I love Americans

(The pro-life ones certainly).

I can't quite see this initiative working. But God bless them for trying. How unlike our own "Captain Catholic" shufflers.

Note to Australian readers. Despite the mention of "senators" and "dollars" in this video, this applies to the United States only. Apparently they have dollars and senators too. Yes I know – it is really confusing.

Note to British readers. the Pro-life Alliance (note the hyphen) mentioned is not the organisation for which I used to work.

The English Day for Life

When I lived in England, there was a Day for life when the Bishops urged us to consider the effect of dog fæces on the streets. Not much has changed. JPII's request is one of those rules nobody keeps.

William Oddie, The Bishops’ Conference has decided that Day for Life 2012 is all about the Olympic Games. Every year, it’s anything BUT what Pope John Paul intended.
A week or two ago, I referred to “the great conundrum, for the English Church, about the reign of John Paul II: why was it, when he had appointed most of our bishops, did nearly all of them go out of their way to undermine his vision for the Church?” Now, perhaps the greatest and most persistent example of this undermining of John Paul’s teaching has been the English bishops’ failure, over the years, collectively to oppose abortion and euthanasia as they should have been opposed. And perhaps the most grotesque and cynical example of this phenomenon is in the annual Day for Life, which year after year has in this country been about anything but what Pope John Paul, when he called for its annual observance, intended that it should be about.

ABC bias on euthanasia

A while ago somebody sent me a post on the MercatorNet blog, Careful! – a blog on euthanasia. It contained a video interview with Bishop Anthony Fisher op. The blog describes him as being "interviewed by a right-to-die activist." I suppose the post writer simply went by the content of the questions and drew the obvious conclusion. The interviewer, Quentin Dempster, is a journalist with the ABC and presumably has pretensions to neutrality. This was not extra-curricular activity.  The interview was part of regular ABC programming.

Bishop Fisher does a very good job dealing with the questions. Dempster is someone who describes obedience to the Fifth Commandment as hardline but as the folk at Careful! say, Bishop Fisher hits the questions right out of the park (in Australia, since you ask, we would say "hits them for six").

Comments on YouTube are disabled, naturally. More Dempster using ABC platforms to promote euthanasia here; see especially the scare quotes around pro-life.