A Minnesota priest said the country witnessed the “entire election” unfold last week during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett.
“Our country, in its laws and in its culture, is divided over these most basic issues. It can be seen just in the last week in the Senate hearings over Amy Coney Barrett, who was nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court. Amy Coney Barrett is a brilliant lawyer, a married woman, a mother of seven. She’s also a devout Catholic. And the firestorm erupted the moment she was nominated,” said Fr. Thomas Dufner of Church of the Epiphany in Coon Rapids, Minnesota.
In his Sunday homily, Dufner said no Democrat would have opposed Barrett’s nomination if she were “a pro-choice Catholic” or a “personally-opposed Catholic,” as former Vice President Joe Biden has described himself on the issue of abortion.
“She showed herself with warmth and charm and revealed an authentic believer and she actually makes the faith attractive. It’s a wonderful thing. The opposition to Amy Coney Barrett looks dark and ugly,” said Dufner.
“They clearly reveal the cultural divide is over abortion and all the lifestyle choices that lead up to it and flow from it. How significant is the way we see the world. One political party is devoted to abortion, the so-called women’s health care or choice. That same party in its very platform stands for unlimited abortion all the way up to the birth of the child and beyond. That same party defends the redefinition of marriage and practically every other immoral lifestyle,” he continued.
Dufner noted that the “other party and its leader” are “devoted to the defense of life” and have “proven it by actions.”
“You and I need to pay attention to that. The news media aren’t going to be our friends in this,” said Dufner, who railed against the censorship of “big tech monopolies.”
“In fact, just this last week Twitter and Facebook have been charged not only with censorship, but using censorship to politically support their own candidate. That’s every bit as dishonest as we expect to find in China,” he said. “These are not good signs. These great media conglomerates have to be broken up. They have to be challenged. They cannot be allowed to continue these policies.”
Dufner then criticized the media for being “particularly dishonest in almost everything these last four years.” Constant exposure to a dishonest media, he warned, can cause viewers to form opinions “without [their] knowledge.”
“Big tech monopolies such as Twitter and Facebook have blocked stories that would be hurtful to their favorite candidate and this censorship undermines our freedom that a democracy requires,” he added.
Dufner urged his congregation to avoid falling into the trap of viewing abortion as just “one issue among many others.”
“The U.S. bishops call abortion the preeminent issue to be considered beyond all others and before all others. Without the right to life, nothing else matters,” said Dufner. He then provided his parishioners with a list of questions they might consider before voting.
“Which candidate and which party will allow for our religious freedoms? Who will allow us to practice our faith openly? Who won’t force us to pay for abortion and sterilization? Who won’t force us to comply with the current errors concerning human sexuality and gender?” he asked.
Catholics need to “consider proportionality” when weighing these issues, he advised. A Catholic could vote for a candidate who espouses pro-abortion views if “there was some proportionate reason to do so.“
“Is there?” he wondered. “In my mind, there is no proportionality, there is no reason to justify that. What do you have to do to balance 860,000 direct killings per year, which attack the very foundations of the republic?”
Opposition to the death penalty, he argued, isn’t a “proportionate reason” to vote for a pro-abortion candidate, since capital punishment “is not intrinsically evil.”
“It is not always and everywhere wrong,” he said. “And by way of proportion, last year and across all of the states, 22 people were executed under capital punishment. 860,000 abortions took place. Every one of those babies was innocent. The proportion is lost altogether.”
Dufner concluded his homily by declaring that Catholics have an obligation “to fight against laws that destroy life from the womb to the tomb.”
“We’ve killed 60 million — 60 million — and exported these ideas out to the rest of the world through Planned Parenthood and through population programs that we have attached to every foreign aid program,” he said. “We’ve expanded this great evil. It’s absolutely that critical that it be number one.”
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Anthony Gockowski
Anthony Gockowski is Editor-in-Chief of Alpha News. He previously worked as an editor for The Minnesota Sun and Campus Reform, and wrote for the Daily Caller.
