Catholics for Amendment 2?

A group of St. Louis area Catholics led by former U.S. senator Tom Eagleton has challenged church leaders by forming Catholics for Amendment 2.

In a two-page letter sent by e-mail last week to fellow Catholics, the group laid out its reasons for supporting the ballot measure that would protect stem-cell research in Missouri.

Given all the information available on this issue concerning its intrinsic evil and immorality, no right thinking individual, let alone a professed Catholic, can possibly endorse Amendment 2. Either these people are suffering from some form of severe mental problem or, they are publicly denying the Faith and choosing to be openly disobedient to their bishops and to the Church.

The letter was signed by the group’s 30-member steering committee, made up mostly of people connected to Washington University and various medical institutions, and including Eagleton, a Democrat, and former state senator Anita Yeckel, a Republican.

The letter is a direct challenge to Missouri’s Catholic bishops, who also sent letters last week to parishioners. Those letters urged the faithful to vote against Amendment 2.

It's about time to see this open disregard and blatant attack on the Church's teachings and authority of the bishop receive the swift rebuke and punishment which is due.

Virginia Weldon, a retired professor of pediatrics at Washington University and co-chairwoman of the group’s steering committee along with Eagleton, said wedge issues like the stem-cell debate lead many participants to take extreme positions.

Church leaders, for example, consider laboratory techniques for cloning cells to be “human cloning,” Weldon said. But Amendment 2 actually makes it a felony to try to initiate a pregnancy by implanting cloned human cells into a woman’s uterus. Missouri would be the only state with a law against human cloning, she said.

One wonders how some professors, utterly lacking in the mental capacity to understand right from wrong, were ever able to "teach"?

Weldon said her group respects the Catholic Church’s concerns and had considered them. In the end, however, she looked to the Bible for instruction.

“Jesus was a Jew, yet he healed people on the Sabbath. He broke the rules of his church,” Weldon said. “I truly believe that, if he were asked about these embryos that were being discarded, but could help someone, he would come down on the side of healing. He was the ultimate healer.”

Open and public repudiation of Church teaching, together with encouraging others to be disobedient to ones bishop and the Church, requires, at a minimum, public redress of the scandal and harm done to the faithful.

These so-called Catholics, who would deny the intrinsic evil of embryonic stem cell research, and who encourage other Catholics to vote for such evil, should receive a dose of the Church's medicinal help - and quickly, before they succeed in spreading their disease to others.

Article here.