Opposing War in Syria
 
       Our members are naturally joining demonstrations against the strike on Syria proposed by the U.S., France, and others of a hawkish mindset (pictured: Lisa Stiller and friends). CL President Bill Samuel has written a blog posting written specifically to be persuasive to legislators. Pope Francis (see quotation below) has appealed to the leaders of the G20 to pursue a peaceful, rather than military, solution to the Syrian war and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry in opposition to the strike. LifeSiteNews, not normally noted for anti-war rhetoric, nevertheless noted that Mideast church leaders are rejecting the war.  
 

 

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Unborn Children and War
 
        While we are mortified by any of the additional killing and danger that a strike may cause in Syria, we also point out the strike’s likely connection to more killing through abortion. War causes women who wouldn’t otherwise get abortions to do so, as Mary Meehan documents. War also kills unborn children directly without taking a side-trip to the clinic, as Emanuel Charles McCarthy put it when reading headlines on the Iraq war, “I could not help but hear the silent screams of all the little Iraqi children in utero who were having their lives ripped from them. The lucky ones were the ones who took a direct hit. [Others] were aborted because of percussion, vibration or because of the terror, trauma, malnourishment and/or exhaustion visited upon their mothers by war.”
 

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Women’s Equality Day August 26
 
        CL member Marilyn Kopp had an excellent Op-Ed published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer entitled: “Promoting a right to abortion keeps women from achieving full liberation.” To quote from it: “Pro-choice women have abandoned core feminist values and adopted the worst patriarchal standards: seeking power through control and domination, condoning violence on the grounds of personal privacy, and using killing to resolve conflict.  By insisting on abortion as necessary for equality, we assume the traditional male world view: equating personhood to manhood, denying women’s reproductive capacities.  Women must become essentially wombless and unpregnant like males, and resort to violence to do so." 
 

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Quotation of the Week
Pope Francis
Letter to president of upcoming G20 Summit, September 5, 2013

         However, the world economy will only develop if it allows a dignified way of life for all human beings, from the eldest to the unborn child, not just for citizens of the G20 member states but for every inhabitant of the earth, even those in extreme social situations or in the remotest places . . . armed conflicts are always a deliberate negation of international harmony, and create profound divisions and deep wounds which require many years to heal. Wars are a concrete refusal to pursue the great economic and social goals that the international community has set itself, as seen, for example, in the Millennium Development Goals. Unfortunately, the many armed conflicts which continue to afflict the world today present us daily with dramatic images of misery, hunger, illness and death. Without peace, there can be no form of economic development. Violence never begets peace, the necessary condition for development.