(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Don’t Listen to “Evil Woman” Hillary Clinton, says Catholic Bishop [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-08-05 From the article: Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas sent a warning to Americans about listening to Hillary Clinton late last year. The former Secretary of State and two-time Democratic presidential candidate has been comparing pro-life laws in the U.S. to Islamic Sharia law in the Sudan and Afghanistan. Strickland couldn’t remain silent on the issues any longer. “Please, please don’t listen to this evil woman,” he said bluntly. “Her lies and immorality need to be silenced for the good of humanity.” Bishop Strickland says Hillary Clinton needs to “be silenced.” It appears Strickland is unacquainted with the fundamental American value of free speech. And how exactly should Hillary be silenced? House arrest, as was done with Galileo? Torture and then death to dissenting voices as the Catholic Church did for centuries until it lost the power to treat its enemies like some mafia boss? This may seem like a low blow against the entire Catholic Church for the words of one bishop. So be it. Here’s another “low blow,” the Church is the world’s oldest and largest organization of child rapist and their enablers. Court cases document the Church moving child-raping priest from one parish to another where they could, and did, rape again. Such court cases regularly appear in the news, in country after country, throughout the world. But let’s return to abortion. Abortion takes the life of a human being, doesn’t it? Not before about the third month, says the Catholic Church itself. For over a thousand years, the Church’s own canon law distinguished between fetus animates, the fetus which possesses a human soul, and fetus inanimatus, the fetus which lacks a human soul. God “animates” the fetus with a human soul after the third month. Before that, the fetus is mere human tissue lacking a human soul. ­­The teaching follows St. Augustine who wrote: One who procures abortion before the soul is infused into the body is not a murderer. An embryo which is not yet formed cannot be murdered, nor can it properly be considered a human being in the womb. This depends on the soul, for when something is unformed and has no soul, it cannot be murdered. Something cannot be deprived of a soul if it does not have one. Augustine’s doctrine was formally accepted by the Fourth Lateran Council and, as far as I can tell, has never been repudiated. Try asking a Catholic theologian exactly when the Church says God gives the fetus a soul. You’ll find you are suddenly talking to one very uncomfortable theologian. Of course, you’d never learn of the Church’s true teaching by listening to the Church today. That’s because the Church does it best to cover it up. One technique is the slippery phrase “human life.” One meaning of “human life” is “a particular human life” as in the life of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln? Another meaning of “human life” is the type of life in every human cell. I’m a living human being so my living cells possess human life. Every time I bleed, blood cells with human life die but no one mourns the death of that type of human life. A fetus which lacks a human soul possesses the same type of human life. Besides, being anti-abortion is hardly the same as being pro-life. St. Augustine also invented the doctrine of the Just War where he laid down the conditions where a Christian could fight in a war. From the time of Augustine, about 1,600 years ago, to today, exactly how many wars has the Catholic Church declared unjust and forbade Catholics from fighting? Exactly zero. In World War II, where an estimated 70,000,000 human beings died—real, living breathing human beings—a genuinely “pro-life” Church might have forbidden Hitler’s Catholic soldiers and Mussolini’s Catholic soldiers from fighting. But we can hardly expect a Church which has historically given Carte Blanche to nations to fight any and all wars to be genuinely pro-life. There is something grotesque about an organization which for centuries tortured and killed women for the imaginary crime of witchcraft, which for centuries tortured and killed anyone who publicly disagreed with dogma, which has a perfect record of implicitly approving any and all wars, whose number of raped children exceeds the number of Donald Trump’s lies, calling itself “pro-life,” and faulting women who find it necessary to terminate a pregnancy, sometimes for the sake of their own health or even life, sometimes for the sake of their other children. Before the Church presumes to teach the rest of us about morality, perhaps it should heed the words of Luke 4:23: “Physician, heal thyself.” [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/5/2185448/-Don-t-Listen-to-Evil-Woman-Hillary-Clinton-says-Catholic-Bishop Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/