As Predicted...

We can count on certain bishops to act like bishops and respond forcefully to the likes of Nancy Pelosi. Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver put out a response to Pelosi's Meet the Press diatribe, where she gave us her convoluted interpretation of Church history regarding abortion. Here's an excerpt from a news story. A link to the entire letter follows.

The Archdiocese of Denver argues that since Speaker Pelosi claims to have studied the issue “for a long time,” “she must know very well one of the premier works on the subject, Jesuit John Connery’s Abortion: The Development of the Roman Catholic Perspective (Loyola, 1977).

The statement recall’s Connery’s conclusion: “The Christian tradition from the earliest days reveals a firm antiabortion attitude . . . The condemnation of abortion did not depend on and was not limited in any way by theories regarding the time of fetal animation. Even during the many centuries when Church penal and penitential practice was based on the theory of delayed animation, the condemnation of abortion was never affected by it. Whatever one would want to hold about the time of animation, or when the fetus became a human being in the strict sense of the term, abortion from the time of conception was considered wrong, and the time of animation was never looked on as a moral dividing line between permissible and impermissible abortion.”

http://www.archden.org/images/ArchbishopCorner/ByTopic/onseparationofsense%26state_openlettercjc8.25.08.pdf