Polish Catholic Bishops Set the Example for Guiding Catholics in Proper Voting Principles to Defend Life

In its Open Letter of June 18, 2007 Vote Life, Canada! called upon the [pseudo-]Catholic Bishops of Canada to engage Catholics in proper voting strategies in order to bring about protection of human life. The following is a quote from the pertinent section of the Open Letter:

6) Bishops Have Failed to Mobilize the Catholic Voting Bloc There is perhaps no greater example of the dereliction of duty of too many Bishops to halt the killing of Unborns in Canada than the failure to mobilize the Catholic voting bloc in Canada. Legal protection for unborn children necessitates a political, legislative solution, a fact evident to even the least politically savvy of Canadians. Roman Catholic Bishops in Canada exercise moral authority over a formidable voting bloc of nearly 10 million Catholics and yet after nearly forty years of "legalized" child killing in Canada there is no indication whatever that Catholics have been guided by the Bishops to effect this political change in Canada through even the simplest of voting strategies, one solidly founded on basic moral principles yet not centred in partisan politics.

Why must such an emphasis on mobilizing the Christians of Canada to vote effectively on behalf of securing legal rights for the Unborn originate with a campaign such as the Vote Life, Canada! project? Surely, if the Bishops had a will to stop the child killing in Canada, a focused and comprehensive Canada wide, diocesan wide, strategy to engage every Catholic to cast a vote for legal protection of the Unborn would have yielded long ago a complete halt to the killing. In the rare case where Bishops have been found to do anything in this regard it has amounted to a poorly organized, last minute, ineffective scramble. God have mercy on those Bishops for their failure in this most practical of all ways to end the holocaust of the Unborn. Their inaction for decades makes them substantially culpable in the deaths of millions of unborn children.

Some naysayers along the way protested that the Bishops could really do nothing about the decisions of voters and that it was unrealistic to expect Bishops to undertake such a project.

Yesterday LifeSiteNews reported on the approach being taken by Polish Bishops in the face of a national election. [The report appears below.]

The article provides a concrete example of the kind of action that truly “Catholic” Bishops will undertake in defense of human life. It is a vindication of the call from Vote Life, Canada! to Catholic Bishops of Canada.

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Polish Bishops Encourage Citizens to Support Only Pro-life, Pro-Family Groups in Election

Emphasize "moral convictions" and "nonnegotiable values"

WARSAW, October 16, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Penned at their annual Conference in Warsaw, the Catholic bishops of Poland have collectively issued a letter that was to be read at all parishes on Sunday, October 14. In the letter the bishops are urging Catholics to vote with "nonnegotiable values" in mind and to therefore support "only those political groups that favor protection of life from the moment of conception, that respect family rights and that demonstrate by their activities deep concern about Poland and respect for its tradition stemming from Christian roots."

The upcoming election will be held on October 21 and was called when the current ruling party, the Law and Justice Party, lost their parliamentary majority. Presently, both the president and the prime minister of Poland are ardently pro-life.

The letter reads, "We ask all lay faithful and clergy in our country and beyond its borders to pray for the homeland and participate in large numbers. But we also need to vote properly, which means in accordance with moral conviction. Believers should give their vote to people whose attitude and views are close, or at least not opposed, to the Catholic faith and Catholic values."

The pastoral letter cautioned Polish clergy to "respect the maturity of laypeople" in their guidance and condemned any party that claimed "to speak in the church's name or claim its support."

While the bishops refrained from promoting any specific party or individual they said that certain political parties were "closer to the Christian vision of the person and society" while others were "distant from church teaching or even opposed to it."

Differing polling agencies have resulted in starkly contrasting poll results with one agency reporting that the incumbent Law and Justice Party was favored to win and another contending that the liberal Civic Platform challenging party was set to win.

[Source]

More evidence of the Polish Bishops' influence on the morals of their society here.