Faith of the Fathers

Friday, September 21, 2012

The following excerpts are from Catholic Culture's Catholic World News:

The Ethics and Public Policy Center has conducted a survey on Catholic women’s attitudes towards contraception.
“Critics of the Church’s teaching propose an image of Catholic women fiercely and forever opposed to the Church’s teaching on contraception, and suggest (wrongly) that nearly all Catholic women use contraception,” according to a preliminary report on the survey.
The report added:
Our research found that up to one-third of church-going Catholic women (26-33%, depending on the question) hold mistaken beliefs about the Church’s teaching on contraception. For example, 33% of Catholic women incorrectly believe that the Church teaches that couples have the right to decide the moral acceptability of contraception regardless of Church teaching. When presented with an accurate description of the Church’s teachings on family planning, many Catholic women show reluctance to completely reject the Church’s teaching …

The following excerpt is from LifeNews.com:

When it comes to Supreme Court decisions, the media and election officials frequently talk about long-standing precedents that become accepted jurisprudence. In their eyes, such precedents should almost never be overturned by subsequent courts.
Justice Antonin Scalia, in a new interview, says he understands and respects Supreme Court precedent but he also says the controversial Roe v. Wade case, that allowed virtually unlimited abortions, is an example of the kind of precedent the high court can and should overturn.
When asked what happens when linguistic analysis of a law conflicts with existing court decisions, Scalia said that judges cannot reinvent the wheel, particularly if precedent has been in place for a long time.
“We are textualists. We are originalists. We are not nuts,” he said.
One prominent exception to that is Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling that legalized abortion. He does not consider that binding precedent, he said, because it was wrong, remains controversial and is an issue better left to legislators than judges.

Read more by clicking below:
Scalia: Roe v. Wade an Example of Precedent That Can be Reversed | LifeNews.com