September 11, 2001, Freedom, Terrorism and Kamala Harris

The world was a dangerous place on September 11, 2001 and is now even more so. Freedom is shaken by terrorism and terrorism neither fears nor respects complacent joy.

September 11, 2024 by Fr Gordon J. MacRae

Eleanor Hodgman Porter was born in Littleton, New Hampshire in 1868. She wrote several novels with little notice, but at the start of World War One she wrote a blockbuster, Pollyanna. It became a world-wide bestseller that commonly came to be known as the Glad Book. It sparked a cultural phenomenon. It was about a girl, Pollyanna, whose ebullient personality met every evil and setback with a sense of glee and giddy happiness.

In the dismal years after World War I, “Glad Clubs” were inspired by it to reprogram young people into a perpetually happy state of mind no matter what ill confronted them. By the start of World War II, according to one reviewer, readers tired of Pollyanna’s laughing ‘hysterically,’ breathing ‘rapturously,’ and smiling ‘eagerly’ in the face of grave concern.

I watched much of the recent Democratic National Convention and was intrigued by it. I thought of Pollyanna all the way through it. It struck me as a half-time show in a Super Bowl game which had no connection to the battle at hand except to entertain. A state of perpetual joy cannot possibly reflect the realities of the dangerous world in which we live. Pollyanna and the Glad Book have mercifully vanished from our culture.

At Christmas in 1985, a young parishioner gifted me with a copy of Tom Clancy’s first novel, The Hunt for Red October. I was put off by its sheer volume and had no time to read it then. So I stuck it on a shelf in my parish office where it remained for months. Every time I saw the high school kid who gave it to me he asked me if I had read it yet. “You have to,” the young prophet insisted.

Then I read that President Ronald Reagan was reading that same book and described it as “unputdownable.” Many years and thousands of pages of Tom Clancy novels later, I wrote a tribute to the book and its author on the occasion of his untimely death in 2013. It was “Tom Clancy, Jack Ryan, and the Hunt for Red October.”

Most of my reading is done — even now — at the end of a busy day while lying flat on my back in bed with a book light. At this writing, nearly four decades after that first Clancy novel, I have devoured some 17,000 pages of his techno-thriller in the widely acclaimed “Jack Ryan” series. As time went on they got ever longer and more detailed, but I found each to be fascinating.

Clancy did a lot of research to bring realism to his novels. At times he would introduce a high tech fighter jet, for example, and devote 20 pages analyzing its technology. That drove some readers away, but it was what I loved most about his books. I made the big mistake once of referring to Clancy’s novels as “guy books.” Whoa, did I ever receive a thrashing from his many “non-guy” readers!

In 1994, I devoured 900 pages of Debt of Honor, Clancy’s eighth novel in the series. More than once, the big hardcover nearly broke my nose as I would read in bed until I could stay awake no longer. Then I would drop the book on my face.

By then, Jack Ryan had progressed through a distinguished and exciting career in the Central Intelligence Agency as a brilliant analyst and eventually as National Security Advisor. The riveting Debt of Honor ended with a spellbinding scene in Washington, DC as a Korean Airlines passenger jet was hijacked by Middle Eastern terrorists and flown at high speed by suicide bombers into the United States Capitol Building during a joint session of Congress wiping out most of the sitting U.S. government just as a new president was being sworn in.

History Repeats

Seven years later, on September 11, 2001, I relived that same scene with an intense sensation of déjà vu. Right before my eyes on national television, I watched live as the terrorist assault that came to be referred to simply as “9/11” unfolded before a shocked and unprepared free world. My first thought was to wonder whether the Clancy novel might have sparked such a framework of real terror into the minds of al Qaeda, but there was no such connection. I wrote of that day, its aftermath, and its challenges for the free world in “The Despair of Towers Falling, the Courage of Men Rising.”

Twenty-three years have now passed since that day, but everyone who was alive then, and at or near the age of reason, remembers it vividly. It became one of those iconic events of history in which everyone recalls not only the terror, but also a clear snapshot of where we were and what we were doing as that event unfolded. Tom Clancy instilled in me a high regard for history as a lens to the present. I have since digested 23 of Tom Clancy’s novels about foreign policy, its impact on history, or history’s impact on it.

It was a sequel to The Hunt for Red October that first drew me to the necessity of seeing the present with eyes that have gazed upon the past. September 11, 2001 did not happen in a vacuum. Clancy’s sequel, Cardinal of the Kremlin (Putnam, 1988) opened my eyes about Afghanistan. It was set toward the end of the Soviet Union’s decade-long occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, and the struggle of the Afghan people to be rid of that occupying force. The Taliban were never mentioned there, nor were al Qaeda, Islamic State, or ISIS-K. None of them existed yet, but the seeds of all of them were firmly planted and flourishing in Afghanistan as a result of that decade and all that followed. It is important to know this.

On Christmas Day, 1979, Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan. They quickly won control of the capital, Kabul, and other important cities. The Soviets executed the Afghan political leader and installed in his place a puppet government led by a faction more amenable to Soviet control. Wide rejection of that government by the Afghan people led to civil war. A Saudi Arabian multimillionaire named Osama bin Laden established a training camp in the mountains of Afghanistan for rebels fighting the Soviet forces.

The 1980s also saw increased friction between the United States and the Soviet Union resulting from the 1979 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. President Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980, greatly increased American military capabilities. The Soviets viewed him as a formidable foe committed to subverting the Soviet system. In his 1985 State of the Union address, President Reagan called the Soviet Union an “Evil Empire,” and vowed to root out and destroy any political movements that supported it.

In the mid-l980s, resistance to the Communist government and the Soviet invaders grew throughout Afghanistan. Some ninety regions in the country were commanded by guerrilla leaders who called themselves “mujahideen,” meaning “Muslim holy warriors.” The mujahideen resented the Soviet presence and its puppet government. By the mid-1980s the U.S. was spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year to aid these Afghan rebels based in Pakistan in a war to expel the Soviet occupation which took the lives of some 1.3 million Afghanis in their struggle.

Then in 1989, the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan leaving in their wake a leadership vacuum in a country wracked by civil war. From a distance over the decade to follow, the United States continued to provide funds and weapons to the mujahideen rebels. Afghanistan was now without solidifying leadership, and nature abhors a vacuum.

The Taliban

From the rubble of war, chaos, and a rudderless nation, the Taliban were born. The Taliban movement was created in 1994 in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar by Mohammed Omar, a senior Muslim cleric (called a mullah) . The name, “Taliban” simply means “student.” It refers to the movement’s roots in the fundamentalist Islamic religious schools in Pakistan. For many youth in this war-torn nation, religious indoctrination was the only education they received.

Even that limited education was available only to young men. As the Taliban rose to power in 1994 imposing strict Islamic fundamentalism on the nation, secondary schools for girls were closed and girls were barred from receiving any education beyond a grade school level. Music and dancing were banned outright. Public works of art were destroyed. I once wrote in these pages of an infamous example. In 2001, just as Osama bin Laden was deep into a plot against the United States, the Taliban drew attention away by blowing up a 180 foot stone statue of Buddha that had been carved into an Afghan mountainside 1500 years earlier.

Many of the Taliban laws alarmed human rights groups and provoked worldwide condemnation. The Taliban strictly enforced ancient customs of purdah, the forced separation of men and women in public. Men were required to grow full beards. Those who did not comply, or could not, were subjected to public beatings. Women were required to be covered entirely from head to toe in burkas while in public view. Those who violated this were often beaten or executed on the spot by Taliban religious police. Women were also forbidden from working outside the home. With thousands of men lost to war, many widows and orphans lived in dire poverty.

As the Taliban movement grew in size and strength, it recruited heavily from the mujahideen, the anti-Soviet freedom fighters who were funded and armed in part by the United States. The Taliban gave a new national identity to the thousands of war orphans who were educated in only two fields of study: strict fundamentalist Islamic interpretation of the Quran, and war. The young men of Afghanistan became radicalized.

The Rise of Al Qaeda

Most other countries did not recognize the Taliban as a legitimate government, thus further isolating Afghanistan and its people from oversight and connection in the world community. From their pinnacle of power, the Taliban provided safe harbor to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, formed in 1980s Afghanistan to help repel the Soviet invasion and incite a global holy war called, in Arabic, a jihad. The term, al Qaeda is Arabic for “base camp.” For its founder and adherents, it would become the base from which worldwide Islamic revolution and domination would be launched. We entered Afghanistan after 9/11 for that reason. It had become the host and incubator for terrorist actions against the United States. When we withdrew suddenly in 2021 we left behind that incubator, still festering with hatred from Islamic extremists.

Over the course of the Soviet occupation from 1979 to 1989, Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda trained, equipped, and financed 50,000 mujahideen warriors from 50 countries. Saudi Arabian nationals comprised more than fifty percent of the recruits. Saudi Arabia’s strict interpretation of Islam motivated many young men to come to the defense of Afghanistan and the Muslim world against Western “infidel” influences.

When the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, Osama bin Laden returned to his original goal for al Qaeda: to overthrow Muslim or Arab regimes that he considered too weak and tolerant of Western influence. Bin Laden envisioned replacing these regimes with a single Muslim empire organized around Islamic “Sharia” law. He targeted the United States and other Western nations because he saw them as obstacles to his cause by becoming political allies with Muslim nations he considered to be corrupt.

From 1991 to 1996, with the Taliban in control of Afghanistan, bin Laden quietly built al Qaeda into a formidable international terrorist network with cells and operations in 45 countries. Training camps were established in Sudan, and by 1992 most of al Qaeda’s operations were relocated there. From that base, attacks on U.S. troops and U.S. interests were launched in Yemen and Somalia and at a joint U.S.-Saudi military training base in Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden was especially angered by the mere existence of that base.

Bowing to pressure from the Saudi and U.S. governments, al Qaeda and bin Laden were expelled from Sudan in 1996 and returned to Afghanistan where they were free to plot. He formed a mutually beneficial relationship with the Taliban while plans for a direct assault on the United States took shape. The September 11, 2001 attacks, which killed over 3,000 Americans on U.S. soil, thus came together while the world was not watching.

In response, the United States declared war on terrorism, the first declaration of war against a concept instead of a country. While Taliban leaders rejected U.S. demands to surrender bin Laden, the U.S. began aerial bombings of terrorist training camps and Taliban military positions in October, 2001. Ground troops of the Northern Rebel Alliance in Afghanistan rebelled and maintained a front-line offensive against Taliban forces with help in the form of funds and weapons from the United States.

Al Qaeda’s attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon began on September 11, but it was not September 11, 2001. This is where failures of national intelligence and readiness are crucial factors. The September 11 date for terrorist assaults on the United States was not random. For extremists in the Muslim world, the next day, September 12, was a day of infamy, a day of reckoning for a 17th Century Islamic assault on Europe.

The Muslim command captured and slaughtered 30,000 hostages. This caused Polish King Jan Sobieski to meet the assault with the largest volunteer infantry army ever assembled. The Muslim push for control of Eastern Europe was stopped in its tracks on September 12, 1683. What we call 9/11 was the result of an Islamic grudge held for over 300 years.

Jesus said (Luke 10:3) “Go your way; behold, I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves.” Lambs in the midst of wolves are ever vigilant, and they count on a shepherd who will not lead them into slaughter. The last four years have seen a disastrous policy that left the U.S. southern border open with little oversight. I would want my country to welcome refugees and care for them. That is clearly called for in the Gospel. But among the nearly 11 million who have crossed that border undetected are al Qaeda and ISIS-K operatives lying in wait to unleash their terror upon the United States. In a world at the cusp of war, the threats have never been more dire.

As much as we might like Pollyanna, and revel in her smile, are we really prepared to make her Commander in Chief of U.S. Armed Forces?

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Note from Fr Gordon Mac Rae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls :

Tom Clancy, Jack Ryan, and the Hunt for Red October

The Despair of Towers Falling, the Courage of Men Rising

No Child Left Behind — Except in Afghanistan

Cultural Meltdown: Prophetic Wisdom for a Troubled Age

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Kamala Harris, Knights of Columbus and Anti-Catholicism

Absent probing and honest media interviews, no one knows whether Democratic Presidential Nominee Kamala Harris still stands by her anti-Catholic rhetoric of 2020.

August 28, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

When I was 18 years old and a newly returned Catholic in 1971, I was invited by my friend, Father Anthony Nuccio, to membership in the Knights of Columbus where Father Tony served as chaplain. Along with the Civil Rights movement, the Knights were largely responsible for fostering in me a sense of Catholic community, service, and a vocation to priesthood. I was, and remain, a member of Valladolid Council #70 on the North Shore of Massachussetts. At the time I entered religious life and seminary in 1974, the Knights of Columbus bestowed on me an honorary lifetime membership. Time and distance diminished my active presence somewhat, but today I consider the Knights of Columbus to be a powerful influence on my life and vocation.

For those unfamiliar, the Knights of Columbus is an international fraternal organization of more than 2 million Roman Catholic laymen. The organization was founded in 1882 by Father Michael J. McGivney to promote ideals of charity, community, fraternity, and patriotism among first and second generation Catholic immigrants. Father McGivney’s cause for canonization was opened in 1997. Pope Benedict XVI declared him Venerable in 2008 and Pope Francis beatified him on May 31, 2020.

More than 10,000 local councils of the Knights of Columbus are presently active throughout the United States, Canada, the Philippines and the Caribbean where the Knights conduct and sponsor volunteer programs for Roman Catholics in service to the communities in which they live. The organization also conducts extensive Catholic education and scholarship programs, promotes Catholic identity, and assists in the support of seminarians and Catholic schools. Our friend, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri cites Knights of Columbus-sponsored free correspondence courses in Catholic and Biblical Studies as pivotal factors in his 2010 Divine Mercy Catholic conversion.

So, as you can imagine, Pornchai and I both reacted with umbrage to the misinformed and slanderous remarks of Kamala Harris and other Democratic politicians while interviewing a judicial nominee in 2020 who happened to be a faithful Catholic and a member of the Knights of Columbus. There are over 73 million Catholics in the United States. That is 73 million potential votes that Ms. Harris does not deserve unless she recants or explains her views on Catholicism and those who practice it.

For the first time in my adult life, I am afraid for America. And not only for America. I fear for all of Western Culture as well. I feel little beyond dismal foreboding for the slide toward democratic socialism into which our democracy is in rapid descent. We cannot escape the truth of it. What was, in 2020, considered the “radical Left” in politics is now merely the Left. There is no irony or subtlety at all in what I am about to write. Our only hope is to halt this course and reclaim it.

This may seem a peculiar point of view from someone for whom democracy and its assurance of justice remains a dismal failure. The imprisoned place from where I write enjoys no distractions of the world in which you read these pages. I cannot escape into Netflix or some local bar to medicate my anxiety. I cannot escape at all. Just using that word in a sentence is risky.

My view of the outside world is limited to raw and sometimes hopeless coverage presented in the 24-hour news cycles. There is no place else to go. You may have heard similar words back in 2020 from Maximo Alvarez, a Cuban-American who fled to the United States forty-four years ago. He fled socialist Cuba for America because his father convinced him that there was no place else to go.

I may be the only person I know who sat through news coverage of both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions this year. I did so for the same reason that Maximo Alvarez articulated with such courage and clarity at the RNC in 2020 — because we are both afraid for America. We both know that there is no place else to go. I have not been so afraid for my country and culture since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 when I was nine years old at the brink of nuclear war. Those of a certain age may remember the drills as grade school children across America were told to hide under their classroom desks with all the shades drawn. The anxiety and fear of a possible nuclear attack from the Cuban Missile Crisis left an impact on the psyche of every child.

When Russia embraced socialism following a cultural revolution, it became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It malignantly spread its tentacles in a quest for global dominance. That included the establishment of a socialist state in Cuba followed in 1962 by the construction of a battery of nuclear missiles aimed at the United States. For anyone who listened to Maximo Alvarez at the RNC in 2020, his revulsion and fear of the growing socialism in America was gripping.

Imagine how he felt when Senator Bernie Sanders referred to Fidel Castro as a humanitarian. Imagine the chill in his spine when Senator Tim Scott warned of the forces in America seeking an American cultural revolution and the establishment of the United Socialist States of America. Senator Scott was not referring to anarchists on the margins of American culture. He was referring to the presidential and vice presidential nominees on the Democratic ballot at that time. Now, history repeats.

Are Faithful Catholics a Threat to Democracy?

Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights heads this nation’s largest advocacy group in defense of Religious Liberty. His work was the subject of our post, “Cultural Meltdown: Prophetic Wisdom for a Troubled Age.” Most recently, Dr. Donohue and the Catholic League have demanded from the U.S. Department of Justice an investigation and explanation for recent documents launched by the FBI to investigate Traditioned-minded Catholics who are merely attempting to exercise their Faith.

Believe it or not, I am not writing a political post. As a lifelong Democrat, now an Independent, I do not oppose any political party. But my conscience requires me to oppose an ideology that is not only a threat to democracy, but a threat to Religious Freedom and my fundamental right to practice and adhere to my Faith.

In late 2018, as then-Senator Kamala Harris was preparing a presidential run, she sat on the Senate Judiciary Committee where she screened federal judicial nominees put forward by then-President Donald Trump. Senator Harris asked a nominee about his Catholic faith, noting that he had been a member of the Knights of Columbus for over two decades. Her questions alluded to the K of C being some sort of politically suspect group. She demanded to know if his membership in such an “all male anti-choice organization” would cloud his judicial decisions. She referred to the Knights as an “extremist” group.

“Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed a woman’s right to choose when you joined the organization?,” Senator Harris asked. The judicial nominee, Brian Buescher, was blindsided. It only got worse. Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii picked up on the line of questioning. “Do you intend to end your membership in this organization to avoid any appearance of bias?” The appearance of bias was already front and center, but it wasn’t on the part of the judicial nominee who was eventually confirmed. On January 5, 2019, I wrote this response to the story posted at The Wall Street Journal:

“The big question here is not what judicial nominee Brian Buescher believes, but whether Senators Kamala Harris and Mazie Hirono believe in anything at all that is worthy of belief. And the bigger question is whether such overt anti-Catholic suspicions render them unfit for public office. At best, they both need a refresher course in remedial Constitutional law. Their disregard for the Constitutional provision against any religious test for judicial confirmation is a serious flaw in their readiness to represent their constituents…”

What made this biased grilling of a Catholic nominee by Kamala Harris far more reprehensible was its déjà vu factor. Just six months earlier, the Judiciary Chair, Senator Dianne Feinstein, became the subject of public ridicule for openly applying the same unconstitutional religious test to President Trump’s nominee, Notre Dame Law Professor Amy Coney Barrett. Looking over her work as a law professor at a Catholic university, Senator Feinstein referred to her faith as a “cult” and said, “the dogma speaks loudly in you.” There was hell to pay.

But not so when Senators Harris and Hirona repeated the tactic just six months later. With the exception of Bill Donohue’s vigilant voice at the Catholic League, little was said to call attention to the newest anti-Catholic bias of Kamala Harris. When this bias was unmasked, Kamala Harris had defenders who argued that she could not be anti-Catholic because she was teamed up with Joe Biden “who carries a rosary everyplace he goes.” True. He carried it while promoting abortion without restrictions at every stage of development. He carried it while withdrawing his forty years of support for the Hyde Amendment that restricted taxpayer funds for the coverage of abortions.

He carried it when he vowed from his campaign headquarters to roll back religious exemptions in contraception coverage extended by the Supreme Court to the Little Sisters of the Poor. Mr. Biden responded to the Supreme Court decisions in favor of protecting Religious Liberty for the nuns and other conscientious objectors by restoring the mandate that both the nuns and the Supreme Court objected to. This would hit the Sisters with ruinous fines and a deeply felt conflict of conscience. The rosary in his pocket notwithstanding, Joe Biden’s threats to Religious Liberty were evidence of how much he was led and misled by the Left wing of his party, a position for which Kamala Harris has taken the reins and has now made it the mainstream of that party.

In just the six months between the anti-Catholic questioning of Notre Dame’s Amy Coney Barrett and that of judicial nominee Brian Buescher, a lot had changed. One distinctive change was the Senate Democrats’ assault on the character of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a devout Catholic.

Senator Kamala Harris reprised her role as a career prosecutor by grilling Brett Kavanaugh mercilessly on entirely uncorroborated rumors of drunkenness and sexual escapades in his high school years — rumors that not a single person could confirm.

It has also been lost in most of the news media coverage that before becoming the nominee for vice president on the Democratic ticket, Kamala Harris went on record to state that she also believes the sexual allegations against Joe Biden brought forward by Tara Reade in 2020. This is among the tough questions that most in our now-partisan news media will not ask.

Credits: Left, Addie Mena/Catholic News Agency; Right, Associated Press

Anesthesia for the Catholic Conscience

After publication of a controversial post, “Joe Biden, Cardinal McCarrick and the Betrayal of Life,” a priest whom I have known for some years “unsubscribed” from this blog in 2020. His reasoning was that any criticism of Joe Biden on moral grounds amounted to a tacit endorsement of President Trump. I do not endorse President Trump. What I endorse — and so should we all — is the lawful election that put him in office in 2016. I am among the many Americans who resent the notion that this “Basket of Deplorables” who cast their votes were too ignorant to be entrusted with the finer points of democracy.

From the moment the election results were announced in November, 2016, a relentless campaign was launched to nullify this lawful election by discrediting the elected President through any means possible. Most shameful of all for democracy, much of the news media abandoned its mission to report honestly on that partisan cause. One result of that betrayal was evident at The New York Times when young, progressive reporters in the news room revolted and brought about the resignation of a respected editor because he allowed “the opposition” to write an op-ed. “The opposition” in that case was the highly regarded Republican Senator Josh Hawley.

When New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan praised President Trump’s emphasis on Religious Liberty in a FOX News interview, two liberal groups of Catholic nuns sent letters of protest to the Cardinal asking him to retract his remarks. They cited Mr. Trump’s positions on climate change and capital punishment as evidence that he cannot be considered “pro-life.” The National Catholic Reporter published an editorial using the same reasoning.

In the Catholic conscience, some real moral gymnastics are required to measure a candidate’s concept of the value of life solely by a position on the death penalty. It entirely overlooks the moral apocalypse that resulted in the execution of 73 million human lives terminated in the womb at every level of development right up to birth. The awakening of the Catholic conscience to this is evident in my post, “The Last Full Measure of Devotion: Civil Rights and the Right to Life”

I am in sympathy with “Black Lives Matter” but there is much hypocrisy. African Americans constitute 12.5 percent of the U.S. population, but 30 percent of U.S. abortions. That is by design and not merely a quirk of sociology. Planned Parenthood was founded by Margaret Sanger for the purpose of controlling the growth of the African American population. That fact is finally exposed in the public square. As monuments to historical figures are toppled across the land, no one has yet suggested that Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi surrender their Margaret Sanger awards for their support of “reproductive rights.”

Whatever Kamala Harris believes about the morality of unlimited abortion on demand, she is falling lockstep in line with the platform of her party. In 2020, Kristin Day, executive director of Democrats for Life of America, reported that a third of Democrats considered themselves to be pro-life, but “top Democrats have gone out of their way to make it clear that we are no longer welcome in the party.” The DNC ignored the group’s request to testify before its platform committee. A major percentage of these pro-life Democrats are people of faith, Ms Day said, “but the much-hyped group, ‘Believers for Biden’ is a flop. It had only 26 followers on Facebook a week after being created” in 2020. One year later, Vice President Kamala Harris addressed the platform stating, “The Declaration of Independence guarantees to every American the right to liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” By single-handedly eliminating the most basic of all human rights, the right to life, Kamala Harris set the Democrat Party on a road to hedonism.

As Joe Biden vowed to bankrupt the Little Sisters of the Poor with never-ending legislation and litigation, Kamala Harris did the same during her tenure as California Attorney General. In 2014, the Catholic Daughters of Charity Health System had six hospitals that were operating at an annual loss that could not be sustained. Prime Healthcare made a bid to assume their $300 million liability for worker pensions, but the United Healthcare Workers’ union opposed the deal.

Kamala Harris attached dozens of previously unheard of conditions to the deal such as requiring the Catholic hospitals to provide 24-hour nursing, surgery, anesthesia, radiology and pharmaceutical services for five years. This crippled the deal.

Prime Health sued Kamala Harris for violating its due process rights. The Catholic Daughters executives said that Ms. Harris blocked the deal at the behest of the union with “financially crippling conditions.” The lawsuit alleged that in return the union pledged $25 million in political financial support for Ms. Harris. The lawsuit ended in 2017 when a federal judge ruled that as Attorney General, Ms. Harris had “qualified immunity” from lawsuits. It is ironic that in 2020, Kamala Harris introduced a resolution in the Senate to abolish qualified immunity for police officers while retaining it for herself.

What are American Catholics left with? Back before the election of 2020, vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris was more likely than any nominee in history to assume the Office of President of the United States at some future point due to the age of Joe Biden at that time. And yet she dropped out of the Democratic process with only a pitiful percentage of votes in the primaries. She has declared the 2 million members of the Knights of Columbus to be a subversive organization and has joined the new Democrat Party in its march toward socialism and its inevitable suppression of religious liberty.

But another voice, that of Representative Tulsi Gabbard, caught onto all this duplicity early on during the presidential debates of 2020. Before ending her own bid for the White House, Ms. Gabbard courageously unloaded her views on the suitability of Kamala Harris for the highest public office in the land. Kamala Harris dropped out of the primaries after receiving only two percent of the Democrats’ votes in Iowa in 2020. I’m giving the last word to Tulsi Gabbard:

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Editor’s note: Please share this post. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

• The Unspoken Racist Arena of Roe v. Wade

• Cultural Meltdown: Prophetic Wisdom for a Troubled Age

• Don’t Defund Police. Defund Unions that Cover Up Corruption

• Wikileaks Found Catholics in the Basket of Deplorables

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”