Cardinal J. Francis Stafford (CNS)

Cardinal J. Francis Stafford had some sharp words of criticism for President-elect Barack Obama last week.

Speaking Nov. 13 at The Catholic University of America, the former archbishop of Denver called Obama “aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic” and said that he campaigned on an “extremist anti-life platform,” Beliefnet.com reported.

Cardinal Stafford, who is the head of the Vatican’s Apostolic Penitentiary tribunal, was speaking on the theme of “Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II: Being True in Body and Soul” in a lecture sponsored by the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family.

“For the next few years, Gethsemane will not be marginal. We will know that garden,” Cardinal Stafford said. “On November 4, 2008, America suffered a cultural earthquake.”

Cardinal Stafford said the election of the pro-abortion Obama marks another downward step of the moral disintegration America has descended into since 1968, when Paul VI published his encyclical Humanae Vitae.

“If 1968 was the year of America’s ‘suicide attempt,’ 2008 is the year of America’s exhaustion,” said the cardinal. “In the intervening 40 years since Humanae Vitae, the United States has been thrown upon ruins.”

Cardinal Stafford attributed much of the social damage to the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. Obama has pledged to nominate only Supreme Court judges who support Roe v. Wade.

Said Cardinal Stafford about Roe v. Wade, “Its scrupulous meanness has had catastrophic effects upon the unity and integrity of the American republic.”

— Tom McFeely