Botticelli's Annunciation: Mary chooses Life.

Here are some pointed remarks about abortion, excepted from Cardinal Francis George of Chicago’s address today at the U.S. bishops’ fall meeting.

“In working for the common good of our society, racial justice is one pillar of our social doctrine. Economic justice, especially for the poor both here and abroad, is another,” Cardinal George said. “But the Church comes also and always and everywhere with the memory, the conviction, that the Eternal Word of God became man, took flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary, nine months before Jesus was born in Bethlehem. This truth is celebrated in our liturgy because it is branded into our spirit.”

Added Cardinal George, “The common good can never be adequately incarnated in any society when those waiting to be born can be legally killed at choice. If the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision that African Americans were other people’s property and somehow less than persons were still settled constitutional law, Mr. Obama would not be president of the United States. Today, as was the case a hundred and fifty years ago, common ground cannot be found by destroying the common good.”

Those remarks might make the cardinal’s fellow Chicagoan, President-elect Barack Obama, a tad uncomfortable, but to us they just sound like common sense.

— Tom McFeely