In choosing Kathleen Sebelius as his Secretary for Health and Human Services, President Barack Obama has appointed yet another pro-abortion Catholic to a key position in his administration.

And the appointment of the Kansas governor may prove to be Obama’s most controversial pro-abortion pick of all.

If confirmed as HHS secretary, Sebelius will have authority over many areas that have a direct bearing on the life issue. And as Kansas governor her pro-abortion record has been so flagrantly at odds with Church teachings that last year her own bishop, Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, told her she should not present herself for Communion until she seeks to repair the public scandal caused by her support for abortion.

Go here for a Q&A interview in which Archbishop Naumann explains in detail why he judged it necessary to take this action.

In a commentary posted on Catholic Online, Deacon Keith Fournier says that by committing herself so completely to promoting the abortion agenda, Sebelius has violated Christ’s basic command to love one’s neighbor.

And, Deacon Fournier says, Sebelius’s claim to be “personally opposed” to abortion while at the same time promoting abortion rights is both logically and morally indefensible.

“Governor Sebelius has embraced an error in her position on life,” Deacon Fournier asserts. “She maintains someone can be ‘personally opposed’ to abortion but then support it being called a ‘right’ in the positive law and protected with the police power of the State. Let us imagine the unimaginable, that the culture of death and use expands and the positive law in the United States was to include protecting the killing of children up to the age of one if they were not wanted for any reason within its protection. This position of ‘personally opposed but’ is morally akin to a public official supporting such an obviously evil law and claiming they were personally opposed to it.”

Notes Deacon Founier, “There is no moral difference between the child in the womb and a one year old child. Medical science has confirmed what our conscience has always known; the child in the womb is a human being, our first neighbor. Abortion is anti-neighbor. Why does this President continue to select Catholics to fill openings in his administration who openly defy their own Church? Why do some Catholics give him cover when he does?”

Concludes Deacon Fournier, “This appointment is an insult to many Catholics. It is time to rise and oppose it!”