Here is some bad news: Illinoisans who support the use of your money to pay for abortions have been calling their legislators asking them to support HB 40. A vote on this bill could come at any time.

The good news is that this legislation can be defeated, but your help and prayers are needed immediately. Your local state legislators need to hear from you and everyone you can encourage to call or email their legislative offices.

Here is part of a statement issued by Brian Burch, who is the president of CatholicVote.org:

“We have been following the developments surrounding H.B. 40, a new spending bill pending before the Illinois General Assembly that, if passed, would authorize the use of state dollars to fund abortion services for qualified Medicaid recipients. Should Governor Rauner sign the bill as it is currently written, pro-life voters will be left with no choice but to oppose his candidacy next year.

. . .

“We have been in conversation with pro-life groups around the state. The overwhelming consensus is that support for any legislation that would coerce Illinois taxpayers into directly funding abortion would disqualify him from receiving their support.

“The state owes $10 billion in unpaid bills, with tens of billions more in unfunded liabilities. Yet now politicians want to spend scarce state resources to pay for abortions. Rauner’s support of this reckless bill would rip apart the Republican Party and destroy any chance of his re-election.

“Let me be clear. If Governor Rauner signs the bill as written, we will urge our members along with every pro-life voter in the state to support an alternative candidate — or to abstain from voting for his re-election. And we won’t be the only group doing so.”

Those are some pretty tough words–words that the Illinois Family Institute and its sister organization Illinois Family Action applaud. We would like to see that threat extended to any member of the General Assembly that votes to use taxpayer dollars to fund abortions.

Cultural issues writer Laurie Higgins explains why IFI supports the position of CatholicVote.org:

IFI wholeheartedly agrees with CatholicVote.org’s commitment to opposing Governor Rauner’s re-election bid should he support HB 40.

There is no more critical human rights issue than the issue of protecting incipient human life from intentional destruction in the womb. The moral offense of legalized feticide is compounded when the hard-earned money of taxpayers is used to fund the killing of humans.

Neither the state of development, dependency status, imperfections, or location of human beings grants to other humans the moral right to end their lives. When the reproductive rights of women come into direct conflict with the right of their offspring to exist, the right to existence takes precedence in that it is a right of a higher moral order.

Any government leader who doesn’t recognize the intrinsic value and rights of all humans doesn’t deserve the support of citizens or public office.

We agree with this statement from eminent legal scholar Professor Robert George:

Maintaining and solidifying the pro-life…stance of the Republican Party is critical. That’s why tactical voting, including voting for bad Democrats over bad Republicans, is IN CERTAIN CIRCUMSTANCES (e.g., where the election of a Democrat does not jeopardize Republican control of a legislative house), morally legitimate and perhaps even advisable. We must not let the pro-abortion…movements strengthen their positions in the Republican Party.

We can make a difference, but only if our legislators hear from their pro-life constituents. We hope to convince enough of them not to vote for this big-government, big-abortion bill. We must prevent the sponsor of this legislation from getting enough “yea” votes to pass it.

Our failure to act with as much energy as the other side too often is the difference between victory or defeat–and in this case life or death.

Here is Cardinal Blase Cupich, the Archbishop of Chicago, weighing in on HB 40:

We have raised our voices in the past for those who have no voice, whether they be the
immigrant or the refugee, the poor, or the unemployed. We now need to speak for the children in the womb, who are the weakest among us.

We need to let our elected officials know that taxpayers should not be forced to fund the
taking of human life. In fact, tax money should be used to fund prenatal services for the poor
and child care for working mothers, as well as expand health-care options for those in need.
Please join me in advocating for all life by urging your state representative to reject HB 40 and work instead to pass a budget that funds all essential services.

You can read Cardinal Cupich’s entire letter here, and the statement by CatholicVote.org President Brian Burch here.

Take ACTION: Please send a message to your state representative to ask him/her to vote AGAINST this pro-abortion bill. This legislation is HB 40 – a bill that would authorize the use of tax dollars to pay for abortions in Illinois through Medicaid and state government health care insurance plans. It is sponsored by State Representative Sara Feigenholtz (D-Chicago).  This bill would reverse the current law which bans taxpayer funding of abortion under Medicaid.

Please also call your state representative during the week to make sure he/she knows how important this issue is to you and your family. The Capitol switchboard number is (217) 782-2000.

Pray for the ultimate demise of HB 40 and all anti-life legislation.

Written by George Weigel

Francis Eugene George was many things: a dedicated missionary priest; a first-rate intellectual; a shrewd observer of the public square; the first native of the Windy City to be named archbishop of Chicago; a great reformer of the Archdiocese of Chicago. But when word of his death came early this afternoon, my first thought was that he was, in the Lord’s mercy, no longer in pain.

His sister once told a Chicago priest that, if he wanted to understand her brother, he should remember that “he’s always in pain.” A polio survivor from the days of the iron lung, Francis George spent his entire adult life with his legs encased in dozens of pounds of steel. Then he was struck by bladder cancer and lived for years with what he called, ruefully, a “neo-bladder.” He beat that challenge, but then another form of cancer struck, and his last years were filled with new pain, more pain, different pain. Yet not once, since I first met him three decades ago when he was Father Francis George, did I ever hear him complain about the pain — or about the sometimes strange ways God has with those He has blessed in so many other facets of their lives. Francis George could live in chronic pain because he conformed his life to Christ and the Cross. And now, I firmly believe, he is pain-free. For the Lord he served so long and well has welcomed home his good and faithful servant.

Perhaps the most appropriate Gospel passage to ponder at times like this, and when thinking about lives like that of Cardinal George, is the story of the Transfiguration. For in preserving the memory of the transfigured Christ, whose “face shone like the sun” and whose “garments became white as light” (Matthew 17:2), the first generation of Christians was bearing witness to its hope for the human future. The transfigured Christ not only prefigured the Risen Christ, in whose Eastertide Francis George died; the transfigured Christ prefigures the life that awaits the friends of the Risen One in his Kingdom, at the Wedding Feast of the Lamb. There, there is no polio, and no post-polio syndrome. There, there is no cancer, no gut-wrenching chemotherapy, no diminishment of vigor. There, there is only fullness of life, with palsied limbs made whole in a wholly new way.

That is the future in which Cardinal Francis George believed. That that is the future in which he now shares is the consolation of those who loved and admired him.

The American hierarchy has not, these past two centuries, been noted for scholar-bishops — unlike, say, the Catholic Church in Germany. But in Francis Eugene George, the Catholic Church in the United States found itself with a leader of world-class intellect, with two earned doctorates yet with none of the intellectual deformities associated with the contemporary academy. He was, in the best sense of the term, a free thinker: one who thought independently of the reigning shibboleths, yet within the tradition of the Church and its intellectual heritage. His was a thoroughly modern intellect; yet how appropriate that he died on the day when the Church reads the Johannine account of Jesus’ feeding of the 5,000, with the Lord’s admonition to “gather up the fragments left over, that nothing may be lost” (John 6:12), for Cardinal George’s fidelity to the tradition was in response to that admonition. He knew that the tradition had something to teach us today; he practiced what Chesterton called “the democracy of the dead.”

That Johannine reference works in other ways, too. For when Francis George became archbishop of Chicago in 1997, there were a lot of fragments to be gathered up. Six months after his appointment, we were together in Rome, and I asked him what he’d learned so far about what had long considered itself the flagship archdiocese of the United States. “I’m 60 years old,” he said, “and in the 15 years I’ve got left I’ve got to get people going back to Mass again and I’ve got to get priests hearing confessions again.” He worked hard to do that, and he did so with effect. And if some of the notoriously difficult Chicago clergy never quite got it, a lot of the people of the Archdiocese of Chicago did — and in the brief months of his retirement, the cardinal often remarked in our conversations on how touched he was by people coming up to him in parishes and thanking him for what he had done for the archdiocese.

We spoke several times since, but what turned out to be our final meeting was last November at Mundelein Seminary, which he had thoroughly reformed. (Something of the flavor of the larger-than-life quality of old Chicago Catholicism can be gleaned from the story about the coat of arms of Cardinal George William Mundelein, founder of the seminary. The motto on his arms read Deus Adjutor Meus [God Is My Help], which local clerical wags translated as “God Is My Auxiliary [Bishop].”) The current rector, Father Robert Barron, had built a new daily-Mass chapel for the growing seminary community. The chapel was to be dedicated to the newly canonized Pope St. John Paul II, and Father Barron had invited me to give a public lecture on the late pope after Cardinal George consecrated the chapel — which he did, walking with difficulty on crutches, rubbing great swaths of holy chrism into the altar and then celebrating the first Mass offered there. It was another example of Cardinal George’s extraordinary physical courage — but he was determined to keep his commitment to consecrate the chapel, in no small part because of his love and esteem for John Paul II.

Like the Polish pope — another man determined to “gather up the fragments” and then re-knead them into a contemporary synthesis of Catholic faith and practice — Cardinal George was a keen observer (and critic) of the Western-civilization project. And his concerns about the trajectory on which that project seemed headed were neatly captured in a sound bite, excerpted from a lengthy discussion with his priests, in which the cardinal said that he expected to die in bed; he expected his successor to die in prison; and he expected the following archbishop of Chicago to be a martyr in the public square.

It was a deliberately provocative formulation, intended to get the priests of Chicago thinking seriously about the challenges posed by what Pope Benedict XVI had called the “dictatorship of relativism.” To some it bespoke resignation, even surrender. That misimpression was due to the fact that the cardinal’s hypothetical was always cut short in the reporting of it. For what he said, in full, was that he expected to die in bed; his successor would die in prison; that man’s successor would be publicly executed; and his successor would “pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the Church has done so often in human history.”

Like John Paul II, Francis George knew that the Catholic Lite project — the unhappy dumbing down of the vibrant progressive Chicago Catholicism of the 1930s and 1940s — was unfit either to fight the zeitgeist in the name of freedom rightly understood, or to “gather up the fragments” and help rebuild the American experiment after the zeitgeist had done its worst. But it would be a great disservice to his memory to suggest, as some undoubtedly will, that Francis George was at war with “liberal” Catholicism. In the first place, he refused to think of the Church as something that could be defined in terms of “liberal” or “conservative.” As he said at his first Chicago press conference in 1997, the Church is about true and false, not left and right. Moreover, he knew that Catholic Lite was dying of its own implausibility, so why waste energy battling it? Rather, “gather up the fragments” — including the fragments of good in the once-vital reform Catholicism of Chicago — and get on with the task of re-evangelizing both the Church and the Great American City.

That could be done, the cardinal was convinced, only by what you might call All-In Catholicism: a Church that offered both mercy and truth; a Church that was both pro-life and committed to the effective empowerment of the poor; a Church that could make Catholicism compelling in a culture that was too often simply indifferent to what religious communities had to say. That apathy would not be met by surrendering core Catholic understandings of what makes for human happiness to the zeitgeist. But neither would it be met by argument alone. Arguments were important, this man of intellect and culture knew; but so was witness, and that was why he put such energy into defending the Church’s institutions for empowering the poor — its schools, health-care facilities, and social-service centers — against the encroachments of a government trying to use the Church for its own purposes.

When the U.S. bishops elected Cardinal George their president in 2007, they were acknowledging a change in the dynamics of Catholic life in America that is irreversible. The liveliest centers of Catholicism in America — the parishes, the dioceses, the seminaries, the lay renewal movements, the growing orders of consecrated religious life — are those that have embraced what John Paul II called the “New Evangelization” and what Pope Francis has called a “Church permanently in mission.” The old post-conciliar battles are, largely, over, and the course has been set. Francis George helped set that course. And when it comes time to write his story in full, he will be remembered as the most consequential archbishop of Chicago in the modern history of the Church — and a leader in American Catholicism whose intellectual and physical courage was instrumental in making the Church in the United States, for all its challenges and problems, the most vital in the developed world. He is now where he has always wanted to be.

He is without pain, whole and healed. He has met Christ the Lord, and he is living in the presence of the Thrice-Holy God — to whom I give thanks for his life, his witness, and our friendship.

— George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies. Originally published at NationalReview.com.