Cardinal Francis George, President of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and Archbishop of Chicago, has reasoned that President Obama is on the wrong side of history.

“I think he has his political debts to pay, and so he’s paying them.”

Cardinal George said his conversation with the president was polite but substantive.

“It’s hard to disagree with him because he’ll always tell you he
agrees with you,” he said. “Maybe that’s political. I think he
sincerely wants to agree with you. You have to say, again and again,
‘No, Mr. President, we don’t agree (on abortion).’ But we can agree on
a lot, and we do, and that’s why there is so much hope. I think we have
to pray for him every day.”

Cardinal George said he told the president he was concerned about
his decision to rescind the Mexico City policy, which resulted in
providing taxpayer money to fund abortion overseas.

“He said we weren’t exporting abortion,” the cardinal said. “I said,
‘Yes we are.’ He would say, ‘I know I have to do certain things here. …
But be patient and you’ll see the pattern will change.’ I said, ‘Mr.
President, you’ve given us nothing but the wrong signals on this
issue.’ So, we’ll see, but I’m not as hopeful now as I was when he was
first elected.”

Few faithful pro-life supporters are. I’ve been hearing this as
recently as through this weekend. Because even those willing to give
the president a chance to learn that governing has far more consequence
and gravity than campaigning, are seeing quick signs of the power the
abortion lobby has over his administration. And it’s dividing society
in half, he says, just like slavery did. Pro-life advocates are with
Abraham Lincoln on this one, and President Obama is with Stephen
Douglas, whether he realizes it or not.

Cardinal George admits Obama doesn’t like to hear that. Though not all communication can be sanitized.

If even the incremental restrictions on abortion — such
as the ban on partial-birth abortion or parental notification laws —
are rolled back, Cardinal George said pro-life advocates could feel
desperate because they fear “abortion will be a human right, and of
course, if it’s a human right, it can’t be qualified.”

Cardinal George said Pope John Paul II, with the help of Muslim and
Latin American countries, successfully fought the Clinton
administration’s efforts to declare abortion a fundamental “human
right” at the 1994 U.N. population conference in Cairo, Egypt.

“Whether or not the present pope will be able to do this a
generation later, I don’t know, because we’re going to be faced with it
again,” the cardinal said. “But you can’t go on indefinitely. For 80
years we were a slave republic, and it took a terrible war to end that.
And now for 40 years we’re in an abortion regime, and I’m not sure how
that’s going to end.”

Cardinal George is a great philosopher. I wonder how he would define “end”.