The catechisms of the Council of Trent and the Second Vatican Council are very thorough books that contain Church teaching. Millions of these catechisms have been sold. The teaching is clear and unambiguous.

The arrangement of both books is the same. They are divided into four parts; the Apostles' Creed and the seven sacraments and the Ten Commandments and the Our Father prayer.

A Catholic forming a conscience gets to know these four parts. Reading a Catechism is a review of what is already known and believed.

Supreme Court documents from 1973 including opinions, concurring opinions and dissenting from Roe vs. Wade and Doe vs. Bolton, the companion case, are not part of required reading for forming a Catholic conscience.

Catholics should "distinguish carefully between the rights and the duties which they have as belonging to the Church and those which fall to them as members of the human society," it says.

"They will strive to unite the two harmoniously, remembering that in every temporal affair they are to be guided by a Christian conscience, since no human activity, even of the temporal order, can be withdrawn from God's dominion," Lumen Gentium, para. 36. says.

How much work is Durbin or Kerry doing to unite these two harmoniously?

Catholics should weigh in on debates because they have a responsibility to make this world a better place.

To wit: "Moreover, by uniting their forces let the laity so remedy the institutions and conditions of the world when the latter are an inducement to sin, that these may be conformed to the norms of justice, favoring rather than hindering the practice of virtue. By so doing they will impregnate culture and human works with a moral value." again, Lumen Gentium, para. 36.

Durbin and Kerry are no more Catholic than they are formed as Catholics.

To be formed by these documents and sacraments means that one has rejected abortion. A simple reading of the 5th Commandment forbidding murder is enough to know abortion is wrong.

The East Coast liberals including Associate Justice William Douglas and Senator Theodore Kennedy decided that abortion rights were necessary to keep the country from splitting.

Fair enough, Jackson thought the same when it came to the issue of slavery. The Democrats are usually on the wrong side of important issues.

Cardinal George muses whether the Democratic Party has a soul. Then he adds the quip that the Republican party never had a soul. The Cardinal should know that if the Democratic Party ever had a soul, that times haved changed and Franklin Delano Roosevelt died.

He should also know that, despite his clever remarks, it is the Republican Party that advanced freedom in the last two centuries -- especially when debating the morality of slavery.

Durbin and Kerry would do well to return to the Cathecism as their moral reference. As leaders in the Democratic Party, they could be instrumental is reviving their party's soul -- while it still has one.