WADSWORTH, Ohio (LifeSiteNews) — A Catholic priest called on voters to reject an upcoming pro-abortion ballot measure in Ohio and slammed Planned Parenthood abortionists as “Moloch’s priests” in a powerful sermon going viral online.
Father Patrick Schultz warned in a September 5 homily that Ohio and the United States are in a “very dire situation” due to widespread abortion, one with similarities to the “ancient pagan world.”
“Over and over and over again in the Old Testament, you hear God condemning child sacrifice,” he said, “which was practiced all throughout the ancient pagan world.”
“It was a temptation to which Israel was always kind of being lured into somehow, again, this god Moloch accepting child sacrifice,” explained the priest, who serves as parochial vicar at Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Church in Wadsworth.
But Moloch is making a resurgence in our time as well, amid the mass slaughter of unborn children, the priest lamented.
“In this very dire hour in which we’re living in our history of our country right now, this very dire situation in which that old, biblical, ancient world demon of Moloch, the demon who received child sacrifice, is kind of spreading his jaws before our nation, before our state to receive so many of our nation’s children through abortion,” he said.
The pagan priests of Moloch haven’t disappeared either, according to Father Schultz: Today, they’re killing babies at Planned Parenthood facilities.
“Moloch’s priests are still very much alive and well, except they wear white coats and scrubs these days, and they mostly work for Planned Parenthood,” he said.
The Ohio priest noted that Planned Parenthood “was founded by Margaret Sanger, who was a eugenicist who desperately wanted to eliminate the African-American population.”
Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion business, committed a staggering 374,155 abortions in 2020-2021, according to its most recent annual report, and disproportionately constructs abortion centers in black and Hispanic neighborhoods.
READ: Here’s what pro-lifers must do to defeat the radical Ohio abortion amendment
‘Send this demonic proposed amendment back to hell’
Fr. Schultz strongly urged voters to defeat a Planned Parenthood-backed amendment on the ballot in Ohio this fall that would create a virtually unlimited “right” to abortion and other so-called “reproductive decisions.”
“This coming November, November 7, we have here in Ohio an opportunity to send this demonic proposed amendment back to hell, from which it came,” he declared.
“There is nothing, absolutely nothing, about the proposed constitutional amendment that’s going to be on the ballot, the so-called ‘Right to Reproductive Freedom with Protections for Health and Safety’ – there is nothing about this that is compassionate,” the priest said. “It has nothing to do with health or safety, but everything to do with ideology and advancing the culture of death.”
“What it’s trying to do is to expand and enshrine the so-called ‘right,’” he said, making air quotes, “of mothers and fathers to kill their unborn babies.”
The radical amendment, titled Issue 1 and pushed by a coalition of far-left groups, would create a “right” in the Ohio Constitution to “make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions” without age limits and with little to no restrictions. The measure would apply to “every individual” and prevent the state from doing anything to “burden, penalize, prohibit, interfere with, or discriminate against” anyone’s “reproductive decisions.”
READ: Detransitioner Chloe Cole urges Ohio voters to protect children from transgender mutilation
Echoing legal experts, Fr. Schultz warned that the amendment would even allow children to obtain sterilizing transgender surgeries and hormones.
“It enshrines and ensures the ability of minors to pursue these sort of experimental medical procedures whereby they mutilate their own bodies in this attempt to become a member of the opposite sex and so-called ‘affirmative care therapy,’” he said. The priest blasted such procedures as “mutilation” of children’s bodies and “an attack on the reproductive organs for minors.”
An analysis by Carrie Campbell Severino and Frank Scaturro of Judicial Crisis Network likewise concluded that the Ohio amendment “would outlaw virtually any restrictions on abortion and all other procedures, including sex-change surgeries, that touch on reproduction, for both adults and minors.”
The ACLU, which helped organize the campaign in favor of the amendment, aggressively opposes limits on “sex change” surgeries and drugs for minors. Planned Parenthood distributes transgender hormones to tens of thousands of people every year.
“Here’s the point: There is no way that any Catholic in good conscience can support this amendment,” Father Schultz said.
“Here’s the point: there is no way that any Catholic in good conscience can support this amendment,” Father Schultz said.
“It’s not possible. It is not, nor is it ever loving or compassionate to make it easier for people to do evil either to themselves or to other people. That can never be the Catholic mind,” he stressed.
Indeed, the Catholic Church teaches that abortion is always gravely evil and that it is never licit to obey, vote for, or “take part in a propaganda campaign in favor of” a law that would liberalize abortion. The Church also rejects gender ideology and condemns mutilation and sterilization as “against the moral law” unless performed for “strictly therapeutic medical reasons.”
Ohio has a law on the books that bans abortion once a baby’s heartbeat can be detected, though it is currently blocked in court. A bill to outlaw underage “sex changes” passed the state House earlier this year.
‘Persons are at stake’ in the fight for life
Closing his homily, Fr. Schultz emphasized the personhood of unborn children, which he noted does not depend on factors like size, level of consciousness, or the circumstances of one’s conception.
“Like I said, people, persons: that’s who’s at stake here,” he proclaimed.
“Where do persons begin? In mothers,” he said. “Where do human rights begin? In the womb. If women have rights, when does a woman come into being if not at the moment of conception?”
Your size as a person doesn’t affect your status as a person, neither does your location as a person affect your status as a person, nor does your level of dependency as a person affect your status as a person, nor does your level of consciousness, nor does whether you were a wanted person or an unwanted person, whether you were the result of a violent act of rape or incest or a loving embrace of mother and father.
“None of these things touch the status of personhood,” the priest insisted. “No person is dispensable.”
Speaking on the feast day of Saint Teresa of Calcutta, Fr. Schultz cited the pro-life saint’s legendary speech in front of then-U.S. President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton at the National Prayer Breakfast in 1994, in which she said:
But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because Jesus said, ‘If you receive a little child, you receive Me.’ So every abortion is the denial of receiving Jesus, is the neglect of receiving Jesus. It is really a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murdered by the mother herself. And if we accept that the mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?
Fr. Schultz encouraged Catholics to pray to Mother Teresa, “this amazing apostle of the person,” so that “all consciences of all voters, especially Catholics and Christians,” would be enlightened to recognize the dignity of the human person.