When Rush Limbaugh made his unfortunate comments about Georgetown Law’s new “it” girl, Sandra Fluke, he may or may not have accurately described the young woman’s behavior according to the standards of a bygone era. The accuracy of his description is not at issue, so much as that Limbaugh broke a cardinal rule and went after someone in an unequal station in life.

Limbaugh, the self-styled “Doctor of Democracy,” indeed travels in the highest political circles, along with academics who seek his counsel. His commentary on Fluke was tantamount to the President or faculty of a college going on national radio and speaking in that way about a student.

It’s. Just. Not. Done.

Students are still in formation and are to be accorded a certain degree of forbearance. When Fluke holds the degree of Juris Doctor, then the gloves come off. However, students do not enjoy blanket immunity from impaling themselves on their own ill-informed or deceitful tongues, and it is the duty of faculty to correct the record when they get it wrong. This serves the interests of truth, the student, the school, and a public misled by false information made credible by the advanced academic status of the student and the stature of the school.

Having held herself out as the spokeswoman for sexually active Georgetown Law women whose extracurricular activities seem to occasion economic disenfranchisement on them, a candid analysis of Fluke’s numbers, submitted in the Congressional Record, seems to be in order.

According to Fluke, it costs a female Georgetown Law student $3,000 for contraception over the course of her three years in school. That’s $1,000 per academic year. So just how much contraception can $1,000 buy in a year?

The nearby Walmart sells generic birth control pills for $9 per month without insurance. Total cost: $108. Balance: $892

Presumably, the rest is spent on condoms to help protect against disease and add an added measure of ‘protection’ from pregnancy.

Walmart sells boxes of LifeStyles Ultra Sensitive condoms (40 per box) for $11.46. Dividing that price into $892, the cost-conscious student can purchase 77 Boxes of condoms for a grand total of 3,080 condoms!

And to think Democrat leaders hate Walmart!

Dividing 3080 condoms by 365 days in a year yields 8.43 condoms used EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. When do these women find time to study? What sort of feminism do they ascribe to where the men are not required to bear some of the cost?

Assuming that these students actually take two days off per week to study and rest, that raises the daily condom usage to 11.8 per day! Not even sailors brag like that.

Obviously math is not Ms. Fluke’s strong suit. I’m not suggesting that she’s any of the things Limbaugh called her, and I won’t repeat them here. However, when a graduate student gives testimony before the Congress of the United States of America, said student had better be deadly accurate with the facts.

The truth is either that Fluke is a bit confused with her numbers, does not know how to comparison shop, or perhaps has an agenda, or perhaps all three. There is no doubt that Georgetown University has an agenda that aligns along the same axis as HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Sandra Fluke.

Given the stark reality of the Obama administration’s war on religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular, the invitation of Sebelius as a commencement speaker this year can only signal that the Jesuits at Georgetown have broken ranks with the bishops in the most public, egregious, and consequential manner possible. There’s no cajoling such ideologues. They have chosen up sides in this war on religion.

It is difficult to see how any Catholic of good conscience can call Georgetown Catholic.

If Real Catholic T.V.’s Michael Voris can be instructed to no longer call his operation “Catholic,” pursuant to the discernment accorded to bishops under Canon Law, then what are the bishops to say of Georgetown?

Jesus gave us the model of fraternal correction. It is time to treat Georgetown as outsiders until such time as they return and bend to the Magisterium in matters of faith and morals. It’s not only medicinal for Georgetown and the Jesuits, but the laity and the world who see such example of disobedience and take it for acceptable difference of opinion within the faith.

The President and his allies have ushered in a new era where there are no more ambiguities, nothing left to debate. Either they will be defeated at the polls and the registrar’s office, or we will be co-opted by the state and her minions dutifully trained by the Georgetown’s of the nation.

Yesterday I posted a blog in response to Cardinal Goerge’s letter regarding the HHS Mandate and the future of Catholic institutions. Today, Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of the Diocese of Springfield, Illinois responded. I offer his response as its own post and respectfully reply below. Here is Bishop Paprocki.

Dr. Nadal is accurate in saying that the President and his supporters would love for the government to take over Catholic health care, social services and education, however, he misunderstands Cardinal George and the Bishops if he thinks we are threatening to abandon these Catholic hospitals if the government does not back down from the HHS mandate. Last year I fought to keep our Catholic Charities foster care and adoption services in Illinois, but we lost that battle in all three branches of state government: executive, legislative and judicial. I warned that this would happen. It was not a threat, but a statement of fact. In fact, the state pushed us out of foster care and adoption services. We did not go willingly or quietly. All that the Cardinal is saying is that the same thing will happen to other Catholic apostolates at the federal level unless the administration’s mandate is withdrawn by the executive branch or overridden by legislative or judicial branches of the federal government. That is where we are currently fighting this cultural war (which they started, by the way.) If Dr. Nadal has some other strategies that he thinks will work, I am open to suggestions.

Sincerely yours in Christ,
Most Reverend Thomas John Paprocki
Bishop of Springfield in Illinois

Your Excellency,

I thank you for your letter of clarification regarding Cardinal George’s intended message, and also for your prompt email reply to my attempt at verifying the authenticity of the message left in your name. Yes, it is alarming to see how many Catholic agencies have been shut down by the government.

As regards a suggested alternative course of action, in my post yesterday I mentioned the only viable option I see at this point. We all know the individual politicians and the party from whence this withering assault on the Church has come. It is the Democrat Party that has declared war on Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular. It is time for this party, as constituted, to be voted out of office. Perhaps in resounding defeat this party may reorganize itself, choosing leadership that does not see its traditional concern for the disenfranchised as being inextricably linked to a war on Christianity.

To be certain, the Republican Party has treated us (especially pro-lifers) as their useful idiots in years gone by. However, we now face threats unimagined a few short decades ago; threats from an increasingly radicalized Democrat Party. They cannot be reasoned with at this point, only defeated. The same goes for Obamacare as a package.

It would help, Your Excellency, if the bishops articulated this threat and poured resources into organizing for the November elections. As I said yesterday, there are hundreds of video clips of Democrats campaigning from Protestant pulpits, so the precedent is there. This, I believe, is the only viable option left to us. We cannot allow the Democrats the socially redeeming patina of social justice concerns with their programs for the poor while they simultaneously:

Fund Planned Parenthood, which operates 78% of their “clinics” in inner-city neighborhoods.

Fund Planned Parenthood abortions with over one third of a billion dollars annually with fungible money.

Promote an aggressive eugenics in fetal medicine.

Promote a national “healthcare” program that has rationing (death panels) built in.

Promote gay marriage while assailing the Church for its righteous objection.

The list goes on…

There can be no doubt as to where Barak Obama stands in relation to the Church. The same for the Democrat leadership. If Catholics do not organize against this wicked administration with a view toward defeating it at the polls, and do so with the full support of the clergy at the highest level, then we are deserving of what will come our way.

In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson wrote that it is the duty of government to protect our inalienable rights–those rights which come from God alone. He also wrote that it is the right of the people to alter or abolish any form of government which becomes destructive of government’s ends (to support those rights).

Barak Obama has launched a war against the Catholic Church and all people of faith with his HHS Mandate. We need our bishops to not only stand with the faithful, but to lead the faithful as citizens who are intent on changing the current government in November by voting out this wicked administration. It is intolerable that we should be forced out of the social services, healthcare, and educational fields because of our faith.

It is similarly intolerable that in states like New York, we have been forced to do at the state level what Obama proposes at the Federal level. If necessary, we need to engage in civil disobedience and refuse to comply any longer.

I believe that the faithful will rally around a muscular response from the bishops. Having failed at receiving justice at any level of government, as has been your experience, our only option is to change our government at the polls.

If any bishop would lead on this issue, my blog is at his disposal. Thank you, Bishop Paprocki, for your faithful service to our Church. Please rest assured of my continued prayers and support.

God Bless.

It is a well-known phenomenon that generals have a tendency to “Fight the Last War,” meaning that they tend to use the tactics that brought them victory in the last war they fought. The problem is that the enemy usually shows up with new weapons and new tactics. Either the generals adapt, or go down to defeat.

In the war over the HHS Mandate, it seems that the bishops have shown up with Cardinal O’Connor’s playbook from the 1980′s. It won’t work, and they had better grasp that reality today, and with all due urgency.

This past week, Francis Cardinal George of Chicago issued a letter to his faithful warning that the archdiocese will need to get out of the hospital and healthcare business, as well as education, social services, etc., if the Obama administration does not back down. Some excerpts:

Catholic hospitals, universities and social services have an institutional conscience, a conscience shaped by Catholic moral and social teaching. The HHS regulations now before our society will make it impossible for Catholic institutions to follow their conscience.

What will happen if the HHS regulations are not rescinded? A Catholic institution, so far as I can see right now, will have one of four choices: 1) secularize itself, breaking its connection to the church, her moral and social teachings and the oversight of its ministry by the local bishop. This is a form of theft. It means the church will not be permitted to have an institutional voice in public life. 2) Pay exorbitant annual fines to avoid paying for insurance policies that cover abortifacient drugs, artificial contraception and sterilization. This is not economically sustainable. 3) Sell the institution to a non-Catholic group or to a local government. 4) Close down.

The state is making itself into a church. The bishops didn’t begin this dismaying conflict nor choose its timing. We would love to have it ended as quickly as possible. It’s up to the government to stop the attack.

If you haven’t already purchased the Archdiocesan Directory for 2012, I would suggest you get one as a souvenir. On page L-3, there is a complete list of Catholic hospitals and health care institutions in Cook and Lake counties. Each entry represents much sacrifice on the part of medical personnel, administrators and religious sponsors. Each name signifies the love of Christ to people of all classes and races and religions. Two Lents from now, unless something changes, that page will be blank.

There’s much more in the letter. Read it here.

Cardinal George’s tactic here was that of Cardinal O’Connor in the 1980′s, when Mayor Ed Koch passed Executive Order 50 that would have forced the Catholic Church to hire homosexuals in all of our institutions. From Wiki:

O’Connor actively opposed Executive Order 50, a mayoral order issued in 1980 by Mayor Ed Koch, which required all City contractors, including religious entities, to provide services on a non-discriminatory basis with respect to race, creed, age, sex, handicap, as well as “sexual orientation or affectational preference”.[25] After the Salvation Army received a warning from the City that its contracts for child care services would be canceled for refusing to comply with the executive order’s provisions regarding sexual orientation,[26] the Archdiocese of New York and Agudath Israel, an Orthodox Jewish organization, threatened to cancel their contracts with the City if forced to comply.[26] O’Connor maintained that the executive order would cause the Church to appear to condone homosexual practices and lifestyle.[27][27] Writing in Catholic New York in January 1985, O’Connor characterized the order as “an exceedingly dangerous precedent [that would] invite unacceptable governmental intrusion into and excessive entanglement with the Church’s conducting of its own internal affairs.” Drawing the traditional Catholic distinction between homosexual “inclinations” and “behavior”, he stated that “we do not believe that homosexual behavior … should be elevated to a protected category.”[28]

The Church won its case in court, but O’Connor was willing to close our schools and child care agencies if we lost, forcing a city just inching back from bankruptcy to pick up the cost.

Different times.

Back then, I was in my early 20′s. The bulk of voters were the Greatest Generation, then in their 50′s, and the generations who preceded them. In other words, most voters actually had education in civics, and most men came from a generation when military service was regarded as a rite of passage into manhood. They valued the Constitution, and a thug such as Barak Obama never would have made it past being a city councilman from a radical district. Back then, voters understood the need for fiscal responsibility and Ed Koch would have had his goose cooked if he threatened the fragile economic recovery of the city, or if he incurred a threat made good by Cardinal O’Connor.

Different times.

Today the bishops are in contention with a Democrat Party headed by a president who wants them to abandon the field in every sector: education, social services, healthcare…

Today the bishops are in contention with a Democrat Party headed by a president who have added ten trillion dollars of debt to the nation in two years. That they don’t care at all about fiscal responsibility is an understatement.

Today the bishops are in contention with a Democrat Party headed by a president who understand that the bulk of the voters who stood behind Cardinal O’Connor almost thirty years ago are dead. In their place are the Baby Boomers, the children and grandchildren of the Boomers who are largely ignorant of American History, civics, or the Constitution.

Today the bishops are in contention with a Democrat Party headed by a president who are catering to the pervasive narcissism and hedoniosm of a society that stands in shameful contrast with the Greatest Generation that backed O’Connor. That’s why the HHS mandate has a good chance of prevailing.

Cardinal George is no fool, and he understands what he’s up against with the Democrats and Obama:

The provision of health care should not demand “giving up” religious liberty. Liberty of religion is more than freedom of worship. Freedom of worship was guaranteed in the Constitution of the former Soviet Union. You could go to church, if you could find one. The church, however, could do nothing except conduct religious rites in places of worship-no schools, religious publications, health care institutions, organized charity, ministry for justice and the works of mercy that flow naturally from a living faith. All of these were co-opted by the government. We fought a long cold war to defeat that vision of society.

He’s right. However, the tactics need to change. We do not have a half-century to fight this one as we did the Cold War. We have until November. If Obama is reelected, we’ll lose our tax-exempt status and be stripped of all our agencies by a president who hates who we are and what we stand for. This is no longer a fight over a facet of Obamacare.

It never was, and the bishops need to awaken to that reality. This is a new Marxism, as Cardinal George alluded to. If Obama backs down and the bishops claim victory they will live to regret being duped in so monumental a manner. A Marxist has declared war on the only Church with enough institutional infrastructure to pose a threat to his party’s agenda.

The Catholic vision of human anthropology, who we are, is lived out in our healthcare and social services, and is inculcated through our educational institutions.

Obama gets that.

Cardinal George left out the fifth, and only viable option. The Church has had war declared on her by the government. She must now rally her faithful to vote out this wicked administration in November. She must coordinate strategy with all people of faith from other religions and Christian denominations. If she doesn’t, we lose everything. If she does, a new administration will not permit her to lose the tax-exempt status for having been forced into political organizing to fight an existential threat from the government. (And there are hundreds of videos of Democrat politicians campaigning in Protestant church pulpits).

The plan as laid out by Cardinal George is yesterday’s strategy. It worked for Cardinal O’Connor in a different age, with a different electorate. It’s time for our normally quiet and pastoral bishops to gird their loins.

This one’s for all the marbles.

UPDATE: Bishop Paprocki of Springfield, Ill. responded to this post. His response and my rejoinder here.

Yesterday at a Congressional hearing, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius made two outrageous claims:

From CNSNews.com

During the subcommittee hearing, Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.) said that contraception provided by insurance companies to people employed by religious organizations under the future form of the rule Sebelius described would not be was not free.

“Who pays for it? There’s no such thing as a free service,” Murphy asked.

Sebelius responded that that is not the case with insurance.

“The reduction in the number of pregnancies compensates for cost of contraception,” Sebelius answered.

Murphy expressed surprise by the answer.

“So you are saying, by not having babies born, we are going to save money on health care?” Murphy asked.

Sebelius replied, “Providing contraception is a critical preventive health benefit for women and for their children.”

Murphy again sought clarification.

“Not having babies born is a critical benefit. This is absolutely amazing to me. I yield back,” he said.

Sebelius responded, “Family planning is a critical health benefit in this country, according to the Institute of Medicine.”

Quite aside from the fact that nobody is incensed that the government is now directing private industry to provide goods and services for free, the twin claims that decreasing the population offsets the cost of such mandates to industry, and that contraception is a, “critical preventive health benefit for women and for their children,” tell us all we need to know about the depravity of the political left in this nation.

Lowering cholesterol and salt intake are “critical preventive health benefits” as they prevent disease states such as atherosclerosis, hypertension, etc.

Eliminating tobacco is a “critical preventive health benefit” as it reduces chances of developing lung and throat cancer.

Now we are told by the HHS Secretary that pregnancy is a potential health risk not only to women, but their existing children as well. This is the trajectory the twin evils of abortion and contraception have had us on all along. No less a prophet than Blessed Mother Theresa of Calcutta saw this coming decades ago:

America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of the father’s role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts — a child — as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered dominion over the independent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters

And, in granting this unconscionable power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or other sexual partners. Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being’s entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be declared to be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign.

~Mother Theresa — “Notable and Quotable,” Wall Street Journal, 2/25/94, p. A14

While it is axiomatic that families and nations do not grow and prosper by shrinking, the question needs to be asked. What is behind the political left’s emphasis on reducing the size of our population, especially in light of the dwindling numbers of employees who will be available to support retirees on Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare?

It seems to me that the Obama crew has it entirely wrong. The only way to fix the funding shortfalls for senior citizen programs is to increase the size of the nation, her tax-paying workforce, and the size of her economy. Having aborted 54 million citizens over the past 39 years, as well as the offspring they’ll never have, has devastated our senior entitlement programs.

Again, it is axiomatic that growth and prosperity are tied to…

Growth!

There is no logical, economic, political, or philosophical explanation for the model of stewardship espoused by the left. Sebelius has revealed, again, the pitting of the mother against the child of the womb and has now added the pitting of the child of the womb against its siblings. She has reduced pregnancy to the level of a disease state in the Federal system of health management.

It is classic radical feminist agitprop. It also echoes Margaret Sanger who famously decreed,

The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it. The same factors which create the terrible infant mortality rate, and which swell the death rate of children between the ages of one and five, operate even more extensively to lower the health rate of the surviving members. Moreover, the overcrowded homes of large families reared in poverty contribute to this condition. Lack of medical attention is still another factor, so that the child who must struggle for health in competition with other members of a closely packed family has still great difficulties to meet after its poor constitution and malnutrition have been accounted for.

From “Woman and the New Race,” page 63. Book can be read online here.

Such sentiments from two prominent Catholic women arise from the crosscurrents of poorly formed morality and ethics, and encountering human suffering. It would seem that in the Sanger-Sebelius circles not much has changed in 90 years. Their response to suffering and death is not charity and expanding economic opportunity. The response is more death.

It is a cramped worldview that sees human struggle and only envisions death, or nonexistence as the solution. We can do better than these people.

We must.

In my youth, the differences between the Soviet Union and the United States were made abundantly clear to us. We had the freedoms enumerated in the Bill of Rights, and they didn’t. Teens at drive-thru fast food restaurants were iconic of American freedom.

The freedom to recreate our culture through music, food, mobility.

Our fathers fought despotism in World War II and Korea and told us of the communist menace, always juxtaposed with the freedoms for which they fought. We could only imagine the deprivations endured by our peers who were trapped behind the iron curtain. We’d heard of the Soviet commissars with the red stars on their sleeves, whose job it was to enforce all of the myriad dictates of the state in what was a dreary existence. The human spirit withers in the absence of authentic freedom. I thanked God for being an American.

Now after the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the destruction of the Berlin Wall, the flowering of freedom in the former Soviet-bloc nations; we have decided that since we beat them, we should emulate their former system of government.

The America of my middle years increasingly resembles the former Soviet Union, especially as regards the all-out war on religion. More on religion in a moment.

Under our Dear Leader in the White House, we now have Soviet-style commissars who are paid agents of the state, enforcing Department of Health and Human Services food guidelines in preschool by inspecting lunchboxes from home, and seizing the offending food items, supplanting them with state-approved food and billing the family. The following story from Sara Burrows at Carolina Journal Online is chilling:

“A preschooler at West Hoke Elementary School ate three chicken nuggets for lunch Jan. 30 because the school told her the lunch her mother packed was not nutritious.

“The girl’s mother – who said she wishes to remain anonymous to protect her daughter from retaliation – said she received a note from the school stating that students who did not bring a ‘healthy lunch’ would be offered the missing portions, which could result in a fee from the cafeteria, in her case $1.25.”

Read the rest here.

That’s not an isolated incident. In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg has decided that trans fats should be outlawed, and so they were. Sales of trans fats in any food in New York is prohibited, even in Twinkies and Devil Dogs! Grannie Bloomberg has also decided that cigarettes are bad for one’s health and raised the price of a pack to $14.50 with new taxes. He has also decreed that all eating establishments, from the finest restaurants to Dunkin’ Donuts, must list the caloric content of each menu item right next to the item on the menu. Soda (pop) machines have been taken from schools, and increased punitive taxation (similar to cigarettes) was proposed for all soda (pop) in New York City. Bloomberg might have gotten away with it, but for the hordes of New Yorkers ready to tar and feather him.

At least soda is safe, for now.

Another New York Moment occurred a few years back when some City employee decided that New Yorkers seeking to escape our 8 1/4% sales tax by shopping in New Jersey (no sales tax on clothes) should have our license plates photographed at New Jersey malls by government commissars, and then some sort of fine be mailed to the offending party. No word on the career of said bureaucrat after that lead balloon crashed.

Then, in California, there was this recent gem:

“One sun-drenched August morning, armed officers wearing sunglasses and bullet-proof vests descended on a market in Venice, Calif., searching for illegally sold goods. It marked the end of a year-long investigation where undercover agents posed as customers.

Their target: raw, unpasteurized milk.

Federal regulators say it’s a dangerous and unnecessary public threat, pointing to 143 cases of contamination linked to still births, miscarriages and kidney failure since 1987, the latest involving five California children. Grassroots, back-to-nature consumers say the product strengthens the immune system by keeping intact good bacteria that’s killed in pasteurized milk. The choice should be theirs, the activists say.“These guns are being drawn on basically aging hippies, all because of illegal milk,” said Ajna Sharma-Wilson, a Los Angeles lawyer for the Venice market owner, in an interview. “This is a waste of taxpayer money.”

Get the rest here, from Bloomberg News!

Enter the HHS mandate and the Catholic Church.

There is actually no better metaphor for Obama’s brand of government in relationship to the Church than what happened to that little girl. The government seized a healthy turkey and cheese sandwich, potato chips, banana, and apple juice and handed the child a plate of chicken nuggets.

When government is permitted to legislate what we may or may not eat, tries to make it a crime to shop where we wish, demands that we be confronted with the caloric content of our food every time we eat out, the Catholic Bishops have an uphill battle on their hands. It isn’t only Obama whom they are fighting.

It is a nation that has quit on itself, a people who have grown weary of freedom and personal responsibility and who are increasingly trading freedom for the meager rations that come with enslavement. We’ve quit the game. The America of my middle years barely resembles the America of my youth. The Greatest Generation, tempered by war and the Great Depression spawned the Me Generation, softened by excess. With the Greatest Generation all but gone, the Me Generation is in charge. My grandmother used to say of the Boomers in our youth, “I’m glad I’ll be dead when they’re in charge.”

I’m beginning to understand why.

We’ve settled for the chicken nuggets.

Narcissism and hedonism breed their own enslavement, and there will never be a shortage of political opportunists who will seize on the desire for freedom without responsibility, ready to stand guard over the prison of our own making. Our clergy, silent for far too long, now fight a two-front war. On the one hand, they must resist the efforts of the government to dictate every facet of life, lest the people not have the requisite freedom to make moral decisions. On the other hand, they must somehow shake people from their narcissistic torpor and instill in them a renewed appreciation for evil and its effects.

Before the bishops can convince the enslaved of the evil of losing their freedom, they need to convince them of their beauty.

We deserve better than chicken nuggets.

When I was a seminarian, Msgr. William Smith would tell us in moral theology class that the freedom of choice would one day become a mandate. We’re seeing that now with the aggressive eugenics in maternal-fetal medicine with extreme pressure to abort being made on mothers of handicapped babies.

The freedom to use contraception will become a mandate once the government is picking up the tab. There is a hidden mandate within the HHS mandate. Our bodies, our families are increasingly becoming the property of the state.

This November we will either begin walking this abuse back, or a new iron curtain will descend.

How ironic that we, the victors of the Cold War, will have done this to ourselves.

The graph tells the story, and comes from Chris Kahlenborn, MD. Dr. Kahlenborn is the founder of the Polycarp Research Institute, which has some excellent materials on the link between oral contraceptives and breast cancer, as well as abortion and breast cancer. Dr. Kahlenborn’s excellent book, Breast Cancer : Its Link to Abortion and the Birth Control Pill was written ten years ago and is a perfect source book for non-scientists. It was Dr. Kahlenborn’s stellar book that drew my interest in this subject and took me from DEEP skeptic to a properly educated and enlightened scientist through his presentation of all the scientific literature. Order it here.

This contraceptive fight is going to be a definitive issue in this presidential election. Dr. Kahlenborn, Dr. Lanfranchi, Dr. Brind, Ms. Karen Malec and others have written extensively on these issues, and a thorough and sustained reading of their work is going to be necessary if we are not going to be written off as religious zealots by those in the middle. The place to begin is with Kahlenborn’s book and his website. It’s an easy read for the layperson.

The individuals just mentioned, and myself, are out here doing the education, but now we need voices. Many more voices.

Perhaps many here have used oral contraceptives in the past, or are using them now. It’s never too late to learn what science and medicine are telling us, and to change our lifestyles; if not by the light of faith, then by the light of empiric evidence.

Our women are being ravaged by breast cancer, and while OC use and abortion don’t account for it all, they account for plenty.

I’m here to educate and answer questions. Let’s get going.

See also, World Health Organization Data on Birth Control Pill and Estrogen Replacement Carcinogenicity

There has been confusion of late concerning the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) listing for their Group 1 Carcinogens, including several forms of oral contraceptives and estrogen replacement therapy. The confusion has arisen because the original link by WHO has been changed. After some sleuthing, here is a treasure trove of information from WHO. Let’s take the links one at a time.

First are the IARC Group Classifications for agents and their degrees of carcinogenicity:

Group 1 Carcinogenic to humans (107 agents)

Group 2A Probably carcinogenic to humans (59 agents)

Group 2B Possibly carcinogenic to humans (267 agents)

Group 3 Not classifiable as to its carcinogenicity to humans (508 agents)

Group 4 Probably not carcinogenic to humans (1 agent)

The definitions of these groups may be found in the IARC Monograph Preamble on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans. Click here.

The page with links to the agents by various classification schemes may be found here.

The actual list of all agents, (IN Group number order) beginning with the following known (Group 1) carcinogens containing:

Estrogen therapy, postmenopausal
Estrogen-progestogen menopausal therapy (combined)
Estrogen-progestogen oral contraceptives

may be found by clicking here.

The same estrogens may be found on the list that lists them in alphabetical order with Group number next to their name. Click here.

Going much, much deeper…

There is another link that shows the monographs on:

1. Exposure Data
2. Studies of Cancer in Humans
3. Studies of Cancer in Experimental Animals
4. Other Data Relevant to an Evaluation of Carcinogenicity and its Mechanisms
5. Summary of Data Reported and Evaluation
6. References

for each of the following:

Oral Contraceptives, combined
Hormonal Contraceptives, Progestogens Only
Post-Menopausal Estrogen Therapy
Post-Menopausal Estrogen-Progestogen Therapy

The link to this page (which contains all the links to the monographs) may be found here.

Hopefully, this helps. Contrary to rumor, WHO did not hide the data, but actually expanded it in new links. Remember that even small increases in risk when multiplied by hundreds of millions of women taking these drugs will produce large absolute new cases of breast cancer.

P.S. Here is a monograph on all of the known carcinogens: Click here.

It started with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi fast-tracking Obamacare and urging lawmakers to read it after voting in the affirmative. In Brooklyn, that’s called a clue.

Then Donald Berwick was recess appointed to head Medicaid and Medicare, and to function as Obamacare’s Rationing Czar. He was recess appointed because the Senate found rather distressing his lack of straight answers on his fondness for eugenics.

It continues with the trend in medicine to continuously expand the definition of “death” for the purpose of organ harvesting to the point that two American bioethicists recently claimed that there is nothing morally wrong with killing, if the individual has lost function and autonomy. Read it here.

All of this, and so much more, points to the real bloodbath that is Obamacare:

Aggressive eugenics feeding the population control agenda.

Enter the HHS mandate forcing the Catholic Church to purchase contraceptives. It’s a brilliant political strategy on Obama’s part, and his Catholic supporters (54%) have aided in this development. It’s the old two-step, one-step; and nobody does it better than the Democrats all up and down the Potomac.

The HHS mandate was Obama pushing two steps forward. If he met with no opposition, he would be significantly ahead of the game. If he met with fierce opposition, then he at least would have galvanized his radical base and caused his opposition to focus on the front end of the life spectrum, while distracting from the real payout for the Culture of Death on the other end of the life spectrum.

Will Obama capitulate? If he does he’ll be lionized in the press as being reasonable and open to dialogue, as well as change. He’ll be juxtaposed with the ‘rigid religious right’ who will not yield an inch. In the end, we will have been too narrowly focussed on the religious liberty issue and will have failed to see the set-up for what it was.

He’ll still be one step ahead, as he will have thrown the right’s attention off of the rest of Obamacare, which will have been tweaked instead of routed.

Our efforts at dealing with the HHS mandate must be tied to a deeper examination of Obamacare and the reality that there is simply no money for all Americans to receive the level and quality of care that those with insurance currently enjoy. There will be a massive decrease in the quantity, type, and quality of service that we will receive in the future, because the very system promising universal coverage is the very system bankrupting the nation.

The eugenists have been setting the table for decades, as have the organ donor folks, and now we are seeing the dangerous and deadly confluence of those two rivers under nationalized health care.

The fight over religious liberty is an important one, and one where we must prevail. However, we need to understand that we are engaged in the two-step, one-step with something far, far, more ominous and consequential. A victory over the HHS mandate that does not translate into momentum for destroying Obamacare is simply putting lipstick on a pig.

It is a rare day that this blog ventures into presidential politics so deeply, but this is not merely an issue of religious liberty. This is about an existential threat. If Obama is not defeated in November, battles over the First Amendment will seem a quaint parlor game compared to what will befall our nation.

If we are to salvage our national identity, this president and his pig need to be retired at the polls in November.

The Saint Gianna Physician’s Guild has begun a petition drive calling for the Obama Administration to reverse course on the HHS mandate. This is a great organization, with more about them in a minute.

Cardinal Raymond Burke has issued the following statement:

I wholeheartedly express my solidarity with the Stop The Birth Control Mandate petition promoted by St. Gianna Physician’s Guild protesting the recent decree by the Department of Health and Human Services of our federal government. I encourage Catholics to sign the petition and thus unite their support of Holy Mother Church by protesting the most grievous violation of the right to religious liberty for Catholics in the United States.

~Raymond Cardinal Burke
Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura

CLICK HERE TO SIGN THE PETITION

At this writing there are 19,311 signatures. Please send this link to all of your friends and family and encourage them to sign the petition.

Now, a little about this wonderful physician’s guild from their website:

Saint Gianna Physicians Guild was founded by a Catholic layman who saw a need for physicians and other health care workers to bring their Faith into their lives and medical practices in a more pronounced way.

St. Gianna died in 1962 at the age of 39. She sacrificed her life for that of her unborn daughter when confronted with complications caused by a tumor that developed during her pregnancy. St. Gianna was canonized by Pope John Paul II on May 16, 2004.

AGAIN, PLEASE CLICK HERE TO SIGN THE PETITION

The first paper I ever wrote in graduate school was a review of the literature on Leprosy. It is a disease transmitted by contact that we now know to be caused by a close first cousin of the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, and can be cured using the same antibiotics that we use against TB. This miracle of 20th Century medicine has emptied the leper colonies, arresting and eliminating the disease in its earliest stages before it maims and disfigures its victims.

Sunlight seems to be having the same salutary effect on the Susan G. Komen Foundation, and they have elected to leave the leper colony, as Planned Parenthood languishes with the increasing ravages of their disfigurement, unwilling to take the medicine that would end the insideous effects of their disease. It’s actually too late for Planned Parenthood, but for Komen, there is yet hope.

The sunlight began to pierce the darkness back in 2007, when Dorinda Bordlee, Vice President and Senior Counsel of the Bioethics Defense Fund met Eve Sanchez Silver who told her about her about the Komen-Planned Parenthood funding link. Silver, a breast cancer survivor and charter member of Komen’s Hispanic/Latina Advisory Council, resigned from Komen, stating,

As a Christian and life affirming citizen I can not reconcile the Foundation’s decision to affirm life with one hand and support its destruction with the other.

Bordlee began to research Komen’s grant database to confirm Silver’s claims. The most recent data available to her back then were the 2005 numbers which showed over $700,000 in grants made by certain Komen state affiliates to their local Planned Parenthood clinics. Subsequent grant totals can be read here at BDF’s site. BDF’s initial findings were picked up and pursued by a great many who then launched their own investigations.

It was discovered that Komen Founder, Nancy Brinker (Susan Komen’s sister), sat on the board of Planned Parenthood in North Texas. Jill Stanek wrote two great articles about the links between Komen and PP.

At the heart of the matter lies three essential issues regarding the deplorable decision by Komen to fund PP:

1. The causal link between breast cancer and abortion (ABC link).
2. The causal link between breast cancer and oral contraceptives.
3. The fact that Planned Parenthood does NOT do mammograms.

Yes the ABC link is hotly disputed, and only because radical proabort researchers have lied through their teeth about the literature. I’ve written 56 articles dealing with this link, which can be read here. Placing that contentious issue to the side, along with PP’s complicity in placing women at risk for breast cancer through their abortion services, we need to look at the role of PP in dispensing oral contraceptives, which have been well established causes of breast cancer.

In 2009, the same Dr. Louise Brinton who is Branch Chief in Epidemiology at the National Cancer Institute, and who chaired the sham 2003 workshop denying the ABC link, coauthored a 2009 paper in which she listed abortion and oral contraceptives under known or suspected risk factors for breast cancer. The reference for the paper follows at the end of the article.

In their paper, the authors list in Table 4. Multivariate adjusted case-control odds ratios for all breast cancer cases, triple-negative
and non-triple-negative cases, in relation to oral contraceptive risk factors, stratified by age at diagnosis under age 40 and
41-45 y, the following devastating information.

The risks for acquiring the deadliest, most aggressive and difficult to treat form of breast cancer, Triple Negative Breast Cancer based on age of first use of oral contraceptives is:

Age 22+: 250%
Age 18-22: 270%
Age Under 18: 540%

These numbers, from some of the finest minds in science, beg the question:

What would possess an organization such as Komen to ever fund an organization that dispenses birth control pills like candy? Could it be the claim that PP does life-saving breast screenings?

Certainly, Senator Barbara Boxer has been quite vocal about PP’s “mammograms”, as reported here.

In truth, PP does NOT perform mammograms. When one hears the term, “breast screening” or “breast cancer screening”, one tends to envision a mammogram. Instead, PP’s screening is a palpation of the breast, checking for detectable lumps. So, yes, if a lump is detected, and if the lump is cancerous, that could be lifesaving. But if no lump is detected? Is the woman given a referral for a mammogram?

It is the mammogram that is essential.

A woman’s best chances at beating her cancer are when the cancer is found through mammography before it is large enough to be palpated, or found through mammography in women whose breast density make it difficult to detect by palpation. By funding PP, Komen funded the abortions that lead to increased risk of breast cancer, the distribution of oral contraceptives which are well known to cause breast cancer, and the lie that women were receiving mammograms.

In an era where less than 10% of research grants are receiving federal money, there is no dearth of scientists in desperate need of funding for legitimate research purposes. One can barely walk the corridors of a university without bumping into them, so Komen should have no difficulty at all in finding and funding worthy Ph.D.’s and M.D.’s who simply cannot access the ever-dwindling supply of federal research dollars.

As far as funding prevention efforts, the neglect of the Dolle and Brinton study, or the many other papers showing oral contraception’s role in breast cancer is tantamount to a crime.

Komen is to be applauded for getting out of the leper colony and breaking its funding ties with one of the largest purveyors of death on the planet. The great work of antisepsis begun by Eve Silver and Dorinda Bordlee that was picked up and furthered by thousands will help Komen more fully achieve Nancy Brinker’s deathbed promise to her sister to do all she could to find a cure. Now that Komen is out of funding causality and lies, they may see a more robust financial future, which we all pray may help speed the end of this scourge which afflicts so many of our wives, mothers, sisters, friends, and other loved ones.

As for Planned Parenthood the mask has been ripped away, in no small measure by Lila Rose and her associates, revealing the true face of the leprosy lurking under the guise of women’s healthcare.

Reference:

Risk Factors for Triple-Negative Breast Cancer in Women
Under the Age of 45 Years

Jessica M. Dolle,1 Janet R. Daling,1 Emily White,1,3 Louise A. Brinton,4 David R. Doody,1
Peggy L. Porter,2 and Kathleen E. Malone1,3
Divisions of 1Public Health Sciences and 2Human Biology, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center; 3Department of Epidemiology, University of
Washington, Seattle, Washington; and 4Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute, Rockville, Maryland

Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2009;18(4). April 2009

Word comes this week that Cardinal-elect Timothy Dolan received a telephone call from President Obama stating that the Catholic Church would not receive an exemption from the requirement to purchase contraception for its employees. Cardinal Dolan is less than enthused:

“It’s not about contraception. It’s about the right of conscience.”

“The government doesn’t have the right to butt into the internal governance and teachings of the church. This is not a Catholic issue, it’s an American issue. We’re strong on this issue of conscience, and that’s what’s at stake here.”

“While I appreciate his courtesy Friday morning to give me a call with the somber news, I had to tell him I was terribly let down, disappointed and disturbed.”

Yes, Eminence, it is about conscience where Obama and the Federal Government are concerned, but it’s about much, much more within the Catholic Church.

It’s about the contending issues of fidelity and narcissism that have torn the Church to pieces over the past fifty years, reducing a once-powerful and respected constituency to a laughingstock in many political circles. Obama’s actions and posture toward the Church, even the election of such a man, would have been unthinkable twenty-five years ago. His declaration to Cardinal Dolan was less a declaration of war than the final, sickening realization that we have had the terms of our self-incarceration dictated to us by the man who embodies all that we have become as a people.

In my 51 years, I have witnessed Mass attendance drop to 1/3 of what it was when I was a child. Since my twelfth year of life, we have butchered more than 54 million unborn babies, millions of them in their Catholic mothers’ wombs. My generation advanced the sexual revolution and spread AIDS like wildfire. Yes many of us have repented of our earlier sins and have pursued virtue, but many of us have not properly formed our children out of misplaced guilt and mistaken notions of what constitutes hypocrisy.

I can’t remember EVER hearing a homily on contraception or John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. I can count on two hands the number of homilies I have heard on abortion, and none, NONE on what makes for a sacramental marriage.

For as bad as it has been, the sex abuse scandal has been the LEAST damaging issue for the Church. That was a very small fraction of our priests, less than 4%. Our marriages are in free-fall, our children torn apart by divorce.

At every step of the way, rejection of what the Church teaches has been behind the disintegration. At every step of the way, we have elected increasingly radical politicians. There is a causal relationship in that pattern.

There is no “Catholic Vote.”

Enter Obama and Dolan.

Their contention, and our current condition, could be viewed as presaged by Abraham Lincoln nearly two-hundred years ago:

The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions:
Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois
January 27, 1838

This task of gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general, all imperatively require us faithfully to perform.

How then shall we perform it?–At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?– Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!–All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

We are dying by suicide. We are killing our babies by abortion, and now our elderly in increasing numbers through passive and active euthanasia. The preservation of resources and lifestyle are the leading reasons offered up.

Malignant Narcissism and Hedonism.

That there is reason to believe Obama could actually be re-elected indicates we passed the conscience issue long ago. Conscience was determined in our last presidential election. We elected Obama knowing full-well his declared intent.

This election will determine whether or not we’re content with our chains.

The recent overruling of the FDA decision to sell Plan B over the counter (OTC) to children as young as eleven years of age has engendered no small amount of outrage by proponents of the FDA plan, and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has come in for severe criticism from women’s health and advocacy groups. Setting aside for a moment the undercurrent of abortion and the distrust between warring parties over the issue, this decision by Secretary Sebelius is a victory for the very children the FDA purports to serve and protect.

According to FDA labeling on Plan B:

“Ectopic pregnancies account for approximately 2% of all reported pregnancies. Up to 10% of pregnancies reported in clinical studies of routine use of progestin-only contraceptives are ectopic.”

That represents a five-fold increase in the incidence of a potentially fatal side effect of the drug’s usage in those taking the drug. The very issue proponents of OTC Plan B sale cite for selling to young adolescents, their fear of parental knowledge and involvement in their sex lives, heightens the risk of fatality in the very young.

Aiding and abetting the young in skirting parental involvement fosters a do-it-yourself gynecology where side-effects such as cramping, nausea, vomiting, and bleeding can serve to reinforce and heighten the fear and distrust that led to the child’s self-medication in the first place. Plan B taken by a child with an existing and untreated endometriosis can lead the child into thinking that the lower abdominal pain and heavy bleeding of a resulting ectopic pregnancy may well be her monthly norm. Such a mistake can be fatal, but what is an already fearful and distrustful child to do? It is entirely unreasonable to expect children, who are notoriously ignorant of their changing physiology, to engage in self-differential diagnosis and admit their clandestine activities to the parents they fear and distrust.

In research conducted by Family Health International (FHI), January, 2003.

“… the sine qua non of an OTC-switch is that patients should be capable of self-medicating by reading the drug’s package insert. The above label comprehension tests for Plan B indicate that safe self-medication is not possible for a significant segment of the population. For example, only 75% of all respondents answered correctly that Plan B should not be taken in the presence of unexplained vaginal bleeding. Among the low-level literacy group that figure declined to 69%. Furthermore, only 67% of all respondents understood that Plan B is designed to serve as a backup for regular contraception methods, not a replacement. Among those of low-literacy this figure dropped to 46%; whereas for women of high literacy the figure was 78%. Obviously, many patients do not understand much of the drug’s package insert, which argues against FDA approval of EC OTC.”

If there are any doubts about the ability of children and teens to self-prescribe such medication and act responsibly, NPR published a story about the work of Harvard’s Dr. Frances Jensen that shows how the child and adolescent brain is underdeveloped in the areas responsible for critical and prudent decision making:

She learned that that it’s not so much what teens are thinking — it’s how.

Jensen says scientists used to think human brain development was pretty complete by age 10. Or as she puts it, that “a teenage brain is just an adult brain with fewer miles on it.”

But it’s not. To begin with, she says, a crucial part of the brain — the frontal lobes — are not fully connected. Really.

“It’s the part of the brain that says: ‘Is this a good idea? What is the consequence of this action?’ ” Jensen says. “It’s not that they don’t have a frontal lobe. And they can use it. But they’re going to access it more slowly.”

Do-it-yourself gynecology is bad medicine for the young, and our daughters deserve better than such callous disregard for their lack of knowledge of their bodies, lack of impulse control, and lack of sufficient neurological development to enable them to make reasonable and informed decisions. For those who lack trust in the experience and wisdom of the adults who know them best, it is all the more imperative that we ensure they don’t fall victim to pharmaceutical merchants and their allies who would exploit the callowness of their youth.

For the women’s groups howling with rage at Sebelius, I remember a time when feminism demanded medicine’s best for women, not do-it-yourself gynecology for our teenage and pre-teen daughters.

From UPI today comes news that a team of researchers, including the Guttmacher Institute, are looking into the issue of abortion’s stigma. Here is a new front in the abortion war. In many ways, it is the vulgar inverse of post-abortion healing ministries such as Lumina and Rachel’s Vineyard.

CINCINNATI, June 29 (UPI) – U.S. and British researchers say they are examining the social issues surrounding abortion and the stigma sometimes associated with terminating a pregnancy.

Danielle Bessett, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Cincinnati, and colleagues at The Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, the University of Cincinnati, the University of California, San Francisco, the Guttmacher Institute in New York, Goldsmiths College, University of London and Center for the Study of Women, University of California, Los Angeles, say there is little research on abortion stigma.

“What does exist focused on women who have had abortions and on their experiences,” Bessett says in a statement. “We’re looking at stigma in a broader context.”

Each researcher is exploring a specific group that could be affected by stigma, such as healthcare providers who perform abortions, supporters of women who have had abortions, the male partner of a woman who had an abortion, women’s experience in pregnancy after previously having had an abortion and women’s self stigma after suffering miscarriage, Bessett say.

“This is new territory into research around the social issues surrounding abortion,” says Bessett, who adds the research will be conducted in both national and international settings, including the United States, Zambia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Mexico, Brazil and countries in Europe.

“Understanding abortion stigma will inform strategies to reduce it, which has direct implications for improving access to care and better health for those whom stigma affects,” the study authors say.

It will be interesting to see what their data have to say. The intent, however, is pretty dark, and is contained in the last line of the report. The researchers wish to reduce stigma with an eye toward improving access to “care,” which is proabort-speak for “abortion.” The goal here is to identify the stigma and then embark on a new campaign of verbal engineering in order to preemptively deaden the collective conscience.

This new campaign will be the most perniciously evil to date. The first wave of verbal engineering sought to distort and deny the scientific truth of the embryo’s development. Sonogram technology has since demolished those lies and shifted the momentum to the pro-life side. Post-abortion healing ministries such as Lumina, Rachel’s Vineyard, and Silent No More have similarly done severe damage to proaborts through the ever-increasing numbers of post-abortive women and men flocking to them for healing.

The cat is out of the bag.

Since the proaborts can no longer deny or suppress the truth, they can only acknowledge that abortion does indeed hurt women, and then begin to spin like mad in the newest attempt at distortion. Knowing their evil, it should come out sounding something like this:

There has been confusion surrounding the stigma of abortion. Abortion is nothing more than a medical procedure that terminates a pregnancy. While it is true that the human embryo is indeed a human animal in its earliest stages of development, much of the stigma comes from the mistaken notion that the human embryo is somehow to be equated with a sentient human being, that is to say, a human person. Reinforcing these notions are religious belief systems which claim that there is no distinction between the single-celled zygote and the newborn baby at its mother’s breast.

The stigma, then, is a misplaced sense of responsibility, both personal and global. The role of the counselor is to reorient the focus of the pregnant woman and abortion clinic staff.

If that sounds too far-fetched, consider this week’s quote from that scientific luminary, former Vice President, Al Gore:

“One of the principle ways of [stabilizing the population] is to empower and educate girls and women,” he said, as reported by the Daily Caller. “You have to have ubiquitous availability of fertility management so women can choose how many children to have, the spacing of the children.”

“You have to lift child survival rates so that parents feel comfortable having small families and most important — you have to educate girls and empower women,” he continued. “And that’s the most powerful leveraging factor, and when that happens, then the population begins to stabilize and societies begin to make better choices and more balanced choices.”

Get the rest of Gore’s story here.

Lost in all of this is the truth of the human person, the truth of who we are. The stigma of abortion will never be programmed out of the human soul. At best, all that will be accomplished is that the researchers will add to people’s confusion, but in the end, the pieces just won’t fit together. We are either integrated, or disintegrated as humans. These folks will add to the disintegration, but will never kill the conscience.

They can’t. We’re made in the image and likeness of God.

Thoughts?

My article in today’s Headline Bistro:

The Internet is abuzz this week with reports from the U.S. Census Bureau that one-fourth of all U.S. counties are dying. The reasons given are an aging population, an increase of only 9.7% in the U.S. population over the past ten years (the lowest decennial increase since the great depression), and migration to more affluent counties in the midst of a protracted economic slump. Demographers call this “natural decrease.” The etiology, in fact, may not be so natural at all.

In the same decade that “natural decrease” has taken place, Catholic bishops have been closing Catholic schools all over the nation, much to the consternation of the laity. So what’s behind the trend?

First and foremost, we are simply not reproducing as previous generations have done. A smaller population has led to increasing demands for higher salaries, as there is less competition in the domestic labor pool, leading companies to relocate manufacturing overseas where populations are large and the cost of living is low. This has a domino effect throughout the economy.

The fact that we have an aging population and are not producing enough workers to support them in their retirement years is an economic disaster. We are beginning to see this played out in state economies that cannot sustain current civil servant salary, retirement and benefits packages, which are far more generous and comprehensive than those in the private sector.

The Church is not immune from the chaos of what many in the pro-life movement call an impending demographic winter. Parishes and schools are closing at a steady and alarming rate, and it makes perfect sense.

I recall my very large parish, St. Michael’s, in 1960s Brooklyn when I was a child. Every Mass was packed on Sundays. Three priests were on hand to distribute communion. By the early 1970s, the church was half-filled. Today when I visit, it’s one-third filled, and with not so many Masses as we had when I was a child.

The schools and churches were built to accommodate the sizeable immigrant Catholic Church, with their sizeable families, including the Baby Boom generation. In my community, families of four and five children were the norm, and families of seven or more children were not at all uncommon. Logic then dictates that if many families no longer go to church or are active in their faith, and if those who do are only having two children, then we simply do not need the infrastructure built to accommodate an active Catholic populace 50-60% larger than we have today.

Sealing the fate of the Catholic schools and parishes has been the precipitous decline in vocations to the priesthood and religious life. Churches cannot function without priests, and a lay staff of teachers has a higher cost of living than the previous communities of religious.

Underlying all of this has been the overwhelming rejection of the Magisterial teaching articulated in Humanae Vitae. Eighty percent of Catholics simply disregard the Church’s teaching about the use of birth control and the obligation to accept children willingly and lovingly from God. Many who decry the parish and school closings are those who also decry Humanae Vitae, and do not see the connection.

It isn’t rocket science.

If we do not produce a sizeable population of workers, there will be nobody to support us in our age and infirmity. If we do not produce sizeable Catholic families and encourage priesthood and religious life as vocations for our children, our institutional infrastructure will collapse. If we do not encourage our children to live marriage as a sacramental vocation, with all that is required of it, our Church will contract like our dying counties.

The “natural decrease” is largely the result of artificial contraception.

These contractions and the suffering and inconveniences they bring are signs to us that perhaps Humanae Vitae was indeed a relevant document. They also highlight for us some of the blessings that come from openness to large families. If we are wise, if we teach our children well, these contractions can be reversed.

The signs of spring are beginning to emerge in the Church. Vocations to more traditional religious orders are on the rise, along with an uptick in the numbers of seminarians. With a protracted downturn in the economy, many are reconsidering the treadmill of pursuit of material acquisitions and discovering the simpler joys of family life.

We certainly have a long way to go in reclaiming lost ground, but there is a sense that a newness is upon the Church. This includes a fresh look at Humanae Vitae through less rebellious and more sober eyes.