From LifeSite News:

SOUTH BEND, INDIANA, May 21, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – In a coordinated defense of religious liberty, at 11 a.m. 43 Roman Catholic organizations filed a dozen lawsuits nationwide to strike down the HHS mandate.

The plaintiffs include some of the most significant organs of the U.S. church, including the Archdioceses of New York, Washington, D.C., and St. Louis; the Dioceses of Dallas, Fort Wayne-South Bend, Ft. Worth, the Michigan Catholic Conference, Pittsburgh, and Rockville Centre; the University of Notre Dame, Catholic University of America, and the Franciscan University of Steubenville; and Our Sunday Visitor.

Timothy Cardinal Dolan, the Archbishop of New York, said the step was necessary “to protect our religious liberties from unwarranted and unprecedented government intrusion.”

The Archdiocese of Washington has created a website dedicated to the new lawsuit. Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., called the mandate a “government attempt to force the Church out of the public square.”

“The Catholic rebellion has begun,” said Catholic League President Bill Donohue in a statement e-mailed to LifeSiteNews.com.

The HHS mandate “amounts to nothing less than a grave threat to our constitutionally protected First Amendment right to freedom of religion,” said Franciscan University President Father Terence Henry, TOR. He added, although they never envisioned taking such a step, the board of trustees unanimously approved the lawsuit.

Our Sunday Visitor linked its involvement to the legacy of its founder, Fr. John Noll, who fought the political clout of the Ku Klux Klan as that organization attempted to impose anti-Catholic policies at the turn of the 20th century. “Today, Our Sunday Visitor stands proudly with our fellow Catholic apostolates and with our bishops in resisting this challenge,” the publication announced in a press release.

Read the rest here.

When a major Catholic publication likens the tactics of the nation’s first black president to those of the Ku Klux Klan it is an indication of how thoroughly corrupt the man truly is. And now we see the stirrings of our bishops who are rising up in defense of their flock.

That’s bad news for Obama.

Many dissident Catholics will support the bishops, not out of a new-found sense of regard for Magisterial teaching, but because they value the freedom to dissent and do not want their dissent mandated by the government.

The president thought he could leverage a family feud to his advantage and now finds that the side he thought he could manipulate has turned on him, specifically the University of Notre Dame. The Interloper-in-Chief has discovered that our Catholic family feud over contraception is just that; a Catholic family feud.

Obama is not one of us, and will pay dearly at the polls for his meddling.

In the interim, the bishops are to be applauded for their defense of the Church, and of her freedoms. Beginning tomorrow, I’ll be hosting a novena for our bishops, for their continued strength.

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.

The twentieth century saw the greatest advances made in science, technology, and medicine that the world has ever known. Building on the conceptual discoveries of the previous three centuries, we have wrought wonders unimagined in every decade of that century, and continue on unabated in this new century and new millennium. If there has been a down side to all of that fast-paced discovery, it has been the fact that the technological developments have come faster than humanity could process their implications and discern their right use, or whether they ought to be used at all.

Consider this quote from former Chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, Leon Kass, M.D., in Human Cloning and Human Dignity, The Report of the President’s Council on Bioethics. Though dealing specifically with cloning, the principles discussed apply equally to a host of issues.:

“We should not be self-deceived about our ability to set limits on the exploitation of nascent life. What disturbs us today we quickly or eventually get used to; yesterday’s repugnance gives way to tomorrow’s endorsement. A society that already tolerates the destruction of fetuses in the second and third trimesters will hardly be horrified by embryo and fetus farming (including in animal wombs), if this should turn out to be helpful in the cure of dreaded diseases.

“We realize, of course, that many proponents of cloning-for-biomedical-research will recommend regulations designed to prevent just such abuses (that is, the expansion of research to later-stage cloned embryos and fetuses). Refusing to erect a red light to stop research cloning, they will propose various yellow lights intended to assure ourselves that we are proceeding with caution, limits, or tears. Paradoxically, however, the effect might actually be to encourage us to continue proceeding with new (or more hazardous) avenues of research; for, believing that we are being cautious, we have a good conscience about what we do, and we are unable to imagine ourselves as people who could take a morally disastrous next step. We are neither wise enough nor good enough to live without clear limits.”

There were four great “divisions” or “splittings” that technology produced in the twentieth century. Each had catastrophic consequences that have contributed to the corrosion of civilization. Each involves the severing of unitive bonds with an uncontrolled release of energy that has been every bit as destructive as the intact bonds are productive. Three of these have been particularly catastrophic for women.

The first great splitting came at the Lambeth Conference of 1930, when the Anglican Church split away from the rest of Christendom and became the first Christian church to embrace artificial contraception. Never before had any Christian church held that the splitting, or separation of the Unitive and Procreative dimensions of marital sex was moral. Over the next few decades most all other Christian churches followed the Anglicans, with catastrophic consequences.

Looking at the moral and familial disintegration occurring in the churches who embraced contraception, as well as those quarters of the Catholic Church where the same was occurring, Pope Paul VI, in 1968, penned Humanae Vitae, the binding encyclical that explicated and reinforced 2,000 years of Catholic teaching about the beauty and sanctity of sex as designed by God in His order for creation. It also warned of the consequences of splitting the unitive from the procreative. Those who have suffered the most have been women, as contraception frees men to follow their most base and animal instincts, making of women’s bodies mere playthings.

What contraception cannot eliminate is the brain biochemistry of women where sex releases the hormone oxytocin, which is involved in producing feelings of bondedness and belonging. It doesn’t take too much violation of the bondedness to induce cynicism, apathy, and despair. If indeed there was a war between the sexes in the 1960’s, the pill did nothing but intensify it and add dimensions that never before existed.

The second great splitting was that of the atom; specifically, the splitting of the atomic nucleus. The bonds that hold the nuclear particles together are so strong that a grapefruit-sized amount of Uranium whose nuclei are split, through fission as it is called, can produce enough energy in an uncontrolled reaction to blow up a city. When the scientists of the Manhattan Project in World War II wanted to slow down and discuss the ethical implications of the bomb they had just invented, they were rebuffed by a military weary of the World War it had been fighting for close to four years, and saw it as the means to avoid millions of casualties in an invasion of the Japanese home islands. The rest is history.

The third great splitting that occurred came in the late 1970’s with in vitro fertilization (IVF). In IVF, eggs are taken from the mother’s ovaries and sperm is collected from the father (who is given a plastic cup and ushered to a private setting for self-expression). The gametes are then mixed in a Petri dish by a lab technician and fertilization occurs. The dozens of embryos thus produced are graded and sorted. The least viable-looking are simply discarded. The best are implanted in the mother’s womb, and the rest are submerged and frozen in liquid nitrogen at –320 degrees F.

A tragic consequence of this splitting is the consent of the desperate mother to this barbaric treatment of her offspring, often not perceived as such by the woman whose desperation blinds her.

If contraception split the unitive from the procreative dimensions of the marital embrace, then IVF has gone further to split the procreative dimension itself by actually negating the need for a marital embrace at all. It also introduced the first division of motherhood’s integrated unity. IVF removes the events of fertilization from within the mother and posits them in the Petri dish. In splitting the marital embrace, husband and wife are reduced from co-creators with God to the role of mere sideline observers in the laboratory as the technicians go about the work of procreation by being the agents who facilitate the union of egg and sperm.

In very short order sperm and egg donation in IVF expanded to any permutation of donors. Couples (many not even married) were engaging in eugenic creations of babies by soliciting sperm and egg donors from Ivy League students. If IVF was the technology for couples with problems rooted in the pathophysiology of conception, the next logical accommodation was made for those where women could not, or would not, carry a baby to term.

That accommodation was the fourth great splitting of the twentieth-century: Surrogate Motherhood. Surrogate motherhood takes the integrated unity of normal female reproduction and divides it across two (or more) women. In the case of the married couple, IVF is performed and then a surrogate is solicited to accept implantation of the embryo and gestate the child for the couple. Surrogates are paid in the tens of thousands of dollars for their services.

The problem with surrogate motherhood is that it isn’t.

It isn’t surrogacy. It’s a critical component of what is supposed to be an integrated physiological process of reproduction.

The legal and ethical communities quickly agreed that the mother was the egg donor for IVF who contracted the services of the surrogate. In my senior thesis in college I argued against this understanding, and remain opposed to it today. A child may now have five parents: egg donor, sperm donor, married couple who procured said egg and sperm for IVF, and surrogate (gestational mother).

Many Catholic bioethicists posit motherhood in the egg donor who is also the married (or not) woman procuring IVF and the services of the surrogate.

It’s a huge mistake to take so simplified a view.

The truth of the matter is that both egg donor and gestational mother are the biological mothers of the child. To say, ethically, that the “real” mother is the egg donor is to blind oneself to the nine months of embryonic and fetal development that occur in the womb. The bondedness of mother and child have as their most proximal and powerful origins the mutual growth together during nine months of gestation, and not the more distal ovulation and fertilization (which the egg donor does not participate in with IVF).

Motherhood is more, much more, than the donation of half an individual’s chromosomal content. If Catholic bioethicists cannot see that nine months of gestation are the second half of the biological equation and produce an intimacy and union between woman and child, an intimacy forged within the created order of gestation, then we are in trouble.

The truth is that God’s created order has been artificially divided within women. First with the division wrought by contraception, which makes of women the very sex objects inveighed against by the feminists of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Then, the integrated unity of the procreative dimension of human sexuality itself is split by IVF and further subdivided by surrogacy, with the end result being that two women can each claim a biological component of motherhood: fertilization and gestation.

Specifically, the baby’s growth and development are all facilitated by the woman in whose womb the child grows. The baby is literally bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh. Lost in all of this technological revolution has been the great dignity of women and motherhood. (We’ll save the discussion on men and fatherhood for another day)

To add further to the disintegration, motherhood has been completely commodified, from the sale of eggs for thousands of dollars, to paid surrogates. Our women have been dismantled and their parts and functions sold to the highest bidders. All of this in the name of a feminism that sought freedom from women’s biology, which was held out to them as nature’s chains of oppression.

Just because we can do something does not mean that we ought to. In forty years we have slowly and imperceptibly come to a place most of us never thought we would come to. When the created order of human bonds is split, the destruction is every bit as catastrophic as the splitting of the bonds that unite the atomic nucleus. The prophets of the twentieth-century have been the Catholic popes and bishops, who have been ridiculed mercilessly. Looking at the ever-widening debris field, perhaps it’s time for another consideration of their unitive message.

Kass was quite correct:

“We are neither wise enough nor good enough to live without clear limits.”

To all of the mothers who give great witness through their loving sacrifices, their example of faith, and to those who came to motherhood through a process of disintegration the pain of childlessness blinded them to,

Happy Mother’s Day.

As Holy Week looms large on the horizon, I’m thinking out loud a question I have thought to myself for years:

Were the Apostles really the first Deacons in the Church? Did the Apostles institute the Diaconate, or did Jesus at the Last Supper?

I believe that a scriptural case may be made for the Apostles being the first deacons. To begin, we all know that the Last Supper was the moment where Jesus instituted His Priesthood, conforming His apostles to himself as Priest when He commanded them:

“Whenever you do this, do this in remembrance of me.”

In that moment, with that command, Jesus conformed His Apostles to Himself as Priest. The Church teaches that at the moment of ordination to the priesthood, the very nature of the man is changed forever. A priest is a priest forever.

The Church also teaches that when a man is ordained to the diaconate he undergoes a change in his very nature, that he is a deacon forever. He is conformed to Christ the Servant, and theirs is a ministry of service. (It is important to note that every priest remains a deacon, forever.)

We are also taught, in Acts, that the Apostles selected and ordained the first deacons, conforming them to Christ the Servant:

1 About this time, when the number of disciples was increasing, the Hellenists made a complaint against the Hebrews: in the daily distribution their own widows were being overlooked.
2 So the Twelve called a full meeting of the disciples and addressed them, ‘It would not be right for us to neglect the word of God so as to give out food;
3 you, brothers, must select from among yourselves seven men of good reputation, filled with the Spirit and with wisdom, to whom we can hand over this duty.
4 We ourselves will continue to devote ourselves to prayer and to the service of the word.’
5 The whole assembly approved of this proposal and elected Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit, together with Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicolaus of Antioch, a convert to Judaism.
6 They presented these to the apostles, and after prayer they laid their hands on them.

A proper understanding of this passage in Acts requires a return to the Last Supper in John 13:

Before the feast of Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to pass from this world to the Father. He loved his own in the world and he loved them to the end. The devil had already induced Judas, son of Simon the Iscariot, to hand him over. So, during supper, fully aware that the Father had put everything into his power and that he had come from God and was returning to God,he rose from supper and took off his outer garments. He took a towel and tied it around his waist.

Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and dry them with the towel around his waist. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Master, are you going to wash my feet?”

Jesus answered and said to him, “What I am doing, you do not understand now, but you will understand later.”

Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered him, “Unless I wash you, you will have no inheritance with me.”

Simon Peter said to him, “Master, then not only my feet, but my hands and head as well.”

Jesus said to him, “Whoever has bathed has no need except to have his feet washed, for he is clean all over; so you are clean, but not all.”

For he knew who would betray him; for this reason, he said, “Not all of you are clean.”

So when he had washed their feet (and) put his garments back on and reclined at table again, he said to them,

“Do you realize what I have done for you? You call me ‘teacher’ and ‘master,’ and rightly so, for indeed I am. If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet. I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do. Amen, amen, I say to you, no slave is greater than his master nor any messenger greater than the one who sent him. If you understand this, blessed are you if you do it.”

“If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet. I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do.”

With those words, Jesus conformed His apostles to Himself as servants, and this before He instituted the Eucharist. Going ahead to the dilemma of the Apostles in Acts, we see them exercising their ministry of service until the growth of the Church placed too many demands on them. When they laid hands on the seven they were transmitting what had been given to them at the Last Supper, namely, the ministry of service.

The Diaconate.

The Apostles realized that the ministry of service was suffering because of the constraints of time upon them, and so it was that they safeguarded the integrity of this ministry that Jesus conferred on them by ordaining men to that ministry alone while the Apostles pursued the ministry of the Word.

But note: The ministry of service was the province of the Apostles, and they created deacons in response to that ministry suffering for want of time.

As I read the Last Supper narratives, there were two ordinations:

Jesus conforming the Apostles to Himself as servants.
Jesus conforming the Apostles to Himself as priests.

The institution of the priesthood tends to overshadow the institution of the diaconate for many obvious reasons, but this has serious ramifications for those in Holy Orders in the Twenty-first Century.

The Apostles functioned as both deacons and priests until the demands of leadership forced the issue. However, many of the problems stemming from priestly clericalism, even the clericalism itself often arises when a priest forgets that he is also a deacon forever, that he was first conformed to Christ the Servant before he was conformed to Christ the Priest. It is even worse in priests who disparage the Permanent Diaconate, but that is a topic for another day.

Every priest, every bishop today is also a deacon. So, too, does it appear from John and Luke (Acts), were the Apostles.

There can be no further objection by the Catholic Bishops to publishing voter guides, or to organizing within our Churches. Obama just tossed the IRS regs. to the wind.

This matters, and for a great many reasons touching on biomedical ethics. This President has defunded the embryo adoption program begun by President Bush while simultaneously promoting the use of embryos for research. Then there are his Obamacare death panels, HHS Secretary who will pay for the contraception mandate by realizing the savings on not providing healthcare to humans not born…

He has declared war and is calling upon Churches favorable to him to work as churches to organize and get out the vote.

Game on.

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.

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.

Your Emminence,

Yesterday on National television you made two statements that, taken together, signal disaster for the Catholic Church in America. In the first statement you said:

We bishops aren’t fighters. We’re pastors, and we want to stand on principle. We just want to do our work as effectively as we can.

In the second statement you said that your response to an overture from the president on backing down from the HHS mandate would be:

I would say… The religious exemption is very choking and very tight. There’s a restriction there that we can’t live with. Simply in the best American principles of freedom of religion, simply give a much more dramatically wide latitude to that religious exemption and protection of conscience and religious freedom, and you’re not gonna hear from us any more.

How in the world could you have said that to this president, of all people, at this moment in history? That was a disastrous full-blown retreat in the name of every bishop in the land. Today, we have Obama’s answer.

A thinly veiled semantic recasting of the exact same policy, by the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

You lamented to Charlie Rose that this president has repeatedly given his word; at Notre Dame, to the Catholic Health Association, and to all of the bishops through you, and then he broke faith. Honestly, Emminence, what did you expect? Didn’t Jesus tell us that poison trees yield poison fruit? Your response was to tell this demagogue to just throw us a bone, an election year sop, and that he would never hear from the bishops again.

What is frightening, Emminence, is that I’m beginning to believe you.

What about abortion, euthanasia, the aggressive eugenics seizing medicine, the ever-widening definition of “death” to accommodate the organ transplant business? Will you hold your tongue on those issues as well?

In the 23rd Psalm, the psalmist writes:

The Lord is my shepherd;
I shall not want.
He makes me to lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside the still waters.
He restores my soul;
He leads me in the paths of righteousness
For His name’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil;
For You are with me;
Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.

The rod and staff in this context are not metaphors for discipline, but the understanding that as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we know that the Good Shepherd will use his staff to beat away the wild beasts, which is precisely what Jesus meant when He said that He is the good shepherd who lays down His life for His sheep.

As we both know, at night the shepherds create pens for the sheep and the good one’s then lie down at the opening to the pen so that the wolves will have to take on the shepherds before they can get to the sheep. That’s a far cry from your statement of the bishops not being fighters. It was always my understanding that the staff carried by a bishop not only symbolized his benign control over the flock, but is a symbolic projection of power to the wolves.

That was very absent in your commentary yesterday with Charlie Rose.

What we don’t need any more of is polite, diplomatic meetings with the architects of the Culture of Death. We had that here in New York with Gay Marriage. We’ve now had that with the HHS mandate.

It’s beyond painful to see our bishops, health care leaders, and Catholic academicians repeatedly being played for fools by this man. Enough! What we need now are shepherds who will wield those staffs against the wolves who have been tearing the flock to pieces for decades. You can’t do business with the most rabidly proabortion politician in American history. He can only be defeated.

And it isn’t just the unborn or the elderly who need your protection. It’s good Catholic laypeople who are business owners and who don’t want to be forced to participate in this mandate. Even if you secure an accommodation for the Church, what about them?

Even if Obama capitulates on the HHS mandate, should he be reelected, he will sign an executive order the next day reinstating the mandate. Then what?

No, Emminence, we need a Cardinal like your illustrious predecessor, John Cardinal O’Connor. We need to confront the Nancy Pelosi’s and Kennedy’s, the Biden’s and Sebeliuses from within and force the issue regarding their Catholicity. They must recant their support of the Culture of Death or be prohibited from receiving communion. We need a Cardinal who will denounce such atrocities as the HHS mandate and not simply voice his “consternation” and “disappointment”.

You cannot afford to be played for the fool ever again. Your staff isn’t large enough to corral the entire flock when they lose faith in the shepherd. Should that occur, Emminence, it will be Obama’s most enduring legacy.

UPDATE: Please see correction 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

It’s been a blistering and draining week with the Komen story. As tomorrow’s Gospel tells us, Jesus often withdrew to prayer and solitude, and so am I today. Time for a retreat weekend. Here is an outstanding homily given by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on the eve of his election to the Chair of Peter. It addresses what we all need to know and understand in our hearts, what we need to do in order to fortify ourselves.

At this hour of great responsibility, we hear with special consideration what the Lord says to us in his own words. From the three readings I would like to examine just a few passages which concern us directly at this time.

The first reading gives us a prophetic depiction of the person of the Messiah – a depiction which takes all its meaning from the moment Jesus reads the text in the synagogue in Nazareth, when he says: “Today this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing” (Lk 4,21). At the core of the prophetic text we find a word which seems contradictory, at least at first sight. The Messiah, speaking of himself, says that he was sent “To announce a year of favor from the Lord and a day of vindication by our God” (Is 61,2). We hear with joy the news of a year of favor: divine mercy puts a limit on evil – the Holy Father told us. Jesus Christ is divine mercy in person: encountering Christ means encountering the mercy of God. Christ’s mandate has become our mandate through priestly anointing. We are called to proclaim – not only with our words, but with our lives, and through the valuable signs of the sacraments, the “year of favor from the Lord”. But what does the prophet Isaiah mean when he announces the “day of vindication by our God”? In Nazareth, Jesus did not pronounce these words in his reading of the prophet’s text – Jesus concluded by announcing the year of favor. Was this, perhaps, the reason for the scandal which took place after his sermon? We do not know. In any case, the Lord gave a genuine commentary on these words by being put to death on the cross. Saint Peter says: “He himself bore our sins in his body upon the cross” (1 Pe 2,24). And Saint Paul writes in his letter to the Galatians: “Christ ransomed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written, ‘Cursed be everyone who hangs on a tree’, that the blessing of Abraham might be extended to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.” (Gal 3, 13s).

The mercy of Christ is not a cheap grace; it does not presume a trivialization of evil. Christ carries in his body and on his soul all the weight of evil, and all its destructive force. He burns and transforms evil through suffering, in the fire of his suffering love. The day of vindication and the year of favor meet in the paschal mystery, in Christ died and risen. This is the vindication of God: he himself, in the person of the Son, suffers for us. The more we are touched by the mercy of the Lord, the more we draw closer in solidarity with his suffering – and become willing to bear in our flesh “what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ” (Col 1, 24).

In the second reading, the letter to the Ephesians, we see basically three aspects: first, the ministries and charisms in the Church, as gifts of the Lord risen and ascended into heaven. Then there is the maturing of faith and knowledge of the Son of God, as a condition and essence of unity in the body of Christ. Finally, there is the common participation in the growth of the body of Christ – of the transformation of the world into communion with the Lord.

Let us dwell on only two points. The first is the journey towards “the maturity of Christ” as it is said in the Italian text, simplifying it a bit. More precisely, according to the Greek text, we should speak of the “measure of the fullness of Christ”, to which we are called to reach in order to be true adults in the faith. We should not remain infants in faith, in a state of minority. And what does it mean to be an infant in faith? Saint Paul answers: it means “tossed by waves and swept along by every wind of teaching arising from human trickery” (Eph 4, 14). This description is very relevant today!

How many winds of doctrine we have known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking… The small boat of thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves – thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so forth. Every day new sects are created and what Saint Paul says about human trickery comes true, with cunning which tries to draw those into error (cf Eph 4, 14). Having a clear faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and “swept along by every wind of teaching”, looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today’s standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.

However, we have a different goal: the Son of God, true man. He is the measure of true humanism. Being an “Adult” means having a faith which does not follow the waves of today’s fashions or the latest novelties. A faith which is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ is adult and mature. It is this friendship which opens us up to all that is good and gives us the knowledge to judge true from false, and deceit from truth. We must become mature in this adult faith; we must guide the flock of Christ to this faith. And it is this faith – only faith – which creates unity and takes form in love. On this theme, Saint Paul offers us some beautiful words – in contrast to the continual ups and downs of those were are like infants, tossed about by the waves: (he says) make truth in love, as the basic formula of Christian existence. In Christ, truth and love coincide. To the extent that we draw near to Christ, in our own life, truth and love merge. Love without truth would be blind; truth without love would be like “a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal” (1 Cor 13,1).

Looking now at the richness of the Gospel reading, I would like to make only two small observations. The Lord addresses to us these wonderful words: “I no longer call you slaves…I have called you friends” (Jn 15,15). So many times we feel like, and it is true, that we are only useless servants. (cf Lk 17,10). And despite this, the Lord calls us friends, he makes us his friends, he gives us his friendship. The Lord defines friendship in a dual way. There are no secrets among friends: Christ tells us all everything he hears from the Father; he gives us his full trust, and with that, also knowledge. He reveals his face and his heart to us. He shows us his tenderness for us, his passionate love that goes to the madness of the cross. He entrusts us, he gives us power to speak in his name: “this is my body…”, “I forgive you…”. He entrusts us with his body, the Church. He entrusts our weak minds and our weak hands with his truth – the mystery of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit; the mystery of God who “so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son” (Jn 3, 16). He made us his friends – and how do we respond?

The second element with which Jesus defines friendship is the communion of wills. For the Romans “Idem velle – idem nolle”, (same desires, same dislikes ) was also the definition of friendship. “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” (Jn 15, 14). Friendship with Christ coincides with what is said in the third request of the Our Father: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. At the hour in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus transformed our rebellious human will in a will shaped and united to the divine will. He suffered the whole experience of our autonomy – and precisely bringing our will into the hands of God, he have us true freedom: “Not my will, but your will be done”. In this communion of wills our redemption takes place: being friends of Jesus to become friends of God. How much more we love Jesus, how much more we know him, how much more our true freedom grows as well as our joy in being redeemed. Thank you, Jesus, for your friendship!

The other element of the Gospel to which I would like to refer is the teaching of Jesus on bearing fruit: “I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain” (Jn 15, 16). It is here that is expressed the dynamic existence of the Christian, the apostle: I chose you to go and bear fruit…”. We must be inspired by a holy restlessness: restlessness to bring to everyone the gift of faith, of friendship with Christ. In truth, the love and friendship of God was given to us so that it would also be shared with others. We have received the faith to give it to others – we are priests meant to serve others. And we must bring a fruit that will remain. All people want to leave a mark which lasts. But what remains? Money does not. Buildings do not, nor books. After a certain amount of time, whether long or short, all these things disappear. The only thing which remains forever is the human soul, the human person created by God for eternity. The fruit which remains then is that which we have sowed in human souls – love, knowledge, a gesture capable of touching the heart, words which open the soul to joy in the Lord. Let us then go to the Lord and pray to him, so that he may help us bear fruit which remains. Only in this way will the earth be changed from a valley of tears to a garden of God.

In conclusion, returning again to the letter to the Ephesians, which says with words from Psalm 68 that Christ, ascending into heaven, “gave gifts to men” (Eph 4,8). The victor offers gifts. And these gifts are apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers. Our ministry is a gift of Christ to humankind, to build up his body – the new world. We live out our ministry in this way, as a gift of Christ to humanity! But at this time, above all, we pray with insistence to the Lord, so that after the great gift of Pope John Paul II, he again gives us a pastor according to his own heart, a pastor who guides us to knowledge in Christ, to his love and to true joy. Amen.

Hot on the heels of our medical conference last Saturday, Therapeutic Advances in Poor Prenatal Diagnoses, comes this letter from Archbishop Chaput to the people of his archdiocese. Opposition to this new eugenics is swelling all over the nation. Here is a bishop who makes me proud of my Church.

Earlier this week local media covered the story of Amelia Rivera, a young girl with Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome reportedly denied a kidney transplant by a local hospital. Amelia’s syndrome results in serious developmental delays, and according to her parents, the hospital declined a transplant due to her diminished mental ability and shortened lifespan.

It’s unwise to assume that news media get all the details of a story like this right, or that the motives of an entire hospital’s leadership and staff are as unfeeling as an individual doctor might seem. Nonetheless, a couple of things are worth noting. First, Amelia’s parents are persons who love their daughter zealously for who she is, and who know the beauty and dignity of her life despite her disability. Second, the habit of treating genetically disabled children as somehow less worthy of life is growing across the country.

A number of my friends have children with disabilities. Their problems range from cerebral palsy to Turner’s syndrome to Trisomy 18, which is extremely serious. Prenatal testing can now detect a high percentage of pregnancies with a risk of genetic problems.

The tests often aren’t conclusive. But they’re pretty good. And the results of those tests are brutally practical. Studies show that more than 80 percent of unborn babies diagnosed with Down syndrome, for example, now get terminated in the womb. They’re killed because of a flaw in one of their chromosomes – a flaw that’s neither fatal nor contagious, but merely undesirable.

The older a woman gets, the higher her risk of bearing a child with special needs. And so, in medical offices around the country, pregnant women now hear from doctors or genetic counselors that their baby has “an increased likelihood” of a genetic flaw based on one or more prenatal tests. Some doctors deliver this information with sensitivity and great support for the woman. But, as my friends know from experience, too many others seem more concerned about avoiding lawsuits, or managing costs, or even, in a few ugly cases, cleaning up the gene pool.

In practice, medical professionals can now steer an expectant mother toward abortion simply by hinting at a list of the child’s possible defects. And the most debased thing about that kind of pressure is that doctors know better than anyone else how vulnerable a woman can be in hearing potentially tragic news about her unborn baby.

I’m not suggesting that doctors should hold back vital knowledge from parents. Nor should they paint an implausibly upbeat picture of life with a child who has a disability. Facts and resources are crucial in helping adult persons prepare themselves for difficult challenges. But doctors, genetic counselors and medical school professors should have on staff – or at least on speed dial – experts of a different sort.

Parents of children with special needs, special education teachers and therapists, and pediatricians who have treated children with disabilities often have a hugely life-affirming perspective.

Unlike prenatal caregivers, these professionals have direct knowledge of persons with special needs. They know their potential. They’ve seen their accomplishments. They can testify to the benefits – often miraculous – of parental love and faith.

Expectant parents deserve to know that a child with special needs can love, laugh, learn, work, feel hope and excitement, make friends and create joy for others. These things are beautiful precisely because they transcend what we expect. They witness to the truth that every child with special needs has a value that matters eternally.

Raising a child with special needs can be demanding. It always involves some degree of suffering. Parents grow up very fast. None of my friends who has a daughter or son with a serious disability is melodramatic, or self-conscious, or even especially pious about it. They speak about their special child with an unsentimental realism.

It’s a realism flowing out of love – real love, the kind that forces its way through fear and suffering to a decision, finally, to surround the child with their heart and trust in the goodness of God. And that decision to trust, of course, demands not just real love, but also real courage.

The real choice in accepting or rejecting a child with special needs is never between some imaginary perfection or imperfection. None of us is perfect. No child is perfect. The real choice in accepting or rejecting a child with special needs is between love and unlove; between courage and cowardice; between trust and fear.

That’s the choice we face when it happens in our personal experience. And that’s the choice we face as a society in deciding which human lives we will treat as valuable, and which we will not.

This Sunday, January 22, marks the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legitimized permissive abortion around the country. More than 45 million abortions later, the damage of that decision continues to grow — undermining our reverence for the life not just of unborn children but of the mentally and physically disabled as well.

We need to understand that if some lives are regarded as unworthy, respect for all life is at risk. We should pray that Amelia Rivera gets the help she needs, and that God surrounds her parents with the support they need.

And especially this week, more than ever, we should recommit ourselves to defending the dignity of all human life, no matter how “flawed” it may seem in the eyes of the world.

We continue our study today of a little-known and little-studied 1974 document from the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith entitled:

Declaration on Procured Abortion

Read Part I here.

Read Part II here.

Today we turn our attention to the prophetic voice of the document, with commentary to follow:

17. Scientific progress is opening to technology – and will open still more – the possibility of delicate interventions, the consequences of which can be very serious, for good as well as for evil. These are achievements of the human spirit which in themselves are admirable. But technology can never be independent of the criterion of morality, since technology exists for man and must respect his finality. Just as there is no right to use nuclear energy for every possible purpose, so there is no right to manipulate human life in every possible direction. Technology must be at the service of man, so as better to ensure the functioning of his normal abilities, to prevent or to cure his illnesses, and to contribute to his better human development. It is true that the evolution of technology makes early abortion more and more easy, but the moral evaluation is in no way modified because of this.

26. But this does not mean that one can remain indifferent to these sorrows and miseries. Every man and woman with feeling, and certainly every Christian, must be ready to do what he can to remedy them. This is the law of charity, of which the first preoccupation must always be the establishment of justice. One can never approve of abortion; but it is above all necessary to combat its causes. This includes political action, which will be in particular the task of the law. But it is necessary at the same time to influence morality and to do everything possible to help families, mothers and children. Considerable progress in the service of life has been accomplished by medicine. One can hope that such progress will continue, in accordance with the vocation of doctors, which is not to suppress life but to care for it and favor it as much as possible. It is equally desirable that, in suitable institutions, or, in their absence, in the outpouring of Christian generosity and charity every form of assistance should be developed.

A few thoughts…

Paragraph 17 especially hits home with the scientific and medical communities. We simply do not have the right to manipulate life in every direction simply because we have the means to do so. This factors into IVF and Embryonic Stem Cell experimentation, as well as developing prenatal diagnostic technologies whose sole purpose is eugenic in nature.

In 1983, the life expectancy of an individual with Down syndrome was 25 years. Today it is 60 years. It’s not a miracle, we just decided to treat them as we would any other human being. That leads to a consideration of one of the proabort’s greatest slurs:

We only care for the baby after it is born.

The paragraphs selected here highlight the great lie in that slur. In the document, the Church invokes the Law of Charity:

“But it is necessary at the same time to influence morality and to do everything possible to help families, mothers and children.”

“One can never approve of abortion; but it is above all necessary to combat its causes.”

Every human being is called upon in this document to do all that we can to assist families with those burdens that drive women to seek abortion as a desperate last measure. In that light, it would be a good idea to challenge the proabort, who utters the great slur against us, with a demand to know why they do not themselves join with us in supporting women’s most desperate needs, and why they only hold out death (along with a hefty fee for the abortion) as their sole contribution.

Finally, when the Bishops state in Paragraph 25, “To measure happiness by the absence of sorrow and misery in this world is to turn one’s back on the Gospel,” their statement deserves a long pause for consideration. In the Last Judgement scene of Matthew 25, Jesus admonishes that whatever we do for the least among us, we do for Him. To turn our backs on those who suffer, especially by murdering them, we commit spiritual suicide. The sufferings of others make demands on us, and in the America of the past 50 years, we have become an increasingly narcissistic and hedonistic society. We cannot stand imperfection in others, not because we are so compassionate, but because we are so bereft of Love.

Imperfection and need in others place demands on us. They draw from our time and material resources in proportion to the degree of imperfection and need. 53 million dead babies later, 93% of all Down syndrome babies aborted, and we see the extent to which American society has succumbed to mental illness and despair, we see the predatory nature of the abortion industry and how it has invaded and corrupted medicine, especially among the baby doctors, the Ob’s, who should be the greatest advocates of the unborn.

This document was a prophetic jewel, issued in 1974 when I was a freshman in high school. It has languished, relatively unknown to most Catholics for decades. Perhaps that’s not so bad. We now have the ability to guage the prophetic wisdom of the Magisterium through the perspective of hindsight.

More tomorrow…

We continue our study today of a little-known and little-studied 1974 document from the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith entitled:

Declaration on Procured Abortion

Read Part I here.

Today we turn to the document’s treatment of the Church’s varied voices on when the body is infused with a soul. This is critical, because so many proaborts look selectively to voices from within the Church that have fixed a point some time after fertilization. What they do not do is point to the universal condemnation of abortion at every stage, going all the way back to our most ancient document of apostolic teaching, The Didache (pronounced DID-a-kay), subtitled, The Lord’s Teaching Through the Twelve Apostles to the Nations.

Here are excerpts from the Declaration on Procured Abortion, followed by the footnotes from the text, and then a few words of analysis:

“6. The tradition of the Church has always held that human life must be protected and favored from the beginning, just as at the various stages of its development. Opposing the morals of the Greco-Roman world, the Church of the first centuries insisted on the difference that exists on this point between those morals and Christian morals. In the Didache it is clearly said: “You shall not kill by abortion the fruit of the womb and you shall not murder the infant already born.”[6] Athenagoras emphasizes that Christians consider as murderers those women who take medicines to procure an abortion; he condemns the killers of children, including those still living in their mother’s womb, “where they are already the object of the care of divine Providence.” Tertullian did not always perhaps use the same language; he nevertheless clearly affirms the essential principle: “To prevent birth is anticipated murder; it makes little difference whether one destroys a life already born or does away with it in its nascent stage. The one who will be a man is already one.”[8]

“7. In the course of history, the Fathers of the Church, her Pastors and her Doctors have taught the same doctrine – the various opinions on the infusion of the spiritual soul did not introduce any doubt about the illicitness of abortion. It is true that in the Middle Ages, when the opinion was generally held that the spiritual soul was not present until after the first few weeks, a distinction was made in the evaluation of the sin and the gravity of penal sanctions. Excellent authors allowed for this first period more lenient case solutions which they rejected for following periods. But it was never denied at that time that procured abortion, even during the first days, was objectively grave fault. This condemnation was in fact unanimous. Among the many documents it is sufficient to recall certain ones. The first Council of Mainz in 847 reconsidered the penalties against abortion which had been established by preceding Councils. It decided that the most rigorous penance would be imposed “on women who procure the elimination of the fruit conceived in their womb.”[9] The Decree of Gratian reported the following words of Pope Stephen V: “That person is a murderer who causes to perish by abortion what has been conceived.”[10] St. Thomas, the Common Doctor of the Church, teaches that abortion is a grave sin against the natural law.” At the time of the Renaissance Pope Sixtus V condemned abortion with the greatest severity.[12] A century later, Innocent XI rejected the propositions of certain lax canonists who sought to excuse an abortion procured before the moment accepted by some as the moment of the spiritual animation of the new being.[13] In our days the recent Roman Pontiffs have proclaimed the same doctrine with the greatest clarity. Pius XI explicitly answered the most serious objections.[14] Pius XII clearly excluded all direct abortion, that is, abortion which is either an end or a means.[15] John XXIII recalled the teaching of the Fathers on the sacred character of life “which from its beginning demands the action of God the Creator.”[16] Most recently, the Second Vatican Council, presided over by Paul VI, has most severely condemned abortion: “Life must be safeguarded with extreme care from conception; abortion and infanticide are abominable crimes.”[17] The same Paul VI, speaking on this subject on many occasions, has not been afraid to declare that this teaching of the Church “has not changed and is unchangeable.”[18]

FOOTNOTES

6. “Didache Apostolorum,” edition Funk, “Patres Apostolici,” V, 2. “The Epistle of Barnabas,” IX, 5 uses the same expressions (cf. Funk, l.c., 91-93).

19. This declaration expressly leaves aside the question of the moment when the spiritual soul is infused. There is not a unanimous tradition on this point and authors are as yet in disagreement. For some it dates from the first instant; for others it could not at least precede nidation. It is not within the competence of science to decide between these views, because the existence of an immortal soul is not a question in its field. It is a philosophical problem from which our moral affirmation remains independent for two reasons: (1) supposing a belated animation, there is still nothing less than a human life, preparing for and calling for a soul in which the nature received from parents is completed, (2) on the other hand, it suffices that this presence of the soul be probable (and one can never prove the contrary) in order that the taking of life involve accepting the risk of killing a man, not only waiting for, but already in possession of his soul.

There are a few lines in all of that which jump out at the reader, and ought to be deployed as tactical weapons in our pro-life argumentation. Firstly, the last few lines of Paragraph 7:

“Most recently, the Second Vatican Council, presided over by Paul VI, has most severely condemned abortion: ‘Life must be safeguarded with extreme care from conception; abortion and infanticide are abominable crimes.’[17] The same Paul VI, speaking on this subject on many occasions, has not been afraid to declare that this teaching of the Church ‘has not changed and is unchangeable.’[18]“

The quote about safeguarding from the moment of conception comes from the Vatican II document “Guadium et spes,” which, as a conciliar document is considered INFALLIBLE teaching. As such, it can never, ever change, which gives rise to the following quote from Pope Paul VI.

Next, it is worth considering footnote #19:

“on the other hand, it suffices that this presence of the soul be probable (and one can never prove the contrary) in order that the taking of life involve accepting the risk of killing a man, not only waiting for, but already in possession of his soul.”

Thus speaks the Church. While there have been, and remain, different voices within the Church, the human organism from the moment of conception is presumed to be in possession of a soul. This cannot be overstated. In her wisdom, the Church grants the presumption of a soul from the moment of conception.

And therein lies a rhetorical dilemma when words such as conception and pregnant come into play.

The plain meaning of the words in their traditional usage are that a child is conceived at the moment the sperm penetrates the egg. When that conception occurs, the mother is said to be pregnant. Simple, right?

Wrong.

The rabidly pro-abortion American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, (ACOG)which is the official society of Ob/Gyn’s adopted an official change of lexicon thirty years ago that defines conception and pregnancy as both being synonymous with IMPLANTATION of the embryo in the uterus, an event that occurs several days after fertilization. Thus, proaborts will argue that even the Catholic Church doesn’t recognize that life begins at fertilization, because we state that the presumption of humanity begins at conception, an event that has been redefined by the proabort crowd.

It should be noted that the Declaration on Procured Abortion was written years before ACOG engaged in their verbal engineering.

More on this tomorrow…

Update: See Part III Here.