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.

From the Los Angeles Times:

In a move that some called historic, the county’s oldest African American civil rights group voted Saturday to endorse same-sex marriage.

The National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People passed a resolution supporting gay marriage at a meeting of its board of directors in Miami, saying it opposed any policy or legislative initiative that “seeks to codify discrimination or hatred into the law or to remove the constitutional rights of LGBT citizens.”

Directors of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force erupted in applause at their board meeting Saturday as their phones buzzed with the news.

“Today is a historic day,” Rea Carey, executive director of the task force, said a phone interview from Seattle. “This is what leadership looks like in this country.”

The vote marks a national turning point on the issue of gay marriage. President Obama announced this month that he supports gay marriage. A Gallup Poll last year found, for the first time in the poll’s history, that a majority of Americans supported the legalization of gay marriage, 53% to 45%. This year, the poll showed 50% supported it, while 48% opposed it.

“Civil marriage is a civil right and a matter of civil law,” Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the 103-year-old NAACP said in a statement.

“The NAACP’s support for marriage equality is deeply rooted in the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution and equal protection of all people.”

Read the rest here.

While tragic, it is not at all surprising that the NAACP has taken a course of action that is at odds with the 62% of the black community mentioned in the article, who oppose such unions on religious grounds.

In New York City, 60% of black pregnancies end in abortion and authentic African American leaders such as Dr. Alveda King and the Reverends Catherine Davis, Walter Hoye, Stephen Broden, Clenard Childress, Michael Faulkner, Arnold Culbreth, Dr. LaVerne Tolbert, and Ryan Bomberger (to name a few), cannot get a hearing by the people Rea Carey calls “real leadership.”

With 6/10 of New York Blacks never seeing the light of day, and similar statistics elsewhere, African Americans are locked into what can only be assessed as demographic suicide. The NAACP leadership has thrown in with the same Democrat party that funds Planned Parenthood nationally with a third of a billion dollars annually; and it is this same Planned Parenthood that has been operating some 78% of their centers in minority neighborhoods, commensurate with Margaret Sanger’s Negro Project.

Now this.

It is tempting to assess the NAACP’s recent vote as an indiscriminate siding with anyone who is oppressed. However, if that were so, the NAACP would be joining the Catholic Church and other religious faiths in opposing the HHS contraceptive mandate, which is actually a war on religion.

The truth is that the American people stood by passively and consented to gays and lesbians being granted all of the goods and privileges society once reserved for married couples, everything from adoption rights to shared employment benefits, domestic partnerships protecting housing rights, etc.

The truth is that gays and lesbians were handed everything but a marriage license. We now see the emerging agenda with the emerging punitive measures against military chaplains opposed to performing such weddings.

The truth is that heterosexuals have been far more tolerant and permissive than the gay community is now behaving, and that the NAACP has missed the opportunity to address the new discrimination in America: Gay intolerance of authentic Judeo-Christian morality. It is an intolerance that, to use the NAACP’s words, “seeks to codify discrimination or hatred into the law or to remove the constitutional rights of,” traditional Christians.

The truth is that it isn’t leadership being demonstrated by the NAACP. It’s something far worse. I’ve heard the assessments range from sheer cluelessness to something sinister. With almost 2/3 of the people it purports to “lead” opposing same-sex marriage on religious grounds, the NAACP has joined in President Obama’s war on religion. Dragging one’s members by the hair is not the same as leading. Neither is neglecting the demographic suicide that has gripped their community.

This weekend the association purporting the “Advancement of Colored Persons,” ceased to exist. Not willing to address their membership’s demographic suicide, they have thrown in with a president bent on reshaping the Christian faith that sustained them during slavery and the Jim Crow era, as well as the authentic and noble struggle for civil rights. In so doing, the NAACP has abdicated the sacred trust that once made them the noblest and most honorable institution in the United States of America.

The African American community in America, as many other quarters in America, has real needs, real problems that call for real, fresh, and imaginative leadership. Becoming embroiled in a war on the Christian roots of its membership and much of the nation has only cemented in the minds of many the image of an organization that has become thoroughly radicalized.

The rest of the nation should take heart that there are many, many other black leaders committed to authentic equality that respects the constitutional rights of all citizens. We turn now to those leaders and seek the way forward together, a way that is characterized by mutual support and respect.

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.

Theodore Shulman, the man who sent death threats to me and several other pro-life leaders, has entered a guilty plea in Federal Court to an incident involving threats to Father Frank Pavone and Princeton Professor Robert George. He faces up to 51 months in prison. According to the New York Daily news:

The plea deal includes an agreement that prosecutors would not charge Shulman for possession of cyanide and two other deadly substances at the time of his arrest.

Read the rest here.

The cyanide and other deadly substances are worrisome, especially since Shulman has evidently had graduate training in either medicine or biology. He is a highly intelligent man who represented the proaborts very, very well when not engaging in threats. Of course, his obsession with promoting abortion led him to explain away the scientific literature that showed the link between abortion and breast cancer. His intelligence and talents as a scientist have been tragically squandered in the service of the greatest evil to grip this nation since slavery.

Shulman’s mother is the celebrated feminist author, Alix Kates Shulman who authored Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, a feminist manifesto. Shulman’s mother aborted four of his siblings. Two before him and two after him. That’s a terrible family legacy to grow up within.

In what I have read by his mother, she mentions his sister but not Theodore.

There is no celebration or joy in my home today. A relatively short sentence for a man who has sent threats to many and who has been found in possession of three deadly substances is a disquieting reality. Equally disquieting is the thought that this brilliant man has destroyed himself, gripped as he has been by a terrible evil; perhaps too, by the emptiness wrought by four missing siblings.

Theodore needs our prayers, and plenty of them. Absent a solid spiritual and ethical formation, the power of our medical and scientific technology will twist, distort, and destroy those entrusted with it’s secrets and protocols. Shulman is living proof.

If tonight many of us are breathing a little easier, I feel nothing but emptiness and sorrow for a fellow scientist my age, whose mother butchered four of his siblings. I can’t imagine such a horrific absence of love, such cold and callous evil and how that factors into a human being’s development.

Pray for Theodore, for his mother, for their conversion and healing. It’s all so very, very sad.

About a year ago I met Reggie Littlejohn, Founder and President of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers. Reggie, an attorney, has been actively and doggedly engaged in efforts to stop forced abortions and forced sterilizations in China, making frequent trips to meet with our elected representatives in Washington, D.C.

The pro-life blogosphere and wider community have embraced Reggie and aided her in getting out the word on what has been going on in China. It has been Reggie who has made known to Americans the plight of blind activist Chen Guangcheng, who has been persecuted by his government for his efforts to stop the forced abortions and sterilizations of women in China. Consequently, Chen’s name and story have been made well known by Reggie here in the States for some time now.

Perhaps the mainstream media will get the credit for breaking the story, but here at Coming Home all due credit goes to my friend Reggie, who inspires me with her courage, her faith, and her love for the oppressed.

Bravo, Reggie!

Reggie’s work requires the generous support of the pro-life community. She has sacrificed in every imaginable way to press home her authentic feminist support of our sisters in China, and I can think of no greater victory for Reggie than the widespread telling of the story whose groundwork was laid by this solitary and indefatigable warrior. Please consider visiting her site and supporting her work with whatever means, no matter how small, you may be able to share.

God Bless You, Reggie. God has honored the work for which you and Chen have sacrificed so much.

Today, President Obama threw his support behind same-sex marriage. Thank God! The mask is off, six months before the election and about a year since he announced that he was willfully violating his Oath of Office by ordering the Justice Department to cease defending the law in court. Specifically, he ordered an end to defending The Defense of Marriage Act.

It is the duty of the Executive Branch to see to it that the duly constituted laws of the land are executed and defended by attorneys general. Hasn’t that been the battle cry of Catholic governors who plead their personal opposition to abortion, but must uphold the law of the land with all of the resources of the Executive?

What Obama has done is actively define dictatorship by the selective upholding and prosecution of the laws. This eviscerates the legislative branch of government and turns the law into the personal prerogative of one man. If anyone claimed ignorance in voting for Obama the first time, he has made his agenda plain for all to see this time around. In not defending the Defense of Marriage Act and now openly declaring support for the redefinition of marriage, the president has declared war on the central institution of all organized religion. The question arises in many quarters…

“So What?”

It’s actually not so benign. For openers, heterosexuals have made a mess of marriage, with no-fault divorce and divorce rates hovering in the 50% range for decades. Still, if we have made a mess of our institution, the truth remains that it is OUR institution to fix.

A core reason for marriage is the universally recognized need of children to have a biological mother and father, each of whom brings their complementary strengths to bear on the formation of their new human beings. Modern research has overwhelmingly borne out the truth that children do best when raised by their biological mother and father, who both reside with the child under the same roof. The pathologies in children increase in proportion to the degree to which the biological parents drop out of the child’s life. That’s not conservative talking points. That’s well-established social scientific data.

Part of the pathology of gay/lesbian marriages (and most divorces in heterosexuals) is the belief that a child can do just fine without a mother or a father. At least in divorce the reality of one-parental involvement is a tragic consequence. In gay and lesbian unions it is a principled and celebrated world-view.

Worse still is the implicit validation of what some in the homosexual community call heterosexuals aloud: breeders. Gay men who donate sperm for IVF and surrogate motherhood merely use women as barnyard livestock. (So do the heterosexuals who pioneered and grew this beastly industry.)

Breeders.

Lesbian couples seeking sperm donations for either insemination or IVF do as much with men: Stud animals.

The entire affair signals the collapse of Western/Christian Civilization. We have lost sight of who we are, what our children require, and have subordinated their needs to our narcissistic and hedonistic obsessions.

There is nothing sweet and benign about two men determining that they are just as good as a mother. Such belief betrays their hostility toward women at the biological and metaphysical core of womanhood. The same for lesbians with men.

Bioethics has as a prerequisite that we know who we are, what our nature is and is not. It is concerned with the right use of technology and prudential judgement. When society embraces such institutionalized pathology it is impossible to have a coherent national discussion about how we treat ourselves and one another.

If we can’t agree on who and what we are, then anything goes.

If we cannot agree on who and what we are, then we will have that dictated to us by the government. Never in the history of any human civilization has a dictatorial government acted with beneficence or charitable forbearance. They have all treated their people as so much livestock. This time around, it is the people who have thus defined themselves. Tragically, there will always be a willing dictator ready to oblige.

Note: Blogging has been nonexistent here for almost two months. Critical illness. in in my best friend has required my full time and attention for several months. Pro-life begins at home. By God’s grace, things for Fr. Clark have stabilized and begun to improve. My heartfelt thanks for all who have written out of concern. It’s good to be back. Now, back to work.

Dr. Elard Koch is a fellow biologist and epidemiologist from Chile with whom I am collaborating on a major research study involving oral contraceptives. Dr. Koch has just released a study refuting pro-abort claims that abortions are safer than childbirth. Here is Dr. Koch’s press release. I have not yet read the study, but hope to within the week, after which I shall lead a guided tour through it for all who are interested. Here now is Dr. Koch:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

EMBARGO TIME: May 4th, 2012 at 5 pm EST

CONTACT:

Reporters UCSC: Carolina Astudillo, Phone 56 (41) 2345587; castudillo@ucsc.cl

Researchers: Dr Elard Koch, by e-mail ekoch@ucsc.cl; ekoch@ug.uchile.cl

Dr John Thorp, by e-mail john_thorp@med.unc.edu

Dr. Sebastian Gatica, by e-mail sgatica@ucsc.cl

Chile Outperforms U.S. and Dramatically Reduces Maternal Deaths by Increasing Women’s Educational Level

Concepción, Chile, May 5 – A scientific analysis of 50 years of maternal mortality data from Chile has found that the most important factor in reducing maternal mortality is the educational level of women. “Educating women enhances women’s ability to access existing health care resources, including skilled attendants for childbirth, and directly leads to a reduction in her risk of dying during pregnancy and childbirth,” according to Dr Elard Koch, epidemiologist and leading author of the study.

The research entitled “Women’s Education Level, Maternal Health Facilities, Abortion Legislation and Maternal Deaths: a Natural Experiment in Chile from 1957 to 2007” was conducted on behalf of the Chilean Maternal Mortality Research Initiative (CMMRI) and published in the Friday, May 4 issue of PLoS ONE. (http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/

journal.pone.0036613).
Using 50 years of official data from Chile’s National Institute of Statistics (1957-2007), the authors looked at factors likely to affect maternal mortality, such as years of education, per capita income, total fertility rate, birth order, clean water supply, sanitary sewer, and childbirth delivery by skilled attendants. They also analyze the effect of historical educational and maternal health policies, including legislation that has prohibited abortion in Chile since 1989, on maternal mortality.

During the fifty-year study period, the overall Maternal Mortality Ratio or MMR (the number of maternal deaths related to childbearing divided by the number of live births) dramatically declined by 93.8%, from 270.7 to 18.2 deaths per 100,000 live births between 1957 and 2007, making Chile a paragon for maternal health in other countries. “In fact, during 2008, the overall MMR declined again, to 16.5 per 100,000 live births, positioning Chile as the country with the second lowest MMR in the American continent after Canada and with at least two points lower MMR than United States” said Koch.

One of the most significant findings is that, contrary to widely-held assumptions, making abortion illegal in Chile did not result in an increase in maternal mortality. In fact, after abortion was made illegal in 1989, the MMR continued to decrease from 41.3 to 12.7 per 100,000 live births (69.2% reduction). “Definitively, the legal prohibition of abortion is unrelated to overall maternal mortality rates” emphasized Koch.

The variables affecting this decrease included the predictable factors of delivery by skilled attendants, complementary nutrition for pregnant women and their children in the primary care clinics and schools, clean facilities, and fertility. But the most important factor and the one which increased the effect of all others was the educational level of women. For every additional year of maternal education there was a corresponding decrease in the MMR of 29.3 per 100,000 live births.

The picture for Chile includes a transition of leading causes of death along with an accelerated decline of fertility and delayed motherhood. Koch explained that direct causes –those directly attributable to pregnancy condition– were the rule before 1990, but from then, indirect causes –i.e. non-obstetric chronic conditions such as hypertension and diabetes among others– rise as the most prevalent, hindering the decline on maternal mortality.

“This study uncovers an ongoing ‘fertility paradox’ in maternal health: education is the major modulator that has helped Chile to reach one of the safest motherhood in the world, but also contributes to decrease fertility, excessively delaying motherhood and puts mothers on risk because of their older age.” Thus, an emerging problem nowadays “is not a question of how many children a mother has, but a question of when a mother has her children, specially the first of them” concluded Koch.

UCSC

“We become what we think we are.”

That was the constant admonition of my life’s mentor, Father Luke McCann. Luke was genius, and constantly ahead of the curve by 20 years in everything. As with so much he taught me, I am still unpacking the depth of it all almost twenty years later.

“We become what we think we are.”

The ascendance of the Culture of Death attests to the fact that ever greater numbers of humans have lost sight of who they are, losing their identity in a morass of guilt and shame. These traveling companions need to be teased apart, and Good Friday is as good a time as any to do so.

Guilt is a healthy emotion, as it is the soul’s barometer, a warning that we have committed a transgression that has harmed others and/or ourselves. Guilt gets a bad name when it leads to others shaming us.

Guilt is about what we have done. Shame is about who we are. If guilt is the soul’s barometer, shame is the soul’s cancer.

Shame is about being devalued, belittled, made to feel worthless. Parents who beat their children with fists and belts for transgressions communicate worthlessness to the child; the same holds true for people being belittled for being “thoughtless”, being “clueless”, being “stupid”.

Note that the behavior is not the issue, but the individual. “Being” is who we are.

“We become what we think we are.”

If we are conditioned to think that we are worthless, we will begin to act that way. People who live with ridicule often cannot separate their behaviors from themselves. In time, they do indeed become what they think they are. They begin to engage in behaviors that will reinforce their feelings of worthlessness, of alienation, of shame.

“We become what we think we are.”

Think of the abortionist who was not the brightest bulb in the ceiling in medical school, who has washed out of pulmonology, oncology, pediatrics, etc… and has endured the ridicule from his/her peers (which is seering and brutal). Abortion is the last stop for these people. It is hard to impress upon such a person the intrinsic value of the baby when they have little sense of their own intrinsic value.

Sure, they’ve made their deal with the devil, but why?

Earlier this week I went to confession and the priest offered the following admonition: “You are not what you have done. You are a son of God who loves you as His own, just as you love your own children as your own.”

That’s the key right there. We are not what we do. If we grasped our true identity and the intrinsic dignity in that identity we wouldn’t cut people to ribbons with our tongues, be they abortionists, siblings, children, or spouses.

When Regina and I had our first real good disagreement, I stopped her and reminded her of the rules of engagement: We address and criticize the behavior, not each other. (I’ve been the biggest beneficierary of that rule.)

How often do we hear people ask if some offender has no shame, when we really mean a conscience. Even Time magazine conflated these terms several years ago when they ran an article asking whatever became of shame.

That’s the problem. We have too much shame with its attendant alienation. We have too many people with poorly formed senses of self (boundary issues), and not enough moral formation.

Morality and ethics only take root in the fertile soil of a self imbued with belonging and intrinsic value. Perhaps that’s why Jesus said that the one who says, “you fool” to his brother is liable to the fires of Gehenna. He knew all too well how those words alienate and isolate people and dissolve the social bonds so necessary for building His kingdom on earth.

To the extent that He came to take away the part of our guilt that carries with it eternal separation from Him, Jesus did so on the cross. Because He did so on the cross, He washed away our shame and restored us to our full dignity. That may not be convincing to unbelievers, but we need to treat them with dignity and value. In time they will come to appreciate Father Luke’s great admonition:

“We become what we think we are.”

The following is a story by Michael P. Farris, Esq., the founder and chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association. It isn’t a story about home schooling. It’s about the metastatic cancer that has crept into obstetric medicine. When OB/Gyn’s perform abortions with routine, they need to callous themselves in order to preserve themselves. Somewhere along the way a piece of their humanity gets lost. The same for the rest of the medical staff. In the end, they begin to hold parents in contempt. It is the arrogance of those who abuse their ability to control who lives, and who dies; the seductive and insatiable thirst for power and control.

This story, by Farris, is bone-chilling. That an entire medical staff could behave this way suggests that they have done so in the past with impunity. Here’s Farris:

Newborn Seized in Hospital by Police, Social Worker

Michael P. Farris, Esq.
HSLDA Chairman

I am not content to sit on the sidelines while the government gradually usurps the very essence of parental rights. I hope you share my determination. We need to stand with people like Scott and Jodi Ferris (obviously no relation to someone named Farris). Here’s their story:

Jodi went into labor a bit earlier than she had expected—and the baby was coming rapidly. Given their location and other factors, the midwife they had hoped would deliver the baby at their home encouraged them to get in an ambulance and head to the hospital.

Their baby, whom I will call “Annie,” was born in the ambulance in the parking lot of the Hershey Medical Center—a government hospital in Pennsylvania. Hospital personnel arrived very quickly and took charge of both baby and mom.

As any mother would do, Jodi immediately began to ask the nurses and attendants how her baby was doing. The hospital staff was utterly unresponsive. When they started to give Jodi an injection, she asked what it was and what it was for. They gave her vague answers like, “It’s just to help.” Only after giving her the injection of oxytocin did they tell her what it was and then asked, “You aren’t allergic to that are you?”

Jodi persisted in asking about Annie. No one would tell her anything other than “she’s in good hands and you’ll be able to see her soon.”

Eventually a doctor told her that Annie scored a 9 on a physical exam applied to newborns known as the APGAR test. A score of 8 or higher is considered healthy. (It is unclear when the score was given since she was in the ambulance at birth.) But shortly after this a different doctor told Jodi that Annie was “very sick” and would need to stay in the hospital. This doctor’s comments were accompanied by an explanation of his disdain for midwives saying, “Too many people think they know what they’re doing.”

About an hour later, another hospital staffer finally brought Annie to Jodi and said, “The baby is doing good. She will be able to go home in no time.”

Legal Requirements?

However, several hours later yet another staffer told Scott and Jodi that Annie would have to stay in the hospital for 48 to 72 hours for observation. Even though they persisted in asking why Annie would need to stay, his only answer was that “the law requires us to keep the baby for 48 hours.” When they asked for a reference to this supposed law, he answered, “you’ll have to get that from risk management.” (By the way, there is no such law in Pennsylvania.)

The risk management staffer eventually told them that even though they saw nothing wrong with the baby, they just like “to keep babies like this” for 48–72 hours. The Ferrises were told that Annie would not be released for this period since it was “unsafe for her to leave the hospital.”

Eventually, a risk management staffer admitted that the risk that was being managed was not the health of Annie but the risk that the hospital might get sued if something went wrong after she was discharged.

Ultimately, risk management said that they would be satisfied with a 24-hour stay and that Jodi and Scott could remain with the baby overnight.

You have been Accused

Late in the afternoon, a government social worker named Angelica Lopez-Heagy came into Jodi’s room announcing that she was there to conduct an investigation. Jodi asked to know the allegations. The social worker claimed that it would be against the law for her to show Jodi the allegations.

Jodi replied that she would not be comfortable answering the questions if she couldn’t know the allegations. Immediately the social worker proclaimed, “Since you’re not going to cooperate, I’ll just go and call the police and we can take custody of the baby.”

Fearing that the social worker would carry out her threat, Jodi replied that she was willing to cooperate.

The social worker soon intimated that the issue was Jodi’s refusal to consent to medical treatment for the baby. Jodi replied that she had no idea why anyone would say that. The social worker claimed that she had refused to allow a Vitamin K shot for Annie. Jodi replied that no one had asked her about such a shot. Moreover, she had overheard hospital staffers saying that they had already given Annie such a shot.

Neither the social worker nor any hospital staffer ever gave Jodi or Scott any example of any medically necessary treatment that they had refused for Annie.

At this point, Scott left the hospital to tend to their older children who were staying with friends.

Ordering Tests

Shortly after this, the hospital asked to check Annie’s white blood cell count and to perform a strep test. Jodi agreed to the testing.

Then the hospital demanded that they give Annie shot for Hepatitis B. Jodi said that she would agree only if they tested her or Annie to see if either of them were positive. If so, then she was quite willing to have the shot for Annie. The hospital claimed that they had forgotten about this earlier when it was still possible to test that day, and that they needed to give the shot anyway without any testing.

When the social worker pressed her to make an immediate decision about this shot, Jodi asked her if they could simply wait until Scott got back before they decided.

Put yourself in Jodi’s shoes at this moment. You gave birth that morning in an ambulance. The hospital has made wild and conflicting claims about your baby’s health all day long. You are exhausted. You are in pain. Your husband has gone to check on your children. And a social worker who has threatened to take your baby into police custody is standing in your hospital room demanding that you make an immediate decision.

Jodi simply said, “Please can’t this wait until my husband gets back.”

The social worker renewed her threat. If Jodi would not answer her question right then, she would call the police. And then the social worker started adding conditions. She and Scott would have to agree to sign a safety plan before she could conclude her investigation.

Jodi said that she wanted her husband and an attorney to look at the plan. She felt she was in no position to read such a document and really understand what she was being pressured to sign.

Thrown Out

And then the story turns ugly.

The social worker left the room and called the police. Without a court order they took custody of Annie, immediately claiming that she was suffering from illness or injury—a patently false claim.

The social worker consented to the administration of the Hepatitis B shot even though no blood test had been done.

The police made Jodi Ferris get up out of her hospital bed and escorted her to the entrance—they were expelling her from the hospital because she had not signed the “safety plan.”

Scott met her at the entrance to the hospital. The police escorted them both off of the grounds of the hospital.

Jodi was told that she would be allowed to return every three hours to nurse the baby through the night.

Jodi and Scott were forced to spend the night that she had given birth in their car in the parking lot of a nearby Wal-Mart. You read that right. They kicked this mother out of the hospital, and in order to be close enough to feed her child, she had to sleep in the car.

To add insult to injury, Jodi was given access to Annie only sporadically and not every three hours.

Get the rest here.

Molotov’s response was to make a video that tore into me with some pretty vicious ad hominem attacks. It can be seen here:

People were incensed at Molotov’s video rebuttal. I just took it in stride and decided to wait and see if the trailer accomplished what trailers are meant to do: Present the arc of the movie. Well, it seems that the movie is out and the reviews are coming in. I present here Jill Stanek’s review, which as well contains that of my colleague, Ryan Bombereger.

Here now, is Jill Stanek:

The movie Gates of Hell has been controversial among pro-lifers since its trailer was posted almost a year ago. In February the film was released on DVD “in honor of black history month.”

Set in 2016, Gates of Hell is a fictional documentary that follows a band of black domestic terrorists known as the Zulu 9 who literally set their sites on abortionists and abortion workers after learning blacks have been purposefully targeted for abortion for generations.

Gates of Hell was written and directed by Molotov Mitchell, a gifted pro-life filmmaker who went terribly astray this time.

Things got personal when Mitchell took apart friend and site moderator Gerard Nadal for coming out against the film after watching the trailer. Mitchell mocked Gerard for basing his review on just the teaser, promising there was more to the movie.

There wasn’t. I really wanted to like this film but have watched it twice now and have been deeply disturbed each time. I’m a provocative pro-lifer who likes to push the envelope, but Gates of Hell goes too far.

The film is quite simply about black terrorists who murder any and all abortion workers they can find – an abortionist leaving his house, an abortionist sitting at an outdoor cafe, etc., etc.

The most disturbing scene is when the Zulu 9 burst into a Planned Parenthood, indiscriminately picking off staff in their offices. I could only think of Columbine.

Ryan Bomberger has written a review of Gates of Hell from a black perspective:

I actually had to hit pause several times throughout this obvious shockumentary, because I was repulsed by what I was seeing and so angry that this creation could even be considered “pro-life”. One of my colleagues, and pivotal figures in the fight against the epidemic of abortion in New York City, Dr. Gerard Nadal, was excoriated by Molotov for daring to react to the trailer. Nadal was attacked for somehow misinterpreting the contents of a trailer that accurately reflect the entire movie.

How would I describe the film in a single word? Detrimental.

The glorification of violence, as a means toward an end, makes the film’s primary message appalling. Molotov, starring in his own film as himself, was the only person in this story who was not a fictional character. He cannot claim a fictional nature for the film, but instead one of seeming advocacy with a deeply disturbing and highly suggestive solution to a cause.

Watching the entire movie not only reinforced my own negative reaction to the trailer but also strengthened the argument that the film does not consider the overall racism that it, too, conveys.

I get that Molotov was trying in the most attention-getting way possible to spotlight the atrocity of black abortion genocide. But that is not what people will be talking about.

Molotov owes Gerard an apology.

I give Gates of Hell one star, only for its display of Molotov’s unique story-telling talent. I look forward to the day Molotov channels his creative energies into a project of value to the movement. This one wasn’t.

Recently, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius dropped her guard and gave the American people a good insight into how it is that Obamacare will ultimately stay solvent: The nonexistence of patients who, not being alive, cannot make claims upon the system.

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.”

See and hear Sebelius in her own words:

Now this week comes word that the Congessional Budget Office estimates Obamacare will cost twice its originally promised cost. News also comes of the return of what Sarah Palin dubbed, “Death Panels” for healthcare rationing. Far from right wing flights of fancy, these realities already exist in chilling bureaucratic routine across the nation in hospital committees who decide when patients have used too many resources, and in Oregon’s health care system where the government decides when a patient’s remaining quality of life justifies the expense of keeping them alive.

Here is the ABC News article about one such patient, Barbara Wagner. It is a portal into the national future.

Adding fuel to the fire is the issue of states increasingly strained by the growing number of civil service pensioners who do their 20 years and retire on full pensions.

Add to that the Social Security insolvency.

It becomes clear that Sebelius has not so much committed a gaffe as she has revealed the solution her fellow travelers see to our insolvency issues: decreasing the number of claimants on the system decreases the system’s expenditures. Nonexistence of humans on the front end of the life spectrum will fund the cost of the HHS contraception mandate through the offsetting of the non-conceived human’s non-claims on the system. Applying the same thinking on the other end of the life spectrum will realize a bumper crop of savings for local, state, and the federal government when civil service pensioners are denied life-saving services, or have them delayed long enough in rationing lines in the hopes that the patient will be overtaken by the disease while waiting.

Being a Pacific Northwestern Governor, Sarah Palin looked to one of her closest neighbors, Oregon, and saw clearly the future of the pro-abortion, anti-life, rabidly eugenic left wing. It is far easier to cull the herd than grow the economy, especially in a political party that is opposed to all known and practical sources of energy; to a political party that has made a central plank of their platform the reduction of the world’s population.

We are a nation in serious, serious trouble.

To only blame the Obama administration or the Democrat Party is to miss the fact that sufficient numbers of Americans agree with these people. Far too many uphold the right for someone else to slaughter their child, even though they are personally opposed to doing so.

So many uphold he right of others to force doctors to perform manslaughter through physician-assisted suicide, even if it violates the doctor’s conscience.

So many uphold the forcing of all medical students to perform abortions against their consciences.

So many uphold the forcing of religious institutions and private businesses to purchase contraceptives against their consciences.

90% of babies diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted, with costs to the parents and the ‘system’ cited by physicians and genetic counselors in a coercive campaign to rid the world of these “defectives”.

Far too many in this nation support the coercion of physicians and private citizens to do the government’s bidding when doing so violates consciences formed by thousands of years of civilized precepts. Now we have established that private and institutional conscience is the property of the state, the state is taking full advantage of the opportunity to advance its agenda.

Hitler never could have accomplished his malignant agenda without the support of the German people in sufficient numbers. It takes more than a village, it takes a nation to be good or evil. Today, our nation balances on a razor’s edge.

It will take more than the November elections to turn things around. It’s going to take the realization of what is at stake. It’s no longer someone else’s ox getting gored.

We’re all in peril.

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.

Ite ad Joseph! (Go to Joseph!)

It’s the great Latin admonition of the Church, to seek the intercession of the Patron Saint of the Church, and a powerful intercessor at that. Against the backdrop of the new aggressive eugenics that has taken solid root in American medicine, and against the war on the Catholic Church declared by the Obama administration, this Feast Day of Joseph requires some contemplation of his life and example.

Being engaged to Mary was probably a safe, peaceful, and hopeful period in the life of the holy older man whose betrothal to the holy younger woman was suddenly upended when she announced to him her pregnancy, and that it was God’s baby. Such obvious infidelity compounded by blasphemy could have merited Mary death, but Joseph chose to divorce her quietly, that was until things really became interesting.

Joseph heard from Heaven, as Matthew recounts:

20 He had made up his mind to do this when suddenly the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because she has conceived what is in her by the Holy Spirit.
21 She will give birth to a son and you must name him Jesus, because he is the one who is to save his people from their sins.’
22 Now all this took place to fulfil what the Lord had spoken through the prophet:
23 Look! the virgin is with child and will give birth to a son whom they will call Immanuel, a name which means ‘God-is-with-us’.
24 When Joseph woke up he did what the angel of the Lord had told him to do: he took his wife to his home;
25 he had not had intercourse with her when she gave birth to a son; and he named him Jesus.

If that weren’t enough, there would be the shepherds coming after the birth and describing the great Theophany, when Heaven opened and the Angels sang. There would be the Magi who journeyed quite a distance bearing their great treasures for this newborn King.

And then there was Herod.

Another dream with an angelic message, and the flight into Egypt to avoid the wholesale slaughter of the innocents. As the scriptures note, there was no intercourse. Joseph was Mary’s chaste spouse through it all, and a fearless adoptive father to her child.

That’s virtue, and an example for our time.

Joseph was called upon to make extraordinary sacrifices in his life in order to ensure the unfolding of God’s plan. If tradition that holds Joseph to have been an older widower is true, his plans for uneventful domesticity with a holy young woman were shattered. As the father of an autistic child, who was on a very different trajectory professionally until our Joseph was given five major diagnoses, I can relate to Saint Joseph.

Our life with our son Joseph has reordered my priorities in ways unimaginable. From seeming tragedy emerges hope, and hope is realized in triumphs great and small. In the eight years since his diagnoses, I thought that I was the one who was in the lead, and indeed I have been through orchestrating and executing Joseph’s therapeutic regimen. In a larger sense, it is Joseph who has been the one leading as his autism has been the portal into the new eugenics claiming countless lives of handicapped children through abortion.

It is inspiring seeing the possibilities for children with autism as Joseph continues to excel in bowling at the competitive level with ‘typical’ kids his own age; as he continues to advance in rank, skill, and socialization in Boy Scouts, as he continues to excel in Irish Step and Street Tap dancing; as he continues to thrill his teammates in baseball; as he continues to inspire his peers in altar serving; as his academics continue to improve. Hope transformed into joy.

But there is a price to be paid for that transformation. It requires death to self, in much the same manner as the successful parenting of typical children. The nuclear fuel for the eugenic engine is the misperception on the part of parents, and the outright lie told by obstetricians and genetic counselors, that life with the child will be a living hell for all concerned, that the parents will lose themselves, their identities, their futures, in the needs of this child.

In truth, the problem of the past thirty years is that all too many parents are unwilling to spend themselves for their children’s health, education, and welfare.

Ite ad Joseph!

Joseph did all that he had to do to secure the safety of his adopted son, including leaving the promised land and returning to the land of his people’s former slavery. He left his business, his friends, family, neighbors, and took the young woman who became pregnant apart from Joseph’s embrace; so Joseph also left behind his good name.

Some might be tempted to suggest that Joseph’s was an extraordinary case, as he was instructed by angels in dreams. A good counter would be to suggest that we don’t need angelic visions when we have the Dei Verbum which spells it out for us.

Joseph is the model of masculine virtue for all fathers. Perhaps we don’t read much about him in scripture because those virtues are supposed to be ordinary. We men plead all sorts of romantic-sounding promises when we court our wives. Jimmy Stewart lassoing the moon for Donna Reed in It’s a Wonderful Life.

Today it’s considered heroic virtue to keep the child of our marital embrace if it is less than perfect, if that child will make demands on our time and resources. Regina and I aren’t heroic for embracing Joseph in all of his frailty and doing all within our power to lift him up. That’s just our job, the fulfillment of vows we made to accept children willingly and lovingly from God, and to raise them in the faith.

Ite ad Joseph!

We need to contemplate the life of Joseph, the ordinary virtues he lived that today make him seem superhuman. We need to offer our lives as witnesses to the power of God’s grace to take the weaknesses of our children in stride, and to make them part of the ordinariness of our day-to-day lives. We need to make people understand that authentic freedom consists in having the ability to do what we must, and not what we want. It’s the only escape from the narcissism and hedonism that have overtaken and enslaved so many, and which fuel the growing eugenic wildfire.

Ite ad Joseph!

I took his name for Confirmation, in no small measure because of the great example of my grandfather, Joseph, who was the living embodiment of Mary’s husband; and gave it to the baby boy who has led me to a place I resisted going for decades before his birth. It is the place we must all work to bring our nation before the eugenic fire overtakes us all.