Coming Home

UPDATE 4/1/10: The events of the week (three funerals) have conspired against my finishing a post on chapter three. With the Triduum upon us, I’m caught up in liturgy and reflecting on my own wretchedness. Let’s call it a week and I’ll post this next Tuesday. Thank you for your gracious indulgence. For the rest of the Triduum, I’ll be posting the Office of Readings from the Liturgy of the Hours. God Bless.

See you all tomorrow.

Read Full Post »

Essential to the spiritual life of Catholics is the need to praise God in our distress. Praise and adoration are what we need to do before we engage in supplication. It is tempting in difficult times to rush into pleading our heart’s desire. But praise and thanksgiving give us a necessary perspective for our petitions. They help us to see all that is good in our lives, and how God is the source of it all.

In so doing, praise and thanksgiving are restorative in our distress. In counting all of the good, the bad seems less capable of overwhelming us, and our faith in a loving Father’s providence is sustained and renewed.

Today is a perfect day for praise and thanksgiving in light of the potentially devastating passage of legislation this weekend that threatens life on both ends of the spectrum as never before. We may begin by focusing not on those pro-life legislators who turned and walked away, but on those who stood strong, and what that means for us going forward. We praise God for the resoluteness of men and women who stood most especially with the unborn and with the redeeming character of our nation.

We look at this past weekend and see how the American landscape has crystallized. In this, I am reminded of the verdict scene in the Spencer Tracy classic, Judgment at Nuremberg, when Tracy as the presiding judge states:

“But this trial has shown that under a national crisis ordinary, even able and extraordinary men can delude themselves into the commission of crimes so vast and heinous that they beggar the imagination. No one who has sat through the trial can ever forget them. Men sterilized because of political belief. A mockery made of friendship and faith. The murder of children.

“How easily it can happen.

“There are those in our own country, too, who today speak of the protection of country, of survival. A decision must be made in the life of every nation at the very moment when the grasp of the enemy is at its throat. Then it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy, to rest survival upon what is expedient, to look the other way.

“The answer to that is: Survival as what? A country isn’t a rock. It’s not an extension of one’s self. It’s what it stands for. It’s what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult.

“Before the people of the world let it now be noted that here in our decision, this is what we stand for:

“Justice…truth… and the value of a single human being.”

Indeed, this is where we stand, though not enough of us. Not yet. This Culture of Death has been a long time in the making, and will take more than a few legislative or judicial fiats to turn around. It’s going to take the rebuilding of a Christian civilization of love, based upon an authentic Christian anthropology.

It’s going to take people grasping their intrinsic worth. That makes each of us today an evangelist. That alone is cause for great rejoicing, as each of us is called forth to do the work of building a civilization of love. At least now we know who has stood strong when standing for life and love was most difficult.

Make no mistake, a battle has been lost, but Jesus assures us through His death and resurrection that the war’s outcome has already been determined. And so today we need to lift our heads and hearts in praise.

We give praise for a very sophisticated pro-life movement.

We give praise for the growing numbers of scientists and physicians who are coming forward and using their expertise to tell the truth of what science and medicine have to say about life.

We give praise for an internet that came into maturity just when an unfiltered medium for our message was most needed.

We give praise for the fifty percent of 300,000+ Marchers for Life this year who are under the age of twenty-five.

We give praise for the growing bonds of fraternity between religious denominations uniting around our common humanity after centuries of hostility and suspicion.

We give praise for the technologies such as ultrasound, which have given us an unprecedented view and participation in the wonder of our own development, and for those who employ this technology at crisis pregnancy centers, which save ninety percent of their babies from slaughter.

We give praise for post-abortive healing ministries such as Lumina and Rachel’s Vineyard that are restoring post-abortive women and men to wholeness in mind, body and spirit.

We give praise for the increasing generosity of benefactors who sustain all of these ministries and activist organizations.

We give praise for over one thousand pro-life bloggers who advance the conversation, unite the movement’s efforts and support one another in their prayers.

We give praise for sidewalk counselors and organizations whose mission is to shut down abortuaries.

We give praise for being alive in this time, in this nation, called to this task.

Most of all we give praise for God’s Love, without which we can do nothing, and with which we cannot be defeated. There is little more that we need ask.

He has given us all we need to carry on this great work to which we are called.

Rolling up our sleeves, we move forward.

Read Full Post »

Repost: I’m attending a bioethics conference this weekend. Will post later tonight on topics covered.

Discovery

“At the heart of science lies discovery which involves a change in worldview. Discovery in science is possible only in societies which accord their citizens the freedom to pursue the truth where it may lead and which therefore have respect for different paths to that truth.”

-John Polanyi, Canadian Nobel Laureate (Chemistry);
Commencement Address, McGill University,
Montreal, Canada, June 1990

In two perfect sentences, Polanyi throws abundant light on the difficulties surrounding scholarship that support the realities of the Culture of Life. There seems to be scientific data that supports both sides. How can this be? It depends on one’s understanding of how science is done, and the scientific culture in which it is done.

For most, their last formal encounter with science took place in high school, or a course in college, where the Scientific Method was taught as the only acceptable standard for discerning truth in the scientific community. As is the case with so many disciplines, that’s what one learns on the front end. For the workaday truth, one needs to stick around awhile.

The scientific community is made up of humans, not machines. We’re just as given to petty (and not-so-petty) jealousies, lust for power and glory, lust for fame and fortune as anyone else. We’re just as given to back-biting and back-stabbing as anyone else. We’re just as given to distorting the truth to fit our pre-conceived ideas as anyone else.

That’s a problem, a very big problem for a community whose training and skills make us best suited for distilling and discerning nature’s secrets.

It’s why we have codes of ethics. As the President’s Council on Bioethics said (quoted a few posts down):

“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.”

Still, even amongst the most ethical scientists, schools of thought on a given topic emerge and orthodoxies arise. People have much riding on those orthodoxies: grant money, publishable papers (which get more grant money), tenure, promotion, esteem, chairmanships on national boards and committees, etc. Such lucre clouds the objectivity of some of the most ethical amongst us, and often unwittingly gives rise to soft tyranny.

The history of science is fraught with tragic figures who challenged the prevailing orthodoxies of their day and were ostracized, dying broken and in obscurity only to be vindicated in death. One such figure is Dr. Ignaz Semmelweiss, whose name should be spoken reverently by all pro-lifers. From the Semmelweis Society International

“Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (July 1, 1818 – August 13, 1865), also Ignác Semmelweis (born Semmelweis Ignác Fülöp), was a Hungarian physician called the “saviour of mothers” who discovered, by 1847, that the incidence of puerperal fever, also known as childbed fever could be drastically cut by use of hand washing standards in obstetrical clinics.

“While employed as assistant to the professor of the maternity clinic at the Vienna General Hospital in Austria in 1847, Semmelweis introduced hand washing with chlorinated lime solutions for interns who had performed autopsies. This immediately reduced the incidence of fatal puerperal fever from about 10 percent (range 5–30 percent) to about 1–2 percent. At the time, diseases were attributed to many different and unrelated causes. Each case was considered unique, just like a human person is unique.

Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis

“”Semmelweis’ hypothesis, that there was only one cause, that all that mattered was cleanliness, was extreme at the time, and was largely ignored, rejected or ridiculed. He was dismissed from the hospital and harassed by the medical community in Vienna, which eventually forced him to move to Budapest.

“Semmelweis was outraged by the indifference of the medical profession and began writing open and increasingly angry letters to prominent European obstetricians, at times denouncing them as irresponsible murderers. His contemporaries, including his wife, believed he was losing his mind and he was in 1865 committed to an asylum (mental institution). Semmelweis died there only 14 days later, possibly after being severely beaten by guards.

“Semmelweis’ practice only earned widespread acceptance years after his death, when Louis Pasteur developed the germ theory of disease which offered a theoretical explanation for Semmelweis’ findings. Semmelweis is considered a pioneer of antiseptic procedures.”

Had his peers not been wedded to their pet hypotheses and been open to new ideas and hard data, how many women and children might have been saved? How much sooner might the germ theory of disease been established? We now know that Puerperal Fever is a type of ‘strep’ infection, caused by Streptococcus pyogenes.

Ideas have consequences, as does their rejection. In Part II, we’ll consider the specific application of the current rejection of Post-abortion Syndrome in the face of mounting data to the contrary.

Read Full Post »