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.

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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.

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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.

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A forum for SimonJM, Bobby Bambino and others to continue their discussion.

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I’ll Post Chapter 2 at 4 PM today. I’m away at a funeral.

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From Today’s HLI Newsletter

Abbot John Klassen, OSB of St. John’s Abbey, Collegeville, Minnesota, informed me personally Saturday that the venerable founder of Human Life International, Fr. Paul Marx, went to his eternal reward peacefully at 8:10 that morning. According to eyewitness accounts, Father raised his hands as he died and said, “Take me home.” Fittingly, he passed away in the Year for Priests, just short of his 90th birthday. Needless to say, he will be sorely missed!

Fr. Marx founded HLI as the Human Life Center in 1972 as a priestly response to what he saw was the global anti-life onslaught that was beginning to wash over the world with oceans of the blood of innocents. As a strong spiritual father, he could not stand by and watch this evil threaten the lives of God’s precious children and the sacred institution of marriage. He infiltrated a pro-abortion conference in California in 1971 as Dr. Paul Marx (correctly so, as he had a PhD in Sociology) and taped all the proceedings of the abortion-promoters so that he could expose their evil. He did this in the book, The Death Peddlers, which was the first major work of his many writings bringing the profound evil of the abortion industry to the light. Father’s legacy of exposing evil and defending the Church’s teaching about the sanctity of human life, marriage and family remains deeply embedded in the hearts of those who continue pro-life work in his indomitable spirit.

I had the privilege of meeting Fr. Marx for the first time only after he had left HLI. One cannot imagine the difficulty of taking over at HLI and trying to fill the shoes of one whom Pope John II called “the Apostle of Life.” After getting to know him, I have always said that there is only one “Apostle” of Life – the rest of us are just “missionaries” of life. Indeed, Father was in every way a unique and unrepeatable gift to the Church and to the world. Like his namesake, St. Paul of old, he went about the entire known world preaching the Gospel of Christ from the 60s through the 90s and establishing apostolic groups and pro-life organizations of faith to carry on the mission. Father was very much like the sower who went out sowing the good seed of life in 91 nations, personally, and motivating scores of others around the world to do the same. We estimate that Father Marx travelled something on the order of 3 million miles in his 40+ year career of pro-life activism, and ever after that, his spiritual children have done the same. In 2009 alone, HLI missionaries from the USA, and our Regional Coordinators, travelled more than 575,000 mission miles and visited 57 countries in our attempt to live up to Father’s high standard of zeal in spreading the Gospel of Life!

Part of Fr. Marx’s legacy can be counted in such HLI programs as the Magdalene Rescue and Rehabilitation Program, the China Orphanage Program, Seminarians for Life, the Population Research Institute (PRI) and the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-Fam), all founded under HLI’s umbrella in the 90s.

Although the Apostle of Life led a retiring life for the last decade, well taken care of by his religious community in Minnesota, Father never ceased his involvement with pro-life issues or his correspondence to his spiritual children still fighting the battles for life on the front lines of the pro-life movement. How precious it was for me to receive his periodic short letters encouraging me to keep up the fighting spirit in the face of so many new challenges. He was always well-aware of the need for funding too so he usually sent $25 and $50 checks with his encouraging notes! I treasure those letters with all my heart. Dr. Brian Clowes of HLI and Mrs. Magaly Llaguno of our Hispanic Division were among his most intimate friends and stayed in regular contact with him and his needs. Countless more were the HLI missionaries around the world who received Father’s letters and notes of encouragement, some of which we will feature in future publications.

To my knowledge, Father’s last public appearance and speech was at HLI’s 35th anniversary banquet held in his honor in Minneapolis on March 25th of 2007. He spoke passionately to his spiritual children using the very same words that Pope John Paul spoke to him when he met with the Holy Father in the early 80s: “You are doing the most important work on earth!” he repeated with fervor. Indeed we are doing that work – it is his work and the true work of the Church. Because of this one man’s indomitable spirit we will not cease doing that work until we too are called home.

Fr. Paul Marx taught the whole world how to be pro-life. He was literally the Patriarch of the pro-life movement. Now it is our turn to take up the mantle of Fr. Marx’s prophetic spirit and, like Elisha who saw his master go to heaven in a fiery chariot, we must turn and part the Jordan with that mantle and get back into the fray – just as the Apostle of Life would want!

[Note: stay tuned for a brand new HLI program in honor of Fr. Marx that will be coming at the end of the month – you won’t want to miss it!]

Sincerely,

Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer,
President, Human Life International

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