President Obama, Can't You Hear the Irony?

The latest soundbite from President Obama really strikes a nerve with me.  He asked the members of Congress to consider "what message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no price."  The President is talking about Syria of course, but we Americans - and especially us Catholic Americans - need to be publicly making this point to him and the hundreds of other lawmakers who support abortion.

He is morally outraged at the thought of Syria's President Assad using chemical weapons against the children of his nation.  Obama understands, and expects all of us to understand, that the killing of children is especially heinous and cannot be tolerated.  And yet, he supports the ongoing atrocity of legalized abortion, even going so far as to ask God to bless Planned Parenthood, our nation's largest abortion provider.

Why can't he see, why can't so many of us see, that when we support the killing of  unborn children, we degrade the lives of all children?  If Assad did use chemical weapons on the children of his nation, then he only took the evil we perpetrate upon our own children to its logical end.  We speak of the innocence of children, human dignity, and inalienable rights; and yet our nation has killed 53 million of its children since 1973.  We stand agasp at events such as the chemical strike in Syria and the shooting in Newtown, never stepping back to consider how abortion insidiously, subconsciously, lessens the value of all human life.

Mother Teresa saw this clearly and warned us:

"Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching the people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. That is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion ... if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?"

Either Embryos Have Human Dignity, or It's All Just a Sham

We speak of human beings having innate dignity, and that innate dignity being the basis for human rights; but then we pretend that embryos do not share that dignity and are not entitled to the same rights as are those who have been born.

And that is absolutely nuts!  Seriously, think it through:

For someone to make the claim that human beings have dignity, while simultaneously claiming that embryos do not have dignity and innate rights, they have to hold that human beings only obtain dignity when they have reached a certain level of physical or cognitive development.

But if that is true then there is really no such thing as "innate dignity" - a dignity that we humans have simply as a result of existence (which science recognizes as beginning at conception).  Rather, human dignity is a human construct - an idea that we came up with, and which we are able to apply or deny to whomever we wish.

And if that is the case, then Martin Luther King, Jr.'s whole argument for civil rights was baseless, and the atrocities committed by Adolph Hitler completely justifiable.  If human dignity is not real - if it wasn't granted to us the nanosecond that we came into existence - then that is the reality. 

But we can't have it both ways, not logically.  Either human dignity is real, or it is an illusion.  If real, then we recognize the dignity and right to life of the unborn.  If not, then we admit that we have no innate dignity either; and we can be disposed of however the most powerful among us decides - and that isn't wrong; it's just the way the universe works.

When the Chips are Stacked Against Us - We Have to Keep Our Heads!

Osmar Schindler's David und Goliath

In several ways, the Western World seems to be losing its mind.  The culture is turning against its foundations in natural law and Judeo-Christian morality.  With the national news only a couple of hours behind us, Brennan (age 11) and I read the story of David and Goliath for the first time.  Brennan has known the story since childhood, from religious books for kids; but this was his first reading of the story from Scripture.  And there is so much there for an 11 year-old boy to love!

[David] took his staff in his hand, chose five smooth stones from the stream, put them in the pouch of his shepherd’s bag and, with his sling in his hand, approached the Philistine ...  David said to the Philistine, “You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This day the Lord will deliver you into my hands, and I’ll strike you down and cut off your head. This very day I will give the carcasses of the Philistine army to the birds and the wild animals, and the whole world will know that there is a God in Israel. All those gathered here will know that it is not by sword or spear that the Lord saves; for the battle is the Lord’s, and he will give all of you into our hands.”

As the Philistine moved closer to attack him, David ran quickly toward the battle line to meet him. Reaching into his bag and taking out a stone, he slung it and struck the Philistine on the forehead. The stone sank into his forehead, and he fell facedown on the ground.  So David triumphed over the Philistine with a sling and a stone; without a sword in his hand he struck down the Philistine and killed him.  David ran and stood over him. He took hold of the Philistine’s sword and drew it from the sheath. After he killed him, he cut off his head with the sword. (1 Sam.17:40, 45-51)

What lesson do I take, do I want my son to take, from David?

1. Remember that the battles we are facing in our culture - battles which are sure to multiply in the years ahead - are not ours; they are the Lord's.
2. And because the battle is the Lord's we must engage in it always cognizant that we are His representatives.  We must avoid taking personal offense when we are attacked and misrepresented; these wrongs are ultimately done not to us, but to Jesus.  (What an honor for us to suffer for Him!)
3. Like David, we can go forward boldly, knowing that we are speaking the Truth.  It is logical; it makes sense.  (That doesn't mean it will be respected or recognized though.)
4. David did not go against Goliath using the giant's type of weaponry - sword, spear, javelin.  No, David approached him with a staff (symbolizing Christ's love, teaching, and authority) and a sling with five stones (Jesse Romero tells people they represent the Rosary with its five decades).

Christ has equipped us with more powerful weapons than David!  Because "the battle is the Lord's" we conduct ourselves, as St. Paul taught, "with innocence, knowledge, and patience, in the Holy Spirit, in sincere love as men with the message of truth and the power of God; wielding the weapons of righteousness with right hand and left, whether honored or dishonored, spoken of well or ill” (2 Cor.6:6-8).  

In the heat of the moment, don't go "losing your head" - that's a Goliath thing to do, not a David/Jesus thing.
    

The Beauty of "Catholic" Sex - Why It's Good for the Baby

One of the hazards of being off school for a snow day is that you might be channel surfing and get sucked into watching an episode of Katie Couric's new talk show. There was a story I just had to hear:  A fertility clinic had accidentally implanted another couple's child into a woman's womb.  I am absolutely thrilled to say that the woman this happened to never contemplated abortion.  She said that her first thought was, "What if someone had accidentally been implanted with my child?  I would be on my knees begging her to carry my child to term."  And she did.  She and her husband contacted the other couple with the news that they had another child on the way - and they were overwhelmingly grateful that their child was going to be allowed to come into the world.  Nine months later, after the healthy birth of a boy named Logan, the woman at the heart of the story was told that her body was unable to endure another pregnancy.  Still wanting to welcome the children she and her husband had partnered with the lab to create, the couple hired a surrogate to carry their twin girls to term.

The story reminded me of a short post I wrote in 2009 where, with the help of The Office's Michael Scott, I talked about the dark side of IVF (in vitro fertilization).  The most shocking thing that I had discovered about IVF was how many "extra" embryos - human beings - are created in the laboratory, but never inserted into a mother.  (That's standard practice.)  There are over 400,000 frozen embryos in the United States alone!  Those are human beings in suspended animation.  Since I wrote that post, even the mainstream media has caught wind of how a higher percentage of children conceived through IVF are born with significant birth defects, in comparison to their normally-conceived peers (9 percent vs. 6.6 percent).  As with the story on Katie Couric, these are problems - serious problems - that God wants to safeguard us and our children from.

The Magisterium of the Church (the teaching office exercised by the pope and bishops) has always been clear that IVF is not compatible with God's will.  Before I say anything further let me state categorically that the Church has never, and will never, look down upon anyone conceived through IVF!  No matter how a person is conceived, he or she is a human being and has the same dignity as every other human being.  (That goes for a person conceived through an act of fornication, adultery, IVF, and even rape.  If the Church believed differently then we wouldn't have canonized saints, such as St. Martin de Porres, who were born out of wedlock.  Give it a hundred years and we could very well have a saint who was conceived through IVF.) You won't catch me condemning parents who have used IVF either; the vast, vast majority have done so with no awareness of its difficulties or the Church's teaching on the subject.


In addition to the problems with IVF cited above, why do the Church's teachers - the shepherds to whom Jesus committed His flock - feel compelled to speak out against the use of IVF?   

To safeguard the dignity and well-being of the child.  There are truths we have to keep in mind:

1.  A child is not an end, a good (to be sought in a lab), but a person with his or her own inviolable dignity and rights.
Yes, we experience the yearning to be parents to a child of "our own."  But the child is not our property; the child is his or her own person, with his/her own rights.

2.  Every child has the right to be conceived through an act of love between its parents.
The child is a person, and persons are meant to come into existence through the sincere, bodily gift of his/her mother and father to one another.  (The child is not a product that a doctor can mistakenly implant in the wrong mother.)


Last year a friend shared his niece's plight with me:  At age 16 she discovered that she was conceived through IVF.  She also discovered that she was the sole surviving embryo of several that had been created.  She confided in her cousin (my friend's daughter) the sense of shame she felt - her brothers and sisters being allowed to die, so that in a sense, she could live.  It messed with her mind.  She was angry with her parents. Not to mention her initial reaction - "I was made in a lab?"

3.  Sex, by its very nature, is love-giving and life-giving.
Everyone thinks the Catholic Church's oppostion to contraception is crazy, but it both maintains the reality of the sexual act and the dignity of the child(ren) produced by it.  What do I mean?

"This pregnancy was an accident."  Bull.  An accident is when something goes wrong.  If a pregnancy resulted from your lovemaking then biologically everything went exactly right - it couldn't have gone better!  Contraception has twisted how we see reality.  A child is never an accident, never some unforeseen by-product of a night of romance.  

Creating a new life is an inseparable part of the sexual act.  And those who do try to separate it out, eliminate it, are doing something against nature.  Only by ignoring that obvious truth can an individual - or a society - speak of the growing child as an "accident."

When a Catholic husband and wife make love, they give their whole selves to one another.  There is nothing about their fertility that needs to be suppressed or treated as a hindrance to their love for one another.  If they are practicing NFP (natural family planning), and come together during a time in the wife's cycle when they believe her to be infertile, and if a pregnancy should result; then they understand that their child is anything but an accident - a surprise, sure; but never an "accident"!  That child is the result of their love - a beautiful gift entrusted to them by God.  That child is its own person, brought into existence to enrich the world and spend eternity with God.  

The child did not come into being to meet a need felt by the parents.  The child is the fruit naturally springing from their love.  They are there to love the child - to pour themselves out for the enrichment and growth of this new person.  In doing so they will be enriched - both in the way they image and make present the love of God, and in the love their child returns to them.  But it is an enrichment that takes place while safeguarding the dignity and rights of the child.

The vast majority of people who have sought IVF have done so innocently, without anyone raising even one of these issues with them.  They know that they want to give their love to a child and have never heard its darker side or the moral problems associated it.  The Church's vision of sex and procreation safeguards the dignity of the child as well as prevents horrible situations like that being experienced by my friend's niece or young Logan from today's Katie Couric show.  Someday Logan will hear the story of his conception.  There is the silver lining of the woman who respected his life enough to carry him to term ... but there's so much else there that will likely be difficult to hear.  And it doesn't have to be that way.

Pushin' 40 - and It is Evil (January 22, 2013)

Only a few months until I turn 40, but I am fine with that.  I realize that chronologically I am not a kid anymore, but I sure feel like one in my head.  Ironically, thanks to God's grace and my good friend Kevin Vost, I am actually in better physical shape now than when I turned 30!

The "pushin' 40" to which I refer in the title is a much more serious matter.  January 22, 2013, will mark 40 years since the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in Roe v. Wade.  In those 40 years, our nation has aborted approximately 55 million children.  My mind can barely begin to make sense of that number; it is just shy of the total number of people killed in WWII.  But this 55 million were not combatants or people living in a war zone - they were children in their mothers' wombs.

I am not a superstitious person, nor am I doom and gloom; but when I hear the number 40, my mind turns to Scripture.  It is a number we encounter there from time to time.  We find it, for instance, in Psalm 95 where Israel was warned:

Today, if only you would hear his voice,
“Do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah,   

as you did that day at Massah in the wilderness 

[at the time of the Exodus],

where your ancestors tested me;
    they tried me, though they had seen what I did.
For forty years I was angry with that generation;
    I said, ‘They are a people whose hearts go astray,
    and they have not known my ways.’
So I declared on oath in my anger,
    ‘They shall never enter my rest.’”

(Psalm 95:7-11)

The Epistle to the Hebrews quoted this Psalm to the early Church, adding "Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, that no one fall by the same sort of disobedience" (Heb.4:11).
 
When Jerusalem's leaders rejected the New Covenant God offered them in Jesus, they were given "a generation," (Mt.24:34), commonly understood as forty years, before God allowed judgment to fall.  Instead of repenting of their crime and pursuing God's will however, they pursued their own wills year after year.  They tried to stamp out the Church in its infancy. Their hardness of heart eventually brought them into rebellion against Rome; and Jerusalem and its Temple were leveled in 70 A.D. - approximately forty years after its rejection of Jesus. 

And here is the United States, after forty years of allowing its children - its most innocent members - to be killed in their mothers' wombs.  Forty years - how has the sin of abortion hardened hearts in our nation?  How has it twisted us and eroded the respect we have for all life?  How many Christians in this nation are horrified by it enough to speak out?  Just look at how many Christians - how many Catholics - believe they can justify the unjustifiable: casting ballots for politicians committed to keeping this atrocity legal.  "Today, if only you would hear His voice ..."

If we imagine a bright future for a nation that continues to practice - whose politicians actually seem to be doubling down on the practice of - killing the child in its mother's womb, then we are as blind as Annas and Caiaphas, as blind as Herod and Pilate.  "God is not mocked, for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.  For he who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption" (Gal.6:7-8).  If we continue, then God will finally allow the evil we have courted to overtake us.  I don't have a clue what that might look like, but it has happened again and again throughout history.  Cultures rot from within, and like the Jewish rebellion against Rome, we will bring it upon ourselves.  In our self-imposed blindness we will undoubtedly make foolish choices and bring it all crashing down.

Forty years is a long time for God to tolerate evil ... but He has been known to do so for longer. Hopefully, we still have time to repent.  "Today if you hear His voice ..."  Fast, pray, talk to your loved ones, and realize that God is with you the next time you step into a voting booth.  We may have failed Him in the past, but we don't have to do so again!  But make no mistake, "God is not mocked."  As Ruth Graham, wife of evangelist Billy Graham, concluded, "if God doesn't bring judgment upon the United States, He's going to have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah."  The cries of our aborted children - our 55 million aborted children - do reach His ears.

Holy Innocents & Unholy Alliances

Today in the Octave (8 Days) of Christmas, we recall the Holy Innocents, the children two-years and younger who were murdered by King Herod in his effort to eliminate the newborn King (Mt. 2:16-18).  The Church honors these children as martyrs - those who lost their lives in this world because of Jesus.

This feast highlights the love and mercy of God - that He invites all to eternal life, with no regard for mental abilities or age! (This was prefigured in the circumcision of Israelites at eight days old, and is witnessed to today in Christianity's practice of baptizing infants.)  Every person is precious to God from the moment they come into existence, and He desires union with them.  That places a pleasurable burden on the shoulders of parents - raising our kids in the practice of the Faith, introducing them into a relationship with God.

Children, loving children as God loves them - that's where my mind is at on today's feast.  I think of the murder of those innocent children at Sandy Hook Elementary.

I of course think of abortion too.  I recently read this quote from Mother Teresa:

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

Those words in bold, they remind me of Herod's motivation for wanting to kill Jesus.  Mother Teresa continued:

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

The spirit of Herod seems to be flourishing in the United States.  Almost half of the Catholic voters in our nation cast their ballot this past November for a man whose party platform reads "[we] strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay."  That's right - abortions being paid for with our tax dollars.  The White House has an ongoing love affair with Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in our nation.  It is responsible for the deaths of over 300,000 children every year!  Innocents are being slaughtered right under our noses, and the "People of God" ally themselves with them.

A deep, profound change of heart is what today's feast calls for, and toward that end I invite you to join yourselves to the intercessions made in the Liturgy of the Hours this morning.  They are incredibly powerful:

We rejoice in the glory of Jesus Christ, who conquered the enemy not by force of arms but with a white-robed army of children, and we cry out:

– The white-robed army of martyrs praise You.

The Holy Innocents gave witness not by words but by their life’s blood,
give us strength to be your witnesses before men, both by words and actions.

– The white-robed army of martyrs praise You.

They were not ready for battle but you made them fit to win the palm of victory,
now that we are prepared for victory, do not let us despair.

– The white-robed army of martyrs praise You.

You washed the robes of the Innocents in your blood;
cleanse us from all sin.

– The white-robed army of martyrs praise You.

You rewarded the child martyrs with the first share in your kingdom,
do not let us be cast out from the unending heavenly banquet.

– The white-robed army of martyrs praise You.

You knew persecution and exile as a child,
protect all children whose lives are in danger from famine, war and disasters.

– The white-robed army of martyrs praise You.

 

Cheating Spouses & God's Providence

A really good friend of mine was telling me about a Bible study for men that he attended, where they looked at King David's adultery with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, as a cautionary tale.  David was the only man that Scripture ever refers to as "a man after God's own heart" (1 Sam. 13:14; Acts 13:22) and yet, he later succumbed to the sin of adultery.  His lust burned to the point that he had her husband placed in a dangerous situation in battle, an act that brought about his death.  David was punished for his sin; God removed his protective hand and let David experience what a life apart from Him was like.  (It got pretty ugly - for David, his family, and his kingdom.)  The lesson of course is not to presume on your own strength.  Do not place yourself in tempting situations, and when you feel a twinge of lust don't allow it to take root and grow.  Call out to God at that very instant to untangle the knots starting to work their way through your soul.  Ask for the grace to look at that beautiful woman the same way that God does.  

There is another lesson as well, and this is the kind of thing that can only be seen in hindsight ... how God weaves even our sins into His plan to bring about salvation, our ultimate good.  David and Bathsheba, you see, became the parents of Solomon and one of Solomon's descendants was ... that's right, Jesus!  David and Bathsheba came together in the darkest way imaginable and yet, their son Solomon had always been in God's mind, always intended as a blessing to Israel (within his own lifetime), and then the entire world (through his descendant, Jesus).

What am I trying to say - that God willed the sin of David and Bathsheba to bring about some greater good?  Of course not!  What David did was evil, the exact opposite of what God desired.  It was horrible and even though David repented and God forgave him, David was still required to pay a temporal price for his sin.  (You and I are for our sins as well.  See here and here, for more.)

What I am saying is that we have a God Who is bigger than our sin, Who is not limited by it.  He sees our sins, our free choices to go against His will; and then in His own utterly incredible way He weaves even those sinful choices into His plans.  He is never the author of the evils we perpetrate; but He is the author of the good He is able to create out of our atrocities - the child conceived through adultery, fornication, or even a sin as despicable as rape - that child that, no matter how he or she was conceived, has been woven into God's plan to bless the world.  Only God, only God, can do this.  He stands outside of space and time and meets our freedom to sin with His own freedom to bless.

So whatever you are dealing with, whatever frustration or injustice - a cheating spouse, an act of violence, an illness, whatever it is - remember that Your Father loves You and that beyond all of our understanding, He is able to weave even this into His eternal plan to save you and this world.  That is our Faith.  It's written right there in Jesus' family tree (Mt. 1:6-7).

"O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!  How unsearchable are His judgments and how inscrutable His ways! ...We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose."  (Rom. 11:33; 8:28)

"I Know I Sound Insane ...

... to some of the people who stumble upon this blog.  Jesus being the fulfillment of our deepest needs, angels and saints, my statements regarding Christian divorce and remarriage, sexual expression, contraception, etc.  To a non-Christian immersed in today's culture these things are foreign, if not laughable.  I know I sound insane to self-described "moderate" and "liberal" Christians too.  (Not that these labels from the world of politics actually have anything to do with our commitment to Christ Jesus, the Truth.)

And honestly, they are right ... if Jesus and His promises are untrue.  Christians who actually believe everything Christ taught are the definition of "putting all your eggs in one basket."  In the first decades of our Church, St. Paul wrote:

We preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength ... (1 Cor. 1:23-25)
... We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing ... The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them ... (1 Cor. 2:6,14) 

We are speaking truths about human dignity, moral absolutes, the beauty and sacredness of human sexuality that this culture and many of our brothers and sisters have closed their ears to, choosing the voice of the world over the voice of God.  It is a temptation in every period of history and in every life.  But we go on enunciating these truths because they ultimately come from the mouth of Jesus - the Way, the Truth, and the Life - and ignoring them can damage us to such a degree that we are separated from Him for eternity.  We recognize that this makes us look "backward" to some, but our vision is really focused far into the future: 

... If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost.  If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. (1 Cor. 15:17-19)

But our hope in Christ is not just for this life.  This life is only the first moments of eternity, but moments where we choose our trajectory.  A little pain making for an eternity of gain:

... I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. (Rom.8:18)

So we must go on living and speaking with joy, with your eyes fixed upon Jesus, our End.  We do not compromise with this age - with, for instance, the Planned Parenthoods and the agenda of handing out birth control to our teens because "their just going to 'do it' anyway ..."  We hold out the vision that we are creatures of incredible dignity, with the ability to practice self-control, to sacrifice and make an authentic gift of ourselves in love.  We will not make use of sinful means in the attempt to bring about our desired end because we Jews and Christians have understood that the path to hell is paved with the best of intentions. "There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death" (Prov.14:12).

So I, so all of us Christians, have to be willing to take our lumps because we believe the One Who said, "I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world" (Jn.16:33).  We have Hope, the theological virtue of Hope, that looks ahead with incredible joy to the world that is to come.