Via Kathryn Jean Lopez at the Corner is the latest euphemism for embryonic stem-cell research. "early stem-cell research" as used in this story and others. The culture of death is tenacious when it comes to coming up with new phrases to describing murder. Though that is always a helpful sign when they have to resort to obfuscation instead of just speaking the truth. That they know they will meet resistance when they speak honestly so they must hide the truth of what they advocate. Human embryo harvesting for example would be much more honest that therapeutic cloning, though even the phrase "theraputic cloning" was determined to be too harsh and they have now resorted to "somatic cell nuclear transfer" instead.
(Front Royal, VA) The Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer, President of Human Life International responds to Warren Buffett’s announcement to donate billions of dollars to the pro-abortion Gates Foundation.
“Warren Buffett’s money has gone to fund the deadly abortion causing drug RU- 486, the production and distribution of portable suction abortion devices in the developing world, organizations that push abortion on developing countries, and among many other radical organizations Buffett’s foundation gave a grant to the Center for Reproductive Rights, an organization that fought bans on partial-birth abortion…
“Warren Buffett, who is not a Roman Catholic, has also donated money to the Anti-Catholic organization Catholics for a free Choice a group that seeks to undermine the Catholic Church’s teachings on the sanctity of human life.
“Warren Buffett’s philanthropy aims at killing pre-born children not curing childhood disease, eliminating the poor not poverty, and destroying the developing world not aiding development.
“The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have also given millions of dollars to organizations pushing abortion around the world. The merger of Gates and Buffett may spell doom for the families of the developing world.
“Warren Buffett will be known as the Dr. Mengele of philanthropy unless he repents and ceases using tax deductible donations to promote a culture of death and desolation…,” concluded the Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer.
I like reading the statements of Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer, though you can tell he had a vocation to the priesthood and not the diplomatic service.
These pictures from a commercial for Legend Condoms that won a prize for advertising at Cannes are unbelievable. Though in a way they really illustrate a cultural attitude of what people think of children now.
A couple of months back Trojan ran a commercial that also illustrated a truth, but not in the way they intended. See Darwn Catholic analysis of that one.
They pray for babies
Thousands of baby pictures plaster the domed walls of the Chapel of the Unborn. Babies with bottles, babies in bonnets, babies cradled in mothers’ and fathers’ arms.
The chapel, in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, is a small side room off the main sanctuary of Regina Pacis Catholic Church. Years ago, the space was used as storage for the church snowblower. Now it serves as a holy spot for women who hope to bring pregnancies safely to term.
"It’s simple. It’s quiet. It’s powerful," said Msgr. Ronald Marino, 59, the priest who founded the chapel in 1988. He did so after finding himself unable to persuade a parishioner of the church’s stance that abortion is wrong. Instead of hammering that message, he said, he decided to create a space to celebrate lives of children brought into the world.
Some of the photos are of infants whose parents struggled to conceive. Others are of babies whose mothers had difficult pregnancies. Others are of children whose parents once thought to abort, but ultimately did not.
The steady stream of visitors is largely anonymous, hailing not only from the church’s parish, but from the other boroughs, Long Island and beyond. Marino doesn’t know the bulk of people who come here, but since the chapel has been open, he estimates he’s received close to 5,000 baby snapshots from families who visited. Sometimes, he said, parents will come straight from the hospital and leave the "Welcome, Baby" balloons and flowers they received after a delivery.
A statue of Mary sits in the center of the chapel. Behind her, a stained-glass window portrays angels praying and a newborn Jesus in the manger. In front stands a red-velvet kneeling bench, a thick, black, ledger book and a pen.
"Dear Blessed Mother, Help us conceive a child," says one entry. "We have a lot of love to give any baby(ies) you wish for us. Love, William.
(ANSA) – Vatican City, June 28 – The Vatican stepped up its fight against embryonic stem cell research on Wednesday, saying that scientists involved in such work would be excommunicated .
Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, head of the Vatican department dealing with family affairs, said in a magazine interview that "destroying human embryos is equivalent to an abortion… it’s the same thing" .
"Excommunication applies to all women, doctors and researchers who eliminate embryos," the cardinal told Catholic publication Famiglia Cristiana .
Trujillo said that "certain crimes" were being treated as if they had "become rights" .
He added that the Catholic Church was worried because "even talking about the defence of life and family rights is being treated as a sort of crime against the state in some countries – a form of social disobedience or discrimination against women" .
This would be a latae sententiae excommunication which is automatic, though would depend on requirements set forth in Canon 1321. I believe the Canons have been interpreted to not apply to lawmakers who help to pass laws that make these immoral actions possible in the first place. There is a big loophole that shows why Catholic lawmakers are not subjected to this Canon. It does not apply if "a person who lacked the use of reason,.."
SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Human rights group Amnesty International will be discredited if it pushes for the decriminalization of abortion worldwide, a senior Vatican official said on Wednesday.
London-based Amnesty, founded by Catholic lawyer Peter Benenson in 1961, has begun consulting its 2 million members around the world on whether it should drop its neutral stance on abortion and start pushing countries to repeal laws that make abortion a crime.
"I have great esteem for Amnesty but doing this, they cut off their hands. I hope they don’t do this because if they do, they are disqualified as defenders of human rights," Cardinal Renato Martino told Reuters in an interview during a visit to Singapore.
Martino, who heads the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Peace and Justice and the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People, said Amnesty would lose support from Catholic activists if it defined abortion as a human right.
"When they say ‘reproductive rights’, they mean abortion. Do they defend the rights of everybody? No! Not of the unborn because the unborn will be killed," he added.
In an update two a story from a couple of years back:
Wilmington, DE (LifeNews.com) — A teacher at a private Catholic school fired for signing a newspaper advertisement promoting abortion lost her appeal in her lawsuit against the school. The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a district court ruling in the case saying the woman’s rights were not violated when the school fired her.
Ursuline Academy, a private Catholic school in Wilmington, fired Michele Curay-Cramer after she lent her name to a pro-abortion signature ad. She filed a lawsuit saying the school violated her First Amendment free speech rights.
But Circuit Court Judge Jane Roth, writing for a three-judge panel of the appeals court, upheld the district court opinion tossing her lawsuit.
Before the court heard the appeal, Curay-Cramer’s attorney, Thomas Neuberger, told the News Journal newspaper, "We hope to ultimately prevail because we believe that since 1990 the Supreme Court has ruled that such institutions are not exempt from the civil rights laws."
Curay-Cramer expected controversy when she attached her name to a signature ad sponsored by a local Planned Parenthood. Her name appeared with 600 other local residents in support of the thirtieth anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion.
The ad was the first time she went public with her involvement with the nation’s largest abortion business, where she had started volunteering in April 2002.
Ursuline Academy officials said she should have been aware of the school’s strong stance against abortion when she got involved promoting it.
"The Catholic Church is very much pro-life," said former Ursuline spokesman Jerry Botto. "This is an area of the church where there is no gray area — it’s black-and-white. In keeping with that, that is something we teach here."
Funky Dung looks at the story on embryo deaths and goes more in depth with it. Additionally Alicia of Frutus Ventris tipped to off to to some letters in reply to the Journal of Medical Ethics original article. The first letter by Dr Mark Whitty is especially interesting being that he says he does not identify with the pro-life movement but proceeds to poke holes in the article.
We often get stories about Catholic schools and how they have
deviated from the faith in what I call Catholic
Identity Theft. So it is not
often you see a story with a headline "College
too Catholic." In fact this is the first one I have ever seen.
STUDENTS at Bexley’s first sixth form college are in revolt because
they claim their Roman Catholic college is too Catholic.
Nearly a third of the students at St Luke’s College, Chislehurst
Road, Sidcup, have protested to headteacher Maria Williams, likening practices
at the college
to "fanatical religious cults".
The 16 to 18-year-olds claim they are forced to attend "evangelical talks" expressing
puritanical views on subjects such as chastity and homosexuality.
They say they were made to walk around the school field carrying
a statue of the Virgin Mary singing hymns and have been hauled into the principal’s
office for holding hands off college premises and told they were a "disgrace".
I can’t believe I enrolled at a Catholic school and then actually
had to be involved in a procession. Unbelievably they even try to preach the
Gospel to us and the truths of the Catholic faith. I mean a Catholic schools
being Catholic is not what we signed up for. Why can’t our school be like so
many other Catholic schools, I mean it’s not fair!
Another student said: "Although we accepted by going to
a Catholic college we would be signing up to the Catholic ethos, we had no
idea we were also joining an institution which embraced many values present
within many fanatical religous cults.
One of their complaints is about a mandatory talk given at the
school by Barbara McGuigan. She is the host of EWTN’s Open Line on Tuesdays
and founder of Voice of Virtue International. I listen to her shows and she
is wonderfully pro-life, a good speaker, and able to talk on the issue with
clarity and charity. I guess these truths were just too much for some students.
There was a recent article in the New Scientist which has been getting much hyped in news coverage. The article contends that the "rhythm method" is responsible for killing more embryos than contraceptive sex. I figured somebody in St. Blogs would confront the silliness of what goes for science and Catholic journalist Thomas A. Szyszkiewicz does it amiably in a letter he has written to the editor of the same magazine.
The story on the "rhythm method" was farcical from the start. If you have a false premise, then the rest of your argument fails. In this case, no one is using the rhythm method anymore. This has long been replaced by any number of methods far more scientific in approach than rhythm ever was. Collectively, they are called Natural Family Planning. And, yes, from personal experience I can testify to its effectiveness — at both postponing and achieving pregnancy.
Beyond this, though, Bovens’ position is absurd. The issue isn’t the creation of embryos that then die naturally. That happens regularly and should cause no one any moral concern. The issue is whether or not the deaths of these embryos are deliberate. If they die a natural death, so be it. Contrary to Bovens’ claims, the Catholic Church has never taught that the preservation of the embryo is the summum bonum.
However, if they’re deliberately killed or killed because of the deliberate presence of a chemical known to make the womb hostile to new life, that’s a completely different story. It is here that the moral agent has culpability.
Even if NFP does cause more embryos to die (which I think is highly doubtful), the couple are not liable for that, and Bovens should know that and no amount of moralizing on his part can change that fact.
It is at best reprehensible for Bovens to try to place guilt on couples who practice NFP because of this supposed finding. As much as I try, though, I cannot believe Bovens was really trying to help anyone along. It is clear from this one quote, "If you’re concerned about embryonic death, you’ve got to be consistent here and give up the rhythm method," that Bovens is trying to get in a jab at the Catholic Church. He fails miserably, leaving behind a stench of hypocritical moral superiority that reeks throughout the story — and it is revolting.
Great points again proving that many scientists are lousy moral theologians. To often the gotcha approach of we caught you in hypocrisy prevails over a serious moral questioning of a subject. Though at least they are admitting that embryo’s can be killed. I was surprised to even find this article linked over at digg.com. I guess when you are looking for stories on the latest geek news, you also want pot shots at the Catholic Church.
Thomas of American Papist also discusses the obvious errors in the article.