Pro-life

Mark Shea in the past has posted that we get the bishops we deserve and he recently posted a quote from Scott Hahn:

“God’s wrath, throughout history, basically means giving us what we want.”

I can understand how this well might be true. When looking at the current scandals in the Church we see that some priests were moved around from parish to parish when it was known that they were fallen from their priestly vows. I would really doubt that Bishops moved these priests around because they wanted to cause scandal or to victimize parishioners so there obviously were other reasons.

1. God’s grace and forgiveness and the ability to transform people is something Christians believe wholeheartedly and I can understand that with a seemingly repentant priest that a Bishop would take this in to account.

2. The science of psychology also played a factor where bishops relied on their diagnosis of fallen priests who had supposedly been rehabilitated, this also plays back on the first item. (See update at bottom)

3. Another factor I believe is the pressure of the shortage of priests. If there had been a large pool of priests available, would the Bishops then have acted more prudently and decided not to move these priest around. Would they have been less influenced by item 2 and have seen item 1 in it correct proportion as compared to protecting the laity?

This is where I believe the laity is complicit. I think the number one factor to the priestly shortage is the contraceptive attitude in Catholic families. Smaller families usually don’t encourage vocations to priestly or religious life because of the desire of grandchildren. There is a selfishness in the desire to control family size so as to have more material gains. A larger family in and of itself is not the goal but the attitude of openess to life. The majority of Catholics practice some form of birth control which means that that same majority also receive communion. Since contraception is a grave sin they are in effect committing a “Real Sacrilege”. The Catholic encyclopedia defines this as:

Real Sacrilege. Real sacrilege is the irreverent treatment of sacred things as distinguished from places and persons. This can happen first of all by the administration or reception of the sacraments (or in the case of the Holy Eucharist by celebration) in the state of mortal sin, as also by advertently doing any of those things invalidly.

The culture of dissent which mainly started against the Churches teaching on contraception has bore its rotten fruit. Many Catholic don’t understand or believe that contraception is a grave sin so they might not be a culpable as to the level of mortal sin, but regardless this is a blight on the church that has blurred many eyes to the truth.

I can well understand the resistance to larger families that happens in our society. Before my conversion I was a card-carrying member of the culture of death. After the birth of our second child I went and had a vasectomy some 20 years ago. Even though I love our children I was selfish and indoctrinated in relation to family size. The seventies were loaded with doom and population bomb thinking. I did not believe in God but I believed in replacement levels for a population equilibrium. I thought well we have two children, one boy and one girl – a matched set and I have bagged my quota. People talk of trophy wives and I think our society views children as either trophies or something you should have just as long as they are not too many of them, especially since they consume resources better spent on yourself. There was absolutely nothing coming from society saying I should question my decision or that there was any ethical dimension to this. In a distorted way I also thought that by getting a vasectomy that I was showing commitment to my wife by showing that I only planned to have children by her and that I was saving her from having to get an operation or to take the pill. While I have done much that has weighed down on my soul, the consequences of this act of self-multilation weighs the heaviest.

With Catholics getting divorced and remarried at roughly the same rate as non-Catholics and with Catholics in general not being open to life then why should we be surprised at the priests and then bishops this culture can generate. We expect to go on living highly secular lives and to do what we please and define our own truths and then also to expect holy priests and bishops. There is a saying that “Holy priests make holy people and that holy people make holy priests. The real surprise is not that there are some bad bishops, but that despite the lack of faithfulness that we have so many good bishops.

Update: I updated point two since I was hasty and used an overly broad brush on psychology. I stand corrected and defer to Gregory Popcak‘s statement he made in the comments. That clericalism was also tied up in some of these treatment centers which were run by clergy.

IRONTON — Abortion may be legal, but it isn’t moral, said the Most Rev. Daniel Conlon, bishop of the diocese of Steubenville.

Conlon dedicated a memorial Saturday morning to the unborn in the yard beside St. Lawrence O’Toole church in Ironton. He accepted an invitation from the Knights of Columbus council 1405 in Ironton to bless the memorial as a symbol of the local Catholic community’s opposition to abortion.

“Life is a gift from God,” Conlon said. “Many people have (had abortions) and turned their backs on God. Life is precious.”
[Full Story]

For the first time, it’s now known how many frozen human embryos created for infertility treatments are being stored in the United States — 400,000, twice as high as previous estimates.

Many of the embryos will not survive the thawing process but, as the number of “leftovers” left in freezers continues to rise, there are calls to minimize embryo production, put limits on storage time, and to have couples donate the embryos for use in research or for the infertility treatment of other couples.

The last choice has been embraced by the federal government, which is spending $1 million to foster public awareness of the “embryo-adoption” option for infertile couples.

…Lori A. Marshall, MD, head of reproductive endocrinology at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, said one point lost in the debate is how many of the embryos actually have the potential to develop into a child.

“I think that’s a misperception: that 400,000 embryos means there could be 400,000 people out there,” she said. “About 35% don’t survive the thawing process.”

Okay so there could be 260,000 more people and 140,000 who died in the process. But actually the death count rises since they implant multiple embryos and hope that at least one survives.

..There is not much complaint about the program’s goal, just its use of the word “adoption,” which in some people’s minds politicizes the process.

“The use of the term ‘adoption’ is loaded,” Dr. Murphy said. “It suggests that there is a recognizable human being in ethics and law, and that’s disputable.”
[Full Story]

Words are used as armour to protect people from truths they would rather not think about. If the truth is bothersome lets call the word loaded or that it politicizes the process. lets not discuss the fact that we have callously frozen human beings and put them into freezers to eventually die or if they are lucky to be experimented on by modern Dr. Josef Mengeles to see if they can find anything useful to do with their little carcasses.

A SYDNEY company is involved in a secret plan to collect tissue from aborted babies and export it for medical experiments.

The sensitive proposal, to harvest some of the 90,000 foetuses aborted in Australia each year has been condemned by pro-life groups for fostering an international trade in human body parts.

The Daily Telegraph has established that a Dutch bio-tech company, Crucell, working through a Sydney contract research organisation, Parexel International, has applied to the ethics committee of Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Adelaide for access to foetal material.
[Full Story]

Here is a judgmental article on how abortion (which isn’ wrong after all) counseling shouldn’t be judgmental.

When it comes to abortion, the issue is most often seen as a black-or-white, right-and-wrong, us-against-them political debate.

Aspen Baker realized this several years ago when she went to a bookstore looking for medical information after she had an abortion. What she found surprised her: all the books on abortion were in the politics section of the store, not the women’s health section.

This article talks about a counseling service called Exhale which describes itself.

“We’re not a political organization and we’re not a pro-choice organization,” Baker says adamantly. However, counselors must be committed to reproductive freedom and are screened on their ability to provide non-judgmental support to all callers, especially in regards to callers whose decisions fall outside social norms, such as callers who are young or have had several abortions.

Exhale runs off two truths, Baker says: Abortion is legal and abortion is normal.

Yep, that sure is my definition of a group that is not pro-choice. Abortion as reproductive freedom and stating that it is normal could easily be confused with the pro-life platform.
[Full Story][Exhale News]

Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review relays of story of Sen. Santorum after the 1998 vote on partial birth abortion to try to override the President’s veto.

�.And we finished up the Senate and closed it down, and the next day the vote came, [and] not one vote changed. But five days later, I got an e-mail from a young man at Michigan State University. And this is what the e-mail said: “Senator, on Thursday night I was watching television with my girlfriend. We were flipping through the channels and we saw you standing there on the floor of the United States Senate with a picture of a baby next to you. And so we listened for a while and the more we listened the more we got interested in what you were saying. After a while I looked down at my girlfriend, and she had tears running down her face. And I asked her what was wrong, and she looked up at me and said, ‘I’m pregnant, and tomorrow I was going to have an abortion, and I wasn’t going to tell you, but I’m not going to have an abortion now.’ ”

In April of that year, a little girl was born and given up for adoption. She is four years old today. Now according to the world, when I spoke on the floor of the Senate that night, I had failed. I did not succeed. But God gave me a gift that many of you as you stand and fight the causes that you believe in may never get, He gave me the gift of knowing that faithfulness to what you believe in can lead to wonderful acts and wonderful miracles.
[Full Story]

The NARAL pro-choice mobilization is mounting a campaign using email cards with graphics on them. They call their e-cards thought provoking. Is a picture of Bush as Uncle Sam saying I Want You, to look the other way…” thought provoking? The only thought that it provoked from me was … Lame!
[Link via Relapsed Catholic]

They have one of a woman as Uncle Sam(antha) which says “I Want You for Pro-Choice America”. The women in it looks like she would beat the crap our of you if
you don’t agree.

Victor Lams had done some some imaginative anti-abortion posters before using one of the same graphics that NARAL had chose, unfortunately his graphic link is broken in his archive.

Oh their site it says:

Many Americans don’t know what they can do to change the anti-choice direction President Bush and Congress are taking us in.

This can be added as one of those paradoxes that cause Star Trek robots to go into philosophical paradox loops and self destruct.

The President is anti-choice

But he choose to be anti-choice

error error error

Maybe it is a good thing that they still have to hide behind the linguistic smokescreen of the word choice and not focus on what that choice involves.

FROM AZ RIGHT TO LIFE EMAILING

Today’s edition of the Arizona Republic ran a story about the Arizona State Budget in crisis over the issue of abstinence education.

In the article, Senator Linda Binder (R-3) has refused to cast the key vote because it contains a $2 million provision for sexual abstinence education. Binder decided to take a three-week second honeymoon to Australia and thus avoid and delay the vote. In an interview with the Republic, Binder is quoted in saying, “That (abstinence funding) tapped me over the edge,” in avoiding to vote on the state budget. She went on to say, “We should worry more about teaching reality rather than morality.” Binder’s move throws a wrench into the Arizona State budget process over this two million dollars in education that has proved to work.

Pretty ironic abstaining from voting on abstinence. That line about “teaching reality rather than morality” I totally disagree with. Morality is based on truth which is the highest reality. You cannot fully teach reality without morality, when you do try you end up teaching an illusion that further destroys lives. What this view says is that people cannot be chaste which is just another modernist lie. I watched the great Alice Von Hildebrand on EWTN Live last night and she describes a scene where someone suddenly drops dead and ends up being taken to the coroners office for an autopsy. She said that the doctor will not pronounce death due to virginity.

From an article in the Then Union Leader [Registration Required]

ABORTION ADVOCATES are trying to claim that Republicans in Congress are exploiting the Laci and Conner Peterson murders for political purposes. They are, as usual, dead wrong.
Kate Michelman, president of NARAL Pro Choice America, told The Fresno (Calif.) Bee two weeks ago, �The only thing new about this bill is the length to which anti-choice lawmakers and advocates are willing to go to exploit a family�s pain in order to move their own political agenda.�

We�d like to see Michelman say that to Laci Peterson�s family, which strongly supports the bill and has voluntarily lent Laci and Conner�s names to it. On May 5 family members wrote to the House and Senate sponsors of the bill requesting that it be renamed �Laci and Conner�s Law.�

�Knowing that perpetrators who murder pregnant women will pay the price not only for the loss of the mother, but the baby as well, will help bring justice for these victims and hopefully act as a deterrent to those considering such heinous acts,� wrote the family.

Michelman is using Laci Peterson�s name to build opposition to a bill Peterson�s family actively supports. So who is exploiting whom?

A lawsuit has forced a Planned Parenthood branch to sever its special arrangement with a public library.

The Waco, Texas, library system included a facility run by Planned Parenthood of Central Texas that blocked access by people who have protested against the abortion provider.

Citing violations of free speech and equal access rights, three Waco women filed a suit last month in federal court after they were barred from Planned Parenthood’s Audre Rapoport Library, which had become part of the city’s public library system.

..Pam Smallwood, executive director of Planned Parenthood of Central Texas, said the group regretted “the necessity to end our successful collaboration” with Waco.

“Although we support an individual’s right to exercise their First Amendment freedom of speech, we must reserve the right to exclude individuals from our library in order that our security not be undermined,” she said, according to a statement.

“Given the level of violence perpetrated on women’s health-care providers in the United States, Planned Parenthood of Central Texas simply cannot risk placing our patients and staff in jeopardy,” said Smallwood.
[Full Story]

Their spokesman must be a broken record since she used the word patients for patrons of a library. So use to denouncing pro-lifers at abortion clinics that there statements just become boiler-plated. The reality is that more people at abortion clinics do acts of violence against the protesters than happens vice-versa. Of course we have our idiots like James Kopp who do more to hurt the pro-life movement than anything else.