Sometimes you can find a truth spelled out in a novel quite accidentally.

Case in point I am reading this SF thriller trilogy where one of the plot points involves alien nanotechnology. When injected into humans these swarms of nanobots repair any damage and brings the person to perfect health.

There is a side-effect mentioned in the novel as a negative. When these nanobots are introduced into a population the “problem” is that chemical contraception stops working. Vasectomies are healed as would other forms of surgical sterilization. Abortion also becomes much harder as the child heals faster than they can kill it. This is remarked rather off-handily in the novel and is really not part of the plot.

This is also probably an unintended insight into the nature of contraception, sterilization, and abortion. The fact that none of this is related to a required medical procedure and instead of bringing a body to health mutilates it or uses hormonal tricks to break a functioning system. Medicine has been corrupted not to mean a remedy or a cure, but to include disrupting or removing a functioning system for reasons other than health.

This distinction seems to be lost more an more. This is obvious by the fact that you so often hear that if medical insurance pays for Viagra then it must also pay for birth control pills. That one restores function and the other removes function is lost in the haze of false equality.

No distinction is made between health and what are bodily hacks. We will probably seem more and more forms of bodily hacks falsely grouped under the category of healthcare. They will also more than likely be ironically named. For example reproductive healthcare is mostly aimed and making sure you don’t reproduce.

Some mistakes keep coming back to bite you. For example my first vote in a Presidential election – Jimmy Carter.

From an interview with *TIME *magazine:

I think there’s a slow, very slow, move around the world to give women equal rights in the eyes of God. What has been the case for many centuries is that the great religions, the major religions, have discriminated against women in a very abusive fashion and set an example for the rest of society to treat women as secondary citizens. In a marriage or in the workplace or wherever, they are discriminated against. And I think the great religions have set the example for that, by ordaining, in effect, that women are not equal to men in the eyes of God.

This has been done and still is done by the Catholic Church ever since the third century, when the Catholic Church ordained that a woman cannot be a priest for instance but a man can. A woman can be a nurse or a teacher but she can’t be a priest. This is wrong, I think…

This though is the typical arrogance of those outside the Church who would proclaim on theology regarding the Catholic Church. Done without of course actually looking at why the Church teaches as she does. There is never any actual engagement regarding this just a nebulous call to equality as if no further thought is required. Although almost exactly the same problem exists regarding member of the Church.

Notice how the Catholic Church is singled out. Funny how he doesn’t call out Islam for not having women inmans or lack of Buddhist women monks. I guess he just throws in the “great religions” to provide cover, while going after the Catholic Church. In fact in this article he brings up Catholics over and over again never referencing at all the actual mistreatment of women in Muslim countries.

Now Jimmy Carter also calls himself pro-life yet once again is remains totally silent regarding this and thinks the great problem that has to be addressed is women clergy.

Further on he goes on attack again:

To repeat myself in a way, I think that what the major religious leaders say is used by others who discriminate against women as justification for their human rights abuse. For instance if an employer, who might be otherwise enlightened, if he is a religious person and he sees that, he might be a Catholic, and a Catholic does not let women be priests, then why should he pay his women employees an equal pay [as men]?

What? This is totally incoherent. Once again he can’t be troubled to find what Catholics actually believe regarding this.

From the Letter of Pope John Paul II to Women

As far as personal rights are concerned, there is an urgent need to achieve real equality in every area: equal pay for equal work, protection for working mothers, fairness in career advancements, equality of spouses with regard to family rights and the recognition of everything that is part of the rights and duties of citizens in a democratic State.

Again theologian and scripture scholar Jimmy Carter opines:

But there are a lot of them, for instance if you look at some of the verses I think in Romans, I can’t remember exactly, maybe Acts, or Romans in the 16th chapter, Paul delineates a lot of top leaders in the church and about a third of them are women. So I think in the original status of the Christian church, women played a very important role, even in the leadership role. And then after about the third century when men took over control of the Catholic Church, then they began to ordain that women had to play an inferior position, not be a priest.

Amazing he didn’t bring up Constantine since this is just about as intelligent as the Da Vinci Code. The magical third century where everything that happened before gets replaced without people at that time noticing it. Whatever you don’t like about the Catholic Church then just say that whatever you dislike didn’t happen until the 3rd century. He also makes a very common mistake of equating the priesthood with leadership as if priests could only be leaders. This again sees the priesthood only in terms of power, another common mistake.

This is the 15th volume of The Weekly Francis ebook which is a compilation of the Holy Father’s writings, speeches, etc which I post at Jimmy Akin’s The Weekly Francis. The post at Jimmy Akin’s site contains a link to each document on the Vatican’s site and does not require an e-reader to use.

This volume covers material released during the last week from 12 June 2013 – 23 June 2013.

This version of The Weekly Francis ebook starts the inclusion of a summary of the Holy Father’s daily homilies, technically called fervorinos, which are provided from Vatican Radio. The full text of these homilies are not provided.

The ebook contains a table of contents and the material is arranged in sections such as Angelus, Speeches, etc in date order. The full index is listed on Jimmy’s site.

• The Weekly Francis – Volume 15 – ePub (supports most readers)
• The Weekly Francis – Volume 15 – Kindle

There is an archive for all of The Weekly Francis eBook volumes.  This page is available via the header of this blog or from here.

Omnibus Edition: In addition to The Weekly Francis I am also maintaining an Omnibus edition that contains all of Pope Francis writings, speeches, etc. At the end of the year an annual edition will be released along with maintaining the full omnibus.

• Omnibus epub
• Omnibus Kindle

The Thomas More Law Center, a national public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, today announces a victory in their lawsuit against teacher Johnson McDowell of Howell High School in Howell, Michigan.  Federal District Judge Patrick J. Duggan of the Eastern District of Michigan issued his opinion yesterday.

The Court declared the teacher’s actions in punishing Daniel Glowacki for expressing his beliefs against homosexuality violated “Daniel’s First Amendment rights.”  In its findings of fact—the Court described how the teacher initiated a discussion about homosexuality.  The teacher wore a purple t-shirt and was promoting the homosexual agenda.  In response, the Plaintiff, 16 year-old Daniel Glowacki stated that homosexuality was against his Catholic beliefs.  The teacher, admittedly, became angry and threw Daniel out of class because he disagreed with Daniel’s beliefs.

The teacher in the lawsuit tried to blame Daniel and claimed he caused a disturbance in the teacher’s classroom.  The teacher’s claims were wholly unsupported by all of the other evidence in the case, including affidavits of students in the classroom and the teacher’s own earlier statements.  The teacher also tried to argue that Daniel’s religious statement was tantamount to “bullying.”  The Court dismissed that claim as well, holding that Daniel’s speech could not be silenced because the teacher did not like Daniel’s religious beliefs and viewpoint.

The Court’s opinion echoed the longstanding legal precedent that “students do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”  Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Cmty. Sch. Dist., 393 U.S. 503, 506 (1969).

The teacher argued that Daniel’s speech that his religion did not approve of homosexuality was a bullying statement.  However, Judge Duggan, citing several cases, disagreed (citations and quotations omitted).

While the Court certainly recognizes that schools are empowered to regulate speech to prevent students from invading the rights of other students, people do not have a legal right to prevent criticism of their beliefs or for that matter their way of life.  Relatedly, a listeners’ reaction to speech is not a content-neutral basis for regulation.  While a student or perhaps several students may have been upset or offended by Daniel’s remarks, _Tinker _straight-forwardly tells us that, in order for school officials to justify prohibition of a particular expression of opinion, they must be able to show that this action was caused by something more than a mere desire to avoid the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint. Simply put, the law does not establish a generalized hurt feelings defense to a high school’s violation of the First Amendment rights of its students.

… (source)

Good news considering how often religious freedom takes a hit. With today being the start of the second phase of the Fortnight for Freedom it nice to have at least some positive news. Being an optimistic-pessimist I will take what I can get. Still I only see an increase in this type of persecution and bigotry towards faithful Catholics and generally those enlightened by the natural law concerning this. Although I suspect this small bit of good news will be overwhelmed when the Supreme Court rules on DOMA and Prop 8.

While the history of how Catholics have contributed and maintained the Culture of Death is mostly known. This article in Crisis Magazine by R. Cort Kirkwood summarizes this history .

… But Pelosi’s eyewash aside, the real import of her remarks is that they remind us of an ugly truth: Catholic Democrats played a significant role in the creation of the contraceptive culture that led to the legalization of abortion. A Catholic, for instance, invented the birth-control pill, and it was Catholic clergy in Boston, for example, who cooperated in repealing the state’s ban on the sale of contraceptives. In 1963, Cardinal Richard James Cushing, Archbishop of Boston, appeared on a radio program and suggested that laws forbidding the sale of contraceptives should be repealed because “I have no right to impose my thinking, which is rooted in religious thought, on those who do not think as I do,” a reversal of his publicly stated position in 1948. Cushing was merely repeating what John F. Kennedy told the Houston Ministerial Association in 1960, which also prefigured Catholic New York Gov. Mario Cuomo’s famous “personally-opposed-but …” position on abortion.

The Catholic role in repealing the laws on contraception is only part of the story. As Phil Lawler reported in his book, Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston’s Catholic Culture, the scheme to legalize abortion took place not in a candle-lit basement where Satanists celebrated black masses, but at the home of America’s leading Catholic family, the Kennedys.

In 1964, Lawler wrote, leftist Catholic priests Robert Drinan, Charles Curran and other theologians convened at Hyannis Port, Mass., with the brain trust behind the Senate campaign of Robert F. Kennedy.  They concocted the teaching that abortion could be justified if it were the “lesser of two evils” and that “a blanket prohibition might be more harmful to the common good”  because political leaders might  “impose their own private views on public policy. …The skillful operatives of the Kennedy family would round up the votes to end restrictions on abortion and eventually provide public subsidies. The Jesuit theologians would provide protective cover” and sabotage Catholic teaching in the universities. “Thus, the basic lines of ‘pro-choice’ rhetoric were sketched out by Catholic theologians, at the residence of America’s most famous Catholic family, nine years before the Roe v. Wade decision.”

It was natural and logical for a society that accepted contraception to eventually approve abortion. Firstly, the cultural race to the bottom coincided with the concomitant success of the Sexual Revolution and the population control movements, which flowered in the 1960s. Secondly, the moral decline followed the premise behind contraception: a child, the natural end of procreative sex, is unwanted. If some children were unwanted, legalizing their murder in the womb was a predictable next step. Though appointed by Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, leftist Supreme Court justice William Brennan orchestrated the legal denouement of what was begun by the Hyannis Port mafia. The renegade Catholic not only invented the “privacy” doctrine that invalidated Connecticut’s law forbidding the sale of contraceptives, but also excogitated the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized the slaughter of innocents. Brennan’s reasoning in Roe v. Wade is accoutered in the language of “privacy” and “rights,” but it flows from the same polluted well as Cushing’s: A Catholic does not have the right to “impose [his] thinking” on those who believe differently. And yet, Brennan’s defiance of Catholic teaching was not considered serious enough to deprive him of a funeral mass at the Washington D.C. Cathedral of St. Matthew in 1997.

And then ends with:

… Which invites two questions. First, where does this leave the Church? Answer: In trouble. Second, what can be done about it? Answer: The bishops must step forward and lead, principally by demanding sound catechesis and formation of the faithful, and then by correcting Pelosi and her ilk, if necessary by enforcing Canon 915. They are shepherds. They must feed their sheep.

The rest of us must do our part. Above all, we must pray—without ceasing.

I am sympathetic to this viewpoint at the end. Unfortunately we often wait around for the Bishops to lead us giving many of us an excuse mostly to gripe and not to actually step-up ourselves. My late pastor use to tell me “Holy priests make holy people and holy people make holy priests.” Bishops certainly have an important role in leadership, but the spere of the laity also has an important role. Al Kresta often emphasizes this point-of-view on his show and I have come more and more to agree with it. When the laity does indeed fill its role as we have seen in the pro-life movement and the growth of apologetics as we have seen with Catholic Answers we see partially what the sphere of the laity can achieve. When combined with the role of bishops, and other degrees of Holy Orders, who live out their charism it is once again that mighty both/and that informs so much of our faith.

In an interview yesterday with Archbishop Chaput he said;

If laypeople don’t love their Catholic faith enough to struggle for it in the public square, nothing the bishops do will finally matter. (Via Why I Am Catholic)

President Barack Obama (above), repeated the oft disproved claim that Catholic education increases division in front of an audience of 2000 young people, including many Catholics, at Belfast’s Waterfront hall when he arrived in the country this morning.

“If towns remain divided—if Catholics have their schools and buildings and Protestants have theirs, if we can’t see ourselves in one another and fear or resentment are allowed to harden—that too encourages division and discourages cooperation,” the US president said. (source)

As Father Z says “And this is his business… how?”

Really the President doesn’t want division in their schools because children don’t know division in our public schools. Okay broad swipe, but when you compare most public schools to parochial schools there isn’t much to brag about.

I wonder how upset the President is regarding the private school education his daughters are getting.

The President’s attitude though is totally unsurprising. The fact is the majority of Democrats would rally for forced public school eduction if they could get away with it. The history of public schools in the United States is filled with the idea of bringing Catholics under line. The “Blaine Amendments” passed by many states certainly had this in mind. The Democrat opposition to school choice also falls in line with an opposition to parochial schools.

Public schools have become a way for the Democrat Party to raise up the “Democrat Youth” beholden to a Federal government that gives out party favors to all who are favored by them. The Federal government – Teacher Union loop just keeps feeding on each other as a bureaucratic perpetual motion machine.

The reality is that Democrats should not fear Catholic schools at all or at least not fear most of them. Students might receive a good education, but probably not regarding philosophy, theology, and a understanding of the faith. Maybe things are getting better in this regard, but time will tell.

The article continues:

The US politician made the unfounded claim despite a top Vatican official spelling out the undeniable good done by Catholic education in a speech in Glasgow on Saturday and in his homily at Mass on Friday.

Archbishop Gerhard Müller, prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, told an audience in Scotland that Catholic education provided a rare place where ‘intellectual training, moral discipline and religious commitment would come together’ while giving the presitigous Cardinal Winning Lecture on Saturday to officially launch the St Andrews Foundation for Catholic teacher education at Glasgow University. During Mass at St Andrew’s Cathedral, Glasgow, on Friday night he said that ‘the Catholic school is vitally important … a critical component of the Church,’ adding that Catholic education provides young people with a wonderful opportunity to ‘grow up with Jesus.’