Insight Scoop | The Ignatius Press Blog

It isn't rare, it isn't safe, but, c'mon, it's legal!

In the hit song, "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad" (#11 in 1977, if you're keeping track at home), Meat Loaf sang the following:

I want you (I want you)
I need you (I need you)
But-there ain't no way I'm ever gonna love you
Now don't be sad (Don't be sad)
'Cause two out of three ain't bad
Now don't be sad

We hear, repeatedly, that the happy, benevolent citizens of Pro-Choice Nation aren't really pro-abortion (remember Sen. Obama's statement of the same?), but actually want abortions to be "safe, legal, and rare". Right. Perhaps Meat Loaf can cut a new tune titled, "One Out of Three Ain't Bad", as more stories come out about women dying or being seriously injured during abortions, not to mention the vile, disgusting conditions found in many abortion mills—as if anyone should be surprised that a facility dedicated to killing the unborn would be vile and disgusting. 

And then there are the recently released numbers from Planned Parenthood (courtesy of The Washington Times):

Continue reading on the CWR blog.

Dorothy Day: A Saint to Transcend Partisan Politics

Dorothy Day: A Saint to Transcend Partisan Politics | Leslie Fain | Catholic World Report

Despite attempts from both liberals and conservatives, Dorothy Day does not fit comfortably in either political camp.

Thomas More, the statesman who would not compromise his faith at the behest of King Henry VIII, was elevated to sainthood during a time when Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini were rising to power. Now, as the United States seems to be locked in a red state/blue state quagmire, the Catholic Church may elevate to sainthood Dorothy Day, a servant of God who could not be pigeonholed as a liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican, or libertarian, and chose to wear no other label than that of Christian.

Last month during their annual meeting, the United States Council of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) voted to support Dorothy Day’s cause for sainthood. To steal a line from Peter Kreeft about his heroes Jesus and Socrates, Dorothy Day certainly has something to offend everyone.

Founding the Catholic Worker movement during the Great Depression, Day and her colleague Peter Maurin farmed, fed the poor, and published a newspaper to protest wars and the unjust treatment of workers. Although Day is widely accepted by the religious left because of her antiwar stance, as well as her dedication to civil rights, workers’ rights, and the poor, Day has met with a cool reception from many on the right. A host of conservatives, from Rush Limbaugh’s callers to Glenn Beck, to writers and commenters at conservative websites and blogs, have opined that Day was a Communist who flouted Church teachings. These conservatives never provide proof, but only make statements to the effect that she was trying to push the Church in a Communist direction.

This is a shame, as Day’s life has a lot to offer the orthodox Catholic. “Dorothy Day constantly lived her life according to a ‘higher obedience’ that was not subject to political instrumentalization,” said Dr. Chad C. Pecknold, assistant professor of historic and systematic theology at the Catholic University of America, and author of Christianity and Politics: A Brief Guide to the History (Cascade, 2010). “Advancing her cause—especially in the wake of the recent presidential election in which the Catholic vote was divided by a political calculus that her life rejects—is providential for the Church in America.”

Tom Cornell, a deacon assigned to St. Mary’s Parish in Marlboro, New York and co-manager of Peter Maurin Farm, served with Day at the Catholic Worker when he was a young man. In fact, he calls Day his matchmaker, as he and his wife, Monica, literally met over a Catholic Worker soup pot. He agrees that the bishops’ push for Day’s canonization is providential. “Dorothy is a bridge between the so-called left and the so-called right in a polarized church.” He adds, “I don’t think the labels are very helpful.”

Robert Ellsberg, the publisher of Orbis Books and editor of All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day, knew Day the last five years of her life, and agrees that she is a bridge figure. “She is a symbol of common ground whose witness could bring together people,” he said.

“She didn’t just communicate with Catholics,” Ellsberg added. “She was in touch with Protestants, Jews, and unbelievers, and trying to seek common ground.”

Day continues to be something of an enigma to many.

Continue reading on the CWR site.

Papal Nuncio to Join Walk for Life West Coast

From the good folks organizing the Walk for Life West Coast:

Organizers delighted with presence of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò at January 26 event
 
January 2, 2013 – The Walk for Life West Coast is honored to announce that Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the Holy Father’s Ambassador to the United States, will be attending the 9th Annual Walk for Life West Coast in San Francisco, on January 26, 2013.
 
“What an honor! We are so excited—this is the next best thing to having the Holy Father himself with us!” said Eva Muntean, a co-founder of the Walk.  Archbishop Viganò, appointed on October 19, 2011, the Feast of the North American Martyrs, is the 14th Papal representative to the United States. The diplomatic post was established in 1893.

The 2013 event will begin at 12:30 PM in the city’s Civic Center Plaza. The rally and Walk will be preceded in the plaza by an Info Faire, beginning at 11:00 AM, and a “Silent No More” awareness campaign, featuring actress Jennifer O’Neill (www.jenniferoneill.com) beginning at 10:45 AM. Rally speakers include:

• Lacey Buchanan, a young mother whose YouTube video about her blind son went viral and has touched over 11 million viewers (her video was voted the #3 video of 2012 on Godvine.com);

• Elaine Riddick, a woman who was forcibly sterilized at age 14 under orders from North Carolina’s Eugenics Board, whose goal was to purify the state’s population by weeding out the mentally ill, diseased, feebleminded and others deemed undesirable;

• Rev. Clenard Childress, the founder and director of www.BlackGenocide.org , a website designed to reach the African-American Community with the truth about abortion;

• Kelly and Matthew Clinger, a post-abortive couple who share their story about the heartache and pain caused by life in the music industry, divorce, addiction, and abortion.

Following the rally, Walkers will march down Market Street to Justin Herman Plaza.
 
Founded in 2005 by a group of San Francisco Bay Area residents, the Walk for Life West Coast’s mission is to change the perceptions of a society that thinks abortion is an answer. Walk participants are expected from throughout the Bay Area and across the United States and Canada.
 
More details at: www.walkforlifewc.com. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, cheap grace, and tough religion

By Russell Shaw | CWR Blog

Much has been said lately about how to do evangelization. I've contributed a bit to that myself. Now I begin to think that, instead of always stressing niceness, it might be good to give tough religion a try.

That idea was inspired by a reading of Eric Metaxas's biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran theologian and pastor executed by the Nazis near the end of World War II for  involvement in the plot against Hitler. Metaxas's book, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Thomas Nelson), is a tad too worshipful for my taste, but it contains a wealth of information about this iconic religious figure of the 20th century and, best of all, quotes generously from his writing.

As in this description of what he found while doing post-doctoral studies in the early 1930s at Union Theological Seminary in New York: "In New York they preach about virtually everything, only one thing is not addressed, or is addressed so rarely that I have as yet been unable to hear it, namely, the gospel of Jesus Christ, the cross, sin and forgiveness, death and life."

As that suggests, Bonhoeffer, an intellectual from a well-off, highly cultured family, was no wimp. Welcomed back to New York in 1939 before the outbreak of hostilities, he could have spent the war there safe and secure. But he chose to return to Germany in the conviction that he belonged with his people during what he knew would be their darkest hour. For the Nazis to have killed him with the end of the fighting in sight was an act of malevolence serving no purpose but revenge.

Continue reading on the CWR blog.

R.I.P.: American's demographic "exceptionalism"

Jonathan V. Last, editor of the Weekly Standard and author of the forthcoming book, What to Expect When No One's Expecting (Encounter, 2013), comments in his e-letter today about the recent report from the Pew Research Center about falling fertility rates in the U.S.:

Last week the general public had a momentary freak-out when it was reported that U.S. fertility rates had hit their lowest point since 1920. The news made it into the front pages of the Washington Post and USA Today and it was as if, for a moment, mainstream America awoke to the fact that our demographics are terrible. And getting worse.

But then the moment passed and everyone went back to worrying about the fiscal cliff and the royal pregnancy. Such is the nature of media.

It's worth looking into the new numbers in a little more depth, though, because they give you a reasonably good sense as to what's happening in our society.

So here's the top-line: Between 2007 and 2010, the U.S. birthrate dropped 8 percent, to the level of 64 births for every 1,000 women. The preliminary data for 2011 shows it sliding still more, to 63.2. This is as barren as America has ever been. For some contrast: During the Great Depression—when it really collapsed—the birth rate bottomed out in the high 70s. In the 1970s—when fertility rates all across the Western world entered a death spiral—the birth rate never dipped much lower than 65. Our birth rate is now lower than it was both during the greatest economic calamity, and the greatest social upheaval, in modern American history.

One striking (and sobering) aspect, Last notes, is that the birth rates among immigrants are not just falling, but are plummeting:

Continue reading on the CWR blog.

A Tale from the Front Lines of the Abortion Wars

A Tale from the Front Lines of the Abortion Wars | Mark Sullivan | Catholic World Report

A new book tells the story of a life lived fighting abortion.

“The time may come when we date the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet system from the appearance of Gulag,” wrote a German reviewer of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation. It may sound crazy, but the time may also come when we date the end of legalized abortion in the United States from the publication of Abandoned: The Untold Story of the Abortion Wars by Monica Migliorino Miller (Saint Benedict Press, 2012).

I recently began reading the abridged version of Gulag, and I was stuck by Solzhenitsyn’s descriptions of the injustice and the powerlessness of the people in communist Russia—in particular, by how fittingly his descriptions of the power structures of the Soviet system could be applied to the institutions that promote and protect legalized abortion in this country. I thought it would make an interesting story, so I requested a review copy of Abandoned. I thought it would make a good point of departure to talk about Solzhenitsyn.

I’ve never read a whole book about abortion. I’m a “good” pro-lifer who will on occasion pass out pro-life voting guides to his friends. I have a pro-life bumper sticker on my car, and I’ve been to the March for Life in Washington, D.C. a few times. I thought I knew all I needed to know about abortion, and that if I learned anything more, I’d just get more upset and frustrated. At least that is what I thought until I read Abandoned.

I couldn’t put it down. It wasn’t what I expected. It is not an abstract book of philosophy, biology, ethics, politics, or theology—even though Miller has her doctorate in theology and teaches at Madonna University in Michigan. It’s not a rehash of the same old pro-life rhetoric or arguments. This is the story of Miller’s involvement in the pro-life movement in Chicago and Milwaukee from 1976 to 1993. Her activities were controversial and sometimes shocking, but she never tells the reader what to do or think. The reader is forced to face the ugly truth of abortion and then decide what he is going to do about it.

Miller has her undergraduate degree in theater. She knows drama. She knows how to build scenes and hold the reader’s attention. She kept a journal during her years of pro-life work, so in writing this book, she was able to recreate scenes and conversations that give you the “you are there” feel.

I keep thinking, “This book would make a great movie.” It is the classic story of the underdog fighting the big bad bureaucracy to save the innocent. It would be America’s version of Schindler’s List, or Erin Brockovich with more modest clothing. It may be a tough sell, but I’m hoping a pro-life movie director will give it a try.

Continue reading at www.CatholicWorldReport.com.

Plans for Walk for Life West Coast, January 2013, in full swing

Pro-lifers rally and stand up for life in San Francisco on January 26, 2013

 November 29, 2012 – Pro-lifers on the west coast are energized and making plans for this year’s 9th Annual Walk for Life West Coast on January 26, 2013, which will begin at 12:30 PM in San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza. They expect to produce a bigger, more dynamic, grassroots Walk for Life West Coast that will demonstrate a growing trend: America is becoming more pro-life.
 
Dolores Meehan, Walk for Life West Coast co-founder and organizer, says, “The indomitable spirit of pro-lifers will never be dampened by the seeming success of pro-abortion policies. Public policies come and go, but the courage and righteousness of individuals persevering to protect the most vulnerable in our midst … that’s what will be remembered for generations to come.  Now more than ever, we must stand and be counted in the public square. We are ‘in it’ to ‘win it’.”

The Walk for Life is gearing up for some vibrant speakers this year, including:

· Lacey Buchanan, a young mother whose YouTube video about her blind son went viral and has touched over 11 million viewers;

· Elaine Riddick, a woman who was forcibly sterilized at age 14 under orders from North Carolina’s Eugenics Board, whose goal was to purify the state’s population by weeding out the mentally ill, diseased, feebleminded and others deemed undesirable;

· Rev. Clenard Childress, the founder and director of www.BlackGenocide.org, a website designed to reach the African-American Community with the truth about abortion;

· Kelly and Matthew Clinger, a post-abortive couple who share their story about the heartache and pain caused by life in the music industry, divorce, addiction, and abortion.

The Walk for Life West Coast team is also excited to announce that actress and model Jennifer O’Neill (www.jenniferoneill.com), who is the national spokeswoman for the Silent No More Post-Abortion Awareness Campaign, will join the Silent No More program prior to the rally.

Founded in 2005 by a group of San Francisco Bay Area residents, the Walk for Life West Coast’s mission is to change the perceptions of a society that thinks abortion is an answer. Walk participants are expected from throughout the Bay Area and across the United States and Canada.
 
More details and the most up-to-date information about the walk is available at: www.walkforlifewc.com.
 
To set up an interview with any of the Walk for Life West Coast’s dynamic speakers or event organizers, please contact: Rose Trabbic, Publicist, Walk for Life West Coast, media@walkforlifewc.com or (239)867-4180

After Tragedy, Irish Abortion Laws Come Under Fire

After Tragedy, Irish Abortion Laws Come Under Fire | Michael Kelly | Catholic World Report

A young woman is dead, and some blame Ireland’s strict anti-abortion laws—but many questions remain unanswered.

The death of a young pregnant woman has thrust the issue of abortion center-stage in Ireland, with pro-choice campaigners blaming the country’s ban on abortion for the woman’s death. However, even a quick perusal of the facts reveals a much more complex scenario. Pro-life advocates insist the tragic case is being used by those trying to overturn Ireland’s pro-life legislative framework. There have even been accusations that Catholic health-care ethics led to the death.

Savita Halappanavar—a native of India who moved to the west of Ireland some years ago—was 17 weeks pregnant when she went to the hospital on October 21, complaining about back pain. The 31-year-old was admitted to Galway University Hospital. According to her husband, doctors determined she was having a miscarriage. Little else is known officially, apart from the fact that a week later, Halappanavar had died from septicaemia, a blood infection.

The only account of the events leading up to her death come from Halappanavar’s distraught husband, who claims his wife asked for a termination of her pregnancy when it became clear that she was miscarrying. He insists that doctors refused because of the presence of a fetal heartbeat. His wife would be alive, Praveen Halappanavar says, if doctors had induced labor and ended the pregnancy as she requested. He told the Irish Times that his wife died because Ireland is a Catholic country and follows Catholic medical ethics.

Cue a torrent of anti-Catholic commentary on social media sites and from prominent journalists and commentators. Despite a lack of facts, the collective outcry was that this tragic incident had occurred because the hospital acted with a Catholic ethos. The country’s Minister for Health, Dr. James Reilly, intervened to warn against prejudging the situation before the conclusion of two independent investigations surrounding the death.

“I am privy to certain facts but I am not privileged to share them,” Dr. Reilly said.

He said that the question of a Catholic ethos preventing or inhibiting medical personnel from carrying out proper medical treatment, as defined by the Medical Council, had been raised. “I have no evidence of that, but, again, I am not going to preclude what a coroner’s court will find, and I want to await that independent investigation that a coroner always undertakes,” Dr. Reilly told the Irish parliament, in response to questions about the incident.

While no one wants to intrude on Mr. Halappanavar’s obvious grief over the death of his wife, medical experts and bioethicists have been quick to express their view that Ireland’s ban on abortion had nothing to do with Mrs. Halappanavar’s death. They insist that guidelines from the Irish Medical Council are perfectly clear that pregnant women must be given all necessary medical treatment.

Continue reading on the CWR site.

The Vampire State

The Vampire State | Anthony Esolen | Catholic World Report

Just loosen your collar—this will all be over in a moment.

“They live in the northernmost community in Canada,” said the fellow at the hamburger joint. “They’re Inuit, and have been living there for more than 2,000 years. They used to follow the caribou herds from place to place, but the government has settled them down, and now they have a permanent village, with the houses built up high, above the permafrost.”

He then told me that the government had given them a quota for fishing turbot, and if they fell short of the quota, the government would make up for the shortfall by a cash grant. Until recently, they’ve attached themselves to international fishing expeditions, but now they have purchased a ship of their own. That was why they had flown the 4,000 miles from the 15th parallel to our island on the 46th—to take possession of the ship. The cost of the ship was borne by the government. I don’t know whether the $20,000 for four round-trip plane tickets was also borne by the government—that is to say, by other people, with the government middlemen taking their substantial cut—but it wouldn’t surprise me.

“I suppose,” I said, “that living in such a forbidding place, they don’t have the social problems they have in, say, Yellowknife,” the capital of the Northwest Territories, notorious for alcoholism and family breakdown. My reasoning was simple. You can’t survive from one year to the next unless you preserve moral order.

“No, they have the same problems there that they have all over the Territories,” he replied, and he put the blame squarely on Ottawa. “Paternalistic” was the word he used.

The conversation caused me to consider what a place like Yellowknife has in common with, say, Detroit. Yellowknife is a small town on the Great Slave Lake, in the midst of the richest mineral deposits on Earth. It is, for all that, a deeply dysfunctional place. Detroit used to be the jewel of the Great Lakes, the auto capital of the world. It is now a pit of crime. Whole neighborhoods have been abandoned. The current mayor, Dave Bing, has ordered some of them to be plowed under, to turn them back to grasslands, perhaps for pasturing sheep.

It’s not just Detroit, and money alone is not the problem.

Continue reading at www.CatholicWorldReport.com.

On Faithful Citizenship

By Father Augustine Hoa T. Tran | Catholic World Report

[Editor's note: The following is a homily given by Fr. Tran on Sunday, October 28th. It is posted here as part of Catholic World Report's desire to contribute to the discussion regarding principles of responsible citizenship among Catholics.]

For the past 41 years, the Catholic Church in America has celebrated October as Respect Life Month. This is a month in which our bishops have asked us to reflect upon, pray about, and renew our commitment to the defense of all human life. Today, I should like to address this issue vis-à-vis our civic duties as Catholic Americans.

Three months ago, I preached on our moral obligation “to pay taxes, to exercise the right to vote, and to defend [our] country” (CCC 2240). In that homily, I said that we are Catholic Americans; we are not American Catholics. In the term American Catholic, American is the adjective, which means that it qualifies the noun Catholic. To qualify our Catholicism is to qualify our faith, to qualify our allegiance to our Creator, to qualify our love for our heavenly Father. Those things we do not qualify, hence, we are not American Catholics.

In the term Catholic American, Catholic is the adjective, which means that it qualifies the noun American. As Catholics, our patriotism is tempered by our faith, our love of country is subordinated to our love of God, our decisions in the body politic and our actions in the public square are all determined by a conscience informed by faith. That is what it means to be a Catholic American.

As Catholic Americans, our Church teaches us that responsible citizenship is a virtue, and participation in political life is a moral obligation (cf. Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship). If a Catholic conscience obliges us to participate in political life, then it stands to reason that we must participate in a way that is consistent with our Catholic faith. When it comes to matters that are purely political, then there is a great deal of latitude in our prudential judgments. This is the purpose of political dialogue. How much should people be taxed? What should the speed limit be? Should there be a minimum wage, and if so, what should it be? What are just immigration laws? There are many sides to these issues and men of good will differ in their opinions. Healthy political debate will hash out these issues for any particular country. The Church only gives us moral guidelines to form our Catholic conscience when engaging in these debates. She gives us the pale, if you will, that we should not step beyond in our political discourse. Within the pale, however, there is much room for disagreement and political discourse. After all, human governments are human institutions, hence, they cannot be perfect. There is usually not one correct answer.

The fundamental principle that under girds our political discourse, however, is respect for the dignity of the human person. Governments exist to protect the common good—to protect people because of our inherent dignity as beings created in the imago Dei, the image and likeness of God. 6. In 1998, the American bishops stated this principle thus: “Any politics of human dignity must seriously address issues of racism, poverty, hunger, employment, education, housing, and health care. Therefore, Catholics should eagerly involve themselves as advocates for the weak and marginalized in all these areas.

Catholic public officials are obliged to address each of these issues as they seek to build consistent policies which promote respect for the human person at all stages of life. But being ‘right’ in such matters can never excuse a wrong choice regarding direct attacks on innocent human life. Indeed, the failure to protect and defend life in its most vulnerable stages renders suspect any claims to the ‘rightness’ of positions in other matters affecting the poorest and least powerful of the human community” (Living the Gospel of Life: A Challenge to American Catholics, 23). In other words, since the issues of racism, poverty, hunger, employment, etc., are fundamentally issues of respect for human dignity, it is logically inconsistent that one could be right on those issues while wrong on respecting the dignity of the most innocent and vulnerable human life, the unborn and the elderly. “You believe I have a right to an education, but I don’t have a right to life?” “You believe I have a right to housing, but I don’t have a right to life?” “You believe I have a right to health care, but I don’t have a right to life?” “Well, how do I get those things if I’m not alive?” This is what the bishops meant when they said, “the failure to protect and defend life in its most vulnerable stages renders suspect any claims to the ‘rightness’ of positions in other matters affecting the poorest and least powerful of the human community.” 

Continue reading an the CWR blog.

Cardinal Bernardin corrects Douglas Kmiec

A week ago, former U.S. ambassador Douglas Kmiec, a strong supporter of Sen. Obama in 2008, was interviewed by the Los Angeles Times. In the course of that interview, Kmiec stated, "The president promotes social justice as if he were a Catholic." Here is the fuller context:

You are antiabortion; Obama is in favor of abortion rights. But you also see abortion as part of a broader policy position, including issues like the death penalty, poverty and war. You don't have a single-issue test for a candidate.

There is a tradition we trace back to Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago, of the seamless garment — all life issues are interrelated: abortion, capital punishment, war, a family wage, the environment. You can't take these things apart. More and more Catholics understand that, but some very important Catholics are resistant.

People on all sides tend to run to get the law on their side and then to say, "See? We're right." That kind of smugness cuts off dialogue. If you have a message about the sanctity of marriage or human life, deliver it to me. Move my heart. Change my mind as I'm sitting in your congregation. Don't run to Sacramento or Washington and put it in some statute and then say, "I'm right because the law is on my side."

Everybody wants to solve [same-sex marriage] with law. I don't need the state to define marriage for me. I need the state to treat citizens equally, to give everyone the benefit of the rule of law and not shape it to favor one side or the other. At the same time, give individual churches the opportunity to define marriage as they read their religious practices.

The president promotes social justice as if he were a Catholic. I get in trouble when I say that. I was fooled by one of my friends in the White House. He called and said, "I want you to be the first to know Barack Obama has converted to Catholicism." He let me talk for 10 minutes about how I knew it was going to happen, and all the while, laughter is building on the other side, and he said, "Isn't it April 1 in Malta as it is in the U.S.?

Setting aside the matter of specific candidates (who come and go) and political parties (who change platforms from year to year), there are a couple of serious problems with Kmiec's presentation and analysis. First, there is a tradition much older than the one mentioned by Kmiec, a tradition rooted in the Ten Commandments, which comes down to us through Jesus Christ, the apostles, and the Church. There are legitimate points of criticism to be made when it comes to Cardinal Bernardin's "seamless garment" teaching, but they aren't of concern here, mostly because Kmiec isn't even true to the teaching as Cardinal Bernardin expressed it. 

Continue reading on the CWR blog.

The Beginning of the End of the Abortion Industry?

The Beginning of the End of the Abortion Industry? | Tim Drake | Catholic World Report

Over the past five years, growing numbers of US abortion workers have left the industry.

For former Planned Parenthood director Abby Johnson, the turning point came when she was asked to assist with an ultrasound-guided abortion.

“Abortions are typically performed blind,” explained Johnson, who served as health director for Planned Parenthood in College Station, Texas. “The doctor takes the suction instrument and probes until he thinks he’s gotten everything.”

On this particular day in the fall of 2009, “the visiting physician wanted to use an ultrasound as a teaching tool to show us what an abortion looked like,” recalled Johnson. “I was excited about the prospect of learning something new. My job, during the procedure, was to hold the ultrasound probe on the patient’s abdomen.”

What Johnson saw on-screen would forever change her life.

“I saw a 13-week-old child struggle and fight for its life during the procedure,” said Johnson. “It was shocking for me because the most common question we were asked in the counseling room was, ‘Will my baby feel this?’”

“Planned Parenthood had come up with a scripted answer that we were to give women,” said Johnson.

“Our answer: No, the fetus has no sensory development until 28 weeks,” said Johnson. “I wholeheartedly believed that.”

So Johnson was stunned when she saw the child on the ultrasound screen trying to get away from the intrusive instruments bent on its destruction.

“I went back to my office, and for the first time during my eight years at Planned Parenthood, I wondered if this was where I wanted to be for the rest of my life,” said Johnson. “I sat down and prayed for the first time in many years. All I knew was that I couldn’t do this anymore.”

Abby Johnson

On October 6, 2009, one week and two days after participating in the abortion, Johnson left Planned Parenthood and approached those gathered outside the business who were in the midst of a 40 Days for Life campaign—volunteers devoted to a prayerful, peaceful presence outside abortion businesses.

“I broke down and told them, ‘I know what I’ve been doing is wrong, and I want out,’” said Johnson.

Damascus Road

Johnson isn’t the first to have experienced a Saul-to-Paul-like moment leading to a departure from the abortion industry. In the decades since abortion’s legalization, abortionists and abortion workers such as Dr. Bernard Nathanson, Carol Everett, Anthony Levatino, and others were convicted by what they were doing and experienced profound conversions. Some went on to publicly share their testimony, such as Nathanson did in his 2001 book The Hand of God: A Journey from Death to Life by the Abortion Doctor Who Changed His Mind.

Johnson’s story is eerily similar to that of the late Joan Appleton’s 1989 departure as head nurse of the Commonwealth Women’s Clinic in Washington, DC.  Appleton, too, had witnessed an ultrasound-guided abortion.     

Continue reading at www.CatholicWorldReport.com.

"Eberstadt is at her best in highlighting both the ironies and tragedies of sexual liberation."

Janice Shaw Crouse, an Evangelical, positively reviews Mary Eberstadt's book Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution (Ignatius, 2012) for The Family in America: A Journal of Public Policy:

Eberstadt is at her best in highlighting both the ironies and tragedies of sexual liberation. She laments the “sexual doublespeak” of popular women’s fashion magazines, a la Cosmopolitan, as they reveal “a widely contradictory mix of chatter about how wonderful it is that women are now all liberated for sexual fun—and how mysteriously impossible it has become to find a good, steady, committed boyfriend at the same time.” Children and young people, too, have suffered. A major legacy of the sexual revolution, she laments, “is the assault unleashed from the 1960s onward on the taboo against sexual seduction or exploitation of the young.” Young people imbibe a “toxic collegiate social brew made possible by the sexual revolution,” a revolution that now includes date rapes, hook-ups, binge drinking, and pervasive pornography. The toxic brew of today’s permissive culture, portrayed by Tom Wolfe in his 2004 novel I am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel, also features what Eberstadt calls contraception’s “permanent backup plan”: abortion. Instead of “liberating women from the slavery of their fertility” as some adversarial feminists claim, the Pill empowered a sexual revolution by absolving men of responsibility and, as Kay Hymowitz documents in Manning Up, left far too many in permanent adolescence. The net effect is a climate of “sexual obesity”—a phrase that Eberstadt borrows from University of Pennsylvania psychiatrist Mary Ann Layden—a perfect storm that includes pervasive pornography and attempts to mainstream pedophilia.

An unexpected dimension of the poisoned culture is the imposition of ersatz morals, evident in new obsessions with so-called safe sex and healthy eating, which have filled the vacuum left by the rejection of common-sense morality. Citing shifts that took place in public attitudes toward tobacco and pornography, Eberstadt believes these developments reveal a great deal about our current situation. In the 1950s, pornography was morally repugnant and tobacco smoking was entrenched in the culture. At that time, family-centered morality governed sexual behavior while food choices were morally neutral. Today, the moral valences have been reversed: anything goes sexually, but food choices carry moral significance. Borrowing from Friedrich Nietzsche, Eberstadt terms these shifts “the trans-valuation of values,” meaning “the ways in which the existing moral code would become transformed in a social order no longer centered on Judeo-Christianity.” We can only hope that by continuing to shine the spotlight of truth on the sexual-revolution juggernaut, we can halt and then reverse the cultural pollution, the widespread discontent, and the collateral damage.

Read the entire review.

Demons, Sin, Death, and Damnation

A Scriptural Reflection on the Readings for September 30, 2012 | Carl E. Olson

Readings:
• Num 11:25-29
• Ps 19:8, 10, 12-13, 14
• Jas 5:1-6
• Mk 9:38-43, 45, 47-48

What do demons, sin, death, and damnation have in common? An obvious (and correct) answer is that all of them are, put bluntly, bad. They have a certain, even close, relationship to one another. Another answer is that each is a topic usually avoided in conversations around the water cooler and over morning coffee. In fact, they are sometimes given short shrift in homilies and sermons.

But today’s Gospel prominently mentions all four. Needless to say, it is a challenging and difficult reading. Yet it is the sort of passage too often ignored or downplayed, resulting in a skewed understanding of both the mission and message of Christ.

Jesus and his disciples took the existence of demons for granted; they also took them seriously. The discussion in Mark 9 about driving out demons is just one of about seventy references to demons in the New Testament. What is unusual, however, is the context: the disciples were complaining because someone who “does not follow us,” they told Jesus, was performing exorcisms. Jesus reminds them that such a deed can only be performed in his name, and such faith could not come from a foe. Since men can only be for or against him, the benefit of any doubt should go to those who exhibit love for and faith in Christ. In the words of St. Gregory of Nyssa, “None of those seeking to be saved will be lacking in this ability,” since salvation is a free gift from God.

That expansive explanation of how good done in the name of Christ should be acknowledged is followed by some of the strongest language in the Gospels about avoiding sin. Two terms stand out: scandal and Gehenna. “If your hand causes you to sin”—literally, scandalizes you, “cut it off.” Scandal, the Catechism explains, “is an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil.” Those who give scandal by words or actions can destroy spiritual life. “Scandal is a grave offense if by deed or omission another is deliberately led into a grave offense” (par. 2284). It is, G. K. Chesterton summarized nicely, “the tripping up of somebody else when he is trying to be good.”

Momentary physical pain cannot be compared to the eternal spiritual torment awaiting those who continue unrepentant in their sins. Gehenna symbolized such torment. It was a steep ravine southwest of Jerusalem where, many centuries before Christ, some Israelites had sacrificed “their sons and daughters to Molech” (Jer. 32:35), a pagan god long associated with such horrors. Gehenna was desecrated eventually by the righteous King Josiah (2 Kngs. 23:10), and became a smoldering garbage dump filled with trash and animal carcasses. Needless to say, it offered a powerful image of an eternal hell filled with undying worms and unquenchable fire.

Speaking of hell is never fashionable or enjoyable. St. John Chrysostom said of this passage: “Ordained as we have been to the ministry of the word, we must cause our hearers discomfort when it is necessary for them to hear. We do this not arbitrarily but under command.”

One of the great sins of our time is the deliberate and self-serving destruction of human life, especially what Pope John Paul II described as “the scandal of abortion.” Such a grave scandal exists because men—even those living in Western democracies—have “lost the ability to make decisions aimed at the common good” (Centesimus annus, 47). Pope Benedict XVI, in his recent encyclical on social doctrine, wrote, “To desire the common good and strive towards it is a requirement of justice and charity” (Caritas in veritate, 7).

Justice requires every man be held responsible for his sins; it rightly asks each pay for his moral deficits. Yet we are unable. As today’s reading from the Epistle of James makes clear, wealth cannot save us. Nor can power or fame. Salvation from demons, sin, death, and damnation is found only in the name of Jesus Christ, the author of life (Acts 3:15).

(This "Opening the Word" column originally appeared in the September 27, 2009, edition of Our Sunday Visitor newspaper.)

Industry of Death vs. Culture of Life

Industry of Death vs. Culture of Life | Carrie Gress | Catholic World Report

Pro-abortion advocates talk of “back alley” abortions while ignoring life-giving alternatives for women in crisis pregnancies.

“When I went to Planned Parenthood for my five abortions, I was never given any sort of a choice other than to pay my money, sign the papers, and go in the back for the procedure,” says Lisa Kratz Thomas.

Kratz Thomas, a former drug addict who turned her life around and is now a mother, motivational speaker, and talk-show host, said her quick fix with abortion didn’t help her with her greatest needs. “It was very impersonal, and it was like, the less talk the better. There was no interaction with the staff and hardly anyone talked about the procedure. No asked ever asked me about what needs I may have had, or why I was a repeat customer.”

Every four years as election rhetoric heats up, pro-abortion advocates threaten that a vote for a pro-life president would send women to the “back alleys” for abortions—and this year is no exception—but the back alley reality may already be here.

The idea of the back alley abortion has long been a tactic used by pro-abortion supporters to scare voters into believing that without legalized abortion women would be faced with unethical doctors, unregulated surgeries, emergency room visits and even death due to botched procedures.

Marilisa Carney, one of the co-founders of 40 Days for Life, says, “Planned Parenthood, in their factory approach to abortion, has really legitimated the back alley. In their focus on profits over women’s health, Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry promote that which they were supposed to rid society of.”

The back alley statistics were first cooked up by abortionist Bernard Nathanson, the co-founder of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortions Laws, which became the National Abortion Rights and Action League (NARAL). He claimed that 5,000-10,000 women lost their lives annually from botched abortions. Nathanson, who performed more than 75,000 abortions during his career—including on his own child—later admitted to concocting the numbers to help legalize abortion.

Continue reading at www.CatholicWorldReport.com.

God and 9/11

I hadn't planned on writing much, if anything, on the anniversary of the murderous attacks of September 11, 2001, if only because that event usually leaves me at loss for words. And what more can be said? It is an occasion, first of all, to pray for those who were murdered and for all those innocent—born and unborn, young and old—who are victims of violence and hatred each and every day.

But more can be said, even if with hesitation and some trepidation. For this is also an occasion to reflect and frankly consider our own mortality, the fragility of the flickering light called life that we each possess as a gift from God. What, then, is the point of it all? Why do we, as individuals and families and communities, come into existence and for what End were we created? Alas, those questions, unfortunately, apparently assume too much in this day and age, for it is not a given that those next to us in the workplace or in the schoolroom or on the street also believe in a loving God who "in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life" (CCC, 1).

It's not so much that explicit forms of atheism have become increasingly popular (although they have), but more that we in the West live as practical atheists. When the rubber meets the road, it is on a secular wheel and it is facilitating the rapid movement of a materialist car driving towards a shimmering temporal goal, with little interest in acknowledging the life to come and the Life from which we come. Sure, we might give lip service to God, or some form of vague deity or life form or higher power, but it is often mere lip service, not the service of body, soul, and mind that finds completion in real worship. "Secularism, I submit", wrote the great Orthodox theologian, Fr. Alexander Schmemann, "is above all the negation of worship. I stress:—not of God's existence, not of some kind of transcendence and therefore of some kind of religion. If secularism in theological terms is a heresy, it is primarily a heresy about man. It is the negation of man as a worshiping being..." (For the Life of the World, 1965).

What does this have to do with the anniversary of "9/11"? Quite a bit. Actually, nearly everything. And I am quite certain that Pope Benedict XVI, in giving his address at Regensberg on September 12, 2006, was trying to get us to see fundamental connections between how we understand God and how we understand our place in this world—in other words, the relationship between faith and reason, an essential theme of his pontificate. Benedict stated:

Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God", he says, "is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably (σὺν λόγω) is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...".[4] The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature

And, as we know, these remarks were soon followed by threats and acts of violence by those who were anged that they had been unfairly deemed prone to threats and acts of violence. But Benedict, in many ways, was simply elucidating a point made by his predecessor, Blessed John Paul II, who took on the question of reason and the nature of God in his encyclical Veritatis splendor, presented almost twenty years ago, in August 1993. Writing about the fall of Adam, John Paul II stated:

Continue reading at www.CatholicWorldReport.com.

Ending the USCCB’s Path to Progressive Politics?

Ending the USCCB’s Path to Progressive Politics? | Anne Hendershott | Catholic World Report

John Carr’s tenure at the USCCB ended on a note quite different from that of several former colleagues.

After 25 years of faithful service, John Carr, executive director of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Department of Justice, Peace, and Human Development, retired last month. In a personal note circulated among his colleagues—which was later posted online—Carr wrote that he was “leaving the USCCB, not to end my service to the Church, but to serve in new ways—to help form, convene, and encourage Catholic lay men and women to take up their unique task of bringing Catholic social and moral teaching to community and political life.”

Throughout the last year of his tenure at the USCCB, Carr was under siege from the secular left because he has supported the bishops in their lawsuit against the HHS mandate to provide contraceptive care—including abortifacients and sterilization services—to employees of Catholic institutions. Carr has responded to these attacks courageously.

This fall, Carr will begin a fellowship on faith in public life at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government—a position that will give him some time to decide where he will bring his passion for social justice to “form, convene, and encourage” the Catholic laity. But the choice of the Kennedy School reveals that Carr may already have chosen to continue the path to progressive politics chosen by so many of his predecessors when they left the USCCB. In fact, the USCCB has provided a kind of training ground for many progressive Catholics currently working to help elect liberal-leaning candidates for office—including candidates who support policies that will expand abortion availability and same-sex marriage.   

Sara Morello, executive vice president of Catholics for Choice, worked for the USCCB prior to her current position at the pro-abortion organization founded by self-described “former nun” Frances Kissling. According to the Catholics for Choice website, Morello—who holds a licentiate in canon law from the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC and a bachelor’s degree in theology from Creighton University—“brings her expertise in canon law, theology, church structure and governance to inform CFC work as well as that of its partners and colleagues.” In other words, Morello is using her graduate degree from Catholic University and her experience at the USCCB to provide canon law cover for Catholics who wish to support abortion with a clear conscience. 

Throughout her long tenure at Catholics for Choice, Morello developed many of the organization’s core publications.

Continue reading at www.CatholicWorldReport.com.

Planned Parenthood, Serious About Profit, Not Women's Health

It Is All About Abortion and the Bottom Line, Says Former Employee | Carrie Gress | Catholic World Report

AUG. 23, 2012 – Profits take presidence over women's health when it comes to Planned Parenthood's focus, says a former employee of the abortion giant.

As the country finds itself in crosshairs of the "war on women," a former Planned Parenthood employee, Susan Thayer, tells the real story of what goes on behind the closed doors of the "pro-women" clinics.

Thayer worked as a clinic director for Planned Parenthood in Iowa for 17 years before she joined the pro-life cause, only to see the very clinic she worked at close after the 40 Days For Life Campaign she initiated.

Q: Planned Parenthood markets itself as a health resource for women that provides, among other things, mammograms and other forms of cancer testing. Their website boasts of providing 750,000 breast exams annually, while abortion only makes up three percent of their work. The impression is that abortion is really just one of many things they do there. Is that impression accurate? 

Thayer: There has never been a mammogram done by any clinic in any affiliate. The only cancer screening done there are pap tests and there are fewer and fewer of those happening with the decline in clinician availability. 

They do offer a range of services – sexually transmitted infection testing/treatment, pregnancy testing, birth control, etc - but abortion is their "main event". It's what they do.

Q: How central is abortion to Planned Parenthood's mission and bottom line?

Continue reading on the CWR blog.

Welcome to Oregon, the State of Teenage Sterilization!

I've now lived in Oregon for over twenty years, having moved here in the summer of 1991 from Montana. I lived in Portland for a few years, during the craziness of the Measure 9 controversy, then in Eugene (my wife's hometown) since 1995. In 1997, the year that we entered the Catholic Church, Oregon became the first to state to legalize assisted suicide, via the "Death with Dignity Act". As I've sometimes dryly noted, when giving talks in other parts of the country, Oregon is that surreal place where you aren't trusted to pump your own gas, but if you'd like to kill yourself, the State is there to assist you.

Oregon is indeed a curious place, politically and culturally: generally speaking, it likes to present itself as a liberty-loving, eccentric haven for free-thinkers who thumb their nose at convention, tradition, religion, and the mores of middle America. In reality, it is more like a State-operated insane asylum in which the inmates are reassured of how openminded, cutting-edge, and truly liberal they are, while their political masters continuously and confidently promote a culture of death, secular homogenization, and narrowminded bullying that is equally breathtaking and bizarre.

As odd as it might sound, I suspect that one reason Oregon's political leaders are able to pull many of the deadly, anti-life stunts they do is because of how jaw-dropping beautiful this state is. People are willing to put up with a lot of craziness in order to live in one of the most gorgeous places in the United States, where they have access to the ocean, beaches, streams, rivers, forests, mountains, and farmlands without the worries of tornadoes, (large) earthquakes, hurricanes, and humidity. (We do take our chances with volcanoes.) Of course, it's not as if all Oregonians are ultra-progressive crusaders for euthanasia, abortion, same-sex marriage, and all the other faddish ills of enlightened secularism; there are, in fact, many good, sane people here (even if few of them go to church or practice "organized religion"—Oregon leads the nation "with 25% of its residents claiming no particular religious identity").

But, in the end, Oregon seems deadset on being California, Jr.—or even outdoing California in some ways, as this recent bit of news indicates:

Continue reading on the CWR blog.

The Catholic Con Continues

The Catholic Con Continues | Anne Hendershott | Catholic World Report

Many left-wing Catholic political organizations use Soros funds and misuse social doctrine to promote anti-magisterial, pro-abortion messages

One of the ways you can tell it is a national election year is that left wing Catholic political organizations re-emerge with new strategies, new funding, and sometimes even new names.  But, while the organizational names may change, the players stay the same as the agenda remains to elect Democrats who will expand the progressive economic agenda, strengthen the power of the unions, and increase women’s access to comprehensive health services—including abortion. 

This con game began during the 2004 presidential campaign with the creation of the Catholic Voting Project.  The founders claimed they simply wanted to “promote the US Catholic bishops’ 2003 document Faithful Citizenship: A Catholic Call to Political Responsibility” and “encourage a dialogue which would allow Catholics to learn how their political views matched up to those of the bishops.” But the reality was that the Catholic Voting Project was always a front for electing pro-choice Democrats.

Catholics United and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good

After Senator John Kerry lost his presidential bid, Chris Korzen, one of the leaders of the Catholic Voting Project blamed the defeat on Kerry’s messaging problems about abortion.  A master at sophistry and community organizing (formerly an organizer for SEIU) Korzen realized that the cover had been blown on the Voting Project and disbanded—but kept the same agenda and leadership—reconstituting the Catholic Voting Project under the new name, Catholics United—a 501C-4.  That same year Korzen also teamed up with left wing Catholics to help found the George Soros-subsidized Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good—a 501C-3.  The two organizations shared staff members (Korzen’s 2007 salary of $84,821 as Executive Director of Catholics United was paid out of Catholics in Alliance donations). 

Continue reading at www.CatholicWorldReport.com.