Tag Archives: Abortion

Father Andrea’s Letter

07 Wednesday Jun 2017

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Fr. Andrea’s letter to anonymous vandal goes viral.Some days ago, Fr. Andrea, the pastor of Milan’s parish of St. Michael the Archangel and St. Rita, found pro-abortion graffiti scrawled on the wall of his church. Not only did the vandalism promote abortion, it added some blasphemy: “Abortion on demand (for Mary too).” Fr. Andrea took…

Dear anonymous writer on the wall,

I’m sorry you couldn’t take an example from your mother. She had courage. She conceived you, carried on the pregnancy and gave birth to you. She could have aborted you. But she didn’t. She raised you, fed you, washed you, and dressed you. And now you have a life and freedom. A freedom you’re using to tell us that it would be better if people also like you weren’t in this world.

I’m sorry, but I disagree. And I admire your mother very much because she was brave. And she still is, because, like every mother, she is proud of you even if you behave badly, because she knows that there is still good inside of you that only needs to manage to come out.

Abortion makes nonsense of everything. Death wins against life. Fear defeats a heart that wants to fight and live, not die. It means choosing who has the right to live and who doesn’t, as if it were a simple right. It is an ideology that conquers humanity and wants to take its hope away.

You obviously have no courage. Given that you’re anonymous.

And while we’re at it, I would also like to tell you that our neighborhood has already experienced a lot of problems, and we don’t need people to vandalize the walls and ruin the little beauty we have left.

Do you want to show how brave you are? Then improve the world instead of destroying it. Give love instead of hatred. Help those who are suffering to endure their sorrows. And give life instead of taking it away! This is real bravery!

Luckily our neighborhood, which you are destroying, is full of brave people! Who know how to love you, too — you, who do not know what you are writing.

Signed,

Fr. Andrea

via The internet loves this Italian priest’s response to pro-abortion, anti-Mary graffiti — Aleteia.org – Worldwide Catholic Network Sharing Faith Resources for those seeking Truth – Aleteia.org

Hot button issues (1); Abortion

25 Wednesday May 2016

Posted by in Abortion, Church/State, Faith

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AHA -1%

Fifty seven million babies have been killed in their mother’s wombs in the United States since Roe versus Wade. In the UK there have been more than 8 million abortions since 1967. In this country this is not even a political issue; in the US it is. Increasingly it seems as though those in favour of abortion are at least willing to admit it is a human life which is being extinguished although they argue over when life begins. I never found a card in the shops with the message ‘congratulations on your foetus’.   We are all aware of the hard cases – they were the reason the Abortion Act in the UK was passed in the first place – but if someone really believes that nearly 200,000 women’s lives were in danger last year, then I have a title-deed for Manhattan Island for sale at a very reasonable price, so do get in touch.

If we are honest – and some are – then we know that the majority of abortions are to do with a different sort of choice – the choice of the putative mother to take time off work and have her career/life disrupted by the demands of a baby; the choice of parents who both need to be working to afford high house prices, not to have a child because of the cost and the life-style consequences. When I was born my father got a family allowance, and there were tax-breaks for mothers and for families; married couples also got tax breaks. The State realised that taking on the responsibilities of a family was a commitment it needed t support – how else, in a purely utilitarian way – was it going to keep its tax base up and fill the jobs that needed to be filled? We know the answer now – immigration – so who needs babies?

Professor Tina Beattie has recently been arguing that in the early church early abortion was only a small sin. Like a lot of her arguments, it is disingenuous with a kernel of truth. The truth is that there was a debate in the early church, as now, about when life began, the disingenuous part is gliding past the fact it was always considered a sin. One of the marks of the early Christians was that in a society where abortion and the exposure of unwanted children on hillside was common, the Christians cherished every life as being from God. Even slave women were as valuable in the eyes of God as the Emperor – in fact, as Jesus taught, it was more likely that the latter would be amenable to the call of the Spirit than the latter, blinded as he would be by flatterers and wealth.

For Christians abortion has always been a ‘hot button’ issue. We live in a society which appears happy to offer up to Moloch its young. Those who argue about when life begins at least show some sign of realising that you shouldn’t kill young humans; but there are others who simply argue that a woman has that right. Apart from praying for them, and their dead children, I don’t know what can be done. But when I read that the sin that cries out to heaven the most is sodomy, I despair – this evil, this vile industry which preys on the lives of the most vulnerable, is the sin that cries to Heaven. If we, as Christians, will not unite to protest again slaughter on this industrial scale, then I don’t see the point in our protesting against lesser evils. The Pope recently said that it seemed as though the church was always talking about abortion. Unlike some here, I admire this Pope, and to be fair, he himself has spoken about the evils or abortion, but I disagree if he was implying we can say too much about this. We can’t. Let us pray to the Lord for the souls of the lost, and for the mothers and fathers concerned – but let us as Christian communities, ensure we make sure our legislators know what we think. In the UK, actually just enforcing the law as passed would make a difference.

 

Recreation?

25 Tuesday Aug 2015

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As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about abortion, I want to report on a conversation I had recently with my youngest daughter, as it enlightened me, and may do others. I’ll not go into any personal detail, but it will help the reader to know she’s recently turned 30 and was, in her own words, ‘determined to find her own way.’ She was the one of our children who dropped out of church-going and went away from the faith entirely; she’s recently come back to live near us, and has found her faith again. This is a great joy to Mrs and myself. Seeing the news about the Planned Parenthood scandal, and knowing my views, she talked to me about it, and what she said opened my eyes to the way her generation think about these things.

We’ve a good relationship and can talk pretty frankly (she’s her father’s daughter there alright!). She explained to me that for her and her friends, sex was primarily seen as a recreational activity. To my response that if they didn’t want babies they could use contraception (even though I don’t agree with it), she said it wasn’t that simple. Most boys don’t like using male contraception, and the pill is unreliable and often has to be changed; abstinence was not on the cards she said. I asked why, and she said largely because of boys. If girls refuse that kind of contact, they get reputations as being frigid or being lesbians, with, she said, other girls being particularly severe on their contemporaries who abstain. So much, I said, for liberation then; she agreed, but said that was the way it was. That, she said, was why people of her generation saw abortion the way most of them did; she did a quick calculation and said that of her ten best friends, seven of them had abortions – all of them for reasons of ‘convenience’. It was, she said, seen simply as another form of contraception.

That seemed, to me, to sum up pretty much what those of us who have always been against contraception on Christian grounds had feared. It corrodes a sense of respect for women, it corrodes their self-respect, it frees up men’s worst instincts without providing anything in the way of a curb on them, and it cheapens the value placed on human life. It creates a mentality where a baby is a ‘problem’ and not a blessing. But, as she said to me, in a society where, to afford a house, both parties in a relationship have to work, it’s not easy for one to drop out for a while, and child care is expensive and not easy to come by if you go back to work. ‘That, Dad’, she said, ‘is the reality as most of my friends see it. Thanks to you and Mum, even at my wildest I saw it could be another way, but most don’t.’ As she pointed out, she’d had a Christian upbringing, and she knew what was wrong and what wasn’t, and had ‘something to come back to’ – most folk don’t and they don’t, as it were.

Against that backdrop I could see very clearly the nature of the challenge – but the answer to it eludes me – save more prayer and evangelisation.

Of Kings, and Popes, and Abortions, and the Environment

24 Friday Jul 2015

Posted by in Church/State, Politics, Pope, Uncategorized

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w704 (1)I do these posts periodically on Nebraska Energy Observer simply to clear out stuff that for one reason or another I’m not going to do a full post on. It doesn’t mean they’re unimportant, usually it means that I simply don’t think I have enough to add to make a post out of it. This one seems to fit better here, though, so here it is.

There’s another video of planned parenthood out, and apparently more to come. This one of President of PPFA Medical Directors’ Council Mary Gatter, if anything it’s more horrific with its casual comments on ‘less crunchy’ abortions. In any case, Kristen Powers (whom most of my American readers will recognize as a liberal, although a Christian unafraid to use her brain, had some thoughts.

[…]This is stomach-turning stuff. But the problem here is not one of tone. It’s the crushing. It’s the organ harvesting of  fetuses that abortion-rights activists want us to believe have no more moral value than a fingernail. It’s the lie that these are not human beings worthy of protection. There is no nice way to talk about this. As my friend and formerObama White House staffer Michael Wear tweeted, “It should bother us as a society that we have use for aborted human organs, but not the baby that provides them.

Read more at USA Today.

John Hinderaker at Powerline had some thoughts as well:

What seems obvious, though, is that we are paying a price for our abortion culture. Many factors contribute to the coarseness of American life, but the ubiquity of casual abortion must be one of them. It was recently reported that among African-Americans in New York City, there are more abortions than births. Surely this is both a symptom and a cause of a pervasive disrespect for human life. If anyone doubts that the abortion industry contributes to the coarseness of American culture, all I can say is: watch the videos.

Just so.

Dr. Jeff Mirus, writing at Catholic Culture.org published an article called Call me Troglodyte: The Cross and carbon credits has some excellent thoughts on Climate Change and our selfishness

The technocratic mindset sees nature as an accident which we must repurpose on demand to satisfy our own desires. For those infected by the technocratic bug, this may mean anything from raping natural resources to get rich to reconfiguring human bodies to achieve a sexual fantasy. Because this attitude is fundamentally manipulative, it is fundamentally individualistic and selfish. It sees nature as a whole, including other people and even one’s own body, as so much raw material to be used in producing personal satisfaction.

Again, the problem with this attitude is that natural things are viewed as instruments of essentially selfish desire. This inescapably undermines not only the universal destination of goods but any possibility of seeking to do God’s will. Rather, in the name of personal “autonomy”, the self insists that reality be redefined in accordance with each inordinate desire. Nature is viewed neither as a gift to be cherished nor as a reflection of the Creator’s loving plan for our well-being.

Jonathon Turley had some thoughts about David Cameron’s recent comments on A Passively Tolerant Society, It’s a superb article by an excellent mostly liberal lawyer. Here’s the money quote from Cameron:

For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone. It’s often meant we have stood neutral between different values. And that’s helped foster a narrative of extremism and grievance.

The problem is this, “as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone” is the very definition of a lawful society. Too bad the politicians can’t seem to understand that.

Our old friend, Francis Phillips, in an excellent article in The Catholic Herald, reminds us what Britain (and by extension, the rest of us) owe to ‘that woman’ an American divorceé, who gave us King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II.

The one thing we expect of our constitutional monarchs is a sense of duty. The shy and awkward George VI, unlike his glamorous older brother, possessed this virtue to a heroic degree. I once knew an elderly gentleman who had been a young officer in the Blues and Royals doing military duties at Windsor Castle in the early 1950s. He told me that he saw the King at close range and was shocked to note how heavily made-up he was: to disguise the pallor of his skin and his evident frailty and ill-health.

Thanks, Wallis!

And so the world goes, any or all of these are, I think, worthy of our notice, and discussion. Nor should we forget, as A Clerk of Oxford reminds us, that we’ve been saying since (probably) Saxon times.

Nunc in iudicio porci dixit maritus sedens in apro.
Nu hit ys on swines dome, cwæð se ceorl sæt on eoferes hricge.
It’s up to the pig now, said the peasant sitting on the boar’s back.

Planned Parenthood: Profiting from Infanticide

18 Saturday Jul 2015

Posted by in Church/State, Consequences, Politics, Uncategorized

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plannedParenthoodLogo-2And so, Planned Parenthood continues to make its founder, Margaret Sanger proud. You remember her, of course, the racist friend of Woodrow Wilson, who admired Hitler, and wanted to end the black race. But PP has found a new way to make money, actually it’s not new, but it is arguably illegal and certainly immoral. or perhaps the word is amoral since its coldness reminds me more of Joseph Mengele than anything else. PP has decided that it’s an excellent idea to sell parts of aborted fetuses, in my universe murdered babies, to make a bit of extra profit.

You know, I’m both single and likely too old anyway to have kids, and increasingly those are two of the major regrets of my life, and while this story sickens me terribly, some will say it shouldn’t concern me. But as Methodius of Olympus reminds us in his On Life and Rational Action, in the new translation by Ralph Cleminson, commissioned by Roger Pearse:

 

[4.] But what sort of men are we, bearing a burden of filth which besets us?  When we see those things that are necessary, we are glad only of those which give us pleasure, thinking that this is good; thereby we take delight also in fair deceits, and imagine that only these are of use to us. [5.] But God, who created us and made us, as he desires man not to be saved just by being given things, does not bestow on men as much pleasure as they can enjoy (the end of which would be death). [6.] Over-abundant feeding and rich food weaken a man, and those who have made themselves weaker through much feeding are unfit for obedience to the commands of God.

And so it concerns us all. But still, I tend to defer to others, who are better informed than I am. One of these is Mollie Hemingway, a senior editor at The Federalist,

 

At 8:00 a.m. on Tuesday morning, a pro-life group released two videos showing Planned Parenthood executive Deborah Nucatola munching on a salad and sipping red wine while discussing the harvesting of organs from babies killed by abortion. One was a nearly nine-minute edited video of the nearly three-hour discussion. The other was the unedited discussion.

Because of the graphic nature of the discussion — Nucatola specifically discusses altering abortion procedures to procure hearts, brains, lungs, and livers from the babies whose lives Planned Parenthood ends by abortion — the video immediately lit up social media. Unlike most significant stories about major hot-button social issues, however, no major media reported on the news until 4:30 p.m. that afternoon. Some are still working on (or working on hiding) their coverage of the story. Let’s look at some of the major media outlets and how they did.

You’ll note, I am sure that both versions of the video are linked there, no question on context, at all. Also via Mollie is a link to John MacCormack at the Weekly Standard who has the background documents from PP’s public relations firm, asserting that this is a humanitarian endeavor. Whatever, is my reaction to that bovine excrement.

A few years ago, I worked in a packing plant. The joke amongst the maintenance people was that it was a disassembly plant for cows. It was never a particularly funny joke, but it described the environment quite well. But cows are one thing, human babies are another, I just can’t get my mind around how a woman (actually any person) can be so cold and uncaring. Mollie also did the Federalist Radio Show about this with Ben Domenech, it’s well worth your time, and will make you wonder even more how this type of story always gets buried by the media. It’s at this link:

http://app.stitcher.com/splayer/f/64217/39734302

Mollie, like me, is a Lutheran, but this is not a religious issue really. It is a moral one. Another writer whom I respect is S. E. Cupp of Townhall, who also has much to say. Here is part of it.

Americans, with their tax dollars, are required to pay for countless things they find objectionable. From wars they might oppose to studies they definitely find absurd — just this week we learned we’re funding one to determine why lesbians are disproportionately obese — it’s infuriating to know that we have no say over how the government spends our hard-earned money.

One controversial recipient of government funds, Planned Parenthood, has gone beyond objectionable into the realm of downright unforgivable. A horrific undercover video came to light this week of a Planned Parenthood doctor casually discussing over lunch how she and other affiliated abortionists expertly “crush” babies they are aborting to keep their organs intact for donation (and potentially sale).

I am pro-life. I’m not religious, but I believe that killing babies for convenience is morally wrong, and a society that condones, and in many cases celebrates, the practice has lost its way. But even if you support legal abortion, I have to think it’s impossible to watch the now-viral video without recoiling in disgust at the frankness with which Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical research, Dr. Deborah Nucatola, describes the destruction of a life. Frankly, as a new mother — and a human being with even the slightest sense of common decency — I found it hard to write this column without getting physically ill.

In the video, Nucatola discusses using ultrasound to know where to crush the fetus with forceps. “We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver because we know that, so I’m not going to crush that part,” she says.

Bioethicist Art Caplan of New York University says altering procedures to get the best tissue is a “big no-no,” telling CNN that “your sole concern has to be the mother and her health,” not preserving fetal organs.

The legality and the ethics of what Planned Parenthood is doing certainly merits serious scrutiny and a national debate. But the more important conversation that we likely won’t have is about the morality of abortion in general, and whether the explicit nature of this video will make us question our embrace of such a grotesque institution.

Along those lines, Planned Parenthood offers a telling defense, insisting now that the donation of fetal tissue is valuable and “lifesaving.” That may be true. But if it’s such a noble cause then why doesn’t Planned Parenthood advertise fetal tissue collection on its website to lure potential abortion customers and brag about its philanthropic contributions?

Planned Parenthood: using tax money for infanticide, and then increasing the profit by selling the leftover body parts of babies.

A Brave New World, indeed.

Weep and convert: abortion in Ireland one year on

07 Thursday Aug 2014

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The is a guest post by Deacon Nick Donnelly. It first appeared in Catholic Voice and is published here with permission of the editor, to whom we are grateful.

Kenny

On the first anniversary of Ireland joining the ranks of countries fostering the culture of death Deacon Nick Donnelly asks what is stopping the Irish bishops from naming Enda Kenny’s role in legalising abortion. The scandal of this silence becomes more acute as a result of evasions over Dublin’s Mater Misericordiae University Hospital agreeing to co-operate with abortion and the prospect of other Catholic hospitals following suit. Deacon Nick notes that, there is the very real danger for the bishops that their prolonged silence will be interpreted as meaning something they don’t intend, such as, their acceptance of the political status quo about the legalisation of abortion.

One year ago, on the 30th July 2013, President Michael D. Higgins signed Enda Kenny’s abortion plans into Irish law to the silence of the Catholic bishops of Ireland.  One year since a coerced majority in the Dail passed the bill which commissioned the intentional killing of babies in their mothers’ wombs.  The bishops have remained silent about those Catholics who actively participated in legalising abortion.

Most likely, no court in the world, either secular or ecclesial, will hold Higgins, Kenny and the other pro-abortion politicians to account for their role.  But one day Patrick Higgins and Enda Kenny, like the rest of us, will stand before a higher court.  Then, at the moment of death, we will receive Almighty God’s individual judgement, and at the end of the world, humanity will receive God’s universal judgement.  If anyone of us dies unrepentant and in a state of mortal sin – and co-operation in commissioning abortion comes under the category of grave matter – then they will be sentenced to an eternity in hell.

Pope Francis’ warned the Italian Mafia, “There is still time not to end up in hell, which awaits you if you continue on this road.  You had a papa and a mamma. Think of them, weep a little and convert.”  This equally applies to other groups organising the murder of innocents, including President Higgins and Taoiseach Enda Kenny.  “Weep and convert”.

On this first anniversary of Ireland joining the ranks of countries fostering the culture of death, the Catholics of Ireland are still waiting for their bishops’ response to the role of fellow Catholics in legalising abortion.  The brief statement issued in October 2013 by the bishops’ following their Fall meeting thanked those who respectfully campaigned against the legislation and ‘acknowledged those national public representatives who did so at great political risk to themselves’. But their statement made no reference to the role played by Enda Kenny and other Catholic politicians in legalising the intentional killing of babies in their mothers’ wombs. Instead, the bishops’ made a general defence of the sanctity of life without making any reference to the details of Enda Kenny’s ‘Protection of Life during Pregnancy’ Act:

‘Bishops reiterated “to legislate for abortion does not make it morally acceptable, and the direct and intentional ending of the life of an unborn child, at any stage of pregnancy, is always gravely wrong.”’

After waiting eight months for the bishops to speak critically about self-described  devout Catholic Enda Kenny and the other pro-abort Catholics, faithful Catholics were deeply disappointed to read the headline in the Irish Independent, ‘Bishop urges pro-life groups to stop ‘screaming’ over abortion’.  Instead of a critical assessment of the moral responsibility of politicians, the newly appointed bishop of Derry, Donal McKeown, decided that rather than holding Enda Kenny to account he’d criticise the pro-life movement.  Bishop McKeown was reported as saying, ‘You can’t hate people into loving life’, and ‘screaming at one another is not acceptable from people who are pro-life’.  This is an unfair, and inaccurate, caricature of the majority of people committed to the Irish pro-life movement, who need encouragement, not chastisement, from their bishops.  Faithful Catholics are still waiting for their bishops’ response to those who personally commissioned the killing of the unborn.

The bishops’ determined silence is also apparent in the failure of the Irish Bishops’ Conference’s voters guide to mention abortion, or euthanasia, or same-sex ‘unions’, ahead of the European and local elections.  In stark contrast Bishop Noel Treanor, the Bishop of Down and Connor in Northern Ireland, issued a powerful pastoral letter prior to the election emphasising the importance of opposing abortion and other direct attacks on the sanctity of life.  Bishop Treanor referred to the Republic of Ireland’s legalisation of abortion, saying it had ‘made the direct and intentional killing of the unborn child lawful in Ireland.’  He continued, ‘With great courage, some public representatives exercised their right to freedom of conscience on this issue of fundamental human rights and voted against the enforced policy of their party, which was to support abortion.’

So, what is stopping the Republic’s bishops naming Kenny’s role in legalising abortion?  Some have suggested that many of the bishops nurse a traditional loyalty to the Fine Gael party which inhibits them speaking out against Kenny. Others suggest that their silence originates in a paralysing phobia of the Irish media that has relentlessly held them to account during the serial child abuse scandals. At a time when the bishops need to challenge those Catholics involved in laying the foundations of a pro-abortion culture in Ireland their institutionalised deference to politicians and the media has apparently rendered this whole area taboo.

The scandal of their silence becomes more acute as a result of evasions over Dublin’s Mater Misericordiae University Hospital agreeing to co-operate with abortion. The Mater is one of the hospitals explicitly mandated to kill babies under Kenny’s law. Fr Kevin Doran, a member of Mater’s Board, had warned before legislation came before the Dail that it was inconceivable that a Catholic hospital would co-operate with Kenny’s plans to introduce abortion to Ireland. However, in September 2013 the Board of the Mater ignored Fr Doran and issued the following statement: ‘The Mater Hospital has carefully considered the Act. The Hospital’s priority is to be at the frontier of compassion, concern and clinical care for all our patients. Having regard to that duty, the Hospital will comply with the law as provided for in the act.’

The Mater Misericordiae hospital’s statement not only implicitly rejected the Catholic Church’s categorical condemnation of abortion, but also attempted to justify their co-operation by claiming that it was an expression of their ‘compassion, concern and clinical care for all our patients.’  What about compassion, concern and clinical care for their most vulnerable of patients, unborn babies threatened with abortion?

No official response has been issued by the Archdiocese, but Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, President of Mater Misericordiae University Hospital, gave a response of sorts when questioned by the Irish Independent.  He defended the hospital’s pro-life ethos, ignoring the fact that the Board of the Mater had just abandoned it.  The Irish Independent reported:

‘He said that though he was president of the hospital he had no powers in the governance of the hospital. And he paid tribute to the Mater hospital’s “great tradition of caring for very difficult pregnancies and doing it well within the ethos of the hospital over years”. He said he would be seeking further clarifications on the exact meaning of the hospital’s statement last week.’

For the past nine months Archbishop Martin has remained silent about any clarification he has received from the hospital, but in the meanwhile Fr Doran has resigned from Mater’s Board saying,

‘I can confirm that I have resigned because I can’t reconcile my own conscience personally with the statement, largely because I feel a Catholic hospital has to bear witness.  It’s about bearing witness to Gospel values alongside providing excellent care.’

In July 2014 the Irish Catholic reported that a spokeswoman for Archbishop Martin confirmed that there was ‘no update’ on discussions between the archbishop and the nuns who own the Catholic-run hospital. This followed news in March 2014 that talks between the Mater and Archbishop Martin were “ongoing” on ‘how the institution would comply with an abortion law while retaining its Catholic ethos.’

Martin

 

As Archbishop Martin remains silent, one bishop has had the courage to speak out against the Mater’s decision to be an abortion provider – the Right Rev James D. Conley, the Bishop of Lincoln, Nebraska.  Bishop Conley is very clear about the meaning of Mater’s statement:

‘By all accounts, Mater Hospital will abandon its commitment to the gospel in favor [sic] of a false doctrine of “compassion, concern and clinical care.” But there is no compassion in the direct killing of children. There is no concern for patients when mental health is treated by violence. In recent weeks, we’ve heard a great deal about the pastoral openness of Pope Francis. It is exciting.  But there are those who would distort the Holy Father’s message: those who would confuse love for laxity. Compassion is not undemanding permissiveness.  Mercy is not an enemy of truth.’

Bishop Conley’s criticism of a Catholic hospital abandoning the fundamental principle of the sanctity of life is what faithful Catholics expect from their bishops – a defence of the truth – but the Irish bishops remain silent.  It is possible that there are prudential reasons why the Irish Bishops’ Conference, and individual bishops, have said nothing substantive since the Houses of the Oireachtas and the President of Ireland legalised abortion a year ago.  It maybe is that they have concluded that Enda Kenny’s government, and the media, are so virulently anti-Catholic and anti-clerical, that if they say anything it will only make matters worse. It is also possible that the bishops are working behind the scenes to persuade Enda Kenny and Catholic hospitals to pull back from the precipice of intentionally killing babies in their mothers’ wombs.

However, there is the very real danger for the bishops that their prolonged silence following their brief Fall statement will be interpreted as meaning something they don’t intend, such as, their acceptance of the political status quo about the legalisation of abortion.  This danger is compounded if they remain silent over Catholic hospitals agreeing to act as abortion providers.  Their failure to act over child sexual abuse by clergy seriously damaged the bishops’ moral authority, but their failure to stop Catholic hospitals providing abortions will be the destruction of the Irish church’s tenuous moral authority in the lives of many Catholics.  If Catholics know that Catholic hospitals are aborting babies what hope is there that they will listen to the Church’s moral teaching on contraception, IVF, sex outside marriage, gay marriage?  The bishops’ silence will be heard as acceptance, even agreement, with Mater Misericordiae hospital’s willingness to perform abortions.  Our Lord Jesus Christ has warned about the dangers of scandal to the faithful which all in authority in the Church should consider:

‘But anyone who is the downfall of one of these little ones who has faith in me would be better drowned in the depths of the sea with a great millstone round his neck. Alas for the world that there should be such causes of falling! Causes of falling indeed there must be, but alas for anyone who provides them!’ (Matthew 18:6-7).

Finally, St Maximus the Confessor cautioned that silence concerning divine truth for the sake of peace and unity is a denial of truth and is a ‘thorough separation from God, and not a unity with God’.  The bishops may gain for themselves a sense of peace and unity by their silence, but at a very great cost.

Deacon Nick Donnelly, founder of the suppressed blog Protect the Pope.

Pro-choice?

02 Wednesday Jul 2014

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abortion

Orwell was correct when he commented that the key to changing the mind of the masses was to play with words until it was impossible to think of certain ideas because there were no words for them. In 1984 he had in mind words like ‘freedom’ and ‘rebellion’, but for our generation it is the word ‘choice’ used in the context of pregnancy.

Except in cases of rape, there is always a choice involved in getting pregnant; if you do not have sexual intercourse you need not worry about pregnancy. We now have, in the western world, one of the most ruthlessly effective advertising public health campaigns to foist contraception on folk, and yet the number of abortions rises relentlessly. We’ve been told by successive governments that the key to it all is more ‘sex education’ and younger and younger ages; and the number of abortions rises relentlessly. People seem reluctant to make the one choice which affects only them – that is not to indulge in sexual intercourse; they even seem reluctant to use contraceptives; but it is OK, they know that, in the UK at least, if they go to a doctor they can get an abortion.

The stigma attached to the slaughter of the innocents is now covered by the mantra of ‘choice’. It is, we are told, a woman’s right to choose, as though, clever thing, she got pregnant all by herself; the man has no ‘rights’, the baby has no ‘rights’. We don’t allow a woman to get someone to help her die, and if she decides to starve herself to death, or to harm herself, we do not allow her the ‘right’ to choose to do these things; but we do allow her the right to kill the baby in her womb.

We seem to have created a world where pregnancy, the most natural consequence of sexual activity between a man and a woman (yes, sorry for the advocates of equality, but Adam and Steve still can’t actually produce a child by their sexual acts, go complain to God) can be regarded as a ‘punishment’ by the President of the United States. It gets in the way of a woman’s career. At what point in our civilization did a job become more important than children and a family? Mrs S worked part-time through most of the years we were bringing up our family. She did so because she wanted to ‘keep her hand in’ as a nurse. She enjoyed her job, but she also enjoyed bringing up the children we chose to have. We both of us chose to make whatever sacrifices of our time and selfish preferences necessary to do the real job we had been set – bringing up the children. Yes, it meant that there were all sorts of hedonistic things we could not do, but having made one choice  – to have the family the Lord blessed us with, we made the choice to go with its consequences; the joys (and sorrows) have been beyond compare, and I shudder to think of the sorts of people we might have dwindled into had we opted for the selfish side of life.

We do not allow women, or indeed men, total liberty about what they do with their bodies, so it is an Orwellian lie to claim that by allowing women to kill their baby in the womb we are ‘pro-choice’. We aren’t, we are pro-death. As a society we are so in thrall to our self-love that we embrace sterility: if we have sexual intercourse, let us ensure it is closed to life by making it homosexual or sterile if heterosexual; and should it produce life, let us snuff it out. All in the name of ‘choice’? I guess the one comfort is that those who believe in this stuff are on the road to genetic extinction; perhaps Darwinian natural selection is at work here, and future generations of children whose parents chose to let them live will look back and wonder what happened to that other species?

Moloch

14 Saturday Jun 2014

Posted by in Faith

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We have a terrible health crisis in the UK. It is one the media, usually ever-ready to hype any health story to the rafters, are ignoring. The law in the UK states that abortion may only occur when there is a risk to the mother’s health. Last year 99.84% of abortions took place for this reason. So, where’s the crisis? Well, if nearly all the 202,577 abortions carried out in Great Britain were because of health risks to the mother, we clearly have a lot of seriously ill young women; clearly worth the State paying 98% of the cost to avert this health crisis, especially, so it seems, among 22 year old women, who are clearly now finding the state of pregnancy especially dangerous (this is the age group where most abortions are carried out). It seems that more than a third of women have such serious health problems that they have to have more than one abortion. You’d think that the media would in uproar. At the very least, shouldn’t they be asking why our contraceptive industry is so useless? Surely, after decades of compulsory ‘sex education’ (aka – make sure he/you wear a condom) we are not being told that people are ignoring the rules advice and endangering their health in this manner?

Dr Tim Stanley suggests that abortion is being used as contraception, so what a good job he is male, white, single and a Catholic, so he can be abused on Twitter and we can ignore his argument and its implications. If there is lower pond life than the scum floating on the surface below his column, I’d rather not know. There are, it seems, lots of people out there who really think it is fine that more than 200,000 babies were aborted last year; let us leave out the sheer breath-taking stupidity of the dolt who commented about spontaneous abortions, asking why pro-lifers did not protest about these – anyone that pig-thick should be left alone, as well as the usual fools who go on about a woman’s rights and ignore the fact that most of the terminations are of women who will never have the basic right to life, and let us just ask how we have reached such a pass?

The priests of Baal would stand in awe at our ‘achievement’; I stand head bowed at it. Perhaps I feel this especially strongly because I am unable to conceive naturally (and won’t go down the ‘artificial’ route), but I know there are many others who share my horror at this situation. There’s no point mankind asking God why he hasn’t sent us the cure for cancer – he might have done, and we might have aborted that person. How much of the resource put into killing might, had it been put into curing or caring, have helped others to a better life?

Perhaps the only good thing to anticipate is that those who believe in this sort of thing are, literally, dying out and exterminating their own kind; those so worried about the population size of the planet might, perhaps, volunteer for post-natal abortions, to aid the process along; after all, if they succeed in their aim of giving everyone the ‘right to die’, should they not lead the way?

We place, it seems, no value on human life – save our own, to which we attach all too much value. Nothing must get in the way of our enjoying ourselves – and the sacrifices to Moloch must continue to we can go on our merry way to the lake of fire.