An encounter with the Son of God

Every day during Lent our parish is offering a Holy Hour including exposition of the Blessed Sacrament and ending with Benediction.

What a treasure the Eucharist is! Not leaving us to wander the desert aimlessly, our Lord leaves us his very self under the guise of bread and wine to be present to us until He comes again in glory. He gives us himself, the Bread from Heaven, the Lamb of God, the Spring of Living Water so that we might receive Him who is true food.

And wordless moments may pass in humble adoration of He who set us free. Please go to Him. Spend time with Jesus Christ in a local adoration chapel or in your own parish. You don't need to work; you don't even need to talk. Just go to Him. Bring spiritual reading, if you like. Listen. He will speak.

I have no idea who this lady is talking about...

...but that's pretty much the definition of a straw man argument.

So pro-lifers stick to the 200 words-or-less rule for letters to the editor, conduct themselves with decorum and respect, and speak of their adversaries as charitably as possible; pro-choicers can be not only misogynist, misanthropic, sophomoric and crass, they can spout off for as long as they choose and will have their rants published as a full editorial in The Day.

Frankly, I should be surprised, but I'm not.

Cathy Cubilla's article is full of sexist and demeaning comments that show no respect for men or for women.

To retort, though, all the pro-life men I know would never even think of calling a woman a vessel for their emissions. Rather, they respect women as unique individuals worthy of care and compassion. And they all have something else in common: they think that we should work towards a culture of life, in which sex is so greatly regarded that we only engage in it responsibly-- namely, in a faithful, committed, loving marriage.

Welcome to the world!

Mary Margaret was born into the world on Monday at 5:51 p.m. Thank you for all your prayers leading up to the delivery. Patty and the baby are doing fine (except for the hit-by-a-truck-cold that wifey and I brought home from the hospital). The big smile on Patty's face shows how well she came through labor, by far the easiest yet. No induction necessary, no epidural; it was completely natural.

The boys are welcoming Mary pretty well. Our four-and-a-half year old is totally in love and takes every opportunity to help. The other two goobers are not quite sure yet that she's staying for good.

Thank you to Our Lady of Fatima who was a constant source of strength and comfort to our whole family as we received this precious gift from God.

Letter to the Editor, The Day, submitted 2-22-09

The focus of abortion often falls on the individual making the decision, yet society at large encourages abortion.

The Safe Haven law, while well-intentioned, is all but unknown. There was a case locally of a woman who, ignorant of the Safe Haven law, wrapped her baby in a blanket, placed it in an abandoned car and went to the nearest payphone to inform the police, who picked up the baby within minutes and brought it to the hospital immediately. The mother was arrested. The story in the Day indicated that the State of CT didn’t have funding to print pamphlets about the Safe Haven law.

It used to be that when a woman couldn’t keep her child, she could bring it to an orphanage so that the baby would be cared for until someone could adopt the child. Orphanages don’t exist anymore and the current foster care program is overwhelmed.

What is the obvious cause of this indifference? Long-term care costs money and abortion has a one-time fee. It is cheaper, faster, and easier.

This is also true of euthanasia. I hope as seniors enter long-term care en masse and we hurtle toward single-payer universal health care, that people will realize this connection before it is too late.

We're gonna try jumping jacks soon.

How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?

Uh, three, I think.

How many days of intense false labor does it take until a baby is actually born?

Uh, not sure yet, but I'll tell ya when we're done.

My patrons for the year

Nearby to us is the Friary of Our Lady of Guadalupe, run by the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate. You might have seen them at Mary Victrix or Air Maria.

Anyway, they have a wonderful tradition on the Feast of the Epiphany. The friars make up a basket full of prayer cards to give out as gifts. Each card is different- a different image on the front, four saints or blesseds, a Marian title, a virtue to focus on and a maxim. The youngest member of the community disperses them to the people after saying a prayer to the Holy Spirit to guide him in choosing the right card for each person.

What's nice is that they usually choose at least one famous saint, one modern saint, one REALLY obscure saint, and a maxim or virtue that sets the bar pretty high. (Not for discouragement when we fail, of course, but to remind us of the ultimate sacrifice and duty we owe to God.)

This is my card this year. I posted links for the saints; feel free to learn more about them yourself. And if anyone has ANY information of Blessed Alcarius, hermit, I'd be much obliged if you sent it my way.

St. Catherine of Genoa Franciscan March 23

Ladislas of Gielnow Franciscan May 21

St. Michael Sept. 29

Bl. Alcarius, hermit Sept. 29

Marian Title: Our Lady of Beauraing (Belgium)

Virtue: Temperance

Maxim: Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 18:20 "Before judgement examine thyself, and thou shalt find mercy in the sight of God."

Train's a-comin!

Blogging might be light for the next few days, or it might not. Wifey's getting close to the due date, which doesn't mean anything precise. Baby is definitely coming soon, just don't know when.

If not today, I'll be setting up my new computer so I can work from home when necessary; hopefully I'll be able to do more blogging with it as well.

Keep our family in our prayers, we're all extremely excited to meet "that blessed ball of life!" (Kathleen, that's for you!)

You know you're a good liar when

you're caught lying and they still believe every word you said.

President Obama said this at the National Prayer Breakfast this morning:

"Far too often, we have seen faith wielded as a tool to divide us from one another -– as an excuse for prejudice and intolerance," President Obama says. "Wars have been waged. Innocents have been slaughtered. For centuries, entire religions have been persecuted, all in the name of perceived righteousness.

"There is no doubt that the very nature of faith means that some of our beliefs will never be the same. We read from different texts. We follow different edicts. We subscribe to different accounts of how we came to be here and where we are going next – and some subscribe to no faith at all.

"But no matter what we choose to believe, let us remember that there is no religion whose central tenet is hate. There is no God who condones taking the life of an innocent human being. This much we know."

So unborn babies are not innocent human beings? Or is that question above your pay grade too?

h/t Ryan Sayre Patrico, First Things

Dear God, when will this end?

Yet another example of the scourge of abortion rotting like a cancer everything it touches.

Sadly, I'm proven right, sort of...(updated)

When I posted this in the week leading up to the March for Life in Washington, I foresaw it to be the attitude of the Main Stream Media which ended up not covering it at all. What I didn't expect was that we'd get this reporting from a Catholic publication. But then I read this article this morning by Dennis Sadowski of Catholic News Service, reprinted in my diocesan newspaper, The Four County Catholic. You might say that my annoyance with CNS and the FCC is just me being a curmudgeon, but then I read Thomas Patrick Melady's fawning coverage of President Obama's first weeks in office in which we find this gem:

"During his campaign, Senator Obama promised to remove the ban on U.S. funding for international aid groups that perform abortions or counsel the termination of pregnancies.

"It was expected that he would lift the ban, just as President Clinton did in 1993. While regrettably this was the case, there is something to be said about the different style he employed in doing so. Thousands of Catholics and others opposed to abortion were in Washington for the “Right to Life March” on Thursday, January 22nd. Obama elected not to sign the order into effect that day, choosing a different course than that of his Democratic predecessor 16 years earlier. Instead he waited until the evening of the following Friday, so that the spirit of that day might not be “clouded”.

"It was signed into effect without any media present; there were no reporters, photographers or camera crews, as there were the day before when Obama announced his decision to close the prison in Guantanamo Bay."

You can read the rest of this hogwash here, if you want...

OK, so Melady seems to have taken some stupid pills. I know he's a former ambassador to the Holy See, (born in Norwich, so maybe that's why FCC saw fit to gravitate toward him) but come on!

What on earth does it matter about his style in signing the executive order to fund overseas abortions? "Gee, Mr. President, you sure know how to kill kids with panash!"

Obama didn't hold off lifting the Mexico City Policy to leave unsullied the spirit of the day, he hoped to bury the story in the weekend news cycle. That's why there was no media present. He wants to trumpet closing Guantanamo Bay as an example of his forthright attitude in undoing everything George Bush accomplished, good, bad or indifferent; yet he doesn't want the American people to come to grips with the extent that he seeks to further the cause of the Culture of Death.

Catholics need to stand firm in witness against the abortion lobby that undermines the very rights of all people. This cynical and frankly, naive coverage from a Catholic publication is, in my opinion, scandalous.

Update: I sent a more charitable version of this post via email to Michael Strammiello, Director of Communications. Below are excerpts of the proceeding correspondence.

Dear Mr. ,

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts regarding the March for Life coverage in in the February Four County Catholic.

I respect and agree with your point of view regarding the need for our diocesan paper to be on the right side of the pro-life stance. Not sure I can agree, though, with your assessment of our missing the mark in the February issue.

The February issue opens with a front page that forgoes thumbnail photographs in favor of a series of strong pro-life quotes,e.g. ""We will defeat the culture of death or will perish as a nation.' and "Express your conviction that all human life is sacred and deserving of legal protection."

We featured a quotation that has President Obama in his own words acknowledging that "God calls on us" to shape the future. We state our resolve in the body copy that we are determined to carry the Catholic view to Washington. We may be gracious to the new president, but we are also tenacious and proactive. And all of that -- on the front page!

Then we keep the conversation going in the interior pages with the "Our Voice is Needed More Now than Ever" article re: FOCA postcards, and Dennis Sadowski's article "We Choose Life" re: the March for Life. Bishop Cote closes his column with a strong call to action message, "Let us try at every opportunity to join in the conversation ourselves in our participatory democracy. We must not rest on the sidelines. We must be
heard." This is the fighting spirit of the newspaper in its entirety.

We also published verbatim the USCCB Bishops' letter to then President-elect Obama with such language as "We will consistently defend the fundamental right to life from conception to natural death. ...We will oppose legislation and other measures to expand abortion. Efforts to force Americans to fund abortions with their tax dollars would pose a serious moral challenge.."

You have singled out Thomas Patrick Melady's Catholic News Service article as too forgiving of President Obama's stance on abortion. Our thinking among our editors was that this presented a somewhat softer edge approach that shows one of many ways to potentially break-through on pro-life. We don't have a fix yet on how responsive the new Administration will be to the Catholic world view. President Obama's campaign rhetoric was not encouraging. However, he may respond in office more favorably. Worth
having a number of approaches in the works to reach him. I hope you can appreciate our thought process.

I must respectfully and strongly disagree with your contention that the Four County Catholic has downplayed the importance of the fundamental right to life. The February addition is ringing with our proactive position on the fundamental right to life.

Again, I thank you for your thoughtful and spirited comments. Believe we are on the same page for the most part.

In His service,
Michael

Michael Strammiello
Director of Communications
Diocese of Norwich



Dear Mr. Strammiello,

Thank you for your thoughtful response to my letter. I want to clarify a few points because it appears I was not thorough in what I was trying to say to you. You are correct that there was a large amount of encouraging items in the FCC about our need to stand up for those most vulnerable. Let me make it clear how much my wife and I appreciate that good work.

I believe it is clearer to say that my frustration was with the content of the Catholic News Service pieces, notably the Dennis Sadowski article and the Melady article we discussed. As I said, I expected the media to cover the March for Life as anti-Obama reactionism, if they covered it at all, which except for a very few outlets, they did not. Yet Dennis Sadowski's article begins for the first few paragraphs as painting the entire day as merely an anti-Obama rally, which you and I know it entails so much more.

I guess I was most concerned with the opinion of Thomas Patrick Melady because even though, as you said, we can hope (with healthy skepticism) about a softer approach by President Obama now that he is in office, praising his style in authorizing the funding of abortion clinics with our tax dollars is an egregious mistake. For a man of Mr. Melady's history and stature in the Catholic community, I find it scandalous.

Truthfully, I am skeptical about the headline remarking that Catholic voices are heard in Washington, additionally considering that the new variant of faith-based initiatives will focus on reducing abortion by a "common ground approach" that relies heavily on artificial contraception.

I do believe that we are on the same page on this most important issue. Thank you again for your response and your continued hard work for our diocese. In fairness to you and the FCC, I would like to post our correspondence on my blog. I will do so on Monday if I do not hear from you otherwise. Your comments there are always welcome.

Sincerely in Christ,
Mike

Thank you, Mr. . Good to hear back from you.

I understood your concerns well in your previous message. Our mission at the FCC is to provide a variety of material on a subject as important as the right to live. This allows our readers to see what is being said on the subject by Catholic journalists. It helps place one's opinion in the context of a broad forum. Overall, I think we accomplished that in the February issue. You might even agree in principle.

If you would like to submit an article on this subject for our March or a future issue, please do so. Glad to consider it for publication.

Ok here with your posting our correspondence online.

Always a pleasure to receive thoughtful feedback. Thank you again.

Blessings,

Michael

Creative Minority Report: Video: Planned Parenthood Breaks Law Again

One more reason to pull the plug on every dime the US gives to Planned Parentkill.

Creative Minority Report: Video: Planned Parenthood Breaks Law Again

check out more at liveactionfilms.org

This is the funniest thing you will see this week.

Creative Minority Report: Now, This is Hilarious

Building a Culture of Life, part two

My hopes for this post are ambitious, to say the least. I'd like to adress the notion that being pro-life means much more than being anti-abortion. Simply outlawing abortion without tackling the underlying attitudes toward life and human sexuality will only result in what pro-choicers always predict: illegal abortions in back alleys with dirty coat hangers. They may rightly point out that we need to address quality-of-life issues, such as education, poverty, etc., but without a change of attitude toward human life, such improvements will only change the scenery of discord. The resentments toward responsibility and sacrifice will persist.

So what do I mean by changing attitudes toward a culture of life? I mean that we must re-orient ourselves, the decisions that we make and the manner in which we conduct our lives so that we may in all things show respect and care for the dignity of all people.

Christopher West and William May have done profound work on explaining John Paul the Great's "Theology of the Body." I will briefly attempt to explain it here. We can see in the very design of the human body, in maleness and femaleness, a revelation of the Divine nature and of God's plan for His Church. Giving and receiving, in a life-giving expression of love, man and woman become one flesh in a lifelong bond. This expression is so strong and sacred that it cannot contain the fullness of love, but overflows into the existence of an entirely new person. The immensity of this plan of God demands our greatest responsibility and commitment. The sacrament of marriage, whereby man and woman become one flesh so as to bring forth a new life to love, is a sign of God's plan for all of humanity. God the Father eternally begets the Son, and the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds from Them both. The Son, Jesus Christ, embodies, literally, the marriage of God and Man. Christ is the Bridegroom who marries His Church in an eternal covenant, from which springs our eternal life.

Yet tainted by Original Sin, man often times, as today, has distorted, manipulated and perverted this vision of God's plan. We see that marriage bond is treated lightly, if at all. The sexual ethics of our time, enabled by the contraceptive technologies of modernity, divorce the procreative and unitive aspects of the sexual act. Sex becomes entertainment; unity becomes a reason for resentment; procreation becomes a burden. The unity of the spouses separated from the procreation of children leads to an environment in which the sexual act is used and manipulated in countless ways. Exploitation and objectification of partners is a result of this, for the responsibility of love is no longer seen as necessary. Families, actually the very definition of the word "family" is redefined, as is the word "marriage."

To come back to practical terms now, what does this mean for the here and now? It means that we find ourselves in an age in which women become pregnant without the external support of a loving, committed, responsible husband on whom she can rely for help in raising, nurturing, and teaching her child. It is also an age in which men are given the opportunity to treat women as sexual entertainment without ever having to face the responsibility of fatherhood.

So in this context, merely saying that abortion should be outlawed will only serve to place women in a situation where they still feel as if they have no options. Does this mean, then, that the pro-life community should not seek to outlaw abortion? Definitely not. What it means is that alongside these efforts, we also must strive to communicate better what we see as a culture of life, as described above. The pro-choice community does not see, or does not wish to see, that the contraceptive, promiscuous culture needs to change. And pro-lifers need to present this strongly, not as taking away freedoms, but as proposing a much higher good.

Some things we need to propose are as follows. First, every individual is sacred, unique and destined for eternity. We are all loved by God and do not deserve to be used, abused, or manipulated. People are not objects. Secondly, sex is sacred and relates to the most intimate aspects of the human person. It needs to be respected as such and therefore, should be kept to the bounds of a lifelong commitment, namely marriage. Sexual acts in which the unitive and procreative aspects are deliberately separated are immoral. Third, children deserve to be loved and nurtured. They ought to be raised, whenever possible, by their mother and father in a stable home environment. All children should be given the right to live.

Will any of this happen just by me willing it to be so? I wish. This will not happen even if all pro-lifers work together. We need all to work together to promote lifestyles in which the awesome miracle of life is welcomed. We need to promote chastity, not sex education. We need to promote fidelity, not conquest. We need to promote virtue, not stark utilitarian outlook. We need to clearly state right from wrong, not acquiesce to the "dictatorship of relativism."

Up next: genetic testing and other procedures, eugenics, end-of-life issues and justice for all individuals.

Please sign onto this letter to President Obama

DEAR PRESIDENT OBAMA:

Congratulations on your historic inauguration.

We'd like to introduce ourselves. We are pro-life Americans.

You will be hearing from us so we'd like to share our motivations:

Like you, we are motivated by faith; we have faith in God in whose image we are created.

Like you, we are motivated by hope; we encourage the kind of hope that is personified by one person reaching out to another to stand with them in difficult situations like crisis pregnancies, and the experience of suffering from disease.

Like you, we are motivated most of all by love:

We have a deep love for the unique and unrepeatable beauty of every unborn child targeted for abortion, and for that child's mother and father who will be deprived of their child's transforming love.

We have a deep love for the young women in our lives who live in a culture that exploits them as sex objects due to the easy availability of abortion.

We have a deep love for our friends and family who suffer from disease and who deserve medical research and treatment that does not burden their conscience with knowing that human lives were destroyed in the name of science.

On this historic occasion that vindicates the rights of human beings who were once considered as property in American law, we invite you, Mr. President, to lead our nation with policies that respect the dignity and equality of each and every human life.

Sign onto this letter by visiting this site:

Letter to the Editor of The Day, 1-26-09

In response to my letter to the Editor of the Day, which I also posted here, is this letter. She thinks she has struck me down when she ends, "Or should we all have these babies and drop them at the door of the letter writer and those who feel the same way?"

My response is below:

Dear Editor,
The writer of the letter entitled, "Decisions On Abortion Are Not Easy To Make" mistakes me. I never said that abortion is an easy experience. I've heard too many stories from the members of Silent No More (www.silentnomoreawareness.org), men and women who have had an abortion and speak of the trauma they suffered before, during and afterwards. I've also never said that it is an easy decision; I've only said that it is the wrong one.

When the writer says, "Or should we all have these babies and drop them at the door of the letter writer and those who feel the same way?" she makes my point. She assumes that because some women do not want their babies, that no one would want their babies. Many couples who are not able to conceive a child of their own would gladly adopt a baby, but cannot because most unwanted babies in this country are not given up for adoption; they are killed by abortion.

I have a question that no one has ever given me a satisfactory answer to. Why is it morally permissible to kill an infant in the womb but it is not permissible to kill an infant outside the womb? Or a one-year old? Or a ten-year old?

Building a culture of life, part one

Over the next few posts, I'd like to start developing the concept of building a culture of life. I'll start by talking about abortion and its moral impermissibility, using a few different examples to illustrate my points. Then I'd like to discuss how being pro-life means more than being anti-abortion, that negating abortion alone only addresses part of the tangible problems we face, but we need as a culture to be positive and pro-active in our attitudes and actions surrounding the beginning of life. I'd also like to show how this links with genetic testing, eugenics, end-of-life issues and justice for all individuals. Then I intend to discuss the relation of the culture of life to our spiritual responsibility; that our commitment to life bears fruit in and is nourished by our relationship to God as we shift from a means-ends mentality to one of sacrificial love, being obedient and responsive to the will of God in all things.

I recently got into an online discussion with a friend about abortion. Actually, she was praising our new orator-in-chief and I made a comment about his pro-abortion policies. She admitted that his stance on that is unfortunate, but was far from her mind in the reasons she voted for him. I'll come back to that later on, but right now I'd like to take up what she said about abortion. She said that she disagrees with the common practice now that it is used as a means of birth control, but she is "absolutely positive that there are other catholics out there like me who lean mostly pro-life, but there are those "by chance" cases of rape/incest and the mother's health where they believe like i do that it should be available in those cases only."

At first glance, that might sound like an acommodatingly noble stance, but when we look at it deeper, we have to realize that it is not enough. We need to understand why it is that abortion is wrong. Once we see that clearly, we will also see that abortion is, and why it is, wrong in all cases.

From the moment of conception, each person is a unique individual. It is then that a person becomes a person. At that moment, all of the information that his or her body will EVER need to grow into maturity is already encapsulated in every cell. The cells of an embryo divide, multiply and differentiate at a higher rate than will ever occur again in that person's lifetime. Within days, the heart begins to beat, pumping blood (unique from the mother) through the already developing circular system. Limbs develop, eye spots become sensitive to light, ears develop and can hear sounds from within and without the mother. Fingers, toes, reproductive organs, lungs, even hair all form within the first few months of gestation. The baby moves, responds, feels pain and comfort. In short, the baby is alive and growing from day one. Human life does not start at birth; it begins at conception.

Abortion is the intentional and direct killing of a child in the womb. It is not a mistake; it is not accidental. It is a willful action whose purpose is the death of an innocent and defenseless human being. In a word, this is murder.

There are some proponents of abortion who deny the personhood of the baby in the womb. They euphamize their position by using words like "fetus," "blob of tissue," etc. Their stance is not an honest one, nor is it legitimate, as we have seen from studying the development of a baby for even just a few moments, but it is a pervasive idea. Those who gain wealth by killing innocent babies deny the personhood of the baby in order to hurry along a woman's decision to "terminate a pregnancy," like one would throw away an old pair of shoes. Abortionists also find it helpful to deny the baby's personhood in order to bolster their claim of helping women with their health care needs (forgetting, of course, the infant women and men being killed by their trade).

The subtler, and by far more dangerous argument, is the one that pays momentary attention to the personhood of the baby in the womb, but nonetheless concludes that her life is not as important as something else, whether that be a career, security, health or convenience.

No baby in the womb has control over her own life, nor did she have any control over the circumstances of her own conception. Yet abortion is the gravest of injustices, for the baby in the womb is being given a death sentence for crimes she did not commit, unless one considers existence a crime.

In my friend's comment she cited three "exceptions" to a ban on abortion: rape, incest, and the health of the mother, to which I'll add the extreme example of saving the life of the mother.

The rape and incest can both be answered in the same way. Here is a case where a woman becomes pregnant by an action that violated her in which she had no control to resist. Let me say first with as much sensitivity as possible that both rape and incest are terrible crimes against the dignity of women and should never happen. It is not justifiable under any circumstances and perpetrators of these crimes should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The damage that those actions inflict on women are brutal and victims need to be shown love, compassion and care.

However, let us point out the glaring contradiction: perpetrators of rape and incest are not subject to the death penalty, unless accompanied by other crimes. The guilty party is not subject to being killed for his crime, and yet we would advocate that we kill the child? Surely, my friend might say that the reason for allowing abortion in such a case is to spare the victim of rape from having to revisit her awful experience while the baby is in her womb. I will say it again: the baby is alive and growing; she is a unique person destined for eternal life to be loved by God. Why should the baby be punished? This is not a cruel and insensitive thing to say regarding the mother, either. As a victim of a cruel and unjust action, she will not find healing by passing along the injustice. Aborting her baby will not make her forget her experience. But an innocent and loving child may bring her healing, whether she decides to keep the child or to give the baby up for adoption to another couple who cannot conceive. Taking the consequences of something terrible and turning it into a life-giving gift is far more healing than abortion.

What about the health or life of the mother? Health is a broad term, and the use of the word in Roe vs. Wade has become a legal boondoggle, used to skirt restrictions on late-term abortions by claiming that completing a pregnancy would cause duress to a woman. (I still can't figure out why partial-birth and live-birth abortions a la Obama were legal at any time since the babies were out of the mother and no one could claim that the mother was any longer in any danger, if she ever was.)

With induced labor, cesarian section deliveries, prenatal care units and the modern health care technology available, rarely can someone say that a woman's life is in danger and the only way to save her is to kill the child. The only possible exception that I am aware of (and I'll show why this is not an exception) is in the case of an ectopic pregnancy where the fallopian tube is certain to burst, causing internal bleeding and death for the mother. Of the various medical interventions, the only one that is morally permissible is a salpingectomy, whereby that section of the tube is removed. Even though the baby does die, this is not an abortion because: a. The direct action is not the killing of the baby, but the therapeutic removal of the tube which, if ruptured, would cause certain death of the mother b. The intention is to save the life of the mother, not to kill the baby. c. The baby will die either way. If an intervention could be developed whereby the life of the mother could be saved without the death of the baby (e.g. somehow detaching the embryo from the fallopian tube and allowing it to implant into the uterine wall), then the salpingectomy would no longer be morally permissible.

For more extensive treatment of the permissibility of fertility and infertility procedures, check out Catholic Bioethics and the Gift of Human Life, by William May.

Another step towards the total isolation of every individual in the name of "tolerance"

Check this out:

Why we shouldn't be celebrating...

This

h/t: Subvet

From Naral to Pro-life!

So what does one do when confronted with the truth? Proclaim it!

h/t: CMR

Catholic Vote has new video!

For any of you who saw Catholicvote.com's video during the presidential campaign, you know what a coversation starter it was. They now have a new, also powerful video on their website. Please check it out and show them your support.

Make sure Obama is asked during interview about his intentions regarding abortion!

Hey guys, one of the guys on Catholic Dads posted today that CNN will be interviewing B.O.

Here is the link for you to insist that he is asked about his intentions with regard to abortion, especially FOCA. Please do so today!

Letter to the Editor of The Day

Dear Editor,

This country has been grimly duped. The 1972 Roe vs. Wade decision was praised as a way to make abortion "safe, legal and rare," poised to liberate women from the bonds of motherhood. What a Pandora's box was opened.

Thirty-seven years later, abortion is the center of a network of issues that grows ever-more complex. Health care, politics, science, law, families and culture are all affected. The tentacles of this abberation are firmly entwined in our common consciousness and conscience, or what is left of it.

Abortion is tied to divorce, abuse, neglect, infidelity, mistrust, isolation and selfishness. It is used for convenience, to maintain a lifestyle, to hide an affair, to attain a career. Some use it coercively to hide their crimes, some use it for health reasons, ushering in an age of eugenics. In the hands of our government, abortion may be used for population control, political manipulation, and to fuel scientific research.

The methods for killing babies are numerous. The justification for it is weak, but is backed by a strong-willed, well-funded industry that has little or no regard for the rights of others. Contraception and abortion become harder to distinguish. And so far, fifty million people have been killed by it.

I also saw the holy city, a new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

Our pastor came over for an impromptu dinner amidst the snowstorm the other night and we got into a lively discussion about the contents of Christopher West's new book, Heaven's Song, and I look forward to reading it. No coincidence, however, that PBXVI, spoke today about the divine meaning of marriage and the relationship of Christ and the Church as a marital relationship. God bless.

"A handful of anti-Obama malcontents showed up late to the inauguration festivities"

That's how I expect the media to cover this year's March for Life. However, you and I know better. Thousands will gather at the nation's capitol to stand in witness to the sanctity of life from the moment of conception (that means fertilization, oh by the way) until natural death. Never since Roe v. Wade have the stakes been so high for the right to life. Unborn children, especially, are facing threats that would have been unheard of 40 years ago. We are facing new ways to kill babies, fund the killing of babies, enable the killing of babies, justify the killing of babies, and even force the killing of babies. The right to life must be guaranteed, or all other liberties are meaningless. Please join the March for Life. If you cannot attend, please spread the word so that others may join or change their hearts. Please pray to our Heavenly Father that the scourge will end.

Baby Grace

Not to be confused with the Bob's new grandbaby Grace, this is a story about a baby Grace whose short life made a tremendous impact upon her family. God bless, all.