Veni Veni Emmanuel - ASAP!!!!!

The title isn't ment to be irreverant, it is a prayer. Sort of a modern "maranatha". & to remind us that Jesus could return any minute.

The more I thought of the story on the Wal-Mart stampede yesterday, the more I realized we need to get back to remembering what Advent is about. For Catholics of some rites, Eastern & Western, Advent has already begun. For us Latin rite Catholics as well as many other Christian Churches, today is the begining of Advent. (& the start of a new Church year.)

The purpose of the season is twofold. The 1st is to remind us of the time of waiting by the"Chosen People" who were the descendants of Abraham for the arrival of the Messiah.

The 2nd is for us to prepare for Christ's 2nd Coming at the end of time. & that is the message found in today's reading from the Gospel of Mark: "Take heed, watch; for you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his servants in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. Watch therefore -- for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning -- lest he come suddenly and find you asleep. And what I say to you I say to all: Watch." (Mark 13:33-37)

& while we should prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus we need to remember why He came. That fact is found in a rarely heard Christmas Carol, I Wonder As I Wander. (We 3 Kings also alludes to this in its lyrics. & when we sing the full lyrics to What Child is This? you find the same message.) The 1 line says it all "How Jesus the Savior was born for to die." We are celebrating much more than the birth of a child, even if this Child is actually the Son of God. We are celbrating the arrival of the 1 person who could pay the penalty for our sins.

That is why the main liturgical color for Advent is purple (like Lent), to remind us of that penetential aspect of the season. & while that aspect has never been emphasised as strong as it is during Lent, it is still a major part of the season. It is an opportunity for us to detatch ourselves more fully from the sin of the world & thus be better prepared for the return of Jesus.

So bake the cookies, hang up the holly, wrap the presents & all the other things that are part of the preperation for the holiday. But remember what it is that we are preparing for.

MARANATHA, COME LORD JESUS!!!!!

The Lows Just Keep Getting Lower

CAUTION: Sleazy doesn't do justice to the latest lows that the "culture of death" reaches out to attain in its efforts to destroy every decent thing that God ever created.

As if Christmas gift certificates aren't enough of a low for Planned Parenthood 1 of their counterparts, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) has come up an ad to promote the "morning after pill". Once upon a time, pictures like this were found in magazines that were kept behind the counter or mailed in brown paper envelopes. I just can't bring myself to pu it on my blog, but you can check it out here. The guy who put it on his blog describes it as "Pathetic, disgusting, immoral, blasphemous (after all Santa IS based on a Catholic saint), outrageous, repulsive". I have 1 word to add, INFAMIA!!!!!

Check this report out. It came from Dawn Eden via Jeff Miller's blog The Curt Jester: Meanwhile, here in the USA PP continues to create videos that hit new lows in sleaze. & You Tube says they are OK. (But videos that show the truth about PP regularly get banned on You Tube. What's wrong with this picture? Pun intended!)

"Planned Parenthood, which made headlines a few months back with its ultra-creepy teen sex-ed Web site TakeCareDownThere.org (which now has its offensive videos back online after having taken them down temporarily), also produces the utterly puerile "Speaking of Sex" YouTube series and podcast .

The latest taxpayer-subsidized "Speaking of Sex" video is unusually revolting and offensive, even for Planned Parenthood. It's aimed, as usual, at teens--but send your little ones out of the room before watching it on Planned Parenthood's official YouTube site:,http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_wRD4TmYug

Incidentally, at the bottom of Planned Parenthood's Web page on in-clinic abortion , the organization promises, "A short video about abortion procedures is under production." Something tells me it won't look anything like Father Frank Pavone's excellent "This Is Abortion" series." I have to agree. Fr. Pavone's show the reality of abortion. PP knows it can't show abortion as it really is. I suspect their video will be so far from reality that it will make "I Love Lucy" look like a gritty reality show.

I am to the point where I am not surprized to see PP & their buddies in the "culture of death" reach new lows. Disgusted, yes, dreading their latest, definitely, driven to tears of sorrow, occasionally, surprized, sadly NO.

Cue AC/DC's Highway to Hell!!! It HAS become our unofficial National anthem.

Source: The Curt Jester Abortion and contraception sleaze

Another Priest Calls Obama Voters to Repentance

This time it is a priest on the "Left Coast" aka California. He is Fr. Joseph Illo, pastor of St. Joseph's Catholic Church, Modesto, CA. It is a part of the Diocese of Stockton. Sadly, his Bishop is 1 of those who can justify voting for Obama. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Modesto pastor condemns votes for Obama
Priest urges confession due to Obama's pro-choice stance.

By Sue Nowicki / The Modesto Bee

MODESTO -- Father Joseph Illo, pastor of St. Joseph's Catholic Church, has told parishioners in a homily and in a follow-up letter that if they voted for Barack Obama, they should consider going to confession because of the president-elect's pro-choice position.
"If you are one of the 54% of Catholics who voted for a pro-abortion candidate, you were clear on his position and you knew the gravity of the question, I urge you to go to confession before receiving communion. Don't risk losing your state of grace by receiving sacrilegiously," Illo wrote in a letter dated Nov. 21.
The letter was sent to more than 15,000 members of the St. Joseph's parish. It is one of 34 parishes in the Stockton Diocese, which has more than 200,000 members in Stanislaus, San Joaquin and four other counties.
Though Obama's support of abortion rights angered many Catholics nationally during the campaign, Illo's letter is believed to be the first in Central California from a priest to his parishioners on the topic.
The Most Rev. Stephen Blaire, bishop of the Stockton Diocese, disagrees with Illo. He said Catholics should not feel compelled to disclose how they voted to their priest.
Blaire said Catholics who carefully weighed many issues and settled on a candidate were not in need of confession. He said confession would be necessary "only if someone voted for a pro-abortion or pro-choice candidate -- if that's the reason you voted for them."
"Our position on pro-life is very important, but there are other issues," Blaire said. "No one candidate reflects everything that we stand for. I'm sure that most Catholics who voted were voting on economic issues.
"There were probably many priests, and I suspect many bishops, who voted for Obama."
Illo's letter states, "Many Catholics voted for such pro-abortion candidates thinking that their good positions on other issues, such as the war or health care, outweighed their deplorable stand on abortion."
Illo said in an interview, "I've gotten a lot of e-mails and phone calls. It's about 12-to-1 in favor of what I said. One person has left the parish. But I got all of these other positive things."
Across the country, Obama's nomination and campaign were divisive for many Catholics. Many priests and church officials sermonized against him because of his stance on abortion, as they did four years ago when Democratic John Kerry challenged President Bush. There were Catholic-inspired anti-Obama videos on YouTube regarding the issue.
National exit polling after the Nov. 4 election shows a majority of Catholic voters rejected the hard-line position -- 54% of them voted for Obama and 45% for John McCain, the Republican nominee.

The New Anti-Catholicism

American Anti-Catholicism

by Rev. Dwight Longenecker

Last week, Greenville, South Carolina -- the buckle of the Bible Belt -- made national headlines for the second time in two weeks. The first story involved Rev. Jay Scott Newman and his comments in his parish bulletin about Catholics who voted for Obama. The second was the announcement that the fundamentalist Bob Jones University had issued a public apology for its racist past.

I happen to be connected to both stories: I'm on the staff of Father Newman's parish, and I'm a graduate of Bob Jones University. How I managed to exit the school in 1978 and return to Greenville nearly 30 years later to be ordained as a Catholic priest is a story in itself, but the coincidence of the two news items in two weeks highlighted the question of anti-Catholicism in our country: Father Newman's statement elicited vitriolic anti-Church statements in some cases, and Bob Jones University is infamous not only for its past racism but its strong anti-Catholicism.

I was a student at Bob Jones University in the mid 1970s when the first black student was admitted. I was there in 1978 when Pope Paul VI died, and I heard Dr. Bob Jones Jr. speak his now famous words: "Pope Paul VI, archpriest of Satan, a deceiver and an anti-Christ, has, like Judas, gone to his own place." I remember students who were training to be Baptist preachers returning to campus bragging that they had visited a local Catholic church and spit in the font, then prayed for deliverance for all the devil worshippers who went there every Sunday. Every year we had the chance to hear Ian Paisley, the fiery Northern Irish Presbyterian preacher, deliver blistering attacks on Catholics during his annual American preaching tour.

This was the stuff of old-fashioned Protestant anti-Catholicism, rooted in centuries of misinformation, black propaganda, and sincere misunderstanding. This was the anti-Catholicism in which the pope was the anti-Christ riding on the back of that great whore of Babylon, the Catholic Church. It fed on Lorraine Boettner's Roman Catholicism, that classic collection of calumnies, lies, and half-truths. As fundamentalist youths, we read the sensational Jack Chick tracts. These riveting comic books portrayed the Catholic Church as a pagan, cookie-worshipping cult, complete with crazed priests, murderous popes, and the bodies of illegitimate babies buried in tunnels under convents. It was juicy stuff -- completely paranoid and ridiculous, but juicy nonetheless.


In this ecumenical age, such traditional Protestant bigotry is dying out. More and more, Evangelical Christians are coming to realize that the "old old story" of God's love for a dying world and the saving work of Christ on the cross is now most fully and vigorously told by the modern Catholic Church, as so many of their own churches are buying into the secular, morally indifferent agenda of the world around them. Marcus Grodi's Coming Home Network reports an increasing number of Evangelical pastors coming into the Catholic Church; it might not be long before Bob Jones University itself issues a statement apologizing for its anti-Catholicism.

Does this mean that anti-Catholicism is dead? I fear not. While the old-fashioned Protestant variety is dying out, a new and equally virulent form is rising up, evident in three different manifestations.

The first is from people who actually call themselves Catholics. The dissenting Catholics in our church have, for the most part, worn a friendly face. They couch their disobedience in polite terminology. They "respectfully disagree with the Holy Father," or "they are listening carefully to the teaching of the Church, but they are also listening carefully to their own consciences." This deceitful dissent will soon die out: As the radical Catholics see their own agendas withering for lack of interest, and as they observe the increasing youth and influence of the faithful Catholics, their true colors will be revealed. If they have not done so already, those dissenting Catholics will remove themselves from the Church. Their failure will focus in anger, their frustration will surface as rage, and they will move from being dissenting Catholics to outspoken critics of the Church.

The second category of the new anti-Catholicism will involve a fresh kind of Protestant revolt. The new Protestant anti-Catholicism will not be from backwoods preachers, with their colorful imagery of whores and dragons, but from the urbane practitioners of suburban, liberal Protestantism. The liberal Protestants who endorse women's ordination, homosexual "marriage," and the whole liberal agenda will become increasingly impatient with Catholicism. Already they sneer at a religion that "demands blind obedience to a medieval monarch." Their frustration at what they perceive to be the Catholic Church's stance on contraception, abortion, women's rights, and homosexuality will lead them to call for Catholicism to be restrained because it is divisive and fosters hate and intolerance, opposing the "New World Order."

In his 2003 book The New Anti-Catholicism, Philip Jenkins describes the third purveyor of the new anti-Catholicism: the secular hedonistic population in the United States. Jenkins recounts a few incidents to illustrate the point: In New York in 1989, a gay activist group demonstrated in St. Patrick's Cathedral. They interrupted Mass, forcing the archbishop to abandon his sermon, and threw condoms around the church and desecrated the Host. In 2000, twenty ski-masked members of a "feminist autonomous collective" interrupted Mass in Montreal. They spray-painted slogans on the walls of the church and altar, tried to overturn the tabernacle, stuck used sanitary napkins on pictures and walls, threw condoms around the sanctuary, and chanted pro-abortion slogans.

These are a few of the most extreme examples, but Jenkins shows how the anti-Catholic attitude that fuels these extreme protests is woven, both subtly and blatantly, throughout the American media and educational culture. Jenkins isn't a Catholic, so his work is all the more powerful for its objective position.

In Tortured for Christ, his account of imprisonment under the Communist regime in Romania, Protestant pastor Richard Wurmbrandt observed that, in prison, there were no divisions between Catholics and Protestants -- all were simply Christian brothers. As our society shifts and introduces new forms of anti-Catholicism, Catholics should be prepared to forge new alliances. We may find that our best friends used to be our worst enemies.

Conservative Evangelicals share many of the same values that we as Catholics have always proclaimed. We need to be open-minded, build bridges with those who distrust us, and work together in the fight for a culture of life. Who knows -- Bob Jones University might yet introduce a "Fellowship of Bob Jones Catholics," and I could be their chaplain.

_____________________

Rev. Dwight Longenecker writes from Greenville, South Carolina where he is Chaplain to St Joseph's Catholic School. Read his website and daily blog at www.dwightlongenecker.com.

“Letter from Birmingham City Jail" - 2009 Edition

The Birmingham Letter Project
Washington D.C.
January 21st-24th
2009

“injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere… ”
- Martin Luther King Jr.

A national call to come to Washington, D.C. to be a prayerful and prophetic witness for life.

On January 21-24, 2009, a prayerful and prophetic witness for life will be taking place in Washington, D.C. called “The Birmingham Letter Project.” Christians from all across America will be coming to our nation’s capitol to call for an end to abortion and boldly be a voice for those who have no voice.
“The Birmingham Letter Project” in Washington, D.C. will be the start of a major national pro-life witness in which the people of God will be challenging the Obama Administration to embrace human rights and social justice and bring an end to the brutality of abortion.
The name of the project is taken from Dr. Martin Luther King’s historic “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” The principles from this letter will provide guidance and a foundation for all our activities and inspire us to stand against abortion as Christians a generation ago stood against segregation and racism.
Below are some principles and quotes from the letter:
The “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” was addressed to “My dear Fellow Clergymen.” Dr. King was reminding everyone that the problem of segregation was created initially by the failure of the church and her leaders to be courageous and prophetic on the issue of racial injustice. In other words, Christians who remained silent on the issue of segregation were more responsible for it then white supremacists and racists.
The same is true today with abortion. It is the apathy and indifference of Christians and their failure to speak out against abortion that has created this grave injustice. The church must stop pointing fingers and take responsibility for the horror of abortion. In the words of Rev. Joseph Foreman, “…every abortion clinic should have a sign posted in front it saying open by permission of the church.”
“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor of the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order than to justice;’ who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice;”
“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of bad people, but for the appalling silence of good people.”
“So here we are moving toward the exit of the twentieth century with a religious community largely adjusted to the status quo, standing as a taillight behind other community agencies rather than a headlight leading men to higher levels of justice.”
“Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection”.
“There was a time when the church was very powerful. It was during that period when the early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. It those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.”
“The Contemporary church is often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is often the arch-supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent and often vocal sanction of things as they are.”
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

The Shock Would Be If They Didn't See Bias

This article might well be the 1st obituary about the pending death of the Main Stream Media. Even if the Fairness Doctrine is revived & we are silenced on the internet, too many people already know the truth, that the MSM is the Obama/Democratic propeganda arm. & there are a lot more ways to get the truth out today than ever.

AMERICANS STILL SEE MEDIA AS BIASED AFTER NO ABORTION COVERAGE IN ELECTIONS

by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
November 24, 2008

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- Another new poll finds a strong majority of Americans still see the news media as biased and they are increasingly turning to the Internet for news. That's no surprise given a recent study finding the mainstream media failed to cover the issue of abortion during the presidential elections.
A Zogby Poll, commissioned by IFC, found 72.6% believe the news they read and see in the mainstream media is biased.
Although there is a partisan divide on the intensity of the feelings that the media is biased, a majority of both parties hold the view. Zogby found 88.7% of Republicans and 57.5 percent of Democrats describe the news media as biased.
When it comes to determine the most reliable source of news, 37.6% of those asked consider the Internet the most reliable, with 20.3% saying national television programs and 16 percent saying radio news is the best.
When asked to name which television network provided the most unbiased news, 39.3% of those surveyed trust FOX News most for the issues they consider most important, followed by CNN with 16% and MSNBC with 15%.
The results aren't surprising given how a Pew study, which examined 7,592 campaign stories from 48 news outlets during the general election, found less than 1 percent of campaign news coverage related to abortion issues.
Pew found only 283 stories in which religion or religious issues played a significant role and only 9 percent of these stories covered the issues of abortion or stem cell research, with abortion getting the most attention of the two.
Although abortion was covered more prominently in previous presidential elections, Pew found this year was an exception.
Pew's report said the coverage abortion and pro-life issues did receive "tended to come in the form of reaction to statements by the candidates and quickly receded without generating any sustained narrative."
In January, a poll from the Sacred Heart University Polling Institute asked similar questions as Zogby and found Americans say the media too often sides with the pro-abortion or liberal position on sensitive political topics.
In that survey as well, Americans were asked to discuss how much they trust particular media outlets and MSNBC and PBS came in at the bottom with just four percent and three percent, respectively, saying the trust the content of those broadcast stations.The Fox News Channel came in with the most trust among Americans, with 27 percent saying it is the most trusted news source. CNN placed second with 14.6 percent of Americans saying they trust its content.
NBC News was found trustworthy and accurate by just 10.9 percent, ABC News by seven percent, the local news channels by 6.9 percent, CBS News by 6.8 percent, and CNBS by just .6 percent of Americans.

We HAVE Been Warned!!!!!

"And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever."
--Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 18, 1781

This Is All Too Believable

I worked in retail for 10 years (79-89). & I saw the worst of the worst at times. 1 time we had a customer who claimed something was in the Sunday ad. when we showed the ad to her, she didn't admit she was wrong. She said it was in her copy at home. (It was another store's ad she was thinking about.) We were the liars trying to embarrass her.

When certain items were on sale, people would be all but break down the doors. I was arround for the worst of the worst. I was arround for the original Cabbage Patch Doll craze. If we got a shipment in, people would grab 1 & then make a bee-line to the pay phone to call their friends & tell them. (Remember, this was before cell-phones became ubiquitous.) People would be lined up hours before the store openned if we had them in an ad. & when the door openned, stand back.

So when I saw this headline, I knew that it was all too possible. & as I read the article, I suspected that the reality was even worse than the article described it as.

Wal-Mart worker dies after shoppers knock him down

(From the article) A Wal-Mart worker was killed Friday when "out-of-control" shoppers desperate for bargains broke down the doors at a 5 a.m. sale. Other workers were trampled as they tried to rescue the man, and customers shouted angrily and kept shopping when store officials said they were closing because of the death, police and witnesses said.

At least four other people, including a woman who was eight months pregnant, were taken to hospitals for observation or minor injuries, and the store in Valley Stream on Long Island closed for several hours before reopening.

Shoppers stepped over the man on the ground and streamed into the store. When told to leave, they complained that they had been in line since Thursday morning.

Nassau County police said about 2,000 people were gathered outside the store doors at the mall about 20 miles east of Manhattan. The impatient crowd knocked the man, identified by police as Jdimytai Damour of Queens, to the ground as he opened the doors, leaving a metal portion of the frame crumpled like an accordion.

"This crowd was out of control," said Nassau police spokesman Lt. Michael Fleming. He described the scene as "utter chaos," and said the store didn't have enough security.

Dozens of store employees trying to fight their way out to help Damour were also getting trampled by the crowd, Fleming said.

What is sad is that no one will probably be charged with the murder of the worker. Even with the surveillance video it will be almost impossible to find the guilty people.

What is even more disgusting is the fact that these aren't exactly the stereotypical poor folks that are supposedly Wal-Mart's customers. "The median income for a household in the village is $103,243, and the median income for a family is $110,585. Males have a median income of $80,094 versus $56,260 for females. The per capita income for the CDP was $66,334. About 1.0% of families and 1.8% of the population were below the poverty line, including 1.4% of those under age 18 and .4% of those age 65 or over." (Source: Wikipedia article Valley Stream, New York)

"Kimberly Cribbs, who witnessed the stampede, said shoppers were acting like 'savages.'"

"'When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling 'I've been on line since yesterday morning,'' she said. 'They kept shopping.'" Based on the 2000 census info has 50.6% of the population identifying themselves as being of Italian ancestry, I would say that the best word to describe them (that I can put in this post, that is) is gavone. The use of the term "on line" tends to confirm my suspicions.

Given that there were dozens of employees working, I have to ask Lt. Fleming what he considers enough? It is easy to be critical in retrospect when something gets out of control. I also suspect the Nassau Police are trying to pass the buck as well. Why? Wal-Mart issued a statement where it "said it tried to prepare for the crowd by adding staffers and outside security workers, putting up barricades and consulting police." Based on my retail experience, I tend to believe Wal-Mart did its best in this case.

& then there was this other incident. "A woman reported being trampled by overeager customers at a Wal-Mart opening Friday in Farmingdale, about 15 miles east of Valley Stream, Suffolk County police said. She suffered minor injuries, but finished shopping before filling the report, police said." She finished shopping 1st. In this case the 1st word I come up with is "pazzo".

As I said at the start, I found this very believable. In fact, given my experience & the fact that things haven't really changed since then, I am actually surprized that there are more incidents like this. The biggest reason for that is that most retailers know how people act, like a stampeding herd, & prepare for this. But, every so often, the best of plans fail.

Christmas gifts are supposed to be symbolic of the gifts the Magi gave to Jesus that 1st Christmas. Actions like this are anything but in keeping with the true Spirit & Meaning of Christmas. This is greedy selfishness gone wild. It is another symbol of how far our society has fallen from its Judeo-Christian roots. Yes, I find the trend towards "Happy Holidays" only offensive. Actions like this give some justification to that trend for 1 reason, these actions have nothing to do with the real meaning of Christmas.

I am not opposed to gift giving. But, we need to get it back into perspective. When gifts become the end-all, be-all of the holiday & Jesus is, at best, on the periphery, then what we have is a blasphemous insult to God.

It is also another example of how much our society buys into the "culture of death". That culture views people as utilitarian. & desposible as a result. So, why be concerned about trampling a person when he/she stands in the way of what I want? & if that person dies so I can fulfill my selfish wants, so what?

I can hear someone say "Wait a minute, this is a gift for a child or another relative. HOW IS THAT SELFISH?" Simple, when it is done to buy the silence of the child, when it is done to say "See how much I love you by spending so much!", when it is done to make the buyer look good, selfishness is at the root.

Gift giving can be a symbol of love. But they are not the be-all, end-all of that love.

What we need to do is get back to the true meaning of Christmas. We need to remember what it is we are celebrating. & that can be summed up in a very familiar Biblical quote: "For God so loved the world, that He sent His only begotten Son . . . ." (John 3:16)

In some of the branches of the Catholic Church, Advent has already begun, for others, it begins tommorrow. There is still plenty of time to properly prepare for the celebration of God's love that is Christmas. How will you prepare? Will you chose to celebrate death, or life?

(Source: Christus Vincit HOW LOW CAN A MOB GO?)

Only If Hell Freezes Over (Oops, That's Right, CINOs Don't Believe In Hell*)

*So that is why they think it will happen.

Recently a post on America Magazine's website by Michael Sean Winters suggested that Professor Douglas Kmiec, the former Republican pro-lifer (emphasis on former applying to both) who became Obama’s top Catholic apologist during the presidential campaign, would be "the perfect candidate" to become U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See.

Mr. Winters, are you serious????

Apparently, the answer is Yes.

According to a CNA report "Winters argues that Kmiec is the perfect candidate because 'He is a lifelong pro-life legal scholar who served as head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Departments of both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He was Dean of the Catholic University Law School and now teaches law at Pepperdine. His published works evidence a find (sic) legal mind and thorough familiarity with the natural law tradition that has been the dominant lens for Catholic social thought. Kmiec would be well known to prominent American churchmen in the Eternal City and a jewel in the crown of the intellectual milieu that surrounds the Holy See.'"

Winters goes on to say "Kmiec’s pro-life credentials, despite some carping from the far right political fringe, are impeccable. Indeed, given that the American bishops have chosen opposition to FOCA as their greeting to the new president, Kmiec gives the bishops some satisfaction since he testified against the measure at its inception in the 1980s."

Has Winters read anything that Kmiec said during the recent election cycle? Kmiec has basically disavoided every Pro-Life view he ever had.

Even before I came across this article from CNA, I had heard about the idea that Kmiec might be in line for the Vatican appointment. I said to myself: "It will happen only if Obama wants to completely alienate the Vatican."

So when I read that CNA contacted an official from the Vatican's Secretary of State department, the reaction didn't surprize me at all. He said bluntly: "it will never happen." He offered his reaction on a strict condition of anonymity. (Given how diplomacy works, I am not surprized at his request.)

The official gave several excellent reasons. He "noted that prominent American Catholics at the Vatican -such as Cardinal James Francis Stafford or Archbishop Raymond Burke- look at Kmiec as a 'traitor,' and 'their opinion will certainly count heavily.' "

He went on to point out that the most important factor "is that the Holy See will not risk alienating vital U.S. Catholic organizations like the Knights of Columbus or the American branch of the Knights of the Holy Sepulcher, 'whose role in the life of the universal Church is decisive, and who have already expressed publicly their disappointment with Kmiec's role in the recent elections.'" (This is true, very true. But the CINOs have already launched their attack on this groups, including a group of so called KCs who supported Obama & attacked the Supreme Knights Pro-Life statements.)

He also explained that the Vatican is "obviously interested in having a good relationship with the greatest power in the world," but such relationships usually flow "through different parallel channels and not only the Embassy."

He went on. "'Despite the importance of a good relationship with the U.S., the Secretary of State privileges the relationship with nations with which it has concordats,' that is to say, international agreements that provide some recognition and support to the public presence of the Catholic Church, such as state support for religious education."

The official went on to explain that the Vatican may not accept Kmiec even if he should be appointed by Obama & approved by Congress. "If the office [the Vatican's Secretary of State] withholds the 'placet' –the official acceptance—from the appointees from Argentina and France, it could easily do the same [to Kmiec]" because "[we] would not risk alienating many U.S. Catholic organizations."

& yes, the Vatican could do that. In fact, it recently has, twice. "The Secretary of State official was referring to the recent Vatican decisions to deny the ‘placet’ to a French Ambassador to the Vatican because he was openly homosexual and to an Argentinean because he was divorced and remarried."

So how does this apply to Kmiec? "Of course Mr. Kmiec is in neither of those situations, but for the Secretary of State it is far more important to maintain a good relationship with, say, Mr. Anderson (the Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus,) who is an active member of several Vatican dicasteries, than to please Mr. Kmiec and his friends in the new administration."

The official was clearly aware of the attacks on those Catholics, especially Bishops who stood up for authentic Catholic teaching on the Life Issues. "Those who the article refers so disrespectfully as 'extremists on the right,' or 'the far right political fringe,' are the serious, loyal Catholics [the Vatican] precisely takes into account, because they are the ones who are there when the Church needs them." (Unlike Winters et al, who are CINOs.)

"Finally, regarding Winters’ claim that 'Kmiec could do for the Democratic administration what (Mary Ann) Glendon has done for its predecessor," the official told CNA: "to be charitable, I will just say that I seriously doubt it.'"

After this, if Winters, the gang at America & Kmiec still think it is possible, then I wish to add a few more names to my list of those who are delusional. Sadly, rather than getting the psycholgical help they need, they will be encouraged in their delusions to the eternal risk of their immortal souls.

(Source: Why Kmiec will not become the new Vatican Ambassador via Bad Doug. No Diplomatic Bone.)

What's Opera Doc?

Today, (29 November 2008) The Metropolitan Opera begins its 78th season of radio broadcasts. It finishes off the season with the complete Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung) cycle by Richard Wagner. (With L'Elisir d'amore being broadcast between the 1st 2 parts.)

Anyhow it will go on for 4 weeks & an interminable number of hours. & it will be in German. So, for those of you who don't have the time, or the understanding of the German language to sit through it all, here is Bugs Bunny & Elmer Fudd in the Reader's Digest version (aka What's Opera Doc?):

Unfortunately they are not doing 1 of my favorites this year. But Bugs & Elmer will give us their version of Il barbiere di Siviglia, ossia L'inutile precauzione (The Barber of Seville, or The Useless Precaution) by my paisan Gioachino Rossini, with a little of Mozart's sequel Le nozze di Figaro, ossia la folle giornata (The Marriage of Figaro or the Day of Madness) tossed in for good measure. (& it is in English for those of you who when they hear Italiano say "Non capisco?")

Rabbit of Seville

OK, time to get serious. I do enjoy opera. It is in the genes, I'm Italiano. Cavalleria Rusticana by Pietro Mascagni is my favorite. But there are plenty of others, including a few by Mozart, that I do enjoy also. For way too many reasons opera has gotten a bad name as being only for the elite. It isn't, esp Italiano Operas. In fact, a lot of the arias became the equivalent of what we would call top 40 music today. In fact many people don't realize how much opera they really know because a lot of the music is used in non-opera settings.

I am writing this post to salute the Met. The 1st performance was Gounod's Faust on 22 October 1883. 125 years & countless fat ladies later, they are still going strong. Please check out their broadcasts. & if there is an opera company nearby, try to see 1 live to get the full experience.

Help Wanted - To Save the Lives of the Unborn

Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust is looking for help. If you are 18-30 years old with a heart for the unborn, or know someone who is in that age range, then check out the following:

If You Could Save a Life, Would You?

You've read the Campus Life Tour e-mails with excitement, thinking how radical it would be to rescue a child from impending doom. You thought, "I'm glad someone's taking a stand...", followed by a list of reasons why it's not the right time for you. Well, my friend, life is too fleeting for maybe later.
If not now, when? If not you, who? "But, but..."
STOP making excuses. What could be more important than serving the Lord of the universe by "rescuing those led away to death" (Proverbs 24:11)?Take what Mordecai said to Esther when she was scared of confronting the King for her people and change one word, "For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the [children] from another place, but you and your father's house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?" (Esther 4:14).
Campus Life Tour needs team members and a director for the spring semester. Events at the March for Life and the Presidential Inauguration in Washington, D.C. will kick off the semester, followed by 100 schools in four months. We need a courageous team of college-age men and women, to bring the truth about abortion and the healing power of God's grace to their peers. Here's the scoop:
Who can join? 18-30 year old Christians who have a heart for the pre-born

What does it entail? Commitments range from two weeks to a full semester. Room and board are provided.

When do I start?As soon as you can! Spring tour begins mid-January

What about the Director position?A candidate for the position of director must meet the following requirements: Strong Christian, 23 years or older. Willing to travel, with an ability to lead. Good organizational and diplomatic skills. Must have ability to articulate and debate the pro-life position. Experience in leadership or pro-life ministry is helpful. Oral and written communication abilities and computer skills are beneficial but not mandatory.
The Campus Life Tour has visited over 1,500 campuses across the United States since 2001, exposing the lie of abortion to thousands of high school and college students. Using graphic photos, relevant literature and powerful debate, members of the Campus Life Tour team speak to their peers about abortion. Every conversation, every piece of paper distributed, every photograph shown can save countless human lives. With what other job can you literally save a life and visit the Grand Canyon in the same day! CLT brings the pro-life message far and wide. In the past two years the team has been everywhere from San Francisco to Mount Rushmore, from the Seattle Space Needle to New York City's Time Square and from the St. Louis Gateway Arch to the California beaches. Support the Survivors and help recruit the next Campus Life Tour Team! For more information e-mail campus@survivors.la or fill out an online application form here.

614 REASONS TO BE THANKFUL!!!!!

40 Days for Life released its final report on the success of their Fall 2008 campaign.

-There have been at least 614 turnarounds, where women seeking abortion changed their minds.

-Several people have quit their jobs in the abortion industry, and clinics have advertised immediate openings on their staffs.

-A number of abortion centers have been closed on days when abortions are usually performed.

-Tens of thousands of people have taken part in 40 Days for Life events, many engaging in pro-life activities for the first time in their lives.

614 reasons to be thankful

More on PP's Gift Certificates

Jeff Miller (The Curt Jester) came up with the perfect design for PPIN's gift certificates. I like the idea of calling them "Herod Bucks" After all they are following in his footsteps. King Herod would be so proud of how PP is honoring his memory.

The Gift That Keeps On KILLING

Just when you think that the "culture of death" can't reach a new low, I come across this on the American Papist blog.

"Planned Parenthood Issues Christmas Gift Certificates: Give the Gift of Abortion"

Yes, you read that right, PP (of Indiana) is now offering gift certificates. & they are pushing them as Christmas gifts. Here is how they are promoting them (from the LifeNews article): "Looking for an unusual, yet practical gift this holiday season? Planned Parenthood of Indiana (PPIN) is now offering gift certificates for services or the recipient's choice of birth control method."

In a news release PPIN president and CEO Betty Cockrum said: "Why not buy a loved one a gift this holiday season that they really need. The gift certificates are also a wonderful idea for that person in your life who puts everyone else first."

She added: "Please join Planned Parenthood of Indiana and give the gift of health this holiday season."

& while PPIN claims that the purpose of the certificates is reproductive health care, let's remember that for PP that includes abortion. & they admit that the certificates can be used for that purpose. In an interview with WISH-TV Chrystal Struben-Hall, PPIN's vice president said: "They really are intended for preventative healthcare. We decided not to put restrictions on the gift certificates so it's for whatever people feel they need the services for most."

Excuse me? Give a gift certificate for someone you know to be able to have an abortion to celebrate the birth of Christ?

Where do I start with how wrong this is? Jesus said that He came to bring us life. Now, PP wants to celebrate the birth of the "Author of Life" by your giving the gift of death. Sick, sick, sick. Evil at its blasphemous worst.

PPIN calls this giving the gift of health. This isn't God's idea of health. This is Satan's idea of spiritual sickness & death.

Like Indiana Family Institute President Curt Smith, I am appalled by this whole concept. He has the right idea, instead of supporting PP with the gift of death, give a gift of life by donating to a crisis pregnancy center. "I think the way to help family planning is to give the money where there's no agenda. So if somebody wants to help a woman at a time of crisis, they can support the life centers throughout Indiana."

While they haven't reached this point yet, what scares me is the direction the ads may take under Obama's presidency. Down the road I can see ads where a guy is talking to his friend about getting his girlfriend pregnant. He is upset, doesn't want the responsibility & doesn't know how to approach the idea of her getting an abortion. The friend suggests he contact PP & get a gift certificate to help her pay for the abortion. The suggetstion in the ad will be that doing so will enable the guy to show how much he really cares. But, the subtext will be that the friend is helping the father to be get off the hook. & I could go on from there, but even as I type this, my stomach is getting way too queasy at the thought that ads like this are possible.

With the "culture of death" reaching this new low with an infamia like this, how much longer before God will have no choice but to allow us to face the chastisement our country is all but begging for & so richly deserve.

Pro Deo, then Patria

"It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage, and such only, as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent both in order of time and degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society. Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe."
–James Madison, A Memorial and Remonstrance, 1785

If Obama Does What He Says, This Could Happen Here

Which is why I am posting this. Those of us in the Pro-Life movement need to realize that if F.O.C.A is signed & Obama pushes his anti-life agenda to the extreme that he has threatened then the 1st Amendment will be totally gutted & a lot of us will be in jail across the USA. For more on where we are heading: Round Up The Catholic Priests!! . I'm not saying it is definite, but open season on authentic Catholics may be just arround the corner. (As well as faithful Christians of other denominations.)

Note: Postage from the USA to Canada is 1 oz - $0.72, 2 oz - $0.96, 3 oz - $1.20, 3.5 oz - $1.44. The usual surcharges for dd shaped envelopes apply.

Send a Christmas Letter to a Pro-Life Heroine in Jail for Silently Witnessing to Life

By John-Henry Westen

TORONTO, November 24, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Pro-life heroine Linda Gibbons will spend another Christmas in jail this year for her refusal to abide by an injunction which forbids even silent prayerful pro-life witness on the public sidewalk in front of the Scott abortion mill in Toronto.

Rosemary Connell of Show the Truth Canada informed LifeSiteNews.com today that Gibbons appreciates very much the letters and cards she receives from pro-lifers all over the world. She assures them of her prayers as well.

"I know she appreciates letters and cards and the effort to send them," Connell told LifeSiteNews.com. "She enjoys letters and art work from children also. She is very humble about the number of letters she gets each day. Please consider sending a Christmas card and short letters regularly. It is great for her spirits and important that the employees of the prison know of her supporters. It reminds people of the plight of little babies being threatened by abortion."

The rules for such letters are:

- handwrite or type address and return address on envelope

- no stickers or stamped images etc. on envelope or in letter

- put return address on letter as well as envelope

- no plastic prayer cards or bookmarks - paper prayer cards and bookmarks are fine

- she is allowed a couple of pamphlets but not many

- no questions about day to day workings of the prison - baby saves, prayer groups, difficulties she faces. She cannot comment on the day to day workings of the prison but will call Show the Truth with any news

.- please number your letters so she can be sure she is getting all that you send

- please include a pro-life comment in each letter - facts of numbers of children being executed, loss of God's children, our prayer for everyone involved in abortion industry

Gibbons' upcoming trial is Jan 12, 2009 in Toronto.

Letters should be addressed to

Linda Gibbons - Vanier Women's Detention Centre

655 Martin St. - Box 1040 - Milton, ON

Canada

L9T 5E6

See related coverage:

Pro-life Hero Linda Gibbons Arrested Again, Only Days after Acquittal

Lifesite Special: Linda Gibbons, Prisoner of Conscience

HOW NOT TO PREPARE YOUR TURKEY TODAY!!!!!

LET'S TRY THAT AGAIN:




THAT'S BETTER!!!!!

Thanksgiving at the Vatican

Papa B: I know the proper way to cook the turkey is in here somewhere.

Cardinal A: I hate to say it but told you not to give the Nuns who cook the day off & then invite the College of Cardinals in for the holiday!

Papa B: Ok, OK!!! Don't remind me. But if I can't find it do you know the number for the Vatican Pizza Hut?

(Picture via American Papist [source: (AP Photo/L'Osservatore Romano, HO)]

Fr. Pavone: Thanksgiving, Freedom, and Life

On 'Turkey Day', Have a Wing and a Prayer

Fr. Frank Pavone

National Director, Priests for Life
Listen to this column in MP3 format

Click here for the Spanish version

Fr. Frank's columns are podcast
A Pythagorean writer once expressed the role of civil authority this way: “The monarch has an irrepressible authority (and is therefore not limited by consent); he is a living law; he is like a god among men.”
How different America is. Our Founders came here for freedom, a freedom that recognized that no human being or group of human beings can ever be “gods among men.” Our republic, instead, was to be governed by the rule of law rather than the rule of men.
Therefore no king or parliament would be able to oppress the rights of others, or delete their right to life. Our forefathers fought a revolution to see to that. It wasn’t simply about “taxation without representation.” It was about freedom, and the understanding that freedom is rooted in God.
The pagan view of government denied any importance to the individual, exalted the power of the state beyond all limits, and therefore was able to endorse things like infanticide. After all, the law came from the mouth of the king. Individuals didn’t matter. If the king decreed it, even infanticide would be all right.
Our Founding Fathers, however, were influenced in their philosophy of government by Scripture and the Judeo-Christian tradition, according to which everyone was a sinner and equally subject to the laws of God. Yes, there would be earthly rulers, but they, too, were subject to God.
Moreover, each person is a child of God. This awareness shaped our Founding Fathers’ concept of government, because it introduced something unheard of among the ancient pagans, namely, that now, each individual has a direct and personal link to the Creator, independent of any earthly power. This awareness of the dignity of the human person then formed the basis for letting each individual have a say in a representative form of government, and for insisting that our rights, starting with Life, come from the Creator, and that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men” (Declaration of Independence).
This is what we celebrate at Thanksgiving – not just that we have food, but that we have freedom, rooted in God and the recognition that government cannot tamper with our human rights.
The Church’s liturgy for Thanksgiving Day expresses this beautifully in the Preface, which says, “Father, …you made man to your own image…Once you chose a people and gave them a destiny and, when you brought them out of bondage to freedom, they carried with them the promise that all men would be blessed and all men could be free…It has come to pass in every generation for all men who have believed that Jesus by his death and resurrection gave them a new freedom in his Spirit. It happened to our fathers, who came to this land as if out of the desert into a place of promise and hope. It happens to us still, in our time, as you lead all men through your Church to the blessed vision of peace.”
And indeed, for this we give thanks!

Buona Festa del Ringraziamento 2008

"It is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His mercy, to implore His protection and favor... That great and beneficent author of all good that was, that is, or ever shall be, that we may then unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people." --George Washington

An Offer He Couldn't Refuse

Mafia Godfather turns to God

Bernardo Provenzano, the Mafia Godfather arrested two and a half years ago, has "turned to God" in prison, where he lives "a monastic life" according to an Italian Parliamentary deputy who visited him in his prison cell.
Antonio Missiani, a centre Left deputy, said Provenzano, 75, who is being held in isolation at a high security prison at Novara, spent his days "praying, reading the Bible and writing to his wife and children". The former Mafia "boss of bosses" told his visitor "faith is everything". "It's incredible, he lives like a kind of monk" Mr Missiani said.
Provenzano, whose brutality earned him the Mafia nickname "The Tractor" because he "mowed people down", used a Bible as the code book for his secret messages or "pizzini" to mafiosi henchmen while in hiding. Mafia bosses often profess to be devout Catholics, and Provenzano ended many of his pizzini with the words "May God bless and protect you".
In the pizzini he also uses the words of the Hail Mary prayer as part of the secret code, and sometimes thanks "my adored Jesus Christ" for helping him to evade capture during more than four decades on the run. However anti Mafia investigators believe this refers not to "heavenly messages" but to a Mafia informer in the police who tipped him off before raids.
Mr Missiani said that Provenzano now read the Bible as a source of faith. On the table in his cell were a Bible, a prayer book and an Italian dictionary, next to images of the Virgin Mary and St Padre Pio, Italy's most popular saint.
Provenzano gets up at six in the morning and eats frugally, Mr Missiani told La Repubblica, with no alcohol, coffee or cigarettes, and tap water rather than mineral water. "He has iron self-discipline", he said. His main indulgence was television. "He never misses the evening news, and watches current affairs documentaries".
Provenzano, who became the Godfather after the arrest of Toto Riina in 1993, had been on the run since 1963, when he was first wanted by police for murder. In 2002 he none the less travelled to Marseilles under an assumed name for a prostate operation. He was finally captured in April 2006 at a delapidated farmhouse near his home town, Corleone, after police tracked a delivery of clean laundry to him from his wife.

So What Did Cardinal Stafford Actually Say?

Cardinal's Address to Catholic University of America

November 13, 2008 - By Cardinal James Francis Stafford

Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II: “Being True with Body and Soul”[1]
For 51 years of priestly ministry I have been attentive to res sacra in temporalibus in American culture, i.e., “to the elements of the sacred in the temporal life of man” or, in a more Heideggerian idiom, “to man as the sacred element in temporal things.” In 1958 John Courtney Murray, S. J. was my guide. With further guidance from the Church over the years, I have learned that the nucleus of this principle, enunciated by Pope Leo XIII, maintains that the sacred element in secular life, especially our use of language, escapes the undivided control of the supreme power of the State. The secular life of man is not completely secular, nor totally encompassed within the State as the highest social organism, and subject ultimately only to the political power. The sacred word within man in secular life transcends the control of the supreme power of the State. A person’s public life is not encompassed within the State as the highest social organism, and not subject ultimately only to the political power.
President Thomas Jefferson’s celebrated 1802 letter to the committee of the Danbury Baptist Association asserting “a wall of separation between Church and State” formally denied the reality of res sacra in temporalibus. He introduced a latent and powerful virus which would eventually be used to diminish and then to wound mortally a theology of discourse in the public arena. It has led to the increasingly secularized states of the American union and their active hostility towards the Catholic Church. Some of these governments are threatening Roman Catholic adoption agencies because of their refusal to select same-sex couples as potential adoptive parents. They are forcing Catholic hospitals to accept medical procedures which are contrary to the dignity of the human person. They are insisting on hiring practices which will destroy the Catholic identity of health and social services under Catholic Church auspices. They have not refrained from coercing the individual conscience. Here the federal and state governments are enshrining the primacy of secular laws over against religious principles. These decisions are the legal and moral progeny of Jefferson’s insistence on debarring personal faith from the public forum. And this is only a beginning. Their seeds can be found in the 1787 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom sponsored and promoted by Jefferson. His self-proclaimed Epicureanism and crypto-utilitarianism furnish the hermeneutical keys for interpreting the opening paragraph of his 1776 Declaration of Independence.
This evening. I will cover the following areas: 1) the narrow, calculative, mathematical mind and its manipulation of the humanum and, more specifically, of human sexuality since 1968; 2) the response of the Church’s magisterium in the encyclical letter of Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae and teachings of later Popes; 3) other Catholic philosophical and theological responses to what John Rawls calls the “embedding module”, namely the increasingly disenchanted world in which we work and pray.
Furthermore, since this month, November, is the time in which the liturgy of the Church reflects on the final things - heaven, hell, purgatory and death, I will be attempting to strengthen the Catholic faithful, as St. John did in the Book of the Apocalypse, against the ever increasing pretensions of the state making itself absolute. For the next several weeks the Book of the Apocalypse will be read at daily Mass. The theme of that final book of the Bible is that the Battle of the Logos has always already been won on Calvary. In the immense conflicts associated with the teaching of Humanae Vitae, the overarching task of the Church is to make manifest for the faithful the apocalyptic victory of the Lamb in our historical time. The Church, the bearer of revelation, insists that the mysterious beginning and earthly end of every member of the human race is illumined by the light of the divine Logos. [“Every human being] comes from the source of light that irradiates him”.[2] Finally, I will be using the word “apocalyptic” in the Christian sense of “expressing the fundamental law of post-Christian world history: the more Christ’s kingdom is manifested as the light of the world......the more it will meet determined opposition.”[3]
1) The apparent triumph of what has been described as “the manipulable arrangement of the scientific-technological world and of the social order proper to this world” [4] over the past several generations.
1968 was the year in which Pope Paul VI issued, Humanae Vitae (HV); it was the long-delayed and long-awaited encyclical letter on transmitting human life. It met with immediate and unprecedented opposition. American theologians were its choral directors. The encyclical arrived in Washington, D. C. in late July 1968. It had to contend with the chaos of assassinations, overseas wars, the conflicts surrounding the Democratic/Republican national conventions, indiscriminate killings, university strikes and riots, growing use of barbiturates, and ubiquitous insurrections within the cities. It was preceded by a one year An Aquarian Exposition, the for- profit, rock-music event staged on a Woodstock dairy farm in New York State. Since then, the chaos has become chronic, more insidious because partially hidden. If 1968 was the year of the year of “America’s Suicide Attempt”, 2008 is the year of America’s exhaustion.
In the intervening 40 years the United States has been thrown upon unlit roads. There have been few, if any, “clearings” (Heidegger’s Lichtung). In 1973 alone the U. S. Supreme Courts’ pro-abortion decision was imposed upon the nation. Its scrupulous meanness has had catastrophic effects upon the identity, unity, and integrity of the American republic. It has undermined respect for human life. We have been horrified and uncomprehending witnesses for over two generations to America’s decline from “a mansion to a dirty house in a gutted world”[5]. Yet honesty compels me to admit that this decision against human life is in historical continuity with the pragmatism on the part of the Fathers of the 1787 Constitutional Convention for the recognition of Black slavery and, following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, in continuity with the same meanness toward Native Americans on the part of the politicians, entrepreneurs and settlers. The 1803 event was a meanness enshrined shortly in the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. The 1973 Court’s alteration has even more radically transformed the way we think about others, especially the least among us. Its inexcusable evasions about the dignity of human life, and their prolongation to the present, have condemned those of us who oppose it to disillusionment and bitter isolation. Both Republican and Democratic partisans have abused rhetoric on this issue. The President-elect is a skillful rhetorician. Civic life has been invaded with an anti-humanism so toxic that it is proving mortal to the body politic.
Nothing has been left untouched by the court’s lethal wand. Social engineering and the price-systems have infected all Americans with a pervasive, technological mind-set. Economics, administration, sexuality, language and, above all, human life are being manipulated by complex strategies of power. “Politics in turn becomes an arena for contention among rival techniques.”[6] Obama’s campaign raised over $600 million, a record, and McCain’s over $300 million. An uncritical, unspoken “metaphysics of presence” dominates American life, both private and public. This new way of thinking has led to the creation of a worldwide colossus, America’s military. It is generally acknowledged that nothing in the nation’s economic, social, or political institutions approaches its influence. Freedom itself has been reduced to power.
Part II of Humanae Vitae, called “Doctrinal Principles”, ends with a description by Pope Paul VI of the “Serious Consequences of the Use of Artificial Methods of Birth Control”. His apocalyptic vision has been prophetic of the epoch we have entered. After 40 years of widespread contraceptive practice, the consequences appear now as the Horsemen of the Apocalypse ravaging what St. Paul described as the “ten logiken latreian hymon - “the humanly proper worship” (Rom 12: 1) of the baptized. The demonic four are the following: marital infidelity; disrespect for woman, governmental despotism in the regulation of births, and the human body manipulated and destroyed as a technological artifact. The four horseman have been responsible for the calamitous meltdown in Western demographics and in real development. Sexual aberration has become a way of life for many. These four shades are insinuating their deathworks upon whole nations and cultures. The Middle East is an obvious example.
Mary Eberstadt in a recent article entitled, “The Vindication of Humanae Vitae”, commented on the prophetic vision of Paul VI, “Contraceptive sex.......is the fundamental social fact of our time.” She continues, “In the years since Humanae Vitae’s appearance, numerous distinguished Catholic thinkers have argued, using a variety of evidence, that each of these predictions [of Pope Paul VI] has been borne out by the social facts.” Human life has been conceded to the arbitrary will of the state.
Governments are dissolving religious and philosophical values and remaking them into the distortions of a dominant, cybernetic model. Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella, Metamorphosis, is not far off the prophetic mark. The good has been drained of ontological content; it has become “a mere cipher, a monadic carrier of information, a unit of cybernetic science”[7]. The British government has recently set as a national goal the manufacture of human life by technology. Its reductive anthropology allows the unprecedented to happen: the radical manipulation of the substance of the biological heritage of the human race. It has allocated £40 million of public monies for stem cell research. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair envisions Britain to be leader of the world in cloning human embryos for research. Potential benefits, he claims, will be huge. Furthermore, a consortium of leading British bankers and scientists have launched a £100 million fund to finance stem cell research. Plans are being made for a national stem cell research institute, costing £16 million. In 2005, the British Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt announced that the Government would spend more than £1 billion on biotechnology by 2008. 'We want to send a signal to scientists that Britain is open for business in some of the most controversial areas,' she said. It is not simply a coincidence that economics and technology dominate. Bankers, financial investors, and MBA executives are mentioned consistently with the scientific midwives of this cultural monstrosity, the nub of which is the forgetting of the question of God.[8]
In the United States President - elect Barack Obama and the Vice-President-elect Joseph Biden, a Catholic, campaigned on a severe anti-life platform. Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University and a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, analyzed America’s descent since 1968-1973 into deathworks by summarizing Obama’s vision. George’s analysis appeared in the journal, Public Discourse. “[Obama] has co-sponsored a bill.....that would authorize the large-scale industrial production of human embryos for use in biomedical research in which they would be killed. In fact, the bill Obama co-sponsored would effectively require the killing of human beings in the embryonic stage that were produced by cloning.”[9]
The assumption under girding the positions of Barack Obama, Joseph Biden, and Tony Blair results from a technological mind-set. Such technologically-driven men eventually may assert that human nature, until recently acknowledged to be a unitary composite of two polarities, body and soul, must not only be changed by technology, but, if necessary, be suppressed. It has proven to be the next logical step after the decision to control and manipulate technologically the origins of human life.
But ‘phusis - nature’, has been essential in Western metaphysics for describing the truth of beings. Martin Heidegger writing about the radical reduction of the goals of medicine to what is technologically possible, and its relation to human phusis, asserted that, in the past even until very recent times, “techne can only cooperate with phusis, can more or less expedite the cure; but as techne it can never replace phusis and itself become the arche of health itself. This could happen only if life as such were to become a ‘technically’ producible artifact. However, at that very moment there would also no longer be such a thing as health, any more than there would be birth and death. Sometimes it seems as if modern humanity is rushing headlong toward this goal of producing itself technologically. If humanity achieves this, it will have exploded itself, i.e., its essence qua subjectivity, into thin air, into a region where the absolutely meaningless is valued as the one and only ‘meaning’ and where preserving this value appears as the human ‘domination’ of the globe. ‘Subjectivity’ is not overcome in this way but merely ‘tranquilized’ in the ‘eternal progress’ of a Chinese - like ‘constancy’. This is the most extreme nonessence in relation to phusis-ousia”[10]
A similar technological mind-set has contributed to the recent economic turmoil. Hedge funds were heavily invested in the technology bubble. The October 21, 2008 issue of The Financial Times read, “Blame it on Harvard: Is the MBA culture responsible for the financial crisis?” Technology and operations represent a major component of the MBA imagination at work at Harvard. The news story described the 100th anniversary celebration of the pre-eminent Harvard Business School. “You would have to have a heart of stone not to be amused by this piquant accident of timing. Here, at the spiritual home of the Masters of the universe, distinguished graduates could only look on as that same universe threatened to collapse.”
2) The response of the Church’s magisterium. The issues now facing us are all entwined within the above-developed linguistic and actual deathworks[11] informing Rawl’s “embedding module”. The response of the Church’s magisterium has been based on the ancient Catholic imagination recaptured happily by Pope John Paul II in his now famous phrase,”the nuptial meaning of the human body created as male and female.” The response includes “being true with the body and the soul.” The title of my talk has been taken from Francois Mauriac. He struggled for many years to overcome the unbending austerity and narrow rigidity resulting from the theological pessimism of the Jansenism of his childhood. In 1931 he overcame this heritage. Thereafter life became a creative drama that engages the fullness of the person by being true with body and soul. Mauriac’s “clearing” was where he discovered the dramatic convergence of form and content. The wholeness of two polarities is manifested within the unity of body and soul in the human person. David L. Schindler in a recent paper on human sexuality summarized his first principle supporting the differentiated unity of body and soul: “The Soul as it were lends its spiritual meaning to the body as body, even as the body then, simultaneously, contributes to what now becomes in man, a distinct kind of spirit: a spirit whose nature it is to be embodied”.[12]
The Church’s response to the technological/scientific hegemony just described has not involved any condemnation of technology or of science as such. Rather is based on her recognition of the present spiritual climate for what it is: A New Ice Age. The great American poet and convert to Catholicism, Wallace Stevens, coined the image. “‘America was always North ....... ‘ where God was in hiding.”[13]. We must turn south and even return to our origins, the desert. How? By recovering the structure of truth in its relation to goodness and beauty. Only a linguistic imagination that is analogical - and ultimately liturgical and sacramental - is capable of such rediscovery. In her devastating critique of the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida, Catharine Pickstock has recaptured the apostrophic voice of Catholicism’s high desert origins, the responsorials first heard in the Sinaitic and Judean wildernesses. The poiesis of the Catholic imagination finds itself in the title of Pickstock’s book, After Writing: the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy.
In his Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis (27), Pope Benedict XVI echoes what is partially anticipated by Pickstock, “The Eucharist, as the sacrament of charity, has a particular relationship with the love of man and woman united in marriage. A deeper understanding of this relationship is needed at the present time. Pope John Paul II frequently spoke of the nuptial character of the Eucharist and its special relationship with the sacrament of Matrimony: ‘The Eucharist is the sacrament of our redemption. It is the sacrament of the Bridegroom and of the Bride.’ Moreover, ‘the entire Christian life bears the mark of the spousal love of Christ and the Church. Already Baptism, the entry into the People of God, is a nuptial mystery; it is so to speak the nuptial bath which precedes the wedding feast, the Eucharist.’ The Eucharist inexhaustibly strengthens the indissoluble unity and love of every Christian marriage. By the power of the sacrament, the marriage bond is intrinsically linked to the Eucharistic unity of Christ the Bridegroom and his Bride, the Church (cf. Eph 5:31-32)”. In Familiaris Consortio, Pope John Paul II called for the celebration of the Sacrament of Marriage within the Eucharistic sacrifice to demonstrate the living connection between the two Sacraments. He thereby made more visible “the rich analogy between the una caro of the Eucharist and the una caro of the spouses through which their gift to one another becomes a particular form of participation in the Body ’given’ and the blood ‘poured out’ of Christ that becomes for the Christian family the inexhaustible font of its identity (with) its missionary and apostolic dynamism.” [14] Here we sense the flavor of Karl Barth’s analogia fidei in explaining the origins and meaning of linguistics.
What are the philosophical/theological foundations for such assertions? What are the meta-anthropological presuppositions for this vision of linguistics, of reality? Two elements should be highlighted: the biblical image of God and the biblical image of man. In his first Encyclical Letter, Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI proposes that the Bible presents us with new image of God - his Trinitarian self-oblation, the self-surrender characteristic of immanent Trinity - and with a new image of man, of which the most sublime sign is the Eucharist. “The Eucharist draws us into Jesus’ act of self-oblation. More than just statically receiving the incarnate Logos, we enter into the very dynamic of his self-giving. The imagery of marriage between God and Israel is now realized in a way previously inconceivable: it had meant standing in God’s presence, but now it becomes union with God through sharing in Jesus’ self-gift, sharing his body and blood” (13). The Eucharist builds up man and woman from within in the image of the Triune God and man learns the complexity of love: St. Augustine’s insight is helpful here: “Capit ut capitur. One grasps in being grasped.”[15] Preeminently in marriage, the Eucharist draws with the cords of love each spouse in the depths of their interiority toward a mutual, total, integrally human, and fruitful self-oblation.[16] The total giving of the Word in the Eucharist is the mirroring of the real language of the human body as created as male and female.
In his Wednesday audiences during the early 1980s Pope John Paul II called spouses to a deeper understanding of the theology of the body. When he described the prophets’ of the Old Testament use of marriage as an analogy of God’s relation to man, the Pope expressed the astonishing insight about the specific “prophetism of the body”[17]. In interpreting this prophetic language, he indicated, one must “reread” the language of the body for “it is the body itself which ‘speaks’; it speaks by means of its masculinity and femininity, it speaks in the mysterious language
of the personal, it speaks ultimately -and this happens frequently - both in the language of fidelity, that is of love, and also in the language of conjugal infidelity, that is of ‘adultery’”.[18] A correct rereading must be done “in truth”. The human body speaks “a ‘language’ of which it is not the author. “Its author is man, who as male and female, husband and wife, correctly rereads the significance of this ‘language’. He rereads therefore the spousal significance of the body as integrally inscribed in the structure of the masculinity or femininity of the personal subject.” In other words, the human body as created by God as masculine/feminine is the Ursprache, the primordial utterance from the beginning. The “nuptial meaning” of the human body originally was the Adamic language.
All of these texts from John Paul II and Benedict XVI refer to the inner dynamic of the relationship between the two spouses. The subject of moral acts is each person, a dual unity of body and soul, a psychosomatic whole. Anything that smacks of a body-soul dualism is firmly rejected. One cannot attempt to free the soul from the body. When a human being seeks the truth and the good, his body is not an afterthought or an accident or a ‘tomb’ for the soul. The language of the human body, rightly reread, is a language by which “the likeness with God shows that the essence and existence of man are constitutively related to God in the most profound manner. This is a relationship that exists in itself, it is therefore not something that comes afterwards and is not added from the outside.” (Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church [CSDC] 109). In the words of the International Theological Commission, “Human bodiliness participates in the imago Dei.”[19] They echo the ancient teaching of St. Irenaeus, “”the flesh ....was formed according to the image of God.”[20]
As Archbishop of Denver, in 1996 I addressed a Pastoral Letter to the people of northern Colorado on the historical importance of a culture formed by the medieval Anglo-Saxon Sarum Rite and by the even more ancient Gregorian Sacramentary. Peoples in such a culture intuitively interpreted reality through the covenantal and bridal relationship of God and creation and of Christ and the Church. Consequently, they would find absolutely inapprehensible the acceptance and promotion of homosexuality activity as a valid moral option. Such activities are a direct assault not only upon the Sacrament of marriage but also upon the Sacrament of the Eucharist.
In light of all of the above realities, I cannot accept the judgement of Fr. Martin Rhonheimer, who in attempting to prevent the passing on of the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, morally justifies the prophylactic use of condoms in a marriage in which one of the spouses is so infected. He summarizes his argument, “The immediate (or proximate) object of one’s choice in such a case is to engage in marital intercourse” and not “to ejaculate into a condom”. I agree with the conclusion of Bishop Anthony Fisher (and many, many other moral theologians) that Rhoneimer’s arguments are not only unconvincing but philosophically untenable and contrary to the Catholic theological and canonical tradition. Bishop Fisher writes about his agreement with the conclusions of [Janet ?] Smith, “Not only is condomized intercourse not a reproductive type of act, it can also be argued that it is not apt for uniting a couple ‘as one flesh’. In the first place the condom places a barrier to complete physical union: while this looks like ordinary sexual intercourse the couple fail, in fact, to touch in the most intimate way; arguably, they do not become ‘one flesh’.”[21]
Rhonheimer dismisses a meta-anthropological objection as a “psychological and perhaps aesthetic” concern, not a moral one. His body/soul dualistic rupture is enunciated with the repulsion he expresses over integral human copulation, “[I find it] intuitively repulsive to make the consummation of marriage dependent upon factual insemination of the woman’s vagina”. Should the wholeness of marriage in its consummation be considered repulsive? The human spirit finds its inner completion only as something honestly externalized, since the human spirit in this life is always already embodied. The body is the externalization of the spirit. The highest expression of human love is embodied in the total self-giving and self-oblation of a couple as “one flesh”.
What renders such repulsion intuitive? A meditation of the “one flesh” found Genesis two? But God described that unity as “very good” in Genesis one. A repulsive intuition before the image of man and woman integrally united as ‘one flesh’ is not only at odds with the biblical revelation but also with the Church’s reflection on that revelation. Pope John Paul II insists on the need for “a correct rereading in truth......of the spousal significance of the body as integrally inscribed in the structure of the masculinity and femininity of the personal subject[22].”
3) Other Catholic philosophical and theological responses to the “embedding module” of John Rawls. I cannot speak highly enough of the reflections on these issues and others by those engaged in the Communio project. According to von Balthasar, Communio’s conversations with the American secularized culture is the project of the Church in the United States. It calls for “the greatest possible radiance in the world by virtue of the closest following of Christ”.[23] Over the decades I have followed and benefitted enormously from reading your quarterly journal. I owe a special indebtedness of gratitude to David L. Schindler, a theologian, and his son, David C. Schindler, a metaphysician and theorist of knowledge. Their clearings have included signs marked “Where we are going!” and “Where we have come from”. I have already cited their works earlier. In these concluding remarks they appear again because they give light for one’s gaze on the mystery of “Being true with Body and Soul”.
David C. Schindler writes that “drama is the structure of being”[24]. From that splendid insight it is reasonable to conclude that the conjugal act itself is a drama that reveals who each individual is and who each is to become. Its principle revelation is not who the individual always was. The meaning of the sacramental act - the summit of the sacrament of marriage in facto esse, is revealed only in the activity of the two spouses. The marital act in its wholeness is a fundamental interpretation or unfolding of the sacrament of marriage.
Each spouse is an actor of truth. Truth has its terminus ad quem, not in the mind of the knower, but rather in a tertium quid, a Gestalt, a structure resulting from the encounter between the appearance of the depths on one hand and the transportation of the seer into the depths on the other. Truth is profoundly relational. It involves the tension of various parts of the whole, the movement from horizontal appearance to the vertical depths. David L. Schindler describes it in this fashion: “The body, always-already informed by soul and spirit and actualized by esse, exhibits an order of love: the body bears within it, already in its creaturely nature as body, the sign of the human being’s constitutive relation to God and to others in God, the sign thus, of a communion of persons and the promise of the gift itself.”[25]
As I mentioned earlier, one of the contested areas of pastoral life today is the predicament of a married couple one of whom has a mortally threatening disease which may be transmitted through the conjugal act. The confusion over this matter is becoming increasingly serious from a pastoral point of view. Fr. Martin Rhoneimer’s position undermines the anthropological teaching of Pope John Paul II and undercuts a coherent Catholic response to the crisis affecting human sexuality.
In concluding, I have underscored that the present crisis is ontological/epistemological and linguistic. At its foundations it is a crisis of signs, which means a crisis that is analogical, liturgical, sacramental. It was a constant theme implicit, sometimes explicit, in the discussions at the recent Synod of Bishops in Rome on the biblical word of God. The participants asked how does religious language refer to reality? The modern response since the Enlightenment has been an “inside-out” approach to epistemological foundations, not an “outside-in”. The Catholic religious education establishment in the USA after the II Vatican Council adopted a similarly subjective-experiential methodology based on an “inside-out” epistemology. Widespread religious skepticism was the outcome. Nothing is recognized as definitive and “meaning itself is forever postponed.” [26] A movement toward “a dictatorship of relativism” is the diagnosis which Pope Benedict XVI has given to this phenomenon.
To counter this nihilism, the discovery of the “Gestalt” character of language, of the word, was pioneered by Hans Urs von Balthasar and brilliantly advanced by many, especially by David C. Schindler in his recent book, Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth: A Philosophical Investigation.
The following conclusions may be drawn from the foregoing. First, we must assert the rootedness of language, including the language of the human body, in ontology. A solidly unabashed metaphysics of being, founded on the real distinction between essence and existence, is essential for any recovery of truth and its objective structure. Postmodernists have rejected the tradition of western metaphysics, the concept of being since Socrates, and the real distinction between essence and existence. Metaphysics of this type is fundamental to any discussion of truth and its nature. Using Plato’s Phaedrus Catharine Pickstock has offered a devastating critique of Jacques Derrida’s theory of Supplementation by writing. She insists that his account “is tantamount to a metaphysics of presence”[27].
Secondly, Catholic scholars must explore the nuptial language founded upon the biblical text and upon the Catholic tradition and enriched by the teaching of John Paul II. Pope Benedict XVI affirmed its substance recently, “The Eucharist, as the sacrament of charity, has a particular relationship with the love of man and woman united in marriage. A deeper understanding of this relationship is needed at the present time. Pope John Paul II frequently spoke of the nuptial character of the Eucharist and its special relationship with the sacrament of Matrimony: ‘The Eucharist is the sacrament of our redemption. It is the sacrament of the Bridegroom and of the Bride.’ Moreover, the entire Christian life bears the mark of the spousal love of Christ and the Church. Already Baptism, the entry into the People of God, is a nuptial mystery; it is so to speak the nuptial bath which precedes the wedding feast, the Eucharist."[28]
Thirdly, an exploration of the relationship between the nuptial meaning of the human body and the Eucharist, as the triform Body of Christ, should be made. Its development by de Lubac and Pickstock would be advanced if accompanied by an awareness of the critical role of the Gregorian Sacramentary and the Sarum Rite had upon the West and especially upon Anglo-Saxon culture. That culture was informed with the perception of the nuptial character of reality. The high medieval poem, In a Valley of this Restless Mind illustrates this. The anonymous English Catholic poet had the same spousal vision of life as that of the modern French Catholic novelist Mauriac when he described the human as “being true with body and soul”.[29] I wish to contrast his cultural vision with that of the dominant political and cultural classes today.
Before doing so, some contextual background of my criticism is important. In early 2003 as our country was preparing to go to war in Iraq, I spoke out against the war and on two occasions condemned the policies of the Bush administration for contributing to the lessening of respect for the dignity of the human person by the use of torture. In the same spirit today as a pastor of souls I do not hesitate again to flag some serious abuses against the natural and divine laws. Our own cultural ambience is not dissimilar from the period of the 1920's when European intellectuals were moving ahead with an understanding of something “new”. Graham Ward’s description of that period highlights elements which characterize the vision of today’s President - elect, the Vice-President - elect, and the legislators elected to assist them in implementing their vision. Graham wrote, “Briefly modernism’s programme was to ‘make it new’. It courted the unconventional and nonconformist in a conscious effort to overthrow the traditional perspective and stock expectations. Its dynamism was aggressive, disruptive and even apocalyptic. Hostility to the.........War fed its anger against the status quo and its desire for a creativity that would be transcultural, transclass and transfrontier.”[30]
On November 4, 2008 a cultural earthquake hit America. Senator Barack Obama and Senator Joseph Biden were elected President and Vice President of the United States together with a significant majority of their Party in the federal Congress supporting their deadly vision of human life. Americans were unanimous in their joy over the significance of the election of a Black President. However, if Obama, Biden and the new Congress are determined to implement the anti-life agenda which they spelled out before the election, I foresee the next several years as being among the most divisive in our nation’s history. If their proposals should be initiated and enacted, it would be impossible for the American bishops to repeat in the future what their predecessors described the United States in 1884 as “this home of freedom.”[31]
While reflecting about the profoundly negative impact of Obama’s vision on the humanum (and also of Biden’s), I recalled how current are the reflections of Mauriac upon his contemporary, an influential European author. Even though Mauriac disagreed with him on almost every point, he acknowledged his great intelligence and personal attraction. “But under all that grace and charm there was a tautness of will, a clenched jaw, a state of constant alertness to detect and resist any external influence which might threaten his independence. A state of alertness? That is putting it mildly: beneath each word he wrote, he was carrying on sapping operations against the enemy city where a daily fight was going on.”[32]
Similar characteristics were evident in Senator Obama’s talk before Planned Parenthood supporters on July 17, 2007 - tautness of will, a clenched jaw, etc. - where he asserted, “We are not only going to win this election but also we are going to transform this nation.........The first thing I will do as President is to sign The Freedom of Choice Act........I put Roe at the center of my lesson plan on reproductive freedom when I taught Constitutional Law...........On this issue I will not yield..” During a town meeting in March 2008 in Johnstown, Pa., he spoke with equal determination on the necessity of universal sex education for preteens and teens, “I don’t want my daughters punished with a baby.” The President - elect did not qualify in any way the methods his single daughters might employ in the event they needed to avoid being “punished with a baby”, that is, giving birth to his grandchild. Obama’s vision is modernist and rooted in the Enlightenment. The content and rhetoric of Obama and Biden have elements similar to those described earlier: aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic.[33]
Catholics weep over Barack Obama’s words. We weep over the violence concealed behind his rhetoric and that of Joseph Biden and what appears to be that of the majority of the incoming Congress. What should we do with our hot, angry tears of betrayal?
First, our tears are agonistic. Secondly, we must acknowledge that the model for our tears is ancient. Over the next few years, Gethsemane will not be a marginal garden to us. A model, I suggest, is medieval. With an anonymous author, our restless minds search in a dark valley during this exhausting year. With him as our guide, we find a bleeding man on a hill sitting under a tree “in huge sorrow”. It is Christ, the Bridegroom of the Church and of mankind.
Thirdly, we listen to the words of Christ as narrated by our mediaeval ancestor. Jesus pointing to his gloved hands says that these gloves were given him when he sought his Bride. They are not white but red, embroidered with blood. He says that his spouse brought them and they will not come off. Fourthly, we focus our attention on the constantly repeated refrain of the Bridegroom and the reason for his “huge sorrow”, “Quia amore langueo - Because I am sick for love”. And finally, we find that before this vision of the wounded young man, our frustration and tears become one with his “huge sorrow”and we make his love for the unfaithful Bride whom he seeks and never fails, our own. I will close with a citation of this spousal model. It serves as a measure of what we need to recapture for the whole Church in 2008:
Upon this hil Y fond a tree,
Undir the tree a man sittynge,
From heed to foot woundid was he,
His herte blood Y sigh bledinge:
A semeli man to ben a king, (handsome enough to be a king)
A graciouse face to loken unto;
I askide whi he had peynynge, (suffering)
He seide, "Quia amore langueo. (Because I am sick for love).
I am Truelove that fals was nevere.
My sistyr, Mannis Soule, Y loved hir thus.
Bicause we wolde in no wise discevere, (because in no way would we part company)
I lefte my kyngdom glorious.
I purveide for hir a paleis precious; (prepared, a palace)
Sche fleyth; Y folowe. Y soughte hir so,
I suffride this peyne piteuous,
Quia amore langueo.
In the autumn of 2008 we must begin anew with that sentiment of our medieval brother. Quia amore langueo. With Jesus we are sick because of love toward those with whom we are so tragically and unavoidably at variance. The reader has now become one with the narrator who is addressed in line one as “Dear Soul”. As Humanae Vitae with the whole Catholic tradition teaches, we are to “be true with body and soul”.
James Francis Cardinal Stafford
(Note: Address given by J. Francis Cardinal Stafford before the International Conference to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute on Marriage and the Family at the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. Due to the lack of time the above discourse was given substantially as it appears here although in a somewhat abbreviated form from written notes and typed materials.)

[1]Francois Mauriac, cited by David C. Schindler, op. cit. 311, 324.
[2]Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theodrama: Theological Dramatic Theory, IV: The Action, ( San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 126.
[3]Ibid. 21.
[4]Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, Revised an expanded edition, ed. By David Farrell Krell, (Cornwall: Routledge, 2004), 435.
[5]Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, (New York: Alfred A, Knopf, 1991), 158. Abridged and cited by Helen Vendler, Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire, (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 34.
[6]Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, translated from the French by John Wilkinson, (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), vii.
[7] David Farrell Krell, ed. Basic Writings: Martin Heidegger, (Cornwall: Routledge, 2004), 428.
[8]George Steiner, Real Presences, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 230.
[9]October 15, 2008
[10]Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. by William McNeill, (Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1998), 197.
[11]Philip Rief, My Life among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority,
(Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2006).
[12]David L. Schindler, Persons, Body, and Biology: The Anthropological Challenge of Homosexuality, unpublished paper, 2008, 3.
[13]Alan Filreis, cited by Charles M. Murphy, Wallace Stevens: A Spiritual Journey in a Secular Age, (New York, Paulist Press, 1997), 72.
[14]Giancarlo Grandis, in Sacramentum Caritatis: Studi e commenti sull’Esortazione Apostolica postsinodale di Benedetto XVI, ed. by R. Nardin-G- Tangorra, (Rome, Lateran University Press, 2008), 277.
[15]St. Augustine.
[16]Pope Paul VI, Encyclical Letter, Humanae Vitae, 1968, 9.
[17]Pope John Paul II, The Theology of Marriage and Celibacy, (Boston, Daughters of St. Paul, 1986), 309.
[18]Ibid. 311.
[19]International Theological Commission, Communion and Stewardship, Human Persons Created in the Image of God, (2004), 31. (cited by David L. Schindler. Ibid., 3).
[20]Irenaeus, Adversus haereses, V, 6, 1.
[21]Anthony Fisher, Cooperation, Condoms and HIV, unpublished paper, 2008, 15-16.
[22]Pope John Paul II, Ibid. 318.
[23]Hans Urs von Balthasar, My Work in Retrospect, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), trans. by Cornelia Capol, 58.
[24]David C. Schindler, Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth: A Philosophical Investigation, (United States of America: Fordham University Press, 2004), 19.
[25]David L. Schindler, Ibid. 8.
[26]Michael Drolet, The Postmodern Reader: Foundational Texts, (London, Routledge, 2004), 23.
[27]Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy, (Oxford, Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1998), 20.
[28]Pope Benedict XVI, Post Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Sacramentum Caritatis, 2007, § 27.
[29]Francois Mauriac, cited by David C. Schindler, op. cit. 311, 324.
[30]GrahamWard, Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology, (Cambridge: Cambridge University House, 1998), 7-8.
[31]“Pastor Letter Issued by the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore”, 1884, found in Pastoral Letters of the United States Catholic Bishops, Volume I:1792-1940, (Washington, United States Catholic Conference, 1983), 216.
[32]Francois Mauriac, “The Death of Andre Gide”, taken from Gide, a Collection of Critical Essays, (Prentice Hall, 1970).
[33]“My use of the word “apocalyptic” would be emphatically biblical, rooted in the understanding of the Book of the Apocalypse.