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Is the Unborn Human a Person?

2008-02-02T13:23:00.000-08:00

Is the Unborn Human a Person ?

Personhood depends upon the nature of the human being.

We determine the nature of thhuman being by examining his powers and activities.
Human beings have many powers in common with non-human beings.
Both beings show metabolic activity, growth, procreation, ability to feel pain, ability to defend against pain, consciousness of things outside themselves, pleasure from fulfilled desires, capacity for self-movement and a desire for sustenance indicated by hunger.

Powers that humans do not share with non-human animals include the preoccupation of humans with transcendental questions, questions about the absolute, the infinite, the eternal, the unconditional: the perfection of species : questions about their identity, their destiny, their ideals, questions about Truth, Love, Goodness, Beauty and Being.
Human progress towards perfection of these human powers is guided by an intrinsic guiding force, referred to as the Soul.

A Person can be defined as a human being who possesses an intrinsic guiding force towards fulfillment towards unconditional, perfect and infinite Truth, Love, Goodness, Beauty and Being This is the nature of man. This is human nature.
Since every being - human and non-human - should be treated with a dignity commensurate with its nature, persons should be treated with an unconditional dignity commensurate with their nature, a nature directed towards unconditional Truth, Love, Goodness, Beauty and Being.
Such unconditional dignity acknowledges the intrinsic value of a human being and it is this dignity that is the basis for inalienable rights. This dignity is intrinsic to the person and is not conferable by the State or other outside force. The role of the State is to recognise, protect and promote this dignity and these rights.

Doing harm to persons would violate the Silver Rule which says ‘Do no harm’ and would constitute violation of his unconditional dignity. The greatest harm done to persons in human history has derived from the assumption that certain human beings wers not persons. Examples include slavery, genocide, racism, and totalitarian persecutions. And now abortion and euthanasia.
Abortion proponents had to divorce personhood from human life because they could not deny that a human life existed at conception.
It was clearly a life because it was metabolizing, growing, sub-dividing and surviving : it was clearly a human life because it possessed the complete genetic structure of a unique human being.
With the Roe/Wade ruling and others that followed has come the legal denial of the personhood of all unborn human beings. Unborn human beings are now at the mercy of the choice of their mothers – the choice between the infant’s life and death.

Abortion is not the only consequence of these legal rulings.
Since it was contended by abortion promoters that rights belonged only to ‘persons’ the court took upon itself to define when personhood occurred. Two effects followed. The hitherto accepted objective basis of human personhood was undermined and the courts were able to assume – for the first time - the unprecedented power to decide when personhood and therefore inalienable rights exist.
The objective basis for definition of personhood was now superceded by subjective bases. From now on, personhood and therefore inalienable rights can be defined in arbitrary, subjective ways at the discretion of the State and the legal system. If the State can establish criteria for definition of personhood, it will be free to isolate certain categories of people as non-persons as it has with the right to life of the unborn. It can decide that a person has to possess a certain I.Q. level, have a reasonable degree of independence, a minimum quality of life or be free from certain diseases or disability.

The evil of subjectivising personhood is illustrated by abortion proponents claiming that mothers have the right to custody over their own bodies, that mothers have liberty-rights over the life-rights of their unborn. Here we see an attempt to place liberty-rights at higher level than the right to life. How can this be reasonable when its obvious that without life all other rights are irrelevant. Life has to take precedence. The right to life trumps all other rights.

The subjectivization of personhood and inalienable rights has implications much broader than the facilitation of abortion and euthanasia.
The citizen’s basic, inalienable rights, hitherto taken for granted, are now no longer assured by the legal system and indeed are seen to be under constant attack by powerful totalitarian forces.
What can be done?
The evil of abortion cannot be eradicated unless and until the personhood of the unborn is clearly established legally and constitutionally and unborn human life is once again protected by the 14th Amendment.
We must refuse to subordinate an objective criterion to a subjective criterion.
We must resolve rights conflicts through use of the moral necessity criterion whenever possible.
In times of uncertainty, we should err in favour of according rights and personhood rather than in denying them.

See "Healing the Culture." By Robt Spitzer

2007-10-17T20:54:00.000-07:00

Desires and the Happiness Cultural Levels :

In our daily lives we are, for all intents and purposes, living out our desires. We desire certain things because we think that their fulfilment will bring us happiness.
Our desires can be at various levels from low to high.
Examples of low-level desires would be the desire for food, belongings and for the pleasures of the senses (Happiness Level 1), and satisfaction of the ego, (Level 2).
Examples of high-level desires would be the desire to promote the welfare of others and of the community (Level 3) and the desire to do God’s Will, whatever it may entail (Level 4).
We can now see that happiness level depends upon desire level.
The presence of higher-level desires does not rule out the coexistant presence of lower level desires. It merely means that fulfilment of the latter is subservient to fulfilment of the former and is not of paramount importance.

When we have desires we act towards their fulfilment and this fulfilment brings a corresponding measure of happiness.
In those persons where pleasure of the senses is paramount, fulfilment is transient and therefore the happiness it brings is transient : we can enjoy the pleasure of food only during its ingestion : we can enjoy our belongings only while we are able to use them, we can enjoy the pleasure of sexual relations only transiently. In these cases, however, there CAN be a more enduring element.
By taking food we can also enjoy the more lasting pleasure of the good health it will bring if we eat properly. In the case of the sexual act, we may enjoy the more durable pleasure, love, committment and happiness of the marriage union within which it should occur and, if God wills it, enjoy the long-lasting joy of the fruit of the act, the conception and birth of a child.

In the case where our desire to promote our egos is paramount, fulfilment will depend upon a realistic balance between the nature of our desires and the qualities we possess that can operate to bring those desires to fulfilment. Our desires must be appropriate to our natural abilities to achieve those desires. Fulfilment tends to be more long-lasting than transient and therefore the happiness therefrom tends to be long-lasting. Fulfilment, however, may be difficult to attain because our desires may be in conflict with the desires, aims and objectives of others and frustration, suspicion, anger, and even downright hostility may prevail to hinder fulfilment.

In those cases where desire to promote community welfare is paramount - to the extent that there is less the element of seeking personal satisfaction, less the element of competition and more the element of cooperation - frustration, suspicion, anger and hostility will probably not be significant and each advance towards the common welfare will produce a corresponding measure of satisfaction and happiness. These will be instances of more durable happiness.

In cases where a paramount desire to further the will of God in our personal and public lives exists, seeking the pleasures of the senses, acquiring possessions and furthering the demands of the ego will not be prominent desires. Happiness will come with the knowledge that one is living in accordance with God’s will with the hope of achieving unending and perfect happiness in a future life. Such hope will minimize the effect of the troubles, frustrations, disappointments and failures that one may experience in this temporary life and thereby allow a significant measure of long-lasting happiness in the interim on earth.

Ethics and the Cultural Levels

The 3rd and 4th Cultural Levels are oriented towards ethical objectives.
Where Levels 1 and 2 are oriented towards bringing the outer world under the control of the inner world by possession, mastery, success, admiration, and other forms of comparison, Levels 3 and 4 are oriented towards bringing the inner world –– the world of thoughts, words, creativity and actions - into the outer world to make it a better place.
In contrast to civil laws which are a form of external control, ethics is a form of internal control, personal laws and self-discipline that seeks to orient human behaviour towards what is true and good.
What is good.?
Some ethicists view good as that which has beneficial consequences for a particular person or group : this is the utilitarian or consequentialist view. Others view good as a quality intrinsic to human intentions and actions : the deontologist view. Both views seek a set of guidelines that will allow persons to optimally achieve the good in their lives. In view of this, ethics may be considered an essentially Level 3 or 4 enterprise.
It is important to make our ethical assumptions explicit since it is clear that clarity of one’s thoughts and intentions helps in actualizing the good .
Those with Level 1 and 2 perspectives tend to hold implicitly rather than explicitly any ethical assumptions they have and therefore they find it difficult to actualize them towards good actions. They will be more interested in living out the Silver Rule – which says “Do not do unto others the harm you would not wish that others do to you” rather than the Golden Rule which says “ Do unto others the good you would like them to do to you ”. The first is ‘Avoid Harm’ while the second is ‘Do Good’. The difficulty Level 1 and 2 perspectives have in understanding the Golden Rule, is that it is essentially contributory and oriented away from self and towards others.

In Level 1 and 2 persons, the emotional vices of the ‘comparison game’ – ego protection, inferiority, jealousy, fear, suspicion, and emptiness - can get in the way of actualizing the good intentions of true ethics. This Level 1 and 2 emotional overwhelming of the contributory desire proper to Levels 3 and 4, makes ethics less clear, less focused, less dynamic and less efficacious. With this failure, ethical relativism may seem to Level 1 and 2 persons to be the only solution.

We must bear in mind that all persons possess - in relation to the cultural elements of Happiness, Success, Quality of Life, Personhood, Love, Suffering, Ethics and Freedom, - intrinsic, inbuilt desires towards achieving the fulfilment of all four levels.
The four perspectives will vary in their predominance in different persons : some will predominate in Level One desire orientation, some in Level 2, some in Level 3 and some in Level 4, but all will have at least a minimum of each kind of orientation.
In the case of those in Levels 1 and 2 predominance, their handicap is that they tend to lack the interest or drive needed to move towards the higher levels and their ultimate end and aim in life remains limited to achieving Level 1 and 2 objectives : they are suffering from Cultural Deficiency Disease.
It is important again to note that no one is fixed in a lower cultural level and all have a capability to move to higher levels of predominance if given the requisite environmental encouragement and the grace of God needed for its accomplishment.
From infancy, childhood and youth, the individual’s cultural development is influenced by his training in the family, in the school and in the local neighbourhood environment. If these developmental influences do not impress upon youth, implicitly and explicitly, the importance of striving towards higher level fulfilment, then the general cultural level of society will reflect orientation towards the lower Level 1 and 2 objectives.

Successful movement to the higher levels, especially to Level 4, can be very difficult.
It will require the acceptance, adoption, practice and habituation of the seven major virtues – humility, generosity, self-control, patience, moderation, magnanimity and commitment - opposites of the seven deadly sins of pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth.
In the process, it will be difficult at first to remember Level 3 and 4 attitudes inasmuch as Level 2, not Level 3 or 4 attitudes, are the default attitudes, the attitudes of habit, the attitudes one falls back on easily.
To make Level 3 and 4 attitudes the default attitudes, to place them, not in our conscious awareness but in our subconsciousness, requires effort over time and the conversion of new virtuous choices into virtuous habits. Changing choice to habit by frequent practice is the conscious, effort-filled, part of changing attitudes : exercising established habits is the subconscious, relatively effort-free, part.
In the period between making the conscious choice and establishing the subconscious habit, there may well be severe conflict between Level 2 and Level 3/4 propensities which might cause the effort to be abandoned as being too difficult or impossible.

Where ethical relativism and utilitarianism prevails in society, this ineffective form of ethics, this failing system of internal controls, must, over time, to avoid anarchy, be replaced by a system of exterior controls in the form of civil laws. Society will then be forced to use the State’s legal system to protect the rights of individuals from attack by those lacking authentic ethics, those lacking in true interior principles. Self-discipline will be replaced by State discipline and the greater the cultural deficiency, the greater will be the State’s involvement. This is a prime reason for the growth of the Leviathon State. Therefore, true ethical norms built on personal self-restraint, rather than collective civil law, must be the basis of a healthy culture.

Though laws are needed to protect the rights of the unborn and others at risk now and in the interim, the Pro-life Movement must work towards restoring the lost ethical norms by converting the majority of people now apparently possessing a predominance of Level 1 and 2 perspectives to Level 3 and 4 cultural dominance. By thus restoring the ethical norms, we will be restoring the Culture of Life and defeating the Culture of Death.

Ref: Healing the Culture by Robt. J.Spitzer. S.J. PhD.

2007-10-07T21:29:00.000-07:00

The Fall and Redemption

Adam before the Fall possessed all the essences of human nature.
In addition, he was given bodily immortality as a special gift.
He was in intimate union with God: ( He was in sanctifying grace) and possessed free will in his soul : he was free to obey or disobey God.
He and Eve were in a state of human happiness.
(The Angels had undergone a similar test of their fidelity)
Adam’s obligation was to know, love and serve God on earth so that he could be happy with Him forever in Heaven.
However, Adam’s free-will had to undergo a test that would prove his fidelity to God.

Did he love and would he serve God.? : was he prepared to obey God or would he choose the Evil One?
In response to Eve’s urgings and Satan’s tempting, Adam disobeyed a clear command of God.

Following the Fall Adam still possessed all the essences of human nature.
However, he was no longer in intimate union with God.
His intellect was darkened.
His will was weakened.
The gift of bodily immortality was taken back from him and he was now faced with the inevitability of bodily death.

Adam’s descendants suffered from Adam’s rebellion by the same loss of union with God, darkening of intellect, weakening of will, and loss of the gift of bodily immortality.
Why did Adam’s descendants have to be implicated in Adam’s sin?
Because they too have free will and have to choose God rather than Satan. Like Adam they too have to be tested.

But why was Adam tested only once and condemned while his descendants have life-times of unknown durations to be tested and to show their love for God.? Adam and (the Angels) were tested once only because they possessed perfection of intellect and will and had no excuse for their infidelity : no weakness that might mitigate their crime.

Despite his mitigating excuse, man after Adam was not fit to enter into close union with God. This would require that man’s failures and sins had to be repented by man and forgiven by God. Simple repentence by man, however, would not be enough to satisfy God’s justice because of the enormity of the offence and insult to God that every sin constitutes.
Redemption was needed whereby God, the Son, would become human and on behalf of man would seek forgiveness for all of humanity’s sins. As it is God who thus acts on man’s behalf, forgiveness (following individual repentance) is assured to all who seek it in the prescribed manner.

It is not known what would happen to Adam and his descendants when they died if Redemption had not occurred. Would each and everyone through history go to Hell or some other place like Purgatory since Heaven was closed to them?
With the reality of the unlimited love God has for everyone He created, one can understand why He would do everything necessary to save us, everything except interference with our free will.

2006-08-21T11:15:00.000-07:00

A Moral Way To Obtain Embryonic Stem-cells - or is it?

Santorum-Specter Bill S-2754, is promoted as a moral way to obtain embryonic stem cells. Let’s see what is involved.

Normal Embryogenesis:Stage 1: Involves one ovum and 300 million sperms.
Fertilization begins when the sperm enters the ovum and it ends with the creation of the zygote/embryo.The process takes about 24 hours.
The sperm penetrates the zona pellucida of the ovum and binds to receptor proteins in the zona. The process takes about 20 minutes. The neuclei of the ovum and the sperm fuse and when fusion is complete, fertilization is ended culminating in creation of a zygote/embryo.

Stage 2:
The zygote/embryo now begins to cleave, each division forming two cells called blastomeres. The first cell division begins a series of divisions with each division occurring approx every 20 hours. Each blastomere within the zona pellucida becomes smaller and smaller with each subsequent division . When cell division has generated about 16 cells, the zygote / embryo is called a morula/embryo. It now leaves the Fallopian tube and enters the uterine cavity, 3-4 days after fertilization.

Stage 3:
The morula /embryo continues cell division and within the resulting mass of cells a cavity called a blastocele is formed. Cells flatten and compact on the inside of the cavity while the outer zona pellucida remains the same size. The structure is now called a blastocyst. The presence of a blastocyst indicates that two cell types have appeared – the embryoblast cells forming the inner cell mass of approx.30 cells on the inside of the blastocele and the trophoblast cells forming the outer cell mass on its outside. From the embryoblast collection of cells the embryo continues its development. Within this collection of embryoblasts are found the embryonal stem cells. The trophoblast cells go on to develop the placenta.
With fertilization, a new entity appears that is directed by an intrinsic teleological process towards formation of an adult person. This process of formation is a continuum: no single moment can be found in which a substantial change occurs, a change that allows us to speak of a human being only after this moment and not before.

Neuclear-Transfer Embryogenesis - Cloning:

In regular cloning an adult body cell - a skin cell in most cases - and a woman’s ovum are taken. The neucleus is removed from the ovum, discarded and replaced by the neucleus of the skin cell. The result is a cell with a full complement of chromosomes, a cell that is alive and that constitutes a cloned cell, an embryo. Since human cells are used, the embryo has to be accepted as human, as a human person. After the neuclear transfer to the ovum cytoplasm, a genetic readjustment or reprogramming has to occur, mediated by elements within the ovum cytoplasm. Growth, development, and maturation of the embryo then proceeds in a manner identical to that which occurs in a normal pregnancy.

Traditional Embryonic Stem-cell Harvesting:

Embryos from IVF are taken at the blastocyst stage at 4-5 days old.
Human embryonic stem cells are isolated by transferring the inner cell mass of 30 cells onto a culture dish containing culture medium. The cells divide and spread over the surface of the dish. Over the course of several days, the cells of the inner cell mass proliferate and begin to crowd the culture dish. They are gently removed and plated onto several fresh culture dishes. The process of replating the cells is repeated many times and for many months and is called subculturing. After 6 months or more, the original 30 cells of the inner cell mass yield millions of embryonic stem cells.
Embryonic stem cells that have proliferated in cell culture for six or more months without differentiating, are pluripotent and appear genetically normal and are referred to as an embryonic stem cell line .
As long as these cells in culture are grown under certain conditions, they can remain undifferentiated/ unspecialized. But if they are allowed to clump together, they form embryoid bodies and begin to differentiate spontaneously. They can form muscle cells, nerve cells, and many other cell types.
To generate cultures of specific types of differentiated cells – e.g. heart, blood or nerve cells - scientists change the composition of the culture medium, alter the surface of the culture dish or modify the cells by inserting specific genes. They have established some basic protocols for the directed differentiation of embryonic stem cells into some specific cell types. It is hoped that the resulting differentiated cells may be used to treat certain diseases at some time in the future.

Cell Potency:

Totipotency:
This refers to the ability of a single cell to express the full genome in the cells to which it gives rise by cell division. Thus fertilized eggs (zygotes) are totipotent because they produce a population of differentiated cells forming an entire organism, whereas under normal circumstances , human skin cells for example, are not totipotent, because, in culture, they divide to produce only more skin cells and not nerve, muscle or other end-stage cells. Totipotency is the ability of all living cells potentially to regenerate whole new individuals. The problem is how to trigger them to do it. All living cells have the necessary information but not the trigger to change the development. Totipotent cells specialize into pluripotent cells that can give rise to most, but not all, of the tissues necessary for fetal development.
Totipotent cells also are able to differentiate into cells of the placenta.

Pluripotency:
Pluripotent cells have the potency to develop into the primitive layers of the developing fetus – the endoderm, the mesoderm and the ectoderm.
From the endoderm develops the stomach, intestinal tract and the lungs.
From the mesoderm develops the muscle cells, bone cells, bone marrow and blood cells and the urogenital tract.
From the ectoderm develops the epidermal tissues and the nervous system.
Pluripotent cells can eventually specialize into any bodily tissue but cannot themselves develop into a human being.
Pluripotent cells undergo further specialization into multipotent cells.

Multipotency:
Multipotent cells are committed to give rise to cells that have a particular function for example. multipotent marrow stem cells that give rise to red cells, white cells and platelets of the blood.

Unipotency:
Unipotent cells are stem cells that can differentiate into only one type of tissue or cell type. Skin cells are the best example.The unipotent cell has the unique property of self-renewal, a feature that distinguishes it from non-stem cells.
In recent experiments, scientists have been able to persuade marrow stem cells to behave like neurons or brain cells and there is continuing research to see if it is possible to make multipotent cells into pluripotent cells.

Altered Neuclear Transfer Embryogenesis (ANT)
Prior to the OAR procedure, scientists were experimenting with cloned cells in a procedure called ANT - altered neuclear transfer. This was proposed by Dr Hurlbut. Prior to neuclear transfer they were disabling a gene in the skin cell neucleus that in the embryo would code for a developmentally-important protein that regulates gene expression in the nucleus. It appears that the gene being disabled codes for formation of the placenta from trophoblast cells. Obviously without a placenta, the embryo formed would not be able to develop or survive because of lack of effective nutrition.
This created but disabled embryo developed normally until the blastocyst stage which is reached 4-6 days after neuclear transfer. Because of the gene disabling, the blastocyst had a disorganised, disabled outer layer while the inner layer of cells which contains the stem cells was normal. These stem cells were removed and used as embryonic stem cells.

Oocyte-Assisted Reprogramming. (OAR)
Since there was much opposition to the ANT procedure of creating and disabling an embryo, a new approach was conceived by Hurlbut and applied to mouse models by Meissner and Jaenisch. – the OAR procedure.or oocyte-assisted reprogramming.
Senate bill S-2754 promoted this procedure.
This new approach is essentially a case of cloning where genetic engineering over-expresses a protein called NANOG normally present in the transferred skin neucleus. NANOG has been shown in mice to promote and maintain pluripotency and prevent differentiation into different cell maturity levels.
NANOG is a transscription factor critically involved in the self-renewal of undifferentiated embryonic cells. It maintains pluripotency. Scientists have yet to identify the signal that turns NANOG on, early in an embryo’s existence. .
Proponents claim that the presence of NANOG and re-programming factors in the ovum cytoplasm causes the neucleus of the entity produced by altered nuclear transfer, to undergo retrogressive de-differentiation from the unipotent, differentiated state of the skin neucleus, to an immature multi-potent state, and then to an even more immature pluripotent state. They claim that it will never reach the ultimately-immature totipotent stage where the cell has the potentiality to differentiate into all final end-stage cells. Proponents claim further that such pluripotent stem cells can never constitute an embryo as they would be unable to produce all the end-stage, specific, differentiated cells needed to constitute a human body . No embryo is created during this entire procedure, they claim, since the cells never reach the totipotent stage. Finding proof for this hypothesis is the crux of the problem. There is no proof for this claim and it remains a hypothesis thus far.
Experience with mouse embryos shows that NANOG normally functions within a certain developmental context. Its expression outside this context will not lead to stem cells but instead will lead to a grossly-defective embryo that quickly dies or to a totally unaffected normal embryo which continues to develop..

Questions:
Will we not require more assurance that the OAR procedure can indeed produce cells that are not human embryos. Can we simply assume that over-expression of NANOG and genetic reprogramming in the transferred skin neucleus would indeed lead to a non-embryo entity that would be able to proceed along the usual path of development and be able to generate a form of non-embryo ‘blastocyst’ from which stem cells could eventually be derived? As yet there seems to be no scientific assurance that it would.

Can we assume that absence of totipotency implies absence of embryo formation?

Since up to the formation of the ‘blastocyst’ in OAR, the created entity must go through developmental stages that are indistinguishable from those of normal embryogenesis, are we not creating a cloned embryo and interfering with its true development. Are we not interfering unjustifiably with a living human embryo?

Where will all the womens’ ova come from? Might the practice not lead to trafficking in human ova?. Will ovum extraction procedures not place donor women at surgical risk?.

The Essence of Human Life

2006-07-26T20:27:00.000-07:00

Part One

The essential, perhaps the only, elements of the soul are the Intellect and the Will.
The Intellect:
The basic function of the Intellect is to receive, process and utilise knowledge.
The ultimate function of the Intellect is to know God in His fullness.
Knowledge is of two types - natural and supernatural.
Natural knowledge enables man in his Will to carry out successfully the natural functions and responsibilities of his life on earth.
Supernatural knowledge enables man in his Will to love : to love God by obeying His commandments and to love his neighbour by wishing him well and never wishing him harm.
Knowledge has to be true knowledge : false knowledge, in the form of errors, propaganda and lies, is harmful to man.
In man, knowledge is acquired in two ways : indirectly via the senses, especially those of vision and hearing and directly by inspiration from the Holy Spirit (or as temptation from Satan)
In God’s Plan for man, it is man’s responsibility to use his Intellect to acquire the natural and supernatural knowledge about God that has been provided by Revelation.
Revelation has been given to us in the Scriptures and Tradition.
The Scriptures and Tradition are to be found in the Bible and in the Teachings of the Church which together comprise Revelation, the Deposit of Faith.
Some knowledge about God cannot be understood by our limited Intellect : such knowledge is referred to as Mystery : we accept a Mystery by the process of Faith.
St Paul used the word Faith to mean total adherence of a person to God, which requires that : if God speaks a truth, we believe it in our minds : if He makes a promise, we are sure He will keep it : if He gives a command, we will obey : all done in Love which is a product of the Will, not an emotion.
True Faith, being the Truth, cannot conflict with right Reason.
The Cross embodies both Reason and Faith, with Reason the horizontal limb and Faith the vertical limb.

The Will :
The basic function of the Will is to act in accordance with man’s true good, man’s happiness, as revealed to him by an Intellect open to natural and supernatural Truth.
The ultimate function of the Will is eternal happiness - to love God and our neighbour for God’s sake and thus to secure permanent happiness, which come only from total union with God, our final end.

Righteousness :
Is defined as concern for the objective order, for objective morality, for objective justice.
Jesus underwent His Passion as the means of restoring the objective order of Justice unbalanced by original and actual sins.
In civil law, when a person expresses repentence for a crime, that does not lead to his release from penalty. No, he customarily receives appropriate punishment as a means of restoring the balance of the objective order, unbalanced by his crime.
So also does our patient acceptance of suffering during life, and/or the sojourn in Purgatory after death, act towards restoring the balance of the same objective order of Justice unbalanced by our personal sins.

Delights, Joys and Pleasures :
Man can enjoy bodily and spiritual delights, joys and pleasures - delights, joys and pleasures in the body and in the soul.
His soul can experience far greater pleasure than the body but also far greater suffering.
Every delight results from happiness or increments(s) of happiness.
A person is delighted, joyful, when he possesses, recalls from his memory the possession of, or anticipates the possession of, some fitting good, a fitting good being defined as happiness or a share in happiness, real or apparent.
These delights that result from happiness, the perfect good, since they result from happiness, cannot be themselves the essence of happiness but only consequences of it.

Happiness :
Is man’s last end and purpose. It is spiritual, not physical. It is man’s proper and perfect good. It is a state, a perfection of the soul, an inherant good of the soul. It is the reward of virtue.
Happiness satisfies of itself. Man having gained complete happiness cannot be lacking in any needful good.
Man attains his happiness through his soul. However, even the soul is not it’s own final end. If it were it would be like a moving arrow being it’s own target.
It cannot be achieved in it’s fullness in this life though it can be enjoyed incrementally and transiently in the form of spiritual pleasures and delights
Since man is not a supreme good, a supreme and final end and purpose, he must therefore be ordained to something else as his final end and purpose. This final end and purpose cannot be for some good of the body, since man consists of soul as well as body and the existence of the body depends upon the existence of the soul, the body being merely the matter existing for the sake of soul which is the form.
As the body is therefore ordained for and secondary to the soul, the goods of the soul are preferred to those of the body and it is impossible for man’s happiness to consist only in the goods, i.e. delights, of the body.
There is much difference between happiness and contentment. Happiness is objective while contentment is subjective. The lower the animal the more merely content it is : the slug is more content than the cat and the cat more content than the human.
Man is ordained to happiness through principles that are within him. Happiness on earth is incompatible with evil. Happiness and evil cannot co-exist in a person’s soul. Happiness, being a spiritual good, can exist only in a soul in the state of grace.
God, man’s first efficient cause, is also his final cause, his ultimate end and purpose, his final complete and permanent happiness.
It is only when man enjoys the Beatific Vision that he can be fully and permanently happy.
“Thou hast made us for Thyself Oh Lord and our hearts are ever restless until they rest in Thee”.

Adam’s Endowment :
Adam was born with the essentials of human nature - and more.
The essence, the essentials, of human nature included the Intellect and the Will, the two essential elements of the Soul.
His Intellect possessed the ability to acquire information to use in the pursuit of knowledge and with this information, the ability to reason.
His Will possessed the ability to make decisions relating to various actions, appetites and desires.
God’s plan for Adam and his descendants required man to use his Intellect to seek Truth, natural and supernatural, and to use his Will to love : to love God by subjecting his will to God’s will and to love his neighbour by seeking his well-being and never wishing him harm.
The essence of human nature does not include grace or the virtues - love, goodness, truth, humility, generosity, chastity, or temperance. These all have their first origin in the Creator and without union of man’s soul with God, man could not acquire them.
Inasmuch as God created man so that He would have someone upon whom He could bestow His love and affection and who would be the recipient of His gifts and ultimately sharers in His divinity, He had added to man’s natural essences the gifts or graces man needed to control, coordinate and direct his naturally-wayward actions, appetites and desires.
Without these gifts, man’s essential actions, appetites and desires would lack the full control and direction of his Will and would be incoordinated, each going it’s own way without regard to the others.
These gifts were available to Adam as long as he remained faithful and obeyed God. Because of them, Adam’s intellect and will, his emotions, actions, appetites and desires, were coordinated, integrated and under his control and he was at peace, united with God and able to enjoy doing God’s will. Adam was in a ‘state of innocence’ - a ‘state of Grace’, a state of full union with God.
As stated, one of man’s natural essences was his Will.
Man had to be given the ability to make a free choice between obeying God or obeying his own natural appetites, inclinations and desires so his Will was given the freedom to either love God by obedience or to disobey Him.
He had to prove by his behaviour whether he was worthy of the awesome eternal future God has put before him as his destiny.
Herein lay the explanation of the Original Sin - the first sin.
We know from Genesis that Adam disobeyed some command of God, the nature of which we don’t need to consider at this time.
We know that the essence of his Fall from Grace was the sin of disobedience - an expression of the loss, perhaps transient, of his love for God.
As a result of this first sin, Adam (and Eve) forfeited those added privileges, those gifts, given to them by God and so could no longer control, coordinate and direct their natural appetites, inclinations and desires and place them at the service of God.
Because Adam lost these added privileges, he was also unable to transmit them as an inheritance to his posterity - there was a ‘block’ at Adam’s level.
Thus, the Church is able to say that the Fall of Adam from Grace had it’s effects on his Intellect and his Will : it ‘darkened our understanding, weakened our wills and left in us a strong inclination to evil’. Adam’s fall left him and his descendants stripped of God’s gifts with only the essences of human nature remaining.

The Redemption:
After the Fall, God, in His mercy, which, like all His attributes, is infinite, and which, because of His love, is always available, conceived the plan to enable Man to return from the grace-less wilderness into which Adam’s disobedience had plunged him.
It is believed that God left man in this wilderness for so long that man over several centuries would see the terrible consequences of sin and separation from the Creator.
Even then He gave man in those times a chance to redeem himself by choosing the Jewish people to be His chosen people and sending the Prophets and Moses to them to show more clearly in the Ten Commandments what God wanted man to do.
Man already with his natural reason could use that reason to see the evidence all around him that there was a higher Being who created the world and all within it.
However, this knowledge was imperfect and inadequate even in persons of high intelligence who had the time and inclination to meditate on spiritual matters, people like the Prophets of old, Aristotle, Socrates and Plato.
This knowledge, known as the Natural Law is knowledge naturally available to man’s reason should he choose to seek and meditate upon it.
Within God’s Grand Design, God had willed that a woman - a second Eve, the Jewish Mary, would be born in the State of Innocence similar to that of Adam’s pristine state.
To this totally pure and sinless woman - this woman ‘full of grace’ who had made a vow of perpetual chastity and who was to be protected by a chaste union with Joseph who had made a similar vow - would be born the Second Person of the Holy Trinity as the second Adam.
God as Jesus would take on man’s human nature, with a human soul intimately united with His divine soul in a hypostatic union within a single Person, a Divine Person, God the Son Himself.
Jesus’s correct name is God the Son Jesus Christ because it is as God the Son that He is a Person, not as Jesus Christ.
We should get used to thinking of Jesus Christ as God the Son to avoid the common tendency to compare Him to the prophets or founders of man-made religions such as Mohamet, Buddha etc.
Jesus was not a human Person - He had to be a Divine Person if He was to take on Himself (figuratively the Lamb of God) and atone for, all of mankind’s sins - not only Adam’s sin but also all those that had been and would be committed during man’s life on the earth.
Inasmuch as God is the Infinity in Justice as in all His other attributes, all sin against Him, even the most venial type, is of infinite gravity, somewhat analogous to how an offence against a high personage such as a king or queen or president is considered to be much more serious than the same offense committed against a common person, an ordinary citizen.
Jesus, as the God-Man suffering death on man’s behalf, because He died as a Divine Person in human form, is the only person who could fully satisfy God’s Infinite Justice for sins of infinite gravity and restore the balance of the objective order of Justice, disturbed by defiant offences against the Creator.

Part Two

Because Jesus is God - the Infinite in all things - the merits flowing from the sacrifice of His life are also infinite.
Jesus devised a plan to make these infinite and inexhaustible merits available on a continuing basis to Adam’s descendants, merits that would be given to us as Graces - Sanctifying and Actual.
Jesus, before His Ascension, established a Church as the institution that would subsist throughout all ages preaching and teaching His Truths, His Revelation, reenacting daily in the Mass in an unbloody manner the bloody Sacrifice of Calvary and administering the other Sacraments as channels of the infinite merits flowing from His Passion.
The Church, inasmuch as it’s Christ’s Mystical Body, is the Treasury
(under Mary) of Jesus’s merits - ‘the Treasury of the Church’.

The Civil State has to have a Constitution as a statement of it’s authority and it’s mission.
Constitutions require that State laws be clearly and reliably understood by it’s citizens.
Because the citizens cannot always reliably determine for themselves the meaning of the Constitution and it’s laws, the U.S. Constitution gives a Supreme Court the authority to interpret and it’s ruling is final.
In the same way, since the Christian Constitution or Divine Revelation cannot always be reliably interpreted by the individual Christian, a Supreme Court is required to give a final judgment on biblical matters in dispute.
This Supreme Court is the Magisterium of the Catholic Church - the Church that Christ founded to perpetuate His message, Revelation, in it’s purity and truth.
“All power is given to Me in heaven and on earth : as the Father has sent Me, I also send you : go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation : he who believes and is baptized will be saved but he who does not believe shall be condemned”. “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I shall build My Church ...and whatever you shall bind on earth shall be bound in Heaven and whatever you shall loose on earth shall be loosed in Heaven”. “ He that heareth you, heareth Me.”
“ - if he refuses to listen even to the Church, let him be to you as a heathen and a publican ” - these statements of Christ gave divine authority to the Church to pass on Christ’s message to future generations and to be the arbiter of it’s meanings.
The civil State or it’s individual citizens do not have this authority and this is why civil law in any country must not contravene divine law as expounded by the Catholic Church. The fact that nations do not recognise this authority of the Catholic Church does not release them from this requirement.
Baptism restores to the soul the graces lost by Adam and the soul is then said to be in the state of Sanctifying grace, wherein the Holy Spirit resides in intimate contact with the soul - ‘our bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost’
As with Adam, so we his descendants possess Free Will.
As did Adam, we also have to prove by our obedience/love whether we are worthy of the eternal future with God that He has presented to us as our ultimate goal in life.
Just as Adam’s sin was essentially one of disobedience, so also our sins, regardless of their variety and nature, are ultimately sins of disobedience - disobedience to God’s laws, Natural and Revealed.
The death of God the Son was the ransom paid for Fallen Man. Man was once again capable of achieving the goal for which he was created, to share in the Divine Nature, to share in his inheritance as a child of God the Father, the inheritance lost by Adam’s sin and recovered by the death of God the Son. Just as a son or daughter do not earn a gift of inheritance because of their goodness but receive it because of their parent’s goodness and generosity, so Man does not earn the heavenly gift of inheritance by his good works but receives it because of God’s goodness and generosity.
In the same way, just as children may forfeit their gift of inheritance by deliberate rejection of their parent’s will, so man can forfeit the gift of heavenly inheritance by deliberate rejection of God’s Will.
In neither case, therefore, does the inheritor have an essential right to the inheritance because inheritance is a gratuitous gift by the donor.

Grace:
The Church defines Grace as ‘a supernatural gift bestowed upon us by God for our salvation’ : the word grace means gift.
As a supernatural gift it must be capable of acting upon our souls.
As our souls are comprised of Intellect and Will, Grace must act upon one or both of these elements.
How can Grace act upon our Intellect ? : how else but by imparting supernatural knowledge to it inasmuch as the intellect is concerned only with the receipt, processing and utilization of knowledge.
How can Grace act upon our Will : how else but by modifying our attitude to God so that we will be influenced to act in obedience to God’s Will.
How can our attitudes be thus modified but through the medium of knowledge, which, received in our Intellect, influences our Will to act in accord with our true best interests.

Knowledge:
In everyday life man deals in information of one kind or another and in one form or another.
In casual conversation we exchange information about ourselves or about other people, we relate or refer to happenings, past, present or expected : we give opinions, make predictions, we advise, we recommend, we tell stories, we tell jokes.
We produce and read newspapers. We produce and watch TV programs. We produce and listen to radio.
We educate in schools, colleges and universities.
In the professions, information in the form of medical knowledge, legal knowledge, engineering knowledge - indispensible to the preservation and maintenance of health, to resolution of disputes, to protection from criminals, to building construction etc - is generated, dispensed and utilized.
In business we use information of different kinds - technical, professional, promotional - to manufacture, produce and sell.
All these activities deliver as their product, information/knowledge.
All human life, in other words, depends upon and cannot function without information, without knowledge.
Information/knowledge is as essential to human life as are water and food : we cannot survive without it, physically, materially or spiritually.
Knowledge includes natural knowledge whose source in man is principally through the five senses.
The angels who possess no bodies with sense organs, possess intuitive knowledge as a direct infusion from the Creator.
There is also supernatural knowledge - knowledge about the hidden world of the spiritual, knowledge about God and His ways. Man receives this knowledge not only through the senses in religious teaching but also as a direct infusion from the Holy Spirit usually in response to prayer and the Sacraments when received worthily : that is, when free from unconfessed mortal sin, since the Holy Spirit cannot dwell within a soul that is not open to the Holy Spirit, a soul ‘with a hardened heart’, a soul that is at enmity with God.
Before His ascent to Heaven, Jesus promised that He would send the Holy Spirit, the ‘Spirit of Truth who would teach you all things and bring all things to your minds whatsoever I had commanded you’
Just as man’s capacity for natural knowledge is limited so also is his capacity for supernatural knowledge.
This capacity for supernatural knowledge however, can be increased by Grace, by growth in the spiritual life, by a greater depth of knowledge of God.
Good examples are provided by the lives of the canonized saints whose object was always to advance in the knowledge of God and who endeavoured to make their wills as fully coordinated as possible with the Divine Will.
Man’s ultimate responsibility is to freely allow God to control, direct and coordinate his earthly life in all things : to continue to be open to receiving those lost graces needed for the exercise of this control, direction and coordination.
When man succeeds in handing over his life, in all it’s decisions and actions to God, he can be assured that he will be successful, not only in religious terms, but often in terms of progress and well-being in the temporal sphere. “ Your heavenly Father knows that you have need of these things, Seek first the Kingdom of God and His Justice and all these things will be yours as well ” (Matt.6:32)
Yes, man will no doubt have problems and privations but if he unites these with the sufferings of God the Son in His Passion, he will know that everything that he does or that happens to him is in accord with God’s will and plan for him and is increasing his capacity to enjoy the heavenly hereafter.
He who just, so to speak, ‘sneaks into heaven’ by a last-minute repentence will indeed be completely happy but only in a relative sense in that his capacity to be completely happy will be correspondingly less than that of the person who always, or for much of his life, lived always in accord with God’s Will.
His cup of happiness though full, is a smaller cup than that of the more consistently faithful one whose cup, when filled, is continually being replaced by a larger one that, in turn, becomes full and replaced by a yet larger one.
Mindful of this we can understand that the level of complete happiness of Our Lady, St Joseph and the canonized saints will be far greater than that of the vast majority of those finally admitted to the Vision of God.
The soul, made up of Intellect and Will, in it’s Intellect equips man to seek and find the information he needs to function in his natural life.
His Intellect uses the nervous system - central and peripheral - and the organs of sense - which are essentially components of the nervous system - to acquire this natural knowledge from an environment made up of the natural world and other people.
By the operation of his nervous system man acquires not only natural knowledge but also much of his supernatural knowledge indirectly, from study of the Scriptures and from the traditions and teachings of the Church through the medium of the spoken and the written word.
Besides naturally-acquired indirect knowledge there is also direct knowledge from divine inspiration.
In divine inspiration, God imparts knowledge in the form of Grace directly, without the medium of the senses, to the intellect of the subject.
This knowledge-by-grace enables man to ‘enlighten his understanding and strengthen his will’ and thus serve to lessen the effects of Original Sin.

Part Three:

Spiritual and somatic resonance:
There are two parts in a human, the spiritual soul and the human body.
Because these two are so closely united as to form but one person, it follows that for normal and harmonious operation there should be a parallel condition on one side to match the condition on the other side : this parallel condition is called a resonance. Resonance can be spiritual or somatic.
When, as is more usual, the resonance is on the side of the material body, it is called somatic from the Greek word ‘soma’ or body.
When on the side of the immaterial spirit, it is called spiritual resonance.
Somatic resonance represents the emotional counterpart to the ‘things of the spirit’.
Emotion is defined as feelings reacting to a value perceived by the intellect and desired by the will or to a dysvalue perceived by the intellect and shunned by the will.
Somatic resonance, since it is emotional in nature, is affected, among other things, by changes in body biochemistry produced by medications, hormones or fatigue e.g. sex hormones or serotonin deficiency may lead to sexual excitation and excess lactate may lead to anxiety.
Somatic resonance, expressed as emotional feelings, may also be affected by different kinds of music, by oratory, by public or peer pressure or by propaganda. Martial music tends to stir up feelings of patriotism and national pride, Gregorian chant and hymns tend to evoke feelings of spiritual ardour and reverence, classical music tranquillises, civilizes and excites, while hard rock music may promote feelings of depression, despair, anti-feminism, irresponsibility and varying degrees of general depravity, and pornography inevitably promotes feelings of sinful sex .
Thus, we may experience healthy or unhealthy feelings, healthy or unhealthy emotions, healthy or unhealthy somatic resonance, depending on the causative influences.
In the framework of resonance, if a condition is present on either one of the two sides, spiritual or somatic, there is a tendency for the parallel condition to develop on the other side.
Faith lies in the spiritual Intellect while Love lies in the spiritual Will.
Love towards God is expressed by obedience to His Will, aligning our will to His will, to His laws.
“ He who has My commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves Me” (John 14 : 21)
“If you love Me you will keep My commandments.” (John 14:15.)
Love towards persons consists of wishing them well. We do not have to have feelings of affection towards them to love them. Love of persons other than our spouses or children is essentially a spiritual desire residing in the spiritual will and not in the emotions or feelings, which are somatic not spiritual, in nature.
In sexuality, if emotion or somatic resonance of the right kind is present, then there will be a tendency for love to develop in the spiritual will : if young people follow God’s plan, confining sexual acts to legitimate marital union, sexuality will tend powerfully, by a double channel of spiritual and somatic resonance, to produce real spiritual love : otherwise, it generates fakes or counterfeits.
Sexual feelings on the somatic, emotional side are designed to enhance and facilitate the growth, on the spiritual side, of true love in the attracted parties, and are not designed to simply promote sexual pleasure, especially sexual pleasure divorced from marital, spiritual love.
In marital love it is essential that each person be aware of the importance of each one unselfishly and unconditionally seeking the happiness of the other, rather than the selfish seeking of one’s own interests exclusively - that one not use the other selfishly - e.g. as a sex object only.
It is common that couples mistake biochemical effects, sexual feelings, the somatic, emotional resonance to love, for the spiritual virtue of love : they will say or think ‘we are madly in love’ when what they may be experiencing is merely the somatic resonance of love, the emotional or biochemical resonance, the chemical counterfeit of love.
Sooner or later these feelings will dissipate exposing in such unions the lack of true love when now one partner finds him/herself yoked to one that he/she does not love truly, does not love unconditionally, does not love spiritually.
If, at this juncture, one or both suffers from the false modern spirituality that sees no virtue in bearing one’s cross for Christ’s sake, no virtue in maintaining the marriage intact despite the disillusionment, then almost certainly the marriage covenant will be violated by divorce and the danger of sinful remarriage and other evils follow.
Love, faith and humility, are examples of virtues while pride and hatred are examples of vices which resonate on the spiritual side.
To spiritual love of God, our somatic resonance would be feelings of reverence and awe, leading to obedience - our authentic mode of loving God.
To spiritual love of persons of the opposite sex, our somatic resonance would be sexual, emotional feelings leading to a desire for the loved one’s well-being.
To spiritual love of our children, our somatic resonance would be parental feelings of tenderness and solicitude for their well-being.
To the spiritual virtue of humility, the somatic resonance would be feelings of inferiority which allow us to realize that all good comes from God and not from ourselves.
To one’s spiritual vice of pride, the somatic resonance would be puffed-up feelings of superiority and arrogance leading to our ascribing all good to ourselves rather than to God.
To one’s spiritual vice of hatred, somatic resonance would consist of feelings ranging from feelings of aversion to actually wishing harm to the one hated.
Thus we can see that somatic resonance is a matter of one’s feelings, of one’s emotions : it is not directly related to reason and the intellect and in fact, not infrequently may operate contrary to reason and good sense.

The Beatific Vision:
What is the Beatific Vision.?
It is the ultimate vision of God when one reaches Heaven.
Yes, we will be able to see God the Son Jesus Christ in His human body which like our own, will last forever.
But God the Father and God the Holy Ghost are pure Spirit without a body.
So how do we see pure Spirit.
Using one’s reason it seems that it can only mean that we will see God by knowing Him more fully, by receiving a maximum knowledge of Him : by our intellect receiving infusions of supernatural knowledge to the extent that our still limited human intellect after death can absorb this knowledge : by receiving, not indirectly through our senses anymore, not through the intermediation of images received through our organs of sense which pass by material pathways first into the realm of perceptual thought in our material brain prior to it’s passing into the soul, but instead, bypassing this material pathway, and proceeding directly by infusions from the Holy Spirit into the realm of conceptual thought in the immaterial soul.
According to Our Father’s Plan p 68, the Beatific Vision is so direct that there is no image involved.
In seeing persons or things in our daily lives we do not take the person or thing within us, we take instead an image.
There is no image involved in the vision of God as no image - since an image is finite - could show us Him who is infinite.
St Thomas Aquinas drew the inescapable inference that the divinity must join itself directly to the human mind or soul with no image in between.
Within the Blessed Trinity there flows among the three divine Persons an infinite stream of infinite, indescribable knowledge personified by God the Son, the Word, and infinite, perfect love personified by the Holy Spirit.
After death, the soul who reaches heaven, made partly divine by grace, participates in this infinite stream of knowledge and love where God joins Himself directly to our Intellect and Will - knowledge in our Intellect and love in our Wills.
Our Intellects will have full access to vast amounts of knowledge, natural and supernatural, and our Wills will be devoted solely to loving God by a total alignment of our Wills to that of the Creator : this is why we must prepare for that life by ensuring now that we use our Intellects to know God and our Wills to love and obey Him.
“Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered the mind of man, to conceive the wonderful joys God has in store for those who love Him “.
St. Paul (1st Corinthians 2 : 9).

Ref. “ Our Father’s Plan” by Fr W.G. Most.
“A Shorter Summa” by Peter Kreeft.

God's Plan

2006-07-26T17:11:00.000-07:00

God has a plan, a Personal Plan for each and every person born from the first one to the last one. Our dilemma is discerning what that plan is and how to integrate our own plans with God’s plan, how to align our wills with God’s Will, how to avoid acting contrary to His Will.

God’s plans are strategic and tactical.
His strategic plan concerns the universe, it’s creation and how it is sustained from the moment of its creation to its ultimate end.
His strategic plan also concerns every person living in that universe. It asserts that the universe exists solely for the sake of each and every person abiding in it. God has a collective plan for humanity and a personal plan for each and every individual person.

The collective plan is to ensure cooperation between all peoples, to ensure harmony, physical, social, political progress and the spiritual development on which that progress must depend. The collective plan is like a giant jig-saw with innumerable pieces that have to fit well to ensure the final optimal picture. Ill-fitting pieces can only distort it, cause disharmony, and interfere with the physical, social, political and spiritual progress and development required.

If everything was perfect, every person would think and act in accordance with God’s plan. With every person thinking and acting in accord with God’s personal plan for him, there would be perfect harmony between all persons, individually and collectively, there would be no wars, tyranny, hatred or evil and man would exist in happiness without anxiety, fear or apprehension.

However, because of God’s gift to man of free-will combined with the effects of the Fall from Grace of Adam, this is not the case. Because of man’s spiritual weakness derived from the Fall, his free-will and its exercise constantly and recurrently frustrate God’s Plan for man’s life on earth.
Christ’s teaching, direct during His life on earth and since then indirectly through His Church, shows us in a general way what His will for us consists of : that we should do all things according to His Will, that we should align our wills with His Will in all things.

The big problem, however, is ascertaining what God’s will is for us in the everyday events of our individual lives. How do we discern what God wants us to do in any particular instance?. How do we know what person is right for us to marry, what occupation, what job, is right for us?. How do we match our personal and social attributes with those of a considered spouse? How do we align our proposed occupation with our individual talents, our individual expertise, our individual endowments?

We may try to solve these problems on our own, using our personal experience, our personal intelligence, the experience and intelligence – advice - of others. Sad to say we seldom have recourse to the One who can best advise, the One who knows the future, the One who knows us and our talents, our endowments, our likes and dislikes, the One who without any doubt in the world can give us the optimal help and guidance needed.

Even among the devout, there tends to be something of the feeling that God doesn’t have time or interest in dealing with everybody’s daily problems. This is akin to the beliefs of the Deist who acknowledges that God did indeed create the world but that after He created it, He ignores it and leaves it and its people to fend for themselves.
God’s answer to the Deist is provided by Jesus who said ‘Seek you first the Kingdom of God and its justice and all these other things (life’s daily concerns) will be added unto you’ and ‘Consider the birds : they neither sow or reap or gather into barns and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than they’?.

If we are to be able to ask God for guidance in particular problems and decisions, we must be in communication with Him, we must be open to His inner voice, we must allow Him access to our soul - to our intellect and to our will. This can only be possible if we are in the ‘state of grace’, in a state of friendship with Him : we cannot be in communion with God if we are in a state of enmity with Him because of unconfessed, unrepentant mortal sin.

When we are ‘in grace’, we can confidently look to God for real guidance and support in response to our prayers, we can safely assume that whatever decision we make, whatever course we take, will be in accordance with His will for us, in accordance with His personal plan for us. We may encounter frustrations and doubts, and even an apparent lack of response to our call for help. In all cases we must have faith and trust that God will hear us, that He is hearing us, as without this faith and this trust, God may turn away from us. In the boat when the storm came suddenly He said ‘Why are you fearful, Oh you of little faith?’. At least once, before performing a miracle, Jesus asked if the person believed that He could do it.

The two greatest decisions we are faced with in life involve the decisions of whether and who to marry, and what occupation, what job, to pursue.
In both instances our decisions should be based on sound knowledge, information and good advice from those in a position to give it. It must also and especially follow guidance from God to ensure that the course taken is in accordance with His Personal Plan for us.
If we can be sure of that we can proceed with complete confidence in the soundness of the decision and look forward to a happy future.
This guidance from God is obtained by focused prayer and prayer’s best form is in a properly observed Mass and Communion, the Rosary and the Chaplet.

Aristotle

2006-07-05T20:42:00.000-07:00

Born 384 B.C.. Died 321 B.C.
Son of a physician to the King of Macedonia .
At 18 years he came to study at Plato's Academy .
When Plato died Aristotle wandered about the Greek world.
In 343 he became the tutor of Alexander, son of King Philip of Macedonia. Alexander was then 13 years old : He taught him Ethics and Rhetoric.

When Alexander became King in 334 B.C. Aristotle returned to Athens and established the Lyceum where he taught until Alexander's death in 323 .
Then the Athenian democracy, rising against Macedonia, accused Aristotle of impiety and caused him to flee to Euboea where he soon died at the age of 63 years

He was born when Sparta was dominant and Macedonia in decline.
He died when Athens surrendered to the Regent of Macedonia and Demosthenes, orator and patriot, was forced to take poison.

In ancient and medieval times he was venerated as a natural philosopher or physical scientist
He did not carry on Plato's lofty idea of the immortality of the Soul.
He treated the Soul as if it was little more than a faculty or attribute of the body - like the axeness of an axe.
He held that Man is a social animal .
He is made for action and the highest form of action is Thought .
In the savage state, man thinks scarcely at all
Ethics is that aspect of study which emphasises the individual's condition of mind or his character.
Politics is that aspect which emphasises the State as the means for attaining the highest human good.
If the City-State should collapse, even rudimentary morality must disintegrate.

Through his doctrine of the Golden Mean he expressed Homer's and Plato's principle of Nothing to Excess.
This was his chief contribution to the understanding of Order .
His Mean did not mean the average or mediocre but the avoidance of excesses or extremes - a balance in private and public life.

A happy life is an existence of goodness, free from poverty, sickness and restrictions .
He said ‘Be temperate, not greedy or gluttonous’.
Be prudently courageous, not cowardly or rash.
Be self-respecting, not subservient or arrogant’ .

He recognised three systems of government
a - Monarchy - with leadership of one man of excellent virtue under a limiting body of laws .
b - Aristocracy - government by a class of men of high birth, dutiful and filled with the spirit of noblesse oblige.
c - Commonwealth - Exercise of power by a majority, but a virtuous majority, respecting the lawful rights of all classes.

Deviations of government
a - Tyranny - Unconstitutional rule by one man for his own satisfaction
b - Oligarchy - Rule by the few for the good of that few
c - Democracy - rule by the crowd for the benefit of the dominant majority.

In his "Ethics”, Aristotle called for a mixed government - a political mean or Timocracy - consisting of features of Aristocracy and Commonwealth or features of Oligarchy and Democracy because the political mean tends to be dominated by the middle-class whom he regards as composed of citizens, neither rich or poor, and not members of aristocratic families or of the demos or masses - mobs of artisans and sailors without property.
The middle-class would be the class most concerned to maintain a decent and enduring social order as they had suffered most in the civil struggles of the Greeks .
From Oligarchy would come the idea of electing magistrates or public officials.
From Democracy would come the principle that all free-born citizens should have some share in public decisions - all producing a community of friendship based on common affections and common interests. Domination either by the selfish rich or the envious poor would be avoided and popular roguery would be restrained .
The problem was that in most states the middle-class was generally small . This meant that either the owners of property or the masses would gain the advantage and overstep the mean and lead to pure Oligarchy or Democracy.

The Greeks never obtained a world-view.
Their religion, morality and frames of government were all bound up with their compact little city, it's dependent lands and it's protecting gods.
When dominated from outside, they lost their arrogance and acquired servility.

As Greece was degenerating, it was governed by Sophist thought with it's clever relativism instead of the mystical insights of Plato's and Aristotle's search for the Supreme Good.
In 529 A.D. the Schools of Philosophy were closed by the Emperor Justinian.
This was long after they had lost their influence.

The community of friendship advocated by Aristotle became an American ideal in it's founding days when America was mostly made up of middle-class farmers.

The Gift Of Life

2006-06-24T11:34:00.000-07:00

In reaction to the spread of abortion, there have developed organizations referred to as Right to Life organizations.
Strictly speaking there is no right to life, inasmuch as life is a gift given to each person by the Creator, not something one can claim as a right.
A gift can vary greatly in value, from minimal to inestimable, depending upon the importance of the giver and the purpose of the gift.
In this case, the gift is inestimable because the Giver is the all-powerful Creator and the purpose is to create persons destined to share in the Divine Nature.
Whenever a gift is given, it carries a specific formula for correct use : a micro-wave, a car or a sewing-machine is to be used by following specific instructions provided by the makers.
In the same way, the gift of life carries a formula that determines how it is to be properly used : it has to be used in the way prescribed by the Creator, i.e. it must be accepted and used so that man will know, love and serve God on earth and thus qualify to eventually share in His divine nature.
When a woman uses unnatural methods of contraception, she, in essence, tells God that she does not want His gift.
When she aborts a pregnancy, she not only rejects the gift but even destroys it as being worthless or a nuisance.
What Right-to-Life organizations are really defending is not a right to life but a right to continue a life already begun, a right to defend and protect a life already received as a gift from God, a gift of inestimable value for the reasons above given.
What the State does, in Roe-v-Wade, is tell all women that it is permissible to reject this priceless gift from the Creator.
What a frightful challenge to an all-powerful God who is also all-Just.!

Abortion:
The term abortion applies to the deliberate, direct and intentional killing of an innocent, living human being, not yet born.
Most people who support abortion apparently have no idea of the part that God directly plays in the genesis of that specific human life, how that life is there because of a specific decision that God made to produce that specific life.
No act of intercourse carries a guarantee of new life.
The fertilization of an ovum following a sexual act is not something either person can ordain.
Neither can it be the result of chance occurrence.
Clearly, it is a result of a decision of Someone of awesome power, who at that same time instills into that being an immortal soul of Intelligence and Free-will.
Jeremiah 1-5 said “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you : and before you were born I consecrated you”
What a terrible intervention by mere creatures into God’s awesome territory of creation - ‘Fools indeed rush in where angels fear to tread’

The US legal system, in it’s act of supreme arrogance, with Roe v Wade, states that every woman has a legal right to abort her child. The child has no legal right to be born : only the mother’s wish operates.
It logically follows that no one has a legal right to be born, to receive God’s gift.
If no one has a legal right to be born, to exist, then all the rights that society has heretofore recognised as inalienable human rights based upon a right to preservation of life, have no fixed basis and can properly be taken away by the State or anyone with the physical power to do so.
That would logically apply to all of us, already born and matured.
The State could justifiably decree that no one should conceive or bear a child, that no one has a right to marry, to establish a family, to expect remuneration for work performed, to own property, to be protected from criminal or foreign attack or enjoy any of our heretofore inalienable human rights.
One would logically have no rights other than those conferred by the State or the powerful, at their discretion or at their pleasure, rights which can be as easily taken away as conferred.
If no one has a legal right to be delivered in safety, to exist outside the womb, then life itself becomes truly expendable.
Life would be lived fully dependent upon the whim of the State’s legal system. Society would operate with the mindset of the Nazi and Communist mass murderers of the last century.
Yet politicians and media persons can state indignantly that controversies on ‘social issues like abortion’ distract the people and government from attention to ‘more important problems’ such as the economy, jobs etc.
What pitiful fools.!

Since Roe v Wade, we have and are witnessing this legalized barbaric slaughter - carried out by physicians who are supposed to be dedicated to preserving life - of millions of helpless unborn infants.
Their mothers, by nature designed to be their protectors, have become their deadly enemies.
We hear many reasons put forward in attempted justification of abortion.
“ It will reduce the incidence of criminal abortion “ Of course it will, if all abortion is made legal.
“Abortions can now be performed in safety”. This is not true. We hear of more and more medical malpractice cases following abortions carried out by unscrupulous, incompetent and unfeeling physicians.
“It will reduce the mental anguish of unwilling and often unwed and very young mothers “. A mental anguish of greater degree will follow abortion in many mothers.
“ It will prevent the arrival of infants with congenital and hereditary defects with all the resultant mental anguish and high expense of caring for them.”
“ We can clean out the gene pool of the future of genetically-derived diseases if we now prevent or abort pregnancies in all carriers of defective genes.”. So we should 'search and destroy'.

Some of these reasons may in themselves appear good but in no way do they justify the taking of an innocent human life, worthless as that life may appear to some.
Abortion has been legalised on the basis of a cold, calculated pragmatism in which the outcome is used to determine the rightness of an action.
Many crimes - individual, social and governmental - have been committed on this basis, that a good end justifies a bad means.
Almost all the wars of history, the barbarities of the French Revolution, of the Nazi and Communist Revolutions in our own time, have followed from adherence to this invalid concept.
When an act is intrinsically evil and against the nature of man, no reason given can make it good.

Many proponents of abortion say that a mother has the right to do as she wishes with her own body. Those who hold this view are wrong and should realise that no one has a right to dispose of one’s own body, or healthy parts of it, which we hold in trust to the Creator : this would be mutilation.
Furthermore, it can easily be shown that abortion does not concern the mother’s body or a part of it. It deals with and destroys another’s body - a body unique and totally distinct from her’s. The infant’s body is within the mother’s body but is not part of it.
The life within her womb is human, distinct and unique.
It is human because it’s genetic system comes from male and female human genes and on that basis alone cannot be regarded as other than human.
The life within is distinct from the mother’s, in that it’s genetic endowment comes, not only from the mother but equally from the father : the combined genetic make-up is mixed maternal and paternal and cannot be regarded as purely maternal. Many infants have blood types different from the mother’s, proving the essential dissimilarity between the mother and baby.
It is unique, in that even at the 3-cell embryo stage, it’s genome has less than a one in one billion chance of being reproduced in some one else.

The infant is not the mother’s property for her to use as she thinks fit.
It is a gift given to her in trust to be cared for and directed to it’s true ultimate end. The mother is merely the guardian and custodian of that new life and bears a tremendous responsibility for it until it reaches maturity and physical and moral independence.

In-Vitro Fertilization:
Some misguided or deliberately misguiding theologians are propagating the concept of a ‘pre-embryo’ period consisting of the first two weeks after conception, when the embryo has ‘not yet become ensouled’
This concept is being used to pave the way to producing millions of human embryos by in-vitro fertilization, for experimentation during that first two weeks, following which the embryos will be discarded, totally without respect for the sanctity of their lives.
In in-vitro fertilization, six ova are extracted from an ovary by laparoscopy and all are fertilized in vitro, almost always using semen acquired by immoral means and often without regard to or recording of the identity of the donor. One fertilized ovum is now chosen to be used in implantation into a women’s uterus. The remaining fertilized ova are placed in cold storage and simply discarded as refuse if the procedure is successful with any of the first chosen ones.
In-vitro fertilization shows an intrinsic connection with unnatural contraception : one is sex without babies while the other is babies without sex.
What a moral and legal quagmire we are faced with in this type of activity.
It is yet another example of anti-life action proclaimed as a marvellous breakthrough of science on behalf of those who greatly desire to have a child.
What crimes are committed in the name of compassion !
The Church insists that man, the person, from conception to natural death, can never be used as a means but always and only as an end and cannot ever be involuntarily sacrificed in his integrity for the benefit of another.
Furthermore, the Catholic Church has never and will never accept the concept of embodiment without ensoulment. She teaches emphatically from Revelation that the soul is present at the first moment of conception.
Thus all embryos from conception are persons within the Christian meaning of the term and as such, are destined for everlasting life and therfore deserving of human dignity.

Euthanasia:
The anti-death forces, flushed with their victories at the pre-born level, now direct their satanic fury against the other end of life’s spectrum.
As with the euphemism of pro-choice, they employ the euphemism of ‘euthanasia’ for the premature killing of the elderly and those suffering from terminal illness.The word euthanasia means happy death. What cynicism! They call it happy death when what it really is, is death without hope, death in despair.
The secular world proclaims that there is nothing beyond the grave : ‘you’re no longer of any value : why put up with pain or the boredom of waiting to die : you’re going to die anyway so why not get it over with and ease the burden on your family.’
Christ proclaims that everlasting life waits beyond the grave for those who are faithful. He proclaims that every person is of priceless value.
He asks those of us in pain or suffering to come and help Him carry His Cross and then to share His victory.
He says “ My yoke is sweet and My burden light” and again, “Come to Me all you who are heavily burdened and I will refresh you” :
He says that everyone will die but that only the Creator can decide the time. He says that watching and helping and trying to alleviate the suffering of loved ones brings out and demonstrates the love we have for them and that we should not view the dying as a burden upon us.

Marriage Witnessing Authority

2006-06-24T10:35:00.000-07:00

The Witnessing Authority presiding over the contraction of a marriage is the only one that should have jurisdiction over it’s possible dissolution, whether such dissolution is canonically valid or not.

I see the following possible categories -
1 - Catholic marriage
2 - Protestant “
3 - Jewish “
4 - Moslem “
5 - Secular “
Various mixed marriages of Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Moslems and Atheists would appear under one of the above headings.

Because of the interest of the State in the protection and continued welfare of the family as the fundamental unit of society, the State does have a legitimate function in matters relating to the stability of the family unit.
However, the State ordinarily should not have jurisdiction in the actual contracting of a marriage. It’s true role should be limited to recognising all marriages that are certified by a particular, legally-recognised religion, as valid according to the ‘canon’ law of that religion. The State’s role must be a permissive rather than a deterministic one.
Those persons, of any or no religion, who do not wish for a religious marriage could opt for a purely secular, civil marriage where the State, represented by a Registry Office, would be the Witnessing Authorising. The responsibility for any transgressions of the moral law should be attributable solely to the persons contracting such civil marriage.

It seems most desirable, on the grounds of logic and legal common-sense, that if one desires a change in the status of a marriage, appeals for that change should be made to the Witnessing Authority which authorised and certified the contraction of the marriage. This would require that all religious bodies sanctioning marriages must also provide the services of a Marriage Tribunal that could deal with any questions relating to the continuation or possible termination of the marriage state. The Marriage Tribunal should not be in any way influenced by pressure from secular or legal elements of the State but should adjudicate purely on the basis of it’s own Canon Law or equivalent. It’s judgment should be accepted as final by the State.

In proceeding according to this arrangement, those who have contracted a marriage under Catholic auspices, would be obliged to address their appeal to the Catholic Marriage Tribunal.
According to Catholic Canon Law, a validly contracted marriage cannot be annulled for any reason and the tribunal’s function would be limited to determining whether the marriage was valid in the first place, according to the same Canon Law.
If the decision was that the marriage was indeed valid, it would so advise the State and the marriage would continue to be legally binding.
Legal separation, of course, could be established for circumstances where co-habitation had become physically dangerous or mentally unbearable for one of the parties or the children and the necessary legal provisions for the upkeep of wife and children could be made.

If the marriage was under another religious Witnessing Authority than Catholic, a tribunal of that Church, synagogue or mosque would render a determination as to whether, according to it’s tenets, it was lawful to continue to bind or to loose the marriage bond. Such a ruling would be recognised as final by the State.

If the State was the Witnessing Authority, the State through it’s court system would determine whether the marriage should continue to be recognised as legal.

In all of these situations, at the time of appeal by a married person to a marriage tribunal, that tribunal should first pursue all possible efforts to bring about reconciliation between the parties and this initial period should be for a pre-fixed duration - perhaps 6 or 12 months.

In all situations where the Witnessing Authority’s Tribunal ruled in favour of releasing the parties from the married state, the State through it’s court system, would investigate and establish the provisions for the continued financial, physical and moral welfare of the children and their parents.

In the case of recognition of marriages contracted abroad, the same principles could be applied.

Were this system to be introduced into the U.S. it would prevent the divorce of validly-married Catholics and apostate, validly-married Catholics would not be able to go through a form of re-marriage ceremony in a Protestant Church, synagogue, mosque or Registry Office.
It also would place on the various Protestant Churches, the burden of facing up to their responsibilities and their portion of blame for the breakdown in marriage, they who presently appear to be getting the State to do their work for them while perhaps paying lip service to the sanctity of the marriage bond.

How God Reacts With The Natural Order

2006-06-21T14:18:00.000-07:00

One of the great mysteries of life is trying to understand how God, who is a pure Spirit without physical elements, can have an effect on the physical, animate or inanimate, things of His Creation. We are told that all God has to do to carry out an action is to will that it occur, that this was how the world was created and all within it.
We are unable to understand how God’s Will causes the desires of His Will to be accomplished. We only know that God is omnipotent and that all of His creation, animate and inanimate, except man, in essence cannot but respond in accordance with His Will. God by special dispensation, freed man’s will and that of the angels.

As humans we cannot imagine e.g. how a person or animal could move except by use of the relevant muscles : how speech could be made except by the use of the muscles of speech : how something could be fabricated or constructed except by use of the limb muscles in conjunction with tools and materials.
Yet, if we enquire in more detail, we can see that in the case of human action, we first must will the action. When we will, when we decide upon, an action, the action follows. If I will, if I decide, to get out of bed at a particular time of the morning, it invariably follows that I do indeed get up at that time unless prevented from doing so by some external force. So here in my own human case, merely by willing to take a particular action, I can cause myself to take that action, and the action occurs.
How the energy of the will, of the decision, gets from the spiritual soul, the spiritual will, outside the body, to the material elements within the body - the nervous system and the muscles - is not known and probably not knowable in this life.

I cannot, however, merely by willing, by deciding, that another person should take a particular action, cause that person to take that action : his action-taking mechanism does not respond to my will : my will has control only over my own action-taking mechanism.

In the case of God, the effects of His will are not of course limited to Himself. Everything and everybody, the animate and inanimate, again except for man and the angels, is essentially automatically responsive to God’s will.
Ordinarily, in relation to human persons, God influences our intellect and will, functions residing within our souls and outside our bodies.
God expects man to freely conform his will to the divine will if he is to reach eternal life but at the same time God gives man freedom to do otherwise, to choose eternal life or eternal death.
The angels, with their free will, elected, some to remain loyal, some to rebel, against the divine will. The angels, good and bad, have finished their period of trial : their free will has already been fully and finally exercised and is no longer a relevant factor.

In the case of the virtuous person, with no obstacle present, the human will is in general accord with the divine will and responsive to it.
In the case of a person in sin - in a situation of spiritual death - that person is unable alone to extricate himself from his spiritual death anymore than a person who is physically dead can restore himself to life. He must have help from God and to get it, he must ask for it or someone else must ask for him.

In the case of the person in sin who is not hardened in his attitude to God’s will, God’s wishes - without infringing upon his free will - can act upon, can influence, through grace, the person’s intellect and will, causing him to recognize the evil of sin and producing a spirit of repentance and amendment of life.
In the case of the person hardened in a state of sin, the sinner who has no interest in virtue or in carrying out God’s will, the person whose conscience is dead or dysfunctional, God’s grace cannot act because this man’s free will rejects God’s grace.
However, Masses can be offered or other prayers on the sinner’s behalf can be made by family or friends : this intercession may be sufficient to induce God’s mercy to soften the heart of the sinner over time, to influence his free will to move towards asking God for mercy, towards a spirit of repentance and amendment of life.

The Missing Link

2006-04-13T12:44:00.000-07:00

Read from below.

From Fergail.

We can accept the idea of evolutionary changes within a species but not evolutionary change from one species to another. That's the crux of the matter. We must have clear definitions to avoid confusion and wasteful discussion.

From Ted:
I'm not a deist. I mean that God doesn't take obvious active roles in our affairs because He wants to preserve Free Will. He would appear to do certain key things like sending Christ into the world and the Resurrection, however they would appear to occur exceedingly rarely, if events the magnitude of resurrections occur more than once at all.
If He was constantly intervening and "micromanaging" world affairs right down to relatively insignificant individual events, then what would be the point of creating us? Where would be our dignity as humans if we're instead merely puppets dancing around to His every whim. I think he gives people free will to do whatever they want and He's willing to accept the consequences, knowing full well that there's going to be some serious suffering due to the imperfect nature of man. He may nudge events from time to time and intervene to keep the world's destiny on course, but probably to the least extent possible in order to make people's lives more real and more meaningful. The stakes are higher when we're all given the chance to make our own realities.

From: Fergail
Lars, I agree with what you say.

From: Lars.
Not sure if you're not reading too much into Ted's ...
"God of the last 2 thousand years, who pretty much sits back and let's the world roll whichever way it chooses roll. If He is taking an active roll in things He does it indirectly and very subtley.
With the huge exception of the Incarnation and Resurection and many assorted miracles and perhaps natural events such as tornados/earthquakes etc...it is reasonable to conclude that God does not intervene much in a physical way in the world. He clearly does intervene in a spiritual way on a routine basis in response to prayer etc. So God is indeed very active but not so much on a physical basis as in a more subtle, gentle spiritual way.

From: Fergail:
You say 'The God of the last 2000 years who pretty much sits back and lets the world roll whichever way it chooses to roll. If He is taking an active role in things he does it indirectly and very subtley'. If you really believe that, it places you in the ranks of the Deists who believe that God created the world and all in it and then 'walked' away and left it to its own devices. The Theists, including the Catholics, believe that God did indeed create the world and all in it but has 'not walked away and left it to its own devices'. On the contrary, He intervened dramatically in the world when He became man at the Incarnation, died as a ransom on man's behalf at the Crucufixion and rose again at the Resurrection. He continually intervenes in the physical world through the physical laws He gave the universe. He gave man a set of laws of belief and behaviour in Revelation and directs the world through man to the extent that man cooperates. The world is in its present misery and suffered all the miseries of history to the extent it has refused to do His will. Yes, the Church should stay out of purely scientific controversies like the Galileo/Copernicus affairs but the scientists likewise should stay out of purely religious/ metaphysical matters like man's origin. They have no expertise/ authority there.

From: Ted
Yes, I think arrogance is the operative word here. Pope JPII was very humble in accepting the fact that the Church can be wrong about scientific matters and pretty much stays out of them. There's a ton of symbolism in the Bible and even the most fundamentalist Christians believe that. The problem with Darwinism -- not just that he's most likely wrong about much of his theories -- was that his stuff was politicized by the Left and now the religious fundamentalists on the political right see Darwin as the Anti-Christ. Their reasoning is that, if he's right, then their faith is bankrupt -- the ultimate fear of all fundamentalists. So they'll fight to the death anything they perceive to be a threat to their faith -- even though much of Darwinism is consistent with the Book of Genesis -- if it's seen as symbolism and not literal fact. Again, God moves in mysterious ways, and Him actually reaching out of the sky and plucking a rib out of Adams chest and then froming Eve out of it sure doesn't sound like the God of the last 2 thousand years, who pretty much sits back and let's the world roll whichever way it chooses roll. If He is taking an active roll in things He does it indirectly and very subtley. To the concrete thinkers whose world and religious views are black or white, Darwin is a heretic (think Islamic Fundies to get the right mindset). Darwin actually believed in God, as his writings about the "wonders of creation" show -- although they appear to have been edited out by the equally militant pro-evolutionists like Stephen J. Gould in one of his books that quoted Darwin. Gould was protecting himself from his ultimate fear: that there could be a God.

From: Fergail
Very well stated, Illiteratti. I'm impressed by the maturity and wisdom you show on these complex matters.

From: Illiteratti
Here's my 2 pesetas on the email traffic re the fishy evolution article Ted posted:
1) Some people actually hate poetry so the poetry of it would more likely dissuade than persuade them.

2) The ultimate conspiracy is the one between satan and his slave minions -- if Hawkings is an atheist, perhaps, this evolution stuff is one of satan's disinformation projects designed to lead people from God.

3) The Catholic Church's magisterium is the horse's mouth which should be informing you of every Catholic teaching, Ted. Note use of the word "teaching" -- the Church does not have "positions." The very word "position" implies a changeability which is foreign to Church teachings, which are permanent and reliable. If Jesus didn't care whether people were reliably taught the truth, He could just have let Protestant ministers do their thing, rather than set up His own Church.

4) Good question on when souls are made, Anna. I believe the general rule is this: God doesn't have a bunch of pre-made souls sitting around up there, waiting for couples to make zygotes so He can drop the souls in. Rather, when a couple has intercourse during the woman's fertile time, assuming the man's sperm level and health are good, etc., God procreates the person with the couple. This means the man contributes the y+22, the woman contributes the x+22 and the use of her womb and necessary nutrients, and God makes a soul right then and there, specifically for this new little person.

Regarding twins: It's nice to think that when the parental contribution is sufficiently wonderful, God wants to get maximum beneft, so creates an extra soul but I doubt that the magisterium would agree. What seems more likely is that, as an intrinsic part of the process of embryo separation into two, God creates a second soul, in the same manner in which He created the first one. in other words, only one soul is created during conception, and then God makes a second one as the physical matter separates into two human embryos.

5) Why does God make twins? Three reasons (again, only my opinion since the Church has no teaching on this question): 1) as a cross for some to bear ( 2) as a gift for some to receive and 3) as a reminder that in God's eyes we're all the same, ie, equally important to Him, though obviously unique and irreplaceable.

6) Lars, I like your comment that the ultimate human arrogance is to think we can figure everything out. Which all reminds me of a question I raised a few months ago: what is the teaching of the Church as to when the soul is "put into" an individual person? Can it really be at the moment of conception? The only reason I ask is that, if so, how do identical twins end up with two souls, and when do they get two? Do they get two souls with conception and then once the flesh divides into the two individual twins, one soul "moves" with each little body?? It's a bit of a mind-bender of a question, isn't it?!

From: Lars
Agreed. The crux of the matter involves when and how the soul was "put" in man. It doesnt make sense that God watched man develop from a chimpanzee-like creature until it became intelligent enough then one day picked two of these creatures called Adam and Eve and popped a soul into them. What makes more sense is that God was creating progressively more and more complex creatures as time went by using the previous creature as a "template" for the next but with added "features". This would explain why we have features both anatomic and physiologic in common with other animals and biologic entities. This also dovetails with the 7 days of creation in Genesis, that God created the simpler life forms first followed by the more complex. Creation was hard work since we know God rested on the 7th day. If it was "hard work" (I suppose that is a relative and quirky term when applied to God) then it would make sense that God would use existing creatures as "templates" rather than create an entirely new form of life. Any other way would be wastefull. So it does all seem to fall into place and make good sense.

From: Fergail
Ted, It depends on what you mean by evolution. One always has to have precise and accurate definitions of things and avoid sloppy definitions. If one means materialistic evolution, macro-evolution, that man derived from a primordial soup and from animals or from a kind of pre-Adam man, the Pope certainly could not and did not accept anything remotely like that. Man derived from a created Adam and Eve regardless of what the scientists proclaim so glibly and confidently.

From: Ted
Pope John Paul accepted evolution. What's the current Pope's position?

From: Fergail
A clear case of Darwinian Fundamentalism

From: Lars
More evolutionary nonsense... that the fish grew arms and legs and walked up on land and then turned into man.I am afraid these people just cant seem to grasp the 2nd law of thermodynamics....that the natural tendency is towards more not less disorder in the universe...something called entropy.

'Link' Between Fish and Land Animals Found

Discovery Called Key Evidence Of Vertebrates' Ocean Origins
By Guy GugliottaWashington Post Staff WriterThursday, April 6, 2006; Page A03
Scientists yesterday reported discovering an evolutionary "missing link" between fish and land animals -- an ancient, river-dwelling predator with arm joints in its fins, an alligator-like head and ribs heavy enough to support its body on dry land.
Researchers found several fossils between four and nine feet long. The creature was a fish -- with scales, fins and gills -- but it moved its head independently of its body, could drag itself along on land as today's seals do, and may have walked, although the research team did not find fossil hindquarters to test that hypothesis.

Neil H. Shubin of the University of Chicago examines the cast of a Tiktaalik roseae fossil that he and a colleague found in Canada. (By Dan Dry -- University Of Chicago Via Associated Press)
Graphic
The Missing StepResearchers have found the fossil of a key transitional creature that blurs the distinction between fish and land-living animals. This river-dwelling predator, Tiktaalik roseae, could stand up on mud flats river bottoms. It provides the closest look yet at the moment when life first crawled from water to land.

The discovery provides the best evidence yet that fish emerged from the oceans and rivers of the early Earth between 380 million and 360 million years ago and evolved into terrestrial vertebrates beginning with amphibians and reptiles, and ending up with mammals and, ultimately, humans.
"This is extremely significant, because while we have been amassing evidence for years on the link between fish and tetrapods [four-legged animals], there was still a gap," said Hans Sues, associate director of research and collections at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. "This link is one we would have predicted, but it's nice to see that it really exists."
A research team led by paleontologist Neil H. Shubin of the University of Chicago and Edward B. Daeschler of Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences found the fossils locked in red siltstone in the windblown Arctic wilderness of Canada's Ellesmere Island, about 600 miles from the North Pole.
The fish lived 375 million years ago in what had been an equatorial river delta before continental drift moved the land mass northward. The team dubbed it Tiktaalik roseae . "Tiktaalik" is an Inuktitut word for "large, shallow water fish," and Shubin said "roseae" refers to one of the patrons of the project who wants to remain anonymous. The research was reported today in the journal Nature.
Scientists for decades have been gathering evidence that four-footed, vertebrate land animals evolved from fish sometime in the latter part of the geologic period known as the Devonian, after the emergence of insects and spiders.
Researchers for years had collected Devonian fossil fish with bones and muscles in their fins. The fish were regarded as forerunners of the land animals that soon made their way to solid ground. Today's coelacanth is such a "lobe-finned fish," a holdover from this early period.
" Tiktaalik is adapting," Shubin said in a telephone interview. "It could stand on the water bottom in the shallows, or it could stand up in the mud flats. It's a fish tetrapod or a 'fishtopod.' "
Sues, also speaking in a telephone interview, said scientists first subscribed to a theory that the red sedimentary rock where most of the transitional fossils were found indicated an ancient desert climate, and that legs evolved because fish were trapped in evaporating ponds and "had to move out or die."
"That became passe, when scientists in recent years found good lakes for the creatures," Sues said. "It seemed likely that they never left the water, and instead evolved limbs for the purpose of running along under the surface. One idea is that they developed limbs to navigate lakes choked with vegetation."
Shubin said he and Daeschler set out to find transitional animals in the far North, because large Devonian deposits are exposed to the weather there without civilization, vegetation or dirt to conceal them. "Up there, it's either rock or ice," he said.
They discovered Tik taalik embedded in a deposit in the southwestern part of Ellesmere: "There were all kinds of carnivorous fish -- big and small" -- and Tiktaalik was one of the top-line predators, Shubin said. "This was a fish-eat-fish world -- you're either big with giant teeth, or you're small and armored."
Shubin said the team understood immediately that they had found what they were looking for. Tiktaalik may have been a fish, but it had a remarkable set of land-animal characteristics, from its flat, alligator-like head with eyes on top to its ribs -- suitable for both heavy lifting and, perhaps, breathing with lungs.
"But the truly remarkable thing is the internal skeleton preserved within the fin," vertebrate paleontologist Hans-Peter Schultze of the University of Kansas said in a telephone interview. "It looks like a tetrapod limb, and you can see that it was used to walk on the ground."
By examining the pectoral fins extending from Tiktaalik like arms, the team could easily see the outlines of bones and joints -- shoulder, elbow and wrist -- powerful enough to support the animal on land.
And once on land, "opportunities were available," Sues said. "They've found [fossil] scorpions about two feet long in Scotland, and that would have made a good meal for this animal. Like eating lobster."

What Do Protestants Believe?

2006-02-23T10:24:00.000-08:00

Protestantism received its name from the fact that certain people protested against some of the doctrines and practices of the Church, the Catholic Church.

Chief among those protesting were Luther, an Augustinian priest, Calvin, a lawyer and Wesley, a defecting priest. King Henry the 8th of England in his struggle with the Papacy for a right to divorce his wife, defected from the Church, not on grounds of doctrine or practices - which he insisted upon enforcing - but on the grounds of personal pride and power. His defection led to formation of the Church of England/the Episcopal Church - while Luther formed the Lutheran Church, Calvin the Presbyterian Church - from which derived the Puritan and Baptist Churches - and Wesley, the Methodist Church. To answer the question above posed, it might be well to compare some basic beliefs of Protestantism with those of the Catholic Church.

Protestantism derided the Catholic belief that good works – a holy lifestyle of devotion to God combined with love of and support for one’s suffering neighbour – was necessary for salvation. Both Luther and Calvin proposed systems based upon the watchwords sola gratia (by grace alone), sola fide (through faith alone) and sola scriptura (scripture alone) that created a dysjunction between human actions and human salvation, leaving man free to make of the world what he would.
Man’s actions in this world, according to them, could not have any salvation consequences. As long as a person believes in Christ, as long as he is ‘born again’, he is assured of salvation regardless of his behaviour, his actions. This ‘sola fide’ belief is condemned by the Catholic Church as Presumption, defined as a ‘foolish expectation of salvation without making use of the necessary means to obtain it’.
“Sola fide’ rejects the words of St James the Apostle, who said
“As the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith without good works is dead”.
“ So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead”
“You see that man is justified by works and not by faith alone” ( James 2:18 and 2:25)
“ Not everyone who says Lord, Lord, shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven but he who does the will of My Father who is in Heaven”( Matt 7: 21)
Even the devils showed that they had faith. They showed their faith that Christ is God when they said “ What have you to do with us, O Son of God” (Matt 8; 28). Their faith was not enough. So, clearly, faith alone is not enough for us.
This Protestant rejection of the traditional doctrines of good works and merit and the resulting weakening of the fear of Hell and desire for Heaven created a new paradigm, a new civilization different from the long-standing Catholic civilization because if God does not care about man’s actions in this world, why should man care? This Protestant disbelief had an effect that, over time, followers of Protestantism could separate their public social and business actions from any significant feelings of restraint by moral considerations. The excesses of the Industrial Revolution and of unrestrained Capitalism since that revolution, are just some examples of bad effects resulting from this lack of restraint. The Catholic Church, mindful of the value and necessity of good works, was always in the forefront of efforts to promote social justice and the application of Christian principles to the workplace and the market-place. “As often as you did it to the least of my little ones, you did it to Me”

Catholic teaching also differs from Protestantism in that there is a central teaching authority in the Catholic Church - the Magisterium - headed by the reigning Pope. Catholic teachings in faith and morals originate with Revelation and the Holy Spirit Who directs and guides the Magisterium.
The bishops in their dioceses and the priests in the parishes are the local representatives and extension of the Magisterium, the central teaching authority in a monarchial, hierarchial Church. Bishops and priests are authorized and obligated to teach and reflect the expressed views of the Magisterium and never to express views opposing defined doctrine. The bishops and priests bear the responsibility to propagate, in a hierarchial manner, as one voice, defined Catholic teachings on faith and morals throughout the Universal Church.

In the Catholic Church, there is a body of doctrinal and moral law based upon Revelation which differs from the Revelation of Protestantism in that it recognises not only the truths of Scripture but also the Tradition of the Church over the centuries. The Catholic Magisterium has always claimed to possess infallibility when it defines and presents for the belief of its faithful, doctrines in faith and morals. The authority to so proclaim is based upon the words of Christ, its Founder, to the Church
“ Go into the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature. The Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and bring all things to your mind, whatsoever I have said to you”(John 14: 25).
Jesus said “He that hears you hears Me: he that despises you, despises Me” (Luke 10:16). Surely this means that when the Pope, Peter’s direct successor, speaks on matters of faith or morals, Christ Himself is speaking.
Christ also said “ Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound also in Heaven” (Matt 16: 19). Is there not here a clear statement, a promise, that the Holy Spirit will give the Truth to the apostles and their descendants? .

Protestantism’s structure is democratic rather than hierarchical. In the area of catechesis, since scripture is to be interpreted by the individual Protestant believer based only on sola scriptura (scripture only) there is no truly integrated body of Protestant doctrine and the role of Protestant pastors is more a supportive one of encouraging congregations to abide by rules of belief and behaviour arrived at mostly by consensus and democratic means than by a central hierarchical, authoritative, guaranteed, code of belief and behaviour.
Disintegration of Protestantism into innumerable sects was inevitable because of this basic tenet that salvation was based only on Revelation by Scripture alone (Sola Scriptura). Protestantism held, despite the above quoted words of Christ, that no Church had the right to claim ultimate authority in the teaching of Revealed Truth and that the individual believer, under the private guidance of the Holy Spirit, was his own authority in scriptural interpretation. This is spiritual libertarianism.
Since the French Revolution, with its false belief that all men are equal in every respect, the principle of equality has been universally applied. If I hold a certain belief and you hold an opposite one, equality demands that we are both right, that my opinion is as reliable as yours. This, of course, is absurd as truth is absolute and contrary beliefs cannot be regarded as equally true. This in its essence is Relativism and is insupportable. Mankind, if it is to survive, must have a dependable source of absolute truth regarding such fundamental issues as faith and morality - man’s relationship with his Creator.

Since the formation of the Protestant Churches listed above, there has been a steady erosion of beliefs and disagreement on matters of faith and practice which led to breaking off of splinter Protestant churches that now total in the area of 20,000 worldwide. If Protestantism is the True Church, which of the 20,000 Protestant churches that vary so much in beliefs and practices, is the True Church? They can’t all be true as Truth is indivisable and does not tolerate contradiction. If one of them is false, why not they all?

Non-Episcopal Protestantism does not recognise the validity of the Eucharist while the Eucharist is the central tenet of the Catholic Faith.
In the Church of England/Episcopal churches, in their ‘High Church’sectors, a form of ‘Eucharist’ is observed but their Eucharist is invalid because, after Henry 8th, a new ordination ritual altered the matter and form of Priestly Ordination – the laying on of hands, - such that all their clergy since that time have been invalidly ordained. They no longer possessed direct sacramental continuity with the twelve apostles. Therefore their form of Eucharist has been and remains invalid.

Protestantism does not honor Mary and either ignores her or attacks her.
The Catholic Church greatly honours and reveres her as the Mother of God. Catholics do not adore or worship her since adoration or worship can only be given to God alone.

Protestantism does not have the Sacrament of Confession. Confession is one of the Catholic Church’s most important sacraments. Protestants hold that confession can only be direct to God and not to a mere man. They say as did the Pharisees “ Who can forgive sins but God alone”. They refuse to accept the Catholic belief that the priest in Confession is in the person of Christ : Confession is made to Christ, through the priest. Christ said
“ Whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed also in heaven” (Matt 13: 20)
“Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven”
(John 20: 23)

Baptism - if the right words are used while pouring the water over the head - is valid in Protestantism since baptism does not require a priest to officiate.
Any responsible person, acting in good faith, can be the minister.

Matrimony, likewise, is valid in Protestantism. The ceremony in general does not demand that a priest officiate for it to be valid since the minister in matrimony comprises the two contracting parties. For it to be a sacrament, however, requires both parties to be baptised.
The Catholic Church adheres to the words of Christ regarding the indissolubility of marriage, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery against her, and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery”.
Protestantism, especially in modern times, pays lip service to those words of Christ. His words are honored more in the breach than in the observance and no-fault divorce is widely tolerated.

Protestantism does not recognise any Sacrament of the Dying.
The Catholic Church does.

The Three Phases of Human Existence

2006-01-28T17:36:00.000-08:00

There are three phases of man’s existence :
Phase One refers to his earthly existence from conception to death of his body.
Phase Two is the period from his death to the resurrection of his body on the Last Day.
Phase Three refers to the infinite period that follows his resurrection.

Christ also shows these three phases in His life as man.
Phase One from His conception at the Annunciation to His death on the Cross :
Phase Two – lasting three days – from His death to his Resurrection.
Phase Three from His Resurrection into eternity.

Phase One:
In Phase One man is an embodied spirit. We all know in a very general sense how he functions during this phase. He is comprised of a body with many functions and a soul that contains the intellect with the ability to reason and free will with the ability to make decisions and to act.
His body’s physical functions can be grouped under the headings of digestion, circulation, locomotion, excretion, reproduction, vision, hearing, taste and touch. They are subordinate to the immaterial soul.

Phase Two:.
At the onset of Phase Two - at his physical death - man’s final fate will be decided in what is called the Particular (or individual) Judgment and he will be assigned to either Purgatory for a temporary period or to Heaven or Hell for ever.
St Faustina’s Diary (p 601) suggests the possibility that at this moment of death, there may be a dialog between God and the dying person where the ‘soul, illuminated by a ray of God’s powerful final grace, turns to God in the last minute with sorrow for his sins and receives from Him forgiveness’

In this phase we are not concerned with the body because man has become a disembodied spirit. The human body is now totally devoid of life and is separated from the soul. The soul, of course, continues its immortal existence with intellect and will continuing to function though without any communication with the body.
Phase Two in the instance of Christ, lasted three days.
For man it lasts for a long, but unknowable, period depending upon when the Last Day - the time of the Second Coming - comes.
Adam and Eve, the Prophets, St Peter and the Apostles, the Saints and all those who have died - with the exceptions of Jesus and Mary - are in Phase Two and will remain in Phase Two until the second Coming. In the case of those still alive on the Last Day, Phase Two will be very short or non-existant.

Purgatory : If dis-embodied man is assigned to Purgatory from his immediate Particular Judgment, he is assured of his ultimate passage to Heaven when his Purgatory time has been served. This can be a short or long period.
His sufferings in Purgatory have to be spiritual in nature rather than physical, inasmuch as his body is separated and lifeless and unable to feel physical suffering.
Perhaps the delay in reaching the vision of God is responsible for most or all of his suffering. The Councils of Florence and Trent have stated that the final purification of the elect in Purgatory is entirely different from the punishment of the damned in Hell.

Heaven : If he gets to Heaven following his Particular Judgment, we know that dis-embodied man will enjoy the Beatific Vision. The just will be forever with God enjoying the Beatific Vision and will be in the company of the un-bodied Angels and the dis-embodied saints from all past generations.
“ Eye has not seen nor ear heard nor has it entered the mind of man to conceive the wonderful joys that God has in store for those who love Him”.

Hell : Unfortunately, there are dying persons who voluntarily and consciously reject and scorn God’s final grace. Sometimes the obduracy in souls is so great that consciously they choose Hell despite God’s efforts.
God predestines no one to go to hell : for this a wilful turning away from God by mortal sin is necessary and persistence in it till the end.
(Council of Trent).
If he goes to Hell following his Particular Judgment, if he chooses Hell, we know that dis-embodied man will be shut off for ever from the Beatific Vision.
“To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God’s merciful love means remaining separated from Him forever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called Hell. The chief punishment of hell is this eternal separation from God.”
(Catechism. P.270).

In what dimension of existence does the soul in Purgatory, Heaven or Hell reside, now that it is not defined by its link with a physical body ?
In what way does the soul function, separated from the body upon which it depended so much in Phase One?.
Does the loss of the Beatific Vision in Phase Two differ from the loss of the Beatific Vision suffered in Phase Three?

Phase Three:
In Phase Three, after the Last Day, man will be re-embodied.
He will be again full and complete with his soul re-united with his body.
Re-embodied man will be in either Heaven or Hell for the rest of his now infinite life .
Risen persons will still be of the same human species and will still be the same individuals they were on earth but decay will no longer affect bodies that had formerly been subject to decay.

To what extent will the body of Phase Three show the bodily functions it possessed in Phase One?
Christ after the Resurrection gives us some examples of what the risen body will be capable. He appeared externally to be and to function as He did before His death. For example, His glorified body, after his Resurrection, consumed, as in Phase One, food given Him by the apostles.
Does this mean that the other - essentially supportive - functions of the body exercised in Phase One, such as circulation, excretion, tasting, touching, vision and locomotion, will once more be present in Phase Three?
We know that reproduction will not be a needed function then.

Heaven: The human body after its resurrection will have attained the full development of human life: it will be immortal and free from all limitations of space and time. The Council of Trent used four terms to identify the qualities of the risen human body. It will show
Impassibility - immunity from death and pain,
Subtility - freedom from restraint by matter: (Jesus was able to pass through closed doors following His resurrection).
Agility - obedience to spirit with relation to movement and space (able to move through space with the speed of light) and
Clarity - the refulgent beauty of the soul is manifested in the body (as when Jesus was transfigured on Mount Tabor).

“The just will reign with Christ for ever, glorified in body and soul and the material universe itself will be transformed. God will then be ‘all in all’, in eternal life.
(Catechism page 1060).
For those in Heaven, the visible universe is destined to be transformed ‘so that the world itself, restored to its original state, facing no further obstacles, should be at the service of the Just’.
(St Irenaeus).
Does this mean that the Just will populate a transformed Heaven on earth?

Hell : In Hell, man will suffer loss of the Beatific Vision for ever.
Will the risen bodies of the damned possess the same attributes as the glorified bodies of the Just?
Will they be immortal?
Will they feel pain?
Will they be able to pass through solid matter?
Will they be able to move with the speed of light?
Will they have clarity?

What will be man’s physical location in Phase Three?
Inasmuch as he will have a physical body it seems that he will occupy, at least in part, whether in Heaven or Hell, a physical dimension in which he will function much as he functioned in Phase One.
The condemned will presumably be in another physical dimension from the Just, cut off from God and from the Just, in the company of Satan, the other Fallen Angels and each other, for ever.

Totalitarianism and Relativism

2005-12-10T19:16:00.000-08:00

The Sequence :
Rejection of the Spiritual Authority of the Church by the Protestant Revolution.
Rejection of the Spiritual Authority of the Bible.
Rejection of the Ten Commandments as binding on humanity.
Rejection of Spiritual Truth as an absolute.
Rejection of Spiritual Truth as originating in God.
Acceptance of Relativism.
Acceptance of Personal Autonomy whereby each individual establishes his own spiritual Truths : where man will believe what he wants to believe, what permits and conforms to his chosen lifestyle.

Professor Roberto Mattei, Italian historian, in a talk given to the prestigious and secular Washington Cosmos Club in February 2000, discussed the relationship between Totalitarianism and Relativism.
He referred to one thesis, which he rejected, that held that the essence of Totalitarianism lay in its pretension to impose a truth, a system of absolute values based on blood or class as in Nazism and Communism. The same thesis also classified the Church as totalitarian in that She seeks to impose a universal Faith. It follows that this thesis holds that the only antithesis to such Totalitarianism is a Relativism that dissolves Truth which then becomes demoted to mere opinion where all opinions are welcomed and treated with equal respect, where opinion polls establish Truth.
The essence of Relativism is the denial of an absolute, transcendental Truth, of a Natural Law, of a Divine Revelation, of a true Religion. There is no attack on religion as such. What is attacked by Relativism and those who espouse it, is the idea of a single true religion, of a single true Church, of a single true God.

Now, if Relativism was the real antidote to the Totalitarianism of the Nazi and Communist varieties, how can it be that this same philosophical and moral Relativism comprised the essence and basis of these two major Totalitarian regimes.
The common point between them is precisely Relativism.
Nazism was Social Darwinism – Evolutionist and Relativist
Communism was Historical and Dialectic Materialism – also Evolutionist and Relativist.

“By their fruits you shall know them” We have seen the horrifying fruits of these systems – the Auschwitzes of Nazism and the Gulags of Communism.
Lest the West take false comfort in being different from them, let us consider the nature of our own modern society which is in fact no less totalitarian than the Nazi and Communist societies.
Our democratic, liberal civilization born of the French Revolution and the so-called Enlightenment, is also characterized by philosophical and moral Relativism no different from that of the Nazis or Communists and like them bearing bad fruit, the bad fruits of legalized abortion, legalized homosexuality, legalized divorce with remarriage, legalized pornography, unbridled personal expression and widespread corruption, crime, immorality and recurring and ever more destructive wars.
In truth, the Liberal Democracy model of the West was rightly characterized by Pope John Paul as Totalitarian Democracy as opposed to Totalitarian Dictatorship.

Communism:
Promotes a system of values based upon Class.
Rests upon a tripod formed of
1 - Historical and Dialectic Materialism
2 - Evolutionism
3 - Philosophic and Moral Relativism

Nazism :
Promotes a system of values based upon Race.
Rests upon a tripod formed of
1 – Social Darwinism
2 – Evolutionism
3 – Philosophic and Moral Relativism

Totalitarian Democracy :
Promotes a system of values based upon the French Revolution and the so-called Enlightenment.
Rests upon a tripod formed of
1 - Democracy
2 - Evolutionism
3 – Philosophic and Moral Relativism.

Christianity :
Promotes a system of absolute values based upon Philosophic and Moral Absolutism and Christian Revelation. It rests upon a tripod formed of
1 – Monarchy
2 – Creationism
3 – Philosophic and Moral Absolutism

Marriage: Why is it necessary?

2005-11-22T11:16:00.000-08:00

Marriage is necessary for mankind’s better good, individually and collectively.
Unlike most animals which become independent and self-reliant days after birth, the human is completely dependent on adult direct care for several months, on adult provision of food for several years and on guidance and advice - emotional dependence - for many more years.
It is therefore clear that at least the mother must be available during much of this time if the child is to develop physically, intellectually and emotionally into a healthy, secure and independent adult.
Bonding between the mother and baby is especially important during the first year of life and is crucial to the feeling of security of the child.

As the mother, for best results, needs to be constantly available to the child during these formative months and years, she cannot readily absent herself to seek and perform income- and food-earning work to sustain her child and herself.
Thus the need for the father to fulfil the latter role.
We can see from this the necessity for the family as the primary unit and institution of society - primary to the State at all it’s levels.
Because of these factors, the father as well as the mother, has to be made responsible for the welfare of the child whom they both are responsible, under God, for producing.
There is no way that this responsibility to the child during it’s years of dependency, can be discarded without an injustice to the child.
This is one of the great anti-personal and anti-social consequences of divorce, which is especially harmful when the children are developing and during the teen-age years when the children most need emotional security to handle problems of self-identity.
There is no way that these children can be better off.

A study by the British Rowntree Foundation featured in a B.B.C. program in Feb. 1994 showed that children whose families undergo a series of disruptions and changes are more likely to have health, educational and social difficulties than families that remain intact despite strained relations between parents :
most of the children had great difficulty coming to terms with the new relationships which their parents had formed :
those from families who had broken up were more likely to suffer from low self-esteem, difficulties with friends or at school and a range of psychosomatic health problems.
Another survey, a U.S. sociological one, referred to by St Charles Forum in 1994, reported that at least one third of children from divorced families showed severe emotional and psychological injury, one third showed no apparent ill effects and the remaining one third showed slight to moderate injury.
Another survey quoted by the Archbishop of Denver showed that ‘children of single-parent families are six times more likely to have emotional and behavioural problems, more likely to fail in the classroom, to get pregnant as teen-agers, to abuse drugs and to get into trouble with the law : children of divorce suffer deep and lasting trauma’.
The U.S.Census Bureau in 1990 reported
1 - The U.S. illegitimate birth rate now stands at 30% :
2 - The rate is now fastest in white women over age 20.
3 - 50% of all abortions are performed on women in age group 15-24.
4 - Behavioural and emotional problems of children in mixed families are even higher than in single-parent families.
5 - Among developed countries, the U.S. has the highest homicide rate, four times higher than France, the next highest.
6 - Homicide rates are the same - and low - among people, both black and white, who live in married, intact families.
7 - Homicide rates are the same - and high - among people in single-parent families and are highest in areas where there is a large concentration of single-parent families
8 - 89% of children living in poverty are in single-parent families compared to 11% living with both parents.
9 - Infant mortality is 1.7 times higher for babies born to unmarried mothers.
Washington, DC, had 21 illegitimate births per 1,000 births in 1991, twice the national rate.

A grave responsibility lies, therefore, with parents to keep their marriages intact and to make their homes as happy as possible, not only for the benefit of the parents themselves but especially for the well-being of the vulnerable growing, dependant children.

In Christian marriage, Christian love - properly understood as an unselfish love in which each party desires the well-being and happiness of the other, for that other person’s sake - should be the primary reason for that marriage.
Persons united in sacramental marriage are now no longer two but one.
Jesus said
“ For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one, so they are no longer two but one “
(Mark 10).
In valid marriage, man and wife become one in the same way that two elements bonded by Superglue become one and cannot be separated without injury to the two elements.
A selfish motive such as to receive satisfaction of one’s own desires and needs is not a good basis for Christian marriage.
A marriage structured upon selfishness can easily lead to frustrations because of unmet desires, irritations because of the needs of the other partner or children of the marriage, and problems arising out of the conflicting demands of motherhood and career.
Such a selfish motive for marriage provides a basis for the introduction of a destructive competitive spirit in place of the co-operative spirit which recognises the complementarity of both parties in the promotion of the family’s welfare.
Selfishness can promote a desire for mothers to enter the work-force and to compete there with men instead of recognising that caring for the family at home is a much more important, fulfilling and rewarding career and one in total conformity with woman’s nature and destiny and the well-being of society in general.
How is caring for one’s family at home more important and therefore more rewarding than an outside career ?

Parents co-operate in marriage and procreation, not just with each other, but more importantly they co-operate with God, whose decision it is that a child should be born.
It is the primary responsibility of the parents, not just to provide for the material and social needs of their children, but, more importantly, to teach them about God and the true reason for life, to prepare them, in this passing world, for the real and eternal world with God.
This is why the Church has always insisted that the parents are the primary and natural educators of their children and that schools are acting only in locus parentis - in the name of and with the consent of the parents - who must be satisfied with the general content of what they are taught, especially in regard to matters of faith, morals, truth and knowledge of God.

The primary function of a career is to provide resources for one’s family to meet it’s needs, both material and spiritual.
It is not to satisfy one’s ego and pride by ambitious striving to reach positions of influence, wealth, luxury and power.
Modern society, by it’s pervasive propaganda inculcates into gullible women and mothers the idea that home-making is not fulfilling and that it does not enable a woman to realise her true potential.
In secular society’s view, the mother at home is a prisoner at the beck and call of husband and children with no one considering her needs and status in life.
Some of the more degraded ‘feminists’ even refer to mothers as ‘baby machines’.
What a travesty on and trivialization of the wonder of pregnancy and motherhood.

A great measure of blame for the present deplorable attitude to marriage and motherhood must be assigned to the so-called feminist movement - a term which is yet another example of double-speak, where women devoted to anti-woman activity arrogate to themselves a euphemistic term totally inappropriate to what they in effect do.
One would expect a true feminist movement to support women and girls to carry through their crisis pregnancies and not encourage them to destroy their children, an act which, in many if not in most cases, leaves behind in these unfortunate women, emotional scars of guilt and the scars of irretrievable loss.
One would expect them to be opposed to the degradation of womenhood by pornography : some are but it’s not official.
One would expect them to be opposed to the trivialization of sex by precocious and irresponsible sexual activity :
One would expect them to be opposed to divorce which leaves mothers and their children exposed to the often grave hardships of fatherless families.
Instead we find many of these so-called feminists - who should be more correctly referred to as anti-feminists - supporting and promoting abortion, divorce and homosexuality and providing no assistance in the community battles against pornography and precocious and irresponsible sexual activity.
They do often support women in their battles against sexist behaviour of some men but, in truth, one can often attribute this to a general anti-male resentment and to exploitation of all opportunities to foment social discord.

A secondary reason for a career is to play a part in providing for the legitimate needs of society in it’s daily course.
As in all such matters, when a conflict between the primary and secondary purposes appears, the primary purpose must take precedence.
This is not by any means to condemn any woman who trains for and enters a career outside the home.
Such a course is very prudent, principally as a measure to ensure financial security in the event of non-marriage or abandonment and to ensure against entering marriage solely to obtain such security.
When a married woman who has a career receives one or more children, she now has a primary and over-riding responsibility to that family which cannot easily be satisfied by a dual role of careerist and home-maker.
In the event of conflict, the family must come first as also must come openness to new life.
It is an affront to the Creator and an insult to His children, to regard as a burden or inconvenience, the children whom He has created with our co-operation and placed in our care.

One of the deadliest forces operating against marital happiness is, not only pre-marital intercourse and intra-marital infidelity, but also the use of immoral methods of birth-control, such as the Poison Pill and diaphragm methods and the mutilating operation of tubal ligation.
In the use of the Pill, the hormonal system is unnaturally deranged with the primary purpose of preventing ovulation.
In the use of diaphragm, a physical barrier is erected against the sperm and is frequently associated with chronic infection which also tends to cause abortion when birth prevention fails.
Let it be noted that these practices make demands upon the wife while leaving the husband totally free of any encumbrance.
In essence, the wife is made responsible for the occurrence of any ‘accidental’ pregnancy and she can easily come to be seen as an object to be used rather than a person to be loved.
The sexual act is totally structured by nature to promote conception of an infant : that it does not necessarily happen does not deny this fact.
The act provides a husband and wife with a physical means to show their love for one another, and to seek, as the fruit of their love, the blessing of that new life.
The pleasure of sexual union is associated with the act to encourage the parents to do what is necessary to produce new life.

When the act is carried out, but a mechanical or chemical obstacle - and this includes use of the ‘Pill’ to artificially prevent ovulation - is deliberately interposed for the specific purpose of preventing the procreative effect of the act, then the act has become an unnatural one, an intrinsically evil one that cannot be justified for any good reason.
It is not the artificiality but the unnaturalness of these methods that render them sinful.
There is a distinct difference between these methods of unnatural birth prevention and use of the natural methods such as the Rhythm, Temperature and Ovulation Methods where pregnancy is avoided by restriction of intercourse to infertile times
In these cases, there is no unnatural direct interference with the act when it is carried out. ( See chapter on Natural Family Planning )
This is not, as some no doubt will say, splitting hairs.
There is a fundamental difference
It can be accepted that God, knowing the varying conditions of married life, has provided us with a natural means of avoiding pregnancy when there is a truly unselfish reason to postpone it.
This natural means enables married couples to take advantage of the natural infertile periods of the woman’s cycle.
The use of hormonal methods such as the’Pill’, causes an unnatural disruption of the natural cycle in which ovulation is hormonally suppressed over many cycles.

It is extremely important to understand the crucial part that God, our Creator, takes in the conception of every human person.
Marriage and pregnancy involve not just two persons but three - the wife, the husband and God - in effect, theologically, a Nuptial Trinity.
Every single person born, whether following voluntary intercourse or the involuntary intercourse of rape, is singly and individually chosen for birth by God.
God uses the father and mother as His agents to co-operate with Him in every conception and birth.
Obviously every act of intercourse does not result in conception.
No man and woman can decide that they are going to have a baby.
They can decide that they are going to try to do so.
Does the particular sperm, one out of competing millions, that goes to form a particular baby, successfully fertilize the released target ovum by mere chance ?
I hardly think so.
The Creator of Life could hardly be expected to leave such a vital event to mere chance even if there was such a phenomenon as mere chance.
No one is conceived by mere chance of intercourse but by a deliberate choice and act of God.
How many persons during the act of intercourse, within or outside marriage, realise that God is present and deciding whether to send new life or not.?
It is an awesome fact that God chooses and presides over every conception and, at that moment of conception, infuses into the material body it’s spiritual essence - it’s soul, consisting of it’s intellect, memory, and will.
We can now see how precious every single person is in God’s sight - however humble, defective, poor or apparently useless he/she may appear to us.
What a reassurance to any of us who wrestles with problems of identity and self-worth, to know that each one of us was specifically and deliberately chosen for birth by God.
How can one feel unimportant or valueless knowing this fact ?
This is the basis for the dignity of the human person - our choice for life by God.
‘Pro-choice’ denies God’s choice.

When we use unnatural methods of birth prevention we are deliberately interfering with one of God’s most awesome actions, the creation of a human life in God’s own image.
What a crime against the Almighty !
The mortal sin committed with every act of contraceptive intercourse deprives the soul of the Actual graces of Christian marriage and leaves the marriage at the mercy of the unhealthy influences of a sinful world.
When we carry out abortion we commit an even greater crime against the Author of Life and will one day have to answer for it to a God who is a God of Justice as well as of Mercy.
The coin of Mercy has on it’s other side, Justice, just as the coin of Rights has on it’s other side, Responsibility.
While we live we are offered the mercy of God : when we die we are exposed only to His justice.
Fools indeed rush in where angels fear to tread.

----------------------------------------------------

Declaration of Nullity

Every diocese has a Marriage Tribunal presided over by a judge with two advocates, one supporting the application, the other opposing it.
The fee for each determination varies but is not excessive and can, in certain circumstances be waived.
The fee is the same whether the application is approved or rejected.
Appeal against a judgement can be made to a higher tribunal at the Vatican.

There are three basic grounds for the Catholic Church declaring a marriage regarded previously as a valid marriage to be null and void.

If one of the persons in the marriage was at the time of marriage unwilling, unknowing or unable to be married.

Unwilling
If one partner was at the time forced or pressured into the marriage.
If one partner at the time of marriage had declared his/her clear intention to be unfaithful during the marriage.
If one partner at the time of marriage had declared his/her hostility to having children.
If one or both parties had stated at the time of marriage, their intent to divorce in the event that the marriage did not work out to their satisfaction.

Unknowing
If one partner was at the time so intellectually immature as to not understand the nature and responsibility of marriage.

Unable
If one partner was truly unable at the time of marriage to observe the physical obligations of marriage.

The Marriage Tribunal will require reliable, corroborative evidence to the effect that these obstacles to a valid marriage truly existed at the time of marriage .
The word alone of either party will not be acceptable but testimony from a reliable third party unequivocally confirming the claim of the applicant will be required.

As in all trials, the outcome depends upon the truth of the evidence received and accepted.
It can happen that a spurious favourable decision can be rendered because of untrue evidence or because of improper application of the Canon Law provisions of the Church by the Tribunal.
It is currently felt by responsible elements within the Church that a scandalous number of spurious favourable decisions have indeed been rendered by Tribunals throughout the U.S ecpecially over the past several years.
In such cases, even though these outcomes have led to objectively adulterous re-marriages, the responsibility for this lies with the Tribunal personnel, as presumably those who re-marry act in good faith.

There are innumerable persons in present-day society, who exist in adulterous and sinful marriages because of ‘re-marriage’ following civil divorce while the true spouse is still alive.
These can be truly described as sinful structures despite society’s acceptance and promotion of civil divorce with re-marriage.
Each and every time such couples engage in sexual relations they commit the mortal sin of fornication.
Our Lady told Jacinta at Fatima that the sins that send most to Hell are sins of the flesh and that many marriages are not good, do not please God and are not of God.

The Philosophy of Suffering

2005-07-15T14:54:00.000-07:00

Suffering appears to be an unavoidable part of life. It comes to us all at one time or another, in some form or another. It is something we all instinctively try to avoid. We exercise all our talents to avoid or minimise it. Some may even sacrifice their lives in order to avoid it or escape from it.

In its nature suffering is a disorder of the smooth flow of life. It has two elements, the actual disorder and our emotional reaction to it. It comes in many forms and may, like disease, be acute or chronic.
It can involve primarily the mind or the body – the mind in the form of acute or chronic anxiety and the body in the form of pain and/or variable disability.

It can appear at different ages. In adolescence, the subject may suffer from varying degrees of disorientation due to confusion as to the meaning of life and his/her role in it. This involves the effort to find one’s true and full identity, one’s relationship to peers and to authority, and the effort needed to determine one’s station in life – one’s future occupation, profession or vocation.
In adult life, the subject may suffer from one or more of a myriad of serious misfortunes, which can include major or minor illnesses or complaints, loneliness following loss of a spouse or separation from family members, disruption of family life, accidents, loss of employment, actions of criminals and drug or alcohol dependency.

In life we experience a variable mix of opposites. There is joy/sorrow. Good/evil. Light/darkness. Sunshine/storm. Peace/war. Plenty/famine. Tranquility/disturbance. Health/disease. Love/hatred. Strength/weakness.
We experience this mix of opposites because we are imperfect people living in an imperfect world with limited control over our own actions, over the thinking and actions of other people or over the activities of the natural world we inhabit. Even God is limited in His control over us because He cannot interfere with the Free Will he gave us.

So what are we to do about our sufferings? Catholic theology tells us that when we cannot eliminate our sufferings we can modify and minimize our emotional reaction to our sufferings by sanctifying them. We sanctify them by accepting them, by consciously uniting them to the sufferings of Christ, by carrying them patiently as Christ carried His cross. In this way, useless suffering can be replaced by meaningful suffering, suffering that will magnify our merit in God’s eyes and earn us a greater reward in the next life where we can expect that all the positives of this life will be ours to enjoy with none of its negatives.

A Crisis of Authority

2005-07-01T20:05:00.000-07:00

To day we live in a spiritual wasteland. We must ask ourselves how we got into this lamentable state?. This did not happen in a few years but has occurred gradually over many centuries. It has taken on a more rapid tempo in recent years because of a more public rejection by governments of divine reality, divine supremacy, divine authority.

What does authority mean?
The term derives from the word author, which means the originator, the origin.
The primary origin, the primary author, of everything is God, the Creator of everything.
The Creator expects His creatures to live and act in accordance with His directions for us, with His Will for us.

Man’s life can be reduced to two primary considerations –responsibilities and rights, including the right to exercise authority.
The responsibilities are primary and the rights are secondary and are bestowed in order to facilitate the carrying out of the responsibilities.

From the beginning of the Church, after it was given freedom by the Emperor Constantine, the Church was universally recognized as the supreme authority in matters spiritual, an authority conferred on it by Christ when He said “ All authority is given to Me in heaven and on earth : as the Father has sent Me I also send you : go therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you, and behold I will be with you all days even until the end of the world” : “And I will send the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of Truth, who will bring all things to your minds whatever I have commanded you”: “He that heareth you, heareth Me”.

This was not just some guru, some philosopher, some mere man, who made these statements : it was God the Creator Himself - whether millions believe it or not. With these words, Christ declares the duties, the responsibilities, of the Church and at the same time, declares the right of the Church to the teaching and ruling authority necessary for it to carry out these duties, these responsibilities.

The right to exercise authority constitutes a permission to do something and is attached, not to a person, but to a position, to an office held by a person. This authority, this right to rule and/or to teach, is bestowed to enable the holder of the office to carry out the responsibilities of the office.

The authority in civil life is to govern, to exercise some measure of direction, some measure of control, over citizens : it is exercised at various levels.

In religious life, authority is given to rule the Church at various levels and to teach, again at various levels, with certainty, the Truths of Revelation as revealed by Christ to His Church.

Papal authority derives in an unbroken succession from the first Pope, the apostle Peter : this authority resides in the office of the Papacy and not primarily in the person of the Pope.
The authority of the Catholic bishop likewise come from a direct, unbroken succession from the Twelve Apostles and resides in the office of bishop and not in his person.
The authority of the Catholic priest is imparted to each one at the time of his ordination and is an extension of the authority given to the bishop who ordains him and under whom he serves : again the authority resides in the office of the priest and not in his person : this authority to function as a priest - the priestly faculties - can be withdrawn from a priest by his bishop for due cause even though he still does, and always will, remain a priest - a laicized priest : there is no such thing as an ex-priest : he carries the indelible mark of his ordination all his life, in the same way that a validly-married person carries the indelible mark of matrimony until one spouse dies.

Authority is given by God to many other types of recipient and is exercised in many ways.

Authority over children is given by God directly to parents who can delegate some of this authority to teachers and civil authorities.With this parental authority goes the parental obligation to ensure that the child is brought up in accordance with God’s Will. The parents are answerable to God for the manner in which they fulfil this role.

Civil authority is given by God to governments at various levels: it is given to mayors, state governors, to presidents and kings. Christ said to Pilate – “You would not have this authority unless it was given to you from above”. Such civil authority does not derive from the citizens who elect persons to these positions : the citizens merely select the persons to whom God gives the authority to rule. Here also the authority goes with the position rather than with the person : when the person leaves office, he no longer has the authority. The authority carries with it the obligation to carry out his responsibilities in accordance with God’s Will and for the greater good of those over whom he exercises authority. Like parents, government office-holders at the various levels, are answerable to God for the manner in which they fulfil the responsibilities of their office : when a government office-holder acts in deliberate opposition to God’s Law, his authority becomes forfeit and it is the duty - in the case of an elected position - of the voters to vote him out of office or - in the case of an appointed position - of the entity that appointed him, to remove him from office : such removal must, of course, be by peaceful means.

Since the beginning of Christendom, the spiritual authority of the Church has been challenged from time to time by various individuals or groups, clerical and lay, but never on a broad scale or in a serious manner until the 11^th century.
The first serious challenge came with the Great East-West Schism in 1054 when the Patriarchate of Constantinople separated itself from the Church in Rome. This was essentially a pure challenge of authority, a rejection by the East of the administrative supremacy of Rome. There was no essential disagreement in matters of dogma or morality.

The next most serious challenge came with the Protestant Revolution in the early 1500s. As this evolved over a hundred or more years, it developed into a broad rejection of the teaching and legislative authority of the Church of Rome under the Papacy.
The Protestants declared that the Catholic Church had no authority to teach or legislate in matters of faith and morals, that such authority resided in the Scriptures and in the Scriptures only : they declared that the Church presided over by the Pope was not the custodian and interpreter of Christian Revelation, but that each individual was to reach his own conclusions based on his/her reading of the Scriptures and that the Holy Spirit would show him the truth directly.

This was undoubtedly a prescription for disaster. The Protestants were setting out on the journey of life as a ship sets forth on a voyage without a compass or chart.
Gradually over the ensuing centuries, dissidents, while they remained faithful to their readings of the Scriptures, though their belief structure included spiritual errors, retained a sufficiency of spiritual truth to enable them to retain and maintain in their personal lives and public institutions an adequate respect for the Christian Moral Law.

The third great challenge to Church authority came with the so-called Enlightenment which ushered in the French Revolution with its savage onslaught on all Church authority and institutions.
From this catastrophe came the false slogan triad of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ which has contributed greatly to the false concepts that have come to govern civil, religious and social life in our times.
Since the Enlightment, Protestants gradually began to lose their faith and respect for the Bible, and with this loss of faith came a disregard for the morality based upon it : they came to find reasons for justifying evil actions: they accepted the Benthamite concept that the end justifies the means: they came to reject the concept of absolute truth, preferring to accept the false concepts of personal autonomy and relativism under which each person can decide for himself what is right and what is wrong or under which right and wrong can be decided by discussion and democratic majority vote : this latter misconception can explain how the democratic majority vote of a Supreme Court and of a Parliamentary Congress favouring and promoting the merciless killing of millions of innocent and helpless prebirth or intrabirth infants, can be accepted by a seeming majority of the citizens of this country : what would have caused tremendous outrage and opposition by the public a few decades ago is now accepted blandly and even promoted.

The citizens now accord to their governments the spiritual authority they have denied to the Church and to the Bible. For this denial, mankind has paid and will pay ever more dearly.

Liberty - True and False

2005-06-21T09:46:00.000-07:00

Liberty is directly related to, and cannot be separated from, the primary purpose of man’s existence and his life on earth which has been defined by Christianity as the responsibility ‘to know, love and serve God here on earth and to be with Him for ever in heaven’.

To any thinking person, it is inconceivable that man is born and exists merely to work, develop the earth, reproduce, and enjoy what life has to offer and then die and totally disappear without a trace.

It is inconceivable to a thinking person that the universe and all that it contains, the visible and the invisible world, in all its wonderful splendour and complexity, appeared and developed by its own power, that it ‘evolved’ from lower forms of itself. Such a theory is an insult to man’s greatest attribute, his intelligence, his power to think conceptually, a power that, when logically applied, totally rejects the theory.

Liberty under Christianity’s definition is a human right justified by that responsibility referred to above, justified by that primary purpose of human existence.

Like all human rights, liberty has certain limitations, limitations that define and prevent its abuses.

The above definition of man’s primary purpose of existence is only loosely related to the American ideal of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ which can be regarded as more a humanistic than a spiritualistic ideal.

To know, love and obey God necessitates that we first know Him. To know God, we must know the truth about Him - the truth which induces us to love Him and to serve Him as the necessary manifestation of this love. ‘If you love Me, you will keep My commandments’.

In previous generations, the definition of ‘the common good’ was accepted by nearly all civil governments and the general public as conforming to the general concept of the Natural Law, the Divine Law inscribed into all human souls by the Creator, the ROM, the inborn ability to use one’s intellect and sensory mechanisms, to know what the Creator expects of us in a general sense.

Man’s overwhelming problem over the generation has been his failure to always and fully accept the authentic source and the authorized promulgator of spiritual truth.

We know clearly from Scripture that Christ founded a Church to which He gave the authority to preach and teach the eternal truths, in general and in the detail required under the changing circumstances of man’s journey through the generations. ‘He that heareth you, heareth Me’ and ‘I shall send the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, who will teach you all things and abide with you forever’.

In recent generations with widespread rejection, mostly because of the naturalistic evolutionism nonsense, of the concept of a Creator who imposed a Natural Law, adherance to such a law has been honoured more in the breach than in the observance.

Modern man has chosen to ignore and disregard the claim to authority presented by the Catholic Church as derived from the above mandate and has elected to go his own way using his own personal concepts of what is good and what is evil. Such personal opinions are, of course, very susceptible to lying propaganda and the weight of public opinion.

This has led, naturally, to the State in some countries, eventually claiming for itself in the name of its citizens, the right to decide what is good and what is evil. According to the United States and other governments, homosexuality is now good and homophobia is evil, the choice to abort the unborn is now good and opposition to abortion is evil, public pornography is now good and banning it is an infringement of free speech and personal liberty and therefore is evil, religious pluralism is now good and – in Sen. Metzenbaum’s words - Christianity is evil.

In our times, abuses of liberty come under two main headings – Totalitarianism and Libertarianism. The former refers to the situation where an all-powerful state defines, controls and abrogates to itself the conferring of all human rights, including that of liberty. The totalitarian definition of liberty relates, not only to human behaviour but also to human thought processes, concepts and beliefs. It attempts not only to define all human rights but also to create new ‘rights’, rights that are not justified by any legitimate human responsibilities, phony rights such as – ‘reproductive rights’, ‘abortion rights’, ‘homosexual rights’ and many forms of so-called civil rights.

For several decades this form of abuse of liberty has been paramount in the Communist countries. It is now being promoted and enforced in the so-called ‘bastion of democratic freedom’ the United States. The United States Government, the Congress - with some honourable exceptions - and the Judiciary, promote and protect the spurious ‘rights’ referred to above
and castigate and punish opponents thereof as guilty of ‘hate crimes’ and ‘political incorrectness’.

Another abuse of liberty is represented by libertarianism. This is the paradigm that insists that there should be no limitations on man’s behaviour or beliefs as long as ‘these behaviours and beliefs do not harm others’. On the face of it, this sounds very reasonable. However, it also leaves to its advocates the liberty to define the nature of the ‘common good’, to define what behaviour and beliefs can harm another. Such definitions are not always compatible with the true ‘common good’ as defined by Christianity, by the Church that Christ founded and to whom He gave custody of spiritual truth.

Libertarians may allow the Church to place limits on freedom as far as the Church’s own adherants are individually concerned but will violently oppose the Church placing such limits on social behaviour - in the political, economic and sexuality spheres.

When the Church places limits on the use of liberty/freedom, it is castigated by libertarians as an enemy of freedom. In actual fact, it is a defender of true freedom. True freedom will perish if its natural boundaries, its natural limits are set aside. Freedom without limits gives way, sooner or later, to anarchy, to social collapse, to the lawless state and - in reaction to that state - to dictatorship, to the totalitarian state, to the final and total loss of all freedom.

The Mass - a Sacrifice

2005-06-17T20:15:00.000-07:00

From time immemorial, we know that the most primitive peoples have felt a knowledge - faint perhaps - of good and evil, derived from their nature and referred to as the Natural Law.

Transgressions of this Law have led to varying feelings of guilt before the gods.

Whenever catastrophies or disasters occurred they were usually ascribed to punishment by the gods for these transgressions, requiring expiation or sacrifice to propitiate their anger.

The sacrifices involved offering up to the gods something precious to the people. In some cases, they were animals, in some cases crops. In some of the most primitive and satanic societies, human sacrifice was offered - e.g. by the Phoenicians, the Canaanites, Egyptians, pre-Christian Mexico’s Aztec 'civilization' and pre-Christian Britain.

Other cultures worshipping false gods were the ancient Greeks, the Romans and in our own day, Hindus and Buddhists.

In 1900 B.C. approx, God promised Abraham, if he would believe in Him as the One God, a posterity to match the stars in the sky and the grains of sand in the desert.

Abraham covenanted with God for himself and his posterity, to serve God and worship Him alone and to mark themselves externally as His Chosen People by being circumscribed.

When Abraham was going to sacrifice Isaac at God's command, Isaac, unknowing, asked where was the lamb of sacrifice. God, of course cancelled the order that was made to test Abraham’s obedience and commitment.

In the days of Abraham, a lamb was a common object of sacrifice.

Around 1800 B.C. Melchisedek, a priest of the Old Law, blessed Abraham in the name of God Most High to whom he offered bread and wine -

a forerunner - of the use of bread and wine in the Mass.

In 1300 B.C. approx, God revealed Himself to Moses as 'I am who Am' and instructed him to lead the Israelites out of Egypt.

Then during the Exodus to Palestine, He further elaborated His doctrine to man by giving the Jews the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic Law.

In Solomon's Temple, a lamb was sacrificed in the Holy of Holies with loaves of pure white bread, one for each of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.

On the Feast of Passover, lambs were killed in the Temple and with unleavened bread, were eaten in the Pascal Meal.

The Feast of Passover commemorates the time when the ‘Angel of Death passed over’ the homes of the Jews in Egypt who had signified their Jewish-ness by painting the blood of a lamb over their doors. They were spared while all the first-born of Egypt died from plague.

Over time, we see that God communicated with the Israelites through His Prophets until, finally, He sent His Son Jesus on earth as man in the Incarnation, to replace the old Jewish Law with the new Christian Law.

We see from the use of the Passover lamb and of unleavened bread as objects of sacrifice under the Mosaic Law, why Jesus used unleavened bread in the Sacrifice of the New Law and why the Church uses the term Lamb of God in the Mass as a synonym for Jesus.

In the New Law, no less than in the Old, Justice demands sorrow and expiation for transgressions of God's Law and this expiation is to be by sacrifice - by acts of self-denial and personal sacrifices but above all, through the Sacrifice which Christ instituted and made the Sacrament of the Eucharist which we know as the Mass.

This Sacrament was instituted at the Last Supper when Jesus took unleavened bread, gave thanks, broke it and gave it to them saying

'This is my Body which is given up for you. Do this in remembrance of me' and likewise the cup, after supper saying 'This cup which is poured out for you is the New Covenant in my blood' and when He had given thanks He gave the cup to them saying ' Drink of it all of you for this is my Blood of the Covenant which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.'

The Old Covenant was that between God and Abraham, the New Covenant is the Eucharist representing the Redemption on Calvary.

This is the sacrifice referred to many times by Jesus during His public life. In John 6th, He said 'I am the living bread that came down from heaven: if anyone eats this bread he shall live forever and the bread that I shall give you is my flesh for the life of the world.

'Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood you shall have no life in you.'

' He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise him up on the Last Day, for My flesh is food indeed and My blood is drink indeed '.

‘This is the bread which came down from heaven, not (manna) such as your fathers ate and died. He who eats this bread shall live forever'

When some of His disciples murmured at these words, He said 'but there are some of you that do not believe'

Many people have trouble understanding the Principle of Transubstantiation.

St Thomas Aquinas in his Summa explains it thus:

Things are divided into Substance and Accident.

Substance is immaterial: it is by virtue of which a thing is or exists.

Accident is that by virtue of which a thing can be changed.

There is no visible change in the bread and wine in Mass because it is their substance that is changed from that of bread and wine into the substance of the Body and Blood of Christ - a transfer of being, though the outward attributes remain the same.

Obviously a miracle, beyond reason and therefore requiring faith.

Even Luther declared "I would like to find a man able to prove that there is only bread and wine in the Eucharist. I feel bound. The Gospel text is very clear. I challenge them to find me a Bible where we find the words 'This is the sign of My Body '

The Protestant Edershin also admits the meaning is clearly 'is' in

'this is my Body ' - not just signified .

The repetition of the rite was unquestionably commanded by Christ when He said 'Do this in remembrance of Me'

As only the eleven Apostles were present at the Last Supper, only they received the power - a power they passed on to their successors through the Sacrament of Holy Orders down through the ages.

The most vital parts of the Mass are the Consecration and the Offertory.

In the Consecration, the Holy Spirit transforms the bread and wine on the altar into the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ when the priest says ‘This is My body ’ and ‘This is my blood’

The bread and wine show no visible change and we believe in the change only by the force of faith in the gospel words above presented.

In the Offertory, Jesus himself, through the medium of the priest, offers His Body and Blood - made available by the Holy Spirit - to the Father as a sacrifice repeating the offering of the sacrifice of Calvary and allowing us to associate ourselves with Him in the offering.

Why did Christ choose to assume the forms of bread and wine in the Mass?

Clearly God used the sacrifice of bread and wine of Melchisadeq as a forerunner of the Eucharistic use of bread and wine and it is equally clear that Christ chose bread and wine at the last Supper and in all Masses, because only in these forms was it possible for us to eat His flesh and drink His blood, as He had called upon us to do if we were to possess Eternal Life.

At the Last Supper, Christ was present in two forms. He was present as the human visible person, Christ, but also as Christ under the form of bread and wine. In Mass, he is present only in the latter form.

If it is the Holy Spirit who transforms the bread and wine into Christ’s Body and Blood, what role does the priest play?

Apparently, since Christ in the forms of bread and wine would not be able to offer Himself to the Father in a manner visible to the congregation, he acts through the priest, he uses the priest as an extension of Himself, to visibly make the offering.

Some people today, claim, as did many of the Protestant revolutionaries, that the Mass is merely a communal meal commemorating the Last Supper and they deny any element of Christ’s Real Presence or of sacrifice taking place.

The scriptures say “ From the rising of the sun to the going-down thereof, My name is great among the Gentiles and there is offered in My name a clean oblation ”

Because of the time-zone differences, a Mass is being said almost around the clock somewhere in the world.

A Green Island

2005-06-14T11:29:00.000-07:00

There is a green island in lone Gougane Barra,
Where allua of songs rushes forth as an arrow:
In deep valleyed Desmond a thousand wild fountains
Come down to that lake from their home in the mountains.
There grows the wild ash, and a time-stricken willow
Looks chidingly down on the mirth of the billow:
As, like some gay child, that sad monitor scorning,
It lightly laughs back to the laugh of the morning

And its zone of dark hills-O! to see them all bright'ning,
When the tempest flings out its red banner of lightning,
And the waters rush down,'mid the thunder's deep rattle
Like clans from their hills at the voice of the battle:
And brightly the fire-crested billows are gleaming,
And wildly from Mullagh the eagles are screaming.
O! where is the dwelling in valley or highland,
So meet for a bard as this lone little island?

How oft when the summer sun rested on Clara,
And lit the dark heath on the hills of Ivera,
Have I sought, sweet spot, from my home by the ocean,
And trod all thy wilds with a minstrel's devotion,
And thought of thy bards, when assembling together,
In the clefts of thy rocks or the depth of thy heather:
They fled from the Saxon's dark bondage and slaughter,
And waked their last song by the rush of thy water.

High sons of the lyre,O! how proud was the feeling,
To think while alone through that solitude stealing,
Though loftier Minstrels green Erin can number,
I only awoke your wild harp from its slumber,
And mingled once more with the voice of those fountains
The songs even Echo forgot on her mountains:
And gleaned each grey legend, that darkly was sleeping
Where the mist and the rain o'er their beauty were creeping.

Least bard of the hills! were it mind to inherit
the fire of thy harp, and the wing of thy spirit,
With the wrongs which like thee to our country have bound me,
Did your mantle of song fling its radiance around me,
Still, still in these wilds might young liberty rally,
And send her strong shout over mountain and valley,
The star of the west might yet rise in its glory,
And the land that was darkest be brighest in story.

I too shall be gone :-but my name shall be spoken
When Erin awakes, and her fetters are broken:
Some minstrel will come, in the summer eve's gleaming,
When Freedom's young light on his spirit is beaming,
And bend o'er my grave with a tear of emotion,
Where calm Avonbwee seeks the kisses of ocean,
Or plant a wild wreath from the banks of that river
O'er the heart and the harp that are sleeping forever.

Morte d'Arthur

2005-06-11T14:12:00.000-07:00

There are more things wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.
For what are men better than sheep or goats, who nourish a blind life within their souls,
if knowing God they lift not hands in prayer, both for themselves and those that call them friend.
( Morte d'Arthur)

How shall Christian Civilization be restored

2005-06-10T19:53:00.000-07:00

First we must have a clear understanding of what civilization and faith mean and how they are related.

Faith is from God while civilization is man-made.

Civilization refers to the whole body of beliefs, habits and practices which pervade a particular society, something which is built up slowly over long periods of time, and passed on from generation to generation as something tried and proven in the crucible of history and therefore worthy of preservation.

The Western world has enjoyed the benefits of Catholic civilization for many centuries, even in the Protestant countries where significant remnants of Catholic belief and practice still prevailed though always referred to as Judeao-Christian civilization rather than as simply Catholic.

Steadily and progressively since the Protestant Revolution, the Catholic civilization has been eroded and secularised.

In the Protestant countries, the Catholic people have allowed themselves to become secularised by the prevailing culture instead of trying to Christianise it, as is their duty.

The Catholic, like the secularised Protestant, has domesticated his religious beliefs and practices and has less and less used these beliefs and practices to influence his public behaviour.

He has allowed himself to become atomised, like the Calvinist.

Because of this, most Catholics do not present themselves as true examples of what their Faith stands for and therefore cannot act as the leaven that the Gospel calls all followers of Christ to be.

Incredibly, many Evangelical Protestants while referring to themselves as Christians deny that name to Catholics : Catholics are to be called Catholics, not Christians.

In the reclamation of our Catholic civilization, we must recognise the supreme importance of our families.

Our civilization, to be preserved, must be continually replenished by fresh infusions from the families in each generation.

If the family is allowed to disintegrate or to become secularised, the civilization cannot survive.

Our families are meant to be first the primary school for teaching, by word and example, the Truths and Laws of God as revealed to His Church by Revelation.

As our children get older, this Catholic culture of the home is supposed to be further elaborated, developed and applied in the Catholic School or CCD classes.

Then, when the child has reached adulthood and enters public life and the general culture, he is in a position to influence that culture by applying the principles and values he acquired at home and in his Catholic school or CCD.

However, it is not enough to transmit Catholic doctrine faithfully to the younger generations.

There must also be a comprehensive correct re-statement and propagation of the true history of Catholic Civilization which has been so drastically falsified by the enemies of the Church down through the centuries, to such an extent that later generations became totally unaware of the glories of that civilization.

Such re-statement would show what has been and is being lost and would awaken Catholics, and indeed other Christians, to work mightily towards the Restoration.

If even a fraction of the millions of, at least nominal, Catholics in the U.S. were educated enough to be able to do this, our general culture would be soon rescued from the progressive secularisation that is destroying it.

Part of the prevailing mind-set implies that God doesn’t mind that millions of people in various parts of the world are not members of the Church that Christ founded, that we should accept as ‘normal’ that Catholics should just keep to their present numbers and not be interested in inviting, by our words and example, these other people to come into the fold ‘so that there should be one fold and one shepherd’.

Any Catholic worthy of the name must realise that Christ wants all people to be members of His Church - yes, Jews, Hindus, Moslems, and Christian sects, sincere as many of them are in their present beliefs and practices.

We have to, though in a charitable way, hold that they are, in plain language, wrong and living in error.

“Go into the whole world and preach the Gospel to every creature”

“He that heareth you, heareth Me”

“He that believes and is baptised will be saved, and he that believes not will be condemned ”.

The Beginning of the Assault on the Family

2005-06-10T15:31:00.000-07:00

Thus was the state of the family until the Protestant Revolution.
In this revolution, which was characterised by rejection of the Catholic Church’s moral and teaching authority, the ideal of consecrated virginity in priestly and conventual life was abandoned, monasticism was destroyed and the Calvinist ethic of atomism was established.
The Church’s authority having been rejected, religious authority now resided only in the family and was centered upon the father of the family - the wife being subservient - and upon the personal, intra-family interpretation of the Scriptures.

The greater social community also was dissolved into it’s individual family parts - the Calvinist, Puritan, patriarchal family became the atomistic ‘community’.
The two most important elements in personal and social life - religious and community authority - were now withdrawn into the interior of the family and domesticised.

Thus, the Protestant division of Western civilization lost it’s communal and social character and became private and domestic while their religion also became private and domestic with little or no influence upon social or business life.
This became a secular culture where religion was kept out of the public sphere and personal values were not expected to affect man’s public dealings and behaviour.

During the 18th century the so-called Industrial Revolution began in England, with the universal acceptance of usury, the invention of the steam engine leading to steam-driven ships and trains and with machines to an increasing extent, supplementing manual labour and greatly augmenting industrial productivity.

The cottage industries, which together with agriculture, had been the mainstay of economic life, gave way to the factory system and industries in large numbers moved from the rural areas to the cities in search of the greater supply of cheap labour.
This new industrial society was totally lacking in the communal spirit and the civic traditions which had marked the ancient and medieval village and city.
It existed merely for the production of wealth and it left all other aspects of life to private initiative.

During all of these radical changes, the strict ethos of the Calvinist, Puritan family continued to rule men’s private and domestic lives but not, to any great extent, their public lives.

We now had this amoral social pursuit of wealth existing side-by side with very strict Puritan personal and family morality which emphasised sexual discipline and hard work for the family’s sake.

As the Calvinist family had cut itself off from the authority of the Catholic Church, it could not be influenced by the Church’s views and Her many pronouncements and encyclicals on the excesses and abuses of the new economic system and so it preferred to remain aloof from public, socio-economic life.

The incompatibilities and contradictions persisted and eventually, under the influence of a pervasive secularism, the natural tendency had to be the gradual abandonment of the Puritan religious and family traditions, the erosion of the old traditions of faithful family life and the loss of the beneficial moral effects on society of this traditional healthy family life.

Divorce was introduced and spread from the affluent to all sections of society and eventually into many Catholic families.
Later no-fault divorce on demand took over.
Next, artificial contraception was introduced and widely accepted.
Next came legalization of abortion.
More recently we see attempts at legalizing homosexuality and even allowing so-called homo-sexual ‘marriage’.

With the decline of the family and the steady reduction of it’s social significance, the State has moved more and more into the vacuum.
Functions which were always regarded as the responsibility and right of the family, are now often taken over by the State, such as one-parent family care, education and health.
One-parent families are subsidized by government and thereby perpetuated.
Income tax systems favour the single and work against the married.
There is no favourable tax treatment of families with more than the socially-acceptable number of children.

Objections to and defiance of the restrictions of family life, which were confined to the males of the citizen class in the ancient and medieval world, are now common to both sexes and all classes.
Many modern women looks upon marriage and especially motherhood as involving the sacrifice of their independence, as an interference with their career ambitions and as a limitation on the realization of their ‘true potential’.
Marriage is still popular because of it’s persistent social prestige and some lingering respect for moral and religious tradition.

The secular forces inimical to the family which introduced divorce, artificial contraception, support for single-parent families, abortion and acceptance of homosexuality, are now advocating spurious forms of ‘homosexual marriage’, in-vitro fertilization, artificial conception, embryo experimentation, euthanasia and other abominations.

We are now at the point where marriage is being regarded as an unnecessary restraint on the hedonistic desires of people who have lost all unselfish love for others and who think primarily of the satisfaction of their own desires.

Males are now able to indulge in unrestrained sexual activity in which procreation is prevented by socially-approved methods, in which any accidental ‘product of intercourse’ can be destroyed - again by socially-approved methods - allowing the male of the species to walk away with nary a thought for any consequences or responsibilities.

These processes must inevitably, if left unchecked, lead to a social decadence far more rapid and more universal than those which brought about the end of ancient civilizations.

We have lost much of the spiritual component of the civilization tripod.

The barbarians are not at the gates but are within the City and are tearing civilization up by it’s roots and are doing so deliberately and maliciously while we, by our apathy and complacency, are helping them.

They are using as battering rams, spurious rights and ‘victim’ status of different kinds - Aids, poverty, racial discrimination and ‘patriarchal oppression’ - to achieve their objectives.

The Christian family must survive and flourish if our civilization is to survive.

It’s as simple - and as difficult - as that.

The Christian Family

2005-06-10T15:12:00.000-07:00

Such was the state of decay in the Roman Empire that had followed the abandonment of the traditional patriarchal society based upon the family when the Catholic Church appeared on the scene

The Catholic Church reconstituted Western Civilization and reconstituted the family on a new basis.

The Catholic ideal of the family owes much to the patriarchal tradition which found it’s complete expression in the Old Testament.

It now became a new creation, a patriarchal system sanctified and modified by a sacrament.

The prior patriarchal family was essentially aristocratic, the privilege of a ruling or patrician class while the Catholic family was common to every class, even to slaves.

In the Catholic family the husband belongs as exclusively to the wife as the wife to the husband and this made marriage a more personal and individual relationship than it had been under the pre-Catholic patriarchal system.

The ideal of marital love now became an unselfish one where each spouse devoted him/her self to the welfare of the other rather than to oneself.

The family became an autonomous and self-contained unit which did not depend upon any outside power.

It was regarded as the primary and independent unit of society, possessing it’s own inalienable rights secondary to it’s duties.

This type of monogamous, sacramental and indissoluble marriage has been the necessary foundation of European society and Western civilization for two thousand years.

Women have always had a wider share in social life and a greater influence on European civilization than was ever the case in prior civilizations -Hellenic, Roman or Oriental.

In Catholic civilization, the patriarchal ideal was balanced by the ideal of virginity and the family did not control the whole existence of it’s members.

The spiritual side of life belonged to a spiritual society in which spiritual authority belonged to a consecrated celibate class - the clergy - who by their acceptance of chastity showed how the sexual instincts could be sinlessly controlled and disciplined.

This transcending of sexuality enabled husband and wife to live together in fidelity and trust.

Evolution of the Family

2005-06-10T15:05:00.000-07:00

The family is not the product of civilization but is civilization’s starting point.

The sexual instinct and the parental instinct are not exclusively human.

These instincts exist equally throughout the animal kingdom.

They contribute to civilization only when they are controlled and disciplined, i.e. when their purely biological functions are transcended by the attainment of a permanent social relationship.

Lewis Morgan elaborated the theory of the gradual evolution of the family from conditions of primitive sexual promiscuity through various forms of group marriage and temporary pairing-up, to the higher forms of patriarchal and monogamous marriage.

This theory was never widely accepted by the scientific community and modern anthropology wholly discredits it and emphasises the universality of marriage in all generations and everywhere.

Whether the social structure was matrilinear or patrilinear, it was the universal rule of every known society that a woman, before she bears a child, must be committed to an individual male partner.

In all human societies moral tradition and law decreed that a group consisting of a mother and her offspring, without a father, was not a sociologically-complete unit.

Marriage is society’s approbation of the biological functions where the instinctive activities of sex and parenthood are socialised and where man is no longer free to follow his own sexual instincts but is forced to conform to an approved social pattern.

Even in the most primitive societies sexual relations were regulated by a complex system of restrictions where any breach was regarded not only as an offense against tribal law but also was regarded as morally sinful - recognised as contrary to the Natural Law which applied always and everywhere since the beginning of the world.

Bear in mind that all primitive cultures involved the widely dispersed descendants of civilised Noah’s sons who, after the linguistic confusion of the Tower of Babel, were forced to separate in language-groups and to go to areas far away from their initial habitats, often to lose the civilising attributes that the original society possessed and so they become variably primitive.

Civilization depends upon a tripod of spiritual, intellectual and technological attributes and the commonest cause of degeneration of a civilization is the loss of the spiritual element with it’s spiritual values, which acts as a glue to hold it together.

Human civilization is not instinctive but instead has to be achieved by struggle involving direction, regulation and control of the natural instincts , appetites, desires and actions and the subordination of these instincts, appetites, desires and actions to the common good.

History has shown us that the civilizations that demanded greater moral effort and stricter social discipline also showed greater cultural achievements and longevity.

For example, in the matrilinear societies and families of ancient times, where the moral discipline demanded less repression of instincts than the patrilinear society, cultural achievement was less impressive and the society was less flexible in adapting to altered circumstances.

The patriarchal society and family required chastity and self-sacrifice on behalf of the wife, obedience and discipline on the part of the children and acceptance of a heavy burden of responsibility by the father who was expected to submit his personal feelings and urges to the interests of the family.

This patriarchal family was a much more efficient unit of cultural life, was not limited to sexual and reproductive functions and became the source of social continuity because of it’s stability and it even acquired a religious character inasmuch as the father, mother and children worked towards society’s common good by working towards their family’s common good in an unselfish manner.

The true patriarchal family did establish the father as the head of the family but under this religious influence also it transformed the position of the woman into a more dignified role as an equal co-partner in the enterprise.

Example of matrilinear societies included those which worshipped the Mother Goddess.

This Goddess worship was barbaric with rites usually marked by sexual excess, cruelty and sometimes human sacrifice.

The Goddess was eventually transformed by patriarchal culture into the more gracious forms of Demeter, Persephone and Aphrodite as well as Athene the giver of good counsel and Artemis the guardian of youth.

The patriarchal culture introduced the concepts of piety, chastity, honor and modesty admired by the Greek and Roman philosophers and present in the other civilizations from Europe to China which were all founded upon the traditions of the patriarchal family.

They had the social strength to prevail over the weaker matrilinear civilizations which preceded them.

The Chinese patriarchal civilization was to last for 2,000 years - it is thought to have originated with Noah of the Biblical flood.

The Greek civilization strayed from the patriarchal path and, like the Roman civilization later, tended to favour the man without a family who could devote all his time and effort to the duties and pleasures of serving the State.

Many of these men satisfied their lusts by licentious living and homosexuality in preference to marriage while others would tend to get married later in life and to have small families.

Other anti-social practices such as infanticide and abortion were common.

In the Roman Empire, because of the falling birth-rate and infanticide - pre- and post-natal - the army and other state positions had to be opened up to foreigners and even slaves.

Mutual Influences

2005-06-06T16:46:00.000-07:00

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.
Footprints that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Longfellow

Terri's Case

2005-06-06T13:49:00.000-07:00

Terri's case is yet another victory for the Culture of Death.
Throughout all this controversy we have heard a lot about 'what did Terri want'? 'Did she once say that she would not have wanted to be kept alive under these conditions'?
What she might have said doesn't matter. It is not relevent in this case. Nobody can morally consent, either immediately or in an advance directive, to one's own death by means other than natural causes.
When a person is dependant upon a respirator and the respirator is removed, the death that follows is a natural death: the person dies from the disease or accident that made him dependant on the respirator. When a person has a terminal, incurable disease and he or a responsible family member elects for Do Not Resuscitate, the patient dies from natural causes.
In the case of Terri, she has not been in a terminal condition in danger of death and has not been receiving extraordinary medical treatment. Receipt of food and nourishment by a feeding tube is basic patient care and does not constitute extraordinary medical care. With this tube in position Terri has been in a stable state, for over 15 years and with the potential to live for many more years if not interfered with. Terri is dying an imposed death, an unjust death, a judiciously imposed death, a death based on the decrees of a dysfunctional judicial system.
This judicial branch of government has been for some time the dominant branch. It dominates over the executive and legislative branches by use of a veto. This veto is exercised by pronouncing certain executive and legislative acts as un-constitutional, thereby nullifying them.
When we see the areas in which they exercise their vetoes, we are led to suspect an underlying agenda. We are reminded that Pope John Paul has referred to the Western Democracies as essentially entities of Totalitarian Democracy

In Vitro Fertilization

2005-06-02T11:24:00.000-07:00

The practice of in vitro fertilization is a subject that needs serious discussion.

Typically we see a childless couple who are unhappy at their inability to have a child of their own, who contract with an in vitro fertilization clinic to bring about a union of sperm from an identified or unidentified donor with multiple ova from the patient. The union, of course, results in the production usually of several embryos. The embryos are placed in frozen storage and one is chosen for further experimentation. If the chosen embryo is found to be suitable it is implanted into the patient’s uterus and encouraged to grow and mature to term. If the effort is successful, the typical patient usually has no further interest in the remaining embryos.

The disposal of these remaning embryos is a matter of considerable importance.

It is being used as an argument in favor of embryonic stem cell research to say that these unused embryos are otherwise useless and that, instead of discarding them, it makes more moral sense to use them for stem cell harvesting that might benefit patients suffering from various degenerative diseases. This is a difficult argument to counter on its face. Certainly if we discard the embryos, we are killing innocent human life just as much as we would if we used them as stem cell sources.

It is clear that the embryos can be dealt with in one of three different ways. They can be discarded as unwanted and useless. They can be used as sources for embryonic stem cells or they can be donated and implanted into other childless women and brought to maturity and delivered in the normal manner. The first two are clearly morally unacceptable in that they involve the destruction of embryos. What of the third alternative? It does not involve death but life for the embryo. It is the only acceptabe way to deal with those embryos now alive but unwanted by those who are responsible for their generation. This does not mean that continued generation of such embryos and adoption of unwanted ones by other couples will solve this serious moral problem.

Lost in the controversy over the use of unwanted embryos as a source for stem cells, is the moral status of the primary procedure, the in vitro fertilization process.

The Magisterium of the Catholic Church, - like it or not the only legitimate guardian and final arbiter of the Moral Law, the law that deals with human behaviour - has clearly spoken and defined its position. The Catholic Catechism, #2376 and 2377, states “ Techniques that entail the dissociation of husband and wife, by the intrusion of a person other than the couple (donation of sperm or ovum, surrogate uterus) are gravely immoral. These techniques (heterologous artificial insemination and fertilization) infringe the child’s right to be born of a father and a mother known to him and bound to each other by marriage. They betray the spouses’ right to become a father and a mother only through each other.”

“ Techniques involving only the married couple (homologous artificial insemination and fertilization) are perhaps less reprehensible, yet remain morally unacceptable. They dissociate the sexual act from the procreative act. The act which brings the child into existance is no longer an act by which two persons give themselves to one another, but one that entrusts the life and identity of the embryo into the power of doctors and biologists and establishes the domination of technology over the origin and destiny of the human person”

It is past time for the pro-life movement to devote as much time and effort in opposition to the false principle underlying in vitro fertilization as it does in opposition to abortion. This use of an unnatural and morally unacceptable method for artificial generation of human life clearly also involves abortion in that it involves abortion of unwanted embryos or embryos used in embryonic stem cell ‘research’. Donation of embryos unwanted from IVF will only tend to perpetuate the primary evil.

Human Cloning: methodology and implications

2005-05-26T16:06:00.000-07:00

An ovum from a woman - her sex cell - is removed from her ovary during a relatively simple procedure. The sex cell’s nucleus containing only the half-set, the 23 female chromosomes, is removed and discarded.

A somatic cell is any cell except a sex cell: it can be a skin cell. The nucleus from such a cell, from any person, is taken. This somatic cell nucleus is then inserted into the female sex cell whose own nucleus has been removed and discarded.
Note that every somatic cell nucleus has the full complement of 46 chromosomes. So now what had been a female sex cell with only 23 chromosomes has become an altered female sex cell with 46 chromosomes.

For some reason not clear, this new altered female sex cell is now capable of, or is made capable of, proliferating and forming an embryo similar to the
embryo that develops as a result of fertilization of a female sex cell by a male sex cell in the normal reproductive process. This is a female sex cell made capable of originating an embryo without any fertilization taking place. This embryo, if left alone, will, of course, be capable of implantation into the uterus and of progressing to pregnancy and delivery.

The question is commonly raised as to whether God would endow such a being with a human soul. The answer has to be YES. Everything that lives, whether human, animal or plant, every animate object, possesses a soul. The soul is the life-factor in everything that lives. Important to note, however, is the fact that only man possesses a soul capable of choice, a soul that can say yes or no. Man also is the only form of life that has a soul that will live forever, a soul that cannot die, a soul that is immortal.

Let’s assume in the following cases that the donor of the female sex cell is named Betty.

If the donor of the somatic cell and the donor of the female sex cell, Betty, are the same, and cloning is successful in producing a pregnancy, the resulting embryo/fetus/infant/adult would have all the chromosomes of the somatic cell donor, Betty, and would be a clone of Betty: would, like Betty, be a female with XX sex chromosomes. The child would have a mother, Betty, but no father. The child would be genetically related to Betty.

If the donor of the somatic cell is another woman, we’ll call Linda, the resulting embryo/fetus/infant/adult would have only the chromosomes of the somatic cell donor- Linda, would be a clone of Linda and would, like Linda, be a female with XX sex chromosomes. The child would be genetically related to Linda, have a mother, Linda, but no father. Betty would not be genetically related to the child.

If the donor of the somatic cell is a man, we’ll call George, the resulting embryo/fetus/infant/adult would have only the chromosomes of the somatic cell donor- George, would be a clone of George, and would, like George, be a male with XY sex chromosomes. The child would be genetically related to George, would have a father, George, but no mother. Betty would not be genetically related to the child.

If the embryo is not implanted into a uterus but used as a source of embryonal stem cells, this is misnamed ‘therapeutic cloning’.
If the embryo is implanted into a uterus and allowed to proceed to pregnancy, this is misnamed ‘reproductive cloning’.

What we are seeing in these developments is the beginning of asexual reproduction in the human world as opposed to normal human sexuality referred to as sexual reproduction.
We are now told that an artificial womb or uterus is available that would permit the embryo product of therapeutic or reproductive cloning to be nurtured through a full-term in vitro pregnancy – the ultimate in asexual reproduction.

What a dream come true for the ghouls among us! What a nightmare for the world, not only in spiritual but also in practical terms when one contemplates the myriad of potential problems of human identity, human relationships, legal relationships and all that these entail.
Is this what we want to leave to our children and coming generations. Is this how we treat the precious gift of life?

8:46 PM

Welcome to Fergail

2005-05-25T15:06:00.000-07:00

The inaugural post of the new blog, Fergail is coming soon...