Is the Unborn Human a Person?

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.