Kansas Governor Sam Brownback has signed welcome legislation protecting the youngest of innocents among us; Credo Priests Celebrates Catholic Teaching; Sex, shame, and STD's haunt the marriage debate.
Welcome to the PRI Review, a round up of news and commentary, brought to you by the Population Research Institute. I'm your host, Christopher Manion.
The issue of the environment is getting a lot of attention these days, both inside and outside the Catholic church. PRI President, Steven Mosher, recently addressed one of the fundamental problems of what is called " the environmental movement": their studied dislike for children.
He called their efforts a "war on maternity, waged in the name of mother Earth."
"I often come across persons," he says, "who attempt to justify forced abortions, sterilization, and contraception because we are destroying the planet, that is, human beings. They view people as pollution, and argue that it is necessary to violate reproductive rights to protect the planet from the beings who are despoiling it."
[Read the rest of this section in full at: A War on Maternity Waged in the Name of Mother Earth, by Steven W. Mosher.]
Hillary Clinton and the Lust for Power
Bob Dylan said, "They times, they are a changing," so Hillary Clinton recently told a bunch of feminists, that religion has to change too. Hillary doesn't have to change, Bill doesn't have to change, it's God's law that has to change. We know who is in charge here.
Let's look at the record. Pagans throughout history, from Thrasymachus to Hitler, Mao, Stalin, the Left, and many of America's neoconservatives today, celebrate power for its own sake without limits, as long as they wield it.
Christianity roundly condemns the lust for power. The Apostle John warns us against the lust of the flesh (slavery to pleasure), the lust of the eyes (desire for the possessions of others), and the pride of life (superbia vitae). That's the desire for fame and glory, the companion of the libido dominandi, the lust for power that Augustan describes as "the motivators of the enemies of the peaceful and just City of God on Earth."
Those who lust for power over their equals (and yes, all men are created equal), even to the point of world domination, succumb to the sin of Satan: envy of the omnipotent power of the risen Lord. Powermongers in our own land and time, preening themselves as they proclaim their Christianity, brag that they will rid the world of evil — after they subject it by murderous force, of course. Satan can sow his seeds of violence and falsehood only through the hands and lips of those who serve him.
Thankfully, Christ triumphs over them all. Anticipating His own perfect sacrifice that would free the world from Satan, sin, and lust, He tells His apostles that such swaggering false prophets are sorely mistaken.
"In the world you will have trouble, but be of good cheer, for I have conquered the world," He says, in John 16:33.
Now, these are the words of the Prince of Peace. All other conquering pretenders will sow only murder, mayhem, pestilence, and destruction, as we have seen in our own land of the living lie.
As pagan power growls with grim resolve at every turn, we recall Solzhenitsyn and tremble, "The truth shall make you free, but falsehood only brings violence in its wake."
The bottom line? The Church doesn't have to change. We do, and that includes Hillary.
British Priests Oppose Communion for Divorced and Remarried Catholics
Over five hundred priests, in England and Wales, have signed a letter calling on the Vatican's next Senate on the Family, to proclaim the Church's unchanging moral teaching, and to oppose any move allowing communion for the divorced and remarried.
In fact, credopriests.org, a website begun by a parish priest in Virginia, now has over a thousand signatures of priests supporting the Church's teaching on marriage.
Well, we all know that all Satan's horsemen and all Satan's men hate marriage, because as the Catechism tells us, it's a sacrament: an outward sign, instituted by Christ, to give grace.
The Church teaches us that within marriage, the complementarity of the sexes and the fulfillment of the union between husband and wife manifests God's plan to people the Earth, ever since Adam and Eve. In the Garden of Eden, Satan did his best to thwart that plan, and he's doing it to this day.
The beauty, which is to say the ugliness, of the proposal to offer the Eucharist to those who in the eyes of the Church are bigamists is this: the proposal attacks two of the seven sacraments, both marriage and the Eucharist.
It is comforting that hundreds of good, British Catholic priests and their American colleagues are willing to risk ridicule for saying the obvious. Church teaching is true, but it's hardly comforting to read that many of the signers privately report that they were pressured by various chancery officials not to sign the letter at all.
According to the Tablet report, the letter expresses fidelity to the Church's traditional doctrines of marriage and sexuality, and affirms the traditional discipline regarding the reception of the sacraments, which bars communion for the divorced and remarried.
The covering note to the letter contended that the media's reporting of the 2014 Senate had left a distorted sense that the church's moral teaching could be changed.
The story ends with this unsettling observation. Cardinal Vincent Nichols, who attended the last Senate, and will be at the next one, has said divorced and remarried people could be readmitted to communion under certain conditions.
Let's take a step back.
Admittedly, it's unpopular to be a loyal priest these days in the United States or England. Say one word about the moral teaching of the Church, and the Satanic, secular culture will spit back in your face with a venomous reference to the abuse and cover-ups scandals first, and will then intone the unctuous litany of pagan demands, courtesy of the Sexual Revolution.
This is a reminder that we can never, ever forget to pray for our bishops and our priests. If they tell the truth, they're going to find it very hard to be popular, and if they're popular, they're going to find it very, very hard to tell the truth for long. And it never hurts to tell them, "Thank you," for being a priest.
Kansas Governor Signs Law Banning Dismemberment Abortions
On April 7th, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback signed into law a bill banning dismemberment abortions. That makes Kansas the first state to ban this grotesque practice, and this summer, we are going to see similar efforts in other states.
Just what are dismemberment abortions? To put it bluntly, the abortionist grabs one limb of the baby inside the mother's womb at a time and tears it off forcefully, and pulls out one piece at a time into a dish, to make sure he's got all the body parts.
Oh yes, he has to crush the baby's head. It's too big to remove otherwise.
Now, if the abortionist went home and did this to his dog's newborn puppy, he'd be jailed immediately for felony animal cruelty, but there's a black hole in the law when it comes to babies.
All the laws that apply to other physicians regarding health and safety simply don't apply to abortion and its practitioners. After all, they're in the business of killing babies, and even hardened liberals don't want to go there.
Barbara Boxer is one example. On the floor of the Senate, some twenty years ago, Senator Boxer repeatedly refused to answer a simple question. How much of the baby has to be delivered outside the mother's body before killing it can be called murder?
For ten minutes, Mrs. Boxer refused to answer the question. You can watch it on YouTube. "I am not answering those questions. I am not answering those questions," she squawked, squirming as much as Senate decorum could permit her to squirm.
It is interesting that Governor Brownback was a member of the US Senate during that debate. In 2003, he confronted Mrs. Boxer with a picture of an unborn child, squeezing the finger of the surgeon who was operating on him in utero to save the child's life. "Is that child a human being," Brownback asked Boxer, "or a piece of property that belonged to the mother"? Mrs. Boxer, refused to answer that question too.
What's going on here? It's called asking the forbidden question.
"Beware the forbidden question," said Eric Voegelin, one of the most prominent political philosophers of the 20th century. He points out how Karl Marx perfected a tactic he called "the forbidden question."
When asked about transcendence, Marx's truly socialist man would find the question to be a practical impossibility. That is because Marx insists that socialist man, the only kind there is, has already rejected the possibility of transcendence once he assumes that view. Asking about transcendence is forbidden, because the very possibility of transcendence would collapse Marx's entire enterprise, which is based on raw materialism.
This is the case with Mrs. Boxer. If she is ever cornered into admitting that the unborn child is indeed a baby, her entire enterprise will collapse. Like Karl Marx, she must insist that the unborn child is merely a material object, and, agreeing with Karl Marx by the way, she must refuse to admit that babies have a human nature.
Marx's materialism goes a lot further beyond questions about abortion and human life. The forbidden question is also central to Marx's denial of any transcendent limit on political power, what our Declaration of Independence calls "the laws of nature and of nature's God."
Marx rejects fundamental questions of philosophy. Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we going? He is interested only in power. In a little list of pet peeves he wrote commenting on the writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, he wrote, "Philosophy has only sought to understand the world. The point is to change it."
God has created the world in one way, and Marx doesn't like it. Like the fallen angels, he wants to remake it in his own image.
Understanding the world means coming to the truth. If truth doesn't exist, and if you only want power to create everything anew, then Karl Marx is your man.
However, beware. Reality is stubborn, and so is truth.
Karl Marx and Barbara Boxer insist that we just can't ask about it. Ignore the truth, and silence the questioner who seeks the truth, and use your power to get his nagging question out of the way of your libido. That's their solution.
Are babies really babies? Common sense tells us that they are, of course, but Barbara Boxer says, "Don't you dare ask that question." We're sorry, ma'am. People ask that question all the time.
That's why Kansas has acted to prohibit dismemberment abortions, and Oklahoma and other states are likely to follow. We have to remember here the hard facts about abortion. Americans have the right to know that many abortions require, literally, tearing the baby apart limb by limb.
These unborn children have a beating heart, active brain waves, and a functioning, sensitive nervous system. Like anybody else, they can feel the agonizing pain of being torn apart.
Even Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is not known for his strong pro-life views, has condemned dismemberment abortion. It is a ghastly, inhuman procedure, that can accurately be referred to as torture.
Now, a long time ago, Confucius pointed out a fundamental ingredient for rebuilding a society that had fallen into ruin. "To restore a society from chaos," he said, "the primordial task is to restore the proper meaning of words."
But the editors of the New York Times, none of whom were aborted themselves, are pretty upset with Brownback. They have different sentiments.
Here's their complaint. "During the past four years, the state of Kansas has become ground zero in the war to criminalize all abortions," they grouse, but watch this as they continue, "and in the process, to remove a woman's ability to control what happens in her own body."
Note, that the editors of the New York Times recognize that the baby is in a woman's body, not part of it. That's progress, since it immediately concedes that the baby is something, or someone else.
But the Gray Lady's editorial board blathers on. "Now Kansas has become," and I quote, "the first state to ban the safest, and by far, the most common method of ending a second trimester pregnancy, which involves removing the fetus, often in parts."
Please notice the delicacy here. It isn't a baby, it is a pile of fetus parts inside the mother that are waiting to be removed, one by one, like old copies of the New York Times that pile up next to the wood stove.
The Times editors defend their elusive language by going on the offensive against accurate language. "The anti-abortion activists in Kansas avoided actual medical terminology in drafting Senate Bill 95," they complain, "by referring to the banned procedure as dismemberment abortion."
And they are shocked.
"The law's language aims for maximum shock value," they cry, "describing clamps, grasping forceps, tongs, scissors, or other instruments that slice, crush or grasp a portion of the unborn child's body, in order to cut it or rip it off." Speaking of accurate medical terminology, which is more accurate to say, that a procedure removes the fetus often in parts, or that the procedure uses forceps, tongs and scissors to slice, crush or grasp the unborn child's body in order to cut or rip it off?
The Times' editors, who are so linguistically pure that they have their own style handbook, flee from the reality of this grisly operation, and try instead to describe it as an unwanted parts removal process. Big Brother, call your office.
The editors then proceed to condemn the pro-life efforts in the various states asserting that, "Lawmakers have imposed their own moral judgments and restricted or criminalized decisions doctors make in caring for their patients."
Here we should make two points. First of all, lawmakers always impose moral judgments, whether their own, those of their constituents, who knows. Every law has a moral impact. When they write legislation, that's what they're doing. Programs are funded because they are considered good. Certain actions are prohibited because they are considered evil.
We understand that the Times' editors would like to have morality all to themselves, but that's just not how it works.
Second of all, we are introduced to, "Decisions doctors make in caring for their patients." Here we go again. Doublethink, literally. According to the New York Times, the same doctor can see the same pregnant woman, as either one patient or two. It is not a matter of reality, but a matter of will, whether he decides that the baby is indeed a baby worth saving or a bunch of fetus parts awaiting removal.
This willful duplicity on the part of the editors is nothing new. In fact, in the very next paragraph, they prate about how such laws punish poor, minority mothers.
As the kids like to say, "Please."
New York city abortionists target poor minorities in much greater numbers than anyone else, and for a simple reason. Abortion in America is fundamentally racist, just like Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, who wanted to eliminate all brown and black people, including Spaniards, Italians, Greeks, and everyone else who lived to the south of Northern Europe.
We've come from racial extermination to removing the fetus, often in parts. Whatever you call it, it still amounts to the same thing: killing the baby.
Bishop Conley of Lincoln, Nebraska, Preaches 'Evangelium Vitae' From the Rooftops
A lot of folks are uneasy when they're forced to confront the mess that so-called "sexual liberation" has made of our society and our culture. After all, Americans tend to be trusting, virtuous, and honest, and yet what we're facing is the breakdown of the family, and of society, and fundamentally, the fact that we've been lied to.
Most of us don't like being lied to, and the liars know it. They quickly react when they're caught by telling us that their lies are popular, that a lot of people are actually relieved to hear them, that the ugliness that surrounds us exists only in the eyes of the beholder, and as though to close the conversation, there's nothing we can do about it anyway.
There is one American bishop who doesn't flinch from calling this sordid situation what it is, "a tyranny of lies." Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, Nebraska recently put it bluntly. "We can't overcome our country's tyranny of evil unless we tackle the contraceptive mentality," he says.
Here is his article. "Last week, a young friend of mine attempted to defend the truth about marriage among a group of peers at a secular university. She presented a meaningful argument about family, social stability, and gender complimentarity. None of her classmates refuted her arguments. Instead, they accused her of being a bigot and a homophobe, called her intolerant, and changed the topic to something less intellectually taxing.
"My friend's experience is practically a cliché. Americans who offer traditional viewpoints on moral issues in the public square, have become accustomed to calumny. They know that reasoned arguments will rarely receive reasoned refutation…"
[Read the full article: Preach from the Rooftops: 'Evangelium Vitae' at Twenty by Bishop James D. Conley.]
"It is time to preach the Gospel from the rooftops," Bishop Conley concludes. The culture of death still gains ground, and the weakest among us suffer. Their suffering will be relieved when courageous men and women proclaim Jesus Christ and witness to the real dignity of human lives, made for eternity with Him.
Ad multos annos, Bishop Conley.
This is Christopher Manion. Thanks for listening.
