In a rare interview last week, the Pope's private
secretary Mgr Georg Ganswein, spoke about Islam,
the Church and being private secretary to the
Pontiff in an interview with the journalist
Peter Seewald in the Munich-based Siiddeutsche
Zeitung. Mgr Ganswein said the attempted
Islamisation of the West was an undeniable fact,
which endangered Europe's identity. A false
sense of tolerance should not lull Europeans
into ignoring the danger, he said. 'The truth
is that a continent like Europe cannot live
if one cuts away its Christian roots, because
then one takes its soul,' Mgr Ganswein said.
He
said that the Pope's address in Regensburg last
September, which provoked violent Muslim reactions
and a media whirlwind, was supposed to address
the naiveté regarding the dangers facing
Europe's identity. After calling the speech
'prophetic', he said that the Pope's remarks
about Islam had been taken out of context by
the media, which presented a controversial quotation
from the writings of the Byzantine Emperor Manuel
II Paleologus equating Islam with violence as
Benedict XVI's personal opinion. The Pope was
shocked by the hostility of the reactions to
the lecture, Mgr Ganswein said. When Mr Seewald
asked whether it was not naïve to expect
inter-religious dialogue between Muslims and
Catholics, Mgr Ganswein said that the Holy See
was working at dialogue on an institutional
level, with the Pontifical Council for Interreligious
Dialogue, but that it was important to remember
Islam was a blanket term for disparate religious
currents. 'It is important to realize that Islam
does not exist as a united binding entity which
speaks with one voice to all Muslims,' he said.
'The term includes a multitude of different
currents, ranging from some that are inimical
to each other, toextremists who act in the name
of the Koran and set about their work with guns.
The
Holy See is attempting to take up contact and
hold talks on an institutional level through
the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.'
Earlier in the interview, Mgr Ganswein identified
the challenges facing the Church and the changes
that Benedict XVI's papacy could effect. He
counted the struggle with relativism, the dialogue
with Islam and strengthening of the Church's
own identity among the challenges and said that
the papacy could strengthen faith and the sense
that Catholicism was a gift from God. He also
said that re-establishing unity between the
Orthodox and the Catholic Church was 'certainly
one of the great goals of the theologian-Pope'.
Mgr Ganswein has been Cardinal Ratzinger's private
secretary since 2003 but had worked closely
with him before then. In 1996 Cardinal Ratzinger
asked him to join the Congregation for the Doctrine
of the Faith and in 2000 he became chaplain
to Pope John Paul II. He holds a doctorate in
canon law from the Ludwig Maximilian University
in Munich and is a professor at the Pontifical
University of the Holy Cross. [Catholic Herald]
1376.1
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The
Family
How
To Save Christian Marriage
Saving
Christian Marriage. Cindy Paslawski, editor.
Hudson, Wis.: The Wanderer Forum Foundation, P.O.
Box 542, Hudson, WI 54016-0542 2007, 128 pages;
$12.95 plus $2.00 shipping and handling. For more
information, visit www.wandererforum.org.
Ellen
Rice writes in The Wanderer : 'The priest
who will be stationed at our parish later this
month has often remarked that Catholic colleges
would do young people a great service if they
paid attention to vocations and marriage as much
as they pay attention to career services. The
heat of midsummer is upon us, and soon college
freshmen will be departing for Catholic and other
colleges across the nation. Families interested
in sending their child, niece, nephew, grandchild,
or godchild to school with a readable handbook
would do well to consider this slim but profound
volume, Saving Christian Marriage.
This
volume features a brief foreword by Bishop Thomas
Doran of Rockford, Ill., a preface by Dr. Charles
E. Rice, chairman of the Wanderer Forum Foundation,
and a final page of sobering reminders about what
has changed since the body of this book, a series
of talks given at the 1973 Wanderer Forum, was
composed.
Yet
these incidental features are only the beginning
of the book's true value. Its magnificence lies
in the fact that it presents essays that dealt
with Christian marriage before its image became
effaced from our society.
Supplemental
essays in this volume, written today about gay
marriage and single mothers, mirror today's social
climate, where the reality of marriage is so diminished
that a Catholic young person would be more exposed
to material dealing with the abnormalities of
sexuality than the ideal of marriage. In addition,
the current debates about 'gay marriage' and 'civil
unions' have corrupted the public discourse so
that we are used to considering marriage as a
purely economic arrangement. The matter of procreation
is entering the realm of freakishness as Britain
allows experimentation on human/animal embryos.
Even
popularizations of Theology of the Body
are usually approaching the teachings of the late
Holy Father John Paul II from the viewpoint of
a corrupted society. Therefore, it is excellent
to read and recommend essays written before marriage
was destroyed. It is quite refreshing, for a change,
to read essays that considered divorce shocking,
gay marriage unthinkable, and marriage a sacred,
lifelong institution created by and, yes, pleasing
to God.
These
essays, though, are sober in nature and were written
in 1973 - in the year of the Roe v. Wade decision
in America. Therefore, while the fruits of abortion,
free love, and contraception were far in the future,
the talented thinkers featured in this book were
able to reason, in remarkable fashion, to the
problems that we face today. Even the possibility
of mass genocide, something not seen in previously
Christianized countries until the Balkan and Rwandan
massacres of the 1990s, was foretold as a fruit
of the problems just beginning then.
The
book begins with the 1973 Wanderer Forum keynote
speech by Most Rev. Godfrey M.P. Okoye of Enugu,
Nigeria. This essay's theme is that Catholic theology
opposes the present-day attempts to interpret
marriage as a profane reality. In this beautiful
essay he urges us to 'acquire Christ's attitude
and outlook toward marriage.' He reminds us that
'God intends marriage as the usual way of life.'
He discusses the sacra-mentality of marriage,
its salvific dimension for all members of the
family, and the perfect love that should characterize
this symbol of the love between Christ and His
Church.
Next,
he discusses factors that jeopardize marriage:
lack of true love (agape), marital infidelity,
birth control. Remedies include chaste courtship,
self-mastery, and self-denial within married life,
large-heartedness, true spiritual love, married
heroism.
This
is followed by Msgr. Alphonse Popek's essay, 'The
Splendor of the Sacramental Union,' a beautiful
talk on the sacramental aspects of marriage. Msgr.
Popek said, 'In the Old Testament, the natural
contract of marriage, like the wine first served
at the wedding feast of Cana, was good but not
good enough to make saints of men and women on
pilgrimage to Heaven. Christ ... took the good
wine of the natural contract and gives only those
men and women who believe in Him and are baptized
in His name the better wine of the Sacrament which
not only challenges the spouses to become greater
saints of God but actually infuses those graces
by which they can attain the highest reaches of
spiritual perfection.'
Next
in the selection is an essay by the legendary
Dr. William A. Marra, entitled 'The Virtue
of Married Chastity.' Dr. Marra needs no introduction
to the readers of The Wanderer, and this
reviewer scribbled 'awesome talk' in the margins
of this book. The keystone of this talk is that
the vow is the essence of the marriage, whether
people fall in or out of 'love.'
But
an amazing surprise is Dr. Reginald Gallop's talk
'Children: The Outstanding Gift of Marriage.'
Dr. Gallop, a former population control advocate
who came to believe that the 'overpopulation myth'
was untrue, had prescient insights about the future
that awaited us, foretelling today's trends in
genetic engineering, euthanasia, infanticide,
genocide, eco-spirituality. He takes issue with
the concept of 'quality of life,' which most of
us were mercifully unfamiliar with until the last
decade or so. It was quite jarring to read this
essay as the Live Earth concerts were taking place,
and to realize how much of the contemporary scene
he foresaw.
Dr.
William H. Marshner: 'A Sign of Contradiction,'
is good reading for all those who have been left
blindsided by the argument that Humane Vitae does
not employ the language of infallibility, and
therefore is not infallible teaching. Dr. Marshner's
talk reviews the prior encyclical on birth control,
Casti Connubii, and points out that it explicitly
uses the formula for invoking the infallibility
of the ordinary Magisterium.
This
presents the Catholic with a much stronger argument
to accept the teaching on birth control, because,
just as Christians were en masse abandoning the
prohibition of birth control, a teaching universally
held by all Christians from A.D. 33 to A.D. 1930,
the Catholic Church reiterated the infallibility
of this teaching.
His
talk provides needed perspective since Humanae
Vitae and Theology of the Body can
seem like theological novelties if one forgets
that there was a universal consensus against birth
control until the 20th century. It is very important
to introduce young people to the beautiful encyclical
Casti Connubii, which is at least as eloquent
as Humanae Vitae or the Wednesday audiences of
John Paul II.
English
intellectual Christopher Derrick's 1973 Forum
speech 'Beyond Splendor: The Other Side of
the Coin,' has two moments of genius. The
first is when he writes, regarding the sexually
permissive society, 'The phenomenon isn't likely
to last very long, since societies in which family
life is weakened and in which sexual permissiveness
prevails are thereby weakened in themselves, as
societies, and are therefore, in biological or
evolutionary or historical terms, unlikely to
survive.' Indeed, the recent past of 'sex, drugs,
and rock and roll' has long since faded into our
dreary present of designer kids, skim milk, and
New Age elevator music.
The
second moment of genius is when he describes the
process of falling in love, which in a sexually
permissive culture was overvalued (and is now
undervalued), as an experience of transcendence,
in which the person falling in love 'has come
to see one of God's creatures in something, like
the light in which God sees all of His creatures
all the time.... [A]nd it's only our blindness
that prevents us from seeing the fact and so enables
us to be bored in this wonderful and delicate
creation and in that blazing and sacramental thing,
that embodiment of Christ's relationship with
His Church, a marriage.'
Dr.
Charles E. Rice's essay, 'Poisoned Pastures,'
is about Roe v. Wade, and though written in 1973,
it is still timely. Its punch line is the call
for a Human Life Amendment, which, sadly, does
not exist 34 years after Roe took place. He also
calls for a pro-life organization that will oppose
all abortions, contraception, and government funding
of family planning. It is good to read the reasons
why we need these, and then recall that American
Life League, Human Life International, and Population
Research Institute, to name a few great pro-life
organizations, all fit this description.
As
usual, Dr. Rice calls for strong and uncompromising
political action, but emphasizes that 'we've got
to rechristianize American society and ultimately,
to disestablish the State religion of secularism.
And we're going to do that through the power of
prayer. We're also going to do it through hard
work, but primarily through the power of prayer,
because this whole tendency is foreign to nature
and to God.'
The
following essays included in Saving Christian
Marriage fast-forward to 2007.
Frank
Morriss' essay 'Same-Sex Marriage: When Two
Can Never Be One,' deals with the essential
realities needed to make a marriage a marriage.
This reviewer underlined the important epistemological
statement, 'There are essentials to all realities.
. . . ' Morriss' essay also ends in uncovering
this disturbing tendency: 'More and more Christians
seem to be surrendering to lust rather than defeating
it by conformity to what Christ taught.'
James
Bemis' essay 'Women's Rights, Lost Dignity'
presents an informative argument that 'women's
rights are safeguarded by the illegality of abortion
and divorce.' Bemis writes that 'modern females
are treated with greater disrespect - that is,
lied to, abandoned, and often treated as little
more than sexual objects - than women have been
traditionally, all in the name of feminism.'
This
little volume ends with Fr. Benjamin Luther's
1973 Wanderer Forum talk, 'Children of the
Promise, which treats marriage as a foreshadowing
of the endless marriage in the new Heaven and
the new earth.
Essential
Reading
In
order to recover the sense of Christian marriage,
we must first recover our memory of human nature,
and of our relationship to God the Creator as
His co-creators. For this reason, these essays
are essential reading for all Catholics, and for
young people seeking to believe that the 'Theology
of the Body' refers to a reality that once existed,
instead of a dream that bears no relationship
to the ever-more-frightening landscape of divorce,
lies, economically motivated and loveless 'marriages,'
infidelity, and live-in arrangements of all sorts.
Send
this to your kids and grandkids starting college,
or starting marriage. And, if you are a Catholic
bookstore owner, consider including a handful
of these books in your 'marriage and family' corner.
(Ellen
Rice is the editor of The John Paul II LifeGuide:
Words to Live By [ St. Augustine's Press, 2006].
She is a full-time freelance writer on a variety
of topics, including religion, education, and
business.) 1376.2
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United
Nations
Honduras
accused
Members of a UN committee have told Honduran officials
that their country's law against abortion is a
'crime,' the Catholic Family and Human Rights
Institute (C-Fam) reports. In their Friday Fax
Samantha Singson reports that at the latest round
of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms
of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) committee
meetings in New York, committee member Heisoo
Shin told the Honduran delegation that it was
necessary for their government to 'create a momentum,
a social force that stops the crime that allows
a woman to die, to risk unsafe abortion and not
have self-determination.'
When
the Honduran delegation responded that government
efforts were aimed at prevention of early and
unwanted pregnancies, committee member Silvia
Pimentel-- a faculty member at the Pontifical
Catholic University of Sao Paulo-- fired back
that the government had been as comprehensive
as possible on prevention and that 'there are
situations where prevention is not enough.'
She
continued, 'Women have their reasons to seek an
abortion, which should be respected.' Pimentel
admitted that those reasons did not always include
a threat to the mother's life, but that she could
not understand the abortion ban in Honduras where
'the interests of the fetus outweigh those of
the mother.' In response to the statements, a
Honduran representative reminded the CEDAW committee
that under article 67 of the country's constitution,
unborn children have the same rights as born children.
The
head of the Honduran delegation acknowledged that
recommendations had been submitted to her government
by other UN human-rights commissions regarding
the termination of pregnancy and that these were
being considered as possible reform issues.
Driving
home the committee's stance during Hungary's review,
Silvia Pimentel criticized the content of Hungary's
planning materials. The Brazilian expressed concern
over brochures entitled 'Life is a Miracle,' saying
that conservatives often construed such material
as reason for not having an abortion. Other CEDAW
committee members pressed Belize, Brazil, Kenya,
and Liechtenstein on their abortion laws, calling
on them to institute legal reform to formally
permit abortions.
States
regularly refute or ignore the committee's questions
on abortion with the understanding that the questions
are not based upon obligations of the treaty,
which does not mention abortion, but rather are
based on the committee's personal interpretations
of the treaty.
In
a similar vein, delegations listened patiently
as committee members used article 16 on marriage
and family to press for homosexual and lesbian
rights. Pimentel questioned Honduras on the subject;
Anamah Tan questioned Brazil on whether 'married
homosexual couples' were protected under the country's
marriage laws; and Ruth Halperin-Kaddari questioned
South Korea on the name and focus of the government's
Healthy Family Act. Halperin-Kaddari said that
its traditional notions of the nuclear family
seemed to be 'judgmental' of other forms of family,
such as divorced, cohabitating, and same-sex couples.
[CWNews] 1376.3
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International
news
ARGENTINA
'A new morality without principles'
In a recent reflection, Archbishop Domingo Castagna
of Corrientes warned that 'sin always existed,
since the first one was committed,' but that in
today's world sin has been distorted and this
should be called 'establishing a new morality
without norms or principles.' In a world in which
there is no respect for family, religion or purity,
he said, 'a culture of distortion that proposes
anti-values' is being foisted on children, young
people and the poor, 'as if they were the new
values of progress and modernity. Prayer, as Jesus
teaches it, is of little importance to this disturbed
generation,' Archbishop Castagna said, adding
that, 'mankind seeks after that which satisfies
his whims and not that which he truly needs,'
and therefore even 'the strongest of believers
become angry with God when their complaints are
not answered as they wish. Is this progress?'
the archbishop asked.
While
the Church speaks out about the dangers facing
believers and strives to provide them guidance,
'other voices seek to discredit' the bishops and
impose belief systems and behavior that are 'contrary
to the faith and to Christian morality,' he said.
'The modern Pharisees set up booby traps for good
people, creating division, inventing fallacies,
undermining good will and portraying the best
men and women as deceitful,' Archbishop Castagna
stated. 'We can always find wounds to heal and
profound doubts to be resolved. Nobody is ignoring
the deficiencies and contradictions that impede
the course of history,' but 'now is not the time
to cast blame but rather to find serene answers
and accept responsibilities,' he added, saying
to do so requires 'silence and prayer' and 'allowing
our personal and social lives to be illuminated
by the Word. [CNA] 1376.4
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KENYA
Court rules priest's death 'murder not suicide'
A
Kenyan court found yesterday that an American
priest, whose death was originally ruled to be
suicide, was actually murdered, contrary to an
FBI finding. The court has ordered a new police
investigation into his death. Fr. John Kaiser,
a 67 year-old priest originally from Perham, Minnesota
worked in Kenya for 35 years and was well known
as an advocate for human rights. It has been speculated
that he was killed because he accused some of
Kenya's most powerful politicians of being responsible
for political violence in 1991-92 that was carried
out under the guise of tribal fighting. He also
helped teenage girls pursue cases of rape against
a former powerful Cabinet member. His body was
found on August 24, 2000 on the side of a busy
highway between the town of Naivasha and Nairobi,
the Kenyan capital. His shotgun was found by his
side, and his pickup truck was 33 feet away in
a ditch, according to the AP. Police at the scene
initially said they believed he was slain and
that it was made to look like a suicide.
At
the request of the Kenyan government, an FBI team
was sent to investigate his death and concluded
that Fr. Kaiser had committed suicide. The FBI
report stated that because Fr. Kaiser suffered
from depression he more than likely killed himself.
However, the FBI acknowledged that their 80-plus
page brief, filed in April of 2001, was not a
substitute for a well-planned investigation. Senior
Principal Magistrate Maureen Odero, who presided
over the inquest into the missionary's death,
described the FBI's work as 'seriously flawed.'
But she said that based on the evidence she could
not clearly identify who killed Kaiser. The late
U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., and Kaiser's
colleagues all rejected the FBI findings. The
clergymen that worked with Kaiser said that he
had been living in constant fear for his life
and have called for a full investigation. 'The
court totally rejects the FBI report and in particular
the court rejects the conclusion and findings
therein indicating that Father Kaiser took his
own life,' said Odero. 'Based on the evidence
before this inquest, the court concludes that
Father Kaiser met his death as result of culpable
homicide.' [CNA] 1376.5
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UK
(Scotland)
The 'sad' future of Blairs College
Archbishop
Mario Conti of Glasgow has 'sadly' backed a plan
to turn the historic building that was once Blairs
College, on the outskirts of Aberdeen, into a
£115 million luxury hotel. From 1829-1986
it was Scotland's only national junior seminary.
The College's listed buildings house the Scottish
Catholic Heritage Museum - a collection of material
from a succession of seminaries in the north-east
of Scotland which were established after the Revolutionary
period and the closure of the Scots college in
Paris. One of the most striking objects in the
collection is the 'Blairs Jewel' a composite reliquary
dating from about 1620, parchment cut-work under
glass, surrounding a miniature of Mary Stuart
in middle age.
The
arrangement of the reliquary implicitly claims
for Mary the status of martyr. What is also interesting
about it is the presence of relics of Jesuits
martyred on the English mission, apparently before
their official recognition as beati by the church.
Blairs also holds the grand posthumous portrait
of Mary Stuart as martyr, commissioned by one
of her attendants at Fotheringay. There is also
a portrait of Mary in youth of French provenance.
There are a fine run of Jacobite portraits. There
are one or two pictures of Flemish origin (presumably
ex the Scots College in Douai). There is also
a remarkably fine collection of vestments, many
of them French work of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. There are recusant chalices and plate.
One of the most eloquent objects is the 'Corgarff
Chasuble' from a remote mission station in the
hills, a low quality and already-damaged mediaeval
orphrey patched onto a carefully re-pieced velvet
ground apparently a textile re-used from an eighteenth
century dress. [CF News] 1376.6
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UK
Traditional Mass conference
Archbishop
Vincent Nichols has agreed to celebrate Mass at
a conference to introduce priests to the traditional
liturgy. He will open the Latin Mass Society (LMS)
training session at Merton College, Oxford, for
priests wishing to learn this form of Mass. He
will celebrate Mass in the ordinary form on August
28th, the first day of the three day event. More
than 50 priests are expected to attend. Peter
Jennings, spokesman for the archbishop, says:
'Archbishop Nichols has never celebrated Mass
using the 1962 Tridentine missal of Pope John
XXIII and is not doing so at the LMS conference'.
[CF News] 1376.7
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UK
Catholic hospices under threat
A
fall in government funding over the last few years
is threatening the existence of Catholic hospices
in England. Figures from the charity Help the
Hospices show that the amount of government money
that hospices receive as a proportion of their
overall spending has fallen for the third year
running. The news comes two year after Labour
promised to double the funding of palliative care
in its 2005 election manifesto. A spokesman for
the Department of Health said the Help the Hospices
report would help to inform its review of England's
palliative care. [Catholic Herald] 1376.8
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UK
Pharmacists' ethical code
An
unidentified pharmacist in Staffordshire, England,
reportedly refused to supply morning-after pills
to a 26-year-old married woman on grounds of conscience.
A spokeswoman for the pharmacists' professional
body said that their ethical code required practitioners
who objected to providing such drugs to refer
customers to colleagues who would. Mrs Sarah Luke,
the person requesting the pills at Lloyds pharmacy,
Hednesford, expressed anger. [icCannock, SPUC]
1376.9
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UK
Human/animal hybrids
The
science academy of the UK and Commonwealth has
welcomed parliamentarians' support for human-animal
hybrids. The Royal Society was responding to Wednesday's
report by the peers' and MPs' committee considering
the government's draft Human Tissue and Embryos
Bill. Sir Richard Gardner, chairman of the society's
stem cell group, said: 'We hope that the new legislation
permits the creation of all types of human-animal
embryos for research ...'. He objected to the
proposed merger of the two regulatory bodies which
control fertility and the use of human tissue.
[Royal Society] CARE, the Christian charity, welcomed
proposals for a free parliamentary vote on hybrids
but said that no scientific case had been made
for their creation. [Inspire, SPUC] 1376.10
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USA
Ultra-traditionalist nuns reconciled with the
Church
A
group of ultra-traditionalist nuns in the Diocese
of Spokane, Wash., who subscribed to the notion
that Pope Pius XII was the last legitimate Pontiff,
have reconciled with the Catholic Church, reported
the diocese's newspaper the Inland Register
on July 5. The report, by Deacon Eric Meisfjord,
said a group of nuns from the traditionalist community
at St. Michael began thinking about returning
to communion with the Catholic Church after witnessing
the funeral Mass of Pope John Paul II and the
election of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to the papacy.
'The Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Church, are
a new Association of the Faithful. The sisters
returned to the Catholic Church from the traditionalist
community at Mount St. Michael and will spend
the next year in discernment at Immaculate Heart
Retreat Center, Spokane,' reported Meisfjord.
[The Wanderer] 1376.11
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USA
Invitation to 'womenpriest' withdrawn
Further to our earlier report, just days before
her scheduled appearance before the St. Thomas
More Society of San Diego, the group's board of
directors has voted to disinvite 'womanpriest'
Jane Via. At a hastily called special meeting
on July 30, the society's board of directors voted
to cancel Via's speaking engagement. Sources on
the board told California Catholic Daily that
some members had threatened to resign from the
society if Via's speech went forward. They said
that the invitation was taken on the initiative
of one member of the group, without authorization
from the board or the knowledge of other members
of the society. The decision marks the second
time Via has been invited, then uninvited, by
the St. Thomas More Society of San Diego. In 1985,
while teaching at the University of San Diego,
a 'Catholic' institution, Via signed a statement
challenging Church teaching on abortion that was
published in the New York Times, which
prompted then Bishop of San Diego Leo Maher to
place her under interdict. The Thomas More Society
had scheduled a speech by Via, but, after the
bishop's interdict, decided to cancel. Via says
she was ordained a 'womanpriest' aboard a boat
on the St. Lawrence River on July 24, 2006. That
same month she met with Bishop Robert Brom, who,
after Via refused to back down, placed her under
interdict. At the time of the most recent St.
Thomas More Society invitation, Via was under
interdict for openly defying Bishop Brom. Last
summer, Bishop Brom forwarded her case to the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in
Rome for further action, possibly a formal declaration
of excommunication. [California Catholic Daily]
1376.12
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VENEZUELA
Government 'similar to Marxist Socialism'
Cardinal
Jorge Urosa Sabino of Caracas warned this week
there are indications that President Hugo Chavez's
'21st Century Socialism' is 'similar to Marxist
Socialism and totalitarianism' and that should
that be the case, the Catholic Church in Venezuela
would reject it. In an interview on state-run
television, the cardinal emphasized, 'Our interest
is that things go well in the country, our purpose
is to work for the good of the country and our
concerns are about some things that could be negative
for the country, such as the problem of what defines
the 21st Century Socialism that the president
is promoting. There are certain clues that indicate
this is similar to Marxist socialism and totalitarianism.
It seems this is the case. If so, we would not
agree with it. If not, it needs to be defined,'
the cardinal explained. He noted that if Chavez's
idea consists of a democratic socialism the Church
could support it. On the other hand, if his idea
of the state is one where it is absolute, such
as in China, where 'the State even tells families
how many children they can have,' then the Church
cannot give its support. He went on, the Church
cannot support a system 'that ruined every nation
that was a part of Marxist socialism. We don't
want that Marxist socialism for Venezuela,' he
said. 'I'm not saying that's what the goal is,
but I am saying we are concerned.' Likewise, Cardinal
Urosa rejected the idea that the Church is involved
in a conspiracy against the Venezuelan government.
'I have heard on a program on channel 8 that the
nucleus of the conspiracy against the government
is in the Bishops' Conference of Venezuela and
the Andres Bello Catholic University,' he said.
'There is nothing further from the truth. We have
nothing to do with conspiracies or secret political
meetings,' the cardinal stated. 'The Venezuelan
bishops are not aligned with the opposition, but
rather with the mission of working for the good
of the country, to teach to the truth and bring
peace to the country,' he added. [CNA] 1376.13
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Book review
Everything
Conceivable
Everything
Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction is Changing
Men, Women and the World. By Liza Mundy.
Alfred A Knopf. £20
Francis
Phillips writes : 'ART is the artless little
acronym for 'assisted reproduction technology'.
Before 1978 technology and reproduction were not
concepts that would have been put together. In
that year a British scientist, Robert Edwards,
together with a gynaecological surgeon, Patrick
Steptoe, enabled the birth of the first child
- Louise Brown - by in vitro fertilisation (IVF).
For the first time in history conception had taken
place outside a woman's body. In practice this
means that sperm and egg are brought together
in a petri dish; the resulting embryos are grown
in a laboratory and then transferred to the womb
of the mother. The two men who made this possible
hoped that it would be of use to married couples
who had problems conceiving. But inevitably they
had opened a Pandora's box, out of which in the
ensuing years flew, fast and furious, any and
every experiment that greed, medical ingenuity
and unappeasable yearning could devise.
This,
then, is the theme of Liza Mundy's book. A Princeton
graduate she is a feature writer on The Washington
Post Magazine, and has done her research conscientiously
if selectively. Interspersed with her investigations
into the reproductive industry are many human
stories which tug at the heart. To want a baby
is the most natural thing in the world, as many
Bible stories testify. So how did this natural
longing become caught up in so much scientific
malpractice (my question, not Ms Mundy's)?
She
lays out the 'new reproductive landscape' for
the reader: one in seven adults in the US is infertile;
4% of Finnish babies result from IVF treatment;
childbearing in the west has massively shifted
to later ages, with inevitable consequences for
fertility; the fastest-growing group of patients
is now single mothers by choice, lesbians and
homosexual men; eggs and sperm are routinely bartered,
bought and sold over the internet. There is also
intense competition between fertility clinics,
leading one specialist, David Keefe, to comment
that 'ART is a business, not science.' Indeed
the author, who has an entirely secular if concerned
outlook, describes fertility medicine as the new
'Wild West.'
Her
book reflects both her uneasiness with some of
the issues - 'what happens when the rights of
the child conflict with the rights of the parents?'
(answer: the parents win) - and her unreflective
endorsement of ART as a testament to 'what we
women, we men, will do to have the children we
love and long for.' After all, human embryos are
only 'multi-celled clumps of tissue' which, 'unlike
hamburgers, say, can be frozen and thawed and
frozen and thawed again, and used…'
If
this is truly the case, why is there so much heart-searching
among many of those involved in ART, both doctors
and patients? One doctor is quoted as saying,
'This is a huge social experiment, mediated by
technology.' There is also increasing awareness
that some male and female infertility exists for
a reason: to prevent genetic problems from being
passed on.
Ironically,
infertility can now be passed from father to son.
Parents also agonise about what they should do
with their surplus frozen embryos. Sell them?
Destroy them? Donate them to science for further
experimentation? One mother, speaking of her frozen
embryos in implicit recognition of their human
status, said simply, 'They call to me.' Tellingly,
the author calls this chapter of her book 'Souls
on ice'.
Then
there is the question of multiple births, when
several embryos are implanted in the womb in the
haphazard hope that one, two or more might 'take'.
This last problem has created its own macabre
solution: selective 'reduction' or 'deletion'
(as if they were unwanted emails, maybe) of embryos.
Even Mundy draws breath at this point in her narrative,
as she describes the injecting of potassium chloride
into the heart of the selected victim: 'the fetus,
which had been undulating and waving, went still…'
Doctors involved swiftly guide the mothers away
from potential grief by instantly talking of twins,
rather than triplets or quads. When multiple births
occur, because parents are naturally reluctant
to 'reduce', the result is often death, disability,
or several disabilities, not to speak of the social
problems for parents who are overwhelmed by what
nature did not intend. A perinatologist, Alfred
Khoury, who struggles to save the lives of tiny,
very premature babies, comments that those involved
in reproductive endocrinology 'have a special
place in hell'.
What
of the children produced by this technology? Mundy
tries to be optimistic about the issues involved;
indeed, she generally ignores moral issues altogether.
Of same-sex parenting she says 'Dads are the new
mothers'; of motherhood itself, she breezily replaces
it with the concept of 'the mothering process':
this involves the egg donor, possibly a surrogate
womb, and the 'adoptive' mother who actually raises
the child thus conceived and gestated.
Actually,
adoption is the wrong word here; none of those
involved see it as remotely similar to traditional
adoption. Mundy ruefully notes that there is minimal
screening of egg and sperm recipients, compared
with the exhaustive home studies required for
adoption proper. Patients are prepared to pay
anything and undergo any treatment, however invasive
and humiliating, to have a baby; the principle
behind fertility treatment is the right of the
paying consumer to reproductive freedom.
Yet
the author acknowledges that for children conceived
under coercive laboratory conditions there is
often a sense of loss, frustration, anger and
confusion over their identity; in a word, genetic
bewilderment. Their parents, in these uncharted
and murky waters, agonise over what to tell them
of their conception and when to tell it, if indeed
they don't decide to conceal it entirely. They
also have related problems, in particular a concern
about the number of offspring produced by an egg
or sperm donor. There is now a Donor Sibling Registry
in the US, where children can search for half-brothers
and sisters; these can number ten, twenty or thirty
upwards. Some parents, understandably, struggle
with the problems raised. Nonetheless, 'This is
the way we have babies now, many of us.'
Mundy
herself is careful to try to avoid taking a moral
line. In raising her misgivings she avoids providing
answers that might identify her as part of 'the
small but vocal body of conservative researchers'
or a 'right-wing opponent of gay marriage.' God
forbid that she should come down from her enlightened
and open-minded perch. Unlike 'some Christian
leaders' who take a 'hard-line pro-life stance'
and believe that embryos should have a father
and a mother, she gamely opines that the 'need
for a family' trumps the need for parents of the
opposite sex. She suggests that lesbians and single
mothers could well produce 'brave new boys' and
even goes so far as to speculate that 'we could
get away from gender entirely.' Doubtless, given
sufficient dollars, scientists will manage this,
too.
What
is lamentably absent from this energetically researched
book, for all its author's sympathy for those
caught up in the suffering of infertility, is
any sense that there is valid criticism of the
repugnant practices she details so eloquently.
I looked in vain for any discussion of what constitutes
human dignity, any suggestion that conception
outside the womb might be tampering with a fundamental,
even sacred, process, one which debases and cheapens
the mystery at the start of life. When the scientists
she interviews speak in their portentous fashion
of 'playing God' they really mean that 'God' is
meaningless and that they can both do what the
market demands and what they damn well please.
The reverence for the science of genetics, as
evinced by the late Professor Jerome Lejeune,
is entirely lacking in this book, as is the notion
of acceptance of infertility. The late King Baudoin
of Belgium spoke movingly of his painful acceptance
that he and his wife, Queen Fabiola, could not
have children. He was led, gradually, to see that
their parental love had to be a spiritual one,
embracing all children. Again, Pope Pius XII,
in an historic address of 1952 to doctors and
midwives, spoke of the dignity of the subjects
of research and the need for researchers to avoid
the risk of inadmissible treatment of other human
beings.
Mundy
would dismiss this as hard-line conservatism.
She is, predictably, critical of opposition to
embryo stem cell research, despite serious misgivings
by others. Indeed, as I write this on 1st August
I note a Letter to the Editor in today's edition
of The Daily Telegraph by two MPs, one
Labour and the other Conservative. It is worth
quoting in full as it raises acute concerns that
Mundy brushes aside. The MPs, David Burrowes and
Geraldine Smith, write: 'As members of the Parliamentary
Joint Committee on the Draft Human Tissues and
Embryos Bill, we have grave concerns about the
Bill. Sanctioning the creation of animal-human
hybrid embryos, the Bill permits what is banned
in many other countries. We are very concerned
that, by facilitating 'hybrid' experiments, the
Bill will inevitably have the effect of further
diverting money away from adult stem-cell research
- which has given rise to more than 70 successful
patient therapies - to embryonic research, which
has produced no therapies whatsoever. It is a
shame that the committee did not have the opportunity
to take evidence from adult stem-cell scientists
with misgivings about hybrid experiments.
'We
are also profoundly concerned about the implications
of the draft Bill regarding fathers, especially
the clause that makes provision for deliberately
bringing children into the world who will be prevented,
by law, from having any legal father. The Bill's
fathers' provisions prioritise the interests of
adults over children whose parenting needs are
best met by the presence of both a mother and
a father.
'On
July 11, the Prime Minister told Parliament that
there was an emerging consensus on the Bill. Our
committee had no consensus on these key issues,
which will probably reflect the position of an
informed public.'
As
Hilaire Belloc wrote: 'Oh! Let us never, never
doubt/What nobody is sure about!' 1376.14
Top
www.cfnews.org.uk
Media
Pro-life
videos on YouTube
A
group of seminarians has joined the YouTube phenomenon
and posted three one-minute videos on the Church's
teachings about contraception. The videos, entitled
'NFP vs. Contraception', are a take on the popular
Mac-PC commercials. The three videos have already
had nearly 9,000 views combined. According to
Nielson/NetRatings, the website has nearly 20
million visitors per month, with the dominant
age group being 12 to 17 year-olds. The actors
are seminarians for the Diocese of Lansing, Michigan,
Dan Kogut and Jeremy Meuser. Kogut, who mimics
the cool Mac personality in the popular commercials,
plays the part of 'NFP' and represents the Catholic
position on sex, sexuality and natural family
planning. Meuser impersonates the PC personality
as 'Contraception'. Eddie Dwyer, a seminarian
for the Diocese of Saginaw, wrote the three skits.
The seminarians decided to make the videos while
at the Institute for Priestly Formation in Omaha,
Nebraska, this summer. 'Eddie definitely had evangelization
in mind with the skits, but we also just thought
it would be fun to do and that people might get
a kick out of it,' Kogut told CNA. The seminarians'
videos join hundreds of other YouTube pro-life
videos. To view the videos, click on:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v56Z1DIMI58
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti9ZBGRf9qc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0UomDP6ExM&mode=related&search
[CNA] 1376.15
Top
www.cfnews.org.uk
R.I.P
Father
Sir Hugh Barrett-Leonard (CongOrat)
Your prayers, please, for a remarkable kinsman,
Father Sir Hugh Barrett-Leonard of the London
Oratory, whose obituary appeared in yesterday's
Daily Telegraph.
'Father
Sir Hugh Barrett-Lennard, 6th Bt, who has died
aged 89, was a greatly admired if highly eccentric
priest of the London Oratory. Pursuing a busy
and eclectic apostolate in Knightsbridge, he was
a dedicated parish visitor, so unconcerned about
his appearance that he sometimes wore odd shoes;
thus attired he would knock firmly on the doors
of rich and poor alike. He visited the Household
Cavalry, and served as a chaplain to both the
local St Thomas More school and the St Christopher
cycling club, though his cassock occasionally
became tangled in a bicycle wheel and had to be
cut free. For a time (until his absentmindedness
with keys led to concerns about security) he acted
as an unofficial chaplain at Wormwood Scrubs prison,
where his masses were said to be served by two
prisoners known as Hammer and Sickle.
He
enjoyed recalling how he had once been served
at Benediction by a thurifer who was a murderer
and by two acolytes who had been convicted of
causing grievous bodily harm. In addition Barrett-Lennard
gave devoted service as prefect of the lay organisation,
the Brothers of the Little Oratory. He accompanied
its youth club to the Isle of Eigg in the Inner
Hebrides, where he was known as the 'Pope of Eigg'
and was in the habit of organising hunts for an
imaginary haggis, which he encouraged with high-pitched
shrieks like a peacock. Noted for his piety, he
was also admired for his unshockability and flexibility.
He was once summoned to a room at the Oratory
to find a woman who had removed all her clothes;
Barrett-Lennard swathed her in a carpet. On another
occasion, during the 1950s, a woman asked for
confession outside church and he held up a tennis
racket to serve as a grille, so that the separation
of confessor and penitent was maintained.
As
a retreat-giver at the Oratory prep school in
Oxfordshire Barrett-Lennard made his mark by getting
all the boys up for a midnight walk through the
woods. He once arrived at the senior school soaking
wet - he had fallen into a fishpond on leaving
a Carmelite convent in Essex.
He
had the title of extraordinary confessor, and
his usual practice was to dump his bag on arrival
at the school and immediately set off on a tour
of the houses, where he received an enthusiastic
welcome; and although he mostly heard confessions
in his room he was prepared to do so behind a
hedge. He remembered every boy, and if he ran
into an Old Oratorian on the day of the St Philip's
Day Mass at the London Oratory, he would remind
him to attend.
Hugh
Dacre Barrett-Lennard was born on June 27 1917
into an unconventional family with two mottoes:
Pour bien d&eacut
