polonia pearl

Overturning Roe? Not anytime soon—Thanks to Catholics

2012-01-24T11:35:00.000-08:00

By Paul G. Kengor Ph.D.

“Romney and Santorum: Roe v. Wade Should Be Overturned.” Thus read the headline in LifeNews.com. My reaction: No, not anytime soon.

Don’t get me wrong, I love LifeNews. Few publications are so thoroughly excellent in what they do. And I like Rick Santorum. As for Mitt Romney, he is not my top choice for president, but I can’t say I dislike him.

But what about this headline? The article reports that a President Romney or Santorum would favor overturning the deadly Roe v. Wade, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court 39 years ago this week. Santorum’s position is not a surprise. He has been a superb, reliable pro-lifer. Romney’s position is great to hear, a further sign of his gradual evolution in favor of the unborn. Romney said of Roe: “I don’t believe they decided that correctly. In my view, Roe v. Wade was improperly decided…. And in my view, if we had justices like Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Scalia, and more justices like that, they might well decide to return this issue to states as opposed to saying it’s in the federal Constitution.” Romney stated clearly: “Do I believe the Supreme Court should overturn Roe v. Wade? Yes, I do.”

I applaud this. It’s good news. It’s a commendable position.
But it also elicits a big “I doubt it.”

Why? Because overturning Roe under a President Romney or Santorum is largely a moot point. It’s very unlikely that Roe v. Wade will be overturned under any Republican successor to Barack Obama. Why? Brace yourself for the ugly truth: Because of Catholics. Yes, that’s right, Catholics.

By a decisive majority in November 2008, Catholics voted for Obama, enough to make the difference in Obama defeating John McCain and taking the White House. In so doing, these tens of millions of self-identified, self-professing Roman Catholics guaranteed this nation more bloody decades of Roe v. Wade. It’s a done deal, already decided.

Let’s recall the situation in 2008:

The November 2008 election was a pivotal moment for Roe v. Wade, a literal matter of life and death. The balance of the Supreme Court was at stake, precariously positioned to become either pro-life or anti-life. The next president would surely get two Supreme Court picks, probably three. A radical “pro-choice” president would choose “pro-choice” nominees. A pro-life president, which John McCain would have been, would opt for justices who would likely overturn Roe, or at least not affirm it.

And what happened? Obama won, and he got two picks right away, in both instances picking not only very liberal “pro-choice” women, but very young (by court standards) women. If Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor enjoy a normal life span, they will be loyal pro-Roe votes for decades to come. If Obama wins in November 2012, he’ll get a third pick, likely a replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In fact, even if he loses, he might quickly get a chance to replace Ginsburg with another (much younger) pro-Roe judge. Believe me, Ginsburg and the “choice” crowd know what is at stake—better than oblivious Catholics do.
Did we see this coming back in 2008? Of course, we did. I did dozens of commentaries warning about this, as did countless pro-life Catholics who understood the enormity before them. This was obvious.

To be fair, I don’t want to indict all Catholics. The data shows that Catholics who attend Mass regularly or more than once a week voted against Obama and thus against Roe in 2008. Unfortunately, those are not the majority of Catholics.

George W. Bush won Catholics in 2000 and in 2004. In turn, Bush made wonderful Supreme Court picks that were positioned to overturn Roe; that is, if he was succeeded by a pro-life Republican. That would-be Republican successor lost, defeated because he failed to get a majority of Catholics.

I’m convinced that if you really want to discern the underlying currents of history, watch the happenings in the Catholic Church and her people. November 2008 was one spot where the Church’s people blew it big time.

So, back to that LifeNews headline: Romney and Santorum believe Roe should be overturned? That’s good, but it’s unlikely to happen in their administrations.

That said, all hope is not lost. On a positive note, we can be content to know that these two men would select nominees who, in the long run, would make a pro-life difference, and could eventually help to overturn Roe, and at least not solidify it. They could again redirect the ship. But overturning Roe? No, not anytime soon. Thanks to Catholics.

Dr.Paul Kengor is professor of Political Science at Grove City College. His books include The Judge: William P. Clark, Ronald Reagan’s Top Hand (Ignatius Press) and Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century.

This article first appeared in Catholicvote.org.

CatholicVote is a non-profit political advocacy group based in the United States that describes itself as consisting "of committed Catholics who are passionate about living out the truths proclaimed by Christ and His Church in the modern world."^[1

http://catholicvote.org/

Polonia pearl....aka.....eddie

Is A Vote For An Anti-Life Political Candidate Morally Defensible?

2012-01-17T15:11:00.000-08:00

F. K. Bartels

http://www.catholic.org/

GLADE PARK, CO (Catholic Online) -- Election Day draws nearer. Yet this "day" is hardly one among others, for rarely -- perhaps never before -- in the history of this nation have Americans faced such radically opposed ideologies among those candidates who hope to occupy future positions of political power. To be sure, Americans are soon to make gravely important political decisions concerning their future and the future of their children.

So serious are our political choices that the USCCB stated: "It is important to be clear that the political choices faced by citizens not only have an impact on general peace and prosperity but also may affect the individual's salvation. Similarly, the kinds of laws and policies supported by public officials affect their spiritual well-being" (Faithful Citizenship 38).

For many Catholics and other Christians the proverbial line drawn in the sand is legalized abortion. Why? The horrifying barbarism of abortion is cutting the heart out of our nation; it has killed over 50 million of our youngest neighbors; and it is physically, emotionally and spiritually damaging untold millions of women and men.

That a nation populated by a Christian majority who claims the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" intentionally kills its youngest citizens under cover of law, is not only unacceptable, it is unspeakably evil. The right to life, the foundational right upon which every other human right is built, is no longer upheld by civil law. Our society has become a self-terminating society.
What will it take to bring an end to the willful and legalized bloodshed of the innocent? Does the solution lie in Americans' voting power? We must not forget that presidents nominate future Supreme Court justices who are in turn confirmed by the Senate. The continuation of the "positive law of destruction" we term legalized abortion hinges on the next Supreme Court decision against it. Given what is at stake and the fact that in nearly every case we have the ability to give the nod to pro-life politicians, is a vote for an anti-life candidate morally defensible?

We might ask, as did Archbishop Chaput, if we can come up with a "compelling proportionate reason to justify" such a vote. "What is a 'proportionate' reason when it comes to the abortion issue? It's the kind of reason," he continued, "we will be able to explain, with a clean heart, to the victims of abortion when we meet them face to face in the next life -- which we most certainly will. If we're confident that these victims will accept our motives as something more than an alibi, then we can proceed."

We might also ask ourselves, since God will not be mocked and whatever a man sows he will reap (Gal. 6:7), if our Lord Jesus Christ will approve of our voting preference -- and we can be certain he will indeed expect an answer. Also, what will our spiritual Mother, the sweet Virgin Mary who bore our Savior in her womb, nursed him at her holy breasts, and witnessed his shameful death on the bloodied Roman cross, have to say about our personal political convictions?

These are not simply emotional appeals. Far from it. Every Christian ought know that God will bring "every deed" and "hidden thing" into judgment (Ecc. 12:14). Further, we will be required to answer for every "careless word" uttered (Matt. 12:36). Therefore it would be difficult to exaggerate the seriousness of those far-reaching choices we make through our participation in the political arena of contemporary society.

http://www.catholic.org/

The Polonia Pearl.....aka ...eddie

Why Homosexual “Marriage” is Harmful and Must be Opposed

2011-12-16T11:54:00.000-08:00

It Is Not Marriage

Calling something marriage does not make it marriage. Marriage has always been a covenant between a man and a woman which is by its nature ordered toward the procreation and education of children and the unity and wellbeing of the spouses.

The promoters of same-sex “marriage” propose something entirely different. They propose the union between two men or two women. This denies the self-evident biological, physiological, and psychological differences between men and women which find their complementarity in marriage. It also denies the specific primary purpose of marriage: the perpetuation of the human race and the raising of children.

It Violates Natural Law

Marriage is not just any relationship between human beings. It is a relationship rooted in human nature and thus governed by natural law.

Natural law’s most elementary precept is that “good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided.” By his natural reason, man can perceive what is morally good or bad for him.

It Always Denies a Child Either a Father or a Mother

It is in the child’s best interests that he be raised under the influence of his natural father and mother. This rule is confirmed by the evident difficulties faced by the many children who are orphans or are raised by a single parent, a relative, or a foster parent.

The unfortunate situation of these children will be the norm for all children of a same-sex “marriage.” A child of a same-sex “marriage” will always be deprived of either his natural mother or father. He will necessarily be raised by one party who has no blood relationship with him. He will always be deprived of either a mother or a father role model.

It Validates and Promotes the Homosexual Lifestyle

In the name of the “family,” same-sex “marriage” serves to validate not only such unions but the whole homosexual lifestyle in all its bisexual and transgender variants.

Civil laws are structuring principles of man's life in society. As such, they play a very important and sometimes decisive role in influencing patterns of thought and behavior. They externally shape the life of society, but also profoundly modify everyone’s perception and evaluation of forms of behavior.

Legal recognition of same-sex “marriage” would necessarily obscure certain basic moral values, devalue traditional marriage, and weaken public morality.

It Turns a Moral Wrong into a Civil Right

Homosexual activists argue that same-sex “marriage” is a civil rights issue similar to the struggle for racial equality in the 1960s.

This is false.

First of all, sexual behavior and race are essentially different realities. A man and a woman wanting to marry may be different in their characteristics: one may be black, the other white; one rich, the other poor; or one tall, the other short. None of these differences are insurmountable obstacles to marriage. The two individuals are still man and woman, and thus the requirements of nature are respected.

Same-sex “marriage” opposes nature. Two individuals of the same sex, regardless of their race, wealth, stature, erudition or fame, will never be able to marry because of an insurmountable biological impossibility.

Secondly, inherited and unchangeable racial traits cannot be compared with non-genetic and changeable behavior. There is simply no analogy between the interracial marriage of a man and a woman and the “marriage” between two individuals of the same sex.

It Does Not Create a Family but a Naturally Sterile Union

Traditional marriage is usually so fecund that those who would frustrate its end must do violence to nature to prevent the birth of children by using contraception. It naturally tends to create families.

On the contrary, same-sex “marriage” is intrinsically sterile. If the “spouses” want a child, they must circumvent nature by costly and artificial means or employ surrogates. The natural tendency of such a union is not to create families.

Therefore, we cannot call a same-sex union marriage and give it the benefits of true marriage.

It Defeats the State’s Purpose of Benefiting Marriage

One of the main reasons why the State bestows numerous benefits on marriage is that by its very nature and design, marriage provides the normal conditions for a stable, affectionate, and moral atmosphere that is beneficial to the upbringing of children—all fruit of the mutual affection of the parents. This aids in perpetuating the nation and strengthening society, an evident interest of the State.

Homosexual “marriage” does not provide such conditions. Its primary purpose, objectively speaking, is the personal gratification of two individuals whose union is sterile by nature. It is not entitled, therefore, to the protection the State extends to true marriage.

It Offends God

Marriage is not the creature of any State. Rather, it was established by God in Paradise for our first parents, Adam and Eve. As we read in the Book of Genesis: “God created man in His image; in the Divine image he created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them, saying: ‘Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it.’” (Gen. 1:28-29)

The same was taught by Our Savior Jesus Christ: “From the beginning of the creation, God made them male and female. For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother; and shall cleave to his wife.” (Mark 10:6-7).

Genesis also teaches how God punished Sodom and Gomorrah for the sin of homosexuality: “The Lord rained down sulphurous fire upon Sodom and Gomorrah. He overthrew those cities and the whole Plain, together with the inhabitants of the cities and the produce of the soil.” (Gen. 19:24-25)

Taking a Principled not a Personal Stand

In writing this statement, we have no intention to defame or disparage anyone. We are not moved by personal hatred against any individual. In intellectually opposing individuals or organizations promoting the homosexual agenda, our only intent is the defense of traditional marriage, the family, and the precious remnants of Christian civilization.

We reject and condemn any violence. We simply exercise our liberty as children of God (Rom. 8:21) and our constitutional rights to free speech and the candid, unapologetic and unashamed public display of our Catholic faith. We oppose arguments with arguments. To the arguments in favor of homosexuality and same-sex “marriage” we respond with arguments based on right reason, natural law and Divine Revelation.

In a polemical statement like this, it is possible that one or another formulation may be perceived as excessive or ironic. Such is not our intention.

http://www.tfpstudentaction.org/

The Polonia Pearl....aka....eddie

A Biblical Roadmap To The One, True Church

2011-11-26T04:44:00.000-08:00

by Gary Zimak

Teach me, LORD, your way that I may walk in your truth. (Ps 86:11)

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? I can’t imagine any Christian looking at the above verse and disagreeing with its content. Essentially, it is a summary of our mission as followers of Christ. But exactly how does the Lord teach us “His way” so that we can “walk in His truth”? Even though we acknowledge Jesus as “the Way, the Truth, and the Life”, we still need a set of guidelines for making moral decisions.

The Bible tells us that “the church” is the guardian of the truth, but why is it that various Christian churches hold such radically different beliefs? While pledging loyalty to the Bible, many denominations have conflicting teachings on important moral issues such as abortion, birth control, divorce and homosexuality. Didn’t Psalm 86 state that there is one way which allows us to walk in God’s truth? Can there actually be multiple conflicting “truths”?

In reality, the Bible illustrates that there is indeed ONE truth and that there is ONE Church which was established to help us learn and live that truth. Let’s look at 10 Scripture passages that take us from point “A” (there is one absolute truth) to point “B” (there is one Church that contains the fullness of truth). Once we arrive at our destination, finding that one, true Church is relatively easy!

1. This is good and pleasing to God our savior, who wills everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth (1 Tm 2:3-4).
According to St. Paul, God wants everyone to be saved and to know THE “truth”. It sounds good to me, but how can I discover THE “truth”?

2. But if I should be delayed, you should know how to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of truth (1 Tm 3:15).
A clue! We are to look to “the Church” to discover the truth…but which one? There are tens of thousands of Christian churches!

3. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth. He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears, and will declare to you the things that are coming (Jn 16:13).
There’s that “truth” thing again! This could be another clue. If (as Jesus promised) the Holy Spirit really guides us to all truth, then conflicting doctrinal beliefs would not be possible. Doesn’t that make a strong case for a single, authoritative interpreter of the truth? Could this interpreter possibly be “the Church” referred to as the “pillar and foundation of truth” in 1 Tm 3:15?

4. If your brother sins (against you), go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have won over your brother. If he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, so that ‘every fact may be established on the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ If he refuses to listen to them, tell the church. If he refuses to listen even to the church, then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector. Amen, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven (Mt 18:15-18).
Jesus gives us a clue about “the Church”. He points to “the Church” as the ultimate authority for settling moral issues and He gives this Church authority to make binding decisions on earth. That narrows my search down a bit; I need to find a church who can teach authoritatively…

5. And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” (Mt 16:18-19).
Not “churches”, but CHURCH (singular)! This Church, founded by Christ, is built on the leadership of St. Peter (the first pope), to whom Jesus gives the power to make authoritative decisions on earth. This could be that Church that I’m searching for, but I still need to look for more clues…

6. Then Jesus approached and said to them, “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.” (Mt 28:18-20).
Let’s see…Just before Jesus ascended into Heaven, He instructed the Apostles to carry on His mission by baptizing and teaching ALL that He has commanded. This is an unexpected development. Now I’m looking for a church that presents the teaching of Jesus Christ and also utilizes baptism as a means to become a disciple. I thought I was getting somewhere, but now I’m not so sure. Lots of churches baptize their members. I need to look for more clues…

7. Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. He came to Jesus at night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one can do these signs that you are doing unless God is with him.” Jesus answered and said to him, “Amen, amen, I say to you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can a person once grown old be born again? Surely he cannot reenter his mother’s womb and be born again, can he?” Jesus answered, “Amen, amen, I say to you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit (Jn 3:1-5).
Wait a minute! Jesus told Nicodemus that no one can achieve salvation “without being born of water and Spirit”. It sounds like He’s referring to baptism and deeming it to be necessary for our salvation! Now I’m looking for a church with a common set of beliefs (the “truth”), that is visible, can make authoritative decisions AND teaches that baptism is necessary for salvation. Our list of potential churches has gotten a lot smaller!

8. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died; this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.” The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us (his) flesh to eat?” Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever.” These things he said while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum. Then many of his disciples who were listening said, “This saying is hard; who can accept it?” Since Jesus knew that his disciples were murmuring about this, he said to them, “Does this shock you? What if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the spirit that gives life, while the flesh is of no avail. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But there are some of you who do not believe.” Jesus knew from the beginning the ones who would not believe and the one who would betray him. And he said, “For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by my Father.” As a result of this, many (of) his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him (Jn 6:48-66).
Huh? Did Jesus just say that eating His flesh and drinking His blood is necessary for achieving salvation? This sounds like cannibalism! He must be speaking figuratively and probably means “spiritual bread”. Although, if Jesus was speaking figuratively – why would this saying be “hard” and why would He let many of His disciples walk away? Wouldn’t it make sense that He would call them back, explaining that He wasn’t speaking literally? In fact, He did just that when the Apostles misunderstood His reference to the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees (“How do you not comprehend that I was not speaking to you about bread?”) in Mt 16:11. Therefore, we must assume that Jesus meant exactly what He said. If that’s true, how is it possible to actually eat His Body? There must be a missing piece to this puzzle and it’s definitely worth pursuing, since it sure sounds like Jesus is telling us that it’s necessary for salvation! Stay tuned…

9. Then he took the bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which will be given for you; do this in memory of me.” And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which will be shed for you (Lk 22:19-20).
Aha! Now the words about eating His Body make sense and thankfully it has nothing to do with cannibalism! Our Lord didn’t say that “this REPRESENTS my Body” or “this SYMBOLIZES my Body”. He said, “This IS my Body”. Is there a church that believes that Our Lord’s Body can actually exist under the appearance of bread and that follows His command to “do this in memory of me”? This sounds like the Catholic Mass…and, come to think of it, the Catholic Church fits all of the other scriptural requirements, but it can’t really be “the Church”, can it? After all, Catholics believe that they can only be saved by faith AND works. All Christians know that we are saved by faith alone…

10. See how a person is justified by works and not by faith alone (James 2:24).
It doesn’t get much clearer than that. Could it be that the teaching of the Catholic Church is actually supported by the Bible? If that’s the case does anything prevent me from recognizing that the Catholic Church is the one, true Church founded by Jesus Christ?
While there are hundreds of Bible passages that support Catholic doctrine, these 10 are among the best. If you are Catholic, you can take comfort in the fact that our beliefs are totally in harmony with these verses. If you are not Catholic, I invite you to compare the teachings of your church to God’s Word contained in these Scripture passages. I urge you to read them over, meditate upon them and ask the Holy Spirit to guide you to “the truth”. A careful and honest study of Scripture has brought many people into the Catholic Church. If you would like to learn more about becoming Catholic, please contact your local Catholic parish or email me at gary@followingthetruth.com.

(© 2011 Gary Zimak)

The Polonia Pearl.....aka.....eddie

What is Personhood?

2011-11-02T04:48:00.000-07:00

Personhood is the cultural and legal recognition of the equal and unalienable rights of human beings.

When the term “person” is applied to a particular class of human beings, it is an affirmation of their individual rights. In other words, to be a person is to be protected by a series of God-given rights and constitutional guarantees such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

This terrifies the pro-abortion foes!
They know that if we clearly define the preborn baby as a person, they will have the same right to life as all Americans do!
This then also begs the question, is every human being a person?
There is a very real sense in which the need to answer this second question is, in itself, an absurdity.
If you look up the word "person" in your average dictionary (we'll use Webster's), you'll find something like this: "Person n. A human being."

A person, simply put, is a human being. This fact should be enough. The intrinsic humanity of unborn children, by definition, makes them persons, and should, therefore, guarantee their protection under the law.
Personhood holds the key to filling the “Blackmun Hole,” a startling admission in the Roe v. Wade majority opinion:

In 1973, the science of fetology was not able to prove, as it can now, that a living, fully human, and unique individual exists at the moment of fertilization and continues to grow through various stages of development in a continuum until death.
However, pick up any embryology book today and you will find that your life and every person’s life began at fertilization.

If the Court considers the humanity of the preborn child, it could end this age-based discrimination and restore the legal protections of personhood to the preborn.

For nearly forty years, however, this has not been the case. The situation we are left with is that, in America, there is a group of living human beings who have no protection under the law and are being killed en masse every day. It is truly astounding, but not wholly unprecedented.

Throughout history, certain people groups have felt the brunt of a system which denied their humanity, stripped their personhood, and subjected them to horrors beyond measure. While the legal framework that made such horrors possible has now been removed, it remains firmly in place for preborn Americans.

There remains one, and only one, group of human beings in the United States today for which being human is not enough. The inconvenience of their existence has resulted in this shameful injustice.

What is a person? A person is a human being at every age.

The Polonia Pearl

Jewels Green - A Former Abortion Clinic Worker's Great Story

2011-09-21T15:46:00.000-07:00

An abortion worker’s ‘ah-ha’ moment: when a surrogate mother was paid to abort a Down syndrome baby

by Jewels Green
Permission to print -
http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/an-abortion-workers-ah-ha-moment-when-a-surrogate-mother-was-paid-to-abort

Note: Jewels Green is a former abortion clinic worker who also had an abortion herself. She recently spoke out about her experiences as an abortion clinic worker for the first time.

September 20, 2011 (LiveAction.org) - After supporting abortion my entire life and working in an abortion clinic for years, my Ah-HA moment seemed to come from an unlikely place. I did not have a profound, sudden shift in my worldview. After years of ignoring the little voice inside me questioning the death around me—the nightmares and the regret—the truth snuck up on me.

I was involved in an online discussion of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and surrogacy with a group of close friends who were all married mothers, and one among us agreed to be a surrogate for a friend of hers who had tragically lost a child to cancer. We were her confidantes as she went through the months of hormonal preparation for her body to accept the implantation of a baby created outside of her womb. She detailed all of the painfully unnatural things done to her body to prepare for this and she also described the IVF process—all those teeny-tiny human beings—being created in a laboratory, then stored in a freezer.

I confess I honestly hadn’t really ever thought about IVF before, but I found the process disturbing. I sought counsel from the two Catholic members of the forum who openly (but always respectfully) disagreed with what she was doing. The more I thought about IVF and the Frankenstein-like process of creating humans in this way, it all finally started making sense to me. This was unnatural, and it was wrong. These were HUMANS. It wasn’t like in the movie Alien where adults made a choice to climb into sleep chambers to willfully enter a state of suspended animation, this was the complete removal of informed consent and the complete antithesis of the maternal instinct (PROTECT BABY AT ALL COSTS). It was just… wrong.

Well, then she went on to describe a woman in her surrogacy support group who underwent prenatal genetic testing on the tiny, helpless, not-genetically-related, innocent baby growing in her body (I think you can guess where this is going.) Down syndrome. I followed the daily posts with increasing horror as she related the story of this surrogate mother who accepted “payment of her contract in full” to abort rather than to carry this baby to term and give birth. One among us pleaded with our friend to tell her about Reece’s Rainbow, that if the genetic parents didn’t want their child, he or she could have a chance of finding an adoptive home through this amazing organization that helps match children with Down syndrome with loving families, and in many cases helps defray the costs of adoption. Nope.

This was my Ah-HA moment: This woman was paid to kill the child. And she did. This is murder. Abortion is murder. I cried. I cried for that (now dead) baby. Then I cried for all of the little cold souls in the IVF freezers around the world. Then, only then, could I cry for all of the babies murdered at the clinic where I worked for so long. How many tissue boxes my small counseling office went through and I walked that pregnant mother back to the procedure room and smiled as I held the door open for her to enter the chamber of death. “You’ll be alright, I’ll come visit you in the recovery room.” My God. What had I done? No, I did not pull the trigger; but I cleaned the gun, readied the ammunition, and loaded it. Sure as the guilt of the killer himself, I was sure of my own guilt as well. The wave of remorse and regret was overwhelming. I prayed. I prayed for peace for the babies. I prayed for forgiveness. I prayed for the strength to become a better person.

All of this played out against the backdrop of a very different public view of the pro-life movement. Gone were the days of outright intimidation and harassment; replaced by a peaceful, prayerful presence outside the clinic doors peopled by compassionate souls ready and willing to assist pregnant mothers in practical, useful, and lasting ways. Only by continuing to offer truth, solace, hope, help, and love to the troubled and misguided can we ever hope to end abortion. Only by continuing to speak the truth about the horror and brutality of abortion can we hope to change minds. One heart, one soul, one mother, one child at a time.

Polonia Pearl

The Polonia Pearl Story

2011-09-19T16:08:00.000-07:00

Polonia Pearl here,

My "inner self" has been insisting that we must give our visitors (if any) some back - ground regarding the name polonia pearl and why it was chosen for this blog. Here it is.

We hang out in rural Central Wisconsin in the rocky hills surrounding the village of Polonia. Beginning in 1857 the first Polish family settled in this area, Central Wisconsin had the first Polish rural settlement in the state, and the second in the United States. Coming along with these immigrants were their love of their Catholic faith, the land, family and a work ethic of hard work. I can attest to the hard work having been raised in the country, working on my grandfather's farm, picking potatos, beans and cucumbers, and all the other chores assigned to us kids.

The land on which these Polish immigrants would settle presented a varied set of challenges. The greatest challenge were the rocks and boulders left behind by the glaciers. Although the soil was fertile, it was littered with "Polonia Pearls" in all shapes and sizes. Poles (slang for Pollacks) seeking inexpensive land, settled in these Polonia hills and turned it into productive farmland. The boulder fences lining these farms and the Sacred Heart Church in Polonia, are a testimony to the backbreaking labor this involved. (tell me about it)

The early Polish people were as Catholic as the Pope! By 1914, Polish communities built eleven new Catholic churchs in Portage county and Sacred Heart church in Polonia, built in the middle 1800's, became the oldest rural Catholic church in America.

The Catholic faith was not the only part of their culture that Poles brought to the Polonia area. Traditional food, dance and music also found its way into Polish country. Polish foods and drinks; rye bread, kielbasa, borsch, czernina (duck blood soup), bigos (sauerkraut), pierogi, golonka (pork knuckles), kolduny (meat dumplings), beef tongue, brains, liver, chlodnik (beet soup), and other "great" tasting delicacies. (is my nose getting longer?) Favorite brews were hootch, moonshine, vodka, brandy and barrels of beer which are all still enjoyed and heavily consumned in the Polonia area at Ernie's and Sylvia's bars. Almost forgot that those foot stomping Poles loved their polish dances -- Polkas, waltzes, obereks and once in a while, the chicken dance.

We came back to this area (got homesick) twenty eight years ago and built our home among the "polonia pearls." And now you know the rest of the story.

The Polonia Pearl aka eddie

THE BITTER TRUTH

2011-07-07T17:01:00.000-07:00

By Jeannie DeAngelis

The entire time Casey Anthony was on trial, the voices in the media called out for justice for the victim, but didn't seem to notice the hypocrisy of many Americans that gives its approval for the slaughter of thousands that takes place every day in America.

Even still, few would argue that the senseless death of a helpless tot isn't heartrending. However, the larger heartbreak is that in a nation that has faithfully sown the culture of death; the idea of a mother wanting to be free from responsibility by taking the life of her offspring is not all that far-fetched.

Whether America believes Casey Anthony is guilty or not, is not the issue.

A mother doing such a thing shouldn't be surprising, because under the auspices of a woman's right to "privacy" in 1973, with the ruling in Roe v. Wade, child murder officially became legal in America. Over the next three decades, developing fetuses were reduced to less than human and women were convinced that disposing of unwanted offspring is a commendable goal.

If Casey took her daughter's life, she's no different from women who justify a similar decision as being nothing more than an exercise in "reproductive rights."

For almost 40 years, with the approval of the United States legal system, millions of little Caylees have lost their lives. The only difference between 60 million aborted babies and a little girl with brown curls from Orlando, Florida is that for at least a couple of years Caylee got the chance to color, wear a baseball cap, and swim with Grandma in the family pool.

If Casey Anthony actually did kill her daughter, she joined the ranks of 98% of the women who choose to abort their unborn children for the sake of convenience. If guilty of the crime for which she was acquitted, single party girl Casey did nothing more than take a little longer to make up her mind about how and when to buy personal freedom in exchange for the life of her child.

In American society the value of life has eroded to the point where women now give birth in restrooms and dispose of newborns in toilets and sewers, or place lifeless infants like garbage into plastic bags and hide them under beds. Many of these murdering mothers are then acquitted much like Casey Anthony, which is indicative of a chilling truth that a mother murdering her own child is not nearly as offensive anymore as a child being murdered by a stranger.

Regardless of who killed Caylee Anthony, her death was caused by a person who lacked respect for human life. If it was her mother, kudos go to pro-choice America, whose indoctrination has been unrelenting in its effort to convince women that mothers come before children; a woman's life takes precedence over her offspring; and the right to choose is an honorable objective.

In the end, a two-year-old child was murdered and a mother who appeared guilty was ultimately acquitted. Also acquitted was a pro-death society largely responsible for not taking into consideration that when life is cheapened we're all potential victims of someone's justifiable reason for disposing of us. The sad truth is that in America a seed of death has taken root, and the murder of Caylee Anthony is just one of the many fruits produced on that bitter vine.

The Polonia Pearl.......aka ...eddie

Voris, Corapi, And The Ned Flanderification Of Catholic Commentary

2011-04-19T09:54:00.000-07:00

by Pat Archbold

Patrick Archbold is co-founder of Creative Minority Report, a Catholic website that puts a refreshing spin on the intersection of religion, culture, and politics. When not writing, Patrick is director of information technology at a large international logistics company. Patrick, his wife Terri, and their five children reside in Long Island, N.Y.

If you are lucky, you may have missed the current debate rippling through the Catholic interwebs. Actually, it is a debate that comes up from time time to time, this time it just happens to involve video provocateur Michael Voris.

Voris contributes to the website RealCatholicTv.com. He produces several videos a week talking about issues related to faith, politics, and culture. No big deal, lots of us speak or write about these subjects every day. What makes Voris a hot topic of debate is mostly style and occasionally a little substance.

Having only watched a handful of Voris’ videos, I do not intend to debate the prudence or sagacity of all his remarks. But I do want to talk about style.

I recently weighed in on a cobbled controversy that popped up after remarks by Voris in which he advised people to run, not walk, from their parish to an orthodox parish if their priest offers a homily, at the request of Al Gore and Global Warming Inc., on the topic greening the planet on Easter Sunday.

Now while Voris’s remedy may be fairly debated, so much of the debate surrounding him is based on his style. Voris, you see, is loud, in your face, hyperbolic, and sarcastic and as everyone knows—you can’t be like that AND be a good Catholic. Or can you?

Before I go on, I wish to un-tether myself from the specifics of Michael Voris to debate the relative value of “in your face-ness” by Catholic commentators as this has even come up in many of the discussions surrounding the relative love/detestation of Fr. Corapi.

So I ask, what is so wrong with bluntness? With having an opinion and speaking it? Why is it that straightforward criticism is so routinely criticized?

Speakers and preachers who prefer declarative sentences to interrogative ones are perceived to be bombastic and thus, somehow, un-Christian.

Don’t get me wrong, everyone has preferences and I am not immune. But if one prefers the Ned Flanders approach to Christian commentary, fine. But does that mean that anything other than that contains only vice and no virtue? Might some people be more effectively reached this way?

As long as one does not contradict the teachings of the Church, why not speak in the declarative? Why not use hyperbole to make a point? If you do, you will be in good company.

Remember St. John the Baptist? He called the Pharisees snakes, “You brood of vipers, how can you who are evil say anything good? For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.”

That St. John guy, do you hear the way he speaks to people? He won’t win over anyone speaking like that. Who does he think he is? Only the greatest of all men born of women. Who says so? Jesus says so.

Oh, and then there is Jesus. Jesus called the Pharisees hypocrites and whitewashed tombs. That sounds more like Voris than Ned Flanders. Not very nicey nice. And then there is hyperbole. Jesus was fond of that too as when he said “it is easier for an camel to go through the eye of needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” And then there was that whole “Get behind me Satan” thing he said to Peter. That is about as in your face as you can get. If exaggeration to make a point is good enough for Jesus, it is good enough for me.

And why not a little righteous indignation from time to time? Jesus threw the money lenders out of the temple.

So why did St. John the Baptist and Jesus sometimes use blunt criticism and hyperbole to make points? Because they knew, as some others do today, that this can be an effective way to reach people. Not everyone can be reached by soothing tones and polite discussion. Sometimes it takes a little more.

So in the pantheon of Catholic commentators and preachers, isn’t there a little room for the blunt? Isn’t there room for a little fire and brimstone among the soothing pastels of the preponderance of today’s preaching? I hope so.

http://www.ncregister.com/
The Polonia Pearl....aka....eddie

What is my Primary Obligation as a Catholic?

2011-04-16T06:28:00.000-07:00

To preach the Gospel ... when no one else will

Where are the Preachers?

If they are not in the homes, in the playgrounds, in the work places of Catholics — at any opportunity at all that presents itself — then they have ceased to be. They are no longer among us. "But we hear the Priest every Sunday give a homily!", you retort. Indeed, I reply. You hear much about "what I think Jesus means" ... and not what the Church teaches us that Jesus means. I am not interested in hearing what a given priest "believes Jesus is saying" — but I am deeply interested in hearing what Jesus actually says Himself, what the Holy Catholic Church teaches us that He means ... which is to say, what Christ means! It is to preach the Gospel ... when no one else will.

This is often quite different from what "Father Bill" believes Christ is really saying — apart from Christ's own words that appear oddly clear to us without an involuted explanation involving things too often only remotely or imaginatively tangent to the actual Gospel Reading. It's show time. Time for the priest to display his talent for finding humor in the most solemn utterances of Christ — and bring laughter, rather than the occasion of grace, to the congregation. "Oh", we ooze, "that Father Bill is such a rascal! Look at the gleam in his eye!".

The Third Rail called Sin

This, of course, presumes that he attempts at all to invoke the meaning (real or imagined) of the Gospel passage just read. So often, too often, most often, it is overlooked entirely in favor of a rise from the audience ... I mean, congregation. "Let's see how clever I can be, how entertaining, how funny, and they will love me! I will then prove myself to be a good priest, for I brought them something far greater than the Sacraments, even greater than Jesus Christ Himself in the Holy Eucharist — I brought them laughter ... and even "spiced it up a bit" to show them that I'm no different from them. Sure, I'll throw in the obligatory, "love each other", "you are the light of the world", and very clearly "God's chosen ones" — but I'll stay clear of the third rail called sin. What if I prick someone's conscience?! The basket would be empty in a month! — and who will be left for me to tickle pink? Where would I get my positive "feed-back" fix for the week?" This is serious stuff.

The alter Christus — altered and tailored to fit

We used to know, "Father Flannery" and "Bishop Sheen". Remember? Probably not. Why? Because the priest no longer sees himself, nor (consequently) do we see him, as an "alter Christus", literally, "another Christ" in the world, which his ordination to the Priesthood made him. We have opted, instead for the leveling of Christ in the person of His priest to the lowest democratic and common denominator: a mere man. They are just, "one the guys" (sorry, girls) and so we now have "Father Dick" and, here in Boston, even "Cardinal Sean". We are all on an intimate first-name basis with our priests, bishops, and cardinals. Try that with your own Senator or even your local Representative or Mayor. Why is this? "It's just so ... cool!" Our cardinals, bishops, priests — in order to "really reach us, to understand us on a human level" — have de-Christifed themselves, thrown off that out-dated vestige and aura of an alter Christus — "another Christ" — so that they can be "just another guy". And somehow that desacralizatiion will make us more likely to be holy when we are in contact with them ... Right.

"Them goddam Yankees"

In repudiating being "Christ-like" they no longer call us in our own vocations to be Christ-like either. We are called to be just "one of the guys" ("C'mon, Fadda ... it's Miller Time! Let's crack open a frosty and root for the Red Sox. Them goddam Yankees ain't no good no how — jus' like you said in your last homily ... and the one before that." Sanctity is the Series and the Parousia is the Sox in the finals, and Heaven? ... the Boston Patriots in the Superbowl. "Fadda Bill" is definitely one of the guys. And none of the "guys" is anything like Christ. It's circular ad infinitum. Saint Peter who was crucified upside down in Rome or Saint Paul beheaded in the same place? Home-schooling kids stuff. Okay, that was a cheap shot. The kids are head and shoulders over "the guys" — you know, Fadda Bill, Cardinal Sean, ... and the "other Christs" who left His company to become "just one of the other guys" so "that in a way beyond comprehension the other guys can get to Heaven, too. Maybe even before the 6th inning. "Pass me another frosty, would you Fadda?"

So, What has this to do with Preaching and being Catholic?

Well, this really brings us back to Saint Paul: "How shall they believe Him, of Whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear, without a preacher? (Romans 10.14)

"Fadda Bill" and "Cardinal Sean" have more pressing matters than saving souls. In fact, the entire lexicon associated with the "salvation of souls" is a fourth-tier priority behind Social Justice, Saving the Planet, and Immigration. I mean, get real! Mother Earth is in far more pressing need of salvation! Look at the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico! Where have you been? And all those poor water fowl! Illegal Immigrants have unaddressed and underfunded legal rights! The Social Network for all that ails society cannot be ignored! And your talking about "souls"? I mean, get real! 4.7 million ducks are in the Mississippi River coastal marshes and face destruction! And you're talking about the peril of the destruction and damnation of millions of human souls for all eternity who haven't even died yet? Where are your priorities?! Yeah, okay, there are dozens of government agencies to deal with these issues ... and not one outside the Church to deal with the salvation of immortal souls. But after all! Can't you see? That's the trouble with you Catholics. You keep your eyes on God and not on the things that really matter to the world: ducks, wildlife, deforestation, endangered animals, global warming, politics, immigration, Wall Street! Well, not all of you, I grant. Your bishops have lots of conferences on these issues. At least they get it!"

Indeed. Where are our priorities as Catholics?

With Christ

That is where they should be. At least in the eyes of Christ, the Gospel, and the Church. We have hundreds of organizations preaching social justice, immigration reform, global warming — but no one is preaching the Gospel! Even those to whom it has been entrusted have tossed it off as an archaic embarrassment. So who ... WHO will preach the Gospel? Most often not your priest. And your bishop is busy with other matters and photo ops 3.

Out-Sourcing Lent

As of this writing it is the holy season of Lent 2011. What rich soil in which to harvest souls! So much that is deep and holy; so many parables of our Blessed Lord to which even the most homiletically-challenged priests can advert in calling us to the serious business of holiness, of self-denial instead of "self-affirmation", of conversion from sin. It is the venue preeminent for preachers! As Christ told us with the greatest urgency, "The fields are white to harvest!" 4 How, then, do our parishes, our priests, our "parish councils" respond to this plea from Christ Himself?

Who is left?

You! "Preach the word: be instant in season, out of season: reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine", Saint Paul says 1. "But I'll be shunned! My friends will flee me! My boss will fire me! I may even end up in jail if I do it in public or on government property!"

Most likely.

But that — THAT IS THE COST OF BEING CATHOLIC! It is the cost of faithfulness to Jesus Christ, His Church, and the Gospel:

"Going therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you." 2

These are the very last words, the final commandment, given by Christ before His Ascension into Heaven. They are the last words of the Gospel of Saint Matthew.

If you do not preach the Gospel, in season and out of season, and at great cost — no one will.

http://www.boston-catholic-journal.com/

The Polonia Pearl....aka....eddie

"The One True Faith and Real Catholic TV"

2011-04-11T08:40:00.000-07:00

Michael Voris, S.T.B.
Host of Catholic television’s The One True Faith and The Vortex.

On September 1, 2008, Michael Voris partnered with Real Catholic TV-- the first ever online Catholic television station. Realizing that the internet is where it’s at, Voris and St. Michael’s Media began producing daily Catholic programming for viewers and subscribers of realcatholictv. Catholic News Roundup, The Shadow Priest and the ever popular, The Vortex, of which Michael Voris is the creator and host and which has been seen by millions of viewers, are just a few of the many innovative programs you will find on realcatholictv..

With a passion for saving souls, Voris epitomizes what it means to be a member of the Catholic laity today - to live out each day, what is meant by the new evangelization, utilizing the tools of the 21st century.

Michael Voris persecuted: singin' the blues in Motown
By Matt C. Abbott

Michael Voris of RealCatholicTV.com is becoming persona non grata among the Church establishment. A talk he was scheduled to give on the property of the Diocese of Scranton has been canceled by the diocese, which posted the following statement on its website:

'The Diocese of Scranton has determined that Mr. Voris will not be allowed to speak in a Diocesan or parish facility. After these engagements were scheduled, the Diocese became aware of concerns about this individual's views regarding other religious groups. In videos posted on the Internet, Mr. Voris makes comments that certainly can be interpreted as being insensitive to people of other faiths. The Catholic Church teaches us to respect all people, regardless of their faith tradition. Although the Diocese shares Mr. Voris' support of efforts to protect human life, his extreme positions on other faiths are not appropriate and therefore the Diocese cannot host him.'

Ah, yes — that "insensitive" Michael Voris. Interestingly, last year the bishop permitted a pro-abortion, pro-unnatural vice American University employee, Sara Bendoraitis, to speak at the University of Scranton. (Source) But, hey, she's not insensitive like Voris. I get it.

However, the real culprit in this situation is the Archdiocese of Detroit, where RealCatholicTV.com is located. The archdiocese has been trying to quietly destroy Voris' credibility for some time. In fact, one archdiocesan official reportedly referred to Voris as a "nutcase." Why, you ask? See the article at this address: http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/abbott/110408 provided to me by a reliable source who's familiar with the archdiocese. (I've done some editing for prudential reasons.)

Welcome to the new springtime, folks.

The Polonia Pearl....aka....eddie

The Narrow Gate

2011-04-07T17:01:00.000-07:00

Catholic Exchange

Fr. Jerome Magat

In an age of inclusivity, our Lord’s stern words must come as a shock to those who would presume their salvation. In no uncertain terms, Jesus makes it alarmingly clear that the road to heaven is arduous and the gate of heaven is narrow. His words would have come as a surprise to his own audience, as well. Presumably, Jesus was speaking to a Jewish audience, and the Jews assumed that salvation was only for them and that the gentiles would be shut out. In this passage, our Lord reveals to us three facts about entrance into the kingdom of heaven:

First, Jesus tells us that in order to enter through the narrow gate, we must continually strive to do so. In other words, we must be prepared to work diligently in order to prepare ourselves for heaven. Interestingly, the Greek word for “striving” is base of the word we use in English which means “agony.” This translation suggests that any person who wishes to get to heaven must be prepared to suffer for it. In effect, the believer must either advance in the spiritual life or risk falling behind and being lost.

Second, it is not simply enough to claim a certain “friendship” with Christ as those in the Gospel who exclaim, “We ate and drank in your presence and you taught in our streets.” There are those who claim that merely being Catholic is a free pass to heaven. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Nominal Catholicism does not pass muster in the kingdom of heaven. One’s Catholicism must be active, vibrant, orthodox and sanctifying. Neither a Catholic education nor a Catholic upbringing per se guarantee automatic entrance into heaven. With the gift of a Catholic education and upbringing comes tremendous responsibility. We are reminded in Scripture that to whom much is given, much is expected and to whom much more is given, much more is expected (Luke 12:48). Therefore, more is expected from Catholics since they have been given the benefit of the fulness of the Faith and thus are expected to produce more fruit.

Finally, we learn that we should expect some surprises in the kingdom of heaven. There are those who might pass through the narrow gate who were “nobodies” in this life. Earthly glory, wealth, and prestige are no assurance of future glory in heaven. We delude ourselves greatly if we think that God will judge us by worldly standards. God will judge us by the standards of the kingdom of heaven and those standards are not easy to meet. In many cases, they are at complete variance with worldly values. Attempting to project worldly standards on an otherworldly kingdom is futile. Hence, our Lord warns us that the door to heavenly glory is in fact quite narrow.

In humility, we do well to ask the Lord how we can pass through the narrow gate. May we never presume our salvation or wrongly evaluate our spiritual progress by earthly standards. Instead, may we learn to follow Jesus on his terms and not merely our own.

http://catholicexchange.com/

The Polonia Pearl...aka...eddie

“They are in great spiritual danger”

2011-04-07T11:07:00.000-07:00

Published: April 7, 2011
(The following pastoral letter from Santa Fe, New Mexico, Archbishop Michael J. Sheehan was read at all Masses in the archdiocese last weekend.)

April 3, 2011

‘Pastoral Care of Couples Who are Cohabitating’

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

We are all painfully aware that there are many Catholics today who are living in cohabitation. The Church must make it clear to the faithful that these unions are not in accord with the Gospel, and to help Catholics who find themselves in these situations to do whatever they must do to make their lives pleasing to God.

First of all, we ourselves must be firmly rooted in the Gospel teaching that, when it comes to sexual union, there are only two lifestyles acceptable to Jesus Christ for His disciples: a single life of chastity, or the union of man and woman in the Sacrament of Matrimony. There is no “third way” possible for a Christian. The Bible and the Church teaches that marriage is between one man and one woman and opposes same sex unions.

We have three groups of people who are living contrary to the Gospel teaching on marriage: those who cohabit; those who have a merely civil union with no previous marriage; and those who have a civil union who were married before. These people are objectively living in a state of mortal sin and may not receive Holy Communion. They are in great spiritual danger. At the best -- and this is, sadly, often the case -- they are ignorant of God’s plan for man and woman. At the worst, they are contemptuous of God’s commandments and His sacraments.

Of these three groups, the first two have no real excuse. They should marry in the Church or separate. Often their plea is that they “cannot afford a church wedding” i.e. the external trappings, or that “what difference does a piece of paper make?” -- as if a sacramental covenant is nothing more than a piece of paper! Such statements show religious ignorance, or a lack of faith and awareness of the evil of sin.

The third group, those who were married before and married again outside the Church, can seek a marriage annulment and have their marriage blest in the Church. Please remember that divorce still is no reason to refrain from Holy Communion as long as they have not entered into another marriage or sinful relationship. Many Catholics are confused on this point.

Christ our Lord loves all these people and wishes to save them -- not by ignoring their sin, or calling evil good, but by repentance and helping them to change their lives in accordance with His teaching. We, as His Church, must do the same. In accord with this, I would remind you of the following:

1. People in the above three situations cannot receive the Sacraments, with the important exception of those who agree to live chastely (“as brother and sister”) until their situation is regularized. Of course, those in danger of death are presumed to be repentant.

2. These people may not be commissioned as Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion, not only because of scandal, but even more because one commits the sin of sacrilege by administering a Sacrament in the state of mortal sin.

3. Nor are such people to be admitted to the role of sponsor for Baptism or Confirmation, as is clearly stated on the Archdiocesan Affidavit for a Sponsor. It is critical for the sponsor to be a practicing Catholic -- and can anyone be seriously called a practicing Catholic who is not able to receive the sacraments because they are living in sin?

4. When it comes to other parish ministries and organizations, I feel it best to leave these situations to the judgment of the pastor. Prudence is needed, avoiding all occasions of scandal. We must see their involvement in the parish as an opportunity to work urgently to bring such people to repentance and the regularization of their lifestyle.

5. Many of these sins are committed out of ignorance. I ask that our pastors preach on the gravity of sin and its evil consequences, the 6th and 9th Commandments of God, and the sacramental nature and meaning of Christian marriage. Our catechetical programs in our parishes -- children, youth, and adult -- must clearly and repeatedly teach these truths.

A Church wedding does not require some lavish spectacle and entertainment costing vast sums of money (Indeed, how often we have seen the most costly weddings end in divorce in but a few months or years!). While beauty and joy should surround a Christian wedding, we must remind everyone that it is a sacrament, not a show.

6. Those who are married outside the Church because of a previous union are urged to seek an annulment through our Marriage Tribunal. If it can be found that the first marriage lacked some essential quality for a valid marriage, the Tribunal can grant an annulment. Your pastor can help someone start a marriage case for this purpose. It is important for such couples to continue to pray and get to Mass even though they may not receive Communion, until their marriage can be blest in the Church.

Our popular American culture is often in conflict with the teachings of Jesus and His Church. I urge especially young people to not cohabitate which is sinful, but to marry in the Church and prepare well for it.

I congratulate and thank those thousands of Catholic married couples who role model the Sacrament of Marriage according to the teachings of Jesus and his Church.

Sincerely yours in the Risen Lord,

Most Rev. Michael J. Sheehan

Archbishop of Santa Fe

http://www.calcatholic.com/

The Polonia Pearl.....aka.....eddie

Sudden Death

2011-04-05T16:47:00.000-07:00

"Take heed to yourselves, lest perhaps your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting and drunkenness, and the cares of this life, and that day come upon you suddenly. For as a snare shall it come upon all that sit upon the face of the whole earth.." (St. Luke 21.34-36)

A Time to Reap

Last night, as I sat immersed in writing, out of nowhere a tremendously brilliant flash filled the room accompanied instantly by an ear-shattering clap of thunder. There was no lapse between the lightning and the thunder. They came together with utter instanteneity. It appeared that a bomb had exploded against my house. I was startled, unable to comprehend what had occurred, except that it was breathtakingly instant, totally unexpected, completely unanticipated. I had once been told that in thunder we hear something of the judgment of God. It is primordial, instinctual. It is foreboding, fraught with the imminent approach of danger, impending destruction, a distant, muttered anger boding the approach of something inimical to life. Even an atheist, I am convinced, hears something of his sins, and something of judgment, in that portentous rumble that causes the earth to tremble under his feet. It evokes images that all our intellectualizing, all our pretenses, cannot shake.

Last night, 153 people from the Greater Boston area died.

For many of them, death came like that clap of thunder. Immersed in many things, and thoughtless of any storm, before they knew what had happened, they had died. They did not get to shut down their computers, turn off their televisions, or put their book neatly on the table beside them. It struck instantly, like a storm ... or a thief ... in the night.

No time for that "Act of Contrition" indefinitely postponed until it could not be uttered.

•"I love you."

•"I am sorry."

•"Tell my brother ..."

In the blink of an eye it all falls away. No time. Not even for words. And no bargaining ... no postponing ...

It will come and find you busy

It will be stunning – for it will have found you utterly unprepared. A millisecond stands between you and death. Hardly time for the realization, let alone preparation. It will have come. Mors stupebit. Death struck. It came ... and found you busy ...

That Confession you were going to make "someday"; that amending of your life that you "soon" would undertake; the sins that you had resolved to renounce "beginning tomorrow"; the pardon you would seek from someone you had harmed – in a thundering instant, your pretensions are removed ... and you are stunned, staggered. You were sure, certain of the next minute, the next hour, the next day.

So were many — perhaps most — of the 153 people who died last night.

Think about it. Like the 153 people who, as of last night, are no more among us, chances are that you will wager against God and still think that you can bargain with death. It will come to another 153 tomorrow, and, like the 153 before them, it will find that it won the wager.

It always does.

But you think that you can beat the odds.

You are a fool. There are no odds. There are certainties. Many. And some you will wish you had come to terms with long before that clap of thunder.

One of them is God.

And one of them is apart from Him.

There is a time to sow ... there is also a time to reap ...

Think about it — while you have time.

Or do you ...?

So ... what are your plans for tomorrow?

http://www.boston-catholic-journal.com/

The Polonia Pearl......aka....eddie

What Happened at Fatima

2011-04-04T13:40:00.000-07:00

By Joseph Bottum

Here's a curious thought. Maybe the single most important person in the 20th century's long struggle against communism wasn't Ronald Reagan. Maybe it wasn't Karol Wojtyla or Margaret Thatcher. Maybe it wasn't anyone whose name might leap to a cold warrior's mind — for the most important figure in that long, dark struggle might have been a 10-year-old girl named Lucia dos Santos.

You remember her, of course. It was Lucia who went out one day in 1917 with her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Martos to tend the family's sheep — and ended up having a talk about Godless Russia with the Blessed Virgin Mary near a little place in northern Portugal called Fatima.

Or do you remember her? Lucia dos Santos died on Sunday, February 13,(2005) at age 97. And for much of her life, cloistered in her Carmelite convent in Portugal, she seemed, well, what? An embarrassment, perhaps: an open invitation for mockery from nonbelievers, a creaky medievalism, a throwback to the kind of peasant superstition modern Catholics hoped would no longer be held against them.

There were certainly waves of enthusiasm about Fatima in Europe and the United States in the years following World War I. But gradually after World War II, and increasingly after the modernizing changes of Vatican II, the cult of Fatima seemed to have lived on too long, like mold in an abandoned crypt — a final catacomb for the bitter and the disaffected: the orphaned throne-and-altar royalists, the bypassed ultramontanists, the rejecters of Vatican II, and all the dark, unhappy people who thought the Catholic church had abandoned them, in one way or another, for a mess of pottage at the modern world's table.

Fatima's continued existence was annoying, more or less, for educated American Catholics, who believed they had made a good-faith effort to reconcile their religion and the twentieth century. This was their grandmothers' Catholicism, which they thought they had escaped. It was an embarrassing spirituality of scapulars and rosaries, miracles and visions — an outdated religion of pilgrimages and prayers for the conversion of Russia, of hushed speculation about the "third secret of Fatima" and angry disputation about whether or not the pope had actually dedicated Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, as Our Lady demanded of those three little children in Portugal.

Worse, there was something not just premodern, but consciously antimodern about all of it. A day in which you can pack up your Polaroid and fly to Europe in a jumbo jet to see a visitation of the Blessed Virgin — surely that's supposed to be a day in which we don't have visitations of the Blessed Virgin anymore.

And then there was the anticommunism of Fatima. "Russia will spread its errors throughout the world, raising up wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, and various nations will be annihilated," the Blessed Virgin warned in 1917. The world was going to suffer "by means of war, hunger, and persecution," and Russia was the "instrument of chastisement."

The Catholic Church was never in much danger of becoming actively pro-Communist. As early as 1846, Pius IX condemned "that infamous doctrine of so-called communism which is absolutely contrary to the natural law itself, and if once adopted would utterly destroy the rights, property, and possessions of all men, and even society itself." In 1878, the prolific Leo XIII named communism a "fatal plague which insinuates itself into the very marrow of human society only to bring about its ruin." And in 1937, Pius XI issued an entire encyclical, Divini Redemptoris, in an effort to educate Catholics and non-Catholics alike about the dangers of "a world organization as vast as Russian communism."

Still, by the later part of the 20th century, such talk had come to seem a little dated for enlightened people — or even dangerous, for those who believed the world was threatened most of all by the U.S. commitment to nuclear deterrence against the Soviet Union. When the bishops of South America met in Colombia in 1968 and defined a "preferential option for the poor," they did not intend a full embrace of Marxism. Indeed, they imagined they were developing an answer to the conditions that drew people to communism. But Latin American theologians and radicalized Catholic missionaries from the United States quickly seized upon the notion to announce a new "Theology of Liberation," born from the essential unity of Catholicism and Marxism — a declaration that Communists were merely Christians in a hurry and that scientific atheism was a disposable element in Karl Marx's writing.

With the collapse of the Soviet bloc after 1989, liberation theology finally lost the fight to capture Catholic theological and intellectual circles. But there were moments in the 1970s when the liberationists looked ready to triumph, and against them stood what? A church hierarchy gradually weakening its official opposition to communism, a handful of Catholic cold warriors in the United States, a young anti-Communist archbishop in Poland who would become Pope John Paul II in 1978 — and the embarrassingly dated visions of a little Portuguese nun named Sister Lucia.

When the 93-year-old Sister Lucia met with a messenger from the pope in 2000, she repeated, one last time, her conviction that the visions of Fatima concerned "above all the struggle of atheistic communism against the Church and against Christians." Those visions began in the spring of 1916, according to the children's report, when Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta were visited three times by an angel, who told them he was the guardian angel of Portugal and urged them to pray and prepare themselves.

The next spring, eight months after the angel's final visit, the Virgin Mary herself began to speak to them. Lucia had just had her tenth birthday, Francisco would turn 9 in June, and Jacinta was 7, when, on May 13, 1917, they took their sheep to a small hollow known as a Cova da Iria, the "Cove of Irene." And there, around noon, a beautiful lady appeared near an oak tree, telling them to say the Rosary every day, "to bring peace to the world and an end to the war," and promising to visit them again "on the thirteenth of each month" for the next five months.

The children agreed they wouldn't tell anyone about the lady, but Jacinta couldn't keep the news to herself, and she told her parents what had happened in the cove. By all accounts, her father tended to believe her, while her mother thought she was imagining things. But they told their neighbors about the girl's story, and those neighbors told their neighbors, and those neighbors told theirs, and within a few months all of Portugal was in an uproar.

Perhaps 70 people came to the cove on June 13 to watch the children receive the second visit, in which Lucia was told that Francisco and Jacinta would not live long. Several hundred attended the third visit in July, when the children received what came to be known as the "great vision," in which the beautiful lady predicted another great war, the spread of Russia's errors, and, yes, something else — the third secret the children were ordered not to tell, the prediction sealed in the Vatican's vaults, the great mystery that dominated discussions of Fatima for the next 70 years.

Portugal at the time was a republic led by a strongly anticlerical party, and the government in Lisbon apparently feared a nascent peasant revolt was brewing in the religious revival emerging from Fatima. On the morning of August 13, the local civil administrator arrested the children and hauled them away to the district headquarters in Vila Nova de Ourem — where, by several accounts, he locked them in cells with "criminals" and threatened them with "boiling in oil."

It didn't have the effect for which the government had hoped. The children refused to recant, the crowds grew larger, and, under enormous public pressure, the frightened administrator returned the children, unceremoniously pushing them out of his car in front of the rectory in Fatima two days later, and driving away as fast as he could before the townspeople caught him. The delayed apparition came on Sunday, August 19, when the children were alone.

At the September apparition, Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta were surrounded by 30,000 people, an enormous crowd for rural Portugal in 1917. And when the news spread that Mary had promised a visible sign, the witnesses swelled to 70,000 on October 13 to watch "the miracle of the sun." Amidst all the enthusiasm and mass hysteria, the ecstatic stories of the sun breaking through the clouds and dancing across the sky, there are some surprisingly sober accounts — mostly by reporters from anticlerical newspapers and skeptical academics who had come to watch the crowd. "The sun's disc did not remain immobile. This was not the sparkling of a heavenly body, for it spun round on itself in a mad whirl," wrote a professor from the University of Coimbra. "Then, suddenly, one heard a clamor, a cry of anguish breaking from all the people. The sun, whirling wildly, seemed to loosen itself from the firmament and advance threateningly upon the earth as if to crush us with its huge and fiery weight. The sensation during those moments was terrible."

As the beautiful lady predicted, two of the children died young — Francisco in 1919, a few months before his eleventh birthday, and Jacinta in 1920, at age 10 — both carried away in the influenza epidemic that followed World War I. The Catholic Church waited until 1930 before cautiously approving prayer at Fatima as "not necessarily contrary to the faith." The cult of Our Lady of Fatima survived through the twentieth century, but seemed to be a declining devotion, particularly among educated Americans. Sermons and catechism classes as late as the 1950s were filled with references to the visions of Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta. Yet a child who passed through Catholic education in the second half of the century would emerge with little more than a vague memory of having once or twice heard the word Fatima.

But then, on May 13, 1991, Pope John Paul II made a visit to Portugal and drew again to the cove the huge crowds he always attracted. And while there, he did something curious and, at the time, inexplicable: He took the bullet with which he had been shot 10 years before and placed it in the crown of the statue of Mary at the site of the original apparitions.

It wasn't till 2000, when Francisco and Jacinta were finally beatified, that the Vatican offered an explanation — and, along the way, revealed Sister Lucia's text of the third secret of Fatima, locked in the Vatican archives since 1957. The hidden part of the vision of July 13 predicted the persecution of the Church and the shooting of a pope. John Paul II had come to the conclusion that the prophecy was fulfilled by the murder attempt of May 13, 1981, when the Turkish assassin Mehmet Ali Agca shot him in St. Peter's Square.

Indeed, for the pope, it all comes together: the repeated thirteens in the dates, the vision of a gun aimed at a pope, even the anticommunism. His latest book, Memory and Identity — a collection of philosophical conversations published last week in Italian and due out in English at the end of April — insists upon the centrality of Fatima. The assassination attempt was "not [Agca's] initiative, someone else masterminded it, and someone else commissioned it," he declares, blaming the Soviet bloc for the shooting. It was a "last convulsion" of communism, trying vainly to hold back the tide that had turned against it. And the cause for that turn against the Soviet system? In part, at least — in large part, perhaps — the prayers and the attitudes inspired by the visions of Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta at Fatima.

In many ways, John Paul II seems simultaneously far behind and far ahead of the rest of the world — as though he had rediscovered the past not by retreating but by advancing, coming out at the far end of modern times, smiling and secure. He was the one who saw nothing antimodern, or even unmodern, in going to pray at the sites of ancient faith — and nothing contradictory in using a jet to do it. He was the one who thought it perfectly possible that the Blessed Virgin Mary might appear in the modern age: in 1917 to a group of children in Portugal, or today, for that matter, to someone else.

And most of all, John Paul II was the one who saw that the anti-Communist visions of Fatima weren't some withdrawal into a reactionary past, but an accurate prediction of the direction modern times should take — a path by which a very old form of Catholic spirituality had taught the common people to resist the Marxism their educated coreligionists had come to assume was the inevitable shape of the future. When the 97-year-old Lucia dos Santos slipped away on February 13 — again, that thirteenth day — she received innumerable tributes from around the world. But she was little praised for the thing she may have done best: bringing an end to the Soviet Union.

http://www.catholiceducation.org/

The Polonia Pearl...aka...eddie

Maybe Russia Will Bury Us After All

2011-04-02T09:23:00.000-07:00

NIKITA KRUSHCHEV ONCE BOASTED THAT THE SOVIET EMPIRE WOULD BURY THE UNITED STATES.

He was thinking militarily in terms of atomic warfare. But maybe he will be proven correct in his prophecy, but not in how it will happen. Russia is concerned about its birthrate having fallen below the level necessary to sustain the Russian population, so the Kremlin has moved to ban abortions and to promote motherhood. Meanwhile, in the West, motherhood is under attack and abortions are promoted. Our birthrate here in the United States, like most of Europe, is too low to sustain our population, if it were not for the immigrants coming into this country with their higher birth rate. Europe will soon have a Muslim majority because a man with three wives produces a lot of children. Our own Muslim population is one of the fastest growing segments of our population, second only to the Hispanics.

After interviewing hundreds of scholars, demographers, economists and sociologists from around the world, it was determined that with the disintegration of the natural family and with the increase in population control policies, the world is headed toward a demographic tipping point that threatens catastrophic economic and social consequences. Today, most of the world is experiencing a birth dearth - for it takes 2.1 children to replace the previous generation and all of Europe is only at 1.36.

History has shown that as a country’s population declines so does a country’s economic future. The findings of the many scholars that we interviewed show that a country’s economic future is tied closely to its demographic makeup and that as population increases, so does the stock of human ingenuity.

Even today, the United States could not replace its existing population, if it were not for children of immigrants

Why is this important that a country understands something about demographics? Because as they understand the role that demographics play as a great predictor of a country’s fate and future, they will come to realize that children are essential for a country’s economic survival. Countries like Russia, which are aborting more children than are being born, and countries like China, which has the One-Child policy and through selective abortions and infeicide killings has now left over a 100 million men that will not be able to get married because there are not enough women to go around, will come to realize that if they want economic prosperity, they need to re-examine their population control policies and programs.

So, if we want to save millions of children each year who are the innocent victims of abortion, social decay, civil unrest and economic strife, then we need to educate policy makers on the messages that are contained in these two important documentaries.

I would ask you and your organizations to help us in getting these documentaries into the hands of policy makers and political leaders around the world. When policy makers come to understand that children are the lifeblood and the human capital needed for a country’s continued growth and economic prosperity and that children are a blessing and not a burden on society, then they will better see the importance and value that motherhood, marriage and family are to society as they come to realize that demography is their destiny.

The Polonia Pearl...kaa...eddie

What has happened to the human element of the Church?

2011-04-01T13:23:00.000-07:00

A typical scenario: You listen to E.W.T.N. or Catholic Answers and have found through them that the earliest Christians were Catholic, that Catholic dogma is not unscriptural. You become convinced that Jesus Christ did set up a Church, that He did so upon the rock of St. Peter, and that the gates of Hell will never prevail against it. You are willing to intellectually assent to the eternal teachings of the Church and truly desire to become a serious, committed Catholic who serves and worships Our Lord Jesus Christ.

You do what most people do in this case; you call up your local parish and get enrolled in an R.C.I.A. program. You don't hear much about Mary, the other Saints, sin, Purgatory, or Hell. You hear very little about the Mass as a propitiatory Sacrifice, but instead hear it described only as a "celebratory meal." Depending on the parish you find, you may hear and see things that seem totally contradictory to what you'd always heard the Catholic Church teaches. Your R.C.I.A. instructor may say things like, "The Catholic Church doesn't teach that any more since Vatican II" and may come off as religiously indifferent, not insistent enough that the Church is Christ's Church and that outside of Her there is no salvation.

The Masses offered seem not too unlike what you'd see at a Lutheran, "low church" Anglican, or maybe even a Pentecostal faith community. You've always associated "Catholic" with things like eating fish on Fridays, nuns in habits, confessionals, and stained glass -- with things that are ancient, mysterious, and beautiful. You look around your local parish and are wondering why nothing you see there seems to match up.

Something in you is worried. What you are seeing and hearing in your local parish seems too -- Protestant. Or maybe even pagan or Unitarian. Whatever it is, it just doesn't add up. All sense of Mystery, of holiness, of ancientness, of beauty is missing. At the very least, it's just not "Catholic enough." It isn't reverent. It isn't holy. What is going on? How can you know if what you're being taught is truly Catholic if the "spirit" of your parish isn't Catholic? What has happened to the human element of the Church?

http://www.fisheaters.com/traditionalcatholicism.html

Polonia Pearl....aka...eddie

A HELL OF A SITUATION

2011-04-01T04:53:00.000-07:00

"The rich man also died and was buried and from the netherworld, where he was in torment ... [he cried out] 'I am suffering torment in these flames. ... warn them, lest they too come to this place of torment.' " (St. Luke 16:19-31)

It is frighteningly odd. We no longer hear of of Hell ... although we see it leaching into our lives and the lives of those around us everywhere – it crouches, either feeding on our malice and greed, or lurking in some obscure corner of our lives that shrinks from the light

Contrary to "progressive" theological speculation, Hell has not been abolished ... nor has its rage abated. Look around you.

Like children fearing to invoke the very evil they fear through merely uttering it, we have somehow convinced ourselves that if we resolutely ignore Hell, it will go away; that if we pretend that there is no such place, then it will become a fiction and therefore we have nothing to fear ... and also nothing to avoid. It is — we are told, and therefore tell ourselves — a quaint vestige of pre-enlightened and distinctly medieval thought, of long gone days of dismal dogma, in fact a notion abolished after Vatican II as unkind, as severe, and therefore "unworthy" of God.

But still, we whistle in the dark. Odd. Very odd.

Despite all that Christ has told us, all that Holy Mother the Church has taught us, we will not hear of it ... we insist on our way. Christ knows this. That is why He gives us the Parable of the Rich Man. Do you doubt it?

Ask yourself this: have you ever (that is to say, even once) been to a funeral Mass where the bereaved are not told, indeed, completely assured, that their dead (who, like the rest of the congregation, had apparently never sinned) are already in Heaven smiling down benignly on our obsequies even as we utter them?

The real illusion ... and it is not Hell

It matters not that "the departed" were cruel and miserly, utterly indifferent to the poor, that they profited from the pain, misery, sin and degradation of others, caring nothing for God and even less for men — and we know it! We knew it while yet they lived, and were ourselves often keenly aware of their selfishness, their lust, pride, and greed, even their open depravity. Unrepentant to the moment of that clap of thunder that ended the illusion of tomorrow, they went to death as they had lived — and we "celebrate their lives" instead of trembling before their death. In the lowest octave of our "celebration" we instinctively discern a deeply dissonant note that is discordant with our carefully revised narrative. It is deeper than the human voice, and more ancient still. We know that we "celebrate" a fiction of our own making to dispel the remorseless truth that stirs uneasily within us: that Heaven alone is not, after all, the abode of all our dead; that we have something to deeply lament, rather than celebrate, something to fear rather than rejoice in.

Has the question, let alone the concern, of the dead's utter need for every possible prayer ever once so much as arisen? Are we ever invited, urged, to pray for our dead? Are they not in need of our prayers? They were in life. But somehow death appears to have obviated this necessity. For all practical purposes and appearances, "being dead" is synonymous with "being canonized". The dead, in every aspect of today's liturgy, is, as it were, "by right" (and rite ...) — in virtue of the fact that they are dead — "in the company of the Angels and Saints."

It is not so much as suggested by the priest Strangely enough, we acknowledge ourselves to be sinners — if we acknowledge sin at all — but in a remarkable dispensation that quite suddenly becomes concomitant with death, not the recently departed who yesterday was "one among us", that is to say, a sinner also. What he needs most, the "Celebrant" carefuly contrives to conceal from us: the need of our prayers.

We no longer pray for our dead

Why is this?

Praying for the dead is very closely connected to a sober recognition of the reality of ... other alternatives ... than Heaven. Lesser alternatives, frightening alternatives, even everlasting alternatives. We wish to spare our dead either a measure of that privative state of purgation preparatory to Heaven through the suffrage of our prayers, or were it possible the pains of Hell through an impassioned petition to the Judge. In any event, the outcome at least admits of doubt in terms of clearly distinguishable consignments.

The Mirror in the Dead

For many years, inscribed on tombstones

Fui quod sis, Sum quod eris. I was what you are, I am what you will be.

— at least as much as we wish to spare ourselves the pain of uncertainty.

Of two things we are certain: that we die, and that following our death we will either live forever or we will not. If we do not, we have nothing to hope for and nothing to fear. If we do, we have an abundance of the one or the other: either much to hope for or much to fear. We reject the first option offhand, that is to say, the notion that death brings total extinction. We are ... after all ... Catholics, and that flies in the face of everything Christ said and did. But neither do we embrace the alternative, at least not in the terms enunciated by Christ Himself. cannot have both. Neither, then, can we have a Heaven and a Hell. So we abolish Hell much in the way that we may succeed in abolishing Mount Aetna by our preferring to say that it is not there.

Dives, the rich man in this parable, would have a decidedly different opinion on the matter – were he present to offer it, but Dives is being ... detained. Indefinitely. Even eternally. Or Christ is a liar.

"Go to my brother", he would importune us, as he did Abraham. Unfortunately, we ourselves would tell him very much what Abraham told him: "It would be of no avail."

"They think you're in Heaven!" The priest told them so; he assured them ... remember? They think that you are looking down on them, having no clue that, could you see, all that you would see of them would be the soles of their shoes!

It's a hell of a situation: Priest, Rabbi, Minister, even his psychologist, are all of one accord: there is no such thing as Hell.

The hell there isn't.

Ah, the price of constant gratification. Yes, such lies console the bereaved, but are a definite disservice to the dead who stand much in need of prayer and, could they tell you, would be eternally grateful for it.

But even if they did, you would not believe them either ... would you?

http://www.boston-catholic-journal.com/

The Polonia Pearl...aka...eddie

Medjugorje is generating what the Devil loves most: disobedience

2011-03-30T17:47:00.000-07:00

Francis Phillips an Author
Reviewer of Books for the
Catholic Herald.co.uk

Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes. I have been to Lourdes on several occasions, largely drawn by the personality of St Bernadette herself. Being chosen by Our Lady as her messenger did not make Bernadette holy; it was how she lived her life afterwards, especially during the 13 years she spent at the convent in Nevers: often in pain, unable to take part in the regular life of the community because of her ill-health, lonely, isolated and constantly belittled by the mistress of novices, she nevertheless bore her crosses with exemplary patience.

St Bernadette has been on my mind ever since I got sent a YouTube film recently, advertising Medjugorje. J Edgar Hoover once said that the only certainties in life were death and taxes. I would add a third: controversy over Medjugorje. It seems that Catholics today are divided into two camps: you are either “for” Medjugorje or “against”. This, needless to say, has led to much unseemly in-fighting within the Church.

What annoyed me about the YouTube presentation (apart from the muzak and the hushed and reverential voice of the narrator) was its blatant way of referring to the alleged apparition as “Our Lady”, as if this were a foregone conclusion. It isn’t. I was further nettled by statements seeming to show that the late pope, John Paul II, as well as Mother Teresa, both “believed” in it, as if to demonstrate that the apparitions must be true, simply because of the witness of these two holy heavyweights.

I am not an expert on the subject of these alleged apparitions. But I have read enough of St John of the Cross to know what he means by “spiritual gluttony” in my encounters over the years with adherents of the place. One lady told me excitedly of her rosary turning to gold; another had been overwhelmed by watching the sun dance; a third became very angry very quickly when I expressed a little caution in my response to her assertion that Medjugorje only brought forth good fruits.

My own instinct is to think that Our Lady has not appeared thousands of times to the supposed seers, or given them dozens of different “secrets”. Nor do the seers themselves live lives like St Bernadette. Of course, you don’t have to be a saint to see Our Lady, as I said above; but there seems to be nothing humble, holy or hidden about the later lives of the Medjugorje “seers”.

Actually, what I think as a private person, or what the late pope wrote in a private letter to two friends who had sent him literature about Medjugorje, or indeed what the saintly Mother Teresa is said to have said, is neither here nor there; it is what the Church thinks that matters. What the Church thinks about alleged apparitions is left to the local Ordinary to investigate and pronounce.

Four years after the Lourdes apparitions of 1858, and after a lengthy investigation, the local bishop pronounced them authentic. In the case of Medjugorje, both Bishop Zanic of Mostar and his successor, Bishop Peric, fully investigated the phenomenon and decided that nothing supernatural was taking place. So why are bandwagons of pilgrims still going there? The answer probably lies in Understanding Medjugorje: Heavenly Visions or Religious Illusion by Donal Foley, available from Theotokos Books. Foley has his vociferous detractors, naturally enough, but he has done his homework and reading his book reinforced my own sceptical instincts. In particular, the scandalous behaviour he describes of some of the Franciscans closely associated with the place, seems shocking: Fr Slavko Barbaric, who died in 2000 and who I was told by one of the faithful at the time “has been taken by Our Lady straight to heaven”, had actually had his faculties for hearing confession withdrawn by Bishop Peric several months before his death; Fr Zovko, who was refused permission to celebrate Mass in Washington in 2002, had had his faculties also revoked; worst of all, Fr Tomislav Vlasic, deeply involved in the early years of Medjugorje, was laicised and dismissed from the Franciscan order very recently, in July 2009, for various misdemeanours including some against the Sixth Commandment.

Bishop Peric has spoken of other problems, apart from disobedient Franciscans: religious communities established without diocesan permission and ecclesiastical buildings erected without approval. What is going on? A sound Canadian priest once said to me, when I asked him about the “good fruits” of Medjugorje: “The Devil doesn’t mind a few thousand people becoming better Catholics after going there if, as a result, he’s got millions of Catholics being disobedient to the authority of the Church.”

Obedience is the issue. It’s what the Devil (you can’t get away from him – and my thanks to “paulpriest”, who pointed out at length to me after my last blog how very busy Old Nick is behind the scenes today) hates like poison. You can imagine Screwtape rubbing his hands with glee. St Bernadette was once asked what she feared most; her reply was: “Bad Catholics”.

The Polonia Pearl...aka .. eddie.....

Reproductive Health Bill (Philippines)

2011-03-22T15:41:00.000-07:00

The Reproductive Health Bill, popularly known as the RH Bill, is a Philippine bill aiming to guarantee universal access to methods and information on birth control and maternal care. The bill has become the center of a contentious national debate.

While there is general agreement about its provisions on maternal and child health, there is great debate on its key proposal that the Filipino taxpayer and the private sector will fund and undertake widespread distribution of family planning devices such as birth control pills (BCPs) and IUDs. Private companies and the public and private elementary and secondary school system will be required to participate with information and product dissemination as a way of controlling the population of the Philippines. Contraception leads to abortion as proven in the rest of the world.

The bill is highly controversial, with experts, academics, religious institutions, and major political figures both supporting and opposing it, often criticizing the government and each other in the process. The issue is so divisive that at one point, the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines threatened to excommunicate the President, Benigno Aquino III if he supported the bill.

The Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Phlippines (CBCP) has issued a Pastoral Letter expressing strong objections to the RH Bill and intends to freely distribute the Letter in the Philippines. A portion of that letter is included in this writing.

"Simply stated the RH Bill does not respect moral sense that is central to Filipino cultures. It is the product of the spirit of this world, a secularist, materialistic spirit that considers morality as a set of teachings from which one can choose, according to the spirit of the age. Some it accepts, others it does not accept. Unfortunately, we see the subtle spread of this post-modern spirit in our own Filipino society.

Human life is the most sacred physical gift with which God, the author of life, endows a human being. Placing artificial obstacles to prevent human life from being formed and being born most certainly contradicts this fundamental truth of human life. In the light of the widespread influence of the post-modern spirit in our world, we consider this position as nothing less than prophetic. As religious leaders we must proclaim this truth fearlessly in season and out of season.

It is parents, cooperating with God, who bring children into the world. It is also they who have the primary inalienable right and responsibility to nurture them, care for them, and educate them that they might grow as mature persons according to the will of the Creator.

Advocates contend that the RH bill promotes reproductive health. The RH Bill certainly does not. It does not protect the health of the sacred human life that is being formed or born. The very name "contraceptive" already reveals the anti-life nature of the means that the RH bill promotes. These artificial means are fatal to human life, either preventing it from fruition or actually destroying it. Moreover, scientists have known for a long time that contraceptives may cause cancer. Contraceptives are hazardous to a woman’s health.

Advocates also say that the RH bill will reduce abortion rates. But many scientific analysts themselves wonder why prevalent contraceptive use sometimes raises the abortion rate. In truth, contraceptives provide a false sense of security that takes away the inhibition to sexual activity. Scientists have noted numerous cases of contraceptive failure. Abortion is resorted to, an act that all religious traditions would judge as sinful. "Safe sex" to diminish abortion rate is false propaganda.

Advocates moreover say that the RH bill will prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. This goes against the grain of many available scientific data. In some countries where condom use is prevalent, HIV/ AIDS continues to spread. Condoms provide a false security that strongly entices individuals towards increased sexual activity, increasing likewise the incidence of HIV/AIDS. "Safe sex" to prevent HIV /AIDS is false propaganda.

Today we come to a new national crossroads and we now have to make a moral choice. As religious leaders we believe that there is a greater form of corruption, namely, moral corruption which is really the root of all corruption. On the present issue, it would be morally corrupt to disregard the moral implications of the RH bill.

This is our unanimous collective moral judgment: We strongly reject the RH bill."

I wish to commend those Bishops of the Philippines for taking this stance and wish many of the Bishops of the United States had this kind of courage and backbone.

The Polonia Pearl aka eddie....

A Time to Protect and Preserve Marriage

2011-02-16T16:09:00.000-08:00

"Has the sky fallen down since gay marriage began in other states?" “How has my gay marriage harmed you personally?”

These questions are implying that if society has not completely fallen apart since the advent of homosexual marriage a few years ago, then that must prove that the redefinition of marriage is harmless. Homosexual marriage advocates suggest that unless our own adult life has been turned upside down as a direct result of same-sex weddings, then gay marriage must be harmless. These questions are a shrewd attempt to frame most of the harms of homosexual marriage out of consideration. If same-sex marriage is truly harmful, the questions insinuate, then either society will instantly be catastrophically impacted or we will suffer immediate personal harm. If we have experienced neither, then there must be no harm. Seemingly suggesting that any valid argument over homosexual marriage is over and the case can now be closed.
However, one of the damages of so-called same-sex marriage is to the very institution and authentic understanding of marriage itself. Calling same-sex unions marriage radically transforms and obscures the fundamental meaning of marriage. It makes the publicly committed union of one man and one woman merely one possible form of marriage. This obviously opens the door to polygamy and polyandry. Calling same-sex relationships marriage teaches that marriage has no intrinsic need of a man and a woman and furthermore undercuts the idea that procreation is intrinsically connected to marriage. This harm will affect everyone, especially children.
The redefinition of marriage does not merely allow different understandings of matrimony, but forces everyone else to accept this dramatically altered conception of marriage and family in schools, law and in our public language. This recently occurred when the federal government reissued passport applications for children, removing the words “Father” and “Mother” and replacing them with “Parent 1” and “Parent 2.” It seems there is no need to be a child with a mother or father to get a passport today. As a direct result of the campaign to redefine marriage in our nation our law and educational institutions are being compelled to falsely state that there is nothing special about mothers and fathers raising children together and, specifically, that children do not need both a mother and a father. The notion of parenthood is being changed to consist in any arrangement of emotionally attached people who care for kids. And of course anyone who opposes these harmful developments is not to be tolerated, but in fact is called a bigot and treated as such.
These are just some of the possible answers to how the redefinition of marriage will result in real harm to others. The sky is not falling, but that does not mean that the fundamental building block of society is not being severely weakened and attacked. We have a chance to protect marriage by calling your State Representative or State Senator today and telling them not to support legislation that will redefine marriage in Rhode Island. If marriage means anything you want, then it means nothing. Change its meaning today and tomorrow it will mean something radically different.

From an Editorial - Rhode Island Catholic February 16, 2011
http://thericatholic.com/

Polonia Pearl...aka eddie

Ronald Reagan Endorses Personhood

2011-01-28T12:42:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WTiK9Dd9z0

I know what I am about to say now is controversial, but I have to say it.

This Nation cannot continue turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to the taking of some 4000 unborn childrens lives every day. One every 21 seconds. We cannot pretend that America is preserving her first and highest ideal - the belief that each life is sacred, when we permitted the deaths of 15 million helpless innocents since the Roe vs Wade decision.

Fifteen million children who will never laugh, never sing, never know the joy of human life, will never strive to heal the sick, feed the poor, or make peace among nations. Abortion has denied them the first and most basic of human rights. We are all infinitely poorer for their loss.

This nation fought a terrible war so that black Americans would be guaranteed their God given rights. Abraham Lincoln recognized that we could not survive as a free land when some could decide whether others should be free or slaves.

Well today another question begs to be asked. How could we survive as a free nation when some decide that others are not fit to live and should be done away with?

I believe no challenge is more important to the character of America then restoring the right to life to all human beings. Without that right, no other rights have meaning.  "Suffer the little children to come on to me and forbid them not, for such is the Kingdom of God."

I think we are making progress in upholding the sanctity of life of infants.  Ive asked for your all out committment for the mighty power of your prayers so that together, we can convince our fellow countrymen that America should, can, and will preserve God's greatest gift.

We are a government of, by, and for the people and people want a Constitutional Amendment to restore the rights that were taken from us. Let us encourage those among us who are trying to provide positive alternatives to abortion and with your help, we can win. And that will be a great victory for our country.

The Polonia Pearl   aka eddie

Barack Obama’s Letter to His Daughters Contradicts His Pro-Abortion Desires

2011-01-15T12:30:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama’s Letter to Daughters Contradicts Abortion-Punishment Remark

by Maria Vitale
LifeNews.com Editorial Columnist
January 19, 2009

LifeNews.com Note: Maria Vitale is an editorial opinion columnist for LifeNews.com. She is the Public Relations Director for the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation and Vitale has written and reported for various broadcast and print media outlets, including National Public Radio, CBS Radio, and AP Radio.

The Parade magazine carried an unusual message. It’s a letter incoming President Barack Obama wrote to his daughters, Malia and Sasha. The headline on the letter reads, "What I want for You–and Every Child in America.

The 44th President’s letter speaks engagingly of the responsibilities and joys of fatherhood. He mentions that, when his two children came into his world, "I soon found that the greatest joy in my life was the joy I saw in yours. And I realized that my own life wouldn’t count for much unless I was able to ensure that you had every opportunity for happiness and fulfillment in yours."

He then recites his wish-list for America’s children: schools worthy of them, the chance to go to college, good jobs with good pay and benefits, a cleaner, safer planet, the peaceful settlement of differences. It’s a litany of superlatives that’s hard to object to.

Obama further states that he wants "every child to have the same chances to learn and dream and grow and thrive" that his daughters have had.

But such a lofty sentiment is not evidenced in his proposed policies.

In 2007, he promised Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion operation, that the first thing he’d do as President would be to sign the Freedom of Choice Act–a radical piece of legislation which is the biggest threat to innocent human life since Roe v. Wade.

While economic concerns may make that promise tough to keep, there’s no denying the fact that, throughout his political career, Obama has supported abortion on demand.

How can Obama reconcile his stated desire that every child have a chance to grow and thrive when he previously stated that he was going to teach his daughters about values and morals but, if they made a mistake, he didn’t want them "punished" with a baby?

In his letter to his daughters, Obama also writes of the Declaration of Independence, and his grandmother telling him "about the men and women who marched for equality because they believed those words put to paper two centuries ago should mean something." That is the same document that declares that all men are created equal, and that life is an unalienable right.

I spoke recently with an African-American woman who is a veteran of both the civil rights struggle and the pro-life movement. She seemed to experience real pain over the fact that the new President supports legal abortion. She remembered how the previous church she attended was against abortion, but the pastor never talked about it. She wondered aloud, if only Obama were "schooled" about the issue, would he then take up the pro-life cause?

Over the next four years, it will be up to pro-life advocates to help educate the President, and the rest of the populace, about what abortion really means for the children of America…about how it directly contradicts the holdings of the Declaration of Independence.

Perhaps someday Obama will write another letter to his daughters, one expressing his deep regret over policies that denied millions of children the one right that counts the most: the right to life.

The Polonia Pearl....aka ..eddie

Catholics Abandoning the Church Because of Scandal

2010-12-29T16:28:00.000-08:00

Scandal is nothing new for the Church. There have been many times through the ages when things were much worse off than they are now. The history of the Church has many ups and downs. At the times when the Church hits its low points God raises up tremendous saints to bring the Church back to its real mission. It's almost as if in those times of darkness the light of Christ shines ever more brightly. Let's focus on a Saint who God raised up in a difficult time -

Francis de Sales came along after the Protestant Reformation. The Reformation was not principally about theology-although theological differences came later-but about morals. Martin Luther, an Augustinian priest, lived during the reign of perhaps the most notorious pope in history, Alexander VI. This pope was a wicked man. He had nine children from six different concubines. He put out contracts on the lives of those he considered his enemies.

Luther, like everyone, must have wondered how God could allow a wicked man to be the visible head of his Church. All types of moral problems confronted Luther even in his own country of Germany. Priests were living in open relationships with women. Some made exaggerated claims about indulgences. There was terrible immorality among lay Catholics. Luther was scandalized, as anyone who loved God should have been. He allowed the scandal to drive him from the Church.

Eventually God raised up many saints to combat this erroneous solution and to bring people back to the Church Christ founded. Francis de Sales was one of them. At the risk of his life he went through Switzerland, where the Calvinists were popular, preaching the gospel with truth and love. Several times on his travels he was beaten and left for dead.

Someone once asked him to address the situation of the scandal caused by so many of his brother priests. What Francis de Sales said is as important for us today as it was then. He did not pull any punches. He said, "While those who give scandal are guilty of the spiritual equivalent of murder [i.e., destroying other people's faith in God by their terrible example], those who take scandal-who allow scandals to destroy their faith-are guilty of spiritual suicide." They are guilty, he said, of cutting off their life with Christ by abandoning the source of life in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist. He went among the people in Switzerland trying to prevent their committing spiritual suicide on account of the scandals.

What a terrible mistake the people make to abandon the Catholic Church because of scandal.

The Polonia Pearl ...aka eddie

Homily from Fr. Kevin Schroeder "The genocide of abortion"

2010-12-13T16:48:00.000-08:00

In the year of the priest, Fr. Kevin Schroeder represents the vocation well, with faith and conviction to share the truth even when it is difficult to do so. Please support our priests with your prayers and as verbal encouragement. For every positive statement they get regarding a homily like this, they are sure to receive several angry phone calls. Our priests need to know that there are people in the pews that are praying for them and are in support of sharing this difficult message.

This homily was given during a Mass Oct. 25 by Father Kevin Schroeder at Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis.

Before I begin this homily, I want to mention that I am preaching on a topic that is a hot-button issue in our nation. And while the morality of this matter is quite clear, it is astonishing how many Catholics remain defiant or at least indifferent to the issue. For many priests, this topic is frightening, so much so that they hesitate to preach on it. Others, when they do so, are surprised at the number of people who walk out of church during the homily. With all of this in mind, as I preach on the topic at hand, I would ask all of you to listen respectfully, not so much to me, but to the words of life given to us by God himself, through the Church. And if you feel like walking out, try your best to stick around until I get to the back of church and then you can confront me face to face about what you disagree or dislike about the Church's unchanged teaching on this topic.
It's no exaggeration that the past 100 years have been some of the most bloody, brutal and violent in the history of the world. In the past century, the world has seen two world wars and numerous "armed conflicts and engagements." But even more troubling has been the explosion of ethnic violence; the killing of others based on their bloodline, physical features, political views, religious beliefs or cultural background. Specific instances of ethnic violence in the past century include Hitler's holocaust against the Jews and others opposed to the Third Reich, an intellectual and cultural cleansing in communist China and Russia and genocides in Rwanda, Sudan-Darfur and in Bosnia. There are undoubtedly others as well, but these are some of the main losses of human life, each one ranging from several hundred thousand to tens of millions.
And what we see, if we look closely at each of these bloody crimes, is that a certain pattern emerges. In each of these genocides, there is a concerted effort to first dehumanize the victims; to make them less than human by different slurs or propaganda. For example, Jews were portrayed as rats in Nazi cartoons and called swine and vermin; in Rwanda, the persecuting Hutus called their victims cockroaches. After the dignity of the victims had been taken away, they were usually stripped of their belongings, kicked out of their homes, and persecuted with the rationale that they were somehow an animal and a threat to the integrity or stability of the country. In other words, because of who they were, not what they had done, they had to be removed for the good of everyone else.
Once the victims had been dehumanized, they were made to suffer a horrible end. They were usually subjected to ghastly deaths that horrified the rest of the world when their fate came to light. For example, those in the Holocaust died by dismemberment, gas chambers, starvation, exhaustion and numerous other horrifying ends. In the African genocides, people, including women and children, were hacked to death by machetes, burned alive, or executed by roving bands of soldiers. And after death, the bodies of the victims were left to rot, never given a respectable burial or distinct grave. Many times, this death and betrayal came not from strangers or enemies, but from friends and family members; people that should have been sources of safety and trust.
Finally, all of these genocides were made possible and perpetuated not only because of the actions of the aggressors but also because good people did little or nothing to stop them. In most, if not all, of these cases, the perpetrators were powerful but small in numbers. But because of fear, indifference, cowardice or love of personal gain and comfort, good, everyday people tolerated and ignored horrendous crimes that were happening in their countries to friends, neighbors, and even members of their own family. These are the people judged most severely by history and yet, even recently whole nations and superpowers have turned their back to the cries of various persecuted people because it would be too messy or politically inconvenient.
Now there is another genocide occurring much closer to home that Africa, Europe, or Bosnia. It has been going on for nearly 36 years in our country and is not only tolerated but also legally sanctioned. This genocide is abortion and has recently expanded to include embryonic stem cell research and abortafacient contraceptives. In the past 36 years, nearly 50 million babies have lost their lives in the name of choice, convenience, or under the guise of mercy when diagnosed with some defect by prenatal testing. This number is staggering and it is still growing by 3,300 babies a day! As a matter of fact, one of the places where abortions are performed daily is just a few blocks from where you are sitting right now.
There are many who label the pro-life movement as a small group of vocal extremists who don't care about people once they are born. It is argued that it is a woman's choice to decide whether or not to continue her pregnancy; that it is her body and we must not impose our morality on others. But listen carefully and pay attention to the structure of the argument; notice how eerily similar it is to the process followed by other perpetrators of genocide.
The first step is dehumanize the victim. We see this in the way that the unborn child is always referred to as a fetus, an embryo, a pregnancy, a mass of cells, or a blob of tissues -- but never a baby. Once people get used to thinking of the baby as a biological mass, and not a little person, it becomes easier to take away their possessions. In this case, there is only one thing that they possess, and it is life. This is taken from them because they are seen as a threat to a certain way of life, as a disruption of a career or personal control.
And this fundamental right is stripped away in some of the most brutal and painful ways imaginable. Perhaps by partially delivering the baby, crushing the skull and sucking out her brain, or by burning the baby while he is still alive with a saline solution, or by tearing apart the baby, limb by limb and then removing it from the womb. And like other victims of genocide, these little persons are not even given the respect of a proper burial but are instead thrown away in the trash or sent away to be used for research and experimentation.
Once again, we see a troubling parallel in the fact that these babies are betrayed and handed over not by strangers but by their own mothers, fathers, grandmothers, and grandfathers, the very people who were supposed to protect and nourish them. Finally, abortion continues in this country, not simply because of activists who promote it but also, and especially, because there are many Catholics who tolerate and accept this barbarous practice. How many Catholics have turned their backs on the unborn and elected public officials who publicly support and promote this act of genocide? It's like we have resigned ourselves to the fact that abortion is just a part of our nation's identity now and we just have to live with it. Nothing could be further from the truth! Nothing could be further from what the values of our country represent! Nothing could be further from what our Faith professes!
I wish there was a more gentle way to talk about abortion, I really do. But I wouldn't be doing my job as a priest if I stood before you and before God and described this act as anything less than what it really is. Abortion is murder because it deprives our smallest brothers and sisters of their right to life in the name of choice, convenience, or, ironically, mercy. And I know that some folks will be frustrated that I didn't comment on war or capital punishment, but they are not intrinsic evils; unlike murder, there are scenarios when war or capital punishment can be justified. And I simply can't treat everything in one homily.
But I don’t stand here preaching to you without hope. Our greatest hope is in the inexhaustible mercy of God. Despite the fact that our country has allowed the destruction of so much innocent life, I am certain that deep down -- America still values life. Deep down we still believe that life is truly precious, life is beautiful, life is the fundamental right of every person and the very foundation of our country. But we must do more to protect those who cannot protect themselves. We must work to ensure that every person has the right to live regardless of whether or not their life is convenient, expected, wanted, or productive. And we must allow this pro-life mentality to transform -- the way we think, the way we vote, the way we live.
Finally, let me make it clear; these offenses against human life in our country make victims of the living as well. If any of you have been involved in an abortion and are hurting please know that you can find healing, peace and forgiveness from Christ in His Church, particularly through the Sacrament of Reconciliation. It is important for each of us to remember that there is no sin, no offense too great for God’s mercy. Those involved in abortion are to be loved and ministered to, not hated and condemned. There are ministries in our Church, like Project Rachael, to help men and women who have been hurt by their decision to choose abortion as a solution to their unwanted, unplanned pregnancy.
As we come here to this Eucharist, during this month of Pro-life reflection, let us increase our efforts on behalf of life. As followers of Christ, we have the weighty responsibility to defend the innocent whether they be in Africa, Europe, Bosnia, or in their mother's womb. Too much stands to be lost if we waver or remain silent. As a final point of reflection, consider this passage from Matthew. In describing the Last Judgment, Jesus says: "Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me." What our country has done to the unborn, it has done to Christ. May we fight for life from its very beginning to its very end and by our efforts, prove our love for Jesus Christ, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

The Polonia Pearl aka eddie

Does Obamacare Fund Abortion? Let Us Count the Ways.

2010-10-20T10:57:00.000-07:00

By Steven W. Mosher

When Obamacare was signed into law in March, the President assured Americans that it does not, in any way, shape, or form, fund elective abortions. He even signed an executive order to this effect. The only problem with Obama's claims, which are being repeated by politicians like Harry Reid and partisan groups like Democrats for Life of America, is that they are not true.
The only real abortion restriction in Obamacare was in fact removed before the President signed the bill into law. This was the so-called "Stupak-Pitts Amendment", named after Democrat Bart Stupak and Republican Joe Pitts, that was inserted into the House version of the bill. This amendment applied the Hyde Amendment abortion restrictions, which forbids certain Health and Human Services (HHS) funds from being used to pay for abortions, to Obamacare.
The Stupak-Pitts Amendment was necessary because the original bill did not include any blanket restriction on using taxpayer funds for abortion. Neither did the original Hyde Amendment suffice (despite what Harry Reid has claimed), since Obamacare creates lots of new pathways for sending money directly to various health care projects, bypassing HHS and the Hyde Amendment restrictions altogether. (We will talk about these in a minute.)
The problem was that the Senate version of the bill contained no abortion restrictions. But instead of putting pressure on the Senate Democrats to add the Stupak-Pitts Amendment to their version of the bill, the Obama administration chose instead to place enormous pressure on the House to take this language out of their bill. In the end, nearly all the House Democrats, including the small "pro-life" contingent, did as they were told. As a result, there are no restrictions against abortion in the bill itself.In exchange, the President with great fanfare signed an executive order that supposedly amends the health care legislation to preclude abortion funding. The problem is that it does no such thing, because it can't: An executive order is not law and cannot amend legislation. The courts will throw out the President's piece of paper as soon as it is challenged. There is no way that Obama, who is a Harvard-trained lawyer, doesn't know this. His political allies certainly do. The head of Planned Parenthood, an organization that stands to make a lot of money off Obamacare, dismissed the executive order as nothing more than a "symbolic gesture."
So what is all this presidential posturing really about? Was it merely an effort to provide some political cover for "pro-life" Democrats who voted for Obamacare despite its abortion funding? If so, it hasn't worked, to judge from the polls, which currently show most of them going down to defeat by large margins on November 2nd.
Most voters understand that, since there is no blanket restriction on abortion funding in the health care legislation, they will wind up paying for abortions, at least in some circumstances. Let me give you three of the Obamacare provisions that will, in my opinion, inevitably lead to abortion funding:
Money for so-called "Community Health Centers":
Money for federal insurance plans:
Money for "temporary high-risk pools": Obamacare provides 5 billion dollars for "temporary high-risk pools" that will cover people with pre-existing conditions until the actual health care exchanges kick in 2014. This money goes straight to the states and is administered by them. Without abortion restrictions, the states are free to use this money to fund abortions if they feel like it. And in fact, some of them tried to do just that … until complaints by National Right to Life forced HHS to promise it would actually enforce Obama's executive order. This will last only as long as it takes to file a court challenge, however. Obamacare will provide two or more state-sponsored insurance plans. According to the bill, only one of these plans actually needs to have restrictions on abortion—meaning that federal dollars will almost definitely be paying for abortions in the other state plan. And even this restriction is limited, and will have to be renewed every year. Many of these Community Health Centers will be run by Planned Parenthood and other groups that see abortion as an essential service and, without abortion-restricting language in the bill, money that goes to these centers will be used to pay for abortions.Vice President Biden has been going around the country saying that Obamacare is wonderful, but that it is simply "too complicated" to explain to the rubes out in the hustings. We disagree on many grounds, but most of all because it will force us—and all Americans—to pay for the execution of our unborn brothers and sisters.

Steven W. Mosher is the President of the Population Research Institute.

The Polonia pearl

My Morning Offering

2010-09-24T06:50:00.000-07:00

Polonia Pearl here......

In Nomine Patris +, et Filii +, et Spiritus Sancti +
Amen.

O, Holy Ghost, I beg Thee, come and fill me, possess me totally. Remove from me all that is not of Thee, from Thee, Thee Thyself!

Mary, Mother of God, please pray with me and for me!

Heavenly Father, Lord Jesus Christ, Holy Ghost, I love Thee above all and before all, and all in Thee!

I offer myself to Thee: all that I am, all that I have, all that pertains to me; all that I suffer, all that happens to me.

Give to me as it pleases Thee. Take from me as it pleases Thee.

I beg Thee, Lord my God, fulfill within me perfectly Thy most holy will. Make of me what You will. Do with me what You will!

I beg Thee, Lord my God, Heavenly Father, Lord Jesus Christ, O Holy Ghost — Holy Trinity, One God … do with me as You will!

I beg Thee, Lord my God, unite me — in my suffering — with Thee, my Jesus, in The Garden, at the Pillar, and on the Cross! Unite my suffering to Thine, I beg Thee!

Lord my God, I hold up to Thee all those I love, my friends, and my enemies. Keep them, I beg Thee, for Thyself — in time, and in eternity before Thy Beatific Vision in Heaven forever. Protect them from the evil one and every evil! I offer myself to Thee for them: give me their suffering and I will gladly bear it for them. Take their suffering from them and give it to me!

Have mercy on me, a sinner. Make me one with Thee in all things.

In a special way I hold up to Thee (names of people who need God’s mercy and healing, His guidance and protection, and those most dear to thee).

Have mercy on me and all poor sinners, especially those of us most in need of Thy mercy.
I offer all to Thee in union with Thy Son Jesus Christ in the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass throughout the world, and through the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

In Nomine Patris +, et Filii +, et Spiritus Sancti +
Amen.

Upon waking and before all else — or as soon as it is possible to us — we should drop to our knees before God and make our Morning Offering of ourselves to Almighty God. It is the beginning of our day, and as the Psalmist reminds us, “Nisi aedificaverunt domum, in vanum laboraverunt qui aedificant eum” — “Unless the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it.” 1 The foundation of our day is no one else and nothing else than God, and unless our day is built upon Him, all we do is in vain.

We can be sure that once we have offered ourselves, and the obligations of our day, to God, nothing — absolutely nothing — will touch upon us except that He wills it or permits it for our sanctification. No suffering, no humiliation, no weariness, no weakness, no temptation of this day can touch upon us that is not ordained by Almighty God to our good and the good of others. Most often we will be largely unaware of the reality of the things that transpire in our day that are precious to God … and to which we are purblind. Simple words, gestures — the mere presence of our being among others touches and influences their lives in ways we cannot see or anticipate. Sometimes, from afar, and utterly unknown to us, another will observe what we do — and in that instant a seed is planted in their souls that grows to everlasting life in Christ — because we are faithful to what we have offered and promised God at the beginning of our day.

Saint Francis once famously said, “Preach the Gospel … and if necessary use words.” Our example is the most poignant testimony to the life of Christ within us. And that example perceived by others — and completely unknown to us — is what changes the lives of others, turns the lives of others to Christ and Holy Mother the Church, His Body. All that we purpose to do to for the glory of God pales in significance beside what we do unknown to us and known to others.

What is notable in this Morning Offering is the prayer for union with Christ, not in His glory, but in the ignominy of His suffering through which He redeemed the world. It has been said that many there are who would gladly walk with Christ upon His Triumphant Entry into Jerusalem, when palm branches were strewn in his path and the crowd proclaimed, “Hosanna, Son of David!” — and few there are who will walk with Him on His sorrowful road to Calvary. All gathered around Him in His glory, and all fled Him in His suffering and humiliation.

This prayer asks for total union with Christ — especially in His suffering: in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night of his betrayal, at the Pillar to which He was chained and scourged to the white of His bones, and on the Cross of His Agony, despised by the world, ridiculed, and mortified in what seemed His abandonment. But it was through His suffering that He redeemed the world — and we wish to share intimately in it with Him through the little, insignificant sufferings and humiliations we experience throughout our day — that we may be one with Him in all things, at all times. Not when it will earn us acclaim and esteem, but reproach and malice.

Your suffering is not yours to choose. It will come to you withal, and on terms decidedly not to your liking. You will embrace the Angel of consolation who came to Christ in the Garden, the chains that bind your hands to the scourging of the world, and the Cross itself upon which you have already died in Christ, and now seek to renew that death for Him: the dying to yourself, to your own will, that you may live in and for Christ alone — that you may be with Him in all things and at all times. In your present suffering … and in the glory to be revealed on the day of the culmination of your life in Christ, when this world passes and all within it … and in your astonishment that all that Christ promised is real … far more real than the world that has passed, and would have deceived you that it is life. But Christ only is the Life. You have found that He is the Way and the Truth. You need only to come to that staggering realization, that He alone is the Life. And it is everlasting.

It is a journey to Heaven that begins each day … on your knees.

http://www.boston-catholic-journal.com/

The Polonia Pearl aka eddie

The Catholic Position on Immigration

2010-08-01T10:27:00.000-07:00

Polonia Pearl here....

The Catholic Church has consistently respected the right of our sovereign nation to control its borders as well as the rule of civil law. However, the Church, along with other members of our democratic society, has the right to work to change laws which are believed to violate basic human dignity, dignity imbued by the Creator

Our immigration system is broken and contributes to the exploitation of migrant workers in the workplace; their abuse by ruthless immigrant smugglers; and their deaths in the desert as they seek to find work to support their families.

First, there would be nothing wrong with demanding that immigrants come to the United States legally if we allowed them to do so. But we don't - they are coming through the back door to take jobs we offer them, because we don't allow them in through the front door. Legal immigration quotas were set more than 20 years ago, when the demand for unskilled and highly skilled workers was much smaller than todays.

During normal economic times, the U.S labor market demands up to 500,000 low-skilled workers a year, while the current U.S. immigration system allows for only 5,000 permanent visas for that category.

One of the greatest challenges in immigration reform is the need to realistically assess our future employment-based immigration needs. This includes permanent and temporary visas, high-skilled and low-skilled workers. Many people agree that our current legal immigration flow is drastically out of sync with America’s labor needs and the global realities of the 21st century. Meanwhile, some employers have been able to misuse the broken system to the detriment of U.S. and foreign workers. Policymakers must recognize that if we create a legal immigration system that functions well, there will be less pressure on immigrants to come to the U.S. illegally and for employers to hire unauthorized workers. Given the current weakened economy and high unemployment rates, it is difficult to estimate the U.S.’s future labor needs. However, the economy will eventually improve, and a reasonable, flexible legal immigration system must be put into place to fill our future labor needs. If the U.S. is to thrive in the globalized 21st century economy, employment-based immigration must be seen as a strategic resource that can both meet labor market needs and foster economic growth and competition while still protecting U.S. workers and improving wages and working conditions.

Comprehensive immigration reform, which the Catholic Church supports, would replace illegality with a system based on legal presense and legal entry, thus restoring the rule of law while also protecting the basic dignity and lives of our fellow brothers and sisters. It would require those who have broken the law to get on the right side of it by paying a fine, taxes, learning english and waiting in the back of a long line to have a chance to become a U.S. citizen.

Many feel that the current situation of illegal immigration is causing an unsustainable strain on our social services. This is a myth. First of all, most studies show that at an early age, immigrants consume more than they contribute. However, over a lifetime they are net contributors to our economy through the taxes they pay, the goods they produce and consume, and their labor. Moreover, legal immigrants do not qualify for welfare or health care for the first 5 years of their residency in the United States, while illegal immigrants never qualify for such benefits. In fact, undocumented immigrants pay billions in income taxes each year and at least $7 billion in Social Security taxes, helping to sustain Social Security for the baby-boomer generation.

By adopting comprehensive immigration reform and providing the undocumented legal status, the United States would receive even more income taxes and Social Security payments from immigrants, since they would be required to register with the government and pay their full share.

It is the Catholic Church view that making changes to the legal immigration system will help ease pressure on our border by taking undocumented immigrants out of the enforcement equation, freeing up law enforcement to focus upon those who are here to harm us - drug smugglers, human traffickers and would be terrorists - and not those simply looking for a job.

The Polonia Pearl aka .. eddie...

CALLING A SPADE

2010-07-29T17:49:00.001-07:00

Polonia Pearl Here....

“"Be no more children tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the wickedness of men, by cunning craftiness, by which they lie in wait to deceive."” (Ephesians 4.14-15)

Saint Paul pulls no punches – and it is little wonder that others literally pulled no punches with Saint Paul. However constantly beaten, he could not hold his tongue and never hesitated to call a spade a spade. This rare and holy candor is seldom encountered today. Christ told us plainly,"Blessed is he that shall not be scandalized in Me." 1 And yet we are! Deeply. Consider how carefully we couch the words of Christ, the teachings of Holy Mother Church --- lest they give offense!

Saint Paul, however, had no problem with this. He even rebuked Saint Peter himself for equivocating on doctrine in Jerusalem in order to accommodate the sensitivities of others! 2In truth, we've become much too delicate for Saint Paul. It is not that we have become “childlike” in our Faith … but rather, childish, infantile, clamoring like choleric babies for what pleases us most or hurts us least, however detrimental it may be to our souls.It is extremely likely, in fact, that were Saint Paul to preach the Gospel — the one he received from Jesus Christ Himself, Who, in the giving, commanded him to preach it “in season and out of season” — in any of our Catholic Churches today, Saint Paul would – yet again – be thrown out and set upon – by bishop, clergy and congregation alike.

And St. Paul thought Philippi, Iconium, and Ephesus were rough! Here, in Boston — the epicenter of everything that went wrong with the Church following the Second Vatican Council — Saint Paul would confront a hostile audience indeed. Especially in our churches.

A Man for Our Times
For one thing, Saint Paul knew all about shifting winds of popular teaching, human trickery, theological cunning, and corporate scheming — both within the Church and outside of it. He is, in short, a man for our times … but not for our tastes.

We want fuzzy. We want warm. We want our way and God had better anoint it as His own --- and if He will not, then our priests, deacons, religious educators and theologians will. Indeed, they have already stepped in, taken matters into their own hands and set things straight and much more to our liking!

Immortal souls, salvation, damnation, Hell, sin, evil, modesty, chastity, Mortal Sins, Venial Sins, "the Narrow Way" (which Christ assures us that few take and fewer enter 4 ), "hoping" for salvation rather than taking it for granted (unlike St. Paul 3 ), the Day of Judgment, Penance, Holy Confession, guilt, mercy, justice, death, the devil himself!. What have these things to do with us?

The Opiate of the "Masses"
After all, we have been taught --- and we all have come to believe --- that despite our sins, our greed, our unbridled and perverse sensuality, our impenitence, our obduracy, even our atrocities, "We are His people and He is our God", as the ditty goes. It is quite that simple. We will speak of other things; you know, social issues, sensitivity, “empowerment”, baseball, and bottom lines — anything ... except what verges upon authenticity in Christ. And we love it!

We do not go to Confession anymore to unburden ourselves of our guilt and to be absolved of our sins. We go to Mass when the guilt of our sins can no longer be repressed so that we may have our weekly "fix" of grace through crooning about our being God's children, a holy people, the light of the world, until the pitch of the ghastly singing drowns out the clamor of the conscience that convicts us, assuring us that we have no need of Confession for we have perfect immunity from sin as befits "God's children", and in any event will be "borne up on eagle's wings" to Heaven when death fetches us off, after which God (corrected to our sensitivities) will wink at our sins and tell us what little devils we are ... ;-)

I think Saint Paul knew a spade when he saw one ... and he knew a Joker. This makes us squirm. We want to deal the cards, and if it requires a little “sleight of hand”, some pandering to the popular pundits, or pulling one from the bottom, well, the end (our end) justifies the means ... right? After all, even dogs go to Heaven.

Saint Paul was no gambler. He knew the House had all the odds. And He knew the Dealer. He also knew that a time comes when, whatever hand you've dealt yourself by deceit, sooner or later you'll have to fold.

The problem is that you've put your soul in the kitty, and when you lose, you won't get it back.

Saint Paul knew the cards. He was, after all, close to the King ... and, for that matter, to the Queen.

http://www.boston-catholic-journal.com/

Polonia Pearl aka eddie

Beloved Priests Attacked By Demons

2010-06-03T17:18:00.001-07:00

By Sonja Corbitt

6/4/2010
Catholic Online (http://www.catholic.org/)

While the demons of hell attempt to knock the feet out from under priests in Rockford IL through attack, they persist in bringing the Gospel even into the satanic abortion trenches.Their revulsion for anything as holy as a Catholic priest is evident in their bizarre window displays, a few of which reportedly include a nun in a coffin, a rubber chicken hanging from a noose, and a picture of Jesus flipping the bird that says, "Even Jesus Hates You."

According to tradition, typical demonic responses during exorcism include foul language, references to sexual perversion, deceit, and profuse blasphemy. Similarly, prayers for exorcism outside the Northern Illinois Women's Center abortuary in Rockford have provoked just such a reaction from pro-abortion workers and activists within.

"Not Against Flesh and Blood, But the Rulers of Darkness" Their revulsion for anything as holy as a Catholic priest is evident in their bizarre window displays, a few of which reportedly include a nun in a coffin, a rubber chicken hanging from a noose, and a picture of Jesus flipping the bird that says, "Even Jesus Hates You."The beautiful thing about this ongoing battle is that the number of abortions has reportedly been cut by half at this abortuary since the spiritual power of the Jesus was first unleashed through the prayers of the priests who have prayed outside since September of 2008. At least, the abortuary seems to blame them and the special prayers of the Church.

Just this past Friday someone inside the building displayed a sign in reaction to a priest and seminarian praying outside that said "F.... Your Perverted Priests." They have endured personal insults and vandalism of their vehicles. One priest's car was egged, another discovered a hand-written sign that read "I Rape Children" taped to his car. Another hand-written sign displayed prominently outside the main entrance to the clinic read "Stop the Perverted Catholic Priests from Raping Young Boys." In convoluted pro-abortion logic, it seems that somehow child abuse is bad, but abortion is good.The priests in Rockford quietly stand vigil in every type of inclement weather with open coats, so that the women seeking an abortion are aware that a priest is present in his flowing, seemingly flaming cassock. Invoking the matchless power of Jesus Christ through the Church, they make sweeping Signs of the Cross and pray that the abortion mill and the whole earth will be cleansed from the evil that surrounds and drives abortion.

Beautiful Victories The Rockford mill hates and attacks the priests outside so viciously because they, and priests and pro-life workers like them all over the country, have saved countless lives and souls. When they first began their vigils, it was reported that the pro-life sidewalk counselors in Rockford noticed an immediate, dramatic decline in the numbers of mothers who go there for abortions, a distinct rise in the numbers of mothers who choose life outside the mill, and the correlation of these changes with the beginning of the displays of blasphemy from inside. The response at this abortuary has been particularly virulent, but priests are praying outside them all over the country through Priests for Life, in which priests and parishes are paired with specific abortuaries. It is to St. John Vianney that our beloved priests are entrusted, and he said it so eloquently: "Were we to fully realize what a priest is on earth, we would die: not of fright, but of love. It is he who opens the door: he is the steward of the good Lord; the administrator of his goods. Leave a parish for twenty years without a priest, and they will end by worshiping the beasts there. The priest is not a priest for himself, he is a priest for you." Because they are priests, they take the good news, uniquely, even into these demonic abortion trenches. As the Year for Priests draws to a close, may we bathe their dusty, tired, beautiful feet with the anointing of our prayers. Amen.

Sonja Corbitt is a Catholic speaker, Scripture teacher and study author, and a contributing writer for Catholic Online. She is available to speak on the New Feminism, current events and your preferred theme. Visit her at www.pursuingthesummit.com for information and sample videos, or www.pursuingthesummit.blogspot.com.

The Polonia Pearl aka eddie

Be Proud That You're Catholic

2010-04-08T06:45:00.000-07:00

The New York Times is at it again, bashing the Pope for his allleged failure to prosecute a child-molesting priest and by implication, the entire Roman Catholic Church.

The Times makes no secret of its lofty disdain for the Church and it's a waste of time taking them to task every time they loose a diatribe against the Church or feature a story exposing the alleged sins of Rome. After all, they really can't help themselves - despising any institution that insists that there is a higher power than the ultra liberal side of the national Democratic party is de reguer.

Taking a different view, Sam Miller, a businessman from Cleveland Ohio allegedly commented on the media's assault on the Roman Catholic Church. Although I don't know Mr. Miller or if he really wrote this fine commentary it's compelling enough to be quoted extensively.

"Why would newspapers carry on a vendetta on one of the most important institutions that we have today in the United States, namely the Catholic Church?" he asks

"Do you know - the Catholic Church educates 2.6 million students everyday at the cost to that Church of 10 billion dollars, and a savings on the other hand to the American taxpayer of 18 billion dollars. The graduates go on to graduate studies at the rate of 92%.
"The Church has 230 colleges and universities in the U.S. with an enrollment of 700,000 students.

"The Catholic Church has a non-profit hospital system of 637 hospitals, which account for hospital treatment of 1 out of every 5 people - not just Catholics - in the United States today

"But the press is vindictive and trying to totally denigrate in every way the Catholic Church in this country. They have blamed the disease of pedophilia on the Catholic Church, which is as irresponsible as blaming adultery on the institution of marriage.

In the wake of the current crisis in the Church, other religious denominations and non-religious institutions have admitted to having similar problems with both pedophilia and ephebophilia among the ranks of their clergy. There's no evidence that Catholic prelates are more likely to be pedophiles than Protestant ministers, Jewish leaders, physicians, or any other institution in which adults are in a position of authority and power over children.

"A study of American priests showed that most are happy in the priesthood and find it even better than they had expected, and that most, if given the choice, would choose to be priests again in face of all this obnoxious PR the church has been receiving.

"The Catholic Church is bleeding from self-inflicted wounds. The agony that Catholics have felt and suffered is not necessarily the fault of the Church. You have been hurt by a small number of wayward priests that have probably been totally weeded out by now.

"Walk with your shoulders high and you head higher. Be a proud member of the most important non-governmental agency in the United States . Then remember what Jeremiah said: 'Stand by the roads, and look and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is and walk in it, and find rest for your souls'. Be proud to speak up for your faith with pride and reverence and learn what your Church does for all other religions.

"Be proud that you're a Catholic."

The Poloni Pearl.....aka...eddie

"LET IT PASS...."

2010-03-16T18:03:00.000-07:00

The Evil of Collective Sin

The faces of sin are many --- and unmistakable.

Anger, greed, lust, pride --- we have seen, stood before, the menacing faces of sin and we instinctively recognize them despite all efforts to conceal or disguise the malice they portend. They contort and disfigure the face that leers at us, the face behind which the turbulence of sin implacably roils. We recoil from them in either fear or disgust --- and we abhor them. The signature of sin is the same even as the faces change, but it is always inscribed on distinguishable faces, on identifiable persons. The sin, the malice, is personal --- that is to say, it infects a personality, an individual to whom we have some manifest connection. In a sense the malice, the evil, is personified; it assumes the personality of another. Avoid the person and avoid the malice, a very reasonable and effective remedy --- for us as individuals.

There is, however, another and much less clearly defined (but no less pernicious) aspect of sin that we are far less disposed to recognize --- despite ample and apparently futile lessons from history.

While most of us grasp the existence of our own individual sins --- and even more clearly the sins of others --- there is little awareness of our own complicity in sins that lacerate us as a people, a society, a nation --- even a civilization. This absence of the realization of an evil to which we contribute beyond our individual culpability, this failure to recognize the reality of collective as well as personal sin – essentially a recognition of our complicity in appalling moral enormities ---- not through our acts but through our silence --- is just as grave in nature (but more far-reaching and devastating in consequences) than most of our personal sins. The sin, as we see it, is not our own. It is not of our making. We do not will it, therefore we are not responsible for it. We recognize the evil. We lament it. But in the end, because we do not enact the evil ourselves, we have no responsibility for it.

Now, multiply that by a society, a nation, a civilization, and we begin to understand the nature of collective sin, the sin for which all are responsible but in which no one personally participates ... It might be summed up in three words: "Let it pass." Whatever the evil, whatever the injustice, whatever the oppression – in whatever form it takes – "let it pass."

We do not see --- it is inconvenient to see --- that when we fail to raise our voice against evil, to stamp it out as inimical to the good, as irreconcilably contrary to a Law greater than any men legislate (and subsequently amend, discard, or abolish) in courts or seats of legislature, however august, esteemed, and established its venue. Whenever we fail to raise our voice, and simply "let it pass" – we have entered into complicity with that outrage through our silence. We fear to condemn it, to reveal our abhorrence of it ... to act against it ... and in remaining silent we promote it.

A more Subtle Evil

Unlike individual sin which both confronts us and indicts us in clear and personal terms, collective sin is a much more subtle evil that attempts to elude the responsibility of the individual by diffusing and propagating itself in a social context. It is collaborative sin, sin that is only possible through the collaboration of the many. The Holocaust, slavery, and pornography come immediately to mind. And because it is so subtle it is extremely pervasive. In fact, we come to believe that the more pervasive it is, the less evil it must be. It is essentially morality as distributive, or more simply, morals as mathematics. In effect, "it is legitimized; it has become a matter of open policy, and since a majority are either practicing or condoning it, I myself cannot conceivably be held responsible for it, even if I loathe it. In fact, I have no right to personally object to what is publicly acceptable, and moreover, no legal recourse, should I choose to. So ... I let it pass."

We may recognize the evil, but believe that we can abstract ourselves from it and place the fault, the responsibility upon others. We distribute the blame, the guilt, until it becomes so suffuse that it is no longer morally tangible. That failing, any residual guilt can simply be ascribed to some impersonal corporate body, to the vast number – of which we, in fact, are part. This amorphous corporate body populated by real but somehow anonymous persons, becomes our scapegoat when the core meltdown of moral imperatives reaches critical mass and can no longer be ignored without catastrophic consequences to the individual and society at large.

We would do extremely well to reflect deeply upon the consequences of articulating morality through numbers.

In Mel Gibson's, The Passion of the Christ, a very brief, but memorable moment occurs when, amid the violence of the mob, an old woman stands, looking quizzically upon the scene of personal carnage. She looks with detachment, indifference, neither incited nor perturbed. This is such a frightening vignette that encapsulates our moral indifference in the face of evil. Her indifference, coupled with her curiosity, makes her the metaphor of evil through omission, of complicity through indifference. In this sense, she is a more frightening figure than the soldiers.

"Let it pass ... what has it to do with me?"

Unknown to her ... everything, both in time and in eternity.Collective sin is malice through mathematics,; and because it is rooted in exponential numbers, it is inherently cumulative. So much so, in fact, that the individual sense of responsibility is diminished by the same exponent through which the collective sin is multiplied. There is a clearly inverse proportion between the magnitude of the distributed number and diminished responsibility.

What, then, was your place, my place, in the crucifying of Christ? What is our place and what our responsibility in the starving of a child, in the "therapeutic" killing of a baby in the womb, of the little girl sold into the slavery of prostitution and pornography? Do you still think that you can take refuge in numbers, lose yourself in the crowd? And how long will you continue "to let it pass" --- until it comes to your own doorstep?

Do the math.

http://www.boston-catholic-journal.com/

Pelosi Lied Again

2010-02-27T08:17:00.001-08:00

The Polonia Pearl

Pro-Life Leaders say Pelosi Lied, Again, on Federal Abortion Funding.....

By: Mark Tapscott
Editorial Page Editor

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wrapped up today's White House Health Care Summit with a characteristically confrontational lecture in which she rebuked House Minority Leader John Boehner for saying the Obamacare proposal approved by the Senate and as modified recently by the White House provides public funding for abortions.

“I think it’s really important to note, though, and I want the record to show, because two statements were made here that were not factual in relationship to these bills,' Pelosi said. "My colleague, Leader Boehner, the law of the land is there is no public funding of abortion and there is no public funding of abortion in these bills and I don't want our listeners or viewers to get the wrong impression from what you said."

Pelosi's assertion brought immediate responses from pro-life leaders who claim the Senate bill indirectly uses federal tax dollars to fund abortion services provided through new Community Health Centers established by the legislation.

"Every version of the health care bill has contained multiple pro-abortion mandates and federal subsidies for abortion -- except for the version that was fixed by adoption of the Stupak-Pitts Amendment, over Speaker Pelosi's objections," said Douglas Johnson, who is legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee.

"But President Obama and Senator Reid succeeded in keeping that fix out of the Senate bill -- indeed, the Senate produced a final bill that is the most pro-abortion single piece of legislation to reach the floor of either house of Congress since Roe v. Wade," Johnson said in comments published by LifeNews.com.

Under the Senate health care bill that will be the main bill Obama and Democrats push through Congress, there is no ban on abortion funding. While some states can opt out of funding abortions under the plan, taxpayers in other states will be forced to pay for them, Johnson said.

The Stupak Amendment was introduced by Rep. Bart Stupak, D-MI, during the House debate on its version of Obamacare last year. The amendment was approved with most Republicans and 64 Democrats voting for it.

Since then, Stupak has insisted that he and about a dozen of his fellow House Democrats cannot support any health care reform bill that doesn't include language specifically barring federal funding of abortion. Since the House version of Obamacare only passed by five votes, pro-lifer Democrats like Stupak likely hold the balance of power in Congress on the issue.

Charmaine Yoest, who heads Americans United for Life, was similarly disappointed in President Obama's failure to address the abortion issue when it was raised by Boehner.

"The president’s proposal was a pro-abortion health care plan before today’s meeting and after six hours of political posturing, it’s still a pro-abortion health care plan," Yoest said. "Federal funding for abortion has become the deciding issue in this debate, and yet the issue was raised only briefly today."

"This has been his approach to the abortion issue throughout this debate: to evade the question or misrepresent the facts to the American people. Among other anti-life provisions, the president's plan creates a first-ever 'abortion tax' to be paid by individuals participating in the health Exchange," Yoest said.

"The plan also includes $11 billion dollars of new funding for community health centers, some of which are abortion providers. And yet Speaker Nancy Pelosi today claimed falsely that 'there is no public funding of abortions in this bill.'"

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com

The Polonia Pearl....aka...eddie

DO YOU ATTEND MASS TO BE ENTERTAINED?

2010-02-23T14:53:00.000-08:00

The Polonia Pearl

Mass Entertainment

The Mass --- as we now know it, and will continue to know it for the foreseeable future --- were it celebrated with the beauty and dignity with which it could be ... and rarely is ... celebrated --- could in fact be in any language: it is still the Mass, the re-enactment of Christ's Sacrifice on Calvary. But too often --- much, much too often --- the Sacrifice is obscured by mindless and meaningless innovations geared to making it "entertaining". 40 years into the "experiment" and things look bleaker than ever. The priest still leaves the Sanctuary and paces the aisles during his homily in an attempt to emulate talk show hosts or "Reality TV", ever ready with a joke, and that failing, any anecdote to stimulate laughter from "his audience". The congregation fidgets and laughs obligingly to conceal their embarrassment and his ineptitude. The wink of the eye ("what a rogue! You devil, you ...") is supposed to "connect" him with everyone "really in the know". After all, he's "just one of the guys". That's why he leaves the Sanctuary: to "connect" himself with the people, instead of remaining in the Sanctuary connecting people to God. Did I ever tell you of the the Deacon in my parish who used a toilet plunger as a "scepter" during the Feast of Christ the King? It is true.

Mass became Mass Entertainment and a mass "communal meal" where the pews emptied entirely with no sinner in sight left behind in the pews. No one knows of sin because no one any longer speaks of sin --- especially "mortal sin" --- eo ipso there are no sinners in the Church. Since Vatican II, all, apparently, have attained to impeccability and are worthy of the Lamb and all --- and I mean all --- "approach the table" (as they now say, once known as the Altar in those dark pre-Conciliar days when the Mass was a Sacrifice, and not entertainment).

And, of course, every entertainer, every MC, has his musicians. If the Mass fails as entertainment it can always fall back on the music --- but the choir-as-music fails even more miserably, even more conspicuously were it possible, than the priest as entertainer. And it is possible: there is absolutely no public venue that would accept what is sung, tolerated really, at Catholic Masses and hope to break even at the end of the night. But at the end of Mass we are encouraged to actually applaud the cacophony that has grated on us for the past 45 minutes.

Applause is the also the most appropriate response to "entertainment".

As you applaud, the "musical entertainers" accordingly bow in gratitude for your appreciation of their performance.

I myself do not find Christ's Sacrifice on Calvary "entertaining". Nor do I approach it expecting to be entertained by it, as the people around Christ at the time of His Crucifixion --- those who milled around at the foot of the Cross --- did.

So ask yourself this, for it is absolutely the most fundamental feature of the Mass --- apart from which there is no Mass:

If you were transported back 2000 years and stood present at the Crucifixion of Christ on Calvary ... would you be:

+Eager to listen to the display of virtuosity of your church pianist ( ... given that organs are now seldom used)?
+Longing for the strumming of acoustical or electric guitars?
+Tapping your foot to the beat of drums and the clashing of cymbals?
+"Feeling warm and fuzzy"?
+Telling jokes to those who sat around the foot of the Cross?
+Sharing humorous anecdotes with anyone who would listen?
+Wish to demonstrate to all around you how "clever" and "contemporary" you are?
+Strive to be the focus of attention ... competing with Christ on the Cross?

These are not facetious questions.

If you would act in any way differently than you would if you stood with your waking eyes before Christ being Crucified --- then you do not understand the Mass. It is the re-enactment of Calvary. It is not a social, a communal meal, the opportunity to display your musical prowess or your ability to amuse and entertain people --- or to be amused and entertained. We have television for that. Movies. Block-Buster Video. The Internet.

Mass is absolutely unique

One does not go to Block-Buster Video to worship God. One goes to experiment with entertainment and to be entertained.

One does not go to Mass to experiment with entertainment and to be entertained. One goes to Mass to worship God.

The two are not synonymous --- except, sadly, in the Catholic Church.

The vernacular, it turns out, has failed miserably in "engaging" the people with God (its putative intent)--- but it has succeeded eminently in engaging people with each other ... which they can equally do in countless other venues. If this is so, however, the logical question then is, "well, why go to Mass at all?" The answer is in the U.S. Census: most don't any longer (note the qualifier "any longer") ...

When the Mass has to "compete" with other forms of entertainment --- it loses. And it loses badly. Nearly anyone else is better at entertainment than a priest and a miserable choir ... hands down.

If the experiment with the vernacular has failed (and it is vital that we remember that it was supposed to be a limited experiment, with Latin remaining intact as the language of worship) and has failed with a staggering and perhaps irrecoverable loss to the Church ---- then a return to what worked in the past cannot possibly fare worse --- and given a successful track record of 1500 years with what worked before it was discarded, it is, I think, a pretty good bet.

The problem is that we are too arrogant to admit that we were wrong, that what we were allowed to experiment with, and had subsequently set in stone, did not work. No matter what the facts, what the figures, what the loss --- we refuse to admit our mistake.

The word for that is pride. The deadliest sin of all. And the casualties, as we have found over the past 40 years, have been nothing less than staggering ...

Yes?

http://www.boston-catholic-journal.com/

The Polonia Pearl.....aka...eddie

How to Talk to Democrats About Abortion

2010-02-20T14:34:00.000-08:00

Five Strategies for Making the Pro-Life Case

by Eric Pavlat

A lifelong Maryland Democrat, Eric Pavlat was raised in a pro-choice household, voted pro-choice, attended pro-choice demonstrations, and belonged to pro-choice organizations. He became pro-life after learning more about biology and human development. He also left his agnosticism and entered the Catholic Church in 1996, becoming a lay Dominican shortly thereafter.

Eric has defended the pro-life position in radio and television interviews and participated in public debate on the topic of assisted suicide. He holds a B.A. in English and a B.A. in Secondary Education from the University of Maryland at College Park, as well as an M.A.T.L. in Curriculum and Instruction from Nova Southeastern University.
He teaches 10th grade English at a public school in Maryland, helps his wife homeschool their six children, and does far too much genealogical research for his own good.

In the 1970s, when about 40 percent of Democratic congressmen were pro-life, the party had a seemingly insurmountable hold on the House of Representatives. Now, less than 15 percent are pro-life, and they're in an ever-shrinking House minority. Meanwhile, the big Democratic success stories from 2004 were the new representatives in Iowa, Missouri, and Michigan, as well as new Democratic governors in West Virginia and Louisiana. All of these victories were won by pro-life Democrats.

Some in the Democratic Party read the signs correctly; otherwise, they never could have elected a relative social moderate like Harry Reid (D-Nevada) as Senate minority leader. But many Democrats are not just pragmatic, wanting victory at any cost. Most Democrats I've spoken with seem to feel that maintaining legal abortion is actually the most compassionate course for a government to take, given the number of women facing crisis pregnancies. For them, criminalizing abortion is both sexist and heartless.

Many pro-lifers feel that arguing with such people is hopeless, especially when dealing with a liberal Democratic audience that has already made up its mind about abortion. And yet we're still called to evangelize. How, then, can we engage pro-choice Democrats in fruitful conversation? (Since Democrats prefer the term "pro-choice," I will use it here.)

First -- and most obvious -- is prayer. When Jesus calls us to pray for our enemies, we're to pray for mercy, forgiveness, and conversion. The more authentically we pray, the more love and compassion we feel for those with whom we fight in this culture war.

Beyond prayer, the key to any discussion is to locate the common ground you share with your conversation partner and work from there. This common ground need not involve abortion, at least initially. Finding one area where you agree with your interlocutor -- such as the war in Iraq, tax cuts, or the death penalty -- creates an openness to hearing your argument. Additionally, it precludes the possibility of his tuning you out solely on the basis of your membership in a certain political party.

Finally, it's important to lower your initial expectations. Due to the high emotions involved with the abortion debate, you may convince a person on an interior level and find that he nevertheless rejects your position outwardly. Your pressing for a concession early on may actually drive him away, making it that much harder to convince him down the road.

A far better tack is to make some concession on your side first -- such as rejecting anti-abortion violence, or promoting increased funding for women's health -- making the other person more likely to consider you "reasonable." Your having made a concession also helps him lower his own guard and gives him permission to admit to a change in his own attitude.

Strategy No. 1: Oppose Violence Against Women

Abortion was first aggregated to the Democratic Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s when feminists, following up on the civil rights movement, advocated it as part of women's liberation. Unfortunately, the results have been anything but good for women.

According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the United States is murder. The most frequent murderer of a pregnant woman is the father of her child. Connected to this startling statistic, we see that in post-abortive interviews, between 30 percent and 60 percent of abortions are described by the abortive mother as "coerced," most often by parents or, again, the child's father.

By legalizing abortion, our country has created an instant escape hatch for irresponsible males who aren't willing to accept the consequences of their actions and who pressure women into unwanted abortions. We have formed an expectation among males that if a "mistake" comes along, the woman has an obligation to "fix it." And they're often all too willing to enforce this decision with violence: Five years ago, the Washington Post reported that an estimated 295 pregnant women were murdered per year, with another 4 to 8 percent of pregnant women suffering physical violence at the hands of their husbands, boyfriends, or partners. While exact numbers are hard to obtain, it's probable that several thousand non-surgical abortions per year are performed by male partners who simply beat the abdomens of women until miscarriage occurs. This not only kills the child, it leaves the bereaved mother without the ability to prosecute the murderer (in most states, depending on the gestational age of the child) for any crime beyond simple assault and battery. The connection between abortion and domestic violence is unmistakable.

Threats and intimidation from male partners, as well as from parents, often play a role in a woman's choice to abort. In fact, according to a statistic in David C. Reardon's Aborted Women: Silent No More (Acorn Books, 2002), 80 percent of post-abortive women say that if they had received support instead of intimidation from their loved ones, they would have preferred to keep the baby. As it was, they felt that they had no choice but to abort.

Clearly, these statistics should be abhorrent to anyone on any side of the debate. Simply sharing the facts above often produces a startling effect. But this cannot be used merely as a bludgeon; it needs to be part of an overall pattern of authentic concern for the mother facing a surprise pregnancy. It might also be helpful to become familiar with the work of the crisis pregnancy centers in your area, especially those that provide shelter for threatened mothers.

Pro-life feminists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton feared that women would be exploited and abused if abortion were to become legalized, and their predictions were proven correct. No solutions to the problem of intimidation and violence against pregnant women can be achieved without the dual solutions of removing the availability of abortion and taking additional steps to protect threatened women.

Strategy No. 2: Support Women Facing Crisis Pregnancies

Sympathy for the woman facing a crisis pregnancy needs to come in two ways. First, we must be compassionate and express solidarity with those who feel forced into an abortion. Post-abortive women, as well as their family and friends, are often extremely defensive. What they need is sympathy for their crisis, not judgment. Part of this involves avoiding inflammatory language. While it's absolutely true that abortion is no less than the killing of a baby, the post-abortive woman hears only judgment in that line of argument. Her mind will immediately close, and your chance to make a convincing case is gone.

Secondly, it's important to acknowledge that simply overturning abortion laws will not end the abortion crisis. Even if Roe v. Wade were reversed, abortion would still be legal in most of the United States (as such a decision would merely leave the question up to individual states). And even if abortion were made illegal on the state level, many abortions would continue on the black market.

We need a system in which no woman feels there's a need for abortion. In other words, we need to admit that the U.S. government isn't yet doing what it should to establish justice and promote the general welfare when it comes to pregnant women. While volunteer groups have bravely filled an important void in crisis pregnancy centers, the government should step up to the plate where volunteerism is overwhelmed.

What Democrats will recognize as "sympathy" for the pregnant woman is government intervention. Though Republicans are generally suspicious of big government programs, this may be a time to make some exceptions -- for example, support for a government subsidy of pre- and post-natal care for low-income and under-insured women, or a child-care tax credit (or stay-at-home parent tax credit). The question of coerced abortions could be addressed from a legal standpoint, perhaps by requiring clinics to screen for coercion or including coercion-to-abort clauses within domestic violence provisions. In some cases, even such a thing as raising the minimum wage becomes pro-life, in that it might encourage low-income families to feel more secure in their ability to care for a child. Simply by addressing the "demand" side of the equation, it's conceivable that certain pieces of legislation could reduce abortion without directly referring to the practice itself.

Strategy No. 3: Explain the Harmful Health Effects of Abortion

Democrats have always been on the forefront of issues related to women's health, but they've tragically grouped abortion under this umbrella issue, alleging discrimination against women when this "health" concern is not adequately addressed. However, abortion represents a grave threat to women's health.

New findings from a study in Finland show that abortion is more physically dangerous than previously believed -- substantially more dangerous than childbirth. (Finland is an excellent choice for such a study because its government provides socialized medical care with centralized records.) A 2004 article in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology relates how researchers from Finland's National Research and Development Center for Welfare and Health looked at the death certificate records from 1987 to 2000 for all women ages 15 to 49 (i.e., of reproductive age). Their findings show that post-abortive women are 3.5 times more likely to die within twelve months after abortion than women after childbirth within the same period. In addition, abortion is a risk factor for future miscarriages and premature births, as well as for breast cancer.

Democrats also recognize that a person's body doesn't give the whole picture of a person's health; the person's mental state must be considered, too. But abortion, which is sometimes promoted as reducing women's stress, actually leads to increased rates of depression, alcoholism, drug abuse, and even psychiatric hospitalization (well-documented in the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association, the Clinical Psychological Review, and other peer-reviewed journals). In fact, according to the British Medical Journal, women who procured an abortion had an almost 500 percent greater suicide risk than women who had given birth -- as measured within the twelve months following either the abortion or the birth.

When all of this information is taken together, the pro-life position can be shown for what it really is: far more pro-woman than the pro-choice position. (For more information about the harmful effects of abortion on women's health, see "How Abortion Hurts Women: The Hard Proof," by Erika Bachiochi.)

Strategy No. 4: Emphasize the Inherent Discrimination of Abortion

Democrats were historically the party of the underdog. What Democrats need to see is that abortion is actually another form of discrimination against the weakest members of our society: unborn children.

The right to life is the fundamental human right, without which all others are meaningless. How will we practice the right to free speech, the right to follow any religion (or no religion), the right to assemble, the right to pursue happiness, if we don't first have the right to live? All other rights are secondary to and dependent upon the right to life.

There's also a strong parallel between abortion and slavery. The Supreme Court declared both slavery and abortion to be constitutional. Slavery denied the personhood of the African American; abortion denies the personhood of the extremely young. The defense of slavery rested on a person's right to do what he wants with his own "property," while the defense of abortion rests on a woman's right to do what she wants with her own body. The unsettling implications of that parallel are hard to ignore.

A final piece of evidence comes from the history of the pro-choice movement itself. Abortion in the United States was promoted partially to control the growth of socially undesirable people. PBS's American Experience quotes Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger as saying, "Birth control is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit [and] of preventing the birth of defectives." Even today, Planned Parenthood's clinics are most common in inner cities. Thirty-five percent of all abortions are performed on black women, even though African Americans comprise only 12 percent of the United States' population. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, more African Americans' lives have been ended by abortion since 1973 than by AIDS, cancer, heart disease, accidents, and murder combined.

Strategy No. 5: Discuss the Science of Fetal Development

When it comes to scientific advances in the field of fetal development over the last 30 years, some pro-choice advocates are simply misinformed. Pro-choice groups like Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and NOW like to claim that the fetus is simply extra tissue in the woman's body that can be disposed of easily. However, any medical textbook on fetal development shows clearly that the fetus is obviously a distinct person from the mother:

· The fetus has unique DNA, different from the mother's, at the moment of conception.
· The fetus has a heartbeat 18 days after conception, which is usually before the woman even knows she's pregnant.
· The fetus often has a different blood type than the mother.
· The fetus has measurable brain activity less than 45 days after conception, well before most abortions in America take place.

Published material on fetal development that's neither politically nor religiously affiliated can be very useful educational tools, as are images from the new 3-D sonograms.

Democrats usually favor government involvement in scientific advances. Remind them that Democrats proposed our mission to the moon more than four decades ago, advocated for alternative energy sources, realized the importance of mental health to a person's overall well-being, and tried to repair the damage we've done to our environment. Now it's time for the Democratic Party to accept the science behind human development.

If a Democrat tries to argue (as I once did) that human personhood begins when brain waves exist, another helpful argument is the existence of anencephalic babies -- that is, children born without a brain who usually live outside of the womb for only a few hours. It's hard to argue that a nine-month-old baby with such a birth defect isn't a person. Point out that humans in a persistent vegetative state are still "persons" deserving of certain civil rights and governmental protection. The existence of brain waves isn't useful as a measuring stick for personhood.

Democrats for Life

It's necessary to drive home the point that being pro-life doesn't mean being Republican. Acknowledging the universal right to life can and should be distinct from any personal political preference. If you feel that your words have had an effect, encourage them to check out www.democratsforlife.org, a national organization for pro-life Democrats.

Most of all, stress that the Democratic Party has considered itself the party that speaks for and protects those who cannot protect themselves, the voice for the voiceless. The unborn are the ultimate example of the powerless. It's time for more Democrats to speak up.

http://insidecatholic.com/

The Polonia Pearl.... aka eddie

We Have Forgotten

2009-12-25T16:50:00.000-08:00

Good Evening,

The writings on this blog are usually from other sites with permission to reprint them here. Tonight the writing will come from me, the Polonia Pearl.

Oh, let me explain the name "Polonia Pearl". When the Polish folks came to this country many years ago they settled here in Polonia amid the large and small rocks that were left behind by the glaciers. It took back breaking toil and years to clear the land for plantings. These Polish Catholic people called those rocks "Polonia pearls".

I took that name for my blog as it tells the story of Catholicism in America. Peoples from early times to today toil to bring truth, love and friendship to all of us here in this most beloved country. It requires dedication, love of God, love of neighbor and much prayer.

Much has happened since those early days when families large and small were deeply involved with their church, with God, their neighbor and with the less fortunate throughout the world.

We have come from having children given to us by God, from a woman and a man given to each other by God, from giving praise and adoration to God, from thanking our Lord for all that He has given us, from remembering with tears that our Lord God gave His life so we could have eternity with Him. We have forgotten!

Look around America. What do you see in this world today? Does it not frighten the soul to see how far we have strayed from the words of Jesus when he came among us to teach and bring us to Him?

The sins of the world need not be written here. We know what they are and we are all guilty of them.

It is now time to pray deeply to our Lord and God, for his forgiveness, for His help, and to ask for life with Him for eternity.

The Polonia Pearl

"Abortion Rights" Chris Matthews

2009-11-23T17:38:00.000-08:00

Opinion: Chris Matthews should be fired for his Offensive Interview of Bishop Tobin

by permission of Catholic Online

By Deacon Keith Fournier 11/23/2009

Matthews showed how inept he is as an interviewer, how misinformed he is as a Catholic, how rude he is as a person and how threatened he is by the Moral truth.

WASHINGTON, DC (Catholic Online) – When I discovered that Chris Matthews of the program Hardball was going to interview Bishop Thomas Tobin on the continuing saga of Congressman Patrick Kennedy, I knew I had to watch. Bishop Tobin has courageously - and with a Pastor’s heart - tried to help Congressman Patrick Kennedy to see the dangerous error of his failure to defend the fundamental Right to Life. The Congressman is one of far too many unfaithful Catholics in public life who do not demonstrate moral coherence in their exercise of public office.

After sitting through several segments, I should have known from the “tease” to the segment which I was awaiting where this arrogant, self centered commentator intended to take this alleged “interview”. He repeatedly “teased” to the segment by incessantly repeating the term “Abortion rights” and indicating that he was going to interview Bishop Tobin who was "punishing" Congressman Kennedy for supporting “abortion rights”. There are no “abortion rights”, only human rights. I cannot listen to that phrase “abortion rights” without instantly responding.

The claim of a so called “right” to abort an innocent child is heinous. It is also a fallacy to couch this evil in the language of a woman’s “Right to Choose.” Some choices are always and everywhere wrong. Yet, that is the current state of the positive law in America since the horrendous decisions in Roe and Doe. Women can “choose” to take the life of our first neighbors, the ones who live where we all once lived, in the womb. That “choice” - which is always and everywhere wrong because it is the taking of innocent human life - is also currently protected by the Police Power of the State.

Abortion is the only example of taking innocent human life which is so protected by the Police Power of the State. It has a special status as some sort of "super right" in the American libertine culture and the dictatorship of relativism. Imagine if the positive law created a so called “right” to kill three week old babies because the Supreme Court said it was OK. There is no moral difference. Abortion is feticide in a new language intended to make what is evil sound acceptable.

In an Orwellian effort to change the debate and assuage their consciences its’ advocates have fashioned a “rights language” to make it somehow sound enlightened. It does not work. Science has confirmed what our conscience long ago told all of us, the child in the womb is one of us. She is our neighbor. It is always wrong to kill an innocent neighbor. This truth is written on our hearts by the Natural Law which all just positive laws should participate in and not abrogate. Intentional abortion is wrong and should be illegal in a just society.

The notion that the act of intentionally killing of an entire class of human beings should be called an “abortion right” is despicable. Only human persons can have “rights.” Governments do not create them, they can only recognize them. The act of abortion is a heinous crime. It has no "rights.”

The shorthand phrase “abortion rights” is a linguistic tool used by some journalists like Matthews to further the abortion deception. Even if the positive law of the United States has placed the Police Power behind protecting the evil “choice” to take innocent human life in the womb, one simply cannot have a “right” to do what is always wrong.

Matthews finally did have the good Bishop on his show. It quickly became clear that he intended to pummel him, browbeat him and try to persuade him to abandon the truth and excuse the error which Matthews has embraced. In his grandiosity and arrogance Matthews proceeded to talk over the Bishop, interrupt him, cut him off, and try to lecture him in a condescending manner on “the law”. He repeatedly tried to force him to answer loaded questions. He finally had the audacity to suggest that the Bishop needed to rethink his position.

MSNBC should publicly apologize to the Bishop and Matthews should be fired for his lack of professionalism. To not give this good and intelligent man, this Bishop of the Catholic Church, an opportunity to speak, after inviting him on this show, was inexcusable.

I hope Chris Matthews is reading this article. If you are Chris, here is my heartfelt personal message to you, “You should be ashamed of yourself. You need to get right with God and with your Church”.

Matthews feigned respect by repeatedly calling the Bishop “Your Excellency”, but his manner of proceeding revealed he has no respect for the Office. Matthews, a professing Catholic, also does not understand his own faith. He does not understand that his own Church’s unwavering opposition to the taking of all innocent human life at every age and stage is the ground of every social justice issue.

At several points in this frustrating interview, as the Bishop was trying to help Matthews see that the defense of the Right to Life is a "Natural Law" position and not simply "religious", Matthews simply cut him off and continued his ill mannered browbeating.

Yet, in spite of Matthews asinine effort to claim that morality has nothing to do with the law, the Bishop at least succeeded in showing that morality is the foundation of much of the positive law. He used a few salient examples such as our prohibiting in the law the killing our neighbor, stealing his property or beating him up. Matthews would hear none of it.

Chris Matthews was not interested in interviewing Bishop Thomas Tobin. In this embarrassing excuse for a program he showed how inept he is as an interviewer, how misinformed he is as a Catholic, how rude he is as a person and how threatened he is by the Moral truth as taught with conviction and courage by his own Church.

Chris Matthews should be fired for his offensive and impolite Interview of Bishop Thomas Tobin. Then, he should sign up for the Right of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) and learn the Catholic faith all over again.

www.Catholic.org

The Polonia Pearl

Health Care Reform - Sample Letter

2009-10-17T10:57:00.000-07:00

Senator .......................
Hart Senate Office Building

Washington D.C. 20510-4903
Congressperson ...............
Rayburn House Office Building
Washington D.C. 20515-4907

Dear ......................

As you and your peers deliberate on "Health Care Reform", I urge you to consider the following:

In this letter I am writing specifically about a fundamental requirement that such legislation must respect human life and rights of conscience in the context of abortion. I urge you to make this legislation "abortion neutral," by preserving longstanding federal policies that prevent government promotion of abortion and respect conscience rights.

In your continuing studies and deliberations regarding "Health Care Reform," please look at current realities:

No federal program mandates coverage for elective abortions, or subsidizes health plans that include such abortions. Most Americans do not want abortion in their health coverage, and most consider themselves "pro-life." About 80 percent of all hospitals do not generally provide abortions. A September 2009 survey commissioned by the Catholic bishops’ conference found that 67% of Americans oppose "measures that would require people to pay for abortion coverage with their federal taxes" while only 19% favor such measures; 68% said they do not want abortion in their own insurance coverage while 24% said they do.

By what right, then, and by what precedent, would legislation make abortion coverage into a nationwide norm, or force Americans to subsidize it as a condition for participating in a public health program?

And most important - for a Health Care Reform Bill to be silent on the issue of abortion would absolutely bring taxpayer funded abortion into this legislation. It must positively and clearly exclude abortion funding from this program in so many words.

I wish to make certain that needed health care reform is not undermined by abandoning longstanding and widely supported policies against abortion funding and mandates, and in favor of conscience protection.

I urge you to help ensure that any legislation that comes up for a vote does not include these unacceptable features. Please support amendments to correct them, and oppose any rule for consideration that would block such amendments. By your actions on these issues, you can advance urgently needed health care reform that will truly serve the poor and needy and uphold the dignity of all.

Sincerely,

...........................................

INDULGENCES

2009-08-21T12:41:00.000-07:00

and Why they Remain Vital to us Today

How many of us --- indeed, all of us --- have at one time or another said, "Ah ... would that I had never done that! Could I only go back in time!

Confucius, in one of his well known Analects, summarized it best: "What is said cannot be unsaid." How true. What is more, in so many, many ways, what is done cannot be undone ...

We are prisoners of our past --- and Time, the stern warden, has thrown away the key.

We are prisoners to what we have said and to what we have done. In spite of all our longing --- and despite every reparation --- we have done what we have done and said what we have said. And we know it! And even this we cannot "unknow".

However much we have amended our lives or corrected our ways, we cannot escape what we have done and what we have said. They are deeds and words indited, chiseled as it were, in a ledger of adamantine stone that we understand as the truthful history of our lives.

For all our blithe protestations that, "we have moved on, moved beyond them", they remain withal the secret burden in our hearts, the darkest closets in our memories in fearfully remote corners of our minds. In the dark watches of the night they often return to us, or totally unbidden, come to us as we walk down the street. Indeed, even the prophet says,

"I know my iniquity, and my sin is always before me." (Psalm 50.5)

And yet the same prophet tells us that

"If thou, O Lord, wilt mark iniquities: Lord, who shall stand it. For with thee there is merciful forgiveness." (Psalm 129.3)

In light of this undeniable reality, how are we to understand the forgiveness of God afforded us in Holy and Sacramental Confession? On the one hand God forgives our sins ... while on the other He retains our punishment ... How is that the forgiveness extended to our sins does not extend to the punishment due sin? More simply put, does not forgiveness of the act entail remission of the punishment? In a word, no.

Justice and Satisfaction for Sin

First of all, not every sin is susceptible to restitution in the way, say, that the sin of stealing $100 can be rectified (not undone ...) by repaying the $100 to the person from whom it was stolen. This sinful act can be remediated by simply restoring what was wrongly taken. A lie can be redressed by telling the truth. However, this clearly is not the case with the sins of adultery and murder ... among many others. We cannot, of ourselves, restore, rehabilitate, or redress every sin. We cannot bring to life whom we have murdered. We cannot restore our virginity or that of another. We may be forgiven such sins but there is no path to restitution. This is to say that we cannot make satisfaction for them.

In such cases a commensurable privation, or punishment, is the only satisfaction possible in justice --- and God is just (however frequently and conveniently overlooked). That justice is a good is indisputable. Were it not, then injustice would be good --- and no one reasonable will argue this. God, then, Who is perfect, and perfectly good, cannot be wanting in any good, and we have agreed that justice is an indefeasible good. There is, in a word, no incongruity between God's goodness and God's justice. In fact, the two are both mutual and reciprocal. The notion of punishment, then, in no way derogates from God as good and God as just.

Since justice demands the atonement of sin, the punishment justly due sin must be satisfied either in this life or in the next. It appears inescapable. Satisfaction in this life is generally held by the Saints and Doctors of the Church to be less rigorous than the satisfaction exacted in the life to come. In this life or the next, justice will be satisfied.

But since all things are possible to God, why cannot the punishment due sin be commuted also? Since God is all good and all loving --- as well as just --- would He not make this at least possible? The answer to this question is precisely the point of this article.

The KEY to Understanding that All Things are Possible to God

The answer is yes.

To understand this, let us look at an analogy in secular life. The President of the United States, (or the Governor of any State) is granted the power of Executive Clemency, or the power to commute the sentence due in justice to an individual guilty of a crime ... even a capital offense. He exercises this power ex meru motu, or of his own accord, and independent of the sentence or penalty already delivered by a Court of Justice. This power is accorded him by Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution.

The question implicit in the exercise of this power is this: why would the President of the United States be granted --- by the Constitution of the United States --- this power to entirely commute the sentence delivered by a court that demands, and would exact, justice --- if he was never intended to exercise it? In other words, why would any power be given any individual if it were never intended that the power so granted be exercised? The question, really, is rhetorical: it would be absurd to do so. Are we agreed?

Let us then look at Indulgences and the power to grant them by the Pope. It is a power explicitly granted him by no less an authority than Christ Himself in Sacred Scripture:

"Et ego dico tibi, quia tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram ædificábo Ecclésiam meam, et portæ ínferi non prævalébunt advérsus eam. Et tibi dabo claves regni cælórum. Et quodcúmque ligáveris super terram, erit ligátum et in Cælis : et quodcúmque sólveris super terram, erit solútum et in Cælis."

“And I say to thee: That thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in Heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in Heaven.” (St. Matthew 16.18-19)

Let us re-frame the question we initially asked relative to Executive Clemency in the state of secular affairs: why would the Pope be granted --- by Christ Himself --- this power to entirely commute the demands of justice --- if he was never intended to exercise it? In other words, why would the Pope be given this power if Christ never intended that the power so granted be exercised? Once again, such an assumption is absurd. If such power resides in the President of the United States through the Constitution --- a fortiori ... that is to say, with greater force still, does the power to grant Plenary Indulgences reside in the Pope through Christ.

This is, literally, the KEY to understanding Indulgences: the key to Kingdom of Heaven given to Peter with a commission of such profound authority that, Christ tells Peter, "whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in Heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven.” Peter, the Pope, has power that extends to Heaven itself, such that it is eo ipso ratified by God Himself in Peter's pronouncing it!

The State of Innocence Regained: undoing the done and unsaying the said

In acquiring a Plenary Indulgence one effectively regains the state of Baptismal Innocence. It is a stunning realization --- and an unspeakable gift! It is nothing less than life absolutely anew in Christ! All that we had done in the way of sin has, through the Power of the Keys of Peter, been undone; all that had been said, is unsaid. They cease to be. Within our lives in Christ, these things no longer exist and never occurred. They have been totally abrogated, canceled, expunged, through the pronouncement of Peter --- which is ipso facto ratified in Heaven itself!

In beginning this article, we had expressed the universal lamentation: "Ah ... would that I had never done that! Could I only go back in time!" You cannot go back in time. But what you have done can, after all --- and to our amazement --- be undone. But not of ourselves. This prerogative belongs to Peter, to the Pope, alone --- to undo what we have done, to unsay what we have said. He has the power because he has been given the power --- and he was given that power by Christ with a purpose and to an end. And Peter --- the Pope --- exercises this power, and is being faithful to this commission, in granting Plenary Indulgences to the Faithful under stipulations that he himself determines. And when he does --- it is instantly ratified in Heaven!

Do you wish to be totally free of the burden of your sins? Of the penalties --- in justice demanded of them, and which, in all likelihood and with good reason, you fear when pondering the hour of your death ... and what lies beyond? Christ has spoken much of this.

But He also spoke to Peter --- and through Peter, to us. A Plenary Indulgence --- the forgiveness of all the sins of your entire life, and the punishment due in justice for them, is held out to you by God ... in the hands of Peter. 1

And still you linger in doubt?

As the Angel said repeatedly to St. Augustine in the garden, "Tolle, lege! Tolle, lege! "Take and read!

And doubt no more.

Joseph Mary del Campos

http://www.boston-catholic-journal.com/

The Polonia Pearl.....aka eddie

1 Of course, the forgiveness extended by God for any sin and under all circumstances, presupposes and thus requires perfect Contrition, or sorrow, for the sins committed together with the resolute amendment to sin no more. Any petition to God for forgiveness of sins that is not accompanied by genuine sorrow is, in conspect Dei, that is to say, before God, an act of presumption and insolence, not reverence; and in the Holy Confessional constitutes the grave sin of blasphemy, such that the sinner leaves the Confessional, not only without absolution (even if the priest has pronounced it), but more guilty than when he entered it. Sorrow for sin is indispensable to its forgiveness.

2009-07-17T17:58:00.000-07:00

Polonia Pearl here....

Did President Obama Mislead the Holy Father?

by Deal W. Hudson

In the late afternoon of July 1o, President Obama met privately with Pope Benedict XVI for just over 30 minutes. According to official Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi, S.J., "The president explicitly expressed his commitment to reducing the numbers of abortions and to listen to the church's concern on moral issues."

On July 13 in a Senate committee hearing, Sen. Barbara Mikulski was forced to admit under persistent questioning by Sen. Orrin Hatch that the new health-care bill includes abortion coverage. Planned Parenthood's Guttmacher Institute estimates government funding of abortion increases abortion by 20 to 35 percent.

There were 1,206,200 abortions in 2006, according to National Right Life (the last annual results available). The math is easy: If the heath-care package currently being pushed by Obama is passed, the result will be 240,000 to 420,000 more abortions in the first year alone.

Did President Obama know these abortion provisions were in the Senate health-care bill when he met with the Holy Father? There is no reason to think he didn't. He certainly knew he had gone on the record supporting federal funding for abortion in the District of Columbia.

If President Obama is honest with himself, he must admit to misleading Benedict at their meeting.

Obama apologists will immediately defend the president by arguing that his plan is about reducing the need for abortion. Melody Barnes, director of the Domestic Policy Council, revealed this as the Obama administration's real aim last May under questioning from Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America.

It's a weak defense. Those 240,000 to 420,000 additional abortions are a near certainty. Meanwhile, the number of abortions eliminated by direct assistance to poor mothers, sex education, increased contraception, and adoption programs are unknown, and projections are highly speculative.

In fact, the new health-care bill's impact on the unborn will be so great that some are calling it the "silent FOCA." Speaking at a press conference on Monday, Rep. Chris Smith said, "Obamacare is the greatest threat ever to the lives and wellness of unborn children and their mothers since Roe v. Wade was rendered in 1973."

Some Catholic supporters of Obama are urging Senate Democrats to take the abortion provisions out of the health-care package. On America magazine's group blog, Michael Sean Winters wrote, "We should, however, be letting our congressional representatives and senators know that providing federal funds for abortion is a deal-breaker."

Even more surprising is a snippet that Jill Stanek posted from Hardball. Chris Matthews, a Catholic Obama enthusiast, insisted that including abortion services in the health bill is "the last thing Obama needs. The issue's complicated and divisive and controversial enough without bringing abortion into it."

But then Matthews adds the kicker:

He goes over to see the pope and says they're going to reduce the number of abortions, and then that same week he pushes to subsidize abortion? You can't do that!

"You can't do that!" will be exactly the reaction of most of America's Catholics when they realize their president looked Benedict in the eye and said he was committed to reducing abortion, knowing all the while just what was in his health-care bill.

This is not just about the abortion issue anymore. It's about basic respect and honesty.

Deal W. Hudson is the director of InsideCatholic.com and the author of Onward, Christian Soldiers: The Growing Political Power of Catholics and Evangelicals in the United States (Simon and Schuster)

http://InsideCatholic.com

The Polonia Pearl

The Honeymoon is Over

2009-04-09T18:26:00.000-07:00

By George Wesolek

My personal "honeymoon" with President Barack Obama is over.

As a "decline to state" voter who voted for John McCain in November, I have been watching President Obama carefully with a mixture of apprehension and hope. I voted for McCain because in conscience I could not vote for someone who appeared by his record to be so extremely anti-life and pro-abortion. Capping this for me was Obama's answer in regard to an abortion question during the campaign where he said that he would not want to "punish his daughters with a baby." My vote was roundly criticized and mocked by some family and many friends. They spoke glowingly of the great hope that Obama would bring to the wilderness of Washington politics.

I must confess that I have been heartened by the Obama straightforward push for advancement on healthcare access, something that I feel is a human right denied to many millions of U.S. citizens. I also am heartened by his offer of friendship to the Arab speaking world by his effort to communicate with them with a sense of reasonable dialogue. I am also in favor of other initiatives regarding pressing social questions that are now, at least, on the table for discussion.

My sense of apprehension and unease, however, has been around the life issues. Being pro-life and considering abortion as the preeminent social justice issue of our day, I have been warily watching President Obama's actions on these issues.

Along with others, I heard during the campaign from pro-Obama Catholics and Catholic organizations established to promote his candidacy that Obama would accomplish more than the previous administration to curtail abortions and promote life using "non-divisive" strategies. I have been eagerly looking for indications that this was indeed the case.

I have not seen anything that would indicate a "pro-life" openness or even a small move in that general direction. On the contrary, I have seen just the opposite.

Besides the appointments of pro-abortion staff to key positions, there have been three policy shifts by Obama that have signaled clearly where he is on the issue of life and where he intends to go.

- The Mexico City Policy

Obama reversed a policy that disallowed federal funds (taxpayer money) for organizations that promoted or performed abortions in the developing world. Now, the funded exportation of that American product - Abortion - will be delivered and paid for using our tax dollars, to people and cultures around the world as one of our solutions to grinding global poverty. The premise is: If abortion is the way to solve difficulties and inconviences here in the United States, it must be eagerly awaited by others to solve their problems even if their culture abhors the thought of killing their precious resource of children.

- Federal Conscience Rights for Health Care Workers

Also being reviewed for revocation is a policy firmly entrenching the rights of medical personnel to refuse to participate in procedures and practices that are against their moral beliefs, e.g. abortion. In attempting to reverse the recently enacted Health and Human Services regulations ensuring conscience protection, Obama has put this policy back on the table for "review" and there is the real possibility that conscience rights will be restricted and even, eventually, eliminated.

- Reversal of the Ban on Federal Funding for Embryonic Stem Cell Research

If there is anything that clearly delineates President Obama's intent regarding the life issues it is this reversal on embryonic stem cell research. Citing that the "majority of Americans" are in favor of this reversal, he distorts science and ethics by making embryos available for research. This is a classic "crossing the Rubicon" as it demonstrates that, in his mind, these embryos either are not human life or they are human life of such a second-class nature that they are not worthy of respect and protection. Further, at the same time, he also rescinded an executive order that provided resources for innovative forms of adult stem cell research, the type of research that is ethical and very productive in terms of scientific results. This move ominously implies an ideological mindset that is unscientific and predisposed to follow the trail of embryonic research even though there are no cures and serious problems with this kind of approach.

Most distressing, is that there is no reaction from those pro-Obama Catholics and Catholic organizations that were and are apologists for Obama and his policies. These organizations - Catholics United, Alliance of Catholics for the Common Good, Network and others - provided Catholics with a scenario that painted Obama as "pro-life." Some of them openly said that they were pro-life and would work to move policy in a pro-life direction under Obama. Where are they now? Where are there any policy initiatives that would blunt the irrevocable thrust of these Obama actions early in his presidency?

The culture of death is making deeper inroads in our national policies and there is almost no response from Catholics who helped elect President Obama. It is time for them to step up to the plate.

By George Wesolek

George Wesolek is director of Public Policy/ Social Concerns for the Archdiocese of San Francisco.

The Polonia Pearl

Bishop Hermann's Clarion Call

2009-02-06T18:24:00.000-08:00

Polonia Pearl here,

Pro-life Mass — Catholic identity

by Bishop Robert J. Hermann

I was very edified this past Saturday to see the Cathedral almost filled for the Pro-Life Mass. Then to see such a large contingent, on a very cold day, make a pilgrimage to the abortion clinic, praying the Rosary for Life, was truly heartwarming.

At the very moment I am writing this, our new president, Barack Obama, is being sworn into office. We congratulate him, and we pray for him, but we cannot condone his pro-death policies, even while we are happy that so many people feel they have new hope. We must do everything we can to oppose his pro-death-to-children efforts.

Joseph Bottum, in an article entitled "Abortion after Obama," writing in the January 2009 edition of First Things, pages 13-15, tells us, "Now the 2008 election has brought us the presidency of Barack Obama, the most consistent supporter of legalized abortion ever nominated by a majority party."

When asked about making decisions as to when a baby gets human rights, President Obama answered that "is above my pay grade." He also stated that he would not want his daughters "punished with a baby."

He has made it known that, upon taking office, he will remove all federal restrictions on funding embryonic stem-cell research. He also intends to sign the Freedom of Choice Act. Seldom has our nation ever been confronted with such an extreme measure. The Freedom of Choice Act will invalidate for the entire country all restrictions on abortion before viability, including parental notification, waiting periods and partial-birth abortion bans. President Obama has no problem supporting legislation that would even kill a child who survived a botched abortion.

If at this stage our anger is directed at President Obama, our anger is misdirected. Obama is not the enemy. He needs and deserves our prayers, not our condemnation.

As Catholics, we are not guiltless. It seems to me that when President Kennedy compromised Catholic teachings and accommodated political pressures in order to be elected to the highest office in the land, he set the tone for many Catholic leaders to follow and to compromise their Catholic principles to get ahead.

In our Supreme Court and in our Congress, we have a plethora of so-called Catholics who are failing to live their Catholic identity. Over 50 percent of our electorate voted for a president who is one of the most pro-culture-of-death candidates from a major party to run for the highest office of the land.

Yes, we can thank one-half of our Catholics for bailing out on their faith!

After almost 50 years of having 50 percent of Catholics abandoning their Catholic identity, we cannot expect to turn this culture around by short-term political efforts.

In order to bring about a transformation from a culture of death to a culture of life, we have to restore our Catholic identity.

This means that all of us, as Catholics, have to undergo a profound transformation. It means that we have to take a good look at every facet of our Catholic life, including the serious study of life issues, the regular and devout use of our Sacramental system, especially the devout and weekly attendance at Mass, the regular reception of the Sacrament of Reconciliation, the devout praying of the daily Rosary, and then the faithful, loving and firm witness to lax Catholics about our Catholic beliefs and practices.

We have to live our lives in such a way that we will be unafraid to witness to what we believe and live.

I may courageously say that I am willing to die to end abortion, but am I equally willing to say that I am ready to let my ego get ruffled daily for the same cause? Yet … that is where I need to arrive if I am to be a credible witness.

What a glorious opportunity we all have to make a difference in the pro-life cause. Until we are willing to be politically incorrect in order to be biblically correct, we will never convince anyone that our religion is worth living.

It does not take 100 percent of our Catholics to transform this country. If 75 percent of our Catholics were steeped in Catholic identity, the abortion issue would be over for our entire country. We have many, many evangelicals on our side in the culture of life. Look at how many more of them would flock to our side if we really lived our Catholic teachings! They, too, are looking for changeless principles lived out in practice.

But there is more! Our laxity in living our Catholic life has blinded us into not seeing the role of Satan in the culture of death. Satan is having a heyday in our midst, because he has managed to remain invisible in the culture of death, and our laxity has granted him that luxury. Since we are not steeped in the Word of God as we should be, we do not recognize his darkness in our society. Our first reading from Hebrews tells us, "The word of God is living and effective, sharper than any two-edged sword, penetrating even between soul and spirit, joints and marrow, and able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart."

St. Paul tells us that our warfare is not against flesh and blood but against the power and principles of darkness. He also tells us that we should not let the sun go down upon our anger so as to give Satan a foothold. These readings are wake-up calls for us all. I bring this up deliberately, because I do not want us to fall into Satan's trap of getting us to hate President Obama or any of the pro-choice Catholic legislators in Congress. Being pro-life means that we engage far more in spiritual warfare than in political warfare.

That Satan is very alive in influencing all of us is his best-kept secret. Becoming steeped in the Word of God and the teachings of the Catholic Church exposes his evil machinations.

President Obama, pro-choice legislators and Planned Parenthood are not our enemies. Our enemies are the invisible forces masked behind these people. Most of them do not have a clue that they are being deceived by our common enemy, the devil. They are used by our common enemy, Satan, and his evil forces, to get us to hate so that we, too, will end up in a culture of death. President Obama and all pro-choice and pro-abortion legislators, as well as members supporting Planned Parenthood (and we have in our own state a national legislator who has received over $900,000 from groups that advocate for abortion rights) — these are not our enemies. They are used by the evil one to get us to hate them in our efforts to be pro-life and thereby ditch our pro-life efforts. We cannot fall for that trap!

We owe all of them prayers and fasting for their conversion. At one point, Gov. Reagan was California's very pro-abortion governor. Yet he became a very pro-life president. He repented and regretted the evil he supported.

We must bravely witness against supporting pro-choice and pro-abortion candidates in political elections, but pray daily for their conversion.

This is a great time to be a Catholic. This is a great time to witness to such a clear choice, the choice of Christ or the anti-Christ.

We have only one life to live, and Jesus is it!

If our focus consists only in counting votes, we will be discouraged. If our focus is on giving ourselves and our activities totally to Christ so that He can use our witnessing as He wishes, our hearts will be throbbing and radiating with life and joy.

This is a great time to wake up from our slumber of simply calling ourselves Catholic, and wage war against the forces of darkness in ourselves first and then in our culture, a culture which is resting on the premise that God does not exist.

Our actions and our lifestyles have to radiate the inner presence of Christ in the home and in the marketplace.

This is a glorious day and a glorious opportunity for any follower of Christ! We need to recover our Catholic identity, and we can do it!

http://www.catholicculture.org/

The Polonia Pearl

The Mystery and Power of Personal Prayer

2009-01-23T10:04:00.000-08:00

Polonia Pearl here,

by Dr. Jeff Mirus, October 12, 2007

I am continually amazed at how many Catholics forget the power of personal prayer. There are priestly, consecrated and lay apostles who make significant commitments to the active Christian life, including the Church’s liturgical life, but fail to nourish that commitment through personal prayer. There are Catholic parents who take their Faith seriously but seldom remember to pray for their children. And of course there are many relatively casual Catholics who fail to cultivate a personal prayer life of any kind.

Personal and Private Prayer

There is certainly great power in public prayer, especially the Mass and the Sacraments, by which Christ makes His divine life available to us in a pre-eminent way. Christ also taught that wherever two or three are gathered together in His name, He will be in their midst (Mt 18:20). But the power of Christ’s presence, offered to us in all the various forms of public prayer, cannot be absorbed and released into our own lives without personal prayer. For a deep combination of spiritual and psychological reasons, if we fail to pray personally, we not only miss many opportunities to do good, but we slowly smother our own relationship with Christ—no matter how many times we go through the motions of public or group prayer.

Although liturgical prayer can and should be intensely personal, we cannot learn to pray personally, or ever excel at it, unless we are willing to pray privately. Our Lord tells us this point blank when he warns us not to be hypocrites, who pray only in public, but to go to our rooms, close our doors and pray privately to our Father, who reads the secrets of our hearts (Mt 6). In fact, the New Testament speaks repeatedly about private prayer (and says comparatively little about any other kind). Jesus prayed at his baptism (Lk 3:21), He frequently went aside to pray alone (see Mt 14, Mk 1 & 6, Lk 5 & 6, etc.), He prayed at the time of his Transfiguration (Lk 9), He prayed that Peter would not fail in his faith (Lk 22), and He prayed mightily during his Passion (Mt 26, Mk 14). Even his great priestly prayer at the Last Supper (for all those the Father had given Him in the world) was an intensely personal prayer said in the presence of the Twelve (Jn 17).

Not surprisingly for one who prayed so frequently, Our Lord also taught often about personal and private prayer. He enjoined us to pray for our enemies and those who persecute, curse and calumniate us (Mt 5, Lk 6); He told us to pray for vocations (Mt 9, Lk 10); He urged us to pray against the temptations and trials of the end times (Mt 24, Mk 13); and He warned us to pray unceasingly (Mk 13, Lk 18, Lk 21). He also explained that we would receive whatever we asked in prayer (Mt 21, Mk 11), and He taught us the Our Father so we would know both how to pray and what kinds of things to pray for (Mt 6, Lk 11). The evidence abounds in the gospels, and this emphasis on personal prayer continues in both the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles.

Persistence in Prayer

In the many New Testament texts on prayer, we see Our Lord emphasizing again and again the need to pray persistently, without losing heart. He told two wonderful stories about the importance of persistence, one concerning a widow and an unjust judge (Lk 18), and the other about a man who needed to borrow bread from his neighbor in the middle of the night (Lk 11). Both the judge and the neighbor, neither of whom loved as God loves, succumbed to the onslaught of prayer. Moreover, Jesus sometimes demanded that same persistence from others, as in the case of the Canaanite woman who actually had to argue with the Son of God that even dogs get the crumbs from under their master’s table (Mt 15, Mk 7). The result was that He healed her daughter.

After the story of the importunate neighbor, Our Lord so stressed persistence in prayer that it became a proverb: “I tell you, ask and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (Lk 11:9-10). But his next point is even more dramatic. What father, Jesus asks, will give his son a serpent when he asks for a fish, or a scorpion when he asks for an egg? This question is the prelude to Our Lord’s final and greatest lesson about prayer: If we who are evil know how to give good gifts to our children, “how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Lk 11:13)

The Holy Spirit in Prayer

Here Our Lord teaches us that the Holy Spirit is always at work in prayer. By way of introduction, I’ll offer an exceedingly small proof, but of a kind that is commonly experienced. On one occasion when I went to Church for my hour of Eucharistic adoration, there was a man sleeping in the back pew of the small chapel where the Blessed Sacrament was exposed. He was stretched out, flat on his back, and snoring loudly enough to distract even the greatest of saints! This annoyed me, but I decided to wait to take action until I’d spent a little time attempting to pray. Paradoxically, as time went on, the louder he got, the less it bothered me. Occasionally he stirred and muttered something like “Oh my God”, so perhaps he was praying too. In any case, left to my own devices, I would have been driven to anger, yet his unseemly noise soon sounded more like the music of another soul. Clearly, I wasn’t being left to my own devices.

Thérèse of Lisieux often fell asleep at prayer, and it caused her to glory in her littleness. I don’t recommend the technique, which was also employed by the apostles in Gethsemane, yet I leave it to God to understand the effort at wakefulness and render it fruitful, even if it fails. In any case, our topic is not sleep, but the Holy Spirit, Who is actively involved in all prayer. The magnitude of Christ’s teaching is precisely this: Personal prayer is a continuous motion of the Holy Spirit between the one who prays and the Father (or, indeed, the Son). It is the Holy Spirit whom the Father continually gives in prayer, and the Holy Spirit whom the Father continually receives back. St. Paul explains it this way:

We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the Spirit groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies…. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And he who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. (Rm 8:22-27)

The challenge for us is that this astonishing and growing action of the Holy Spirit—this ever-deepening exchange of the Holy Spirit between ourselves and the Father—does not take place within us unless we pray personally, by which I really mean interiorly. There is nothing automatic about it, and the mere external use of rites, group prayers, or verbal formulas avails nothing. True prayer requires our personal, interior participation—that is, our determination to communicate with the Father, honestly lifting ourselves to God with whatever capacity we possess at the time. Even if all we can do is throw ourselves toward God in an occasional moment of fear or longing, we have made a beginning according to our capacity. The intention and the habit of personal prayer can be built on whatever beginning is within our power. It is up to us to practice, to exercise this initially limited ability to pray.

When we do this over time, the Holy Spirit becomes a fountain of life and power within us, uniting us to God Himself. Just as the theological virtues enable us to believe with God’s conviction, hope with God’s strength, and love with God’s love, so too is our capacity for prayer uplifted, amplified and perfected by the power of the Holy Spirit. For this reason, there is nothing on this earth more powerful than a person at prayer. Nothing is better calculated to overcome any conceivable obstacle, and we can give or receive no greater gift than prayer. Indeed, the success of everything else depends on our interaction with the Holy Spirit in prayer. Are we not foolish, then, to so often overlook what should be first, last, and always in our lives?

http://Catholicculture.org

Polonia Pearl.....aka...eddie

Worry

2009-01-20T17:16:00.000-08:00

Polonia Pearl here,

"Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself."

(St. Matthew 6.34)

Imagine a man who had lived the better part of his life worrying about many things, living in great apprehension and anxiety and seldom allowing himself to relax, to breathe freely, to enjoy the many good things around him – afraid even to lift his head confidently, since worrying weighs him down --- and, in truth, even if this man consciously chooses not to worry, he believes that doing so will surely bring down upon him all about which he had worried or feared! In fact, he secretly believes that it is worry alone that staves off such impending catastrophes, for unless one fears the worse, it is sure to happen ...

Suppose, moreover, that the principal source of his worries was, as often it is, money, financial security -- and that he had lived this way miserably for many years. Then imagine this man unexpectedly coming into a great sum of money; in fact, enough to provide him with the financial security for which he had so desperately longed --- and then some.

Can you begin to imagine his regret over those years spent in needless worry, those unrepeatable events in his life which he never truly enjoyed–those days, weeks, months, years spent under the pall of worry which, had he known of his future windfall, he would otherwise have embraced with enjoy, grasped in the happiness they would have lent him.

For all his money, for all his present security, he cannot regain so much as one of them – all of them were lost, and forever, in the moment he had relinquished them to worry. In the end, his deepest regret would be the realization of his having lacked trust in the providence of God.

Looking back, from an irrecoverable distance, he realizes too late that he had squandered all his time and so much of his life in needlessly worrying – when instead, he should have been rejoicing all along.

This is a parable for modern man. Man immersed in matter. Man apart from God.

Do not be afraid to rejoice in the moment.

If your inheritance is not yet present, it is forthcoming. It is true. Christ Himself promised it.

http://www.boston-catholic-journal.com/

The Polonia Pearl

2009-01-04T11:03:00.000-08:00

Polonia Pearl here,

Spirit & Life®
"The words I spoke to you are spirit and life." (Jn 6:63)

Catholic Culture and the Election of Barack Obama

It is impossible to speak of a “Catholic culture” in America any longer. A whole segment of the populace who call themselves “Catholics” do not feel bound by any standard of Catholic orthodoxy or sanity. In fact, it is impossible to even speak of a Catholic culture in most parishes! At a recent “ministry faire” of a large Catholic parish in south Florida, the Respect Life ministry of the parish displayed its pro-life materials next to the table of the “social justice” committee of the same parish. Any commonality between the two ministries was simply in the space they shared. Their worldviews could not have been further apart, but they both call themselves Catholic.

In fact, the “social justice” people were positively aglow about the election of their new messiah, Barack Obama. Several of them were speaking of their plans to attend the Inauguration and were utterly unaware that there would be 100,000 people marching on the nation’s Capitol two days later for the right to life of unborn Americans which they had just voted into irrelevancy by electing Obama to the highest office of the land. One of them even expressed shock at the provisions of the upcoming Freedom of Choice Act until he was confronted with the nasty little fact that his messiah had been a sponsor of that pernicious bill in the last Congress. True to form, he steadfastly refused to allow that truth to have any effect on his euphoria. His mind was made up, and he would not let himself be confused by facts. Needless to say, the orthodox, practicing, believing Catholic pro-lifers will not be attending the Inauguration.

How can these two groups sit side-by-side in the same pews and display their ministries in the same space at the same Catholic parish? Simply because this contradiction has been tolerated for years by those in charge of our Church. In this election season neither of these two groups received any guidance about voting according to Catholic principles because, as per usual, there was silence from the pulpit on the issue. The absolute failure of our church leaders to define for us what membership in the Church means—and then to enforce it—has led to the degradation of Catholic culture and the loss of meaning for things that are sacred. When Christ and Belial (the evil one) are considered equal partners in the sanctuary, then nothing in the sanctuary means anything any more and no meaningful standard exists to distinguish a true Catholic from a false Catholic.

The degradation of Catholic culture is largely, but not exclusively, the fault of the clergy. For four decades in the Catholic Church in America we have seen:

1. Liturgical abuses run rampant, aided and abetted by those in charge
2. Two or three generations of Catholics left un-catechized or taught with flimsy

Protestantized fluff passed off as Catholic education
3. Sexual abuse by clergy excused and unaddressed by the hierarchy
4. A blind eye turned to high profile dissent and political class heretics
5. Wholesale attacks on sacred teachings that receive virtually no response from our pastors (and if it weren’t for Catholic Answers, EWTN and the Catholic League we would have no defense whatsoever)
6. The succumbing of our Catholic institutions of higher education to the ravages of political correctness, and the list goes on.

In the face of all this, should we be surprised that 54% of “Catholics” voted for Barack? Hardly.

The battle for Catholic culture begins with us, and there is no time like the present to don the armor of spiritual warfare. We either believe and practice what the Church teaches or we live as part of the shadow church, falsely trading on the Name Catholic for its benefits without at the same time shouldering the crosses that this entails.

There is, however, great hope for the future because the battle has already been engaged: new Catholic colleges are springing up to replace the old decrepit houses of heresy, new religious orders with abundant vocations and orthodoxy have arisen, home schooling families and strong lay movements are abundant now. Only when we take back our beloved Church from the false Catholics and clerics will our Church be able to stand up and rebuke the storm winds of paganism that are building faster than we care to admit. This project is not without its price, however. The cost of being a true believer will undoubtedly be much higher than ever before in our lifetime. Starting now and into the next generation we as Catholics will have to show the world not only what we believe but that we are willing to lay down our lives for it as a witness to the truth.

Sincerely Yours in Christ,
Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer,President, Human Life International

http://www.hli.org/

The Polonia Pearl

Wishing you a most blessed and joyful Christmas!

2008-12-22T16:17:00.000-08:00

The Polonia Pearl

"He who does not give God, gives to little"

2008-12-19T16:27:00.000-08:00

Polonia Pearl here,

We love people.

Occasionally we give them some money ... or clothes that we no longer want and would not be caught dead in, gifts (the least expensive possible, or better yet, those that had been given us that we consider useless or worthless and save for the occasion when a gift will be required of us ... or which we were ready to throw out anyway).

We give them much advice – in this regard we are unstinting and most generous.

We are less generous with our time; we express appropriate sadness and compassion but we invest nothing of ourselves in it; we are quick to empathize but quicker still to forget ... and we assiduously avoid the deeply needy.

We write out cheques, tear them off and post them to some poor child in an impoverished country – and never remember their name ... only the deep, almost sensual sense of satisfaction that we are so good, so generous, so loving of ... "what's her name ...?"

We give far, far less of ourselves, for that is the most valuable commodity of all ...

Even ... even if we give extravagantly of our money, generously in time, amply of ourselves – our Holy Father reminds us of the greatest gift of all (and it is not ourselves ... sorry): The gift of God. We hear an echo of this in St. Paul:

And if I should distribute all my goods to feed the poor, and if I should deliver my body to be

burned, and have not love, it profits me nothing. 1 Cor. 13.3

The gift of God is the gift of love, – quóniam Deus cáritas est – "because God is Love" 2. In fact, this is the very title of our Holy Father's First encyclical. I believe it is so because so much of the nature of love has been lost or obscured to us in a culture of sensuality and death, the sensuality that leads to death on so many levels, and the death that is sensuality on so many levels – and love is the antidote of death.

"... the very thing that the suffering person – every person – needs: namely: loving personal concern."... because in addition to justice man needs, and will always need, love." 3

We keep our money from the poor at the peril of our souls (and we all have excuses ...), we give our refuse to Christ when we toss our useless clothing to the poor; we give "wise" counsel to the needy, but no bread. In a rare paroxysm of magnanimity we even give ourselves!

But do we give God? Do we give Him Who is most necessary to us, Who loves us above the loves of all others? We are made in His image. We can. We can be the face, the hand, the voice, of Jesus Christ to our brother, our sister, needy or not – all cry out for Him in the dark watches of the nights that leach into our lives from every shadow ... sickness, loneliness, grief, death ...

Your money, your clothing, your cheques, will never bring them solace ... they will only find it in the face of God ... and you alone can bring it.

Imagine ... you can!

The two words – Jesus Christ – are the most beautiful in the world! And you are ashamed to utter them ... to give God to the world...? Jesus spoke of those who are ashamed of Him in this world ... or perhaps you have forgotten? (St. Matthew 10.33)

http://www.boston-catholic-journal.com/

The Polonia Pearl

Letter From Jesus From The Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar

2008-11-20T05:08:00.000-08:00

Polonia Pearl here,

You have found me ...

For so very, very, long I have awaited this moment! Since first I formed you in your mother's womb, in unutterable love, I have awaited this moment ... and it is come.

Let us now speak, face to face ... no, no, child, do not cast down your eyes, but lift them up. See: I hold your face even as you speak; let me look upon your eyes, as ever a father looks lovingly into the eyes of his child. You are mine; even more than you are his.

Let us remember this moment.

At every Mass I had sought you. I peered past the faces of my many beloved children, and I looked for you, looked upon you – and after every Mass I invited you, called to you, but you did not hear me. You did not hear me because you did not see me.

You knew I was here, but you had forgotten.

Not in vain did they hide me so far – sometimes even completely hidden from – the Altar of my Sacrifice, as though the Lamb could be separated from his own immolation.

You did not gaze upon me because you did not see me. My Altar has become barren of my Agony ... it is become a table, a refectory for many, and no longer the Altar of the Sacrifice of the One.

I must ask you, my child, did you ever see me laid upon that Altar? Did ever you see my bruised, battered, and broken body laying across, upon, that hallowed height? Did you ever see me, before your very eyes, lifted upon the Cross before you as my Priest held me up to the Father in the Holy Eucharist?

Did you ever recognize that what was being enacted before you in the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is the very same Sacrifice which I offered up to my Father on Calvary?. Not a different one. Not a symbolic one. But the same Sacrifice enacted before your very eyes. Did you know that what separates you from my Holy Mother at the foot of the Cross ... is the closing of your eyes ... even as she closed hers – and I was, I am, present to you both. You were not at Calvary. You are at Calvary ... at the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass!

You have forgotten so much, my little one, or more often still – and this is so painful to me – there is so much that you had never been taught.

We are talking ... at long last in My very Presence ... so let me ask of you one question, my child. It is really a question I should like you to ask yourself. Tell me:

Would you behave any differently were you to see me visibly; were you to behold me physically standing before you, the wounds still in my hands and my feet, still in my side? Were I to appear thus to you ... would you behave any differently toward me than you do in acknowledging my Presence – Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity – in the Eucharist, in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar, in the Tabernacle, at the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass? Think well before you answer, little one, for much depends upon how you answer this.

If your behavior would be any different, if your reverence would be greater, your love more fervid ... oh, little one, you are then lacking so much in faith; and what is more grievous still, your behavior does not accord with your belief: you aver, profess to hold to, one thing ... and behave as if you do not believe what you profess at all ...

It may sting you, my child, and it so pains me to tell you, but this grievous disparity between what you profess to believe, and how you actually behave is either the deadly sin of pride or the shameful sin of hypocrisy. Either you pretend to believe what you really do not believe, or you do believe but are too proud before the world, before the eyes of men, to humble yourself in my Real Presence. Were I visible to their eyes, you would not hesitate; but because I am not, that act of Faith that conquers Pride defers to the world of men. You have Faith, my child, but you have no courage. Instead of ignoring men ... you ignore your God. And think, my child ... is that not the essence of sin?

"How so?", you ask, "and in what ways?"

Look back and think of the many, many times you have passed by me in the Tabernacle – how lovingly I have watched you approach, thrilled at your coming, ... and how sadly I have watched you pass me by with not so much as a silent greeting, a genuflection or even a bow. You have passed by me as by a column in the Church, which is unknowing of you, heedless of you, without love for you. Quickly, thoughtlessly, and most often attentive to your neighbor whom you would not dare to affront by ignoring or disregarding their presence. Surely you would not pass by even a casual acquaintance, let alone a loved friend, without so much as a word, a gesture – and yet you seem to fear, as it were, scandal, by acknowledging me.

Do you not know by now that to be one of mine is to be a scandal to the world, a contradiction to it?

You shrink from the epithets they will hurl at you, even as they hurled still greater ones at me. Do you think I do not know of them? "See how pious he makes himself appear to be!" "Look at her, ever holier than thou." "She should be humiliated by these acts of piety!" "He is doing it for the praise of many, to be thought holy in the sight of men. What a hypocrite!" "Who does she think she is ... a St.? Pretending to be one! ... shameful!"

You know they will avoid you, marginalize you, accuse you of subtle evil ... and most often they will think you ill of mind; you will be shunned, and even hated ... and so often, to my unspeakable sorrow, by the very people held to the holy: by your priests, your deacons, your nuns – you will be a scandal to them because you will cause them to accuse themselves. You will be a reproach to them, and they will hate you for it. But take heart. Did I not tell you that if the world hates you, know that it hated me first? You wish to share in my glory. But will you share in my shame? You will be glorified with me; but will you also be humiliated with me? For your sake I bore humiliation. For my sake will you bear it also? Is the servant greater than the Master?

Beloved child, I hear you sing that I, the Lord of Heaven and Earth, am "the center of your life", and at once behold the breathless celerity with which you leave my church, a haste that will not allow a reverent genuflection before me, an unspoken word of love to me ... Who has fed you with the Bread of Angels, and Who ever beholds you ... and sustains you in my love. I am puzzled, my child; but more than puzzled, I am greatly sorrowed.

Do not be discouraged, little one, by what I tell you. Ever and always I speak to you in the gentlest love, and yet, my child, I must ask you now to consider more. We are Heart to heart, are we not? And Voice to voice? Even Ear to ear? Listen to me, my child: Had I chosen to remain with you in my true Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity ... that is to say, in my total being, as your Lord, your Redeemer, and your God – had I chosen but one place to abide, – let us say with my servant Peter in Rome – and in no other Church except St. Peter's, how many, many pilgrimages would be made, and at what great cost and sacrifice to the faithful, to be truly in my Real Presence, where I may be found as in no other place on earth! No expense would be spared, no suffering not gratefully endured, no hardship happily undertaken ... as long as the journey brought them to Me!

With what reverence, love, and devotion would they accord themselves before me! Having enjoyed this but even once in a lifetime would suffice to make for a happy death. Each would say, in utter consolation,

"I have knelt before my God, I have been in His Presence, I have offered him my love – and what is more .... what is infinitely more ... He gave himself to me! He gave me, fed me, placed upon my tongue, his very Body, his very Blood, his very Soul, his very Divinity! He Himself! All this ... all this ... He deigned to give me, an unprofitable servant in the mid-day sun! I have received ... Communion with God. I have become one with Him and He with me. I have partaken of the Bread of Angels. I have received the pledge of life eternal: "Who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has life eternal, and I will raise him up on the last day." Truly ... truly, what possible return could I make to my God for so unspeakable a gift! His very Self! Is this not the Gift given the blessed in Heaven?"

But I see that you are eager to speak. Come, then, let us whisper. Now I will be silent. It is your turn, little one .... speak."

http://www.boston-catholic-journal.com/

The Polonia Pearl.....aka...eddie

The Mystery and Power of Personal Prayer

2008-11-18T12:12:00.000-08:00

Polonia Pearl here,

by Dr. Jeffrey A Mirus

I am continually amazed at how many Catholics forget the power of personal prayer. There are priestly, consecrated and lay apostles who make significant commitments to the active Christian life, including the Church’s liturgical life, but fail to nourish that commitment through personal prayer. There are Catholic parents who take their Faith seriously but seldom remember to pray for their children. And of course there are many relatively casual Catholics who fail to cultivate a personal prayer life of any kind.

Personal and Private Prayer

Persistence in Prayer

After the story of the importunate neighbor, Our Lord so stressed persistence in prayer that it became a proverb: “I tell you, ask and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (Lk 11:9-10). But his next point is even more dramatic. What father, Jesus asks, will give his son a serpent when he asks for a fish, or a scorpion when he asks for an egg? This question is the prelude to Our Lord’s final and greatest lesson about prayer: If we who are evil know how to give good gifts to our children, “how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Lk 11:13)

The Holy Spirit in Prayer

Here Our Lord teaches us that the Holy Spirit is always at work in prayer. By way of introduction, I’ll offer an exceedingly small proof, but of a kind that is commonly experienced. On one occasion when I went to Church for my hour of Eucharistic adoration, there was a man sleeping in the back pew of the small chapel where the Blessed Sacrament was exposed. He was stretched out, flat on his back, and snoring loudly enough to distract even the greatest of saints! This annoyed me, but I decided to wait to take action until I’d spent a little time attempting to pray. Paradoxically, as time went on, the louder he got, the less it bothered me. Occasionally he stirred and muttered something like “Oh my God”, so perhaps he was praying too. In any case, left to my own devices, I would have been driven to anger, yet his unseemly noise soon sounded more like the music of another soul. Clearly, I wasn’t being left to my own devices.

Thérèse of Lisieux often fell asleep at prayer, and it caused her to glory in her littleness. I don’t recommend the technique, which was also employed by the apostles in Gethsemane, yet I leave it to God to understand the effort at wakefulness and render it fruitful, even if it fails. In any case, our topic is not sleep, but the Holy Spirit, Who is actively involved in all prayer. The magnitude of Christ’s teaching is precisely this: Personal prayer is a continuous motion of the Holy Spirit between the one who prays and the Father (or, indeed, the Son). It is the Holy Spirit whom the Father continually gives in prayer, and the Holy Spirit whom the Father continually receives back. St. Paul explains it this way:

We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the Spirit groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies…. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And he who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. (Rm 8:22-27)

The challenge for us is that this astonishing and growing action of the Holy Spirit—this ever-deepening exchange of the Holy Spirit between ourselves and the Father—does not take place within us unless we pray personally, by which I really mean interiorly. There is nothing automatic about it, and the mere external use of rites, group prayers, or verbal formulas avails nothing. True prayer requires our personal, interior participation—that is, our determination to communicate with the Father, honestly lifting ourselves to God with whatever capacity we possess at the time. Even if all we can do is throw ourselves toward God in an occasional moment of fear or longing, we have made a beginning according to our capacity. The intention and the habit of personal prayer can be built on whatever beginning is within our power. It is up to us to practice, to exercise this initially limited ability to pray.

When we do this over time, the Holy Spirit becomes a fountain of life and power within us, uniting us to God Himself. Just as the theological virtues enable us to believe with God’s conviction, hope with God’s strength, and love with God’s love, so too is our capacity for prayer uplifted, amplified and perfected by the power of the Holy Spirit. For this reason, there is nothing on this earth more powerful than a person at prayer. Nothing is better calculated to overcome any conceivable obstacle, and we can give or receive no greater gift than prayer. Indeed, the success of everything else depends on our interaction with the Holy Spirit in prayer. Are we not foolish, then, to so often overlook what should be first, last, and always in our lives?

Dr. Jeffrey A. Mirus

President, Trinity Communications

Dr. Jeffrey A. Mirus has been a leader in Catholic education and the dissemination of Catholic information for over 30 years. He has co-founded a Catholic college, authored and published numerous scholarly books, pioneered Catholic Internet services, founded a non-profit corporation to advance the Catholic Faith through education and the media, and established an advanced computer consulting enterprise (Trinity Consulting, Inc.).

In addition to his apostolic and career accomplishments, Dr. Mirus is the father of six children. He and his wife Barbara currently reside in Northern Virginia.

http://www.catholicculture.org/

The Polonia Pearl.....aka...eddie

What's wrong with Catholic voters? What's wrong with Catholics?

2008-11-17T11:58:00.000-08:00

Polonia Pearl here,

by Phil Lawler, November 5, 2008

According to the exit polls, between 53 and 54% of American Catholic voters cast their ballots for Barack Obama, despite the Democratic candidate's enthusiastic support for unrestricted legal abortion.

Nationwide, Protestant voters supported John McCain, by a solid 54- 45% margin. But the Catholic vote broke for Obama. Why?

Earlier this week the US Conference of Catholic Bishops released a helpful listing of the 50 American states, with the proportion of population in each state. In 7 states, Catholics make up more than 30% of the population. Obama captured all 7 of those states on Election Day. In 8 states, Catholics account for less than 5% of the population. Seven of those states swung for McCain, and the 8th, North Carolina, is still listed as "too close to call" as I write this analysis.

To be sure, America's Catholic population is heavily concentrated in states that have a liberal political tilt. But is that a coincidence? Are those states hotbeds of liberalism despite the heavy Catholic presence, or because of it?

Yes, Catholics have traditionally leaned toward the Democratic Party for historical reasons. But why have Catholic voters remained doggedly loyal to a party that has come, in the early 21st century, to be wholly allied with the "culture of death" on issues such as abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, and embryonic stem-cell research?

The support that Obama won among Catholic voters is noteworthy because in the last presidential contest, in 2004, President Bush won 52% of the Catholic vote while his opponent John Kerry-- himself a Catholic!-- managed only 46%. Catholic support for the Democratic candidate rose markedly in this campaign, even though the Democratic contender was the most militantly pro-abortion candidate ever to win a major party's presidential nomination.

This trend is all the more remarkable because over the course of the past several weeks, dozens of American bishops issued strong public statements reminding their people of their moral obligation to vote in defense of human life. Those statements varied in candor and in quality, but their overall impact was remarkable. The 2008 campaign produced a seismic change in the attitude of the American hierarchy; the bishops as a group were far more outspoken, far more explicit, than in any previous election.

And still most Catholics voted for Obama. Again: why?

Before answering that question, let me cite one more vitally important piece of polling information: Among Catholic voters who attend Mass weekly, McCain won majority support: 54- 45%. Among those who do not attend weekly Mass, the margin for Obama was an overwhelming 61- 37%. Thus Obama drew his support from inactive Catholics. And unfortunately, most American Catholics are inactive.

In an interview recorded just before Election Day, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver explained that he had decided to take a prominent public stand on the obligations of Catholic voters because the "quieter approach to these things has not been effective." How right he was! He and many other prelates deserve the gratitude of loyal Catholics for their willingness to take a more energetic approach. This year, at last, the American bishops were clear and forthright in their teaching. Yet on Election Day it became evident that millions of American Catholics weren't listening.

Should we be surprised if Catholics ignore directives from the hierarchy? Should we be surprised that Catholics who do not attend Mass regularly-- thereby violating a precept of the Church-- ignore Church teachings on other issues as well? No, this result was predictable.

An entire generation of American Catholics has grown accustomed to dissent from Church teaching, and grown accustomed to seeing their bishops tolerate that dissent. In the 35 years since Roe v. Wade, Catholics have watched their Church leaders handle pro-abortion Catholic politicians with kid gloves, treating their moral treason as a minor annoyance rather than a public scandal. Yes, the bishops routinely denounced abortion; but at the same time they treated the public supporters of taxpayer-funded abortion with jovial deference. Puzzled lay Catholics concluded that the bishops didn't really take the issue too seriously, and the laity in turn stopped taking their bishops seriously. A few dozen statements from brave orthodox bishops in the autumn of 2008-- however clear, however compelling-- were not enough to undo a generation of damage.

Abortion is not an isolated issue. Lackadaisical American Catholics are not ignoring Church leadering on this issue alone, but on the entire range of Catholic teaching. Most Catholics skip Sunday Mass regularly. Most Catholics rarely if ever go to Confession. Most Catholics use contraceptives. Most Catholics do not believe in the Real Presence. Most Catholics no longer accept Church authority on any issue. Why should we be surprised, then, if on Election Day most Catholics ignore Church teachings on their moral obligation to vote in defense of human life?

For most of my life I have lived in Massachusetts, a state whose political culture was once thoroughly dominated by active Catholics. In my book The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston's Catholic Culture I explain how that Catholic culture deteriorated, as the faithful drifted away from the Church, until today the political scene in Massachusetts is dominated not by Catholics but by ex-Catholics, thoroughly hostile to the teachings of the Church.

Are Catholics in other states following the same trend? Will the next presidential election see even strong support for the "culture of death" among voters who identify themselves-- inaccurately-- as believing Catholics? Regrettably, I see the same forces that corrupted Catholicism in my native state now active all across the nation.

To repair the damage, we must recognize that the problem is not restricted to abortion, nor to defense-of-life issues. Indeed it is not, strictly speaking, a political problem. To restore the integrity of the Catholic vote, we must first restore the integrity of the Catholic faith, and rebuild the foundations of a Catholic culture.

That will be my goal-- my crusade-- in coming years. I hope and pray you'll join me.

Mr. Philip F. Lawler Director, Catholic Culture

Born and raised in the Boston area, Phil Lawler attended Harvard College, graduating with honors in Government in 1972. He did graduate work in political philosophy at the University of Chicago before entering a career in journalism.
Phil Lawler has been active in politics as well as journalism. He has been Director of Studies for the Heritage Foundation (a conservative think-tank based in Washington), a member of two presidential inaugural committees; and a candidate for the US Senate.
As a journalist, Phil has acted as editor of Crisis magazine. In 1986 he became the first layman to edit The Pilot, the Boston archdiocesan newspaper. From 1993 through 2005, Phil Lawler was the editor of Catholic World Report, an international monthly news magazine. And in 1996, recognizing the power of the internet, he founded Catholic World News: the first online Catholic news service.
Phil Lawler is the author of five books on political and religious topics. He has recently completed a new book titled "The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston's Catholic Culture". His essays, book reviews, and editorial columns have appeared in over 100 newspapers around the United States and abroad, including the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe.

Phil lives in central Massachusetts with his wife Leila and their seven children.

http://www.catholicculture.org

The Polonia Pearl.......aka .....eddie

Sin To Vote For Pro-Abortion Politicians?

2008-11-15T08:57:00.000-08:00

Polonia Pearl here,

Fr. Matthew Habiger, HLI

Can a Catholic in good conscience vote for a politician who has a clear record of supporting abortion? Or is it a sin to vote for a politician who regularly uses his public office to fund or otherwise encourage the killing of unborn children?

I take the position that it is clearly a sin to vote for such a politician. Let us examine the issue. I shall appeal to arguments based on authority and to arguments based upon the consequences of such a vote.

Every Catholic should know that abortion is a gravely serious evil, and as such is never to be supported. In the Vatican's "Declaration on Procured Abortion" there is a discussion of "Morality and Law". "Man may never obey a law which is in itself, immoral and such is the case of a law which would admit in principle, the liceity of abortion. Nor can he take part in a propaganda campaign in favor of such a law or vote for it. Moreover, he may not collaborate in its application. It is, for instance, inadmissible that doctors or nurses should find themselves obligated to cooperate closely in abortions and have to choose between the law of God and their professional situation."

Pope John Paul II in "Evangelium Vitae" states "I declare that direct abortion, that is, abortion willed as an end or as a means, always constitutes a grave moral disorder, since it is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being. ... No circumstance, no purpose, no law whatsoever can ever make licit an act which is intrinsically illicit, since it is contrary to the law of God which is written in every human heart, knowable by reason itself and proclaimed by the Church"
.
"The 1917 Code of Canon Law punished abortion with excommunication. The revised canonical legislation continues this tradition when it decrees that a person who actually procures an abortion incurs automatic excommunication. " The excommunication affects all those who commit this crime with knowledge of the penalty attached and thus includes those accomplices without whose help the crime would not have been committed" (Canon.

"By this sanction the Church makes clear that abortion is a most serious and dangerous crime, thereby encouraging those who commit it to seek without delay the path of conversion. In the Church the purpose of the penalty of excommunication is to make an individual fully aware of the gravity of a certain sin and then to foster genuine conversion and repentance".

The argument can be made that voting is a very remote form of cooperation in abortion. But is it all that remote? The legislator who votes for abortion is clearly a formal accomplice, giving formal cooperation with abortion. S/he shares both in the intention of the act, and in supplying material support for the act. If I vote for such a candidate, knowing full well that he will help make available public monies for abortion, or continue it decriminalization, then I am aiding him/her.

It is a hard fact that when funding dries up for budgets of abortuaries, the abortion provider lays off staff, making fewer abortions possible. Unlike the pro-life movement, the abortion industry is not staffed with volunteers, who stand to gain no commercial advantage. If budgets are cut, the staff is reduced. If the abortuary is unprofitable, it closes its doors.

It is not sufficient to think that, since candidate X takes the 'right position' on other issues such as the economy, foreign relations, defense, etc. but only goes wrong on abortion, one can in good conscience, vote for him/her. Abortion deals with the first and most basic human right, without which there is nothing left to talk about.

Is this too stringent a way of thinking? Is it not nuanced enough, or does it do injustice to the complexities of a pluralistic society? Consider this question in light of another issue. Would voters be understanding and nuanced in their toleration of a known racist? Or would that be sufficient reason for everyone to consider him/her unfit for public office? Why should we understand intolerance in the case of racism, but not in the case of murdering unborn babies? Abortion is not just another "issue" - it is a matter of life and death, the great civil rights issue of our time.

In his homily delivered at the National Shrine on 21 January, Bernard Cardinal Law said: "We who are here are challenged by the words of the Holy Father who calls us to be aware that we are facing an enormous and dramatic clash between good and evil, death and life, the culture of death and the culture of life. We find ourselves not only face with, but necessarily in the midst of this conflict; we are all involved and we all share in it, with the inescapable responsibility of choosing to be unconditionally pro-life."

"That is what Catholics are called to: to be unconditionally pro-life. There is no ambiguity in the words of Peter's successor. To be Catholic is to be unconditionally pro-life. To support abortion, to advocate the right to choose an abortion can in no way be considered a catholic option. ..."

"All too many of us, however, have hidden the Gospel of Life under the bushel basket of political expediency. How scandalous it is to see the evidence of Catholic votes supporting those who deny the Gospel of Life! It is easy to criticize Catholic elected representatives who have rejected life. Do we not need to be even more concerned with the far greater number of Catholic voters who fail to challenge those politicians?"

"Our task within the household of faith is clear and daunting, my brothers and sisters. It must be made abundantly clear in pulpits, in classrooms, in the lecture halls of our colleges and universities, in the Catholic press, in the way we vote, that to be catholic is to be unconditionally pro-life."

It is a scandal that Catholic politicians vote for bills which fund or otherwise advance abortion. They should be named, publicly shamed and admonished so that they can cease their evil and return to God.

To vote for such a candidate is to willfully participate in that candidate's choices and deeds. It is a sin, and must be repented.

Fr Matthew Habiger,
Human Life International

www.hli.org

The Polonia Pearl .......aka eddie

Martin Luther King's Example Should Be a Beacon for President-elect Obama

2008-11-12T16:16:00.000-08:00

Polonia Pearl here,

November 10, 2008

by Father Jonathan Morris

Martin Luther King’s prophetic dream brought unity because its demands were constructed upon truth, unchanging truth, of the kind we must seek today.

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident…’”

His was a voice of reason crying out in the wilderness of ignorance. It was a call of conscience in favour of objective righteousness.

“One day right there in Alabama, little black boys and girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”

Dr. King knew all children could and should join hands, not because it would be pretty or nice or convenient if they did, but rather because we are sisters and brothers, by nature, in the same image and likeness of God.

Now, forty-five years later, President-elect Barack Obama—himself a symbol of historic change—has promised to change America.

He would do well to remember, as all of us would, that the power of Dr. King’s rhetoric resided in the origin of his ideas—a shared human nature endowed with universal rights and obligations—and in the unwavering conviction that the human intellect was and is capable of grasping the details of this endowment, when it is free from blinders of pride and selfishness.

Blinders there will always be, we know. But today, I fear, our biggest blinder is much unlike and even more destructive than those of 1963: we think there is no such thing as perfect vision; we doubt clear lines exist between right and wrong. Or worse still, we don’t imagine such clarity matters as long as we are in control.

President-elect Obama and a Democratic Congress are now in control. The machinery is on. Engines are humming. Will theirs be change we can believe in?

The first word is out. A senior aide for the incoming president — transition coordinator John Podesta — has confirmed Mr. Obama is planning to use executive orders to reverse his predecessor’s policies restricting embryonic stem cell research and federal funding of abortion in third world countries. Podesta’s explanation was simple:

“There’s a lot the president can do using his executive authority without waiting for congressional action, and I think we’ll see the president do that. I think he feels like he has a real mandate for change.”

There is good reason to believe Mr. Obama will effect such change through legal and democratic channels. Unfortunately, in our times, that is of little consolation.

A country blinded by relativism, pragmatism, and materialism needs a leader who will look beyond the polls and beyond his party platform and formulate policy in congruence with enduring principles of the dignity of the human person and the common good of society.

Otherwise, on many accounts, we will be Europe-bound, and that’s not all good. Take for example the decision on October 29 by the House of Lords to approve amendments to the Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill. The approved measures include the creation and later destruction of animal-human hybrid embryos for research and the production of “savior siblings” that will provide genetic material for seriously ill relatives. Only a few years ago, these provisions would have been judged unthinkable in the United Kingdom. Today they are law. Yes, the journey from ethically “unthinkable,” to “acceptable,” to “normal” is happening faster in our generation than ever before. And such a journey does not end well.

I believe the only effective route for measured, moral thinking in a world of wonderful and dangerous diversity is to recommence our pursuit of Natural Law—truth written on every human heart—and to consider what it and its Author have to say to us today, first about issues of life and death, but also regarding prudential policy of immigration, health care, economics, foreign affairs, and so on.

Martin Luther King removed the blinders of an intractable majority because his invitation to unity was neither partisan nor parochial; it was neither arbitrary nor ideological; it was instead, founded firmly on the universal and corresponding rights and duties of man—as truth, not opinion.

“In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men—yes, black men as well as white men—would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

There is no reason we can’t cash more checks at the same bank.

Now let’s got on with it, in charitable tones, and reasoned explanations.

God bless,

Father Jonathan

Father Jonathan Morris is author of the new book, “The Promise: God’s Purpose and Plan for when Life Hurts.” For information go to www.fatherjonathan.com

Polonia Pearl aka eddie

On Voting For Pro-Abortion Candidates

2008-09-13T14:55:00.000-07:00

by Dr. Jeff Mirus

September 5, 2008

by permission

It’s election season again, and we should make one more attempt to convince our fellow citizens, our fellow Catholics and even some users of CatholicCulture.org that they cannot morally allow any issue to take precedence over abortion in their decision about how to vote in the U.S. presidential election. This statement may strike some readers as just another example of knee-jerk conservatism or, worse, sycophantic advocacy for the Republican Party. But it is neither. It is simply a moral fact of life. This time around, I’m taking the gloves off.

God's Teaching and Man's Statistics

Church teaching could not be more clear on this point. The Magisterium has stated repeatedly that direct abortion is intrinsically evil under all circumstances, and that it is immoral to vote for a politician because he supports abortion. The Church has also taught that voting for a politician in spite of the fact that he supports abortion is at least remote cooperation with evil, and so can be justified only when there is a proportionate reason. I endorse this latter point entirely. But the problem, for those who wish to take advantage of this to support pro-abortion candidates, is that there is no issue on the contemporary American political scene that is even remotely proportionate to abortion. No issue exists that can be cited as a proportionately moral reason to support a candidate that favors abortion, especially in a Presidential election.

Admittedly this is partly a prudential judgment, for it involves not only the nature of the evil involved but how widespread it is—how many people are impacted by it. The Church’s teaching authority can help us to discern that murder is a more serious evil than theft, but the Church can employ no special charism to determine how large a problem murder may be in a particular society at a particular time. If the murder rate is very low, and the theft rate high, one is certainly justified in voting for a politician who concentrates his attention on reducing theft. But abortion is not only in the most serious class of moral evils (the deliberate taking of an innocent human life), but it affects more people than any other comparably serious crime.

The number of abortions reported in the United States is over one million per year. Since abortion is notoriously under-reported, the actual numbers are substantially higher. For the sake of argument, we will suggest that there are at least 1.5 million abortions annually in the United States. By contrast, there are about 17,000 other homicides per year in our country, a number two orders of magnitude lower. In fact, abortion is in roughly the same class as far less serious (but still significant) crimes such as burglary and domestic violence assaults, which numbered about 2.1 million each in 2005.

When compared with the issues that are widely argued to be somehow proportionate, the lack of proportionality is even more astonishing. Thus, while abortion claims between one and two million lives per year in the United States, premature deaths due to inadequate health care are estimated at about 34,000 per year; the Iraq War has claimed a total of roughly 55,000 American and Iraqi lives since its beginning several years ago; and the death penalty claimed the lives of 42 persons in the United States last year, most of whom were presumably at least guilty of a serious crime. You can find all these statistics in about five minutes of research on the web. I submit, again, that no voter who is guided by reason can even begin to make the argument that there is an issue in the United States presidential election that is remotely proportionate to abortion.

False Assumptions

The argument that there are legitimate reasons to support a pro-abortion candidate is weakened still further when two common but false assumptions are brought into play. The first false assumption is that there is a moral equivalence between a candidate who places his emphasis on other issues and a candidate who is actually in favor of abortion. I stated earlier that, if the murder rate were very low and the theft rate very high, one might well vote for a politician who advances a good program for reducing theft. But what if this same candidate is determined to protect the right to murder or even seeks to expand murder's “availability”? Surely this changes both the moral equation, and the potential consequences.

The second false assumption is that abortion is so endemic to our culture that there isn’t likely to be much that any candidate can do about it; therefore, whether a President is pro-abortion or pro-life will make very little practical difference. While I would reject this assumption for symbolic reasons alone (what impact does it have on a culture to place in its highest office a person who publicly advocates murder?), the argument rests on so deep an ignorance of American political life as to be utterly ludicrous. The primary political reason abortion is both legal and extremely widespread in our culture is because we are increasingly ruled by an oligarchy of activist judges who wish to remake society in their own image. At the apex of this oligarchy is the Supreme Court, and Supreme Court justices are appointed for life by the President of the United States. Apart from all other considerations, this political fact is of capital importance in the selection of the next President, especially with the Court in many ways fairly evenly divided, and with an opportunity for the next President to appoint two or more justices.

Moreover, in the culture wars overall, our nation is fairly evenly divided. The future of abortion (along with many related grave evils) will depend on relatively small shifts in American voting patterns. Yes, it is a difficult and long struggle, but it is hardly an irrelevant struggle or a struggle with no hope of success. Persons who are very much more pro-life than would be suggested by existing rulings and laws are not in a tiny minority. On the various related issues, they are always close to half of the population, and often more than half. The person who argues that there is nothing we can do about abortion, and therefore it is perfectly moral to vote based on other considerations, is simply denying—in the midst of hotly contested circumstances—that there is at least one very important thing he can do: He can refuse to vote for those who support abortion.

Thanks, But I'm Not Personally Affected

I could go on at considerable length about the links between abortion and so much else that horribly afflicts the American people and their social fabric: the breakdown of the family, the objectification and abuse of women, contraception, rampant divorce, female poverty, ubiquitous pornography, experimentation on human persons, euthanasia and everything else that attends both irresponsible sex and increasing callousness toward the human person. But it should be enough to focus on the unmistakable fact that well over one million innocent persons are being willfully and directly murdered each year, and that this is happening not in a few inaccessible locations but all around us, in our local communities, as part of the fabric of our daily lives.

The bottom line is that to most of us the unborn child is invisible. It is not as if we have to witness the fear, the screams of terror, the bloodshed, the grief and the devastation that accompanies the murder of older persons, whom we often encounter and sometimes come to know. No, abortion is rather a case of out of sight, out of mind, for a little baby that hardly anybody wanted anyway, and we find it very easy to go on with our lives, attending to the issues that affect us personally, hobnobbing with those we find congenial, feeling secure in being part of the status quo, and thankfully aware that we’re not foolish enough to rock the boat. Indeed, with respect to abortion, the commitment to resist is very seldom the result of an emotional process; it is very seldom governed by our feelings. Very few pro-lifers are moved by feelings of solidarity with pre-born children. How could they be?

Instead, the pro-life moral and political commitment is a rational commitment: Abortion is a serious evil, it is an epidemic evil, and it is linked to a great many other evils in our culture. Therefore I will oppose it, root and branch, tooth and nail. Unfortunately, those who seek instead to justify with specious arguments their desire to vote for pro-abortion candidates make no such intellectual commitment. As we have seen, their arguments are utterly bankrupt. For where is their proportionate issue? Global warming? Tax revisions that might possibly benefit the poor? The price of gas? No, we are talking here about death, death immediately before us and on a grand scale. That is why those who justify voting for pro-abortion candidates are so obviously wrong, so seriously wrong and—let us tell the whole truth—so dangerously wrong.

By Dr. Jeff Mirus

http://catholicculture.org/

The Polonia Pearl ...aka...eddie