March for Life '11

From pal Frank Weathers at Why I Am Catholic:

The Curse

As Notre Dame got stomped by Navy (again), one sees with how much intensity Navy plays.

Notre Dame used to play with a chip on its shoulder; as though something set it apart from everybody else.

You don't suppose that as Notre Dame has whittled off the edges of its Catholic faith and morals, the intensity it once possessed - what made Notre Dame distinct, different, set apart - has dwindled on the playing field, do you?

They LOOK big, strong, well-fed, and well-funded. Too bad looks don't translate into wins.

Bocelli's Little Story

Andrea Bocelli tells a little story about a mother who chose to give her baby life:

Loving Life

At Reflections on Faith and Culture, Gil Bailie posts a brief yet moving video: Love Life: Are you pro-life or pro-choice?

The Best Lie

C. S. Lewis once sagely noted, "The best lie is the one closest to the truth." That is why this is so important for us to observe, condemn, and pray about.

The proposed health care reform is a conundrum shrouded in complexity wrapped in obfuscation, just the way the leftists and the Administration want it. It purports to be "compassionate", but maintains the language that Rep. Stupak condemns. Abortion equals fewer Americans for whom health care will be needed.

Pray like there is no working, and work like there is no praying. Ora et labora.

Abortion and Coming to Ourselves

Frances Kissling and Kate Michelman's op/ed runs in today's Washington Post, What Tim Tebow's Super Bowl ad can teach the pro-choice movement.

It is a curious piece, extremely soft-handed for the "pro-choice" folk. Perhaps they beginning to realize the way the wind is blowing. They and their MSM, progressivist ilk successfully ignored and downplayed the recent March for Life in D. C. (that's easy: be disingenuous about numbers and the intent of March attenders in their rags and mags). But they know they cannot do anything about the airwaves during Super Bowl XLIV.

The seething nature of their worship of human individualism is made clear time and time again. The attempt to "normalize" it is, therefore, understandable.

But the realization - the coming to ourselves that Our Lord referred to in His parable of the Lost Son (Lk 15,17) - of what we do when we murder our unborn children is beginning to overtake and overwhelm our shoddy thinking about living only unto ourselves in hubris and selfishness. And I say, Thank God.

Abortion, Anger, and Sex

A former pro-abortion atheist (former to both, that is) reports on a common characteristic among pro-abortionists:

January 28, 2010 (InsideCatholic.com) - Of all the things I remember about the Texas March for Life in Austin last January, the memory that stands out the most is the look on the faces of the counter-protesters who followed us along Congress Avenue and down to the capitol that frosty morning. When I glanced over to see the source of the epithets that were being screamed at us, I met the eyes of one young woman wearing a black bandana over the bottom half of her face. She happened to look over and meet my gaze, and in her eyes I saw one thing: hatred.

I was caught off guard when my gut response to her rage-filled glare was one of sympathy. In fact, I realized as she turned away to continue yelling angry pro-choice slogans that I knew the source of the rage behind her eyes and had even felt it recently.

Until a couple of years ago, I was militantly pro-choice. When I heard people make anti-abortion statements, it filled me with a white-hot anger that I could barely contain. Behind my views was a buried but unspoken sense that there was something inherently unfair about being a woman, and abortion was a key to maintaining any semblance of a level playing field in the world.

My peers and I were taught not that sex creates babies, but that unprotected sex creates babies. We absorbed through cultural osmosis the idea that every normal person will have sex at some point in his or her life, and that the sexual act, by default, has no significance outside the relationship between the two people involved. In this worldview, when unexpected pregnancies came up, it was seen as a sort of betrayal by the woman's body. My friends and I lamented the awful position every woman was in: Unexpected pregnancies were like lightning strikes, and when one of these unpredictable events did occur, there were no good options for dealing with them. Abortion wasn't ideal -- even we acknowledged that it was a violating procedure that was hard on a woman's body -- but what choice did anyone have? To not have the option of terminating surprise pregnancies when they came up out of nowhere would mean being a slave to one's biology.

My staunch support of these views did not soften until a few years ago, when a religious conversion after a life of atheism led me to the Catholic Church. I began researching the ancient Judeo-Christian understanding of human sexuality, in which the sexual act is seen as being inextricably entwined with its potential for creating new human life. The more I considered this point of view, the more I questioned my long-held views. In fact, I started to see the catastrophic mistake our society had made when we started believing that the life-giving potential of the sexual act could be safely forgotten about as long as people use contraception. It would be like saying that guns could be used as toys as long as long as there are blanks in the chamber. Teaching people to use something with tremendous power nonchalantly, as a casual plaything, had set women up for disaster..More>>

War with Evil

Our man in the field, Gil Bailie, at the March for Life last Friday himself, posts an interview with Rep. Smith of New Jersey on the fact that the Obama Administration is pumping not millions, but billions of dollars here and abroad into culture of death / pro-abortion agencies.

In the same way the March was ignored or misrepresented, the proposed Tim Tebow anti-abortion ad slated to run during the Super Bowl is being trashed too.

René Girard says the second great trick of Satan is convincing people that he does exist, I know. But it is difficult not to agree with Peter Kreeft in this war with evil.

That said, Father John Zuhlsdorf shares a ray of hope-filled light.

You Know It is Wrong. You Know It.

Monsignor Charles Pope reports on his experience yesterday at the March. My favorite part is when he came upon the "Keep Abortion Legal" folk protesting the March:

...then I came to our opponents on the steps of the Supreme Court. They were small in number but with that distinctive blue and white sign: “Keep Abortion legal.” These too, I thouhgt are known and loved by God from before the foundation of the world. Sadly misled but loved.

And then it occurred to me that at the heart of their dignity was to hear the truth, the truth that would set them free. “Why not?” I thought. “Am I not here to influence, to change hearts? At least plant seeds?” One by one I went to each of them I could get to. I look them in the eye and appealed to their conscience. They were chanting “Ho, Ho! Hey, Hey! Roe v. Wade is Here to Stay!” I stood before each an looked in their eyes and said in a clear but low voice that they could hear: “But you know it’s wrong. Deep in your heart you know it is wrong. You know.” It was interesting. In years past I tried to debate the issue with them and all we did was argue. But this year the Lord said, “Speak only to their conscience.”

Some of the looks I got back were powerful. Some were troubled looks, some neutral, one gave me a knowing look as if I (no not I, the Lord) had connected. It was brief with each but powerful. I didn’t have to win. All I had to do was to respect their dignity to hear the truth and let God speak to their conscience. He made them to know the truth and I pray that even one of them really heard the Lord. It was a moment in time that was written in God’s book before it ever came to be. Your prayers will make it fruitful.

Real all …

37 Years of Sacred Abomination

Fellow convert Francis Beckwith offers this on the 37th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. And Father Barron on, appropriately enough, apocalypticism.

Once More into the Breach

Anne Barbeau Gardiner, a Contributing Editor of the NOR, is Professor Emerita of English at John Jay College of the City University of New York. She reviews Cultures of Abortion in Weimar Germany. By Cornelie Usborne. Berghahn Books. 284 pages.

...one might conclude that the road to Hitler was paved with abortions. The Weimar Republic was a society committing suicide in slow motion. It could neither stop the killing of its unborn children nor control the degrading hedonism that accompanied this practice. In retrospect, one might call Weimar a very weak form of the culture of death, a preview of what now prevails in much of the Western world. It was so weak it easily caved in when confronted with a fiercer form of that same culture. For even under the Nazis the slaughter of the unborn continued. Hitler was gung-ho for eugenic abortion, and while he made abortion virtually inaccessible for German women of supposedly superior "stock," he legalized it and sometimes made it (along with sterilization) compulsory for women of what he called "inferior races." Thus did an enervated society cave in to a mad tyrant. Thus did Weimar's "cultures of abortion" usher in the Holocaust. Perhaps we should take warning..More>>

In The Killing Fields, there is a moment when Dith Pran, the trusty wingman of Sydney Schanberg, having escaped his captors stands dumbfounded, up to his ankles in decaying human flesh and bones: the mad, murderous violence of the Khmer Rouge.

In the same way, in the sane lucidity proffered by faith and reason of Mother Church, one comes to a moment of standing dumbfounded by the sheer magnitude of the abortuarial madness of today's global "civilization". It makes one want to throw in the towel, almost. And it certainly makes sense of stories like this.

But having faced my mortality (and yours), as well as the hope for the future of many young parents, one needs to sally forth - once more into the breach, as young King Hal admonished.

After all Domine, ad quen ibimus?

Personhood USA Project

Via our mentor, educator, and pal, Gil Bailie, the 4Ms bring and recommend for you, gentle reader:

The Personhood Movement from Personhood USA on Vimeo.

Just One Judge

Good news. Good thinking. Hopeful, redemptive, penitent. [ht: CMR]

Find more videos like this on Catholic Mountain

The Voiceless Victim

At The Catholic Thing, Austin Ruse, President of the New York and Washington, DC-based Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM) sums it up: We Americans have many generous impulses, but we have become blinded and hardhearted by failure to protect the poorest and most defenseless among us – by abortion.

Chaput - Health Care Reform

Archbishop Charles Chaput:

God, or the devil, is always in the details. As Scripture says, “You will know them by their fruits” (Mt 7:20). The test of White House and congressional honesty about seeking “common ground” will be the details of the health care plan being worked on this summer and fall. The whole meaning of “health care” would be subverted by any plan that involves mandated abortion access or abortion funding. The reason is obvious. Killing or funding the killing of unborn children has nothing to do with promoting human health, and including these things in any “health care” proposal, no matter how shrewdly hidden, would simply be a form of lying. More>>>

Common sense has so long been rejected and subverted that sacrifice of unborn children is once more the characteristic of a conventional self-satisfied, pagan culture, anthropologically speaking. The influence of the the Church's gospel is reaching its lowest ebb. Family is nearly however you desire to define it. "Heteronormativity" is verboten in curricula. Down is up and up is down.

The good Archbishop Chaput is like the Baptist. A lone voice crying in a wilderness.

Two-Stepping to Hell

From Verum Serum, via Gil Bailie:

Now I realize that the editors at these MSM institutions are probably following some style-guide which tells them that a baby inside a mother is fetus and a fetus in the hospital is a baby. What this case points out so clearly is that it’s a distinction without a difference. If we wanted to lay aside the style-guide we’d have to admit it was a baby when it was kidnapped and it was a baby when it was discovered alive in the hospital. Calling it a fetus didn’t change anything about it except its implied location. So why do it? I think the answer is obvious. You don’t have to look any further than yesterday’s NY Times hagiography of George Tiller for an answer. From the Times story:

[T]he other 2,800 abortions involved viable fetuses. Some had serious but survivable abnormalities, like Down syndrome. Many were perfectly healthy.

Those were healthy babies Tiller dismembered. Babies. More >>

I would love simply to call the prevarication by the MSM on abortuarial murder cowardice: merely fear of losing advertizers, or readership, or viewers, or the like. But at heart it stems from a baser motive: fear of the rising tide of the primitive Sacred. That is, it is hypocritical turning away from human sacrifice, lest all of us face the horror of cultural collusion that became a staple of United States cohesion since Roe v. Wade. Or, perhaps it is one and the same after all.

If our country, like so many other western nations formerly informed by the Judeo-Christian ethos, faces cultural meltdown it will be because we turned our collective back on that Judeo-Christian ethos for a heinous, softcore, "professional" - even suburban - version of human sacrifice: an antiseptic, stainless steel and latex medical "procedure".

But is it hypocritical? I fear that our collective consciousness about abortion has truly changed. It is no longer horrible. It is now "routine" for a vast majority of Americans. It is clearly a political chit in the Washington "two-step" for all but a very small minority on either side of the aisle. And if we are so blinded to the abomination of abortion, what others have become "normalized"? (Fill in the blank.)

And so I say, batten down the hatches. I fully believe in the consequential judgment of God against idolatry and paganism. Particularly when those who knew better reject what once was espoused and cherished as God's revelation and truth.

19 Pro-Life Dems

Matthew Archbold points out something very interesting involving nineteen pro-life Democrats:

Democrats have had a strategy of running "conservative" and pro-life Democrats in red districts as a way of gaining seats the last few cycles. You must admit, it's worked quite well for Democrats as they now have massive majorities in both the House and the Senate.

But the strategy does have its drawbacks for the Democrats.

Representatives like Heath Shuler from North Carolina and Tim Holden from Pennsylvania among others are pro-life Democrats that have won in red districts. While adding to the Democrat majority, those same conservative Democrats may make it more difficult for Obama to pass his more "progressive" legislation.

Particularly, the fate of President Obama's health care reform might come down to one single issue: abortion.

Read all here.

Stinkin' Luciferian Thinkin'

Personally, I am opposed to ( fill in the blank ), but I don’t want to impose my moral values on others.

Awww - Too Bad

Matthew Archbold raises a delightful - tragic - problem (reminds me of that of 'Call to Action'):

Irony is abortionists worrying about where the next generation of abortionists is going to come from. You can't make this stuff up.

One mainstream media organization is saying abortionists are getting old and when the old generation retires who's going to be around to kill the next generation? Salon Magazine is concerned. Me? Not so much. In fact, I'm kind of pleased. Not that I don't think some shell of a human with a medical degree will step up since there's bucks to be made but it's good to see they're having difficulty replacing abortionists ...

Read all …

Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

There is a growing multitude of attacks on the Holy Father and Catholic truth. As such, they attempt to draw us away from faith and hope and charity. Note them; but do not let them tempt you either to despair or frenetic distraction.

Damien Thompson notes the full frontal attack by such progressivist (read: let's continue the social meltdown) news organs as Time. Why not? Today is Let's Celebrate I Won's Trip to Notre Dame Sunday.

Meanwhile, the WaPo mounts the scaffolds to shout that Gay-Marriage Issue Awaits Court Pick Same-Sex Unions Supplant Abortion As Social Priority for Conservatives ... just as a poll is released that more Americans are pro-life than pro-choice for the first time.

Ah, what a glorious day to go to Mass and celebrate Our Lord's victory over the world and it satanic prince.