In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court gave women a choice. Thirty-seven years later, we’re giving them a voice. BUMP+ is a provocative web series from Yellow Line Studio that follows the fictional stories of three women facing unintended pregnancies.

If you haven’t heard, a new online program by Yellow Line, entitled “Bump+” has those on both sides of the abortion argument debating opposing viewpoints.  Not surprising.  What is surprising, is that they seem to be debating those within their own camp.

Fr. Frank Pavone, director of Priests for Life, recently commented on the show in an interview with Tim Drake, over at the National Catholic Register.

“Bump+” is a great service to the pro-life movement. “Bump+’s” target audience is not the pro-life community. It is trying to reach the vast number of citizens whose attitude toward abortion can best be described as conflicted. “Bump+” is not a forum for an abortion debate. The point here is to help viewers hear and feel both sides of the issue through stories. This is simply a conversation, not a condoning of abortion. We need to bring people through the conversation through stories. Jesus was a storyteller. You tell a story and let people connect with that. We do this through our Silent No More Awareness Campaign.

Laura Ingraham, however, tends to disagree.

For people to root on women to have an abortion online is moving the ball forward?  Remember, you’re tying make abortion entertaining on your little faux web bogus little event here on the internet.  It’s an immature, petty, Sophomoric, and unserious approach to what is a cataclysmic issue for our culture.  We’ve got 46 million people who can’t participate in the “Bump+” reality show because they’re not here today.

The show “airs” every Monday and Thursday through March 15th.

Pro-life blogger Jill Stanek shares PP’s Valentine’s Day Cards.

Read more here: http://www.catholic-sf.org/news_select.php?newsid=&id=56744

The responses ( bold and underline mine):

Planned Parent Hood
WIC – Women, Infants, and Children
Family Resource Center

WIC for nutrition and education, the Depression Connection Team to take care of her mental health, and the Parenting Center to show her how to take care of a child.

Planned Parenthood
Mental Heath Mental Retardation
KEYS Learning Center or New Lives School

The YWCA is a place where she and the baby could stay before/after the baby was born

The Nurse-Family Partnership through the County Public Health assigns a nurse to a mother and child up to the child’s second birthday

Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance offers education programs, guest speakers and peer support groups

The first place I would refer a depressed, pregnant, 16-year old would be Planned Parenthood for pregnancy options counseling.

If she decided to have an abortion, Planned Parenthood would be able to help her. I would recommend that the patient follow up after her procedure with Planned Parenthood for birth control counseling as well.  Then I would refer the girl to MHMR for continued monitoring of her mental health.

If she decided to give the child up for adoption, I would refer her to the Gladney Center for Adoption.  They could assist her with the adoption procedures.  I would then, again, also refer her to planned parenthood for birth control counseling and MHMR for her mental health.

If she decides to keep the pregnancy, I would refer her to MHMR for post-partum care of her mental health, Planned Parenthood for post-partum birth control counseling, Big Brothers Big Sisters of for mentoring by an older girl.

DISCLAIMER: This assignment was for extra credit, and is not therefore representative of the entire class.  Disturbing nonetheless.

Two lights on a lowly Altar;
Two snowy cloths for a Feast;–
Two vases of dying roses,–
The Morning comes from the East,–
With a gleam for the folds of the Vestments
And a grace for the face of the Priest.

The sound of a low, sweet whisper
Floats over a little Bread,–
And trembles around a chalice,–
And the Priest bows down his head!
O’er a Sign of White on the Altar,–
In the cup–o’er a sign of Red.

As red as the Red of roses
As white as the White of snows!–
But the red is the red of a surface
Beneath which a God’s blood flows;
And the white is the white of a sunlight
Within which a God’s Flesh glows.

Ah! Words of the olden Thursday!
Ye come from the Far-away!–
Ye bring us the Friday’s victim
In his own love’s olden way?–
In the hand of the Priest at the altar
His Heart finds a Home each day

The sight of a Host uplifted!
The silver-sound of a bell!–
The gleam of a golden chalice–
Be glad.–sad heart! ‘t is well;
He made,–and he keeps love’s promise
With thee, all days to dwell.

From his hand to his lips that tremble,–
From his lips to his heart a-thrill,–
Goes the little Host on its love-path
Still doing the Father’s Will;–
And over the rim of the chalice
The Blood flows forth,–to fill,–

The heart of the man annointed,
With the waves of a wondrous grace;
A silence falls on the Altar–
An awe, on each bended face–
For the Heart that bled on Calvary
Still beats in the Holy-Place.

The priest comes down to the railing
Where brows are bowed in prayer,–
In the tender clasp of his fingers
A Host lies pure and fair,–
And the hearts of Christ and the Christian
Meet there,–and only there!

Oh! Love! that is deep and deathless!
Oh! Faith that is strong and grand!
Oh! Hope that will shine forever,
O’er the wastes of a weary land!–
Christ’s Heart finds an earthly Heaven
In the palm of the Priest’s pure hand.

Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions. – G.K. Chesterton

Tolerance

I was in the supermarket the other day buying some charcoal and lighter fluid (like a good Catholic, I had some books to burn), and I saw a drop-quote on one of the magazine covers from Paster Rick Warren, founder of Saddleback Church. The quote went something like this: ‘The idea of tolerance has come back into style.’ This was the teaser line from an interview he did for Reader’s Digest… Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that preachers are teaching that which is fashionable – I mean, Jesus was pretty fashionable in all He did, I’m sure – but I was surprised that the ‘hook’ for the article was Pastor Warren’s desire for tolerance. It seems tolerance has become synonymous with love. And I think there is nothing further from the truth…

The story of June

The following is the completely untrue factual story of June:

June was an adventurer. She climbed Kilimanjaro, backpacked across Europe, and she even kissed the Blarney Stone. On one of her adventurous journeys, she found herself deep in the Amazon rain forest. As she was hiking, she heard the faint whisper of a voice from afar… and the voice sounded panicked. She doubled her speed and ran towards the voice, finally finding its source about 100 meters away. It was a young man who was trapped in quicksand.

June looked to her right, then looked to her left where she saw the thorny, but strong branch of an acacia tree lying on the ground. She had two options, and she quickly voiced them in her head: She could either She could either let him be overtaken by the quicksand, or grab the acacia branch and reach out to the quickly sinking gent – but risk harming him with the thorns from the acacia branch. So, faced with these two courses of actions, she chose the obvious one yelling, ‘I don’t want you to think I think badly of you for walking into that quicksand. I think you’re really great! I want to be your friend!’

Then June turned around and walked to the nearest base camp to enjoy a good night’s rest.

The Branch of the Acacia

The two options offered to June were, of course, tolerance or love. I say *or* because, though some say they are related, tolerance is not loving in the least. Merely telling someone who is living in moral quicksand that you accept them and aren’t afraid of them or their choices, but never mentioning to them that their choices will lead them to their demise is not love – it’s tolerance… and it’s easy.

Sometimes loving someone means handing them the branch from the acacia tree to get them out of the quicksand they’ve gotten themselves in to. It may hurt them at first, but it’s much better than the alternative.

I have much more to say on this topic, but my wife told me to write shorter posts so I’ll stop there.

The Church to me is all important things everywhere. It is authority and guidance. It is love and inspiration. It is hope and assurance. It is God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. It is our Lady and St. Joseph. It is St. Peter and Pius XII. It is the bishop and the pastor. It is the catechism and it is our mother leaning over the crib teaching us our evening prayers. It is the cathedral at Chartres and the cross-tipped hut on Ulithi. It is the martyrs in the Colosseum and the martyrs in Uganda, the martyrs at Tyburn and the martyrs at Nagasaki. It is the wrinkled old nun and the eager-eyed postulant. It is the radiant face of the young priest saying his first Mass, and the sleepy boy acolyte with his soiled white sneakers showing under his black cassock.

It is the spire glimpsed from a train window and the cruciform miniature of a church seen far below on the earth from an airplane. It is six o’clock Mass with its handful of unknown saints at the communion rail in the gray dark and it is pontifical High Mass with its crowds and glowing grandeur in St. Peter’s. It is the candle-starred procession after evening Benediction in St. Patrick’s and the rosary, the night before the burial, at a stuccoed funeral parlor in Los Angeles. It is El Greco’s soaring Assumption in Toledo and it is the primitive pink and blue angels on a mission altar in Peru. It is the Sistine Choir and it is the May procession of Chinese children singing the Regina Coeli in Peking.

It is the Carthusian at prime on Monte Allegro and the Jesuit teaching epistemology in Tokyo. It is the Scheutveld Father fighting sleeping sickness in the Congo and the Redemptorist fighting prejudice in Vermont. It is the Benedictine, the Augustinian, the Passionist, the Dominican, the Franciscan. It is all religious and especially the great unnamed Order of the Parish Priest.

It is the Carmelite Sister lighting the tapers for vespers in the drear cold of Iceland and the Sister of Notre Dame de Namur making veils for First Communion in Kwango. It is the Vincentian Sister nursing a Negro Baptist dying of cancer in Alabama and the Maryknoll Sister facing a Communist commissar in Manchuria. It is the White Sister teaching the Arabs carpetmaking in the Sahara and the Good Shepherd Sister in St. Louis giving sanctuary to a derelict child, a home to a lamb who was lost. It is the Little Sister of the Poor salving the sores of a forgotten old man in Marseilles, the Grey Sister serving the destitute in Haiti, the Blessed Sacrament Sister helping a young Negro write poetry in New Orleans. It is the Sister of Charity… It is all the Sisters everywhere.

It is the crippled woman who keeps fresh flowers before our Lady’s altar and the young woman catechist who teaches the barefooted neophytes in the distant hills. It is the girl who gives up her bridge to drive the Sisters to the prisons and the homes of the poor, and it is the woman who goes from door to door begging for help for the orphanage. It is the proud mother of the priest and the heartbroken mother of the criminal. It is all mothers and sisters everywhere who weep and suffer and pray that sons and brothers may keep the Faith.

It is the youth climbing the September hill to the seminary, his heart sure of Him calling, and it is the lost priest stumbling, groping, seeking vainly afar the God he can hold in his hands, a stranger among men always and everywhere. It is the bad sermon and the good, the false vocation and the true. It is the tall young man who says the Stations of the Cross every evening and it is the father of ten who wheels the sick to Mass every Sunday morning at the County Hospital.

It is St. Martin and Martin de Porres, St. Augustine and St. Phocas, Gregory the Great and Gregory Thaumaturgus, St. Ambrose and Charles de Foucauld, St. Ignatius and Ignatius the Martyr, St. Thomas More and St. Barnabas. It is St. Teresa and St. Philomena, Joan of Arc and St. Winefride, St. Agnes and St. Mary Euphrasia. It is all the saints, ancient and new, named and unnamed, and all the sinners.

It is the stained-glass window with the ragged hole from a boy’s baseball, and the small red sanctuary lamp sputtering in a dark and empty church. It is the bursting out of the Gloria on Holy Saturday and the dim crib at dawn Mass on Christmas. It is the rose vestments on Laetare Sunday and the blue overalls of the priest working with the laborers in a mine in the Ruhr.

It is the shiny, new shoes and shiny, reverent faces of the June bride and groom kneeling before the white-flowered altar at nuptial Mass, and it is the pale, troubled young mother at the baptismal font, her joy mingled with distress as she watches her first-born wail its protest against the sacramental water. It is the long, shadowy, uneven line of penitents waiting outside the confessional in the dusk of a wintry afternoon, each separate and solemnly alone with his sins, and it is the stooped figure of a priest, silhouetted against the headlights of a police car in the darkness of the highway as he says the last prayers over a broken body lying on the pavement beside a shattered automobile.

It is the Magnificat and it is grace before meals. It is the worn missal and the chipped statue of St. Anthony, the poor box and the cracked church bell. It is peace and truth and salvation. It is the Door through which I entered into the Faith and the Door through which I shall leave, please God, for eternity.

Excerpt from my favorite book of all time,  Dan England and the Noonday Devil, by Myles Connolly, 1951. Kudos to the St. Louis Catholic for typing this up.

Vienna, Jan 11, 2009 / 02:10 am (CNA).- The chemist who made a key discovery leading to the invention of the birth control pill has written a commentary calling demographic decline in Europe a “horror scenario” and a “catastrophe” brought on in part by the pill’s invention.

Mr. Carl Djerassi, now 85 years old, was one of three researchers whose formulation of the synthetic progestagen Norethisterone marked a key step in the creation of the first oral contraceptive pill, the Guardian reports.

In a personal commentary in the Austrian newspaper Der Standard, Djerassi said his invention is partly to blame for demographic imbalance in Europe. On the continent, he argued, there is now “no connection at all between sexuality and reproduction.”

“This divide in Catholic Austria, a country which has on average 1.4 children per family, is now complete,” he wrote.

Djerassi described families who had decided against reproduction as “wanting to enjoy their schnitzels while leaving the rest of the world to get on with it.”

The fall in the birth rate, he claimed, was an “epidemic” far worse but less highlighted than obesity. In his view, young Austrians who fail to procreate are committing national suicide.

If it is not possible to reverse the demographic decline, an “intelligent immigration policy” will be necessary, Djerassi said.

According to the Guardian, Archbishop of Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schonborn told Austrian TV that Pope Paul VI had predicted the pill would cause a dramatic fall in the birth rate.

“Somebody above suspicion like Carl Djerassi … is saying that each family has to produce three children to maintain population levels, but we’re far away from that,” the cardinal said.

Ugh. God bless Europe. God bless the world.

I have never understood Mary. Don’t get me wrong; I believe every Marian dogma. I just have never felt the connection.

I’ve tried, though. I read Hail, Holy Queen by Scott Hahn and Our Lady and the Church by Hugo Rahner, S.J. I thought they were very nice books, but I still didn’t feel it. Some meditations by Chiara Lubich, foundress of the Focolare Movement, stirred something inside me. Lubich focuses on Mary’s personal faith as opposed to the doctrines and dogmas that Hahn discusses, or the theological implications about which Rahner writes. With those meditations in mind, I prayed for a more personal relationship with and understanding of Mary.

Then, it finally happened. I read a chapter called “The Mother” from Romano Guardini’s book The Lord. I have never seen a more beautiful interpretation of why we honor Mary. Guardini focuses on her heroic faith and not “the miracles of Marianic legend.” As Guardini says, “Legend may delight us with deep and gracious images, but we cannot build our lives on imagery, least of all when the very foundations of our belief begin to totter.”

Guardini frames her heroic faith in this way: “Everything that affected Jesus affected his mother, yet no intimate understanding existed between them. His life was hers, yet constantly escaped her.” Almost every encounter between Jesus and Mary shows that some type of separation existed between them.

-Mary and Joseph worriedly search for their child. They find him in the Temple and express their worry. What’s his response? Not “I’m sorry you were afraid” or “I should have looked for you, Mom,” but amazement! “Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?” Can you imagine the shock they must have felt after hearing him say this? They simply were not of his world and thinking.

-Mary pleads with him at Cana. His response? “What wouldst thou have me do, woman?” As in, “The Father has a different plan that you do not understand.” His will was not hers, and she had to trust him.

-Mary comes down from Galilee to see him. Do we see an excited, joyful response from Jesus? Nope. “Who are my mother and my brethren? Whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.” Not a rude response, but one that must have reminded Mary she would not have the same mother-son relationship as other mothers are privileged to have. That traditional intimacy simply could not exist between her and her son.

-Guardini’s words are best here: “Finally on Calvary, his mother under the cross, thirsting for a word, her heart crucified with him, he says with a glance at John: ‘Woman, behold, they son.’ And to John: ‘Behold, thy mother.’ Expression, certainly, of a dying son’s solicitude for his mother’s future, yet her heart must have twinged. Once again she is directed away from him.”

This was not a normal mother-son relationship. It was terrifying and mysterious for her. And that’s why Mary is amazing. Guardini: “Again and again he left her behind to feel the blade of the ‘sword’—but each time, in a surge of faith, she caught up with him and enfolded him anew, until at last he severed the very bond of son-ship, appointing another, the man beside her under the cross, to take his place!”

She constantly wrestled with faith and stayed committed. She constantly felt desolation and separation from an intimacy with Christ—(the first real “dark night of the soul,” you might say)—but she continued to follow blindly. Mary is the most shining example of heroic Christian faith.

And with that in mind, Chiara Lubich’s meditations mean so much more to me now:

“If one day our sufferings reach such depths that make everything inside us rebel because the fruit of our ‘passion’ seems to be taken out of our hands and, moreover, from our heart, let’s remember her.

“It will be this coldness that will make us a bit similar to her, and which will shape better in our souls the figure of Mary, the All-Beautiful, the Mother of all because by divine will she was detached from everyone—most of all from her divine Son.”

Somebody’s knocking, should I let him in?
Lord, it’s the Devil, would you look at him?
I’ve heard about him, but I never dreamed,
He’d have blue eyes and blue jeans.

–Terri Gibbs, “Somebody’s Knocking”

My dad used to sing us that song – and only on the rarest of occasions would he use it as a lullaby. He used it when I was a teenager to illustrate the point that evil is enticing. If Satan showed up at your door with his Pitchfork ‘n’ Horns™, you’d probably run. However, if he shows up in blue jeans and sunglasses, you’re more likely to fall for his wiles.

I listened (mostly) to his caution and it served me well. In fact, I never hung out with anyone who wore blue jeans or had any eye color other than brown… so that kept me from interacting with, well, anyone. Evil avoided.

But as these years have passed, another theory I was exposed to has started to make more sense. Yeah, evil is attractive in some cases – but the real nasty evil is neither unattractive nor alluring. Nasty evil is boring. Nasty evil is blasé. Nasty evil is banal… and its power is the apathy from whence it was borne.

Eichmann and the Jewish people

Hannah Arendt wrote a book entitled ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ in which she suggested that Eichmann’s biggest fault was not that he hated Jews (in fact, she said he showed no signs of anti-Semitism), but that he blindly followed the law. When he showed that stereotypical German prowess of efficiency by streamlining the deaths of thousands of Jews, he was merely acting within the boundaries that the state laid out for him. 

The evil he was perpetrating was, to him (and most involved), merely a set of rules by which to live. And the verbiage used to communicate the rules was changed slightly, but significantly. Rhetoric took the place of thinking. Jingoism took the place of true patriotism. And it all happened with the spectacle and flourish of moss growing on a tree. It was banal.

‘It is acceptable to treat Jewish people with caution because they may affect our quality of life,’ slowly morphed into, ‘It is necessary to treat Jewish people with caution because they may affect our quality of life.’ Then it became, ‘In order to facilitate caution, Jewish people will be marked with a Star of David.’ Then it became, ‘In order to fully exercise caution in regard to Jewish people, we need to gather them up and put them in a separate area.’ And we all know where that snowball led…

So what? The Holocaust happened and the necessary lessons were learned by the world.

Lesson learned? Hardly. I do think it will be a while until we see a genocide of Holocaust proportions, but we are currently living in a society that, in 1973 issued the decree that, ‘It is acceptable to allow the abortion of a fetus in the womb because it may affect your quality of life.’ Then the decree morphed in to, ‘It is necessary to allow the abortion of a fetus in the womb because it may affect your quality of life.’

10% of the people are against abortion rights with their heart and soul. 10% are for abortion rights with their heart and soul. But there is that 80% who see abortion as just another law – the government okayed it and we comply with the law. Abortion is boring.

All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

What must we as Catholics do? We must pray. We must pray that the people in this country see the genocide we are executing. Also, since it has become convention that a woman has ‘the right to choose’ to kill the baby in her womb, we must defy convention fearlessly.

Yeah, it’s tough. Those who defy convention are usually scoffed at and ridiculed. It was convention that people held slaves. It was convention that women couldn’t vote. It was convention that African-Americans couldn’t vote. Convention was defied, meaning replaced banality, and nasty evil was squashed.

Let’s fight the banality of evil by keeping meaning in our lives and by communicating that meaning to others.

-jpb-