Author: Chandler Marrs, PhD

If you’ve read any of my posts, you know that this is one of the questions that pervades my work. Do we really know what we think we know? More often than not, the answer is no. Upon examination, what we hold true falls short. In the field of pharmaceutical medicine, where money plays an enormous role in determining what is known about a particular drug, finding the real and honest truth about a medication is difficult and sometimes impossible. Hormonal contraception, because it has been on the market for decades and because as women we really want it to be safe and absent negative side effects, is one of those drugs where what we think we know and what we actually know are two entirely different things.

Over the last few years, we have been commission for a two studies on the safety of hormonal contraceptives. One study, the Real Risk project, ended early due to a loss of funding. As a result, Phase 2 data were never analyzed. (We decided to continue collecting data in the hopes of finding funding to complete the study at some point. We haven’t found the funding yet.) Nevertheless, we learned a lot and what we learned should be public. Slowly, some of that information is making its way into blog posts.

Below is a portion of the final report, covering the history of the pill, a sort of ‘what they knew when’ of side effects. Looking back at the history of the development of the pill and other forms of hormonal contraception, it becomes clear that the health and safety of the female population was not a primary objective. Indeed, more often than not, the serious side effects were ignored, particularly in the US, setting the precedent for the almost total acceptance of the drug’s safety that we see today. As a woman who used hormonal birth control and developed many of the side effects noted by early researchers, side effects that were ignored by my physicians, reading this is eye-opening. If I had known then what I know now, I would have never used this drug.

The History of Birth Control Induced Side Effects

The first case of birth control induced thrombosis, a pulmonary embolism, was reported in 1961, only one year after the drug’s release. This was soon followed by the first contraceptive induced myocardial infarction in 1963. In the years that followed, research groups, primarily in Great Britain, began delineating the risks and mechanisms by which hormonal contraceptives induced the state of hypercoagulability that led to thrombotic events. Much of this research, along with the publication of Barbara Seaman’s book, The Doctor’s Case Against the Pill, formed the impetus for the Nelson Pill Hearings (NPH) in 1970.

Early on, British researchers noted significant changes in blood clotting mechanisms in the women using oral contraceptives compared to those who did not, but also compared to pregnant women. Hormonal birth control, it appeared, increased several pro-clotting factors while simultaneously decreasing anti-clotting factors; changes in hemodynamics that were in many ways, though not entirely, akin to late pregnancy and early postpartum where blood clots are known risks. This was in addition to systemic vessel wall damage that simultaneously set the stage for both clotting and hemorrhage. They also found that clot risk increased over time and was compounded by other variables such as exercise and smoking. In 1967, based upon the results of three studies, the British Medical Research Council issued a preliminary communication that stated:

“The sum of the evidence, however, is so strong that there can be no reasonable doubt that some forms of thromboembolic disorder are associated with oral contraceptives. The association is particularly strong in the group of women with no known medical condition predisposing to thrombosis.”

Politics and Money Rewrite History

These findings, though clearly implicating hormonal contraceptives in thrombosis, became immediately controversial and were all-but-entirely dismissed by American medical societies who argued an inherent difference between British and American women (NPH pages 6222-6259); one that supposedly predisposed British women more strongly towards blood clots than their American counterparts.

Additionally, according to testimony made in the Nelson Pill Hearings, the American Medical Association allowed industry experts to write and publish the early safety statements while simultaneously refusing to publish research and case reports indicative of risk (NPH page 6113). G.D. Searle, one of the early manufacturers of oral contraceptives, went so far as to ‘vote away’ the risk of thrombosis at a medical conference (NPH pages 6108-6133). Sales and marketing materials were designed to dismiss the risk and obfuscate the research (NPH pages 6218-6296). This led American doctors, researchers, and the population as a whole, to presume falsely that the pill was safe and without risks. It bears noting that by failing to publish the evidence implicating the pill in thrombosis and by allowing industry experts to write and publish the safety reports, the American Medical Association set the precedent for what has now become a complete abrogation of scientific and medical ethics, not only regarding contraceptives, but also, for every other drug on the market.

Beyond Thrombosis: System Wide Side Effects

A persistent notion in contraceptive research is that progesterone and estradiol, the two hormones mimicked in contraceptives, are singularly involved with reproduction. What follows is a presumption that these hormones have no impact on other tissues and altering them affects nothing but the intended target. Contrary to this popular belief, these steroid hormones are not solely involved in reproduction. Hormone receptors are distributed throughout the brain and the body, on every organ, in every tissue, and in every fluid. Hormones, thus, regulate every physiological system. When synthetic hormones bind to endogenous or native hormone receptors, they effectively override the body’s natural regulatory functions in ways we have yet to comprehend fully. It is not unexpected then that the use of hormonal contraceptives would have broad based effects. Thus, in addition to the higher incidence of thrombotic events in otherwise healthy women, physicians and researchers testifying at the hearings noted clear associations between the use of hormonal contraceptives and a broad array of disease processes. Some of those effects are highlighted below.

Metabolic Disturbances

Perhaps some of the least well-recognized effects of these hormones include those to a woman’s general metabolism. Hormonal birth control induces wide ranging metabolic disturbances in insulin and glucose regulation, lipid control, and in heart rate, rhythm and pressure leading to weight gain, diabetes, high blood pressure, and cardiovascular disease. One researcher testified accordingly:

“There are more than 50 ways in which the metabolic functions of the body are modified, and to say therefore that normal physiological function has been demonstrated in the years of oral contraception is to overlook a very large amount of information (Dr. Victor Wynn, NPH page 6311).”

“When I say these changes occur, I mean they occur in everybody, more in some than in others, but no person entirely escapes from the metabolic influence of these compounds. It is merely that some manifest the changes more obviously than others (Dr. Victor Wynn, NPH page 6303).”

And yet another said:

“These alterations, which have been demonstrated, include changes in carbohydrate metabolism, fat metabolism, protein metabolism, and the endocrine, liver, nervous and vascular system, among others. The findings are straightforward and reproducible (Dr. Hilton Salhanick, NPH pages 6382).”

Impaired Reproductive Capacity

Impaired reproductive capacity, likely due to the pill’s effects on the pituitary gland and its ability to prevent ovulation was noted (Dr. James Whitelaw, NPH pages 6009-6019). Case studies presented by the physicians indicated use of hormonal birth control often delayed fertility while the body re-adjusted to its non-pill state. In at least 1-2% of the women who used the pill, however, it caused permanent infertility. Ovulation never resumed. Additionally, women who used the pill were more prone to miscarriage, stillbirth, and chromosomal abnormalities in the offspring; abnormalities that as one researcher indicated were:

“…completely incompatible with live birth…”

Sadly, much of this research was disregarded and there has been very little work since. In fact, the use of oral contraceptives to regulate cycles in advance of fertility treatment is now commonplace. Despite research suggesting it is contraindicated.

Beyond the immediate effects to fertility and reproduction, early researchers postulated potential transgenerational effects. That is, when women use hormonal contraceptives, ovulation is suppressed unnaturally and germ cell damage to the ovarian follicles is possible: damage that may not only express itself in the first generation, but also in subsequent generations, e.g. in her grandchildren and great grandchildren.

“An unequivocal abnormality produced by estrogen-progestogen is the suppression of ovulation itself. It is only reasonable to consider the ultimate fate of the ovum that would have been normally released from the ovary. We do not know whether the ovum dies or survives. If it survives, is it altered in any way?”

Cancer

One of the most damning, but again disregarded and disputed, findings of the early researchers was the association between hormonal birth control and cancer. Researchers testifying at the Nelson Pill Hearings noted that cancer developed in all animal models tested when oral contraceptives were administered. In fact, the use of synthetic estrogens is banned in animal husbandry in Europe because it causes cancer in the animals and also in the workers. In the US, there is no such ban, owing partly to the decades delay in cancer onset but mostly to industry lobbying.

“I think here is the proper place to point out that when we talk about the pill being used by 18 million people in the prime of life throughout the world, we are in fact considering an internal pollution, the extent of which is not yet known, but the nature of which is indeed known. And we are threatening the destruction of a large segment of one of our most precious natural resources, the young women of our society (Dr. J. Harold Williams, NPH pages 6219).”

Liver

Liver function, because of its role in drug metabolism and detoxification, is inevitably altered by the use of any medication. To what extent the liver is impacted, is a key safety issue reviewed during drug approval considerations. As one might expect, hormonal contraceptives degrade liver function. At the hearings, researchers testified to four key changes in liver function.

• A 40% reduction in the ability to clear sulfobromophatalein (a compound used to test liver function)
• An increase in liver enzyme activity (a marker of liver damage) in 20% of the women who use hormonal contraceptives
• Jaundice in 1 in 10,000 women that subsided after discontinuation of OC (Dr. Philip Corfman, NPH Pages 6391-6426)
• Reduction in total plasma protein level (Dr. William Spellacy, NPH Pages 6426-6445)

Overall, the changes in liver function were summed up as follows:

“The immediate effects include the alteration of several of the laboratory tests used in medical diagnoses. Aggravation of existing liver disease, if present, to the point where jaundice may be seen has also been shown. There is no answer to the query of will permanent liver damage result from the use of the oral contraceptives.”

We have yet to answer the question of permanent damage, although a large study in 1997 suggests that liver damage abates upon cessation.

Disturbed Immune Function

One of the most commonly recognized but simultaneously disregarded effects of hormonal contraception include disturbances in immune function. Autoimmune diseases such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis are significantly more common in women than men, especially in women who use hormonal contraceptives. Once again, the onset and increased incidence post-pill use was noted as soon as these medications hit the market, but because of the complexity of these diseases, all but disregarded. Early researchers noted that with new onset cases once contraceptive use ceased, symptoms resolved and most patients remained symptom free for at least the 2.5 years of the study period (Dr. Giles Boles, NPH pages 6086-6108). In recent years, awareness of this connection has increased somewhat.

“Over the past three years we have seen 22 young women who… after beginning oral contraceptives developed [arthritic symptoms]. The joint swelling was usually limited to the hands. On cessation of the oral contraceptive, the symptoms disappeared… We specifically inquire as to the use of oral contraceptives in all young women we see with rheumatic complaints…”

In addition to the increased incidence of autoimmune diseases associated with hormonal contraception, other immune system changes were noted, and again, dismissed.

“The Pill, by interfering with the natural secretions of the vagina, leaves women susceptible to a variety of infections, including syphilis and gonorrhea. Those who use the Pill develop VD, other sexually transmitted infections, and vaginitis twice as often as the female population as a whole.”

Namely, the use of hormonal contraception increases the incidence of bacterial and fungal infections and the risk for developing sexually transmitted diseases. More recently, researchers have identified the mechanisms by which contraceptives initiate these disease processes – via changes in cervical immune composition that increase a woman’s vulnerability to infection.  Hormonal contraceptives also predispose women to persistent MRSA infections.

Psychiatric Illness

Perhaps one of the more disturbing findings regarding hormonal contraceptives is their role in new onset psychiatric illness and their capacity to induce suicide. In the original trials, at least one women committed suicide while taking the pill. Her case, along with at least 18 other deaths (Dr. Edmond Kassouf, NPH pages 6108-6133), was omitted in the reports filed to the FDA.

“There is considerable incidence of mild to moderate psychiatric morbidity [disease] associated with the use of combination oral contraceptive agents… In three of the four studies, there seems to be agreement that those who have required psychiatric care in the past will be more at risk for the development of morbidity, including psychosis. One study also suggests that there may be some increase in the depth of illness the longer the medication is taken (Dr. Francis Kane, NPH page 6457).”

“The emotional or psychiatric problems are the complications which seem to me to have the most serious potential danger. Three patients have stated that they were desperately afraid that they were going to kill themselves… After the pills were omitted, the depression and suicidal fears of the three patients disappeared, as did the depression of the other patients (Dr. John McCain, NPH page 6473).”

“It is disturbing to consider the patients on the pills whose depression may have ended in suicide and/or homicide with no recognition of any association with the contraceptive pills… Personality changes could be a factor in other conditions such as automobile accidents and divorces (Dr. John McCain, NPH page 6473).”

Despite the early research, connections between hormonal contraceptives and mental health have been largely ignored. In fact, since the nineties, hormonal contraceptives have been marketed specifically for depression and anxiety in direct opposition to the data suggesting these medications cause and/or exacerbated psychiatric illness. As recently as three years ago, an epidemiological study suggested,

“…a protective association between hormonal contraceptive use and depressive symptoms, as well as suicide attempts, in a population-based sample of young, sexually active US women.”

Fortunately, the tide appears to be changing. Fifty years after the release of these medications and after generations of women have complained of serious mental health issues while using hormonal contraceptives, a large study published definitive data indicating that hormonal contraceptives did indeed induce depression, especially in adolescents. No doubt, industry sponsored studies will surface shortly and contradict these findings.

Hormonal Contraceptives Today

Today, 80% of American women will use hormonal contraception at some point in their lives, mostly oblivious to their risks for thrombosis or any other of the side effects. Indeed, most women and physicians consider the side effects extremely rare, if they consider them at all. This is largely due to the fact that the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology and other medical associations routinely claim they are safe. At any given time, 62% of women of reproductive age are using at least one contraceptive method. In contrast to the perceived lack of side effects, the numbers tell a different story. Fully 60% of women will cease using hormonal birth control within six months of initiation because of side effects and 30% will try up to five different types of hormonal contraceptives, switching between brands to temper side effects.  Given that most brands may vary in name only, switching between brands is often a fruitless endeavor, something prescribing physicians seem not to appreciate.

That there are over 200 brands currently available on the market worldwide, suggests an abundance of options, but from a pharmacological standpoint, not much has changed in hormonal contraceptive technology over the last half century. The predominant estrogen used in contraceptives remains the same as was developed decades ago, a compound called ethinyl estradiol (EE2). With the exception of the fourth generation progestins, the progestins used in modern contraceptives involve only slight modifications to the original compounds. Even the ‘newer’ delivery methods, like the intrauterine device and the cervical ring, were developed decades ago, in the 1950s and 1960s. For all practical purposes, contraceptive technology remains as it was over half a century ago. Therefore, today’s contraceptives carry as many or more of the side effects and risks as their predecessors did.

Only now, our increased familiarity with these drugs has fostered a deeply ingrained but false sense of safety. Phrases suggesting that after 50 years on the market these are among ‘the most studied medications’ pepper the literature. When in fact, these medications were never studied properly before their release:

“Evidently, for whatever reasons, there is no sound body of scientific studies concerning these possible effects available today, a situation which I regard as scandalous. If we proceed in the future as we have in the past, we will continue to stumble from one tentative and inadequately supported conclusion to another, always relying on data which come to hand, and which were not designed for the purpose (Dr. Paul Meier, NPH pages 6548-6560).”

And they have not been studied conclusively since. For all intents and purposes, safety issues associated with hormonal birth control remain largely under-investigated and unrecognized. What research exists generally favors commercial interests, and if we’re honest, our interests as women. We want easy, safe and effective birth. We need it and so we ignore the side effects and ignore any research that confirms our suspicions. We allow ourselves to accept the risks. Maybe it’s time we didn’t. Maybe it’s time we dig in and find out what is really going on and then fix the problems.

Share your Story

If you have a birth control story, please consider sharing it on Hormones Matter.

The family is the most sexual of all organizations. But given the sexual chaos of modern times, new families who want to succeed in their task of child-raising must quickly find a community of other families of like mind.  They are most likely to find such families at their place of worship if the sexuality taught there is a family and child centered sexuality.

The data show (see chart below) that central to family sexuality is an ethos of chastity, necessary for marital unity and stability and out of which flow myriad benefits.  Without chastity the family is no more a thriving family than a monastery without celibacy is a monastery.

Chastity is now central to the public argument for religious freedom because such families need their freedom of association and freedom of action to raise the next generation to live the same strong family life.  They need freedom to teach their own way of life: marriage till death do us part, and raising their children to do the same.  Much as the Amish fought and won their freedom of association and way of life, so too other religious communities are now finding they too must fight and win a freedom which they had assumed was theirs without asking.  It had been so.  It is no longer.

If we want our religious freedom we have to be able to make the argument for teaching chastity as a way of life, not as a “risk reduction strategy”.  Chaste family life is easy to defend in the public debate because it is far superior to all other ways, by any measure of human thriving.  Teenagers (who have yet to experience life and learn its hard lessons by experience) need to understand that there are lifelong consequences for “sowing wild oats”, as the most important chart in all the social sciences makes clear:

They need to be very familiar with the data (with the lessons of life experience) that the totally monogamous couple (only sexual partner ever: their spouse) is the least likely to divorce – by far. And that one third of women who have had only one other sexual partner (normally before marriage) are likely to divorce within five years, and that those who had two such sexual partners (other than their husband – again most likely before marriage) have a fifty percent chance of divorce within five years — and that half of their children will be raised without their father present.

Chastity may be difficult but it is central to a family-centered life.  And it is also central to justice for children.  There is no free lunch on this issue, not for teenagers, adults nor for society itself.

If churches and parents do not make the strongest case possible for the chastity-based family (and on its fruits and benefits it is an easy case to make) they will not get their religious freedom.

The rest of society may think such families are weird (despite the data) but they will likely respect them for the path they have chosen.

The future of the First Amendment rests on the freedom to teach the centrality of chaste family life.   We will not win I if we are ambivalent or shy.

Pat Fagan is the director of the Marriage and Religion Research Initiative at The Catholic University of America. He is publisher and editor of Marripedia.org. Republished from the MARRI blog with permission.

Friday Night

Secular Pro-Life’s conference booth was set up just a few yards away from our friends at Rehumanize International, with whom I also shared a hotel. Quick plug: their latest project is Create | Encounter, which wants your visual art, creative writing, musical works, etc. related to any and all life issues. Submissions are due July 31; details here.

Saturday
The program opened with Lacey Buchanan, who spoke about her experience as a mother. Her son, Christian, has an extremely rare disability. Among other things, his eyes never developed. She struggled with people who’ve stared at Christian, made insensitive comments, and even attacked her as a “bad mother” for not aborting him! But the family has persevered, and the more she publicly advocates for him, the better it’s gotten. She had a wonderful message about the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

Next up was a panel of women who had all received poor prenatal diagnoses. Some did indeed give birth to children with disabilities; in other cases, the doctors turned out to be wrong. All of them described immense pressure from their doctors to abort, even after repeated refusals. One asked for a note to be placed in her chart that she was keeping the baby and did not want to hear any more abortion talk, to no avail. The most moving story came from a woman who received a scary initial test result. She asked the doctor for more testing, and was told “The only test I’ll perform on your daughter is an autopsy.” After sharing this, she asked her daughter to please stand—she was there attending the conference, 19 years old and perfectly healthy!

After lunch, there was a panel of pro-life physicians. Much of the discussion focused on natural family planning (NFP): what it is, and what it isn’t. Specifically, it is not the rhythm method, and it is not just having a period tracker app on your phone! Effective natural family planning methods use personal indicators like cervical mucous and temperature readings to determine when you are ovulating, as opposed to when the “average” woman in an “average” cycle is ovulating. NFP allows women to either avoid pregnancy or try to conceive, and charting also offers doctors insight into underlying hormonal issues that may be treatable. The panelists were religious, and opposed hormonal birth control for a mix of medical and religious reasons, but noted that NFP can benefit women from all walks of life. This led to the memorable line “Atheists have cervical mucous too!” (Can confirm.)

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Two breakout sessions were scheduled for the afternoon. All the speakers and topics looked interesting, and it was hard to pick. For the first session, I attended a presentation on pregnancy loss from a woman who had experienced seven miscarriages/stillbirths at various gestations. She shared that she was well supported when she lost a child later in pregnancy; people brought her meals and sent sympathy cards and listened. But that was not the case when she miscarried early, and that hurt. The pro-life community needs to step up in those situations, and we shouldn’t expect women’s grief to follow the classic linear “seven stages.” Life is much messier than that.

The second breakout session I attended focused on sex trafficking. The speaker was a social worker who shared (with names changed, of course) how her clients, often young teens, were recruited into prostitution rings through a combination of seemingly legitimate job opportunities, manipulation, and force or the threat of force. Helpful tip for pregnancy care centers: trafficked women and girls are often supervised by a handler, except when they are in the restroom. When a client goes to the ladies room to take a pregnancy test, give her the opportunity to tell you what is going on. This can be accomplished with a sign and a message box. Naturally the message box must be checked after each pregnancy test.

Sunday
The morning’s keynote speaker was Melissa Ohden, who shared her story of surviving a saline abortion, growing up in a loving adoptive home, and eventually reconnecting with her birth mother—who, as it turned out, had been coerced into the abortion by her mother, Melissa’s grandmother. You can read more about Melissa’s incredible journey here.

Next up was a panel entitled “Engaging the Black Community.” Much of it was church-focused, which is not surprising given the large role Black churches play in social and political life. But here’s an important takeaway for the pro-life movement in general: be mindful of Martin Luther King Day! It often falls on or near the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, when we have memorial events and rallies planned. But Planned Parenthood is attending the MLK events, and if we aren’t, we’re giving the abortion industry a free pass. Schedule accordingly.

The final event of the conference was also one of the most moving. Seven birth mothers shared their pregnancy and adoption stories. They were incredibly diverse; some never considered abortion, others wavered back and forth, and others were dead set on abortion until a pro-lifer changed their mind. One woman was incarcerated during her pregnancy and gave birth in shackles, a terribly inhumane practice that everyone, whether pro-life or pro-choice, should oppose. There were many adoptive parents and adoptees in the audience, and the Q&A was truly beautiful.

Throughout the weekend, I had the opportunity to network with like-minded women from all over the country, and I also got to hold three different babies. This is the most mom- and child-friendly conference on the planet. Whenever a mom needed a break, there was a line of people volunteering for a shift. If you want to see what pro-life means in practice, this is it! The date for the 2018 conference is TBD (I assume it will be sometime in the summer), but the location has been announced: St. Louis, MO. See you there!

LifeNews Note: Kelsey Hazzard is the head of Secular Pro-Life and this article originally appeared at its blog.

Fr. Shenan Boquet

June 26, 2017 (HLI) — Most Catholics reject the Church’s teaching on contraception not because they’ve carefully considered it but because they’ve never had to do so.

When someone hears that the Catholic Church has a teaching about contraception, a common response is “Why?” Since this crucial teaching is so rarely given in venues where everyday Catholics can hear and consider it, there is widespread ignorance of, and therefore rejection of, the Church’s teaching.

This teaching dates back many centuries but was reiterated and expanded in Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae in 1968. Following continued confusion and widespread rejection of this teaching, Pope John Paul II shed further light on this teaching in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae and a series of Wednesday audiences over several years, which has come to be known as The Theology of the Body. Here we offer a brief introduction to a beautiful teaching that we believe, when understood, will be embraced with great joy.

Why is the Church always saying ‘no?’

The Church has the solemn responsibility to uphold truth, and to do so with love. She has a vested interest in the good of both Catholics and non-Catholics, so she seeks the “common good” of all in society. Her teaching regarding contraception is made “in the light of an integral vision of man and of his vocation, not only his natural and earthly, but also his supernatural and eternal vocation” (Humanae Vitae 7).

We have been made by God and for God, and the Church proposes the truths necessary to aid men and women to live this life so that they might enjoy eternal life with Him. The Church teaches because she loves everyone who, as Scripture reminds us, is set free by the truth both in this life and for the next.

Despite what most people hear about Church teaching through other sources – that it is just a bunch of “nos” to good things – the Church’s teaching about contraception is based on her teaching about sexuality and marriage, which is primarily an affirmation of great goods to which the Church proclaims a resounding “Yes!”

The true meaning of marriage

Scripture affirms that marriage is not a man-made institution, but an institution of nature that has been divinely ordained by God. Marriage is a beautiful lifelong covenantal relationship between one man and one woman, and it is exclusive and open to new life. It is “the wise institution of the Creator to realize in mankind His design of love” and the marriage between the baptized has been raised by Christ to the dignity of a sacrament (HV 8).

Through marriage, spouses enrich one another’s lives through union in love, and so that their mutual love might give rise to new life. This is expressed beautifully in the Book of Genesis by Adam who, upon seeing Eve, exclaimed “at last this one is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh;” and our understanding of marriage is enriched further by God’s first command to “be fruitful and multiply.” (Gen 1:28)

What does the Church teach about contraception?

The marital act is and must always remain open to new life, therefore the union of spouses through conjugal love must never be deliberately closed to life or love. As Pope Paul VI explained, “The Church … teaches that each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life” (HV 12). In God’s divine plan, the marital act unites spouses in love and gives rise to new life. God has established an “inseparable connection” between these unitive and procreative purposes of marital love, so when a couple rejects one of these beautiful purposes of their sexual union they harm their spouse and their marriage, even if their intentions are good.

Contraceptive intercourse involves a choice against the possibility of new life so as to prevent pregnancy. It deliberately makes infertile a sexual act within marriage that should be fertile. The couple who freely and knowingly does this commits a mortal sin.

Contraception is “anti-life”

Contraception contributes to a culture of death by creating an environment in which children are treated as an unwelcome burden, an impediment to personal goals, or even worse, an enemy to be avoided at all costs. This negativity toward new life which is part and parcel of the “contraceptive mentality,” and is why so many children conceived are considered an “accident,” “unplanned,” or “unwanted.”

Blessed John Paul II noted that contraception and abortion are “fruits of the same tree.” “Indeed,” he writes, “the pro-abortion culture is especially strong precisely where the Church’s teaching on contraception is rejected” (Evangelium Vitae 13). Recent studies have confirmed something that may seem counterintuitive, but was actually predicted by the leadership of Planned Parenthood as contraception achieved wider acceptance: higher rates of contraception use do not reduce demand for abortion but rather lead to an increase in abortion because abortion becomes a sort of “Plan C” after a woman becomes unexpectedly pregnant following the type of behavior that naturally leads to pregnancy.(i) This self-ignorance affects women’s identity, and distorts male/female relationships as sex becomes detached from its natural end, becoming meaningless and leading toward an attitude of using the other person for one’s own enjoyment.

It’s not just about potential new life, but about love

Recall that Jesus revealed to us on the Cross that the true and full nature of love is that love is self-gift. Husbands and wives are called to foster love and unity within their marriage. Every couple seeks marriage precisely because they ardently desire to love deeply and fully. But love is more than a feeling: it is a choice and it is hard. Instead of facilitating love, contraception actually makes it more difficult to love.

In The Theology of the Body, Blessed John Paul II explains that we communicate with our bodies. Marital intercourse (without contraceptives) allows for spouses to fully give and receive one another – there are no barriers, there is no withholding of self from one’s beloved. With contraceptive intercourse, however couples reject one another’s fertility, protecting themselves from one another, and withholding a full gift of self. John Paul emphasized that “(W)hen the conjugal act is deprived of its inner truth because it is deprived artificially of its procreative capacity, it also ceases to be an act of love.” Contraceptive intercourse is incapable of the complete gift of self that married couples truly desire. Ultimately, contraception is opposed to love.

Does this mean we have to breed like rabbits?

Not at all. Following the teaching about “responsible parenthood” in Humanae Vitae and previous Church documents, John Paul stressed that, “unfortunately, Catholic thought is often misunderstood on this point, as if the Church supported an ideology of fertility at all costs, urging married couples to procreate indiscriminately and without thought for the future. But one need only study the pronouncements of the Magisterium to know that this is not so.” When couples have serious reasons to postpone having children they may do so by abstaining from intercourse periodically by using “Natural Family Planning” or “Fertility Awareness.”

Spouses must prayerfully and responsibly decide when to have children, while always maintaining a generous commitment to being open to new life and complete love.

Further reading

Humanae Vitae, encyclical of Pope Paul VI

Evangelium Vitae, encyclical of Pope John Paul II

The Theology of the Body, teaching of Pope John Paul II

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, especially 2360 – 2379

(i) Malcolm Potts, M.D., Medical Director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, in 1973. Quoted in Andrew Scholberg, “The Abortionists and Planned Parenthood: Familiar Bedfellows.” International Review of Natural Family Planning, Winter 1980, page 298.

Reprinted with permission from Human Life International.

André Schutten

June 22, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — I was scrolling through the news on our publicly funded CBC website the other day and, when I clicked on one video for a story, I had to first watch a 15-second advertisement (this one funded by the government of Ontario). The ad may seem tame enough to the average viewer, but it was shocking to me and left me with many different questions and thoughts.

A few thoughts swimming through my head after watching the ad:

1. What in the world is a cash-strapped province doing advertising birth control? How much did they spend on creating and on airing this ad?
2. Why advertise one choice over another when it comes to having children? Why sell (which is what ads do) childlessness over having and nurturing children? (I’m not saying the government needs to do the latter, just questioning why they chose to do the former at the expense of the latter.)
3. Connected with selling childlessness, the attitude toward children in this ad is pretty deplorable. I can’t imagine anyone with children or hoping for children even dreaming up such an ad. Take it from a guy who, with my wife, desires to have more kids: this ad is pretty offensive. It plays to a terribly self-centered attitude of being able to mindlessly scroll your phone and sip your latte without a care in the world, and certainly without what this ad portrays as the annoyance and hassle of kids.
4. Not only is Ontario broke, its fertility rate is terribly low, well below the replacement level of 2.1 children per couple. The social and economic costs of this demographic trend are severe. It appears that the current government is either blind to these costs or willing to promote the trend despite the costs.
5. My colleague suggested I leave this one alone, but I do wonder: Why did they choose to portray the child as red-haired? This minority happens to suffer much higher rates of bullying than other kids. The casting of a ginger child struck me as an intentional choice to emphasize the point of the ad, which is: “You don’t want one of these!”

The message of the ad is pretty obvious: “Isn’t life gonna suck with a kid? Make sure you get your birth control!” Basically the opposite of “Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward” (Psalm 127).

I find the ad tasteless, a waste of money, displaying terrible moral judgment, and well outside the role of government. I hope we don’t see any more of these ads. If you agree, maybe send your Ontario MPP a respectful note.

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts, June 19, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) – “Unborn babies are constitutional persons,” the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy stated in a remarkable release last month.

The nation’s “leading forum for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship,” according to its website, said in its report that unborn children do in fact fall under the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections.

The Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in 1868, holds that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

The question of whether “life” includes unborn life has been the crux of the pro-life debate carried out in the courtrooms for years.

Harvard Law student Joshua Craddock challenged the premises of both the pro-abortion and pro-life sides of the debate in the article.

Since Roe vs. Wade, the court’s abortion-friendly decisions have basically been predicated upon the assertion that it is unknown if the unborn child constitutes life, The Stream reported, so the court has typically said “no” it does not.

Similarly, Craddock’s argument also challenges the conservative – often originalist – position that the Constitution does not deal with the nature of the unborn person.

Craddock believes both are wrong and that the “original” meaning of the Constitution includes the unborn child’s right to life.

He argues through three premises that the amendment includes the unborn: What the word person meant when the Amendment was crafted, the anti-abortion laws of the time, and what the people who wrote the amendment said about it.

The article states in part:

One might look to dictionaries of legal and common usage, the context of the English common law tradition, and cases that attempted to construe the meaning of the text in a manner consistent with original meaning. Using this methodology, it is reasonable to construe the Fourteenth Amendment to include prenatal life. The structure of the argument is simple: The Fourteenth Amendment’s use of the word “person” guarantees due process and equal protection to all members of the human species. The preborn are members of the human species from the moment of fertilization. Therefore, the Fourteenth Amendment protects the preborn. If one concedes the minor premise (that preborn humans are members of the human species), all that must be demonstrated is that the term “person,” in its original public meaning at the time of the Fourteenth Amendment’s adoption, applied to all members of the human species.

Craddock concluded that states allowing abortions violate the Constitution and that a higher authority must act to protect the lives of the unborn.

If Craddock is correct, The Stream report said, the Supreme Court may finally base its rulings upon what the Constitution supposes about the unborn. “The Fourteenth Amendment,” Craddock stated in conclusion, “was to be a new birth of freedom for all human beings.”

CLAIRE CHRETIEN

June 2, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) – When I first became pro-life, the solution to ending abortion seemed fairly obvious: just give people condoms so that there won’t be accidental pregnancies.

I chuckle when I think about that now. But at the time it made perfect sense. I had yet to realize the deep relationship between the bioethical issues surrounding sex, procreation, and the human person.

The phrase “seamless garment” to most people means the “consistent life ethic,” a philosophy that equates moral issues like abortion and euthanasia with war and poverty.

I would like to propose a different kind of “seamless garment”: the garment by which abortion, contraception, pornography, and distortions of human sexuality are all woven together.

Typically, shortly after a country legalizes and spreads contraception, it legalizes abortion. Why? Contraception can fail, but it gives couples the impression that they’re “protected” from the natural result of sex, offspring. If contraception fails, abortion is a back-up.

Why are couples contracepting in the first place? Perhaps they’re unmarried and uninterested in a long-term future together.

Why are they hooking up? Well, why not? Perhaps their sex ed classes, or parents, or friends and favorite television shows and magazines and celebrities told them sex is rather meaningless. If you feel like it, just go ahead.

Of course, these lessons weren’t complete unless they included instructions on how to best eliminate the chances of pregnancy.

“Here’s how babies are made, but don’t worry, we’ve got a great way to prevent that from happening.”

Is it easy for anyone who’s undergone years of public (or sadly, perhaps “Catholic”) school sex education to even imagine sex that is “safe” unless it involves latex or hormonal distortion? No, of course not. And it’s not their fault. It’s something they were taught their entire lives, something reinforced by the media, the abortion industry, and many who think they’re doing good by promoting contraception.

It was difficult for me to fathom that there were actually people out there who had sex without some form of contraception on purpose. But, it turns out there are lots of those people (and I’m grateful to the one who argued with me about contraception long enough to eventually change my mind).

Such people have usually learned, either from a solid foundation, personal experience, or friend or loved one’s experience, the pain and emptiness that so often accompany such a sterile view of sex and the human person.

The world basically says:

• Your mind and body are separate, and there’s no real meaning to your body.
• It’s important that sex be procreation-free and consensual.
• Contraception and abortion are necessary for a sexually active society.
• No one is harmed if you watch a girl be subject to sex that would make E.L. James blush, because you’re just watching it on your computer. In fact, this is probably better than going out and trying that on someone in real life (and there’s no risk of an assault charge either).
• Since your body has no meaning, it doesn’t matter if you castrate yourself or “marry” someone of the same sex.
• Freedom means having the right to be able to do whatever you want.

All of these notions support each other, and each one persists because the others persist.

For example, contraception, which attempts to remove the procreative purpose of sex, fuels abortion, pornography, and same-sex unions. They all remove the procreative purpose of sex in one way or another. Pornography distorts sex, just like sodomy and contraception do.

Countless marriages have been wrecked, young children robbed of their innocence, girls and boys pressured to do things they don’t want to sexually, babies aborted, and souls deeply wounded due to this prevailing ideology.

The antidote to it is simple: the beautiful teachings of the Catholic Church and the healing power of the Sacraments.

To the world’s culture of death ideology, the Church responds by saying, essentially:

• You are body and soul.
• Sex is beautiful and awesome and so meaningful. You are made for love and to be loved, not to be used by someone or to use another. Your body was designed to be a gift to another. God made fertility for a reason; it doesn’t need to be suppressed. Of course sex needs to be consensual – in fact, it needs to be way more than that.
• Abortion and contraception aren’t necessary for a sexually active society. But they certainly help make society miserable.
• Turning in on oneself closes us off from God. You don’t need pornography to be happy.
• Your ears are for hearing. Your feet are for walking. Your body is designed the way it was for a reason.
• Freedom means the capacity and ability to choose what is good and right.

Coming to understand this “seamless garment” is a process. Many people begin this when they experience horror at the injustice of abortion, and then gradually come to agree with Church teaching on other issues. Anti-abortion beliefs are a gateway that can lead to chastity, greater respect for self and others, and authentic human freedom.

With God’s grace, may we realize that the Church teaches what it teaches because it’s true, and because it wants what’s best for humanity, and that the culture of death teaches lies because it wants the worst for humanity.

Wednesday, June 14, 2017 by: Isabelle Z.

 (Natural News) If you’ve ever spent time around a baby, you have probably noticed that he or she seemed fixated on your face. No one would blame you for assuming that babies develop this fascination as a result of early interactions and bonding experiences with their mothers, but new research has shown that babies might develop the ability to recognize human faces while they are still in the womb.

Researchers at Lancaster University shone dots of light through the uterine wall of expectant mothers when they were 34 weeks pregnant. When the dots were arranged in a formation that made them look like the eyes and the mouth of a human face, the babies turned their heads to face the light, but they did not have this reaction when the dots were arranged in another shape that did not resemble a face. The babies were seen moving their heads more in order to track the stimuli when the lights were shown in the face-like arrangement. Overall, the babies were four times more likely to show a response to the face-like pattern than other patterns.

The scientists used high-quality 4D ultrasounds to monitor the babies’ reaction to the light, and they used computer modeling to get an idea of how the light would change once it has passed through their mother’s abdomen. They used red light because previous studies showed that third-trimester fetuses are able to see light in this hue.

Babies have long shown a preference for looking at human faces over all other stimuli. Past studies have demonstrated that babies prefer to look at dots of light arranged in this manner after birth, and now it appears that this preference starts in the womb.

Study co-author Kirsty Dunn remarked that the babies’ response in the womb was very similar to that of infants. Moreover, the babies appeared to blink in the ultrasound scans despite the fact that it is believed that their eyes are normally closed for much of the time. She said it was the first time fetal vision had been explored in the womb, although other senses like smell, taste, hearing and touch have already been studied.

Scientific discoveries like this one continue to dispute the notion embraced by abortion activists that a fetus is an unfeeling and dispensable ball of tissue.

New insight into visual development

Professor Vincent Reid, the psychologist who led the study, theorizes that babies in the womb could already be hardwired to recognize human faces, but he believes it’s more likely that their experience while in the womb is what primes them to recognize face-like shapes. He thinks this preference could be triggered by the patterned light that babies are exposed to in the womb and is due to prenatal visual experiences. For example, he posits that their mother’s rib cage might create variation in the light that penetrates the womb, spurring this preference.

He also says the results imply that upper visual fields are more advanced developmentally and more sensitive than lower visual fields. This would mean that light exposure inside the womb might be just as important to human eye development as it is after birth. Nevertheless, Professor Reid advised expectant mothers against shining bright lights through their abdomens as they could inadvertently damage their baby’s eyes. He pointed out that the study used controlled conditions and a very low level of light.

Babies in the womb are already known to respond to sounds like music and the voice of their mothers, and this groundbreaking new study shows that they do have some visual abilities. The researchers believe this could lead to further discoveries about fetuses.

Reid has already used this technique in studies that suggest fetuses have the ability to differentiate between varying numbers of objects. Next, he’d like to find out if the fetuses have the ability to associate particular light patterns to other types of stimuli, like a specific nursery rhyme. This would provide some clues as to how early the brain can integrate information across senses.

by Katy Faust | Jun 12, 2017

I recently spoke with a bright college student fresh from her Gender Studies class who wanted to know why Christians were trying to “force their morality upon a secular society” by supporting traditional marriage.  It’s a good question, and one that we should be ready to answer.

From a Christian perspective sex is relational, covenantal, intimate, fruitful, selfless, complex (involving the mind, soul, and body), complimentary and symbolic- that is, giving us a picture of the union of Christ and the church. But I’m certain she couldn’t care less about my well-churched rhetoric because from the secular perspective, sex is about fun.

From an evolutionary standpoint however, sex is for one thing and one thing only: baby-making. The problem is that this baby-making activity demands much more from women than men.

It is the woman whose body will be burdened and stretched (literally) for nine months of pregnancy.  She will have to endure labor and delivery. She will be vulnerable and dependent as she recovers and meets the demands of a helpless and needy infant. Her availability to work and provide for herself and her child is hindered for several years as the child grows. Her anatomy demands that she be present for the birth of the baby.  And after delivery, her brain and body are wired for infant attachment- making it highly unlikely that she’ll abandon her child.

The problem is that biology does not demand anything more of the man than, on average, a 2-3 minute contribution.

Every culture and religion throughout history has understood that when the father is absent, the child, the mother, and by extension all of society, suffers as a result.  Whether in 200 B.C during the Han Dynasty or 2017 America, children who grow up fatherless (and their mothers) are more vulnerable to poverty and exploitation.  They are more likely to be involved in criminal activity and less likely to become responsible citizens, not to mention a host of other risks. Therefore, every community throughout history has wrestled with the same problem: How do you require of men what biology makes optional? 

Interestingly, nearly every religion has come up with the same answer: society-wide expectations that a man commit to a woman prior to sex and remain committed to her, and only her, throughout his life. And up until the last ten minutes of history, we have all called this “marriage.”

The five major religions of the world disagree about:

• The nature of God
• The nature of man
• The problem in this world
• The solution to this problem
• The nature of the afterlife

And yet each faith encourages monogamy, complementary, and permanence in sexual relationships.  Each faith independently developed these marital norms because they recognized that it was good not just for men, women and children, but for society at large.

What does that tell us?  That marriage has much more to do with being human than it does with being Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish or Christian.  A Buddhist teen, a Hindu sixth-grader, a Sunni boy, a Jewish girl and a Lutheran adolescent may have little in common when it comes to their religious life.  But I guarantee that if those kids are being raised by a single mother, they all have laid awake at night wondering “Where is my father?” and “Does he love me?” But don’t take my word for it. Why don’t you ask several fatherless children of various faiths that you know whether or not they wish they had a dad and let me know what they say.

Except you wouldn’t ask those questions because you know the answer will be one of pain and heartache, if they are able to choke words out at all.  All the “sex-positive” cultural messaging is powerless in the face of a child who has had to pay for their parents belief that they had a “right” to sexual expression, freedom, and pleasure.

The issue of marriage, especially civil marriage, has less to do with religion and everything to do with biology. Primarily, the fact that children need both of their parents so that they can mature and thrive.  But that means demanding that adults channel their sexual behavior into faithful life-long marriage. Without the society-wide expectation that men commit prior to sex, there is little protection for women from whom biology demands so much. And there is no provision, protection and involvement from the men for whom children so desperately long.

After we talked through the statistics on fatherless children, the complementary nature of mothering and fathering, and the power of biology in parenting, I asked my young college friend this question. “Given that no-fault divorce removed the expectation of marital permanence, and same-sex marriage has removed the expectation of a father or mother’s involvement, how can we encourage men to make this costly life-long sacrifice to women and children?

As I mentioned, she is a smart woman. Smart enough to know there was no good answer.

Edward Pentin

Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, archbishop emeritus of Bologna, Italy, has a key message to deliver: Great efforts must be made in Catholic education and catechesis if the Church is to combat today’s attacks on marriage, life and the family.

In a May 19 interview with the Register in Rome, the founding president of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, also called on Catholics to be present in the public square and to call things by their real names. “Error is error,” he says. “There is no peace between truth and error.”

One of the four dubia cardinals, he preferred not to discuss that topic in the interview, but warned about a current trend in the Church of separating doctrine or theory from pastoral practice, ostensibly to be more pastoral and compassionate. “Theory without praxis is like a wheel without an axis,” he says. “Praxis without theory is a blind man on the road. To give primacy to praxis: First of all, this is theologically false.”

Your Eminence, much is said about the importance of the family. But what does the Church have to do to defend it against gender ideology and other attacks?

I think that the first choice has to be a very clear, very complete and very profound proclamation of the gospel of marriage and of the family, because the situation has now already reached the extreme point, even of putting into question the definition itself of marriage.

Humanity has always defined marriage as the legitimate union between a man and a woman, with a view to procreation and education. Today that definition has been put into question; some juridical laws have even put in place another definition of marriage. It was in this sense that I said that we have arrived at an extreme point. Therefore, the Church needs to say to man: “This is what God had in mind for marriage; this is what Christ has done — because marriage is a path to salvation for a man and a woman who marry.”

The gospel of marriage has two great chapters: The first is the good of marriage in creation; the second is the announcement of the salvation of marriage, which Jesus came to bring forth, both in words and behavior.

We must not forget that the first miracle brought about by Jesus was in favor of two spouses during the marriage banquet. So that is the first thing that the Church needs to do. The second thing, no less important, is the need for great efforts in educating the young generation, because the heart of every boy and every girl desires to love and be loved, in the truth. Otherwise, after a while, the thing becomes boring because it was not what the heart wanted.

So this desire, it is necessary to say, is inscribed, sculpted in the heart of every man and woman. Education is needed to liberate it from all that impedes it, so that this desire is fulfilled.

I’ll give you an example: If there is a stone covering a spring of water, the spring continues to exist, but the water doesn’t flow. I have to get rid of the stone; then the true spring gives all of its wealth of water. It’s as if a stone is covering this human desire, and the Church, with its educational work, needs to remove it.

How can the Church better resist the current crisis she is facing within?

I believe — I’ll say this right away — the point at which we have arrived is a station at the end of a long process. I am speaking of the West and a process that has lasted centuries. It would, therefore, be naïve to think that in a few years — at times, I think, in a few generations — one could correct this process, turn it around. This must be said as a premise. It’s not as if St. Benedict saw immediately the consequences of the communities he founded in the woods around Rome. It was necessary to have a whole process of civilization. We have to always remember this in order not to be naïve.

Coming now more precisely to address the question, I believe there is, above all, a swift-acting strategy, and it is this: We cannot continue to let ourselves get used to this real absence of lay Catholics from places where juridical norms, laws are formed. So there should be a strong presence of Catholics, for it’s not just a good for the Christian; on the contrary, it’s a good that pertains to creation, marriage and the family. However, laws by themselves don’t resolve the problem. Therefore, the more long-term strategy is to busy ourselves in a great educational work.

Third, St. Thomas, at the beginning of the Summa, says that antithesis cannot exist together. He gives an example: He says the doctor, by the fact that he wants the sick person to recover, fights against the illness. Wanting one [the person’s health] means he doesn’t want the other [the illness]. Thomas continues: The wise man seeks the first principle, God the creator; therefore, he fights the error which obscures the truth he is seeking.

Augustine is even stronger: For he says, love the one who errs, but persecute the error. The corresponding Latin verb is one grammarians call emphatic. It doesn’t mean tolerate the error, but tear it out and to show its insubstantiality.

Therefore, there are three things: laws, the presence of Christians in parliaments, public institutions; second, a great work of instruction; and, third, call things by their real names. Error is error. There is no peace between truth and error.

Is the problem today that people do not speak out strongly enough against sin?

Yes, in places of learning. Thomas’ strategy at the beginning of the Summa against the Gentiles [of calling out sin] is not followed. On the contrary, it is even belittled.

I also often saw this when I was the titular pastor in Bologna. In my opinion, in the places of learning, there’s also no education of true love of the truth anymore. On the contrary, many people teach the young that the search for the truth is a sad and useless passion that can breed only intolerance. At this point, the human person is lost and finds himself, the famous philosopher would say, before paths that don’t lead anywhere.

What is your view of Amoris Laetitia in this regard?

First of all, there is a whole chapter on education, which, for me, is very important. Second, the initial chapter is supposed to, through commenting on a Psalm, describe marriage and family life in the light of God’s plan. These are, with regard to Amoris Laetitia, the second part of Familiaris Consortio — all the great catechesis of John Paul II on marriage and the family.

We have a wealth [of teaching] that can help us at this difficult moment. But, says a great German poet, where the danger increases, there salvation increases

Looking back at your time with the Pontifical John Paul II Institute, what, according to you, should be its priorities?

With regard to the institute, I believe I can say it was one of the things dearest to John Paul II. I can show this with numerous proofs. The priorities, the motives, for the research are written in the apostolic constitution, which direct the institute.

Every great pastoral program for marriage and the family points to, and therefore requires, a true knowledge of marriage and the family. It is not the case that, in diminishing the doctrinal dimension, one becomes more pastoral. One becomes more ignorant. In medieval times, they said that theory without praxis is like a wheel without an axis. Praxis without theory is a blind man on the road. To give primacy to praxis: First of all, this is theologically false.

It’s a false compassion.

Yes, I’ll return to this afterward. Because every praxis presupposes an intellectual project. The second reason is that the basis of the Christian life is not charity; charity is the perfection of the Christian life. The foundation is the faith.

A Christian life without faith is like the house, which Jesus talks about, built on sand. It’s no longer built upon the word of God, so it doesn’t stand. To put charity before the faith through the category of compassion brings us to a street that does not have an exit, if you stop only with compassion. The Samaritan did not stop just to say: “Poor devil, look how they treated him,” and then went on his way. No. He who is truly compassionate takes care of the person, using the adequate instruments, or how do you take care of a person if you don’t know what a person really needs?

The result is disorder.

Yes, there we are. Certainly this is true. Aristotle said there is nothing greater than teaching a man philosophy. But if you come across a man who is hungry, don’t teach him philosophy first. Feed him first, and then teach him philosophy.

Thomas quotes this text approvingly. It’s evident that you need to feed a hunger, without which man is no longer a man — he loses his dignity. However, these are not the only needs of man. A great medieval theologian, St. Albert the Great, says that the needs of man are two: in dulcedine societatis inquirere veritatem — “in the sweetness of a good life with others, seek the truth.” This shows us the greatness of the man.

Is the problem that, in the Church, we have lost sight of heaven, that there’s too much attention paid to this world and not the next?

I would say when you speak of the Church you are speaking of such a vast reality. But I would say we’re running a risk of doing this; we are in danger of doing this, forgetting that the Church, at her base, is not an NGO or an emergency room of the International Red Cross. The Church exists, above all, to free man from sin and to accompany him into eternal life. This is the purpose of the Church.

Jesus taught us nevertheless that this implies, also, attention to the human person and his needs. Around Jesus, there were always sick people. Jesus cured them. Jesus found himself before a hungry crowd. Jesus multiplied the loaves. Jesus knew well who Zacchaeus was, that is, a collector of unjust taxes, because taxes can also be unjust.

But he cured him of this profound sickness of the heart. As I was saying before, this is the ultimate end of the Church.

Edward Pentin is the Register’s Rome correspondent

June 12, 2017 (Priests for Life) — Millennials have a bad rap. They’re labeled as crybabies, snowflakes, fragile, spoiled, and entitled. They’re told they want safe spaces, participation trophies, and handouts. They’re accused of wanting the most benefits for the least work, and the list goes on and on. I feel kind of bad for them. I suspect that every new generation of young adults that pops up gets some flack, but I don’t ever remember having it as bad as Millennials. If there is one thing that gets most overlooked within their cohort, it’s that they are the most pro-life generation yet. And they deserve a thumbs up for that.

In the 2016 March for Life, the youth made up 80 percent of approximately the half-million marchers. The pro-life movement is mostly a youth movement. As the most tech savvy of all the generations, they are perhaps the least likely to be fooled by pro-abortion rhetoric. Their first baby pictures were most likely sonogram images or even 3D ultrasound pictures. They have access to YouTube, Snapchat, Tumblr, Twitter, VSCO, Instagram, etc. and they know how to use it. There is no topic they don’t know how to Google search within seconds for answers.  They know what abortion is and they don’t like it.

It’s easy to understand why. This generation is not just standing up for babies in danger of being aborted — they are also standing up for themselves. They understand that they are survivors. They know that when they were in the womb, they were not protected. Millennials experience “survivor syndrome,” like soldiers back from the war in which their comrades were killed. In fact, during the gatherings of the Silent No More campaign (a project of Priests for Life and Anglicans for Life), we have a growing awareness of siblings holding signs that say, I mourn my aborted sibling.

The sense of being an abortion survivor is a big part of what motivates young pro-life activists today. In fact, when I am asked to encourage parishes and pro-life organizations to focus more on recruiting youth, it’s not a difficult task. Millennials understand the pro-life message better than older generations, and the most common response they give to the question, “Why are you involved in trying to stop abortion?” is “Because it could have been me.”

I often point out that our youth are not simply the “future leaders” of the pro-life movement. They are leaders here and now, in more ways than one. They have a lot to offer to their peers, as well as to the rest of us. Those of us who have been in the movement longer need to understand what will happen when we recruit more youth into the pro-life effort. They will challenge us. They will remind us of things that we have perhaps forgotten, and will even be able to teach us a new way of activism, and even a new way of thinking. We’ve all seen the edgy, in-your-face activism of Millennials. It’s void of any pretense. That’s refreshing.

Straightforwardness is a characteristic of young people when confronting fundamental moral issues like pro-life. They think in straight lines. Unaccustomed to the layers of complication that years of enduring resistance from opponents can bring, young people can frame certain questions with a simple and direct clarity. And while they always need to be open to learn from those with more experience, they also need to be listened to. We need to let them shape our own thinking.

When made aware that killing is taking place in the building down the street, they will ask, “Well, let’s go down there and stop it! We should go there and tell them we are not going to leave until the killing stops! If that’s where the babies are that we need to save, what are we doing here?” Or, when told that a particular candidate for office is in favor of keeping child-killing legal, our youth will declare, “Well, we have to tell people not to vote for that person!” When they understand the clarity of Gospel teaching about the sanctity of life, they will say, “All the pastors need to preach about this and sign their people up for pro-life activity! It’s more important than anything else!”

Is there not truth in this “straight-line thinking?” We can learn something from them and refocus our attention and energy on fundamental things which, in the end, simply have to be said and done. Maybe we’ve become too complicated and are too quick to say, “it’s not so simple.”

I rejoice in the pro-life commitment and involvement of our youth — so much so, in fact, that while I am committed to training them for the battle, I am not going to “hand the battle over to them.” The time to end abortion is now, not in another generation or two. Rather than “handing the baton” to our young people, let’s take their hands, and let’s march together into the promised land of victory for the unborn!

Fr. Frank Pavone is the national director of Priests for Life, the world’s largest Catholic organization focused exclusively on ending abortion.

BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan, May 31, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — The leader of Russia’s 150 million Orthodox Christians says homosexual “marriage” is unnatural and contrary to the conscience of every human being, which is why so many people resist its normalization for the same reason that people resisted fascism and apartheid.

In an interview at Kyrgyz-Russian Slavic University, His All-Holiness Kirill was asked about same-sex “marriage.” The Patriarch, who is well known for opposing sodomy, referred to legalized gay unions as false, “so-called” marriages. He then flatly stated that they are a threat to family values because homosexuality is a “complete break with the moral nature of man.”

The Russian government and its people have been under severe criticism from leaders in the West for standing against the normalization of homosexuality. “When laws are detached from morality, they cease being laws people can accept,” Kirill explained.

The Christian leader then said something immediately pounced upon by Western pro-gay mainstream media.

People resist the legalization of same-sex “marriage,” the Patriarch commented, “for the same reason that they resisted both fascist laws and the laws of apartheid — (because) such laws break with morality.”

Hence, the Western headlines:

Russian Orthodox Patriarch Says Gay Marriage is Like Nazism”

Same-Sex Marriage as Immoral as Nazi Laws: Russian Putin Ally Says“

Head of Orthodox Church Compares Homosexual Marriage to Nazism”

Russian Orthodox Leader: Gay Marriage Advocates, like Nazis, Promote Immoral Laws”

Head of Russian Orthodox Church Compares Same-Sex Marriage to Nazism“

“Patriarch Kirill’s statement will probably garner a lot of criticism with the gay pride folks,” Fr. Johannes Jacobse, founder of the American Orthodox Institute, told LifeSiteNews, “but he’s pointing out a fundamental truth: Gay ‘marriage’ is a creation of the state. Natural marriage, on the other hand, conforms to nature.”

“When the state affirms natural marriage, it merely recognizes that which already exists across cultures and time,” Fr. Jacobse explained. “When the state deems that homosexual marriage should exist as part of the social order, however, it declares that the state is source and judge of what qualifies as legitimate human relationships.”

“The state has assumed an authority it legitimately does not have and becomes the enforcer of a new social order,” Fr. Jacobse concluded.

“The moral code reflects the natural law, which is ingrained into our very being,” His Beatitude Metropolitan Jonah of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia explained.

“We have an innate sense of right and wrong, which is the voice of our conscience,” the Metropolitan continued. “Fascist, communist, and apartheid laws violate our fundamental sense of freedom.”

“The validation of gay ‘marriage,’ so-called, distorts the natural mode of relationship between the sexes,” His Beatitude said. “It fundamentally distorts the nature of the family. Thus, many people will reject it as unnatural.”

Kirill was presenting his book, Freedom and Responsibility: A Search for Harmony. The point His All-Holiness wanted to make was that homosexual behavior comes out of “an emphasis on freedom with complete disregard for moral responsibility.”

“The forced imposition of homosexual marriage will be met with resistance just like other contrived orderings enforced by state authority, like fascism and apartheid were,” Fr. Jacobse elaborated. “New social orderings that go against nature universally oppress the human spirit.”

“We see the early stages of this conflict with the state driving people out of business who resist the attempts to define homosexuality as a natural expression of human sexuality,” Jacobse pointed out. “Clear thinkers will discern the totalitarian spirit behind the enforcement and reject it, regardless of the reasoning used to justify it.”

In a 2016 interview, the Patriarch said same-sex “marriage” laws “are at odds with the moral nature of human beings” and are “a significant threat for the existence of the human race.”

In that interview, he compared pressure to normalize sodomy as “very reminiscent of what was happening under Soviet totalitarianism.”

In 2013, His All-Holiness said homosexual “marriage” was “self-destructive” and a “very dangerous and apocalyptic symptom” of the end times.

Last year, Kirill shared his view that many young men are drawn to Islamic radicalization because of the extremist, unnatural liberalization consuming the West. He speculated that some youth who join ISIS are misguided, “honest people” who join out of “truly religious grounds” because of the moral morass the West is sinking in.

“It’s not the same thing, of course, but we could compare this to an extent to the apartheid in Africa or Nazi laws – when the law went against inherent moral values, people rebelled,” he said. “They knew it wasn’t right; it was artificial; it was part of some ideology and not in sync with their moral nature.”

Kirill emphasized, however, that those who have fallen into the pernicious sin of same-sex attraction or homosexual behavior should not be criminally punished.

“The Church can never approve of this, but we don’t condemn people who have homosexual tendencies,” he said at a meeting with Council of Europe Secretary General Thorbjørn Jagland at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. “It’s on their conscience and it’s their business, but they shouldn’t be discriminated against or punished, as used to be common practice in some states.”

In 2013, Russia passed a law banning the distribution of gay propaganda to children and teen minors.

“You can sin if you want to, but you will answer to God,” the Patriarch said. “However, if you are trying to propagate your sin by seducing and degrading people, society must oppose it.”

Metropolitan Jonah reasoned that the church opposes the normalization of homosexual behavior out of love for the sinner.

“On a spiritual level, unnatural relationships are profoundly unhealthy,” he explained. “They isolate people rather than build a real community that will last.”

Bishop Robert Barron

Robert Cardinal Sarah’s recent book The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise explores a number of themes both theological and spiritual, all centering around the unhappy role that noise has come to play in our culture and more specifically in the Church. His observations are most trenchant in regard to the liturgy, which should come as no great surprise, given his role as head of the Vatican Congregation devoted to liturgy and sacraments. As I read the sections of his book dealing with the importance of silence during Mass, I often found myself nodding vigorously.

Silence, accordingly, tended to be construed as the enemy, for it would lull the people into inattention and boredom. Hardly anyone in the post-conciliar liturgical establishment appreciated that silence could be a sign of heightened, even enraptured, attention on the part of the congregation, a deeply contemplative entry into the mystery of the Mass. And what several decades of this in turn has produced, especially among the young today, is the impression that the Mass is a sort of religiously-themed jamboree, during which our fellowship is celebrated and at which lots and lots of sound is indispensable. I will confess that during many years as a priest, and now as a bishop, I have often wondered whether our hyper-stimulated congregations know exactly what they are participating in. They know that they are active, but active precisely in what?

The Mass is the act by which the Son of God, in union with his mystical body, turns toward the Father in worship. Through our full, conscious, and active participation in this right praise, we become more rightly ordered, more completely configured to Christ and more thoroughly directed toward the Father. We do indeed experience heightened fellowship with one another during the Mass, but this is because we are realizing, not so much our mutual affection, but our common love of a transcendent third, to use Aristotle’s language.

In this regard, one of the most illuminating rubrics under which to read the Mass is that of call and response: Christ the head, through the priest who is acting in Christ’s person, calls out to the members of his mystical body, and they respond, somewhat in the manner of the lovers in the Song of Songs. At the very commencement of the liturgy, the priest (again, operating not in his own name but in persona Christi) says, “The Lord be with you,” and the people respond, “and with your spirit.” The spirit in question here is the power of Christ dwelling in the priest through the sacrament of Holy Orders. This exchange continues throughout the Mass, Head and members conversing with one another and solidifying their communion. Jesus speaks his Word in the Old Testament readings and in the Pauline epistles, and the members of his body sing back to him in the responsorial psalm; Jesus announces himself in the Gospel, and the people chant back, “Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ;” Jesus breaks open the Word through the preaching of the priest, and the people respond with the Creed, a signal of their faith.

Having prepared the gifts (presented by the people), the priest says, “Pray, brothers and sisters, that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God, the Father almighty.” This line is of great significance, for it signals the moment when Christ and the members of his body are turning toward the Father in order to perform an act of sacrifice and thanksgiving. How beautifully the Preface to the Eucharistic Prayer expresses this dynamic: “Lift up your hearts!” says Christ to his people; they respond, “We lift them up to the Lord,” and then Jesus, through his priest, says, “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.” What follows is the magnificent Eucharistic Prayer, directed toward the Father and prayed by Head and members together, the latter’s many sacrifices—small and large—subsumed into the former’s definitive sacrifice on the cross. At the conclusion of the liturgy, Christ sends his mystical body, now more perfectly ordered to the Father, back into the world to effect its transformation.

Cardinal Sarah imitates his master Joseph Ratzinger in insisting that silence rightly asserts itself throughout this entire process. The silence of gathering, recollecting, listening, praying, offering, etc. There is plenty of sound in the Mass, but unless silence is cultivated therein as well, we can easily lose sight of what we are doing in this most sublime of prayers.

June 7, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — My wife and I had trouble conceiving when we were first married in 2004. After our daughter came two years later we again had trouble conceiving. Being open to a larger family, we went to a healing service to ask the good Lord for his help.

It came our turn to be prayed over. We told the priest we were having trouble conceiving and wanted more children. As he was praying over us, he started smiling. Then he started laughing. I asked him what he was laughing about. “The Lord has much in store for you,” he said. “You have nothing to worry about.”

Shortly thereafter we conceived our second daughter. In less than a year after she was born we had our third. Then came our son, another daughter, another son, another son, and three miscarriages in between.

Yup, our fertility had clicked. It seemed that all I had to do was look at my wife and she became pregnant. Now I knew what the priest had been laughing about.

While my wife and I dearly love our seven living children and our three little blessings in heaven, we realized that we needed more space in between births. My dear wife needed time to recuperate and build up her body after the exhausting months of nursing day and night. The baby just born also needed time to be loved and nurtured before another baby became the priority. We saw these as serious reasons.

My wife and I don’t believe in using pills or plastic to block the gift of fertility. We actually see contracepted sex as morally evil. Yeah, I know, sounds crazy. Let me explain.

We believe God made sex for the purpose of making babies and bonding with your spouse. Contraception essentially poisons both of these. It blocks the baby-making purpose of sex by rejecting fertility. By rejecting fertility, one spouse is basically telling the other that there is a part of them that they want nothing to do with. And out the window goes that unconditional self-giving and receiving-of-the-other in love that marriage needs in order to survive.

So, my wife and I didn’t want to poison our love with any kind of contraception. Our only options to postpone pregnancy for a time were to completely abstain (a struggle for any man) or to only come together when my wife was not fertile.

So, we learned a fertility awareness method.

A rather significant problem arose when it turned out that my wife had various fertility signs during many days of her cycle, not just around the days of ovulation. Bummer. This meant waiting, and waiting, and waiting for the right signs that would permit us to come together during the infertile time. And added to this is that she sometimes has a cycle length that is longer than for most women.

Ok, I’ll be honest. I usually find these times of waiting a trial. And no, there can’t be any kind of cheating during this time. No masturbation, single or mutual, since the former is a selfish perversion of the sexual act, and the latter really amounts to contracepted sex (see above).

The only real option to safeguard the beauty and holiness of the sexual act during this time of abstinence was self-mastery. And yes, self-mastery is difficult, a big learning curve.

If I wasn’t going to wallow in self-misery or fantasyland during this time, I had to learn to control my impulses and desires. And this is where I would sometimes fail, pushing past a boundary that we had set so as to not reach the point of no return. Or, me anticipating so much the time when we could finally come together that I would fail to find joy in the time that we had together right here and now.

One thing that I’ve found is that abstinence during fertility signs becomes a kind of mirror that shows me things about myself that I don’t really like to see. Ugly things. Such as how selfish I can be. How little I can control my impulses and desires. And how easily I can lose focus on what’s really important in our relationship, like the fact that we’re together, that we’ve been faithful and true to one another all these years, and that we’re still crazy-mad in love with one another.

I can just imagine people scratching their heads, wondering why my wife and I put ourselves through this struggle when there are such easy alternatives out there that make it possible for a man to never have to deny himself.

I’ve thought about this very question long and hard. I probably don’t have the perfect answer yet, but I know it has something to do with love being about denying oneself for the sake of the one you love.

I truly do love my wife. I have no doubt that contraception would poison our love. So, if we’re going to space our children, we have to abstain during the fertile times. This means that love demands that I not only deny myself during fertile times, but that I learn to find peace and even joy in it. Yup, that’s a tall order for any man, but I really think it’s the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Don’t laugh at this, but my wife suggested that we both make a little daily sacrifice with the intention of helping us be victorious during these times. I’ve found this has made a rather significant difference for me. It’s pretty amazing to know that I have my wife’s prayer support to back up my own (often pitiful) efforts at mastery of self.

Jesus said something about this denial thing too. He said that those who wish to be his followers must deny themselves and take up their cross. Sometimes prolific fertility can seem like a cross, but when I really think about it, I realize that it becomes an occasion during our child-spacing times to show my wife how much I really love her. And every man, including me, loves to show his wife how much he loves her.

Micaiah Bilger   Jun 5, 2017   |   1:26PM    London, England  | LifeNews.com

Just one week after Chelsea Nally and her husband, Daniel, were married, the newlyweds discovered they were pregnant.

For some, the news may have brought thoughts of abortion, but the British couple said they were excited about their unplanned pregnancy. They did not know that several weeks later, a serious discussion about abortion would come up when Chelsea found a cancerous tumor in her left breast, The Sun reports.

The Nallys chose life for their baby boy, Finley, and today the mother and son are doing well. Chelsea said Finley saved her life because the pregnancy helped her find the cancer sooner.

“Finley saved me before he was even born,” she told The Sun. “He’ll always be so special to me for that reason.”

Chelsea Nally said she found a lump on her left breast about 10 days after they learned she was pregnant – barely a month after their wedding. A few weeks later, doctors confirmed that she had stage 3 breast cancer, according to the report.

“When I heard the words’ breast cancer’ I reeled,” Nally remembered. “In six weeks, I’d gotten married, found out I was pregnant and was diagnosed with cancer. Medics weren’t sure of the prognosis. They had no idea if the baby was at risk.

“The doctors told me that it was unusual for a lump to move in a breast, but said that had my breasts not changed with the pregnancy, I might never have found the lump,” she continued.

Initially, doctors discussed the possibility of Nally having an abortion; but when further testing revealed that her cancer was limited to her left breast, they did not push the idea, according to the report. Nally said she felt relieved because she did not want to abort her unborn son.

“I was determined to fight the disease for the both of us,” she said.

After undergoing surgery to have the tumor removed, Nally went through multiple rounds of chemotherapy. She said she constantly worried about how it would affect Finley.

“With every scan, Daniel and I would hold hands watching the monitor, desperately hoping to see a sign our baby was growing,” she said.

Here’s more from the report:

Medics told Chelsea the swelling of her breasts had moved the lump in her breast closer to the skin where it could be detected – saving her life.

Incredibly, on March 19 this year, baby Finley was born healthy, weighing 5lbs 3oz.

Speaking from her home in Woodbridge, Suffolk, she said: “Battling a deadly illness while growing new life inside of me was indescribable.

“The chemo was tough but it was nothing compared to the fear that my baby might not survive the treatment.

Nally said she felt so relieved when she heard Finley cry for the first time. Even more relief followed when doctors told her that Finley was healthy.

“Holding him in my arms for the first time I felt like my biggest battle was over,” she said. “I couldn’t believe we had both survived pregnancy and chemo. He is my hero, even before he was born he had saved my life.”

Recent studies indicate pregnant women who undergo cancer treatments do not put their unborn babies at significant risk. A 2015 study published in the highly reputable New England Journal of Medicine concluded, “Prenatal exposure to maternal cancer with or without treatment did not impair the cognitive, cardiac, or general development of children in early childhood.”

Based on these findings, lead researcher Professor Frédéric Amant said women should not abort their unborn babies based on fear that their cancer treatment could affect their child.

address was given by His Eminence Carlo Cardinal Caffarra on 19 May 2017 at the fourth annual Rome Life Forum, which is organised by Voice of the Family.

“When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself” [John 12, 32]. “The whole world is under the power of the Evil One” [1 John, 5, 19].

Reading these divine words gives us perfect awareness of what is really happening in the world, within the human story, considered in its depths. The human story is a confrontation between two forces: the force of attraction, whose source is in the wounded Heart of the Crucified-Risen One, and the power of Satan, who does not want to be ousted from his kingdom.

The area in which the confrontation takes place is the human heart, it is human liberty. And the confrontation has two dimensions: an interior dimension and an exterior dimension. We will briefly consider the one and the other.

1. At the trial before Pilate, the Governor asks Jesus whether he is a king; whether – which is the meaning of Pilate’s question – he has true and sovereign political power over a given territory. Jesus responds: “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice” [John 18, 37]. ‘Jesus wants us to understand that his kingship is not that of the kings of this world, but consists of the obedience of his subjects to his word, to his truth. Although He reigns over his subjects, it is not through force or power, but through the truth of which he is witness, which “all who are from the truth” receive with faith’. [I. De La Potterie]. Thomas Aquinas puts the following words into the mouth of the Saviour: “As I myself manifest truth, so I am preparing a kingdom for myself”. Jesus on the Cross attracts everyone to Himself, because it is on the Cross that the Truth of which he is witness is resplendent.

Yet this force of attraction can only take effect on those who “are from the truth”. That is, on those who are profoundly available to the Truth, who love truth, who live in familiarity with it. Pascal writes: “You would not seek me if you had not already found me”.

He who holds the entire world under his sway, instead dominates through lies. Jesus says of Satan: “He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. [John 8, 44].

The wording is dramatic. The first proposition – “He was a murderer from the beginning” – is explained by the second: “and he does not stand in the truth”. The murder which the devil performs consists in his not standing in the truth, not dwelling in the truth. It is murder, because he is seeking to extinguish, to kill in the heart of man truth, the desire for truth. By inducing man to unbelief, he wants man to close himself to the light of the Divine Revelation, which is the Word incarnate. Therefore, these words of Jesus on Satan – as today the majority of exegetes believe – do not speak of the fall of the angels. They speak of something far more profound, something frightful: Satan constantly refuses the truth, and his action within human society consists in opposition to the truth. Satan is this refusal; he is this opposition.

The text continues: “because there is no truth in him”. The words of Jesus go to the deepest root of Satan’s work. He is in himself a lie. From his person truth is completely absent, and hence he is by definition the one who opposes truth. Jesus adds immediately afterwards: “When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies”. When the Lord says “speaks according to his own nature”, he introduces us to the interiority of Satan, to his heart. A heart which lives in darkness, in shadows: a house without doors and without windows.

To summarise, this therefore is what is happening in the heart of man: Jesus, the Revelation of the Father, exerts a strong attraction to Himself. Satan works against this, to neutralise the attractive force of the Crucified-Risen One. The force of truth which makes us free acts on the heart of man. It is the Satanic force of the lie which makes slaves of us.

Yet, not being pure spirit, the human person is not solely interiority. Human interiority is expressed and manifested in construction of the society in which he or she lives. Human interiority is expressed and manifested in culture, as an essential dimension of human life as such. Culture is the mode of living which is specifically human.

Given that man is positioned between two opposing forces, the condition in which he finds himself must necessarily give rise to two cultures: the culture of the truth and the culture of the lie.

There is a book in Holy Scripture, the last, the Apocalypse, which describes the final confrontation between the two kingdoms. In this book, the attraction of Christ takes the form of triumph over enemy powers commanded by Satan. It is a triumph which comes after lengthy combat. The first fruits of the victory are the martyrs. “The great Dragon, serpent of the primal age, he whom we call the devil, or Satan, seducer of the whole world, was flung down to earth… But they [= the martyrs] overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of the testimony of their martyrdom” [cfr. Ap. 12, 9.11].

2. In this second section, I would like to respond to the following question: in our Western culture, are there developments which reveal with particular clarity the confrontation between the attraction exerted over man by the Crucified-Risen One, and the culture of the lie constructed by Satan? My response is affirmative, and there are two developments in particular.

• The first development is the transformation of a crime [termed by Vatican Council II nefandum crimen], abortion, into a right. Note well. I am not speaking of abortion as an act perpetrated by one person. I am speaking of the broader legitimation which can be perpetrated by a judicial system in a single act: to subsume it into the category of the subjective right, which is an ethical category. This signifies calling what is good, evil, what is light, shadow. “When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies”. This is an attempt to produce an “anti-Revelation”.

What in fact is the logic which presides over the ennoblement of abortion? Firstly, it is the profoundest negation of the truth of man. As soon as Noah left the floodwaters, God said: “Whoever sheds the blood of a man, by a man shall that person’s blood be shed, for in his own image God made man” [Gen. 9, 6]. The reason why man should not shed the blood of man is that man is the image of God. Through man, God dwells in His creation. This creation is the temple of the Lord, because man inhabits it. To violate the intangibility of the human person is a sacrilegious act against the Sanctity of God. It is the Satanic attempt to generate an “anti-creation”. By ennobling the killing of humans, Satan has laid the foundations for his “creation”: to remove from creation the image of God, to obscure his presence therein.

St Ambrose writes: “The creation of the world was completed with formation of the masterpiece which is man, which… is in fact the culmination of creation, the supreme beauty of every created being” [Exam., Sixth day, Disc 9, 10.75; BA I, page 417]. At the moment at which the right of man to order the life and the death of another man is affirmed, God is expelled from his creation, because his original presence is denied, and his original dwelling-place within creation – the human person – is desecrated

• The second development is the ennoblement of homosexuality. This in fact denies entirely the truth of marriage, the mind of God the Creator with regard to marriage.

The Divine Revelation has told us how God thinks of marriage: the lawful union of a man and woman, the source of life. In the mind of God, marriage has a permanent structure, based on the duality of the human mode of being: femininity and masculinity. Not two opposite poles, but the one with and for the other. Only thus does man escape his original solitude.

One of the fundamental laws through which God governs the universe is that He does not act alone. This is the law of human cooperation with the divine governance. The union between a man and woman, who become one flesh, is human cooperation in the creative act of God: every human person is created by God and begotten by its parents. God celebrates the liturgy of his creative act in the holy temple of conjugal love.

In summary. There are two pillars of creation: the human person in its irreducibility to the material universe, and the conjugal union between a man and woman, the place in which God creates new human persons “in His image and likeness”. The axiological elevation of abortion to a subjective right is the demolition of the first pillar. The ennoblement of a homosexual relationship, when equated to marriage, is the destruction of the second pillar.

At the root of this is the work of Satan, who wants to build an actual anti-creation. This is the ultimate and terrible challenge which Satan is hurling at God. “I am demonstrating to you that I am capable of constructing an alternative to your creation. And man will say: it is better in the alternative creation than in your creation”.

This is the frightful strategy of the lie, constructed around a profound contempt for man. Man is not capable of elevating himself to the splendour of the Truth. He is not capable of living within the paradox of an infinite desire for happiness. He is not able to find himself in the sincere gift of himself. And therefore – continues the Satanic discourse – we tell him banalities about man. We convince him that the Truth does not exist and that his search is therefore a sad and futile passion. We persuade him to shorten the measure of his desire in line with the measure of the transient moment. We place in his heart the suspicion that love is merely a mask of pleasure.

The Grand Inquisitor of Dostoevsky speaks thus to Jesus: “You judge of men too highly, for though rebels they be, they are born slaves …. I swear to you that man is weaker and lower than You have ever imagined him to be! Man is weak and cowardly.”

3. How should we dwell in this situation? In the third and final section of my reflection, I will seek to answer this question.

The reply is simple: within the confrontation between creation and anti-creation, we are called upon to TESTIFY. This testimony is our mode of being in the world.

The New Testament has an abundantly rich doctrine on this matter. I must confine myself to an indication of the three fundamental meanings which constitute testimony.

(i) Testimony means to say, to speak, to announce openly and publicly. Someone who does not testify in this way is like a soldier who flees at the decisive moment in a battle. We are no longer witnesses, but deserters, if we do not speak openly and publicly. The March for Life is therefore a great testimony.

(ii) Testimony means to say, to announce openly and publicly the divine Revelation, which involves the original evidence, discoverable only by reason, rightfully used. And to speak in particular of the Gospel of Life and Marriage.

(iii) Testimony means to say, to announce openly and publicly the Gospel of Life and Marriage as if in a trial [cfr. John 16, 8-11]. I will explain myself. I have spoken frequently of a confrontation. This confrontation is increasingly assuming the appearance of a trial, of a legal proceeding, in which the defendant is Jesus and his Gospel. As in every legal proceeding, there are also witnesses in favour: in favour of Jesus and his Gospel. Announcement of the Gospel of Marriage and of Life today takes place in a context of hostility, of challenge, of unbelief. The alternative is one of two options: either one remains silent on the Gospel, or one says something else. Obviously, what I have said should not be interpreted as meaning that Christians should render themselves… antipathetic to everyone.

St Thomas writes:  “It is the same thing, when faced with two contraries, to pursue the one and reject the other.  Medicine, for example, proposes the cure while excluding the illness. Hence, it belongs to the wise man to meditate on the truth, in particular with regard to the First Principle …and to refute the opposing falsehood.” [CG Book I, Chapter I, no. 6]. In the context of testimony to the Gospel, irenics and concordism must be excluded. On this Jesus has been explicit. It would be a terrible doctor who adopted an irenical attitude towards the disease. Augustine writes: “Love the sinner, but persecute the sin”. Note this well. The Latin word per-sequor is an intensifying verb. The meaning therefore is: “Hunt down the sin. Track it down in the hidden places of its lies, and condemn it, bringing to light its insubstantiality”.

I CONCLUDE with a quotation from a great confessor of the faith, the Russian Pavel A. Florenskij. “Christ is witness, in the extreme sense of the word, THE WITNESS.

At His crucifixion, the Jews and Romans believed they were only witnessing a historical event, but the event revealed itself as the Truth”. [The philosophy of religion, San Paolo ed., Milan 2017, page 512].

“WHEN I AM LIFTED UP FROM THE EARTH, I WILL DRAW ALL PEOPLE TO MYSELF” [John 12, 32].

The Brazilian priest Alexandre Awi Mello, the National Director of Brazil’s Schönstatt Movement, will serve as the new secretary for the the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life. He was born Rio de Janeiro in 1971, and was ordained a priest in 2001.

Since 2002, he has been a professor of Pastoral Theology in several Brazilian universities. In 2007, he collaborated in the Aparecida Conference. He also directs the magazine “Tabor,” and has published several articles in magazines specialized in catechetical and pastoral works.

He studied Philosophy and Theology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Santiago de Chile and later moved to Germany to continue his studies. He holds a PhD in Mariology from the University of Dayton in the United States.

The Vatican announced the creation of the new Dicastery for Laity Family and Life in June 2016 and began operations on September 1 of the same year.

By Fr. Dwight Longenecker, Standing on My Head:

The effect of birth control and a contraceptive culture has altered our world in ways we could never have expected.

Think for a moment about the effect contraception has had on the number of vocations to the priesthood and religious life.

First of all, if a family has ten kids it is more likely that they are going to be happy for a few of them to pursue the priesthood or religious life. Mothers will quite happily send a few off to the seminary or monastery. If she has ten she can spare a few.

But if the neat and tidy suburban career woman only has two she is going to treasure them that much more. The idea that one would become a priest would be a shocking idea, but there is another more subtle attitude shift beneath this.

When mother and father decided to limit their family to two children by artificial means they usually do so in order for the woman to go back to work. The silent statement is, “What is most important to this family is to have as much income as possible.” and “The career. The career is everything! It comes first. Children? Meh.”

This attitude is then transmitted to the children who also put career first. Will there be any vocations from a home like that? Probably not.

Think further of the effects of this revolution in family life on the question of vocations. Before the invention and acceptance of artificial contraception a young man considering the priesthood would look around and weigh up his option.

Let’s say he lived in Philadelphia in the 1950s. He came from an Italian American family. He sees his Dad, his uncles, his grandfather. They are working class. They sweat in dangerous jobs to support their large families. They come home to a little house full of kids. Its a good life, but its a hard life.

The priest, on the other hand, doesn’t have his own wife and family, but he’s in Philadelphia. He gets sent to St Anthony of Padua parish. He’s surrounded by a big extended Italian family. He has status. He’s the priest. He gets an education. Maybe he travels to Rome. He lives in a big house with maybe three or four other priests. They have a nice Italian mama who cooks and cleans and looks after them.

The point I’m making is that, from a human point of view, the young man’s choice is fairer. With a wife and family he will have certain joys and certain sorrows and sacrifices. With the priesthood he will have certain joys and certain sorrows and sacrifices.

You pays your money and you makes your choice.

But think of the young man’s choice in today’s contraceptive culture. To be married and have a family doesn’t seem to require any sacrifices at all. Indeed, it seems like the passport to perfection. You get married. You eventually have two nice trophy children. Your wife continues her education and career. You’re both earning enough money to have everything. No sorrows. No sacrifice.
Of course I know it doesn’t always pan out that way, but that is what seems to be on offer.

On the other hand, for a young man to be a priest? He’s faced with a life of loneliness–stuck in Rectory by himself with onerous duties and little reward.
Again–I know it is not really like this, but this is what it may very well appear to be.

What’s to be done?

I happen to feel optimistic about the problem because I think the pendulum is going to swing back. I think an increasing number of young people are going to reject the contraceptive culture and choose a life giving alternative, and with that will be an increasing number of young men and women who choose a religious vocation, and they’ll be choosing for all the right reasons.
Why do I think this? Because a lie cannot sustain itself. All that is false eventually implodes. It can’t last.

On the other hand, all that is beautiful, good and true will always be attractive. Like fresh shoots on a tree that has been felled, it will spring back.