Man…
Yes, I know (s)he’s givin voice to someone voiceless. But who hasn’t looked at a child and seen both ends of this spectrum?
And yet…so many term the other in this two who are one for a time, a “choice”.
He or she isn’t the choice. The only house is whether to let him/her live…or to cause him/her to die. Personally, I think 50,000,000 people dead is enough of *that* choice, thank you…
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Fr. Longenecker does a much better job than I seem to be taking time to do in explaining the a) difference between Dan Cathey, president of Chick-Fil-A, and other corporate speakers on the subject of same-sex unions and calling them marriage, and b) the hypocrisy of some in the media and elsewhere in how they approach these issues.
I particularly like this comparison:
The equivalent of Starbuck’s move would be for Chick-Fil-A to issue a public corporate policy statement in formal opposition to gay marriage and to fund measures to repeal it. An equivalent action by Chick-Fil-A to Ben and Jerry’s marketing and publicity blitz would be for Chick-Fil-A to name a new sandwich ‘The Mom and Dad Traditional Chicken Sandwich’ with a marketing campaign saying, “If you support Mom and Dad not Dad and Dad–then buy this sandwich, along with a media blitz to convince people to be against gay marriage.
Yeah. Exactly. So, please stop telling me how all us evil Christians, including evil Big Christian Business and the Catholic Church, are so bigoted and discriminatory against this poor new minority. Unlike some of my caucasian brothers and sisters of the Jim Crow era, I have no problem with anyone because of who they are, and I only have a problem with what they do when that conduct seeks to impinge on my right to do what I do (as in the case of redefining marriage, and hate-speech laws taken to ridiculous lengths, etc.).
For my part, I share the concern I’ve heard expressed, most recently by Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia, and the incoming bishop of Glasgow, Bishop Tartaglia, that those who believe Christian values are bigoted and discriminatory will seek to marginalize people of faith, even to the point of imprisonment. All I can say is:
Bring it.
It will put me in good company, and I promise I will not go softly into that good night. I don’t think they know who they’re messing with; FYI, folks, this is not Cardinal Bernadin’s Catholic Church./ We are MUCH less confused about what is right, and about how to communicate it and defend it, even in the courts and elsewhere, if necessary. I don’t think we’ll have to go the way of the Cristeros, but then again, I don’t think the folks who seek to marginalize us have the stones of Plutarco Elias Calles, either. I pray I am right, because if I am not, there could be rocky times ahead…
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I had what was , for me at least, a most interesting conversation the other day.
I have a friend, an otolaryngologist in Memphis, who likes to “stir the pot” with his colleagues in his operating room. He invited me into his room the other day to continue a conversation we’d been having on the topic of politics, and as that would down, the nurse anesthetist staffing his cases said, ” Why don’t you ask that marriage question, Dr. B?” She then explained that the topic was same-sex marriage, so I held forth. And the reaction was interesting.
I took my explanation from (my admittedly weak understanding of) John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. I explained that, while I understood the desire on the part of my same-sex-attracted brothers and sisters to legitimize their relationships, marriage isn’t the way to do it. I then explained that marriage isn’t something that is just a whim; it represents a total gift of self to the other, both emotionally and physically. The meaning of marriage is written, literally stamped into our bodies as male and female; this “nuptial meaning of the body” is the way we are configured as male and female. The male and female bodies, by design, bear the mark of that meaning, and they reflect and symbolize the completeness of the love of God, which is so complete as to be life-giving (the human analog of that completeness is the life-giving potential of sexual intercourse between spouses (I hate the term “marriage act”, even though it is so perfectly descriptive). This leaves aside the question of the morality of various ways of using our sexual faculties, many (most, these days) of which are just wrong; that’s another discussion.
Needless to say, they looked at me like I had spoken Chinese, then said “Oooookay…thanks!” and sent me on my way.
So the question: How would you explain it? Just curious.
The comments are open both here and on Facebook; don’t be crude or cruel, or you’ll get “moderated”.
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http://www.myfemininemind.com/2012/07/things-your-doctor-may-not-have-told_25.html?m=0
Excellent post about the effects of various forms of contraception. I’ll legit speak for itself; even without the claims without liked supporting evidence, this is a pretty damning piece as to the things doctors DON’T know or consider when prescribing a carcinogen to “fix” something that ain’t broke…
Read it, please. And remember that fifty years ago, they looked at people who opposed smoking and cigarettes the same way…
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6 Incentives to Consider Natural Family Planning | Natural Family Planning
via 6 Incentives to Consider Natural Family Planning | Natural Family Planning.
Y’all might think we harangue you too much about this. But consider this.
Our associate pastor, Fr. Mike Morgera, preached yesterday evening at the 5:00 pm Mass. he pointed out the last paragraph of yesterday’s Gospel reading, which read:
When he disembarked and saw the vast crowd,
his heart was moved with pity for them,
for they were like sheep without a shepherd;
and he began to teach them many things.
Fr. Mike pointed out also that people need God. No matter the act they put on, no matter the veneer with which they cover that need, ultimately, Man is restless until he rests…in God.
So what does this have to do with NFP? I’ll tell ya. 🙂
What if you had a friend, who was in a relationship with someone…someone who lied through their teeth to your friend at every available moment. and suppose you knew that this person really was the poseur that s/he was, and you could prove it. What would you do? Would you just leave your friend to wallow in this destructive relationship?> or would you try to wake him/her up to the TRUTH, so that s/he could find true happiness?
It’s kind of like that with contraception and NFP.
My wife an I bought the lie for years. We assumed that, because “everyone was doing it”, contracepting in our marriage would lead to happiness and freedom.
But we were wrong.
Contraception takes something beautiful, something that allows us to image see God in our maleness and femaleness, and reduces it to the level of ping pong and PlayStation. Contraception actually does all the things that Pope Paul VI predicted in his encyclical Humanae Vitae (see section 17…the whole things is NOT about birth control!).
And most importantly: Contraception strikes at the heart of marriage, and the core of the sacrament, the sign, that marriage is supposed to be: a sign of God’s total gift of Himself to all of us. Our sexuality, our creation as male and female, images God. It shows us the way to God. It is, when properly lived out, a foretaste of heaven.
And yet, as Christopher West so aptly puts it, we so often choose to eat from the dumpster of lust-laden sexual encounters, instead of eating at the banquet of the free, faithful, fruitful union of souls that God served up for us in the beginning.
So if we seem to be harping on this…it’s because, to quote Denzel Washington as Malcolm X (again), “Ya been had! Ya been took! Ya been hoodwinked! Bamboozled! Led astray! Run amok!”
Wake up, y’all. Wake up…
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Imagine Sisters: Antidote to the LCWR. A great post from Creative Minority Report.
I recommend watching the embedded video. As is so often the case, people who do this for a living write so much more eloquently than me; suffice it to say that, if one or more of my daughters found this kind of joy in completely giving their lives to the Lord, well…what more could I wish for them?
Like I said: Watch the video. And pray for vocations to religious life.
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This blog post by Msgr. Charles Pope of the Archdiocese of Washington is spot on, and it dovetails pretty nicely, I think, with the theme of my homily last week.
I love this. We (and by we I mean every single one of us) spend a lot of time trying to ignore sinful behavior, to justify it, to minimize it…and sin has its way with us. This is not some Catholic guilt thing, either; we are made for love, and sin is the true opposite of love, in all its manifestations, because sin invariably puts me before the good of the other.
Read/watch; I’m interested in your thoughts.
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I encourage…no, I dare, any of my brothers in Christ to listen to this homily (starting at 5:20) by my friend Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers of the Diocese of Portland, OR and EWTN. Given teh recent discussion I had with my daughter and some of her friends on Facebook regarding the book series Fifty Shades of Gray.
For people who are so “free”, we sure are a wounded bunch. One thing Deacon Harold says that stuck with me (at time mark 9:34): Real men, who live their spirituality from the Cross of Christ, and who preach Christ crucified by teh example of their lives, would never take the knife of sin from
the hand of Satan and plunge into the hearts of women over and over again.”
Amen.
You playahs aren’t helping anyone. And ladies, you are not liberated if you’re addicted to using other people in order to get what you need. “Our hearts are restless until they rest in You, O Lord”…St. Augustine got it right. You know whether you’ve found what you’re looking for, after a night of using another person. You know that ache in your breast, that emptiness after having told lie after lie with the language of the body isn’t right.
Want that ache to go away? Grace is the antidote. Christ is the physician.
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I’ve been preaching 12 years; I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to work my favorite movie (OK, one of my favorites, after “The Song of Bernadette” and “In The Shoes of the Fisherman”), The Matrix into a homily. SUCCESS!
For you young’uns, watch this clip from The Matrix.
Now, go read my homily, or listen to it. Personally, I think I delivered a decently competent thing, in spite of its length.
I am, I will admit, on a Theology of the Body tear these days, and the readings for last weekend oozed TOB to me.
Why is it that we will go through convoluted reasoning to justify the use of artificial contraception. Mountains of evidence are piling up that The Pill is bad for women, and that the “freedom” they enjoy merely enables them to become objects of other people’s lust. The combination of chemicals is bad for women, bad for the environment, and bad for men. So how is this a good deal for everyone, this unhitching of our maleness and femaleness from our fertility?
To steal from Spike Lee (my Caucasian brothers and sisters can scroll to 1:58 in the clip to avoid a Spike-ized history of the Black Man in America): “Ya been had! Ya been took! Ya been hoodwinked! Bamboozled! Led astray! Run amok!” How in God’s name…never mind, it isn’t in His name that this is happening. Could it be…Satan? Hmmmm? (h/t to Dana Carvey’s Church Lady).
Who wants to pervert the gift into something that brings death instead of life? And lest you think that contracepted sex is neutral…do you really think that all those aborted children are the product of women who are just too dumb to take their birth control on time? Or is it possible that those dead children represent contraceptive “failures”? I use quotes there, my friends; NO child, NO life is an accident.
Ya been had! Ya been Took!
Tall, Bald, and Called 
Article: Shackled to Fertility? An interesting commentary
Shackled to Fertility?
Fr. Longenecker makes an interesting point here about a comment he received. This goes back to the Big Lie I keep harping on:
You believe that your ability for sexual expression is there, like a nice Christmas present, for you to play with and enjoy without boundaries, without restriction, and without judgment. The fact that you feel certain things when you experience sex with someone else outside of marriage doesn’t faze you; you presume (because you’ve bought the Big Lie) that it’s just all those darned (fill in the blank with your favorite moral authority, be it the Catholic Church, Islam, the Southern Baptist Convention, your mom, whoever) are making you feel guilty! If they would just leave you alone, cuz you aren’t hurting anyone, why, you’d be just fine!
The problem with the Big Lie is that it is so pervasive, it’s hard to see how much it spoils things for everyone. The Big Lie justifies contraception, and by extension abortion (why should I be punished with a child for playing with my toy?). The Big Lie justifies divorce, and sometimes infidelity (s/he doesn’t “do it for me” anymore. Our marriage lacks intimacy. S/he just doesn’t understand me…). The Big Lie sexualizes our children at ever younger ages. It makes our female children feel like they need to set themselves up as objects to be used, to be socially acceptable. It makes us think the misogynistic lyrics of our favorite songs are actually funny. It makes us ponder why everyone is so uptight about the human body; why y’all stressin’ ’bout pictures of naked people having sex? It’s natural!
But the Big Lie doesn’t have hold of us completely. The Big Lie doesn’t keep us from hearing that still, small voice in the quiet moments, you know, the one that questions why we put ourselves through all this, the voice that says, reeeeeally quietly, that “there must be something more than this…” And most importantly…the Big Lie can’t compete with the Truth. Christ, the Light, can and does break through. He can and does make it clear that there is more than this. And He can and does help us to understand that our fertility isn’t a shackle, it’s a cooperation in Creation with God, who loved each one of us into being through our parents!
So, yes…abortion takes upwards of 60% of Black children in the womb in New York City. Yes, on every side, there are forces coming together to try to fundamentally change society’s definitions of its most basic units, to justify lifestyles that are destructive. Yes, the Guhmint seems to have gone stone crazy in its exercise of power against those who call Christ Lord and Savior.
But (spoiler alert!) I read the book to the end. God wins!
Shackled to fertility, indeed.
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