Legal Protection of the Unborn

January 22  Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of Unborn Children  

Sunrise on January 23

Gospel and Preaching Text for January 22

Gospel   MT 18:1-5, 10, 12-14

The disciples approached Jesus and said,
"Who is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven?"
He called a child over, placed it in their midst, and said,
"Amen, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children,
you will not enter the Kingdom of heaven.
Whoever becomes humble like this child
is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven.
And whoever receives one child such as this in my name receives me.

"See that you do not despise one of these little ones,
for I say to you that their angels in heaven
always look upon the face of my heavenly Father.
What is your opinion?
If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them goes astray,
will he not leave the ninety-nine in the hills
and go in search of the stray?
And if he finds it, amen, I say to you, he rejoices more over it
than over the ninety-nine that did not stray.
In just the same way, it is not the will of your heavenly Father
that one of these little ones be lost."

The period of time after Roe vs. Wade corresponds roughly with my own years as a priest.    I was ordained in June of 1972 and the decision regarding Roe that invalidated state laws prohibiting abortion was handed down in January of 1973.    Through the last 47 years I have followed the debate and spoken frequently about the need to protect life from conception to natural death.    We are blessed to have in every Catholic community men and women who have found ways to assist women who identify pregnancy as a dilemma for them.   

I believe that the developing embryo is a human being from the moment of conception.   If I have any doubt I am persuaded by the need to grant this organism the benefit of the doubt.   This blanket belief is consistent with our universal belief in the human dignity of the child after birth.   I believe that the organism before birth bears the exact essence of the child.   

I take notice, too, of Pope Francis’s pertinent remarks in his encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si.   Here he points to the need for a consistent posture toward life protecting both the developing fetus and the threatened biosphere.

 “….Concern for the protection of nature is… incompatible with the justification of abortion. How can we genuinely teach the importance of concern for other vulnerable beings, (even earth itself, this my own addition) ….if we fail to protect a human embryo?   If personal and social sensitivity towards the acceptance of the new life is lost, then other forms of acceptance that are valuable for society also wither away.”  (120)

In any case the laws prohibiting abortions in the USA were unevenly enforced over the years before Roe.  Even today I believe the weakened laws protecting the fetus from certain procedures or at certain periods of gestation are unevenly enforced.    The difficulty of enforcement has always been one hesitation arguing against absolute and universal abortion laws.  

But we should note that abortion is not the only moral problem that demands prudent law and its careful implementation.     Especially in modern times, for example, war cries out for laws to guarantee the protection of non-combatants and for the enforcement of these laws.   For this reason there are very detailed, absolute and universal laws protecting non-combatants.   These laws have international support and they speak well of our sensitivity to human dignity.     But again these laws are nearly impossible to enforce despite ongoing efforts in an International Criminal Court.     Sadly war-time violence against civilians overwhelms the desire to punish such violence and the desire to eliminate it.   But no reasonable government or civic body questions the nature of the laws.   And their enactment unites communities.

In the case of abortion the widespread belief that the developing embryo and fetus should not be granted human status creates a lack of unity around the need for protection.   Approval in the USA of absolute laws protecting the fetus like those protecting non-combatants faces a very steep up-hill battle.

There are, for example, over 350,000 medical abortions a year in our country.   Even should laws prohibit them, the nation lacks substantially the enforcement and judicial systems required to enforce such a law.   Controlling the drugs used will be almost impossible and offers no solution.   Adding to this enforcement burden the vast majority of the women and medical professionals involved in these medical abortions deny that these procedures in the first ten weeks of pregnancy are the taking of human life.  Any consistent effort to enforce a law against this practice will lead to a fractured human community.    We could say “so bit it” but laws prohibiting medical abortions are very unlikely to be enacted and less likely to be enforced.      Protection for the unborn facing medical abortions will be better served by devoting our resources to education about the nature of the fetus and to providing services to pregnant women who are contemplating abortion.    But in all cases, whether our laws are perfect or imperfect applications of natural law, we can rely on God’s justice and mercy having the last word.

Of course, 60 to 65% of abortions are not medical abortions and there is a need to decide on some level of protection for these unborn, protection that is prudent and that our human community can administer.    Such protection must include continued and expanded outreach to support and encourage pregnant women.  I welcome the wisdom of our two new Justices on the Supreme Court.   I hope that they can aid the court to broaden the level of protection.

We join in prayers for the unborn, for pregnant women no matter their intentions and for medical professionals and bioethicists who dedicate themselves to protect life.

Go West Young Man (and Woman) !

AM  JAN 9, 2020  Vapor Trails   GO WEST YOUNG MAN (and WOMAN)

Three trails getting an edge on the morning, all going west!    But at least we will have warm sun right here in the East.

First photogenic snow of the season Jan 6, 2020

JANUARY 8, 2020

FIRST PHOTOGENIC SNOW OF THE SEASON

THE WEST WIND WHIPS THE SNOW OFF THE TREES

What about Joseph?

THE SLEEPING JOSEPH, DREAMING OF HIS MISSION

Today about Joseph, the steady and quiet Joseph.  A dream moves Joseph to take care of Mary and become the legal father of her child Jesus.  He is told quite distinctly in the dream that this child is to save the Jewish people from their sins. 

Pope Francis keeps in his own bedroom a statue of St. Joseph reclining in sleep as a reminder that the Spirit of God sometimes speaks with us in the quiet solitude of our rest or our prayer.

I dream every night.   Once in a dream a few years ago, Pope John Paul ll appeared to my mother and me in her kitchen and we were supposed to provide him with breakfast.   We were totally unprepared.  (To be clear, no other recognized saint ever appeared to me in a dream.)

IN THIS MULTI-MEDIA ON BROWN PAPER, JOSEPH IS SCRATCHING HIS HEAD IN WONDER!

(From the Brady Collection at Wernersville, artist unknown,  Dated likely in the 1920's)

Notably Matthew depicts Joseph as silent even when he is not asleep.   He has none of his own lines in this drama of Jesus’ birth and growth.   He comes on stage and does his duty fully and generously.   But we never hear him say a single word.  In fact after the young family settles in Nazareth, there is only a brief mention of him, years later, when the townspeople refer to Jesus as the carpenter’s son.

But think of the possibilities.   Jesus’ Mother Mary is the one who finally voices the possible and asks Jesus to do the extraordinary at the Wedding Feast of Cana where she pushes the adult Jesus to change the water into wine.  

But what was Joseph thinking all those years before in his carpenter shop?  Typically a son like Jesus would have helped in the shop and would have been a student at a school in the town synagogue.   But Joseph kept it a secret that his son was destined to save his people from their sins.   Joseph accepted patiently the role he was given.   The father in heaven asked him to live an ordinary life with an extraordinary son.   He did not use this relationship to boost his own standing in the community.  He must have been happy to have his son recognized as a good student and a young man with excellent social skills.   But he himself stays in the background.   There is no evidence that Joseph even lives to see their son as a recognized religious leader.

I think of Joseph as a patron saint of shall-we-say ordinary fatherhood if we can even think of fatherhood as ordinary.  He protected his wife and child.    He accepted the gift of his wife and loved her.   He taught his child the skills that he knew, even the social skills at which Jesus excelled.  And his patient love helped to build a world best defined by his son, the gift of God with us.

What place Mary in our saving Hope?

What place Mary in our saving Hope?

Nativity image from the Brady art collection at the Jesuit Center in
Wernersville. 

It fits the season of Advent to pepper the daily readings and feasts during these four weeks before Christmas with references to the Mother of God, Mary.    And we celebrate in this season both the Feast of the Immaculate Conception and that of the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.   As a memory of popular devotion to Mary, I recall celebrating Mass at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, built where it is said that the Mother of God appeared to an Aztec native, Juan Diego.   Even as we celebrated Mass on the main altar at an early hour young couples approached prayerfully at a side altar to present their new-born children before the same image of Our Lady that Juan is said to have found imprinted on his cloak.

There is such an outpouring of affection among the faithful for Mary that Protestants sometimes accuse us of worshiping her or praying only to her as if she were the Incarnate God.   

We know that we do not worship her but look to her as a saint in heaven, indeed as a disciple of her Son, a mother who can help us grow in the graces of discipleship ourselves.   Our love for her, however, does raise the question about why indeed she herself could not have come to us as the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity.    So I ask God why Mary is not our Incarnate God instead of Jesus.   God in Three Persons could certainly have arranged for that.   And any child that Mary, as our Incarnate God and Savior, might have conceived could have been born to be a disciple to her rather than the other way around.

We cannot question the freedom of God to arrange our salvation in any way God desires.   We know that the Second Person of the Trinity comes as Jesus.  This has been revealed to us.  There are, indeed, some cultural reasons why God might come to us as a man instead of a woman.    One of them, I conjecture, is that women were far less likely to be crucified in the Roman Empire.    And God in the crucifixion of Jesus wanted us to know the greatness of divine love for us.     Jesus showed us such great love by subjecting himself to the worst possible humiliation and suffering that the so-called civilized world has devised: Crucifixion.

Mary as the Incarnate God could have suffered the same fate but women were almost always protected from crucifixion.  We have in the history of lynchings in the United States something similar.   The victims of lynchings were sometimes women but this was exceptional.   Crucifixions and lynchings, public shows of power, are used to humiliate, intimidate and eliminate opposition and they typically fall on men.   Women within the cultures that tolerate crucifixion and lynching suffer humiliations and abuse in other ways and Mary suffered at the foot of Jesus’ cross to represent them.

God chose to come as the man Jesus to take on this responsibility of sharing the worst effects of human sin that any one of us could suffer, humiliations and abuse of any kind.   Jesus wanted all of us and especially all those who suffered like pain and humiliation to be strengthened by the fact that God chose to suffer in the same way.  The sufferings of Jesus and the pierced heart of the Mother of God are 100% sufficient to strengthen and comfort men and women who have suffered atrocities of all kinds.    It is with this man Jesus and his Mother that we will be saved from our darkness.   So we celebrate in this season the beginning of our salvation in the birth of the Child and in the generous willingness of His Mother to follow him in hope.   They become our hope even as the world rejects them.

2019 Christmas Card by Sr. Mary Bur, IHM, one of an annual series!

November photos

NOVEMBER PHOTOS

Sunrise, November 7

States of Red and Blue

Leisure and "Seeing"

We see this volunteer finding a crack in the stone cloister walk!

Short reflections on Leisure and “Seeing”  from

Josef Pieper’s Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation.

Pieper argues that avoiding idolization of labor today cannot be achieved except by an objection based on some ultimate truth about human nature (which is therefore to be taken as of lasting relevance, he assumes). He notes how there are still vague notions about the seventh day of the week being special and about holidays and quitting time (in Germany), but that we are ignorant of how the accumulated wisdom of our Western cultural and existential tradition “as expressed, say, by Plato, and Aristotle, or the great teachers of Christianity” viewed leisure.

“The most important element in this teaching declares: the ultimate fulfillment, the absolutely meaningful activity, the most perfect expression of being alive, the deepest satisfaction, and the fullest achievement of human existence must needs happen in an instance of beholding, namely in the contemplating awareness of the world’s ultimate and intrinsic foundations.” P. 22. He asks the question what constitutes here and now an activity that is meaningful in itself, in contrast to an activity that is meaningful for what it produces, and he answers that it is whenever in contemplation we touch, however remotely, the core of all things. As Matthew Arnold once wrote, “The touch of truth is the touch of life.”

He says that in feast days (he glancingly mentions the Sabbath) man has traditionally expressed his being in harmony and awareness of being surrounded by such fundamental realities, in non-ordinary ways.

He says, indeed, that wherever there is lacking the attitude of heart and mind recognizing and seeking to live in harmony with this fundamental truth of human nature (“even if beheld through a veil of tears”), all endeavors to organize relaxation techniques turn hectic and, indeed, become an “outright desperate, form of work”.   

                                                                            See me Seeing you!   Artist:  Eileen Martin



In the second essay, “Learning How To See Again”, Pieper asks the excellent question “How can we be saved from becoming a totally passive consumer of mass-produced goods and a subservient follower beholden to every slogan the managers may proclaim? The question really is: How can man preserve and safeguard the foundation of his spiritual dimension and an uncorrupted relationship to reality? He suggests that more and more we tend to see with less detailed grasp, to hear with less detail (in contrast for example to the Indians) and to remember with less capacity.....(These weaknesses are related to the commercial and corrupting images with which materialism has flooded the world.)……

He says that fasting and abstention from the “noise” is a valuable first step but hardly sufficient. “A better and more immediately effective remedy is this: to be active oneself in artistic creation, producing shapes and forms for the eye to see.

Nobody (for example) has to observe and study the visible mystery of the human face more than the one who sets out to sculpt in a tangible medium. And this holds true not only for the manually formed medium.”

(From a blogger posting as “Infinite Resources”)

We see how the blue sky highlights this red tree entering the winter.