God bless Linda Gibbons:

Linda Gibbons is explaining why she has decided to refuse bail and spend the past 550 days in prison instead of opting for freedom. We are at the Vanier Centre for Women in Milton, an hour west of Toronto, sitting on beige plastic chairs around a small beige table. We are in a secure room and there are guards outside. It is just a precaution but at 62, and prematurely frail, Ms. Gibbons poses no physical threat.

One of Canada’s longest-serving anti-abortion protesters no longer thinks of being locked up as anything out of the ordinary.

Since Aug. 30, 1994, when a temporary injunction was placed around several abortion clinics in downtown Toronto at the request of the provincial Attorney-General, Ms. Gibbons has been arrested roughly 20 times and has been behind bars eight of the past 16 years — more time than Karla Homolka.

She served an earlier six-month stint for a protest in front of a Morgentaler clinic in 1992.

Her most recent stint behind bars began in January 2009. Instead of standing back the required distance from a clinic as her fellow protesters had done for years, she once again walked within the forbidden bubble zone.

She held up a sign that showed a drawing of a baby that read: “Why Mom, when I have so much life to give?”

If she would only comply, Ms. Gibbons could be out on $500 bail in mere days, thereby breaking her tortuous 16-year cycle of arrest and imprisonment. But until the injunction is quashed, she will refuse bail, insisting that would be “compromise and complicity with evil” and, to her, unthinkable.

To those inside Canada’s anti-abortion movement, Linda Gibbons is a quiet hero whose sacrifice is to be admired.

“I didn’t have the courage to break the injunction,” says retired high school teacher John Bulsza, of London, Ont., who was named in the original injunction in August 1994. “Everyone of us should have protested with her and this case would be history. She’s our Gandhi and we’re letting her take the fall for the rest of us.”

To her detractors, though, she is a self-aggrandizing pain in the ass who has no respect for the rights of others. They see nothing honourable in her commitment to the cause. She is simply another self-delusional fanatic with a martyr complex.

“What people like her do is creepy,” says Celia Posyniak, an abortion clinic director in Calgary. “They don’t even have to say anything. It’s intimidating just to have someone standing there.”

“Why is it acceptable to intimidate women making a personal and legal decision?”

Continue reading…

Satan’s greatest success is not when he gets someone to do something that they know is immoral; it is when he gets someone to do something immoral and be convinced that it is not wrong. In the first case, the person can come to repentance and ask for forgiveness, but in the second case they do not even acknowledge they need to repent of their actions.

Such is the case today with artificial contraception. When you take a step back and think about it, it is unbelievable (and diabolical) that just 100 years ago every practicing Christian, no matter their tradition, would acknowledge that artificial contraception is immoral. But today, almost none do; artificial contraception is as normal as cell phones and McDonald’s. As an Evangelical Christian, I never once gave a thought to the morality of using artificial contraception; to me that would be as silly as contemplating the morality of using a fork instead of my hands to eat. This is still the situation in most of the Evangelical world (and scandalously much of the Catholic world as well).

But perhaps the tide is turning:

(RNS) Is contraception a sin? The very suggestion made Bryan Hodge and his classmates at Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute laugh.

As his friends scoffed and began rebutting the oddball idea, Hodge found himself on the other side, poking holes in their arguments. He finished a bachelor’s degree in biblical theology at Moody and earned a master’s degree at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

Now, more than a decade later, he is trying to drive a hole the size of the ark through what has become conventional wisdom among many Christians: that contraception is perfectly moral.

His book, “The Christian Case Against Contraception,” was published in November. Hodge, a former Presbyterian pastor who is now a layman in the conservative Orthodox Presbyterian Church, realizes his mission is quixotic.

In the 50 years since the birth-control pill hit the market, contraception in all its forms has become as ubiquitous as the minivan, and dramatically changed social mores as it opened the possibilities for women.

No less than other Americans, Christians were caught up in the cultural conflagration. In a nation where 77 percent of the population claims to be Christian, 98 percent of women who have ever had sexual intercourse say they’ve used at least one method of birth control.

The pill is the most preferred method, followed closely by female sterilization (usually tying off fallopian tubes).

“People are no longer … thinking about it,” says Hodge, 36, who had to agree with a Christian publisher who rejected his book on grounds that contraception is a nonstarter, a settled issue.

“People don’t even ask if there is anything possibly morally wrong about it.”

For more than 19 centuries, every Christian church opposed contraception.

Under pressure from social reformers such as Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, the Anglican Communion (and its U.S. branch, the Episcopal Church) became the first to allow married couples with grave reasons to use birth control.

That decision cracked a door that, four decades later, was thrown wide open with the relatively safe, effective birth-control pill, which went on the market in this country in the summer of 1960. Virtually every Protestant denomination had lifted the ban by the mid-1960s.

Even evangelicals within mainline Protestant and nondenominational churches embraced the pill as a way that married couples could enjoy their God-given sexuality without fear of untimely pregnancy.

“It was a reaction to that whole Victorian thing where sex was seen as dirty,” says Hodge, who lives in Pennsylvania.

Official Mormon teaching through the late 1960s was against birth control. But by 1998, the church’s General Handbook of Instructions made it clear that only a couple can decide how many children to have and no one else is to judge.

There remains one massive holdout among major Christian churches—the Roman Catholic Church, which expressed its opposition in no uncertain terms in Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae.

To separate the two functions of marital intimacy—the life-transmitting from the bonding—is to reject God’s design, Paul VI wrote.

“The fundamental nature of the marriage act, while uniting husband and wife in the closest intimacy, also renders them capable of generating new life—and this as a result of laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman,” Humanae Vitae proclaimed.

Janet Smith, a Catholic seminary professor whose writing and talks have been influential for two decades, puts it this way: “God himself is love, and it’s the very nature of love to overflow into new life. Take the baby-making power out of sex, and it doesn’t express love. All it expresses is physical attraction.”

Continue reading…

Some people criticize Natural Family Planning (NFP) as just “Catholic birth control.” It is fundamentally no different, according to critics, than condoms, birth control pills, or other means to prevent pregnancy. These are obviously people who have never actually used NFP in their own lives, for if they did, they would know how different it really is.

The great thing about NFP is that using it helps one to recognize the great gift of marital sexuality as well as the great blessing of children in a marriage. Whereas artificial birth control focuses exclusively on preventing the natural consequence of sexual relations, NFP helps a couple focus on the two primary purposes of sexual relations: procreation and marital unity. This often leads them to a deeper marriage and a greater openness to children – and even a greater appreciation of the Catholic Church, as can be seen with this couple:

Couple credits NFP for changed worldview

Chris and Christelle Hagen weren’t Catholic when they decided to use natural family planning instead of artificial birth control.

Christelle was initially attracted to NFP for health, not moral, reasons, she said. At first, Chris was surprised she didn’t want to use birth control pills, but he was happy to oblige.

Now, 13 years into their marriage, the Hagens, members of St. Michael in Stillwater, say using NFP has positively affected not only Christelle’s health, but also the way they view their marriage, intimacy and children.

NFP also opened the door to the couple’s exploration of the Catholic faith, and their eventual conversion to Catholicism from the Evangelical faith in 1999, said Chris, 34.

Learning to trust

Unlike contraception, which uses barriers or hormones to prevent the marital act from producing life or, in some cases, can act as an abortifacient, NFP ensures the couples’ marital act is always open to life. When a couple does not want to become pregant, they abstain from sex when the wife is fertile.

According to the Catholic Church, NFP is the only moral way to regulate pregnancies.

Christelle, 37, first learned of NFP while living with a Catholic family after college, and she explained it to Chris, whom she was dating. They made a decision to use NFP after they married.

But, out of fear of pregnancy, the Hagens used condoms during their honeymoon. A few nights later, however, they had a spiritual experience — something Chris said is difficult to describe.

“We both felt an intense amount of fear, we felt very vulnerable, and we both had the sense — we were experiencing this at the same time — that it was because we were using condoms,” he said.

They didn’t use a condom after that night and tried better to trust God, they said.

Their Evangelical church didn’t teach contraception was wrong, and initially, the Hagens thought that, while it was wrong for them, contraception wasn’t wrong for everyone, Christelle said.

They eventually changed their minds. Chris was persuaded by the fact that no Christian denominations approved artificial birth control until the 20th century. Although Christelle had already changed her mind, a miscarriage eight months after their wedding confirmed her beliefs, she said.

“That experience for me was really a turning point emotionally for NFP, because I realized more of what was at stake with sexuality — that it had incredible power to it, the power to create life, and after that, I’ve never looked back,” she said.

They started to teach NFP, which they did for eight years as a couple through Couple to Couple League. When Chris became too busy to co-teach, they retired from Couple to Couple League, and Christelle focused on her growing interest in childbirth and parenting.

Practicing NFP deepened their appreciation for children, they said, and today they have four, ranging in age from 2 to 9.

Continue reading…

God bless Archbishop Francisco Gil Hellin of Burgos of Spain:

Archbishop Francisco Gil Hellin of Burgos warned this week there is no right to kill an innocent human being and therefore no obligation to obey to the new law on abortion. Rather, “direct opposition without distinction” must be mounted, he said.

“Let’s be clear: this law is not a law, although it is presented as such by some politicians and lawmakers.  It is no law because nobody has the right to take the life of an innocent human being. For this reason it is not obligatory.  Moreover, it demands direct opposition without distinction,” the archbishop said in a letter.

He underscored that reason cannot recognize abortion as a right because it constitutes the killing “of a person who is not guilty.”  “The right of a person to exist who has already been conceived, although not yet born, is not a belief stemming from any religion.  One does not need to be a believer to hold that an innocent person has the right to be defended and respected in his or her integrity.  Common sense dictates that one cannot take a human life in order to solve another problem or to “get money or votes,” he said.

The archbishop went on to say it is a “fallacy to assert that this law was passed by a majority in Parliament and that it represents the will of the majority of citizens, or if the Constitutional Court upholds it, that opposing it would be disobedient and would warrant sanction.”

“The fallacy consists in giving politicians, judges or citizens a right they do not have.  And nobody has the right to legislate the killing of an innocent person,” Archbishop Gil Hellin said.  He urged Spaniards to help all mothers who are in difficult situations and to support motherhood “with all the means at our disposal” in order to “halt this plague of abortion that, in Spain alone has already destroyed more people than all those who live in the cities of Zaragoza, Cordoba and Burgos.”

Back in the 1990’s, some pro-abortion folks suggested that pro-lifers formed a “conspiracy” and thus they needed to use federal racketeering laws to try to stop us. At the time I was active full-time in pro-life work and I found the accusation of “conspiracy” quite funny, as most pro-lifers could never agree on strategy on just about anything. I would joke that if you had ten pro-lifers in the room, that meant you had ten different ideas of the “best” way to combat abortion. I wish there were a conspiracy!

Because of that experience, I try to be supportive of all pro-life activity, whether it be activism, prayer, counseling, or political action. Anything that brings us closer to a society that recognizes the humanity of the unborn child in law and daily life is a good thing. But I admit that I have a soft spot for praying at abortion clinics. To me, nothing is more important than praying the Rosary in front of a place that kills innocent children in the womb. It is like going into the heart of the Enemy’s camp and detonating our most powerful weapon. I can just imagine how the demons who encircle a clinic cringe when they see a Rosary being pulled out.

Summer is a great time to engage in this activity. With children out of school and the weather quite nice, a whole family can take time each week to pray a Rosary in front of an abortion clinic. My own wife takes our children to do this, and it only takes about 20 minutes, but I believe it does a world of good. Consider making this a practice in your own family (or by yourself) this summer.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us!

About eight years ago, a good friend of mine knew a great Catholic family that was in the process of adopting a child with special-needs from abroad. They were a solid family who would have no problem financially raising this child. But there was a problem: they were about $2,000 short of the needed funds to complete the adoption. If they did not come up with that money, and fast, the adoption would fall through. This child might never be loved by a family and received into the Catholic Church. So he quickly found a way to raise the $2,000 and donated it to the family. That child has been thriving in his family ever since.

But that got my friend thinking: how often does such an adoption not take place? So he and I and our wives started talking and thus was born Little Flowers Foundation, which exists to assist Catholic families with that final amount they need to complete their adoptions. Since its inception, LFF has helped over 40 children be brought into Catholic homes, where they have been loved and have received the saving sacraments of the Church.

But to continue to do this Little Flowers needs money. We only fund-raise twice a year, and we just sent out our latest fund-raising letter, which you can read here. We have many grant applications we would love to fulfill, but we can only do so if we receive enough money through donations. If you are interested in helping bring children home both physically and spiritually, please donate now. Any amount is helpful and we especially appreciate recurring donations, which can be easily set up via this link. LFF is a 501c(3) organization, so all donations are tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the law. Also know that LFF is all volunteer-run, so over 97% of all donations go directly to Catholic families.

Thank you for your support!

Who would have thought that P&G would create one of the most pro-life applications for the new iPad? It’s true:

One of the great things about being pro-life is that we never have to worry about facts getting in the way of our convictions. Science clearly tells us that it is a baby in a mother’s womb, no matter what pro-abortion advocates might claim, and advances in technology are just reconfirming that each day.

St. Teresa of Avila often emphasized that one of the most important virtues in the spiritual life is perseverance. All of us can get excited and begin some spiritual practice or work of mercy, but it takes perseverance to practice it over and over, no matter the circumstances.

As a model of perseverance, we should look to a young man from Cincinnati, Ohio:

The White House staffers who open President Barrack Obama’s mail are likely well aware of Tommy Behan’s pro-life stance.

Behan, a member of St. Maximilian Kolbe Parish and a sophomore at Lakota East High School, has written the president every day since Obama’s inauguration asking him to change his position on abortion. The 16-year-old has handwritten and mailed more than 430 letters.

“His stance is the most radical pro-choice one for a president who has ever held office,” said Behan. “In the first letter I made a vow to never stop writing until he changed it or he’s out of office.”

The teen usually writes in the evenings. He avoids email, preferring to show his passion with the extra effort a handwritten letter requires. His parents supply the pens, paper and stamps. If Behan gets pressed for time and misses a day, he’ll write additional letters until he is caught up. The letters are sometimes mailed in batches.

Behan begins each letter by telling Obama how many times he has written before. Then the teen argues the constitutionality of abortion, talks about justice for the unborn and tells of the lives that have been lost. His stance is straightforward: Life begins at conception and comes before liberty, he said.

“I keep building on my argument,” Behan said. “It really upsets me how some people choose to have an abortion when others really want to have children.”

One of six children, Behan has seen his sister and her husband suffer miscarriages. That experience has made him more passionate and given him more resolve to try to get Obama to publicly change his position.

After about three months of writing Behan received a form letter from the White House. There have been about 17 more since. The generic replies thank him for writing and sometimes acknowledge the topic.

The teen also debated the issue in an editorial in Spark, a well-known student magazine at Lakota East.

“He’s always had a deep respect for life,” said Behan’s mother, Jude Behan. “We’re very proud of him. This was not initiated by us.”

She said her son is dedicated to the letter-writing campaign and is self-motivated.

“I think his voice is being heard, and that’s what’s important,” Jude Behan said. “The ultimate is to respect life, and for those wee little one who don’t have a voice of their own, he wants to be their voice.”

Though he is persistent, Behan doesn’t expect a personal reply or phone call from the president. He also knows the president may not change his opinion, but in the end, Behan will be pleased if he honors his vow to keep writing.

Still, the teen does hope his efforts will encourage others to follow suit and contact the president regarding abortion, at least via email.

“When I wrote the first letter, I didn’t think it would go this far at all,” Behan said. “It’s been building momentum, and it’s hard to stop now. It’s definitely a cause worth fighting for.”

What an amazing young man! Would that we all would be as persistent as he is in fighting evil and preaching the Gospel.

H/t: Rich

Sad news.

In my work with Little Flowers Foundation over the past eight years, I have been involved with a number of adoptions from Russia. One thing I can tell you for sure: the life of an unadopted orphan after they leave an orphanage is very rough in Russia. They are basically left out on the street with no support system and no money. Many of the girls end up as prostitutes and the boys end up in a life of crime. Adopting them before they get to that point is often the only chance these children will ever have at a normal life.

Pray for this situation and for all the children in Russia who need a family. Also, if you are so inclined and able, please consider a donation to Little Flowers Foundation and we will use it to help Catholic families bring these type of children into their homes.

Back in the late 1990’s I changed jobs and rolled-over my (minuscule) 401k into a self-directed IRA. I did some basic research and chose a mutual fund to put the IRA money into. Every quarter I got a statement from the mutual fund company and I would usually scan it briefly. Imagine my surprise one day when I noticed that they added Playboy to the list of companies they invested in. I wrote the company asking them to stop investing in Playboy. I received a very professional response respecting my position, but telling me that they would remain invested in Playboy as it was good for their investors.

So what was I to do? I figured I had five options:

1. Invest in another mutual fund with the possibility that it too would eventually invest in a morally-objectionable company.
2. Invest in a “socially-responsible” mutual fund which respected my worldview but could very well lag other mutual funds in performance.
3. Invest the money in individual stocks instead of a mutual fund I couldn’t control.
4. Invest the money in federal bonds or another non-stock vehicle which didn’t involve morally problematic firms.
5. Leave the market.

These are the choices the Catholic faces when involved in the stock market, either directly or through mutual funds. I came to the conclusion that option (1) wasn’t a viable choice for me, as I didn’t want my money being invested in companies that engaged in explicitly immoral activities. I also don’t think option (5) is a good option for those who wish to be good stewards of their money, and option (4), while viable, definitely limits one’s ability to grow their money over time. So that leaves options (2) and (3), both of which have serious downsides: a “socially-responsible” fund usually performs worse than comparable mutual funds because of its restrictions, and do-it-yourself investing has a whole host of potential problems associated with it.

In the end I made my choice and it has worked out fine for me over the years. But these are the type of questions every Catholic must make while living in a culture which increasingly disrespects our values. And with the advent of government-funded abortion, the conceit that our money isn’t directly used for evil is quickly slipping away. What type of choices will the Catholic have to make in the future?

This is what I love about the Internet. Earlier this morning I had a post about lying, and I mentioned that the Catechism (in paragraph 2483) stated, “To lie is to speak or act against the truth in order to lead into error someone who has the right to know the truth.” No more than a few hours later an observant reader said that the part about “someone who has a right to know” is NOT in fact in the Catechism. Although I copied it straight from my Catechism sitting on my bookshelf, when I looked it up online, sure enough, paragraph 2483 stated “To lie is to speak or act against the truth in order to lead into error.” But in my copy of the Catechism DOES state “To lie is to speak or act against the truth in order to lead into error someone who has the right to know the truth.” So what is the story here?

It looks like this paragraph was actually changed between the original 1994 version of the Catechism (which is what I own) and the official version which was released in 1997. If you look at this page, you will see a large number of updates were made, including the following:

2483 The second sentence of this paragraph presently reads:

“To lie is to speak or act against the truth in order to lead into error someone who has the right to know the truth.”

This sentence will be modified to read:

To lie is to speak or act against the truth in order to lead someone into error.

Obviously, this change makes a major difference, and my whole argument in my previous post is based on the (removed) section of that sentence.

That being said, I’m not going to change my underlying argument that telling an untruth can be moral in certain extreme circumstances, such as saving the life of another. We have examples in Scripture of this occurring, and I do not think anyone in their right (moral) mind would condemn someone who deceived Nazis while hiding Jews. I do not think the new wording of the Catechism eliminates the possibility that one can tell an untruth to someone without the right to the truth, just that it does not explicitly condone it either and most likely wanted to avoid confusion in this area. Perhaps also those in charge of the Catechism wanted to prevent the possibility of the abuse of this condition; as I mentioned myself, it could be easily abused. But the very fact that the clause was in the first edition (which was vetted and edited by hundreds of bishops and theologians) shows that the concept is not against Catholic teaching.

Note also that I am not saying that someone is morally obligated to tell an untruth in those situations, just that it would not be immoral to do so (although if I was the Jew hiding in your basement I’d rather you did tell the untruth).

Update: My argument in this post is based on the wording of the original version of the Catechism, which was later changed. See this post for more details.

One of the classic moral dilemmas of the 20th century was the case of hiding Jews during Nazi Germany. If a Nazi officer comes to the door asking if any Jews are in the house, are you morally permitted to lie to the officer in order to protect the lives of those Jews hiding within? Unfortunately, this is not just a theoretical or historical question, but has real-world applications in today’s abortion-satiated world. Case in point:

Lila Rose, the 21-year-old leader of the group Live Action, posed as a 14-year-old seeking an abortion who was told by a clinic employee that she could have someone with the same last name approve the procedure. State health officials subsequently determined that nine minors had received abortions from the clinic without proper verification of parental consent.

Rose, who converted to Catholicism last year, has been criticized by abortion groups for using deceptive tactics. In reply, she cited Europeans hiding Jews during the Holocaust and the biblical example of Rahab hiding Israelite spies.

I can tell you that in my own pro-life activism experience, I encountered similar situations in which we had to be less than truthful in order to successfully work against abortion clinics. So, was Ms. Rose justified? Is it moral to lie in order to save lives?

The answer is that telling an untruth in such a situation is not a lie, and therefore it can be moral to be deceptive in such situations. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines a “lie” in the following way:

To lie is to speak or act against the truth in order to lead into error someone who as the right to know the truth. (CCC 2483)

So there are three conditions that have to be in place to make a statement a lie:

(1) “Speak or act against the truth”: In other words, the words or actions have to be not true.

(2) “In order to lead into error”: A misspoken word or erroneous statement said in ignorance is not a lie.

(3) “someone who as the right to know the truth”: Here is the key component for the situation we are discussing: does a Nazi guard or Planned Parenthood employee who plans to kill an innocent life have the right to the truth? Of course not.

So we cannot “lie” to save a life, but we can tell an untruth if necessary, but in doing so, that is not a lie.

Now we need to be careful with this definition. It can too easily be used to justify almost any untruth: “My parents didn’t have the right to know that I was out at that party.” “My wife doesn’t have the right to know what I’m doing on my computer in my free time.” I would posit that only extreme situations really call for even the possibility of that third condition being applicable. But if saving the innocent life of an unborn baby is not an “extreme situation”, what is?

God bless you, Ms. Rose, and keep up the good work!

The founder of Human Life International, and one of the most committed pro-lifers of our lifetime, has died:

Fr. Paul Marx, O.S.B., 1920-2010

I am confident that the first words Fr. Marx heard after his death were, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into your reward.”

Misdialed call connects woman who had scheduled an abortion to pro-life help

I can just see her guardian angel moving her fingers to “misdial”!

For those in the Baltimore area, there is an interesting talk coming up by Rita Marker, executive director of the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide. Entitled “End of Life Issues and What Can Be Wrong with Advance Directives,” the talk will focus on the legal and moral aspects of end of life issues and what to look for when making advance directives. Here are the details:

ST. JOHN THE EVANGELIST CHURCH, SEVERNA PARK
TUESDAY MARCH 16, 2010
7:00 P.M.