Suffering as a Gift from God

November 25th, 2009 by Steve Pokorny · Edit Print This Article ·ShareThis

I write to announce great joyful news: my grandmother passed away last week. How is this great and joyful news?She was 93, had been in a nursing home for the past six years, and because of her long suffering, there is a very good chance, especially since of her steadily declining health over the past year, that she went most likely skipped right over purgatory and fell into the arms of Jesus.

To be honest, I have a holy jealousy of her. I firmly believe that if I am faithful to the gifts that Christ has given to me, when I draw my final breath, I will be invited into the Wedding Feast that has been promised from all eternity, where all that is masculine will be united with all that is feminine, and joined with Christ the Bridegroom. It will be an eternal embrace that will never end, where we will see Love face to face. All will be known by all, and there will be peace and joy forevermore.

However, there is one major stipulation: It must be my time to go. Not on my time, but by God’s watch.

Throughout human history, since Adam and Eve, there has been the temptation to want to take the powers of life into our own hands. There is the insidious idea that is floated through our fallible minds that if we manipulate things to our liking, then things will just go better. Or so we think.

Take the issue of euthanasia that is ramping up its exposure. From a recent Discovery Institute article entitled “Suicide Radicalism Surges in America,” we read that “Doctor” Philip Nischke of Australia “has brought his suicide seminar to California and Washington State, where he taught all comers how they can make themselves dead.” His logic (albeit misguided) leads him to “if we each own our bodies, he says, and if self-termination is an acceptable answer to human suffering, then assisted suicide shouldn’t be restricted to limited “subgroups” such as the terminally ill.”

“Dr. Phil” would be correct if our bodies were merely an instrument, something that is separate from ourselves. Yet this is the same trouble that dear fellow Descartes got himself into.

We must remember that in our creation as being made in the image of God, we are the only persons who have both a material and a spiritual existence. The Trinity, as Divine Persons, and angels have only a spiritual nature. We, as human persons, have both a body and a soul. Thus, to speak as though our bodies are merely something we have is incorrect. Instead, it is more precise say that “we are our bodies.”

Why is this distinction important? If we simply “have” our bodies, then we are free to manipulate it any way we please. In addition, if our body is just a thing that is merely loosely associated with our souls, and if our souls are our true identity, then if we destroy our bodies, it really doesn’t matter.

However, John Paul in his Theology of the Body makes explicitly clear that the body is supremely importantly, precisely because the body expresses the person. If we aren’t in our bodies, in a very real sense, we are not fully ourselves. Even though we lose our bodies after we die, we are promised that every person who says yes to the promises of Christ is to receive a resurrected body. Most importantly, because the God of the universe, the One who gives the ultimate meaning to everything, took on human flesh, the body is thus elevated to its pre-eminent position.It is in and through the Incarnation that every human body is given its true dignity.

While it is true that the human body inevitably breaks down and often doesn’t function the way that we may want, it is crucial to realize that suffering is a part of life. If we are going to live, we are going to suffer. More importantly, if we are to love, we are going to suffer. As Blessed Mother Teresa has said, “suffering is a bi-product of love.”

So many who are a part of the eugenic movement simply don’t get what life and love is all about, and they especially don’t understand what Christianity is all about. Especially in a culture that believes that the way to true happiness is centered on one’s own self-satisfaction, when suffering inevitably comes about, there is the temptation to want to rid ourselves of this experience.

Yet without suffering and sacrifice, we miss the glory. As Bill Donaghy has written, “Suffering can set us free. Crying out can often lead to a catharsis. Sorrow affords us a chance to struggle and squirm our way out of the black cocoon of self and into the wide expanse of the world of the Other.” It is in and through suffering that we can discover what life is all about, for ultimately it is not suffering simply for suffering’s sake, but for the sake of love.

We see this most profoundly on the cross. Christ gives Himself to us in a pouring out of His own blood, offering up His Body as a sincere gift. He did this to bring us back to Love. He makes it clear that if we are to be fulfilled, we must make a sincere gift of ourselves (cf. GS 24), and this often comes through the carrying of our cross.

Yes, it is true that we do not want to suffer, because it hurts, but we must understand that it is oftentimes through the moments of great suffering that the greatest meaning about the mysteries of life are revealed. As formerly Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in Introduction to Christianity:

From the point of view of the Christian faith, man comes in the profoundest sense to himself not through what he does but through what he accepts. He must wait for the gift of love, and love can only be received as a gift… One must wait for it, let it be given to one. And one cannot become wholly man in any other way than by being loved, by letting oneself be loved… If he declines to let himself be presented with the gift, then he destroys himself.

The process of death, like birthing pains, if viewed within the paradox of the cross, is a profound gift of God. We, who are Bride, are called to receive all that our Bridegroom wants to give to us. Through unification with Christ, the process of dying is a form of the wooing that God does in preparation to unite Himself to us in the Wedding Feast that will never end.

For six years, my grandmother was in a nursing home, and my aunt tended to her care faithfully, visiting her almost everyday for about 3 hours. As can be imagined, this certainly caused suffering for both my grandmother and aunt. And I am sure the question was asked by my aunt as to why, in her late 80s, she was still hanging around, waiting for her reward. Although we may never know the answer on this side of eternity, I truly believe that it was a gift that God was presenting to my family, demonstrating that Love was present in the midst of these difficulties.

When we try to take the powers of life into our hands, we escape this process of letting ourselves be loved. If we do not allow Love in all its grandeur to infect us, we cannot be transformed into love. If we cannot love, we can never fulfill the meaning of our being and existence. It is only by entering into this process, which at first glance, only looks like pain and grief, that we are purified to become the gift that we were destined to become.

This originally appeared on Catholic Exchange's Theology of the Body Channel, tob.catholicexchange.com.

A New Patron Saint for Chastity?

by John Zmirak

9/30/09

Display Full Article/Printer Friendly | Send to a Friend When we're thinking about the Deadly Sins, it helps to use examples. It's too easy for theological writers to sling around Abstractions with Capital Letters, as if with each stroke of the pen they're tapping into Plato's realm of changeless, ineffable Forms. Or at least that they're writing in German, where all nouns start with caps. A friend of mine used to write weekly for the estimable investigatoryjournal The Wanderer. Founded by German-Catholic immigrants, it was published auf Deutsch well into the 20th century. As my friend recalled, "The editors were, I think, waiting for the rest of the country to catch up with them. At last they admitted that this was unlikely, and agreed to translate the paper. But they kept on as their typesetter someone named Uncle Otto, who for years insisted on capitalizing every noun." At least, that's the story. Such Teutonic stubbornness served The Wanderer's editors well in the wake of Vatican II, as the newspaper became a snout-rapper -- whose reports, as Bishop Rembert Weakland whines in his memoirs, were what Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger used to roll up and smack heretical bishops on the nose. I urge all to subscribe. But capitalizing your Concepts in order to give them an Air of spurious Authority will only take you so far in this world -- as far as "B-minus," I learned back in freshman rhetoric class at a staunchly secular school. So I've decided to give the Virtues and Vices a little flesh, to fatten them up for the reader so he'll remember how they look, sound, even smell. I've already, elsewhere, profiled the patroness of promiscuity, the racist shrewMargaret Sanger. Lust's opposing virtue, Chastity, deserves an equally unforgettable advocate. Much as I love St. Maria Goretti, I'm not sure that her story is terribly useful for illuminating this virtue. Maria died from wounds incurred while resisting a rapist, and is quoted as having chosen "Death before Sin." In another context that's surely a worthy maxim, but it's worth pointing out, over and over again, that rape victims who don't fight back are not committing a sin. A woman I knew, the victim of a violent rape, said that tales of Maria Goretti (which she'd learned as a girl) fed into the crippling, inappropriate guilt that haunted her after the attack. What's edifying about Gorretti's story, I think, is how she forgave her attacker before she died, and how he converted afterward -- even attending her canonization Mass. That part is enough to break your heart, but its matter is Mercy, not Chastity. So let's move on to another story, a longer and sadder one, of Chastity lived over decades and under duress in its most common context, marriage. I speak of someone well known to Showtime subscribers, Queen Catherine of Aragon (1485-1536). The beleaguered first wife of Henry VIII, she started life with every promise of pleasure and power -- as the youngest daughter of Europe's richest, most well-armed monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella. She learned Spanish, French, Latin, and Greek, and all the liberal arts, in an education infused with the Christian humanism that formed Erasmus and Thomas More (her future friend). Obedient to her parents, she made a political marriage at age 15 to the English Prince Arthur -- a shy young man who died only six months later. According to Catherine, Arthur carried shyness to quite an extreme, since she always claimed the marriage was never consummated. This may seem implausible now, but it pays to remember two things: Arthur was sickly. Arthur was English. A few centuries down the line, it would take seven years for Louis XVI to consummate his bond with Marie Antoinette; perhaps the prospect of handing on royal genes can cause performance anxiety. Whatever the case, the pious Catherine would swear to this fact repeatedly under oath, so it probably behooves us to believe her; her actions in later years otherwise make no sense. After Arthur's death, Catherine was left for seven years an impoverished widow living under something close to house arrest in damp and alien England. She escaped this fate when her parents arranged with Henry VII for her to marry Arthur's brother, the dashing and learned Prince Henry. Because of Leviticus 20:21, Canon Law forbade a widow's marrying her brother-in-law. But royal dispensations back then were as thick on the ground as Kennedy annulments, so Henry and Catherine married in 1509. A very different man from his brother, Henry made Catherine pregnant five times -- in between long bouts with mistresses, a sport which historians think gave Henry syphilis. That disease contributes to infant mortality, which might explain why only one of Catherine's children outlived infancy. Lacking a legitimate male heir, with his own family's claim to the throne still legally tenuous, Henry began to doubt the validity of his marriage to Catherine. By sheer coincidence, he'd fallen in love with one of her teenaged ladies in waiting, Anne Boleyn. Thus began the well-known story of the English Reformation, whose sordid origins have given Irishmen ever after the chance to snark at their English landlords: "My Church was founded by Christ, and yours by Henry VIII." This isn't the place to rehearse the tedious legal proceedings by which Henry sought a divorce, or the violence he used on those who resisted him. His efforts were slowed, not stopped, by the fact that Catherine was the well-loved aunt of Charles V, whose armies held the pope a virtual prisoner. There was little honor on any side of this issue, most of whose protagonists (except for saints such as Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher) treated the sanctity of marriage as a pawn on Europe's chessboard. It all ended with butchered Carthusians; roofless abbeys; bare, ruined choirs; and the liltingly lovely language of the Book of Common Prayer, whose sacraments are invalid. What matters to us is Catherine's unfailing commitment to her marriage. As the wheels of her persecution ground slowly and certainly, she found herself losing first her privileges, then her rights. In the end, she was banned from even visiting her daughter, the disinherited Princess Mary, and imprisoned in a crumbling castle far from court. At any point in time, Catherine could have freed herself, left England, and returned to Spain -- to life as a pampered dowager. All it would have required for Henry to set her free was a simple letter, admitting that their marriage was invalid. But Catherine wouldn't write it, not even long after she'd given up any prospect of the throne. To the end, she concerned herself with "my husband's" health and holiness -- both in steep decline. She died in poverty and solitude, but would never renounce the reality and the sanctity of her vocation as a wife. Deeply in love with her husband, affectionate and romantic, she was sentenced to decades of celibacy in the midst of the marital state. Abandoned, she never abandoned God. She never even gave up on Henry. As she wrote him, the year before she died: My most dear lord, King and husband, The hour of my death now drawing on, the tender love I ouge [owe] thou forceth me, my case being such, to commend myselv to thou, and to put thou in remembrance with a few words of the healthe and safeguard of thine allm [soul] which thou ougte to preferce before all worldley matters, and before the care and pampering of thy body, for the which thoust have cast me into many calamities and thineselv into many troubles. For my part, I pardon thou everything, and I desire to devoutly pray God that He will pardon thou also. For the rest, I commend unto thou our doughtere Mary, beseeching thou to be a good father unto her, as I have heretofore desired. I entreat thou also, on behalve of my maides, to give them marriage portions, which is not much, they being but three. For all mine other servants I solicit the wages due them, and a year more, lest they be unprovided for. Lastly, I makest this vouge [vow], that mine eyes desire thou aboufe all things. She died with dignity, as true to her vocation as any monk or martyr. I cannot think of a worthier model today for all the married. John Zmirak is the author, most recently, of the graphic novel The Grand Inquisitor and is Writer-in-Residence at Thomas More College in New Hampshire. He writes weekly for InsideCatholic.com. This was first published in Insidecatholic.com

What’s REALLY behind the Green Movement

October 2nd, 2009 by Steve Pokorny · Edit Print This Article ·ShareThis

First published on tob.catholicexchange.com

OK, so I’m ticked. Usually that’s not a very good thing to be while driving, but when writing, it can be the impetus for some great commentary. That is, unless you’re writing an e-mail to your soon-to-be ex, but I digress…

I have long held suspicion about the so-called “Green Movement.” In case you need a refresher, it is beyond question for some members of the “intellectual elite” that the world is undergoing global warming at an alarming rate. And based on the words of Barack Obama to the U.N. recently, it would appear that the sky is falling. All of this is based on a the preconceived notion that all of the scientific community is completely in union on this scientific “fact,” even though at least 31,000 scientists beg to differ.

Now, I don’t claim to be a scientist, but a simple Google search will reveal that the idea that global warming is primarily manmade is hogwash. That’s right, it’s a myth. Just take the following excerpt, for example:

Johan Feddema, acting chair and professor of geography at KU, studies global warming. Atmospheric science is a program in geography at KU. He says he is skeptical of any one phenomenon being the direct cause of global warming because there are so many climate variables that factor into global temperatures. (Emphasis Mine)

Did you catch that? It cannot be just one factor. There are many factors that go into climate change, but apparently the main factor has to do with the variation in sun spots. Writing in Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years, by physicist Fred Singer and economist Dennis Avery, they note that most of the earth’s recent warming occurred before 1940, and thus before much human-emitted CO2. Moreover,

physical evidence shows 600 moderate warmings in the earth’s last million years. The evidence ranges from ancient Nile flood records, Chinese court documents, and Roman wine grapes to modern spectral analysis of polar ice cores, deep seabed sediments, and layered cave stalagmites. Unstoppable Global Warming shows the earth’s temperatures following variations in solar intensity through centuries of sunspot records, and finds cycles of sun-linked isotopes in ice and tree rings.

So if it’s all just made up, why are people buying into this drinking The Green Agenda Cool-Aid like its going out of style? Like all myths, if it’s not grounded in reality, there simply has to be a good spin machine used to manufacture the publicity to conjure up feelings of fear, blame, and uneasiness to get people to pay attention. And one quick look at your major news outlets will reveal one heck of an ad campaign being hoisted onto an unsuspecting public.

While it is possible that human beings may play a very small role in the heating up of our planet, it is vital that we as a Christian community wake up to the huge agenda that is being rammed down our throats, and it boils down to this:The green movement is all about reducing the world’s population.

Just take a look at the following title (which is the premise found in many articles involving climate change currently): “Birth control could help combat climate change.” The thesis behind this theory is that by giving contraceptives out to developing countries, it will help to slow the population growth that, they believe, causes the rising of the planet’s temperature (while at the same time, it is being reported that the “U.S. northeast may have the coldest winter in a decade): They quote an editorial (not even a study) in a British medical journal entitled Lancet that states that because there are 200 million women worldwide desiring contraceptives that don’t have access to them, this results in 76 million unintended pregnancies every year. We’re not sure where that unscientific editorial got those numbers, or who really believes those children are unintended — the mothers who bore the children, or the powers that be that are terrified that a third-world nation could out populate them.

Yet as one blog entitled, “The Evangelical Ecologist,” pointed out, “And then there’s China, famous for it’s one-child policy. It currently holds the title of world’s worst greenhouse gas emitter. With such a policy in place for the past 40 years shouldn’t China be on the bottom of the list?.” Thus if China can’t get this green machine thing right, and they’ve butchered countless babies and children, the question has to be asked: Can we REALLY solve global warming by population control?

By taking off our green glasses and revealing the wizard behind the curtain of this nice globally conscience motivated movement we see that this is none other than a furthering of Margret Sanger’s anti-God, anti-life, anti-family legacy that still promotes eugenic policies (Thanks Planned Parenthood!)in order to suppress, to the point of elimination, the type of people that The Green Agenda deems undesirable. And Geologist Ian Pilmer, who has a much longer view of the earth’s history than merely the last century, who sees global warming as “an entirely natural phenomenon with many precedents in history,” has hit it on the head: Global warming is the new religion of First World urban elites.

It makes sense, really. For when God is replaced as the center of one’s life, then anything else can take His place.Truly, there are no atheists; just men and women making something more important than their Origin. And right now, global warming is the deity of the month. Just as Satan said to Adam and Eve that “they could be like gods, determining for themselves what is good and evil,” the liberal elite have gobbled down that entire fruit and determined clearly what is good and what is evil (in their eyes): earth good, people bad.

Please understand me: I am all for taking care of the environment. God commanded Adam to tend the garden, and because I’m from his same ilk, I am called to take care of the planet, and do the little things I can, like recycle. Yet to a point. If it comes down to whether a forest remains standing or an unborn baby gets to live or a family gets to eat, I’ll be happy to approve of a new parking lot.

If global warming were really caused by human beings, and if I could make any prediction on why it is happening, I would base it on Romans 8: “All of creation is groaning, waiting for the redemption of our bodies.” For just as Jesus said the Sabbath was made for man and not the other way around, we must remember that the earth was created for us, not for us to be subservient to some absurd agenda that does not take into account Jesus’ words that the Father cares for His children. When we don’t follow God’s plan for our lives, and instead try to live life in a way that we deem best, things are going to go badly, and that includes the environment.

So, maybe we should all be ticked and raise a stink over the Green Agenda Elitists and their power grabs. For while they are paving the way for first world economies to plunge headlong into the ocean like all the glaciers that are claimed to be are disappearing, because there are not enough workers to replace the current generation (remember the old phrase, “IT’S THE ECONOMY, STUPID!?), I’ll take as many “uncultured, third world” children as possible, and I’ll be grateful for those “backward” places like Africa that will help to rebuild the world on the cornerstone of every society: the family.

A Real Answer to Obamacare: A Plan by Deal Hudson It's often been said that if you're going to complain about something, you need to give a viable answer to the problem. There have been a lot of people complaining about the health care bill that is currently before Congress, yet I have not heard too many solutions. When my wife asked me what should be the appropriate Catholic response, I didn't have an answer for her. Well, thank God, Deal Hudson has offered something very interesting that keeps control of health care options in the direct hands of the people, not the government. The government, as it should, will merely protect those individual rights. Check it out. (Original article can be found at http://insidecatholic.com/Joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6688&Itemid=121&ed=1) A Workable Alternative to Government-Run Healthcare

by Deal W. Hudson

8/16/09

Display Full Article/Printer Friendly | Send to a Friend The newly launched USCCB Web site on health care tackles the question: "Are the bishops promoting socialized medicine by advocating for universal access?" That's a good question, since the prospect of a government takeover of health care has created a growing chorus of complaints about the present bills before the Congress. The bishops' answer to the question about socialized medicine makes it clear they do not consider a government-run program the only option for providing universal health coverage. "There may be different ways to accomplish this, but the Bishops' Conference believes health care reform should be truly universal and genuinely affordable," the bishops explain. But thus far the bishops have not recommended alternatives to the type of government-run program contained in the bills before Congress. They have objected loudly to mandated abortion coverage but have not indicated any discomfort, in principle, with the federal government managing the medical care of every American citizen. However, the bishops will welcome any reform resulting in a universal health policy that respects "human life and dignity" and includes "freedom of conscience," while restraining costs and applying "costs equitably among payers." The media coverage of the health-care debate among Catholics has treated the Catholic Health Association's (CHA) advocacy for the present legislation as if it were the official voice of the bishops. This is mistaken: CHA is a trade association of Catholic hospitals, and as such, it speaks with a voice of knowledge and experience but not ecclesial authority. Another group, the Catholic Medical Association (CMA),has a different point of view on health care reform. The CMA was formed as a result of a 1965 debate with the Catholic Hospital Association over socialized medicine and widespread dissent regarding the teaching on contraception in Humanae Vitae. CMA supports an approach to health-care reform "achieved by legislation that empowers people to own their health insurance policies (as contrasted with government, or employer controlled healthcare insurance) and using targeted measures to help people who cannot afford the entire cost of their insurance premium." CMA's recommendation points the way toward an alternative solution -- one based on the principle of subsidiarity -- to reach the goals advocated by the bishops. Universal coverage can be achieved without handing health care entirely over to the federal government. Here are some specific recommendations of my own that would implement the general suggestions of the CMA. Such a plan can begin with mandating health savings accounts (HSA) for everyone: These individual accounts become the vehicles to disperse payments to insurance providers. Everyone will be required to purchase his or her own insurance, and group insurance policies will end. Insurance would be sold to individuals and not through employers or other parties. This solves the issue of portability, the ability of individuals to keep their own health insurance. This would also reduce costs: Consumers would seek to control their own consumption. The government would also take the lead in bringing about litigation (or tort) reform to curtail the amount of irrelevant and unnecessary testing and defensive procedures that doctors use to protect themselves from negligence claims. At a minimum, individuals would be required to purchase hospitalization insurance so as to prevent people from using emergency rooms without paying. This would also lead to beneficial discriminatory pricing for those who choose to purchase primary care or preventative care as opposed to those who only purchase hospitalization. Verification of insurance would occur by including the policy number annually on one's tax return. The role of the federal government would be to spell out a minimum level of mandated services to be covered by insurance companies. Freedom of conscience provisions would be included, while abortion services and so-called end-of-life services would not. Insurance companies would not be allowed to deny coverage for preexisting conditions. Health-care providers, in turn, would have to provide the same price to everyone for each service. Furthermore, government would need to create incentives in order to increase the number of primary care providers and local clinics to help lower the baseline of medical care costs. How are individual HSAs to be funded so that universal coverage is achieved? For the next three years, employers would contribute to each employee's HSA the mean amount of dollars that they had previously paid into group insurance. For the millions of uninsured, Congress would contribute dollars to their HSA. Congress would have to determine at what level of income this assistance would cease. There is more than one way to achieve the goal of universal access to health care -- without turning over the reins to government. Deal W. Hudson is the director of InsideCatholic.com and the author of Onward, Christian Soldiers: The Growing Political Power of Catholics and Evangelicals in the United States (Simon and Schuster).

The Quest to Redefine Reality

Originally Published on tob.catholicexchange.com

Recently, LifeSiteNews.com ran a story about how the London-based organization called Marriage Care is courting the same-sex agenda. The chief executive, Terry Prendergast, is “to be the keynote at the annual conference of the homosexual organization Quest.” While sadly these conferences acclaiming the same-sex lifestyle are happening more and more frequently, what is most troubling is the connection between Marriage Care and the Catholic Church.

Marriage Care is “registered as a Catholic charity whose president is the sitting Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols,” where “the group operates from 80 locations and 53 relationship counseling centres in England and Wales.” The last time I checked, the Church had a very clear stance on the issue of same-sex attraction, and they definitely don’t see eye-to-eye with organizations like Quest, which is “is trying to convince the Catholic Church to abandon its ‘policies’ on sexuality and the nature of marriage.”

Oh, and the real kicker about Marriage Care is that

“Terry Prendergast told LifeSiteNews.com in an interview that a significant source of the group's funding and other support comes from Catholic dioceses, one of which pays the rent for offices, and from individual parishes across the country. But…the group's purpose is not necessarily to uphold the Catholic teaching on marriage and family.”

Did you catch that? The Catholic Diocese of Westminster is directly helping to finance the destruction of marriage and the family! Any attempt for the Diocese to be “pastoral” (read: a pushover) and bring outsiders into the Church is doing much greater damage than any possible good.

(I encourage everyone to contact the Archdiocese of Westminster, requesting that diocesan funding be pulled from Marriage Care. To do so, please contact:

Archbishop Vincent Nichols
Vaughan House,
46 Francis Street,
London SW1P 1QN
Phone: (+) 020 7931 6007
Fax: mauramcbride@rcdow.org.uk)

Let’s get back to Quest: The conference they are putting on is themed, "We Are Family: New Thinking (Read: Bad Thinking) for the Twenty First Century”, and as keynote speaker, Prendergast will be calling “upon the Catholic Church to "rethink" the nature of the family this weekend.” His reasoning: the “romantic image" that has been “built up by the Church of a ‘golden age of the nuclear family’ which excludes those who "do not fit," including single parent ‘families,’ "and also ‘co-habiting and same-sex families.’"

What’s more: Prendergast believes that persons with same-sex attraction "lay equal claim to their married heterosexual counterparts when bringing up children in stable relationships." He believes that “children do best in a family where the adult relationship is steady, stable and loving,” and that “adult, not married, (are what is important) since there is no evidence that suggests that children do best with heterosexual couples."

I just have one question for him: Is he actually in touch with reality?

Every single statistic used by the same-sex agenda to claim that children do no better with male-female relationships than with those in same-sex relationships have been flawed. For example, take the Goodrich v. Department of Public Health in 2003 (the case that legalized same-sex “marriage” in Massachusetts and started the snowball effect of “gay marriage” in other States). In that decision, and every other one since, none of the children in the stats were raised by a married man and woman, but instead of children raised by single women. In comparing between the single mother and those in “committed” same-sex relationships, there seems to be no difference in child development.

However, when comparisons between the child development of those who are raised in a home with a father and a mother and those raised with only their mother are made, there is not even a caparison. When the father is in the home and is present to his children, the children are much more confident, self-assured, and ready to engage in world in a constructive way (for more info, see Joseph Nicolosi, A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality, Chapter 9).

What does the opposite scenario look like? Just look at our society. We have grown up since the 1960s where “free love” ruled, contraceptives became readily available, and divorce rates began to skyrocket. In the midst of this, vast numbers of children were raised in fatherless situations, leading to three generations of children lost, not knowing their origin, and when they became adults themselves, because of their homegrown education, they continue the pattern of irresponsible parenthood, not to mention the increased chances for emotional dysfunction and getting involved with drugs and crime in their youth. (For more info, see here.)

And what about the “steady, stable and loving” relationships? Again, if we look at the statistics, we see that these types of relationships don’t exist in the same-sex community. For those who have been involved in “stable” relationships (primarily men), it is widely understood that for the relationship to last, cheating must be allowed to occur (read: one night stands) as long as they don’t become emotionally attached.

This is not a healthy environment to raise children, where they will obviously be exposed to the latest partner that daddy brings home. To have them raised by a couple who do not understand what their sexuality is all about, as well as to flaunt this in front of their “kids,” is not something that should be celebrated, but instead should be treated as a form of child abuse.

What about love? Now there’s a word that is thrown around. I’m all about love when it’s actually love, but when it is counterfeit version being passed off as the real deal, then its going to lead to a world of hurt for all parties involved. While the world may define love by the relationship between those who express themselves genitally, real love from the Catholic perspective is based on the reality of the Person of Jesus Christ, who demonstrates love not through mere sentimentality, but as a sincere gift of self. He poured out everything that he had, not holding anything back. He demonstrated the full truth and meaning of sexuality, that it is not about what a person can get, but it is about what can be given to others.

For love to exist between two human beings, there must be one who gives the gift, one who receives, and the gift between them. In regard to genital activity, if one is not giving (or receiving) everything to (or from) the other person (a.k.a. their fertility), then they are actually lying with their bodies. Like those who contracept, those in same-sex relationships know something is wrong, but can’t put their finger on it; they become more and more distant, and eventually the relationship will die. This is because when the house is built on lies, it is isn’t going to last.

And guess what? Like children of divorced relationships, the children in these “families” will be left to try and figure out why this has happened, when in reality, it shouldn’t have happened in this first place.

I believe that Dale O’Leary puts it best: “If we are to put the best interests of children first, we must respect a child’s right to be born into a family consisting of his biological father and mother, who are united in a permanent and exclusive marriage” (One Man, One Woman, A Catholic's Guide to Defending Marriage, 197).

Even more important than the issue of child rearing is that when organizations like Quest try to change the Church’s ‘policies’ on sexuality and the nature of marriage, we must recognize this as THE most fundamental issue facing the Church today. For the union between man and woman is not simply a historical construct but was instituted by God from the beginning to image His love for humanity. To say that marriage can be conceived in any way possible is to say that there is no real structure to love and that it can mean anything.

If love can mean just anything, than it becomes meaningless. If love is meaningless, than we are without hope; a world without hope means despair. Simply look at the rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, and successful suicide attempts (see here for more info) amongst those in the same-sex lifestyle shows just how deep despair goes when love becomes inverted. To pretend that this is simply a different way of a person “expressing themselves” is simply fooling ourselves and betrays the very reason we were created, which is to love as God loves.

Remember Paul Revere? He rode throughout the colonies, waking up the slumbering to alert them that the British are coming. We must be like him, taking that long, swift ride through our homes, schools, work places and streets, proclaiming the truth about the human person. To simply accept this agenda laying down will have disastrous consequences, for marriage…and our children.

The Cult of Ugliness in America

The following article gives a pretty good diagnosis of the problem, but the solution, where we abandon the modern world and not engage individuals with examples of true beauty, I'm not so sure. Read for yourself and decide.

Originally posted on: http://www.tfp.org/slideshow/slideshow/the-cult-of-ugliness-in-america.html

The Cult of Ugliness in America
Written by Fr. Anthony J. Brankin
Tuesday, 14 July 2009 11:42

The topic on which I have been asked to speak today is “The Cult of Ugliness in America.” I do not intend to speak of every possible example of ugliness in our society. That would be exhausting if not thoroughly discouraging. We already live cheek-by-jowl in an incredibly ugly culture; we cannot escape it. So if there is any purpose to this talk, it is to keep you aware of the very real danger that you might miss the ugliness entirely and never catch on to the real destruction that this ugliness is working in your very souls.

Now, what could I possibly mean by the word “ugly”? Is it too glib to say that if beauty can be defined as that which when seen pleases, then the ugly is that which when seen displeases? Why does it displease? Is there some definable element that tells us that an ugly piece is ugly? Is there an obvious line or shape or combination of lines and shapes that screams, “ugly!”
What can we make of the modern phenomenon whereby what is considered ugly nonetheless pleases — or what would be considered beautiful in another era or society is deemed by ours to be ugly?

For example, when I say that you live cheek-by-jowl with this ugliness, I mean to say that in coming to and going from this hall you are surrounded by miles and miles of unyielding ugliness: McDonalds and Burger Kings sandwiched between Amocos and tenements. You do not mistake that for beauty, but it is so ubiquitous that you may no longer recognize it as specifically ugly.

cult_ugliness_times_square
People no longer recognize things as specifically ugly.

You may never even make a mental note of the ugliness of all the malls with their false fronts and even falser interiors, or of the condominiums that are just as empty and sterile on the inside as they are on the outside. That’s just how everything looks now.

And, of course, that’s just for starters, for there is likewise in our world a spiritual ugliness no less all-pervasive than and somehow related to the visual ugliness all about us.

You will turn on your car radio only to hear of some new school shooting, and you won’t even be sure if this is the eighth or ninth such massacre in as many months. You will, however, be able to form a mental image of the alleged perpetrators, for you have seen the look and the fashions on your own block and maybe even within your own families: the chopped, colored hair, the mutilations, the tattoos, the rings in the nostrils and eyebrows, the baggy clothes, the backward baseball caps, the surly looks and the sullen grunts. You’ve even heard their music — God have mercy on us; we’ve all heard their music.

Then, of course, when you finally reach home, you will turn on the television news to hear of our scientific culture’s progress in the harvesting and sale of babies’ body parts. You will see news bytes of the political candidates trying to outdo each other in their dedication to killing babies.
cult_ugliness_la_ol2
A statue of Our Lady in
Los Angeles, the Cathedral
of Our Lady of the Angels.

Perhaps then, after supper, you will turn the channel to a show where you are treated to hour after hour of actors and actresses spewing vile lines in ever more tawdry productions. Could television programming be any less accurately described than by saying it consists of ugly, mean people doing ugly, mean things to each other? Indeed, the ugliness is so universal, so part and parcel of our lives, that it hardly registers in our minds anymore. And having drunk fully of this awful cup, you go to bed.
Now, you might think that at least on Sunday you could be rescued from all of this visual and spiritual ugliness by going to church; but ugliness is there, too, for chances are that your church has already been despoiled by modern Catholic barbarians who haven’t even the artistic sense of the Unitarians who sit on your towns’ historic preservation boards.

The modernists will already have removed the tabernacle to a closet and the crucifix to the rectory basement. They will have torn up the sanctuary and torn down the shrines; and they will have done their expensive best to ruin whatever vision of spiritual loveliness the first parishioners and the first architect possessed. But, again, you are so used to it by now that what they have done to your church in the name of reform barely registers anymore in your minds — at least not until you have to confront what they have also done to the Mass — ever-perky, ever-childish, ever-changing, ever-boring, ever-therapeutic, until you are no longer sure who should be more embarrassed, you for still being there or the liturgists who invented it all.

No, the cult of ugliness is so pervasive, so all around us, in every nook and cranny of our lives, that we stand the risk at every moment of missing it, of no longer being able to see it or even be repelled by it.

What is Beauty?
Our talk will be divided into three parts: We shall first try to understand what has always been traditionally understood by the use of the word “beautiful” by most people in most eras, and in fact, how traditional Catholic philosophy was able to sort out that traditional understanding of beauty into an actual set of principles, the violation of which would yield ugliness.

Secondly, we shall try to situate these understandings of beauty and ugliness in the context of culture — or cult or faith — to see how beauty and ugliness flow naturally into the world from the content or emptiness of the soul.

Thirdly, we will make some personal resolutions, which we hope would take us a long way towards the destruction of this Cult of the Ugly.

Nature, the Matrix for Beauty
Ask any child who is drawing something what he is trying to do and he will tell you that he is trying to recreate something that he saw in nature, be it an apple, or the sun, or a tree, or a house. And, invariably, the measure of the success of the drawing for that child is how closely the drawing resembles nature.

Accuracy according to nature was always the standard of reference for artists and societies, for all high civilizations from the Egyptians and Greeks to the Romans and Europeans. Each culture’s succeeding generations of artists tried to improve upon, or at least remember, the techniques, lessons, and discoveries of the previous generations, always seeking a greater beauty of lines, more solid figures, and truer perspectives.

It was generally accepted that there was infinitely more to a face than just that face — something else between the proportions of nose, eyes, cheekbones, jawbones, lips, and mouth — and this, of course, would be “beauty.”

cult_ugliness_st.thomas
St. Thomas Aquinas defines
beauty as that which when
seen pleases.
If, therefore, we are to understand anything about the “Cult of Ugliness,” we must first understand what beauty is. Its definition is basic enough. According to the great saint-philosopher of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas, beauty is that which when seen pleases.* No more, no less. If colors and forms and shapes and compositions would please beggars and kings all at the same time, then that would be considered “beautiful.”

But why does it please? What would make the heart delight in that which the eye saw? Well, Saint Thomas said that if something gives us pleasure then there is always somehow present in the thing which gives pleasure something that is “good,” and the good always attracts us, always pleases us.

Now the good, which a person sees and senses in some beautiful thing, is its “form.” That is, it’s wholeness, its proportions. If such a thing is complete, right, and balanced, it is “good,” and what happens is that we are attracted to that “form” because we sense that there is in the object the same kind of form within us. We see and sense in the form of the beautiful object a “good.” And the good in it echoes the good in us — or at least the good that should be in us. We are fascinated and attracted by that sameness. It delights us and we want to remain in its presence.

Did you ever watch babies and see how they are totally taken in by other babies, how they react to those other little creatures that are so like them? How they stare at other babies, recognize the similarities, and even reach out to touch their faces?

The form of a beautiful object is considered beautiful because it is whole and proportionate, as we would sense ourselves to be whole and proportionate. We delight in the beauty of our own being. There is a resemblance between that which is in us and that which is in the beautiful object. And we are pleased.

But that is not all there is to the story. There is one more element present without which we cannot achieve all this pleasant recognition. Just as the eyes of the body need actual light to see anything, so too the eyes of the soul need a similar light which Saint Thomas calls claritas — clarity — a spark of light, so to speak, that glances off the beautiful object and actually comes from the beautiful object. It is the very same spark of being which comes from the Being of God. The very Being of God is present in the being of the object, and God’s beautiful Being is therefore revealed in the form and proportions and clarity of the object. Precisely because a beautiful thing is a reflection of the Beauty of God, we are naturally drawn and attracted to it as we would be drawn and attracted to God in our desire for union with Him.

The beauty of God is somehow mysteriously reflected in the beauty of being — first in nature, then in trees, sunsets, in faces and forms and figures; and then it is reflected in art — in drawings and paintings and sculptures and even in architecture (and, somehow, even more mysteriously, in music.)

The closer those artistic forms conform to nature, the closer they conform to the supernatural, and the more accurately do they reflect the truth, the beauty, and the goodness of God.

Beauty is Objective
We have been made to believe for generations now that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, that it is all a matter of taste and culture, opinion and upbringing, that there is no true objective beauty out there that can be used as a universal standard. It all comes from one’s mind and what one likes. So, if you think a horribly skewed, out-of-shape series of smears and stains is beautiful, then, for you, it is beautiful.

Well, I stand here today to say, along with thirty thousand years of human instinct and two thousand years of Catholic tradition, that beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. Beauty resides in the beautiful thing itself. It will either have proportion, wholeness, integrity, and clarity in itself and be from God, or it will not have those qualities and will be displeasing to the discerning soul and will therefore be ugly.

You see, just as theological modernism denies the objective reality of the supernatural, saying that all dogma, all revelation, is just your experience and, therefore, the truth is what you think is the truth, so too, artistic modernism tries to convince us that whatever anyone thinks is beautiful is beautiful for that person.

Indeed, today no one is allowed to say that anything is ugly, for to call something ugly hints at the possibility of an actual real standard of reference by which some things can be beautiful and some things not beautiful. This hints at the possibility of a claim to objective truth, which is certainly not allowed in today’s society because that would hint at a God.

We are cowed into a moral and cultural silence before the modern proclamation that a squat, misshapen, mis-proportioned figure is somehow beautiful — and even perhaps more artistic than the figure that God first created. How could it be said that that which seemed so ugly to us was still somehow beautiful to them? Well, they say it still, but now we know that this attitude is simply a modern intellectual conceit, by which their higher appreciation of art makes them superior to those not in on the game.

For the same reason, no one today is allowed to say that anything is wrong, to say that something is evil, or to say that something is immoral. If there is nothing that is in and of itself “true,” then neither is there something that is in and of itself good or bad — neither beautiful nor ugly.

Indeed, when you walk into some modern monstrosity of a church and your instinctive reaction is, “My God, this is ugly,” you are right. It probably is ugly. And you have no less an authority than Thomas Aquinas to back you up.

cult_ugliness_bras_cat
Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder.

You incur no moral or aesthetic fault if weird angles and blank concrete walls in a church make you feel uneasy and uncomfortable. There is no sin in seeing some hideous deformation of Christ on the cross or some monstrous representation of Mary and saying that it is hideous, that it is monstrous. Nor is there virtue in trying to think that, somehow, it is all really beautiful and that there must be something wrong with you. You need no longer feel forced into a corner bleating, “Well I guess I don’t know much about art.” It may simply mean that your good human and Catholic instincts are still intact and that they have, somehow, survived this ugly, ugly society.

Now you might be thinking: “My goodness, the world is falling apart and he’s talking about drawings. More than a million babies a year are being sucked out of the wombs of their mothers and he wants to discuss pretty pictures. Seventy per-cent of Catholics don’t even go to church anymore and he’s giving us lessons on the philosophy of art. If we wanted Sister Wendy we could have turned on PBS.”

This goes much deeper than aesthetic philosophy. It refers to the way we think about and deal with life itself — all of life, all of nature, all of being. All human activity is meant by means of beauty to provide us with an access to God, Who is All-Beautiful.

To Produce Beauty One Must Possess Beauty
cult_ugliness_bruges_cathedral
Bruges Cathedral. Medieval man possessed a sense of beauty.

It takes virtue to do virtuous things. Indeed, it takes virtue to even recognize virtue or to recognize its opposite. And if you possess this virtue, this grace — this natural penchant for the supernatural, this healthy sense of beauty, you will see, know, feel, and do things of which the rest are simply incapable.

The same goes for the sense of beauty. Unless beauty first resides within, it will never be exemplified without in any part of our society. Nor will it even be recognized.

That remnant sense of beauty — in our minds and hearts — by which we can still recognize the ugliness out there, either in ugly buildings or ugly philosophy or ugly lives, must be cherished and guarded as our last weapon in the struggle with No-God.

But how is it that the rest of our world has become so relentlessly ugly at every level? We seem to wallow in it. Well, perhaps it is clear by now that our society, no longer possessing virtue — theological or practical — no longer possessing grace or faith or even the dimmest notions of God, has embraced emptiness. Having forsaken the true God, having blinded ourselves to His “claritas,” His spark, His light, we dwell in ugliness, darkness, and confusion.

We do not see or accomplish virtuous or beautiful things without, because there is no longer virtue or beauty within. A society that does not believe in God or super nature or even truth — let alone beauty — will do only ugly things.

Tragically enough, our world does not even know that it is ugly. We have already said that beauty is that which when seen pleases, and therefore we would know that the ugly would be that which when seen displeases. But look at our society, where it has become the macabre, the strange, the twisted, and the deformed that please. Where the most popular piece of cinema in years — number one for weeks — is a movie about a cannibal. It is the evil and ugly that now delights.

Well, welcome to the “Brave New World,” where that which in another era would have been called bad is now called good, and that which was once considered ugly is now considered beautiful.

The Cult of Ugliness Targets God Himself and Our Perception of Him
This discussion is hardly about pretty pictures. It is about the ever-ancient assault on His beauty — the original affront to His very existence and to the nature and the life that He created. The cult of ugliness in our land is no less than Satan’s rage against God. It is no less than the gleaming spear-point of the culture of death.

Moreover, the cult of ugliness is so utterly pervasive and thorough in its celebration of the fruitless, the sterile, the weird, and the ugly that it pushes to the margins all other faiths — above all the True Faith.

The subliminal message in every confused and misshapen piece of modern architecture, art, music, or drama is that there is no God. The subliminal message in every deliberate mutilation of natural forms, in every tribute to physical and personal perversion, is that there is no God. The subliminal message in every celebration of the weird and deathly is that there is no God. This subliminal message is as surely the “Illuminated Gospel of Death” as any culture could have ever proclaimed, and by virtue of its omni-presence in every aspect of modern life, we are constantly encouraged to accept this gospel.

Sadly, even much of the clerical caste, whose task would certainly be understood to include fostering the cult of the beautiful as part of its proclamation of the Gospel of Life — and whom we certainly imagine would defend us from the ugly allurements of the No-God, is often too dense to see what is going on, and itself has surrendered in so many ways to the Cult of Ugliness.
This is demonstrated every time we walk into a church to see some splayfooted, goggle-eyed Christ on a cross or some rude, crude cement Madonna. The poor priest thought he was simply purchasing a nice piece of contemporary art for his flock. In all innocence and ignorance he assumed he was simply obtaining some fresh interpretation of traditional religious themes and was never conscious that what he was looking at and what he was filling the eyes of his flock with was actually the human form exploded, exploited, and degraded — reduced to its individual and impotent parts and slapped together again in a unsettling imbalance — all for the purpose of revealing and teaching the modern loathing of living forms, the modern loathing of a Creator.

No, the poor priest never thought he was doing that. I don’t think he thought it through at all. I don’t think he ever questioned the spiritual source of such strange shapes, or ever wondered from what terrible fonts such new forms sprang.

Perhaps he never suspected the existence of a Cult of the Ugly. Perhaps he just assumed that it was all a matter of taste, and that his taste, like that of his flock, was simply old-fashioned and ready for a little jarring now and then. Well, we have all been jarred.

cult_ugliness_ol1Look at some of our newest churches and cathedrals. Many of them are stunning and awesome — no, not for their homage to tradition and the Catholic sense of beauty. They are stunning and awesome in their utter inhumanity, their complete lack of scale, their thorough and total sterility, and their horrifying proportions. There is not an angle that could please nor an arch that could comfort. Not a piece of molding that could hold us in its shadow. Not even a little statue before which we could light a slender taper. Like the gaping mouth of the pagan, child-sacrificing furnaces of Moloch, some of our new churches will consume their people in holocausts of visual horror. I venture to say that one or two of these ecclesial “worship spaces” are some of the most terrifying pieces of architecture to have ever been accomplished by and for modern Catholics. I shudder at what harm this ugliness may accomplish in the souls of those who try to pray there. They are the clearest possible examples of the nihilism, the emptiness and nothingness, of which modernity constantly speaks — the relentless message that there is nothing out there — neither nature, nor beauty, nor God. And will we surprise ourselves to discover one day, by means of such architecture, that there is nothing left in our souls either?

Oh, what a series of ironic tragedies. We Catholics, thinking that we were opening the windows to dialogue with modernity, never had a clue that we were being used. Having spoken for so long in the language and in the forms of the modern world, we thought that we could put a Christian interpretation to the philosophy of the atheistic Enlightenment. We thought that now they would love us and come to our side. But we have found ourselves saying and meaning things we did not want to say or mean. And we do not even know how to unsay those things anymore. There it is for all the world to see — our newly acquired evangelical impotence and spiritual paralysis so clearly shown in the confusion of our renovated churches, the foolishness of our experimental liturgies, and the emptiness of our new cathedrals. Why indeed would anyone be attracted to the beauty of God, if this is what it looks like? And we will find one day that we ourselves are growing distant from God because His fascinating beauty is no longer to be found even within our own buildings.

What to Do?
So what do we do? What is the answer? Should we spend our remaining energies and spin our wheels trying to convince, to change, to convert our culture? And we really do sometimes think that, don’t we? We think that if everyone would see that one beautiful statue, or that one beautiful church, or would hear that one perfect argument or one beautiful Mass chant, then they would all be converted.

But how many converts came streaming into the Church after hearing the Gregorian chant recording from Spain? Sure it sold millions, but most, I’m sure, regarded it as little more than mood music to accompany them on the treadmill. The moderns had no idea about what these monks were singing — and Latin was not the problem.

How many of us thought, twenty-five years ago, that if we could just show everyone photos of the developing fetus, the pro-life cause would triumph conclusively? No one cared; and now we find ourselves fighting the battle against infanticide.
Well, is it all over? Do we throw our hands up in total discouragement? Do we resign ourselves to the physical ugliness and spiritual vacuum of our age? Do we surrender to the No-God of our era, place ourselves on the dung-heap of modernity and, like Job, wait for a merciful death?

No, I don’t think we have to. First among all our tasks is that we remain converted and committed to the God of our Fathers, the God of all beauty and all being. And then, naturally and unself-consciously, we will share among ourselves the beauty that we have interiorly experienced.

True Catholic culture has been left to us to create anew and afresh — with precious little reference either to our modern society or even to the clerics panting so faithfully after modernity. We ignore it and them and, taking a tip from the purveyors of the cult of ugliness, we proceed to fill our minds, our hearts, our families, our children, and our world with as much beauty as possible that by dint of the quantity and quality of our efforts there will be no room for that which is inhuman, ungodly, or ugly.

If this sounds like a clarion call back to the catacombs — that we withdraw from our modern culture — then so be it. Yes, that too is heresy in our contemporary Church culture where we are constantly encouraged to engage and embrace the modern world. But in doing so — as we have seen over these last tragic decades, we stand to gain nothing and lose all in such a poisonous encounter.

But where are those catacombs? Where are those refuges from the human and spiritual horrors of our “Brave New World”? They are in your very homes, your front rooms and bedrooms, your home schools and private academies. That is where the true culture of the New Millennium will take shape, for, undistracted by the pomps and pleasures, the flashy arrogances and fleshy superficialities of the ugly world around us, mothers and fathers can form and mold and guide their children with unadulterated faith and inculcate into their souls every form and example of beauty.

And in isolating and insulating your children from the moral squalor about them, you are only strengthening them in their eventual confrontation with it. Fill the walls of your homes with beautiful art, fill the ears of your family with beautiful music, fill the souls of your children with beautiful stories, and there will be no room left for the insipid, the warped, the ugly, and the faithless. If you can make of your family a little Church, you will not have to be engaging constantly in rear-guard action to counteract the toxins of the media and schools or that of your children’s strange new friends down the block. They will not be forced to unlearn at home the lessons they have just learned outside.

Your families will come to know and appreciate that there is only one thing about which to be busy, around which to revolve, only one thing to cultivate, and that is their souls, the beautiful gift from God. This realization will then help them do beautiful things, create beautiful things, and appreciate all the beautiful things that issue forth from beautiful grace-filled souls.
And if we do this, then, little by little, as modernity continues to die — as surely it must, for is not death its very theme? — it will be replaced by life, in fact a new Culture of Life whose healthy hallmark will be the celebration of the beauty of God in the beauty of the life around us.

Oh, indeed there is a Cult of Ugliness in our society, but it is not our cult and we will have nothing to do with it.

Last Updated on Tuesday, 14 July 2009 15:46

the opposite of lying

(This is from an excellent blog post....http://www.whoisjohngalt.com/2009/05/the-opposite-of-lying.html)

Note: I don't mean to dwell on abortion here, but there have been a couple of interesting stories about this issue in the news recently. So I'm going to cover it one more time, and then I'm going to put it to bed for a while until it appears in the headlines again.

If you're like most people, then you probably think the opposite of lying is truthfulness.

If I say "yes" when I know the truth is "no," then I am lying. But if a liar says "yes" when the answer is "yes," it doesn't mean he is not a liar. Lying, you see, is not about being untruthful -- it is about controlling the information a person receives, distorting reality, so that they act on flawed facts. It is about making another person your own means to an end. This is the reason fraud ranks right up there with force as an enemy of reason. And it is why we should expect a liar to say "yes" when it's the answer that suits him best. He's not concerned with being untruthful; he's concerned with controlling your actions by altering the information you use to make decisions.

Because of this, I am not satisfied calling mere truthfulness the opposite of lying. The opposite of lying, to me, is being informative.

Yesterday I saw this: States passing bills requiring ultrasounds prior to abortions. This is actually brilliant, not because of how it will influence women's decisions, but because of how it tests the liberal position on abortion.

A fetus, women are told, is just tissue. If you believe that is a lie, you might think the remedy is to deny it. This law is different -- it says: "See for yourself." And liberalism has a problem with this, not because it refutes their "tissue" argument, but because it truly allows a woman to make an informed choice. And here you thought they were protecting a woman's right to choose. Are you so sure?

Similarly, abortion activists are suing states over specialty license plates with slogans like "Choose Life." Tell me, if you wanted to make abortion "safe, legal and rare," do you think choosing life more would make abortion rarer? I do.

The truth is that we've been told that one side is about life, while the other side is about choice. When I see the life side clobbering the choice side by espousing choice, it puts the choice side in a very uncomfortable position of having to face what it is they really seek. And that's a lot like looking into a baby's face and calling it tissue.

So what does liberalism really seek, with regard to abortion? Well, it seeks what it always wants: a way to escape the consequences of irresponsible action by shifting some cost (in this case a very brutal and violent one) -- onto an innocent, but politically unrepresented, minority. And it relies on misrepresentations like "it's just tissue," to garner support from people who simply don't know better. Liberalism relies on lying.

Consider the source.

Letting a Man be a Man

This is an excellent post from Anthony Buono, one of the writers on Catholic Exchange's TOB Channel (tob.catholicexchange.com). It really lays out the distinctions b/w man and woman, and that women shouldn't expect a man to be a man. This, however, doesn't mean that a man should not allow Christ to form him, because we all have a need to grow into more of who we were created to be.

Friendship from a Man
Posted At : April 29, 2009 11:50 AM | Posted By : Anthony Buono
Related Categories: Theology of the Body,Dating

Women have an uncanny ability to make friends and be a friend. A good way to put it is that women are, by nature, inclined to care. Specifically, women care about people. They intuitively are capable of entering into the inner reality of human beings. This makes them capable of friendship.

It does not surprise anyone that women make friends with other women so easily. They show interest in each other. They enjoy the sharing of personal information. They pursue with sincerity knowing more about the person behind the external presentation.

Men, on the other hand, are primarily interested in the outer world. By nature, men focus on the “what” more than the “who” in life. Of course, I am not saying that men don’t have the ability to “care”. I’m only pointing out that women have an easier time at friendship than men do. Men get to know each other through actions rather than conversation. They do not sit down and start sharing what’s going on inside or their likes and dislikes. They just act, and they talk within situations, and knowledge about that man is revealed as he goes along. That is why men are much more transparent than women. You can know what a man is thinking or what he wants because he externalizes himself. Women keep things hidden inside and are hard to read externally.

Why is this so important to consider? It is because in dating relationships and in marriage, there can be an overstressing by women to have a man be their “best friend” at a level that is probably unrealistic. I’m all for friendship in courtship and marriage, but the friendship required for marriage needs to be defined and understood. It cannot be understood to mean that a woman will be getting someone she can converse with anytime she wants and about anything.

To really get to know any person, there must inevitably be spoken conversation. The reason is that you can never “really” know what someone is thinking or experiencing at the personal level, or why they did something, unless they speak about it. Actions may very well reveal truths about a person, but actions do not provide all the information about the whole person. So men do have to talk and be able to make conversation with a woman. He can’t just be too shy and not a talker at all.

By definition, a person is a being who acts. So what someone does speaks about who they are. However, as human beings, we have a fallen human nature that inclines us to sin. And, in fact, we all sin every day. Should our sinful actions be what defines us as a person? It would be unfair to do so, because everyone is entitled to the freedom to fall from grace and be forgiven and given another chance. How we recover from these falls tells much more about the person. Obviously, someone who keeps doing the same things over and over again is probably unlikely to stop doing them. So actions should be judged over time, rather than in moments.

This is the courtesy men desperately need from women today because men are more action-oriented than women. Therefore, men are prone to do more stupid things than women. Men need the benefit of the doubt from a woman if he is ever going to risk the level of friendship that women want.

Women have to understand, however, that men typically do not “need” the kind of deep friendship that women want. This is why it is important for women to have close female friendships. There are needs women have at the friendship level that should not be expected from a man. I realize that there is an ideal in modern marriage that a man and a woman be best friends, but this must not distract from the practical aspects of the vocation to marriage in the eyes of God. The two become one flesh, but not one person. There will always be two unique individual persons in a marriage, which means the personhood of both will always be developing and forming. The friendship bond in marriage provides love, security, sacrifice, and interest in the other’s good and welfare. In this friendship they cannot help but grow closer together.

But it is impossible for a man to fulfill a woman completely, nor a woman to fulfill a man completely. First and foremost, only God can completely fulfill any person. That’s a given. But also, people need other people to continue making them the whole person they are called to be. Some couples have terrible problems dealing with what the other does outside of themselves. There is a possessiveness that makes them hate when the person they are dating or married to does something without them or doesn’t tell them everything they expect to hear. They feel betrayed because they believe that true love means you do every single thing together and only share everything with just that one person. They also do not like it if anything they talk about together is shared with anyone else.

This is not what marital friendship is. Friendship does not mean possessing every single bit of information about the other, nor doing every single thing together or else love is not true or real. There are couples who do happen to have that. But many good couples have ended their relationships because they didn’t have this. And that is wrong. Women will find it difficult to find a man who desires to tell her everything and wants to do everything with her. Some men might be like that but most are not. Men definitely have to open up more to women, but women definitely have the need of a friend they can open their heart to; to talk about everything. Typically, women find this in another woman. That’s why there are so many happy marriages where each spouse has their same-sex friends. These friendships outside the couple enhance the person and make them better spouses to each other.

Women must not put so much pressure on a man to be a conversational friend they need. But men do need to talk more to women. Women need to have conversation. They need to know what’s going on inside. Many times a man does not even know himself enough inside to share himself. Women must be patient about that.

Don’t give up on a good man who defines who he is by his actions. Just because he does not talk as much as you would like does not mean he would not make a good husband and father. Make sure you have friends who make you a better person, and take that betterment and bring it faithfully into dating and marital friendship.