Why I March: Because of Her

[W]e are facing an enormous and dramatic clash between good and evil, death and life, the "culture of death" and the "culture of life". We find ourselves not only "faced with" but necessarily "in the midst of" this conflict: we are all involved and we all share in it, with the inescapable responsibility of choosing to be unconditionally pro-life.

 - John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae 28

Why, You DO Hate Babies!

[EMPHATIC CONTENT WARNING: Some of the content in this post might be disturbing to more sensitive readers, so proceed with caution. It's nothing that will get you fired or anything, but it could leave you heavy-at-heart.]

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"Why do you hate babies?"

... or puppies, or kittens, or rainbow, or flowers, or any and all things good?

So goes a meme or trope or whatever you want to call it that frequently is bandied about among my friends in internet conversation. It's mean, of course, to parody those whose failure to engage in rational discourse leads them inevitably to ad hominem type attacks or to convenient non sequiturs.

Thus, for example, if in a public forum (such as on my Facebook timeline), I were to criticize the actions of a certain type of pro-life activist whose tactics were offensive for some reason, there is a certain other type of pro-life who probably before long would come speeding in with a line of accusations. None of these accusations would be based in any reasoning or facts; none would follow in any logical way from my criticisms. But the probability is so high as to appear a necessity that sooner or later in any thread of the sort, the following sorts of comments will be made:

I DARE criticize SO-AND-SO?!? [NB: ALL CAPS are a useful tool for this type of commenter.] What have I done for the pro-life movement, that I should talk? How @#$%ing DARE I be so UNCHARITABLE? Why, I am aiding and abetting the entire abortion industry myself! I might as well be performing abortions with my own hands! I just DON'T CARE, I guess, about the poor innocent BABIES!... and so on, ad nauseam. 

Is the Jury Still Out on Vaccines?

Recently on Facebook, I posted an article regarding the new trend of anti-vaccination and offering a rebuttal. It was a pretty poor article, I realize in hindsight, and I'd only skimmed it at the time. But I posted it in the interest of getting a conversation going. It, er... well, it worked, let's just say.

A lot of people posted a lot of things; some facts and documentation on both sides combined with anecdotal and authoritative experiential accounts, also on both sides. As with the original article, I sloppily skimmed all this material, and now (as with the original article) I'm hastily posting my own thoughts on the matter. I am, if you haven't noticed, A Guy With A Blog.

Quick Invitation and Call to Prayer

If you're at all like me, you may have groused, groaned, mumbled, grumbled, or even uttered an oath upon stepping out of doors into the extreme cold these past couple days.

I don't guilt myself with that, nor do I think you should, but I do see an opportunity in it for growth in virtue and for efficacious prayerful offering. And so that's what I'm going to do, and I decided I'd invited you to do the same.

As Wednesdays are a traditional day of fasting and penance anyhow, and as it will still fall at least somewhat in the cold snap for most of us here in America, I'm inviting my friends and readers to make tomorrow, Wednesday, January 8, a day of fasting and prayer for the less fortunate.

"Christ of the Homeless" (1982) by Fritz Eichenberg

In addition to the ordinary means of fasting by abstinence from meat and reduction in victuals, I'd also recommend trying to make a spiritual offering of the suffering involved in encountering such cold weather - and yes, it is a kind of suffering, and maybe for some of us (depending on various conditions we might have and the like) a greater suffering than for others.

But of course we can also take the opportunity to pray through this experience as well, reminded as we are by this suffering of the cold that there are many more less fortunate who suffer much more terribly, without shelter and proper clothing, dependent upon the charity of others. (And, needless to say, while I won't go so far as to challenge us to go looking tomorrow for an opportunity for charity, I hope we will hold ourselves ready to act upon such an opportunity should it arise.) All of which is to say, there should be no lack of substance for meditation and reflection as we imagine what it must be to lack shelter on days such as this: Hospes eram, et collexistis me (Mt. 25:35).

So, I hope you'll join me in making a special offering of suffering this cold weather tomorrow (Wednesday, January 8th), adding to it prayer and fasting, offering any part of our discomfort through it all up in prayer to God, calling for His generous blessings upon the less fortunate and acting in reparation for whatever sins of mankind might be contributory to making them so unfortunate.

+ A.M.D.G.

Between a Woman and Her Doctor

An historian's artistic rendering of the 4th Lateran Council. 

G.K. Chesterton famously observed in Orthodoxy that when he came finally to look critically at Christianity in light of so many charges leveled against it by so many of its critics, he realized that "[i]t looked not so much as if Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with."

This insight comes back to me frequently nowadays in internet debates (especially on social media), where it seems that for every authentic representation of a particular Church figure or a particular Church teaching there abound besides legion straw-men and bogies, such that in the end finding the Truth becomes like an ideological "Where's Waldo."

Among the more annoying convenient cudgels exploited by moderns who would denigrate or challenge the Church specifically in the matter of Her teaching on birth control (and I give benefit of the doubt that ignorance prevails in many of these cases rather than malice) is the canard about the Church "coming between a woman and her doctor."