HoodedHawk

Interviewed on Meet the Press August 24, Speaker Pelosi was asked when human life begins. She said the following (my emphasis):

“I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time. And what I know is over the centuries, the doctors of the church have not been able to make that definition. . . St. Augustine said at three months. We don’t know. The point is, is that it shouldn’t have an impact on the woman’s right to choose.”

Many Catholic leaders have released statements that reflect true Catholic beliefs and teachings. An excerpt from a statement by Archishop Chaput and Bishop Conley of Denver (my emphasis):

Ardent, practicing Catholics will quickly learn from the historical record that from apostolic times, the Christian tradition overwhelmingly held that abortion was grievously evil. In the absence of modern medical knowledge, some of the Early Fathers held that abortion was homicide; others that it was tantamount to homicide; and various scholars theorized about when and how the unborn child might be animated or “ensouled.” But none diminished the unique evil of abortion as an attack on life itself, and the early Church closely associated abortion with infanticide. In short, from the beginning, the believing Christian community held that abortion was always, gravely wrong.

Of course, we now know with biological certainty exactly when human life begins. Thus, today’s religious alibis for abortion and a so-called “right to choose” are nothing more than that – alibis that break radically with historic Christian and Catholic belief.

Abortion kills an unborn, developing human life. It is always gravely evil, and so are the evasions employed to justify it. Catholics who make excuses for it – whether they’re famous or not – fool only themselves and abuse the fidelity of those Catholics who do sincerely seek to follow the Gospel and live their Catholic faith.

And this is not just a Catholic teaching. The Bishops above also quote the Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

“Destruction of the embryo in the mother’s womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed on this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder.”

Also Cardinal Justin F. Rigali and Bishop William E. Lori (chairman of the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine) state:

In the course of a “Meet the Press” interview on abortion and other public issues on August 24, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi misrepresented the history and nature of the authentic teaching of the Catholic Church against abortion.

In fact, the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law.” (No. 2271)

In the Middle Ages, uninformed and inadequate theories about embryology led some theologians to speculate that specifically human life capable of receiving an immortal soul may not exist until a few weeks into pregnancy. While in canon law these theories led to a distinction in penalties between very early and later abortions, the Church’s moral teaching never justified or permitted abortion at any stage of development.

These mistaken biological theories became obsolete over 150 years ago when scientists discovered that a new human individual comes into being from the union of sperm and egg at fertilization. In keeping with this modern understanding, the Church teaches that from the time of conception (fertilization), each member of the human species must be given the full respect due to a human person, beginning with respect for the fundamental right to life.

More statements of Catholic leaders are on the EWTN site.

Finally, I like the moral counsel Father Mitch Pacwa gave to Pelosi:

“If you are ignorant and you don’t know [when life begins], then you go on the side of safety and protecting rights. You don’t bomb a city where there might be a lot of civilians. You don’t do that. You say, ‘Well, I’m not sure.’ Well, then be on the side of safety. Protect the lives of the innocent, the non-combatants.

“Same with the unborn children. You must also go on the side of your ignorance to say then, “If I don’t know, then I’ll protect all the more. I don’t want to act while I’m ignorant.”

[Read 11/2007] Religion. 2007

In God’s Mechanics Brother Consolmagno discusses religion from a “techie” standpoint. Br. Consolmagno is an astronomer, and many of his friends/coworkers are either scientists or in other technical fields. He tells both his and their stories about how to reconcile a life of faith with a life in science. I enjoyed this book tremendously; Br. Consolmagno shows how he (and others) can have “unprovable” religious beliefs and still work every day in highly scientific or technical fields.

He poses three questions that postulating the existence of God is useful in answering:

1. Why is there something instead of nothing?
2. What is the source and object of my deepest yearnings?
3. How do I make sense of my life?

Some notes on what Br. Consolmagno says in this very engaging book:

The urge to find something “out there”, or the longing to find meaning is the search for the transcendent. It is very unsatisfying to just have a God who is responsible for the creation of the universe (question 1) but then has no further interest in it. What then, would be the point of our lives?

Religion: The various “sacred” scriptures serve as a sort of database – a record of the community’s history of interaction with the transcendent. It’s a template against which we can compare our own experiences of the transcendent. The collective religious wisdom (and Tradition) gives us the tools to “throw out” data points too far from the norm.

Sacraments are a concrete “thing” that only a Church can provide. The function of religion is to get closer to God, and the function of God is to address the fundamental questions of meaning and purpose. However, you cannot insist (or assume) that religious doctrines are a complete and final description of nature and God. Our understanding of God is always incomplete – as St. Paul says, “through a glass, darkly”.

Catholic theology notes that all doctrine, no matter how authoritative, embodying divine truth, still requires interpretation because our understanding of that truth is expressed in a given time and in an historically conditioned language and culture.

He recommends Saint Augustine (~400 AD): “On the literal meaning of Genesis” (trans. by John Hammond Taylor, S.J. 1982). Augustine puts a creative spin on biblical passages, as when he says “Let there be light” actually refers to instilling rationality into intellectual creatures.

A particular strength of Catholicism over denominations where worship depends totally on music and preaching is that even the most tasteless liturgy with the most inane homily from a priest who’s an outright scoundrel doesn’t stop a Mass from being a valid and worthwhile source of grace.

The absence of an electron looks mathematically like the presence of a hole [ in a semi-conductor ], just as the absence of good can look like the presence of an entity called evil.

I just returned from a wonderful weekend Retreat at the Loyola Retreat House in Faulkner, MD. The House is right on the Potomac River, with beautiful, serene grounds overlooking the water. Surrounded by woods, there are also trails you can walk to enjoy nature even more. Inside the house are accommodations for about 68 or so retreatants. This past weekend (Feb 29-Mar 2, 2008) was a men’s retreat. Meant to be a time of contemplative prayer, it is a silent retreat to allow you to more easily get into the “spirit”. Three meals a day, Mass daily, and many lectures on prayer. Large blocks of time were devoted to individual prayer. You can attend as many or as few of the events as you like. The Jesuit priests (as well as Sisters and lay people) running the retreat were wonderful and quite approachable.

I last went on a retreat almost 30 years ago; other than “I liked it”, I don’t recall it at all. I believe I will be able to remember this retreat. With three kids, the youngest only 17mo, it’s not often I get to spend a weekend in “silence”, lost in my thoughts. Wonderful experience. This photo above is linked to some more pictures.

Last night I went to a lecture/signing by Dr. Francis Collins for his book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, at Olsson’s Books in Arlington, VA. Dr. Collins is the counterpoint to Dr. Richard Dawkins, (See my previous blog post) who recently wrote The God Delusion. While Dawkins is still an atheist, and Collins was once, Collins is now a Christian. Dr. Collins’ discussion about how he came to his belief in God, and how he reconciled this with his belief in science was very interesting. Dr. Collins was prompted by his work with patients (and their religious beliefs) to explore various faiths. He read up on Islam, Judaism, Budism, etc. and was most enticed by Christianity. While it may seem that Dr. Collins believes in “mere” Theistic Evolution, his pronouncement that he is a Christian (and believes that Jesus was also God) shows that he has more of a belief in a personal God (also evidenced by his statement that he prays).

Unlike Creationists (and those thinly-disguised Creationists, “Intelligent Design” fans), Dr. Collins has no problem reconciling his belief in God (and Jesus, and the Bible) with Science (specifically, Evolution). To paraphrase Dr. Collins: “It’s perfectly reasonable to believe that God created man by creating the Universe, and letting Man come into being via evolution. Yeah, it took billions of years to happen, but to God that’s an eyeblink.”

Dr. Collins did touch on the “anthropic principle”, which basically states that the fundamental physical constants of the universe are fined-tuned to exactly support life. Some theorists have proposed that this can be explained away by the concept of a “multiverse”, with an infinite number of parallel universes. If you have an infinite number of universes, then obviously at least *one* of them will result in physical constraints that support life as we know it. I did appreciate Dr. Collins comment that a belief in a “multiverse” (something that can never be proven or tested) is no different than a belief in a God that created our (anthropic) universe.

A question was asked of Dr. Collins: Does he believe in God because it is “useful” or because it is “true”; or rather which of these qualities is more important? Dr. Collins unequivocally stated that it must be “truth”. A belief in God merely because it is “comforting” to believe (and thus be part of a network of like-minded people) would not work for him; he must also believe that it is true.

Amen.