As Catholics, we have a graphic image in all our churches - Jesus, scourged, crowned with thorns, raised on a cross, his side pierced by a lance. He is our model to answer the question of whether or not to use graphic pictures and the answer is a resounding, "Yes!" Abortion is one of the evils that put our Savior on the cross. May we never forget it. The little ones share in his passion and death.
Defend Life's Face the Truth Tour begins with its introductory session this Sunday at St. James Catholic Church in Charlestown, West Virginia beginning about 3:00 p.m. I'll be speaking about some of the heroes of the pro-life movement who led the way. The tour begins with its first stop on Monday and goes through Friday. As Catholics we are called to be witnesses. Why not join the core team or participate in one of the many stops on the tour. Check them out at https://defendlife.org/docs/facethetruth07232025.pdf
Defending the innocent is a duty and a mission close to the heart of God Who sent his Son, not as an adult, but as a single fertilized cell in the womb of the Blessed Mother. Those who defend the least of God's little ones in danger of brutal murder participate in the saving power of Christ.
May God forgive us for our indifference and refusal to hear the silent screams of the innocent.
My thoughts after reading this are that the first step to repentance depends on first comprehending the gravity of one’s sin. The second step depends on a desire to repair the damage. The third step, finding Jesus Christ - the Redeemer and Doctor of the soul and the only One who can repair spiritual damage, even spiritual death.
ReplyDeleteMy second thought is that Jesus was very tender with public sinners who turned to Him with an earnest heart. But He was angry exceedingly with religious zealots whose hearts were hard as flint - outwardly religious but inside “whited sepulchers filled with dead men’s bones”.
We should therefore confront others with the gravity of their spiritual crime, together with tender mercy and compassion in their lost spiritual state. And we should be very hard on ourselves that we traditional Catholics are not like the Pharisee - against whom was the only recorded instance of Hesus being publically angry, even violent. We outwardly orthodox should pay close heed to the hidden, (hidden often from even ourselves), state of our soul.
Thanks for your lifetime of service for the unborn babies and also to the mothers who often just don’t know what they are doing and need a way out.
Unfortunately, with IVF (slavery's triplet) (abortion is slavery's twin), the pictures *favor* the evil (pictures of bouncing babies). There needs to be a graphic image of ivf that shows the evil.
ReplyDeleteHow do pictures of bouncing babies "favor" the evil? Are babies now a sign of evil? IVF is an abomination, so is contraception. It is difficult to show graphics of either of those moral evils. Although one could show the freezers I suppose. You have a lot of opinions, rohrbachs. I'm curious whether you actually ever do anything to defend the unborn or any other innocent victims of the death peddlers.
DeleteI’ve often thought that a forgotten part of the abortion apocalypse is the mother.
DeleteI think Catholics do an essential service to God by defending his defenseless little ones in the womb. But the “mothers” who are in circumstances that led them to the death clinic rather than the birthing hospital … they also are souls, lives worthy of salvation of soul and body.
A good thing for Catholics to do who may not be led to stand the line for babies, perhaps in various ways they can help the “mothers” who God also created and loves.
I adopted almost 30 years ago from a young teenager and can tell you that, thanks to the leadership of her messy family unit, she adopted rather than aborted. Her son is now a successful professional, making his own way through the life God gave him. But her (his mother’s) situation was messy, complicated and quite difficult for one so young. They need help, these unfortunate women. They are so often forgotten.
What I am saying is that too many people justify IVF by pointing to pictures of the babies conceived.
DeleteI am contrasting ivf with abortion in that respect, how the photos support or not. People use ivf baby pictures as a justification for the process by which it was conceived.
DeleteYou fell into that pattern yourself, accusing me of attacking those poor babies instead of addressing what was my attack on the procedure by which they were conceived.
This is a perfect illustration of the difficulty in fighting IVF. But if we haven't been able to abolish abortion in the fifty years that we had the graphic image favoring our cause, how will we ever abolish ivf?
I try to use the term frankentube instead of ivf when I can for this very reason. (Mary Shelley wrote better than she knew). The problem concerns the process and not the child. And reading"Brave (Frankentube) New World" to understand the many effects of the ivf system (for example on its weakening parental rights and strengthening the totalitarian state ) can be useful.
This is why the children of ivf, particularly of SSM could be compared to slaves.. They were conceived by and primarily subject to the state, not by the marital embrace. This is catholic teaching but unfortunately you won't hear it homilized by homosex priests.
I agree, Aqua. We were a shelter home for about 15 years until our sons got to be teens and it was imprudent. We had about a dozen women live with us during that time. All of the young women had difficult situations. I'm still in touch with one who is a close friend. I pray for the others.
DeleteWow! So many lives saved, which spreads out from that source. Beautiful!
Delete“Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.” (James 1:27)
There is no dichotomy between pure liturgy and pure Charity, but so often we forget to apply the sweat and labor and *personal risk* of specific acts of Charity toward specific individual persons (not theories, real people).
Liturgy, dogma, belief … check.
Giving myself away to another for Love … oops.
Well, rohrbachs, many people justify abortion by pointing to the woman. A baby, no matter how sinfully the child was conceived, is one of God's least ones and a source of joy and thanksgiving. I fight IVF like I do abortion, but I will still rejoice at new life. The tragedy is that no one cares about those tiny ones abandoned in the freezer orphanage.
DeleteSo, you are depriving your readers of my side of the argument, which I posted before and am repeating here:
DeleteI am contrasting ivf with abortion in that respect, how the photos support or not. People use ivf baby pictures as a justification for the process by which it was conceived.
You fell into that pattern yourself, accusing me of attacking those poor babies instead of addressing what was my attack on the procedure by which they were conceived.
So
This is a perfect illustration of the difficulty in fighting IVF. But if we haven't been able to abolish abortion in the fifty years that we had the graphic image favoring our cause, how will we ever abolish ivf?
I try to use the term frankentube instead of ivf when I can for this very reason. (Mary Shelley wrote better than she knew). The problem concerns the process and not the child. And reading"Brave (Frankentube) New World" to understand the many effects of the ivf system (for example on its weakening parental rights and strengthening the totalitarian state ) can be useful.
This is why the children of ivf, particularly of SSM could be compared to slaves.. They were conceived by and primarily subject to the state, not by the marital embrace. This is catholic teaching but unfortunately you won't hear it homilized by homosex priests.
I'm not sure what caused this tirade since I posted your comment. Fundamentally we agree on this although I call the babies "doll objects" instead of slaves and their moms "sex objects" being used by unscrupulous men.
DeleteI'm curious though and you didn't answer my question. What actually have you done to fight any of this besides post comments on social media and blogs. Have you ever joined a Face the Truth Tour, sidewalk counseled, worked in a pregnancy help center, offered a shelter home to unwed moms? My assessment from our long association on the blog is that you are all talk. What have you actually done in the last 50 years to fight abortion since you seem to think we should have been able to end it? You remind me of people who used to tell me what we should do to end abortion while I was doing speaking engagements, sidewalk counseling, etc. and they were doing nothing but talk. There are plenty of folks out there who can tell the footsoldiers how to end abortion in five minutes. But all they do is talk. Are you one of those, rohrbachs?
rohrbach
DeleteA picture is worth a thousand words, which I think was the primary point of this morning’s excellent post. So you are correct in that regard - most people (99% probably) connect IVF to babies, families, satisfied mom and dad, family values, apple pie (etc); and almost no one (~ 1%?) thinks of that which was left behind. In that regard it is like abortion - easier to think of the woman in her freedom than the baby left behind in bloody pieces; the parents with their baby than the all the babies destroyed thereby.
Extract from Google search: “(Data suggests that somewhere between 1.5 million and 1.8 million embryos created through IVF in 2021 were not born. Trends show a growing proportion of patients choosing to discard cryopreserved embryos)”.
So I think your point is to refocus the debate on the babies in cryogenic suspension pending their own murders. I think almost everyone is ignorant of this fact. They (most of them) truly know not what they do. So visualizing this in a way that people can relate to … the famous scene from the Matrix comes to mind … might help them understand the cost associated with every IVF life (and it is an infinite cost, since each baby is ensouled and immortal at conception and murdered at termination) .
Aqua, all you say is correct except I think that the frozen embryos are not the only victims. The living children of ivf have been conceived under the "authority" not of their "parents", but of the state. Think what that does in the long term to parental rights and the family.
ReplyDeleteMaryann, as parish prolife coordinator in a busy college town for a number of years, I have seen a bit of action. Prayer, outreach, political action, education ("POPE"). Many abortion clinic prayer witness, many marches, crisis pregnancy support. We studied the prolife heroes and wondered why they did not achieve the results of the civil rights movement. I think the answer is targeted media censorship enacted by the powers that be.
Why does "Mr Big" care so much about abortion and IVF? It's his Eugenic plan, laid out in Brave New World, to have firm control over the conception and euthanizing of each person on the planet. That book's satirical description of the assembly line manufacture of children exposed the plan in detail. And we are now "here" with the technology. And the Church is the only one with the priceless teachings that defy that plan. (But Mr Big infiltrated the church with homosex priests so that its teachings got muted from within!)
It is an epic struggle. Our claim that abortion is slavery's twin and should be abolished on the same basis had a chance of working but Trump stripped that language from the GOP platform. He has also set IVF up for *state subsidy*. (And believe me, IVF *relies* on abortion on its assembly line!). It's us against Mr Big.
I agree it is an "epic struggle." Much of the blame for the failure of the pro-life movement to succeed lies at the feet of men in roman collars. The human life amendment was actively pursued in the early days when Msgr. James McHugh (later bishop) was Director of the Bishops Office for Prolife Activities. He was a Trojan Horse favoring sex ed, contraception, artificial reproduction, etc. Mary Calderone, head of the evil organization SIECUS, called him "Jimmy." They were great friends. If you are calling Trump "Mr Big" (I think Mr. Big is Satan), he came very late to the game. Read the McHugh Chronicles by Randy Engel. McHugh gets major credit for trying his best to strangle the pro-life movement in the cradle.
DeleteGlad to hear you aren't all talk, but I can tell you that your message often gets lost in the rude and obnoxious presentation. As St. Francis de Sales said, you catch more flies with a spoonful of honey than with a barrel of vinegar.
Mary Ann,
Delete“Mr Big (I think) is in reference to the bad guy antagonist in the brilliantly conceived and executed Spider Man - Into The Spider-verse animated film.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g4Hbz2jLxvQ
I can see why the connection is made if someone didn’t like DJT to begin with - Mr Big is a bull and bully who only consumes and only cares about himself. I do like Trump, think he’s brilliant actually, the man for the moment, so I think he is profoundly misunderstood, and that the analogy is as wrong as it can be.
As to the topic in general - we will never win the pro-life war until we can reframe it within the language and logic construct of life in all its God-given glory. And that means we all tell the truth, live the truth.
Trump is not Mr Big but his puppet. He didn't dream up warp speed, but got handed a script. Same with most of his initiatives.
ReplyDeleteI believe your reception of my remarks is filtered through a bit of defensiveness about Trump. But if you begin to see that he is not what he was said to be, you might receive my message differently.
No, your remarks are filtered through my courtesy and good will thermometer. Your comments are often rude, personal (like this one) and bullying. You don't know me at all and only measure me by your filter which is TDS and your bias against the South in the Civil War. Trump, like all of us is a mix of good, bad, and stupid. Sadly, he is turning out to be a warmonger just like most politicians on both sides of the aisle. But he has done some good and sensible things and acknowledging that is just. I certainly don't think we'd be better off with Kamala Harris in the White House!
ReplyDeleteAs to Trump being a “warmonger” - it seems to me the man is defined by a really unusually strong desire to advance the cause of *peace*, not war. That was proved in his first term and now, in his second, dealing with the cleanup of the geopolitical mess left by the previous occupant of the Office - “complex business”, as he’s said.
DeleteIt’s like a city whose downtown core has been taken over by Antifa thugs. One response might *seem* peaceful - let them have it, but that’s not real peace. The other response involves cracking Antifa skulls which is going to be really ugly in its execution, as any fight against “Indians”, anarchic violent opponents, will always be. Iran is the geopolitical equivalent of Antifa, and they are very close to getting a world-ending weapon and 46 years of stated intent to turn us into a smoking hole. That cannot happen.
I hope you're right, Aqua.
Delete