Category Archives: Culture views

I’ve been wandering through this land
Just doin’ the best I can Tryin’ to find what I was meant to do
And the people that I see
Look as worried as can be
And it looks like they are wanderin’, too.

And I can’t help but wonder where I’m bound
Where I’m bound
I can’t help but wonder where I’m bound…,   Tom Paxton

Once a smart phone became firmly established in my daily routine, layered on top of an assertive laptop, the compulsion to check emails and all manner of distraction entrenches week by week into my neurons and synapses.  The message notification “dings” set me to salivating like Pavlov’s dogs; resisting the impulse to jump from what I am doing to the current diversion is increasingly difficult.  Focus blurs.

Nicolas Carr published in 2010 The Shallows, What the Internet is Doing to our Brains, which analyzes the physical, emotional and psychological effects in our brains of using the net.  I first listened to “The Shallows” as an audio book, now I’m reading it on the Nook; I can’t get the ideas to stop their reverberations. The implications for us and for the lives of our children are unsettling.

Our method of acquiring information is transmuting us into feverish wantons with the attention deficits of mosquitoes in a crowded tent on a humid summer night.  On laptop or smart phone we flit to the compelling chime of personal and work email, Facebook updates, Linked In messages, Tweets, text messages and voicemail notifications. The banner of multitasking rides at the head of a rabble with a disordered compass.

”It wasn’t just that so many of my habits and routines were changing as I became more accustomed to and dependent on the sites and services of the net.  The very way my brain worked seemed to be changing. It was then that I began worrying about my inability to pay attention to one thing for more than a couple of minutes…. My brain… wasn’t just drifting.  It was hungry.  It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it – and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became.” The Shallows, Nicolas Carr

Brain theory long assumed genetically predisposed neurons and synapses which congealed in late adolescence.  Neurology now concludes that plasticity for neuron and synapse formation persists for all of our lives.  We rewire incessantly. New experience and repetitive actions shape fresh biological connections; neglected habits atrophy.  The media is not only the message, but re-forms our minds, our nerve cells, how we think and what we think.

We read fewer books and grow impatient with long articles (or blog posts).  We follow YouTube videos, clever slogans and the Tweets of movie actors and baseball players where once we probed nuance in the insights of genius. 140 characters and hash tags hazard scarce space for fine distinctions. Research and analysis defaults to bouncing hyperlink to hyperlink, descending into minutiae and boggling detail. Renaissance Man is no more; as my boss is fond of saying, we major in minors. We know (or have immediate access to) more and more about less and less.

”By waiting and by calm you shall be saved, in quiet and in trust your strength lies.  But this you did not wish.”  Isaiah 30:15

I wonder if other societal problems are related.  Can it be coincidence that the first generation engrossed in on line distraction and video games from their infancy is also the generation beset with epidemic Attention Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder?  After decades of consistent improvement, IQ scores have declined in the last fifteen years, mainly in writing and verbal skills.  Studies cited in “The Shallows” are conclusive that those reading material in a traditional book retain more and have deeper understanding of the same material read by other subjects on screen with hyperlinks, supposedly better equipping them to explore and understand associated texts.  How can these two issues not be related?  Are we sacrificing biological memory capacity and the ability for deep thinking even as we gain in artificial memory and silicone aided rapid computation and recall?  Are exponential gains in access to facts depriving us of knowledge, and worse, of sorely needed wisdom?  Where do we find peace in feverish, addictive distraction?

Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.   Bob Dylan

The still developing technology affords us the ability to assimilate not only the printed word, but images, video and speech from sites like TED and on line learning educational channels from many universities.  Irrevocably alterations occur to how we learn and communicate, even how our brain works, hopefully into wisdom, not Babel.  Should we choose to dissipate this windfall into pornography, trivialities, Tweets, two minute YouTube videos, Facebook posts and in violent, amoral games like Grand Theft Auto, we will corkscrew into degradation.  One of the earliest developments in printed books was pervasive pornography, but the ship pitched in the storm for a while and then righted. Should we similarly roll with the wind and tide to integrate imaginatively human wisdom with this virtually unlimited source of information, our children will have a future worth leaving them.  Our creative gifts and free will to act will set us on our path.  The jury is not only still out, we are the accused, the advocates, the judge and the jury.

“Many years back I gave up all claim to a rational view of the world and even avoided people who believed that the laws of physics and causality have any application when it comes to understanding the mysteries of creation or the fact that light can enter the eye and form an image in the brain and send a poetic tendril down the arm into a clutch of fingers that could write the Shakespearean sonnets.”  Creole Belle, James Lee Burke  

No posts in far too long.  For the last couple of weeks, the metaphysical relationship between the Kermit Gosnell trial in Philadelphia and the terrorist attacks in Boston struck me.  As I was struggling to excavate the time to explore this for the blog, I opened this week’s edition of our statewide Catholic newspaper, the “Rhode Island Catholic”. On the Commentary page was a piece by my friend Barth Bracy that made the connection far better than I could have.  Barth is a deacon who worked and studied many years in Manilla.  He currently holds my wife Rita’s old job – Executive Director of Rhode Island Right to Life.  At the risk of embarrassing Barth, when someone refers to “the smartest guy in the room”, it’s usually Barth.

If you have not had the time to pay attention to the Gosnell atrocities, the mainstream media ignored (some say suppressed) it until the clamor forced them to cover the story; here is a link to a CNN feature posted on the 3801Lancaster site.  Not for the weak stomached.  We can speculate on the degree to which one has to sear their conscience to fill pressure cookers with black powder and ball bearings and explode them among hundreds of innocents.  The conscience of a doctor who is on trial for murdering four infants by severing their spinal cords with scissors is beyond the imagination of anyone but a sociopath.   I’ll leave the rest to Barth – this week’s guest writer.

“No more hurting people”

Who can escape the atrocities reported with increasing frequency from every part of the globe, and now even upon our very doorstep with the recent horrors in Newtown and in Boston?

From the time of Cain to this very day, each human being and human society is presented a challenge. Their response (our response) leaves a defining mark upon them (upon us).

 Does human life have intrinsic value and inherent dignity such that innocent human life should be protected and must never be deliberately taken?

The extent to which peoples and nations have answered “yes” to this question has been the extent to which those same peoples and nations have been marked by peace and justice, offering their citizens the opportunity for dignified and fulfilling lives.

Conversely, peoples and nations that have answered “no” to this question, choosing to disregard the unalienable right to life of each human being, have been marked by a descent into depravity, barbarity, and crimes against innocent human life; the kinds of unspeakable acts witnessed so frequently today, whether in Sandy Hook, or at the Boston Marathon, or in Kermit Gosnell’s abortion mill in Philadelphia, or in the government-sanctioned starvations of Terri Schiavo and, here in Rhode Island, Marcia Gray.

It is not possible to separate the prevailing chaos and senseless acts of mass violence from the disordered and murderous acts protected by the “right to privacy” concocted by a court system blind to the most fundamental principles of justice.

When Jesus spoke of the reality of hell in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, He spoke of Gehenna. What was Gehenna that makes it the most concrete image of hell?  Gehenna was a valley a little to the south and west of Jerusalem where the Canaanites, who were expelled by Israel from the Promised Land, as well as the apostate Jews who adopted the evil ways of the Canaanites, would go to sacrifice their very own children at the altars of false gods.

When Jesus spoke of of hell, He spoke of a place where parents sacrifice their own children… He spoke of what our world has become through the scourge of legal abortion.

The inescapable fact of the matter is that when the world embraces a perverse notion of freedom, an autonomy unfettered by the duty to respect the fundamental right to life with which each human being has been endowed by their Creator, that murderous world marks itself, fashioning itself into a living hell.

Yet even in the midst of the hell we have fashioned, God ever beckons: “I have set before you both life and death, the blessing and the curse: choose life, therefore, that you and your descendants may live.” (Deut. 30:19) Isn’t this the meaning of little Martin Richard’s sign: “No more hurting people.”

“It was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”  A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

I have had a long fascination with the origin of words.  Lent derives from the old German or Teutonic root word meaning “spring” or a “lengthening of days.”  As such, Ash Wednesday promises the coming of the annual warming and greening with longer days and shorter nights.  I love Ash Wednesday and look forward to it each year.  For the non Catholic, this may strike some as odd, but I love Lent, and not just for its indication of sunnier afternoons, but for its call to deeper human wholeness.

“Oh God, you are my God, for you I long; for you my soul is thirsting….like a dry, weary land without water.”  Palm 63

As well as the clear reminder of our mortality with “from dust you came and to dust you shall return” as the priest imparts the ashes in a sign of Christ’s cross on our foreheads, during Lent we are encouraged to deeper prayer, penitential fasting and openhanded charity.  Part and parcel to our Lenten prayer also is a rigorously honest personal moral inventory.  The word “ἁμαρτία” (“hamartia”) from the original Greek New Testament is typically translated into English as “sin.”  Hamartia literally means “misses the mark.”  Lenten meditation asks of us an examination of conscience, not to establish guilt, but to sharpen our aim.

We all miss the mark, but the serenity and clarity attained from finding some time each day for silent reflection and honest self assessment has no analog in the exactingly physical existence in which we spend most of our waking hours.

“We must maintain great stillness of mind even in the midst of our struggles… A tranquil sea allows the fisherman to gaze right to its depths.  No fish can hide there and escape his sight.  The stormy sea, however, becomes murky when it is agitated by the winds.  The very depths that it revealed in its placidness, the sea now hides.  The skills of the fisherman are useless.” Diadochus, Bishop of Photice

Another type of Lent encompasses the whole Church, and instead of forty days, it may not be fully understood for forty more years — or even forty decades.  The retirement of Benedict XVI makes us mindful of the crucial drama being played out in our lifetimes page by page for Catholicism, perhaps for all Christendom – a drama the denouement of which we likely will not live to see. The Second Vatican Council was called by Pope John XXIII in 1962 and closed under Paul VI in 1965.  Four men who attended the opening session and participated in writing the resulting documents were chosen as the next four popes to lead the Church in the intervening sixty years: Giovanni Montini (Paul VI), Albino Luciani (John Paul I), Karol Wojtlya (John Paul II) and Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI, the 265^th Pope including the first, Peter the Apostle). The selection of the next Pope will indicate how resolute the Church remains in her commitment to fidelity to first principles and beliefs.

While attempting to “open the windows” to modernity and the cultural tsunami of the last century, the crisis of scandal within the Church grew to a great degree through confusion regarding the interpretation of Vatican II documents: the so named “spirit of Vatican II”.  What was misunderstood about the council writings became even more murky when dissidents and outside influences critical of (and often antagonistic towards) the Church stirred up the waters disputing issues involving celibacy , married priests, priest’s gender, homosexual marriage,  teaching authority of bishops, “liberation” theology, armed rebel priests and almost any other conjuring that could be contrived.  Volumes have been written on each of these issues, and both my skills and the scope of a blog will not attempt to write of them.  Suffice it to say that it is still an open question as to how or if we will reconcile “Catholic lite” with its stepchild “Cafeteria Catholicism” and fidelity to orthodoxy.

The point here is that one of the consequences of this confusion evolved a pervasive homosexual culture in some seminaries in the late sixties and seventies leading to a betrayal of trust with the “pedophilia” crisis within the priesthood in the seventies and eighties that was exposed in the early years of the last decade.  Actual pedophilia (a pathological sexual attraction to children under 13) was rare within the priesthood and within the culture. Ninety percent or more of the molestation offenses involved teenage boys, not seven year olds, an under reported truth regarding these events, not that this mitigates the sin of the perpetrators and the incompetence or malfeasance of the bishops who failed to curb it.  One of the saddest aspects of this scandal is the salacious jokes and depiction of all priests — including some of the finest men I have ever known, as similarly disposed – a tragic lie of epic proportions.

The collapse of these men was not caused by their vows of celibacy – that rationale is a fabrication of dissidents and media with an agenda.  The breakdown resulted from a violation of their vows. Betrayal of vows is not a new phenomenon; all four Gospels record the first defection of a priest and bishop, Judas Iscariot.  Nothing is accidentally incorporated into the scriptures, so it is relevant to all times.  Indeed the whole history of Christianity is a cycle of fidelity, betrayal, reform and fidelity to start anew.  We are not to lose heart, but we are to look at these events in the harsh light of day.

“They strayed, as faithless as their fathers, like a bow on which the archer cannot count.” Psalm 78

The confusion rippling through the last sixty years has attended the years following all the councils called to navigate changes in the Church or in the world.  There have been only twenty one such councils in the twenty one century long history of the Church.  Some like the Fifth Lateran Council of 1512-1517 were too timid and shallow, having no lasting effect and leading directly to the great schisms and upheaval of the Protestant Rebellions with bloodshed, hatred and bitterness – none of which in my experience have anything to do with God.  Occasionally, a council like Trent (1545-1563) takes place with long reaching positive consequences for centuries.   The mark of all long lasting reform is fidelity to “first things”, to ageless truths and fearlessness in implementation of their findings. 

Since the Church consists of imperfect human beings, many periods of infidelity and disgrace have occurred throughout the long centuries of Church history, which have always been followed by renewal and recommitment with reformers as diverse as Francis of Assisi and Catherine of Sienna.  A further sign of all renewal is that light is shed on darkness, the excising of the evil.  In the past, those engaged in scandal and sinful behavior were exposed, taken out of ministry and punished during any rekindling of the faith, whether the offense was sexual, abuse of power or financial.  That this cleansing is happening is a sign of expectant healing, not one of despair.

Recalling these seminaries to fidelity (or closing them) and culling the predators and those who were so woefully derelict in their solemn trust to protect the innocent began in earnest during the later years of John Paul II and continued through Benedict XVI.  More is to be done.  For those of us who remain, our hope and prayer is we live in the beginning of a true renewal. Today we are seeing a resurgence of strong, faithful, intelligent and committed young priests coming into some of our parishes.  Spirited (and Spirit filled) revival and strong growth is taking place in Africa and the Pacific Islands.  Those remaining in our churches, at least those that are alive and pulsing with life, are younger, full of love for each other and for the Church – a Gideon’s Army of rebirth.  These are signs of great hope for Catholics everywhere.

“There are those who despair of finding any meaning in life:  they commend the boldness of those who deny all significance to human existence in itself, and seek to impose a total meaning on it only from within themselves.

But in the face of the way in which the world is developing today there is an ever increasing number of people who are asking the most fundamental questions. Or are seeing them with a keener awareness:  What is man?  What is the meaning of pain, of evil, of death, which still persist in spite of such great progress?  What is the use of those successes, achieved at such a cost?  What can man contribute to society?  What will come after this life on earth?”  

From the pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world of the Second Vatican Council

Creating a firebreak is sweaty, sometimes risky work and especially dangerous in an emergency.  Crews crank up bulldozers, brush axes and chainsaws, even light backfires – anything to stop a wildfire from spreading further destruction onto fresh ground.  If the fire rushes too quickly upon the firefighters and fleeing panic stricken animals rush by, they have little choice but to run for their own lives or hunker down under emergency wild land fire shelters and hope they can keep breathing long enough for the fire to pass over them.  Other crews will be working again ahead of the fire to make a new firebreak to try and restrain the blaze.  A successful firebreak contains the devastation and preserves what remains.

If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.  Thomas Jefferson

An article in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal entitled “America’s Baby Bust” by Jonathan Last tells of a different kind of consuming fire – one far more destructive.  United States citizens, like 97% of the rest of the world’s population now, live in a country with birth rates below a replacement threshold necessary to sustain itself – 2.1 births per woman.  We have not been consistently at a sustaining rate since the early 70’s; currently we are at 1.93 and dropping because the immigrant population, which was holding its own for a long time, has now followed those of us born here.  Among college educated women, the rate is 1.60 births per child bearing woman, about what it is in Japan overall.  China is in worse shape at a 1.54 rate after decades of a one child and forced abortion policy, exacerbated because of cultural bias with a young demographic heavily weighted male.  Japan has been at it longer and is in full blown panic.  Russia, Italy, France and Canada are all paying mothers large tax credits or even cash bounties for new babies.  By 2100, Japan will be half its current population.  Its once dazzling growth rate in GDP has ground to a halt.

Many of the economic and sociopolitical crises we face arise from a stagnant population.  A rapidly aging demographic makes any social security program for the elderly unsustainable with only two workers for every person drawing benefits.  The major impetus for escalating health care costs is directly attributable to the inescapable reality that we are living longer with more expensive health remedies available, and there are too few still working (and contributing) to pay for it all.  Another slow train coming is too few young fit people to staff a strong military and too few taxpayers to fund it.

The myth of overpopulation touted incessantly in the 70’s is long behind us.

If I … comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge…, but do not have love, I am nothing.   1 Cor 13:2

Last week in Washington, there were two demonstrations: one to express support for new gun control legislation was attended by three to four thousand people and received ubiquitous coverage by every major network and print news media.  The second was to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973 that overturned every state law in the country that limited abortion for any reason at any stage of pregnancy.  Attended by somewhere between 500,000 and 650,000 people, the March for Life got little if any mention on most news outlets (except for Fox News and EWTN) with every effort made to obfuscate the size of the crowd.

The most eye-catching aspect of the turnout was the average age of the participants.  Hundreds of thousands of young people from high school to post graduates braved the bitter cold, carried signs and chanted, “We are the pro life generation.”  They are the survivors of the last forty years in which between 25 and 33% of those conceived in the womb were killed – fifty five million of them.  Earnest, healthy, full of life, intelligence and humor, the young people came.  The progeny of a generation of materialists, hedonist pleasure seekers, narcissists and those committed to self fulfillment, not self sacrifice, they came.  To make extraordinarily clear that the torch has been passed to those even better suited for the fight, they came.  And given the sparse numbers born to those committed to a pro-choice agenda, these born to be pro life will eventually triumph – even if just by an inexorable demographic.

These are the children cutting the firebreak, and they will persist.  They will not go gently into the night.  They will “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.  Deuteronomy 30:19 (NIV)

One more article captured my attention this week.  In it pro choice (or formerly pro choice) reporters described what they observed in abortion clinics.  For the sake of brevity and limiting the brutality, I will cite only one out of seven.  Pro choice author, Magda Denes, in her book, “Necessity and Sorrow: Life and Death Inside an Abortion Hospital”, wrote this about coming into an operating room following the abortion of a second trimester baby:

I remove with one hand the lid of a bucket … I look inside the bucket in front of me. There is a small naked person there floating in a bloody liquid- plainly the tragic victim of a drowning accident. But then perhaps this was no accident, because the body is purple with bruises and the face has the agonized tautness of one forced to die too soon. Death overtakes me in a rush of madness … I have seen this before. The face of a Russian soldier, lying on a frozen snow covered hill, stiff with death and cold. … A death factory is the same anywhere, and the agony of early death is the same anywhere.

We have made technological advances undreamt of by our parents and grandparents.  Among these is the scientific and medical ability to control pregnancies in a way not possible just forty years ago.  We can take a pill to end a pregnancy and flush a new life away.  We bicker about whether taxpayers who find the practice morally repugnant and in violation of their religious freedom should have to pay for it.  We seem to have lost the thread on the larger question.  The issue is not “how” or even “why”, the issue is “ought”.

These are some of the gripping questions it will take at least another generation to determine, and they will look into themselves, not into the media, to resolve them.  And this generation is hopeful and ready.

So to my pro life and pro choice friends, I pose these queries.  Have we come so far?  We differentiate ourselves from all other known species not just with rationality and imagination, but with accrued knowledge, wisdom, a search for love, truth and beauty, with spirit and soul, and with consciences formed by all of these facets.  Do we endure in dragging along with our hoodies up, our ear buds in and our eyes cast down a yard or so ahead of our sad shuffling?  Is this really the best we can make of it?  Is this really the best we can do?

The world arrays a twofold battle line. It offers temptation to lead us astray; it strikes terror into us to break our spirit.  Hence if our personal pleasures do not hold us captive, and if we are not frightened by brutality, then the world is overcome.  St. Augustine

St. Patrick’s Christmas

Friday night, we brought our granddaughter, Gianna (pronounced “Jahna”) to the St. Patrick’s Parish Nativity play.  Gianna remained rapt for the entire performance, needing an occasional gentle restraint from wandering too far up the aisle.  A teen choir accompanied the players; there were twirling, dancing, singing angels, a trek around the church with a donkey for Mary and Joseph only to be turned away at several inns, sheep singing with shepherds, a tall, lanky, twelve year old yellow star leading three Magi to the cradle and the tiny Holy Family in the stable.  All of the players were ardently earnest; everyone sang.  We stood to cheer for them at the end. Gianna didn’t want to leave.

“Are we like sheep?”

St. Patrick is a small, inner city bilingual parish.  The parishioners span a wide cross section of Providence life from all ages, colors and abilities, almost none of them affluent.  Prison tattoos can be seen on some of the men, who are attending with their families. These men hug their wives and kids frequently; some have packs of cigarettes in their shirt pockets.  St. Pat’s has a soup kitchen and help for the homeless at a food pantry called Mary House; there is a small Eucharistic adoration chapel in a converted office trailer with a year round 24/7 vigil.  Pretensions are rare. There is no cry room; children make children noises:  beautiful sounds.  We are reminded of our first parish as adults in Maine, St. Joseph’s, because of the community life, joyful music, love and peacefulness of the assembly.  We have come home again.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned..    W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

Jesse Lewis

Grace Audrey McDonnell

Daniel Barden

Charlotte Bacon

Ana Marquez-Greene

The Children of Newtown

I have been to Newtown many times. My old company had a lumberyard there about three miles from the Sandy Hook School.  Much has been written about the perfect New England village with the friendly coffee shops and picturesque woods, fields and upscale homes of NYC professionals.  All of this is true, yet it is a town like any other.  Like yours and mine with the imperfections, well hidden family troubles, anxieties and small betrayals, as well as love, joyful sounds, Christmas lights and festivities.  And schools.

Evil visited Newtown a week ago.   Books will be written about the deterioration and lack of funding for mental health facilities and support; about semi automatic weapons such as the AR-15 with hundred shot clips (for which I can see no earthly rationale for circulation in the general population, just to be clear – they have only one function); about bullying and Asperger Syndrome and autism spectrum disorders;  about the sad necessity for fortress schools; about the crushing of some children who never recover from their parent’s divorce and withdraw into a killing isolation; about the failure to identify evil before it pounces full throated on the innocent; about a fascination with violence within our entertainment, within ourselves.  It seems to me a confluence of these things created Adam Lanza, a weak, cowardly and wounded boy/man; they afforded him the facilities to make a decision for evil. All of these aspects merit full analysis to uncover a passageway to enable us to perform our most basic human function – to protect our young.

I think also, we need to be thinking about Pope John Paul’s Evangelium Vitae (Gospel of Life), a 1995 encyclical in which he decried a “culture of death” which has inculcated itself into our attitudes and practices, almost without notice anymore.  This dark culture misconstrues freedom as license, leading to “this eclipse of the sense of God”, and devolving ever more into narcissism, materialism, hedonism and utilitarianism.  Adam Lanza was the product of his personal and familial pathology, but he also was the effluence of the milieu in which he swam.  A “culture of death” according to John Paul most specifically reveals its morbidity as a war of the strong against the weak, be they handicapped, old or unborn.  “The first to be harmed are women, children, the sick or suffering and the elderly.”  Adam Lanza was harmed.  From that he made increasingly easy decisions to inflict his rage and pain on others more vulnerable: one evil act cascading into the unspeakable – a definition of evil.

Perhaps Eugene Kennedy, cited in Peggy Noonan’s column, put best what should be our response to all of this (in addition to seeking preventative solutions).  What good can we take from this senseless act?   Newtown reminds us of “the mystery of being alone in the world as it is and as we are… with cracks running through it… from small disappointments to blows of the heart.” But it “revealed the goodness of normal people, which is seldom celebrated” when the teachers sacrificed their lives trying to shield the children.  Ms. Noonan says that we will attempt to respond politically to “take actions that will make our world safer, and this is understandable. But there is no security from existence itself.”  As Professor Kennedy put it, the answer is to “plunge into life  … we have to engage in life and take it on with all the risks it entails or we won’t be alive at all.”  “It is better to suffer pain than to live in a world in which you don’t allow yourself to be close enough to anybody to have the experience that’s bound to give us suffering.  Love guarantees suffering.”

Kennedy concludes, ”we’re all on a hero’s journey… the hero faces challenges along the way… entering the forest each day without a cut path, and finding our way through is what we are called to do.”  Here, says, Ms. Noonan, Mr. Kennedy suggests that faith offers not an explanation of tragedy, but the only reliable guide.  “Jesus said, ‘I am the Way.’ That is not a metaphor.”

“Can a mother forget her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb?  Even should she forget, I will never forget you.”   Isaiah 49:15

The response at St. Patrick’s Church was not to be embittered or paralyzed with sadness over inexplicable tragedy, but to embrace the life given to us.  At the conclusion of the pageant, Rita asked our four year old Gianna if she wanted to be in the nativity play next year when she turned five.  I suggested that she could practice really hard and be the donkey.  Never lacking ambition, Gianna told us she wanted to be Mary.  Mary, the Christ bearer, who within her carried Love, is the call to all of us at this time of the year.  To hold within us Love, and to do what that Love calls us to.  For when it comes down to it, that is all we have.

NYC Nativity, Mary waits and welcomes

Heather was a nineteen year old freshman at Columbia University, one of the world’s most prestigious centers of learning.  Her frequent mood swings of deep depression and unpredictable crying led her to visit a psychiatrist at the school’s clinic, Dr. Miriam Grossman.  Dr. Grossman drew out Heather’s personal situation.  Her new boyfriend was delighting in the female gift of her young body, but was balking at going out to eat or to a movie because that might lead to a “relationship”, and he didn’t want a relationship: he just wanted to be friends…..with benefits. Heather was wondering why she was depressed because “friends with benefits” was a common arrangement after all, and she had not considered it as a possible source of her unhappiness.  From Dr. Grossmans’ book “Unprotected”: “Heather thinks women are like men, so she’s puzzled when her “friend with benefits” – a man with whom she has a physical relationship, no strings attached – is content, while she hates herself.  Is Zoloft the answer?”

In “Unprotected” she writes of other client-students she counseled: Stacey, who was cutting herself with scissors, had an HPV infection that would be with her the rest of her life; condoms are ineffective with HPV and 25% of teenage and above women are infected.  Some strains of HPV can cause cervical cancer.  The medical community’s and big Pharm’s solution de jour is inoculating all young girls with “Gardasil”, which a study now shows can trigger the premature death of ovaries and eggs causing permanent infertility.  Stacey had three “relationships” in the last year and was unaware whether her partners may have had previous relationships, creating multiples of exposure; her odds of HPV infection went up 300%.

Then there was Olivia, who was bulimic, vomiting frequently and depressed, the first big love of her young life having dumped her.  She told Dr. Grossman, “When it ended, it hurt so much,” she said, weeping.  “I think about him all the time and I haven’t been going to one of my classes, because he’ll be there, and I can’t handle seeing him.  I was unprepared for this. Why, doctor,” she asked, “why do they tell you how to protect your body – from herpes and pregnancy – but they don’t tell you what it does to your heart?”

Dr. Grossman eventually left Columbia when she became terminally discouraged with both the medical community’s acquiescence in a political and social agenda and Columbia’s advice to its students on the “Go Ask Alice” web site for students. “Go Ask Alice” suggests experimentation to help students “find their sexual identity” tacitly encouraging multiple “friends”, ménage à trois trysts and homosexual hook ups.  Sadly, Columbia is far from unique.

Dr. Grossman started her (wholly secular) crusade.  Here is a direct quote from her website mission statement:

I am here to tell you that radical politics pervades healthcare, and common sense has vanished. Who’s paying the highest price?  Girls and women.

Not long ago, we physicians could call casual sexual activity “mindless” and “empty”.  Before political correctness muzzled us in the 90’s, a therapist might advise her client that it is love and life-long fidelity that bring liberated sensuality and provide the best insurance against infectious diseases.  An unwanted pregnancy, an abortion – these were weighty issues.

We understood that men and women are profoundly different and weren’t afraid to say so….Self restraint built character, and character was something to strive for…

Things have changed.  Teens are encouraged to explore and experiment with their sexuality.  Self-discipline has been replaced with latex and Plan B.  There is tacit approval of promiscuity, and an STI is a rite of passage.  Abortion?  It’s likened to a tonsillectomy. 

The health care system has declared war on tobacco and alcohol, tanning salons and transfats, but is silent about the hazards of our hook-up culture….Devoted professionals, motivated by altruism are foisting these agendas on young people. I witness the ramifications daily.

The agenda is sunk deeply into the soil of some misguided feminism that confuses equal treatment and opportunities for women with men and women being the same in every aspect of their personalities.  Even well-meaning parents are not immune.  Many “put” their teenage daughters on birth control pills, some below the age of legal consent, falling into the trap that all of them will be sexually active anyway, and there is nothing to be done about it, so we may as well protect them as best we can.  Their girls remain unprotected, however, against emotional havoc and over 50 sexually transmitted diseases.  The implicit communication is that character development in all things sexual and self-control are not possible — and the girl is informed subtly that she is ready and available.

“Which of you fathers, if your (daughter) asks for a fish will give (her) a serpent instead? Or if (she) asks for an egg, will give (her) a scorpion?”  Luke 11: 11-12 with apologies to St. Luke for paraphrasing for a female child.

Further ripping away the mantle of protection are the possible side effects of the pill itself: increased risk of depression, mood swings, weight gain, suicide, breast cancer, infertility, stroke, blood clots, cervical cancer and, most ironically, loss of libido.  The World Health Organization lists the birth control pill as a Group 1 Carcinogen along with tobacco, asbestos, benzene, formaldehyde, plutonium and others.  In NYC schools, a pilot program with the catchy acronym CATCH (Connecting Adolescents To Comprehensive Healthcare) provides birth control pills, Plan B abortion pills, Depo-Provera long-lasting contraceptive shots as well as condoms to 22,000 students as young as 14 in 14 city high schools without parental consent or notification. They can’t get an aspirin from the school nurse without parental consent.  Political correctness run amok.

When the Catholic Church objects to Obamacare mandating inclusion of contraception and abortifacient drugs in their health care plans, the Health and Human Services department of the Obama administration refuses to allow an exemption (with the very narrow exception of churches themselves).  Catholic hospitals, schools, charitable organizations and universities are put in the impossible dilemma of providing what is morally repugnant to them or not providing a health plan at all to their employees.  Over 40 lawsuits are pending.  Political correctness runs rough shod over religious freedom, freedom of conscience and common sense.

“Unprotected”, indeed:  it seems we have lost our way.

While it is true, of course, that (technological progress) ha(s) given us tremendous power, it is absurd to suggest that we must use this power to destroy our most precious inheritance: liberty.  The Road to Serfdom – F. A. Hayek