Tag Archives: conscience

Pro-choice and Moral Schizophrenia

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Nine ways of participating in the sin of another:

1. by counsel

2. by command

3. by consent (“I’m personally opposed to it but” )

4. by provocation

5. by praise or flattery

6. by concealment

7. by being an accomplice

8. by partaking

9. by Silence!

Once you snuff out a child in its mother’s womb you have crossed the line and there is no sin off-limits to you. Society can’t hide behind our laws and our complicit politicians. Yes those in positions of authority bear the greater responsibility but their accountability does not set us free!  How deafening the silence.  Silence in our churches, our schools, our universities, our laboratories and the halls of government.

The fact that a law was passed to enable the atrocity of abortion, does not pour clean water over the scarlet decision.  It simply makes our culpablility national and places our country in the cross hairs of retribution. You can declare a human being a non-person, but the DNA, the blood and the flesh, the substance and the soul witness against our immoral “Law.”  Relativism may allow our society to lie to itself, but the law written on our hearts will condemn us. We do have freedom of choice, provides it is the right choice!

“I call heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live” – Deuteronomy 30:19

This sin too was nailed in Christ to the Cross.  It is time to leave the darkness and live in the Light.

The Borg: Master, Meister, Mind

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Is he Borg? He is the Borg Master, and the Borg is on the move. It is hungry and ambitious, and knows no benevolent God of love and limits. By edict, it steals the inclination to Virtue, usurping the role of conscience. Borg Master, and no other, proclaims right limits and no limits. He declares who has a right to being and how to be. He looses the license of pride and greed into his pot of promises. He stirs his brew with class hatred and malcontention. Where there was the reign of virtue, decency, morality, there is enthroned a sceptered Specter; the One, the Borg Mind ruling a “no people – no voice.”  The Borg Meister feeding on our fears, our frenzy and our fetuses.

The Borg Master contemplating and worshiping himself along with the adoring, mindless, masses. Everything becomes his; his hope, his audaciousness, his government, his plan! Your life is his to manipulate, as are your morals and your dreams. What you have will be his in the end. He covets your freedom and your laughter. He is building a State of being and a state of living in which you are a nobody, a number. Have no doubt; you, my dear cog, will be assimilated into the Borg.

Borg Mind Master wants your soul. He can taste it. He nibbles at your conscience. Resistance stirs his rhetoric, as word upon word, worms beneath your reason, reconstructing the underpinning of your logic, and your creed. Winning your vote, he has procured your serfdom. Licking his fingers, how delicious your servitude!

Unity,Hope,Change – Truth & Conscience

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It been two weeks since Archbishop Chaput’s addressed over 700 participants on the campus of the University of Toronto at St. Basil’s Church.  The Archbishop urged Catholics to live out their faith in the public square.  He sounded a warning saying that in the United States Catholics “needed be on guard against “a spirit of adulation bordering on servility” that exists towards the Obama administration.  Of President Obama, he said, “There’s no way to reinvent his record on abortion and related issues with rosy marketing about unity, hope and change”

“I think modern life, including life in the Church, suffers from a phony unwillingness to offend that poses as prudence and good manners, but too often turns out to be cowardice. Human beings owe each other respect and appropriate courtesy. But we also owe each other the truth — which means candor.”

That Catholics voted for Obama despite his stand on life issues proved  Chaput’s point that  the “Church in the United States has done a poor job of forming the faith and conscience of Catholics for more than 40 years.” In his book, “Rend Unto Caesar” Archbishop Chaput traces the Catholic struggle to be accepted in the United States, which was formed mainly by Protestants.  President John F. Kennedy ushered in a coming of age of Catholic respectability.  What will that acceptance cost us, if, for it’s sake, we lose our sense of duty, our will, and our nerve to be outspokenly Catholic?

I have a friend who said her father taught her that she needed three things to be happy: “a wish bone, a funny bone and a back bone.”  I think our catholic back bone is being tried, but if we are found wanting, there will be no happily ever after in America.

Life & Conscience – Not debatable!

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Where pray tell is Obama’s conscience?   The Anchoress writes: Obama: Your conscience means nothing to me… after seeing the story she knew was coming:

“Taking another step into the abortion debate, the Obama administration today will move to rescind a controversial rule that allows health-care workers to deny abortion counseling or other family planning services if doing so would violate their moral belie, according to administration officials.

It makes me want to cry, while at the same time making me fighting mad,  that life and conscience take yet another hit.  The hit-man, Obama, means for that to keep happening, day after day, week after week, eating away at our morality.  We will be losing bits and pieces of our humanity.   Soon, we won’t recognize this country. A lot of Americans are re-thinking Obama, but where to from here? Obama will keep the pressure on.  Here’s one man pushing back:

Old Bishop, New Priest

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WITH PRAISE AND THANKSGIVING TO

ALMIGHTY GOD

THE ARCHDIOCESE OF SANTA FE

ANNOUNCES

THE ORDINATION TO THE

SACRED PRIESTHOOD OF

JEFFREY N. STEENSON

THOUGH THE IMPOSITION OF HANDS AND THE INVOCATION OF THE

HOLY SPIRIT

BY HIS EXCELLENCY

MICHAEL J. SHEEHAN

ARCHBISHOP OF SANTA FE

SATURDAY,THE TWENTY-FIRST OF FEBRUARY,TWO THOUSAND AND NINE

AT  TEN-THIRTY O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING AT ST.THOMAS AQUINAS CATHOLIC CHURCH, RIO RANCHO, NM

Jeffrey M. Steenson will be new to the Roman Catholic priesthood, but not new to our Lord’s vineyard.  When ordained February 21, 2009 by Archbishop Michael J. Sheehan of the Santa Fe Diocese of New Mexico, Steenson will continue a faith adventure that still astounds him.

It was much more than the divisions within the Anglican Church over issues such as the affirmation of the openly gay Gene Robinson as bishop, and the election of Katharine Jefferts Schori as the first female presiding bishop, that coaxed the then Bishop Steenson onto a new path.  These issues were monumentally troubling to his church and he was himself,  “deeply troubled about where the Episcopal Church is heading.”  Bishop Schori had also blessed same-sex unions.  Though grave, still more important issues than these motivated his faith journey to the Roman Catholic Church.  No less than the Fathers of the Church held great sway in this matter of faith, conscience and desire.

Before he even entered the ministry, Jeff thought about entering the Roman Catholic Church.  One of his professors, a nun, did a very good job showing him that the early Church looked and was as it continues to be very Roman Catholic.  She also pointed out that she thought he might have a vocation to the priesthood but he was married and so that was then not to be.  Years passed, Jeff became an priest and then a bishop in the Anglican Church .

The Church Fathers still sounded Roman Catholic but life got very complicated.  It took the powerful personage of the inimitable Pope John Paul II to re-ignite his Catholic leanings.  He made a promise to himself that he would revisit his Catholic inclinations and act if that meant becoming a Roman Catholic.  Acting on the promise was tougher and so a bit late in being fulfilled.  He meant to act while JPII was still alive, and not doing so troubled him, but life as Rt. Rev Steenson of the Rio Grande Diocese of the Anglican Church made serious decisions too serious to rush.  Prayer, study, meetings and mentors,  more prayer and more study, soon demanded that conscience be honored.  The promise he made to himself ended with his resignation as bishop.  This was not without pain.  There were explanations to be given and loose ends, at all ends.  In his customary gentle manner,  Jeff reached out as best he could to make clear with persuasive reason and Patristic history the underpinnings of his choice.

Happily, eventually the sun did shine on the road ahead for Jeff and his wife, who shared these dilemmas and discoveries.  Soon came his entry into the Roman Catholic Church. and now, more promises to be made, the promises of the sacred priesthood.  Jeff goes forward carrying his faith-filled past in his heart, grateful for loved ones in his Anglican Church family and his beloved deep Anglican roots.   At this, a new beginning on a continuing faith journey, may God bless Jeffrey Steenson and his family.