Tag Archives: Culture of Death

Gardening and the Soul – 101

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Lent means that spring is just around the corner.  Looking at my garden, it was obvious that it was in need of some serious tender loving care. All I had the energy for was to uproot a few of the hundreds of weeds, but I did begin. Immediately, a thought interrupted my picking. “Many souls are dead and don’t even know it.” Surprised by the seriousness of the pronouncement, I turned to the Lord,  “Why is that, Lord?”

“Look at the weeds you’re uprooting; they look healthy and well, don’t they? Yet, you know they’re counterfeits; you root them up.  Many people no longer know what’s good for them.  They opened their soil to the world and allowed the world to decide what grew in them;  no questions asked!

Empty places invite weeds.  Weeds take the place of authentic, productive life.  Soon they choke out the good by sheer  numbers and their greedy appetites.  Weeds look pretty good for a while.  It isn’t until you miss the flowers and the fruit,  that you notice something has gone awry.  In life, people are like gardens. Some are dying but still look good.  Sin like weeds is deceptive.  People are kept busy and entertained by counterfeit life.  Yet they are loosing ground to the world.  They are losing the reward of their time and effort.  Their work and play have no eternal end,  just transitory vigor and flash. It’s really death wrapped in greenery.

This morning I weeded my entire garden. I also went to confession.

Martin Luther King Jr. Would Weep

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Arizona Rep. Trent Franks states the facts:

“An astonishing 50% of African-American babies are killed by abortion,and nearly 80% of abortion clinics are deliberately located in or near predominantly minority neighborhoods.”

Ultimately, Franks says “a minority baby is five times more likely to be aborted than a white child.”

Planned Parenthood doesn’t need bullets to reach it’s targets. You have only to look at where they locate their clinics and count them to note the disproportionate number in minority neighborhoods as well as abortion numbers among minorities to realize PP’s aim.  Franks refreshes the American memory of the words of Planned Parenthood founder, Margaret Sanger when he recalls that the abortion industry’s biggest secret is that their entire movement was largely founded by eugenicists like Margaret Sanger who said:

“We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.”

Would Martin Luther King, Jr. weep?  The battle for civil rights continues as the weakest, the poorest and the youngest are disregarded and discarded daily and genocide goes on in the guise of “health care”.

Manifesting the Bit by Bit and Hidden Evil

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Os Guinness in his discourse “Addressing the Question of Evil In An Age of Genocide and Terror” dialogues on the questions of evil: “Where on earth does evil come from? How are we to understand evil?” Guinness asks us to consider the possibility of magnifying evil in modern times:

“The dreadful evil of the Final Solution was not carried out by monsters. Hitler was a monster.  Goring was a monster. Goebbels… They were monstrous. They didn’t carry any of it out. It was carried out by millions, and millions and millions of “good ordinary people.”

“You could see how in a world of bureaucracy with division of labor and diffusion of responsibility and a distancing,.. people don’t actually see the effects of the decisions they make.   You can see how a modern world and its procedures and its way of doing things has made possible evil on a scale the world never imagined. (paraphrased)

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.- Edmund Burke

On Not Judging the Man-Just the Record

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For the record:  judging, discerning, and choosing are part and parcel of life.  From day one, our senses present the world to us and we’re off on the grand adventure.  All is recorded in the Book of Life from cradle to grave.  “Known but to God” can be recorded on every tombstone.  And so, now we come to the death of the “great man”, Edward Moore “Ted” Kennedy.  What constitutes this greatness matters.  Of late, we have seen idols and iconic figures come to their respective ends.  To judge, to discern, to choose is human, wisdom depends on it. Society learns and survives by it.

Let a merciful and just God judge the disposition of a soul.  I’m okay with that for myself and others.  What to make though, of hours and days and in some cases eons of public pronouncements and near cult worship.  Senator Ted Kennedy died and now the myth begins, or has it been spun like a cocoon about him throughout life?  For the butterfly to emerge, the cocoon must be broken.

I’m of the opinion that God isn’t wowed by the Kennedy legacy and I’m certain all spin stops before His throne.  A face to face with God isn’t like Facebook, Twitter or even “Meet the Press”.  Men may flatter us, but the truth is that pride goes before a fall.  Before the Almighty, humility is the better garb.

For my part, I see that Edward Moore “Ted” Kenned, had it all; life lived to the full. He got the chance as the youngest of nine children born to a Catholic mother who practiced her faith, not birth control, to experience family, faith, power, love, fun, sin and foolishness.  He got to make mistakes, ask forgiveness, build bonds of kinship and friendship.  He got to roar like a lion and cry like a baby. I see, too, that this gifted and blessed man, failed to find it in his heart or philosophy to support the unborn, the un-named also conceived by the will of  God, failed to grant them protection or welcome into the same life he so abundantly lived.  May these, the Holy Innocents,  now pray for him, their brother, offering the purest Innocent, the Lamb of God, to a loving Father who even Now, stoops to the lowly when they cry out for mercy.  Lord have mercy!

Ignatius Press sticks to the facts and leaves the funeral fuss, fantasy, and lionization to press, popular myth romantics, and political agendas.

Open Letter to Senator Tom Udall

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My dear Senator Udall,

You say, “I firmly believe that reproductive health care is a personal matter that should be left to individuals, their families, their doctors, and their religious counselors.” That sounds good, but in actuality it ignores the fact that a new life in already in this world, growing as we all do from day to day in this life.  Reproductive health care must begin with that new life in the womb, to nurture and provide a wholesome,supportive environment.  Your position, ignores each individual’s right to their own life.  Your position abandons your responsibility while giving to a doctor or a religious counselor a sacrosanct role. Mother, father, counselor, minister; none of these, has the authority to take a human life because tragic, untimely or inconvenient circumstances surround the new life coming into this world, and present in the womb.  It is not a question of choice.  We are not given the choice of taking another’s life.  When we choose to take a life, we kill what God has begun.  You do not have that authority, nor does a mother, father, doctor, priest or counselor.  Words do not change truth.  Truth is staring you in the face and your look the other way, when you support legislation that treats life as some material commodity rather than the holy gift of God that it is.
In closing, I refer you to Archbishop Chaput’s words:
“America is not a secular state. As historian Paul Johnson once said, America was ”born Protestant.” It has uniquely and deeply religious roots. Obviously it has no established Church, and it has non-sectarian public institutions. It also has plenty of room for both believers and non-believers. But the United States was never intended to be a ‘’secular” country in the radical modern sense. Nearly all the Founders were either Christian or at least religion-friendly. And all of our public institutions and all of our ideas about the human person are based in a religiously shaped vocabulary. So if we cut God out of our public life, we cut the foundation out from under our national ideals.”
“As Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George said recently, too many Americans have ”no recognition of the fact that children continue to be killed [by abortion], and we live therefore, in a country drenched in blood. This can’t be something you start playing off pragmatically against other issues.”

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Americans United for Life is working hard getting the word out:

With the Sotomayor confirmation hearings set to begin on July 13, we need “all hands on deck” to show the Senate and the nation that Judge Sotomayor’s radical record — including her longtime participation in a pro-abortion advocacy group — makes her unfit for the highest court in the land.

Michelle Malkin writes Racism Rejected:

President Obama applauds the decision as a victory for equality under the law. Not.The Supreme Court has ruled that white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge.

SCOTUS Blog background here. More background here and here.

Tom Goldstein: “Ricci result: Kennedy finds a violation of Title VII. An outright reversal 5-4…the plaintiff firefighters won. New Haven violated the law by throwing out the test.”

Sotomayor = Not so wise now.