culture of death – Page 2 – Mama Needs Coffee

abuse, Catholics Do What?, Contraception, Culture of Death, current events, Parenting, prayer, scandal, sin, spiritual warfare, Suffering

What’s a faithful Catholic to do?

August 16, 2018

There is a tremendous – and warranted – outcry of rage and betrayal in the Church right now.

I’m not talking about the usual suspects in the media and the voices coming from the cafeteria line, either. I’m talking about the men and women who have sacrificed and stood steadfast, serving the Church with their professional lives, settling for smaller salaries and raised eyebrows at cocktail parties when they disclose their line of work. The little old ladies who are daily communicants. The blue collar workers who pray a Rosary on their lunch breaks and fast on bread and water on Wednesdays. The underpaid Catholic school teachers and the harassed Catholic healthcare professionals.

In other words, the faithful.

The ones raising larger than average families on smaller than average budgets. Refusing to cave to the extraordinary societal pressure to relieve the emptiness of their wombs at any cost, and opting for adoption or even childlessness over IVF. Bearing patiently the slings and arrows of public opinion when it comes time to defend the Church when her ways are not the world’s ways. Tossing aside the contraceptives and using NFP instead. Forgoing the “pleasures” of pornography and honoring their marriage vows. Remaining celibate and suffering in loneliness as an abandoned spouse or a same-sex attracted person. Sacrificing to educate their children in the Faith in the face of extraordinary difficulty. Refusing to reduce the immutable dignity of every single human person to an object to be used or discarded.

And defending Holy Mother Church with the ultimate gift – one’s fidelity to the Faith – even as the world around us spins farther into secular materialism.

Fathers, these children of your flocks are suffering. Suffering over the grievous injuries done to those other children, the ones named in the Pennsylvania report, the ones whose innocence was shattered, whose dignity was spat upon, who suffered in their very bodies the wounds of Christ tortured and crucified.

We cannot sleep for weeping over these images, crying out to heaven that men ordained to act in the person of Christ at the altar could also rape, pillage, and destroy the most innocent.

We need to hear from you.

We need to hear lamentation and rage, resolution and public penances. We must know that you stand on the side of Christ, crucified and risen. That even if your diocese is beyond a shadow of suspicion in August of 2018, your father’s heart breaks and your stomach roils in anger over what happened in our Church – no matter which diocese and no matter what year.

Many of us carried heavy hearts into Mass for the Feast of the Assumption of Mary yesterday, lifting red and swollen eyes to heaven during the readings and beseeching God for any answers, any explanation.

Too many of us – not all, but many – were met with deafening silence from the pulpits when the time for the homily arrived. The silence tore deeper into the wounds rent by the horrifying grand jury report; there was scarcely time for a scab to form over last month’s McCarrick revelations.

We need to hear from our fathers. We need to hear your anger, your shame, your outrage, your sorrow, and your profound and sincere resolution that this evil will be purged from the ranks of the Church hierarchy, no matter what the cost.

When someone intentionally injures or violates my child, even if – and perhaps especially if – I am not the cause of the injury, he or she can count on my swift and unapologetic rage.

We need to see your hearts, fathers. We need to see and hear our bishops doing public acts of reparation and penance, or resigning the privilege of office if the circumstances warrant it.

We need to hear our priests – especially our pastors – speaking uncompromisingly and unceasingly about what is happening, about the war zone we American Catholics find ourselves in, about the corruption and satanic violence within our own ranks, and about what is being done to bring about justice.

If your bishop hasn’t issued talking points yet or the diocesan-level HR department is cautioning restraint, damn the restraint. Your people are suffering, and they need to know their spiritual fathers are mad as hell and they aren’t going to take it anymore.

What can we, as lay people, do at a moment such as this?

Pray. Pray as you never have before. Pray a daily Rosary with your family, if you have one. With your spouse or significant other or roommate. Alone or with a recording, if you have nobody else to pray with. Ask especially for the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima, St. Charles Lwanga (Google his martyrdom story) and St. Catherine of Siena.

Fast. Give up social media one day a week, or limit it to a few minutes a day. Get rid of one of the three or four platforms you’re using entirely, maybe. Offer up those pinpricks of dopamine denial for the cleansing of the Church, and for the souls of the victims living and deceased.

Purge your home of anything that is complicit with this culture of death. Vaguely pornographic media. Explicitly pornographic media. Showtime or HBO DirectTV or maybe even your high speed internet, if it’s an occasion of sin for you. Go through your library and destroy anything that is influenced by the occult. If your right arm causes you to sin, cut it off. We must be beyond reproach as Catholics going forward if we are to have any credibility with this world and, more importantly, with Christ.

Throw away your contraception. Your mind altering drugs. Your habit of gossip, of masturbation, of criticism, of getting drunk, of cheating “just a little” on your income taxes, of cheating on your spouse, of ignoring your children.

In other words, be a saint.

Our times call for great sanctity to counter this grave evil. And sinners like us, myself first and foremost, are the only material Our Lord has to work with.

Other practical suggestions:

Email, call, and write to your bishop’s office (and while you’re at it, to the Holy Father himself.) Be respectful and unrelenting in asking for a public meeting or an explanation of what your diocese is doing to address these evils. Ask your bishop what his plans are to clean up your local church if housekeeping needs to be done. Find out what measures are in place to protect youth and children and seminarians and old people and not so old people. Ask what standard of sexual integrity is set and maintained by the diocese of X. Do the same with your pastor. Be persistent. But love your Church enough to not stop until you get a satisfactory answer.

Tell your priest, once you’ve finished asking when his next related and excruciatingly clear homily will be preached, that you are praying for him. And then do so. Offer a specific act of penance every day for your priest. For any priest you know. Give up your daily coffee, your nightcap, your nighttime pleasure reading, a workout, salt on your food, etc. Do not leave our courageous priests and bishops unarmed in this time of agony for the Church. They are suffering as Christ did in the Garden of Gethsemane, and they need our prayers.

We have decided for our family, that to avoid even the appearance of scandal and to protect all parties involved, it is best to avoid ever putting our priest friends – or any priest – in a situation where they are alone with a child of ours. I’m not talking about casual one-on-one talks with Father on the playground during recess, but being alone in a car, in a closed room, in a private home, etc. We are also exceedingly cautious about whom we leave our children with, and take into consideration the circumstances of any home or place they’ll be visiting. Most abuse takes place within the context of the extended family or trusted circle of friends, and we have chosen to err on the side of potentially giving offense by being “too careful.”

May Christ Jesus in whom we place our trust and confidence convict in our hearts a profound sorrow for all who suffer, and a firm resolution to spend ourselves utterly in striving to prevent future evil.

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle.

Catholics Do What?, Culture of Death, Homosexuality, Sex, sin, Suffering

When deferred maintenance hits the fan

August 1, 2018

Yesterday our sewer main backed up. I happened upon the grisly scene when I entered the basement. I stood transfixed, an overflowing basket of laundry on my hip and a stench in my nose. At first I didn’t realize what I was looking at. I got angry, my mind racing to assign blame to the horror I was beholding.

“JOHN PAUL!” I bellowed up the stairs, certain that the mess was a case of litter-box cleaning gone hideously awry.

Are my kids ever going to be old enough to be responsible for their own chores? Why would he dump the litter box on the ground down here? Why is it wet? Oh…

Once I realized that it was raw sewage we were dealing with, my anger melted away. First into disbelief and then to shame for having yelled at my poor 6-year-old, and finally to horror as I realized that I was the grown-up who was going to have to deal with this.

“Sorry buddy,” I called up the stairs to the wrongly accused, “there’s something wrong with the pipes. Tell everyone to go into the backyard until I figure this out.”

The rest of the day passed in a blur of phone calls and sewer technicians tromping in and out of the basement and the sound of many toilets being flushed over and over again. Nearly 8 hours and $500 dollars later I was crouched down scrubbing away at the horrific aftermath (using the cat’s litter scoop, appropriately enough) and willing myself not to vomit and add to my misery.

Dave and I laughed about the entire situation over drinks later that night, shaking our heads in regret that we had neglected to take immediate action on the results of the pipe inspection we’d had performed last August before we’d closed on the house. A main-line cleanout must have fallen to the bottom of our laundry list of things needing immediate attention once we moved in. So while we were tearing up dirty carpet and peeling back stained wood paneling, our pipes, the very guts of our home, were continuing to deteriorate. Every month that went by where we paid attention to some cosmetic detail rather than addressing a crucial functional problem, we were skating by on borrowed time.

In our defense, the report really did slip our minds. Or at least, it slipped my mind. I was so focused on making our house beautiful that I was not super concerned with anything of a more practical nature. When I did think of the less glamorous stuff that needed to happen – installing a radon system in the basement, having the asbestos popcorn removed from the ceilings, etc – I would brush it aside, telling myself we’d take care of it “someday.”

Meanwhile, it was really important that we install hardwood floors in our dining room. We scrimped and saved and stretched uncomfortably far to make it happen, and I told myself it was essential because the kids would spill food there! It had to be a hard surface! We didn’t want to waste money installing an inferior product that we’d just be updating one day anyway…

So we did it, and our house looked better and better. At least on the surface.

The thing with deferred maintenance is that it usually ends up costing you more, in the long run. Sure, you don’t have to take that initial painful hit by dealing with the problem when it first presents, but as the rot progresses, it often does more damage than even the initial discovery would have yielded. The $100 we “saved” by postponing a main line cleaning ballooned into a $500 emergency situation, draining our resources and making a disgusting mess that affected the entire family.

The Church finds herself in a similar situation today. Deferred maintenance which allowed evil to take hold. Rot spreading silently through the ranks, corrupting and defiling when it should have been swiftly and relentlessly exposed to the light. Horrific crimes plowed under and buried while the facade remained polished, presenting an attractive – and unrealistic – image to the outside.

Shame on Dave and I, as parents, for not taking action sooner and making sure our house was well maintained, safe, and reliable. Thankfully, our failure to act will yield nothing more harmful than some traumatic memories of mommy yelling unrepeatable words and dry heaving while carrying trash bags to and from the basement.

The damage the Church is suffering now, and will continue to suffer in the months and years to come, will be far worse.

I am horrified, as a Catholic, by the stories that are coming to light because of the now-Archbishop McCarrick situation. (Click here for a balanced assessment of the issue if you don’t know what I’m talking about.)

I am horrified as a mother.

I am horrified as a mother of sons.

I am horrified as a friend to good and holy priests, and as a Catholic under the jurisdiction of a good and holy bishop.

People will leave over this. People will walk away from Christ, who has the words of eternal life, because of the failure of some of His shepherds. People walked in Judas’ time, and they will walk in Theodore’s time, and woe to those who cause these little ones to suffer. It would be better for them to be cast into the sea with a heavy millstone around their necks than to cause that suffering.

We should never defer the maintenance. Bring it out into the light, all of it. Let us once and for all drag everything out into the light and put our houses in order. That goes for the clergy as well as the laity. The pornography. The child pornography. The homosexual behavior. The pedophila. The copies of 50 Shades of Grey and the innocent online affairs that “don’t hurt anyone,” really.

There is no such thing as a private sin. There is no injury done to the Body of Christ that does not affect all of its members.

Lord, have mercy. Help us get our house in order. No matter what the cost.

Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, Contraception, Culture of Death, IVF, Living Humanae Vitae, Marriage, NFP, Parenting, planned parenthood, politics, Pro Life, Sex, sin, Theology of the Body, vasectomies, Women's Health

Humanae Vitae at 50: how does a Catholic respond to sex in the modern world?

July 25, 2018

Today marks exactly half a century since the publication of Humanae vitae, Bl. Paul VI’s prescient missive to the Church in response to the modern world’s views on sexuality and the human person. Reading it now through the warped lens of the 21st century’s concept of sex, it seems extraordinary that there was once a time the world was not arguing over the existence of multiple choice genders and contraception as a fundamental human right.

Progress, eh?

I look around at our culture and I see a lot of suffering. Children unsure of their parents’ commitment to the family and uncertain of their own place in the world, women who feel compelled to compete with their bodies in the sexual marketplace, babies snuffed out of existence because they had the misfortune to be conceived as the result of a violent act or a contraceptive failure.

There are a lot of people in a lot of pain. But the situation is not without hope. I personally had to hit a sort of rock bottom in my own life before I was able to recognize my own misery and cry out for something more.

The Church was there, and she was able to offer me something better. Discovering Humanae vitae made a big impression on me when I was finding my way back to belief, and it has not ceased to fascinate me in all the years since. It is brief, concise, and only seems to become more applicable as time passes.

There are four predictions which Pope Paul makes in HV, things which perhaps seemed far fetched in 1968, but which have themselves wretchedly accurate in 2018.

First, he envisioned a rise in infidelity and a general moral decline. The Pope noted that the widespread use of contraception would “lead to conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality.” Everyone knows that the rate of divorce is up and the rate of marriage is down and we’re watching things on network television that would have been censored as pornographic only a generation ago. I’d like to take things a step further and propose some remedies to what ails us.

First and foremost, if you are married or are preparing for a vocation to marriage, be all in. A holy marriage is a beacon of light in a darkening cultural landscape, and a vital witness to your children, friends, coworkers, and neighbors. Commit yourself to chastity – both before and within marriage. That means setting clear boundaries while dating and knowing your own and your partner’s limits when it comes to sexual temptation.

Renew your marriage vows with a sense of reverence for the sacred nature of sex and a delight in the goodness and dignity of your spouse. Don’t buy in to the culture’s cheapening views on sex as primarily recreational or selfish. Commit to studying and growing in your practice of authentic Christian sexuality with your husband or wife. “50 Shades of Gray” has nothing on “Theology of the Body.”

Secondly, Pope Paul foresaw a devastating loss of respect for women. He argued that “the man” will lose respect for “the woman” and “no longer (care) for her physical and psychological equilibrium” and will come to “the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment and no longer as his respected and beloved companion.”

Make a pledge to reject pornography in all its forms. Find a trusted spiritual director and/or mental health practitioner to help you navigate the road to freedom from addiction. Be honest and open about your struggles, and recognize your own limitations when it comes to the kind of media you can consume. Talk with your children, teens, and tweens about the dangers of sharing nudes and explicit content on the internet, SnapChat, and Instagram, helping them understand the far-reaching effects their youthful choices can have in adulthood and in eternity. Even better, keep smartphones out of the hands of your young people! Your kids will not die without an iPhone. Set an example of purity and transparency by keeping your computers and connected devices in open communal spaces and having a charging station where all devices are checked in at night.

Consider financially supporting an anti-trafficking campaign like the USCCB’s Coalition of Catholic Organizations Against Human Trafficking (CCOAHT), or by calling your congressperson to voice concerns about human trafficking in your state. There is a direct and demonstrable link between the pornography industry and human trafficking. Pornography is not an “innocent, private, personal choice.” There are real victims and there are real addictions which bleed over from the virtual world to the real world. Read Matt Fradd’s excellent book “The Porn Effect” with your men’s or women’s group or with your older kids. Sign up to become a fighter at the website Fight the New Drug.

Paul VI also voiced concern about the potential for the abuse of power, particularly at the hands of powerful governments and non government organizations who could wield “family planning” as weapon against poorer nations and oppressed populations. China’s infamous “One Child” policy is a sobering and extreme example of this, and there are stories of horrific forced abortions, state-mandated abductions, and government intervention in the lives of citizens who dared to flout the law. In the developing world today there are many instances of people undergoing involuntary or uninformed sterilizations at the hands of “compassionate” and eugenic non profit organizations whose understanding of humanitarian work seems limited to the reduction of undesirable populations.

Teach your children about the fundamental dignity of every human person, no matter their skin color or place of origin. Discuss the exploitation of poorer countries and populations by the wealthy and powerful, and explain the Church’s responsibility to defend the least of these. Raise money or awareness for an authentically Catholic charity doing work on the ground, like the Missionaries of Charity or International Missionary Foundation. Lobby your political representative for humane and responsible humanitarian aid that does not impose draconian population control measures on disaster-stricken or impoverished nations. Our “charity” is no charity at all when it comes with strangling strings attached.

Finally, the Holy Father recognized that a widespread acceptance and use of contraception would lull men and women into a false sense of control over their own bodies and, ultimately, the bodies of their children. If you stand around a playground with a group of moms for long enough, eventually you will overhear or take part in the vasectomy conversation: “I scheduled Matt’s for next week – it’s his turn to suffer!” or “Jim got snipped last year, because we are d-o-n-e done.”

Sterilization, according to a 2012 study by the Guttmacher Institute, is now the leading form of contraception in the United States. The rates of IVF and other assisted reproductive technologies have also skyrocketed in recent decades. Couples are waiting longer to become parents and women are often spending decades ingesting hormonal contraceptives without a clear understanding of the risks to fertility and the decline of the reproductive system with age.

When it comes time to have a child, couples will often stop at nothing to achieve their dream of becoming parents. This has led to a glut of “unwanted” frozen embryos who linger indefinitely in cold storage in laboratories around the world and the troubling emergence of a thriving surrogacy industry where it is frequently the poorer minority women who are hired to carry a pregnancy for a wealthy heterosexual or homosexual couple. Little thought is given to the physical and emotional effects that surrogacy has on the surrogate or the resulting child who is necessarily reduced to a product available for purchase.

Teach your children about the grave respect due to every human person, no matter the circumstances of their conception or birth. But also teach them that a massive and corrupt industry has sprung up around the conceiving of children at any cost and by any means necessary. Take responsibility for the sexual education of your own children from a young age. Opt them out of any public school instruction in human sexuality – some of which is developed by Planned Parenthood and other corrupt for-profit corporations with a vested interest in your children becoming sexually active – and educate yourself in the biology and theology of the human body. Gone are the days of having “the talk” with a pubescent teenager and hoping to have any impact on your child’s formation. If you want to get to your child before the culture does, you must have many such talks throughout the years. Early, and often.

Finally, pray. Pray for the wisdom to navigate this toxic culture and for the courage to live as a sign of contradiction. Look around and observe the pain and the confusion caused by living in a manner contrary to the Church’s teachings – even to those within the Church itself – and be bold enough to choose something radical. As 1 Peter 3:15 states, “be prepared to give an account for the reason for the hope you have in you.”

And in the words of my favorite Saint echoing the words of my Lord and Savior, “be not afraid.”

Catholics Do What?, Contraception, Culture of Death, Evangelization, Family Life, Living Humanae Vitae, Marriage, motherhood, NFP, Sex, Theology of the Body

Living Humanae Vitae: stories of faithfulness to the Church’s teachings on sex and marriage

May 1, 2018

How many times can she write about NFP?

I can write about it as many times as it takes in order for me to internalize the seemingly simple concepts undergirding this most perennially misunderstood of Catholic teachings: openness to life.

I’ve spilled plenty of digital ink on the splendors of HV in the past, and I don’t retract a single character of any of it, but boy, living it out day-to-day is a little different than studying it in abstraction.

I just finished reading a trilogy of stories set in ancient Rome, around 70 years AD, and the grit and virtue and boldness of the early Christians whose lives it chronicled astonishes me. Not only because of the certain death in the arena at the jaws of wild beasts which they faced if their clandestine faith was exposed, but because they were truly – at least in the fictional narrative I read- in constant conversation with one another and with God about His will.

It reminded me a little bit (and only a little bit) of practicing NFP. The willingness to look foolish, to feel foolish, and to be subject to some degree of rejection – varying from bemused to downright nasty – by the culture at large. This comparison both consoles and shames me, because on the one hand I probably don’t need to worry overly much about imprisonment and martyrdom in 21st century America (not at this precise moment, at least) and on the other hand, how embarrassing that the relatively benign cross I’ve been asked to shoulder feels so crushing upon my feeble shoulders.

Because for all the beauty and truth and goodness I perceive in the Church’s teachings on sex and marriage, living it out is often none of the above. I don’t want to spend the next 12 to 14 months “getting my body back” only to balloon to an unspeakable number on the scale again with another pregnancy. I don’t want to practice copious amounts of abstinence within marriage, feeling more like a roommate than a spouse while I learn the ropes of (yet) another method of NFP. I don’t want to peer anxiously into the mists of my 40’s and wonder if I’m going to be one of those lucky women who keep ovulating well into their 5th decade, thereby prolonging the suspense and surprise of another baby in the very twilight of my fertile years.

I don’t have the faith of Sarah and Abraham. I don’t have the confident humility of Mary. I lack Elizabeth’s joyful surrender. I spend a lot of time worrying about all of this, to be perfectly honest, and for the first time in my life, I can wholeheartedly empathize with the temptation of contraception.

But.

(It’s a big but.)

God knows my heart better. God knows our needs better than we do. And God asks so relatively little of us modern Christians in the developed world. My children have food and medicine and beds to sleep in. There is no conflict in our region that daily imperils their lives. We have medical care to bring them all, almost certainly, to adulthood, a reality unthinkable only a few generations past. We are richly, richly blessed. My life is not without its challenges, but should I come face to face with a Christian mother from the ancient world, I don’t think she would recognize my suffering as such. Maybe she would look around at the vast temptation all our technology affords us to ignore God – to become like gods in a real sense – and she would nod her head in understanding at the real difficulties this presents in raising a faithful family. But I think she would probably also look at our overflowing closets and dishwasher and running water and marvel at the sheer wealth and provision we tend to take for granted.

And I wonder if she would look at me with my access to a clean, safe hospital (and epidurals!) and good maternal healthcare and a supportive, faithful husband and no known health issues and steady employment and wonder why I was so afraid of bringing new life into the world.

I wonder that, too.

Is it because I’ve been conditioned to not overdo things in the gestational department by a culture that hammers us over the head with the message that two is plenty? Is it because I have unrealistic beauty standards for myself based largely upon the availability and use of contraception? Is it because we have little to no daily support outside our extended family (which alone is an enormous advantage) as we parent these children of ours, the village having since passed into the realm of history and metaphor?

All I know is that we had 5 babies in 7 years, and I’m tired. I want my body back. I want to sleep through the night again. I want to eagerly count down the months until all 5 kids are in school full time and my professional life can ramp up again during those 35 available hours a week.

Basically, I want motherhood and child rearing to have been a fleeting season that flies by (as I am repeatedly told by strangers at Target) and is gone in the wistful blink of an eye, but I also want to reject the cultural narrative that my children are somehow holding me back and that my fertility is something to be tightly managed, suppressed, and ultimately discarded.

I want it both ways.

I want to live in harmony with the culture of which I am a part while also raising children who transcend the culture to seek the Lord’s will over their own. I want to be confident in our choice to live faithfully the Church’s call to marital chastity and fruitfulness and also look great in jeans and effortlessly drop the pounds that pregnancy hangs on my diminutive frame. I want to fill my home with happy children and also be handed the keys to a Nissan NV with a wink and a smile from a God who, as it turns out, subscribes to the health and wealth gospel Himself, despite what the actual Gospels say, and will surely reward my faithfulness with material abundance and children who sleep through the night from birth.

I want a lot of contradictory things.

And my greatest discomfort lies in that friction between what I claim to want as a subject of Christ and what I pant enviously after as a citizen of the world.

I have some stories to share with you from friends and fellow Christians in the coming weeks as we approach the 50th anniversary of Bl. Paul VI’s prophetic text, Humanae Vitae, in July. They are stories of suffering and heartache. Stories of loss and betrayal. Stories of hope, of fidelity, and of a peace that surpasses understanding. They are the stories of ordinary men and women who are using NFP and struggling, failing, confessing, and getting back up again to keep at it because the struggle is worth it. Because the Church asks us to do this thing in Her wisdom, not in Her sadism. Because either we trust in the Apostolic authority handed down from Peter or we are each our own little magisterium and, as such, are tasked with an exhaustive and impossible list of things to discern for ourselves using the quivering compass of our own consciences.

The Church asks us to do much harder things than what Humanae Vitae contains. We worship the Creator of the Universe contained in a scrap of bread. We proclaim the Resurrection of the dead and immortality. We turn our cheek to let an enemy get a better angle for the second punch. And yes, we offer our bodies as a living sacrifice even in the bedroom, which is the very last place our culture encourages us to exercise any sort of restraint or charity.

It’s a wild ride. It’s an impossible mandate without Jesus. And it is going to the stuff that 21st century saints are made of, I’m firmly convinced.

I think after reading some of the stories I’ll be sharing over the next 2 months, you’ll think so, too. We hear plenty of stories of people who find the demands of Christ impossibly high and, like the rich young man in the Gospel, walk away.

But sticking with it when the going gets tough? Relying on the unfathomable depths of Jesus’ mercy when we inevitably stumble and fall?

Now those are some stories worth telling.

Culture of Death, motherhood, Parenting, Pornography, Sex, technology

Pornography, technology, and being the parent who says “no”

April 25, 2018

We had some sweet little friends over recently during a rare spring-like burst of warm weather and had the snacks flowing and the sprinkler turning in the backyard, and I had a very “I have become my mother” sort of interaction with one of my son’s buddies.

He had his “phone” with him – an old iPod or a very original iPhone, I’m not qualified to confirm which (though it looked more like a phone to me) and was asking for our wifi password to connect to the internet to play music videos off of Youtube.

“Sorry buddy, we don’t do screens without parents in our house.”

“But it’s just music, Miss Jenny (I don’t ask them to call me this, but it’s fairly adorable/extremely aging that they do).”

“Yeah bud, I trust you, but I don’t trust the internet. Here, I’ll pull up a Pandora station on my computer.”

He continued to fiddle with his device for a few more minutes until I had to gently lay down the law: “bud, you’ve got to turn that off and put it in your pocket, or else you need to take it home.”

Thankfully my kids are not old enough to be mortified by me yet, but I imagine at some point they will feel exactly the way I did when my mom poked her head into the family room and caught my girlfriends and me watching a “Sex in the City” VHS (Lolol) tape that we’d rented from Blockbuster for a sleepover one Saturday night.

“Girls, you’re better than this. This is garbage. You can’t watch this in our house.”

I eye-rolled her haaaaard (and also rebelled like a hellion in college), but my mom was right. And she wasn’t afraid of me – or of my friends – thinking that she wasn’t cool. She didn’t have any ego in her parenting as far as morality was concerned. If it was wrong, she let us know, and while there is room for improvement in everyone’s parenting decisions, this was one area that mine got pretty right.

The funny thing is, even though my parents were known to be less permissive than some of my friends’ parents, if only because they were more likely to be home and therefore less likely to let us host raging parties during their weekends away – my friends flocked to my house after school and on weekends, many of them specifically seeking out the counsel and friendship of my mom. Even though (maybe specifically because?) she often told us “no.”

Fast forward 20 years and I know that we are in the minority in our parenting choices where media and technology are concerned. Our kids don’t have iPads, they don’t have internet access without us peering over their shoulders, we don’t have cable, and we (try to) vet anything they watch on Netflix before they see it. Are we being overprotective? Hell yes we are. Will they someday have unbridled access to everything the www has to offer and go hog wild, glutting themselves on the raunchiest content available? Yes… and hopefully, no.

We’re trying to train them to make good choices in that realm, just like we’re coaching and micromanaging the things they eat, the time they spend on their homework, and the physical activity they get each day. I’m not planning to follow my 18 year old around checking his cell phone any more than I’ll be trying to sneak bites of broccoli into his pasta sauce at that point: the hope is that the training and coaching will have paid off by that point and he will be captain of his own ship. But between now and then, it is our job to teach, guide, coach, protect, and, frankly, look like a jerk in front of his buddies who have their own tablets.

He may never thank me for it, or he may look back in his early 30’s and be glad we tried our best. Either way, it is not my job to be his best friend. It is my job to help him become the best version of himself. And in 2018? That means being super, super cautious where the internet is concerned.

It isn’t a matter of if my kids will eventually see porn, it’s a matter of when. And it isn’t a matter of whether they see the darkest and most degrading, chauvinistic violence committed onscreen, but at what age they first encounter it. I’d just as soon they be twelve than seven, since by that point we will have had several dozen conversations about dignity, sexuality, abuse, consent, and addiction.

It’s not enough to say “well, it’s out there, we have to assume our kids are going to find it,” throwing our hands up in surrender. It *is* out there, and yes, our kids are going to find it. And it is up to us as parents to arm them with the training in virtue and common sense to do with it what they ought: identify it correctly as dehumanizing garbage and reject it as such.

Will they falter and fail? Almost certainly. Will they pick themselves back up again after they stumble, and have the courage to start fresh? That part is up to the grace of God and the best efforts of the adults in their lives to form them, pray for them, and model lives of repentance and virtue.

Our culture eats purity. It feasts on vice and mocks virtue, and signals to parents that any wild oats our kids may sow are simply inevitable stages in modern life. We are told our kids will – and, in fact, should – question the gender we “assigned” to them at birth. That pornography is healthy and normal. That sexual activity among preteens and even younger is only natural, and is best managed with a box of condoms, a scrip for hormonal birth control, and a well-supervised setting where they can experiment “safely.”

This is asinine and more – it is diabolical. We throw our children to the wolves and then we cry out in horror when they themselves become the wolves. We have to be the grown ups, and not to get too Daniel Tiger up in here, but groo-oohn-ups pro-tect.

And say no. And generally do things that make them super unpopular with kids, like withholding matches and credit cards and car keys and, yes, even technology, until and unless the child proves himself capable.

I’m already sweating over the inevitable “how to recognize pornography” talk with my seven-year-old, and came darn close to it last month when his kindergarten brother came home wide-eyed from a trip to the modern art museum and regaled the back seat with tales of “naked people” paintings. We had a decent conversation about the beauty of the human body and how there is a difference between “art” and “bad pictures” like someone might take with their phone and…we stopped there. On the one hand, I’m grateful for the anecdotal point of reference to be able to return to as the conversation continues over the years. On the other hand, I’m going to have 3 teenage boys in my house in less than a decade and come Lord Jesus, come.

What are your best practices for modeling – and expecting – good behavior with technology in your home? Are you already getting the eye rolls from your kids? Do you have good, open communication with their friends and have clear expectations for what flies in your house?

Contraception, Culture of Death, current events, Marriage, Parenting, Pro Life, reality check, Sex

It’s not a fertility problem, it’s a marriage problem

December 1, 2017

I read – and shared – a piece from Medium with my Facebook readers yesterday morning. It’s about the precipitous decline of childbirths in the West – particularly in America – and especially in the year 2017.

In it the author, Lyman Stone, contemplates the impending collapse of the US fertility rate and tries to make some sense of it. He also rings a few alarm bells, launching wondering statements into the ether in an attempt to explain “why” this is happening. And also, to communicate to the reader that barring a full-stop culture-wide reversal of the trend, there is little we can actually do to recover to a baseline replacement rate of fertility.

I think he makes some compelling points, and that his data are both fascinating and confounding.

I also think we may be missing the forest for the trees.

The problem, from where I see it, hasn’t as much to do with our fertility rates as with what we have done – or what we have allowed to be done – to marriage.

Marriage has undergone a radical paradigm shift over the past decade. Sure, the roots of that shift date much further back, reaching into the origins of widely available artificial contraception and no-fault divorce, but marriage has been transformed from a commonly-agreed upon arrangement of mutual sexual fidelity between one male and female “till death do them part” has been dismantled piecemeal over the last decade at breakneck pace. And not only dismantled, but resurrected as something entirely different, styled and promulgated through the media and disseminated with breathtaking effectiveness across the digital continent.

So let me bring this back around to my thesis: people aren’t having children because people aren’t getting married. At least not “married” in the way we would have commonly recognized as marriage 100, 50, or even 25 years ago.

Let me try to explain.

Old view of marriage: (leaving religion entirely aside) Life partner/best friend + sexual attraction + desire to build a family + pledge of fidelity and financial/emotional support through thick and thin = lifetime commitment.

(Were there people who fell outside the bounds of this overgeneralization I’m making? Yes. But they were cultural outliers.)

New view of marriage: contractual arrangement ordered toward self-fulfillment/actualization, sexual desire and acquisition of maximum pleasure + material goods + financial fail-safes engaged to legally protect both parties in case of dissolution + mutually agreed upon terms of behavior/performance = finite legal arrangement hinging upon the satisfaction of both parties.

You notice in the old view of marriage, friendship – or at least partnership – and the creation of a family, built to last, were at least a part of the bundled expectations at the outset of marriage. My theory is that far fewer couples today go into marriage thinking primarily of the other, let alone the potential others, who might benefit from their committed union.

Marriage used to be ordered toward the future and toward the other. I would argue the marriage, in its present culturally understood form, is ordered primarily towards the present and the self.

And that’s not a great recipe for childbearing.

Because if marriage is primarily about me, and about my fulfillment in the present moment, then it makes almost zero sense to take the flying leap of courageous insanity necessary to procreate the next generation.

First, because the cost to me personally is so high: social, professional, financial, physical, and even sexual well-being can all take a real beating during childbearing and rearing.

Second, if I am partnered with a spouse who views our union primarily in terms of contractual benefits weighed against risks, and whose fidelity I cannot count on, I would have to be somewhat delusional to take the step to introduce a permanent fixture into our union: a child.

Until we can restore and adequately communicate an authentic vision of marriage as the fundamental building block and the primordial relationship of society, no government policy or tax break is going to make a dent in our fertility freefall.

Unless we recapture a sense of sacred duty toward the future, and an obligation to provide for someone beyond ourselves and our immediate needs, then from a purely hedonistic perspective, marriage looks completely insane, and having a child might be considered tantamount to self harm.

Are there other factors at play? Surely.

The current economic situation presumes a dual income household in most parts of the country (and given the typical consumerist expectation of standard of living), and bucking that trend by having more than 2 kids and almost by proxy, being priced out of daycare as a viable option, means being willing to suffer the cost of a radical downgrade in “experiences” and standard of living.

Like maybe being a single car family. Or not taking vacations. Or not owning a house for the first 5 or 10 or ever years of marriage. Or not bankrolling (gasp) a trip for every single offspring through a 4-year university of their choosing.

Of course, there are more dire circumstances than the absence of a college fund. And many families can and do choose to suffer those iniquities willingly out of love, or at least resignedly through gritted teeth and furrowed brows. And those couples, in my opinion, are the real heroes in this equation. Couples who don’t just forgo the annual vacation or the college fund or the organic milk, but who live a life markedly below what is considered “standard” middle class living, foregoing even basic pleasures and nearly all luxuries and likely being ridiculed while so doing.

But if the rest of us can’t get past the vision of marriage as a “me first” vehicle for self-fulfillment and happiness that may happen to include a kid or two at some nebulous point down the road, provided all the appropriate financial failsafes are in place and the milestones of adulthood in a materialistic consumer-driven society such as ours are checked off, then we’ll make little if any headway in rebalancing our precarious fertility rate.

And so, finally, why does it matter?

Why look to the future and worry about a time that doesn’t personally concern us?

Why not just leave the childbearing to the religious zealots and the immigrants and the poor, uneducated working class to pick up the slack?

In short, does it matter that people are no longer getting married and having babies?

Being 20 or 30 years old can indeed at times feel something like immortality, the inevitable physical and mental and financial slowdown of old age will one day claim us all, if we are fortunate enough to achieve it.

So even if we have no personal interest in weighing ourselves down with the baggage of a lifelong commitment and a handful of small people who share our DNA, have we stopped to consider the consequence of an aging population outnumbering the generation or two beneath it by 50 or 100 or even 200%?

The choices we make today will engineer the society we inhabit in the future. And as everyone who has ever had a mom who drilled mom-isms into their little brains can repeat in a singsong voice, “our choices have consequences.”

And a future of upside-down demographics where the culture is overwhelmingly grey and non-productive, fiscally speaking? That’s where forced – and likely plenty of voluntary, as is the duty of a good materialist – euthanasia will probably come into play.

Look to Japan to see the social and economic cost of an upside-down population where every worker is disproportionately responsible for 2 or 3 or even 4 pensioners a piece, and do the math.

On a fundamental economic level, our failure to adequately replace the dying, aging population otherwise known as all of humanity leads to a gruesome end-of-life scenario for those of us who will not or cannot invest in the next generation.

But who cares? Shrugs the pro choice, pro radical individualism, pro what-suits-me-needn’t-concern-you camp.

I suppose that remains to be seen, whether those who are so flippant about other people’s lives today maintain that perspective on their own lives one day in the not too distant future.

In the meantime, the rest of us should be getting about the business of having and raising families, despite the temptation to count the cost – and the cost is often and increasingly dear.

But when you look a little further down the road, through the mists of time, the long-term cost looks to be far, far greater.

Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, Culture of Death, current events, politics, Pornography

It’s the culture, stupid

November 10, 2017

2017 has been kind of a train wreck, hasn’t it?

Lately it seems like each week has brought news of another mass shooting, another massive sex scandal, another round of accusations and tarnished reputations and fresh outrage and calls for … something.

But I can’t help noticing that we seem to want to have our cake and eat it too, collectively speaking.

Frankly, this is the culture we’ve built for ourselves, constructed on promises of sex without commitment or consequence, violence as entertainment, and the pursuit of personal appetites at any cost.

We lament the violence done to women and the apparent backsliding of decades of feminist progress in our nightly newscasts, but the commercials between segments are filled with soft core porn using women’s bodies to hawk products.

We flinch at each new accusation of predatory sexual violence that hits our newsfeeds, many coming to light decades after the fact, while we meanwhile hound our elected officials for greater access to abortion and contraception, those necessary components fueling the sexual revolution.

We reject God and His laws, written into our very bodies, and then we rail against the cruelty and evil that springs up in the absence of a moral compass.

In short: this culture is one of our own making.

And it cannot be cured in Washington.

America – the entire world – can only return to greatness by falling to her knees.

Until and unless we get serious about pursuing personal conversion and cultivating holiness, this is what the world will look like.

This is what the world was like, before Christ, and this is the natural state to which it will return as we reject Christ. You might call it the human equilibrium, determined by the introduction of Original Sin and remedied by one thing alone:

Jesus.

The world can be saved, one soul at a time, by Christians willing to live out their faith without counting the cost, leading people to Him. But as long as Christians play at the game of going along to get along with the world, whether that means an outright rejection of the faith or a lazy complacency where we drift through life in a haze of busyness and Netflix, then this is the new reality.

Life with Christ is, as St. John Paul II was fond of joyfully reminding us, “a wonderful adventure.”

But life without Him is a nightmare.

Guys, we’re living the nightmare right now.

I have some ideas.

First, we have to get serious about our own personal prayer lives (looks meaningfully into mirror). I am the first to admit that falling into bed with my Kindle at 10 pm is immeasurably preferable to spending time with my Bible or rosary. That’s because my spiritual muscles are flabby and undisciplined, worn down by years of parenting small people and self-medicating with mindless entertainment and distraction in the evenings. I have to commit to at least a solid 15 minutes of serious mental prayer at some point in the day, offering back to God a fraction of the time He has given me. I know this, but actually doing it is another matter entirely.

Second, there are areas in my life where I have not fully given Christ Lordship. I’m thinking of a few novels I’ve read lately, grimacing and skimming over the explicit sex scenes and degraded morality but justifying continuing to read because “most of the book is fine.”

But it’s not fine. It’s not fine for me to read a book that is 10% pornographic content, justifying that the other 90% is Tolstoy (which it sure as hell ain’t). I’m no prude, and there is a place for realism and grit in literature, but what I’ve been encountering with increasing frequency in modern fiction is straight up smut: graphic, gratuitous, and worst of all, conscience-numbing. How silly to be striving to form my conscience and conform my mind to Christ’s while continuing to fill it with garbage. Maybe your garbage takes another form, but you probably know exactly what it is.

Which brings me to…tv. And movies. There’s a lot to choose from and a veritably limitless array of options, but it’s becoming increasingly necessary to just turn the thing off. I spend a good amount of time and energy devising ways to protect my kids from sexual deviance and premature exposure, and we put a lot of effort into forming this area of their personalities to be receptive to goodness and beauty. How can we spend a hour or two in the evenings fast forwarding through garbage, letting our own consciences become dulled by repeated exposure to pornographic content, homosexuality, adultery, sexual violence, witchcraft, and abortion and expect that there will be no long-term effects?

What goes into us very much affects what comes out of us.

Our consciences can become deadened and dulled by repeated exposure to garbage. What is shocking the first or seventh time it is encountered might not even raise the blood pressure the 40th or 100th time. Try popping in a DVD of a popular sitcom or drama from the 90s and then contrast it with, mmm, pretty much anything that’s popular in primetime in 2017.

You may be astonished at how much has changed in a relatively short time. By how “tame” the innuendo and violence, and how seemingly chaste the onscreen depictions of intimacy.

We’ve come a long way in a short time, thanks in large part to the internet, and very few of us have taken the time to step back and ask “is this okay?” rather than getting pulled along with the tide. It’s a small, necessary sacrifice I can – and must – make, as a parent, as an adult.

Finally, we need to be heeding Our Lady’s call to the children of Fatima and making regular sacrifices in reparation for our own sins and for the sins of others.

We each have a role to play in the sorry state of affairs of the modern world. We have been asked to pray, to make sacrifices, and to offer up suffering for the good of our neighbors. Those neighbors are our own family members, the people across the street, and the monster who shot up a church last weekend.

We live in a kind of modern fantasy of autonomy and individual freedom, when in reality, we are all intimately connected to one another by virtue of our brotherhood in the family of God.

Look, I am the absolute worst at fasting and making sacrifices. Happily, God has given me a tidy pile of stuff to offer up in the course of living out my actual life, if only I would consent to suffer willingly and intentionally rather than always proceeding directly to “thrashing about like a wounded animal railing at the injustice of it all,” which seems to be my default setting when confronted with pain.

But I needn’t waste it. I can offer up those midnight wakings, the stomach flu, the broken down cars and zeroed out bank accounts, the wrecked out bodies and the agonizing, lonely hours of solo parenting during business trips or endless Tuesdays. I can offer my little loaves and fishes to God to do whatever He pleases with, and perhaps it pleases Him to do something insanely miraculous with the crumbs.

But first I have to offer them.

Finally, we must be unashamed in our witness of faith in the public square.

Christians in the early Church were set apart form the depraved pagan culture from which they sprang because of the way they loved one another. Because of their marriages, their charity, their civic engagement and their unwavering witness to the truth.

And yes, some of them were killed for it. And they went joyfully to their martyrdoms not for love of pain, but for love of Jesus. We will probably not be martyred in a literal sense of shedding blood. But our careers? Our reputations? Our friendships and social status and financial stability?

Yeah, those are all up for grabs. We ought to be prepared to offer them willingly, if He asks. We should absolutely fight for just laws and morally sound legislation, but we should also be prepared to be increasingly marginalized as the cultural free fall – which shows little sign of halting – continues. We know how this game ends, but it might be a hell of a fourth quarter, so to speak.

I keep coming back to JPII’s most oft-repeated phrase when I read the news lately: Be not afraid.

That’s the hope we can offer to a world that is bleeding out in self-anihilation, seeming to crumble before our very eyes.

Be not afraid.

But also, be not an idiot. Be not caught doing nothing, when the Master returns. Be not a complicit accomplice in the carnage that is laying waste to a civilization.

I can’t save the world with my one little life, but I can offer it to God to do with it what He sees fit. And when He asks for something, I can give it to Him without hesitation, knowing that the steely core of the Christian identity must be a readiness and willingness to suffer as He did.

coffee clicks, Culture of Death, ditching my smartphone, feast days, infertility, liturgical living, Pornography, social media, technology

Coffee Clicks {September 29th}

September 29, 2017

Hey it’s Michaelmas. Which means you can totally get away with ordering chicken wings for dinner and calling yourself a liturgical boss. (Just don’t skip on the diablo hot sauce.)

This past week felt so heavy in the news. I mentioned on Facebook on Tuesday that I’ve started taking Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays completely off of all social media platforms, and it has been awesome. Super good for the head and the heart. And it has really catapulted my book-consumption rate through the roof. This past week I devoured one of my favorite blogger’s debut offerings, Anne Bogel’s “Reading People,” along with a book Dave passed on to me, “Beneath a Scarlet Sky” (depressing but well written with a shocker at the end; a rare glimpse of WWII told from an Italian perspective), two middling modern fiction/YA offerings “Holding up the universe” and “Forever, Interrupted,” and am halfway into both “Hidden Figures” and “Today Will Be Different.” (First one is good but very statistic-y. Second is meh. I liked “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” better, by the same author.

Suffice it to say, I get a lot of reading accomplished when I’m not numbing my brain with newsfeeds and the perpetual cycle of What Is Offensive This Week. Even if none of it was particularly deep or scholarly. It was all very Josef Pieper, truth be told.

I’m getting into that home stretch (that’s a stretch) of pregnancy where suddenly decaf isn’t cutting it in the morning, and an afternoon nap is looking more and more like a daily necessity. 27 weeks but who’s counting? If I hadn’t done this four times already, I’d swear there’s no way my belly could get any bigger. And the general public would tend to agree with that assessment. Just you wait till December, helpless passersby. Things are going to get real.

-1-

While I spent a nice little chunk of time away from social media, I was still aware enough of the outside world to note the passing of cultural icon Hugh Hefner. Arguably the single greatest driving force behind the prolific spread of pornography, we should all take a moment to pray for the response of his soul. I said as much on Facebook and was a little shocked by some of the vitriolic responses from fellow Christians, who apparently missed the memo of Jesus praying to the Father “that none may be lost.” Also, color many people vv confused about Purgatory and the Spiritual Works of Mercy. I’ll have to write a whole piece on the big P one of these days. This examination of the legacy of Hefner is worth a read (and do offer a Hail Mary for his soul).

-2-

Fr. James Martin. Sigh. So much ugly electronic ink spilled on both sides of the aisle lately. His prickly responses to perceived or actual criticism of his work make it hard to root for him, and, unlike other “controversial” churchmen like Chaput or Gomez, he seems particularly unwilling to dialogue with those who hold opposing viewpoints. This interview with a baptist theologian sums up the consequences of his theological understanding of homosexuality, according to his controversial book, “Building Bridges.”

-3-

I actually burned out on HGTV after Luke’s pregnancy. By the end of my third trimester with him, I was spending hours each day, counting the gym + nightly soaks in the bathtub, consuming endless reruns of House Hunters (International and local, thankyouverymuch) and Fixer Upper, and it actually made real life house hunting really, really painful. Forget granite countertops and his and hers sinks; how about a foundation that isn’t failing, an intact roof, and a clean bill of mold free health? This piece hilariously (and a little bit disturbingly) sums up what is so addictive and so destructive about this particular genre of reality tv.

-4-

My friend Emily Stimpson Chapman wrote a beautiful and hard and brutally-honest piece exploring her foray into the world of infertility. It’s actually the best thing I’ve ever read about the heartache of hearing “no” to the question of new life.

-5-

Guys, I know it’s nearing the season of spookiness and all-things-creepy, but everyone knows that actually, um, dabbling in the demonic is utterly and irrevocably opposed to faith in Jesus Christ, right? Right? Okay, well just in case there is any residual confusion over the matter, give this a look, and remember that just because something seems innocuous or fun or even “worth it” in terms of risk taken, doesn’t make it so. Stay far, far away from the occult, from Satan, and from all his empty works and promises.

-6-

This is what real power looks like. This woman’s story beggars belief and begs the question: “what grudges am I holding on to that I have been unwilling to release?” If she can forgive the infamous Dr. Mengele of Auschwitz, what in the (literal) hell is holding me back?

And on that mind blowing and uplifting note, I bid you the happiest weekend filled with restorative, leisurely activities and authentic worship. And many hours of consecutive, uninterrupted sleep.

Culture of Death, Evangelization, motherhood, pregnancy, Pro Life

An open letter to the Duchess of Cambridge on the announcement of her third pregnancy

September 5, 2017

Dear Kate,

(Can I call you that? I feel like I know you since I follow your fashion account on Twitter. Or, rather, the person who stalks the fashion rags and reposts effortlessly elegant shots of you in that stunning, understated classic signature style of yours, whether you’re caught in 3 inch heels standing on a tarmac in South Africa or kneeling to reprimand an errant 3 year old in a perfectly chic blazer. But, I digress, the point of this tangent being: I admire you to the point of familiarity.)

Maybe it’s because you’re an everygirl’s princess, a lot like your late mother in law. (And while I know you’re not technically a princess yet, it’s tempting to project my childhood Disney dreams onto your gorgeous, growing family.)

I know you face a lot of scrutiny in the press, whether it’s for looking “too perfect” or for being adorably “just like the rest of us” for daring to bare an hours-fresh postpartum bump in each of your previous hospital-step photo ops. It takes guts to face a global press corp at a mere 6 hours postpartum, let alone 6 weeks. And girl, if you want to get your hair blown out before appearing on the cover of every rag and tabloid in Great Britain, power to you.

The reality is, you’ve married onto the world stage by marrying into the royal family, and you seem to shoulder the mantel of responsibility with grace. That you’ve chosen to make mental health one of the most public focuses of your personal advocacy work speaks volumes about your character; it’s not always easy or even civil to discuss mental health and the lack of care for those who suffer mental illness, especially in the public arena. But you seem no stranger to criticism.

I know that pregnancy is an enormous sacrifice, and that each of your pregnancies have been complicated by the presence of Hyperemesis Gravidarum, a serious and debilitating complication that can result in hospitalization and real trauma to the mother’s body, mind, and spirit. I know there are those who have scoffed at you for subjecting yourself to another nine months of “torture” (because I’ve read the comments online) just for the sake of another little bundle of royal needs. One intrepid Twitter genius quipped “there goes the rainforest” in reaction to your joyous news, as if 3 children were some hideous burden to lay upon the shoulders of the environment. As if a human person could possibly be reduced to the sum of their projected carbon footprint. As if a family of 5 were a ghastly vestige of the past, best swept into the annuls of history as we move boldly forward in our “enlightened” view of the human person as nothing more than a collection of electrical impulses, nerves, and appetites for consumption.

But you seem to know better. While chasing around two little toddlers, you’ve probably recognized the infinite value and capacity for love and innovation contained within the spirit of a single human person. The truth that no matter how many times you open your heart up to another little soul, it is not only your body that expands to accommodate them.

It is no small thing to bring forth new life in a culture that seems to be deteriorating all around us, to whisper that humble and magnificent fiat with your very body. In a world of increasing strife and violence, it’s easy enough to give in to fear and uncertainty, perhaps choosing to play it safe or decrying the sensibility of bringing forth innocent children into a place that, frankly, we’ve made a mess of.

But you’re a mom. So you’ve had a peek behind the curtain. You know that these children of ours are worth it, and that the future belongs not to those of us who rule from on high with money, power, and prestige (though you surely posses all three) but that it actually rests securely in the hands of our little ones. Perhaps you’ve come to the same conclusion that I have: that the only real, lasting impact we stand to make on the world lies in the intellectual and moral formation of our sons and daughters, in instilling in them a love and appreciation for truth, goodness, and beauty. That all the strife and suffering that exists in this weary world of ours cannot possibly be eradicated in our lifetimes, but could perhaps be in theirs.

Isn’t that always the hope? And isn’t bringing another child into the world, not in spite of but precisely because of the grim circumstances of it all, the most profoundly hope-filled thing we can do?

I know you’re going to be under the microscope for the next 9 months, even more intensely than you normally are. And I know there will be discussions on your hairstyle, on how big or small or perfectly round or disappointingly flat your belly is. I know whether you choose to convalesce for 24 hours before stepping out for photos or appear bright eyed and blown-out a mere hours after delivery, you will be scrutinized and judged by a sometimes unfeeling public.

But let mine be one small voice among many offering you congratulations, prayers for health and comfort in the face of hardship, and sincere gratitude for the courageous – yep, courageous – act of bringing forth new life in a culture that despises the light, and in a world that prefers comfort to courage.

It is no small thing to bring a new source of light into a world that loves darkness.

(And P.s. idk where you do most of your maternity shopping, but Target’s got a killer new maternity jean that you might want to check out if you ever feel like slumming it, sartorially speaking.)

Yours sincerely,

An American mum

Abortion, Bioethics, Catholics Do What?, Culture of Death, euthanasia, Parenting, Pro Life

Eradicating people, not disease

August 16, 2017

Perhaps you’ve seen the headlines that Iceland is on track to “virtually eliminate Down Syndrome,” having achieved a close to 98% success rate in preventing DS fetuses from coming to term.

The energy and enthusiasm with which this is being reported belongs to a cancer-research breakthrough, not to what essentially amounts to a successfully-executed eugenics campaign. Make no mistake, advancements have not been made in ameliorating the negative effects of Trisomy 21 on human beings suffering from said condition, but rather, in the field of prenatal diagnosis and the dissemination of information to expectant women on the likelihood of their fetuses being “defective:”

“Since prenatal screening tests were introduced in Iceland in the early 2000s, the vast majority of women — close to 100 percent — who received a positive test for Down syndrome terminated their pregnancy.

While the tests are optional, the government states that all expectant mothers must be informed about availability of screening tests, which reveal the likelihood of a child being born with Down syndrome. Around 80 to 85 percent of pregnant women choose to take the prenatal screening test.”

Maybe Icelanders are just particularly harsh? I mean, they do have some long, dark winters up there. But wait, there’s more:

“Other countries aren’t lagging too far behind in Down syndrome termination rates. According to the most recent data available, the United States has an estimated termination rate for Down syndrome of 67 percent (1995-2011); in France it’s 77 percent (2015); and Denmark, 98 percent (2015). The law in Iceland permits abortion after 16 weeks if the fetus has a deformity — and Down syndrome is included in this category.”

Let’s explore an analogy here. Suppose we are able to craft foolproof, super-effective predictive prenatal testing that determines with near 100% accuracy whether or not your child will get cancer and whether that cancer will be a fatal, particularly virulent form that will end in certain death.

Perhaps they’ll survive infancy but succumb to leukemia in toddlerhood. Perhaps a sarcoma will claim them in the tween years. Maybe they’ll make it to their early 20s, but then carcinoma takes them down. Imagine, for a moment, the medical community rejoicing in this innovative predictive technique, exclaiming that now at last we have defeated the big C. Cancer-free fetuses can be virtually guaranteed, provided the little tykes still make good lifestyle choices and don’t smoke.

Do we rejoice? Has a disease truly been defeated, in this scenario? Are kids who are genetically doomed to cancer better off being aborted before their parents have a chance to bond with “defective” babies who will only end up breaking their hearts by dying young? Is the greater community served by not having to bear the brunt of their medical costs and the resource-draining care they will require?

It’s a little more shocking put in those terms, isn’t it?

We ought to be shocked. We ought to be mortally offended, in fact, by the suggestion that a nation claims to have nearly “eradicated Down Syndrome” when in fact they’ve just gotten really, really good at pushing prenatal testing and recommending selective termination of “undesirable” outcomes of conception.

Look, no parent gets any real choice in terms of how their kid turns out, health wise or otherwise.

Little Johnny may grow up to be a serial killer through no fault of his mother or father. Sarah might drop out of college and burn out on weed and work in an auto parts shop and get divorced at 29 and never buy a home. Isaac might win a Nobel Prize and negotiate lasting peace in the Middle East. Any given child might be a human being, in other words: wildly unpredictable and beyond the grasp of foolproof human manipulation.

And guess what? That’s the way it was designed.

Look how profoundly God’s first two children screwed things up. There is surely no clearer precedent for not being fully in control of one’s offspring’s destiny, from time immemorial.

And speaking of destiny and screwing up, who are we to say what “quality of life” really means?

Would a child destined for death by leukemia at age 7 be better off dead rather than being born only to suffer and die? Does a kid with DS have less inherent value than a typically-developing kid, or experience an impoverished version of reality simply because he has 3 chromosomes in a location where most of us have only two?

This is a dangerous path we’re treading down. Dangerous for what it signifies in terms of worth, value, and human rights, and dangerous for what it says about a society willing to blithely accept the lie that only certain “kinds” of human persons are valuable, are acceptable, are worth having around.

Look where that kind of thinking is getting us in our political and cultural landscape here at home in the US.

But, but, that’s totally different! Racism is a whole different disgusting animal apart from prenatal screening and selective termination. You can’t compare the two.

Can’t I? Isn’t there a common thread running through both philosophies, that certain people are less suited to live with the rest of us, that certain people are worth more or less than other types?

If we think that we can live in a civilized, post-racial society and at the same time celebrate the willful eradication of a certain “kind” of people, we are fooling ourselves.

Until we embrace the value of every human life: frail, fallible, weak, unwanted, unreliable and ultimately straight up mortal, same as the rest of us….we will continue to reap the whirlwind of violence and social unrest.

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