Snowflake Babies (part 2)

It’s a nice confirmation when someone probably wiser, and certainly more published, writes an article that confirms something you already wrote.  In my case, the issue was what to do with the “leftover” embryos in the fertility clinic freezers after the IVF process.  I wrote about snowflake babies some time ago because of a segment on The World Over on EWTN.

Much more eloquently, Gerard Nadal tackled the same issue in “The Catholic Case for Embryo Adoption.”

I understand the arguments against embryo adoption, but we aren’t talking about the choice to do the evil anymore; it’s done.  We’re talking about children’s lives.

I pray this conversation will go forward, both on IVF and embryo adoption, because we’ve ignored it for much too long.

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The book Planned Parenthood sued to keep off your desk

Well, it’s out, because Abby Johnson fought off the lawsuit from her former employer.

If you don’t remember, Abby Johnson was the director of a Texas Planned Parenthood abortion center.  One day, she was asked to assist with an abortion.  In spite of having worked for Planned Parenthood for years, she had never actually observed a “procedure.”  The day changed everything for her.

Read the first chapter of unPlanned here. 

(I will review the book as soon as my copy arrives and I get it read.)

unPlanned released today (Jan. 11) and is already shooting up the bestseller charts.  Jill Stanek, another convert out of the abortion industry, wrote on her blog that she loved the book.  And for the commenters under that blog post who thought we should look down our noses at converts out of the abortion industry instead of “treating murderers like celebrities”… there isn’t much to say beyond, “Wow.  You just don’t get it, do you?”

Speaking of unwelcoming, Johnson’s Episcopal parish, which was ok with her being the director of the local Planned Parenthood, is not so ok with her now vocally adovcating against abortion (the pastor’s statement to the Washington Times was something about having to minister to everyone, on either side of the issue, so you get the impression the official parish stance is “just don’t insist there’s truth”).  News is, Abby is in the RCIA progam, and she and her husband will be welcomed into the Catholic Church this Easter!

(I will note, Johnson is joining notable pro-life converts Randall Terry, Lila Rose (president of Live Action, famous for undercover video stings on PP), and others who finally looked at their various denominations and said, “What do you mean abortion isn’t clear-cut or isn’t that important?!  I don’t care what the denominational poll said, don’t you have the authority to teach?”  And found themselves, often against their previous prejudices, nudged towards the doors to the Catholic Church.)

So, Abby Johnson, congratulations on your bestseller, and, more importantly, welcome to the Catholic Church!  We are thrilled to have you and your family in communion with us, and we will pray for you.

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Conversion

If you are Catholic, hopefully, you noticed the Rite of Acceptance the weekend before Thanksgiving.

If you aren’t Catholic, the short summary: people who have been prayerfully discerning and learning in RCIA (the converts’ classes) are welcomed formally into the church as those travelling towards the sacraments of initiation.  (No, Catholics don’t do anything regarding conversion in a hurry!)  After months of classes and seeking, they are welcomed and recommended to the parish’s prayers… but they’re still waiting for full communion, or even designation as candidates for the sacraments of initiation.

My DH converted as an adult.  He found the wait rather frustrating.  He had read, argued, and prayed, and he was ready to be Catholic… but he had to wait.

The  Church, following the lead of the early church, mandates a period of formal declaration, instruction, and prayer before any convert is accepted.  (Occasional exceptions are made, but not as a matter of routine.)  We don’t do instant conversions.  God may know you’re converted, but the Church, which cannot read your mind, wants to see some measure of perseverance in the intention.

Furthermore, we do not view conversion as a complete renunciation of what went before (with possible exceptions for Wicca or worse).  No matter where you came from, you learned something.  My DH was non-denominational Christian.  He learned to love Jesus, he learned Scripture, he learned perseverance and searching for truth.  All of which brought him to the Catholic Church.  Thus, his conversion was not a renunciation of the community he had been raised in, but its fulfillment.  Not that my in-laws saw it quite that way, in spite of his efforts to explain it to them.

Perhaps I can understand their alarm, since they probably expected to be rejected as part of their son’s conversion.  I have seen and heard converts out of the Catholic Church behave quite differently from incoming converts, and they are generally applauded for it.  A not-very-Catholic acquaintance stood up at a Bible study and tearfully announced that Jesus had led her out of “that demon-led church” and brought her to true faith.  Everyone nodded and made appropriate frowns about the “demon-led church”.  Thanks, guys, nice to know what you think about my faith.

Not surprisingly, I was one of the few Catholics (practicing, at least) in that group.  “Confrontational” does not begin to describe the experience, although everyone insisted the group was “non-denominational”, which meant “any denomination, any belief, but not Catholic.”  I had lots of *interesting* discussions, and, after DH let it be known he was becoming Catholic, we had even more discussions with friends in the group about the disunity of Protestantism, authority, Scripture interpretation, history, the group’s acceptance of Protestants who didn’t agree with them on anything (inerrancy of Scripture, historical reality of Jesus, morality of homosexuality, and the ordination of women being some topics) but not Catholics (who agreed with the non-liberal Protestants on all those subjects), etc. … and then, years later, some friends who were among the most upset that DH had “gone papist” converted and are now Catholics of the Latin-only, really conservative type.  So, apparently, there was a reason for four years of not-always-comfortable fellowship in that group.

But converts are wonderful.

They see with fresh eyes everything that has become routine to us “cradle Catholics.”  They remind us how wonderful it is to have a Creed we recite every week, the Sacraments, and the Magisterium (the teaching authority of the Church, which prevents us from getting into all sorts of errors or reinventing the wheel arguments… I still wonder if a friend from our last non-denominational Bible study ever got straightened out on the Trinity after someone threw him for a loop by pointing out that “trinity” isn’t in the Bible.  Poor guy; none of the usual verses was convincing him anymore, and, “Stop it!  The bishops the apostles taught themselves all believed in the Trinity!” didn’t help, either, because he felt obliged to reject that argument as appealing to tradition or teaching authority.).  In spite of the sometimes awful music and forgettable architecture in many of the Catholic parishes I have known, mass is mass, the Church is beautiful, and they are amazing gifts from God, even when we forget that fact.

Converts remind us that following God is worth risking family relationships, worth ridicule, worth anything.

Speaking of new converts, Kassie at Secret Vatican Spy wrote a really touching post last week about going through the Rite of Acceptance.

And also speaking of “Dratted zealous converts!  Why didn’t I think of that?!”, Kassie has promised a conversion hit-list for your considered prayer and sacrifices.  My husband and I have often said, “Beck is right… now, if only he’d revert to Catholicism!”  Kassie isn’t just daydreaming, she’s actually organizing prayer on the subject.

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Snowflake Babies

You may have heard the term.  “Snowflake babies” was coined to describe the children who were adopted as embryos, the “leftovers” of their parents’ IVF treatments.  Their lucky siblings were injected into their mom’s womb; the luckiest actually survived to be born.  A few were fortunate enough to be adopted and brought to birth by adoptive parents.

And the other IVF orphans were left in the freezer, until some decision was reached on their fate.

I’m not interested in getting into the argument over IVF again.  BTDT, made a lot of people upset with me.  Today, I want to specifically talk about those children left in the freezer after their parents have decided they have given birth to all the children they want to give birth to.

Unfortunately, there’s usually still ”extra” children in the cryostorage at the IVF facility.  As long as their parents pay the fees, they remain in storage.  If the fees aren’t paid or the parents order it, the children will be discarded (some clinics and countries require that “extra” embryos be discarded after a set period of time).  It’s more of a “refusing to make a choice” kind of choice, though; in the freezers, these children remain in limbo, not dead, but not proceeding towards birth, either.  Several adoption agencies are now addressing the issue by facilitating adoptions of embryos: home studies, parental rights relinquishment, all the usual procedures followed in post-birth adoptions.  And the children get a chance to be born.

But is that moral?

The Catholic Church (and, I suspect, a number of the other pro-life denominations) is wrestling with the issue.  On the one hand, the marriage bond (and bed) is supposed to be between the husband and the wife, and all life coming from the union should be from them.  This is part of the objection to IVF and other invasive fertility procedures: the marital union is no longer the cause of the conception, the fertility doctors are.  On a recent episode of EWTN’s news show, The World Over, a guest stated that the moral thing to do would be to “let nature take its course” by taking the IVF orphans out of the freezer and allowing them to die if their parents refuse to take them.

I think you could make that argument for the banks of preserved sperm and eggs harvested for research, artificial insemination, and the like.

The problem with the IVF orphans, however, is that they are already human.  If you’re Catholic, we also believe that at the instant of conception (under whatever circumstances) the child received a soul.  Being conceived in a petri dish doesn’t make you a soulless non-human, just as being conceived in incest doesn’t change your soul.  The situation is entirely beneath the child’s dignity, but that does not mean that the child doesn’t have dignity.

The argument on TWO that night, and I’ve heard it before, is that implanting these children into the womb of someone not their biological mother would be improperly intimate or a violation of the exclusivity of marriage.  Which begs the question: so, are my children improperly intimate within our family?  My husband and I didn’t conceive them; they were all adopted.  I didn’t pay doctors to get involved to get a child, I paid social workers; is there a problem with my family, too?  People usually get flustered and insist that that isn’t what they meant.  Ok, then what do you mean?

A child conceived in rape is still human.  We don’t just leave them out to die when they’re born because of the issues of their conception.

A child conceived in a petri dish is still human.  Why would we ever say we should just let them die because of the issues of their conception?

A person in a coma or terminal illness may not be licitly deprived of food and water, as was done to Terri Schiavo (who wasn’t neither in a coma nor dying, anyways).  Why would we say that we should starve to death an orphan for the “illness” of being an orphan?

Contrary to the guest on TWO, embryo adoption is not going to be solely about saving the children.  He implied that maybe embryo adoption would be moral, as long as it was understood to be only about saving the child’s life.  That, however, would just be objectifying them further.  An adoption is a meshing and healing of needs: parents’ desire for a child, the child’s need for a family.

Any adopted child needs food, care, and shelter.  An IVF orphan is going to need much more specialized attention (i.e. a mother’s womb), but, essentially, what he or she needs is food, care, and shelter.  The difference, we argue, is not so fundamental as to legitimize the killing of the unborn while the born are protected.  The Catholic Church makes these arguments for unborn children who were conceived in their mothers’ womb, so why would we fail to make them for the sake of the unborn child who has never known the warmth of a mother’s womb?

The sin has been committed: these children were conceived by illicit means.  Hopefully, if their parents have come to understand the pro-life implications of their “extra” embryos in cryostorage, they will be open to trying to carry the rest of their children to term.  If not, of course there should be safeguards, as there are already in the adoption process, to prevent children being sold (in the case of IVF, there would be a temptation to make extra embryos to sell to offset the high costs of IVF), but the children should have an adoption arranged, not a passive execution by exposure and starvation.

We are past the point of condemning the action.  Now, we have to deal humanely and lovingly with these children in the freezers.

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Blessed are the poor?

Often, in an attempt to keep her interested, I hand Diva a copy of a daily devotional and tell her to pick a verse or prayer and copy it as her handwriting practice.  She dutifully trotted off with her books and came back with this, saying it was short, and she liked it, so she copied it three times:

“Blessed are you who are poor.”

Wait a minute.  Twenty minutes later, I think she was thoroughly tired of the subject.  The quotation, I began, was incomplete.  Matthew 5:3 says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”  Luke 6:20 says, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God,” but couches it within a series of seemingly material needs (poverty, hunger, sorrow) that definitely seem to be oriented towards a deeper spiritual meaning regarding those who have chosen poverty, hunger, or sorrow for the sake of the name of Christ.

Poverty is not, in and of itself, a virtue.  Neither is wealth necessarily a sin.

Sadly, many Christians today also need to be reminded that poverty is not necessarily a sign of sin (laziness, gambling, etc.), and riches are not necessarily proof that your behavior has God’s stamp of approval.

The Gospel last weekend was the story of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31).  Lazarus is absolutely destitute, starving and sick.  The rich man eats lavishly, dresses opulently, and lives in luxury.  Lazarus dies and is taken to the bosom of Abraham, the rich man dies and winds up in firey torments.  Our priest explained that the rich man’s condemnation was not on account of his riches, it was his disregard for the needs of his neighbor (who, I would point out, he apparently knew by name, as he asks Abraham to, “send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue,” so the rich man was not merely ignorant of Lazarus’ need, he was actively choosing to do nothing to help).

Our priest also told the story of St. X, an ascetic monk (whose name I have forgotten, unfortunately; enlighten me if you know!), who was asked to name the holiest person of his day.  Quickly, he answered, “The bishop of Alexandria.”  The questioner, taken aback, demanded to know how the monk could say that, when the bishop lived in a palace and dealt daily with the riches and power of his office.  Shouldn’t the monk instead have suggested his fellow monk, who had given up everything for God, owning only his robe and a cup?

“No,” answered the future saint, “I know that the bishop of Alexandria is a humble man, always generous with his wealth and concerned for the good of others.  That monk who lives next to me, yes, has only his cup, but he’ll kill you if you try to take his little cup from him!”  Clearly, the bishop was not attached to the riches that went with his office, but the other monk was materialistic about his meager posession.

To quote an old Christian rock song (“Cash Cow” by Steve Taylor- great video!), “From the trailer of the fry chef to the palace of the sheik, the cash cow lurks!… I, too, was hypnotized by those big brown eyes, the last time I uttered those three little words, ‘I deserve better!’ “  The Catechism of the Catholic Church said about the same thing, a little less colorfully: it’s about humility, it’s about acknowledging our spiritual weakness and need for God, not just our lack or posession of material goods.

The redeeming point of the discussion with Diva came when I read the reflection under the quote, taken from Blessed Guerric of Igny (died 1157), an abbot, writing to instruct his monks:

Truly blessed poverty of spirit is to be found more in humility of heart than in a mere privation of everyday posessions, and it consists more in the renunciation of pride than in a mere contempt for property.  Sometimes it may be useful to own things, but it is never anything but mortally dangerous to hold on to pride.  The devil owns nothing in this world, nor does he desire to own anything; it is pride and pride alone that damns him…

Let us therefore rejoice, brethren, that we are poor for Christ, but let us at the same time take care that we are also humble with Christ.

I’m suddenly struck by the thought of what we give up for the sake of God… but then begrudge or complain about.  I do things for God, because I believe He called me to it, but, so often, I fail to be joyful and patient in it.  I’ve said, “I deserve better!” a number of times today, often in connection with wanting five minutes of peace to read a non-talking-animal book, wishing I didn’t have to clean off the toilet seat and hang the towel back up every single time, and wondering when what I say and do is actually going to result in some progress (“Say please.  Don’t hit your sister.  Please don’t leave books on the floor.  Do not whine when I say it’s time for math.  What does the U say?  No, not ‘eh’.”).

Dutiful and efficient are relatively easy… joyful and humble is a whole lot harder.

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Spiritual Inheritance

Last year, in Seton’s religion book for second graders, I came across a page that bothered me.

Sort of amusing, too, in a grim, “I am so sick of being smacked across the face for no good reason from people who should know better… and I can’t believe they didn’t read what they’d written before they chose that picture!”

While discussing the fourth commandment (“Honor your father and your mother.”), the book explained to children that they owe their parents obedience because the parents gave the child life.  They participated with God to create a new and unique human being.

The picture at the bottom?  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph at home, working at their respective tasks.

Um, guys?  Joseph had nothing to do with Jesus’ conception, remember?  Although Joseph protected Jesus and provided for him, he did not actually participate in giving him life.  So, by what they wrote, Jesus didn’t have to obey Joseph.

But the Bible said Jesus did obey Joseph.   Hmm.  I’m thinking the Bible is telling us there’s more to this parenting/obedience thing than blood ties.  And, although we often use the work-around of calling St. Joseph Jesus’ “foster father”, it’s always been a bit awkward.  We’re trying to acknowledge that Jesus’ father is God, but we can’t quite give St. Joseph the honor he deserves at the same time.

I re-explained the point, after reading the page through and asking my second grader to think about, “Ok, what’s wrong with this picture?”  Parents have authority because they are parents.  They are appointed by God to care for their children.  All parents’ authority is on loan from, and to point their child towards, God.  When parents seriously abuse that authority, that’s a separate discussion of what happens next (and a poor father figure often hampers his children’s relationship with God the Father), but, generally, parents are obeyed because of their position, and not just their blood relationship to the child, even though the two normally go together.

If you saw World Over tonight, you might have noticed what brought the subject up.  Dr. Robert George was discussing Proposition 8 in California (the gay “marriage” ban) and made the unfortunate comment about “all adoptees” needing to connect with their biological parents, thus proving why we need to defend traditional marriage.

I will not concede that an adopted child is the same as a child conceived via IVF with a father named “Donor”.  One is a loving response to an unfortunate situation (birthparents can’t raise the child, adoptive parents would love to).  The other is a child born from manipulation and commodification, and often raised without a father because his mother chose it that way.  Lacking a father figure (and even if his mom insists fathers are an unnecessary social construct), the child naturally seeks to fill that hole, and that doesn’t always go well.  (President Obama has famously chosen some rather questionable men to fill the hole left by his absent father.  The new study out on children conceived by donor sperm showed rates of drug abuse and crime more than doubled.)

A child who was adopted, living with a set of married parents, doesn’t have that issue.  He has a mom and a dad.  Wondering about birthparents is common, but there is no reason to interpret that to mean that all adoptees are incomplete until they’ve met their “real”, i.e. birth, parents.  Largely, I suspect this is a backlash to the norm of completely closed adoptions that existed several decades ago.  A number of the “experts” leading the noisy charge to proclaim that all adoptees must want to reunite with their birthparents (and if they don’t, they’re told they’re in denial) are at least partially projecting their own frustrations with closed adoptions or the shock of finding out as an adult that they were adopted.  The high emotions garner a lot of media attention and squash discussion. 

Somewhere between universal mandatory reunions and completely hiding the adoption to help the child fit in, there is a healthier middle ground.

(And I have to say I understand, to some extent, the old advice to keep the adoption secret, pretend that the mom was pregnant, etc. so the child could fit in.  Society, in case you’ve missed it, associates adoptees with psychological scarring and violent tendencies.  Any crime or sad story that fits that story line will be trumpeted: “Adult adoptee murders parents,” “Adoptive parents send back uncontrollable child”, etc.  You’re never going to see the headline, “Happy adult adoptee has normal life, family.”  One book I read commented on how the Chinese people the author interacted with in China were so amazed that her daughter (adopted from China as an infant) was so polite, sweet, and, well, normal; aren’t adoptees supposed to be walking disasters?  Faced with that awful preconception, what parent wouldn’t want to protect their child?  Some were willing to lie to do it.  Some never told their children the truth, and they only found out as adults.)

There is a materialistic line of thinking that says that biology is everything.  Your DNA, they say, sets your personality, temperament, intelligence, health, everything.  You can change almost none of it, the theory claims; one psycholgist rolled his eyes at me and informed me that 95% of my ADHD child’s behavior was set by DNA and unchangeable.  (And we’ve studied the effects of DNA vs. environment how, exactly, since the people who provided your DNA are almost always the key creators of your environment?)

As Christians, we don’t believe in materialism, remember?  We believe that each person is an individual, loved and willed into existence by God, and the spiritual bonds are the strongest.  Sometimes those spiritual bonds are reinforcing blood bonds, and sometimes not.

We call priests “father” because they are fulfilling the duty of passing on the spiritual inheritence to the next generation (and reinforcing it in the older ones).  Perhaps Jesus told his disciples, “Call no man your father,” because he had dealt with Jews who claimed blood descent from Abraham, but lacked his faith; they’d lost the important part of the inheritance, the spiritual bond.

 St. Joseph was Jesus’ father not by blood, but because he loved, protected, and provided for him as a child.  Joseph would have been the one to present his son as an adult male member of the synagoge for the first time.  Joseph taught Jesus his trade, Bible stories, and morality.

In the perfect family, the Holy Family, the father-son bond was not blood, but a spiritual inheritance.

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Speaker Pelosi, Leather, and Some Salt

A while back, I posted on Speaker Pelosi’s fondness for putting her foot in her mouth.

Apparently, she has dug herself so far into a hole that she is not only chewing her shoe leather more and more regularly, she is trying to make it look like she likes the leather, and salting it with some false holiness makes it really, really nutritious, so why isn’t everyone emulating her?

In case you missed it:

*sigh*

Those of you wondering if catechesis in the Catholic Church in America was really as bad as some people say, well, here’s your proof that yes, it was.  I’d like to say she’s alone on this one, but I know that she’s definitely not.  Plenty of people, insisting that they are good Catholics, supported Obama, claiming that it was more pro-life to follow his policies than to be “only” anti-abortion (blithely ignoring the fact that the pro-life movement is heavily involved in ongoing support for women who choose life in a difficult pregnancy, whether they walked away from an abortion appointment or showed up first at a crisis pregnancy center looking for help).  I saw the Obama/Biden stickers on cars at church, I saw people wearing the t-shirts and loudly talking up Obama in the hallways.  And I haven’t heard abortion mentioned, much less condemned, from the pulpit at a Sunday mass for years.

You just have to love the holier-than-thou audacity of her snide comeback: “Whenever it was [that 'the Word' became flesh and had rights], we bow our heads when we talk about it in church, and that’s where I’d like to talk about that.”  As if the reporter was being horribly crass and disrespectful of Jesus by asking for an answer from the Speaker about whether she thinks “the Word was made flesh” at the Annunciation or the Nativity.  While I’d love to be able to believe that Speaker Pelosi is so respectful and traditional that she bows her head whenever anyone speaks of Jesus (a Name she notably failed to mention in all her random ramblings about the beauty of the Word), I really don’t think she’s that pious.

Maybe she bows her head at Jesus’ name.  She obviously enjoys calling publicly on saints to help pass pro-abortion, rationing-riddled health care bills that will hasten the deaths of millions.  She pretends to herself (on national TV, no less) that she is a well-studied theologian on the issue of abortion…

As one commenter on Free Republic said, “She and the USCCB deserve each other.”  All too true, but we’re all stuck with her, and, unless you have a particularly brave, orthodox bishop, all Catholics in the U.S. are stuck with what comes out of the USCCB bureaucracy, unfortunately.  (Including a distinct reluctance to call Catholic politicians to task for grossly misrepresenting Catholic teaching and/or promoting abortion and other moral evils.)

LifeNews concluded their reporting on the incident with a nice little summary of “good Catholic grandma” Pelosi’s gross theological missteps.

Is it November yet?

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Homeschool Conference 2010: Prof. Joseph Pearce (#1)

Yes, I’m ignoring politics for… well, for a while.  Different day, same junk.  We’ll see how the November mid-term elections go… not that I’m sure that’ll fix everything, or even most things, because we usually get the government we deserve.

Prof. Joseph Pearce, of Ave Maria University in Florida, talked on “The Quest for Shakespeare.”  (Yes, he has a book out: The Quest for Shakespeare and his new, follow up, Through Shakespeare’s Eyes, which analyzes the plays for Catholic markers and trends.)

Of course, we all grew up with the, “Gee, we don’t know much about him, Shakespeare could’ve been…” and then the teacher filled in with the latest trendy guesswork.

Pearce’s point is that of course we don’t know too much about Shakespeare: being a Catholic was a crime during his lifetime.  You don’t exactly leave a huge papertrail detailing your Catholicism in those circumstances.  But a few clues creep through.

(First, some terminology.  Conformists were Catholics who grudgingly attended Anglican services, largely to avoid the heavy fines that were levied on Catholics.  Papists were outwardly conformed to the Anglican church, but also secretly went to Catholic mass when they could.  Recusants were devout and defiant Catholics who refused to go to Anglican services and, consequently, paid the fines.  Obviously, although all are Catholics, the recusants were the most likely to still be Catholic after a generation or two.  The conformists and papists generally compromised enough that their children and grandchildren failed to understand the gravity of the argument, comfortably fitting into the state-approved Anglican church.)

So, as a Catholic, you could be fairly unobtrusive… unless you were a recusant, in which case there would be records of fines, possibly imprisonment, etc.  If the first fine failed to “convince” you of the wonderfulness of the newly-created Anglican church, there would be many records of fines and other punishments.

William Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden, came from a family of staunch recusants.  Several of his uncles were executed for their stubborn Catholicism.

William’s father had an extended political career; for a time, he was the mayor of Stratford on Avon, a fact that is often cited as proof that John Shakespeare must not have been a Catholic.  However, most of the town council of Stratford were recusants; they’re on the list of people being fined for recusancy.  Eventually, after the continued resistance of the recusants, Queen Elizabeth made the oath of allegiance to the queen as the head of the Anglican church mandatory… and John Shakespeare promptly disappears from politics.

Furthermore, John Shakespeare’s “Spiritual Last Will and Testament” was found hidden in the rafters of his house in Stratford.  This document was nearly identical to similar items found in Spain, Mexico, and Switzerland.  The Wills, however, seem to have originated with the Bishop of Milan, (St.) Charles Borromeo, who issued them during a plague in Milan.  Due to the overwhelming number of deaths, many people were unable to have a priest to attend to them before death, so the Will was a sort of “confession by desire” statement for those who would die without the comfort of having a priest to hear their confession and bless them.  Many of the English priests studying in Rome passed through Milan on their way back to England, staying some time with Bishop Borromeo.  A letter from secret priests in England requested “more testaments”, which were “in huge demand,” which, from the numbers requested, seems to refer to these “Spiritual Last Wills” and not a Bible (which would have been prohibitively expensive and bulky to smuggle into England in the numbers requested).

In 1592, John Shakespeare was again fined as a recusant.  William Shakespeare’s daughter, Susanna, would also be fined as a recusant.

Most of us heard the story about Shakespeare leaving Stratford in a bit of a hurry.  There was some rumor about problems with the local lord, maybe poaching, or possibly something about a critical poem.  Sir Richard Lucy, the local lord, was also the leader of the anti-Catholic hunting squad.  So, there is some hint that the poem criticized Sir Lucy, who was the anti-Catholic lord of a stubbornly Catholic area… which resulted in a prompt exit to the anonymity of London for young William.

Recently, a German researcher found three or four cryptic signatures at the English college in Rome’s guest book.  (England was an anti-Catholic police state; even the guest book could be used as a way to catch Catholics, hence, most signatures were not real names.)  The researcher thinks the pseudonyms were Shakespeare’s, and they appear in the years immediately before and after his years of fame in England.  (Last year, Prof. Pearce also pointed out some details that would seem to support the idea that Shakespeare went to college, first in London, then abroad, as laws against Catholics attending college were tightened, which would also explain some of the arguments about, “Will Shakespeare didn’t go to college and didn’t travel, so he must’ve just been a front for someone else who really wrote this stuff.”)

Another piece of circumstantial evidence (remember, outright evidence could be deadly), is the lack of a funeral eulogy for Queen Elizabeth.  All the “big names” in English literature wrote one… but not Shakespeare, who was probably the biggest name in theater at the time.  Why not, unless it was that Shakespeare was Catholic, and, thus, not particularly hoodwinked by the “Good Queen Bess” routine?

At the end of his career, Shakespeare returns home to Stratford on Avon, but buys a house in London: the Blackfriars’ Gatehouse.  (Yes, the name is linked to one of the theater companies he worked with, as well.)  Shakespeare already owned the second largest house in Stratford; why invest in real estate now?  For starters, the blackfriars were the Dominicans, wiped out by Henry VIII.  The gatehouse of their razed monastery had been kept in Catholic hands since the order was destroyed in England.  It was known to be a hub of underground Catholic activities in London.  Furthermore, the sale contract stipulates that the person living in the gatehouse must stay; John Robinson was known to be active in the Catholic underground, and his brother was then studying in Rome for the priesthood.

Finally, Shakespeare’s will named his daughter Susanna as executrix.  Susanna was a recusant; her sister Judith had married a Protestant.  The will’s beneficiaries were primarily Catholics.  Again, it doesn’t state on the will, “I, William Shakespeare, am a Catholic and have always remained so…” but it might as well.

Apparently, it was enough to convince some.  Fifty years after Shakespeare’s death, an Anglican vicar disparaged and dismissed him, saying Shakespeare “died a papist.”

Of course, Prof. Pearce has two books on the subject, which I will also point out are probably much more detailed than my notes from his one hour talk.  And, as always, the conference talks are available from the IHM Conference website.

In London, Shakespeare was sued.  His co-defendants were all recusants.  His accusers were anti-Catholic hunters who raided houses to catch Catholics.

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Homeschool Conference 2010: Dr. Guarendi #1

Dr. Ray Guarendi is a psychologist dealing with troubled children and families.  He has ten children, several with special needs and/or learning disabilities, all adopted and all homeschooled.  And he’s absolutely riotously funny.

“Yep.  I’m a great homeschooling dad.  I’m not bragging, but I’m a huge help.  I mean, seven years ago, one of the kids knocked a book on the floor, and I looked at it and said, ‘Uh, honey?  Do you want me to pick that up?’ “

Dr. Ray’s first talk at the conference was called “Why be Catholic?”  Raised Catholic, he had drifted away from his faith as a young adult, and, since his wife was Protestant, ended up very active in a Protestant denomination.  This was the story of how he left and how he came back to the Catholic Church.

First he contrasted old and new atheists.  The old-fashioned atheists says there is no God, therefore, I can do what I want.  The logic follows, but the intial premise is wrong.  The new atheist says, “There is a God, and He thinks just like me.”  The new one is much more dangerous, and might be the #1 religion in America, frankly.

Anyways, after becoming very active in his wife’s denomination, Dr. Ray started to feel that he had some questions that weren’t being answered.  The number one question, finally, was which system (Catholic or Protestant) is consistent within itself?  If the system contradicts itself, it’s eliminated as truth.

Looking for answers, Dr. Ray asked his pastor and some of the more experienced Christians his questions.  If the Bible and the Holy Spirit will lead us to all truth, as they taught, then how did we wind up with more than 30,000 Christian denominations?  What happens when the “Holy Spirit” leads people to different conclusions?  (Abortion, divorce/remarriage, etc.)

The answer: “Ray, you’re being unfair.  We agree on the basics.”

(And this is where he sidetracked into an explanation of how being a philosophy minor can permanently mess up your brain and your life.  He described sitting in class, unsure if the professor was really there and fighting the urge to go slug him to find out…  Anyways, he brought up the problem of tautologies, a proposition that’s true in itself and unarguable.  And, so, back to the discussion…)

Dr. Ray: “But what are the basics?”

Pastor: “The things we agree on.”

Dr. Ray: “Ok, so why do we agree on them?”

Pastor: “Because they’re the basics.”

*sigh* Ok, that didn’t help him, so, moving on…  Dr. Ray pointed out that there are tons of ex-Catholics in Protestant churches bad-mouthing Catholicism.  Most of them say they know all about Catholicism, but are actually, frankly, completely clueless.  (I would hold up an aquaintance and a close relation as excellent examples of this.)  Plus, ex-Catholics, Dr. Ray pointed out, are about as reliable a witness as ex-spouses.  Would you really want a potential employer surveying your ex-spouse and the neighbor who hates you as job references?  Of course not: it wouldn’t be a fair picture.

Dr. Ray started looking for a fairer picture.  And some answers.

Next question to the pastor: you teach once-saved-always-saved, but when someone botches it, you say, “Well, you weren’t really saved when you prayed the prayer because you must not have meant it.”  But you told me I was saved, you quoted verses to me to prove I was saved, I lived under the assumption that I really meant it… and now you inform me that I was never saved at all?  Then who is saved?  What kind of assurance is that?!?  (I have a friend who, after three or four “praying the prayer” events up through her teens, just sort of buried the question, because nobody could answer it, and who wants to fear for your salvation all the time?  Eventually, she became Catholic.)

It gets worse.  Eventually, Dr. Ray pointed out, if you try to defend something logically indefensible, you sound stupid!  (I could apply this to a few of the other speakers at the conference who will not make the summaries.)

The last straw was somewhere about the time Dr. Ray tried to argue Early Church Fathers with the pastor.  “The Early Church Fathers learned from the apostles and said this.  Ok, Peter was with Jesus himself for years.  If Peter was here and you could ask him, would he say to baptize infants?  What would he teach about the Lord’s Supper?  Would you believe him?”

The pastor said she’d believe Peter if what he said accords with Scripture.  Huh?  But this was one of the guys who wrote Scripture and orally passed on the Gospels…

Dr. Ray said he finally got to the point where he was standing in his kitchen telling his wife he wasn’t sure if he could be  a Christian anymore.  It didn’t make any sense.  He couldn’t logically hold the contradictions together anymore.

Finally, he decided that he needed to go to the best witnesses.  When you hear something weird about someone, you go to the person, you go to the people who heard him.  With Christianity, that means the apostles who heard Jesus and the people they directly taught.

“Have nothing to do with the heretics, because they do not confess Jesus’ body and blood in the bread and wine.”  – Ignatius, made a bishop by the apostle John

The Early Church Fathers taught infant baptism, that contraception was morally wrong, the bishop of Rome was to be respected and obeyed, etc.  Presenting what he was reading to his pastor and others, the response was, “So?  They could be wrong.”  But these are the people who gave us the idea of the Trinity, they were the witnesses to the Resurrection.  If you don’t trust their testimony on contraception and infant baptism, then why believe them on anything?

It’s sort of like, Dr. Ray went on, the people who want to say, “Jesus was just a good moral teacher; that God stuff was added later by his apostles.”  … but you believe that the teachings are authentic, so are the apostles reliable witnesses or not?  You can’t have it both ways.

As they understood Dr. Ray was considering returning to Catholicism, people countered with the “scandal” of transsubstantiation.  Dr. Ray countered with the example of an ordinary quarter.  Science tells us that that quarter is 99.999% space; we perceive a solid object because of all those electrons going the speed of light around closely packed atoms.  But your senses tell you that the quarter isn’t moving and it’s solid.  Are you so confident that your senses see everything in the host that’s really there?  (St. Thomas Aquinas talked about the “accidents” our senses perceive and the reality of what is there.)

We believe in the scandal of the Incarnation (the God of the Universe was a baby, leaking out of every available orifice… not exactly awe-inspiring, at first glance).  So why not the Eucharist?

So, to finish an already long and rambling story, Dr. Ray came back to the Catholic Church and his family converted.

He closed with one final topic of conflict.  Until 1930 all Christians (except for a few way-out-there fringes) condemned contraception as evil.  In 1930, the Anglicans declared that contraception was morally licit, under certain restrictions that were rapidly ignored.

Did the Holy Spirit change His mind?

In 1968, the Pope called a council of twenty-three experts in various fields to advise him on the question of contraception.  The council overwhelmingly (19-4) told the Pope to allow contraception, that the prohibition was outdated, people were overrunning the planet, etc.

After a break for prayer and consideration, the Pope came back in and thanked the council for their time, but that he was rejecting their advice, since we have no power to tell God He’s wrong by preventing conception where He has caused it.

The critics rolled their eyes and said, “See?  That’s what you get with some old, celibate guy in charge…”

Years later, scientists discovered that oral contraceptives are frequently not contraceptive, but actually cause an abortion of an already conceived child.  Other forms of contraceptives can also be abortifacient.  By that time, most people were so addicted to the convenience of contraceptives, they didn’t want to hear it.

God had protected the Catholic Church, almost completely alone, from condoning the chemical Russian Roulette of contraceptives and encouraging the murders of untold millions of children.

Which is exactly what the Church teaches about itself: that God will protect the pope from teaching error in matters of faith and morals.

(Get tapes at the IHM Conference website.  Dr. Ray is so much better than my summary!)

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Mary, Full of Life

I saw this lovely ad in a LifeNews newsletter today.  It’s a simple series of photos of a statue of Mary, very pregnant, with a prayer/reflection underneath.  It’s at Mary, Full of Life.  I’ll have a button up in the sidebar in a bit.

Don’t forget to participate in your local 40 Days for Life!

(Photo used by permission of copyright holder.  Please do not copy.  Do what I neglected to do: ask through the contact info at the website!)

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