Pro-life group overwhelmed at abortion clinic

Maybe 'overwhelmed' isn't the right word. They held their own. I know some of these guys in the group reciting the Rosary -- Companions of the Cross. And the intrepid Monica Miller in the white coat in front. But they are soon nearly drowned out by the obscenities and shouts of wymyn representing the Culture of Death, with signs that proclaiming their message: keep baby-killing safe, affordable, and legal. (Safe?? For whom, the baby??) I can't help but admire the fortitude of those who continue to pray amidst the din and babble of hell, bearing witness to the truth about life, death, and abortion, and to the fact that the battle involves the unseen world of powers and principalities.

One of those present told me that he eventually found himself in a meaningful conversation with some in the pro-abort crowd. May the Lord bless that and such conversations and pro-lifers such as these to bring illumination to hearts darkened by a society now fallen under the shadows of the Culture of Death.

I was told that pro-aborts have rarely turned up at abortion clinics like this in the past. Word is that the election of President Trump seems to have galvanized them by a real fear that wymyn's right to have their babies killed may actually be in jeopardy.

Here are the published remarks below the video, from Feb. 11, 2017:

If there ever was a video that captures the difference between those who support the killing of the unborn and those who support the sanctity of human life-- well-- here's one. Demonstrators in support of abortion at this ProtestPP (see: www.protestpp.com) demonstration in Detroit, Feb. 11, 2017 are obnoxious, vulgar, obscene and rude-- indeed they acted like bullies toward those with whom they disagree-- namely the pro-lifers assembled calling for the defunding of Planned Parenthood. Notice the "F" word shouted out by abortion supporters in an attempt to drown out the pro-lifers peacefully praying. Surely God ​​still heard these prayers that no amount of noise and vulgarities could ever drown out.

For more information, see the account by Monica Miller at Citizens for a Pro-life Society

Michael Matt: it's not 'the Donald,' stupid; it's his 13 conservative Catholic advisors

In case you ever thought Planned Parenthood was innocent

The first video ["Planned Parenthood and Race"] shows Planned Parenthood representatives accepting donations from a man who says he wants his donations earmarked for the African American abortions because there are too many blacks in the country. The Planned Parenthood reps willingly go along with the caller, insisting that they'll comply with the caller's request, because they'll happily take the money regardless of why anyone donates.

The second video (below) is a montage of outright lies, fabrications, abuse on the part of Planned Parenthood in some case assisting clients involved in sex trafficking, sometimes involving minors. Sickening.

Fr. Perrone on the commodification of human beings in porn and abortion, as reflected in the McDonaldization of death

Fr. Eduard Perrone, "A Pastor's Descant" [temporary link] (Assumption Grotto News, January 31, 2016):

Funeral customs are fast a-changing in our time. Speaking recently with a local funeral director, I was shocked to learn about the new thinking of how we bid adieux to the dead, viz. with increased indifference and quick dismissal. It’s so very inconvenient to have someone’s death interfere with whatever one happens to be busy about. The old obsequies of making visits to the funeral home to “pay one’s respects,” of comforting the mourners, of praying for the happy repose of the departed, of taking time off from other demanding necessities in order to perform these corporal works of mercy–all that is fast vanishing from American life. In its place, according to my funeral director friend, is something like this. No funeral home visitation; no flowers or Mass offerings; the quickview scan of the online bio of the deceased with its ready-at-hand link to register a brief word of sympathy; cremation for the corpse; and, often, no funeral service or requiem Mass. Moreover, the strictly forbidden retention of the deceased’s cremains or, worse, their scattering to the four winds, is becoming more prevalent. In short, we’re making rapid disposal of the dead, just as we had avoided contact with them as living persons in their last years of life, allowing them to rot in a nursing home or hospice facility. (Even that fate is now become accounted as fortunate since the administration of painkilling drugs in high doses can speed along the death processes so as to avoid all the inconveniences of what we had been accustomed to call one’s “final illness.”)  

What’s caused these new customs, these new ways of thinking about the dead and the process of dying? For one thing, we’re all on life’s fast track. We have now no time to be bothered by the death (or even the life) of anybody else when we’re so busy getting done whatever we must do–or even–whatever we think advantageous to ourselves–even our own pleasures and idle leisure. And what’s behind that selfish preoccupation? A number of things. The indoctrination of Selfism has long been forming our attitudes, succeeded to convince us that only the Great I am worthy of myself, my time, my deeds; only my goals are important; only what I want–morally good or bad–is what I must have; and whatever may interfere with these ‘goals’–God and religion included–must be set aside. And how did we arrive at this?  

Among the contributing causes to this attitude and way of living is the ever increasing use of porn which reduces the human person to so many body parts for exploitation and titillation of the senses. The fact that the “models” who so shamelessly expose themselves for public viewing are real people with minds and consciences, with souls that have human feelings–these facts have been put out of mind with porn use. Other people are toys. They can be bought, used, abused and are disposable. This contributes to estimate that the bodies of the deceased are as so much useless trash. 

Another thing that has shaped our thinking about the body is our relative unconcern over the hideousness of crushing and dismembering babies in the womb. Killing babies or–worse yet–selling its surviving parts as ‘spares’ for the living or as ingredients for cosmetics–is regarded as a social good. But it’s an old heresy which regards the human body this way where it was said that only a person’s spirit, (soul) counts. The body is unimportant. This specious premise, which at first glance may seem an ascetical, spiritual perspective, is in fact a way of so denigrating the body as to make utilitarian use of it without a care to any moral considerations of it or even to consider the meaning of the human person as a unity, a totality, of spirit and body.  

Our world is changing fast, and with it our thinking about who (or what) we are. Necessarily we will think about God and the Catholic faith differently (and not for the better). We are transhumanizing, becoming something else. Monsters, I would say, caricatures of what we were made to be–the image of God–and of what we were privileged to become as Christians–children of God and Christs-in-miniature.  While we may not be able at large to stop these horrible denigrating ways of inhumanity, we can retain the consciousness of our human dignity and our Christian vocation to holiness and refuse to go with the flow. Keeping ourselves unsullied by all the filth this fallen world offers and by the devout practice of the Catholic life is a goal within the reach of all of us. 

Fr. Perrone

Secularism's guilty compassion and resentful brutality

The great nineteenth-century Spanish Catholic political thinker, Juan Donosco Cortes, addressing the issue of capital punishment in his Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism, writes:

Governments seem to be endowed with an unerring instinct that teaches them that they can only be just or strong in the name of God. Thus it happens that whenever they commence to secularize, that is to say, to separate themselves from God, they always begin to relax the severity of penalties, as if conscious that their right was weakened. The loose modern theories regarding criminal law are contemporaneous with the decadence of religion, and they have prevailed in the code whenever the complete secularization of political power was established....

"Those who have made the world believe that this earth can be converted into a paradise, have not more readily made it believe it ought to be a paradise where blood is never shed. The end is not in the illusion, but in the very day and hour that this fallacy is everywhere accepted: blood will then gush from the rocks, and the earth will become a hell. Man cannot aspire to an impossible felicity in this obscure valley of our dark pilgrimage without losing the little happiness he already possesses."

Eleven-minute rant on everything wonderful about the "new world order"

This is tongue-in-cheek, obviously, but pretty funny (or sad, or awful, or riling) -- a rapid-fire litany of the "successes" achieved by the enlightened ruling elites over the last fifty years or so:


Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would just say, as he did several times before he died: all this is simply what happens when men have forgotten God.

"Nazi 'unworthy of life' doctrine driving abortions in the U.S.?"

Michael Haverluck, "Nazi 'unworthy of life' doctrine driving abortions in the U.S.?" (One News Now, May 8, 2014):

A Catholic theologian who is considered one of America's leading public intellectuals says the abortion holocaust in his country can trace its roots to the murderous, life-denying ideology of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

During his keynote speech at the International Pro-Life Conference in Rome Saturday, U.S. commentator and bestselling author George Weigel reminded the world that its embrace of abortion is rooted in the exact doctrine that propagated and "justified" the horrific slaughter of tens of millions under Nazism and Stalinism in the 20th Century.

One correspondent asks whether Mr. Weigel isn't referring to the idea of eugenics espoused by Margret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood. She notes that Margaret Sanger was not only one of Hitler's inspirations, she also founded the organization which would later become Planned Parenthood. She proposed in Birth Control Review, April 1932 in A Plan for Peace:

"...to keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feeble minded, idiots, morons, insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes and others in this class barred by the immigration laws of 1924...to apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of the population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring...to give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization...to apportion farm lands and homesteads for those segregated persons where they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives."

The correspondent further notes that Sanger lists further candidates for this type of treatment and then goes on to celebrate that "having corralled this enormous part of our population and placed it on a basis of health instead of punishment, it is safe to say that fifteen or twenty millions of our population would then be organized into soldiers of defense--defending the unborn against their own disabilities."

While one could argue that there is a difference between the "unfit" and those imprisoned in Nazi death camps, the difference is negligible and the logic behind disposing of them "for the good of the race" is identical.

[Hat tip to C. G.-Z. and M.]

Popular suicide spots in Japan

Larissa Macfarquhar, "Last Call" (The New Yorker, June 24, 2013) - a Buddhist monk confronts Japan's suicide culture:

From time to time, Ittetsu Nemoto gets a group of suicidal people together to visit popular suicide spots, of which there are many in Japan. The best known is Aokigahara forest, the Sea of Trees, at the foot of Mt. Fuji. The forest became associated with suicide in the nineteen-sixties, after the publication of two novels by Seicho Matsumoto, and even more so after Wataru Tsurumi’s 1993 “Complete Manual of Suicide” declared it the perfect place to die. Because its trees grow so closely together that they block the wind, and because there are few animals or birds, the forest is unusually quiet. The Sea of Trees is large, fourteen square miles, so bodies can lie undiscovered for months; tourists photograph corpses and scavenge for abandoned possessions. Another common suicide destination is Tojinbo cliff, which overlooks the Sea of Japan. Visiting such a place turns out to be very different from picturing it. The sight of the sea from a cliff top can be a terrible thing.

At other times, Nemoto, a Buddhist priest, conducts death workshops for the suicidal at his temple. He tells attendees to imagine they’ve been given a diagnosis of cancer and have three months to live. He instructs them to write down what they want to do in those three months. Then he tells them to imagine they have one month left; then a week; then ten minutes. Most people start crying in the course of this exercise, Nemoto among them.

One man who came to a workshop had been talking to Nemoto for years about wanting to die. He was thirty-eight years old and had been institutionalized in a mental hospital off and on for a decade. During the writing exercise, he just sat and wept. When Nemoto came around to check on him, his paper was blank. The man explained that he had nothing to say in response to the questions because he had never considered them. All he had ever thought about was wanting to die; he had never thought about what he might want to do with his life. But if he had never really lived, how could he want to die? This insight proved oddly liberating. The man returned to his job as a machinist in a factory. Previously, he had been so averse to human company that he had been able to function only in certain limited capacities, but now he was able to speak to people, and he got a promotion. . . .

[Hat tip to Saleem P.]

Related: a scene from the Japanese movie, "Departures," which portrays the respect and tenderness with which the dead are treated in Japan, a film well-worth seeing, in my opinion:

New York Times reports white America Culture of Death

Sam Roberts, "Census Benchmark for White Americans: More Deaths Than Births" (New York Times, June 13, 2013):

Deaths exceeded births among non-Hispanic white Americans for the first time in at least a century, according to new census data, a benchmark that heralds profound demographic change.

Related: Demographic Winter (trailer)

Planned Parenthood's Poster Girl

Wake up, Know-Nothings, and pull your heads out of the sand! It's not a dirty little secret that the policies of "liberals" are anything but liberal; and this despite their often rosiest of intentions!

It's no accident that the celebrated author, Flannery O'Connor, once wrote: "In the absence of faith, we govern by tenderness. And tenderness leads to the gas chamber."


[Hat tip to Nina Bryhn]

"Culture of Death"? What an unpleasant thing to say! No manners?

• Judge drops 3 murder charges against Philly abortionist and born child butcher (AP, April 23, 2013)
• Obama to headline fundraiser for largest US abortion provider (Washington Times, April 23, 2013).

[Hat tip to Drudge Report]

Is 'dialogue' between opposing sides in the 'culture wars' still possible?

Fr. Eduard Perrone, "A Pastor's Descant" (Assumption Grotto Church, March 3, 2013), raises a number of questions that made me sit up and take stock. Can members of opposing sides in the current 'Culture Wars' still meaningfully communicate at all? While one cannot discount the role of God's grace, the implications are staggering, for they raise questions about the very possibility of things like the "New Evangelization," which are close to the heart of many in the Church today.

Fr. Perrone addresses what he calls the "ever-growing problem of failure in attempts to dialogue with liberals, that is to say, leftists." Here is what he writes (my emphasis in bold):

You have no doubt noticed the difficulty, even with your relatives of a more freewheeling kind. As our culture (a euphemism here) becomes ever more unmoored from the Christian faith and even from the norms of right reason, we find ourselves confronted by people whose only creed is their own opinion. Discussions with them on topics such as abortion, contraception, cohabitation, assisted suicide and gay marriage on the one hand, and on religion, especially the Catholic Church, on the other, tend to become fruitless exercises, no matter how civil, how irenic the adopted tone. The thought occurs to us, Why can’t they see what’s so obviously reasonable? The problem is this: liberals have now actually got to thinking of themselves as conservatives. In their minds those who uphold moral norms, who pledge adherence to religious faith and Church, these are the dangerous ones, the radicals, while they are traditionalists. You protest this reversal instinctively. The ‘author’ of this grand deception can be none other than the Archdemon, the one our Lord referred to as the Deceiver.

Unless we come to realize that there has been this seismic shift of thought in many minds and thus in culture, efforts to win over those on the opposing side are going to be useless. They will not get it because ‘it’ cannot be comprehended by them. To such persons, it is we who are the radicals, the oppressors, the cause of human suffering, the intolerant ones, the unreasonable, the inhibitors of a happy and free society–we, the religious types, the moralists, who insist on Church, family, marriage, discipline, restraint, received rules and regulations. For liberals, life is whatever they wish it to be, and the meaning of life is determined solely by their passions and desires.

You may recall the early words of Pope Benedict’s pontificate to the effect that there is a growing “dictatorship of relativism” in world consensus. The formation of this new governance over life means that relativism has now the status of dogma. The result is that for liberals this new thinking is the right and ‘traditional’ one, a pragmaticism that’s irrefutable. The only recognized value for them is no value other than the limitless freedom to do anything at all that one pleases and by whatever means will ‘work.’ You say, “It’s like talking to a wall,” referring to your frustrating experience in dealing with such folks. You can’t really talk sense with them precisely because there is no ‘sense,’ that is to say that reasons or truth for them do not make for right. Now that’s a formidable, if not insurmountable problem in trying to ‘dialogue’ or discuss differences with people on the left. It’s a doomed enterprise.

I know this last statement is bleak, hopeless, but I don’t know a way out for such closed minds apart from a special illumination from above. But, come to think of it, there might yet be another way, though I tremble to mention it. The way back to sanity and faith may have to come through suffering. Acute suffering alone may be able to reawaken reason. There is a danger in this, however, that if suffering be not rightly bourne, it may quickly lead to despair–and despair, when complete, leads to self-annihilation. Such is the logical end of meaninglessness leftism.

The culture of death is now entrenched in our politics and we seem poorly able to change it. When people of faith and traditional morality become the enemy of the political powers, we know that we’re in serious trouble. If one asks, What can be done about this? I have no better answer than ask you to pray perseveringly for our country. Certainly it would be ironic for us to despair since that’s the very same final outcome of those committed to the left.

How much we need your rosaries, your holy hours in church, and the witness of your good lives in public. God is not through with us. Neither then should we be hopeless. I wrote for you what is here only to motivate you so much the more to fruitful spiritual action and to try to explain to you why you may have been having such rotten luck in your efforts to evangelize and reason with your wrong-headed friends.

One thing I remember from my debates about "presuppositionalism" back at Westminster many years ago, is the insight that even where epistemological common ground fails with those who do not share our faith, ontological common ground persists insofar as all of us share a common human nature and are created by God in His own image. While that has to count for something, it's slim pickings for 'dialogue.'

"Lawler on Card. Dolan’s upcoming appearance at the Democratic Abortion Convention"

Via Fr. Z. (WDTPRS, August 29, 2012): "Phil Lawler at CWN has some thoughts about the Card. Dolan’s upcoming appearance at the Dems’ Abortion Convention. He doesn’t so much consider whether Dolan should have offered to go or whether he should have accepted, but rather whether the DNC should have extended the invitation and what Dolan’s appearance at the convention might mean for them."

There is much that is interesting here, including the commentary by Fr. Z. Lawler's chief point however seems to be this (Lawler's words):

"One way or another—because he is treated rudely, as an enemy; or because he is treated politely, as a foreign dignitary—Cardinal Dolan’s appearance in Charlotte will help Catholic voters to notice that they are no longer 'at home' in the Democratic Party. Like the cardinal they may be accepted as guests, but as long as the Democratic Party embraces the culture of Death, Catholic Democrats will be operating on alien territory. "Cardinal Dolan offered to attend the convention if his presence was wanted. The truth is that he is not wanted. But the Democratic Party has chosen to pretend, and that is a serious tactical error." [emphasis Fr. Z.'s]

Fr. Z. asks: "Is Lawler on to something here?" I wish he were.

Moloch worship in senate chambers

In 2001, then IL state Sen. Obama for the 2nd year in a row was the sole senator opposing Born Alive Infant bills on state senate floor.

Let me translate: Obama was arguing for infanticide.


See Fr. Z's commentary HERE.

Perversity of the secular mind

Imagine a little girl crying after falling and bruising her knee. The natural HUMAN impulse would be to come to her 'rescue', comfort her, tell her everything is going to be alright.

According to the naturalistic worldview (not to mention the nihilistic one), life is ultimately a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying absolutely nothing.

Now imagine a man possessed of such a view encountering such a little girl and responding to her plight by telling her: "Listen, young lady. You think you've got something to cry about? Let me tell you something. Your crying is pointless. Your life doesn't even have a purpose. It counts for no more than the life of a bug. Go tell that to your mommy."

What human being in his right mind, even if he were convinced that this view were true, would not consider it the greatest tragedy of human life? How could this not be the most unnatural, perverse, and disgusting fact of the human predicament? Every natural desire has its natural fulfillment. Thirst has drink, hunger has food, fatigue has sleep, etc. That the human heart, however, should find itself burgeoning with unfulfillable aspirations, hopes, dreams, loves and yearnings -- how could this not be a tragedy of colossal proportions?

Today on the way in to work, I happened to tune in to NPR, where a man was being interviewed about the rediscovery of a work long forgotten by most of the world of popular culture: the epic poem On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura), by the Roman poet and philosopher, Lucretius (ca. 99–55 BC).

Lucretius' view of the world is naturalistic materialism. In other words, matter is the only reality. There is nothing outside of or beyond this natural material world -- no supernatural, no spiritual world, no unseen world of souls or minds. Everything is explicable ultimately in terms of atomistic materialism. Sound familiar?

The remarkable thing about the NPR interview, however, was the exuberant tone of the conversation on air. Lucretius' work had lost popularity with the advent of the Church, because there was no room in such a Christian world for views such as his, the interviewee explained. Moreover, he stressed, Lucretius' vision is BEAUTIFUL, because there is no heaven above us or hell below us. Just us and the world. Without any greater purpose. We're just here. Then we're gone. No deeper mystery. And Lucretius is just so ELOQUENT about all this. Isn't this WONDERFUL!!

It's one thing to find such a vision of human life "compelling" (and there are plenty of arguments against finding it so). But it's another thing altogether to be filled with such fevered ENTHUSIASM for such a view.

Imagine the interviewee encountering the little girl crying, not only trying to persuade her that her life is pointless, but that she should find this fact "beautiful" and "wonderful"!

What a piece of work is secular man, how perverse in reason, this quintessence of dust who rejoices in his nullity!

Which ties in nicely with the contemporary rebirth of enthusiasm for the "Wisdom of Silenus" of ancient Greek folklore, according to which the best thing of all is never to have been born, not to be, to be nothing; and the second best -- to die as quickly as possible.

Smile. Have a nice day.

God's 3 tests for His angels

The Primeval Struggle

By Terence J. Hughes

In the Apocalypse of St. John we read, "Now a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman, adorned with the sun, standing on the moon, and with the twelve stars on her head for a crown. She was pregnant, and in labor, crying aloud in the pangs of childbirth. Then a second sign appeared in the sky, a huge red dragon.... Its tail dragged a third of the stars from the sky and dropped them to the earth, and the dragon stopped in front of the woman as she was having the child, so that he could devour it as soon as it was born...a male child...the son who was to rule all the nations with an iron scepter.... And now war broke out in heaven, when Michael with his angels attacked the dragon.... The great dragon, the primeval serpent, known as the devil or Satan, who had deceived all the world, was hurled down to the earth and his angels were hurled down with him" (Rev. 12:1-10).

What are we to make of this vision, and how is it connected to the celebration of the Gospel of Life revealed by Jesus Christ and the struggle against the Culture of Death that stalks the earth in our own day?

The answer may be found in Volume One of The Mystical City of God, the Divine History and Life of the Virgin Mother of God, manifested to Mary of Agreda, proclaimed a Venerable Servant of God by the Church. She received this private revelation from Jesus Christ while she served as abbess of the discalced Franciscan nuns in the Convent of the Immaculate Conception in Agreda, Spain, from 1625 until her death in 1665. Ordered by her superiors, she wrote down this history twice, from 1637 to 1645 and from 1655 to 1665, both times reluctantly, believing she was unworthy. By the order of five popes -- Innocent XI, Alexander VIII, Clement IX, Benedict XIII, and Benedict XIV -- it was repeatedly subjected to the closest scrutiny and declared authentic, worthy of devout perusal and free from error. It has been published in over sixty editions in ten languages.

Chapter VII of Book One (in Volume One) is an account of the creation of "Heaven for angels and men and Earth as a place of pilgrimage for mortals." Hell, with material fire but originally uninhabited, was located in the center of the earth.

"The angels were created in the empyrean heavens and in the state of grace by which they might be first to merit the reward of glory." They were purely spiritual beings in a state of probation, not seeing their Creator "face to face." The probation consisted of three tests, each administered in an instant, since the knowledge of angels is intuitive, not worked out over time as we gain knowledge. The tests consisted of the intuitive reactions by angels to knowledge infused into their minds by God. Among the angels, Lucifer was conscious of "being endowed with greater gifts and greater beauty of nature and grace than the other angels." This made him vulnerable to "a most disorderly self-love."

For the first test, "they received a more explicit intelligence of the being of God, one in substance, triune in person, and they were commanded to adore and reverence Him as their Creator and highest Lord, infinite in His essence and attributes." All obeyed the command, most with perfect charity and joy, but Lucifer obeyed because "the opposite seemed to him impossible," and his pride dimmed the original perfection of his nature. He owed his existence to someone infinitely greater than he. Even so, Lucifer passed the test. He obeyed.

In the second test, God informed the angels that He would create beings lower than themselves, men with immortal spiritual souls infused into material bodies formed from the dust of the earth. "In order that they too should love, fear, and reverence God...the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity was to become incarnate and assume their nature, raising it to the hypostatic union and to divine Personality." Then God commanded the angels to acknowledge the incarnate Word of God as both God and man, and to adore Him as God-man, infusing the angels with knowledge that it was both just and reasonable for man to be elevated above them in this way. Most angels were overjoyed that God's love could raise such lowly creatures to such an exalted status, and gratefully obeyed the command.

But Lucifer, in his pride, rebelled against this command. He argued that, since both angels and men were created beings, it should be an angel -- i.e., himself -- who became incarnate, angels being higher than men. It was beneath the "dignity" of God to so lower Himself by joining the Word of God to such an inferior part of His creation in this way. Lucifer disguised his pride by feigning concern for God's omnipotence. He was able to infect many other angels with this attitude, offering, as a temptation, to make angels masters over men and leading mankind to God.

The third test cemented this rebellion among the angels. God revealed that His Son would become incarnate man by being born of a woman, just as all men are born of women. The angels were ordered to revere this woman as superior to them -- as "Queen and Mistress of all the creatures," angels and men -- for God was to be clothed with her flesh in her body, making her the Mother of God. Assembling the angels, Lucifer retorted, "Unjust are these commands and injury is done to my greatness; this human nature which Thou, Lord, lookest upon with so much love and which Thou favorest so highly, I will persecute and destroy. To this end I will direct all my power and all my aspirations. And this Woman, Mother of the Word, I will hurl from the position in which Thou has proposed to place her, and at my hands the plan, which Thou settest up, shall come to naught."

One-third of the angels joined Lucifer in this rebellion; but it was Lucifer and they who were hurled down to earth, as recorded in Revelation 12. One archangel, filled with love for God, beseeched Him to allow him to rally the other angels with the battle-cry, "Who is like God?" God granted his request, confirming his name, Michael, meaning "Who is like God?"

All this happened before mankind was created. Lucifer watched warily as Adam emerged from the dust of the earth and saw Eve closest to Adam's heart, "taken from Adam's rib," as the Woman he must overcome. He succeeded in seducing Eve and, through her, Adam, making a woman the vehicle for stripping mankind of the primeval state of grace. Thus were our first parents expelled from the Garden of Eden, and Lucifer fulfilled his threat to thwart God's plan for mankind.

God chose from eternity the humblest of His creatures, Mary Immaculate, to shame the proud. Humility is the essence of love: humble obedience even to suffering the most degrading death. Her Divine Son, unjustly crucified between two criminals, endured the scorn of those who hated Him, all for one purpose alone: to unite mankind to His Eternal Father in Heaven. In His last gift to mankind He gave us His beloved mother, the Mother of God (Jn. 19:26-27).

This is why the Culture of Death targets women. This is why the female reproductive system is attacked by contraceptive drugs and contraptions. These assaults are directed not just against a woman's reproductive organs, but her whole body, her mind, and her soul.

This is why Planned Parenthood lies and deceives women, even young girls, with promises of liberation from childbearing. It is to prevent God's plan for salvation by eliminating children, first by contraception, then by aborting children who are conceived anyway, and ultimately by sexual practices that preclude children. We are being taken down a road that ends with whatever degrades us the most. Such is Lucifer's hatred of mankind.

In His mercy, Our Lord has sent His Mother to alert us, first through a poor peasant girl in the French Pyrenees (at Lourdes) in the 19th century, and then through three poor children in Portugal (near Fatima) in the 20th century. One was a century in which a lie spread through Europe, calling itself the Enlightenment (Lucifer means "Light Bearer"). It led mankind away from God and took us into a century in which mankind engaged in global genocide from beginning to end, starting in the heart of Christian Europe. All this to prepare the way into a 21st century in which all mankind would join Satan in Hell, negating God's plan to lead mankind to Him in Heaven.

All this because of the intense hatred of man by Lucifer, the Adversary, "a liar and murderer from the beginning," who cannot tolerate our occupying the places in Heaven bathed with God's eternal love that he coveted for himself from the dawn of creation. He is the author of the Culture of Death that closes around us. The Woman opposes him. It is women who bear each generation of mankind. It is women who must be crushed, degraded, and abused in every way, taking away from us the one gift God withheld from His angels, from Lucifer: the ability to cooperate with Him in the very act of creation. Angels cannot beget angels.

Before the three tests God applied to His angels, He made known to them the existence of Hell: "They were enabled to see eternal reward and eternal punishment, the perdition of Lucifer and of those that would follow him. His Majesty showed them Hell and its pains. They saw it all...so that, before falling from grace, they were clearly aware of the place of their chastisement." The forces that promote the Culture of Death are hell-bent on destroying mankind -- and themselves with it -- as was their master before them. They have chosen their reward: "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven!"

The Mystical City of God in four volumes is available from TAN Books & Publishers, P.O. Box 410487, Charlotte, NC 28241; www.tanbooks.com.

Terence J. Hughes is a professor at the University of Maine. He and his wife have taken two dozen sexually abused women into their home, all but four of whom were pregnant. He has been imprisoned in six states for peaceful sit-ins at America's "abortion Auschwitzes." The foregoing article by Terence J. Hughes, "The Primeval Struggle," was originally published in New Oxford Review (July-August 2009), pp. 42-45, and is reproduced here by kind permission of New Oxford Review, 1069 Kains Ave., Berkeley, CA 94706.

Emanuel: Docs take Hippocratic Oath too seriously

Oh, for the love of death!

Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of White House Chief of Staff nepotism Rahm Emanuel, who was already appointed health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research, recently outed himself with the following necrophilic first-dance-with-Mary-Jane gems.

On record since last year for having already bluntly admitted that the cuts associated with the new heath care reform bill will not be "pain-free," he declared that "Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality are merely 'lipstick' cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change" (Health Affairs Feb. 27, 2008). Savings, he wrote, will require changing how doctors think about their patients: Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, he believes (Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008). Emanuel wants doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and consider "social justice," and let "communitarianism" guide decisions on who gets care. He says medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those "who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia" (Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec. '96). Translation: Don't give much care to a grandmother with Parkinson's or a child with cerebral palsy. He explicitly defends discrimination against older patients: "Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years" (Lancet, Jan. 31).

Acknowledgement: Betsy McCaughey, "Deadly Doctors" (New York Post, July 24, 2009).

US gov't pushes global death culture

In his Friday Fax (April 30, 2009, vol. 12, no. 20, received by email), Austin Ruse writes:

Dear Colleague,

We report today on Hillary Clinton’s announcement last week in Congress that the US government will begin a global push for a right to abortion. She also linked family planning with abortion, a clear violation of the Cairo Program for Action.

We also report today on the Senate hearings of Harold Koh to be the top legal adviser at the US State Department. With him in this position, you can count on greater US engagement in the radical global agenda for abortion and homosexual rights.

We chose these two “American” stories because of the impact these two individuals will have all over the world. (emphasis added)

The two articles are:

• Samantha Singson, "Obama/Clinton Position on Family Planning and Abortion Violates Cairo Agreement" (Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute, April 30, 2009), and
• Austin Ruse, "Transnational Supporter of Abortion Advances to Top U.S. Legal Job" (Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute, April 30, 2009).

Battle lines are being drawn. The crunch is coming. Pray without ceasing. Don't be caught off guard. The weapons of our warfare are not carnal. Take the fight to the Enemy. Clean your Sword.

Political items

• Charles Krauthammer, "Obama's Unnecessary Apology" (Real Clear Politics, January 30, 2009):

  WASHINGTON -- Every new president flatters himself that he, kinder and gentler, is beginning the world anew. Yet, when Barack Obama in his inaugural address reached out to Muslims with "to the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect," his formulation was needlessly defensive and apologetic.
  
  Is it "new" to acknowledge Muslim interests and show respect to the Muslim world? Obama doesn't just think so, he said so again to millions in his al-Arabiya interview, insisting on the need to "restore" the "same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago."
  
  Astonishing. In these most recent 20 years -- the alleged winter of our disrespect of the Islamic world -- America did not just respect Muslims, it bled for them. It engaged in five military campaigns, every one of which involved -- and resulted in -- the liberation of a Muslim people: Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq.

• George Neumayr, "Nancy Pelosi's Modest Proposal" (American Spectator, January 27, 2009):

  "It will reduces costs," Nancy Pelosi said on This Week, in reference to the "stimulus" rationale for sending millions of dollars to the states for "family planning."
  
  What would once have been considered an astonishingly chilly and incomprehensible stretch is now blandly stated liberal policy.
  
  The full title of Jonathan Swift's work, A Modest Proposal, was, For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden to their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public.
  
  Change a few of the words and it could be a Democratic Party policy paper. Swift suggested that 18th-century Ireland stimulate its economy by turning children into food for the wealthy. Pelosi proposes stimulating the U.S. economy by eliminating them.
  
  ... Population is the poverty, not the riches, of a country, according to the left. Never mind that the only developing countries are the ones with growing populations. No matter: While nature can grow unfettered, human nature is to be controlled at all costs. We must preserve everything purely except ourselves. We must send money to the UN to save rain forests and destroy humans.
  
  Pelosi's idea would have appealed to Swift at some level. Mocking the fashionable utilitarian theories of the day, he attributes his Modest Proposal to a "very knowing American of my acquaintance in London." He also had his own satirical notion of stimulus: have the poor be run "through a joint-stock company." Who knows what he would have done with TARP?

[Hat tip to Prof. E.E.]

Population control, Christophobia, and hatred of life

Frank M. Rega has an interesting little essay, "Why they fear Christmas," which begins thus:

Michael Matt's Christmas editorial in The Remnant, "From Bethlehem to Calvary," notes that a burgeoning Christophobia has launched a concerted attack on the birthday of Jesus. Mr. Matt asks just what are these grinches afraid of?

I believe one clue is to be found in the disturbing memo recently made available on the web by Randy Engel at her U.S. Coalition for Life site, www.uscl.info. In this heinous 1969 memo from Planned Parenthood to the Population Council, numerous strategies for controlling world population growth are outlined. The current implementation of many of these proposed policies from forty years ago illustrates the power and influence of the Population Control machine. For example, one of their nefarious schemes is to "encourage increased homosexuality."

Just as I was thinking about this, I remembered a book that a student of mine had recently called to my attention, with the remark that it's thesis was "depressing," which is an understatement. The title -- I am not kidding! -- is Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). The book carries chapters with titles like: "Having Children: The Anti-Natal View," and "Abortion: The Pro-Death View." The fact that the head of the University of Cape Town philosophy department named David Benatar should even undertake to write a book championing his thesis of anti-natalism, let alone the fact that a publisher such as Oxford University Press should be willing not only to seriously consider but to publish such a title, is an indication of just how much momentum we've picked up already on the Culture of Death's greased skids to Hell.

Here's what the editor says about the volume:

Most people believe that they were either benefited or at least not harmed by being brought into existence. Thus, if they ever do reflect on whether they should bring others into existence--rather than having children without even thinking about whether they should--they presume that they do them no harm. Better Never to Have Been challenges these assumptions. David Benatar argues that coming into existence is always a serious harm. Although the good things in one's life make one's life go better than it otherwise would have gone, one could not have been deprived by their absence if one had not existed. Those who never exist cannot be deprived. However, by coming into existence one does suffer quite serious harms that could not have befallen one had one not come into existence. Drawing on the relevant psychological literature, the author shows that there are a number of well-documented features of human psychology that explain why people systematically overestimate the quality of their lives and why they are thus resistant to the suggestion that they were seriously harmed by being brought into existence. The author then argues for the "anti-natal" view--that it is always wrong to have children--and he shows that combining the anti-natal view with common pro-choice views about fetal moral status yield a "pro-death" view about abortion (at the earlier stages of gestation). Anti-natalism also implies that it would be better if humanity became extinct. Although counter-intuitive for many, that implication is defended, not least by showing that it solves many conundrums of moral theory about population.

Near the beginning of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche recalls the ancient myth about King Midas hunting in the forest for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus. At last, after many years, the King manages to capture him and asks what is "the best and most desirable thing for man." His answer:

Oh, wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is -- to die soon. (BT:3 [Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 1224ff])

In many of his other works, Nietzsche makes a point of criticizing Christianity as being, not only "otherworldly," but "anti-earth," of being against life -- at least life in this world. It has been said of some Christians that "they are so heavenly-minded that they are no earthly good." Yet if Mother Teresa's life and the lives of many unsung individuals like her are any testimony, those who are the most earthly good may be precisely those Christians who are most heavenly-minded. Millions of faithful Catholics have an indefatigable record of being pro-life, and Christians generally have been Pro-Existence, as Udo Middelman once argued in a book by that title. By contrast, our contemporary culture has embraced the 'Wisdom of Silenus' with a vengeance. With spokesmen such as Benatar, U.S. President Obama, and Planned Parenthood pulling for anti-natalism in the limelight, it's not hard to imagine what mischief may lay in the offing as these ideas go to seed in popular culture.