Politics, Prayer, Patrimony, Pelosi, The Pope & Pro Life

Illustration by Cleon Peterson | The New Yorker | Screenshot

Making Prayer a Political Problem Once Again
Dr. Christopher Shannon, September 23, 2021 | CWR

The conventional, modern Catholic gloss on this problem has been to assert that Catholic values guide the use of technology. Thus, in our own time, it is not unusual for parish priests to devote a few homilies a year to the dangers of the internet, warning the faithful to stay away from “bad” sites, usually a euphemism for pornography. Daniélou’s great reversal, his emphasis on the social and cultural conditions of faith, would flip the emphasis from content to form.

Were Daniélou alive today, I suspect that he would argue that the problem with the internet (not to mention “smart” phones) is less the way we use it than how it uses us: a restructuring of our life, not just our work life but our leisure and social life as well, to conform to the demands of the technology. Thus, disembodied “social” media increasingly becomes the norm for human interaction, even for formation in the faith. Were the internet to be purged of all morally objectionable content, it would still corrode the bonds of community that Daniélou judges essential to the survival of the faith of the poor. The Church is always something more than face-to-face relations, but the Mystical Body of Christ should not be confused with its simulacrum, the Virtual Body of Christ.

The Sacred, The Profane and the Desecrated
Sir Roger Scruton, 2016 | The Thirty-first Eric Symes Abbott Memorial Lecture

[...] Here is the point on which I wish to dwell, since it is one that would surely have been dear to the heart of Dean Abbott. The Anglican Church survived the long battle against puritanism in the 17th century, not because it was allied with the powers that be – on the contrary, for much of the century it was the puritans who had the upper hand. It survived because it administered the sacraments. Beneath the outward show of a regal fiefdom, the Anglican Church concealed the sacramental bequest of the Catholic faith, including the service of Holy Communion, and all the devotional practices associated with it. It was not there to conscript people to the King’s armies, or to maintain the outward show of discipline. It was there to secure the inner peace and reconciliation that comes, when people bow their heads in the presence of sacred things. If it were not so the Anglican Church could never have produced the abundant poetry, music and devotional literature with which we are familiar, nor would the idiom of its liturgy or the language of its Bible have so thoroughly penetrated the hearts and minds of English-speakers down the centuries since the first appearance of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.

Nancy Pelosi’s Faulty Theology: Free Will and Abortion
Paul Kengor, September 27, 2021 | NCRegister

Pelosi threw the whole weight of her party behind (the Women’s Health Protection Act of 2021). Introduced by Pelosi’s California colleague, Rep. Judy Chu, it passed the House last Friday on a strict party-line vote, 218-211.

[...] Of course, God has given us a free will — but explicitly not to be used to do evil.

“Any reasonable person with a basic sense of morality and inkling of decency cannot but shudder in horror at such a heinous evil being codified in law,” said Archbishop Cordileone. He said it was “especially shameful that any self-professed Catholic would be implicated in such an evil, let alone advocate for it.”

But Pelosi did that, and then some.

“The archbishop of the city of that area, of San Francisco, and I had a disagreement about who should decide this [family size and timing]. I believe that God has given us a free will to honor our responsibilities,” (Pelosi) said in response to the question from Erik Rosales, Capitol Hill correspondent for EWTN News Nightly. - CNA

What Pelosi affirmed is, of course, utterly contrary to how a Christian and a Catholic understands free will.

The Catechism says of free will: “Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility. By free will one shapes one’s own life. Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude. … There is no true freedom except in the service of what is good and just. The choice to disobey and do evil is an abuse of freedom and leads to ‘the slavery of sin’” (1731-33).

Pope Francis

September 27, 2021 | All'Assemblea Plenaria Della Pontificia Accademia Per La Vita

Anche qui vorrei accennare che noi siamo vittime di una cultura dello scarto. ... (C)’è lo scarto dei bambini che non vogliamo accogliere, con quella legge dell’aborto ... e li uccide direttamente. E oggi questo è diventato un modo “normale”, un’abitudine che è bruttissima, è proprio un omicidio, e per capirlo bene forse ci aiuta fare una doppia domanda: è giusto eliminare, fare fuori una vita umana per risolvere un problema? È giusto affittare un sicario per risolvere un problema? Questo è l’aborto.

Here too I would like to mention that we are victims of a throwaway culture. ... (T)here is the waste of children that we do not want to accept, with that abortion law that ... kills them directly. And today this has become a "normal" way, a habit that is very ugly, it's really a murder, and to understand it well perhaps it helps us to ask a double question: is it right to eliminate, to take out a human life to solve a problem? Is it okay to hire a hitman to solve a problem? This is abortion.

Becoming Signs of Contradiction

by J. D. Flynn, September 27, 2021 | First Things

(L)ast Thursday, (Heidi Crowter) had to stand before two judges who said, effectively, that women shouldn’t have to put up with someone like Heidi (who is a Down Syndrome person) being thrust into their lives—that permission to kill people like her is a fair way to balance the rights of people with Down Syndrome and the rights of their own mothers.

I suspect that Heidi is exhausted, and am amazed that she will keep up her campaign. I pray she has not internalized the message those judges articulated so definitively—that people with disabilities are such a burden, the law should make special allowances to kill them.

Imagine living with that around your neck.