Journeys of a Catholic Poster Girl

So it’s been a little over a week since my retreat…how are things going?

Well I have managed to get back to my daily rosary habit, which had sorely slipped over the past few months. The great thing about the rosary is one can pray it anywhere, and there are plenty of time pockets in my day when I can work it in. So that’s nice. I’ve also been saying the St.  Therese novena I received there,  and  reading my Bible daily.

I’ve also been working out of the Medjugorje Prayer book, but that’s a little harder, since the “seven sequence” prayers in there take about 40-45 minutes to say. I try to get it in when I can. Some days I am more successful than others, but most of the time I manage to get it in.

never ceases to amaze me. “The papists are coming! The Papists are coming!”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/25/us/politics/26web-toner.ht ml?ex=1178164800&en=cb972999b15b9e41&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Some bits:

All are men. All were nominated by conservative Republican presidents. And, it was widely noted, all are Roman Catholics.

Did their religion matter? Should it even be discussed? In the wake of the 5-4 ruling in Gonzales v. Carhart, these questions have been raised and debated in venues from the blog of the American Constitution Society (where Geoffrey R. Stone, a constitutional law professor, said the justices’ religious identity was “too obvious, and too telling, to ignore,”) to ABC’s “The View,” (where Rosie O’Donnell declared, “How about separation of church and state in America?” according to ABC News.) Gee, how about Free Exercise? How about we believe them when they tell us in confirmation hearings that their religion does not infringe on their jurisprudence? How about they can just believe that it was bad law?

The pushback from conservative Catholics was immediate – even pre-emptive. Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, declared, “We need more, not fewer, Catholics on the Supreme Court.” On his Web site, the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, an influential conservative, wrote last week, “I expect it is on the minds of many, but so far there has been only marginal public comment on the fact that all five in the Carhart majority are Catholics.” He added, “What can one say? Know-Nothings of the world unite?”

This discussion was probably inevitable: Catholics, for the first time, hold a majority of seats on the Supreme Court, after decades when there were, typically, only one or maybe two “Catholic seats” on the bench.  :”Catholic Seats?” What the heck does that mean? Two of the Catholic justices, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, were confirmed only in the past two years, in an ideologically charged environment in which all sides were eager for clues on how they might rule on abortion rights and other hot-button issues.

With so much unknown about their legal leanings, their religion became a proxy for both sides — a source of reassurances for conservatives, and of anxiety for liberals. But the nominees’ supporters discouraged any questions about the role of their faith in the confirmation hearings, essentially arguing that it would amount to an unacceptable “religious test” for public office. Exactly.

Now, with an actual opinion on abortion from the new court in hand, the debate has moved from the theoretical to the concrete. Some legal scholars say the Catholicism of the five justices, in and of itself, means less than their conservatism. Yes, the Church hierarchy denounces legalized abortion, but many Catholics in public life, over the years, have drawn a bright line between their private beliefs and their public duties (memorably, John F. Kennedy in 1960, and Mario Cuomo in 1984).  Also known as “CINO”s. Well, JFK I can’t really speak for. But a lot of them (John Kerry? Nancy Pelosi? Teddy Kennedy?) are not really Catholic. I’m sorry.

Scholars also note that Justice William Brennan, who was carefully appointed to the “Catholic seat” by President Dwight Eisenhower, turned out to be one of the key supporters of the constitutional right to abortion. “There can be no greater proponent of a pro-choice vision of the 14th amendment than William Brennan,” said David Yalof, an associate professor of political science at the University of Connecticut and a scholar of the judicial selection process.

John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, said that the existence of a Catholic majority on the court should not be minimized as a historical marker of “just how much the nation has changed over the last century.” But, he added, “When it comes to predicting what they will do, it’s important to note that this is a Republican Catholic majority.”

In fact, American Catholics are very much a two-party religion. The Catholic vote has typically split in recent presidential elections, and Catholic elected officials fill the top ranks of both parties. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Senator Patrick Leahy and the 2004 presidential nominee, Senator John Kerry, are all Catholics – and Democrats who support abortion rights. Um, see above. Please.

Ralph Neas, the president of People for the American Way, has been a fierce opponent of many of the Bush Administration’s judicial nominees – and is also a Catholic. “My problem with the right wing bloc on the court is their view of the Constitution, not their religion,” Mr. Neas said in an interview. “I am absolutely certain their views do not represent all American Catholics.” No, they don’t. And that is the sad thing, because it should. If we can’t all get together on banning sucking out a baby’s skull, then what’s left here?

In short, any discussion of the new Catholic majority on the Supreme Court only underscores the complicated, subtle role of religion in the public square – nearly 47 years after Kennedy tried to reassure an anxious country that it was safe to elect a Catholic. “I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me,” Kennedy declared in September 1960, when American Catholics were on the brink of their political ascendancy, and the questions they faced were more raw, but also more simple.

Why do I even read this stuff ?

Some of my favorite bits:

But if Congress can ban the partial-birth procedure, why can’t it express its “ethical and moral concerns” with the standard procedure for second-trimester abortions, dilation and evacuation? As Kennedy notes, this procedure, in which the fetus is dismembered before being removed, is “in some respects as brutal, if not more,” as the partial-birth procedure.

Why can’t Congress impose its ethical views by requiring any woman seeking an abortion to wait a few weeks, watch a sonogram of her developing fetus, listen to an antiabortion lecture?

And so much, by the way, for the conservatives’ hymns to federalism. Now a state that wants to allow the procedure is barred from doing so — even if its lawmakers believe that would best protect the health of women there. Well gee, I’m so sorry we’re banning the states’ rights to approve infanticide!

Third, and most chilling, was the court’s willingness to subordinate the health of individual women, and the individual judgment of physicians, to the moral whims of the majority. Whims of the majority? Congress studies this stuff, has extensive committee hearings, and then votes. Judges just…um…decide. So which one is the whims of the majority?

(snip)

This is a dangerous ruling, but I have some hope that its effect will turn out to be limited. Kennedy was horrified by the partial-birth procedure, no doubt sincerely. That emotional response may not carry over into his assessment of other abortion laws.

Great column from Archbishop Chaput in Denver. Read it!

So in Ohio we’re having a brouhaha about hospitals providing “Plan B” or emergency contraception. It is available to girls over 18, and some hospitals just aren’t doling it out the way Planned Parenthood and NARAL would like it, including some of our Catholic Hopsitals, like St. Ann’s and Mount Carmel.

Here’s my thought. If you are a Catholic hospital (that is, affiliated with the Catholic Church), not only shoulkd you not have to distribute this stuff but you shouldn’t be doing it anyway. It’s against Church teaching. It’s like the adoption agencies in CA and MA that wouldn’t allow their kids to be placed with gay couples. It’s against Church doctrine. And I’m sorry but I think the state has to respect that. Doesn’t the constitution say that the state has to respect in the Free Exercise Clause?

Besides the fact, if you want Plan B, I wouldn’t think a Catholic hospital would be the first place you’d head. That just doesn’t make sense to me. If you want that, head for your local secular hospital. Columbus has plenty of them. And it’s not like you’ll die if you have to drive an extra 1/2 hour or so.

There has also been issues about pharmacists refusing to dispense the drug over the counter. Well, then find another pharmacy. Or another pharmacist.

Because really, if you don’t want a baby, don’t have sex. It’s really, really simple.

Well so far I have been able to keep regular prayer, but it’s only been one day! Still, it’s better than nothing. I was able to do morning prayer, the Mass readings, the Magnifcat meditation, my St. Therese rosary novena, and the Medjugorje Seven Sequence prayers. Now hopefully I can get in a rosary, evening prayers and compline before I go to bed!

Oh, also got in the daily Bible reading. And I hope to read more of Wayne Weible’s Medjugorje: The Message before bed tonight.

As I wrote in my retreat post (below), I had never really read/heard much about St. Emily, except I thought she was a Roman virgin/martyr.

Well I did a little internet trolling today and found this:

St. Emily de Rodat belonged to a prominent and prosperous French rural family.  Although by nature an independent person, she was raised devoutly.  True, in her mid teens she became for a while attracted by the charms of a “worldly” life, and it even led to her cutting down on her daily prayers.  However, she had a spiritual experience in 1804 that convinced her that God intended her for some special service.  Later on, speaking of her most “worldly” period, she confessed, “I was bored only once in all my life, and that was when I had turned away from God.”
God wanted her, but He let her find out for herself why He wanted her.  She sensed that her vocation was to educational work.  First she became a lay teacher in her own convent school at Villefranche.  Then she tried out living for a while, successively, in convents of three religious orders.  None of them had exactly what she wanted.
However, one spring day in 1815, Emily overheard some mothers complaining that the could not send their daughters to school because the tuition was beyond their means.  At once she was inspired:  “I will teach poor children!”
Mlle. De Rodat opened her first poor-school in May 1816, with two other young laywomen as a staff.  The enterprise had many difficulties to hurdle, but by 1820 she and her companions had taken final vows as members of a new religious community, the Congregation of the Holy Family.  As time went on, despite her own uncertain health (cancer and a constant ringing in her ears), plus a period of spiritual anguish, Mother Emily set up 38 new convents.  Schools were her principal labor, but the Holy Family nuns gradually expanded their efforts to cover most of the corporal works of mercy: visiting the jailed, sheltering orphans, and caring for endangered women.  Along with her convents of very active sisters, she also established groups of contemplative sisters to pray for the aims of their congregation.
Because they were to see themselves as servants of the poor, St. Emily firmly insisted that her nuns live a life without frills.  Even their chapels, she said, were to be poor: no expensive statues or rich marbles.  The Abbe Marty, her spiritual director, disagreed with her in the matter of chapel décor, and on other points as well.  But he and this very positive woman (”a saint, but a headstrong saint”) got along very well together, and his guidance was crucial in the development of her community.  Emily de Rodat died of cancer on September 18, 1852, after a long illness patiently borne.  Pope Pius XII canonized her during the Holy Year of 1950.
St. Emily was noted for her crisp common sense.  For instance, although many young women applied to enter her religious order, she rarely invited them to “leave the world.”  That invitation, she said is God’s business.  “Religious vocations are brought about by the grace of God, not by any words of ours.”
Mother Emily also had a flair for being quotable.
“It is good to be an object of contempt,” she said at times when many people were criticizing her.  When her secretary deplored the criticism, Emily retorted, “don’t you know that we are the scum of the earth, and that anyone is entitled to tread on us?”  (So much for human pride!)
“There are some people,” she once observed, “who are not good for a convent, but a convent is good for them; they would be lost in the world and they don’t do much good in a convent, but at least they keep out of mischief.”  “Confession,” she admonished one nun, “is an accusation, not a conversation.”  “Keep your enthusiasm,” she wrote to one discouraged postulant.  “Be brave.  Put all your trust in God.  And always maintain a holy cheerfulness.”  And as if to illustrate her respect for the church whose poor she served, Emily once said, “If I meet an angel with a priest, I bow to the priest first.”
No namby-pamby person, Mother Emily de Rodat.  But God doesn’t intend for us to be namby-pamby.  He gives us all a certain number of talents to invest, and He jolly well expects us to produce dividends.
–Father Robert F. McNamara

OK, so apparently not a Roman virgin/martyr. But still pretty cool nonetheless.

From Jonah at NRO:

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — After several years of study, the Vatican’s International Theological Commission said there are good reasons to hope that babies who die without being baptized go to heaven.

In a document published April 20, the commission said the traditional concept of limbo — as a place where unbaptized infants spend eternity but without communion with God — seemed to reflect an “unduly restrictive view of salvation.”

The church continues to teach that, because of original sin, baptism is the ordinary way of salvation for all people and urges parents to baptize infants, the document said.

But there is greater theological awareness today that God is merciful and “wants all human beings to be saved,” it said. Grace has priority over sin, and the exclusion of innocent babies from heaven does not seem to reflect Christ’s special love for “the little ones,” it said.

“Our conclusion is that the many factors that we have considered … give serious theological and liturgical grounds for hope that unbaptized infants who die will be saved and enjoy the beatific vision,” the document said.

“We emphasize that these are reasons for prayerful hope, rather than grounds for sure knowledge,” it added.

Gotta tell you, Limbo is one of our theological things I never really thought about, especially since everyone I know has been baptized. But it’s nice to know that we’re giving these babies “hope.” Have you ever seen the film The Others?  It mentions limbo, and in  a not-nice way; the mom (Nicole Kidman) uses it to scare her kids. Not so much.

This, from Andy on the Corner, is a great illustration of NY Times nuttiness:

I heard a lot of feedback from my post of yesterday (see here) regarding the nurse’s chilling infanticide testimony, quoted at length by the Court.  But, for my money, if you want a sense of the ineffable, impenetrable coarseness of what passes for pro-choice thought, of the trance these people must have to put themselves in to filter out the inherent savagery of the “procedure,” try this (highlighting is mine).  It made my jaw drop:

[T]he surgeon then forces the scissors into the base of the skull or into the foramen magnum. Having safely entered the skull, he spreads the scissors to enlarge the opening.  The surgeon removes the scissors and introduces a suction catheter into this hole and evacuates the skull contents….

Safely?  “Having safely e-n-t-e-r-e-d the s-k-u-l-l?”  Right before spreading the “opening” (i.e., the wound) and “evacuat[ing] the skull contents” (i.e., sucking the brains out)?

Safely for whom?

What can you say about the mindset of human beings who could defend that?  That which they wouldn’t abide being done to a dog, and which they declaim the dire necessity of … right before their next editorial about how our lives are really threatened by gasoline fumes, second-hand smoke, aerosol spray, melting ice caps, or Dick Cheney?

With bated breath I await the Grey Lady’s next lecture about the benighted cruelty of Guantanamo Bay.

Yup, Andy, I do too.

I got back from my retreat around noon today, and I spent the afternoon unpacking and talking to my parents all about it. So here’s my report:

It was fantastic. If you’ve never made a retreat, do it the next time you get a chance. They are awesome. Mine was a silent retreat put on by the Diocesan Council of Catholic Women at St. Therese’s retreat center here in Columbus. Our diocese is really big–it stretches north into Amish county, south to the Ohio river, and east to Zanesville/Cambridge, about 1 1/2 hours from the West Virginia border. So we had women from all over, which was great. I was, by far, the youngest, but I didn’t mind. I’m used to it by now (youngest in my church choir (I think), one of the youngest on parish council, with the exception of the h.s. rep…).

Silence didn’t start immediately; we had a welcome by the DCCW president and the retreat director/planner, Nancy Jo. After that we had dinner in the dining hall (just like the one in the film Trouble With Angels, where the nuns eat), which was fish, baked potato and carrots, and  salad and dessert. The food was great; simple, but so yummy. And fresh-baked rolls….mmmm.

After dinner, silence began (although it could be broken when you went outside, or it you went to the Blue Lounge to talk to someone), and we had our first “conference” with Fr. Bertrand, the retreat director from St. Thomas in Zanesville. There were five of these altogether, and each one was full of practical advice and insight. He even got into theology with us, saying that this was th ekind of stuff the laity needed to hear. He is so right. If you are a member of his parish, you are very lucky!

The first night also has Mass in their chapel (gorgeous, with stained glass, a St. Therese reliquary, stations of the cross, and a beautiful ad orientem altar with the tabernacle prominently displayed) and evening prayer. Most of us went to bed after that, because our wake-up call for the next two days was at 7:30. Yup, that’s what time this night owl got up. Voluntarily. It was crazy. (Read on …)