But, what is Natural Family Planning? It’s realizing the totality, the fullness, the completeness of human life, which begins with woman and man sealing their married love with a generous personal embrace of life – two persons committed to one another in such a way that they become “one” and welcome, with open hearts and lives, the gift of their children.
Morally good and constitutionally right as it is to argue for the protection of our religious liberty in light of the current threat of a mandate, we cannot hope to achieve victory if we continue to provide fertilizer in the enemy camp. Plainly stated, it is a contradiction that we fight for religious liberty in our healthcare system while at the same time the majority of Catholic physicians in our pews willingly sustain the culture of death by penning countless prescriptions for contraceptives and scheduling quick and easy sterilizations.
A federal judge in Nebraska has thrown out a lawsuit brought by seven states against Obama’s contraception mandate. US District Court Judge Warren K. Urbom tossed the suit saying they could not show any harm from the edict and that they had no standing to sue.
“Let [responsible men] first consider how easily [artificial birth control] could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards” (HV 17). Just a few years after Humanae Vitae the wedge of artificial birth control was driven so deeply between the marital act and human procreation that it spawned the unspeakable evil of legalized abortion in the U.S. under the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. The logical extension of the contraceptive mentality is the abortion mentality. Further, there are many other grievous manifestations of this moral decline present in contemporary society. One has to wonder, what is next?
A true witness of Christ will be someone who is also fearless. Fearless witnesses are those who have abandoned themselves to the loving friendship of Jesus. They trust his power and his presence. They know that the judgments of time will be corrected by the judgments of eternity. We are in dire need of men and women who will evangelize a difficult world by the witness of their lives. Will you be one?
The power of words and formulating arguments is an extremely powerful and precise science. While pro-life advocates are careful to use words that accurately represent terms that surround abortion, Planned Parenthood is careful to craft their language and arguments in a way that will subtly manipulate the issue and cause confusion.
Planned Parenthood submitted “repeated false, fraudulent, and/or ineligible claims for reimbursements” to Medicaid and failed to meet acceptable standards of medical practice according to a federal lawsuit made public Monday. Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys representing former Planned Parenthood clinic director Sue Thayer filed the lawsuit against the abortion giant’s Iowa affiliate in March 2011.
No previous president ever promoted a giveaway more peculiar than Barack Obama’s mandate that all health care plans must offer free sterilizations to all women – but not all men – capable of breeding. This mandate is Obama’s defining act as president – just as his adamant opposition to a bill that would have defined a born baby as a “person” was his defining act as an Illinois state senator.
While there may be some such Catholics who might change their minds regarding abortion, or contraception, or infallibility if only the doctrines were better explained to them, most Catholics who disagree with these, and other, doctrines understand well enough why the Church teaches what it teaches, but they still refuse to accept them. So if they understand on an intellectual level the general reasons for a doctrine, why do some Catholics accept doctrine and others reject it? The answer is that the fundamental obstacle lies not with the intellect, but with the will.
Without the aid of any Church doctrine, by just listening to the “close-in teleology” of the conjugal act, I had encountered the truth that to engage in contraceptive sex would be to live a lie. I had an inclination I could not have then put into words that to separate the unitive and the procreative aspects of the conjugal act was wrong, and not only wrong but horribly wrong. For me it was clearly something despicable, something for which I would have to answer to God were I to continue the practice.
In our devotion to Mary we must pray that our own lives be rooted in the virtues of the...
The Blessed Virgin Mary, because of her profound humility, had no other ambition than to do the will of...
