God Made Me

He Made You Too

 Here is a cute video song about God making us all.  Enjoy.

Go Granny Go Go Go

A You tube Video for Gray Power

Don't know if it is real.  Looks like it, but Snopes has nothing on it.

H/t Bob

Abortion Kills

Catholic Insight Online Newsletter - Fr. Alphonse de Valk

This insightful piece arrived in my inbox this morning.  It comes from Catholic Insight, a thoughtful publication spearheaded by Fr. Alphonse de Valk.  There continues to be a lot of misinformation about abortion and its effects on the mothers, and the obvious effect on the baby.  But, there are those in the pro-life movement who are prepared to put their mouth and their money together and speak out about the evil of abortion.

There are human lives involved here, folks.  This is not about inconveniences.  This is about human beings.  God loves each and every one of them.

Newsletter No. 5
June 4, 2010

Dear Friends,

Abortion has suddenly become a hot topic in the Canadian press, not because there is a serious political debate about it, but because certain parties think abortion should be promoted by the G-8 powers meeting in Canada this coming June.

Please remind your friends and acquaintances that abortion has grave physical and mental consequences for those involved, not to mention the deaths of the babies.

The Toronto Star continues its harassment of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. On Saturday, May 22, it published an article entitled, “No new abortion law planned, PM insists.” On Tuesday morning, May 25, it followed up with, “Tories ignore abortion advice” and “Oda won’t comment on CIDA notes.”

In an earlier article, Catholic Insight drew attention to the Star’s recent pre-occupation with abortion (“Anti-life Left panics over pro-life activism” website, May 17; printed edition, June, pp. 9-11). The Star sees abortion as a necessary ingredient for the G-8 maternity welfare policy. Prime Minister Harper does not. He wants to help poor women and their babies with food, milk, water and medical assistance that will aid them to survive the births of their babies and have those babies live, too. The Star wants the overseas advisors in Africa and Asia to advise parents to kill their babies in what it constantly refers to as “safe abortions.”

Canadian Press discovered in January of this year that “briefing papers” from CIDA (the Canadian International Development Agency for International Co-operation) had suggested that “safe abortion services could save numerous lives” (deadly for babies, of course, but presumably “safe” for their mothers). Needless to say, the “experts” of CIDA drew figures out of a hat, such as that “500,000 women die annually during pregnancy.”

Feminists have been doing this for the last five decades. They and pro-abortion journalists like Star columnist James Travers (“Access to safe abortions is an essential of any effective international strategy,” May 24) do not know what they are talking about.

Polling firms like Ipsos Reid suffer from the same problem. They poll people who know nothing about the subject. For most people, abortion is an abstraction. It means nothing. When these firms “poll” Canadians, they present abortion stripped of all reality (no family; no father, brothers and sisters; no mental or physical consequences to the mother; no financial costs to society). Hence to the question: should abortion be permitted? 46 per cent of Canadians easily say, “The government should leave things as they are” (National Post, Saturday, May 22, 2010).

We, however, should raise questions about these “safe” abortions. Are they really safe?

First, go to the statistics on the subject provided by Toronto’s de Veber Institute for Bioethics and Social Research: “The physical and mental consequences of abortion on women’s health.” The original is available from the Institute, 103 Jane Street, Toronto, Website: www.deveber.org. Telephone (416) 256-0555.

It was also reprinted in Catholic Insight, October 2008, pp. 19 and 20 and is on the web at:  http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+physical+and+mental+consequences+of+abortion+on+women%27s+health-a0187426337.

The following is a summary of the main points, with the technical data about sources omitted.

Suicide

Within 12 months of the abortion or live delivery, Scandinavian women who aborted experienced a suicide rate of 34.9 per 1,000, compared to a suicide rate of 5.9 per 1,000 for women who delivered their babies. This is a suicide rate nearly six times greater.

A similar study in Wales discovered that women who aborted experienced a suicide rate 3.25 times greater.

Another study in the U.S. found a suicide rate 2.6 times greater.

Mental Health

A study sponsored by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario found that after three months, aborted women had a hospitalization rate of 5.2 per thousand for psychiatric problems, compared to a rate of 1.1 per thousand for the control group.

Recently (November 2006), a rigorously neutral study from New Zealand uncovered a strong correlation between induced abortion and subsequent mental health problems. Whether it is major depression, anxiety disorder, suicidal ideation, alcohol dependence, illicit drug dependence or mean number of mental health problems, those who ended their pregnancies by abortion suffered much higher rates of disorder than those who were never pregnant and those who were pregnant but did not abort.

Prematurity

The average is 33 weeks’ gestation among women with previous first-trimester abortions and there is a 267 per cent increased risk of premature delivery among women with previous second-trimester abortions.

Two large multi-centre, case-control studies were conducted in Europe. Both studies revealed that previous induced abortion was associated with increased risk for every preterm delivery.

Prematurity in turn is associated with an enormous increase in the risk of cerebral palsy and other health problems.

Lower fertility after abortion

Women who undergo abortions experience 6 per cent lower fertility than women who do not.

Abortion and STDs

Women with a history of induced abortion were found to be 3.15 times more likely than women without a history of induced abortion to be seropositive for the organism causing pelvic inflammatory disease (PID).

Chlamydia is a major cause of post-abortion PID.

Abortion and breast cancer

Out of 37 studies up to the year 2003 on the link between induced abortion and subsequent breast cancer, 23 of them showed a 30 per cent increased risk of breast cancer among women who experienced induced abortion.

Since 2003, five studies have been published showing no link between abortion and breast cancer. However, these studies are either underpowered or use a control group with the same risk characteristics as the women who have had induced abortion.

The National Cancer Institute denies any link between induced abortion and breast cancer. However, the Institute has itself sponsored two major studies that discovered a 50 and 137 per cent greater risk respectively of breast cancer among women who aborted their pregnancies.

Complication rates

A study conducted by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario shows that after induced abortion, there is a four-time increase in medical admissions and a five-time increase in surgical admissions to hospital.

For a comprehensive examination of these issues, based on over 500 studies, see Elizabeth Ring Cassidy and Ian Gentles, Women's Health after Abortion: The Medical and Psychological Evidence (Toronto: The de Veber Institute for Bioethics, 2nd edition, 2003.) Some of the material above will appear in the forthcoming third edition of the book.

Another source of detailed information can be found at www.abortionfacts.com/effects/effects.asp. It contains a list of various effects on women’s health. One of them, for example, discusses a factual look at the number of maternal deaths that have been reported and the real numbers.

Fruits of the Spirit

A Video Presentation of the Fruits of the Spirit

Enjoy

Today is the Official Feast of Corpus Christi

The Body of Christ

The priest at Our Lady of Fatima in Tucson periodically, when distributing Holy Communion, says, rather than the English "Body of Christ", the Latin form that many of learned as children. "Corpus Christi."  Today is the official day for celebrating the Feast of Corpus Christi, the Body of Christ.  In our local parish here of St. George, it will be celebrated this Sunday, on what would be the 2nd Sunday after Pentecost.

This feast celebrates Christ giving us His body and blood in the form of bread and wine, where the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of our Saviour.  They look like bread and wine, and they taste like bread and wine, and to complicate matters, it is Catholic belief that the bread is itself the body and blood, and that it is not required to drink the wine to consume Christ's blood.

For Catholic Christians, it is a matter of taking the words of scripture seriously, ie. this is not a joke folks, Christ meant what he said.  It is literal, not figurative.

Here again, is Dr. Marcellino D'Ambrosio explaining this special feast of the Catholic Church to us in an article entitled "The Eucharist: The Real Presence of the Body and Blood of Christ?" over at the Crossroads Initiative.

  

The Feast of Corpus Christi celebrates the gift of what is called the Eucharist, the Blessed Sacrament, Holy Communion, the Mass, and the Lord's Supper.  Few Catholic doctrines  have been so misunderstood.

The Catholic Church teaches the doctrine of transubstantiation, namely, that in the Eucharist, the wafer and the wine really become the body and blood of Jesus Christ.  Have you ever met anyone who finds this a bit hard to take?

If so, you shouldn’t be surprised.  When Jesus spoke about eating his flesh and drinking his blood in John 6, the response was less than enthusiastic.  “How can this man give us his flesh to eat? (V52).  “This is a hard saying who can listen to it?” (V60).  In fact so many of his disciples abandoned him that Jesus asked the twelve if they also planned to quit.  Note that Jesus did not run after the deserters saying, “Come back! – I was just speaking metaphorically!”

It’s intriguing that one charge the pagan Romans lodged against Christians was that of cannibalism.  Why?  They heard that this sect met weekly to eat flesh and drink human blood.  Did the early Christians say: “wait a minute, it’s only a symbol!”?  Not at all.  When explaining the Eucharist to the Emperor around 155AD, St. Justin did not mince his words: "For we do not receive these things as common bread or common drink; but as Jesus Christ our Sav­ior being incarnate by God's word took flesh and blood for our salvation, so also we have been taught that the food consecrated by the word of prayer which comes from him . . . is the flesh and blood of that incarnate Jesus.”

 

Not till the Middle Ages did theologians really try to explain how Christ’s body and blood became present in the Eucharist.  After a few theologians got it wrong, St. Thomas Aquinas came along and offered an explanation that became classic.  In all change that we normally observe, he teaches, appearances change, but deep down, the essence of a thing stays the same.  Example: if, in a fit of mid-life crisis, I traded my mini-van for a Ferrari, abandoned my wife and kids to be a tanned beach bum, bleached and spiked my hair, buffed up at the gym, and made a trip to the plastic surgeon, I’d look a lot different.  But for all my trouble, deep down I’d still substantially be the same confused, middle-aged dude as when I started.

St. Thomas said the Eucharist is the one change we encounter that is exactly the opposite.  The appearances of bread and wine stay the same, but the very essence of these realities, which can’t be viewed by a microscope, is totally transformed.  What starts as bread and wine becomes Christ’s body and blood.   A handy word was coined to describe this unique change.  Transformation of the “sub-stance”, what “stands-under” the surface, came to be called “transubstantiation.”

 
What makes this happen?  The Spirit and the Word.  After praying for the Holy Spirit to come (epiklesis), the priest, who stands in the place of Christ, repeats the words of the God-man: “This is my Body, This is my Blood.”   Sounds like Genesis 1 to me: the mighty wind (read “Spirit”) whips over the surface of the water and God’s Word resounds. “Let there be light” and there was light.  It is no harder to believe in the Eucharist than to believe in Creation.

But why did Jesus arrange for this transformation of bread and wine?  Because he intended another kind of transformation.  The bread and wine are transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ which are, in turn, meant to transform us.  Ever hear the phrase: “you are what you eat?”  The Lord desires us to be transformed from a motley crew of imperfect individuals into the Body of Christ, come to full stature.

Our evangelical brethren speak often of an intimate, personal relationship with Jesus.  But I ask you, how much more personal and intimate than the Eucharist can you get?  We receive the Lord’s body into our physical body that we may become him whom we receive!

 

Such an awesome gift deserves its own feast.  And that’s why, back in the days of Thomas Aquinas and St. Francis of Assisi, the Pope decided to institute the Feast of Corpus Christi.

The Mystery of the Trinity

Explained by Dr. Marcellino D'Ambrosio

Dr. D'Ambrosio released this explanation of the Trinity on his web site, The Crossroads Initiative here.  It is more in depth and complete than my own summary of a revelation I received on the topic during Sunday Mass this past week, and reported here.

The Trinity has always been a difficult doctrine to swallow.  First of all, there is this statement from Sunday’s first reading: “The Lord is God in the heavens above and on the earth below, and there is no other.”  This was tough for anyone to accept in the days of the Old Testament when people generally honored sky gods, sun gods, water gods, and specialized gods for about every aspect of human life and every region of human habitation.  C’mon, there’s only one God?

We might smirk at the ancients, but we have a very similar problem today.  It flows from a philosophy called relativism, but winds up with much the same result.  You might believe in Jesus, I believe in Buddha, and our neighbor reveres Allah.  Your God is true for you, his is for him, mine for me.

Yet the Bible insists, and the Catholic Church along with it, that there is only one God.  And that God is not an “it”, some impersonal “force”, but a “Him,” more truly personal than any of us.   In fact He is so personal, that from all eternity He is interpersonal–three persons in perfect union of will and activity, so perfect that they are truly One God, not three. Everything in our experience is finite, meaning that it has limits, including the degree of unity that we can have in our relationships.  God’s inner unity, the unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is unlimited and perfect, love pouring itself, one person into another, ceaselessly, at every moment, for ever and ever amen.

The author of the Da Vinci Code is not the first to allege that the Church made up this whole Trinity thing.  Various sects in the first few centuries plus the Muslims made this accusation.  Then the Jehovah’s Witnesses rehashed it in the 19^th century, blaming the Roman Emperor Constantine.

Bur really, everything but the term “Trinity” is right there in the Scriptures.  In Sunday's reading from Romans 8, Paul speaks of the Father, Christ Jesus, and the Holy Spirit all in the same few verses, distinct and yet one.  In John’s Gospel, Jesus dialogues with his Father in prayer, showing their distinction, yet boldly proclaims “The Father and I are One.”  Jesus, in this Sunday’s Gospel, sends forth the disciples to baptize people in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”  Note he does not say in the “names” but in the “name”, showing the unity of these persons.  And baptizing in this triune name demonstrates their equality as well, for what sense would it make to baptize in the name of three, one of whom is God and the other two of whom are not?

But this feast of the Most Holy Trinity does not just celebrate the nature, grandeur, and beauty of God.  It also recalls that we have been baptized or plunged into this energizing reality of divine love.  God has drawn us in to share in the dynamism of his own inner life.  He has not called us servants, but friends.  It is not just the Holy Spirit who indwells our souls, but the entire Trinity who has made each of us a dwelling place.  The three divine persons are loving each of us in us and want to love others through us.

Some charge that we call this doctrine a mystery because we want to cover up how illogical and preposterous it is.  No, it is a mystery because it exceeds our powers of imagination and comprehension.  But shouldn’t we expect the inner nature of God to be greater than our finite minds?  Any reality that our minds can master is by definition inferior to our minds.  The Supreme Being by definition has to be greater than our minds.

Fabrication?  Impossible.  Human minds cook up things that other human beings are likely to buy.  Three gods?  People could handle that.  How about a hierarchy of one supreme God with two assistant demi-gods?  That would work.  Three equal but distinct persons in one divine being strains the brain too much to have been concocted by a bunch of theologians or politicians.

Save a Place for Me

Matthew West

Here is the official video for Matthew West's new song.

Shocking Abortion Video - US Statistics

Ending Abortion by 2020

Awake and Alive

Skillet

Visit their web site here.

Bring on the Love

Coldwater Jane

Ain't No big Mystery.  Ain't Rocket Science.  We all need a little MERCY.

Visit their web site here.