Spiritually, I am in a new place. A few months ago I finally completed the Total Consecration of St. Louis de Montfort. I was prompted to re-try (I tried before and did not finish) this consecration after a spell of nightmares and heart palpitations. Oddly, the doctor could find nothing wrong, though my husband even felt my heart beating so fast it was, frankly, unnatural. For several weeks I woke from nightmares so intense that I did not know where I was, I was lost in some unknown place, and in all my nightmares I also lost my home and my family. My heart would beat through my chest so fast that it was scary. I began the consecration, and a week later it stopped. I canceled my future doctor appointments.

Then I had another miscarriage, but it was during the consecration and I discovered that I was at peace. You see, in the consecration you give everything to Christ through Mary. Everything. Yourself, your family, your belongings, your virtues. My fears disappeared.

I’m not just in a new place spiritually either, we are literally in a new place physically this year. I’m also enrolling for my last two courses this summer and completing the comp exams in the Fall to finish my MA in Dogmatic Theology next December. I look around me now, in this rustic setting, homeschooling my children, tending our home with my husband, reunited with my grown children, and loving life — and something’s changed in me.

I do accept these abundances, I struggled with accepting good things before because I knew I did not deserve it, but now I understand that I can accept anything because I will give it all right back to God. Until I die, I will be accepting, praying, and giving, consecrating it all to Christ through Mary.

So, I’ve gone and started a new blog. This one is just my name, and in discerning my new direction I decided that it was time to write about what I’m passionate about — science. I’ve long followed popular science, long read scientific papers for fun, and as I’ve learned about dogmatic theology, I’ve started to see science in a new way. I think I’ve found my niche as a writer. This blog was for learning, something I’ll always be doing, but the new blog will be more focused: Popular Science, Dogmatic Theology, and Mountain Life.

I hope you will all join me there, and re-subscribe, re-follow, re-bookmark. If you liked this blog, I think you’ll love the new one. I even have a Facebook page which I’m going to run as a mini-blog. What is that? you say. Well, come find out. I’m bursting with ideas!

And what of this blog? Oh, I have plans! It is not just going to sit here. All the old posts will remain, but I’m considering, pending interest, starting a small group of writers here operating similarly to Ignitum Today and Catholic Stand, only this one is for new converts. A group of new converts sharing their journey. My daughter may even take up the pen.

So if you are a new Catholic convert of five years or less, and you are interested in writing about your journey (people love convert stories) under the guidance of my free editing, managing, and promoting services (I know, I know, for what it’s worth), email me at stacytrasancos@msn.com. You can help me decide how to redesign this space, but the name will remain the same. It stands for conversion.

And to the commenters awaiting the post on Egypt. It’s coming, it’s coming. Promise. Follow me over to the new place. The first two posts are already there. Come and let me know what you think.

After many years of prayer, my oldest daughter converted to Catholicism this Easter vigil mass, but not because of me. More like, in spite of me. Until recently I have had great difficulty letting go of my children, and in the past, as I watched her make choices that I knew would hurt her, I was unable to have simple conversations with her, unable to just talk.

Instead all I could do was lecture, teach, warn, utter loud and strident cries and threaten to pull my hair out. I came to refer that anguish as the painting-the-porch-while-the-house-is-burning syndrome. How can a mother stand there and paint the porch all pretty while engulfing dangers blaze on the other side of the door?

That feeling was not limited to her. I felt that way about evangelization in general. The house is burning folks, stop decorating and start fighting!

The relationship was strained because I never knew what to say to my daughter. Over time, she grew distant. And so God put other people in her life, people who understood the bigger picture, people who could see that what I thought was a house burning down was really a structure instituted by Christ which the very gates of hell could never prevail against, people who knew that sometimes God calls us to paint porches because He has called others to put out fires. What was I doing? Well, having promptly thrown away the paint brush God placed in my hands, I was trying to turn the porch into my podium.

But God is a loving and merciful Father, and through Christ we are offered second chances, and third, and three-hundredth, and so on. As I watched my precious eldest daughter bow her head to let the baptismal waters flow over it, I saw her sponsor standing diligently behind her, a friend who saw the fires in her life as something that would eventually temper her, purify her, and strengthen her. Smiling through unsparing tears and holding a chest that was about to burst as understanding dawned, I heard the Holy Spirit whisper: “Here Mom, here is your brush and some fresh paint. Now go make the porch beautiful, and while you are at it, put up a swing, for your daughter is home now and come morning, she’ll need a place where she can sit in the sunshine and talk. See? I make all things new, now and forever.”

The Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen once gave a talk on the Devil and at the end of it he said that when there is silence, day or night, he is startled by a cry. The first time he heard it, the cry came down from the cross. When he went out and searched, he found a man in the “throws of crucifixion.” He tried to take the man down, tried to take the nails out of his feet, but the man said, “Let them be; for I cannot be taken down until every man, woman, and child come together to take me down.” The archbishop pleaded, “What can I do? I cannot bear your cry.” And the Lord said to him, “Go into the world and tell every one that you meet that there is a man on a cross.”

What a simple, direct expression of our command to evangelize. Go tell people about Christ, that he is God and that God became man and suffered and died to save us. Tell people in a way that unites them at the cross.

Fulton Sheen also describes in this sermon that the Devil is “anti-cross.” Anything that is of the Devil leads people away from the cross. He explains that anything that produces discord or brings about division in the Church is diabolic. That is, again, a simple test to remember when we evangelize, when we speak to others about Christ or even live our lives as Christians. Is what I’m about to say or do going to cause discord? Speaking the truth can be hard enough if we fear rejection or isolation; speaking the truth in love, in a way that communicates to people not inclined to listen, takes skill and effort. You have to consider the audience before yourself.

Another disruptive element in society, he says, is also the decline of discipline. “The decline of the spirit of discipline is a hatred of the cross.” It starts in schools, and when a nation tries to impose discipline without the cross, the nation becomes totalitarian. The disciplinary character of Christianity commits people to a common purpose beyond themselves. Discipline without the cross brings destruction of human liberty.

This Holy Week as we pray before the cross and celebrate the Resurrection of Christ, let’s pray also that we are granted the words we need to tell others about the man on the cross, and let’s pray they hear us and join with the angels in praising our Lord.

—–

You can watch the videos of the whole talk here, Fulton Sheen on the Devil.

Alright, look, I have to come clean.

When I first read Father Stanley L. Jaki, as I described in the last post, Would There Be Science Without Christianity, it seemed like a curtain to a grand stage was pulled back. I kept returning to the book. I read Jaki’s other writings; I read summaries of his thesis; I read other accounts of the history of science; I read original sources when I could. But — I kept returning to this book, The Savior of Science by this Benedictine priest and leading thinker in the philosophy and history of science.

Anyone who has read his writing knows, it is not easy. On one hand if you stay with it, the overall picture emerges. On the other hand, to get the full picture you have to dig into the sources he provides amply. You have to get up on that stage and pick up the objects. For a while now I’ve gone around touting what I saw on that new stage, that science was born of Christianity, but it fell flat each time (and I’m told it caused spewed coffee to ruin a few computer screens belonging to some atheists). So I’m exploring the objects on the stage now, but I have to go slowly. I promised to explore Egypt next, but one more thing flipping around needs to be settled first.

Fr. Jaki begins his explanation of the birth of science by reviewing the “stillbirths” of science. It is important to first understand what he means by this curious phrase. History itself requires a scientific approach, a commitment to honesty and not a filtration of facts that tell the story the teacher wants to tell. This seems obvious enough, but that is what happened in the telling of the history of science. The history of science has been presented to modern students (if the history is taught at all) as a linear climb out of darkness, an inevitable development of mankind that heightened us to where we are today. Consider the introduction in this 1973 college physics textbook used at Berkeley:

“Through experimental science we have been able to learn all these facts about the natural world, triumphing over darkness and ignorance to classify the stars and to estimate their masses, composition, distances, and velocities; to classify living species and to unravel their genetic relations. [. . .] These great accomplishments of experimental science were achieved by men of many types. [. . .] Most of these men had in common only a few things: they were honest and actually made the observations they recorded, and they published the results of their work in a form permitting others to duplicate the experiment or observation.” (Source here and here)

Is that how you think of it? Probably. This is how the history was more exhaustively set forth in the 1904 five volume account, A History of Science, by Henry Smith Williams and Edward Huntington. For all the history of mankind science has been developing neatly in a linear fashion, one step necessarily leading to the next, communicated across around the globe from one culture to the next, culminating to the present day.

“We shall best understand our story of the growth of science if we think of each new principle as a stepping-stone which must fit into its own particular niche; and if we reflect that the entire structure of modern civilization would be different from what it is, and less perfect than it is, had not that particular stepping-stone been found and shaped and placed in position. Taken as a whole, our stepping-stones lead us up and up towards the alluring heights of an acropolis of knowledge, on which stands the Temple of Modern Science. The story of the building of this wonderful structure is in itself fascinating and beautiful.” (Entire set free on Kindle)

But ask yourself a question. Even in your lifetime has science developed like that? Has science really made modern civilization perfect? Was 1904 really the alluring height of an acropolis of knowledge? Has not science developed since then? And did it develop linearly, or in growth spurts that were a function of the culture?

Other historians have called this all too tidy story into question. In a 1972 editorial in Science journal (ahem, I hear they take slow readers) titled Should the History of Science Be Rated X?, Stephen G. Brush, who is now a Distinguished University Professor of the History of Science at the Institute for Physical Science & Technology in the Department of History at the University of Maryland, questioned whether it was even appropriate to teach this to students. He argued that teaching this “fictionalized history” to young and impressionable future scientists harms the profession. Why? Because if a new scientist believes that the field he is entering is really a series of successive stepping stones from one achievement to the next by the men and women who unabashedly bucked the norms and broke through to new heights, then they will imagine they have no place in science unless they are “an Einstein or a Dirac or a dozen others.”

He says it leads to the idea that there are two kinds of scientists: “the average scientist, who must obey the rules, and the genius, who will know when to break them.” It encourages an unhealthy psychology. Who wants to be average and meaningless? But, do we really need scientists thinking their measure of genius is dependent on their ability to break the rules? I can attest to this mindset even from the 1990′s, a “publish or perish” mentality. It is the same mindset that led the luminary at Harvard, Henry Rosovsky, one of Harvard’s most eminent scientists who became the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, to say in 1987 without hesitation that his scientific inspiration was “money and flattery.” (See page 10) Even though historians have called this linear story and its dangers into question, it persists. That’s why Jaki’s argument resonated with me.

To understand Jaki’s argument, then, it has to be understood that he rejects this faulty stepping-stone model. Instead he describes the history of science more naturally, as an evolutionary tree that had many dead branches before it flourished into a vital and self-sustaining living discipline as we hope it is today, a discipline that is an ever-continual revolution of the scientific method in many areas, asking many questions, searching for the truth of nature. The history of science to Jaki is thus a work of mankind that must take into account different cultures and cultural mindsets. Since every culture in the history of man has sought God, the evolution of science must take into account the religions of those cultures too, and ask some searching questions.

Jaki takes the analogy another step further in arguing that empirical science as described in the last post was born of Christianity, since Christianity itself was born of a woman. He refers to the dead branches, as it were, on the evolutionary tree as stillbirths, as living entities that formed for a while in a womb (a certain culture) but died before becoming viable on their own as a universal discipline recognized for its own methods.

He begins with Egypt, which will be the subject of the next post. I promise. I’m way over the 1,000 word limit for now.

St. Agnes of Rome, pray for us.

Tough question. Recently I read a story with my daughter in her 1890 Catholic National Reader. The story described a praetexta and bulla-wearing boy of ancient Rome during early Christianity. His father had been martyred. Returning from school one day, he was jubilant but hesitant to tell his mother how his head had been injured.

The teacher had asked the children whether a real philosopher should ever be ready to die for truth. The other children had given flat answers, but the martyr’s boy, having been instructed firmly in the faith, had given his answer so passionately that the word “Christian” accidentally escaped his mouth. In those days Christians were “obliged to live as strangers in their own lands” for fear of their lives.

Moved by the conviction of the boy’s answer, all the students applauded except for one named Corvinus. Noticing the betraying slip, Cornivus became jealous and angry, vowing to harm his classmate and turn him over to the authorities. After school Cornivus challenged the martyr’s son to fight, but the Christian peacefully vowed that he never intended anyone harm. When he turned to leave, the crimson-faced and furious Corvinus smashed the martyr’s son in the head, knocking him to the ground while the other children cheered.

The martyr’s son told his mother how he stood up to his persecutor and, even as he admitted temptation to fight back, the hardest struggle of his life, flesh and blood so strong within him, he remembered her lessons and prayed that the good angels would conquer the demon at his side. He thought of Christ being beaten and humiliated, yet meek and forgiving, and rather than fighting back he stretched out his hand and replied to Cornivus, “May God forgive you, as I freely and fully do; and may He bless you abundantly.”

The conviction of this boy convicted me. In many ways my jean and sneaker-wearing children also live in times when Christians are strangers in their own lands. Am I preparing them to die for truth? Would they be martyrs? Have I taught them seek the counsel of angels and remember the meekness of Christ? Or have I become complacent in this modern confusion of political correctness? As we closed the book, my daughter and I opened a new discussion. As much as I pray no harm comes to her, I now pray even more that my children courageously confront whatever the world deals them as true children of God.

So did I.

Here is what I thought I knew.

The Luteinizing hormone (LH) in the female menstrual cycle precedes ovulation by about a day. It is the pink line with a spike in the graph shown here. If the MAP is taken too soon before the LH surge, it has no effect. If the MAP is taken just before that, it can stop the LH surge and thereby prevent ovulation. If it is taken during or after the surge, it probably will not stop ovulation but it may or may not interfere with implantation of an embryo should the ovum become fertilized by sperm. If it is taken after implantation, it has no effect.

Thus, the MAP is morally illicit for married couples because it is contraception. It is considered by some to be morally licit only 1) in the case of rape, and 2) if it is taken just before the LH surge to prevent ovulation. It is illicit to give it to a rape victim during or after the LH surge because there is a risk that the pill will cause the death of an embryo by inhibiting implantation, which is a chemically-induced abortion. Is that what you thought too?

This understanding is consistent with the guidelines outlined in the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference Guidelines for Catholic Hospitals Treating Victims of Sexual Assault from 1998.It is consistent with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) position issued in the 2001 Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, number 36. It seems to be consistent with the recent decision of the German Bishops Conference to allow the MAP which was praised by the President of the Pontifical Academy for Life.

But it does not seem consistent with what the scientists and doctors are saying.

Some Catholic medical professionals warn that there is no MAP that will not affect implantation and that in about half the cases chemically-induced abortions result. Other Catholic professionals explain that it is possible to know whether the MAP will cause an early chemical abortion by determining if a woman is ovulating, and they describe tests to do this. But who is correct? There are still questions unanswered.

What happens if the pill is taken at the right time, but ovulation occurs anyway? If the MAP only prevents ovulation 50-60% of the time, does the pill then interfere with implantation if fertilization occurs? This would also be a chemically-induced abortion, right?

Or what happens if the pill is given during the LH surge accidentally? Hormone fluctuations vary for a woman, and vary even more from one woman to the next. What happens if the MAP is taken slightly after the LH surge? Will the MAP interfere with implantation in that case?

There have been studies to answer these questions, but the results vary. This is a good point to make note of something important but rarely discussed: The only way to definitively get these answers is to intentionally test on human subjects knowing that the test may kill them. That is immoral.

The pro-MAP medical professionals who have already done testing do not add any clarity to the questions either. The opinion that seems to be the longest held is that MAPs probably reduce the incidence of fertilized eggs that do not implant. Some say there is no proof that implantation is inhibited, but they concede that in theory it could be. Established forms of emergency contraception, such as the Yuzpe regimen which uses large doses of both estrogen and progestin and the copper-releasing intrauterine devices (IUDs) are long known to inhibit implantation. Less is known about other forms, such as Plan B (progestogen only) and Ella (ulipristal acetate, a chemical cousin of mifepristone). The Plan B manufacturer claims that it shouldn’t affect or terminate an existing pregnancy. The Ella manufacturer claims that it may also work by preventing attachment to the uterus. Who would give a child medicine with a label that said it “shouldn’t” or “may” terminate him?

Most recently some researchers even go so far as to claim boldly (and without any new testing) that Plan B and Ella do not ever interfere with implantation even though Plan B contains 50 times (30 micrograms every day vs. 1,500 micrograms in two doses) the synthetic hormone that the progestogen-only mini-pill contains which is known to thin the lining of the uterus and stop implantation, and Ella uses a chemical that behaves as the known abortifacient mifepristone. One researcher even said that both pills “have absolutely no effect after ovulation“ but there is no new data to support such certainty. If they are right, the debate would be over. Or do they just want it to be over?

In March 2012 the International Federation of Gynecology & Obstetrics (FIGO) released a definitive statement on the mechanism of the Plan B pill. They likewise said that it does “not prevent implantation” but cited the same studies others have cited when they said that in theory it could and probably does. One is only left to conclude that the talking points changed even though the science did not. In addition, the United States Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have all redefined pregnancy as beginning with implantation which allows drug companies to declare that no drug that prevents implantation is abortifacient – circumventing the real question about human life. Why did they do this?

Studies have been conducted for decades now and it is still not scientifically clear how to even determine whether the MAP caused an embryo to die or not. It is not that they cannot analyze the tests; it is that they do not even have a test available. So, to add to the point made before, those who want that answer about implantation must not only demand testing on the lives of human subjects knowing some may die, and they also demand testing that will not give a definitive answer. That is not only immoral; it is nonsense.

So does anyone know how the MAP works? It seems not. That the pro-MAP professionals changed talking points about its mechanism and about pregnancy, thereby circumventing the real question, seems to suggest that they do strongly suspect that the pills interfere with implantation, but will not admit it. In fuzzy language, the manufacturers conclude that prevention of implantation is not proven as a mechanism, but they cannot prove that it is not a mechanism even though other MAPs and uses of these drugs in different dosages are known to work by preventing implantation. They seem to think it is unreasonable to have to prove the negative, but that is a standard required of any other medication if the lives in question are valued by society.

Remember, professionals who promote the MAP have are not concerned with protecting embryonic human life; their motivation lies elsewhere. Should those of us who are motivated to ensure that human life is not directly ended continue to demand more tests then? We already know that lives have been lost in the development of these drugs. Asking for more proof implicates us in the act, even if remotely. I conclude that not only do I not know how the MAP works, I do not need to know because it would require senseless testing on embryonic human lives from an industry not motivated to protect them. There is enough confusion in Catholic hospitals already. We ought to reject it completely and focus on other ways to help victims of rape.

I hope more people will read and participate in the discussion too.

First, let me briefly (promise) chronicle my introduction to this concept. I loved science as a child. Nature fascinated me and as I grew and studied, I wanted to know how things worked. I loved science in high school, I majored in biology in college, and I taught high school chemistry for two years. Since teachers learn as much as students, especially when they are as young as I was, I developed a love for chemistry. So I went on to graduate school for a Ph.D., and published in enough reputable international journals, Science magazine included, to go on and work for DuPont.

I don’t list all of that to brag, but to emphasize an important point: I had no clue what philosophy was even though the title Doctor of Philosophy was appended to my name.

Then I became Catholic and entered a Masters degree program in theology where I was required to take the introductory philosophy course for people who have never studied philosophy. In that course the first book I read was The Savior of Science by the late (and great) Father Stanley L. Jaki, a Benedictine priest and leading thinker in the philosophy and history of science. He authored more than two dozen books on the relation between science and Christianity, and was a frequent lecturer at Yale and Oxford. He was awarded the Templeton Prize in 1987 for furthering the understanding of science and religion.

It blew me away as if I were a child again. Here in an introductory course in theology I suddenly understood science like never before, not as just some discipline to master so I could publish and get a job, but I finally understood why people ever wanted to know about the natural world in the first place and where we are supposed to be going in our knowledge of it. I understood why we all pine for truth and why science was born — and it was because of Christ. Now, of course, I understand that everything is because of Christ, who is God, but at the time it was a radical, mind-boggling, and awesome concept.

Would science ever have developed without the Christian mindset, the Christian psychology about the world and man’s ability to know truth?

My lifestyle now (read that “My kids, puppies, editorial obligations, and glued eyes to Facebook celebrating with internet friends our new Pope Francis, who also studied and taught chemistry) prevent me from covering all of the material in one long discourse (which I doubt I could do without all the other priorities anyway), but here I want to at least introduce the framework of Fr. Jaki’s thesis. Not all theologians or historians of science agree with him, but I think I do. This plunge into the topic is as much for my own learning as it is for anyone else, so argue away.

Defining Terms

Anyone who has read this blog for a while knows I am a stickler for defining terms, not because I’m some superhero of logic, but because it must be done if a discussion is to stay focused. It’s only fair. If people cannot agree on definitions, then communication, much less debate, is impossible, and useless combox swaggering will ensue.

Science: In modern use, this word is treated as synonymous with Natural and Physical Science, and thus restricted to those branches of study that relate to the phenomena of the material universe and their laws. This is the dominant sense in ordinary use that the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives. It is a systematic body of knowledge about nature gathered by sense experience and organized by reason. This is Modern Science.

What we do not mean: As I have explained before, science in the general sense of the word (also given primarily in the OED) from its Latin root means a “body of knowledge.” In the early universities begun by the Catholic Church, science comprised the entire curriculum of studies (the consortium magistorum) except for theology, law, medicine, and arts (philosophy). For the question of whether Modern Science (as most people know it today) grew out of Christianity, we need to define the more limited term, which is done above.

What science is not: Science, Modern Science that is, cannot comment on immaterial or spiritual things. It cannot prove or disprove the existence of angels, demons, or God (though reason can assume the first two and know with certainty the latter). Science cannot comment on anything that is not:

1. material,
2. therefore, in motion, and
3. thus, observable and quantifiable.

Modern Science can apply the Scientific Method to the natural world and answer questions about, for instance, the rate of falling objects, the reaction of materials with each other, or the effect of controlling conditions on a process. It includes, most fundamentally, physics, and also chemistry and biology, and their sub-disciplines.

It should also be noted that to even do science, a scientist also must rely on intellectual abstractions to organize what he has observed and make predictions for the next round of the Scientific Method. A scientist must also rely on abstract reasoning to apply his knowledge to life, and a scientist must rely on abstract reasoning to even define science and define that he (okay, or she, darn pronouns) is a scientist.

Since I’m nearing a self-imposed 1,000 word limit, I’ll explain what’s next: Fr. Jaki’s thesis begins with a review of the “Stillbirths of Science.” He explains how in other cultures under different religious mindsets scientific progress may have been made in off-sprouts of the “evolutionary tree of science” but together they ended in “a vista of dead branches (to say nothing of the innumerable dead twigs).” If you’re up for the adventure, we’ll move through these cultures one at a time, and consider the title question.

So first, tell me, do we agree on terms?

(1,000 words reached – now.)

Especially note in the first clip 5:58 – 7:20. He explains that “diabolic” means discord and talks about division in the Church. Then he discusses three ways a psychiatrist has identified the diabolic: 1) love of nudity, 2) violence, and 3) split personality (no inner peace).

Note at 6:00 he discusses three shortcuts to the diabolic: 1) permissiveness, 2) anything that makes us say “Oh!”, and 3) concern only with social and political order.

He begins describing the evil in nations, the disruptive element. “The decline of the spirit of discipline is a hatred of the cross.” It starts in schools.

Listen to the very end, when he tells what he hears when there is silence.

By the time this article is in print, the next pope will probably have stepped out onto the balcony to greet the world for the first time. My children know what is happening, but they really do not understand the immensity and significance.

Apostolic succession is an easy concept to grasp. The hierarchy from laity to priest to bishop to cardinal to pope is, like everything else about Catholicism, logical and fitting with the order of the created world. But to comprehend that St. Peter was succeeded by St. Linus who was succeeded by St. Anacletus I, all the way to the next 266th pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church over two millenia, is just beyond them. It’s beyond me.

As I wonder whether this pope will be the pope my children will grow up with, I find myself thinking about the new generation and the New Evangelization. Whatever the New Evangelization has meant to people until now, I have a sense that it is about to be clarified. Fulfilled maybe.

I work with Catholic young adults as editor of an e-magazine Ignitum Today, and if the 100 or so intelligent and articulate writers I have met so far are any indication, young Catholics very clearly understand that evangelization is not about marketing the Church as salespeople or, to quote a young husband and father Nic Davidson, it is not about some “theologically absurd belief that Christianity should bend to the whims of culture.” No, they are thirsty for real, objective truth, the truth that the Catholic Church teaches, the Word of God.

They see that there is a “desperate, pressing need for more people … to hold the line against the subversive gibberish and rhetoric of a culture which says you don’t have to mean what you say or be what you are.” Evangelization is not an activity for them, it is a way of life. They choose chastity and fidelity, they strive for excellence and humility, they know that Evil is a person, and Love is the Person who conquers sin. They will not compromise their faith. Without a doubt I know that every single one of them would lay down his or her life before denying Christ.

So as we meet our new guardian of truth, I feel an overwhelming sense of excitement and relief. I know in many ways these are dark times and there are attacks on religion all over the world, but no matter what darkness or persecution may lay ahead, the life in the Church is shining brightly, and that light is growing.

—–

Nic’s words were actually in response to an atheist, Penn Jillette, who defended Catholicism to a Catholic, Piers Morgan, who argued that doctrine should change with the times. Nic wrote him a letter of thanks, An Open Letter to Penn Jillette From an Appreciative Young Catholic. Here’s a clip of the conversation between Penn and Piers in case you missed it.

So when I heard about the decision of the German bishops to allow Catholic hospitals to use the morning-after pill or other contraception in rape cases, I was concerned about communication, but not critical of the decision. This is an opportunity for clearer communication, not crisis-style panic, finger-pointing, and insinuating that our bishops are ignorant. We have enough of that in the misguided secular media already.

Read the rest at Catholic Exchange, and let me know your thoughts. The issue of the morning-after pill needs more discussion.