A perfectly serious letter, emailed to the Dompost April 18

Now we’ve got same-sex marriage, I’m campaigning for incestuous marriage. I’d like to marry my brother and seeing I’m past child-bearing age I can’t see why not. The current marriage legislation discriminates against men and women who want to marry their siblings. Even if they’re young enough to have children, abortion’s readily available. I’d have to divorce my husband first and my brother would have to divorce his wife, but that’s easy too.

The only trouble is, I have three brothers and I can’t decide which one.

 

Julia du Fresne

A Piece of Idiocy

Before the vote is taken on same-sex ‘marriage’ (for all I know, it’s all over already, but I’ve got better things to do than hang on the lips of Parliamentarians) I’d like to advertise my opposition to this piece of idiocy by publishing the email I sent to Louisa Walls, John Key, David Shearer, Russel Norman and Hone Harawira:

 

I wish to express my opposition to the same-sex ‘marriage’ Bill, and please be assured I will not give my party vote to Labour if you vote in favour of it. My reasons for opposing this abysmally silly proposal follow, and please note also that THIS IS NOT A FORM LETTER.

 

The traditional family, of children growing up with their biological parents, is the basis and heart of New Zealand society, indeed of civilisation.

 

Evidence has been collated and published overseas of less favourable outcomes for children of same-sex ’marriages’.

 

Children already face difficulties and encounter pressures unknown to previous generations. Depriving them of one of their biological parents (an inevitable consequence of same-sex ‘marriage’) will mean more tax revenue siphoned off to meet increased expenditure in hospitals, schools and the courts to meet a much greater demand for their services.

 

NZ voters were assured, after the passing of the Civil Unions Act, that all demands for equality of homosexuals with heterosexuals had been met and there would be no further legislation on this matter. Parliament has in fact misled the public.

 

Support for same-sex ‘marriage’ has dropped sharply since the introduction of the bill. Many New Zealanders to whom it initially appealed because of our sense of fairness and equality now realise homosexuals already have equality guaranteed by the Civil Unions Act. So fairness is not the issue – except of course, to children who would lose their natural role models and traditional family support.

 

Members of Parliament who vote for this Bill are ignoring their largest constituency, the ‘baby-boomers’ who have 40+ years of emotional, mental, financial and more often than not, spiritual investment in their marriages.

 

By no means do all homosexuals want same-sex ‘marriage’. Parliament has kowtowed to a tiny, politically correct, time- and money-rich, vociferous minority.

 

If same-sex ‘marriage’ can be legalised, then so can polygamous and polyandrous ‘marriage’.

 

Experience of gay ‘marriage’ overseas shows that marriage celebrants who object to gay marriage have been heavily fined or otherwise penalised for refusing to conduct such ceremonies.

 

I’m disillusioned by the shabby treatment meted out by the Select Committee to people making submissions against this Bill, which was impolite to say the least, and the speed with which it’s been rammed through Parliament, which is unfair and undemocratic.

I can only hope that you and all Members of Parliament who voted for this nonsense will realise before it’s too late that reason has been sacrificed to emotion.

Julia du Fresne Kynoch

 

Letter to the Dominion Post, March 21 2013

So the Families Commission in sorting itself out under the Government’s White Paper on Vulnerable Children has discovered ‘scandalous expenditure’. Maybe that’s a consequence of the White Paper ignoring the extremely vulnerable children, in the womb, which is now the most dangerous place for a child to be. In other words, the Government is deceiving itself and its White Paper is a lie. We pretend (inconsistently, as we concede it’s a child when it’s wanted) that the unborn baby is an unborn something or other else. And as Sir Walter Scott said, ‘Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive.’

While my heart aches for women suffering the trauma of abortion, and for their whanau – and given the numbers, very few families in New Zealand today are not affected – the longer we keep up this pretence, the more women will be pressured into abortion and everyone’s suffering prolonged.

First published in NZ Catholic, April 7 2013, titled 'Do You Believe in Purgatory?'

I once knew a parish priest who didn’t believe in purgatory. He said so. From the pulpit. Another concedes that it exists - but not for the faithful, for whom apparently God is a glorified Insurance Agent, with Masses offered for them after death a celestial endowment fund delivering immediate admission to heaven.

Now, what would Mother Seraphim of the Adorers of the Sacred Heart make of that?

Not much, I suspect, as at a Carmelite retreat at Ngakuru recently she visited our dinner table with a small book which made our hair stand on end, the tales it tells.

Hungry Souls - Supernatural Visits, Messages and Warnings from Purgatory, by renowned psychotherapist Gerard van den Aardweg, has many scholarly annotations, a bibliography and photographs. Photographs? Of purgatory? No; of the church of the Sacred Heart of Suffrage in Rome, its glass and marble images of saints who promoted devotion to the holy souls, including Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure and Margaret Mary Alacoque, and a mural Benedict XV called ‘a visual compendium of Catholic doctrine on purgatory’.

More tellingly, the church has a museum giving evidence of visits from holy souls, among them scorch marks left by fiery fingerprints on clothing or prayer books. … Hold on. How can spiritual beings leave physical marks? Immaterial spirits, Dr van den Aardweg says, take on material form to make themselves visible, a form expressing essential features of their spiritual state.

If we Carmelites were thinking ourselves exempt, we had another think coming. The ‘theologian of purgatory’, St Catherine of Genoa, insists that even the smallest imperfections must be burned away. How many NZ Catholic readers would believe that a pious, cloistered nun, who took two painful years to die of tuberculosis, could find herself in purgatory? But there’s her fingerprint, burned into the pillow of a fellow religious, to prove she’d sinned against faith by wanting to die, and therefore had need of suffrage.

So we Carmelites’ nearest and dearest should take heed: if our obsequies turn out to be occasions for eulogising and celebrating, assuming we’re in heaven and lulling everyone into a sense of false security, they could be in for hauntings too.

St Catherine describes the fire of purgatory as the fire of the love of God, enkindled in the soul imediately after death. ‘At… a glance, (God) so transforms the soul in Him that it knows nothing other than God … the soul feels itself melting in the fire of that love of its sweet God. … The greatest suffering of the souls in purgatory … is the awareness that they have deliberately gone against His great goodness … the soul feels within it a fire like that of hell.’

How wise then, to pre-empt that fire by learning to love God now in meditation and contemplative prayer, in the knowledge that patient suffering and prayer, especially in the Mass where our beloved dead pray with us, accelerate not only their journey to ineffable joy , but our own.

Yesterday I caught up with Karl du Fresne’s article ‘Heaven protect us from righteous zealots’, first published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard on April 10, which condemned unbridled perfectionism as manifested in the promotion of a test to detect Down syndrome in utero.

Funnily enough, I wrote to the Dompost about that on March 22:

‘If the three beautiful young people ‘rewarded for lives well lived as part of World Down Syndrome Day’ (High Achievers, March 22) had been conceived a generation later, they might not have had lives to live, well or otherwise. They could have been snuffed out in utero under the National Screening Unit’s search-and-destroy mission on Down Syndrome. They’d never have discovered their talent for skiing, gym, speech, drama, photography, swimming or dance. And New Zealand would never have had the ‘fantastic example’ they’ve set.’

The Dompost printed a letter making the same point, but more politely.

 

I was highly edified, not to say tickled pink, when I discovered the first book Benedict XVI turned to in his retirement from the papacy is one by Hans Urs von Balthasar, the Swiss theologian whose work on contemplation, Prayer,  is currently keeping me up late at night reading.

 

Balthasar founded the journal 'Communio' with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and died (in 1988) just a day or so before John Paul II was scheduled to create him a cardinal. Now of course God always knows what's best, but it seems a pity that a theologian celebrated as one whose influence would long outlive his century wasn't in Rome last month. to exercise that influence in the conclave to elect Benedict's successor.

 

As a young Jesuit novice Balthasar reportedly found lectures on Thomas Aquinas so boring, he stuffed his ears so he could read Augustine and the early Church Fathers instead. It wasn't the 'angelic Doctor' he found fault with, it was his professors’ treatment of such an exalted subject as theology.

 

I think I know how he felt, or rather thought, about theologians. Something like the philosopher Maurice Blondel whose 19^th century comment was, ‘as soon as we regard (God) from without, as a mere object of knowledge or a mere occasion for speculative study without freshness of heart and the unrest of love, then all is over, and we have nothing in our hands but a phantom and an idol.’

 

It was as a teenager that I first read these immortal lines of Keats:

 

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'. - That is all

    Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

 

Then, in middle age, while reading under a taupata tree on a beach I was handed a book called Fire Within, a treatment of contemplative prayer by famed Marist spiritual director Thomas Dubay, which elaborated on Keats' theme - and Blondel's, and von Balthasar's.

 

Listen to Dubay: ‘One of the most commonly admitted, frequently lamented and rarely corrected defects in current moral theology is its dire lack of a contemplative/mystical dimension.’

One is tempted to draw the conclusion that most theologians, like so many priests,  don’t know how to pray.