LOVE URGES US TO LIVE MORE INTENSELY

Charity sanctifies every action, even the most trivial and indifferent, and confers upon it a value for eternal life. 'Love urges us to live more intensely for him who died for us and rose again'.

By living in this manner we carry out the divine plan for our soul, and reach that level of love that God expects of us and with which we shall love and glorify him for all eternity. (Fr Gabriel of St Mary Magdalen, as previously.)

WE SHALL BE ESTABLISHED FOREVER IN THE DEGREE OF LOVE WE REACH IN TIME

Last night, New Year’s Eve, I wrote my email with its ‘holy thought’ as usual, but not from the usual site (my desk). From my son’s kitchen table, where I sat party-sitting, it refused to budge and on my return home, at midnight, it had gone AWOL.  So belatedly, here it is:

 In eternity… time will be no more; we shall be established forever in the degree of love which we have reached now, in time.

If we have attained a high degree of love, we shall be fixed forever in that degree of love and glory; if we possess only a slight degree, that is all we shall have throughout eternity (Fr Gabriel, as previously).

WRESTLING OVER FREE SPEECH IN REGARD TO ABORTION (Letter to Dom Post, Dec 31)

‘Censorship slowly rots society’, argues Matthew Parris (Wrestle over free speech goes on, Dec 30). I absolutely agree. But censorship not of the media, but by the media, which he fails to mention, is a factor more putrefying than any other.

 

Parris wisely observes that ‘protecting people from harm has an emotive appeal that the defenders of free speech will always struggle to counter’. Even journalists apparently succumb to this emotive appeal.

 

Presumably it’s a natural inclination to protect women from painful reminders of their personal tragedies, the trauma of abortion, which explains the media’s persistent failure to allow pro-lifers freedom of speech - and as probably one in three women in New Zealand have suffered an abortion, to do so would certainly qualify as shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre. 

But the media’s raison d’etre is to inform, and in this instance, to inform women of the health risks of abortion. 

In the wrestle over free speech in regard to abortion, in which corner are New Zealand’s media, in particular The Dominion Post ?

GOD MADE MAN INTELLIGENT AND FREE (from my nightly family email)

God has made man intelligent and free; he offers him all the treasures of salvation and holiness contained in the infinite merits of Jesus Christ; man is free to accept or refuse.


From Divine Intimacy, by Fr Gabriel of St Mary Magdalen, OCD

FLOWERS NOT WASTING THEIR SWEETNESS ON THE DESERT AIR

For years now I've been sending my long-suffering children (all adult) a nightly collective email.

Events and encounters amusing and embarrassing, brilliant ideas and appeals to their better nature, several short paragraphs usually, all leading to the particular brilliant idea which inspired the venture.

That in turn was inspired by a few verses in the Divine Office which cut me to the quick:


Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words which  I command you this day shall be upon your heart;and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise (Deuteronomy 6: 4-7).


I realised how far I’d fallen short of this ideal I'd fallen and thought, I know, I'll send them a line or two every night from whatever it is I'm currently reading – which apart from the daily rag (The Dominion Post) is exclusively what’s called 'spiritual reading' (such a rebarbative description for such utterly absorbing material. Once upon a time I devoured literary fiction, but no more. A friend who's HOD Speech and Drama at leading 'gels' ’ school says I don't know what I'm missing but I do, and that's exactly why I'm not missing it).

I suspect my kids skip the bit in italics at the end of my nightly message, and read only the come-on.

So not wanting to have my flowers wasting their sweetness on the desert air I thought, I know! I can post my nightly ‘holy thought’ on my blog.

So now you’re in for it.

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL BELIEVES UNBORN CHILDREN AREN'T HUMAN (Letter published in Dom Post, Jan 4)

Grant Bayldon of Amnesty International says ‘human rights define the basic requirements we as humans have to be able to live our lives in a fair society’ (Never take human rights for granted, Dec 29). 

But hang on. Amnesty promotes abortion, which denies unborn children the basic requirement they ‘have to be able to live’, full stop.

 

Evidently Amnesty believes unborn children are not human. Can Bayldon please explain what they are, then?

THE FLAG DEBACLE SEEMS PRETTY EXPENSIVE (Letter published in Dom Post, Dec 23)

We’ve been told the $26m we coughed up to fund the flag debacle  - not to mention many millions more if we persist - is neither here nor there. A bagatelle. And I can see that to a Prime Minister and Cabinet who’ve just pocketed thousands more pay, it would seem like small beer. 

But a year’s supply of 33 types of fruit and veg for 110,000 school pupils (More kids to get free fruit in schools, Dec 21) will cost just $7.8m. To those kids and their parents the flag debate must seem pretty expensive.

NOT 'HEALTH' PROVIDERS, SICKNESS PROVIDERS (Letter to Dompost, December 18)

 

In Modern lifestyles cause 90pc of cancers (December 18), the threat of breast cancer posed by abortion is once again overlooked.

 

The causal link has been proved by studies in India, Iran, Japan, China et al. American breast surgeon Angela Lanfranchi says those most at risk are teenagers and women aged over 30. Research scientist Dr Joel Brind says an induced abortion will result in a woman’s higher long-term risk of developing breast cancer and insists on a woman’s right to informed consent.  

So next time you’re asked to wear a pink ribbon or buy pink cookies or wrap your balage in pink plastic, ask the fundraisers why the facts about breast cancer are not reported. Maybe because they don’t fit with the radical feminist agenda of freeing women from childbearing (which would explain the collusion of the media, run largely by women of the liberal left).  

Or could it have something to do with making money from terminations, surgery, oncology and the associated pharmacopoeia? Because it seems ‘health’ providers in this area might more accurately be described as sickness providers.

CHRISTIAN WOMEN ARE ANYTHING BUT 'CONFUSED, ANXIOUS AND BELITTLED' (Letter to Dom Post, Dec 17)

In Tips to help make the season jolly (Dec 17) Dr Cathy Stephenson advises planning good times with ‘helpful behaviours’.

 

The best Christmas times are had by forgetting oneself, giving generously to others, and going to church. In celebrating the birth of Christ, Christians rejoice in the intervention of the divine in human history, in the love and life of God shared with anyone who wants it. 

Christian women who live in that love are anything but ‘confused, anxious and belittled’, as Rosemary McLeod states in the same issue.

 

The advent of that child in Bethlehem offers all women their right to a real sense of purpose, peace of mind and potential to become other Christs.

THE CHURCH IS CHARGED BY CHRIST WITH PROCLAIMING THE TRUTH (First published in 'NZ Catholic, December 13)

‘Truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long’, says Launcelot in The Merchant of Venice.

Shakespeare lived in a more innocent age. A Christian age. But now that legally speaking  abortion’ s not murder it’s been effectively hid a long time, with the result that the media are hiding not only abortion but the lucrative trade in fetal body parts.

In Ireland recently, sharing the dinner table at a B and B,  I realised just how easy it was for the Nazis to get away with murdering 6 million Jews. I waited till we’d finished eating before asking these Scandinavians and Canadians if they’d seen anything in the media about Planned Parenthood’s business of fetal tissue harvesting (including brains for transplantation into mice, but I didn’t spell that out).

There was a brief, stunned silence. Then a guy who’d said he’d spent three years in a Carmelite seminary said, ‘It isn’t happening.’

Now, the Nazis didn’t publish the statistics on the holocaust, but these days everyone’s informed about the abortion stats. The Nazis weren’t exposed online, but Planned Parenthood is. You’d think if the stats and pcs had been around in WWII, the holocaust couldn’t have happened.

Oh yes it could. If we’re not listening to Christ who ‘makes the deaf hear and the dumb speak’ (Mk 7, 37) we become spiritually deaf and mute. If the truth’s upsetting, we don’t want to hear or speak it. The human capacity for self-deception becomes boundless.

Consequently, New Zealand is now confronted with the spectre of euthanasia. A Protestant friend whose mother has Alzheimers’ says she’s asked ‘all the time’, when is she going to put her mother down. I was told recently by a prominent local citizen, a cradle Catholic, that he’d had friends in pain with cancer. ‘And they ‘did it’, he said. ‘If your dog had terminal disease you’d put it down. What’s the difference?’

‘The difference is, a dog doesn’t have a soul,’ I said. And he turned away.

At Mass now we’re given that truncated version of Matthew’s Gospel which ends soothingly with the sheep ushered into the Kingdom. What happens to the goats who didn’t care for ‘these least’: the frail, the elderly, the unborn and their mothers? We’re spared the reality, that ‘these will go into everlasting punishment’(Mt 25, 46).

Terrorism has filled the world with fear. Naturally, the Church doesn’t want to add to it. But supernaturally, the Church is charged by Christ with proclaiming the truth.

We hear and proclaim truth only by ‘the love of God which has been poured into our hearts’ (Rom 5,5). By ‘poured in’ St Paul means the love which is Truth itself, which is divinely infused by the Holy Spirit in contemplative prayer.

Vatican II spelt it out. In the official liturgy the Church prays for us all to be ‘fed with her (St Teresa’s) heavenly teaching’ and ‘imitate John (of the Cross) always.’

Contemplative prayer opens our ears, our hearts. And it’s for everyone.

 

 

ARE YOU A CANNIBAL? (Letter to Dom Post, December 7)

Imagine an ad showing an aborted human fetus in a glass of human milk and blood.

With aborted fetuses now supplied to the food industry, as flavour enhancers for example, this ad could pose the question, ‘Are you consuming human cruelty?’

Or to put it more bluntly, ‘Are you a cannibal?’

WHILE WE'RE ALL SHUDDERING ABOUT BOBBY CALVES ... (Letter to Dom Post, Dec 1)

While we’re all shuddering at the abuse of newborn male calves (Blanket condemnation of abuse of bobby calves, December 1), let’s think for a moment of the treatment meted out to babies killed in the womb.  

An investigation has ‘uncovered calves killed by farm workers thrown into piles’. How do we think the dismembered bodies of babies killed by medical professionals are treated? Except for organs which are saleable (eyes, brains and livers fetch a good price) they’re disposed of as so much rubbish. 

But we wait in vain for this ‘cruel and violent abuse’ to be similarly ‘uncovered’ by the media. Why?

 Because we don’t want to know. What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over.

 

HOW GOD BRINGS GOOD OUT OF EVIL (Letter to Dompost, November 19)

I notice that when I email the Dompost, specially on the subject of Christianity, and my letter fails to appear, very often the dear old Dom will print another letter on the same topic, but one that is less challenging mentally and suitably anodyne.

After I'd sent the following missive, not one but two letters of that nature appeared. Letters that would upset no one.

So read on:


As an ‘off-putting, smug’ Catholic I say thank you Rosemary McLeod, for reminding us how God brings good out of evil.

Out of the Crusades, the revelation to Islam of a faith which declares that ‘each human life has value’. Out of the the Inquisition, a resolve to atone and never repeat it. Out of Spain’s conquest of South America, breathtakingly beautiful cathedrals where millions of tourists go for a glimpse of heaven.

And out of Isis, the realisation that while most of us Christians try but fail, the Mother Teresas and Vincent de Pauls and Mother Mary Auberts illumine our darkness with the light of Christ, living like he did, for the good of others.

GRADUATING FROM MEDITATION (Letter to Dompost, November 25)

So keeping my comments on the previous post, on my letters on Christianity, in mind, we can expect someone else's opinions on meditation to appear in the Dompost columns shortly.

Read on:


‘Meditation can help you thrive’, says Dr Libby (November 24), and she’s right. In adding ‘even spiritually’, she hints at benefits which with the right guidance will lead you to indescribable delight.

Graduating from meditation, in which you do all the work – and as Dr Libby says, it’s hard – you arrive at contemplation, where God takes over and gradually transforms you. Along with all the benefits Dr Libby mentions, ‘unhelpful emotions’ disappear.

No one who truly follows the Christian contemplative tradition has any no trouble sticking with it. They find they can’t live without it.

ABANDONING MY POST (S) TO BE A PILGRIM (First published in 'NZ Catholic, October 18)

 

 

I apologise to all my readers for abandoning my post (or rather, posts) at Carmelite Canto Fermo for two months - and more.

As I explain in the following NZ Catholic column, I was in Spain.  I made a pilgrimage to Avila for the 500^th centenary of St Teresa of Jesus, and pilgrims don't have time to post ...

 

So read on:

 

 

European holidays are for people with family there. Or so I thought. Actually, after our OE eighteen years ago with 4 year-old Rosanagh I thought, never again.

It was always my dream to go to France. And we did. We drove straight through France, at speed, at the height of summer, with ‘im indoors’ brother and his wife from Basingstoke in their two-door BMW. They’d been to France before. They wanted to go to Italy and I, in the grip of post-natal depression, incapable of making plans, went along for the ride.

It wasn’t until years later that I discovered Spain, or more specifically, the woman Spaniards revere as La Santa. From Primer One I’d heard the ‘black Joes’ lauding the Carmelites as the crème de la crème of religious orders and eventually - those humble Sisters of St Joseph of Nazareth having wisely not invited me to join them - I became a lay Carmelite.

Then last November I opened an email announcing a pilgrimage to Spain for St Teresa of Avila’s 500^th anniversary celebrations. Without thinking I flicked it to ‘im indoors, who’s always thinking and always Scottish. ‘It’s very reasonable,’ he said. ‘You should go.’

‘Not without you,’ I said, and before bob was our uncle we were booked for Spain.

Then at a family wedding a relly who’d nearly died on OE in London told me I was being ‘a bit selfish’. He was probably thinking of the airfreight for a coffin. But at the same wedding was our Melbourne son, a health and fitness Nazi who brought his father up to speed on the latest diet, and ‘im indoors started fasting two days a week. (I’d been doing that for years, but never mind.)

Then a long-lost friend surfaced on the net with pix of his new house in Buendia, Cuenca, and said he’d meet us at Madrid airport.

After two knee replacements ‘im indoors was wont to say his doctor had forbidden him to walk, don’t y’ know, but as his weight dropped his legs started working. Now friends say he’s a shadow of his former self and he’s walking the distance from a monastery bed to the plaza de la cuidad.

We booked house sitters. Bosy and Orlando sitters, really. The dog and cat being elderly, ‘im indoors thought they could die before we left, but even so I’d rather not come home to swallows and starlings in the roof tiles. And the prospect of house sitters had a startling effect - while ‘im indoors planned and packed, I furiously spring-cleaned. In winter.

I should be writingl this in the third person. When Teresa wrote (only under obedience, while I’m just showing off) of her experiences, she’d say, ‘I know someone who …’. That’s humility. If I did that I’d sound coy. Anyway, no one would believe me.

It hurt, leaving our family. But with everything falling into place so sweetly, I’m convinced it was God’s will that we should go to Spain.

 

ALTAR GIRLS A TROJAN HORSE FOR WOMEN PRIESTS? (First published in 'NZ Catholic' September 19 - or thereabouts)

                Some of the questions which must occur spontaneously to many Catholics, I’m guessing, are questions to which we all know the obvious answers.

Like when the Vatican says boy altar servers are ‘very appropriate’ but only ‘permits’ girl altar servers, why are there more girls in the sanctuary than boys? Because girls can do anything. Preferring boys to girls is sexist. Girls provide gender balance. Girls like it more than boys. They do it better.

But wait on. If/when you were a boy, would you want to get dressed with a bunch of girls in long frocks and parade into church together all dressed the same? When they were worn only by boys, servers’ robes were seen as masculine like priests’ robes were, and still are in the Catholic Church. Now altar boys have to wear the same gear as their sisters, it has to be sissy.

Girls can’t ‘do anything’. They can’t become priests and as the Vatican has acknowledged, altar serving leads to priestly vocations. What’s the introduction of girl altar servers done for priestly vocations in Aotearoa New Zealand? Warning against false prophets, Jesus said ‘By their fruits you shall know them’ (Mt 7.16). Think about that.

Boys can’t ‘do anything’, either. They can’t become mothers. Should we say God is sexist then, because he prefers girls as future mothers and boys as future priests? Which role is more important, when the former produce the latter?

Girls like altar serving more than boys do because they like dressing up and obeying instructions and parading more than boys do, and that’s why they do it better. Which only makes it worse for the boys.

Where was the ‘gender balance’ at the Last Supper? Not even Mary was present.  Her role was different, more exalted than the apostles’ – because she was more humble.

‘Ah’, as Teresa of Avila cries, ‘humility’! Where there’s no humility there’s no love of God or neighbour, no charity. Vocations are lacking because humility is lacking, because the priesthood must be lived out of love propter Deum: love of others because of love of God.

One could be excused for thinking altar girls are a Trojan horse for women priests. That wouldn’t be the prime motivator, but we have to realise there are forces at work which are beyond our immediate control or understanding. For one thing, we are attached to our ideals of sexual equality, and attachments are a handy vehicle for the devil to drive.

The Holy See recommends that as far as possible, the custom of having only boys as servers be retained, that if a bishop has special reasons for permitting girl servers his decision must be clearly explained, that his priests are not required to use them in an act of worship in which no one has any inherent rights. That sounds to me like an attempt to shut the stable doors after the horse of girl altar servers had bolted. Like Communion in the hand, it’s born out of dissent and disobedience (Innocent IV and Benedict XIV) – ‘an exercise in charity’. 71% of US priests served as altar boys. It’s not rocket science. The recent trend has been to relax (weaken) law and doctrine (communion in the hand). Countries with flourishing priestly vocations generally do not have female altar servers.lysih: igrXo h

The only diocese in the US not allowing girls as servers is Lincoln Nebraska, where very few Catholic families have asked for the privilege. The reason? Wait for it. The diocese focuses from a young age on ‘the serious vocation of laity to full … participation in the Mass through contemplation, thanksgiving and adoration’ (my emphasis).

In the end I think we must accept that all the reasons advanced for girl altar servers are prompted by an influence beyond human reason.  

EXTENDING RITE III? COME BACK ST JOHN VIANNEY, WE NEED YOU NOW! (Letter to NZ Catholic, September 4)

Remember how people flocked to Rite II Reconciliation when it was first introduced? But now parish priests are sometimes embarrassed by having to send home the priests they’ve called in to assist with Rite II, for lack of penitents. The novelty has worn off, as it surely would also with Rite III. 

It’s not fear, as Fr Consedine alleges, but magisterial wisdom which reserves Rite III for emergencies. And it’s our natural, human preference for novelty, accessibility and ease which explains its attractions. But Jesus calls us to a supernatural, divine preference for the will of the Father.  

Michael Otto’s piece shows clearly that we urgently need priests who ‘hasten to meet’ the latter-day Prodigal Son literally, in their parishioners’ homes, figuratively in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, and collectively by authoritative catechesis on the benefits of the sacrament in their Sunday homilies. 

Jesus’ view of sin was always person-centred, and priests who dedicate time daily to Jesus in contemplative prayer will automatically acquire that view. 

Come back, St John Vianney, Cure of Ars, we need you now!

 

 

IF FAT'S IN THE GENES, HOW COME KIWIS USED TO BE THIN? (Letter to Dom Post, September 1)

If genes are responsible for Kiwis’ obesity (A weighty look at the DNA of Kiwis, Sept 1), how come only two generations ago very few were overweight?

EARNEST RESEARCHERS DISCOVER THE BENEFITS OF GIVING (Letter to Dom Post, September 1)

Clearly all those earnest researchers who’ve spent God knows how many hours discovering the benefits of giving (The benefits of being generous, September 1) have never taken on board the last advice of St Paul to the elders of Ephesus.

‘Remember the Lord Jesus said, ‘There is more happiness in giving than receiving’.

POLITICS, BREAD AND THE BIG MATCH (Letter published in the Dom Post, August 31)

Human nature never changes, so neither do politics. Dave Armstrong’s excellent In Rugby State, opening the pubs comes first (August 31), could be summed up by the Roman poet Juvenal.

As he wrote two thousand years ago, ‘Only two things does he (the modern citizen) anxiously wish for – bread and the big match.’

THE SACRED COW THAT NEEDS POKING IS ABORTION (Letter to Dom Post, August 31)

Asking for public feedback on proposals to deal with domestic violence (Courts plan for family violence, August 29), Justice Minister Amy Adams says she wants to ‘poke a few sacred cows’.

 

Abortion. Is. Domestic. Violence. As long as violence is allowed in the womb it will continue to permeate the whole family.

 

Adams stands in need of great courage, because the sacred cow she has to poke is abortion.

CYF GIVE MARRIED COUPLE'S CHILDREN TO SINGLE PARENT OF DIFFERENT ETHNICITY (Letter to Dom Post, August 28)

 

Children’s Commissioner Russell Wills might be interested in three small Pakeha/Indian children taken by CYF from married parents because the elderly father had an historical conviction for sex abuse, and following a disastrous triple pregnancy when she lost two children in utero, the mother was very unwell.  

Those children were handed over to a single parent, a Maori. Two years on, the parents are still fighting to get their children back. They struggle to contain their grief over their lost little ones, who present at their pitifully infrequent access visits as hungry, inadequately dressed, and uncared for. 

I wonder if CYF would dare to place Maori children of loving, married parents in the care of a single, Indian mother. The whole saga reeks of prejudice and discrimination based on both age and race.

 

BE AWARE, SERENE AND TRULY JOYFUL (First published in 'NZ Catholic', August 20)

            ‘Be aware.’ A strange remark, wouldn’t you think, to make to a group of women heading to a café for lunch?

But these were not Lady Lunchalots. They’d just attended Mass on the patronal feast of the order of Carmelites whose charism is contemplation, who understand that these two  words go straight to the heart of things, implying another perspective, a gaze directed more or less steadily through rose-tinted lenses at eternal realities. ‘Enjoy yourselves,’ these women were told by another Massgoer as they left the cathedral, ‘but be aware.’

How precious is prophecy, specially on the way to lunch – so good for the digestion! - and specially prophecy not in the accepted sense of foretelling, but forthtelling: speaking God’s truth.

Years ago, suffering quite badly and undiagnosed from post-natal depression, I clung for dear life to a little book by the Jesuit Anthony de Mello. Awareness was given me by my spiritual director and I hiked it around the world, together with ‘im indoors and 4 year-old Rosanagh, on our first OE to Europe.

 Awareness didn’t make me aware. I thought that was my fault but in fact de Mello had already been the subject, in 1998, of a Notification by Cardinal Josef Ratzinger and how I wished, after someone handed me Fire Within one day at the beach some time later, that it had been the Marist Thomas Dubay’s masterpiece I’d toted around the world. But it was probably a case, to quote Christopher Fry, of ‘the lady’s not for burning’. The green wood of the soul needs purifying before it can be kindled by the fire Jesus came to cast upon the earth.

De Mello said things like ‘true happiness is uncaused’. By contrast, Dubay offers St Peter’s ‘joy so glorious that it cannot be described’ (1 Pet 1,8), deriving from God. The joy of the heights of holiness to which we all without exception are called is an ‘advanced joy’ which as Dubay explains, comes only from ‘advanced prayer’.

The woman at Mass that day was warning the lunch party not be diddled out of that joy by enjoyment, getting sidetracked by treats meant only as means to the end of union with God. Bogged in the daily grind, we’re often beguiled by the good life but Jesus offers a better life, a best life where the only concern is loving God and neighbour. If only we could get our snouts out of the trough and go after it!

We need to lift our game. Recently I heard a priest (imported) quote the Third Commandment. He said it’s a sin not to go to Mass on Sunday. I’m told there are holy people in his parish. With such a priest, and access 24/7 to a Blessed Sacrament chapel, that’s entirely predictable and explicable.

To be aware, serene and truly joyful is to live like Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity, who knew that ‘everything that happens to me is a message of God’s great love for me.’

NO WONDER PREGGIES GET DEPRESSED (Letter to Dom Post, August 24)

 

Baby blues a widespread problem, you say (August 24). Of course. Quite apart from the fact revealed by research that past abortions incline women to depression in subsequent pregnancies, the media constantly present pregnancy not as the exciting adventure it’s meant to be, but almost as an illness.  

Pregnant women have to stop drinking, or their babies will get addicted. They have to stop eating all their favorite foods or they’ll get listeria. They have to attend ante-natal classes or they won’t be able to give birth. They have to buy an amazing amount of gear including pushchairs that face their unfortunate infants away from mummy into the oncoming traffic. They have to find midwives and hope like hell they’ll turn up and know what they’re doing.  

And now you tell them they might get depressed. Aren’t you stating the obvious? 

NO PRIME MINISTER, THE PEOPLE HAVE NOT SPOKEN (Letter to Dom Post, August 24)

 

No, Prime Minister, the people have not spoken. Thousands of people have never attended a rugby match in their lives and will not be distracted from the real issues by Juvenal’s ‘beer and the big match’.  

Thousands of people go bush and know silver is the fern’s backside, so that’s actually a bit of a cheat. 

Thousands of people go to church on Sunday to revere the Cross, which is represented in the New Zealand flag by the Union Jack. 

At least, Prime Minister, you picked the right colour. Black, to represent all the women consciously or unconsciously in mourning for their babies killed before birth, all the babies battered to death after birth, all the students drinking themselves into stupor, all the men dying in ‘Correction Facilities’ like Mt Eden. 

As for your new flag being ‘worth billions’, Prime Minister, the question is, to whom?

ETHICAL CONSUMERS UNWITTINGLY BUYING FOOD CONTAINING FETAL MATERIAL (Letter to Dom Post, August 20)

‘The internet’, you editorialise (August 20), ‘has brought the markets of the world into New Zealand houses’. How right you are.

 

For example, the market for fetal body parts, recently exposed on our computers by undercover operations in the US, busting Planned Parenthood for trading aborted babies for profit. For example, harvesting a brain intact from a late-term baby boy while his heart was still beating.

 

You warn ‘ethical consumers’ of a dilemma in buying from companies that oppress their workers and don’t pay enough tax. Right again. And then there are ethical consumers who unwittingly are buying beauty products, pharmaceuticals and food containing fetal material.

 

As The Dominion Post editorialises about ethics, and ethics for journalists mean reporting the facts, I assume you know nothing about this grisly trade. So you’ll be pleased I’ve brought it to your attention.

FETAL BRAINS ARE BEING IMPLANTED INTO MICE (Letter to Dom Post, August 14)

‘Doctors (are) obliged to focus,’ says Medical Association chairman Stephen Child, ‘on the best possible health outcome for patients’. But even when requested, for pregnant patients the death of their unborn child has been shown to be the worst possible outcome, and Child is conveniently overlooking the fact that an unborn child is also a patient.

 

Oh, but only when the child is wanted. Then, doctors see that child as a patient and focus on the best possible health outcome. However, preborn children who are not wanted are seen not as patients but objects to be dismembered and dispatched with impunity.

 

Dismembered, despatched, but not discarded, it seems, because in the US Planned Parenthood are selling fetal parts for huge profits: currently, fetal brains are being implanted into mice.

 

This sickening practice, reminiscent of Josef Mengele and the Holocaust, began with doctors who decided some of their patients in utero weren’t human. And it’s coming to an abortion clinic near you.

 

 

 

THE ULTIMATE IN BULLYING (Letter to Dom Post, August 10)

‘Bullying in healthcare’, says NZ Medical Association chairman Dr Stephen Child (Letters, August 10), ‘is not tolerated’. Unfortunately, the evidence indicates otherwise. That’s because the basic principle of the health profession – healing, not hurting – has been lost.

 

Dr Child talks about raising awareness of ‘inappropriate behaviour’ in the medical profession but seems blissfully unaware of the inappropriateness of damaging patients’ physical and emotional health by deliberately ending the lives of their preborn infants. There can be no medical procedure more ‘disruptive’ than the forced removal of a fetus from the womb. Killing the defenceless, voiceless preborn infant must be absolutely the ultimate in bullying.

 

What’s appropriate is that the attitude of these health professionals towards their patients, which is condoned by their peers, should also damage their relationships with one another.

 

MY BROTHER KARL'S DELAYED REACTION (Letter to Dompost, August 7)

My brother Karl ‘can’t help but get the uncomfortable feeling that food has been fetished’ (August 7).

A classic case of delayed reaction.

TO SAY HURTING A CAT MIGHT BE A CRIME IS DEVIANT (Letter to Dom Post, August 8)

For Justice Minister Amy Adams to say hurting a cat might be a crime (Harming a pet domestic violence? August 6) while unborn children are legally pulled limb from limb in utero is preposterous and quite frankly, deviant.

 

And so is Rosemary McLeod. A journalist, lamenting the skinning and beheading of a lion while in the US Planned Parenthood’s sale of aborted fetal organs and entire cadavers for profit goes unreported!

 

‘To be honest’, as everyone says now that we’re anything but, our society is becoming sick at heart.

 

VIOLENCE IN THE FAMILY BEGINS WITH VIOLENCE IN THE WOMB (Letter to Dom Post, August 3)

Any hope of success in yet ‘another crackdown on domestic violence’ will entail the reclassification of family violence-related offences vowed by Justice Minister Amy Adams (Joint response to tackle family violence, August 3), to include abortion.

 

GPS monitoring, safety alarms, a chief victims’ adviser and review of the Domestic Violence Act are all attempts to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted. 

Violence in the family begins with violence in the womb and it will not end until abortion ends.

EXORCISM FOR TONY ROBERTSON? (Letter to Dom Post, July 30)

Certain aspects of Tony Robertson’s heinous crime (The Making of a Killer, July 29) suggest it is an instance of demonic possession.

I hope someone with responsibility for his care and treatment will take the initiative of consulting a properly qualified Catholic priest with a view to exorcism.

WOMEN WHO SPEND ALL DAY IN CHURCH (First published in 'NZ Catholic' July 26)

            I have it on good authority that a recent Sunday homily somewhere made fleeting reference to ‘women who spend all day in church’. I infer (wouldn’t you?) that these women are a bit of a liability.

I might be one. I’m at Mass, usually prefaced by the Rosary, most days, and at Adoration 2-3 times a week. There’s also my ‘organdizing’ (remember Winnie the Pooh?). As a tyro at the organ and having no instrument at home I practise in the church.

When a shortage of organists meant our Sunday Masses were sometimes compromised by CDs (think agonising pauses and occasional bursts of ridiculously inappropriate music), I started praying for our music ministry. Before long I was looking at the organ and thinking, ‘hmmm’.

I put the case to ‘im indoors for a piano. It could fit in the hall, I said. But ‘im indoors’ office is just through the door so that was never a goer. And when I realised I’d have to practise in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament I was delighted.

Because it’s killing two birds (practice and Eucharistic prayer) with one stone. St Teresa of Avila, whose amazing achievements were funded by profound contemplation, was a very busy and practical woman who spent hours every day in contemplative prayer and ‘in choir’. She knew the Eucharistic power to transform our lives on earth and raise us to sublime heights in heaven.

Every time we receive Holy Communion in awareness and a state of grace, our blood runs more with Christ’s and our soul joins more with his, giving us more grace, more benefit for our whanau, more progress towards peace on earth and if we keep that grace intact, more happiness in eternity.

‘Im indoors (who’s a fan for the national programme so the piano idea was pretty silly) tells me he heard a psychologist advising about teenagers and saying he was impatient, as if that were a fact of life and he (and his teenagers) had to live with it.

‘My ways are exalted above your ways’ (Is 55,9). Sadly, it’s typical of experts in human behaviour not to realise that any chronic behavioural problem can be solved by the Eucharistic Jesus. The changes effected in Christ’s Eucharistic companions today, not just in behaviours but in the nitty-gritty detail of their lives and in the people around them, are amazing.

Maybe Father had had pastoral experience of women with unwashed dishes, unmade beds and unhappy children, but love for the Eucharist isn’t something esoteric. It’s profoundly practical. In fact for Teresa, an important benchmark for spiritual growth is ‘the performance of ordinary duties’.

God makes me laugh, the ways he invents for spending time with him, like simplifying  your lifestyle, prompting people to help you, even finding great clothes on the cheap.

La Santa’s namesake, Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, knew the benefits. ‘The time you spend with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament,’ she said, ‘is the best time that you will spend on earth.’

 

 

A DOCTOR'S EXTRAORDINARY STATEMENT (Letter to Dom Post, July 23)

‘Without our health we have nothing’ (The importance of self-acceptance, July 23.) Even for a doctor, with a doctor’s vested interest, that’s an extraordinary statement - even in our milieu, with our pathological obsession (and I use those words advisedly) with health.

 

What does Dr Libby’s attitude contribute towards the self-acceptance of the chronically ill? What does it do for the terminally ill? If these people ‘have nothing’, they may as well end their lives, or get someone else to do it for them. Dr Libby may not intend it, but she sounds like an advocate for euthanasia.

 

Such a mindset could hardly be called ‘Well and Good’, like her column. It’s sick and bad.

WE WERE JUST AS NAIVE ABOUT TV. DOH. (Letter published in the Dom Post, July 21)

‘We were naive in our initial expectations for the internet,’ says Reddit’s ex-CEO (Bullies and trolls are winning the internet war, July 21). ‘We focused on the huge opportunity for positive interaction’.

That’s exactly what we once thought about television. .

A CHURCH SILENT ON ABORTION CAN'T EXPECT NEW PRIESTS (First published in 'NZ Catholic, June 28)

How we all must have prayed for Lecretia Seales! She died at home in Wellington, in a hospital bed obtained with concerted efforts by  the hospice, friends and family, from natural causes after Justice Collins said no to her bid for doctor-assisted suicide.

But TVNZ’s Sunday and TvOne News - both biassed reportage, the latter outrageously so - showed the poster girl for euthanasia had advanced that cause no end.

Then there’s the cause for gender well-being.

‘Pardon me?’ I hear you ask.

Two days before Lecretia’s death, at a café in Wellington I said to our daughter Rose, ‘Why do they call him ‘Shortie’?’

Rose works nights at Ivy in Cuba Street. Ivy is a gay bar. Shortie, the waiter at our table, works nights at Ivy too.

 ‘Why do they call them Shortie,’ said Rose.

‘Pardon me?’ I said, and Rose explained how the pronoun ‘him’ is sexist. We should eliminate such gender-explicit expressions. ‘Im indoors suggested that being singular, a better pronoun for Shortie would be ‘it’. Peace-loving Rose made no reply.  

As well as nights bar-tending at Ivy, Rose’s days are spent doing honours in theatre at Vic. Politically speaking her milieu is ultra correct, far removed you’d think from yours or mine, but gender well-being is coming to a school near you.  

The Ministry of Education is advising schools to consider non-gender toilets, changing rooms and uniforms. Five year-olds need to question ‘gender stereotyping’.  Canada, cited as our model for doctor-assisted suicide, puts posters promoting the eternal triangle with ’Love Has No Gender’ signs in school toilets. 

The day after Lecretia’s death, in Hastings outside the hospital the group praying for women arriving for ‘terminations’ questioned  the churches’ silence around abortion. Maybe it’s because probably one in three Kiwi mothers has killed her own child. ‘The ones who can’t bear to hear the word abortion’, says Dr Theresa Burke, founder of Rachel’s Vineyard, ‘they’re sitting in our churches.’

We’re all implicated. It’s a guilty silence.

Blessed Teresa of Calcutta’s statement, ‘abortion is the greatest destroyer of peace today’, is illustrated by violence especially towards women and children, sex and drug abuse, eating disorders and the breast cancer generated by abortion.

We lament the lack of priests, and so we should. The fewer the priests, the fewer the Eucharists and people attending, the more sorrows our families and communities will have to bear. But when the Church by her silence condones rejecting God’s gift of human life, she can’t expect to be granted the priests whose sole purpose is to make that life divine.

Our natural reaction to societal degeneration is fear. But we’re designed by God to become supernatural,  called to personal holiness, by contemplative prayer to live like a child as St Therese of Lisieux did, in the arms of Jesus.

As Luisa Piccarreta did, fifty years on.

‘Stay calmly in my arms’, Jesus told Luisa, ‘with your eyes closed.  Everything I let happen to you is directed by me for your greater good.’

 

CATHOLIC EDUCATION IS ABOUT COMMUNICATING CHRIST (Letter published in Dom Post, July 8)

Marian School principal John Coulam says (July 6) ‘the role of the Catholic schools is to support the parents.’ That’s subsidiary to their primary goal which is stated unequivocally by the schools’ proprietors, the NZ Catholic Bishops, as ‘Catholic education is above all a question of communicating Christ’.  

The fact that children are booked into Catholic schools before birth shows that even when inadequately done – as will always be the case – communicating Christ produces the results parents want.

A 'SMALL GROUP' OF 80 PROTESTORS (Letter to Dom Post, June 24)

Can’t your reporter count? Adding insult to the injury of outrageously biased television coverage of the sad demise of Lecretia Seales, The Dominion Post account of the petition for voluntary euthanasia’s presentation (Cross-party support for voluntary euthanasia petition, June 24) mentions ‘a small group of protestors’, which in fact numbered eighty.

 

Which was more than twice the number supporting the petition. 

New Zealanders are not so stupid as you make out.

THE REASON WHY POLICE ARE STRUGGLING WITH FAMILY VIOLENCE (Letter to Dom Post, June 30)

Forgive me if I point out once again a truth that must be blindingly obvious to any rational thinker.

 

The reason why police are struggling as cases of family violence increase (June 30) is that probably one in three NZ women has undergone at least one abortion.  

When we sanction the violent deaths of thousands of children before birth at the wish of their own mothers we can only expect violence to permeate society, as it has. Hidden in the womb, those children might be out of sight, but for the sake of New Zealand’s future we can’t afford to keep them out of mind.

ABORTION IS 'TANTAMOUNT TO MURDER', TOO (Letter to Dom Post, June 20)

We’re all appalled by the street attack in London (Unborn baby targeted in horror street attack, June 19) on a woman’s unborn child. ‘It seems all the violence was targeted at the child. It is tantamount to murder,’ says Scotland Yard.  

But you have to wonder what’s the difference between an attack targeted at an unborn child in the street and an attack targeting an unborn child in an abortion clinic. This child was wanted and children in abortion clinics are not, but objectively speaking, attacks on the latter must logically also be called ‘tantamount to murder’.  

Only in an abortion clinic it’s supposed to be legal, so we can’t call it murder. But then, in abortion clinics the law is honoured in the breach rather than the observance.

 

Which means abortion is precisely ‘tantamount to murder and beyond the pale’.

 

WHY DIDN'T ANYONE ASK MATT VICKERS THE OBVIOUS QUESTION? (Letter to Dom Post, June 7)

I’m sorry, but I’m having trouble reconciling two statements by Matt Vickers (Isn't this my body? My life? June 6), whose wife Lecretia Seales died on Saturday of natural causes, frustrated in her wish for assisted suicide.  

Vickers stated that ‘there was no mistaking her response’, (to Justice Collins’ judgement). ‘She was hurt and disappointed’. Then in the next breath he says, ‘I am relieved that Lecretia was unconscious and unresponsive when we received it.’ 

A glaringly obvious question has gone unasked by any of the journalists present at that media conference. The fact that none commented on the inconsistency in Vickers’ script suggests they were all carried away by a tsunami of the sentimentality - not to mention blatant bias, as demonstrated in Tv One ’s ‘reportage’ that night - that has so far characterised the euthanasia debate in the media.

SANITY, NOT SENTIMENTALITY, IN THE EUTHANASIA DEBATE (Letter to Dom Post, May 27)

At last some sanity, as opposed to sentimentality, in the euthanasia debate (Court told Seales ‘can’t change law’, May 27). As Solicitor-General Michael Heron states, what Lecretia Seales is asking for is clearly either suicide or euthanasia.  

One would have thought Seales’ experience of failure to conceive with IVF might have taught her she is not the author of life. Neither is she the author of death.

THE DOM POST IS KOWTOWING TO 'THE RIGHT NOT TO BE OFFENDED' (Letter to Dom Post, May 20)

All children, says Jonathan Boston in reference to child poverty (How New Zealand can cut child poverty, May 19), should be able to participate fully in society.  

What about the children who can’t participate in society at all? Children who die every day in agony, ripped limb from limb before birth, in abortion facilities? Boston talks of strategies informed by ‘sound ethical principles’. A society which kills its most vulnerable citizens has no ethical principles and consequently no hope of real prosperity for children who survive the womb.

 

Boston wants ‘an integrated policy package’. How ‘integrated’ is policy which kills children before birth, then wants the best for them after birth? 

On the same page, under the headline Value of free speech immense, we read that our freedom to express ourselves is threatened by ‘a rising tide of offence-taking and indignation’. In persistently refusing to publish letters addressing the hypocrisy and double-speak around the issue of abortion, The Dominion Post is presumably kowtowing to what Joanna Norris of the NZ Media Freedom committee calls the argument that people have ‘the right not to be offended’. 

If that’s not the case, then you’ll publish this letter.

TEENAGERS NEED HELP BEFORE EXAMS, NOT DURING (Letter to Dom Post, April 13)

‘It has been revealed’, The Dominion Post says portentously (May 13), that ‘teenagers do not qualify for more time to sit exams if their ability is not what it should be’.  

Talk about shutting the door after the horse has bolted.  Next thing we know, the exams will be dumbed-down to suit their ability. If it’s not what it should be, clearly they need funding assistance to make it what it should be.

 

That is, they need assistance before the exams, not during.

MOTHERS FEED THEIR UNBORN WITH 'WOMB MILK' BEFORE THEY'RE ABORTED (Letter to Dom Post, April 8)

So ‘we’ll soon know how serious the Government is about looking after our most vulnerable children’ (Time for Nats to walk the talk on child poverty, May 8). Don’t make me laugh. Our most vulnerable children are the unborn.

 

And don’t try to tell me they’re not children. New research shows that during the first eleven weeks of life, before the umbilical cord develops, they’re fed by their mothers with secretions called ‘womb milk’, otherwise known as histiotrophe. But it’s while this is going on that they’re most likely to be killed by abortion.  

Unicef’s Deborah Morris-Travers asks for ‘a more inclusive approach to children’. That will be achieved only by allowing all children to live.

LECRETIA SEALES IS IN A PRIVILEGED POSITION (Letter to Dom Post, April 7)

In asking the High Court ‘to clarify whether a doctor would be committing a crime if he/she were to help her to die’ (April 7), surely Lecretia Seales realises she’s in a somewhat privileged position. 

She’s comparatively young and attractive. She can expect loads of sympathy. She’s a lawyer so she knows how to work the system. But if her case succeeds and the law is loosened – and she must know what’s happening in Holland - what about old, ugly, stupid people whom no one wants around any more?

 

Who will defend them against avaricious rellies and conniving doctors, if not the law?

PARENTAL PERMISSION REQUIRED FOR ASPIRIN BUT NOT ABORTION (Letter to Dom Post, May 6)

Parents, says Australian cyber-safety expert Brett Lee (School bans anonymous message app, May 6), have the right to know who their children are talking to and where they’re going. Well, of course.  

Except, that is, when they’re talking to school nurses or counsellors about going to an abortion clinic. Parents don’t have the right to know that. But after her abortion, if a teenager wants aspirin for the pain, then the school has to get the parent’s permission. For the aspirin, that is.

 I kid you not.

ACEDIA'S THE REASON WHY WE DON'T DESERVE A PRIEST (First published in 'NZ Catholic', April 30)

This Eastertide in our parish, following an Easter Vigil prepared with great care by our dear priest and attended by a congregation numbering about 20, some might say we’re licking our wounds. I’m thinking we don’t deserve a priest. And there’s a strange little word lurking in my consciousness.

Acedia. I didn’t really know what it meant or how to pronounce it (a-seed-ya), so I looked it up. There’s a lot of it about. For most of my life I had it myself. 

The door to acedia, says the Catechism of the Catholic Church, is opened  by presumption. If we think that at death’s door  we’ll be received as is, where is, unchanged and unrepentant, and given ‘glory without merit’, we’re presumptuous.  We’re often reminded that we can’t merit God’s love, but have we forgotten we must merit eternal life? God’s love is unconditional. Eternal life is not.

Coasting along presumptuously we fall prey to acedia, which the Catechism defines as ‘spiritual sloth … depression due to lax ascetical practice, decreasing vigilance, carelessness of heart’. Pope Francis talks about ‘slumbering Christians’. In a secular sense, Alexander Solzhenitsyn speaks of ‘indifference … the failure of a listless public to make use of the freedom which is its birthright’. Considering baptism offers us ‘the fulness of God’ (Eph 3:19), doesn’t that sound like us?

In the Middle Ages, when they were up with the play on this, the faithful were told to ‘counter acedia with holy activity’. We might think that doing stuff which seems meritorious and we enjoy is ‘holy activity’, but is it what God wants? Our ‘stuff’ is often a diversion, which the philosopher Pascal says ‘prevents us from thinking about ourselves and leads us to destruction … We turn to pleasures’ (sports, Tv, the internet, even work) ‘to forget our miserable state but this is even more destructive because it leads us further from our Creator.’ For centuries spiritual writers have declared acedia’s ultimate expression to be suicide.

If that’s not enough to alert us, listen to St Paul (1 Cor 11:28). Acedia is caused by receiving the Eucharist unworthily or without recognising the Real Presence, which brings ‘condemnation’. Where Confession is disregarded, when non-Catholics are regularly given Communion, we shouldn’t be surprised at acedia bcoming so rampant as to affect almost entire congregations.

To acedia sufferers, the remedy  of regular attendance at Mass, prayer, fasting and almsgiving sounds boring. Hellishly boring. But acedia is fundamentally a lack of faith which we acquire precisely by these means, and especially by contemplative prayer.  I speak from personal experience.

Pascal knew why we resist contemplative prayer: ‘Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest … he feels his nullity, inadequacy, dependence, emptiness. And at once there wells up from the depth of his soul boredom,  gloom, depression … despair.’

The paradox is, that’s where we meet God. In contemplation, instead of telling ourselves ‘Just do it’, we let Christ do it.

It’s that simple.

IF 'CONSUBSTANTIAL' IS 'CLUNKY' THEN 'TRANSFIGURATION' MUST BE CLUNKY TOO (Letter to 'NZ Catholic', April 29)

US Bishop Donald Trautman’s list of words (NZ bishop's voice joins critics of Mass translation, NZ Catholic, April 19)‘illustrating the failure of the English Missal to communicate in the living language of the worshipping assembly’ has notable omissions. 

If he regards ‘consubstantial, incarnate, oblation, conciliation, ineffable, unfeigned’ as solecisms, then logically he should also deplore ‘annunciation, visitation, nativity, transfiguration and ascension’. As human attempts to describe divine mysteries, these words all convey something of that mystery by the very fact of not being quotidian (or perhaps I should say, everyday).  

We understand the rosary’s ‘clunky’ terms because previous generations of priests taught us their meaning. The Missal now presents our pastors with an opportunity to explain the Mass as the fountain of life, to give the laity a clearer understanding of the Holy Sacrifice and incentive to attend. Given today’s reduced attention span sentences could be shortened, but dumbing-down the language connotes possibly dragging down the faithful from mystical contemplation to the level of the news at six. 

The Mass is literally out of this world. To penetrate this mystery our hearts must be dilated and our minds raised up ‘into intimate contact with the High Priest’ (Mediator Dei).

THE LINK BETWEEN ABORTION AND BREAST CANCER IS CAUSAL (Letter to Dom Post, April 27)

Breast Cancer Foundation chief Evangelia Henderson says ‘every little bit helps’ (Massey student gives back to charities, April 27). What would help women far more than pink ribbons, pink silage wrap or wedding dresses is a little bit of realism.

 

For example, the Breast Cancer Foundation, the pharmaceutical industry and the media need to face the fact, reiterated earlier this month by the American College of Pediatricians, that ‘the link between abortion and breast cancer is causal, not correlational’.  

Prevention is better than cure.

TOM SCOTT CALLS A KETTLE BLACK (Letter to Dompost, April 23)

New Zealand should take more refugees, you say (April 23). Of course we should. But next door to your editorial there’s Tom Scott deriding Tony Abbot’s ‘indifference’ to the plight of boat people.

Talk about a pot calling a kettle black.

WHAT LUCRETIA SEALES IS ACTUALLY PLEADING FOR (Letter to DomPost, April 23)

The heart-breaking case of Lucretia Seales will surely generate many more column inches for The Dominion Post, but could you please desist from employing oxymoronic terms such as ‘medically assisted death’(Groups want a say in assisted death case, April 22)?

 

The word ‘medical’ means ‘curative’, which is exactly opposed to the nature of the act she proposes. That it’s done by a doctor doesn’t make the deed ‘medical’ any more than a doctor going for a bike ride makes it a medical bike ride. 

Not to mince words, Lucretia Seales is pleading for a general practitioner of the art of healing to kill her and get away with it.

 

ONE GOOD THING (Letter printed in Dom Post, April 10)

There’s one good thing to be said for the otherwise depressing Nearly 30pc worldwide are obese (April 6).

No more will we hear from the doom and gloom merchants who say there’s not enough food to go round.

IT'S TRUCKS THAT ARE TROUBLESOME (Letter to Dompost, April 7)

It’s trucks that are troublesome, not roundabouts. Like our food portions, our dinner plates and our bodies, trucks are oversized, and basically it’s all down to consumerism.

Or to put it bluntly, greed.

IT'S CHRIST WHO'S REALLY SUFFERING (Letter to Dompost, April 7)

How ironic that Darryn Odering should ask plaintively (Friday best trading day so far for garden firm, April 7) in regard to trading on Good Friday, ‘Who is really suffering?’

Any Christian could tell him that it’s not Odering’s customers who really suffer, but Christ who died to save them, and who suffers still because of their ignorance and indifference.

THE SAME DAY MY LIPSTICK MELTED, I FELL IN LOVE WITH A CHURCH (Published in NZ Catholic, April 5)

The same day my lipstick melted, I fell in love with a church.

We were in Aussie; ‘im indoors and I were in Sydney for our godson’s wedding and it was on Sunday afternoon on the Manly ferry that the lipstick went sideways. By then we’d been charmed by egrets strolling in a park, the heaven-scent of frangipani in the night, flat whites served gratis while we waited outside a café for a taxi - but what knocked our socks off was St Peter’s Church, Surry Hills.

On Saturday morning, dear ‘im indoors having booked an apartment around the corner, we set off on foot for the convent where their website said Mass would be celebrated.

We never found the convent; instead the parish priest found us, lurking lost in the street behind the church. He directed us to a side door. In the entry was a statue of St Therese of Lisieux. In the church, in front of the tabernacle the Blessed Sacrament was exposed until Mass began, closing St Peter’s monthly overnight Vigil for Life. Oh, and there’s key pad entry to the Blessed Sacrament, any time.

On Sunday morning, we heard hymn-singing and laughter just within earshot as the choir rehearsed nearby for an hour. A teenager entering the sanctuary in jeans and trainers presaged the style of Mass to come: in his hand he carried a pair of shiny black shoes. Three such boys processed with the priest, all wearing black shoes and robes whiter than white.

By now I was purring, I who’ve been told off after Mass occasionally by ‘im indoors for subdued grinding of teeth. Before Mass I’d joined the queue (of people neither old nor Asian) outside the confessional. On a Sunday. Inside was a prie-dieu and a curtain. There’s no provision at St Peter’s for a cosy chat, for Father in a vulnerable moment opening compassionate arms to a lovely young thing in distress, of either sex. And after Mass the confessional light went on again. Immediately.

Communion was under only one kind. An altar server held a paten beneath the Host, distributed by the priest’s consecrated hand. I noticed people kneeling to receive on the tongue. When in Rome, I thought, and did likewise.

The only female to enter the sanctuary, a literally Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion, was one of St Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. The altar servers were male and whenever they passed before the tabernacle they genuflected. Every time. The lectors were male, the organist was professional, young, and male.

The choir master was a mistress, however, and a very pretty one at that. She didn’t look like she lies awake at night worrying about gender balance. Some of the hymns were Latin. I knew the lyrics. The homily was about sin, repentance, and intimacy with Jesus.

Afterwards in the porch we had to say no to a cuppa. It was a nice man who asked us, but he wasn’t the priest.

The priest was in the confessional.   

IF ONLY WE HADN'T LOST THE HABIT OF KNEELING (Letter to Dom Post, April 1)

Wina Sturgeon’s ‘easy routines to help build much-needed strength’ in the knees (March 31) actually sound awfully hard. I wonder how many untold millions spent world-wide in knee replacements would have been saved, and untold benefits gained, by a simple exercise that’s been around for ever.

If only we hadn’t lost the habit of kneeling.

THE GREENS AREN'T THE ONLY ONES (Letter printed in Dom Post, March 28)

Hideous though the subject is, I had to laugh at Kevin Hague’s comment on a euthanasia policy (Euthanasia issue too ‘risky’ for politicians, March 23). The Greens, he says, ‘haven’t worked out how to create a regime that doesn’t have the risk of being abused.’ 

That’s because it can’t be done.

BISHOP DRENNAN AND THE 'HOLLAND OF OCEANIA' - Letter to NZ Catholic, March 23

So Bishop Drennan has gone ‘out to the peripheries’, joining 500 protestors in a city square. So far, so good.  

But our bishops’ first task is to preach the Gospel, to ‘bring out the great value ... of a human being, his physical life’ (Vatican II). The protest God awaits is surely not one against a perceived ‘assault on our rights as citizens’ but the actual, prolonged assault on the right to life itself, its dreadful toll of nearly 500,000 unborn citizens killed by abortion, on the rights of their mothers to proper informed consent, of parents to be informed of teenage daughters’ pregnancies.

 

It seems unlikely that Bishop Drennan could muster 500 of his flock in the cathedral to pray for the rights of the unborn. This dismal reality reflects the priority accorded doctrine, prayer and sin in our dioceses, a desacralization which has earned a new title for New Zealand - the ‘Holland of Oceania’. 

It’s not soap boxes and speeches the unborn cry out for, it’s prayer and fasting; it’s not the TPPA we should protest about. There can be no justice as long as we tolerate, and by our silence condone, this latter-day slaughter of the innocents.

DON'T LOOK NOW TOM BUT YOUR CONSCIENCE IS SHOWING (Letter to the Dom Post, March 12)

Tom Scott has a way of hitting the bull’s eye without even trying.  

In The world according to 1080 Nazis (March 12) he depicts as ‘fair game’ something which looks remarkably like a baby in the womb. Scott may not know that since 1974 nearly 500,000 babies have been aborted in New Zealand, but he certainly knows that unborn babies are legally ‘fair game’. 

Don’t look now Tom, but your conscience is showing.

MUSLIMS TAKE GOD SERIOUSLY (Letter to the Dom Post, March 10)

Garry Wills rightly inveighs against ‘a holy war’ against Muslims (Peace, the Pope’s biggest mission, March 10). Any and all war is unholy: New Zealand’s response to Iraq’s appeal for help against ISIS must be by way of humanitarian aid. Training troops is simply making war at one remove.  

As Wills suggests, Pope Francis may well ‘unite believers in the One God’. Francis will certainly be aware that the root cause for the rise of Islam in the West and especially its appeal to the young is that Muslims take God seriously. Nominally Christian Baby Boomers have in practice forgotten God and consequently Gen Z and its offspring are looking elsewhere for the Supreme Being they instinctively know exists.  

Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so does the human spirit.

WHY WOULD CHANDOR RATHOD WANT TO BE BACK IN WAIPUKURAU? (Letter printed in Central Hawke's Bay Mail, March 10)

This letter to CHB Mail was prompted by Mayor Peter Butler's comment on Chandor Rathod, who in 2004 was found not guilty on reasons of insanity of murdering his wife.

In an interview with CHB Mail former CHB district councillor Hilary Pedersen, who had befriended Rathod, described him as 'a gentle man' whose violence towards his wife was 'completely out of character'.

Rathod has left New Zealand  to return to India for a funeral, prompting Mayor Butler to remark that 'we don't need types like him living in Central Hawke's Bay. We don't want him back in Waipukurau.'

 

Is it likely Rathod would want to be back in Waipukurau?

 

......................................................................................................................................................................

 

LETTER TO THE EDITOR, CHB MAIL, MARCH 10:

I’ve never in my life had such generous, charming service from a retailer than from Chandor Rathod in the Racecourse Rd Dairy, Waipukurau.

Wanting spices for a curry, I remembered someone saying they’d smelt wonderful aromas coming from the Sunset Dairy’s kitchen. I asked Chandor, at the counter, where I could buy what I needed.

He disappeared and returned with his smiling wife, smiling grandmother and children and all the spices I wanted, individually wrapped and named, and refused any payment.

If our community had accorded him more of the respect he’d enjoyed as a banker in his home country, had considered how he must have felt, serving icecreams while his wife earned a decent income as a veterinarian, and had extended to the family the compassion and friendship shown them by Hilary Pedersen, that heartbreaking tragedy and sad blot on our Central Hawke’s Bay escutcheon might have been avoided.

 

IT'S PETER SINGER WHO'S IN THE GRIP OF AN IDEOLOGY (Letter to the Dom Post, February 24)

I suppose Peter Singer (Why family planning is a win-win, Feb 24) realises that he himself is ‘in the grip of an ideology’, expounding as he does a shallow philosophy of self-gratification and love of oneself, as opposed to the profound Christian ideal of love of others.  

So it’s ironic that he should accuse Pope Francis and the Catholic Church of proselytising. The Philippines were not ‘ideologically colonised’. The Filipinos simply accepted the Gospel for what it is - Good News – and as good people do, they live it with enthusiasm.

TEN TIPS FOR LENT (To be published soon in 'NZ Catholic')

        I don't usually post my 'NZ Catholic' column until after publication but because my deadline was yesterday, Shrove Tuesday, and today is Ash Wednesday and my theme is Lent, l'm putting it out there now. A dear friend, an eremitical religious who advises me on such matters, said my 'Ten Tips' sounded like instructions instead of invitations.

        I think of them as suggestions! Please think of them as you see fit.

         ‘Pressed 4 Time’, as our local drycleaners say, I wanted to give you something short, snappy and Lenten. Ten tips, I thought, might do it. Wanting authoritative back-up I googled ‘Francis on Lent’ and there it was: ‘Lent: Pope Francis’ 10 tips’.

            Hmmm. I was happy to be on the papal wavelength but the devil, as we say, is in the detail. How would the Pope’s tips compare with mine, scribbled in the middle of the night, in the dark (not wanting to wake ‘im indoors)?

The papal exhortations for Lent, posted on an American university blog, were selected from Lenten messages, homilies and audiences, and obviously not limited by NZ Catholic’s exigencies of space. But my tips, with quotes from Francis throughout, are means to the same end and made in the same hope as his, that our parishes may become ‘islands of mercy in a sea of indifference’.

1.      Go to Confession. The Eucharist remits only venial sin; the Sacrament of Penance forms our conscience, heals and strengthens us in ‘leaving behind old habits and the lazy addiction to evil’.

2.      Go to Mass.  ‘Become what we receive – the Body of Christ’. Go weekdays as well as Sundays. If you attend weekdays already, go daily. When we make the most of our priests, God will send more.

3.      Fast. ‘Not a formal fast … which makes us feel good about ourselves’, not for the physical and mental benefits, but ‘to cultivate the style of the good Samaritan’. If you’ve never fasted, try simply waiting till lunch or dinner time before eating. If you’re already fasting one day, fast two.

4.      Fasting saves money. Give it to the Lent appeal. ‘Almsgiving leads to freedom from the obsession of possessing’. 

5.      Fasting saves time. Give it to God. Get out of bed 10 minutes earlier and simply listen to the Lord. ’Dive into the sea of God’s boundless love.’ If you pray this way already, give it twice the time.

6.      Do something for someone. Every day. ‘By loving and serving the poor’ (poor in terms of love as well as money) ‘we love and serve Christ’.

7.      Read or listen to the Gospel. Every day. To ‘experience the joy of spreading this good news’, first we need to hear the good news and make it our own.

8.      Pray the Rosary. ‘It’s spiritual medicine. Don’t forget to take it. It’s good for your heart, for your soul, for your whole life.’

9.      Kneel for the Consecration, as the Pope requires at his Masses. ‘We Christians kneel before the Blessed Sacrament because therein we know and believe to be the Presence of the One True God.’

10.  Kneel to receive Communion on the tongue, also required at Papal Masses. You’ll be criticised, but that helps conform you to Christ, whose family thought he was mad. So push the boat out!

‘Kneeling in adoration before the Eucharist is the most valid and radical remedy against the idolatries of yesterday and today.’