WHO OR WHAT IS "SERIOUSLY UNDERPOWERED"? (letter to DomPost, Dec 29)

If David Seymour thinks his fellow MPs are "seriously underpowered" - presumably compared with him - and if he’s so “into polls” (People of Parliament, according to Seymour, December 29), how come he can’t figure the stats on submissions to the Parliamentary Select Committee on euthanasia?

78 per cent were opposed to the law being changed to let doctors kill their patients or help them commit suicide. 

Seymour should be able to deduce that it’s his own noxious End of Life Choice Bill, rather than his fellow MPs, which is “seriously underpowered”, and withdraw it from the ballot.

ARE WE ALL CAPABLE OF LOVING GOD, OR NOT?

Someone sent me this query today:

Does God not make all people with the ability to deep intimacy with Him? Is it actually impossible for some as they are not wired to 'get' detachment or abandonment and they have no interest? Is it just not in their data-base to 'get it'?

So I looked up Divine Intimacy (which has a very handy index) and sent her Fr Gabriel's answer:

What is of the greatest importance is to know that union with God is not reserved for a small number of privileged souls; God calls every soul of good will to union with Himself, regardless of the way by which He chooses to lead it. Hence the ordinary way, “the little way”, as St Therese of the Child Jesus called it, or the “carriage road”, according to St Maria Bertilla, leads just as surely to divine union. ... Whether God chooses to lead us by one way or by the other, we shall never lack the necessary divine help to attain to union with Him.

BEST STRATEGY FOR MANAGING STRESS (Letter to Dom Post, Dec 27)

I hate stating the obvious, but I suppose to non-Christians it’s not obvious that the best strategy for managing stress (How cortisol may affect your health, December 27) is prayer.

 

Dr Libby suggests meditation as a “breath-focused practice”, but the God-focused practice of contemplative prayer is incomparably superior. Look at one of its best-known modern practitioners, Mother Teresa of Kalkuta, and what she achieved.

 

Cortisol? I bet she didn’t know the meaning of the word.

WE KNOW BY EXPERIENCE

There are things too good to keep to oneself. Such as the thoughts I pass on to my kids every night by email, which are not mine anyway, but very often belong to Fr Gabriel of St Mary Magdalen OCD, and published in his classic work, Divine Intimacy. Tonight's quote (below) is one such.

From the silent, loving contemplation of the Infant Jesus there is easily aroused in us a more profound and penetrating sense of his infinite love; we no longer merely believe, but in a certain way we know by experience God’s love for us.

A CONTEMPLATIVE, REGIFTED CHRISTMAS PREZZIE FOR YOU

Here, as a re-gifted Christmas prezzie for you, is an extract from Divine Intimacy by Fr Gabriel of St Mary Magdalen which goes straight to the crux of the mystical life.

'The infallible word of Jesus resounds continually in the heart of every Christian: “If a man loves me . . . we will come to him and make our home with him”(Jn 14:23).

Just the same there still remains a great question: if God abides in every person who lives in the state of grace, why does such a person have such difficulty in finding him and in recognizing his presence?

John of the Cross answers: “It should be known that the Word, the Son of God, together with the Father and the Holy Spirit is hidden by his essence and his presence in the innermost being of the soul. A person who wants to find him must leave all things through affection and will, enter into himself in deepest recollection and regard things as though they were nonexistent”(Sp C 1:6).

The answer is clear: God is within us, but he is hidden. In order to find him we must go forth from everything as regards affection and will That means to detach ourselves, to renounce ourselves, annihilate ourselves, to die spiritually to ourselves and to all things, not so much, or only, by a physical withdrawal, but especially by detachment of the affections and the will. It is the path of the “nothing,”or complete detachment; it is the death of the old man, the indispensable condition for putting on Christ, for life in God.

St. Paul, too, has said: “You have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God”(Col. 3:3). The loving search for God present in our heart goes hand in hand with this dying to the world and to ourselves. In this sense, the more we die to ourselves, the more we find God.

The soul. . . “in order to speak to its eternal Father and to find its delight in him has no need to go to heaven . . . neither is there any need for wings to go to find him. All one need do is to go into solitude and look at him within us”(St. Teresa, The Way of Perfection 28:2).

But in actual fact, Christians, even those consecrated to God, are very often satisfied with a superficial life, pretty much an exterior one, which makes them incapable of recollecting themselves interiorly in order to come into contact with God. We have in us a host of inclinations, ideas, and strong passions which make us turn toward creatures and induce us to give them our heart, to build our hopes on them and find consolation in their presence and remembrance.

All this can make us go so far as to forget, or at least neglect the great treasure that we carry within us: God, living and present, who urges us on to a life that is deeper and truer, a life of intimate communion with him. The Lord awaits us there, in the depths of our soul, where he has set up his abode; but we find it very difficult to recollect ourselves at such a depth, and continue to let ourselves be taken up with a thousand external matters to which we give all our interest.

“Anyone who is to find a hidden treasure,”warns St. John of the Cross, “must enter the hiding place secretly, and once he has discovered it, he will also be hidden just as the treasure is hidden. Since, then, your beloved Bridegroom is the treasure hidden in a field, for which the wise merchant sold all his possessions (Mt 13:44). . . in order to find him you should forget all your possessions and all creatures and hide in the interior, secret chamber of your spirit”.

Without a certain avoidance of the outer world, of the superficial life, it is impossible to reach God who is present, but hidden, in us; it is impossible to live in communion with him who never abandons us unless we first abandon him.'

Start reading this book for free: http://amzn.to/2hbpJp3

TRUE TESTIMONY TO THE BABY OF BETHLEHEM

The lives of Cyril Naylor, the Lower Hutt ‘legend’ and Suzanne Aubert, Our first likely saint (December 23) offer touching and true testimony to Jesus Christ, God made man and born in a cave at Bethlehem to teach us to how to love.

If only we could follow their example.

MOST WANTED CHILDREN NOT TO BE HAD (Letter published in Dom Post Dec 20)

At Christmas time, when the whole world celebrates the marvel of birth, the plight of women unable to conceive is particularly poignant. So why are Fertility funds falling short (December 19)?

Back in the day, infertility was rare. Now, because of abortion and delayed childbearing, it’s common. Back then women could decide to adopt, and that decision alone not infrequently resulted in pregnancy. Now, because of abortion, there are no babies to adopt.

‘Every child a wanted child’. That was one of the ALRANZ catch-cries, and unwanted children were done away with. Isn’t it ironic that as a result of that policy the most wanted children are not to be had. 

A STRANGE BILL ENGLISH (Letter to Dom Post, December 13)

This is a new Bill English (December 13), certainly, given his startling volte-face on “gay marriage”.

This issue was never an attack on traditional marriage; it’s an attack on the right of children to a mother and a father and the proven but unreported benefits of that right.

 

This is a strange Bill English. And this is a funny sort of Christmas present our new Prime Minister is giving to the children of New Zealand.

FRANCE MAY OUTLAW 'PRO-LIFE PROPAGANDA'

If I were writing these pro-life posts in France, I'd be risking two years in prison and a $30,000 fine. That's the fate proposed for all pro-life websites in a new bill which forbids 'pro-life propaganda' in that country.

France was the first nation as such to convert to the Catholic faith. By the baptism of King Clovis in 496AD, by the inspiration and example of the Saint Clotilda, Queen of the Franks, France received a mission and vocation as 'The Eldest Daughter of the Church'.

We await the response of the bishops of France, 'Eldest Daughter of the Church', to this outrageous offence to Christianity and to God.

INCONVENIENT TRUTHS (Letter to Dom Post, Dec 7)

“Some truths,” says Doug Bailey (The decline of fact and reason, December 7), “really are inconvenient and have far-reaching implications for how we live and breed”. He cites climate change and the environmental costs of growth.

 

I can think of a couple or three other truths which are more inconvenient, so much so that the media’s need for advertising revenue means they’re almost entirely suppressed. One is the harm done by early childhood care. Two, the high incidence of child abuse in single-parent families. Three, the harm done to women by abortion – including the proven link between abortion and breast cancer.

 

The facts are out there, but so are very powerful influencers preventing any commentary in the media. Bailey says we must demand more of the fourth estate and of ourselves; what we should demand is honesty, courage and disinterest.

 

Otherwise we will continue, like the bedevilled Gadarene swine, to rush to Noam Chomsky’s precipice.

CALL ME OLD-FASHIONED (Letter published in Dom Post, Dec 3)

In Free GP visits for under-18s get nod, December 1, “deprivation reinforced by ethnicity” is cited as a driver for poor health and its consequences.

We know that abused children are far more likely to be Maori and Pasifika than Pakeha or Asian, and that child abuse is closely associated with poor health. It’s high time we acknowledged that the incidence of child abuse and poor health is closely associated with single-parent families.

Call me old-fashioned, but the fact remains that the healthiest children are those protected by a mother and father who have committed themselves to each other and their children in marriage.

HOMOPHOBIA OR HOMOSEXUALITY? (Letter to Dom Post, Dec 6)

MP Paul Foster-Bell is worked up over gay students failing and puts it down to homophobic bullying and harassment in schools.

Is it only bullies who are the cause of such unhappiness, and not also the condition of homosexuality itself - or the awful choice now visited on vulnerable teenagers by sex ed of whether to be straight or gay, instead of the general acceptance of our given sexuality which we enjoyed before we became ‘sexually educated’? Or even worse, now teens are enlightened by the LGBT hegemony, the agonizing over whether they should be male or female?

As for Bishop Brian, what Foster-Bell calls his “outburst” has been roundly condemned also by the establishment churches. But they take it for granted that once upon a time, “God sent a flood”.

So why can’t he send an earthquake?

THE DOMPOST'S "DEPLORABLE" READERSHIP AND TOM SCOTT (letter to DomPost, November 25)

Criticising a senior Muslim cleric for hate speech against Jews (Ugly speech the fault of one, November 25), your editorial implies that it might constitute an offence against “a seldom-used ban on certain kinds of insulting speech”. And fair enough.

But with the “declining news media sector” (Calm voices and reliable information, same date) proved wrong by the Trump triumph of “deplorables” (Liberals hold tight to disdain, same date) and still wearing blinkers, it might be useful to reflect on your readership of “deplorables” and their reaction to Tom Scott’s cartoons, which are occasionally insulting to Christians in general and Catholics in particular.

Scott would realize that because they're supposed to turn the other cheek, Christians present a soft target. I’ve been waiting for a non-Christian to speak up but they haven’t so I will.

Only in the interests of shoring up your declining readership, of course.

WHICH CHURCH-RUN CHARITIES COULD WE DO WITHOUT? (Letter to Dom Post, November 22)

Dave Armstrong (Essential broadcaster has own crisis) November 21) has an idea. He asks, why not tax the all money given to churches and the money they make?

I ask, which church-run social services does he think we can do without? The Sallys’ food, clothing, budget advice and addiction counselling? The Wellington City Mission, the Wellington Family Centre? Enliven Central’s retirement villages and dementia care? The Wellington Night Shelter? The Suzanne Aubert Soup Kitchen? St Vinnie’s shops, counselling and advocacy services? I could go on.

Perhaps Armstrong has a Plan B which would ensure these outfits would keep running with a lot less of our money.

CRUX OF THE CRISIS IN THE PRIESTHOOD (First posted on associationof cathic.priests.ie on November 17)

Our country parish newsletter certainly makes for interesting reading. Last Sunday we had the Association of Catholic Priests saying in “Judgment on the horizon” that “Most days, one must be like Martha who was fully occupied with her daily work, busy with many things.”

Here is the crux of the crisis in the priesthood. One must not be like Martha who was fully occupied with work most days; one must be like Mary, partly occupied in time dedicated to contemplative prayer every day.

It was Mary, Jesus said, who chose “the best part” and that best part is contemplative prayer. He chided Martha not because she was busy but because she was “troubled”. If Martha had spent time “at the Lord’s feet” she wouldn’t have been troubled; she would have learned, in contemplating Christ, that perfect love which casts out fear.

Vatican II repeatedly urges contemplative prayer on both priests and lay people but to the best of my knowledge it’s still not taught in seminaries. That’s obvious from our Sunday homilies and parish newsletters. Priests and lay people may perhaps be practising Christian Meditation or Centering Prayer, but those are “strange doctrines” (Heb 13, 9), not contemplative prayer.

No wonder we lack priests. “By their fruits you shall know them” (Mt 7, 16).

BATTLE LINES IN NEW ZEALAND'S CATHOLIC CHURCH

'Cathnews.co.nz' is a website, a creature of the Marist Order, which is often quoted in our small country parish newsletter. It invites comments but there’s a limit of 10 days from initial publication.


I wasn't aware of that until my comments on Joy Cowley’s 'The Flat Earth Society', which said hell exists only on earth and so contradicted the Gospel, were declined.



Then last Sunday in our newsletter we read in 'Cardinal Dew appointed to the Congregation for Divine Worship' something rather more than “news about and of interest to the Catholic Church” as the website editor, John Murphy S M, describes the website’s content. The article appeared on Cathnews on November 1 so I'm too late to post my remarks there. Never mind, there’s always Carmelite Canto Fermo, and here they are:

I was surprised to see the divisive and adversarial tone taken by Cathnews.co.nz in regard to new appointments to the Congregation for Divine Worship.

I knew the NZ clergy generally, who often give the impression of operating independently of the Vatican, would be very hostile to Cardinal Sarah’s suggestion that the Mass be celebrated ad orientem, and the item in our parish newsletter this week seems to show that even the Marists, whose tradition is surely to imitate Mary in humility and obedience, were among the disaffected.

As Prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments, Cardinal Sarah did not “call for priests to turn their backs on the congregation”; he was encouraging priests and people, wherever possible, to turn together towards God. His very legitimate concern is that man, not Almighty God, is now often the focus of our liturgy.

How can Cathnews construe the Cardinal’s position as striking “a very different tone to the Pope’s merciful approach to families in difficult circumstances”? If they’re saying Pope Francis’ moves toward the deconstruction of three Sacraments – matrimony, confession and communion – in order to accommodate the divorced and ‘remarried’ are “merciful”, they would seem to be drawing up battle lines in the New Zealand Church.

Last week, in Joy Cowley’s piece, I thought Cathnews was not serving truth. This week I believe they are not serving unity.

DEAR WELLY, WAKE UP

“Shaken up” in Wellington (November 17), are Statistics House, BNZ Harbour Quays, Defence House, Queensgate, Justice House and Pipitea House, the PM’s and Cabinet’s Departments.

 

Statistics House, where I suppose the grim total of aborted babies is totted up every year. The BNZ, which invests in pharmaceuticals possibly implicated in the use of fetal body parts. Defence House, which attempts to defend a morally indefensible nation. Queensgate, the biggest incentive for wasting money in the lower North Island. Justice House, which administers laws allowing babies to be killed in their mothers’ wombs. Pipitea House, where the PM and Cabinet preside over all the foregoing.

 

Yesterday I heard an honest priest say, “Earthquakes are caused by God. We need to pray.” Please, dear Welly, wake up.

SEYMOUR WANTS AUTOMATONS IN PARLIAMENT (letter published in Dom Post, November 16)

David Seymour thinks it’s “enormously disappointing” that Cabinet ministers’ political stance is affected by their personal judgment on moral issues such as euthanasia. He thinks they should not exercise “a personal vote” but vote for what the polls say the majority wants.

The polls having been Trumped however, he must know that polls can get it wrong but even so, it sounds like Seymour wants automatons in Parliament. Men and women who operate not out of beliefs, but who believe in nothing. Nihilists who will vote for anything in order to stay in office, members of Parliament who are relentlessly politically correct.

But in fact what New Zealand desperately needs is political representatives with vision, values and courage.

HILLARY CLINTON AND THE POWER OF PRAYER (Letter to Dom Post, November 10)

Thank you Tracy Watkins, for acknowledging Trump’s speech was gracious, but I believe there’s a factor in WTF which to my knowledge you and the rest of the media have completely overlooked.

 

Namely, the power of prayer. Donald Trump may be everything you say, but Hillary Clinton totally supports partial-birth abortions, Planned Parenthood’s illegal, evil trade in fetal body parts and forcing Christians to fund abortions. If I were a US citizen I’d have returned a blank ballot paper.

Yesterday, the prayers of Christians the world over were answered. And this morning, like many other Catholics I should think, I walked out of Mass with the following line from Psalm 146 ringing in my ears.

The Lord thwarts the path of the wicked.

 

CENTERING PRAYER IS NOT CONTEMPLATION (Letter to NZ Catholic, November 10)

I’m sorry to say I see little resemblance between Father Ronald Rolheiser’s “Centering Prayer” (October 30) and the “Contemplation” of the Desert Fathers, John of the Cross and The Cloud of Unknowing.

For Rolheiser, contemplation is “prayer without the attempt to concentrate ... on God”. But then he contradicts himself, quoting The Cloud, saying “It’s a simple reaching out directly towards God”.  Introducing A Letter of Private Direction by the author of The Cloud, Jesuit James Walsh says, “It is not at all a question of thinking of nothing, but of dynamically accepting the fact that I am .... nothing.”

The Desert Fathers’ first requirement for contemplation is detachment, but Rolheiser doesn’t mention detachment.

As to John of the Cross, he says, “The soul enjoys being ... fixed in a loving knowledge”. Then even when having passed from meditation to contemplation, “as soon as the soul comes before God, it makes an act of knowledge”.

Contemplation is a grace for which we prepare primarily - if I may refer to a woman, a Doctor of the Church and John’s mentor – by Teresa of Avila’s “intense practice of the virtues”. By trying merely to empty the mind, “we shall end by driving ourselves silly.” Exactly.

Meditation is something we do. Contemplation is something God does for us, when we are ready.

WHO'S MORE "WILLFULLY IGNORANT" - CLINTON OR TRUMP? OR SCOTT? (Letter to Dom Post, Nov 9)

Yes, “Hillary tells fibs, is unlikeable and has ovaries” (Tom Scott, November 9).

She also totally approves of partial-birth abortions, where a full-term baby is dragged feet first out of its mother so the neck is exposed and stabbed, a tube inserted and the baby’s brains sucked out, so that the skull collapses and the baby extracted, dead but entire except for the brain.

Hillary also totally supports Planned Parenthood’s illegal, profitable trafficking of these dead babies’ organs, except for the brain which is the most valuable. But then, the products of thousands of earlier abortion ensure that Planned Parenthood has plenty of babies’ brains to sell off.

Who’s more “wilfully ignorant” in regard to such callous butchery and evil profiteeering – Clinton or Trump? Or for that matter, Tom Scott?

INSTEAD OF NEMBUTAL IN THE CUPBOARD, FAITH IN GOD (Letter to Dom Post, November 8)

Say a little old lady has a bottle of Nembutal “locked away in a cupboard at home” (Personal liberty at stake, November 8). Say she’s a rich little old lady. Say she goes senile and tells her children about the Nembutal. Say they’re not very nice children. Say they’re liars who tell her doctor she was suicidal. You get the picture?

 

I only hope I’m not giving my children ideas. But they know I’d never have Nembutal in the cupboard. 

Because I have faith in the God who loves me and sets me free.

MR PLOD PLODS INTO A HORNETS' NEST (Letter published in Dompost, November 3)

Interestingly, this letter was published with the sentence in italics deleted.

If the police checkpoint at that Exit meeting in Maungaraki was designed - by persons unknown - to turn up the heat under the euthanasia debate, it succeeded: seemingly we all agree (Letters, October 31) that it was above and beyond the call of duty.

In essence this debate is driven by fear of death, but in the past our Christian heritage meant we coped with it. Kiwis had a can-do attitude to life - and to death. We could do death, because we knew it meant new life. Now that we’ve forgotten that, or reject it, or simply don’t know it, that fear pervades the whole of society: witness drug, food and alcohol addiction, bursting prisons and ever-increasing crime.

Unfortunately, a decision predicated on fear, such as legalising assisted suicide, will never work. And unfortunately there’s nothing like fear of suffering and losing control for making people as angry as hornets.

Forget the outrage over the blitz on after-hours drinking, or delinquent Hutt Valley teens; this time poor old Mr Plod has plodded into a hornets’ nest.

HOW COME WE'RE NOT TOLD ABOUT HILLARY CLINTON? (Letter to Dom Post, October 29)

Tracy Watkins says she can’t stop watching the US race (Why we're captivated by the US race, October 29), and so she knows all about Donald Trump. Then how come she doesn’t tell us about Hillary Clinton?

How Clinton totally supports partial-birth abortions – that is, slicing through a full-term baby’s spine in order to sever the spine from the brain.

How she totally supports Planned Parenthood, revealed in under-cover videos as selling fetal body parts for profit.

How Planned Parenthood has spent more than  $20 million helping to elect her. How she lied in the final presidential debate, saying Planned Parenthood provide mammograms and that partial-birth abortions are sometimes necessary to save mothers' lives.

Trump may be everything Watkins says he is, but at least he’s not evil.

EUTHANASIA IS OPPOSED NOT BY RELIGION BUT BY REALISM (Letter to Dom Post, October 26)

I’d forgotten the fuss about after-hours trading which preceded the demise of the ‘six o’clock swill’ (October 25). But arresting little old ladies in their homes for possession of balloons is so weird, it had to be a put-up job, designed to get the public onside with said little old ladies and their fear of “interminable” pain.

 

However, research shows that in the Netherlands, guidelines established for the practice of assisted suicide are consistently violated and cannot be enforced. Last year, 56 people had themselves euthanised because of “incurable” PTSD. In Belgium a child of any age can ask to be killed.

We need to think of the awful consequences of giving in to fear instead of striving for solutions to pain. What’s driving the demand for euthanasia is individualism cloaked in humanism, and it’s opposed not by religion so much as by realism.

NOW GROWN-UPS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT STRANGER DANGER (Letter published in Dom Post, October 22)

We can only hope that the awful, awful Tostee/Wright story (Private night, public view, October 21) will serve as a warning not just to young women but to men also, not to risk this kind of encounter.

Remember the tragic Blanche Dubois, in A Streetcar Named Desire, who “depended on the kindness of strangers”, and her horrible end in a lunatic asylum.

It seems modern mores require that not only little children but adults too, should know about Stranger Danger.

PASSING WOMEN FROM PIMPS TO ABORTIONISTS (Letter to Dom Post, October 18)

Let’s not forget that when We pluck them from the Med to pass them to pimps (October 18), the pimps then pass them on to abortionists.

 

The Senior Adviser on Trafficking for the US State Department says the prevalence of forced abortions is an especially disturbing trend in sex trafficking.

If that’s what it’s like in the States, where women in forced prostitution suffer from hepatitis C, stomach and back injuries and psychological issues, and one quarter of under-age victims of sex traffickers got nothing from Planned Parenthood except contraceptives (no questions asked), the reality for these black women in Europe can only be worse.

WHY SHOULD WE PRAY? AND HOW AND WHERE? (Letter to NZ Catholic, October 18)

Michael Pender (NZ Catholic, October 16) first heard about personal relationship with Jesus from non-Catholics, and only recently from Catholic sources. That’s probably typical and explains why Protestants are so often fired up, and Catholics so limp-wristed.

 

Pender says we should pray earnestly for this gift. But why, when Requiem after Requiem “celebrates the life” of the deceased, who’s presumed to be in heaven? 

Because “we shall be separated from (God) if we fail to meet the serious needs of the poor” (Catechism of the Catholic Church).

 

We need teaching, because for priests especially, “serious needs” include the spiritual needs of lay people denied the treasures of Catholic doctrine.

 

We need example. We need to know the saints. But I’ve heard it said, in a Sunday homily, that saints are “”neurotic” - which explains both why we don’t know our saints, and why we don’t want to know them: because our pastors don’t.

 

Saints, in heaven and on earth, are other Christs who inspire us to become Christ-like. Saints become saints primarily by keeping Christ company, in contemplative prayer and in the Mass.

“Implore his grace daily”, says Pope Francis; at the risk of being called non-inclusive I add, “in the Eucharist”.

 

Don’t say you’re too busy. Jesus can re-arrange your life; he who created time will give you all you need.

WHY MAKE THE WORST SUICIDE RATE EVEN WORSE? (Letter published in Dom Post, October 18)

NZ suicide rate the worst in world (October 17).

So it can’t get any worse - or can it? Do we really want to make the worst suicide rate even worse?

Why are we even thinking about making it easier to commit suicide, by legalising euthanasia?

WHAT HAPPENS TO NICE GUYS WHO NEVER GO TO CHURCH, WHEN THEY DIE?

A Catholic I know has just been to a funeral. That's not unusual. What's unusual is, he asked did I know what happens after death to guys like his friend, nice guys who live decent lives without ever seemingly giving a thought to God, let alone going to church. 

I should have known the answer right off, but I didn't. That's not unusual either, because we're not taught Church doctrine now and it's blithely assumed now by most Catholics that God's so kind, we all go to heaven.

 

So I resorted to The Catechism of the Catholic Church.

 

Our Lord warns us that we shall be separated from him if we fail to meet the serious needs of the poor and the little ones who are his brethren (Matthew 25, 31-46). To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God’s merciful love means being separated from him for ever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called “hell”.

 

But, you may say, God is “a forgiving God”. That’s true. In the story of the prodigal son, when he realised how stupid he’d been, wasting his inheritance etc, and went back home to ask his father’s forgiveness, his father ran to meet him, hugged him and made a huge fuss of him.

Same with us. God forgives us just as soon as we realise our mistake and ask his forgiveness. But to be forgiven we must first ask to be forgiven - in other words, repent, be converted, have a change of heart.

 

And when someone dies, even someone who says they don’t believe in God, or even a convicted serial rapist/murderer, we normally have no way of knowing that right up to the moment of death they didn’t change their mind and ask God for forgiveness. In which case they’d go to Purgatory - but that’s another story.

 

GOD DOESN'T WRESTLE, LLOYD: HE WAITS (Letter to Dompost, October 15

Lloyd Geering may think he’s been “wrestling” with God (October 15) but more likely it was shadow boxing.

Waiting, not wrestling, is what God does. He’s waited 98 years for Lloyd to realise that the God he's made a jolly good living out of is not a symbol, but for real, and give him thanks.

 

Not long now, Lloyd. If I were you, I’d be getting down on my knees.

 

GETTING DOWN AND DIRTY

There's something about hand-weeding that is conducive to thought. Maybe it's the kneeling. Maybe it's getting down into the dirt, where I'm reminded that the word 'humility', describing the fundamental Christian virtue, derives from the Latin for earth.

As I tossed out the 'pingy' weeds and orange escholtzias (I'm so over orange) I found myself thinking about old people in rest homes. Wondering how many would answer, if asked what they'd do if they won Lotto, that they would "fly to one of those countries where they have euthanasia". I suspect the old woman I know who said that is not the only one to feel that way.

She feels she's outgrown her usefulness. That's the natural reaction to the humiliating situation of people who all their lives have served others and now must submit to being served themselves, in every way. It's only natural for them to feel useless. A burden on society, even.

So then how fortunate are the Christian elderly, who can transcend these natural feelings and respond supernaturally. Because people who know what the Church teaches (many don't, because the faith is rarely taught) know that their service to humanity in this situation, if their plight is accepted with love, with Christ and for Christ, far outweighs anything physical they might have done in the active lives they once led.

Death - which the old woman who wants to win Lotto looks forward to - and suffering in the way old people do in rest homes, in spite even of the best of care, and all other kinds of suffering too, are the consequence of sin: the sin of our first parents, and also actual sins.

Suffering in itself is an evil, but God can draw good out of evil. When the elderly sacrifice themselves and their sufferings for Christ, they win other souls to his love and reach 'the apex of the apostolate and hence of apostolic fruitfulness' (Fr Gabriel of St Mary Magdalen O C D).

 Funny what comes to mind when you're on your knees among the weeds!

THE ALL BLACKS AS 'STRANGE GODS' (Letter to Dom Post, October 7)

The reason why ‘once again the great rugby PR machine has exploded in scandal’ (October 7) is to be found in the first of the Ten Commandments: ‘I am the Lord your God. You shall not put strange gods before me.’

The All Blacks are very strange gods, for sure. But that’s what this country has made them, and has put before God, and as such they are not tolerated by God. So they repeatedly fall off their pedestals, revealing their big feet to be made of clay.

This letter will be dismissed by the majority as the ravings of a religious maniac. All I can say is, too bad.

THE RUGBY UNION DOESN'T 'GET IT'. NEITHER DO I (letter published in Dom Post, October 1)

I’m no rugby fan but for the life of me, I can’t see why the rugby union should be blamed for a player’s violence. 

If a young farm worker employed by my son attacked someone in the street, would my son be blamed for it? Would my son be expected to beat his breast and sack his employee? Wouldn’t he more likely have a conversation with the guy, find out the reasons for his anger and help him deal with it?

We’re talking about a kid who was promoted out of his depth into a macho culture, and couldn’t handle it. The rugby union is entitled to end his contract, of course, but where does that leave its promising protege? Up the creek without a paddle.

If the nation makes so much of a violent sport, it must expect that violence to spill over into the streets, and be prepared to deal with the consequences with compassion.

A CAUTIONARY TALE

This is a story about a rock.

I’d been trying to follow a piece of advice from Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, in his spiritual classic, The Practice of the Presence of God. 'Never,' he saysO, 'do anything hurriedly or impulsively'.

I had to admit to myself that of course, that means not breaking the speed limit, which I was wont to do.

Breaking the speed limit is a sin. So at the cathedral in Palmerston North last Saturday for a Lay Carmelite meeting, at confession beforehand with Fr Brian Walsh I said that on my way down to 'Palmy' I’d realized, on those bendy bits north of Norsewood, that to compensate for keeping to 100k on the straights, I was driving faster than I should through the bends. I thought about that for a good two minutes, but I continued to drive faster than was safe.  

Suddenly there appeared in the middle of the south-bound lane in front of me, a good-sized rock. Right in the middle. Just one rock, no little stones or sign of a slip from the slight bank on the left. I had no chance of avoiding that rock.

It ripped my front left tyre open.

I limped along until I could safely pull over. I put the hazard lights on and walked back to remove the rock so no one else would hit it. There was no sign of that rock.

I had to call my long-suffering husband (known to readers of NZ Catholic as 'im indoors'), who had to get dressed (this was around 7.40 a m) and come outdoors to drive some 30 ks to change my tyre and lend me his car to drive on to PN, where I'd missed Morning Prayer but was in plenty of time for the Gospel. (Deo gratias.)

Now, how do you explain that? No way, except that the Holy Spirit Himself was teaching me a much-needed lesson in patience. An expensive lesson: not only was the tyre wrecked, but the wheel as well.

That rock cost us $300. 'God works in mysterious ways, his marvels to perform.' Or something like that.

Scottie Reeve is on to something rather more significant than container cafes. In fact, his comment on the Franciscan friar Richard Rohr’s ideas about “the interior life which could be really transformative to our culture” could qualify as the understatement of the year.

 

But as to “rediscovering contemplative spirituality in the Christian tradition”, it was never lost. Countless Christians still practise it daily, as they have for 2000 years.

In our era, you could say it’s most famous exponent was Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Others will follow.

JOY COWLEY'S NEW BOOK MUST BE MEANT FOR GAYS ONLY IF THEY'RE CELIBATE (Letter to 'NZ Catholic', September 16)

Reviewing Joy Cowley’s Made for Love – Spiritual Reflections for all Couples (August 7), Lyndsay Freer inevitably references Pope Francis’ quite unremarkable question, “Who am I to judge?”- which simply states what every Catholic should know, that judgment is reserved to God alone – and his exhortation to be ‘more loving’.

 

What exactly does that mean? Because when Jesus says, as quoted by Freer, that we’ll be known as his disciples if we have love for one another, Jesus is talking about his kind of loving. Jesus loves propter Deum, for God’s sake. He’s talking about the love which gives God glory by helping others towards eternal life.

 

It’s in faith that Catholics accept the teachings of his Church. It’s in faith that they believe Christ’s love is inseparable from grace, and that grace and serious sin are mutually exclusive. So a homosexual couple can’t live ‘in faith’, except in celibacy.

 

So I assume that because Made for Love is written by a Catholic, and reviewed by a Catholic in a Catholic newspaper, these Spiritual Reflections are meant for gay men and women only if they are celibate.

STRANGULATION IS "INCREDIBLY COMMON" . SO IS DISMEMBERMENT OF BABIES IN UTERO (Letter to Dompost, Sept 15) I

So now we’re up for $130m worth of new family violence laws (September 14).

Before abortion was legalized we were warned it was a Pandora’s box, but I for one never imagined the horrific scale of violence resulting from this violence against unborn children – violence perpetrated by their parents, and aided and abetted by the rest of us through our taxes.

Women’s Refuge’s Dr Ang Jury instances strangulation as domestic violence which is life threatening and “incredibly common”.  But to be honest (as everyone says now, which is interesting), we should admit that dismemberment of babies in utero is much more common,- and life destroying.

As Mother Teresa of Calcutta has said, “The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion, because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you, and you to kill me? There is nothing between.”

EMPTY HOMES AND HOMELESS PEOPLE (Letter published in Dom Post, Sept 12)

Tom Scott (September 9) puts his finger on the pulse in confronting John Key with the conundrum of empty homes and homeless people.

In the same issue Jonathan Boston asks for ‘a robust, durable and cost-effective strategy’ to halve poverty rates by 2030.

The solution actually does stare us all in the face: it’s simply the basic requirement for fair-mindedness and generosity in sharing our resources as a nation.

All we need is the political will to do it.

EMPTY HOMES AND HOMELESS PEOPLE (Letter published in Dom Post, Sept 12)

Tom Scott (September 9) puts his finger on the pulse in confronting John Key with the conundrum of empty homes and homeless people.

In the same issue Jonathan Boston asks for ‘a robust, durable and cost-effective strategy’ to halve poverty rates by 2030. The solution actually does stare us all in the face: it’s simply the basic requirement for fair-mindedness and generosity in sharing our resources as a nation.

All we need is the political will to do it.

NO RESPECT FOR LIFE MEANS NO RESPECT FOR PROPERTY EITHER (Letter to Dom Post, Sept 1)

The sad fact that it’s now Boom time for burglars (September 1) was, from the moment we legalised abortion, entirely predictable.

Where there’s no respect for life, there’s no respect for property either.

EVERYONE HAS 'THE 'RIGHT TO DIE' AND NO HUMAN AGENCY CAN PREVENT IT (letter to Dom Post, August 31)

Sympathy for Lecretia Seales and for her husband Matt, deprived of the one person who was everything to him, naturally runs high. Theirs is a very sad story.

 

But was she really deprived of “the right to die”? It seems to me it’s not possible for her or anyone else to be deprived of that right. Everyone has ‘the right to die’ and in the final analysis no human agency can prevent it.

 

It’s not even the “assisted dying” that Matt Vickers and Geoffrey Palmer want. What they really mean is “the right” for someone to ask someone else to end their life.

An an academic in the field of ethics, Professor Theo Boer of the Netherlands argued in 2012 that ‘a good euthanasia plan’ would result in a relatively small number of deaths. Now, with refreshing common sense, he admits that the very existence of a euthanasia law turns assisted suicide from a last resort into a normal procedure - as witnessed by the 200,000 abortions annually in the Netherlands today.  The law Vickers and Palmer want is, in the Netherlands, he says, “on the way to becoming a default mode of dying for cancer patients”.

 

Vickers and Palmer of course, are principled people - but how principled, especially when there’s a question of material gain, are the rest us?

 

ECE IS PARTLY THE AUTHOR OF ITS OWN MISFORTUNES (Letter to Dom Post, August 24)

Two generations ago, I’d have read that Kindies need more male teachers (August 23) and asked, why? Because naturally and historically, in our culture children up to the age of five have needed only female ‘teachers’ - their mothers.

Now I ask whether early childhood education (ECE) might be partly the author of its own misfortune. Economic and ideological pressures on women to find paid work and pass that teaching role on to ECE must contribute to the stress which results in the breakdown of parental relationships and men abandoning their role as fathers.

‘Children under 5 learning about gender stereotypes’ has a subtext which to me reads as children learning values which may be quite alien to those of their parents.

It’s a warped society which in effect forces men out of their homes and away from their children and wants to pay other men to be their ‘fathers’. What’s needed is not political support so much as moral support for parents, the kind of moral support which comes only from friendship with Christ. . 

WE NEED RESEARCH INTO THE SPIRITUAL MALAISE OF OUR NATION (Letter to Dom Post, August 17)

“Booze-trackers touted”on the front page, and “Cancer risks from alcohol” on the op ed page (August 16). That’s a fair reflection of the huge concerns around alcohol consumption in today’s society.

 

Research into its effects, and ways of managing its effects, take up many column inches in almost any magazine or newspaper you pick up. It seems to me that what we desperately need is research into the causes of alcohol consumption – in other words, the cause of the spiritual malaise of our nation.

 

Here of course the churches have a role to play, but will the secular media allow their voice to be heard?

WE MAY AS WELL READ THE WOMEN'S WEEKLY (Letter to Dom Post, August 13)

Combined with a pic of Lecretia Seales, the beautiful poster girl for assisted suicide, your headline Thousands want say on euthanasia (August 12) implies, as euthanasia is illegal, that thousands want euthanasia.

 

They most emphatically do not. Three to one of the 1800 submitters to the petition for an inquiry oppose euthanasia. What’s wanted is analysis, but going by your article it seems we’re not going to get it.

 

You say David Seymour’s bill is likely to “languish indefinitely”. The euthanasia petition “demanded” the committee examine public opinion into ending lives which are “unbearable”.

 

Spare us the plaintive violins, and opinion pieces masquerading as reportage. We may as well read the Women’s Weekly.

PARLIAMENTARY INQUIRY INTO KEIFT'S PETITION WAS GROSSLY INCOMPETENT (Letter published in Dom Post, August 11)

The grief of having your baby snatched (Call for forced adoption enquiry, August 9) is beyond imagining.

But Hillary Kieft, who lost her grandchild and the possibility of any others when her teenage daughter Ariana was taken from school for a botched abortion resulting in infertility for life, would want to warn them that a select committee inquiry could be a waste of time.

The inquiry into Kieft’s petition, which called for parents to be notified when their 15 year-old daughter wants an abortion, sought evidence from vested interests such as Family Planning (read Abortion Provider) but incredibly, excluded any group representing parents - who polls showed were in favour of notification - and were gulled by data that was manifestly incorrect.

Why should these women, so unjustly bereft of their babies, now subject themselves to the arduous process of an inquiry which may prove, like that of the Justice and Electoral Reform Committee into parental notification, to be grossly incompetent?

THE LOVE LETTER TO HUMANITY (Letter to Sunday Star-Times, August 8)

"It’s quite a nice thing,”says Dr David Galler (A love letter to humanity, August 7), when your loved one is dying, to turn to religion. What a masterpiece of understatement.

 

If everyone turned (converted) to genuine religion - which means loving your neighbour because you love God – Sunday Star-Times wouldn’t be running stories like ‘Secret Police List of NZ’s Bad Bars’.

There’d be no ‘ ‘Cheating’ truckies’. There wouldn’t be a ‘School board in race row’. Not even ‘A tangled web’.

 

As Alexander Solzhenitsyn pointed out, we have forgotten God. The ‘love letter to humanity’ we all need to read is the Bible.

ARE THINGS NOT BAD ENOUGH ALREADY? (Letter to Dom Post, August 1)

Thank God someone in Parliament - NZ First’s Barbara Stewart (Better strategy needed to cut suicide rate, August 1) – is demanding changes to the current “Suicide Prevention Strategy” which is demonstrably not working.

Because Act’s David Seymour’s  misguided strategy of legalising assisted suicide will only make matters worse. In the Netherlands, since euthanasia was legalised in 2002, suicides have risen 25%.

 

Legalising assisted suicide sends the message that lone suicide is okay; there is also ample evidence to suggest that suicide is contagious, especially among youth. Are things not bad enough already?

 

LIES TOLD BY POLICE WILL NEVER JUSTIFY A CONVICTION (Letter to Dom Post, July 22)

Lies told by the police (Police lied to catch baby killer, (July 22) to obtain a conviction, lies upheld by the Supreme Court, undermine and potentially make a travesty of the entire edifice of New Zealand’s justice system.

Note that Chief Justice Dame Sian Elias dissented from the Supreme Court’s approval of this shabby business, perhaps because her presumably Jewish heritage has written the Decalogue and its Eighth Commandment - ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour’ - into her very bones. 

Why did the police go to such lengths to trap a mere boy (at the time of his offence), floundering out of his moral depth after finding himself father to premature twins at age seventeen? Was it a knee-jerk response to the outpouring of anger over child abuse in this country?

If so, their machinations have served simply to aggravate our difficulties. We must remember that the ends never justify the means.

NATIONAL'S "ARDENT PRACTISING CATHOLICS" AND IT'S EUTHANASIA POLICY(Letter to Dompost, July 19)

A moment’s quiet reflection (which “ardent, practising Catholics” find easy, because they do it regularly) would tell John McLean (July 18) that the argument against euthanasia, like that against abortion, hasn’t necessarily anything to do with religion, but a lot to do with common sense.

 

A little more reflection would reveal that Catholics are also doctrinally opposed to abortion - which was introduced in New Zealand under a National Government. So much for McLean’s “simple lesson”on National Party policy making.

Not simple so much as simplistic. In the extreme.

PAYING FOR OUR CONTEMPT (Letter to Dompost, July 15)

Navina Clemerson (Letters, July 14) is right to condemn the jailing of a mother of small children. She’s right to point to money being more important than children, that in New Zealand children are of no account, and that when they grow up we may have to pay for our contempt.

 

Only we won’t have to wait. We’re paying right now. The evidence is everywhere – for instance, this mother’s offending - that our society has already lost respect. And that’s because we have no care or compassion for the smallest children, those yet to be born.

 

Children’s welfare will ‘truly come first’ only when we show care and compassion for all children, not just the ones we can see.

HOW MANY TRUFFULA TREES? (Letter printed in The Dominion Post, July 11)

Isn't it interesting? The letters I fire off so frequently to the Dompost on the subject of abortion never see the light of day.

But behold, I write one about a billionaire's yacht and the homeless (see below) and bingo! It's in. Why? It's politically correct.


Thank God we still live in a democracy with a free press. Because the day may come when the needs of the homeless, jobless and hopeless are seen to outweigh the indulgences of the overpaid, overfed and overprivileged. And with the luxuries of the latter, like Graham Hart’s (Hart floats superyacht sale for $266m, July 11), flaunted in the face of the former, we should only have to wait for polling day to see some kind of justice done.

It adds irony to injury that having made his billions in packaging Hart might fairly be described, in the terms of Dr Seuss, as the ‘Onceler’. 

Since The Lorax was written in 1971, how many truffula trees has he cut down?

MORE CHANCE OF HARM FROM AN ABORTION THAN FROM PARENTS (Letter to Dom Post, July 8)

Taranaki mother Hillary Keift braved Parliament to tell how she found her teenage daughter hanging from the rafters in the car shed after a covert abortion which resulted in infertility for life.

 

And the select committee were “sympathetic”. That’s nice. But they say if girls have to tell their parents they’re pregnant they might be harmed. Really? Did they actually compare the statistical possibility of such a sinister scenario (incestuous, violent father/brother + absent or brutish mother) with the likelihood of a botched abortion? More chance of harm from an abortion surely, than from parents.

 

There are about 280 under-sixteen abortions a year - five times more than the committee stated. And Family Planning’s Jackie Edmond has said that 25 % don’t tell their parents. So in the last ten years about 700 girls have secretly had an abortion. 

 

The committee thinks organisations like Family Planning – who are responsible for Hillary’s daughter’s infertility – can be trusted to ensure such a tragedy doesn’t recur. Family Planning is in the business of selling teenagers contraceptives so they can have safe sex, and then referring them for taxpayer-funded abortions when it turns out to be unsafe.

 

How trustworthy is that?

FAMILY PLANNING TOUTING FOR THE BUSINESS OF ABORTION (Letter to Dom Post July 5)

How naïve, to publish a plea from Jackie Edmond (Our abortion laws are broken, July 5) for ‘flexible’ abortion legislation. As if our legislation weren’t already as flexible as a yogi. 

Edmond is chief executive of the cutely titled Family Planning Association, who stated in the ‘40s that “once a life is created it should not be destroyed”. How times change.

Family Planning, now one of the top NZ referrers for abortion, runs an abortion clinic in Tauranga and will likely apply for licences to run more clinics throughout the country. Family Planning peddles contraceptives and nearly half the abortions done in 2012 resulted from contraceptive failure. 

Family Planning promotes ‘anything goes’ graphic sex education for teens and tweens and since its introduction in NZ schools, teen pregnancies and STIs have soared. Family Planning is in the business of sex, which naturally is good for the abortion trade, and Edmond is paid to run it.

She sounds like she’s touting for business.

WHY BISHOP DUNN'S "ELEPHANT" SEEMS LIKE A PET (Letter to 'NZ Catholic', July 5)

Msgr Brian Arahill’s concerns (NZ Catholic, June 26 - July 9) about aging priests being incapable of raising the Host above their heads provide an excellent illustration of the reasons for "Kiwi drift", as acknowledged recently by Bishop Patrick Dunn.

 

So does your headline, and the whole story. Cardinal Sarah didn’t "question" anything; he quoted our Pope Emeritus, who as Cardinal Ratzinger wrote that it’s essential during the Eucharistic Prayer to look together at the Lord. 

 

NZ Catholic is pandering to our Kiwi habit of questioning rubrics from "Rome". "We’re Kiwis," we say. "We do things differently here." The reason why Kiwi priests are aging and can’t raise the Host above their heads, and why aging lay Kiwis can’t kneel is, we’ve lost the fear of God which fears nothing but sin, and perfects us in love. At Pentecost my cathedral omitted it from the gifts of the Spirit. Without that filial fear which inspires humility and obedience, how can we hope to staunch the haemorrhage of native-born New Zealanders from the Body of Christ?

 

But to echo Cliff Corbett (Letters, June 26), accepting challenges like Cardinal Sarah’s to the way we do things here means clergy who led the 20th century charge to change would lose credibility.

 

Maybe that’s why they’ve only just noticed that gradual but great loss of Kiwi Catholics which Bishop Dunn describes as "the elephant in the room".

It’s been around so long, it seems like a pet.

COMPARING LETTERS TO THE DOM POST ON THE SUBJECT OF ABORTION

This is the what the Dominion Post does. It filters letters on the subject of abortion so that only the mildest objections make it into print.

Here's an example - a letter published today, July 4:

'I suppose it's true, Maggie Miller (July 1) that abortion is more humane for an unwanted child than 'years of misery ending in death by torture'.

This reasoning, though, is better suited to the euthanasia debate which involves the death of someone who chooses to die more 'humanely'.

Abortion is different because it involves no such consent and because it does involve a third option: life. I wish we would take that third option more seriously.

                                                                                                         Gavan O'Farrell

                                                                                                              Lower Hutt

And here's mine, which was not published today - and won't be tomorrow, either:

Maggie Miller (July 1) can’t understand why abortion is the precursor to child abuse. Of course parents should "take responsibility for the protection of children they bring into the world". But doesn’t that automatically imply they should also take responsibility for their protection before they bring them into the world?

Look at the stats. See when child abuse first became a problem - soon after we legislated to kill unborn children. The reason why abortion is the precursor of child abuse is, if it’s okay to kill a child before it’s born, it’s okay after.

But before birth we can’t see them. And for most of us apparently, that makes all the difference.


I'm not saying mine's the better letter. Just saying.

WHY ABORTION IS THE PRECURSOR TO CHILD ABUSE (Letter to Dom Post, July 1)

Maggie Miller (July 1) can’t understand why abortion is the precursor to child abuse. Of course parents should ‘take responsibility for the protection of children they bring into the world’. But doesn’t that automatically imply they should also take responsibility for their protection before they bring them into the world?

Look at the stats. See when child abuse first became a problem - soon after we legislated to kill unborn children. The reason why abortion is the precursor of child abuse is, if it’s okay to kill a child before it’s born, it’s okay after.

But before birth we can’t see them. And for most of us apparently, that makes all the difference.

WHY WE DEMONISE PEOPLE LIKE SHAILER AND HAEREWA (Letter to Dom Post,June 29)

‘Never let go of the rage’, says The Dominion Post (June 29) adding that ‘the treatment of poor Moko is indescribable’ – but then Duncan Garner, who ‘locked eyes with a monster’ describes the treatment in such detail, it smacks of voyeurism.

Your coverage of this horrible crime seems to suggest it’s what readers want. And the reason why we wallow in it, why we demonise people like Shailer and Haerewa is, we want to assure ourselves that we are not like them.

Because deep down we’re afraid we are, a little bit. Intuitively we understand that having over 40 years been responsible as a nation for killing 500,000 defenceless babies before birth, we’re also partly responsible for producing people like Shailer and Haerewa who torture and kill them after birth. They don’t see the difference - which after all is only that the babies are bigger, and we get to see their photos in the paper.

Let’s face it, rage sells newspapers. We have good reason to ‘express rage and anguish’: we know we are already morally lost.

YOU CAN BE ANTI-TOBACCO OR ANTI-OBESITY, BUT NOT ANTI-ABORTION (Letter - abridged - in SS Times, June 26)

The following letter was printed in the Sunday Star-Times on June 26. The text in italics was edited out.

Child abusers make Children’s Commissioner Russell Wills feel sick. Me too. But what makes me sicker is that a Children’s Commissioner can’t see the connection between abusing children we can see and children we can’t. 11 week-old Chris and Cru Kahui suffered head injuries and broken bones, and so do 11 week-old unborn children, who are just as human.

 

The reason “why communities accept violence by men against women and children” is, we accept violence also by women against women and children. And in abortion women do violence also to themselves - physically, emotionally and spiritually.

 

The rise in child abuse is logically linked to the rise in abortion. If it’s okay to abuse a child before it’s born, it’s okay to abuse it after.

 

But although you can be anti-tobacco or anti-obesity, who in the health industry is willing to stick their head above the parapet and be anti-abortion?

 

MURDOCH MOCKING THE MOTHER OF GOD (Letter to the Dom Post, June 21)

Murdoch, of course, has a perfect right to mock the Mother of God (June 21) but even a cartoonist has the concomitant responsibility of considering the consequences of his levity, even if it’s merely letters to the editor rather than masked gunmen storming the offices of The Dominion Post.

 

However, I won’t confine myself to predictable and entirely justifiable objections on the grounds of offence to Christians which would not be tolerated even in Islamic countries.

 

Although it may afford The Dominion Post an opportunity to reprint Murdoch’s insult - and make me a laughing stock - I have to say the publication of such effrontery in the capital’s daily paper makes me tremble for Wellington, the city I love.

 

God will not be mocked.

WELLINGTON HOSPITAL ADMITS IT'S BABIES THEY ABORT (Letter to Dom Post, June 20)

‘Under hospital policy, a baby born earlier than 23 weeks would be left to die’ (Party time for miracle baby, June 20). Note the terminology - it’s ‘a baby’. This amounts to a tacit admission that it is in fact babies, not ‘blobs of tissue’ not even ‘just fetuses’, who in the same hospital are routinely killed by abortion.

 

That throw-away line, in an otherwise delightful story about a cherished baby born at that gestational age who’s now celebrating her first birthday, is an utterly damning indictment of a selfish, materialistic and heartless society.

ANTI-TOBACCO AND ANTI-OBESITY IS FINE BUT WHAT ABOUT ANTI-ABORTION? (Letter published - edited - in Sunday Star-Times, June 26)

Child abusers make Children’s Commissioner Russell Wills feel sick. Me too. But what makes me sicker is that a Children’s Commissioner can’t see the connection between abusing children we can see and children we can’t. 11 week-old Chris and Cru Kahui suffered head injuries and broken bones, and so do 11 week-old unborn children, who are just as human.

The reason “why communities accept violence by men against women and children” is, we accept violence also by women against women and children. In abortion women do violence also to themselves - physically, emotionally and spiritually.

The rise in child abuse is logically linked to the rise in abortion. If it’s okay to abuse a child before it’s born, it’s okay to abuse it after.

But although you can be anti-tobacco or anti-obesity, who in the health industry is willing to stick their head above the parapet and be anti-abortion?

DR ROSY FENWICKE AND 'A TIME OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT' (Letter to Dom Post, June 18)

In his letter of June 17 Mike Woods quotes George Orwell, who in his book 1984 describes “a time of universal deceit”. And in her letter of the same date, Rosy Fenwicke mounts the moral heights to condemn Gordon Jenkins for stabbing a dog to death. “Any living creature”, she says, needs to be treated with respect and humanity”, adding that “a society is judged by how it looks after its weakest.”

 

But wait on. As a Certifying Consultant and abortionist, Fenwicke kills defenceless unborn humans for a living. Such breathtaking hypocrisy, taken together with Dr Fenwicke’s standing in society, perfectly illustrates the prophetic nature of George Orwell’s work.

 

That “time of universal deceit” has finally arrived.

MEDIA, MARRIAGE AND THE GADARENE SWINE (Letter to Dom Post, June 17)

I don’t suppose women start out in life with the expectation of ending it, either for their unborn children by abortion, or for their born children at one remove by exposing them in their own homes to ‘stranger danger’ in the shape of their latest ‘partner’ (Mum told new partner to leave crying infant, June 16).

It’s our throw-away culture which inures them to this lifestyle. If you don’t want your unborn child, get rid of it. If you don’t like your ‘partner’, get another one.

In sedulously avoiding any discussion around commitment and marriage – except for celebrating 70th wedding anniversaries, which reinforces the idea that marriage is passe - the media remind me of the biblical Gadarene swine, rushing to destruction. Because it’s proven that children (and so also our society) have the best outcomes, even in avoiding poverty, when their parents are married.

WHY WE SUFFER AND HOW SUFFERING AND PRAYER CAN MAKE US LIKE GOD (Letter to Dom Post, June 1)

The reason ‘Why people suffer’ (Faith, hope and war chaplains, June 1), is sin. Not necessarily individual sin, but generic. Like Anthony Pantlitz who accepts that PTSD made him ‘a better chaplain’, when we accept suffering we become better people.

The key to accepting suffering, as Pantliz proves, is prayer. And although ‘yelling the 23rd Psalm’ is great when you’re scared, meditation works better. In meditation we can keep company with the God who accepted 33 years of hardship and a hideously painful death, and it works simply because we become like the people we spend time with.

You might call it a virtuous circle. In this prayer of meditation we get to know and fall in love with the God who suffered because he loves us. We learn how to suffer and to pray because we love him. And suffering with prayer makes us more like God.

"LET THEM GO TO WINZ" (Letter published in Dom Post, May 28)

The call from Auckland Action Against Poverty for lawyers to help thousands of beneficiaries in debt to Work and Income (Beneficiaries appeal debts, May 25) shines a new light on our Prime Minister’s statements on the dire need for homes for the homeless, and his plans for 26 hotels to house the rich.

On the day he flew to Paris for his daughter’s graduation he said, “There have always been homeless people.” And he has advice for these homeless people, too. "Let them go to Winz."

His utterances are becoming increasingly reminiscent of the late, unlamented Queen Marie-Antoinette, who said in regard to her subjects who lacked bread, "Let them eat cake".

I look forward to next year’s elections in the hope that like hers, heads will roll.

WILL PFIZER NOW SELL ITS LETHAL DRUGS FOR EUTHANASIA? (Letter to Dom Post, May 16)

Pfizer will score brownie points (Ban brings execution 'turning point', May 16) for deciding not to sell any more drugs for lethal injections for criminals in the US.

Call me cynical, but it occurs to me that there’s now a much bigger market for its death-dealing chemicals in despatching the frail, the elderly, the terminally ill and depressed people of the Netherlands, Switzerland and Oregon.

 

And in New Zealand too, if euthanasia enthusiasts here get their wicked way.

DISCRIMINATION IS NOTHING TO GET EXCITED ABOUT (Letter to Dom Post, May 11)

 

The Wellington City Council’s ban on teenagers and young adults’ birthday parties is indeed, as upset Mum Andrea complains, ‘a bit discriminatory’. And why not?

 

Discrimination is nothing to get excited about. Everyone has a right and a responsibility to discriminate the best course of action, even as to when to get out of bed in the morning.

 

In this case, the council sees its responsibility to protect ratepayers’ investment in their venues as outweighing the right of teenagers and young adults to cause damage to life, limb and property, and trouble for our overworked constabulary.

LOOSE CANNON FUELLED WITH NUCLEAR CANNONBALLS (Letter to Dom Post, April 10)

Any cursory glance at current headlines in The Dominion Post would seem to suggest it and the spectre of Trump, the ‘loose cannon’(Trump angry at speaker's snub, May 10) fuelled with nuclear cannonballs confirms it: in declaring 2016 a Year of Mercy, Pope Francis was right on the money. The world needs Divine Mercy now more than ever before.

 

Let us pray!

HELLBENT ON ASSISTED SUICIDE (Letter to Sunday Star-Times, May 5)

David Seymour and Jacinda Ardern (Time we got serious about assisted dying, April 1) are hellbent (I use that word advisedly) on what is actually assisted suicide. ‘Assisted dying’ is what happens in hospices, hospitals and rest homes. Nobody in New Zealand is ‘beyond the help of palliative care’.

 

In effect, Seymour and Ardern suggest normalising suicide, when youth suicide is already a huge concern. For the frail elderly and chronically ill whose maintenance is expensive, they want what would inevitably become not the right but the duty to die. They want doctors, whose purpose is to preserve life, to be able to end it.

 

In Holland, 97 dementia sufferers have now been killed by their doctors. The number of mentally ill patients killed in a year has trebled. Regulator Theo Boer, formerly an advocate for euthanasia, now says the Dutch were ‘terribly wrong’ to think they could control it.

'HOW MANY SHEEP WITHOUT, HOW MANY WOLVES WITHIN' (Letter published in 'NZ Catholic', May 1)

I can only conclude from Benedict XVI’s interview on faith and the Church (NZ Catholic, April 3) that he’s maintaining extra ecclesiam nulla salus without obviously contradicting his successor.

The blogosphere’s confused. Some say Benedict’s upholding the necessity of baptism and evangelisation, some say not. But Benedict wasn’t being obscurantist; he was addressing the Italian bishops’ newspaper, a highly-educated readership.

‘Outside the Church there is no salvation’ doesn’t mean people who don’t know the Church was established by Christ for our salvation can’t be saved. As Pius IX  stated, God’s clemency doesn’t permit those who aren’t guilty of deliberate sin to suffer eternal punishment. But those who know but refuse to enter (the Pharisees) or to remain in the Church (totally lapsed Catholics), won’t be saved.

Benedict’s question, ‘Why try to convince people to accept the Christian faith when they can be saved even without it?’ indirectly referenced Pope Francis’ jaw-dropping instruction not to convert others - which confutes St James’statement, ‘He who converts a sinner shall save his soul from death’ (Jas 5, 20).

With exquisite tact, Benedict says that mercy steers us towards God. And that mercy is best manifested by bringing people into the Church, to the sacraments which Jesus instituted specifically for salvation.

As St Augustine remarked, ‘How many sheep there are without, how many wolves within!’

'GRANDMERE' ADMONISHES THE DOMINION POST (Letter to Dom Post, published April 20)

As ‘Grandmere’ (yes, I know, how pretentious) to one of the hosts – he’s not yet 20 - of the ‘feral’ party in Knigges Ave, I suggest you refrain from plastering such aberrant behaviour over the front page.

It only encourages them.

A CLASSIC THEODORABLE TALE

 

Now, a classic Theodorable tale, told me by his mother today.

 

Theodore is my grandson. He's six. Driving somewhere with his mother the other day Theo suddenly said, ‘I can’t stop telling lies!’

 

But, disappointingly, he wouldn’t say what lies. Mother, being curious, urged him to confess. It was good for people, she said, to tell God they were sorry and then tell their mum or dad ('sharing' is not an expression with currency in this family).

 

There ensued a strained silence, of about five minutes. Then he 'fessed up.

 

He said, ‘I told this stupid girl that broke my jandals that I bought them on TradeMe for a thousand dollars’.

THE NETHERLANDS' NON-ELECTIVE EUTHANASIA (Letter to Dom Post, April 11)

 

The trouble with the Netherlands’ elective euthanasia so much admired by Pete Herridge (Letters, April 11), is that now it’s also non-elective. A report commissioned by the Dutch Government reveals that the Netherlands have moved from assisted suicide to euthanasing patients who ‘need’ it but are judged incompetent to decide that for themselves.

 

The Dutch call it ‘termination of the patient without explicit request’. Chillingly, the Remmelink report says of 130,000 deaths in the Netherlands, 1000 were admitted by doctors to have been caused or hastened without their patients’ request. Eighty per cent of physicians who gave treatment that might have hastened or caused death gave as their reason their patient’s impaired ability to communicate. Thirteen per cent of physicians failed to tell even competent patients that they were actually administering lethal treatment because, they said, the subject had been discussed previously.

 

And now more than half of Dutch physicians are happy to suggest euthanasia to their patients. In other words, forget palliative care (the Netherlands don’t do that any more) because your life’s not worth living.

ST FAUSTINA'S VISIONS OF THE AFTER-LIFE, ON YOUTUBE

I've just viewed on Youtube a video presenting St Faustina Kowalska's visions of the afterlife. It's shaken me.

St Faustina of course was a Polish nun who was canonised by Pope St John Paul II and whose visions of the Divine Mercy led to his instituting the Feast of Divine Mercy, celebrated on the first Sunday after Easter, which was attended in my parish this year by four people. With the circulation of this video I hope for more in the future.

The text of the video is extracted from her diaries, and from Scripture. It came to me this morning from a trusted source, Francis Yuen of the Divine Will.

The link to go to is https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=MYVRfGIW8M

ADDRESSING THE PERENNIAL PROBLEM OF HUMAN GREED

 

‘Early intervention,’ says Labour's Jacinda Ardern, ‘is where resourcing is most needed’ for the rebuild of Child Youth and F. amily (Vulnerable kids to stay in state's embrace longer, April 8). The early intervention that’s really needed is earlier than any mentioned in these ‘radical plans’.

 

Government needs to intervene to end the unequal distribution of wealth, which places so many families under stress. For those who feel unable to afford the child they discover is on the way, this may result in an abortion.

 

Whatever the reasons, such a decision is the ultimate in child abuse, and until we address the causes of abortion, including the real reason for poverty, born as well as unborn children will continue to die and our nation will continue to grieve.

 

But I suppose the high-powered panel leading the restructure would say that addressing the perennial problem of human greed and its consequences is outside their brief.

THE TRUTH ABOUT KILLING YOUR OWN CHILD, FROM THE RECOVERING SURVIVOR OF FOUR ABORTIONS

For the first time ever, I'm posting a pic on my blog. These flowers, (the dahlia 'Bishop of Llandaff', in my garden) are suggestive of the beauty and fragility of human life, ended so often before it even emerges into the light of day, by abortion.

 

I read the following first-hand, unedited account of tragedy and hope in 'Broken Branches', a newsletter from Anne Lastman of Melbourne, who works full-time and full-on counselling victims of abortion.

 

You never see these stories of trauma and tragedy in the mainstream media. Their head-in-the-sand stance, their avoidance of reality, is one of the reasons why newspapers and magazines are going down the tube.

 

 

'ABORTION AND SUICIDE - by Bec Clarke (not her real name).

 

I am a recovering post abortive mother. Not aI – Apr/May 2016

professional, but a living example. I have had four (4) abortions in my time and have experienced ubsequent severe mental health issues. I have been in locked ward facilities in psychiatric hospitals under the mental health Act. I have been labelled as being psychotic, manic, depressed, anxious, and delusional and many many more things.

Before my first abortion at age 18 and half I had suffered depression, but mildly. Within hours of waking up in that abortion clinic, anxiety had set in to the max. Within weeks I was so clinically depressed I wasn’t talking, eating, or sleeping hardly at all. Within six months I had attempted suicide three times in the space of three weeks and was hospitalised. I was put on one of the strongest anti‐psychotic medications ever made and underwent 7 treatments of ECT Electro Convulsive Therapy treatments. That friends, was only the very beginning of a very long journey.

It occurred to me many years later that I had crossed that line with my first abortion.. Once you are on the other side of that line it is so easy to be swayed into further abortions. “I am a murderer anyway” “killed one, why not this one” “I’m going to hell anyway” Progressing from there, I feel, in retrospect that killing myself was the ultimate solution to my constant pain. “I KILLED MY BABY THEREFORE I CHOOSE TO KILL MYSELF” “I will do God’s work for Him” “An eye for an eye.” But, attempting suicide puts you over yet another line you can’t return from. Once you have faced death so intimately your mind never lets you forget. Something trivial may happen and your immediate thought is “may as well kill myself.” So intricately linked are abortion, mental illness and suicide in my life that I was coerced into my second abortion as I tried killing myself while I was pregnant but didn’t know it. I had overdosed on pills and was told that the baby would be deformed. They also played themental health card “IT will be taken away OFF you at birth” So intimately linked in me are pregnancy and mental health that with each subsequent pregnancies (I have had five in total) I have become psychotic almost immediately. Twice I have been hospitalised for psychosis, only to find out that I was pregnant. With my youngest daughter I knew I was psychotic so I took a home pregnancy test and my gut instinct was correct.

I have attempted suicide over 10 times and I believe without the abortions in my story there would have been no attempts. Abortion is death. Suicide is death.

Perhaps if we stop allowing abortion the suicide rate would also go down.

Submitting to the death of my own flesh and blood sets me up for suicidal ideation and attempts. It set me up because I had already been complicit in a death. I considered myself a murderer. My life had no meaning or value (“I have killed my baby”) A violent act has taken place against my body‐why not another one (suicide). Once done that will alleviate all my heartache and constant misery.

I was so traumatised by my abortions that I, in total, tried killing myself 10 plus times. But it’s not just the attempts. It’s the suicidal thoughts, ideas, thinking.  The amount of times I have planned to kill myself,  written the suicides notes, agonised over the details and then presented at psych wards to be admitted.

I have dreamt of suicide. I have longed for suicide attempts to work. I have woken up in intensive care angry as hell that I had been saved. Then comes the shame. Which is all pervasive. “I am a piece of sh…t I can’t even kill myself!” “I’m even useless at this. I can’t even accomplish this...”

Having crossed that initial line (my first abortion)  having suffered severe pain and grief that I crossed yet another line, (first suicide attempt) I concluded that in my experience that my first experience of death lead to my next experience of death.

Abortion is strongly tied to my suicide ideation and attempts and sadly at times maybe even completed suicides. Looking back with a clearer perspective and having had much work with counselling and healing, I know that I was “longing for the release of death, yet yearning for the bounty of life”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

mental health card “IT will be taken away OFF you at

birth”.

So intimately linked in me are pregnancy and mental

health that with each subsequent pregnancies (I have

had five in total) I have become psychotic almost

immediately. Twice I have been hospitalised for

psychosis, only to find out that I was pregnant. With

my youngest daughter I knew I was psychotic so I

took a home pregnancy test and my gut instinct was

correct.

I have attempted suicide over 10 times and I believe

without the abortions in my story there would have

been no attempts. Abortion is death. Suicide is death.

Perhaps if we stop allowing abortion the suicide rate

would also go down.

Submitting to the death of my own flesh and blood

sets me up for suicidal ideation and attempts. It set

me up because I had already been complicit in a

death. I considered myself a murderer. My life had no

meaning or value (“I have killed my baby”) A violent

act has taken place against my body‐why not another

one (suicide). Once done that will alleviate all my

heartache and constant misery.

I was so traumatised by my abortions that I, in total,

tried killing myself 10 plus times. But it’s not just the

attempts. It’s the suicidal thoughts, ideas, thinking.

The amount of times I have planned to kill myself,

written the suicides notes, agonised over the details

and then presented at psych wards to be admitted.

I have dreamt of suicide. I have longed for suicide

attempts to work. I have woken up in intensive care

angry as hell that I had been saved. Then comes the

shame. Which is all pervasive.

“I am a piece of sh…t I can’t even kill myself!” “I’m

even useless at this. I can’t even accomplish this...”

Having crossed that initial line (my first abortion)

having suffered severe pain and grief that I crossed

yet another line, (first suicide attempt) I concluded

that in my experience that my first experience of

death lead to my next experience of death.

Abortion is strongly tied to my suicide ideation and

attempts and sadly at times maybe even completed

suicides. Looking back with a clearer perspective and

having had much work with counselling and healing, I

know that I was “longing for the release of death, yet

yearning for the bounty of life”.'

I