'PRO-CHOICE' IS A SHAM (Letter published in Dom Post, March 31)

Margaret Sparrow  (Letters, March 31), blows her whole ‘pro-choice’ argument out of the water in one half-sentence. She says, “...the rates of mental health problems for women with an unwanted pregnancy were the same whether they had an abortion or gave birth.”

In other words, women’s mental health is not improved by having an abortion. But hang on. 98% of abortions in New Zealand are performed on the grounds that the woman’s mental health will be adversely affected by giving birth.

The whole ‘pro-choice’ argument (for starters, why is having an abortion more of a choice than having a baby?) is a sham, and as an intelligent woman and medical professional Sparrow knows it.

  

ABORTION IS A HEALTH ISSUE, NOT A CRIME (Letter to Dom Post, March 29)

I agree with Terry Bellamak (March 29): Abortion is a health issue, not a crime. That’s because apart from botched ops resulting in infertility, abortion creates mental health problems for women and concomitant health issues for surviving children suffering from the mother’s alcohol and/or drug abuse and suicidal behaviours.

So yes, the grounds are ridiculous. And getting an abortion is not just time-consuming, it’s time-wasting.

I agree that abortion is not a crime for the mother, only for certifying consultants who break the law. Which means because the mother’s mental health is ill served by abortion, morally all certifying consultants are criminals. 

I agree that abortion wastes money. Let’s consider not only the $4m those consultants cost the taxpayer. Let’s think about economic activity lost through abortion. One US study shows more than $6000 of economic activity is generated in the first year of a baby’s life. Which means 100,000 abortions annually (in 2013 there were nearly 700,000) would cost the US economy $6 billion annually and over their lifetimes, $9 trillion.

So in the end I have to disagree with Terry Bellamak. ‘Abortion care’ is an oxymoron. ‘Abortion care’ is not ‘health care’; it’s illhealth and it’s uncaring.

AND JESUS WEEPS AGAIN (Letter to NZ Catholic, March 27)

Just as Jesus was not foretelling 'the demise' of Jerusalem’ (NZ Catholic March 26) but its destruction, a ‘functioning Church’ is based on fear of God, not presumption. ‘Happy the man who fears the Lord, who takes delight in all his commands’ (Ps 111), which Jesus came to fulfill.

Catholics are terrified of death only when they haven’t experienced God’s love as his blessing on repentance, forgiveness, prayer and doing his will. Our ‘quest for identity’ is designed to end in identifying completely with God in this life; hindered by original sin, that quest's ‘hallmarks’ like selfishness, quarrelling and disobedience are naturally sinful, even in children. At Fatima Our Lady revealed hell to three little shepherds - should our priests be less realistic than she?’ 

It’s not Church doctrine or Christ’s word which have changed – ‘patterns of society’ have become perverted. Church teaching must not follow suit. 

‘Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps’ (1 Pet 2, 21). 

John Perriam and others in his demographic, and the NZ Church, were not well served by seminary training which denied the reality of sin, death and suffering, and we are not well served by NZ Catholic propagating that denial.

The way of Christ is the way of the Cross.

ACCESS TO ABORTION (Letter to Dom Post, March 25)

Just how Peggy Klimenko and Dave Armstrong (Letters, March 24) can equate vasectomy and abortion, I don’t know. A vasectomy destroys the potential for life; an abortion destroys the reality.

 

The “silliness and hypocrisy of the hoops through which women wanting an abortion must jump” subsists in the fact that almost all abortions are allowed because of danger to mental health - but it’s precisely mental health which is adversely affected by abortion.

Opposition to abortion is is grounded not on “a religious perspective”, but on research like that published in the Australian Journal of Psychiatry which shows abortion is associated with increased risk of anxiety, alcohol and drug abuse and suicidal behaviours.

 

Common sense dictates also that abortion denies the basic human right to life, and not only is abortion a terrible risk to women’s health, it also has a terrible effect on the economy. An American study says abortion has cost the US economy $15 trillion – the size of the national debt.

 

So abortion is not, as Klimenko claims, a woman’s “business alone”. It has to be everybody’s business to try to avoid it.

 

GIVE US THIS DAY OUR SUPERSUBSTANTIAL BREAD

Prompted by a friend with whom I once briefly shared a jail cell, a few years ago I bought a paperback Douay-Rheims Bible. Sometimes I take it to monthly meetings with Protestant friends to choose Scripture for the local rag. They listen politely but we’ve never used the Douay version for publication in the paper: ‘Good News’ is the bible which would seem to resonate best with Central Hawke’s Bay readers.

However, I’m aware of the Douay’s faithfulness to the Vulgate translation by St Jerome and was pleasantly surprised recently to read it was confirmed by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church at the Council of Trent as “authentic” and that “no one should dare or presume under any pretext to reject it”.

But I was more than surprised – I was staggered – to stumble across the Douay version of the Our Father, according to St Matthew. In chapter 6, 11 Jesus instructs us to pray Give us this day our supersubstantial bread.

I immediately thought, that means the Eucharist, and in the notes at the bottom of the page I read, In St Luke the same word is rendered daily bread. It is understood of the bread of life, which we receive in the Blessed Sacrament.

Now, the notes in the Douay are, like the text, sanctioned by the Magisterium as authentic.

What would have been the result if for the nearly 1600 years that the Douay was the only Bible used by the Church, those millions - or billions - of Catholics had all asked in that prayer which is the most commonly prayed, give us this day our supersubstantial bread? What effect would that have had on the numbers of churches built, Masses celebrated and priests ordained? What if we were still praying it now? Just asking …

From now on, in praying the Rosary St Matthew’s version of the Our Father will be mine. And the Douay bible, with its authenticity guaranteed, its subtleties, nuances and depth of meaning will be mine also, in daily use as a companion to the modern texts which are oh, so different from the Douay - and from one another.

And why were we sharing a jail cell, my friend and I? We’d been arrested for praying outside the abortion clinic at Wellington Hospital. That friend, who spent months in Arohata as a result of her heroic witness, still imports the Douay-Rheims Bible and sells it on request.

'PROPHECY', NOT 'VISION'. THERE'S A DIFFERENCE

‘Where there is no vision the people perish’, says Bishop Charles Drennan of Palmerston North, in a piece published by Cathnews.co.nz.

+Charles is quoting Proverbs 29, 18. In the Douay Rheims Bible, translated word for word from the Vulgate which in turn was translated by that towering genius  St Jerome from the original Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek, and was the only bible used in the Catholic Church for over 1500 years, this verse is rendered as ‘When prophecy shall fail, the people shall be scattered abroad’.

Prophecy, not ‘vision’. What a difference in meaning.

+Charles is quoting ‘vision’ in relation to Donald J Trump in the US, Duterte in the Philippines, and John Key in NZ. I’m sorry but not surprised to see +Charles subscribe to the popular view of Donald Trump as “a maverick” and “Facebook on steroids”. His election, he says, left “almost everyone … disturbed and perplexed.”

Not me. Donald Trump’s election filled me with joy and thanksgiving. His behaviour might not have been and still isn’t what it should be (whose is?), but he defeated Hillary Clinton, whose achievements and ambitions were thoroughly evil.

That aspect of the US election campaign seemed to escape the Catholic Church in NZ. I was told by a priest, after I interceded in the POF at a weekday Mass in regard to the American elections, not to expect him to pray for Trump. Apparently I’d implied I was interceding on behalf of Donald Trump.

Not so. I was asking for God’s will to be done. God being Goodness itself could not have wanted a win for Hillary Clinton, who proudly and totally supported Planned Parenthood, for goodness’ sake, for devoting 97% of their business to exterminating unborn children, and profiting by the sale of those children’s body parts, while taking $500m annually from the American taxpayer - as we ourselves are forced as taxpayers to fund abortions here in New Zealand.

Trump is resolutely opposed to abortion. He pledged to appoint a judge to the Supreme Court who would overturn the infamous Roe v Wade ruling, which opened the Pandora’s box of legal abortion for the US and then for NZ, and that was his first executive action as president. We should remember, in regard to Trump and his past, and his silly utterances  in the present, that every saint made mistakes – think St Peter – which they bitterly regretted and repented, and were converted.

This is where ‘prophecy’ comes in. We know that ‘prophecy’ doesn’t mean just foretelling the future. It also means the interpretation and expounding by a preacher of Scripture or of divine mysteries (Shorter Oxford).

+Charles has the wisdom to see that politics and religion cannot be unmixed, and asks us as Catholics for a vision for our nation.  Well my personal vision, for every child in the womb to be welcomed and loved, is blurred by the fact that while in the past NZ’s pro-life organisations were largely run by Catholics, in my neck of the woods at least Catholics have been replaced by Protestants, who freely quote Scripture to support their stand and who pray outside abortion clinics.

The only reason as far as I can see, for Catholics’ falling support for the right to life, is lack of leadership in the Church. We need to hear truth prophesied - the sacred nature of human life from conception till natural death - as proclaimed by God in Scripture, Tradition and the Magisterium. And if you’re going, “What?” at mention of the Magisterium, that’s proof in itself that Catholics are no longer taught the doctrine which for centuries was unchanged and is unchangeable.

And it’s not just preaching that we need. We need encouragement to pray for the United States and for Donald Trump, for his repentance, healing and conversion.

We need to have prayer taught and modelled, most of all in fervent and frequent participation in the Mass. Protestants are shown by their pastors how to pray and fast, and they take to it like a duck to water. In the Catholic Church however, fasting has been whittled away to next to nothing, and most Catholics know next to nothing about the prayer practised and taught by the saints down through the ages, in a tradition older even than the Douay-Rheims bible. It’s called mental prayer, and we all need to learn it.

Because as internationally renowned psychiatrist Dr Philip Ney stated in NZ recently, people need to realise there is a discrepancy between what they believe and what they live. “It’s time for pro-life people who say they are pro-life” (i.e. Catholics) “to live it and stop giving themselves all sorts of excuses.”

To know oneself like that and get up and doing, one needs to know Christ and the only way to Christ is prayer.

Listen to St John of the Cross, Doctor of the Church: “Those who are great actives, that think to girdle the world with their outward works and their preachings, take note here that they would bring far more profit to the Church, and be far more pleasing to God (apart from the good example they would give) if they spent even half of this time with God in prayer.”

JUMPING THROUGH ABORTION HOOPS (letter to Dom Post, March 20)

I agree with Dave Armstrong (March 20) that Jumping through abortion hoops is sheer hypocrisy. The hypocrisy lies in the fiction maintained by the Abortion Supervisory Committee in allowing almost all abortions on the grounds of mental health.

A meta-analysis published in 2011 in the British Journal of Psychiatry revealed that 81% of women who had an abortion increased their risk for depression, alcohol abuse and suicidal behaviours, and 10% of all mental health problems are directly attributable to abortion. What’s really “spurious” about granting abortions on the grounds of mental health is that abortion is in fact an inducement to mental illness.

Armstrong fishes up the red herring of religion, saying that in 1977 “the pro-life faction included many religious figures”. The Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child was led by Professor Sir William Liley, known internationally as “the father of fetology” whose expertise could never be matched by Armstrong’s “health professionals”.

Liley was an agnostic whose opposition to abortion was based on science. Tragically - and in view of our government’s legalisation of abortion, unsurprisingly - in 1983 when Sir William took his own life, New Zealand and the world lost a giant of scientific endeavour.

FR MURPHY ENCOURAGES SILENCE AT MASS (letter to NZ Catholic, March 16)

As a ‘royal priesthood’, many lay people will applaud Fr Peter Murphy for encouraging the ordained priesthood to ensure silence after Communion (NZ Catholic, Feb 25) in preparation for contemplative prayer. Although “somewhat lost” in the western Church at large, contemplation is still practised as the chief charism of Carmelite friars, nuns and lay people.

 

If Fr Murphy experiences “the love of God” by a word “leading one into stillness”, it must be due to his priestly labours and years of meditation on the life and death of Jesus Christ. If he’s “teaching contemplative prayer to children”, it can only be by firstly teaching them to sit in silence, focussing not merely on a word, but on Jesus himself.

Contemplative prayer is a grace from God, who I suppose may grant it sooner to innocent children than to adults, but normally it takes time and good works - and as in every state and stage of prayer, the company of Christ.

 

The Carmelite reformer, that spiritual genius Teresa of Avila, insists on this method. To expect the grace of contemplation by sitting and waiting in silence is, she says, a subtle form of pride.

There are no short cuts; we have to put in the hard yards, always with Jesus as our companion, until God raises us to supernatural heights.

EVERYONE NEEDS TO BE TEACHING CONSENT (letter to Dom Post, March 16)

Taken as read, Everyone needs to be teaching consent (March 15), literally means everyone should be teaching girls and women to consent to sex.

What it really means I suppose, is teaching requirement for consent - and that consent, once acquired, needs to be informed.

Teens need to know the risks of STDs and abortion, and their consent to abortion needs to be fully informed. They need to know, for instance, that 10 per cent of all mental health problems are directly attributable to abortion.

But how absurd it is to preach ‘consent’ on sex to kids, while practising denial of their unborn siblings’ consent to death? Or “the rights of women” when women deny the rights of their unborn children - and so do men, who MP Kelvin Davis says “need to speak out and stamp out this sort of talk” of rape.

Before men speak out they need to think. About how women’s and girls’ rights are human rights. And that unborn children are human. Ergo, justice demands they have the same human rights, including the right to consent - and if the unborn could speak out, would they consent to death?

ECONOMIST'S HOPES FOR WOMEN DISAPPOINTED (letter to Dom Post, March 10)

Buried in the business pages (Economist’s hopes for women disappointed, March 8) is the understatement of the year. I refer to economist Pru Hyman’s claim that “bringing up the next generation is also important’’.

“Bringing up the next generation” is not merely ‘also important’; stay-at-home mothers are the most important, most valuable members of our society. It’s grossly ironic that, as Hyman points out, because they are unpaid and their toil isn’t recognised by the Government in gross domestic product (GDP) calculations, the Government calls them ‘dependants’.

It’s actually the Government which is ‘dependant’ on these women and the unpaid work they do, not just in ‘household work’ but  in forming healthy minds, hearts and bodies in their children, equipping them to support the burden of our aging population.

Children, born and unborn, are our most precious resource.When a society is so warped as to consider producing ‘gross domestic product’ more important than producing future citizens, surely we should pay them to fulfill their basic role, one which like practically any other job women do better than men, simply because they are designed to produce not ‘product’ but people.

NO NEED TO ASK (Letter to Dom Post, March 7)

Jem Traylen is correct: the Human Rights Act (Letters, March 6) does give transwomen permission to use the women’s toilet. But it seems to escape her notice that the Act gives all women that permission, and on exactly the same grounds. All women “have the right to access a toilet (they) feel safe in”.

 

Many of those women for whom feeling safe in the loo could be called a birthright - especially if they have daughters - would feel threatened by the presence of transwomen, and many will feel angry. Because they know some men will pretend to be trans so they can use 'the ladies' '. 

 

So unless schools, universities, employers and restaurants are forced into the expense of providing three toilets – male, female and trans - it seems we face an impasse.

GIVING UP HER LIFE FOR HER SON (Letter to Dom Post, March 4)

Not only will Rhianna Truman’s son be proud of her; the whole of Central Hawke’s Bay is proud of her.

In laying down her life for her baby she shines a light of love and life in our broken world. She shows us how to put the needs of others before our own.

 

Pro-life people and organisations like mine (Voice for Life CHB) will be there for this inspirational young woman, and not just with prayer and practical support.

We must put our money where our mouth is.