CHILDREN OF MARRIED PARENTS HAVE THE BEST OUTCOMES (letter to Dompost, June 27)

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It may not be politically correct, but it’s factually correct to say the children of married parents have the best outcomes in life.

It’s a question of commitment, but even more, for many couples it’s a commitment before God that they’ll support each other life-long and although some don’t, they’re all given the grace to do it.

‘The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world’, they used to say - but society has warped since then grotesquely, to the degree that most women would rather compete with men in an office or Parliament than shape their children’s future.

The singular value of mothers is shown in a new study revealing that the auditory cortex of the brains of babies who hear their mother’s heartbeat and their voice, singing and reading, is significantly larger than babies’ exposed to ‘routine noise’. From the fourth month of pregnancy babies hear and respond to their mother’s voice, their inseparable companion until birth and until 40 years or so ago, for the first years of life. 

A mother’s voice means the world to a baby. It’s father’s, not so much. Not nearly.

DHBs ARE AS SICK AS A DOG (letter to Dompost, June 27)

No, District Health Boards are not healthy (DHBs healthy? How will we tell? June 27). 

 

Anyone who can think straight can tell they’re as sick as a dog and have been since they started killing their patients, deliberately and legally, way back in 1977.

 

DHBs treat unborn babies, as a matter of course, as patients – but only for as long as their mothers want them. Not wanted, they’re somehow not human, so not patients any more.  How sick is that?

 

National Health Targets have been scrapped because they’re unachievable. And yes, removing the yardstick will “allow the Government to reset agendas according to expediency”. Nothing new in that: expediency has been the name of the game ever since people insisted they should be able to have sex without being held responsible for the consequences.

 

Shame about the 500,000 extra taxpayers – and their children, who’d be taxpayers by now too – who’d have made the targets so much more achievable. 

 

But they’ve gone to landfills, every one.

DOCTORS WHO REFUSE TO ASSIST SUICIDE (letter published in Dompost, June 29) p

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T.P. Newell asserts that the End of Life Choice Bill's coercion clause is undemocratic, (June 25), and warns of “violation of the right to freedom of conscience” of doctors who object to euthanasia.

In 2013, Labour MP Louisa Wall assured Parliament that her same-sex marriage bill would not force ministers to carry out marriages which didn’t “fit with the beliefs of the celebrant”.

Well, surprise, surprise! Wedding celebrants who refuse to officiate at gay marriages will now be sacked. The Celebrants Association has told them they’ll lose their registration. In the last 2 years or so, almost 50 new marriage celebrant applications have been rejected because they don’t want to officiate at same-sex weddings.

It’s not like Louisa Wall was telling the usual political fibs. Celebrants aren’t being forced to carry out such marriages; they’re just not allowed to be celebrants any more.

So if the End of Life Choice Bill is passed, it follows that doctors who refuse to assist suicide won't be allowed to be doctors any more.

They'll simply be refused registration as medical practitioners.

Think euthanasia. 

THROWING THE TOASTER IN THE BATH (letter to Dom Post, June 23)

We shouldn't have to live with constant peril, says Verity Johnson (June 22). As her name suggests, she’s speaking the truth. It’s appalling that women, my daughter among them, can’t walk through Welly at night alone in safety.

 

But another truth, known and accepted by all, is that violence begets violence. Abortion is violence. Women pressured into abortion resort to the ultimate violence, against their own children.

 

Tragedies like the murder and rape of comedian Eurydice Dixon, and the sexual abuse women object to so strenuously - not to mention our aging population - are all products of the Pandora's box of legalized abortion.

 

Come on people, face the truth. Let’s put love before money, before careers, before financial hardship. That’s advice we all know in our hearts. It’s much more basic than knowing  “not to throw a toaster in the bath”.

 

And because it’s “practical advice”, we need to take it, on the chin.  

If we do, in time the streets will be safe again.

 

IF ONLY WE COULD HEAR THEIR CRYING (letter to Dom Post, June 22)

It's wonderful how virtuous we can be about children crying for their parents (Peters quiet as kids cry, June 21) in the US. The sound of a baby crying makes us want to do something to stop it. We want to meet its needs for food but even more, for love.

 

Winston Peters is “concerned”.  Simon Bridges says the children’s treatment is “inhumane”, and it is. These children are being treated as less than human.

 

It would be wonderful if we could be as virtuous about the babies we don't hear crying, here in New Zealand. 500,000 unborn babies, who as Pope Francis points out, are human too. 

If only we could hear their crying.

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALES CAN BE GREEDY (letter to Dom Post, June 20)

“Our nurses poured cold water on their latest pay offer” (June 19), and “Mother Nature” is set to do the same to Wellington.

Considering the calamities “Mother Nature” dishes out constantly, a package of $500 million for nurses seems above and beyond.

We like to picture nurses as Florence Nightingales which individually they are, on the whole. And naturally they advocate for their patients. But even Florence Nightingales can be greedy. 

They should think of the needy. Beyond the ward doors are unemployed people, hungry people, homeless people, mentally sick people, imprisoned people, abused people – even farming people forced to slaughter their stock. None of them can wield the threat of strike action to get what they want.

We credit “Mother Nature” as being in charge of the weather. But in charge of everything and credited by most of us with nothing, is Father God.

GROWING UP WITH STEP-PARENTS (letter to Dom Post, June 16)

“What drives people using P?” asks Harry Tam, who works with hard-to-reach Maori (Plan to cash in on our gangs, June 15), and says, "it's poverty”.

 

Isn’t it time we asked what drives poverty? Material poverty is worst in single parent families - 28% of all families with dependent children. And then there’s emotional poverty, shown by more than 90% of our ballooning prison population having a lifetime diagnosis of a substance use or mental disorder.

 

Growing up with a step-parent (or serial step-parents) is the biggest predicator for future imprisonment. Because solo parents have such a horrible row to hoe we tip-toe around them, blaming housing costs, low wages, unemployment and insufficient benefits – anything but their solo state. 

But to reduce physical and emotional poverty, we need government policies supporting the best insurance for our children’s future. More than anything else children need two parents, committed to them and to each other in marriage.  

 

It seems that for children, going without a father equates with going without their daily bread.

NEVER SO CLOSE TO JESUS

We are never so close to Jesus, so penetrated by him, transformed, deified, and plunged into the divinity as at the moment of sacramental Communion: “with him, all that we are is in God” (St Hilary).

                                                                    - Fr Gabriel of St Mary Magdalen, Divine Intimacy

THEY GOT ON LIKE A HOUSE ON FIRE (Letter to Dom Post, June 13)

The historic summit took place; Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump got on like a house on fire, and the New Zealand media are on the back foot. 

After months of dishing out insults against Trump, they simply don’t know what to say.

I can only assume that Tom Scott, for instance, is struck dumb. It seems he rootled around in his files for the least offensive Trump cartoon he could find, and stuck it out there. 

It’s still offensive - and irrelevant - but it saved him thinking too much.

PUTTING HUMANS TO SLEEP (Letter to Sunday-Star Times, June 11)

Two lions at Auckland zoo are “put to sleep” and Alison Mau thinks that might be nice for humans too. Because, she says, zoo staff chose “their time of death with such care and dignity”.

 

Unfortunately human nature, as opposed to animal, is not always so caring. Animals never kill their own species except in self defence, but humans do it all the time for all sorts of reasons. Like greed, for instance, or laziness.

 

Humans are “a superior species” because unlike animals we have a soul, a conscience. Not just an individual conscience that makes choices for oneself, but a collective conscience which must care for the vulnerable disabled and elderly, putting their need for dying with care and dignity ahead of our own fear of suffering.

A PROTESTANT ASKS WHY

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A Protestant who knows Catholics pray for people in Purgatory is confused by this post, and no wonder. Clarification is called for!

If we believe what Father usually says or implies at Requiem Masses, that the dear departed is already in heaven, there's no point praying for them. That presumptuous attitude, that they've gone straight to heaven, means the prayers said at the Mass for their soul are a waste of time. They don't need our prayer any more.

And if the dear departed is in hell, likewise. There's no getting out of hell and praying for people there is a waste of time too. 

BUT no matter how many or awful the sins they committed, how many Masses they missed, they might have sincerely repented before death and asked forgiveness. 

So they're in Purgatory and certainly need our prayers. It's not a nice place to be, except for the fact which consoles them, that they are bound for Heaven. 

But not till they've made atonement for their offences against Almighty God, and that's where our prayer comes in. We can help expiate their sins.

Let's pray! 


Today, on the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, in my little country church the only ones at Mass were school children and their teacher. I don't suppose Mass attendance was much better elsewhere. I'm prompted to state the obvious, at least to me, about the terrible hurt and offence this causes the Heart of Jesus.


The Catholic Church, in New Zealand at least, has been weakened enormously I believe in two ways.

First, the Second Commandment is put before the First. Enshrined in the Mass text used in our little school, the children pray, we find He came to show us how we can love you, Father, by loving one another. 

Absolutely NOT. According to the First Commandment, we love the Father first by our prayer, especially in the Mass. How can we, frail and weakened by original sin as well as actual, and trying to swim against the tide of our selfish, individualistic society, possibly love one another as Christ loves us?

Only with the help of Christ Himself, in the supreme prayer of the Eucharist, are we empowered to love one another.

The endemic failure to teach and preach this truth in NZ is partly why Mass attendance has dropped so drastically, taking with it the number of men in our seminaries.

The other debilitating factor, closely associated with the first and rampant in the Church, is the presumptuous idea that we're all going to heaven. We fall for this one chiefly through ignorance fostered by non-attendance at Mass, except for Requiem Masses celebrated by aging and very aged priests who take it for granted that the dear departed is already enjoying eternal bliss, in spite of the priest and the congregation all knowing for instance, that they hardly ever or never attended Mass.

That means the deceased was, spiritually speaking, already dead. Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you (Jn 6,53).

Yes, as many of his disciples (and more recently Protestants) said, This teaching is difficult; who can accept it? (Jn 6,60). 

CATHOLICS accept it! If they don't they're not Catholics. They are the disciples (or Protestants) who went back and walked no more with him (Jn 6,66).

The awful truth, taught by all the saints - that most people go to hell - appears for many years now to have been seen by Catholic clergy in New Zealand to be 'difficult', and to use the ultimate politically correct put-down, 'unacceptable'.  

Either way, at Requiems, whether our beloved dead is in heaven as Father implies or often states, or in hell as the saints teach is usually the case, it's a waste of time praying for them. Telling children to pray that Grandma will have a wonderful time in heaven is nonsense. The time to pray for them is  before they die - and that's by far the best done at Mass.

And don't try to tell me, as one good Catholic has, that the Sacred Heart of Jesus is not affected by any of this, because 'God doesn't have feelings'. 

Jesus wept (John 11,35). Think about it.  

MAKING NO APOLOGY

I make no apology for sharing the 'holy thoughts' I send my kids every night by email (along with a lot of other information they'd probably do better without, gossip and stuff). It seems to me that many people - not necessarily Catholics - hunger for more knowledge of Church doctrine and Tradition.  


The offering of gifts (in the Mass) ... are precious moments of recollection, readying ourselves for sharing most intimately in the sacred act in which we are all called to exercise our holy priesthood, accompanying the bread and wine with our own lives, works, prayers, sufferings, weariness, sacrifices and resolutions, so that Christ may take them into his own offering to the Father.
                                                                             
                                                                       -Fr Gabriel of S Mary Magdalen, Divine Intimacy

THE WHOLE MYSTERY OF CHRIST

A thought for today from Fr Gabriel of St Mary Magdalen in his classic work 'Divine Intimacy':


The Liturgy (of the Catholic Church) ... embraces, expresses, and prolongs the whole mystery of Christ the Redeemer in its fundamental aspects of glorification of the Father and of the salvation of men.

CHOW BROS COULD GET INTO GYMS (Letter to Dom Post June 6)

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A women’s gym (Make room for trans people, June 5) earns the ultimate in politically correct condemnation: it’s unacceptable. 

Revive, hang your head in shame. Fancy refusing entry to someone who obviously looked like a guy. Fancy asking the incriminating question, have you had The Operation? 

Someone looking like a guy poses a potential threat for girls and women suffering from sex abuse who seek the protection of a women’s-only gym. So that protection is absolutely the gym’s business.

Having amended his sex, Felix Desmarais complains about having to amend documents. How precious. He was asking for it. Trans people don’t need birth certificates to prove their ‘humanity’; they may need them when required by common sense to prove their sex.  

Yes, Felix and friends should go to gyms “that align with our gender”. Brothel owners John and Michael Chow are now ‘on a mission’ to become respectable, providing high-quality housing in Auckland. With their acumen in making money out of misery, couldn't the Chow brothers get into providing high-quality trans gyms?

Then we could look forward to next year’s gongs. Sir John and Sir Michael. 

Surely brothel owners deserve honours just as much as brothel workers.

SEX SLAVES, MORE LIKE (Letter to Dom Post, June 4).

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The leftist ideologues may be breaking out the Bolly, but I doubt many Maori are celebrating lesbians and prostitutes as “taonga” (Recognising our taonga, June 4).

 

Maori are too much in touch with reality. They quite likely know it’s pimps and brothelkeepers who’ve prospered under decriminalisation, not ‘sex workers’. Sex slaves, more like. 

A government report after decriminalisation shows they experience two to three times the violence other workers do. 35% experience sexual molestation and serious violence including rape, which is under-reported by more than 20%. Catherine Healy’s prostitution reform has utterly failed to “safeguard occupational safety” for these women. For their protection, pimping and brothelkeeping should be criminalised.

 

As for the Topp Twins, yes, they’re funny but HIV isn’t, ever. Lesbians get HIV and more New Zealanders were diagnosed with HIV in 2016 than ever before. Lesbians also get sexually transmitted diseases. They’re not funny either.

 

Dames Lynda, Jools and Catherine promote lifestyles which not long ago were beyond the pale, for practical reasons as well as moral. 

The irony is that the ladies of the liberal left are drinking to dames who’ve certainly not “helped make our society healthier”; they’ve helped pervert it.

THE BLESSED SACRAMENT

Every time we look at the Blessed Sacrament our place in heaven is raised for ever 
                                                                                                                      - St Gertrude the Great

A holy hour in front of the Blessed Sacrament is worth more than a thousand years of human glory 
                                                                                                                        - St Padre Pio

Spend as much time as possible in front of the Blessed Sacrament and He will fill you with his strength and his power -
                                                                                                                          - Mother Teresa 

ADOPTION THE BEST OPTION (Letter to Dom Post, June 2

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For brevity’s sake I’ll take issue with only one example of Rosemary McLeod’s hysterical hyperbole (Bad look for a good cause, June 1), prompted by Germaine Greer deserting the cause.

Giving children up for adoption does not cause “lifelong pain all round”. And McLeod herself may be causing pain to women who heroically sacrificed their child to people unable to have children of their own.

I know one whose mother - who was anything but “casually callous” - organised an adoption. My friend’s child is now not only a beautiful daughter to her adoptive parents, but after contacting her birth mother to invite her to her wedding has since doubled the size and happiness of the whole whanau.

Germaine Greer is far too intelligent to wallow in recrimination and resentment over real or imagined abuse. Instead, she’s a passionate gardener.

Perhaps McLeod could follow suit.