Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

My brother-in-law shared this independent short-film with me on Thanksgiving and I thought I would pass it along.  It is called “Volition.”  Here is a short synopsis:

Volition (n)- The act of making a choice. Sometimes the choice of inaction has consequences stronger than we could ever imagine. Throughout history, men have been faced with difficult choices in a world that makes it easy for them to conform. This film explores the hope that lies behind every decision made in the face of adversity; the hope that is buried in the heart of those that look beyond themselves and see something bigger worth fighting for.

Lord grant me the courage that I may never sit idle when great evil occurs all around me and I have the ability to do something about it.

Sharing some of our pics and videos from the last couple Saturdays @ the local Planned Parenthood @ 104 Babcock rd. in San Antonio, TX.

J.P. Moreland, a philosopher and Christian apologist, has written a new book with an intriguing title. Here’s a description of it:

In Consciousness and the Existence of God, J.P. Moreland argues that the existence of finite, irreducible consciousness (or its regular, law-like correlation with physical states) provides evidence for the existence of God. Moreover, he analyzes and criticizes the top representative of rival approaches to explaining the origin of consciousness, including John Searle’s contingent correlation, Timothy O’Connor’s emergent necessitation, Colin McGinn’s mysterian ‘‘naturalism,’’ David Skrbina’s panpsychism and Philip Clayton’s pluralistic emergentist monism. Moreland concludes that these approaches should be rejected in favor of what he calls ‘‘the Argument from Consciousness.’’

I am very interested in this topic, but do not have access to the book. Amazon is selling it at an exceedingly steep cost. Has anyone out there read it?  I’d like to hear about it, if so. Or, if you know anything about Moreland, please chime in.

One of my personal heroes in the present-day leadership of the Church is Cardinal Biffi, the former Archbishop of Bologna. Cardinal Biffi is a very outspoken and theologically direct pastor of the Church. I often wish that a man like Biffi would have been elected pope at some point in the past 50 years. He is a man who is not prone to the realpolitik of modern Vatican-think, which often afflicts popes and lower-order curial officials alike. And he is a man who craves and recognizes responsible governance in the Church.

Biffi has often taught about the character of the Anti-Christ, a theme most pertinent to our present day. He is perhaps most famous for having done so in a well-publicized lecture on Vladimir Soloviev’s “The Three Dialogues and the Story of the Antichrist.”  Here is how he describes the Anti-Christ of Soloviev’s remarkable parable:

The Antichrist will be a convinced spiritualist, Soloviev says, an admirable philanthropist, a committed, active pacifist, a practicing vegetarian, a determined defender of animal rights. He will not be hostile in principle to Christ. Indeed, he will appreciate Christ’s teaching. But he will reject the teaching that Christ is unique, and will deny that Christ is risen and alive today.

One sees here described a Christianity of “values,” of “openings,” of “dialogue,” a Christianity where it seems there is little room left for the person of the Son of God crucified for us and risen, little room for the actual event of salvation. A scenario, I think, that should cause us to reflect…

A scenario in which the faith militant is reduced to humanitarian and generically cultural action, the Gospel message is located in an irenic encounter with all philosophies and all religions and the Church of God is transformed into an organization for social work. Are we sure Soloviev did not foresee what has actually come to pass? Are we sure it is not precisely this that is the most perilous threat today facing the holy nation redeemed by the blood of Christ - the Church? It is a disturbing question and one we must not avoid.

One might add that the Anti-Christ could very well also speak of himself as a “unifier” or as an “agent of change,” who promises to use the charity of law to protect homosexuals from “discrimination” or parents from the “burden” of having to care for their children when times get tough economically. Or who promises to lift the burden of life from the elderly and the terminally ill through “mercy” killing.

The Anti-Christ, in other words, is a figure of false compassion. He appeals to Christians who are weak in faith because he is able to proof-text scripture, or because he publically proclaims himself sympathetic to Christian faith. He might even refer to himself as a Christian.

Cardinal Biffi has recently released a book of great interest. Sandro Magister reports on it at his Chiesa weblog. Though Magister does not talk about whether or not Biffi touches on the theme of the Anti-Christ in this book, there is much of interest that Magister does suggest is present in it.

Biffi is apparently as straightforward as ever, though he is now retired and living in the hills of Bologna. Biffi says in the book, according to Magister, that we live in an age where orthodoxy, rather than heresy, is newsworthy and considered shocking. Believers who take seriously Christian chastity, or who recognize Christ as both God and man, are outside of respectable public opinion — and this is as true inside of the Church as outside of it!

Magister says that Biffi does not embrace the fashionable theologies of the day. He preaches the Gospel. One quotation in this brief article by Magister caught my attention. Biffi says that given the widespread acceptance of heresy inside the Church today, the Council of Nicaea may be more pertinent to our age than the Second Vatican Council!

How insightful this is, and how refreshing to hear it said by a prince of the Church! For those who may not know, the Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.) was the first ecumenical council of the Church. The Church affirmed in this council the ancient tradition of Christ’s divinity against “Arians” (followers of a bishop named “Arius”) who denied it.

We may, indeed, as a Church, need to turn again to this ancient council: and to the other Christological, Trinitarian, doctrinal councils of the early Church. We have, as Biffi suggests, lost our way. I would add that the archaizing tendency of many twentieth century Catholic theologians, including some of the heroes of John Paul II and Benedict XVI (Balthasar, Congar, de Lubac, etc.), following in the train of Protestant thought, has left us unsure of our heritage as Christians. The theological archaizers have, quite unintentionally, revived the doctrinal uncertainty of the early Church.

The Body of Christ today, in many minds, seems to be as malleable as it is presumed to have been, perhaps falsely, in the first four centuries. The old, bedrock certainties of modern scholastic theology, which in fact continued the patristic tradition quite faithfully, were cast aside by the post-war, conciliar theologians and popes, and we have been left trying to rebuild the edifice of the Church.

The texts of the Second Vatican Council provide little help in this regard. They do not speak directly and strongly enough to a Church that has become comfortable and accepting of heresy. They oftentimes seem to betray a misreading of modern culture. The task in our day is less one of showing how Vatican II exists in a spirit of continuity with earlier councils than of turning to the earlier councils themselves. We need to be reminded, as a Church, of how the heroes of the faith upheld the truth of Christ in the days of the first councils: at much personal cost and in the face of ostracism, banishment, and even imprisonment and death from within the precincts of the Church itself.

Biffi’s voice, as a strong, clear, and critical assessor of post-conciliar trends, is a powerful voice for our age.

One of the ways that Barack Obama sold himself during his campaign for president was as a unifier of a divided nation. Together with his mantra of “change,” this sounded quite hopeful and pleasing to a populace unsettled by times of increasing national hardship.

Of course, no one knew what it was that he meant by “change,” and much has been made of this fact by astute analysts. But what has not been much commented on is what Obama could possibly have meant by speaking of himself as a unifier.

Well, Richard Neuhaus, in his most recent post at the First Things blog, has brought out precisely what Obama meant by speaking of himself in such terms, particularly on the issue of abortion:

The truly ominous possibility, indeed likelihood, is that Obama does not see his extreme positions on abortion as being extreme at all. They are the entrenched orthodoxies of the parties that got him to where he is. Those in opposition are viewed as a recalcitrant minority guilty of perpetuating divisiveness, and the time has come to break their back once and for all. I hope I am wrong, but this strikes me as the more plausible understanding of the Freedom of Choice Act and other measures aimed at “bringing us together again.”

In other words, when it comes to abortion, the way that Obama proposes to end divisiveness in our land is by destorying the political and religious freedom of those who oppose him.

Of course, it is not only on the issue of abortion that our new “healer”/president promises to end divisiveness in our land. It is on the whole range of issues that pertain to the family and the Church, inasmuch as these stand in the way of hegemonic authority of the State over the individual.

Obama, the Great Unifier, has made known recently on his website his plans for advancing the “gay agenda.” Catholic News Agency reports that his website is reporting that he will, as has been predicted here on our blog, expand hate speech legislation. Furthermore,  he will force increasing “anti-discrimination” laws upon employers. He will fully oppose all marriage amendment legislation that proposes to define marriage in the traditional, human, and essential meaning of the term.

All of these actions that he is proposing are opposed to religious and political freedom. They apply to Catholic institutions: priests, when the Great Unifier gets his way, will be found culpable of “hate speech” for preaching the Gospel, and Catholic institutions will be forced to employ open homosexuals.

This is the agenda of the One: whose goal is to establish peace and unity on earth by destroying his political and religious opponents.

This city has aroused my anger and wrath, from the day it was built to this day, so that I will remove it from my sight because of all the evil of the sons of Israel and the sons of Judah which they did to provoke me to anger–their kings and their princes, their priests and their prophets, the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem.  They have turned to me their back and not their face; and though I have taught them persistently they have not listened to receive instruction. They set up their abominations in the house which is called by my name, to defile it.  They built the high places of Baal in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to offer up their sons and daughters to Molech, though I did not command them, nor did it enter into my mind, that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin (Jeremiah 32:31-35)

Carolina had a very good post today over at the Crescat. She echoes the assessment of Cardinal George that the electorate went, by and large, to BO because of their economic fears.  She insightfully points out the farce that was such a motivation and what it reveals about us.

For my part, this brought to mind Jeremiah’s prophecy about Judah who had gone over to the gods of the nations.  As the phrase has come to be used, they “bowed to Molech.”  Now we, often times, in reading how Israel and Judah “played the harlot” after the gods of the pagan nations, are left perplexed as to why they might do such a thing.  We often dismiss them as not all that wise.  We ought not make this chauvinistic mistake…”it’s the economy stupid.”  The early Church Fathers, following the Rabbis, explained that the gods the nations worshiped in reality were demons who did in fact provide material benefits for those who would fall before them.  Israel did not play the harlot for the charge they got out of rebelling against YHWH; they voted with their wallets, if you will.

Carolina’s post reminded me also of Cardinal Stafford’s comment about those who feel betrayed by prolife Catholics who voted for BO.  This is especially true of those who rationalized and allowed themselves to be swayed by the propaganda that BO is the the economic savior of the poor and middle-class.  They have played the harlot.  They have, most astoundingly, bowed to Molech.

Now Molech was a particular kind of god worshiped by Israel’s neighbor and enemy, the Ammonites.  As Jeremiah indicates, this god demanded the sacrifice of the worshipers’ children by fire in order to receive his promised material benefits.  Now everybody worships something and many of us seem to have done as Israel often did.  They, like we, wanted to have it both ways.  They would still worship YWHW but they found it hard to pass up the material benefits sacrificing to the other gods could bring them.

It seems the arguments from those who profess to be prolife Catholics but still voted for BO fit this picture quite well.  They point out all the good that he has promised to do…and oh, this little peccadillo like signing the FOCA bill, well the wealth he will redistribute will take care of this as well.  It’s all about the gold don’t ya know.  If enough people have it then they won’t be compelled to kill their unborn children (though the Guttmacher Institute shows that less and 1/5 of those who abort say that economics were a consideration).

We have elected a material messiah who promises to give us every material thing we could ever want.  However, there is just this one catch.  We must offer our collective sons and daughters to Molech in exchange.  The messiah cannot do his miracles of wealth redistribution unless we make this sacrificial offering to his god…and we have done it.

I wonder if we have gone so far now as to provoke God’s wrath and anger such that he will remove our city from His sight because of the evil we have done?  I do not think that BO would have been elected except for the complicity of people who should have known better.  Now, as even many otherwise sober leaders are warning, we indeed may have hell to pay.

Too many Catholic commentators, who claimed to be pro-life, drew a moral equivalence between George Bush and Barack Obama in the recently completed election cycle. Asserting a moral equivalence between abortion and such issues as the War in Iraq, capital punishment, and torture, they tried to argue that both republicans and democrats are equally unsuitable candidates for the presidency, if the criteria of social justice are applied to them.

This was a ridiculous argument, of course. Barack Obama, unlike John McCain, however incompetent as a candidate for president the latter may have been, is a eugenics-minded maniac and cold-hearted enemy of the natural family and religious freedom. These positions follow from his fervently held socialism. There was no moral equivalence to be drawn between their candidacies.

Likewise, there was no legitimate moral equivalence to be drawn between Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama. Be that as it may, all of the good work that George Bush has done for the cause of life and in protecting religious freedom during his time in office was neglected by the Catholic commentators that I have just mentioned. Well, they can continue to ignore the good work that he has done, but he is proposing to give Christians one last ray of hope for religious freedom before he leaves office.

The New York Times (international edition) reports on Mr. Bush’s plan to protect the freedom of Christians in the health care industry, a plan which is being bitterly opposed by federal bureaucrats who care little for human life and not at all for religious freedom:

A last-minute Bush administration plan to grant sweeping new protections to health care providers who oppose abortion and other procedures on religious or moral grounds has provoked a torrent of objections, including a strenuous protest from the government agency that enforces job-discrimination laws.

The proposed rule would prohibit recipients of federal money from discriminating against doctors, nurses and other health care workers who refuse to perform or to assist in the performance of abortions or sterilization procedures because of their “religious beliefs or moral convictions.”

It would also prevent hospitals, clinics, doctors’ offices and drugstores from requiring employees with religious or moral objections to “assist in the performance of any part of a health service program or research activity” financed by the Department of Health and Human Services.

But three officials from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, including its legal counsel, whom President George W. Bush appointed, said the proposal would overturn 40 years of civil rights law prohibiting job discrimination based on religion.

The counsel, Reed Russell, and two Democratic members of the commission, Stuart Ishimaru and Christine Griffin, also said that the rule was unnecessary for the protection of employees and potentially confusing to employers.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 already prohibits employment discrimination based on religion, Russell said, and the courts have defined “religion” broadly to include “moral or ethical beliefs as to what is right and wrong, which are sincerely held with the strength of traditional religious views.”

Ishimaru and senior members of the commission staff said that neither the Department of Health and Human Services nor the White House had consulted their agency before issuing the proposed rule. The White House Office of Management and Budget received the proposal Aug. 21 and cleared it the same day, according to a government Web site that keeps track of the rule-making process.

The protest from the commission comes on the heels of other objections to the rule by doctors, pharmacists, hospitals, state attorneys general and political leaders, including President-elect Barack Obama.

Obama has said the proposal will raise new hurdles to women seeking reproductive health services, like abortion and some contraceptives. Michael Leavitt, the health and human services secretary, said that was not the purpose.

Officials at the Health and Human Services Department said they intended to issue a final version of the rule within days. Aides and advisers to Obama said he would try to rescind it, a process that could take three to six months.

To avoid the usual rush of last-minute rules, the White House said in May that new regulations should be proposed by June 1 and issued by Nov. 1. The “provider conscience” rule missed both deadlines.

Under the White House directive, the deadlines can be waived “in extraordinary circumstances.” Administration officials were unable to say immediately why an exception might be justified in this case.

The proposal is supported by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Catholic Health Association, which represents Catholic hospitals.

Sister Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association, said that in recent years, “we have seen a variety of efforts to force Catholic and other health care providers to perform or refer for abortions and sterilizations.”

But the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, the American Hospital Association, the American Medical Association, 28 senators, more than 110 representatives and the attorneys general of 13 states have urged the Bush administration to withdraw the proposed rule.

Pharmacies said the rule would allow their employees to refuse to fill prescriptions for contraceptives and could “lead to Medicaid patients being turned away.” State officials said the rule could void state laws that require insurance plans to cover contraceptives and require hospitals to offer emergency contraception to rape victims.

The Ohio Health Department said the rule “could force family planning providers to hire employees who may refuse to do their jobs” - a concern echoed by Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Under the Civil Rights Act, an employer must make reasonable accommodations for an employee’s religious practices, unless the employer can show that doing so would cause “undue hardship on the conduct of its business.”

In a letter commenting on the proposed rule, Ishimaru and Griffin, from the employment commission, said that 40 years of court decisions had carefully balanced “employees’ rights to religious freedom and employers’ business needs.” The proposed rule, they said, “would throw this entire body of law into question.”

Leavitt, a leading proponent of the rule, said it would increase compliance with laws adopted since 1973 to protect health care workers.

In his encyclical Quadragesimo anno, Pius XI considers the question as to whether the more benign forms of socialism, which had come about since Marxist socialism had been condemned by Leo XIII in Rerum novarum 40 years earlier, could be reconciled with Christianity.  After considering the question from many sides, recognizing that many of the fearful totalitarian aspects had been expunged, and that in many ways it had become more amenable to Catholic social principles, the Pope still had this to say:

Whether considered as a doctrine, or an historical fact, or a movement, Socialism, if it remains truly Socialism, even after it has yielded to truth and justice on the points which we have mentioned, cannot be reconciled with the teachings of the Catholic Church because its concept of society itself is utterly foreign to Christian truth (paragraph 117).

What was its societal concept?  It was one in which the goal of society is considered solely from the perspective of material wealth and one in which the state was ultimately responsible for creating and distributing such wealth.  This contradicts Christian truth because it gravely distorts the meaning of the human person and so damages human dignity.  Pius XI warns that even if more benign forms of socialism do not deny completely the ability for private ownership of property, they still so mistake the nature of the human person and the purpose of society in aiding in the perfection of the human person, that they can never be reconciled with Church teaching.

In fact, he warns about the socialist mentality’s inevitable recourse to “excessive force” and also to the attempt by socialists to use public education to indoctrinate the young to their way of thinking.  To counter this, he emphasizes the importance of Christian based education.

It is amazing how these prognostications of the popes bear themselves out in lived history, sometimes sooner, and sometimes later…but inevitably.  The reason for this, of course, is that the Church is an expert on the human person.

We have all heard about Germany’s assault and persecution of home schoolers.  Here is a story about a German family that is seeking asylum in the U.S. from their government’s persecution.  Socialists in Germany do not recognize the priority of pre-political institutions, especially the family, in the education and formation of children.  In fact, they seem to fear the consequences of allowing families to assume their rightful responsibilities in this matter.  In fact, the German government is employing the tried and true totalitarian approach of condemning such persons as mentally unstable and removing the children from their parents’ care.

Unfortunately, this family has come to the US at a time in which the incoming administration is likely to be more sympathetic to the German government’s ideology than to the rights of this family.  We will see what happens, but I will not be surprised if this family is quickly deported.  Such an action would indicate that those in control of the U.S. government have slid into this same socialist mindset and would imply that such persecution may not be too far off for US home schoolers (for example in Florida). If this happens, one might consider whether US parents who home school ought to start looking for sympathetic governments elsewhere.

The sober Cardinal Stafford has some words about our President-elect that would seem to justify our own Hierothee’s alarming prognostications about life under the next administration.  Here are some snippets from EWTN’s mirror of a CNA article:

Cardinal James Francis Stafford, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary of the Holy See, delivered a lecture on Thursday saying that the future under President-elect Obama will echo Jesus’ agony in Gethsemane. Criticizing Obama as “aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic,” he went on to speak about a decline in respect for human life and the need for Catholics to return to the values of marriage and human dignity.

[snip]

Commenting on the results of the recent presidential election, Cardinal Stafford said on Election Day “America suffered a cultural earthquake.” The cardinal argued that President-elect Obama had campaigned on an “extremist anti-life platform” and predicted that the near future would be a time of trial.

“If 1968 was the year of America’s ‘suicide attempt,’ 2008 is the year of America’s exhaustion,” he said, contrasting the year of Humane Vitae’s promulgation with this election year.

“For the next few years, Gethsemane will not be marginal. We will know that garden,” Cardinal Stafford told his audience. Catholics who weep the “hot, angry tears of betrayal” should try to identify with Jesus, who during his agony in the garden was “sick because of love.”

The cardinal attributed America’s decline to the Supreme Court’s decisions such as the 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, which imposed permissive abortion laws nationwide.

“Its scrupulous meanness has had catastrophic effects upon the unity and integrity of the American republic,” Cardinal Stafford commented, according to The Tower.

Cardinal Stafford sees in the next administration an all out assault on the human person and the family, just as Hierothee has said.  This assault will not be marginal the Cardinal warns.  It is interesting that he refers to the “hot, angry tears of betrayal” as this characterizes the experience of many Catholics with respect to other “Catholics” who have helped vote in such a radical person for a variety of  misguided rationalizations.

Another interesting thought is what seems to be Cardinal Stafford’s tying of the mean spiritedness of our abortion laws to the disintegration of American unity and integrity.  In other words, the dissolution of our societal stability and our radical polarization into two sides now comprising a culture war arise from the blood of our unborn with which our collective hands are soaked.

We had a very successful Catholic businessman speak to our students just before the election.  His topic focused on the importance of fidelity to one’s faith in the business world.  Someone asked him about the current economic crisis.  This man’s background is with Wall Street and so he had some insights to share.

His main concern was not so much the catastrophic possibilities to the economy and economic stability but with what the 20th century’s experience of such events has brought about.  In other words, these times have been the occasion for the rise of totalitarian monsters.  This, he said, was what we needed to guard against.  There are more and more ominous warning signs that we may have selected such a path.  Mary Immaculate, Patroness of America, pray for us!

Update: Zenit has clarified Cardinal Stafford’s reference to BO:

CNS reports that the administrator of the Diocese of Charleston, SC has rebuked Fr. Newman for advising his parishioners that those who had voted for BO needed to go to confession before being admitted to Holy Communion.  Here are the relevant quotes from the article:

The administrator of the Diocese of Charleston, S.C., said a pastor who told his parishioners they should refrain from receiving holy Communion if they voted for President-elect Barack Obama did not “adequately reflect the Catholic Church’s teaching” on abortion and conscience.

“Any statements or comments to the contrary are repudiated,” Msgr. Martin T. Laughlin said in a Nov. 14 statement.

[snip]

Msgr. Laughlin said that Father Newman’s comments “diverted the church’s clear teaching on abortion” by pulling it into the “partisan political arena.”

Quoting the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Msgr. Laughlin said that Christ gives everyone “the freedom to explore our own conscience and to make our own decisions while adhering to the law of God and the teachings of the faith.”

Unfortunately, the administrator, Msgr. Laughlin, has gravely misconstrued the teaching of the Church on abortion and conscience himself.  Fr. Newman is correct in saying that one who voted for BO has committed an objectively grave error.  They have most certainly unjustly cooperated with inherently grave evil (see here and here for analysis of this issue).  An erroneous appeal to conscience does not provide, in and of itself, exculpation from such an act.

It is not clear what Msgr. Laughlin understands by conscience but he did not accurately quote from the CCC.  The passage which he paraphrases actually says:

Man has the right to act in conscience and in freedom so as personally to make moral decisions (CCC 1782).

The CCC does not say that one has the “freedom to explore our own conscience and make our own decisions.”  It may be possible to paraphrase it in the way he does but the implication is a serious error that if one does “form his conscience” then he is thereby free of culpability if he errs in his decision making.  Conscience can err and anyone who did honestly form their conscience could only be exculpated if they had invincible ignorance.  This is a difficult matter to discern.  However, even if invincible ignorance was the case, this does not remove the fact that they erred in a grave manner.  Clearly, once the gravity of his error is brought to the attention of a Catholic of good will he would be motivated to repent of his error.

Moreover, Msgr. Laughlin betrays a troubling, and erroneous, view point when he says that Fr. Newman’s pointing out that there was a clear moral choice in the past election was an act of political partisanship.  By this he implies that by forming of conscience he means that a conscience does have the ability to override clear moral norms.  He seems to imply that a candidate, because this is the “political arena” can never be ruled out by his policy decisions.  I suppose this could be a mistaken notion about the separation of Church and State?  Regardless, it is manifestly wrong to suggest that pointing out that voting for BO was gravely wrong in and of itself, is political partisanship.

Neither is Msgr. Laughlin’s statement self-consistent because he qualifies that all moral decisions have to be made in accordance with “the law of God and the teachings of the faith.”  He is either saying that there was no clear morally correct choice, which is erroneous as indicated above.  Or he is implying that following one’s conscience is the only relevant concern, which contradicts the teachings of the Church (see CCC 1790-1794 on erroneous judgments).

Fr. Newman perhaps could have been more nuanced in his letter (perhaps he was, it was taken down by the time I went to read it), explaining the possibility of invincible ignorance, or reduced levels of culpability, especially in light of the confusion sowed by some partisan “Catholic” groups and persons, the media, and even the unfortunately worded paragraph 35 of the USCCB’s Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship.  However, Msgr. Laughlin’s statement exacerbates the confusion much more than did Fr. Newman’s (as I understand his letter any way), especially since the Msgr. presents his erroneous opinion with the magisterial weight of the Diocese.

Msgr. Laughlin’s poor choice of using an appeal to conscience and his condemnation of Fr. Newman’s letter as partisan politics have done great harm to the prospect of clearing up the confusion of voting for pro-abortion politicians. There is much work to be done in correctly forming the moral decision making of Catholics in the US, ordained and laity, alike.  St. Thomas, pray for us!

Catholic News Agency has a fascinating story up about a former abortionist in Serbia, named Sotjan Adasevic, who, after performing over 40, 000 abortions, became a champion of the cause for life.

What changed his heart? A series of dreams in which he was met by the figure of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Adasevic was raised in Communist Yugoslavia. He had no concept that the procedures that he performed were murderous. The textbooks on which he was formed had convinced him that the fetus is nothing more than an impersonal blob of tissue. His dream encounters with Saint Thomas, whom he had never before heard of, convinced him otherwise.

Since his conversion to the cause of life, he has, at much personal and professional cost, becoming the leading advocate for the unborn in Serbia.

Here is how he described his recurrent dreams:

In describing his conversion, Adasevic “dreamed about a beautiful field full of children and young people who were playing and laughing, from 4 to 24 years of age, but who ran away from him in fear. A man dressed in a black and white habit stared at him in silence.  The dream was repeated each night and he would wake up in a cold sweat. One night he asked the man in black and white who he was. ‘My name is Thomas Aquinas,’ the man in his dream responded. Adasevic, educated in communist schools, had never heard of the Dominican genius saint.  He didn’t recognize the name”

“Why don’t you ask me who these children are?” St. Thomas asked Adasevic in his dream.

“They are the ones you killed with your abortions,’ St. Thomas told him. 

“Adasevic awoke in amazement and decided not to perform any more abortions,” the article stated.

“That same day a cousin came to the hospital with his four months-pregnant girlfriend, who wanted to get her ninth abortion—something quite frequent in the countries of the Soviet bloc.  The doctor agreed. Instead of removing the fetus piece by piece, he decided to chop it up and remove it as a mass. However, the baby’s heart came out still beating. Adasevic realized then that he had killed a human being,”

After this experience, Adasevic “told the hospital he would no longer perform abortions. Never before had a doctor in Communist Yugoslavia refused to do so.  They cut his salary in half, fired his daughter from her job, and did not allow his son to enter the university.”

After years of pressure and on the verge of giving up, he had another dream about St. Thomas. 

“You are my good friend, keep going,’ the man in black and white told him.  Adasevic became involved in the pro-life movement and was able to get Yugoslav television to air the film ‘The Silent Scream,’ by Doctor Bernard Nathanson, two times.”

Adasevic has told his story in magazines and newspapers throughout Eastern Europe. He has returned to the Orthodox faith of his childhood and has studied the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas.

“Influenced by Aristotle, Thomas wrote that human life begins forty days after fertilization,” Adasevic wrote in one article. La Razon commented that Adasevic “suggests that perhaps the saint wanted to make amends for that error.”

I am not sure if that last bit about Thomas is a typical, Eastern Orthodox dig at the great saint. At any rate, he should be grateful — and I am sure that he is – that the great common doctor of the West diverted him from his hellbound path.

The US bishops have continued their outspoken concerns about life issues that characterized the last few months leading up to the just completed presidential election.  They have released, under the signature of the USCCB President, Cardinal George, a letter clearly articulating their intent to oppose BO’s promised litany of baby killing policies.

LifeSiteNews has an article with soundbites from a host of US bishops detailing their concerns and their absolute conviction that there can be no compromise with the soon to be installed Obama administration over life issues.  Some quotes:

Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln: “One cannot compromise between the fire and the fire department, the fly and the fly swatter. There are things that don’t admit of compromise - and vile … intrinsic evil such as abortion do not admit us any such compromise.”

Bishop Joseph F. Martino of Scranton, PA: “We are going to have to speak as firmly as possible to Catholic politicians who are not merely reluctant to vote pro-life, but are stridently anti-life,” he said. He also spoke of “canonical measures” such as excommunication, noting, “We have to have something like that. I cannot have the vice president-elect coming to Scranton saying he learned his values there, when his values, at least in the area of abortion, are utterly against the teachings of the Catholic Church.”

Bishop Robert Conlon of Steubenville, OH: “Some people may think it’s time for a truce, but we’re dealing with a moral absolute. There’s nothing here that allows for common ground. We’re talking about a human being whose life cannot be compromised.”

The US bishops are coming together on this matter in a way that is unusual, it seems to me.  This clear and direct language is at odds with the traditional US bishops’ approach which sought to avoid confrontation.  With a view to avoiding activities that would make it difficult for Catholics to be accepted by US society since the early days of colonization, it has been rare for a vast majority of US bishops to agree to come out swinging at the policies of a president (or soon to be one), at least against policies for which they did not already have some substantial media support.

This is the perennial problem of the Church’s engagement of society.  There must be a dialogue if the Church is going to influence it, but how far does that dialogue go?  It is clear that the bishops have decided that on this fundamental issue of life, there is no room for “dialogue.”  If the state believes it has the authority to deny some of its constituents the fundamental right to breathe, then the Church’s right to proclaim that truth cannot be recognized as anything but contingent on the beneficence of the state.  I do not suggest that they are primarily motivated by the issue of religious freedom, but some of the statements of bishops (such as one from the Auxiliary bishop of Chicago–see link above) indicate that they recognize this freedom is threatened.

Nevertheless, the bishops have drawn a line in the sand–there will be no compromise.  It will become more and more difficult for US Catholics to allow themselves to wallow in confusion over life issues in the future.  Perhaps this is, in part, the greater good that is to come out of the great tragedy for life that will be the next four years.  The Church in the US may get smaller as cultural Catholics find they must finally make a choice between truth and their culture of death ideologies.  In any case, if the bishops consistently follow through with this initiative then one might reasonably hope that with the next election the “Catholic vote” will be much more clearly in line with Church teaching, even if it might be a smaller percentage of the overall electorate.

Fr. James Schall, a Professor of Political Philosophy at Georgetown, has a fascinating new book review up at Ignatius Insight of David Walsh’s new book: The Modern Philosophical Revolution. This book is the third in a trilogy of volumes written by Walsh exploring the connections of metaphysics, history, and political philosophy. Walsh’s trilogy is, as Schall describes it, a completion of Eric Voegelin’s work on politics and philosophy, though more sympathetic than Voegelin’s work to orthodox Christian doctrine.

To hear Schall describe it, it is as important in its significance as Robert Sokolowski’s The Phenomenology of the Human Person, which Schall has also glowingly reviewed, and which I think is the most important philosophy title of the 21st century.

David Walsh is a professor in the Department of Politics at The Catholic University of America, whose reputation has not quite caught up to the scope and depth of his writings. With the publication of this new volume, perhaps that will now change. Walsh has surely emerged as a philosopher of the same caliber as Alasdair McIntyre, Jean Luc Marion, Robert Sokolowski, Charles Taylor, and Robert Spaemann: who are generally considered to be the world’s greatest Catholic philosophers.

Not all of these men are as orthodox as one might wish, but all of them have produced bodies of writing that merit our attention. Here’s a tidbit from Schall’s review:

Walsh’s book is a remarkable revision of what modern philosophy is really about. Revision is perhaps not the right word. Walsh’s own word in the title, “revolution,” is better. Walsh has done nothing less than rethink the meaning of German idealism and French existentialism in terms of Plato, Aristotle, and the essentials of Christian revelation, which latter subject, in one form or another, has never been far from the consciousness of these modern thinkers. Walsh’s book asks: “What did philosophers think?” Sokolowski’s book asks: “What does one do when he thinks?” The one thinker the two books touch on in common is Husserl, a man who wanted to know exactly what is it we know when we know anything?

Walsh devotes successive chapters to Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, and finally and most centrally Kierkegaard. By showing what they have in common and their individual differences, Walsh is able to follow the thread of existence as the real “revolution” of modern philosophy. This revolution has really never been about either idealism, skepticism, or pragmatism except as dead end solutions to a live problem that is best explained by being in the light, in the luminosity of the Being. This book is exciting to read as it puts so many things together.

What is perhaps unique to Walsh’s consideration of these particular authors is his constant attention to the impact of revelation on their souls. In effect, the apparent philosophical rejection of Christianity ends up by deepening philosophy itself, something we already learned from Aquinas. In so doing, now corrected, philosophy becomes open precisely to those things in which logos, wherever found, especially in each of us, is directed to and rooted in Logos. As Walsh says again and again in different ways, the thinker—the person who thinks, “the agent of truth,” as Sokolowski calls him—already finds himself within being that includes his thinking, his affirmation. He cannot find a place outside of it.

One thing that has always struck me about Walsh is his remarkable independence of the academic orthodoxies that are too often found in philosophical departments of various hues. This independence of mind is also true of the CUA School of Philosophy in general. In both places, logos seems to have been more important than credentials or outside “evaluations,” which often turn out to be but reaffirmations of modernity in its worst sense, the sense that Walsh is attacking. These CUA places, I think, is where to go to study “real” philosophy. The reform of the Catholic mind can begin here. Benedict’s observation that theology addresses itself to logos in its own terms is here adhered to.

Politics, at its best, allows this same logos to flourish midst things which are not themselves political. Much modern politics, however, conceives itself as not ethics or politics of finite mortals, but as a “pseudo-metaphysics,” to use the words of Father Charles N. R. McCoy, who once held the position in the Politics Department at CUA that Walsh does today.

It is also typical that Sokolowski, a philosopher, should be actively interested in political philosophy. Walsh, a political philosopher, on the other hand, writes not just a history of modern philosophy. He writes what Daniel Mahoney called a “deeply meditative” penetration of what was really going on in what we have come to call modernity or post-modernity, often unbeknownst to or unarticulated by itself. The real alternative to philosophy and revelation in the modern world has been a political philosophy that, as Aristotle already suspected, considers itself as the highest of the sciences and not just the highest of the practical sciences. Philosophy turns to politics when the transcendent order is conceived as a political, not theological or metaphysical, project. This is what Voegelin meant when he said that modern politics is the “immanentization of the eschaton.” And it was precisely to this corruptive influence that Benedict XVI directed Spe Salvi.

Actually, Sokolowski’ little book, The God of Faith and Reason, is a very fitting context for the Walsh trilogy. Obviously, Walsh has been working for decades on this rethinking of modern thought. Indeed, he purposes to do nothing less than explain what it was really about all the time. He proposes this view not in terms of philosophy’s history but in terms of philosophizing itself. As with Plato, the separation of philosophy and political philosophy rejoins itself in order to free politics from an alien philosophy. It has long been clear that no understanding of philosophy is possible outside of politics. Nor can we understand politics outside of both philosophy and revelation.

Obviously, much of the thought of Benedict XVI is related to Walsh’s trilogy—the question of hope, the relation of truth to Logos, and the relation of both to the inner-worldly eschatology that the pope has seen to be the driving force of modern thought that takes it away from actual being and its transcendent ends. Walsh’s book, I think, is best seen as a rediscovery of the meaning of existence and of our role within it, a role that includes our pursuing the “restless heart” we find within us to its very existential end. This end can only be the personal and resurrected destiny of each of the human beings who exist. I have remarked that Benedict XVI observed that the best proof of the doctrine of the resurrection of the body is through the idea of justice, a position that was suggested by the Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno. Similar rediscoveries are found on almost every page of Walsh, and of Benedict, for that matter.

Not all Kenyans are enthusiastic about BO’s election to the US presidency.  Which ones you ask?  Those who are concerned about the stability of Kenyan society and thus are concerned about life and family issues.  LifeSiteNews has an article interviewing a Catholic MD from Kenya who voices his concerns.  Here are some tidbits but do read the entire article:

Dr. Stephen Karanja, a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist from Nairobi told LifeSiteNews.com that those in Kenya “who know what is good for their world,” had feared the election of Obama because of his pro-abortion and anti-family positions.

“We in Kenya know him (Obama) as a person who is anti-family,” Dr. Karanja said. “A person who would support abortion. In America they can do all right killing their babies. But they must not associate us with the people who would want our babies to be killed.”

In an interview at an international conference of obstetricians and ethicists in Rome, Dr. Karanja said that Africans are now under threat, with Obama having made his radical support for abortion without restriction a key point of his campaign. “Now we are in big trouble because of these Americans,” Dr. Karanja said.

Dr. Karanja expressed his frustration at the result of the US election: “They have no business electing a person who is going to destroy our countries. And that is what they have done. This is something that a lot of people don’t realise, that what these Americans do affects innocent people thousands and thousands of miles away.”

“The truth is that they have put a bad man in the most powerful office in the whole world. And are putting people outside your borders in danger.”

Of course, the argument will be that this Kenyan OB/GYN is really a Republican stooge who is expressing sour grapes about his man having lost the election or some nonsense.  The truth of the matter is that we in the US have lived with the culture of death for so long we have now become immune to the horrors of killing.

We have traded our unborn children’s birth-right, or rather right to birth, for pottage.  In the mistaken notion that the government can and should bail us out of our present economic difficulties (see Carl Olson’s post for support for this claim) , those who profess to be pro-life have rationalized their support for an administration that has promised policies that will increase the number of dead unborn babies by hundreds of thousands.

We have much work to do in the next four years.  It begins with reaching out to Catholics who thought they could licitly vote for BO and convince them to they have committed a gravely immoral act and are in urgent need of repentance.  Instructing them in moral decision making is needed.  Active and prayerful support is needed for pro-life activists, lobbyists and legislators.  Finally, prayer and fasting for BO’s and the rest of the country’s conversion is also a high priority.  The battle may have been lost but the war is not over.  Clayton reminded me of this in a recent combox post about eucatastrophe:

“It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?

But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer.”
-Samwise Gamgee, The Two Towers

The title for this post is drawn from theologian Aidan Nichols’s important book, written several years ago, meant to spur Christians to proclaim boldly the truth of the Gospel and to reclaim the beauty and nobility of their heritage. A non-theologian, in a newly published book, makes a similarly stirring plea to Christians. Herb London, in America’s Secular Challenge: The Rise of a New National Religion, takes on the many new atheists and radical secularists in our culture in making the argument that only Christianity, not a national secular religion, can save Western Civilization from the threat of Radical Islam.

There is a review of London’s book at National Review Online that is worth checking out. Of course, the thesis of the book is ultimately unacceptable from a theological standpoint: Christ did not institute His Church in order to serve or to protect the interests of a nebulous entity known as “Western civilization.” But it is good to see a non-theologian take on the ludicrous and dangerous secularists who are fast becoming the substitute priests of the burgeoning secular religion of the United States.

Meanwhile, south of our border, the Spirit appears to be stirring in the growing community of Evangelical Christians. There is a massive outreach of Evangelical Christians planned for the coming weeks, that will be a national, televised event, bringing together 48,000 churches and 850,000 Christian homes. This will be a time of testimony and witness to the power of the Lord of history.

These Evangelical Christians serve an important mission to the One, True Church of Christ: they force her ministers to abandon their false, political religion and to preach once again Christ and Him crucified.

Christendom is, indeed, awakening. Even in communist Brazil.

The Cardinal Newman Society has released the results of an important new study showing that Catholic colleges and universities are failing to have an impact on the moral formation of students. Indeed, it seems that they are even exercising a negative impact on the moral formation of students. It was found that students, after four years of Catholic college education, tend to have diminished support for the Church’s teachings on gay marriage and abortion, and on other key issues. Of course, not everything can be blamed on the administrations and faculties at Catholic colleges. Many students come to Catholic colleges so thoroughly inundated by the culture of death that there is not much that the institutions can do about it.

On the other hand, many Catholic colleges and universities have embraced the sexual revolution, or at the very least look the other way in regard to it. Most theology instructors at Catholic colleges reject Humanae Vitae and reduce Catholic social teaching to an apologia for Marxism. Indeed – and I have witnessed this firsthand on several occasions — they reduce the figure of Christ to a political messiah, precisely opposite to the Christ of the Gospel who rejected, in no uncertain terms, Satan’s offer to give Him political power. And there is a pronounced anti-papal attitude among many instructors of theology at catholic colleges.

Students are no doubt left thinking that to be a Christian, or at least to be a Catholic, is to be a political Marxist. The abstract concern of “care for the poor” replaces concrete discipleship and understanding of the tenets of the faith.

At any rate, here is a basic summary of the survey, as well as pertinent results:

For the current study, CNS commissioned QEV Analytics, which conducted an analysis of the Catholic vote for Crisis magazine prior to the 2000 presidential election….

QEV President Steven Wagner, a former researcher for the U.S. Information Agency, has conducted studies for several federal agencies and the National Center on Additional and Substance Abuse….

“Most respondents say that the experience of attending a Catholic institution made no difference in their support for the Catholic Church or its teaching or their participation in Catholic Sacraments,” Wagner writes in his report.

* Nearly 1 in 5 knew another student who had or paid for an abortion

* 46% of current and recent students—and 50% of females—said they engaged in sex outside of marriage

* 84% said they had friends who engaged in premarital sex.

* 60% agreed strongly or somewhat that abortion should be legal.

* 60% agreed strongly or somewhat that premarital sex is not a sin.

* 78% disagreed strongly or somewhat that using a condom to prevent pregnancy was a serious sin.

* 57% agreed strongly or somewhat that same-sex “marriage” should be legal.

* 57% said the experience of attending a Catholic college or university had no effect on their participation in Mass and the sacrament of reconciliation.

* 54% of respondents said that their experience of attending a Catholic college or university had no effect on their support for the teachings of the Catholic Church.

* 56% said their experience had no effect on their respect for the Pope and bishops.

It is now official. The American people, in their quest for “change,” have elected to the presidency the most radically pro-abortion, eugenics-minded, enemy of the natural family and religious freedom conceivable.  It hardly needs pointing out that many poor, duped souls see Barack Obama not only as a political figure but as our Lord Sovereign King Almighty and as the Savior of the World. Indeed, he sees himself in these messianic terms. No doubt his messianic self-image will increase several-fold now that he has been officially designated God Incarnate by the American masses.

I do not think that there is any reason to belabor the point that Obama bears all the signs of an Anti-Christic figure. He thinks and speaks in terms of political salvation. He views his soteriological power in cosmic terms: he is not only, in his mind, the savior of the economy, or the healer of “social division,” but the reconciler of planetary strife. He sees himself as the Cosmocrator.

This election confounds political analysis because its meaning exists not on the plane of politics but of theology. There is no need to consult your local political hack in order to try to understand what has happened here. A spiritual war that has been fought. The Mystical Body of Satan has emerged victorious — for the time being.

America has been the most important defender worldwide, for the past 100 years, of the Mystical Body of Christ. This is true in spite of all of our atrocious missteps: Woodrow Wilson’s post-war destruction of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Clinton’s massacres in Eastern Europe, W. Bush’s decimation of the Christian populations in Iraq. But, we, and we alone, thwarted the global expansion of tyrannical, anti-religious Socialism in the twentieth century.

With this election, it seems clear that God no longer desires for us to fill the role of defender of the Church. Perhaps John Paul II feared as much, in his premonitions about the consequences that would follow from the War in Iraq. The problem is, who on the world stage can take our place? Remember, the Church developed a doctrine of just war precisely because the bishops and popes realized that it is sometimes necessary to employ military force in order to protect the very existence of the Church.

The Church disappeared from history in Islamic lands. It would have done the same in Communist or Socialist lands, if not for the divinely provided emergence of the American Empire in the 20th century. Islam and Socialism have the power to make the Church disappear from vast geographical regions.

The Americans have just elected a Socialist who was educated in Islamic schools and is a good friend of the leader of the Nation of Islam and of many other radical Islamists. He embodies in his person, aside from his messianic self-delusion, formation by the two world-historical ideologies capable of destroying the Church.

Who, then, shall stand up to protect the Church?

Obama will be inclined to destroy the Church. He is, to repeat, a prototype of Anti-Christ, and our very age is a prototype of the Apocalypse. Unless it is the real thing….

We must pray more fervently and work more earnestly than ever before on behalf of the Church. Anyone who has even had an inkling of a vocation should now be inspired without the encumbrance of desire for material prosperity to follow through on it. Those who are not able to serve the Church as priests or consecrated religious must strive to orient their lives and their families around prayer and the Church. We must pray more fervently for our bishops, and for the Pope, that the Good Lord keep our shepherds strong and safe. Take your children out of public schools. Find a monastic community to orient your family’s life around. It is long past time to employ the “Benedict Option.” Band together, create a new culture….

It is time to give up on our bourgeois comforts and dedicate our selves fully to serve the Church. God is giving us this opportunity to see that Liberal Democracy is not the same thing as the Kingdom of Heaven. This is a time of great grace, a time to see plainly that false peace is idolatry. God is calling us out from this false and fallen world to be an instrument of grace to it.

Ages dominated by prototypes of Anti-Christ have been, historically speaking, periods of great grace. They shatter our illusions of comfort and peace. They are instruments used by God to help us to understand that service to the Church, the Bride of Christ, is the highest vocation in this life. The greatest and holiest leaders in our Communion of Saints have grown up on the soil of nations debased by tyranny. In our own age, we have the example of John Paul II to guide us.

This election has smashed the idol of Liberal Democracy, once and for all. As Barack Obama moves his policy initiatives through, this will become clearer to all of those Christians who wait in earnest to hear the voice of the True Shepherd, Christ Himself.

This is a time of great sorrow, for the unborn, for the elderly, for the mentally disabled, and for the terminally ill, who will no longer have any legal protection from the instinctive desire to kill the “useless” that so predominates the mentality of our peers. It is a time of great sorrow for all of those people of good will who instinctively recognize that society cannot survive the destruction of the natural family.

But it is a time of great grace as well: for it is a time in which God will open our eyes to see that no earthly, political empire can take the place of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Today’s second reading from the Office of Readings is taken from Gaudium et spes 82-83.  It is about the need for reeducating man for the cause of peace if we are to bring authentic peace about through political structures. I thought how appropriate this reading is for the day before such a critical election.  In a nutshell, the reading indicates that justice is required if peace is to be attained.

There are other aspects of the problem of peace covered in the reading but it seems to me that false hope and justice are key here.  That is we are now seeing a false sense of hope motivating about half of the country to be positioning itself to elect a candidate who has told us very little about what he has planned in specifics but what he has made clear is that he plans untold inherent evil for unborn children.  If he has gotten justice wrong on such a fundamental level as the protection of the most innocent and defenseless human beings then it is certain that this injustice, as devastating as it is, will lead to untold more.

I have heard many excuses from Catholics who consider themselves pro-life trying to justify their vote for this candidate of false hope.  Some of them sound like rebellious teenagers claiming that the Church cannot tell them who to vote for as if moral truths end at the voting booth.  Others repeat the vacuous, pollyannic claims of the candidate about restoring justice and peace through little more than government fiat. In doing so they take the stance that one may do grave evil if good may come from it.  Others simply reveal their legalistic mindsets by declaring it is illegal for the Church, and by extension anyone who belongs to the Church apparently, to tell them that they can’t vote for their favorite candidate.  Accuracy in jurisprudence aside, I suppose that it hasn’t occurred to them that it was illegal in Nazi Germany to oppose its “final solution.”  If it were illegal to declare moral truths then this would be an unjust law that cannot bind one’s conscience.

I will not speculate about the additional evils that this candidate may bring to the world; those that he has explicitly promised for the unborn I think sufficient to cause any Christian to shudder.  We have two days left.  I think that Jesus’ admonition to His disciples that some evils can only by exorcised through prayer and fasting need to be our guidance here.  Please pray and consider fasting today and tomorrow during election day for something evil this way comes.

Drudge has a link to the youtube video of the Anointed One calling for the establishment of a “national civilian military force” as powerful and as well-funded as the United States military. What on earth is he talking about? Storm Troopers? Brown shirted thugs? We are about to usher in a darker, more sinister period of American history than any of us have ever known.

Mary, The Mother of All Nations, please pray for us, that we might have the protection of your Son for the trials that lie ahead. Please pray for the strengthening of His Church, so that we might face the Enemy with courage and resolve, that we might spread the light of Christ’s peace to a world torn apart by sin and darkened in conscience by the Enemy’s false promises. Please pray that we might have the strength and courage to proclaim the Truth and Love of Christ, to follow the Father’s will, when faced with public outcast, financial hardship, violent retribution, or death.