HLI President calls for immediate elucidation on excommunication of Brazilian doctors

Here is a statement by Human Life International President Fr. James Euteneuer clamoring for clarification from the Vatican regarding the excommunication of doctors who connived and participated in the abortion in a nine year old girl.

It is no secret that pro-lifers over the years have been greatly burdened by the general lack of support by many of the members of our clergy on life issues, but until now, we have been able to rely on the various Vatican offices for a clear, consistent and correct defense of life. A statement made two weeks ago by an official of the Vatican about an abortion case in Brazil, however, has raised more than a few eyebrows, and is causing grave concern for its potential impact on the Church’s ability to defend life around the world. I am asking your prayers that the Holy See will clarify and correct this situation right away before further damage is done.

The incident in question involves – unbelievably – the head of the Pontifical Academy for Life, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, who issued a statement on March 15th criticizing a bishop in Brazil for properly declaring to be excommunicated the doctors who performed an abortion on a nine-year-old girl who was pregnant from rape. The girl was pregnant with twins so the doctors aborted two babies. Despite her young age, she was not in any serious danger (according to the hospital), nor were the two babies she was carrying in any danger. Even if she would have been in danger, the abortion would have been immoral because the direct killing of the innocent never is allowed. It goes without saying that the Church condemns unequivocally the incestuous act committed against this young girl, however, the issue of excommunication of the perpetrators of the abortion stands on its own and deserves applause, not criticism by other prelates. Unfortunately, Archbishop Fisichella is not the only bishop to publicly criticize the decision of the Brazilian bishop in applying church law.

The innocent little girl, thus, became the center of a perfect storm created by the abortion industry which capitalized on her victimization to promote abortion in Brazil where it is currently illegal. Unfortunately, Abp. Fisichella’s intervention gave the impression of a quasi-doctrinal statement and played right into the hands of the abortion promoters by seeming to give permission for abortion in such a “hard case” scenario. Archbishop Fisichella was not condoning these abortions per se, but due to some unfortunate choices of words in his article, and predictably, on the very day that Abp. Fisichella issued his statement, the Associated Press picked it up and titled their own article, “Vatican prelate defends abortion for 9-year-old.” The world is indeed watching and listening to what comes out of the Vatican because of the Holy See’s immense moral and spiritual authority; hence the responsibility to be loyal without fault when speaking in the name of the Catholic Church.

I applaud most of all the handling of this case by the local diocese in Brazil and pray that all bishops may take an example from this picture perfect handling of a difficult pastoral situation. Credit needs to go to Archbishop José Cardoso Sobrinho and several priests of is diocese for providing generous pastoral care to the family during this terrible crisis. Indeed, when the girl was transferred to a hospital 140 miles away from the parish, her priest travelled that distance every day to visit her and to assure the family that the Church would provide every possible care for the welfare of the three vulnerable children.

The great irony in all this is that while we get little or no support from Church officials to correct bishops who are negligent in their duty to guard the faith and the flock, in this case, the local bishop did exactly the right thing in issuing this excommunication edict and he was slapped down by a Vatican official!

The appearance of a Vatican compromise on this issue comes at the worst possible time in the cultural and political situation of Latin America. This Catholic continent is especially the target of attack by the aggressive forces of the culture of death, so the last thing we need is for the Church to look weak or divided about our teachings or our resolve to fight the purveyors of death to our brothers and sisters there. The Catholic Church, and her divine authority, is in many places the only shield that the unborn have to keep the abortionists’ instruments of death from them. Let us pray that the Vatican will rectify this error and fortify that shield without delay. The unborn children of Brazil as well as all other parts of the world are counting on us!

Sincerely,

Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer,
President, Human Life International

Lifeguard Column by Nicolo F. Bernardo

NATURAL family planning, more known in clinical circles as “fertility awareness” method, was surprisingly the subject of a lecture of a Nobel Peace Prize recipient 30 years ago.

On Dec. 11, 1979, the lecturer, notwithstanding her other remarkable contributions, focused on a rather controversial topic that must have raised the eyebrows of her elite European audience in liberal Oslo. At that moment, this “peace worker” was telling the world that her social work for natural family planning was among the things she would like to be remembered most.

She was no other than the “living saint,” Blessed Mother Teresa.

In her lecture, the founder of the Missionaries of Charity started with the story of the unborn babe in Elizabeth’s womb, St. John the Baptist, who “leaps with joy in her womb” as the Virgin Mary approaches with her unborn. This unborn child was Jesus, who would later welcome all the unwanted: the poor, the sick, the homeless, the naked, and of course, the “most little one of these”—the unborn.

Mother Teresa cared for this most neglected and defenseless member of the human family, saying, “Let us make…every single child born and unborn, wanted.” Abortion, said Mother Teresa, was a “direct war” committed by the mother herself. “If a mother can kill her own child,” she asked, “what is left for us from killing each other?”

How is this war to be stopped? As her Missionaries did in India, Mother Teresa advocated adoption centers for unwanted babies and the prevention of unintended pregnancies through natural family planning.

Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity began teaching the method in 1967 after a postulate who trained in the Sympto-Thermal method joined them. Since then, the trained Sisters would visit families to teach about fertile and infertile periods via charting or thermometer. Once a couple mastered the method, they are asked to instruct others in return.

It was in 1970 when a Natural Family Planning center was opened in Calcutta, with 150 registered families. Its success drew the attention of the government of India which funded more studies on the method and excused practicing couples from the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s mandatory sterilization. (Indira was not related to the other Gandhi, Mahatma, who like Mother Teresa advocated “birth control through self-control” or brahmacharya. But despite their opposed views, Indira was a close friend to Mother Teresa, as they frequently visited and wrote letters to each other). By 1989, India’s Annual Report lists 69 Natural Family Planning Centers care of Mother Teresa’s nuns.

Illiteracy had not been a barrier in teaching natural family planning. Take it from Mother Teresa, who taught no-read-and-write poor couples how to chart their cycles using sticks! We can credit her for her creativity and resolute effort, which should be emulated by people of good faith who can make natural family planning part of any comprehensive social program for the poor, like our local Gawad Kalinga.

“Another thing which is very beautiful,” she said in her speech, “we are teaching our beggars, our leprosy patients, our slum dwellers, our people of the street, natural family planning.”

Mother Teresa’s message is very timely for our country where families are supposedly struggling with extreme poverty and, either by ignorance or imprudence, not observing responsible parenthood.

Due to the long standing association of “family planning” with “contraception,” promoting natural family planning can itself be daunting, as some would even believe that any form of responsible parenthood should not be taught at all.

But Mother Teresa did not share this confusion. In fact she understood well that part of her mission is to introduce to people natural family planning—the Creator’s design in our reproductive system.

“In Calcutta alone in six years,” she said in her lecture, “we have had 61, 273 babies less from the families who would have temperature meter which is very beautiful, very simple, and our poor people understand. And you know what they have told me?’ Mother Teresa asked, ‘Our family is healthy, our family is united, and we can have a baby whenever we want.’”

Unlike other contraceptive methods, natural family planning works both ways of valuing sexuality and periods of abstinence, so it is in itself promoting moderation.

Mother Teresa reiterated her point in another most publicized speech, before the National Prayer Breakfast at Washington, DC on Feb. 3, 1994, before the pro-abortion and contraception Clintons. In her words:

“I know that couples have to plan their family and for that there is natural family planning. The way to plan the family is natural family planning, not contraception. In destroying the power of giving life, though contraception, a husband or a wife is doing something to self.”

As to whether nuns and priests should involve themselves in teaching natural family planning, Mother Teresa recalled a poor parent who once told her, “You people who have practiced chastity, you are the best people to teach us natural family planning because it is nothing more than self-control out of love for each other.”

In her other speeches, such as before the Nagasaki National University School of Medicine in April 1982, and in her other interviews, Mother Teresa would invite couples to practice natural family planning and for social workers to do the same since the method is effective and healthy—without any side effect.

A feisty woman, Mother Teresa—unlike many pastors today who cannot even raise the issue before the pulpit—would not compromise her principles on the matter. She was staunch and pro-active on the subject. She took the same stand again during the 40th anniversary of the United Nations, when there was a premiere screening of a film on her life during the gala event. Her views certainly made her audience, not the least the UNFPA which supports abortion under special circumstances, uncomfortable.

Navin Chawla, a Hindu civil service worker, writes thus in his book Mother Teresa: The Authorized Biography: “Both (Mahatma) Gandhi and Mother Teresa share a curious combination of religious conservatism and radical empiricism. At heart, Gandhi always remained deeply conservative. Mother Teresa, too, has remained faithful to the official interpretation of Catholic doctrine, particularly on abortion and family planning….She is a true Vaishnavajana—a minstrel of God.”

If only Mother Teresa’s example would be actively emulated in all religious orders, societies, parishes, Catholic communities and schools in our country, we would have gone far in averting incidents of “unwanted” pregnancies and abortions especially among the poor. Perhaps our times call for more Mother Teresas, fertile with vision and courageous to spread responsible parenthood as a noble cause, a saintly mission.

To this end, may I congratulate fellow columnist Sr. Mary Pilar Verzosa, RGS, founder and national coordinator of Pro-Life Philippines. Kudos to the successful National Congress for aNatural Family Planning on the anniversary of Pro-Life Philippines. May your brood of pro-life advocates increase and multiply! #

Dear Spirit and Life Readers,

The Scriptures and our Church both tell us that Lent is not a season for timid creatures. If in Lent we were to simply jump through the hoops of fasting and abstinence on the days prescribed, we would be rightly accused of a sort of spiritual minimalism. But God is not served by minimalists – He wants tested saints of faith to be channels of His Life to the world! That is what Lent calls us to be.

How will we embrace God’s Life so deeply this season? The answer is simple. By first jettisoning the baggage we have accumulated in our lives over the past year. I am talking here about interior personal baggage that we have picked up at the cheap convenience stores of human frailty and about which we let ourselves off the hook continuously: pettiness, every sort of self-indulgence, backbiting, selfish attitudes, worldliness, gossip and the like. Withdrawing permission for anti-Christian behaviors at the core of our beings and ridding ourselves of these faults and imperfections is the first order of business for Lent. It is the basic Gospel call to conversion of heart, and there is no growth in the spiritual life if we do not repent of the things that keep us far away from God. Will we accept the challenge of removing the
blockages to God’s grace this Lent?

If so, this interior purification is just the first step to embracing His Life. The Church gives us three more: prayer, fasting and almsgiving. They seem so commonplace, yet these practices can create a consuming fire within us, transforming us into spiritually strong men and women of Christ. These practices are not spiritual drudgery; they are spiritual life! We don’t put on our calendars that we have to “embrace life today”! We only have to live life each day, and in the same way, Lent asks us to consciously live those things which are channels of spiritual life for us.

Make prayer a passion, not a duty. Ask God for the grace to understand the true nature of prayer which is the very soul of our spiritual lives. If we don’t pray, we suffocate spiritually. We wouldn’t allow that to happen to our physical bodies, yet through negligence and any number of excuses we drop prayer off our list of priorities and end up spiritually suffocating our souls. There is no time like the present to commit ourselves to a strong prayer life. The interior benefits are truly life-giving.

Fasting makes us spiritual men and women in a way that few other practices can because fasting is a voluntary renunciation of desires of the flesh. No truly spiritual person can live without this practice. So here is a simple Lenten challenge – skip a meal. I guarantee that you will not die! Quite the contrary – you will find yourself filled with divine light in the depth of your being and a vibrancy of life like you have never felt before. Really try it.

Finally, make sure you go above and beyond the call of duty to help your neighbor. Almsgiving, namely, the voluntary deprivation of personal resources for the sake of another, is inconvenient, and sometimes radically so. No matter. Do it anyway and trust God to send it back to you many-fold. When even the smallest deeds of kindness and generosity are done with a completely childlike heart that expects nothing in return, the actual return is a full measure of God’s grace and blessing. I would rather have that than all the money in the world.

Be faithful to Lent. It is a deep training program in life, divine Life that is. Let’s not lose the opportunity to become deeply spiritual men and women this Lent, and God will then make us a channel of His Life to others.

Sincerely,

Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer,
President, Human Life International

source:: www.hli.org

Lifeguard Column by Nicolo F. Bernardo

ALTHOUGH the human sciences have always dabbled with the healthy and ill, the “natural” and the “unnatural” in sexuality, anthropologists and biologists of recent seem to have found new affection on cracking the “biochemistry of love.” After all the poetry has been said about romance—whose feast we shall celebrate on February 14—scientists finally have their take on love, with revelations to interest theologians of the body.

The clinical thesis is this: The body’s neuropeptides reveal how love does proceed and what sexual practices could better serve our physiologic interests. John Paul II must be right to say that the Creator’s plan for relationships is imprinted in our bodies (dubbed as the “Theology of the Body”). Our bodily design has got a lot to tell on what true love could mean.

Take for instance our hormone oxytocin. By it we can fairly say how sex, love, and reproduction are meant to rhyme. This “bonding hormone,” as it is called, is present in the continuum of courtship, romance, orgasm, pregnancy, infant nurturing, and breastfeeding. And what oxytocin joined together, let no man put asunder.

Then there is the hormone vasopressin. It is the aggression hormone that makes males protective, jealous, and attentive husbands. Vasopressin helps in laying down memories, in familiarizing with the partner and her kids. Take out this mechanism of jealousy and protectionism and the father would be like any stag, oblivious of who may be his kids or who may be his partner’s partners.

Of course there are many men who behave that way, which only shows that the presence of this or any hormone—or their absence—is hardly deterministic of human behavior. The phenomena of love could not be reduced to a chemical concoction or a biological event, although the body’s chemicals may suggest how a healthy loving person could be.
A study by the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience, funded by the US National Institute of Mental Health, says that oxytocin and vasopressin play key roles in the formation of social attachments between animals, especially for “lifelong pair bonding” or “monogamy.” It might lead us the answer whether we humans are meant to stick to one, since humans, unlike other animals, are high in oxytocin and vasopressin.

It is no coincidence that another mammal high in oxytocin and vasopressin is also monogamous. The prairie vole, unlike its other mice cousins, is a case in point. Oxytocin receptors have high concentration in the nucleus accumbens and the pre-limbic cortex of prairie voles as in humans. Vasopressin receptors are also in large quantities in the ventral forebrain of the prairie vole. The male prairie vole is defensive and exclusive of its partner, while the female prairie vole and her boons are almost inseparable. Together they make a family.

“The oxytocin and vasopressin systems appear to activate two separate nodes of the same reward pathway to form and reinforce pair bonds,” explains Dr. Larry Young, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University School of Medicine (Emory University Health Sciences Center in the study Reward Mechanism Involved in Addiction Likely Regulates Pair Bonds between Monogamous Animals).

Among humans’ fellow primates (monkeys) that have been studied, monogamous marmosets also have higher levels of vasopressin found in the reward centers of their brains than do non-monogamous rhesus macaques.

Remember that in John Paul II’s work Love and Responsibility, love proceeds from phases of “sensuality/sentimentality” to “affection” then to “real love.” These stages agree with our brain’s neuropeptide mechanisms.

Attraction allows people to home in on a particular mate. This state is characterized by feelings of exhilaration, and intrusive, obsessive thoughts about the object of affection. But this romance, sometimes of lust, is unstable, and not a good basis for commitment and child-rearing. The final stage of love, long-term attachment, allows parents to cooperate in raising children. This state, says Dr Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University-New York, is characterized by feelings of calm, security, social comfort, and emotional union (Fisher, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love).

How do you maintain the stimulant of romance for a long time? Fisher holds it possible to trick the brain into feeling romantic in a long-term relationship by doing novel things with one’s partner. These drive up the level of dopamine or the “pleasure hormone” and can therefore trigger feelings of romance as a side effect. Thus, long-term love can be sustained by doing acts of love as exhilarating feelings follow after.

Now about procreation. Oxytocin is the same hormone that works for rearing and reproduction. Not only does the oxytocin mediate females’ retention of the male sperms, it also causes men to sleep and snooze after a sexual act. This seems to work to make the man stay awhile with the woman, to bond longer while asleep, and probably deal with commitment and possible conception the morning after. Interestingly, one cause that helps women deal with and forget the difficulty of pregnancy and childbirth is her oxytocin being secreted into her spinal column during and after labor. Oxytocin is also responsible for her maternal behavior.

With all these mechanisms of oxytocin in mind, we can see why in contraceptive and homosexual sex, the purposes of oxytocin release are frustrated (and precisely why certain contraceptives have to tamper the body’s natural hormones). My former professor in Feminism of the Theology of the Body, Dr. Josephine Acosta-Pasricha of the University of Santo Tomas, used to say that in male to male relationships, the most we have are aggressive vasopressins defaulting together. No wonder why such ties hardly last.

So arguably, we can say that the Christian theology of the body has a biological and anthropological support. Man has the natural components for choosing love, and it benefits him to act on love and life-giving acts. It appears that the mores about fidelity, divorce, abortion, contraception, and homosexual sex came up not just to savor the soul, but to give the body its authentic reproductive health.

Brian Clowes, PhD

There are two causes of most of the human misery that afflicts the world today. The first is lack of respect for the transmission of life within the marital union, which leads to destructive practices such as contraception, sterilization, abortion, homosexual adoption and “gay marriage.” The second is a lack of respect for the born human person, which has given us murder, genocide, racism, slavery, rape and many other evils. (more…)