God, Man, and Abortion: A New Summons to Hope - by Edward Short

In Crisis

 

Many good things distinguish Grief Redeemed, Anne’s Lastman’s gripping testament to the dehumanizing havoc wrought by abortion. It is the work of a woman who has devoted over seventeen years of her life to helping thousands of fathers and mothers heal from the wounds of abortion. It is an unsparing analysis of the way abortion destroys not only unborn children but the very fabric of the family. And it is the fruit of conversion: Mrs. Lastman has come to her courageous testament after two abortions of her own, which she was only able to survive, as she says, because of “the mercy of God” and her own “profound rediscovered love for him.”

That contrition should be the foundation of so much of Mrs. Lastman’s testimony puts her in lively company. One thinks of the great English defender of life, Aleck Bourne (1886-1974), who, despite initially agitating for the legalization of abortion, went on to found the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child, and Dr. Bernard Nathanson (1926-2011), an abortion doctor for many years in New York, as well as an architect of the American pro-abortion lobby, who became one of the most ardent and heroic of pro-lifers.

In addition to these splendid pro-life converts, Mrs. Lastman’s career evokes that of an even more illustrious figure. “You can depend on this as worthy of full acceptance,” St Paul told St Timothy, “Christ came into the world to save sinners. Of these I myself am the worst. But on that very account I was dealt with mercifully, so that in me, as an extreme case, Jesus Christ might display all his patience, and that I might become an example to those who would later have faith in him and gain everlasting life.”

In her impassioned appeal to those unaware or heedless of the real enormity of abortion, and in her solicitude for those beguiled into conniving in the killing of their own unborn children, many of whose stories are woven into the text of Grief Redeemed, Mrs. Lastman exhibits an altogether compelling, Pauline authority. In this respect, she calls to mind another convert, John Newton (1725-1807), the former slave driver turned abolitionist and hymnologist, who, in repudiating the slave trade, came to personify amazing grace.

Another differentiating virtue of Mrs. Lastman’s approach is that she recognizes that the essence of abortion is a failure to embrace the God-given gift of life. As she writes early in the book, “for every one of the abortive women whom I have counseled there has been a history in which the Word of God has been totally absent.” Consequently, many of these women often kill their babies out of genuine ignorance of the sanctity of life.

Yet they are not the only ones who fail to grasp the source of life’s sanctity.
 Many pro-lifers preen themselves on making the case for life without making reference to the Lord of Life, as though the all-important relation between the Creator and His creatures had nothing to do with the inviolability of life. Many lose sight of the fact that the guilt suffered by those who betray that inviolability is the voice of conscience, the voice of the Holy Spirit calling the sinner back to the Father of Mercies. Many remain convinced that natural law arguments alone can sway a public opinion ignorant of the God who animates that law. By boldly making God and His love the centerpiece of her study, Mrs. Lastman reminds her readers that it is only by understanding and receiving the love of God that we can understand and protect human love.

Her theological approach also takes into account the full scale of abortion’s evil, something from which many pro-lifers shy away. Indeed, it is striking how few reviewers have accurately described Grief Redeemed. Far from being a “non-judgmental” counselor’s log, as Frances Phillips and Kathryn Jean Lopez suggest, it is a searing indictment of the satanic viciousness of abortion. Above all else, Mrs. Lastman is a truth teller and when she defines her terms she does not shuffle.

Abortion is ultimately not about rights…. It is about hatred, especially spiritual hatred. It is about the hatred Lucifer bears for God and his creation. It is about the cursing of the seed and the crushing of the head. It is about robbing God of children destined for his Kingdom. It is about wickedness wanting tenants for his own accursed kingdom. It is about violence and degradation. It is about dehumanization and death. It is about the mechanization and finally the death of societal conscience possibly leading to the death of society itself.

If Grief Redeemed is full of compassion for those who regret allowing themselves to become agents of this “violence and degradation,” it is never ‘non-judgmental’ compassion, which, she recognizes, would trivialize the grief of those who deplore what they have done in killing their own children. As such, her approach reveals the debt Mrs. Lastman owes to the most perceptive of all pro-lifers, Pope John Paul, II, whose Evangelium Vitae remains the single best book ever written on the topic precisely because it anatomizes so clearly and so charitably the grave inherent sinfulness of abortion.

Still another virtue of the book is that it does not avoid addressing aspects of the culture of death that pro-lifers often sidestep. For Mrs. Lastman, the tragic rejection of Pope Paul VI’s condemnation of contraception, so prophetically set out in Humanae Vitae, lay the groundwork not only of legalized abortion but of all of the moral and spiritual disorders that have come to characterize the pro-abortion ethos. “Humanae Vitae,” she writes, “was the document which came out against the social engineers. It attempted to sound the warning bells about possible future disasters. Very sadly it was a document not embraced either by the Catholic world or society in general. Hence the rampant spread of unbridled sexuality, unholy sexuality, contraception on an unimaginable scale, abortions in unprecedented numbers, overt demands for homosexual acceptance as a ‘normal’ lifestyle leading to demands for same-sex marriage, and the slow and insidious disintegration of the family.”

That contraception, sodomy and abortion are sins that mutilate the family is something one rarely hears even from Catholic pro-lifers. As we all know, in a social order where deploring such sins opens one up to charges of bigotry, silence rules, a silence replete with collusion. It is also a silence which consigns young men and women suffering from post-abortion grief to an isolated grief, which gives rise to the nihilism and self-destructiveness that now characterize so many young people. In taking stock of this “disenfranchised grief,” as she calls it, which has become ubiquitous in the wake of Roe v. Wade, Mrs. Lastman asks a number of very pointed questions.

Are the drugs, promiscuity, recklessness their cry to be loved, welcomed, valued, nurtured, guided and directed? Are the dangerous paths embarked upon a rebellion against their perceived lack of value? Are the young consciously atoning for the unjust deaths of millions of their siblings?

Throughout the book, Mrs. Lastman makes clear that unless we acknowledge the intrinsic sinfulness of abortion and other related evils there can be no hope of our coherently combating the culture of death.

Often it has been said to me during counseling sessions: “Now I understand what sin is and what sin does.” Until this time the sense of sin had not been an issue. “Sin” was what religious fanatics spoke about…. As I listen to these and other similar words I am filled with hope, as I see that the spirit’s travail for this loss can be the energizer for future hope.

Here, Mrs. Lastman echoes a memorable passage from a sermon by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who knew from the confessional how necessary the sense of sin is to those seeking to disenthrall themselves from the trammels of evil.

True contrition, that is perfect sorrow for sin, is when we are sorry, and sorry for God’s sake. Now people think it is hard to have so pure a sorrow, that to be sorry because we are in danger to be damned may be easy … but to be sorry for God’s sake and not our own—which is contrition—is a thing for saints or the devout and not for ordinary men or loth and lingering sinners. But easy or hard, remember, brethren, this, and root and rivet it into your hearts, that sorrow for sin is a gift of God and that if you ask for it, it will be given. Do not enquire if you have got it; ask for it, beg and pray for it, with tears, with inward tears at least, and strong cries of the heart beseech God to give it to you. Summon your last strength for that. You will have it; you will get it in time enough. God knows our need. God knows our need. I repeat it a third time. God knows our need.

In encouraging those suffering from post-abortion grief to see for themselves the sinfulness of abortion, Mrs. Lastman shows true solicitude for the survivors of abortion, not the false solicitude of those who give out that by glossing over this sinfulness they are somehow doing the sinner a favor. Penance, after all, enables the sinner to come to terms with his post-abortion grief and reconciles him to God, while impenitence aggravates his grief and estranges him from God.

Then, again, Mrs. Lastman shows how an impenitent age attempts to defy its guilt by authorizing the State to have the final say in matters of birth, marriage, family, and death, an unholy compact which has set off a tourbillion of deviance.

A nation which legally mandates that its future citizens may be murdered, has also covenanted itself with death because it has attempted to wrest sovereignty over life and death from God, and placed it in the hands of Caesar… Having done this, it cannot then hope to justly govern its people. Those who have forced the legalisation of abortion cannot then rest because what has been enacted must be protected, and so further abominations must be deemed necessary in order to justify the original act. Thus late term abortions, infanticide, patricide, matricide, euthanasia, same-sex addictions, demands for deconstruction of marriage and demands for same-sex marriage must follow. Beginning with the killing of weakest infants slowly the moral order must collapse.

Particularly odious proof of the collapse of the moral order in England came recently when the Director of Public Prosecutions released a statement on the Crown Prosecution Service’s failure to prosecute two doctors exposed by the Daily Telegraph for carrying out abortions based on gender. In his statement, the Director, Keir Starmer said that “there may be circumstances, in which termination of pregnancy on grounds of fetal sex would be lawful….” Unconscionable bureaucrats like Starmer may never regret condemning babies to the abattoir, but for those capable of contrition Mrs. Lastman has a vital message:

Human beings were not designed to abort children. They were designed to fulfill a desire to give birth; therefore, the damage which abortion does cannot be repaired by psychological or psychiatric measures (although these measures can help) but by God Himself. Only He can repair the damage to the sacred sanctuary where He encounters the creature of His desire. The healing of abortion grief comes when there is an encounter between the sinner and God. When this reconciliation is facilitated then solidarity with God and neighbor (including the aborted infant) is reestablished and reintegration into the human and heavenly family is achieved.

The alternative to acknowledging and repenting of the sin of abortion, as Mrs. Lastman shows, is set out by the author of Evangelium Vitae with great cautionary dispatch: “If it becomes licit to take a human life when it is weakest, wholly dependent on its mother, on its parents, on the strength of human consciences, then what dies is not only an innocent human being but also human conscience itself. And who knows how widely and quickly the cancer of this destruction of conscience will spread.” At any rate, Lastman is surely right when she says that at the root of the culture of death is “a death of desire to know our creator God,” a death for which our absentee Catholic episcopacy must bear grave responsibility.

Having shared with her readers the fundamental threat that abortion poses to the very survival of our civilized humanity, as well as the lives of unborn children, Mrs. Lastman insists that it is precisely in our war with the pro-abortion establishment that our most valiant pro-lifers will emerge.

Perhaps the greatest and strongest warriors against the enemy of life, abortion, and against abortion providers, will be those individuals who have submitted themselves to the procedure and allowed their baby to be destroyed. Men and women who have experienced an abortion and who know the pain, loss, loneliness, regret, guilt, shame, will slowly surface. With a loud voice they will condemn governments, abortionists, societies and individuals who have lied to them, when told their baby was not a baby and there would be no after effects.

This rousingly hopeful passage will give readers some sense of why Grief Redeemed is such a special book and why Anne Lastman is a pro-lifer to celebrate and applaud.

St. Francis, Christian Love, and the Biotechnological Future - William B. Hurlbut, M. D.

In The New Atlantis  

Sometime near the end of the twelfth century, a wealthy young man named Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone came upon a shepherd driving his flock to market. And apparently for the sheer joy of it — the extravagant pleasure of saving those sheep from slaughter — the young man promptly bought the entire flock, led the sheep out to open meadows, and set them free.

This is the man everyone knows as St. Francis of Assisi (ca. 1182–1226) — namesake of the newly elected pope, a saint beloved throughout the world, even by people who have nothing to do with the Catholic Church. A figure of the High Middle Ages who has been called “the morning star of the Renaissance,” he seems even now, almost eight centuries after his death, to radiate all that is most liberal in our modern mood: the joy of nature (he is the patron saint of ecology), the love of animals, a profound social conscience, an endless compassion for the poor and downtrodden.

And yet, consider another story about this man. Later in life, in the full flowering of his compassion, his followers came to ask him if they should serve meat for Christmas, the feast of the Incarnation, and he answered, “On a day like this, even the walls eat meat — and if they cannot, then let them be spread with meat.” This too is St. Francis, and in that image of meat smeared on the walls in exuberant joy at the birth of Christ, he affirms what he recognized as the pattern and purpose of creation, the drama of death and redemption.

Somehow St. Francis remains both universally admired and broadly misunderstood. In his almost childlike cheerfulness and generosity, he seems at times the most human of human beings: “the man of poverty, the man of peace, the man who loves and protects creation,” as the new Pope Francis has described him. But in the severity of his self-denial and solitary vigils, St. Francis of Assisi also seems strangely discordant with the modern culture he helped create — his life both familiar and distant, genial and disquieting. It is as though he anticipated the spiritual outlines of all that was to come: the great new possibilities of the modern world and the dangers those possibilities would deliver. Yet within these apparent contradictions may be a treasury of wisdom the modern world urgently needs.

Love and the Natural Order

 

As the popular account of his conversion is often given, the young Francis rode out one day on the plains of Umbria in central Italy. He was well liked by his friends and well known for his extravagant frivolity, but lately he had seemed somehow changed. An illness had thwarted his plans of military glory, and he was troubled by a series of vivid dreams. Along the way, he came across a poor man begging by the side of the road, and drawing closer, he could see that the man was a leper. Francis recoiled at the sight of this wretched and repulsive body, for leprosy was as much a subject of dread in medieval Europe as it had been in biblical times. In pity he tossed the leper a coin and turned away — but then, in even deeper pity, he turned back and embraced the man.

Some of Francis’s biographers (notably André Vauchez, in his recent work) doubt the incident occurred in quite the way it is commonly told, but Francis himself described similar encounters that played a major part in his spiritual transformation: “When I was in sin, it seemed very bitter to me to see lepers,” he wrote in his Testament, but “the Lord led me among them and I did mercy to them. And in going among them, what had seemed to me bitter was changed for me into sweetness of soul and of body.” Freed from his disgust and fear to love others as God loved him, Francis proceeded to give away everything he owned and turned his life to the service of the sick and the downcast, for the glory of the Lord. He took it as a matter of courtesy that he should never be in the presence of anyone poorer than himself.

What followed from these early encounters with lepers would astonish and awaken the world. Through the humble faith of Francis, as in the parable of the mustard seed, the smallest and seemingly most insignificant became the source-spring of an extraordinary transformation and renewal. Others quickly followed him in what they called “holy poverty,” including a wealthy magistrate named Bernard of Quintavalle. (As the Franciscan biographer Efrem Trettel observes, here for perhaps the only time in history the world witnessed the spectacle of two beggars standing in a town square giving away gold coins.) Soon hundreds and then thousands joined Francis, spreading across Europe and beyond. Wearing only a tattered cloak and a rope belt tied with three knots symbolizing the evangelical counsels of perfection (poverty, chastity, and obedience), they walked the world like the grace of God, enlivening faith, reconciliation, and hope, and stirring the most ordinary lives to extraordinary exultation.

All of this forms a vision of life in stark contrast to the aspirations of our own age, our technological moment defined perhaps most of all by the interplay of freedom, pride, and peril. Nowhere is this more evident than in our advancing comprehension and control of living nature. Biotechnology is more than a set of ingenious processes and products. It is also a conceptual and ethical outlook grounded in ideas about the source and significance of the natural world, an outlook informed by philosophical assumptions about progress and human destiny.

The traditional role of medicine, for example, has been to cure disease and alleviate suffering, to restore and sustain the patient to a natural level of functioning and wellbeing. The medical arts were in the service of a wider reverence and respect for the order of the created world: “the physician is only nature’s assistant,” as the Roman healer Galen explained.

But now, armed with the powers of biotechnology, medicine has found a new paradigm, one of liberation: technological transformation in the quest for happiness and human perfection. Slowly but steadily the role of medicine has been extended, driven by our appetites and ambitions, to encompass dimensions of life not previously considered matters of health, with the effect of altering and revising the very frame of nature. Increasingly, we expect from medicine not just freedom from disease but freedom from all that is unattractive, imperfect, or just inconvenient. More recent proposals, of a still more ambitious scope, include projects for the conquest of aging, neurological fusion of humans and machines, and fundamental genetic revision and guided evolution — for transhumans, posthumans, and technosapiens.

The danger is immediately evident. Imagined ideals, untethered from a comprehensive and coherent moral frame, set the course. And desire, deracinated from its natural origins where pleasure and higher purpose are inextricably bound, provides the motive force. In the absence of any concept of cosmic order, where the material and the moral flow forth from a single creative source, all of living nature becomes mere matter and information to be reshuffled and reassigned for projects of the human will.

Yet, notwithstanding these concerns, it is clear that this is not a simple issue. What understanding of nature and human purpose can guide us? Disorder, disease, and death are woven into the very fabric of life. And medicine itself is an intervention over and against the underlying anguish that permeates the natural world. It is our species’ strength, and moral imperative, to aspire to a fuller flourishing of life. Francis was well aware of these realities, for he suffered deeply from bodily ills for which he sought medical care — but ultimately, in affectionate acceptance, he called these burdens “his sisters.”

For Francis, the answer lay, not in escape from the desperations of natural life, but in a transformation in his spiritual understanding of the interwoven meaning of suffering and love. He came to see that the whole of creation, and each of its varied creatures in their distinct strengths and struggles, reflected and revealed the perfection of the Creator. If all things are from one Father, then all are kin and worthy of solicitude and appreciation. It was not nature in the abstract that he loved but every differentiated being in its particularity and individuality. Likewise, he loved not humanity in the abstract so much as individual human beings. He described this love as courtesy, a tender affection and concern for others as precious and unique, as creatures beloved of God; and his courtesy was born not of magnanimity or largesse (with their implicit sense of superiority) but of genuine humility of heart. He became the “little brother” (the Order of Friars Minor is the official name of his followers), placing himself in a position of neediness before others. Not so much a giver of gifts as a “giver of giving,” Francis provided the invitation to give by putting himself in circumstances that drew forth the generosity of others — and with it, their self-respect.

As he treated his fellow human beings so he treated all of his fellow creatures. His great canticle Laudes Creaturarum speaks of sun, moon, and water as brothers and sisters. According to his disciple and first biographer Thomas of Celano, “Even towards little worms he glowed with exceeding love,” and “used to pick them up in the way and put them in a safe place, that they might not be crushed by the feet of passersby.” This was not mere sentimentality but a gratitude grounded in an intimate awareness of the dependency of life. Indeed, on his deathbed he extended his canticle of creation with the words, “Be praised, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death, from whose embrace no living person can escape.” How, within the creation of an omnipotent and beneficent God, there can be both suffering and love remains a mystery. But clearly for Francis, that creation was simultaneously material and spiritual — sacramental through and through.

Hubris and Humility

 

St. Francis’s attentive and appreciative disposition toward the multiplicity of natural forms, even the tiniest and seemingly insignificant, expresses an understanding of the universe as an ordered and intricately interrelated whole. This perspective on the natural world as a unity established and sustained within a structure of governing principle and overarching purpose, as opposed to the perverse and capricious inclinations of the gods of antiquity, contributed to crucial conceptual foundations for the birth of empirical science. It is not an accident that Roger Bacon, the thirteenth-century naturalist often called the father of the experimental method, was a Franciscan friar.

Moreover, this Franciscan frame of mind suggests limits on our modern project of biotechnology. Recognition of the fragile interdependence of living nature urges us to be cautious — lest we disrupt the basic balance of being and thereby drain the created order of its beauty, vitality, spiritual significance, and moral meaning. We have no license for an attitude of arrogance as masters and possessors of nature. Plants and animals may be used, not as mere raw materials, but with tenderness, compassion, and genuine gratitude. Genetically engineered featherless chickens for cheaper pot pies and leaner pigs with severe arthritis are a violation of basic kindness and courtesy — of the concern that Francis extended to even the lowliest of creatures.

It is clear that biomedical technology has moved away from its noble and compassionate origins, pulled and persuaded by more immediate desires and images of personal fulfillment. Within the constraints of the natural world, desires provide directions that motivate and empower purposeful action. Now, in our technological era, they have increasingly become ends in themselves — an imperative of indulgence, with all the disproportions and dangers that implies.

It is not difficult to see where this will go in the absence of a higher and more compelling ideal. First, the easy satisfaction of our most infantile and shallow desires, a voluntary trivialization and enfeeblement of soul. Then, an uninhibited technological exploration of the aesthetics of the self. We are already somewhat familiar with these degraded manipulations of natural desire in the personal and social tragedy of substance abuse, but it seems likely that our advancing knowledge of neurophysiology and neuropharmacology will deliver temptations far more difficult to resist.

Equally troubling are the direct social dangers, the pervasive and open-ended competition with others, where biotechnology is deployed in the service of vanity and pride, or simply the unbridled quest for position or power. Building on the principled justifications already established in the practice of cosmetic surgery, we will seek better babies, more beautiful bodies, and superior performance.

Finally, and most disturbingly, there is at least the possibility that the powers of biotechnology will be deployed by the state in a coercive program of social engineering — all in the name of building a better world. Already we have examples of mandatory genetic screening and forced abortion, and one only need remember what was done in the name of “racial hygiene.”

It has been said that people who worship health will not remain healthy, but in the depths of our desires we have always dreamed of something even beyond health. The witness of human history testifies that when we elevate our natural inclinations to the level of a guide, when we move along the gradient of desire, we tend toward disproportion and even perversion — desires become tyrants. And now, in our age, such disproportions and dangers are dramatically magnified by our biotechnology.

In light of all this, one can sense a wisdom in the severity and self-denial that were, for Francis, inseparable from the source of his joy. He had rediscovered an ancient truth in the inversion of desire, not as a negation of being but as a positive passion. In the image of the Lord, he emptied himself and received all things back renewed, purified, and restored in their divine glory. In his humility and self-surrender, Francis became more fully human, more free from temptation and fear, and more free for the fullness of love. Indeed, if G. K. Chesterton is correct, Francis’s severity of self-denial is most rightly understood as romance, a special dedication and devotion freely and joyfully given. In the heroic mode of medieval chivalry, it was for “Lady Poverty” that he lay down his life.

Suffering and Redemption

 

Francis’s life of poverty suggests something far more than just a technique to balance the seduction of the senses and the errors of emotion. Rather, it points to a spiritual anthropology that stands as a corrective to the naïve naturalism that is increasingly employed to describe the human person. Francis understood that spiritual unity with a divine source and significance is essential for the fullness of human life and our capacity for genuine altruistic love. From an evolutionary perspective, acts of altruism are usually described as a naturally grounded mechanism for sustaining social solidarity. And generally, within such accounts, the notion of divine love is considered a mere functional fiction, a projection of the idealizing imagination. In this sense, the heroic acts of Francis on behalf of Lady Poverty can be explained away as nothing but a sublimation of natural inclination. The experience of history, however, is that self-giving love is an indispensable dimension of human flourishing and even human survival. Genuine altruism is the crucial element necessary to sustain shared community and personal peace. And when it is absent, we find conflict without conciliation, bitterness without forgiveness, and misfortune without mercy.

Yet, even if we accept the idea that the self-giving spirit of Francis drew its sustaining power from a divine source, we still face a dilemma. However much we may wish to simplify and sanitize the story of St. Francis, an honest reading of the historical record brings us face to face with dimensions of his spirituality that are remote and disquieting to the modern mind. The same man that greeted the glory of the dawn sought out the silence and solitude of the cave, and the same hands that stretched out in joyous welcome to the little birds, bore, according to the testimony of his companions, the very marks of the wounds of Christ. Indeed, Francis had prayed that he would know the pain of the passion of his Lord, in order to comprehend more fully the depth and meaning of God’s love. This was no mere moderation or rebalancing of desire; the spiritual transformation in the life of Francis was a radical realignment — a recognition that the whole of the present disposition of creation, in both its beauty and its suffering, is an unfolding story of sacrifice and redemption.

This acknowledgment of the centrality of suffering in the order of the natural world does bear a certain superficial similarity to the picture given by evolutionary theory. Yet in the absence of a coherent spiritual cosmology, it is not hard to recognize the deep source of the pessimism and cynicism of our scientific age. The evolutionary panorama presents the spectacle of unspeakable suffering that is inseparably woven into the entire fabric of predation and natural catastrophe. A comprehensive account of the world must reckon with the problem such suffering poses for any notion of transcendent goodness.

Francis faced this issue by recognizing a sacred order of creation in which there is a hierarchy of sacrifice, one in which life is sustained by life — and ultimately, by the willing offering of life in the image of God’s love. But which of these visions of the source and meaning of life is true? Which account are we to believe? Torn between the private lures and longings of self-will and the aspirations of the religious ideal, the fundamental question arises, “In whose image are we made?” In the seventeenth century, Pascal would warn that those who sought God apart from Christ, who went no further than nature, would fall into atheism. The natural world, with its strife and struggle, poses a question that it cannot answer: How can there be both suffering and love?

Yet with this question the deepest meaning of the material world is opened to understanding. All of creation, and its evolutionary ascent to mind and moral awareness, may be recognized as a kind of living language in an epic tale of the deepest spiritual significance. Through the eyes of faith, the entire cosmic order of time and space and material being may be seen as an arena for the revelation of Love, for the creation of a creature capable of ascending to an apprehension of its Creator; but more profoundly, for the reaching down, the compassionate condescension of Love Himself.

There within the human form with its capacity for genuine understanding and empathy, moral truth was revealed in matter; the true Image of God was borne within a body. In the face of Jesus was made evident the face of Love, and most specifically in His suffering on the Cross. Those who looked upon Him felt His pain, yet recognized His righteousness and knew the injustice of His plight; His was the ultimate, defining act of altruism.

In this the transcendent was revealed in and through the immanent; nature and God were reconciled, and the cosmos was restored to its intelligibility. The fullness of Love was revealed in human form. In that moment of human history, the entirety of creation was lifted to another level of meaning. The evolutionary struggle, the seeming futility of suffering and sacrifice and death itself, was raised to the possibility of participation in a higher order of being. In the drama of death and redemptive love — as in both the story of his rescuing the flock of sheep and the story of his urging his followers to smear the walls with meat in celebration of the Incarnation — Francis saw the ultimate design and purpose of creation.

Christian faith is a faith in the God whose nature is Love — an affirmation that reaches beyond all suffering to the ultimate goodness of life. It is here that, while decisively denying the pessimism, cynicism, and amoral implications of a purely naturalistic psychology, Christianity may at once affirm the reality and positive significance of the material world and its evolutionary process. In the emergence of moral nature and the capacity for genuine spiritual understanding, humanity, as the culmination of creation, is called into communion with the very life of God, the life of Love.

Torn and tattered, frail and needy, but joyful in the freedom of love, Francis of Assisi provides a startling juxtaposition to the ambitions and appetites driving our images of perfection in this age of biotechnology.

Conto de Natal - por João César das Neves

In DN

Não sei bem o que aconteceu. Foi uma espécie de ataque, que me atirou paralisado para esta cama de hospital. Ouvi há pouco o médico dizer à minha mulher que há hipóteses de eu sobreviver.

Ainda de manhã me levantei cheio de vigor e dinamismo, pleno de ocupações e projectos. Agora estou aqui, prostrado, inútil, vegetativo. Não sei o que foi, mas sei que não consigo falar nem mexer o lado direito. Tenho dores não sei bem onde. A minha tentativa de sorrir deu um esgar que assustou a enfermeira. Acabou tudo, mesmo que haja hipóteses de sobreviver. A minha vida, se ainda lhe posso chamar assim, mudou para sempre. Ou melhor, a vida que eu tinha acabou.
Foi então que me lembrei da pergunta que decidira fazer sempre: "Senhor, o que é que Tu queres disto?" Foi há anos que, perante novidades e acasos que me sucedem, quis ver tudo a partir de Deus. Qual a atitude que Ele quer que eu tome agora? Esta pergunta salvou-me de muitas situações difíceis, onde a minha mesquinhez me ia meter em sarilhos. As coisas vistas de cima ficam muito diferentes. S.Paulo disse que "tudo concorre para o bem dos que amam a Deus" (Rm 8, 28). Do ponto de vista de Deus as coisas são sempre boas, belas, grandes. O Senhor do universo tem sempre uma saída, uma solução, um projecto grandioso ligado a tudo o que faz. O que é que o Senhor quer disto?

Aqui, mais até que nos problemas do emprego ou perplexidades de família, a pergunta parece fazer todo o sentido. Esta cama de hospital é tão inesperada e surpreendente que tem de ter uma razão. O Senhor podia ter-me levado, mas não levou. Não me quis levar. A minha vida acabou mas eu continuo aqui. Porquê? Devo ser preciso para algo. Ou isto tem lógica, ou então nada tem.

Mas que pode o Senhor querer de um paralítico? Qual a tarefa que me compete? O que pretende o Senhor disto? Ser testemunha d'Ele aqui, claro. O Senhor precisa agora de alguém neste sítio e mandou-me a mim. A resposta é a mesma que eu tinha ouvido tantas vezes: "Nada temas, continua a falar e não te cales, porque Eu estou contigo e ninguém porá as mãos em ti para te fazer mal, pois tenho um povo numeroso nesta cidade" (Act 18, 9-10). Ser sua testemunha aqui, paralítico na cama. É isso mesmo. Ainda me falta mais isso, antes de o Senhor me levar.

O meu sofrimento, paciência, alegria na adversidade testemunharão uma presença diferente. "Se alguém quer vir após mim, negue-se a si mesmo, tome a sua cruz, dia após dia, e siga-me. Pois, quem quiser salvar a sua vida há-de perdê-la; mas, quem perder a sua vida por minha causa há-de salvá-la" (Lc 9, 23-24). A minha cruz agora é a paralisia, as dores. Já foi o desemprego, a falência, o insulto, agora é a cama de hospital. Ligada à Mangedoura e Calvário é testemunha e presença salvadora, de mim e outros, neste sítio.

Mas como? Não consigo falar e mal me posso mexer. As visitas, doentes e pessoal do hospital não entendem o que penso, não ouvem o que digo, não percebem o que sinto. Não pode ser isso. Uma testemunha precisa de meios para testemunhar. Mesmo cheio de boas intenções e propósitos elevados, ninguém dará por eles. Quando ninguém ouve, como se pode ser apóstolo?

Então percebi. Um consegue ouvir-me. Para Ele falo. S. Inácio disse: "O homem é criado para louvar, reverenciar e servir a Deus Nosso Senhor, e mediante isto salvar a sua alma" (Exercícios Espirituais, 23). Nesta cama não tenho préstimo como servidor, nada posso dizer ou testemunhar, mas posso louvar e reverenciar o Senhor. Neste Natal devia haver falta de quem glorificasse a Deus neste canto do mundo, e por isso Ele me mandou vir. Para a harmonia do universo é preciso que alguém louve a divindade aqui, agora. É isso que o Senhor quer. Essa é a minha tarefa. A última tarefa da minha vida.

Louvar a Deus, paralítico mudo numa cama de hospital no tempo de Natal. Aquilo que os Anjos e os Santos fazem no Céu, que os coros fazem nas igrejas, que em todo o mundo se ouve nesta noite, eu tenho de o fazer aqui. Isso fará deste Natal o mais feliz da minha vida. O último.

Man’s Search for Meaning and abortion: finding hope in suffering - by Catherine Shenton

“The world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming it.”
– Helen Keller

October 10, 2012 (Unmaskingchoice.ca) - Viktor Frankl witnessed and experienced the far reaches of human suffering. “Life in a concentration camp,” he wrote, “tore open the human soul and exposed its depths.” Man’s Search for Meaning—his reflective recounting of his imprisonment by the Nazis—has much to tell us about life, suffering, and what it is to be human.

Frankl and his fellow prisoners had everything taken from them that could be taken. They were forcibly removed from their homes and separated from their families. Their possessions were confiscated. Even their names were replaced with numbers. Others told them when and where they could sleep, when they must arise, what work they must do, and even how much (or how little) they could eat. And yet we find many heroes among the victims of the concentration camps; for, as Frankl tells us, “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s own attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

I, and probably most people who read this, have never experience the depth of suffering Frankl and his fellow prisoners experienced. Our lives, nevertheless, are not without suffering in some form or another, and so I want to examine how suffering affects opinions and choices in our society. In particular, I often hear suffering given as a justification for abortion, whether the suffering be that of the mother or of the child. Does the suffering of either justify abortion?

Abortion to alleviate the suffering of women?

So many times I hear people condoning abortion out of a sense of compassion for women. An unexpected pregnancy can be a terrifying thing. Sudden responsibility for another human being, if she accepts this responsibility, may reshape a woman’s life—both present and future. Fear, uncertainty, and lack of support are just some of the factors that may contribute to the suffering of a pregnant woman. For some there are further difficulties to deal with—her child may have been conceived in rape, or her health may be in danger. If a woman is considering abortion, it seems reasonable to infer that she is suffering in some way, and that she sees abortion as an acceptable means of alleviating that suffering.

Viktor Frankl witnessed many men, who when confronted with difficult circumstances sought only to alleviate their own suffering, with no regard for the wellbeing of others. He tells of the Capos—men who betrayed their fellow prisoners and took the side of the Nazis. They made their own lives easier, but increased the suffering of others, even condemning some to death by their actions. While we may sympathize with the desperation that led people to behave in this way, these are certainly not the people we remember as the heroes of the concentration camps. We look up to those who chose the harder path—that of retaining their dignity and moral conviction in spite of their suffering, those who sacrificed in whatever ways they could for the benefit of others.

We admire people who do hard things when the right things are hard. We admire people who suffer with dignity, and who suffer for the sake of others. And yet, as Frankl points out, admiring this noble suffering in others is no assurance that we will respond this way when faced with our own sufferings. Most people can probably relate to this. Even in the simple things, we may blame our circumstances for our irritability, impatience, or our failure to help another. While suffering can be an opportunity for courage, so often we use it as an excuse. Frankl, on the other hand, maintains that to be worthy of suffering is to seek the ways our unavoidable suffering can benefit others.

While removing (in the case of abortion, killing) another human being whose presence is causing us difficulty is something we can do, and is a decision which some may sympathize with because they see the difficulty of our circumstances, this is not to say that it is something we ought to do. Acting to alleviate our own suffering at the expense of the lives of others is something many people have done throughout history, but on a deeper level we know that this is not a choice we would commend or even condone in other situations—why should we do so with abortion? Why should our society say that because one human being is suffering, she has the right to end the life of another? The answer is, we should not. We should instead do our utmost to alleviate the suffering of women in crisis, and to preserve the lives of their children.

When we talk about people having freedom to choose, we should always consider what is being chosen, and should strive to challenge one another to choose the highest good. For a woman in a crisis pregnancy, this may mean choosing to see her child as someone to fight for, rather than as something to be gotten rid of. Nietzsche wrote, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Living for her child will not take away a woman’s suffering, but it can help to give that suffering meaning.

Abortion to alleviate the suffering of children?

There are times, according to some defenders of abortion, when abortion is what is in the best interest of the child. “The child is going to have a terrible life. The child is going to suffer. The mother is choosing what’s best for her child.” And what’s best for her child (according to these people) is death.

If someone is going to suffer—perhaps to suffer greatly—are we doing that person a service by ending his or her life? Is abortion justified in cases where children are very ill, or will be born into difficult life circumstances? Is sparing them this suffering an act of compassion?

What was the correct response for Viktor Frankl when confronted with the challenge of speaking to fellow inmates who were in despair? He knew with certainty that if these men remained convinced that their lives had no meaning, if they remained without hope, they would die. Their suffering would end. He could have told them this. He could have said that they were all better off to give up on the miserable lives they were forced to live and simply die. Instead, he challenged them. He challenged them to consider not what they expected from life, but what life expected from them. He challenged them to find a “why” worth living for. He could do little to eliminate their suffering short of ending their lives, but he did much to alleviate it, to help them see meaning in their suffering.

Sparing others suffering when we can is, most certainly, an act of compassion when our means are moral. Sparing someone suffering by ending her life, however, is a misguided attempt at compassion. To deny someone a chance to live will indeed prevent her from suffering, but it will also prevent her from experiencing joy, from loving, and from having the choice to overcome her suffering with dignity. You are the only person with the choice to see meaning or despair in your suffering. You are the only person to make that choice of how you will respond to your circumstances. Why would we deny this choice to others?

We live in a culture that abhors suffering. Suffering is to be avoided—almost at all costs. Life is seen as good and valuable when it is pleasant, comfortable, and pleasurable. We may admire the noble way in which others suffer, but most of us would rather avoid suffering altogether for ourselves. No life, however, is devoid of suffering. There are times when it is inescapable. What then does this mean for our life? Every living human being will suffer in some way or another. Is life then less valuable? On the contrary, Frankl reminds us, “We must never forget that we may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that cannot be changed… When we are no longer able to change a situation… we are challenged to change ourselves.”

Every human life will have suffering. Every human being will be faced with choices as to how to respond to his own unique suffering. Some will allow their suffering to chart their course, to dictate their thoughts and actions. Others will be the masters of their suffering. Some will hurt others because they themselves are hurting. Others will face their suffering as a means of protecting others from harm.

What did Frankl discover in his time in the concentration camps? “The truth—that love is the ultimate highest goal to which man can aspire.” To love is to choose the highest good for the other. If we love someone we certainly do not want to see that person suffer. We may do all we can to alleviate the suffering. But when we cannot take the suffering away, to love is to walk beside them and help them recognize their dignity, to help them suffer with their head held high.

To love a woman in crisis is not to offer her death for her child in order to take away her suffering, but to empower her to live for love, and so to find a meaning for her suffering. To love a woman in crisis is to walk with her so that she may not say “My circumstances forced me to do what was wrong,” but rather, “I had the courage to do what was right.”

To love one’s child is not to deny her life so that she may never suffer, but to give her life so that she may experience it in its fullness, and to teach her to suffer with dignity when suffering cannot be avoided.

We live in a culture where people seek to make their lives easier by ending the lives of others, but to love our culture is to constantly call people to live for something higher, to recognize their own dignity and the dignity of others. Humanity is capable of great cruelty, selfishness, and evil. We see this now with abortion, as we see it throughout history. Humanity, however, is capable of still greater love, selflessness, courage, and good. We must decide how we will respond to our own sufferings, and to the sufferings of others.

“We have come to see man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.”

—Viktor Frankl

Assisted Suicide: The Forgotten Front in the Fight for Life - by Adam J. MacLeod

by Adam J. MacLeod

In The Public Discourse

As the proponents of assisted suicide strive to legalize it in Massachusetts, we should take another look at their arguments and the deceptions therein.

The battle over assisted suicide and euthanasia is not over; advocates of assisted suicide are not resting. While earnest and engaged Americans are focused on the economy, an upcoming presidential primary, and impending Supreme Court battles over the health insurance mandate and same-sex marriage, the culture of death continues to advance largely unnoticed along a front that some had supposed was dormant. Now, from the Bay State, comes news that advocates for assisted suicide have succeeded in bringing before Massachusetts voters a ballot initiative that would permit doctors to help their ill patients kill themselves. The initiative will appear next year. If it succeeds, Massachusetts would join Oregon and Washington in legalizing assisted suicide. Montana remains in limbo after the state high court called into question the enforceability of Montana’s prohibition against assisting suicide, but the legislature earlier this year declined to legalize the practice expressly.

People quite naturally recognize that life is better than death, that the deliberate destruction of life is an evil to be avoided, and that the state has a role to play in preventing suicides. It follows logically from these uncontested (and incontestable) observations that state laws prohibiting euthanasia and assisted suicide are just and efficacious. But, like magicians who use distractions to remove the important object from view, proponents of legalized death have shrouded the inviolability of human life in a mist of confusion. Exposing their ploys is the first step in defeating their efforts to advance the culture of death. Below are three arguments that are likely to be advanced for legalization in Massachusetts. All three are designed to distract and to deceive.

The Alleviation-of-Suffering Ploy

In public, proponents of assisted suicide most commonly characterize assisted suicide as the only hope of relief for “suffering patients” who are afflicted with serious illnesses. This plea is of course designed to appeal to voters’ (rightful, natural) sense of compassion for those unfortunate souls in whose shoes none of us would choose to walk. None of us likes to contemplate what it would be like to be told by a doctor that one has just a few months to live, and that one’s most prominent experience during those final months will be unrelenting pain. And we cannot bring ourselves to judge our neighbor who is forced to face such grim prospects. Who are we to tell the terminally ill patient that she must not end her life a few weeks early, and that she may not avoid the suffering and indignity that attend such horrible illnesses?

Thus, cleverly, assisted suicide proponents use voters’ natural aversion to death and suffering to build support for legalized death. To be against suffering is to be against laws that unnecessarily prolong a life of suffering, the argument runs. To celebrate life is to celebrate what is good and enjoyable in life, not to burden the terminally ill with a dark and unendurable coda.

This is an effective ploy, but it rests upon a bold deception. Assisted suicide is neither necessary, nor actually used, for the alleviation of pain. Indeed, the data show a wide gulf between the public justifications for assisted suicide and its actual use in practice. Oregon was the first state to legalize assisted suicide, implementing its program in 1997. The state’s annual reports consistently reveal that, of those who seek and obtain assistance in suicide, only a small fraction cite “inadequate pain control or concern about it” as a reason for their choice. Indeed, hauntingly, more patients are worried about being a “burden on family, friends/caregivers” than are concerned about pain.

Even these data do not tell the whole story; Oregon lumps those who are in pain with those who are merely concerned that they might be in pain at a future date. But few terminally ill patients need to resort to suicide in order to alleviate actual pain. Tragically, legalization in Oregon appears to have decreased patient access to palliative care. Of the initial 142 cases of assisted suicide in Oregon, only 13% were referred for palliative care consultations, and studies reveal that the quality of palliative care in Oregon has declined since assisted suicide became legal.

A much more common motivation than pain management appears to be simple clinical depression. In 2006, the Royal College of Physicians released a statement revealing that patients who want to die will change their minds—will choose life—after they are treated for depression in 98% to 99% of cases. Two researchers writing in the Michigan Law Review also concluded that when patients are treated by physicians who listen to them, treat their depression, and manage their pain, “their wish to die usually disappears.” In light of these facts, it is striking that only one of the sixty-five assisted suicide patients in Oregon in 2010 was referred for psychiatric evaluation. In 2009, none was referred.

The Unnecessary Prolongation Ploy

A second favorite ploy, related to the first, is to conflate prohibitions against assisted suicide with extreme measures to keep people alive. Though legalization proponents trade on fears of being artificially sustained after one’s time has come, prohibiting assisted suicide is not the same as forcing people to live beyond their time. To affirm that life is always worth defending from attempts to destroy it is not to claim that one should always make efforts to lengthen life.

Nor does respect for human life entail that the terminally ill must bear up stoically under extreme pain. Showing respect for all persons regardless of their condition or circumstances means providing needed medical care, including palliative care, when the terminally ill are in their final weeks and hours. That some forms of palliative care hasten impending death is not a reason to condemn its administration. The purpose of administering palliative care is not to kill but to relieve pain. The physician who administers palliative care is no more culpable than the physician who attempts to save a life by performing a risky surgery.

Medical practice involves risk and, sometimes, death. The line that we must ask a physician not to cross is the line at which he adopts the patient’s death as his purpose. That action is inherently different from performing a risky medical procedure; it makes the physician a different kind of person, one who is unfit to practice medicine and who harms himself as well as others.

The Personal Autonomy Ploy

The most common motivation for assisted suicide patients is a desire for personal autonomy, to control the time and manner of one’s own death. In Oregon, this is the most commonly cited concern of assisted suicide patients, and many scholarly advocates of assisted suicide admit that this is the real justification for legalization. The desire for control is understandable, but suicide is a means of control that causes real harm not just to the person who destroys his own life but also to all those with whom he is in community.

Proponents of legalization invoke a radical conception of personal autonomy. The idea is that each individual person makes the value of her own life by choice. When an individual ceases to value her own life, when she no longer prizes those treasures that life enables her to enjoy, she ought to be free to end her life.

People do not make their lives valuable merely by choosing to live. If this were the case, then the lives of small children and senile adults would have no value and would be unworthy of protection in law. As a matter of fact, myriad laws protect human life at various stages of human development, even in states—Oregon and Washington—that permit assisted suicide for the terminally ill. These laws do not discriminate against the very young or the very old, or against those who ascribe the least value to their own lives. States invest resources in suicide prevention and privilege citizens to prevent suicidal acts, by force if necessary. None of these laws provides for weighing the instrumental value of the life being saved.

So even in states that permit assisted suicide, the law reflects our understanding that life has value, regardless of the conditions in which it is lived. Laws preventing suicide preserve the communities of which the suicidal person is a part. The personal autonomy ploy rests upon the deception that suicide affects only the one who commits it, and that this individual alone should have a say in the matter. But suicides are not purely autonomous acts. Just as the family and neighbors of each person recognize the intrinsic value of that person, the family and friends of a suicide realize the irremediable loss that suicide causes.

Suicide should not be inflicted upon anyone. To assist its commission is to do violence to the very fabric of civil society. For the sake of doctors, their sick patients, and the communities in which doctors and patients live, Massachusetts and Montana should strengthen their legal commitments to protect the sick and suffering.

Saudação do Papa aos portadores de deficiencia e seus cuidadores em Madrid

In Vatican
...

A juventude, como recordei outras vezes, é a idade em que a vida se revela à pessoa em toda a riqueza e plenitude das suas potencialidades, incitando à busca de metas mais altas que dêem sentido à mesma. Por isso, quando o sofrimento assoma ao horizonte duma vida jovem, ficamos desconcertados e talvez nos interroguemos: Poderá a vida continuar a ser grande, quando irrompe nela o sofrimento? A este respeito, escrevi na minha encíclica sobre a esperança cristã: «A grandeza da humanidade determina-se essencialmente na relação com o sofrimento e com quem sofre. (…) Uma sociedade que não consegue aceitar os que sofrem e não é capaz de contribuir, mediante a compaixão, para fazer com que o sofrimento seja compartilhado e assumido mesmo interiormente é uma sociedade cruel e desumana» (Spe salvi, 38). Estas palavras reflectem uma larga tradição de humanidade que brota da oferta que Cristo faz de Si mesmo na Cruz por nós e pela nossa redenção. Jesus e, seguindo os seus passos, a sua Mãe Dolorosa e os santos são as testemunhas que nos ensinam a viver o drama do sofrimento para o nosso bem e a salvação do mundo.

Estas testemunhas falam-nos, antes de mais nada, da dignidade de cada vida humana, criada à imagem de Deus. Nenhuma aflição é capaz de apagar esta efígie divina gravada no mais fundo do homem. E não só: desde que o Filho de Deus quis abraçar livremente a dor e a morte, a imagem de Deus é-nos oferecida também no rosto de quem padece. Esta predilecção especial do Senhor por quem sofre leva-nos a contemplar o outro com olhos puros, para lhe dar, além das coisas exteriores que precisa, aquele olhar de amor que necessita. Mas isso, só é possível realizá-lo como fruto de um encontro pessoal com Cristo. Bem conscientes disto sois vós, religiosos, familiares, profissionais da saúde e voluntários que viveis e trabalhais diariamente com estes jovens. A vossa vida e dedicação proclamam a grandeza a que é chamado o homem: compadecer-se e acompanhar quem sofre, como o fez o próprio Deus. E, no vosso maravilhoso trabalho, ressoam também estas palavras evangélicas: «Sempre que fizestes isto a um destes meus irmãos mais pequeninos, a Mim mesmo o fizestes» (Mt 25, 40).

Por outro lado, vós sois também testemunhas do bem imenso que constitui a vida destes jovens para quem está ao seu lado e para a humanidade inteira. De maneira misteriosa mas muito real, a sua presença suscita em nossos corações, frequentemente endurecidos, uma ternura que nos abre à salvação. Sem dúvida, a vida destes jovens muda o coração dos homens e, por isso, damos graças ao Senhor por tê-los conhecido.

Queridos amigos, a nossa sociedade – onde demasiadas vezes se põe em dúvida a dignidade inestimável da vida, de cada vida – precisa de vós: vós contribuís decididamente para edificar a civilização do amor. Mais ainda, sois protagonistas desta civilização. E, como filhos da Igreja, ofereceis ao Senhor as vossas vidas, com as suas penas e as suas alegrias, colaborando com Ele e entrando, de algum modo, «a fazer parte do tesouro de compaixão de que o género humano necessita» (Spe salvi, 40).

Com íntimo afecto e por intercessão de São José, de São João de Deus e de São Bento Menni, confio-vos de todo o coração a Deus nosso Senhor: Seja Ele a vossa força e o vosso prémio. Como sinal do seu amor, concedo-vos, a vós e a todos os vossos familiares e amigos, a Bênção Apostólica. Muito obrigado.