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I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.

The Catholic Donnybrook; One Kennedy Legacy? | First Things Then there is this...

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2009/09/the-catholic-donnybrook-one-kennedy-legacy

Grief over Kennedy's passing (and, I suspect the resounding end it brings to an irreclaimable and more innocent-seeming era) should not permit us to pretend that serious effects of Kennedy's work simply do not matter. It matters that through Sen. Kennedy's influence many Catholics voted for candidate Obama; they now languish in a kind of suspended animation while the president runs a cup-and-ball trick with life issues—now you see it, now you don't. Is taxpayer-funded abortion covered under Obamacare? Will healthcare rationing demand physician-aid-in-dying in place of treatment? No, not under that cup, not under that cup. The hand is quicker than the eye and the truth is become an illusion.

The Catholic Donnybrook; One Kennedy Legacy? | First Things

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2009/09/the-catholic-donnybrook-one-kennedy-legacy

Sen. Kennedy did his share of private and public good but then, we most of us do our share of good, proportionate to our means and connections; it is by no means disrespectful to the memory of this influential and powerful man to recall that he pivoted on abortion during a moment of crucial debate, and as Kennedy was then the very voice of Catholic politics, that mattered. His turnaround on abortion gave the American Catholic the means of paying lip service to life while enabling a culture of death. They didn't even have to think about it, because Ted Kennedy had thought about it for them, and even fed them their lines.

Pope cites Teilhardian vision of the cosmos as a 'living host' | National Catholic Reporter

Pope cites Teilhardian vision of the cosmos as a 'living host' | National Catholic Reporter

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The Democracy of the Dead

G.K. Chesterton notes that tradition is intrinsically democratic: "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

Thank You Lord!

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Catholic Vote

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Human Backups...Coming Soon To A Medical Center Near You!

By Wesley J. Smith...More proof in that embryonic stem cell research is not—and never has been—about getting some use out of leftover IVF embryos that are due to be destroyed anyway. A serious proposal has been forwarded in the UK that would allow people to make IVF embryos, not to bring to birth, but rather, solely for the purpose of storing them for later use as a source of stem cells. From the story:

Couples could be allowed to store embryos in order to use them to create new body parts or cure diseases.

Government legal and ethical experts are to discuss whether families can 'bank' embryos not just for procreation but also for use by doctors to create personalized treatments for parents and their children.

Now, [under UK law] embryos—the first stage of life after an egg has been successfully fertilized—can be stored for up to five years but only for procreation. But a huge ethical debate is set to erupt as the Government's fertility watchdog, the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA), moves closer to endorsing new developments in medical science. It will debate whether embryos could be stored to harvest important stem cells that have the ability to turn into any tissue type in the body.

Given that this is Brave New Britain, which already allows the creation of human/animal hybrid cloned embryos, the outcome of this "debate" is easy to predict.

This is figurative cannibalism, and it won't stop with embryos. Once the principle is accepted that living human beings can be objectified and used as a product, there is no way it will be limited to the earliest humans. Indeed, as I have often described, fetal farming is already on the table in bioethics discourse and some of the world's most notable medical journals have published articles urging that people with profound cognitive impairments be used as sources of organs and human subjects in medical experimentation.

Ideas have consequences. Once we state that human life does not have intrinsic moral value simply and merely because it is human, there isn't much that we cant justify.

The Clarity of First Things

Certain matters are at the heart of what First Things magazine(firstthings.com) exists to do. The struggle to halt the slaughter of the unborn and the ill, for instance—the need to defend the weakest among us, constantly threatened by a culture that accepts abortion and euthanasia as easy devices with which to solve personal and social difficulties. We believe the United States to be a grand historical experiment, worth defending in its own right and inherently interesting to study. We work for the advancement of Jewish–Christian relations. We feel the divisions of Christianity—Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic—as a scandal that shames all believers, even while we know that true ecumenism must begin with each tradition's theological integrity. We demand a society that feeds the hungry and cares for the poor. We know that the political effort to strip religion from the public square is an attempt to undermine the American experiment, and it will bring only disaster in its wake. On all this, we will not be silent, and we will be heard.

First Things is not a political magazine. It deals with religion, culture, and the moral structures of public life, and it does so in the politically indifferent light of philosophy, theology, literary theory, and historical study. We live, however, in strange days: a time in which the doing of such things—the very attempt to be serious—is itself a political act, with political consequences and political costs.

Politics is a secondary activity, of course. Even theology, philosophy, and poetry are secondary, in a sense: They may be first in the order of language—and thus first in the range of what a magazine can actually publish—but they come second to faith and prayer in the order of existential truth. Still, both politics and intellectual pursuits have a genuine importance and dignity precisely because, in their proper secondary places, they require neither false inflation to the all-encompassing nor false deflation to the insignificant.

"The first thing to be said about public life is that public life is not the first thing," Richard John Neuhaus declared when he launched First Things in 1990, and he added:

"By religion and public life we mean something like what Saint Augustine meant by the City of God and the City of Man. The twain inevitably do meet, but they must never be confused or conflated. Whether at the beginning of the fifth century or at the end of the twentieth, the particulars of their meeting are always ambiguous. At the deepest level the two cities are in conflict but, along the way toward history's end, they can be mutually helpful. The polis constituted by faith delineates the horizon, the possibilities and the limits, of the temporal polis. The first city keeps the second in its place, warning it against reaching for the possi-bilities that do not belong to it. At the same time, it elevates the second city, calling it to the virtue and justice that it is prone to neglect. Thus awareness of the ultimate sustains the modest dignity of the penultimate."

As the dead ideas of previous decades rear again their angry heads, we seem in many ways thrust back to where we were when the magazine began. This is a moment when the modest dignity of the penultimate must be reasserted. This is a day, again, for seriousness. This is a time, once more, for First Things.