Stephen Mirarchi has a post on his recent experience praying at an abortion clinic.

Anyone familiar with the television series Star Trek: Voyager will remember the character of the holographic doctor. When the ship’s doctor was killed at the beginning of the series, a computer program–the Emergency Medical Hologram–was activated as a temporary solution. Since Voyager became stranded in the Delta Quadrant, the EMH had to be utilized far more than intended by his designers. Throughout the series, the doctor’s behavior simulates more and more closely that of a normal member of the crew such that he becomes regarded by the others as another person whom they have come to know.

This theme is entertaining in Star Trek: Voyager but deadly in real life, that is, the theme of becoming a person. In the modern West, today, we often base our behavior on the premise that personhood is something to be accomplished.

There are a number of ways this is expressed:

1. Personhood is achieved by reaching a certain stage of physical development.

This is one reason why abortion is acceptable at all in our culture. While we cannot deny that from the moment of conception an embryo is a unique human being (speaking from a biological point of view), we easily deny that it is fully human by appealing to a lack of personhood. Interestingly, this runs completely counter to our tendency to materialism–after all, we can’t appeal to something immaterial if we are materialists. Materially, speaking, an embryo is just as human as anyone else.

2. Personhood is achieved by being able to perform certain functions.

Most people who support abortion will appeal to this, especially if they are confronted on the first point. This is also the error that admits things like euthanasia, etc.

3. Personhood does not intrinsically entail certain rights which must be respected.

This is a very sad error, indeed, for it denies the most basic rights of everyone. The other errors tend toward this error in practice. Claiming that a person has no intrinsic rights by virtue of being a person, leads to several horrific conclusions, e.g.: a person’s rights are granted by the state (the opposite of the American philosophy), a person who is strong enough may assert his will in an arbitrary manner (Nietzscheism), we all operate on a consensus of “polite behavior” in a society.

Those who embrace this error cannot know what love is because they recognize in no one–not even themselves–anything which by its nature is lovable.

As usual, we have things entirely backwards.

Every human being is a person by nature. This human nature, which entails personhood, is a gift of God, and is a primary reason that human beings are in the “image of God.” God is personal; in him are Three Persons. We are personal, too. Our destiny, therefore, is a free relationship with him. This freedom is his gift to us, a key element of our personal nature.

The theory of human rights is based precisely on the affirmation that the human person, unlike animals and things, cannot be subjected to domination by others. We must also mention the mentality which tends to equate personal dignity with the capacity for verbal and explicit, or at least perceptible, communication. It is clear that on the basis of these presuppositions there is no place in the world for anyone who, like the unborn or the dying, is a weak element in the social structure, or for anyone who appears completely at the mercy of others and radically dependent on them, and can only communicate through the silent language of a profound sharing of affection. (Evangelium Vitae)

Many will say that Vatican II brought the idea of the “universal call to holiness.” Of course, the universal call to holiness is not new: it is written on human nature and made explicit by our Lord himself, who said “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The Vatican II Council, however, beautifully re-emphasized against certain errors the dignity of the lay vocation.

There had been and is still a dangerous tendency in the Church to speak of a “vocation” only to the priesthood or religious life. What a pity! It’s as if God only has a plan for certain of his children, and the others belong to a catch-all category of “lay people.” How far from the truth!

There is an unfortunate coincidence from the beginning with the word ‘lay,’ which means in a secular sense “someone who is not an expert,” but it is not used this way by the Church. Lay people must be experts in holiness.

A lay person is someone who fulfills the call of his baptism by sanctifying the temporal order. Christifideles Laici says, “The vocation of the lay faithful to holiness implies that life according to the Spirit expresses itself in a particular way in their involvement in temporal affairs and in their participation in earthly activities” (17).

The laity can help evangelize the world in a way that priests and religious cannot do.

In fact, given that the New Evangelization recognizes that the Church herself is the first object of evangelization, that is, that the Church herself must always grow more faithful to Christ even as she preaches him to others, it might be appropriate to express the complementarity of the priesthood, religious life, and lay state in terms of evangelization. The priesthood exists to support the lay state through: teaching, the sacraments, and shepherding. The religious life provides an example of radically living the Beatitudes. These two vocations evangelize, by all means, but they express in a certain way the eternal order. This is why celibacy is very fitting for the priesthood and religious life: they witness before the Church and the world the reality of Heaven “where they neither marry nor are given in marriage.”

The lay state, on the other hand, can sanctify the temporal order of the world. I imagine that it says something about the difficulty of this task that God gives more people the lay vocation than any other vocation.

There are a few tendencies, which exist today, that undermine the dignity of the lay state. Christifideles Laici points out two, especially: the tendency to be over-involved in “Church work” and the tendency to separate faith and everyday life (CL, 2).

We all see these tendencies crop up in various ways.

For example, I read the other day in a vocations discernment guide, the following statement, “Some [vocations] are more important for the work of the Church, but all lead to personal sanctity.” The work of the Church is sanctity, the “salvation of souls” (Code of Canon Law, 1752).

Another example. I was talking with a priest awhile ago. The subject of the purification of sacred vessels at Mass came up since this was not too long after many parishes had begun to have only priests, deacons, and acolytes purify the vessels after Holy Communion. He explained to me the difficulty in implementing this particular change at his parish, telling me that it hurt people’s feelings because they felt like Rome was telling them that they were not holy enough to touch the vessels.

How sad! I wonder whether the people at that parish are ever told about the purpose of the lay vocation? It’s a tragedy that people think that holiness comes from doing the things that priests do. For priests it does, but not for others. What an insult to the faithful, to let them think that they’re not participating at Mass or that they’re not active in the Church if they don’t perform a specific function like proclaiming the readings or acting as an extraordinary minister of Holy Communion.

Especially in certain liturgical matters, such as when extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion are needlessly multiplied–as if this is a way to participate more at Mass–the universal call to holiness is being presented as a “universal call to priestly ministry.”

Redemptionis Sacramentum says:

[12.] On the contrary, it is the right of all of Christ’s faithful that the Liturgy, and in particular the celebration of Holy Mass, should truly be as the Church wishes, according to her stipulations as prescribed in the liturgical books and in the other laws and norms. Likewise, the Catholic people have the right that the Sacrifice of the Holy Mass should be celebrated for them in an integral manner, according to the entire doctrine of the Church’s Magisterium. Finally, it is the Catholic community’s right that the celebration of the Most Holy Eucharist should be carried out for it in such a manner that it truly stands out as a sacrament of unity, to the exclusion of all blemishes and actions that might engender divisions and factions in the Church.

Personally, although I do not believe that I have the lay vocation, at this time in my life I am in the lay state, and I find it insulting when lay people are treated as second-class members of the Church, when their rights are trampled on by priests who refuse to celebrate the liturgy according to the liturgical norms. Priests are supposed to support the lay faithful, exercising Christ’s priestly office in the celebration of the liturgy. Is it any wonder that there is such a crisis of family life, then? The vocations of the Church are complementary. There is, indeed, a “vocations crisis,” not only a crisis of vocations to the priesthood and religious life.

MY WIFE AND I just had an abortion. Two, actually. We walked into a doctor’s office in downtown Los Angeles with four thriving fetuses — two girls and two boys — and walked out an hour later with just the girls, whom we will name, if we’re lucky enough to keep them, Rosalind and Vivian. Rosalind is my mother’s name.

We didn’t want to. We didn’t mean to. We didn’t do anything wrong, which is to say, we did everything right. Four years ago, when Tina and I set out on this journey to have children, such a circumstance was unimaginable. And yet there I was, holding her hand, watching the ultrasound as a needle with potassium chloride found its mark, stopping the heart of one male fetus, then the other, hidden in my wife’s suffering belly.

The rest of the story.

Some philosophers think that people only did things that were wrong because of a lack of knowledge. While the Beatific Vision, for instance, would be so good as to overwhelm the will making it impossible to choose anything less than God, we can’t attribute every sin to a lack of knowledge.

It is very sad when we know what we’re doing but do not do the right thing. What a failure of Charity we are all capable of, what a failure of even natural love.

I was watching some Neon Genesis Evangelion the other day and I was struck by the emphasis placed on Existential beliefs such as “reality is what you make it” and “you have as much value as you choose to give yourself.” Indeed, “self-worth” and “worth” were used synonymously.

What is the problem with self-esteem?

Your value does not depend on how much you value yourself.

It doesn’t depend on you. It doesn’t depend on what you accomplish. It doesn’t depend on others.

Every human being has value because God loves him. Period.

This is just another example of modern philosophy’s (and psychology’s) tendency to think it can create reality rather than recognizing what is real.

While the Church does not reject the theory of natural selection or various other theories of evolution, I find that there is a problem with the “evolutionary mindset” of people today. What is the problem? It is precisely that people find it hard to recognize differences of kind rather than merely of degree.

For example, how many people consider human beings to be on a continuum with plants and animals? No one can deny that humans are more advanced than other animals, but plenty of people today deny that there is a qualitative difference. The difference is huge: man has a spiritual soul. Our spiritual faculties such as intellect and will cannot be the result of matter and thus could not have evolved.

So, technically speaking, man could not have evolved from lower creatures. However, the Church does not rule out the possibility that man’s body could have evolved to the point where it was capable of being animated by a spiritual soul.

It’s interesting to note that it used to be commonly held that the ability to reason required a non-material element in man while today people commonly take it for granted that reason is the product of evolution, a material quality. This leads people to suppose on one hand that in the future artificial intelligence will be possible and on the other hand that things like abortion are okay because we’re simply animals anyway.

Hierarchical cosmology where there are clearly different orders of things recognized (plants, animals, men, angels) has been replaced by a democratic cosmology where everything is thought to be on a continuum. In other words, modern man simply believes that one kind of thing is not really distinct from another but that given the right circumstances any kind of thing could become any other kind of thing.

In the Post-modern, Relativist culture of the modern West, on what ground can we engage people with the message of the Gospel?

We cannot really combat Post-modernism on its own terms since it would undermine the truth of the message, and we cannot engage only in rational terms since that is now foreign to the culture.

I think we can look to the Gospel itself. People may see Christianity–or any institution or morality, etc.–as oppressive, but real oppression is found in the inescapable human experiences of sin, suffering, and death. Everyone knows what it is to do something wrong and to have something wrong to him. Everyone has suffered something. Everyone dies. Christianity offers the only remedy for these things. This is the message of the Resurrection without which our “faith is vain” according to St. Paul. The example of Christians willing to embrace suffering and death and who are not slaves to sin is essential.

Reflecting on the title of the post immediately prior to this one, I realize that what matters most is not whether I like those words or not. Either they are used accurately or they are not. If they are used accurately, they should be used when appropriate. If they are not they should not be used.

See how subjective we like to make everything?

Which questions are the ones we ask first?

• Do I like it?
• Do I agree with it?
• Is it popular?
• Is it easy?
• Will I have to change?

What about:

• Is it true?
• Is it right?

There are words that have become ubiquitous in our vocabularies that I just don’t like to use. Some of these started out as legitimate terms but have taken on modern meanings that I don’t want to support.

Values: These are created by people. Because different people have different “values,” they cannot be debated. After all, a debate would only be an appeal to someone’s values. Which value system do you use? How do you decide? You don’t. Use this word when you want to keep people from offending you by questioning one of your beliefs or actions.

Lifestyle: This word is a very recent one, I’m sure. I can’t imagine that before the rise of the middle class and radical individualism the idea that people can choose to live different “lifestyles” arose. Use this word when you want to declare that a class of behavior is not debatable.

These words obviously have legitimate usage, but often they are thrown out simply to keep us from talking about what is really going on. They’re a sort of secret code. There are more examples, but I don’t want to go into all of them right now.

This is not to say that there shouldn’t be any variety to people’s lives or to what their interests are. It is to say that these things are secondary and must be grounded in the recognition of a set of core principles.

With the mainstream acceptance of embryonic stem cell research, I think it’s time for some honesty.

In the past, what were some of the common reasons people gave to justify allowing abortion?

• No one can tell me what to do with my own body.
• An embryo is not a human being.
• Abortion is necessary for difficult or unexpected pregnancies.
• Abortion should be permitted because it’s an issue of privacy.

What does the acceptance of embryonic stem cell research mean?

• An embryo created in vitro is not in anyone’s body.
• If embryos are not human why do we want their stem cells?
• The intentional creation of embryos in order to destroy them for research is not unexpected.
• Embryonic stem cell research is not an issue of privacy.

It’s time to be honest: We want to be able to kill human beings whom we don’t know and don’t care about in order to do research on parts of their bodies. Why? It could be for money. It could be because we hope the research will lead to the cure of certain diseases, possibly affecting people whom we do know and care about.

Why is this permitted by law at all? If abortion is legal but killing a child outside the womb is illegal, then is it a question of physical location? If it is, then embryos in vitro–who are outside the womb–should not be killed. If it’s a question of degree of development, then the degree of development necessary to have one’s right to live respected seems incredibly arbitrary.

The acceptance of embryonic stem cell research seems to me to debunk a lot of the pro-abortion attempts at justification. It also seems to be a worse crime in this sense: abortion may often be a crime of passion, that is, it may heavily involve the emotions and be an impulsive decision. The systematic creation of embryos to be killed is a crime of malice, that is, the will is freer when the decision is made.

Please, let’s just be honest about what we do.