When I was in college, I joined a kind of Evangelical Bible Study club for about a year. A friend invited me and I was in that contrary phase where I was trying to find arguments why Catholicism might not be the way to go, so I accepted. The discussion wasn’t on as high a level as I would have liked, though it did probably help me to establish a daily regimen of Scripture reading. The scariest part, though, was when I was asked (not asked really, so much as ordered) to sell candy to help raise money for the summer mission trip of a girl in the group.

My problems with this were that 1) I really don’t do the candy-selling thing, 2) I wasn’t sure how I felt about the whole Protestant mission-trip business, and 3) This girl was crazy. Truly neurotic. I won’t elaborate, except just to say that she would be a dreadful emissary for Christianity in almost any setting. I was almost sorry she was going to a Muslim country instead of a Catholic one; as a representative of Evangelicalism, she might have been an excellent instrument for scaring Catholics back to Rome.

Continue reading

I was reading Fr. Z’s blog today, and ran across a tidbit in an article he posted from the Catholic News Agency that I found rather alarming. Fr. Z let the remark pass without comment, but it certainly popped off the page for me. The article was covering an ongoing “conversation” of sorts between Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, and Richard Doerflinger, associate director of the USCCB’s Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities. Richards was wagging a finger at the US bishops for (gasp! shock!) opposing Barack Obama’s attempts to include national sponsorship of abortion in his health care bill. Doerflinger was trying to argue, contra Richards, that the bishops are not, in fact, opponents of “women’s rights.”

Here was the part that alarmed me:

“Doerflinger said the bishops’ materials about health care reform have been centered on supporting universal coverage, but opposing mandated abortion coverage.

‘She keeps talking about how we’re trying to diminish a right,’ he said of Richards. ‘A mandate is not consistent with personal choice. If what she’s talking about is people’s personal ability to choose whether or not to buy abortion coverage, we’re not going to oppose legislation that allows that.’”
Continue reading

LifeNews.com recently ran a story (which I saw via Fr. Z’s blog) on Barack Obama’s director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, John Holdren. Unsurprisingly, he’s yet another behind-the-curve cliche liberal hack, with a history of advocating for such charming ideas as forced abortion as a means of population control. Poor man… it’s got to be tough to be a soulless party liberal. Back in 1973, when he co-wrote Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions, this stuff was cutting-edge and cool. Then before you can say Jack Robinson, the overpopulation bubble bursts, America fails to follow China and the Soviet Union down the path of taking abortion for granted, and you have to rely on Obama’s mantle of press protection to keep these youthful indiscretions from the mainstream public eye. Rough break, guy. Still, I did enjoy the following snippet from his book, as quoted by LifeNews:

“The fetus, given the opportunity to develop properly before birth, and given the essential early socializing experiences and sufficient nourishing food during the crucial early years after birth, will eventually develop into a human being. Where any of these essential elements is lacking, the resultant individual will be deficient in some respect.”

Continue reading

Today at Mass, in light of the Epistle reading, we were treated to a homily on the subject of murmuring. It was a nice, homey topic for me because, while I’d not yet heard a Catholic homily about murmuring, it’s a frequently recurring topic among Mormons. In the first book of the Book of Mormon, Lamen and Lemuel, the two main baddies, are constantly murmuring against the Lord and getting punished for it. In Sunday School, this was often portrayed as though Lamen and Lemuel were engaging in a kind of adult equivalent of little kid whining, and my main questions were two: 1) These guys really don’t learn, do they? 2) On the other hand, pretty tough break for them, getting punished so harshly just for complaining a little.

Even as an adult, it can be a little bit tough to sort out the moral significance of complaining. On the one hand, everyone is familiar with the dispiriting effects that a constant complainer can have on a family, workplace or other group. On the other, we obviously can’t be expected to be little Polyannas all the time, and indeed, a failure to exercise discernment when necessary can itself be a grave fault. This, then is my best shot at breaking down negativity and suggesting where it is appropriate, and where dangerous.

Continue reading