Partial-Birth Ban Upheld
Supreme Court upholds illegality of, well, murder.Did you notice that the article demurs from actually describing the "controversial procedure" until the very last paragraph on the second page? Because we hope people don't read far enough to know that the "procedure" involves
partially removing the fetus intact from a woman's uterus, then crushing or cutting its skull to complete the abortion.
Oldie but goodie
Originally posted two years ago on Easter DayI am finally what I have always wanted to be: a Roman Catholic.
It was kind of like a wedding ceremony in that I wasn't sure at what point I actually transformed into a Catholic. When the priest said "The Lord receives you into the Catholic Church," or when he anointed my forehead with the holy oil? I kept trying it out in my head:
I am a Catholic. How strange to say, yet I had been thinking of myself as Catholic for months now. Yet only afterwards did it come from an organic truth about my spirit: I had been initiated, I had been received, I had been sealed, I was Catholic.
And taking the Sacrament! For a full year I've sat on the back pew, watching, believing that I was seeing the body of Christ raised before me, yet disbelieving because of my distance, my separateness from the Sacrament. Last night, I sat nervously, terrified and thrilled, went forward and looked at the Body of Christ offered to me--and held it in my hands, and magically did believe, in an awed and thrilled way, and took it into my mouth with both horror and amazement that it was finally permitted me, that such an intimacy was permitted me--I went to take the cup and did not realise until I stretched out my hands that they were sweating, that i was nervous, and it was an eternity holding it, putting it to my lips, the pungent scent of fermentation in my nostrils, an eternity before it finally flooded my mouth, and eternity of fear lest I drop it. I went back to my seat with a mind struck clean of thought, knelt and reflected on what had happened, unsure and afraid lest I failed to appreciate the event.
After some time I opened my eyes, not hearing the song, and gradually became aware of the sound of weeping: Lily, next to me, was weeping. Then it was that I heard the words of the song: In the breaking of the bread our eyes are opened, and it suddenly became just so, just exactly that. The mystery of faith was real. It had been real all this time that I had waited on the back row, waiting to be part of this mystery, waiting to claim my heart. And now I was invited in.
And do I feel different? Yes, but not without the knowledge that that will fade, I will still be given to despair and tempers and hatred, and that saddens me, the permanently disordered state of my appetites, being only human after all, and yet now is open to me the sacrament of restoring that disorder, the sacrament that has the full power to restore me to rights, if I only let it do so.
Labels: catholicism
Herr Grimm
Someone googling Dr Hans Grimm stopped by here today. Out of curiosity I clicked on it. It appears that our Dr Grimm, writer of the historical fantasy
Tradition and History of the Churches of Christ of Central Europe, was
also a Nazi. Well, ok, it could be a coincidence, but still.
EDIT: No he wasn't! Turns out there are two Hans Grimms. Poor man, how would you like to go around with a name like Joseph Goebbels or Adolf Hitler??
Labels: hans grimm
