Bible in a year Excel file to upload to todoist or other task program

I have recently started doing the Great Adventure Bible in a year reading project. 

I wanted to have this as a list of tasks that I could tick off, so I manipulated the data in an excel spreadsheet and put it in a format to use in my task list software todoist. If you would like to use it please do. If you want it in another format, let me know. 

It creates clickable links in todoist. See images. 

Files to use

Excel File

CSV File

WHERE ALL ROADS LEAD

G. K. CHESTERTON

https://www.ecatholic2000.com/cts/untitled-711.shtml

I

THE YOUTH OF THE CHURCH

Until about the end of the nineteenth century a man was expected to give his reasons for joining the Catholic Church. Today a man is really expected to give his reasons for not joining it. This may seem an exaggeration; but I believe it to stand for a subconscious truth in thousands of minds. As for the fundamental reasons for a man doing it, there are only two that are really fundamental. One is that he believes it to be the solid objective truth, which is true whether he likes it or not; and the other that he seeks liberation from his sins. If there be any man for whom these are not the main motives it is idle to enquire what were his philosophical or historical or emotional reasons for joining the old religion; for he has not joined it at all.

THE CHALLENGE OF THE CHURCH

But a preliminary word or two may well be said about the other matter, which may be called the challenge of the Church. I mean that the world has recently become aware of that challenge in a curious and almost creepy fashion. I am literally one of the least, because one of the latest, of a crowd of converts who have been thinking along the same lines as I. There has been a happy increase in the number of Catholics; but there has also been, if I may so express it, a happy increase in the number of non-Catholics; in the sense of conscious non-Catholics. The world has become conscious that it is not Catholic. Only lately it would have been about as likely to brood on the fact that it was not Confucian; and all the array of reasons for not joining the Church of Rome marked but the beginning of the ultimate reason for joining it. At this stage, let it be understood, I am speaking of a reaction and rejection which was, as mine would once have been, honestly if conventionally convinced. I am not speaking now of the stage of mere self-deception or sulky excuses; though such a stage there may be before the end. I am remarking that even while we truly think that the reasons are reasonable, we tacitly assume that the reasons are required. Far back at the beginning of all our changes, if I may speak for many much better than myself there was the idea that we must have reasons for joining the Catholic Church. I never had any reasons for not joining the Greek Church, or the religion of Mahomet, or the Theosophical Society, or the Society of Friends. Doubtless, I could have discovered and defined the reasons had they been demanded, just as I could have found the reasons for not going to live in Lithuania, or not being a chartered accountant, or not changing my name to Vortigern Brown, or not doing a thousand other things that it had never occurred to me to do. But the point is that I never felt the presence or pressure of a possibility at all. I heard no distant and distracting voice calling me to Lithuania or to Islam; I had no itch to explain to myself why my name was not Vortigern or why my religion was not Theosophy. That sort of presence and pressure of the Church I believe to be universal and ubiquitous today; not only among Anglicans, but among Agnostics. I repeat that I do not mean that they have no real objections; on the contrary, I mean that they have begun really to object; they have begun to kick and struggle.

A YOUNG RELIGION

Now I have noted first this common consciousness of the challenge of the Church, because I believe it to be connected with something else. That something else is the strongest of all the purely intellectual forces that dragged me towards the truth. It is not merely the survival of the faith, but the singular nature of its survival. I have called it by a conventional phrase, the old religion. But it is not an old religion; it is a religion that refuses to grow old. At the moment of history it is a very young religion; rather especially a religion of young men. It is much newer than the new religions; its young men are more fiery, more full of their subject, more eager to explain and argue, than were the young Socialists of my own youth. It does not merely stand firm like an old guard; it has recaptured the initiative and is conducting the counter-attack. In short, it is what youth always is, rightly or wrongly; it is aggressive. It is this atmosphere of the aggressiveness of Catholicism that has thrown the old intellectuals on the defensive. It is this that has produced the almost morbid selfconsciousness of which I have spoken. The converts are truly fighting, in those words which recur like a burden at the opening of the Mass, for a thing which giveth joy to their youth. I cannot understand how this unearthly freshness in something so old can possibly be explained except on a supposition that it is indeed unearthly.

It is not true, as the rationalist histories imply, that through the ages orthodoxy has grown old slowly. It is rather heresy that has grown old quickly. The Reformation grew old amazingly quickly. It was the Counter-Reformation that grew young. In England, it is strange to note how soon Puritanism turned into Paganism, or perhaps ultimately into Philistinism. It is strange to note how soon the Puritans degenerated into Whigs. By the end of the seventeenth century English politics had dried up into a wrinkled cynicism that might have been as old as Chinese etiquette. It was the Counter-Reformation that was full of the fire and even of the impatience of youth. It was in the Catholic figures of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that we find the spirit of energy, in the only noble sense of novelty. It was people like St Teresa who reformed; people like Bossuet who challenged; people like Pascal who questioned; people like Suarez who speculated. The counterattack was like a charge of the old spears of chivalry. And indeed the comparison is very relevant to the generalization. I believe that this renovation, which has certainly happened in our own time, and which has certainly happened in a time so recent as the Reformation, has really happened again and again in the history of Christendom.

A FLAMING TORCH

Working backwards on the same principle, I will mention at least two examples which I suspect to have been similar; the case of Islam and the case of Arianism. The Church had any number of opportunities of dying, and even of being respectfully interred. But the younger generation always began once again to knock at the door; and never louder than when it was knocking at the lid of the coffin in which it had been prematurely buried. Islam and Arianism were both attempts to broaden the basis to a sane and simple Theism, the former supported by great military success and the latter by great imperial prestige. They ought to have finally established the new system, but for the one perplexing fact, that the old system preserved the only seed and secret of novelty. Anyone reading between the lines of the twelfth-century record can see that the world was permeated by potential Pantheism and Paganism; we can see it in the dread of the Arabian version of Aristotle, in the rumour about great men being Moslems in secret; the old men, seeing the simple faith of the Dark Ages dissolving, might well have thought that the fading of Christendom into Islam would be the next thing to happen. If so, the old men would have been much surprised at what did happen. What did happen was a roar like thunder from thousands and thousands of young men, throwing all their youth into one exultant counter-charge: the Crusades. The actual effect of danger from the younger religion was renewal of our own youth. It was the sons of St Francis, the Jugglers of God, wandering singing over all the roads of the world; it was the Gothic going up like a flight of arrows; it was a rejuvenation of Europe. And though I know less of the older period, I suspect that the same was true of Athanasian orthodoxy in revolt against Arian officialism. The older men had submitted it to a compromise, and St Athanasius led the younger like a divine demagogue. The persecuted carried into exile the sacred fire. It was a flaming torch that could be cast out, but could not be trampled out.

CATHOLICISM ON THE MARCH

Whenever Catholicism is driven out as an old thing, it always returns as a new thing . . . It is not a survival. This then is the vital distinction, upon which I have dwelt before going further, because its comprehension concerns the argument later on. It is not endurance, but the kind of recovery. Doubtless there are, in every such transition, groups of good and even glorious Catholics who have held their religion rather as a thing of the past; and I have far too much admiration for their religious loyalty to insist here on any regrets for their reactionary politics. It is possible to look back to the passing of the monks merely as one looks back to the passing of the Stuarts; it is possible to look back to the passing of the Stuarts merely as one looks back to the passing of the Druids. But Catholicism is not the thing that faded with the final failure of the Jacobites; rather it is a thing that returned with a rush after the relative failure of the Jacobins. There may have been an ecclesiastic surviving from the Dark Ages who did not understand the new movement of the Middle Ages; there certainly were good Catholics who did not see the need for the great raid of the Jesuits or the reforms of St Teresa; and they were most probably much better people than we are. But rejuvenation does recur; and it is the first fact with which I wish to start my argument . . . For the moment I am content to say that we live in one of those recurrent periods of Catholicism on the march; and to draw a more simple moral from it. The real honour is due to those who were with it when its cause seemed hopeless; and no credit, beyond that of common intelligence, really belongs to anyone who has joined it when it is so evidently the hope of the world.

II

THE CASE FOR COMPLEXITY

I began with the power of the Church to grow young suddenly, when she is expected to grow old slowly, and remarked that this power in a creed was one which I could only conceive as thus regularly recurrent under two conditions: first, that it was really true; and second, that the power in it was more than mortal. In the ultimate sense, these are undoubtedly the reasons for what is a revolution that really returns like the revolution of a wheel. But among the secondary and superficial causes of this rejuvenation may be specially noted, I fancy, the very fact of which religious reformers have so constantly complained; I mean the complexity of the creeds. There is a sense in which the Faith is the simplest of religions; but there is another sense in which it really is by far the most complicated. And what I emphasize here is that, contrary to many modern notions, it owes its victory over modern minds to its complexity and not its simplicity. It owes its most recent

revivals to the very fact that it is the one creed that is still not ashamed of being complicated.

We have had during the last few centuries a series of extremely simple religions; each indeed trying to be more simple than the last. And the manifest mark of all these simplifications was, not only that they were finally sterile, but that they were rapidly stale. A man had said the last word about them when he had said the first. Atheism is, I suppose, the supreme example of a simple faith. The man says there is no God; if he really says it in his heart, he is a certain sort of man so designated in Scripture. But anyhow, when he has said it, he has said it; and there seems to be no more to be said. The conversation seems likely to languish. The truth is that the atmosphere of excitement by which the atheist lived was an atmosphere of thrilled and shuddering theism, and not of atheism at all; it was an atmosphere of defiance and not of denial. Irreverence is a very servile parasite of reverence, and has starved with its starving lord. After this first fuss about the merely aesthetic effect of blasphemy, the whole thing vanishes into its own void. If there were no God, there would be no atheists.

It is easy to say this of the nineteenth century negation, for that sort of atheism is already one of the dead heresies. But what is not always noticed is that all the modern forms of theism have the same blank. Theism is as negative as atheism. To say with the optimists that God is good and therefore everything is good, or with the universalists that God is love and therefore everything is love, or with the Christian Scientists that God is spirit and therefore everything is spirit, or for that matter with the pessimists that God is cruel and therefore everything is a beastly shame; to say any of these things is to make aremark to which it is difficult to make any reply, except Oh,' or possibly, in a rather feeble fashion, Well, well.' The statement is certainly in one sense very complete; possibly a little too complete, and we find ourselves wishing it were a little more complex. And that is exactly the point. It is not complex enough to be a living organism. It has no vitality because it has no variety of function.

THE OLD BECOMES NEW

One broad characteristic belongs to all the schools of thought that are called broad-minded, and that is that their eloquence ends in a sort of silence not very far removed from sleep. One mark distinguishes all the wild innovations and insurrections of modern intellectualism; one note is apparent in all the new and revolutionary religions that have recently swept the world; and that note is dullness. They are too simple to be true. And meanwhile any one Catholic peasant, while holding one small bead of the rosary in his fingers, can be conscious, not of one eternity, but of a complex and almost a conflict of eternities; as, for example, in the relations of Our Lord and Our Lady, of the fatherhood and childhood of God, of the motherhood and childhood of Mary. Thoughts of that kind have in a supernatural sense something analogous to sex; they breed. They are fruitful and multiply; and there is no end to them. They have innumerable aspects; but the aspect that concerns the argument here is this: that a religion which is rich in this sense always has a number of ideas in reserve. Besides the ideas that are being applied to a particular problem of a particular period, there are a number of rich fields of thought which are in that sense lying fallow. Where a new theory, invented to meet a new problem, rapidly perishes with that problem, the old things are always waiting for other problems when they shall in their turn become new. A new Catholic movement is generally a movement to emphasize some Catholic idea that was only neglected in the sense that it was not till then specially needed; but when it was needed, nothing else can meet the need. In other words, the only way really to meet all the human needs of the future is to pass into the possession of all the Catholic thoughts of the past; and the only way to do that is really to become a Catholic.

THE RESERVES OF THE PAST

In these notes I do not intend to say anything in very direct criticism of the Anglican Church or the Anglo-Catholic theory, because I know it in my own case to be the worst possible way to go to work. The Church drew me out of Anglicanism as the very idea of Our Lady drew me along before out of ordinary Protestantism by being herself, that is, by being beautiful. I was converted by the positive attractions of the things I had not yet got, and not by negative disparagements of such things as I had managed to get already. When these disparagements were uttered they generally had, almost against my will, the opposite effect to that intended; the effect of a slight setback. I think in my heart I was already hoping that Roman Catholics would really prove to have more charity and humility than anybody else, and anything that even seemed to savour of the opposite was judged by too sensitive a standard in the mood of that moment. I am, therefore, very anxious not to make that sort of mistake myself It would be easy to put, in a much shorter and sharper fashion, the conclusion to which I and every other convert have eventually come. It would be easy to argue merely that our whole position was a common contradiction; since we were always arguing that England had suffered in a thousand ways from being Protestant, and yet at the same time arguing that she had remained Catholic. It would be easy, and in a sense only too true, to call the whole thing a piece of English half-conscious hypocrisy; an attempt to remedy a mistake without admitting it. Nor do I deny that there are High-Churchmen who provoke and perhaps deserve this tone, by talking as if Catholicism had never been betrayed and oppressed. To them indeed one is tempted to say that St Peter denied his Lord; but at least he never denied that he had denied Him.

But of most souls in such a transition the truth is far more subtle; and of all I knew far more sympathetic; and I have deliberately approached this problem by a route that may seem circuitous, but which I believe to be the right approach in such a problem of subtlety and sympathy. The first fact to be pointed out, I think, to the honest and doubtful Anglican is that this power of resurrection in the Church does depend on this possession of reserves in the Church. To have this power, it is necessary to possess the whole past of the religion, and not merely those parts of it that seemed obviously needed in the nineteenth century by the men of the Oxford Movement, or in the twentieth century by the men of the Anglo-Catholic Congress. They did discover the need of Catholic things, and they did discover the need of one thing at a time. They took their pick in the fields of Christendom, but they did not possess the fields; and above all, they did not possess the fallow fields. They could not have all the riches, because they could not have all the reserves of the religion. We have a great many predictions of the future, which are only rather dull extensions of the present. Very few moderns have dared to imagine the future as anything but modern. Most of them have gone mad with the attempt to imagine their great-grandchildren as exactly like themselves, only more so. But the Church is Futurist in the only sane sense, just as she is individualist in the only sane sense, or Socialist in the only sane sense. That is, she is prepared for problems which are utterly different from the problems of today. Now I think the truth about a man who calls himself, as I did, an AngloCatholic, may most fairly and sympathetically be stated thus. He is, of course, in strict definition a heretic, but he is not a heresiarch. He is not founding a heresy of the moment; but he is merely fighting a heresy at the moment. Even when he is defending orthodoxy, as he so often is, he is only defending it upon certain points against certain fallacies. But the fallacies are only fashions, and the next fashion will be quite different. And then his orthodoxy will be old-fashioned, but not ours.

III

THE STORY OF A HALF-TRUTH

By this time it must be obvious that every single thing in the Catholic Church which was condemned by the modern world has been reintroduced by the modern world, and always in a lower form. The Puritans rejected art and symbolism, and the Decadents brought them back again with all the old appeal to sense and an additional appeal to sensuality. The rationalists rejected supernatural healing and it was brought back by Yankee charlatans who not only proclaimed supernatural healing, but forbade natural healing. Protestant moralists abolished the confessional and the Psychoanalysts have reestablished the confessional, with every one of its alleged dangers and not one of its admitted safeguards. The Protestant patriots resented the intervention of an international faith, and went on to evolve an empire entangled in international finance. Having complained that the family was insulted by monasticism, they have lived to see the family broken in pieces by bureaucracy; having objected to fasts being appointed for anybody during any exceptional interval, they have survived to see teetotallers and vegetarians trying to impose a fast on everybody for ever.

All this, as I say, has become obvious, but there is a further development of the truth with which I am more especially dealing here; which concerns not so much the case of these general movements which may almost be called vulgar errors, but rather the case of certain individual ideas that are private inspirations of the individual. A young man may, without any very offensive vanity, come to the conclusion that he has something to say. He may think that a truth is missed in the current controversies and that he himself may remind the world of it in a tolerably lucid or pointed fashion. It seems to me that there are two courses that he can follow; and I wish to suggest them here because there must be a good many young men in that position, because I have been in it myself and because I may be said in some sense to have followed both courses, first one and then the other. He can take his truth, or half-truth, into the bustle and confusion of the modern world, of general secular society, and pit it against all the other notions that are being urged in this way . . . . .In that case it is likely enough that he will be hailed by journalists as having a message'; it is, at any rate, probable that he will have a vogue; but it is not very clear that anything will happen to his idea in the long run . . . . .and even though he may have done as well as he could reasonably expect for himself, it is not clear that he has done very much for the world; especially when the world is in a mood that permits nothing but fashions and forgetfulness. But there is a much greater danger in his position. Even supposing that his truth does become a tradition, it will only harden into a heresy. For it can only harden as the half-truth that it is; and even if it was true in its lifetime, it will have become false when it is fossilized. Sometimes a few touches from fanatical followers can turn it into a most extravagant and horrible falsehood . . . .The moral is that the half-truth must be linked up with the whole truth- and who is to link it up? Herod the tyrant must not massacre babies because they would have been glad of a few months of life when they were babes unborn. A man must not be a slave on the plea that even a slave can see a dandelion. A man must not be thrown into gaol in defiance of justice because he will still see a patch of daylight on the wall. In a word, wonder and humility and gratitude are good things, but they are not the only good things; and there must be something to make the poet who praises them admit that justice and mercy and human dignity are good things too. Knowing something of the nature of a modern poet captured by a modern fancy, I can only see one thing in the world that is in the least likely to do it.

I have said that there are two courses for the young man specializing in the half-truth. I have given a personal example of him and the possibility of his horrible end. The other course is that he should take his half-truth into the culture of the Catholic Church, which really is a culture and where it really will be cultivated. . For that place is a garden; and the noisy world outside nowadays is none the less a wilderness because it is a howling wilderness. That is, he can take his idea where it will be valued for what is true in it, where it will be balanced by other truths and often supported by better arguments. In other words, it will become a part, however small a part, of a permanent civilization which uses its moral riches as science uses the store of facts. Thus, in the idle instance I have given, there is nothing true in that old childish mood of mine which the Catholic Church in any way condemns. She does not condemn a love of poetry or fantasy; she does not condemn, but rather commands, a sentiment of gratitude for the breath of life. Indeed, it is a spirit in which many Catholic poets have rather specialized, and its first and finest appearance, perhaps, is in the great Canticle of St Francis. But in that same spiritual society, I know that optimism will never be turned into an orgy of anarchy or a stagnation of slavery and that there will not fall on any one of us the ironical disaster of having discovered a truth only to disseminate a lie.

Extracted from a series of five essays contributed to Blackfriars, 1922-23

********

God has created me to do Him some definite service

God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good; I shall do His work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it if I do but keep His commandments. Therefore, I will trust Him, whatever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him, in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him. If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me. Still, He knows what He is about.

John Henry Newman 

Masculinity. What is it?

Masculinity. 

What is it?

To be a true, good man, is to do the things that a good man does. 

These things are things that a man does better than a woman, or can only do, that a woman cannot do. 

Does this mean that true femininity is to do well the things that women do better than men and that men cannot do. Does this mean that a woman who does not have a baby is not truly feminine? It would seem that way. John Paul II in his theology of the body claims that to be feminine is to bring life into the world, but this could be done by nuns. Not be physically giving birth but by spiritually giving birth and being a mother to those who require it. 

So then what can a man do better than women, and what can only men do?

I'm really stuck at this point. 

Men are on average physcally stronger than women, men can father a child. What does it mean to father, besides at the beginning of conception?

Are we to say priests are not manly? I think this can't be the only thing. 

I think both sexes have dignity and worth because they are loved by God, but what is the particular ways that men are called to participate in this world?

Sometimes they say that women reproduce, as in children, and men produce as in work. 

God is a Father. What does he do as Father that I can learn about? To help the family. To look after it. 

Is it something to do with sport? With tradework - with changing a tyre. With making money?

Podcast - This Catholic Life Podcast -  Australia - 19/08/2020

- 

Spirituality of the 12 Steps

This is amazing

http://store.casamaria.org/the-spirituality-of-the-twelve-steps-9-cd-set-fr-emmerich-vogt-op/

The best Christmas songs

O Holy Night - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zh-yR0pbmU

Venite Adoremus

I vow to thee my Country

The Holy City 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF9fiJzoMF8

The Holy City 
Music by Stephen Adams 
Words by F.E. Weatherly 
Published 1892 by Boosey & Co. 

Last night I lay a sleep-ing, There came a dream so fair, 
I stood in old Je-ru-sa-lem Be-side the tem-ple there. 
I heard the chil-dren sing-ing And ev-er as they sang, 
Me thought the voice of An-gels From Heav'n in an-swer rang. 

Me thought the voice of An-gels From Heav'n in an-swer rang. 
Je-ru-sa-lem! Je-ru-sa-lem! Lift up your gates and sing, 
Ho-san-na in the high-est! Ho-san-na to your King! 

And then me thought my dream was chang'd, The streets no long-er rang, 
Hush'd were the glad Ho-san-nas The lit-tle chil-dren sang 
The sun grew dark with mys-te-ry, The morn was cold and chill, 
As the sha-dow of a cross a-rose up-on a lone-ly hill, 

As the sha-dow of a cross a-rose Up-on a lone-ly hill. 
Je-ru-sa-lem! Je-ru-sa-lem! Hark! how the An-gels sing, 
Ho-san-na in the high-est, Ho-san-na to your King! 

And once a-gain the scene was chang'd, New earth there seem'd to be, 
I saw the Ho-ly Ci-ty Be-side the tide-less sea; 
The light of God was on its streets, The gates were o-pen wide, 
And all who would might en-ter, And no-one was de-nied, 

No need of moon or stars by night, Or sun to shine by day, 
It was the new Je-ru-sa-lem That would not pass a-way, 
It was the new Je-ru-sa-lem That would not pass a-way 

Je-ru-sa-lem! Je-ru-sa-lem! Sing for the night is o'er 
Ho-san-na in the high-est, Ho-san-na for ev-er-more! 
Ho-san-na in the high-est, Ho-san-na for ev-er-more!

Everything is a blessing?

I'm coming to see many things in life as a blessing, but can I say everything if a blessing?

Can an earthquake that kills people be a blessing? Can the death of a loved one be a blessing?

Today I prayed

Today I prayed. Thankyou for all the good things in my life. Can I please have a girl

Hmmm

Sermon.

Our lord wants to know how much his disciples understand. Re the transfiguration Randwick. March 16 2014

Adventures in prayer

A while ago. Perhaps a number of years. Let me check. I started praying daily for a wife. How has that prayer been answered? Well, I don't have a wife. I don't have a girlfriend. The prayer has the line "I open my heart to you". At times praying this has helped me to realise that my heart was not open and for a while I added the line "please help me to open my heart" after the original line.

Corpus Christi. The Body of Christ

At table sat.
The twelve. Eleven later.
Preparing Passover celebrate.
Brother, Master, fate.

Bread, took blessed and ate.
Shared and said
My body
And Blood, wine drink.

A bond, new and sparkly
A love, a lesson
Fresh and darkly
Prophesied his betrayal.

The question we must answer is "if Catholicism offers a better way, why don't Catholics' lives seem any better?"

The question we must answer is "if Catholicism offers a better way, why don't Catholics' lives seem any better?"
http://t.co/HeadmnCtE2

Happiness, Contentment, Feelings

Happiness and God.

God wants us to be happy. But perhaps we aren't. Happiness is not a feeling. Happiness, Aquinas tells us is found in knowledge of God. Perfect possession of the perfect good. Happiness as he describes it is something that satisfies one's ultimate desire.

Happiness is distinguished from satisfaction of the senses, which we might call contentment. But surely if we are happy we will also be content? Will we not.

If I am trying to follow the correct path and love God and my fellow man, then why do I not feel happy?

I wonder what Lewis has to say on this matter.

The new Jerusalem

Lewisham is my Jerusalem

Prayer for direction

MY LORD GOD, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end, nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. 

But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. 

Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Fr Thomas Merton


My prayer for direction
My Lord God,

You who created me. You who know all things. You who have a plan for me. You who I pray to. Do you hear my prayer? Please guide me.

I have no idea where you want me to go. Where you want me to be. I am stepping out each day in Faith and hope. Using the talents and virtues you have given me as best I can. If I am heading in the wrong direction, please turn me round. If I am going in the right direction, please continue to lead me there.

I trust. You. My friends, my intellect. My church.

Amen

O God beyond all praising

O God beyond all praising




Christian Hymn Lyrics Online
© 2008 Carden's Design. All Rights Reserved.
O God beyond all praising,
we worship you today
and sing the love amazing
that songs cannot repay;
for we can only wonder
at every gift you send,
at blessings without number
and mercies without end:
we lift our hearts before you
and wait upon your word,
we honor and adore you,
our great and mighty Lord.

Then hear, O gracious Savior,
accept the love we bring,
that we who know your favor
may serve you as our king;
and whether our tomorrows
be filled with good or ill,
we'II triumph through our sorrows
and rise to bless you still:
to marvel at your beauty
and glory in your ways,
and make a joyful duty
our sacrifice of praise.

What sort of man do i want to be?

Responsible
Reasonable
Reliable

Take account of those reliant on me
Do my bit
Reasonable... plan. Have a plan and follow it.
Reliable does what it says on the tin

Germain Grisez

from: http://www.ewtn.com/library/HOMELIBR/GRISEZ.TXT

The Making of a Moral Theologian

by Russell Shaw

Growing up during the Depression as the youngest in a family of nine children, Germain Grisez ate more seashell macaroni than he likes to remember. "I don't care if I never see another seashell," he says. All the same, one has the impression of a tightly-knit family, with a strong sense of identity rooted in shared beliefs and commitments. Two of the Grisez boys became religious brothers and one of the girls became a nun. The Grisezs' house in the Cleveland suburb of University Heights was physically isolated from the rest of the neighborhood, and as a small child Germain seldom played with youngsters outside the family, so that, when the time came to go to school, the hurly-burly of classroom and playground struck him at first as an unpleasant change from the well-ordered atmosphere at home.

The forebears of the Grisez clan on the paternal side had come to the United States from France in the 1830s, traveled upriver from New Orleans to Ohio, and settled down to farming southeast of Cleveland. Germain's father, William Joseph-universally known as "W.J."-worked on the family farm as a child. Trained as a bookkeeper, he went to work as a bookkeeper-accountant with an Ohio firm and remained there some twenty years. In the 1920s the family moved to Cleveland so that the children could attend Catholic schools, and he became wholesale credit manager with a manufacturer of major appliances. On September 30, 1929, their youngest son was born, and on October 19 of that year the stock market crashed. The appliance manufacturer struggled on until 1933 but eventually the firm failed. One of Grisez's earliest memories is of his father coming home from his last day there.

Thereafter W.J. Grisez, like many other men in the Depression, took whatever work he could get to support his family-part-time bookkeeping for a succession of business establishments, door-to-door vacuum cleaner sales, peddling a mineral water from Toledo. All in all, he made a go of it.

On January 9,1915, W.J. Grisez had married Mary Catherine Lindesmith, whose family was of German-Swiss stock. Her education ended after the eighth grade. Her father, a railroad switchman, had died in an accident, and thereafter the 14-year-old girl was needed at home to help with the younger children.

By current standards, Mary Catherine Lindesmith Grisez was not a highly-educated woman; but, according to her son, "she read so much that she was really quite well educated." This reading included standard Catholic authors of the day- Newman, Chesterton, Belloc-as well as the Bible, which she knew much better than most Catholics. Her belief in learning is reflected in the fact that, although the family was hardly wealthy and had no tradition of extensive formal education, much less scholarship, in its background, the Grisez children received as much schooling-college in most cases, graduate degrees in several-as they could benefit from.

Germain attended a parochial school and Cathedral Latin School and in both places found at least some able instructors. At 14 he began working after school in the East Cleveland public library, a job that expanded to full time hours in the summers. That established a pattern of working while attending school that would continue through his graduate years at the University of Chicago, when he held a full-time clerical job at night at the Federal Reserve Bank.

The encounter with Aquinas

Graduating from high school in 1947, Grisez entered Cleveland's John Carroll University, run by the Jesuits. It was there that, intellectually speaking, significant things started happening for the young man.

In his sophomore year he encountered a youthful philosophy professor, Marshall Boarman, who had received a master's degree under Etienne Gilson at the University of Toronto and become an ardent Thomist. This was an enthusiasm Boarman was eager to share, not only in the classroom but outside, organizing an informal Aquinas seminar for his better students that convened weekly in the basement of a nearby pub. There, over beer and potato chips, Germain began reading St. Thomas.

Senior year brought one of those vocational epiphanies that often come to serious-minded young people. Up until then, Grisez had been mulling a career in journalism or law; he also had attended philosophical gatherings outside the sheltering Catholic environment of John Carroll and had encountered a largely negative attitude toward Catholic philosophy; and he was doing research for a bachelor's thesis on "Art and Beauty in Aquinas," and, lacking indexes, was skimming widely in St. Thomas. On Christmas morning of 1949, while he was sitting quietly in the family living room, things came together. He remembers the moment:

I had been going through the four books of the . The end of the fourth book is on the Last Things. Aquinas has quite a good imaginative description of heaven there. I was very taken by this, and I came to the conclusion that it would be a good thing to go ahead and do philosophy-be a professional philosopher and try to teach in a state university or a non- Catholic university. A place where a lot of Catholic kids go and don't have much of this offered to them and where there are a lot of non-Catholics who don't have anybody to argue with them about their faith or lack of it. You could do some good in a place like that. I thought it would be a worthwhile thing to do. But first there would be the long slog of becoming a scholar. Aware that he had a great deal to learn about his revered model, Thomas Aquinas, Grisez concluded that the best place to start learning it would be the house of studies conducted in River Forest, Illinois, by the saint's brother Dominicans, many of them contributors to a new three-volume translation with commentary of the prepared under Dominican auspices. Today it is common for lay people to study in Catholic seminaries, but it was virtually unheard of then. How did he manage it? He supposes his application to River Forest was accepted because the Dominican reviewing it assumed that, sooner or later, the applicant would end up in the Order. Whether for that reason or simply out of a generous spirit (they are mendicants, too), the Dominicans charged him nothing.

One day, departing from custom, the prior asked the young layman to lunch in the refectory. Rising at the end of the meal, the priest announced to the community, "This is the first case in which a student in the has announced he was getting married and remained a student in the ." Says Grisez, "I think he invited me to lunch so he could make that joke."

Marriage and career

Germain had met Jeannette Selby two years earlier, in the spring of 1949, at a parish dance. Soon they were dating regularly, and by the summer of 1950 they knew they wanted to marry; but the Korean war was on by then, Germain expected to be drafted, and River Forest lay ahead even if the Army did not. They decided to wait. In the year that followed, living in a boarding house and attending school, Germain was intensely lonely. Perhaps Jeannette was, too. On June 9, 1951, "despite everything"-no money, years of graduate school ahead, and a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the marriage on the part of both families-they were married. Germain was twenty-one.

As everyone who knows the Grisezs realizes, theirs is an exceptionally close relationship in which the ideal of complementarity-on each side a set of skills, attitudes, and personality traits that balances and meshes harmoniously with the other party's-is realized to an unusual degree. Besides successfully carrying off her roles as wife, mother, meticulous housekeeper, and admirable cook, Jeannette acts as Germain's secretary, sounding-board, and commonsense critic. God alone-literally-knows how much she has contributed to his work, both directly and indirectly, over the years.

Finishing up at River Forest, Grisez was still intent on teaching philosophy in a non-Catholic school. That would require getting a doctorate at such an institution, and the University of Chicago was his choice. Given his interests, he gravitated in particular toward Richard McKeon, an eminent scholar of ancient and medieval philosophy who was to exercise the greatest influence on him among his Chicago professors.

Back then, though, Grisez had no ideas of going into ethics. "I thought ethical theory was a vast, swampy area that wasn't philosophically very interesting," he says. With McKeon as mentor, he selected as his dissertation topic "Basic Oppositions in Logical Theory." This involved comparing , an influential work that at one time was incorrectly attributed to Aquinas and that contains an implicit theory of knowledge and metaphysics, with Aquinas' actual views, scattered through out his writings, and also with William of Ockham's

. His aim in pursuing this project was "to figure out how you do metaphysics"-since it was metaphysics in which he was professionally interested.

Still planning on a career in a non-Catholic school, he sent off "probably hundreds" of inquiries to such institutions- and ran into "a good deal of resistance to the idea of hiring a Catholic who was a believer." That was demonstrated in a particularly "brutal and grotesque" fashion, Grisez recalls, at a well-known Midwestern school. After an apparently successful interview, the philosophy chairman drove him to the airport and there, in the coffee shop, put one more casual yet crucial question about his religious faith: "You don't really believe that stuff?"

"You bet your life I do."

"Then, I'm sorry, there's nothing here for you."

Reactions elsewhere were less bluntly expressed, but Grisez got the message. Early in 1957 he sent applications to twenty-five Catholic schools. Five job offers resulted. Georgetown University proposed an assistant professorship at five thousand dollars a year, and Grisez accepted.

Drawn toward ethical theory

By the time he received his PhD from Chicago, he had been teaching at Georgetown for two years and the last of the Grisezs' four sons had been born. Germain was now 29 years old. With a doctorate in hand, he was eligible to teach on the graduate level. The only graduate position then open at Georgetown, though, was in ethical theory, and so in 1959 he began working up that subject. Soon he was teaching two graduate courses: one on St. Thomas' moral philosophy, the other on the ethics of Aristotle and Kant. In these years he also read widely in Protestant moral thinkers and engaged in a lengthy dialogue with the eminent Princeton ethicist Paul Ramsey, a Methodist, who often participated in summer programs at Georgetown.

Now, too, Grisez was beginning to draw certain conclusions about the version of ethics he found in Aquinas. He explains:

He wasn't primarily interested in philosophy; he was interested in doing theology, and you didn't have to have a tight ethical theory and tight moral arguments in his day because in general the big arguments weren't going on in the area of ethics. So the theory in Aquinas is no more refined and perfected than it needed to be, and it didn't have to be very refined and perfected for his purposes. It's sound as far as it goes and very suggestive, but it's not honed and not worked out carefully. He's a gold mine of a starting- place, he's got a lot of good ideas, but he doesn't have any coherent overall theory of ethics, and he doesn't equip you to argue the issues and solve the problems as they've been posed in modern times.

As for ethical thinking since Thomas, Grisez renders a tough judgment: "It's a lot less impressive and lot less philosophically viable than what you've got in Aquinas."

Grisez began to think he might be able to do something about that. He had been teaching the utilitarians Bentham and Mill in an undergraduate course, and had come to the realization that they were psychological determinists: "What you choose is determined by what looks most appealing." To hold this view, however, places the would-be ethicist in a rather strange position, since if what people choose is determined for them, then they have no freedom of choice. What Bentham and Mill were in fact seeking, Grisez saw, was a "strategy for socially controlling people" so that they would act in society's best interests.

These insights set him musing about why psychological determinism is a false basis for ethics. When making choices, he observed:

it just isn't the case that one alternative is better or more appealing or seems better to you. That is the experience of choice. The difficult thing about choice is that alternatives are "more appealing" in respects, and you need to choose because the goods and the bads don't commensurate-you gain something and lose something from either alternative. So the idea that the right act is the act that's going to have the better payoff is mistaken. You can't know that, and if you could know it, there wouldn't be any free choice. Any kind of ethical theory that tries to derive the rightness or wrongness of action from the calculation of good and bad consequences has got to be wrong.

The contraception Issue as a key

Around this time, the early 1960s, the birth-control debate was heating up in the Catholic Church. To the extent Grisez had given the matter any thought, he supposed that "contraception maybe isn't always wrong." In his thorough way, nevertheless, he read Pius XI's 1930 encyclical in which the Pope unequivocally condemned artificial contraception. "It looks like the Church's teaching is nailed down and cast in concrete on this," he told himself. But what did that mean for the ethical theory he was beginning to conceptualize?

Wrestling with these questions, he drew a diagram representing "different aspects of the well-being of the person;" it was one's attitude of being either for or against these, he had begun to think, that was crucial to the moral question. Morality lay in the relationship between choice and action and the good of the human person: to be "for" the different aspects of the well-being and full-being of persons was to be "loving;" to be "against" these human goods was to be "unloving."

In 1963 Louis Dupre, a Georgetown colleague in philosophy and Flemish Belgian who had studied at the University of Louvain, returned from a visit to that important continental center of Catholic thought with the interesting suggestion that contraception is not always wrong. Grisez and Dupre, who later was to teach at Yale, discussed that at lunch one day, and after lunch Grisez invited the other philosopher into his office and showed him the diagram of human goods. "We argued all afternoon," he recalls.

A few months later, Dupre was invited to speak about contraception to a Catholic lay group that met at Georgetown. Grisez was asked to comment, and explained why he considered Dupre's arguments unsound. His remarks drew a "ferociously nasty reaction" from some members of the audience to which his faculty colleagues raised no objection. He recalls the incident as "the beginning of a kind of personal antagonism. I got mad."

In the spring of 1964 Grisez had attended the annual convention of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, held in Kansas City. By then the contraception controversy was going strong. Grisez found hardly any of his fellow Catholic philosophers interested in defending the Church's teaching; it occurred to him that he should further develop his own thinking on the subject and publish an article. But he hesitated. If he went into print defending Catholic teaching on birth control, he could forget about teaching in a non-Catholic school. (This was no idle dream. By now he was acquiring a modest reputation, had taught a graduate course in medieval philosophy for a year at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and had received an invitation, which he declined, to be visiting professor at a large university in the Midwest.)

"I decided, 'Well, I ought to write the article on contraception,"' he recalls. After two weeks of concentrated effort in the spring of 1964 he had produced the manuscript of a book. He sent it to the Bruce Publishing Company in Milwaukee, a Catholic house whose principal editor, William E. May (now an eminent theologian in his own right as well as a close friend and Grisez enthusiast), had earlier invited him to write on the subject. The volume was published in January, 1965, as

Its core was the laying-out of Grisez's emerging ethical theory and its application to the question of contraception. In much over-simplified terms, the argument is this: The choice to contracept is a choice against the human good of procreation and as such can never be justified, since it is never morally right to turn one's will against a good of the person, not even for the sake of some other good. The argument was developed meticulously, accompanied by a devastating critique of inadequate "natural law" arguments against contraception (e.g., the "perverted faculty") and a similar critique of the case some Catholic moralists had lately begun to make for the practice (or at least for "the Pill"-the new oral contraceptive-in the confusion of those days sometimes thought to be morally distinguishable from older forms of contraception). The book is dedicated to William Joseph Grisez and Mary Catherine Lindesmith Grisez, "who did not prevent my life."

The "birth-control commission"

Canny readers recognized in a new and potentially important voice, and this was reflected in the reviews. "In the modern controversy [over contraception]," observed the Jesuit moralist John C. Ford, "Grisez's work is the first philosophical attempt I have seen which makes a substantial, constructive contribution to an understanding of the Church's natural-law position." In a long "Special Review" in the , the Jesuit theologian Richard McCormick called the volume "an unusual book," and said "the quality of Grisez's work is a guarantee that we shall profit enormously by his further research in this area." In light of their subsequent careers- Grisez as an innovative defender of received Catholic teaching, McCormick as a major figure in Catholic proportionalist dissent-there is a certain poignancy in the inscription on Grisez's file copy of this review: "To Germain-with affection and admiration. ***, SJ."

Pope John XXIII in 1963 had established a Commission for the Study of Problems of the Family, Population, and Birth Rate to advise the Vatican Secretariat of State on positioning the Holy See as a participant in the international discussion of population. In June 1964, Pope Paul VI enlarged the commission and expanded its mandate. As he did, the internal Catholic debate over birth control burst into the open. Was the Pope contemplating a change in the Church's teaching? Might not the Pill at least be approved? With change in the air, thanks to the Second Vatican Council then underway, the very existence of the Birth Control Commission (as it became known immediately and forever) seemed to suggest intriguing possibilities.

In the spring of 1965 the expanded commission held its first plenary session in Rome. One of its members returned to the United States and shared startling news with a number of interested parties, among them Grisez: about a third of the theologians on the commission held that the Church's position on birth control had to change, another third believed that at least it was subject to change, and the rest argued that the teaching as it stood was true and therefore could not change. Grisez's informant also shared with him the meeting's written report. Having read it, Grisez called Father John Ford and said, "Let's talk."

Perhaps the most distinguished of the pre-Vatican II American moralists, John C. Ford, SJ, was then teaching at the Catholic University of America. He had read Grisez's contraception manuscript before publication and, as noted, had favorably reviewed the book. In expanding the birth- control commission, Pope Paul had named him to it.

From June 1965, on, Grisez collaborated closely with Ford on commission-related work. The collaboration continued after the Pope, in early 1966, reconstituted the body, naming the non-bishops (theologians, physicians, demographers) -advisors-and restricting membership to sixteen cardinals and bishops. Grisez spent June of that year in Rome working with Father Ford-"drafting stuff, criticizing stuff." (One of the documents they produced was a rebuttal of the document that in time would be called the commission's "majority report" favoring change. Of the commission documents that have turned up in print to date Grisez says dourly that they are "only a small and not very representative part" of the whole-understandably so, since what to publish and what to hold back has been determined by the supporters of contraception. )

Pope Paul's own position

All this points to an obvious question: What really was the role of Pope Paul VI? Grisez has no doubt that the Pope believed from the start that contraception is wrong. "What he wasn't sure about was whether the Pill is a contraceptive in the traditional, condemned sense," he explains. Worried about overpopulation in some areas, Paul thought oral contraception might be a solution, and therefore was "inclined to approve it if possible." Nevertheless, Grisez says, as Vatican II was nearing its end in later 1965, Paul VI wanted [the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World] to say clearly "contraception is always wrong." That would leave the question about the Pill for him to decide. He had Ford and a bishop draft some amendments, and they were sent over to the Council commission around Thanksgiving time. Then there was a big scramble: "Can we put these in our own words?" By the time they got done doing that, they had changed the meaning of the amendments so that it was no longer clear they were saying contraception is always wrong. So came out rather ambiguous in the end.

What the document says, in fact, is that the "sons of the Church" are "forbidden to use methods disapproved by the teaching authority of the Church in its interpretation of the divine law;" a footnote here cites and two allocutions by Pope Pius XII. The footnote adds that "certain questions requiring further and more careful investigation" had been turned over by Paul to a commission, and the Pope would announce his decision in due course. Thus: "With the teaching of the magisterium standing as it is, the Council has no intention of proposing concrete solutions at the moment." Whatever all this was supposed to mean, it naturally had the practical effect of inflaming speculation.

Long before the publication of , Grisez had concluded that, just as contraception had triumphed in secular society, so, practically speaking, it also would triumph-indeed, already was well on its way to triumphing- among Catholics, regardless of what the Pope finally said. He began research for two more books, one on abortion and the other on nuclear deterrence. He was working on the abortion book in the summer of 1968 when came out. Pope Paul had reached his decision. The condemnation of contraception stood, with no exceptions for the Pill or anything else.

Earlier that year, attending an abortion conference at Louvain, Grisez had found the groundwork for theological dissent in the event of such an outcome already laid in Europe. It quickly became clear that dissent in the United States also would be widespread and fierce. The Archdiocese of Washington, DC rapidly became a center and focal point for this dissent-because of the concentration of pro- contraception theologians there, because a substantial number of archdiocesan priests immediately announced that they intended to set aside the teaching of in their pastoral practice, and because Cardinal Patrick O'Boyle of Washington was a staunch defender of the encyclical. O'Boyle, a crusty Irish-American with a gruff demeanor and a warm heart, took an uncomplicated view of the situation: the Pope had solemnly restated the clear teaching of the Church, and it was his duty as a bishop to uphold that teaching and see that his priests did the same. O'Boyle told the dissenting priests that they were forbidden to preach, teach, or hear confessions in his archdiocese.

Showdown In Washington

O'Boyle called in John Ford to help, and Ford called in Grisez. Within a week the two men had a pastoral letter ready to go in the cardinal's name. It was Friday afternoon. The chancery staff, accustomed to a less frantic pace, maintained that the document could not possibly be issued until the following week. Grisez argued that it needed to be out that weekend. The cardinal agreed, and the staff suddenly found ways to get the job done. Afterward, the two men were left alone in O'Boyle's office. Grisez, his voice growing husky, recalls: "He said, 'You'd make a better bishop than I am,' and he put his pectoral cross on me. I handed it back to him and said, 'No, you're the bishop and I'll help.' And then we all went over to the Mayflower Hotel and had dinner."

At O'Boyle's urging, Grisez was given a leave of absence from Georgetown to work full-time for him. Ford having returned to his duties in Massachusetts, Grisez was the principal theological advisor on matters pertaining to the birth control controversy in Washington. His work involved extensive negotiations with the dissenting priests, critiquing the National Conference of Catholic Bishops' collective pastoral letter (published in November 1968, in response to ) helping to establish a new national entity, the Human Life Foundation, to foster the understanding and practice of Natural Family Planning, and drafting replies for the cardinal to the "piles and piles of letters" that poured in. Grisez was able to return to work on the abortion book in the spring of 1969 and to resume teaching at Georgetown in the fall; but he continued part-time work for Cardinal O'Boyle until 1972.

In time, the dissenting Washington priests-those of them, that is, who had elected to remain in active ministry- appealed their case to the Roman Rota, the Church's chief appellate court. Pope Paul removed the case from the Rota and turned it over to the Congregation for the Clergy for what Grisez calls an "administrative-pastoral solution."

Would it be fair, I ask, to say that the rug was pulled out from under Cardinal O'Boyle? Instead of answering directly, Grisez notes that the Washington dispute did not concern theology as such but centered on "faculties"-under what conditions the dissenting priests, now dwindled in number from 54 to a remnant of about 15, would be allowed to preach, teach, and hear confessions in the archdiocese. Responses to on the part of bishops' conferences and individual bishops were now in, and the picture they produced was one of "open, obvious conflict among the bishops about contraception and conscience, the authority of the teaching, and so on," Grisez notes. Instead of risking further, and possibly worse, conflict by confronting this state of affairs, he says, Pope Paul apparently decided to calm things down.

Against this background the Washington case came to its inglorious conclusion. The Congregation for the Clergy apparently was instructed to find a pastoral solution. The result was a statement that seemed to say all the right things but gave the game away by requiring restoration of the faculties if the priests merely agreed to insist that Catholics whom they dealt with in the matter of contraception be "guided by objective moral norms." One night shortly before its publication Grisez argued with Cardinal O'Boyle until well past midnight, urging him to fly to Rome to remonstrate with the Pope and even threaten resignation if need be. "I just can't do that with the Pope," O'Boyle said. Says Grisez: "That was the sad ending of that episode."

Keeping perspective

Grisez is unusually detached- even disengaged-about such matters. Using a formulation that students of his work would recognize as an element of his moral theory, he says now: "My overall project isn't that I've got a particular state of affairs in mind that I want to accomplish." It was not always that way. He recalls leaving the May 1968 abortion conference at Louvain deeply discouraged by the evidence of dissent he had found among Catholic intellectuals there, not only on birth control but even, to some extent, on abortion. On the way home he stayed overnight with a priest-friend in London.

I woke up very early with the light flooding the room, and I was thinking about this. And it occurred to me, "Well, the whole things is providential, and you can't really figure out where what you're doing fits in or what good it's going to do. But that shouldn't really concern you too much. It's all going to come out right in the end." And beginning to think of things that way made it possible for me to do everything I've done since then.

If that sounds Pollyannish, Grisez's view of the state of the Church is a blunt, harsh corrective. Conditions in Catholicism worldwide, he believes, are very bad, with a kind of "artificial unity" masking confusion and dissent not only on moral questions but on fundamental dogmas like Jesus' bodily resurrection and the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The problem extends not just to the simple faithful and the theologians but to people in authority. Much depends on the next pope.

Meanwhile the Church is in crisis, and the condition of moral theology is particularly bad. Pope John Paul II, to his credit, is "dealing constantly with morality as a matter of truth"-for example, in --while also speaking of Christian humanism. Says Grisez appreciatively: "That's light years away from how it would have been looked at in the old days, and I don't think it's going to go away.

If the Church gets itself straightened out..." As for his own efforts: "What I'm doing is coming along and getting picked up in a few places." Still, the overall picture is bleak. The renewal of moral theology for which Vatican II called "isn't happening." And: "On the whole, dissenting moral theology is prevailing around the world. If I had been thinking about fighting and winning some kind of war, the whole thing would be completely impossible. You just couldn't do it. I don't have the status, I don't have the power. I haven't' accomplished that much."

Further complicating matters is the neo-Platonist strain of other-worldliness in Christianity against which secular humanism so disastrously rebelled several centuries back.

More and more it's nonbelievers who set the framework, determine the agenda, establish the public culture... If there is no God, you've got to be a consequentialist and do your best. That's not a bad position for somebody who doesn't believe in anything. And an awful lot of people who think they believe in God really don't believe in anything, because it doesn't have any practical effect. Whereas faith is telling you, "You're cooperating with God but you hardly know what his plan is." And you've got to do his will without seeing good results-not killing the baby, not contracepting, sticking to a marriage when it seems impossible. It's terribly difficult... If Christianity is going to survive at all, it's going to survive among people who are very tough and very clear-headed, and there don't seem to be many of these around.

Time has run out. "No one will ever accuse us of optimism," I say.

"No," Germain says, "I'm afraid not. I'm not optimistic."

Russell Shaw is director of public information for the Knights of Columbus in Washington, DC. This article is excerpted from a profile that will appear in Ethics, Metaphysics, and Politics: Essays on Grisez, edited by Dr. Robert George, forthcoming in the fall of 1996 from Georgetown University Press.

This article appeared in the March 1996 issue of "The Catholic World Report," P.O. Box 6718, Syracuse, NY 13217- 7912, 800-825-0061. Published monthly except bimonthly August/September at $39.95 per year.

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Cancer in Women

The sad reality is that any woman who takes a hormonal contraceptive for four years prior to her first full-term pregnancy increases her risk for breast cancer by 52%. It is worth noting that this same research arm of the World Health Organization also places "the Pill" in the same category with asbestos and cigarettes.

Researchers in Iran have published results of a new study showing that women who have had an abortion face a 193% increased risk of breast cancer



from: http://www.zenit.org/article-30799?l=english

Marriage Notes- Good for society

American Academy of Pediatrics Panel, “Marriage is beneficial in many ways” because people “behave differently when they are married. They have healthier lifestyles, eat better, and mother each others health.” Looking at the effects on children, the Panel stressed that this advantage is not found in step family households nor in households headed by unmarried cohabitating parents. (Pediatrics, 2003)

Another research team found that the advantages given to children by intact marriages extend beyond the individual child: the existence of such marriages also predicts the overall health of a school and a neighbourhood → that is, intact families are essential for creating “a social world [that] is ordered in ways that generally favour young persons.” (that from the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 2004)

Regarding child sexual abuse, for example, data from Canada showed that preschool-age children living with their natural parents are forty times less likely to become abuse victims than are those children living in alternative arrangements. (Ethology and Sociobiology, 1985)

The children from such homes are ― on balance ― also much healthier, in both mind and body, than those growing up in any other setting. They earn higher marks in school; indeed, family structure is superior to all other competing theoretical explanations for differences in child achievement. (Journal of Early Adolescence, 2000; Social Problems, 2000)




From the article: http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/why_australia_and_the_world_needs_a_renewed_culture_of_marriage/
October 2010