Katie van Schaijik

The lie underlying the culture of death

Feb. 25, 2012, at 3:30pm

Theodore Dalrymple, who is also Anthony Daniels, professes to be an atheist.  He is, in any case, a true philosopher—a man with rare powers of insight and expression, who reflects deeply and fruitfully on human experience, its moral meaning and implications.  A doctor and psychiatrist by training, he spent many years serving badly messed up people in horrible places, in Africa and in English inner cities.

He has an article about sex selection abortion in the Telegraph today, pointing out the moral incoherence of the current outrage over the discovery that it is practiced fairly routinely in England. 

The Abortion Act provides, de facto, abortion on demand, and this has been so for many …

Gregory Borse

The Bishop and the Baby

Feb. 11, 2012, at 10:12pm

Here's my question to the Bishops, who made a full throated defense against the Administration's effort to infringe upon the rights of Churches to teach and live their creeds--and to protect their institutional sister-institutions to be free of governmental infringement.

What about me, your Eminences?

I work for a secular institution that will enact the Administration's mandate requiring that my premiums pay for other people's contraceptions, sterilizations, and abortions.  So what if the Administration has said that insurers will be the ones who will be required to do this?  Isn't my compensation package inclusive of health insurance benefits in the form of my employer contributing to the …

Katie van Schaijik

Moral confusion run amok

Jan. 27, 2012, at 10:16am

It's always jarring to hear moral indignation and moral terminology being deployed in the defense of moral evil. Here is National Organization for Women President, Terry O'Neill, answering a reporter's question about whether the President has a right to dictate that faithful Catholics pay for emplyees' contraception and sterilizations through their health care plans. In fact, she asserts righteously, President Obama has "an obligation" to force them.

One can't listen without feeling,

1) that this is a wretchedly unhappy woman.

2) that she supposes she has just delivered a crushingly dispositive argument instead of a steaming mass of moral confusion.

But, the state of culture and …

Katie van Schaijik

Flight from reality

Jan. 23, 2012, at 2:38pm

T.S. Eliot once wrote, "man cannot bear too much reality."

I've been meditating on this a lot in recent years--realizing its truth more and more, and finding it a key to understanding various human situations I come across.  

In his post on forgiveness below, Michael Healy mentions one especially common case of reality avoidance: the dishonesty of the wrong-doer about his responsibility for the wrong.  

A searing article on Roe v. Wade at realclearpolitics.com (hat tip Barbara Nicolosi) today shows that it happens not only on an individual level, but also at the communal level. [My bold]

If human embryonic life is morally worthy of protection, we have permitted sixty million murders under …

Katie van Schaijik

Mildred Jefferson, heroine for life

Nov. 11, 2010, at 4:54pm

To my regret and dismay, I only learned about this wonderful person after her death in October. I would have liked to sit at her feet and be her disciple.

The first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School and a founder of the National Right to Life Committee, she deserves the gratitude and admiration of everyone who cherishes human life.

An article in today’s American Spectator online describes her fearless and articulate opposition to abortion:

Dr. Jefferson, a surgeon, was appalled by the 1973 decision, Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion on demand for all nine months of pregnancy, up to the moment of birth. This decision, along with its evil twin, Doe v. Bolton, …

Katie van Schaijik

Josef Seifert calls on PAV President to step down

Mar. 5, 2010, at 4:48pm

Personalist Project Adviser Josef Seifert is the seventh member of the Pontifical Academy for Life to call for its president, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, to step down or be removed from office over public comments that “appeared to condone the abortion of the unborn twins of a nine-year-old rape victim in Brazil.”
Here is an article about the scandal.
See also Professor Seifert’s open letter on the question. The whole thing is more than worth reading, but below is a sample paragraph, responding to the Archbishop’s published suggestion that the moral status of such “therapeutic abortions” was a difficult question addressed to the consciences of those directly involved.

He even …

Katie van Schaijik

Nancy Pelosi’s Archbishop explains the meaning of freedom

Jan. 14, 2010, at 1:29pm

His excellency, George H. Niederauer, Archbishop of San Francisco, has published a letter to Nancy Pelosi laying out the Church’s teaching on freedom and conscience. I find it very well done.

Freedom of will is the capacity to act with moral responsibility; it is not the ability to determine arbitrarily what constitutes moral right.

In reminding his readers of the objectivity of moral values, the Archbishop stresses not so much the binding character of the law as given by the Church, but rather the reality of conscience as the “core of the person” and the locus of his interior encounter with God. In other words, the Church teaches us not so much to “obey authority” as to …