I could hardly watch this video containing audio conversations of Planned Parenthood employees, including a director of development, talking to people saying they wanted to fund abortions only for Black people to diminish the Black population, and the Planned Parenthood director agreeing happily! It is unconscionable. It is as bad as the videos of hundreds of Planned Parenthood workers happily being willing to cover up statutory rapes of 13 year old girls.

This organization is the same one that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton received money from and were honored by at the Planned Parenthood conference. How can Barack Obama support an organization that specifically targets and accepts money for aborting Black people, those of his own race?
Hat tip to the American Papist.

The AmericanPapist has the story.

Euthanasia, gay marriage, abortion through all 9 months of pregnancy, creation and destruction of human embryos: These are important pillars of the Democratic party.

You can support this debate and encourage McCain to answer the challenge by commenting on Huckabee’s blog post.

Early voting in Texas ends this Friday, so find a polling place and cast your primary vote, whether for Democrat or for Republican.

I wrote a blog page a while back explaining why I became Catholic.

However, one aspect I didn’t touch on in that article was the numerous pieces of evidence that confirmed my decision to enter full communion with the Catholic Church that I only found once inside of it.

The Saints

As a Protestant, I once called them “the Catholic Hall of Fame members” when discussing Protestant-Catholic issues with my (Catholic) friend Gerardo.

While that is true, it’s true in the same somewhat irreverent sense that the Pope is “God’s homey”.

I was upset and felt cheated when I as a Protestant started reading the lives of the saints. “Why haven’t I been told about all these amazingly faithful people?!” I demanded. Their writings don’t show up anywhere at the Christian bookstores I went to, nor the secular bookstores. I had read most of the “Left Behind” series but nothing of St. Augustine, St. Aquinas, St. Therese of Lisieux, or St. Francis de Sales.

Something was wrong about that. My Protestant reading went from the Bible, then skip years 100 AD – 1800 AD, then “modern” Christian writing, though doctrines of the first-centuries Church and the reformers were interspersed throughout my beliefs.

These men and women loved God and accepted His love in a way I longed for and to a degree that I did not see among anyone I knew. They were special; they were the way Christians could be and should be, the fulfillment of Christ’s commands to us to obey His teachings and to love God and one another with all our heart.

And, all of these people were unabashedly Catholic. They were as Catholic as the Pope, believing in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, in the authority of the Church and in the Holy Spirit’s guidance of Her.

Ask any Protestant you know if they know who St. Therese of Lisieux is. Very few do, even though she is the “greatest saint of modern times” and one of the few Doctors of the Church. All Christians should learn about her and her little way to help them grow closer to Christ, yet she is hardly known outside of the Catholic walls.

This factor was one of the strongest confirmations that this was the Church Christ established.

The Theology of the Body

Pope John Paul II’s landmark work. Every person in the world should be taught this understanding of the human person, but so far, even most Catholics don’t know what the theology of the body is.

However, that is changing, especially with young Catholics, who are devouring these liberating teachings on who we are as male and female persons, how to understand our sexuality and sanctify our sexual desires, and how to understand who man was, who he is, and who he will be because of Christ.

I believe that our Protestant brothers and sisters will open up to this teaching as well, sparking a powerful movement within their communities, too. It is just too awesome to be contained and is the antidote for the post-modern world’s enslaving doctrines of hedonism and selfishness.

The theology of the body was a gift given the world by God through Pope John Paul II. It could have been given through others, through a Eastern Orthodox priest, or an Anglican priest, or a Reformed Protestant pastor, or an Evangelical one, but it was not.

It was given through the Pope of the Catholic Church, who spent his life for Christ enduring all manner of evil in World War II and communist Poland, who studied philosophy and theology and wrote encyclicals on how faith and reason complement each other, how women have tremendous dignity and gifts for the Church and the world, and how critical the family is to society and civilization.

Through the theology of the body, God gave me the grace to overcome habits of sin that had shackled me for years. Truly it is in hope we are saved and for freedom that Christ has set us free!

These two factors, the saints and the theology of the body, were the most powerful in confirming the decision I made to enter the Catholic Church. There were others, too, like the vocation to religious life and the priesthood, which perhaps I will write about sometime in the future.

Rock. On.

Check out these short but powerful videos from a group in Phoenix called Catholics Come Home inviting people to discover the beauty of the Catholic Church and the splendor of truth:

• The Church’s impact on the world over the centuries in education, science, charity, and faith
• People watching their life’s movie, the good and the bad, at their deaths, as a metaphor for Judgment
• Testimonies of Catholics who have returned to their faith

Hat tip to to Catholic Media Review.

This winter has been brutal in many places of the world, colder and harsher than normal.

We have seen it in the U.S., and you probably saw the freezing weather in China that brought their trains to a standstill and had people trapped in stations for days on end. The arctic ice, which was supposedly melting at a rapid rate, has now thickened considerably.

Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.

Contrary to my facetious title, we don’t need more global warming, and this winter is just one more data point in what must be a long-term analysis of information, something that goes for scientists on either side of the global warming debate.

I made a post a few months ago challenging the accuracy of computer simulations in predicting the weather, something that the IPCC touted heavily in their investigation.

I pointed out that there are so many complex factors involved in simulating the weather that it is very difficult to know whether the simplifications and abstractions made in creating the simulation didn’t cause the results to diverge radically from the reality being modelled.

And now scientists are talking about that:

According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona — two prominent climate modellers — the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.

“We missed what was right in front of our eyes,” says Prof. Russell. It’s not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind’s effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.

Even though these scientists support my proposition, who is to say that they are now modeling all the important factors in the correct way to accurately simulate the weather? They may be missing something big, too, or be weighting the inputs incorrectly. More work and sane, rational discussion are needed before passing legislation that tries to solve what may not end up being a problem at all.

Meet David and Frances, a fellow Ave Maria Singles Catholic couple, at their new blog!

Frances has read and commented on our blog for some time, and I have been enjoying reading their posts since I discovered that they had a blog recently.

Survey says: Americans are leaving or changing their religion more than ever, and more Americans are leaving the Catholic faith than any other.

My response: This is a good thing!

If you’re an atheist, be an atheist. If you’re a Christian, be a Christian. If you’re a Muslim, be a Muslim. Be hot or cold, not lukewarm.

In short, it is better to be an authentic believer in nothing than to say you believe in something untruthfully. Someone once said that if people really knew what the Catholic Church taught, most of the people in the pews would be scrambling to get out, while most of the people outside the church walls would be scrambling to get in! It is hyperbolic, but there is truth to it.

I have known many people, decent Americans, who say they are Christians but who never go to church, who use profanity every third sentence, who blaspheme daily, or who are ignorant of what their faith actual teaches. God bless them and may He convert them to the love of Christ, but it would do them more good to be honest with themselves and others and own up to the fact that they live their lives as practical atheists.

We in the Catholic Church are working hard with Christ in the New Evangelization called for by John Paul II. A big part of that is a re-evangelization of people who are culturally Catholic or who are Catholics weak in their faith. They can grow in their faith with God’s help and our encouragement and instruction!

Other communities and churches, too, are working hard to evangelize and reach out to people with the good news of Jesus Christ, and they are fighting the battle against the tides of the culture and concupiscence, which lead people toward selfishness and hedonism and not to love and the gift of self to others.

Europe has already shown us what a post-modern culture looks like: I have read that 5% of French people go to church on Sundays, yet the majority still claim they are Christians. They, too, need to be evangelized anew.

So this study is only indicating the reality that many people are casting off the facade of faith that they only weakly believed in. I hope it will help people discover, probably for the first time, the splendor of the love of God in Christ Jesus, when they realize that the atheism they follow ultimately offers no hope against the despair of meaninglessness.

This blog is really hilarious and unfortunately true for many white people.

I am half-Honduran so, of course, none of it applies to me.

White people voting Green Party!

Any religion except your parents’ (Christianity) is cool to believe in!

You have probably heard about this horribly sad story: A woman, Emma Beck, committed suicide shortly after aborting her twin babies, leaving a note explaining her actions.

She wrote:

I should never have had an abortion.  I see now I would have been a good mum.  I told everyone I didn’t want to do it, even at the hospital. I was frightened, now it is to late. I died when my babies died. I want to be with my babies: they need me, no one else does.

This is so sad on every level, and to me it shows the real story of abortion: sadness, grief, and sometimes despair.  I do not believe that God wanted her to despair after she aborted her twins, but rather, he wanted her to find forgiveness and healing in Christ’s love–nothing is too much for God to forgive and heal.

Apparently, Ms. Beck’s boyfriend, the children’s father, “reacted badly” when he heard she was pregnant.  This young man failed to be a true man, who would have protected his girlfriend and his children rather than turning his back on them.

And the doctor at the hospital who performed the abortion: Ms. Beck told “everyone” at the hospital she didn’t want to do it, that she was scared, and yet they also failed to help her, even though she was clearly crying out for help.

Mother Teresa spoke before then President Bill Clinton and other congressmen at the national prayer breakfast in 1994:

And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion? As always, we must persuade her with love and we remind ourselves that love means to be willing to give until it hurts. Jesus gave even His life to love us. So, the mother who is thinking of abortion, should be helped to love, that is, to give until it hurts her plans, or her free time, to respect the life of her child. The father of that child, whoever he is, must also give until it hurts.

By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems.

And, by abortion, the father is told that he does not have to take any responsibility at all for the child he has brought into the world. That father is likely to put other women into the same trouble. So abortion just leads to more abortion.

Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.

She continued:

We [her order, the Missionaries of Charity] have sent word to the clinics, to the hospitals and police stations: “Please don’t destroy the child; we will take the child.” So we always have someone tell the mothers in trouble: “Come, we will take care of you, we will get a home for your child.” And we have a tremendous demand from couples who cannot have a child – but I never give a child to a couple who have done something not to have a child. Jesus said. “Anyone who receives a child in my name, receives me.” By adopting a child, these couples receive Jesus but, by aborting a child, a couple refuses to receive Jesus.

Please don’t kill the child. I want the child. Please give me the child. I am willing to accept any child who would be aborted and to give that child to a married couple who will love the child and be loved by the child.

May our Lord have mercy on this woman’s soul and bring her to eternal life in Heaven with her twins.