I am glad to hear that the Church is going to intervene and send apostolic visitors to the Legion.

Look to the Church!

We were recently honored by Katie being invited to guest post on Faith and Family Live, so if you are joining us from that excellent collaboration, welcome!

Katie wrote about how we met and married via Ave Maria Singles.  If you are single Catholic, I highly recommend joining this site and being open to God bringing you together with your future spouse through it.

Katie here:  Yesterday, we dabbled a little in the days of merry ole’ England.  Our friends, the Fleurys, were hosting a homeschool medieval festival, and Devin and I went as Jeeves and Winifred, former Waldensian heretics who were now repentant and on pilgrimage to the Holy Land in penance.  Making a pilgrimage was all the thing during the Middle Ages, apparently.  As was heresy.  Our twin sons, we explained, were poor Saracen children we had picked up in Jerusalem and were adopting.  We felt such pity on them, poor infidels, and could not bear to have them raised outside the Church and in peril of hell (this was before the days of Vatican II and Nostra Aetate, mind you, so don’t hold our harsh views against us).

“Holy, hoppin’, holy water bottle, Batman!”
“Shutup, Robin.”
– Fictitious exchange between the Dark Knight and his sidekick

Firstly, we do not use the word “shutup” in our house, Katie bids me tell you.

But the boys do love their holy water bottle.

Having fun as usual:

Quick, somewhat humorous post; our boys, Leo and Tobias are twins, as you know.  They were both covered by Medicaid from birth (under a special program for foster children called Star Health), but then inexplicably before we got them, Tobias was dropped from Medicaid.

The boys’ foster mom at the time tried to get him back on, but I guess the state workers couldn’t figure it out how to do it.  We have his Medicaid number, which is what we need for prescriptions and what not, so even though he was dropped, the pharmacy was happy as long as we gave them that magic number.

So, I think we requested sometime back that he be put back on Medicaid since he is still in foster care, and after many weeks we got a letter in the mail from the state of Texas saying “Request Denied” because Tobias “is not under 18 years of age and so does not qualify”.  Of course, Tobias is not even 1 year of age, and his twin brother is still covered.  We just kind of laughed about it because “what are you gonna do, right? The State has declared him to be over 18 years old.”

Well then today we got another letter from the State congratulating us on Tobias being admitted into Medicaid’s Star Health, with a letterhead addressed to the old foster mother (whose name was misspelled) but sent to our address.  So Tobias after being covered but then being dropped but still being covered kind of by the magic number and then being rejected soundly has now been accepted again.  Got that?

…that I’ve forgotten that most people think condoms are a good thing that will help solve the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

Of course, they don’t help solve it, and in many ways they make it worse, just as Pope Benedict said.  Prophetic.  The culture and the world hate it.  He says it anyway.  Experts from Harvard agree with him.

Dr. Green:

The accepted wisdom in the scientific community, explained Green, is that condoms lower the HIV infection rate, but after numerous studies, researchers have found the opposite to be true. “We just cannot find an association between more condom use and lower HIV reduction rates” in Africa.

Dr. Green found that part of the elusive reason is a phenomenon known as risk compensation or behavioral disinhibition.

“[Risk compensation] is the idea that if somebody is using a certain technology to reduce risk, a phenomenon actually occurs where people are willing to take on greater risk.” The idea can be related to someone that puts on sun block and is willing to stay out in the sun longer because they have added protection. In this case, however, the greater risk is sexual. Because people are willing take on more risk, they may “disproportionally erase” the benefits of condom use, Green said.

Claiming to be a liberal himself, Green asserts that promoting Western “liberal ideology” where, “most Africans are conservative when it comes to sexual behavior,” is quite offensive to them. Citing his new book, “Indigenous Theories and Contagious Disease,” Green described Africans as “very religious by global standards” who are offended by “trucks going around where people are dancing to ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’, tossing out condoms to teenagers and the children of the village.”

You know when liberal Harvard doctors and the Pope are agreeing, something is going on that is deeper than the media’s knee-jerk reactions.

You cannot defy God’s plan for love and marriage and hope to have it solve problems.  Contraception, why not?

This positive post brought to you by melancholic-choleric Devin deep in the penitence of Lent. 

I know that I am days behind on posting about the ND Obama news, but I feel obliged, as an ND alum, to voice my utter disgust with the University’s decision to honor President Obama at the 2009 Commencement.  The University’s administration has for years made decisions that bring distress to the faithful faculty and students on campus and besmirch the name of Notre Dame with faithful Catholics throughout the country.  And, now this.

I loved my years at Notre Dame–the candlelit Grotto after sunset, the twin lakes (St. Mary’s and St. Joseph’s) bursting with spring blossoms, Lucenarium at the seminary across the lake, Tenebrae in the Basilica with all the lights off and the Reproaches sung so beautifully.  I fell in love with my faith at Notre Dame.  I was part of the effort to bring Christopher West to campus in 2002 and to establish a Theology of the Body class through the depts. of Theo and Philo, which continues to this day and is consistently full.  My JPII Catholic friends and I were eager to evangelize the culture and felt that we owed a debt to the University to evangelize her, too; some friends talked of joining the Holy Cross priests and reforming from within.  Others hoped to work for the University and evangelize through the administration.

In recent years, however, I have begun to lose hope that such reform is possible.  Optimism was rekindled with the appointment of Father Jenkins as President but has been dashed by his decisions regarding the V-Monologues, etc that seem too much like appeasement for “progressive” elements of campus.  And, now this.

How Christ must grieve.  This University dedicated to His mother, who is the primary model of life honored in the womb, will now give public honors to a president who seems so wholly bent on supporting the destruction of human life.  There seems a deeper irony, here, too.  One might wonder how long before Obama’s administration begins to persecute and penalize faithful Catholics who stand in the way of his plans for social engineering.  His administration seems to brooke no opposition, for all his talk of collaboration, and one wonders how long he will stand outspoken bishops and homeschooling families and pro-life protests.  And, so, for a very visible Catholic university to publicly honor this man who might one day touch off a major persecution of Catholics is, well, ironic.

I’ve written my letter and signed the petition and so forth, and suppose I ought to encourage you to do the same.  Here are the requisite links: Letter to Father Jenkins, Petition.  However, I don’t really see much point.  God help him.  Blessed Mother, please pray for him to your Son.

Wow, we are really becoming a dime a dozen nowadays. 

Just joking!  Our friend, Jen, has been interviewed for the National Catholic Register about her conversion from atheism!

There is always a first step that leads to belief in God. What was yours?

Thanks to meeting and knowing my husband, I learned that belief in God is not fundamentally unreasonable. We met at the high-tech company where we both worked. Joe believed in God — something that, fortunately, I didn’t know for a while.

Why was that fortunate?

To me, belief in God was so unreasonable that, by definition, no reasonable person could believe in such a thing. I felt I could never be compatible with someone that unreasonable. Had I known that Joe believed in God, I would never have dated him.

Some atheists have contended that people like me who convert to Christianity do so because they can’t hack it as an atheist and so turn to the “comfort” of religion “where everything that you need to believe is told to you so you don’t have to think for yourself” and where you know you’ll go to Heaven when you die and not become worm food, which must feel very good.

To which I would reply, “Like hell that’s why I became a Christian.”

It was one of the most difficult decisions of my life to become a Christian.  I had to come face to face with the possibility that I was egregiously wrong about everything I believed with respect to the world and human beings.  I did face it, disbelieved in God but begged Him for help if He was real, and then waited to see if anything about my horrible situation would change.  And it did.  Why?  Because God did it.

Christianity, then, far from then handing everything to you on a silver platter to believe in, engages your whole intellect, imagination, memory, and will, challenging you to become the person God created you to be, to overcome your sinfulness and become a person who loves others selflessly.

Since becoming a Catholic, I have now had Protestant friends tell me that it must be nice being Catholic, because “everything that you need to believe is told to you so you don’t have to think for yourself”.  Sound familiar?  It is the same misconception that my atheist friends made, but this time it is within Christianity.

Quite the contrary.  Now, more than even when I was a Protestant, I am challenged to believe and to think.  And that thinking is not making myself my own authority, but instead to “think with the Church” that Christ established.  It is not easy, but it is the way that Christ has ordained things to be.  And I can tell you that, having lived life as both an Evangelical Protestant and as a Catholic, it is the best way.

Christ did not want us to have to “think” our way in Christianity by deriving from scratch every truth and doctrine, going by the Bible alone.  Christ “knows what is in a man” and knew that that way would lead to chaos and error, and He does not want His children to be led into error.  Instead, as He said, He built His Church and has prevented the gates of Hell from prevailing against her, and He gave  authority to the apostles, and they to their successors, to preserve the Sacred Tradition and the Sacred Scriptures faithfully.

I did not become a Christian because it comforted me; I became one because it was true. Similarly, I entered full communion with the Catholic Church from being an Evangelical Protestant, not because it comforted me, but because I came to believe it was true.