I know this is off topic from this thread of posts about Congress, but since I previously posted about a new name for my newly purchased sailboat I felt the need to post on a new name idea that came to me.  This one even Wendy likes:

Your Ad Here!

Of course I’ll put it on the bow like the previous name but the great think about the name is that you can put it in odd places that you’d never want to have an ad.  Like on the bottom of the boat where it would only be visible during a capsize.  Or on the bottom of the hiking board (similarly only visible during a capsize).

What do you guys think?

The first session I went to was about Martin Luther King Jr. and what he REALLY spoke.  Fr. Massingale was an excellent speaker, gifted with the ability to shift through the information to the heart of the issues being discussed. MLK (excuse the abbreviations throughout the post) is one of those universally held heroes.  Whenever that is the case, it means that aspects of that person’s life have been overlooked by the public.  No one’s message is that universally liked.  Instead that person’s beliefs get “sanitized” to make it more palatable to the public as a whole.  John Paul II is another example of this phenomenon.  Most try to forget his strong stances against birth control and married priests when they revere him as a great Pope.

MLK was a big believer in government social programs.  Additionally, he had many critical things to say about capitalism and its ability to leave people in the gutter.  In many aspects he had sympathies towards certain socialistic thoughts although certainly not all.  This part of his legacy has certainly been overlooked by the public.

The other aspect that gets forgotten is how much his message was a Christian one.  Although the public likes to think of him as a black leader, he was primarily a Christian pastor who led a Christian movement.  As the words of his famous “I have a dream” speech go: “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”  To him, ending segregation in the south was all about doing God’s will.

And what stuck me about these things is how true he was to the underlying truths of Jesus Christ, even when that meant re-thinking and re-tooling his message or speaking what was unpopular even in the black community.  Fr. Massingale referred to the riots in Watts as a transitional moment in the life of MLK.  He hadn’t been exposed to black repression in communities where there was no physical segregation laws.  When he saw that black repression existed in communities without physical segregation, he saw that ending segregation required more than changing bus and water fountain policies.  That without economic justice, financial segregation would be just as, if not more crippling as, physical segregation.  Again, the Christian message was bigger than just busses and water fountains.

And it made me think: what would King have to say today?  He was a big fan of government programs.  But that was before the day when the radical attack on Christianity in government began.  How would he feel about that today?  Would he have been able to help stem that radical purge of faith from the public square?  If not, would his attitudes have changed to prefer church sponsored programs over government programs?

And it pained me to think that we no longer have his voice.  Instead we are stuck with the voices of comically pathetic people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.  Both people with the ‘Reverend’ title but neither of whom deserve it like MLK did.  They are no more ministers than Karl Rove.  They are politicians.

So I left the session praying for another MLK to shine in today’s world.  To have a powerful black voice that reclaims the Christian message he spoke so boldly.  A voice that knows that expediency is a sign of desperation and that desperation is a sign of lack of faith and hope.  Because, in the words of St. Paul: If God is for us, who can be against us? (Rom. 8:31)

Always best to start off posts like this with something lighthearted like a joke.  I heard a few jokes from Congress.  Here’s the best one, told by John Allen Jr., the National Catholic Reporter’s correspondent to the Vatican:

On the Pope’s last trip to America, he arrived a little bit early.  He was able, with little fanfare, to get his luggage and make it to the limo that was taking him to St. Patricks Cathedral.  About 5 minutes into the drive, he rolled down the window and said to the driver:

“I was wondering if you could indulge an old man who doesn’t get to do much on his own.  Could I possibly drive the limo for a while?  I love to drive and haven’t been allowed to in years.”

The driver didn’t see any reason why not so he parked the limo, let the Pope get into the driver’s seat while he got into the back.  The Pope started driving and it was immediately evident that he hadn’t driven in years.  He was going way too slow, could barely keep in his lane and cut off a number of people.  Finally after nearly sideswiping a large bus, a cop pulls him over.

The cop gets out of his car and goes to the driver’s window.  When the Pope rolls down the window, the cop, looking puzzled and without saying a word, goes to the back of the car and opens the rear door.  Again looking puzzled, he closes the door without saying a word and goes back to the driver’s door.  After taking a good look at the Pope he nods his head, shrugs his shoulders and heads back to the cop car.

When the cop got back to the car his partner ask him, “Aren’t you going to write him a ticket?”

“No, I can’t write this guy a ticket.”

“Why not?  Who is it?”

“Well, I’m not exactly sure who it is.  But he’s being driven by the Pope!”

This past weekend I went to the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress and had a very good time.  It was my third trip after two years off.  I went with 44 other members of my parish.  It was a faith filled journey at which I renewed some of my commitments in my life, picked up some new ones and learned a great deal.

There are those in the conservative Catholic circles I frequent that are fairly critical of “Congress”, one periodical going so far as to call it “Cardinal Mahoney’s Dissident Fest”.  While it is true that Congress leans fairly liberal, I think many over-react.

Yes, there are some presentations that include some dissident or heretical thoughts.  However, the reality is that the vast majority of sessions are consistent with Catholic Orthodoxy.  To my knowledge, no formally disciplined clergy have presented at the conference.  You won’t see Fr. Curran there.  When you balance this against the fact that there are a number of great presenters like John Allen Jr. and Wesley J Smith (in past years) and conservative Catholics have nothing to fear.  I always find sessions that I enjoy.

Yes, the Masses reflect a liberal mindset of how Mass should be conducted including liturgical dance and all the other “innovations” that are consistent with the liberal mindset of focusing Mass on the celebration with little desire to reflect the fall to our knees sacred that I so desire to see in Mass.  However, it is a good experience to witness these Masses as you get to see what that vision looks like when professionally done.  There is much to like in the Liberal vision, although it has many shortcomings (like liturgical dance outside of the procession and recession). I think a melding of the minds could result in Masses which not only honor the sacred but also reflect the jubilation of an Evangelical Christian service.

There is much a conservative Catholic can learn and grow in their faith by attending Congress and I whole heartedly encourage those with the means to attend in future years.

In the next few days I’m going to write about 10 posts (one on each of the 8 sessions and a couple of general thoughts) on my experiences and the things I took away.

There’s a phrase you won’t hear often on this blog, but their recent opinion piece regarding the out of control board of supervisors is excellent. To quote from the opinion piece (in case you’re too lazy to click on the link yourself):

“THE IRONY was obviously lost on the clueless San Francisco supervisors when they passed a resolution warning that a Christian youth gathering could “negatively influence the politics of America’s most tolerant and progressive city.”

“Spare us the doomsday hyperbole, supervisors.

“We can safely report that the politics of San Francisco suffered no discernible shift in ideological alignment from the convergence of 25,000 Christian teenagers listening to rock ‘n’ roll music and words of inspiration.

(snip)

The supervisors’ reaction to the evangelical Christians was so boorishly over the top that only one word could describe it:

“Intolerant.”

The reality is that the ultra-liberals of our country, and they seem to have an exclusive lock on positions on the SF board of supervisor positions, while constantly claiming their goal is tolerance are actually one of the least tolerant groups since McCarthy was in office. They don’t respect freedom of religion and are perfectly willing to prevent individuals from practicing their faith or at the minimum forcing them to violate principles of their faith (e.g. force to provide birth control coverage to employees). They don’t respect freedom of speech by those whom they disagree (e.g. abortion protestors). As this resolutions shows, the don’t respect the right of people to peacably assemble. And if completely spitting on the 1st amendment isn’t enough, they would eliminate the 2nd amendment entirely.

Bravo to the SF Chronicle for shining light on the excesses of the left.

Today’s Gospel has one of the most important statements that Christ made:

“If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” (Luke: 9:23)

This is from Luke chapter 9 and the context is important to fully understand the importance of what Christ has said. The 12 disciples have been following Christ for a while now. They’ve seen the miracles. But yet, one can imagine, the “newness” of being a disciple has worn off. Christ send THEM out to exercise demons and cure diseases. They come back amazed, knowing that the powers they yielded did not come from themselves but from Christ.

Then, just when you think they’d understand how powerful Christ was, something amazing happens. The crowds are persistently following Christ and have no food. The disciples ask Christ to send them home so that they can eat. Christ then amazes all of them by multiplying the little food that the disciples have to feed the thousands who are following Him. Everyone, disciples included, were amazed.

It is then that Christ asks the disciples: “Who do you say that I am?”

You can imagine that these overwhelmed disciples are ready to say that he is anything he wants to be, and they do. Peter recognizes Him as the Messiah, as the Son of Man.

But then Christ throws them a curveball. Instead of telling them how wonderful He is or rejoicing in their recognition of His divinity, He admonishes them:

“The Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised.”
Then he said to all, “If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”

Kind of a letdown, no?

What a challenge that was to the disciples and to us all. If you want to follow Christ, you must be ready to sacrifice more. I envision God saying, “You think you’re up for this? You think you’ve got it under control? You haven’t seen ‘nothing yet. Get ready to hunker down because we’re just starting!”

Today I’m in my second day of fasting and I am HUNGRY. I didn’t eat anything Wednesday and had my first meal of Lent today at Lunch. As I sat down to eat my taco salad, the salad that usually leaves me stuffed, it looked particularly small even though the cafeteria lady seemed to pile it unusually high (she must have seen the hunger in my eyes). I thought to myself, “this tiny thing has to last me until tomorrow until dinner!?!” Nevertheless I wolfed it down hoping that it would at least leave me filled for an hour or two. But I hadn’t even gotten up from the table and I was already hungry.

It is at these moments when remembering Christ admonision is important. I must remember that to follow Christ is to deny myself even in physical hunger. It means that we have to dig deep to find that strength to follow Him, no matter how hungry we may get.

All praises be to God for all the strength that He gives us! It’s time to hunker down.

Following Christ is always such a difficult thing because it requires balancing many things. Christ many times tells us to proclaim the Gospel in public. But in today’s Gospel reading he tells us:

‘”When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may see them. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward.
But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you.’ (Matt. 6: 5-6)

We have to be very careful to examine WHY we do what we do in public. Are we doing it because we are actually trying to accomplish something or are we doing it so that we may get public recognition for doing it?

I think the answer to this question can often be difficult to determine even for ourselves. What is our true inner motivation? It takes a great deal of reflection to understand all of our motivations. Lent calls us to spend lots of time in prayer and I think spending a fair amount of that time examining, with brutal self-honesty, what our motivations are, is prayer time well spent.

May God bless all of you in this Lenten season.

For those not in the know, Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. I’ve been feeling in a religious rut for a while now so I’m going to be putting a lot of focus on fasting, prayer and repentance (not so much on almsgiving, I’m broke.). Lent basically lasts until Easter (technically it ends mid-day on Holy Thursday at which point the 2 1/2 day Triduum starts) which this year is April 16th. It is considered to be 40 days although technically it is 46 days between Ash Wednesday and Easter and there are various days that “don’t count” depending on who you talk to to make it an even 40.

In any case, I wanted to let everyone know that I’ll be fasting for all of Lent (this means basically one meal a day for the entire period) and blogging about how it is going and my reflections on growing close to God through suffering.

I was pointed to this article in the New York Times regarding cloning and I thought it was worthy of comment.

As I’ve said before, everyone should consider it manditory reading to read Wesley J. Smith’s blog (linked in my blogroll) regarding bioethics. This guy has spent the time to understand all the issues at hand and will repeat the underlying truths over and over until they finally make sense.

In this NYT article, Michael Gazzaniga tries to make the point that there are two different types of cloning: reproductive cloing and biomedical cloning. It used to be that people who thought like he did called biomedical cloning therapudic cloning, but apparantly that smokescreen has fallen out of favor.

So to make sure it was absolutely clear what was going on here I thought I would explain the ins and outs of the issue:

The whole issue fits under the broad heading of “Stem Cell Research”. Stems cells are cells that can turn into different kinds of cells, cells that could become skin cells or nerves cells or blood cells or brain cells or whatever. The problem is that not all kinds of stem cells can become every type of cell, they usually have a limited subset of cells they can become. So a stem cell that comes from the ambilical cord could become (I’m making this list up for demonstration purposes) skin or blood or nerve cells but could not become brain cells. Stem cells that come from other sources could become a different handful of types but again not all of them.

So the holy grail of stem cells is to find pluripotent stem cells, stem cells that could become ANY type of cell. This has the potential to allow for all kinds of treatments that otherwise couldn’t be done if we couldn’t find a type of stem cell that could become the needed cell type.

Up until this point, NOBODY has an ethical issue with this science. Catholics are perfectly content with stem cell treatments and the search for pluripotent ones. But after this point, the ethical delimas start.

You see, many scientists believe that the best source for pluripotent stem cells come from embryonic stem cells. Embryonic stems cells are the cells that make up recently created embryos (like in the last week or two). Us Catholics like to call that embryo a human being because, well, it is. Life begins at conception from our vantage point. Or said another way, life begins when a cell is created that can be properly fostered to divide/grow into a full grown human being. What is it before it grows? A very small human being. It’s nature doesn’t change because it grows.

So for us Catholics (and many others), the idea of taking/creating an embryo and instead of letting it develop to become a baby, destroying it so that the cells can be used for stem cell research, is very ethically troubling, just as ethically troubling as abortion because, well, it’s exactly the same thing it just has a different intent when the embryo is destroyed.

This is the point at which cloning enters the fray. You see, inherently all the scientists want is an embryo. They don’t care how it was created. So it can either be one conceived in the womb (in theory although very difficult in practice because of the difficulty of extracting the embryo from the womb without damaging it), one conceived in a petri dish OR one that was cloned.

Because of the immediately obvious opposition to using conceived embryos, many scientists have put their hope in cloning to give them the embryonic stem cells they want. This desire is magnified because of the trouble that scientists have had with concieved embryos in their stem cell research. You see, embryonic stem cells often become cancerous/dangerous to the subject when injected in the person. This is thought to be because the cells don’t have matching DNA to the person they’re being injected into. If however, the scientists were to be able to create an embryo that has exactly the same DNA as the person being treated, the hope is that they could get around the cancer/rejection problem.

So scientists have two motivations to figure out how to create cloned embryos: To potentially avoid the ethical questions about destroying life and to hopefully give a new avenue to prevent embryonic stem cell rejection.

The good news for scientists is that they have a process that promises the ability to do exactly what I outlined above: create an embryo with the DNA of the person that is to be treated. This process is called somatic cell nuclear transfer or by its initials SCNT. The process is as follows:

-An unfertilized egg is taken from a woman
-Just about any cell is taken from the subject to be treated.
-The DNA is sucked out of the egg
-The DNA is sucked out of the subject’s cell
-The DNA from the subject’s cell is placed into the egg, creating an embryo
-The embryo is stimulated into starting the division/growing process

While it is fairly easy to outline the process, there are all kinds of difficulties with it. Things like doing these processes without damaging the egg or the DNA. It’s so difficult that no one has yet been able to successfully do it for human embryos, at least that they can prove (note the recent scandal with the Korean research that was likely completely fabricated data). However, there have been numerous experiments with animals where they have successfully used this process to create a cloned animal embryo and then grown that embryo into an adult animal, Dolly the Sheep being the most famous.

So, FINALLY I get to the point of the article from the NYT!

Note that I said that SCNT was the process used to make Dolly the Sheep. In other words, it was used to do what is called reproductive cloning. Also note that the logic that got us to discussing SCNT was stem cell research and the desire for pluripotent stem cells. This is what the scientists would like to call therapudic or (in the NYT article) biomedical cloning.

The fact is that these two “different” types of cloning are EXACTLY the same thing. They can try to call them different things, but the procedure is the same and is called SCNT. The only conceivable difference is intent. However, after one has performed SCNT, no matter what the original intent was, the embryo could either be distroyed and used for medical purposes or it could be grown into what it is a miniature version of: a human being.

Finally, there are a number of additionally troubling issues specifically with SCNT the most overlooked of which is the need for eggs from women. See, they don’t create these clones from thin air. Unless some unforseen breakthough comes about, they will always need 1 egg for every clone they do. So if they’re going to treat millions of people with embryonic stem cells, they will need millions of eggs from women. This issue popped up during the Korean experiments where women were forced to donate eggs to the experiment.

Additionally, much of the focus on SCNT and embryonic stem cell research (which has yet to produce ANY treatments) takes away focus from far less troubling stem cell research using adult stem cells (of which the above mentioned ambilical cord stem cells are an example of) which not only shows much promise, but has ACTUALLY developed meaningful cures/treatments for a number of different illnesses.

However, these issues are just the icing on a very ethically troubling cake. The reality is that no matter what proponents of embryonic stem cell research say, every time they create a new stem cell line, they destroy a growing human embryo.

In a Crawford family first, my brother actually recommended a movie of religious nature that I enjoyed watching: The Mission. This movie was made in 1986 and stars Robert DeNiro.

The number one thing that struck me in this movie was the value of Penance. Robert DeNiro plays a slave capturer who kills his brother in a fight and turns away from his past life to become a religious brother. During his transformation he goes through a process which is very common for new/renewed believers: he doubts whether his sins can be forgiven. And while God forgives, the process of penance helps us to recognize the truth. The sequence of him carrying a heavy load of miltary gear up the mountain to the natives that he had hunted and sold was very powerful and the natives freeing him from that load was even more powerful. You could feel the healing in DeNiro’s tears.

Penance is a very powerful healing tool.

The second thing that I thought of what how far the mighty Jesuits have fallen. This movie portrays the best of who the Jesuits are. They were formed by a Saint who knew the value of fighting for the faith or as is said in the Catholic Encyclopedia:

‘Ignatius had suggested for the title of their brotherhood “The Company of Jesus”. Company was taken in its military sense, and in those days a company was generally known by its captain’s name.’

The movie shows the Jesuits standing up for the faith and, just as importantly, the people of the faith in the face of secular persecution. Today, however, the Jesuits far too often find themselves associated with questioning the faith and denying Jesus and particularly his divinity. How the mighty have fallen…