In 1968, something terrible happened in the Church

This is the smallest violin in the world playing just for Cardinal Stafford. Much as I enjoy beating up on the spirit of vatican ii clowns, the poisonous rifts he's talking about did not come out of nowhere in 1968 - and not in 1963 either. So the dissenters have a lot to answer for. Great.

But let's not forget the atmosphere that helped foster that poison. Chilly hierarchic triumphalism followed by a few years of excessive exuberance under Giovanni, followed by a long road of Carter-esque hell under Paul. The "trads" have a lot to answer for too.

You Orthodox have different problems. Your priests are less prone to hysteria, probably more prone to ethnic bigotry and venality. We all have our crosses to bear. His Eminence should suck it up and bear his. That wasn't witness, it was self-pity.

The church will change its teaching eventually - or become extinct.

I don't know whether or not you've noticed, Ollie, but those faithful to HV are having lots of kids and those who dissent are on their way to becoming "extinct".

"those faithful to HV are having lots of kids..."

True - but their kids will grow up poor (costs a lot to educate kids these days) drift into the underclass and lose their faith...

It's like evolution (which at a guess, most of the people who believe in HV think is false). It isn't just a matter of getting your genes to the next generation, you have to make sure that the next generation is in a good position to pass them on too...

Time has proven Humana Vitae prophetic. Imagine if it had been embraced instead of rejected. Perhaps Catholics could be an actual counterculture, a culture of life witnessing to this culture of death, where abortion is considered a right and a quarter of adolescent girls have HPV. Instead you got the felt banner generation griping about Latin phrases being reintroduced to the Mass oblivious to the mortal wounds caused by their institutionalized dissent.

Cdl. Stafford is a brave and wise man. I hope this essay is widely circulated.

As far as I know, there are a few countries that have "embraced" HV - i.e. their governments have made it hard for ordinary people to access contraception. Places like the Phillipines, El Salvador, etc... really wonderful places. Interestingly, they have higher rates of abortion than the US, despite abortion also being illegal.

My guess is, if the US had "embraced" HV, it would be a second-world-rapidly-approaching-third-world status country, will a population heading towards the 1 billion level...

"Yep, because children always become exactly the same as their parents, and the only way to expand one's group is through reproduction.
Which must mean those modernists were breeding like rabbits some 20+ years before 1968, hmm?"

Nope, because the traditionalists of that time didn't perceive the threat against their children that was being foisted on them in public schooling. We do now, hence the rise of homeschooling and private schooling. After all, who wants their kids being taught being taught by a bunch of leftover 60s radicals and their lock-step intellectual progeny, especially when the chief purpose of said 'education' is to train the children against parental and religious values?

their kids will grow up poor (costs a lot to educate kids these days) drift into the underclass and lose their faith...

My guess is, if the US had "embraced" HV, it would be a second-world-rapidly-approaching-third-world status country, will a population heading towards the 1 billion level...

Speaking of questionable prognostications, didn't "The Population Bomb" also come out in 1968?

For you youngsters, this from Wikipedia: "The Population Bomb (1968) is a book written by Paul R. Ehrlich. A best-selling work, it predicted disaster for humanity due to overpopulation and the "population explosion". The book predicted that "in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death", that nothing can be done to avoid mass famine greater than any in the history, and radical action is needed to limit the overpopulation."

Methinks Paul VI was the more accurate prophet.

OllieW: You may be able to recite chapter and verse but so far you haven't shown any willingness to do so nor any understanding of HV, NFP, or what JP2 taught. Might I suggest Christopher West's take on JP2's TOTB? Might be more accessible.

I can give you best-practice success rates on NFP based on 1st hand knowledge. Sorry, you actually do have to follow it in order for it work.

And your realization that the Church is nonsense doesn't seem to have left you better off given that you're hanging out at a conservative Christian blog spreading ignorance and bitterness all around.

A long and pretty convoluted piece. I love the irony of Cardinal Stafford excoriating vulgarization, and then going right to (likely unwittingly) vulgarizing a thought of Meister Eckehart's.

Or maybe the sexual intercourse of average people is in fact on par with mystical experience. In which case celibacy would be a teaching of the Devil. :)

Or maybe the sexual intercourse of average people is in fact on par with mystical experience.
Posted by: Jillian | July 29, 2008 6:33 PM

It can be, with a little effort. Margot Anand wrote some good books on introducing Tantric ideas to Western readers.

I take your point, MDavid, and besides, state socialism and totalitarian communism are artifacts of modernity. They nearly destroyed religion and tradition in the East. I was thinking, though, of John Paul's warning to his fellow Poles as they emerged from communism: that they should not exchange one form of slavery for another.

For ye who dun Cardinal Stafford for his views on sex, I'm wondering if you would rather live in a world informed by the old cardinal's views, or the views of the young guy in the post above who declares condom-free sex "the new engagement ring."

Charles Cosimano may be a little bombastic in his choice of words, but his point is basically correct. HV didn't stand much of a chance in a world in which Protestantism (and to a lesser degree, secularism) were viable options. HV could only work in a closed cultural context. By the 1980s (when I was an adolescent in Catholic schools) it was a dead letter.

"As such a stricture could only work in a closed cultural context, the prohibitions in HV were not going to be culturally enforceable. On the contrary, they were being promulgated to a culture that had no use for them and still does not."

Much of my Protestant (and some Catholic) friends' misunderstandings about and resistance to NFP, HV, and Catholic teaching on sexuality are summed up in the above statement--that this is a list of prohibitions to be enforced, that no one follows them anyway (so therefore they can't be true, since we know the majority is always right, or rather, that the majority decides what is right), and that our modern culture is somehow more advanced / Catholics just need to "get with it" (unsure what "it" is, but I'm pretty sure I don't want to "get" anywhere near it).

First of all, Catholic teaching on sexuality is not simply a list of prohibitions. It is an invitation to unadulterated, uncontracepted (ie, total, self-giving, completely trusting) love. Who is not looking for this kind of love? The unfortunate thing is that few if any will find it in sexual encounters that do not allow both partners to be completely open, trusting, and vulnerable (really, if you are using a condom or contraceptives, how trusting are you? how vulnerable? how open to a future and future responsibility with your partner?).

Second, contraceptives are seen as a good thing by many. However, this necessitates believing that the behavior they are used to safeguard (non-committed, consequence-free sex) is good, whereas such behavior is harmful both to one's physical health and to one's emotional health (and to one's spiritual health, although somehow fornication and such aren't seen as an issue in many circles). Even within marriage, what effect does using contraception have? I am currently seeing it pull a number of my married friends apart, as one partner wants children and the other postpones or flatly refuses without discussion. I'm hearing my faithful Protestant friends talk about pregnancy as a disease and about children as horrible burdens. Is this healthy? Is this happy? NFP offers couples the ability to postpone pregnancy, if necessary (perhaps to finish one's education, to get a steady job, etc), so contraception is unnecessary for married couples to obtain any necessary and licit goals.

As to the "no one follows the teaching, so therefore it must be changed" argument, that is preposterous logic. The truth doesn't cease to be the truth, even if no one believes it, and error does not become truth because everyone believes it. The earth didn't become flat just because everyone thought it was, and it didn't cease to be round even though no one knew it.

I would argue that the culture needs HV now more than ever. As a young-adult convert to Catholicism, I was initially against the whole no-contraception thing. Then I actually investigated what the Church taught, what being faithful to her teaching would mean practically (NFP being extremely effective in postponing and achieving pregnancy), and gradually I began to see how beautiful that teaching was, and how it would raise the dignity of marital relations to something sublime--the opportunity (not always realized, obviously) to participate with God in His creation of a new, immortal soul.

Finally, check out the huge and growing evidence that young Catholics are embracing HV and the Church's teaching on life and sexuality (ie, the sizeable NFP Facebook site, to cite one small example)--it's not just for fusty, old-fashioned clerics anymore :)

Well said, Gradchica.

I would only add that anyone who reads HV can see for himself how many of Paul VI's predictions about what a post-contraceptive world would look like have come to pass. HV was a truly prophetic document, and the things it teaches are powerful and true.

As a young-adult convert to Catholicism, I was initially against the whole no-contraception thing. Then I actually investigated what the Church taught, what being faithful to her teaching would mean practically ... and gradually I began to see how beautiful that teaching was, and how it would raise the dignity of marital relations to something sublime--the opportunity (not always realized, obviously) to participate with God in His creation of a new, immortal soul.

That is almost precisely my experience as well. I would say that "I could've written it myself", but in fact you did it much better than I could have. I *did* experience almost exactly this trajectory, however.

I entered the Church in 1996 at the age of 33. I had long been an ardent pro-lifer, and to that extent, had no argument with the Catholic Church. But I could not understand why it opposed contraception, since it seemed to me that contraception prevented pregnancy, which would mean fewer abortions occurred.

And so at some point prior to my conversion I was moved to pick up John Paul's encyclical The Gospel of Life, and discovered for the first time that chemical contraceptives often weren't contraceptives at all -- that they work AFTER conception by preventing implantation.

This shocked me to my very core -- as it did my wife, who had been on the Pill for years. The realization that we -- ardent pro-lifers who were solidly anti-abortion -- could have been experiencing very early term chemical abortions without even knowing it, shocked us both into action and we immediately stopped using the Pill.

This is the dirtiest of dirty little secrets: the Pill is an abortifacient, and if you're on it for long enough, odds are that you've had an early term abortion and not even known it.

The above is mine.

We have Cleveland to thank for this morning's scripture lesson, as I was encouraged to look up Matthew 7:6 in context. In the NAB (a translation I normally eschew), with notes from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, for the benefit of all you good Catholics. "Pearls before swine" is found in a list of sayings, probably not originally spoken consecutively. Still, it's interesting what comes just before it.

1 "Stop judging, that you may not be judged.
2 For as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.
3 Why do you notice the splinter in your brother's eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye?
4 How can you say to your brother, 'Let me remove that splinter from your eye,' while the wooden beam is in your eye?
5 You hypocrite, remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter from your brother's eye."

The Pill is not an abortifacient, so set your minds at rest. Any normal woman has almost certainly had a large number of very early failures of a fertilized egg to implant--which is really not the same thing as an abortion or miscarriage. But that was not caused by the Pill. It happens in the normal course of events--from one-third to half the time. So I guess that means we all have dozens, or hundreds, of unborn children awaiting us in Heaven . . . oh, wait, they can't go to Heaven because they aren't baptized. So we all have hundreds of unborn children that God created for no other reason than to die unbaptized. I know the Pope is doing his best to retcon this one, but he hasn't quite figured it out yet.

The false assertion, unsupported by scientific evidence, that the Pill causes "abortions" is the propaganda of desperation. The Church just keeps repeating it, hoping it will stick. I think it's a disgrace that they're once again trying to heap shame and condemnation on women, but oh well, what else is new.

From the New York Times article, "Contra-Contraception," May 7, 2006:

According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, however, pregnancy begins not at fertilization but at implantation. The medical thinking behind this definition has to do with the fact that implantation is the moment when a woman's body begins to nurture the fertilized egg. The roughly one-half of all fertilized eggs that never attach to a uterine wall are thus not generally considered to be tiny humans - ensouled beings - that died but rather fertilized eggs that did not turn into pregnancies. Federal regulations enacted during the Bush administration agree with this, stating, "Pregnancy encompasses the period of time from implantation until delivery."

Later in the same article: . . . Dr. Trussell added: "There is evidence that there is a contraceptive effect of breast feeding after fertilization. While a woman is breast feeding, the first ovulation is characterized by a short luteal phase, or second half of the cycle. It's thought that because of that, implantation does not occur." In other words, if the emergency contraception pill causes abortions by blocking implantation, then by the same definition breast feeding may as well.

I guess women need to feel like murderers for breast feeding, as well as for controlling their fertility. If preventing a fertilized egg from implanting is abortion, why did a merciful God arrange for nursing mothers to simultaneously be killing babies?

Just few quick replies to some earlier comments (way up in the thread).

Elmo wonders why I read CC - since I am not a conservative Christian. I actually find it fascinating - despite disagreeing with > 60% of the postings. I have always found reading stuff I disagree with more useful and interesting that things that flatter one's preconceptions. I really like that Rod also posts a lot of stuff _he_ disagrees with - it makes for a nice atmosphere. Elmo thinks I speak in ignorance of HV - I'm not sure what meaning ignorance could have here, given that having read HV + other documents should put me in the top 1% of catholics sorted by amount of time spent researching this.

One thing I have to get off my chest (coz it annoys me soooo much) is the idea that HV is "prophetic". As a statistician by profession, this is a perfect example of people reading in to the "prophesy" what they want to see. I would happily write a whole essay/book on this, but lets just take one datapoint. Would you rather be a woman in the US or in one of {phillipines, uganda, zaire, saudi arabia}?

I'm guessing you chose US. But there is so much more contraception in the US... so surely, according to HV, women will be treated horribly over here...

Is HV infallible teaching? I mean really, really infallible. No wiggle room.

Can so many priests, theologians, lay people who do not accept HV be in bad faith?

And what ever is to be done about it in the Church? Some may accept HV and practice NFP or just have enormous families. But the vast majority of people who consider themselves practicing Catholics, go to Mass, receive the sacraments, etc. will never buy into HV. Does God send them all to hell when they die?

caroline: Is HV infallible teaching?

I remember reading (can't remember where at the moment) that Cardinal Ratzinger affirmed that HV was a teaching of the infallible Magisterium. Incidentally, HV is merely the last word on the issue; Pius XII's Humani generis had previously affirmed the teaching.

But the vast majority of people who consider themselves practicing Catholics, go to Mass, receive the sacraments, etc. will never buy into HV. Does God send them all to hell when they die?

The Church makes no statement about who will go to hell, which in the infinite mercy of God, may well be empty. The Church confines itself to acknowledging who is in heaven, viz., the saints. For the rest of us it's a toss up.

An ancillary point is that for anything to be a mortal sin, you must know in your conscience that it is a sin. Most Catholics conscientious disagree with the teaching of HV; I would suspect few use artificial contraception merely to piss off the parish presbyter.

Elmo wonders why I read CC - since I am not a conservative Christian. I actually find it fascinating - despite disagreeing with > 60% of the postings. I have always found reading stuff I disagree with more useful and interesting that things that flatter one's preconceptions. I really like that Rod also posts a lot of stuff _he_ disagrees with - it makes for a nice atmosphere. Elmo thinks I speak in ignorance of HV - I'm not sure what meaning ignorance could have here, given that having read HV + other documents should put me in the top 1% of catholics sorted by amount of time spent researching this.

1.) I am a woman
2.) I didn't wonder why you read CC. I asked why you posts convey such ignorance and bitterness if you are so "free" of the Church. It's good that you seek to educate yourself; it's not so good that you are spreading vitriol and lies about topics which you have shown no understanding of (or proof of even having a passing familiarity with) despite your claims to the contrary.

Would you rather be a woman in the US or in one of {phillipines, uganda, zaire, saudi arabia}?

I'm guessing you chose US. But there is so much more contraception in the US... so surely, according to HV, women will be treated horribly over here...

An unjust society is unjust with or without contraception being available. However, artificial contraception/abortion will cause a just society to quickly become less so -- as forewarned in that, yes, prophetic document that you despise so.

"I know the Pope is doing his best to retcon this one, but he hasn't quite figured it out yet."

You may have to explain 'retcon' to the non-role playing games playing portion of our audience. Unless it has managed to slip its way into the regular vocabulary. *grin* (Which it may have. I have a hard time keeping up.)

Wonderful word, stands for 'retroactive continuity'. Used in a form of online game playing called 'MUSHing' (which I've done once or twice) to describe the act of a judge reversing a decision in the past and, thereby, (because you can do this in games) undoing, or altering all the consequences of that decision from the time it was made to the present.

I don't know of any other word that really manages to put that entire concept into such a tidy package.

But he is right. Most people don't realize that actually the majority of fertilized eggs, even without chemical contraceptives, fail to implant. I would wonder what they consider to be the fate of those millions upon millions of fertilized eggs, most of which the woman never was aware even existed.

And yes, every NFP woman who ever used breast feeding as a natural way to space their children is NOT merely not fertilizing a waiting egg by not having sex at the fertile periods. THAT method works specifically by preventing the implantation of an already fertilized egg.

Well, Scrappy, that's why I brought up breastfeeding with the INTENT of spacing the children.

If one is breastfeeding, unaware of the effects, and just notices the results, that is one thing.

But the use of it to space children.. one of the ways it spaces children is by causing fertilized eggs to fail to implant. Identical to the secondary way the Pill works. (Noting that, with both, the primary means is to prevent the ovaries from releasing an egg.)

Therefore, if being used AS a means of preventing pregnancy, it should be viewed the same way. Indeed, if people view those who take the Pill for other reasons (such as regulating their cycle, endometriosis, etc) as culpable even if those effects aren't the intent, and because there could be other means to achieve that end, the same should be said of breastfeeding.

Roland, I'd be happy to elaborate on my earlier statement.

Consider for a moment this passage from an essay published in the May, 1950 edition of "Harper's Magazine," by agnostic author D.W. Brogan. The essay is titled "The Catholic Church in America" and seems to be a strangely organized discussion of the limits of religious tolerance. The passage in question speaks of contraception (the author has already argued that the Church can't make a good case for forbidding abortion--remember, this is 1950):

"What the Catholic bishops are fighting is the growth of forces in American life that make the maintenance of the old Christian standards of sexual morality increasingly difficult. The formal increase in the membership of all churches, the support given to organized church activities by business, by the press, cannot conceal the fact that in one most important field of human conduct, the standards defended and imposed by all orthodox Christians for two thousand years are on a losing defensive in America (and of course elsewhere). So the Catholic bishops try to call in the secular arm, but the secular society does more harm than any amount of censorship and moral policing can do good. After all, it is not the movies, the burlesques, the sexy historical novels that do most to weaken the old folkways; it is advertising. But advertising is business and so sacred. I am convinced that if the manufacture of contraceptives were economically as important in Connecticut as divorce is in Nevada, the Catholic leaders of the state would be as impotent to destroy the business as Senator McCarran is to shut down the divorce mills of Reno..."

So in 1950 the Catholic Church, in the person of her bishops and priests, was seen by secular observers as fighting a losing and ultimately unwinnable battle against not only contraception, but the sexual revolution in general. By the time eighteen more years had passed, many priests and even some bishops had come to share that idea. They really believed that along with the various changes coming out of Vatican II would be not a few major "corrections" to how the Church viewed human sexuality. Oh, sure, adultery and fornication would still be sins. But contraception, some divorce, married clergy--these were *demanded* by the times, and surely the Church would recognize that fact. In advance of HV some of these priests told married couples it was morally fine for them to use contraception; some tribunals processing annulments developed a "rubber stamp" mentality that persists in some places (though not all) to this day; and as for clerical unchastity--we know about the Scandal, but we forget about the many, many priests who petitioned Paul VI to be released from their vows so they could marry.

To priests who were thinking this way, who had been taught to take the Church's teachings on human sexuality with a grain and an asterisk, so to speak, who expected that any day now a spirit of new freedom and the severing of all those old "sin" labels affixed to certain actions would be forthcoming, Humanae Vitae was a deep shock. It wounded their pride more than anything--they had, after all, all but promised their flocks that this new method of "birth control" would be accepted by Rome as it had been by Lambeth. And here was Rome, acting as though the Council had never happened, as though this change was a moral impossibility!

Satan's sin was the sin of disobedience, the cry "Non serviam!" It was echoed by those priests, as we see in Cdl. Stafford's account, who rushed to dissent from Humanae Vitae before they'd even read it. The dissident priests in America--and they were legion--had seen in the Second Vatican Council the chance to remake the Church (at least here) into a savvy, with-it, social justice organization that no longer paraded around in silly rituals or insisted on increasingly difficult moral rules that nobody, including some of these priests, I suspect, really followed. Instead they were being reminded that the Church has always existed as a sign of contradiction to the world, not a willing participant in the world's follies and brief temporal concerns--and they rejected that call.

What happened after that, in effect, was that a bargain--I've called it an unholy one--was struck between lay Catholics in America and their American priests (and in many cases, bishops). The bargain went something like this: we will do what we have no authority to do, that is, absolve you from the requirement to follow the Church's teachings on artificial contraception. All we want in exchange is for you to see us, rather than Rome, as your ultimate leaders--in other words, we'll protect you from Rome, provided you do the same for us.

How many times have parishioners reacted with shock and even anger to the removal of their "beloved" priest for crimes against children? How many times have we shaken our heads over the willingness of a bishop to move a priest from parish A to parish B to parish C without really investigating the complaints against him? I don't think any of this would have been as easy to get away with if the people hadn't already been taught to distrust Rome and place ultimate confidence in their own priest or their own bishop--and it doesn't matter if the particular reputation of that priest or that bishop was for orthodoxy or (as was more common, though not exclusive) for dissent. The new clericalism was worse than any old, because every bishop and every priest was the pope, in terms of being one's ultimate moral authority (provided he was willing to look the other way on birth control, of course).

The price of having bishops and priests who are willing to look the other way while the laity is committing sexual sin is that the priests and bishops are likely to expect the same courtesy. And that hasn't changed, either--only the fact that some of these sexually active priests started targeting children changed the face of the situation. How many priests who are addicted to lives of unchastity involving adults remain in ministry? How many Catholics, committed to cohabitation before a big Catholic wedding and contraception afterward, are comfortable with this bargain?

Does it have to be the primary reason? And does the effect matter at all?

Would a person who takes the Pill to regulate their cycle, though there are other means to do so, be culpable for those failed implantations, even though not getting pregnant wasn't the purpose?

How about those who take it for the primary way it DOES prevent pregnancy, which is to prevent eggs from releasing, with the other as only an unintended side effect? (It only happens when the first method fails to work, after all. It isn't the primary way the Pill works.)

Same, exactly, as breast feeding.

And yes, I have heard women use lots of different reasons to breast feed. After all, if it was just about giving the baby food, there's formula, without that risk at all. Including increased calorie loss, and YES, natural family spacing.

Well, I'd argue that the rates of priest abuse before 1950-1968, including the shuffling around of abusers, was not a problem of the scope that it became once the sexual revolution really got going. I'm sure there were always problem priests just as there have always been pedophiles among the lay population, but the kind of institutional dysfunction we saw here in the recent past wasn't the result of orthodoxy no matter how much anyone would like to spin things that way.

but the kind of institutional dysfunction we saw here in the recent past wasn't the result of orthodoxy no matter how much anyone would like to spin things that way.

I don't think anyone here, especially me, has tried to make the argument that the "dysfunction" (I love that euphemism!) was a result of "orthodoxy". What you are trying to do is argue is that the "dysfunction" is the result of dissent on HV, which is a load of crap. The only one doing any spinning here is you.

The scope of the abuse and cover-ups was huge long before HV. The information isn't hard to find. But I guess if it doesn't fit into your view it's easy to overlook.

Erin,

Thank you for your explication.

I am afraid I don't buy the idea that a Faustian bargain was struck between the clergy and laity that permitted each faction its own peccadilloes. Clerical incontinence is not a novel phenomenon. Neither is clerical homosexuality; medieval monasteries were often in need of "reform" -- that didn't mean the Benedictines were making inferior brandy, I suspect.

Most Catholics that I know simply ignore the ban on artificial contraception. They do not seek the tacit wink and nod from a louche episcopacy and presbyterate. HV was a milestone only because the expectations were at odds with the outcome; that was the result of the Rome's Reformation redux during V2. There was no new teaching in HV.

That priests have always strayed is not to be wondered at: Augustine put away his concubine and her child; Merton was scaling the Mons Veneris long before his Seven Storey Mountain, and hooked up with a nurse after taking his Trappist vows. There is a myriad of similar tales in the naked City of God. The Catholic Church is a church of sinners; that from their ranks arise the greatest saints is the true wonder.

But what has this to do with your postulated complicity of the laity in clerical pederasty and its episcopal facilitation? The shock and anger at the removal of priests? There were cases like that indeed. But it is to be attributed to the pain of believing that a familiar friend, counsellor and man of God, could perpetrate such iniquities, not to a sober and sinister calculation to exculpate him.

It is, to me at least, a travesty to maintain that the laity, tacitly suborned by the clergy in their obstructing the natural procreation of children, should reciprocate by tacitly abetting clerical malefactors in the corruption of such children as they did produce.

I regret that I cannot agree with your idiosyncratic interpretation.

anon for now, there's no reason why you should listen to my advice, but here it is:

If you are approaching double digits in the number of children in your family, you've got the genuine good of the procreative aspect of intercourse covered.

Go ahead and have a vasectomy done, make sure the residual wigglers have cleared out, and enjoy the genuine good of the unitive aspect of marital intercourse with a clear conscience.

You've done your bit, and then some.

Cleveland: you should have stayed with the Benedictines' original recipe for B&B instead of mixing your own Benedictine and brandy religion--it just ain't 100% real stuff. Here's hoping you come to the same conclusion before it's too late. It would be very sad to see your intelligence and learning wasted, nes pa? (That's the extent of my French).

I appreciate the undeserved compliment to my alleged learning and intelligence, but I am not sure what you're referring to. I recall we once had an exchange of recipes for the most salvific of various eaux-de-vie, but I am at a loss to connect that to a mélange of a religion. And when is too late?

Cleveland: It strikes me that you have concocted a Salon de Contrefaçons-like Catholicism just as you have concocted your own private mix of B&B; close but not the real thing. Yes, your take on Catholicism acknowledges authentic RC doctrine, just as your contrefaçon, but no doubt delicious mix of B&B, includes authentic, i.e., store-bought, Benedictine liquor. You clearly have all 27 plants and spices which comprise the RC faith, but it's my impression that you don't know how to distil and blend them into the finished, real thing.

Au contraire, mon cher. I concoct nothing. I distill nothing. I buy mon cognac préféré, and mix in a splash of the genuine Benedictine. The resulting blend is purer in spirit while less treacly than the monkish mingle.

I do appreciate your laudable attempt at catechesis even though founded on an encyclopedia article about booze. Bishop Sheen would be bemused.

When is it too late to embrace the original, you ask? After you're dead, of course.

How do you know that? Been tippling with the Deity, have you? ;-)

Louise, here is some evidence, as you requested. John Opitz, M.D., Professor of Pediatrics, Human Genetics, and Obstetrics/Gynecology, School of Medicine, University of Utah, testifying before the President's Council on Bioethics, engaged in the following exchange:

PROF. SANDEL: Thank you. I have two questions about the rate of natural embryo loss in human beings. The first is what percent of fertilized eggs fail to implant or are otherwise lost? And the second question is is it the case that all of these lost embryos contain genetic defects that would have prevented their normal development and birth?

DR. OPITZ: The answer to your first question is that it is enormous. Estimates range all the way from 60 percent to 80 percent of the very earliest stages, cleavage stages, for example, that are lost.

PROF. SANDEL: Sixty to 80 percent?

DR. OPITZ: Sixty to 80 percent. And one of the objective ways of establishing the loss at least as of the moment of implantation, well, even earlier, let's say as of five days because the blastocyst begins to make a chorionic gonadotrophin and with extremely sensitive assay methods, you can detect the presence of gonadotrophins, let me say, first around Day 7. That's the beta of human chorionic gonadotrophin. And if you follow prospectively the cycles that has been done on quite a few occasions in the Permanente study in Hawaii and so on, a group of women, of nonfertility, who want to conceive and you detect the first sign of pregnancy there of human chorionic gonadotrophin, about 60 percent of those pregnancies are lost.

It is independently corroborated by the fact that the monozygotic twin conception rate at the very beginning is much, much higher than the birth rate and then if you follow with amniocentesis, the presence of the two sacs in about 80 percent of cases, the second sac disappears, one of the sacs disappears.

A full transcript of this very interesting testimony on embryonic and fetal development is found here:

http://www.bioethics.gov/transcripts/jan03/session1.html

Marian Neudel: The recipe [for Benedictine] is a closely guarded trade secret, ostensibly known to only three people at any given time.

I don't know who the three are, but one of my attempts came awfully close. I am not sure exactly what it was missing, but it was either the eye of newt or the toe of frog.

Cleveland, may we drop the bibulous mode of biblical exegesis? It's not only pointless, it's making me thirsty.

Firstly, if you are "drinking the Deity", you'd be well advised to consider that the Novus Ordo Words of Institution may well be invalid. They are a mistranslation of the Latin and the Greek. If so, not only does your taste in wine vitiate your remonstrations about the spurious character of my vinous "concoction", it also condemns you for the heresy of universal salvation, which avers that Hell indeed is empty.

The label on the bottle of your concoction reads not "D. O. M.", but "The infinite mercy of God may well mean hell is empty, so join the enlightened and pick your rosebuds while you may."

Mmmm. "Misericordia infinita divina docet infernos vacare posse, vos igitur humanioribus iungite atque quam primum rosas carpite." Come on, that wouldn't fit on the bottle even in Latin. You are not in the jingle writing trade, obviously.

And I have nothing to do with Canada, much as I love visiting that country.

May I just add that I don't acknowledge your right to interpret my beliefs in your own fashion for your own purposes, whatever they are. That is unjust.

I find it amazing that a memeber of the orthodox church would throw stones at the latins; after all they, the orthos, do not believe in birth control. Of course the Russian Patriarch at one time aid," There is no birth control, if they want to control birth let them sleep in separate beds". this was said in the hearing of a catholic priest the Patriarch held in great regard

I don't see much difference between res ipsa loquitur and solam veritatem spectat justitia, but I do appreciate your gentleman's guilty plea (nolo).

No, Roland, I am not a licensed attorney although law has been my
life. After college, I began as an aid to the Law Director of the City of Cleveland well over forty years ago, then worked in semi-judicial/legislative positions with the Feds for thirty or so years. I never followed up after my law school admission test because I had no confidence in my ability to handle full-tine work and full-time law school and full-time D.C. women chasing. I finally caught one after plying her with a Baileys and Kahlua concoction (she hates B&B).

I'm retired, but I have had the honor of getting one case up to the Supreme Court on certiorari (which was not granted); of a few years of being routinely consulted by Congressional staff on a narrow type of draft legislation; and of writing quite a bit of Federal regulations, with international application, to implement the resulting statutes.

Oh, the Bishop took care of the pre-meal prayer and I took care of the lunch tab. C'est la vie.

Gee, I'd like to quote a sign protesting Planed Parenthood & their abortions! "Planned Parenthood exploits women & liberates men"! Until people realize the succinctness of this, they won't understand the wrongness of birth control. Promiscuity, delinquent & absent fathers became much more prevalent after PP, Margaret Sanger & welfare checks to unwed mothers.