by Susan Fox
Bishop A.M. Blanchet watched
in horror as members of his flock killed white settlers in Eastern Washington.
It was how they did it that caused him the most anguish: “easily and with
gaiety of heart,” he wrote, “whooping and hollering.”
A white French Canadian, Bishop
Blanchet has the distinction of being the first bishop of Nisqually – later known
as the dioceses of Seattle and Spokane. He kept a journal in French; traveled
the early American frontier cooking altar breads over an open fire; he was accosted
and mistreated by prejudiced pastors of other denominations. And he witnessed
the atrocities of the “red” men he loved and considered his own.
In the mid-1800s, he wrote a
letter addressed to these men using the term of address, “Mes pauvres
sauvages.” (My poor savages or my poor wild men) It was an anguished and
compassionate letter from a spiritual father. While he was obviously distressed
by their actions, he never lost faith in the indigenous peoples of the Pacific
Northwest “because it cannot be doubted that when the Indians will understand
the seriousness of the crime of homicide, they will avoid committing it.”
In his letter, he explained
that he merely felt he had a job to do as a missionary: “As they learn to know
God – that will inspire their horror of all these terrible crimes that they
commit now so easily.”
He was a successful
evangelist. I’ve attended Mass side by side with descendants of those same
Indians in Eastern Washington. Their liturgy was celebrated in Salish.
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| Twitter Wild Man |
I kept his spiritual advice
in mind as I met the same group of “wild men” on Twitter this week. They
insisted that children in the womb are not human beings. They are simply cancer
cells. A woman has the right to have her appendices out. A baby is no different than a cancer cell,
they argued in 140 characters or less.
Humorously, I recalled having
my appendices out in Grenoble, France, in 1974. It was the practice in France
to give the patient the portion of the body removed after the surgery! I woke
up in a French hospital with a test tube lying next to me. Yep, sure enough, it
contained my appendices!
They did not look like a baby,
I swear. They looked like long pink stringy things. How embarrassing that the
inside of one’s body could be so very ugly.
I have the personal experience
-- unfortunately -- to explain to you the difference between my ugly appendices
and an unborn baby. I miscarried my son Raphael in 1985. He was about six to eight weeks from conception.
As the Twitter atheists said,
Raphael did drop into the toilet. They implied this made him something less than
human. But we pulled him out and baptized him, and brought him into the
hospital where I was to have a DNC.
And even the doctor agreed he
was unmistakably a very small human being. I recognized my husband’s long face
and legs. And while my stringy appendices had my DNA, Raphael didn’t. He had
his own. Therefore, he is not my organ or my cancer. He is his own person, with
his own personal right to life. If I have the right to “choose” what is done
with my body, then Raphael should have an equal right, and that requires him to
be born and raised.
Yet this week I was accused
of lacking “science” by a science major in grad school, my dear atheist
tweeter. In his mind women are ruled by “hormones,” must have uncontrolled sex,
and then they are rudely occupied by infant invaders who must be firmly
repelled medically in abortion. Under this scenario, the human race is actually
an alien band of parasites!
“Abortion is not murder
because it deals with a part of a woman's body, not a life,” he said. Another atheist
argued, “If
you need an organ, should your mother be forced by law to donate?” He referred
to the womb.
One
of my new pro-life twitter friends, responded, “A ridiculous argument that has
NOTHING to do with the subject.” But the
second atheist responded, “It does actually. Why do fetuses have the right to
use a body without consent?”
I
responded, “The mother practicing self-mastery gives consent when she has
sexual relations.”
“No,
she doesn’t. Consent to sex isn’t consent to pregnancy!” the atheist shot back.
This led to an argument on the ineffectiveness of birth control. “Only
abstinence works,” I said. And it doesn’t damage the health of either the
mother or the father. Birth control
endangers women’s health, and vasectomies are associated with brain damage.
My son did not choose to come
into existence. He didn’t -- with his life -- occupy my womb without my
consent. My husband and I were waiting in love for our child, and we actually
watched for the best time to conceive. There was nothing involuntary about my
womb being occupied by another human being, nothing requiring us to expel the
“little invader.” And when we lost him, there was no greater suffering. I
simply can’t describe it.
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| Atheist View of Women |
To suggest that women are
helpless rag dolls who can’t keep their legs together is to suggest that women
are incapable of self-mastery – that, in fact, they are as wild and savage as
the atheist barbarians arguing on Twitter.
So I started asking
questions. And the first atheist tweeter admitted that his mother had an
abortion, and his “girlfriends” had abortions.
Here we are all upset and
shocked because a 39-year-old woman in Utah kept seven dead infants in her
garage, children she bore at home while her three teenage daughters lived in
the house. She is charged with six counts of murder (the seventh baby was still
born). No one doubts that it was infant murder
– right after birth. What is the difference between infanticide and abortion?
Five minutes.
So how would a man deal with
the knowledge that his mother murdered one of his siblings? And he was spared?
Loving his mother, wouldn’t he decide that what she had done was to simply
remove unwanted tissue? He says that’s not the case. “I support abortion not
out of loyalty (to my mother), but because it's the right thing to do. Women shouldn't be forced to be pregnant.”
Behind those words, however,
I sense a story of great fear on his mother’s part. And his family is not alone.
Fifty-seven million abortions in the U.S. since 1973, but how many brothers and
sisters survived and were affected by those 57 million decisions? We could have
hundreds of millions of walking wounded in the United States.
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| Baby Oven: A Woman Willing to Bear Children According to An Atheist |
I asked my tweeter atheist how
he felt about the “decision” his girlfriend made to have an abortion. He
answered, “I respected it. My girl is not my baby oven. She is her own person.”
But his child is not.
Patience is required. In 150
years, our country has come full circle. The wild Indians are now law-abiding
Catholics, and the population is infiltrated with wild men, who think nothing
of murdering their own children. The time of Moloch has emerged. Child sacrifice
is the new norm, but this time the false god’s name is FEAR. Maybe that’s what
Moloch meant the first time around too. But today the New Barbarians wear
suits, carry iPads and have college degrees.
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| Moloch the god of child sacrifice |
Atheists are bitter when they
see bad things happen in the world. Stories like Noah’s Ark and the Exodus make
them think, "If God exists, He is mean."
My husband has been trying to
explain to them that God takes responsibility for evil. Even though He does not
directly cause it, He promises to handle it – to bring good out of evil.
God tried to show us how He
would repair our “mistake” in the Garden by sending His Son to become man and
die for us. God so loved the world that He gave His only Son.
Early Christians seemed to
get this message that is ignored and buried today. In an Easter homily, the
second century bishop of Sardis, St. Melito, said, “For the sake of suffering
humanity he came down from heaven to earth, clothed himself in that humanity in
the Virgin’s womb, and was born a man. Having then a body capable of suffering,
he took the pain of fallen man upon himself ... and by his Spirit, which was
incapable of dying, he dealt man’s destroyer, death, a fatal blow.” Death entered
the world through man’s fall. God came to earth to fix our “mistakes,” not His.
Everything God made was good.
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| Behold the Lamb of God Who Takes Away the Sins of the World |
The good bishop goes on to
explain: “He is the mute lamb, the slain lamb, the lamb born of Mary, the fair
ewe. He was seized from the flock, dragged off to be slaughtered, sacrificed in
the evening, and buried at night. On the tree no bone of his was broken; in the
earth his body knew no decay. He is the One who rose from the dead, and who
raised man from the depths of the tomb.”
Death where is thy sting?
This Easter Sunday is the 15th
anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado
near where I live. This story is perfect atheist fodder. Two students entered
the school on April 20, 1999, and sprayed the library with bullets, killing 12
students, one teacher and injuring 26 more before taking their own lives.
The Denver Catholic Register
this week wrote about the Columbine tragedy with the headline, “Out of evil
comes A GREATER GOOD.”
Students who survived spoke
of the joy they had in their lives despite their injuries. Patrick Ireland was
shot in the head, arm, leg and foot that day. He spent three hours in and out
of consciousness pushing himself slowly toward a shot-out window. When he
reached it, he hurled himself out to rescuers.
He had to relearn how to
walk, talk and retrain his memory. But he finished high school on schedule,
went on to college, married his college sweetheart, had a daughter and manages
an insurance office. Forgiveness was an important part of his recovery.
“We have a choice of how we
live our lives, choosing to be a victor or a victim on a daily basis... Being a
victor is a conscious decision,” Ireland said, adding that “God has a plan. If
that was my purpose to be used as a tool for greater things, then I’m happy to
be able to serve that way.”
Sean Graves has had 47
surgeries since he was shot in the back six times 15 years ago. “I don’t think
the pain is something that will ever change,” he said. “But it’s a blessing and
a gift to still be here and do all the things I can do.”
A member of St. Frances
Cabrini Church in Littleton, he and his wife, Kara, serve as peer mentors with
the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation for people living with paralysis. Mr.
Graves spent four years in a wheel chair, and was originally told he’d never
walk again. “I’m stubborn,” he said,
“when they told me that, I took it as a personal challenge.” Today he walks.
God showed great tenderness and
respect for the Blessed Virgin Mary in the manner he used to gain her consent
to become the Mother of His Son.
St. Luke reported Our Lady’s response to the Lord’s
invitation through the Angel Gabriel: “Behold the Handmaid of the Lord. Be it
done to me according to your word.” Doesn’t her answer remind you of Patrick
Ireland’s response? “If that was my
purpose to be used as a tool for greater things, then I’m happy to be able to
serve that way.”
I don’t think a God like that would create men and women who are “invaded” by “cancer cells” that magically
turn into human beings. No, that sounds like a fairy tale created by someone in
a red suit with horns on his head.
Neither would I expect the
Blessed Mother to call herself a “baby oven.” Let us pray that the people, who
think of pregnant women as “baby ovens,” have their stony hearts removed. May God give
them hearts made of real flesh.
Watch this fascinating video of the human being developing from seven weeks from conception. It jumps to the next video for the whole development automatically. Share with your atheist friends!
The Development of the Human Embryo from Seven Weeks.
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