The International Struggle for the Unborn Continued

by Susan Fox

Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God. (Matt.5:8)

New York, April 3-7, 2006 -- One might hesitate to begin a story about the United Nations’ 39^th session of the Commission on Population and Development (CPD) with such a quote, but I really did meet CPD delegates who shone with this beatitude – perhaps not perfectly, but they shone. They were all pro-life.

The delegate from Haiti, for instance, was Catholic and pro-life, quite willing to talk to me, but because his country was not pro-life, he could offer little help. Nevertheless, he accepted a copy of The Gospel of Life by Pope John Paul II and promised to give it to his wife -- a Catholic physician.

One South African delegate was pro-life, while her country was not. I gave her a red rose, affirming human life, and she received it readily. But when I asked for her help, she told me she was part of a delegation which led the Group of 77, mostly composed of Third World countries. Not only that, but her delegation was charged with impartiality because of their leadership role. I asked her if she was a person of prayer. She nodded shyly. “Then do that,” I said. She agreed.

This was the third UN conference I participated in as a non-governmental observer (NGO) for a coalition of pro-life, pro-family NGOs under the leadership of the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute (C-Fam). Members of my family did not accompany me on this trip, but fellow home-schooling mother Kim Kunasek of Phoenix did. I was privileged to be able to travel with her. It made the week so much more enjoyable.

The 39^th session was on migration. So from a lobbying perspective our goal was to initially remain hidden. If we made too much noise right off the bat, we might inadvertently bring in language that promoted abortion. So early in the week I focused on meeting the delegates, and then I could use my contacts later in the week when the lobbying was underway. Our goal was to get them to reaffirm “the report of the ICPD” in its entirety. It’s probably a difficult lobbying position to explain outside the UN.

But in 1994 in Cairo, Egypt, the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) created the Commission on Population and Development and charged it with the task of monitoring the implementation of its “Programme of Action.” By itself, the “Programme” is ambiguous on the issue of abortion. It recommended that women be given access to “reproductive health services.” The pro-abortion lobby always says that doesn’t include abortion, but then UN agencies use the term, “reproductive health services” to pressure countries to legalize abortion.

However, the ICPD report in its entirety, that is, the ICPD plus 47 reservations submitted by numerous countries was a very pro-life document. In order for the UN to create new international law, every country involved has to approve of the final wording of the document. Reservations on specific issues mean that there is no agreement on that issue. The pro-life issue had 20 reservations, so the ICPD in reality did not create a new human right – the right to abortion. Yet many UN agencies use the ICPD to pressure countries to legalize abortion, prostitution, overturn parental rights, prosecute medical workers who won’t perform abortions, etc.

Here are some of the pro-life reservations of the 1994 ICPD:

The reservation of the Latin American countries, which were at that time overwhelmingly pro-life, read, “Because our countries are mainly Christian, we consider that life is given by the Creator and cannot be taken unless there is a reason which justifies it being extinguished. For this reason …we consider that life must be protected from the moment of conception.”

The country of Jordan clarified in its reservation that when the ICPD mentions “couples,” they understood it to mean “married couples.” The Vatican and other countries did also affirm the sacrament of marriage as the basis for referring to two people as a “couple.”

Libyan Arab Jamahiriya expressed a reservation about the term, “unwanted pregnancies” “because our written Constitution does not allow the State to undertake abortions unless the mother’s health is in danger.”

Nicaragua said it accepted the concepts of “family planning,” “sexual health,” “reproductive health,” “reproductive rights,” and “sexual rights” except “when they include abortion or termination of pregnancy as a component.”

Paraguay didn’t mince words: “The right to life is the inherent right of every human being from conception to natural death.”

Needless to say, in 1994, the United States made no reservations to this document because under President Bill Clinton, we were promoting abortion worldwide.

Now it is 2006, and the U.S. is pro-life and some Latin American countries are emerging as socialist nations on the Castro model and they are therefore pro-death. The African nations are allowing restricted abortion, and the Muslim countries are some of our staunchest allies on the issue of abortion. In this and past conferences, it was Syria, Lebanon and Egypt that really fought for the world’s children. Egypt hosted the 1994 ICPD, and was greatly embarrassed when it produced a document that could be interpreted as pro-abortion. Therefore, ever since, the representatives of this country have been fierce fighters for the pro-life cause.

One of the proposed resolutions for the 39^th session of the CPD was to reaffirm the 1994 ICPD “Programme of Action.” While that might seem like harmless boilerplate language, it actually was an aggressive pro-abortion statement because a reference to the “Programme of Action” does not include the pro-life reservations. A reference to “the Report” of the ICPD does. Therefore our lobbying went something like this: Defend your national sovereignty. Make sure the final document this week includes the whole report of the ICPD, a document subject to 47 written and oral reservations, 20 of which related to reproductive health.

Actually, we started by lobbying them to keep the focus on migration by reaffirming only the relevant chapters of the ICPD relating to migration because that was, after all, the topic of the session. But that idea was discarded by the delegates early in the week.

You may ask why we didn’t try to get positive pro-life language into the document. Well, that’s a very interesting question. During this week, our lobbying team included a gaggle of Mexican school girls, a young Canadian, who headed one of the biggest pro-life lobbying groups in Canada (I was accredited under that group), Jeanne Head, R.N., the UN representative of National Right to Life, four men and one young woman from United Families International and Samantha Singson, who now heads the New York office of the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute. I was also there with Kim Kunasek, and my old friend, Janet Cook also of Phoenix. I met Janet in 2000 at my first UN lobbying experience in New York. Kim, Janet and I were all from Arizona. So were the four gentlemen from United Families. It was a coincidence.

And those four gentlemen led by Doug Clark did create a pro-family resolution, which the delegates from the United States agreed to try and put it in the final document. It was a very simple paragraph stating that the family is the basic unit of society: “Recognizing the ICPD’s emphasis on the family as the basic unit of society and noting the effect of international migration and development on the family…” Some members of our pro-life team feared that introducing something like that could provoke the opposite response, that is, the world could be pushed to put pro-abortion language in the document. But by the grace of God, that didn’t happen. Neither did the family language make it despite strenuous efforts by the U.S. representatives. Now this is very shocking because even the Programme of Action of the ICPD, which was literally drafted by a consensus of the whole world in 1994, referred to the family as the basic unit of society.

In just 12 short years, the world has lost its direction. No one can agree that the family is the basic unit of society. But we have to applaud the courage of United Families for making the effort, and the Bush Administration for fighting for it.

Most of the meeting was about international migration. So we heard talks on the so-called “brain drain” – that is educated medical and other personnel from Third World countries moving to developed nations. We heard talks on remittances, that is, money that immigrants send home to their families. The socialist countries wanted to figure out how to tax this money. The (American) capitalists showed how this money actually produces new investment in the home country because the recipient uses it to buy groceries. And another citizen can open a grocery store for the migrant’s family. From the capitalist point of view, even the brain drain was good for developing countries because the people left behind filled the positions in their countries left by the departing “brains,” and therefore the whole population developed.

The best talk at this conference was given by the papal nuncio appointed by Pope Benedict XVI. Archbishop Celestino Migliore has been given the UN as his sole responsibility. That means the United States now has two apostolic nuncios in residence, one for the UN and one for the U.S. It was a treat to be at St. Patrick’s Cathedral Sunday morning on April 2^nd as Archbishop Migliore concelebrated Mass with New York Cardinal Edward Egan. Then during the week the archbishop could be seen walking around the UN very informally.

On April 4^th, he delivered an indirect sermon against abortion and contraception: “Dire predictions as to the future composition and sustainability of the projected human global population led to radical population polices, which have been responsible for different but equally grave dilemmas … falling birth rates, and the creation of imbalances between men and women… If the development of the world’s peoples is to be …sane, such flawed policies will have to be replaced by truly people-centered ones.” In other words, in the 1970s, we were all told to fear the “population explosion,” but three decades later, we are coping with the effects of a population implosion. Through sex-selection abortions, China is raising a generation of men without women, and Europe’s populations are shrinking rapidly, making them heavily dependent on immigration. “Due to low fertility, net migration counts for three quarters of the population growth in developed countries and by 2030, migration may account for all population growth in those countries,” the archbishop said, predicting “radical consequences” for the composition of entire nations.

Delegates from each country split into two closed committees, one working on the substance of the document and the other working on the methods of work. This latter committee was very contentious because the UN Population Fund, a big source of pro-abortion activity in the world, was looking for a larger role in the work of the Commission on Population and Development. That would have been disastrous for the pro-life side.

I remember praying to God to help us with the final document during the week, but if we couldn’t get something pro-life then let them get nothing. It was interesting because on Friday the best we got on the substance was that they did reference the whole “Report of the ICPD” in a footnote (not good according to our leaders). And we heard that Egypt was going to add a reservation saying that the final report should reference the whole report of the ICPD. We were rejoicing about that much, but then the whole Group of 77 walked out of the meeting and went home, and it looked like there would be no document produced by the Commission of Population and Development. But the rest of the countries continued meeting Friday night and then on May 10.

I have since obtained a copy of the final report of the 39^th session of the Commission on Population and Development. We did get our footnote referencing the whole report of the ICPD. The word family does not appear anywhere in the report. They really didn’t create any new methods of work. They did not give the UN Population Fund a bigger role in the work of the Commission. That is interesting because we --- the pro-life lobbyists -- were escorted from the closed meetings when we tried to break in (yes, I crashed a closed meeting). But the UN Population Fund lobbyists – pro-abortionists par excellente – were always inside these meetings.

From the perspective of evangelizing the world, it was a wonderful week. First there was Esther from Ghana. She was a devout Protestant with four sons and holding the highest position in her country in charge of population. She asked me why Catholics – who oppose contraception -- own a contraception factory. Mystified, I responded that many Catholic don’t practice their religion properly, but that the Church does not officially own a “contraception factory.” She understood the concept of individuals not following their own faith, but promised to get back to me with the information on the factory we owned. The end of the week I gave her a red rose (symbol for pro-life) and we hoped to talk together again, but never could because I was lobbying, and she was in meetings.

This past summer Esther called me from Africa. By the grace of God, I was in the shower, and my husband, Lawrence, answered the phone. He said she asked him if Natural Family Planning was a pill. He explained Natural Family Planning to her. When I got out of the shower, I heard him shouting into the bad connection on the phone, “No, there are times during the month when your husband respects you, and leaves you alone so you won’t conceive.” “It’s because of his love and esteem for you,” he added. I could have hugged him! How wonderful to have a good Christian man answer her questions. She was still confused though, and he recommended she speak to a Catholic priest. We must pray for Esther.

We had a beautiful young woman on our lobbying team. Marin was reading the Da Vinci Code in her spare time. The movie was not yet released. She knew I was Catholic, and so she asked me about Opus Dei, the Catholic lay organization started by Msg. Jose Escrivá. Some of you may know that Opus Dei is the evil villain in the tortured anti-Catholic plot of the Da Vinci Code. I explained to her that Opus Dei means “Work of God,” and it was a wonderful Catholic organization dedicated to teaching lay people to give their ordinary daily work to God. The very next day after this conversation, when I was standing in the lobby outside the meeting of the Group of 77, Kim, who was helping me hand out red roses, said, “Look at that man. He was at Mass this morning.” So in a pause of the lobbying I approached “that man” and found out he was a member of Opus Dei, in fact a widower, who had dedicated himself to God and would never remarry. He was an economist from the University of Cadiz in Spain, attending a conference at the UN on international trade. We, of course, told Marin right away of the encounter.

During most of the week, the lobbying seemed more difficult than usual. Many times, Kim and I would be the first on the scene in the morning to lobby as people went into their meetings because we were staying across the street at the UN Millennium Plaza Hotel, and the others lived some distance away or had found cheaper digs at some distance. They always told horror stories of being in cabs stuck in traffic jams. Kim and I walked a block to daily Mass at the UN’s parish, Holy Family, every morning and were already at the UN by 8:45 a.m.

On one such morning, we parked ourselves outside the door of a critical migration meeting, which would be closed to us, and greeted everyone on the way in. Surprisingly, I had not seen these delegates before. Their cards showed they were higher up in the delegation than the ones we were meeting earlier in the week. This therefore was an important meeting. I was careful to say nothing to France. France is on the opposing side, and we were not supposed to tip off the enemy to our presence. But then I met Andrei from Belarus, and he was pro-life. I begged him to stand up for the pro-life cause in the meeting and told him that while many supported the right to life, they were afraid to say anything. He promised to try. The problem was that Belarus probably didn’t have much clout in that meeting. That was the story of the whole week – the pro-life delegates were from countries without power or countries that were pro-death. The U.S. was pro-life, but seemed to be isolated. A South African delegate told me it was actually fashionable to be against the positions of the United States. Everyone wanted to be accepted by their peers. How funny that sentiment did not afflict the world when Bill Clinton was president. Then everyone was happy to be on the U.S. side on abortion.

The U.S. delegate is Roman Catholic and works for the Bush Administration. He is often our source for what is going on in the closed meetings. You have to understand that we often sat in a group, and this was dictated by Jeanne Head of National Right to Life. She has been lobbying at these conferences for decades, and acts as the younger lobbyists’ mentor and leader. It is not easy to stay in a group outside closed meetings from early in the morning to late at night especially since these meetings are held in the smoking area. The world has not embraced the American distain for smoking. However, sitting in a group really pays off. The U.S. delegate showed us this.

He told us of a conversation he had with an anti-life German delegate. The delegate looked at us--sitting in a big group (including many young people)—and complained about the size of our group. (The anti-life lobbyists were present at this meeting but did not sit in a group.) The U.S. delegate basically told him he hadn’t seen anything yet because of the demographics. Only pro-lifers are having children, so there are tons of young people growing up pro-life. The German man groaned.

I had a similar experience later in the week. The radically pro-life Egyptians weren’t on the CPD this year, and so I tried to find a Middle Eastern substitute and settled on the delegate from Lebanon, also pro-life, but very unsure of himself. Nevertheless, he proved helpful at the end of the week in terms of telling us what happened with the Group of 77 leaving, and as we were talking he pointed at our group and asked me who all those people were. I said, “Why, they are all here to support the pro-life cause.” And he expressed his amazement that all those Americans/Canadians/Mexicans were pro-life! I introduced him to Jeanne.

It was the same story with the Indonesian delegate. He read my pro-life business card, looked at me, and said skeptically, “You are against abortion?”

I said very firmly, “Yes.”

“You believe in marriage between one man and one woman?”

“Yes, absolutely,” I replied. He looked shocked. Some Muslims, unfortunately, do not have a very good opinion of the American woman. Just being there with my wedding ring and my little pro-life, pro-family business card was a very important witness.

Arizona couple lobbies the UN for the unborn during the week Pope John Paul II died and was buried.

"I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly" (Jn 10:10).

By Susan Fox

New York, April 2-8, 2005 – It was the week that Pope John Paul II died and was buried. Shortly, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger would be elected Pope Benedict XVI.

Lawrence & Susan Fox 

During that critical week, my husband, Lawrence Fox, and I were in New York City at the United Nations, lobbying for the pro-life cause with the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute. We were secretly wearing St. Benedict medals (with the exorcism blessing) and openly handing out copies of “The Gospel of Life” by Pope John Paul II.

We had no idea how symbolic that would become for what occurred next both in the papacy and at the 38^th session of the UN Commission on Population and Development. We were about to face what our future Pope Benedict would call the “dictatorship of relativism.” The conference was on HIV/AIDS, but the abortion lobby planned to use this conference and all UN conferences – no matter how unrelated the subject matter might be – to establish a universal right to abortion in every country on earth. We were there to stop them.

The week began at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Saturday, April 2, 2005. We were in line for confession when Pope John Paul II passed away. New Yorkers, who try not to show their emotions, were seen nevertheless with tears in their eyes.

The next day was Mercy Sunday, and at 3 p.m., the hour of Divine Mercy, we were holed up in the basement of the Salvation Army in New York City with our fellow volunteers -- Catholics, Protestants, and Mormons -- from all over the world. Pope John Paul II had asked for volunteers in the early 1990s to come to the UN and speak for the unborn child. 

Since then the Holy Spirit had stirred up countless ordinary people from all over the world to go to the UN conferences and work quietly to change the minds of the delegates, and to strengthen some in their pro-life stance.

We were moved to see around the table that afternoon what has been called the “ecumenism of the trenches”: a Baptist woman with 8 children, who works full time and uses Natural Family Planning, a young Catholic woman, who had paid for her own trip from Australia, two Protestant ladies, who are living martyrs in their own country of Canada for the pro-life cause, an Evangelical lawyer and three people from the pro-life Population Research Institute, and others. Later in the week we would be working with students from Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, a Mormon lawyer and Capuchin brothers from Fr. Benedict Groeschel’s Franciscan Friars of the Renewal in the Bronx.

But the news wasn’t good. The lawyer told us that the pro-abortion lobby was using stealth to influence customary international law. Mere repetition of legal norms over time can result in the development of customary international law, which scholars believe is even more binding on countries than treaties – even if those nations do not formally consent to be bound by the law, thereby bypassing the democratic process and the national sovereignty of a country.

The U.S. Supreme Court has already begun quoting international customary law. On March 1 of this year, the U. S. Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty for youth under the age of 18, overturning the capital punishment law of 20 states. The majority decision included references to international opposition to the juvenile death penalty.

Justice Anthony Kennedy justified the use of international customary law in this Supreme Court decision by sayings, “The opinion of the world community, while not controlling our outcome, does provide respected and significant confirmation for our own conclusions."

While ending the death penalty for youth may be a good cause, the fact of the matter is that every voter in the United States is disenfranchised when the Supreme Court looks to world opinion rather than the U.S. Constitution to create new law.

In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned anti-sodomy laws in 13 states, possibly paving the way for homosexual marriage, and again referenced international customary law by quoting a 1981 decision in the European Court of Human Rights to justify the decision.

The week before we left for the UN, we had had to watch helplessly while Terry Schiavo, a vulnerable handicapped adult, was murdered by what pro-lifers now call “judicial homicide” even while our executive and legislative branches of government tried fruitlessly to save her.

Therefore, the information that the government of our country, and all the countries of the world, were falling into the hands of a small liberal elite was very disturbing news. But many pro-life delegates at the UN were largely asleep to this issue.

Our lobbying papers urged the delegates to clarify that the goals for world development approved at world conferences in Cairo and Beijing in the 1990s did not create a right to abortion. The amendment was necessary, we said, because those documents were being systematically misinterpreted to promote abortion worldwide.

We heard the echo of this push in the talks given by the European Union and others. They spoke of the need for countries to provide “safe motherhood,” while lamenting the fact that women die from “unsafe abortions.” It was an oxymoron.

But it proved an excellent arguing point for my husband, who asked many people what they would think if they went to an eye doctor and the first thing he did was poke out both of their eyes. That is what occurs when the world talks about “reproductive rights and services” and “safe motherhood.” You would think they are talking about bringing healthy, happy babies into the world, but they are actually talking about the children's murder.

Some countries did speak out in favor of human life, but they did not support our amendment because they felt that if another country interpreted reproductive rights to include abortion, that would not affect their national sovereignty. Our job was to tell them it would indeed. So we told them about the Supreme Court, and how our voters, living in what might be considered the greatest democracy in history, were being disenfranchised by “world opinion.”

On Mercy Sunday night before our actual lobbying began, I remember telling my husband, “Honey, I feel alone and abandoned by the whole world.” It was a kind of spiritual trial, but God had not forgotten us.

My husband, Larry, and I, have been doing door-to-door evangelization for the Catholic Church for over 20 years. So we began to meet and greet people on Monday morning. 

Many of the friendships we began on Monday continued through the week, and enabled us to hand out critical lobbying documents to certain countries as late as Thursday.

Lobbying is the fine old art of “waiting around in the lobby for an opportunity” as one seasoned pro-life activist told us. On Tuesday morning, Larry stationed himself outside the conference room where the Commission on Population and Development would meet, and began to pass out our first official lobbying document asking the nations of the world to clarify that the Cairo and Beijing conferences did not create an international right to abortion.

When I came out of the conference room to watch Larry work in the hall, I was amused to see that Lawrence already knew many people, and was making his second contact. Although they were very friendly to his face, later when Lawrence wasn’t watching one Japanese delegate began making fun of the document he had given to her. 

I reflected that one day this delegate would not be laughing. Japan –like most of Europe and parts of Asia – is witnessing a complete demographic meltdown – perhaps the end of its race.

For the first time in human history, mankind has deliberately reduced his fertility. Worse than a nuclear bomb, the culture of death may cause whole populations to disappear. According to UN statistics, 61 countries now face “below replacement fertility,” which means their population is aging and declining through death, abortion and contraception. This is going to create problems in the short run with the nations’ pension funds and health care systems when there are more retired than working people to support them. 

But in the long run, it’s going to mean no more Japanese, no more Swedes, no more Italians, Spanish, French, and fewer South Americans. The United States currently does not have an imploding population. We are teetering at a replacement level birth rate – 2.08 children per woman, which is enough to give us a stable population.

But Japan’s fertility rate is only 1.4 children per woman, well below the required birth rate of 2.1 children per woman just to keep the population from decreasing. Japan recently became the first country to have more people over age 65 than under age 15. The New York Times called Japan “one of the world’s least fertile and fastest aging societies.” The aged are expected to make up one third of the Japanese population in just 50 years.

But Japan is not alone in this problem. Italy’s fertility rate, for example, has dropped to 1.15 children per woman, making one wonder if there will be any Italians left from which to chose a bishop of Rome should the Church decide to resume that practice. One Italian population expert, studying a recent report of the Population Division of the UN Secretariat, questioned “whether Italy can stand up to a reduction by nearly half of its working age population in (the next) 50 years.”

I am one-quarter Norwegian, so I made a point of introducing myself to the Norwegian delegate, a demographer. Larry and I asked him if he wasn’t concerned about his country’s decline in population, and he defensively told us that Norway had the most pro-family policies in all of Europe. Still their birth rate is well below replacement level, and the delegate shrugged when it was pointed out that Norway’s indigenous population was dying out, and handing the country over to its immigrants.

Our allies in the war against abortion proved to be delegates from the Middle East and some, but not all South American countries as well as the United States itself. It actually seemed easier to talk to Muslims than Roman Catholics on the issue of abortion. My husband and I humbly introduced ourselves to the delegate from Jordan on Tuesday morning. He proved to be a very interesting man. All of the conferences began at least 45 minutes late, but he was always in his seat behind the sign, “Jordan,” promptly when the meeting was officially scheduled to begin.

He was pro-life, but his complaint was that you could not trust the United States to continue to be pro-life because we had all just lived through eight years of a Democratic presidency. President Bill Clinton had done much to export abortion around the world.

The means he used was the UN Population Fund. President Reagan and now President Bush have managed to cut off all U.S. funding to the UN Population Fund because Steve Mosher’s group, the Population Research Institute, did undercover investigative reporting and found the UNPF responsible for human rights violations -- forced abortions in China and forced sterilizations in Peru.

Ironically, however, the delegate from Jordan was also upset because his country was not receiving the funding it needed for contraception from the UN Population Fund because of the U.S. pull-back. Larry and I represented a coalition of pro-life, pro-family NGOs (non-governmental observers). But we were not officially anti-contraceptive. So having gotten to know the Jordanian delegate fairly well, I told him, “This is not official. But personally, I have used Natural Family Planning in my marriage for 21 years, and it works.” And it’s great because it requires no money, no doctor, and it can be taught couple to couple.

I was not prepared for his response. He was astounded. “But I thought NFP didn’t work!” he said. I assured him it was actually more effective than artificial contraception. I didn’t realize that suggestion would create such a revolution! For everything in the UN runs on money and to suggest that someone could get something done without money was incredible.

Larry and I also enjoyed talking to many members of the Gambian delegation, all of whom were pro-life. They have in their culture the practice of spacing their children naturally through periodic abstinence. After the child is born, the wife moves back in with her mother for two years! When the Gambian delegate told us this story, I said, “Why, you don’t have to abstain for two years with Natural Family Planning!” He looked at my husband, and said, “How long?” And my husband said, with satisfaction, “Five days before (ovulation), and two days after!” His eyes widened and he looked very enthused.

In the encyclical the “Gospel of Life,” Pope John Paul II, calls abortion and contraception “fruits” from the same tree. “It is frequently asserted that contraception, if made safe and available to all, is the most effective remedy against abortion. The Catholic Church is then accused of actually promoting abortion, because she obstinately continues to teach the moral unlawfulness of contraception,” the pope wrote, adding, “When looked at carefully, this objection is clearly unfounded.”

“Indeed, the pro-abortion culture is especially strong precisely where the Church's teaching on contraception is rejected. Certainly, from the moral point of view contraception and abortion are specifically different evils: the former contradicts the full truth of the sexual act as the proper expression of conjugal love, while the latter destroys the life of a human being...Still such practices (contraception) are rooted in a hedonistic mentality unwilling to accept responsibility in matters of sexuality, and they imply a self-centered concept of freedom, which regards procreation as an obstacle to personal fulfillment. The life which could result from a sexual encounter thus becomes an enemy to be avoided at all costs, and abortion becomes the only possible decisive response to failed contraception.”

I speak French, but my Spanish is very limited. However, one of the delegates from Bolivia did not speak much English, and he wanted to question me on the Church’s position on contraception and abortion. He – like Larry and I – was Roman Catholic. But he apparently worked in the government promoting contraception.

The conversation was carried out in pantomime, although my husband later suspected the delegate knew more English than he let on. The delegate explained to us that the Bolivian women had many, many children, and they needed information on how to limit their families.

I picked up on the word, “information,” and I explained Natural Family Planning. No money, no doctor, no government and it is taught couple to couple. In the process, I had my husband as a teaching tool, and I showed my friend from Bolivia that I sent my husband to the couch (as in “Sleep on the couch, honey.”) In actual practice, this doesn’t happen, because the couple communicates. But it got the idea across. My husband dutifully lay on the couch to show him what I meant, and then I said, “seven days” in Spanish.

This was a critical moment for my friend. He looked at my husband questioningly. And my husband looked him in the face, and said, “Yes, we practice Natural Family Planning.” The Bolivian was visibly impressed. Then I explained to him that God had called him to teach Natural Family Planning, to give the information to Bolivian couples so they could limit their family size – if they wished.

In the end, he accepted a copy of the “Gospel of Life” in Spanish, and a picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe. We even had to explain to him by pantomime that Our Lady was pregnant with Jesus in that picture, and that’s why she is called the “Patroness of the Unborn.” 

The humiliation we endured to communicate paid off handsomely. For after that anytime my friend met my husband in the hall, he asked for me, and looked very disappointed if I was not there.

Another delegate friend of ours, who was passionately pro-life, had difficulty with Natural Family Planning. He was Muslim. He didn’t believe the men in his country could practice periodic abstinence. He also labeled our interest in this as a religious point of view (i.e. Roman Catholic). I realized by the choking sensation in my throat that I did not practice Natural Family Planning for religious reasons, but for human reasons. I may have gotten into the practice with the encouragement of my church. But I reflected that if men have available contraception and abortion, and won’t use periodic abstinence, a woman is trapped -- always at the disposal of the male.

In fact, a delegate from South Africa addressed this issue when he spoke about his country’s solutions to the AIDS crisis. He said the government there has developed a life skills program to “empower women to manage sexual relations and to be able to assert themselves appropriately, for instance in situations requiring negotiation for the use of the condoms.”

“Negotiate for use of the condoms??” I thought, “What’s the matter with telling your partner with AIDS to sleep on the couch?” Everyone agreed that condoms are absolutely ineffective against AIDS transmission. Needless to say, the delegate had to admit that in 1990, less than 1 percent of pregnant women in South Africa were HIV positive. But by 2004, 28 percent were HIV positive. And this happened while condom use increased 34 percent in that country during the two decades ending in 2002. This basically supported my husband’s argument at the UN that abortion and contraception in the United States have not helped empower women. In fact, since Roe vs. Wade made abortion legal in 1973, sexually transmitted diseases have increased, the rate of illegitimacy has increased, and so has abuse against women and children.

There has been one stunning success against the AIDS epidemic in Africa: Uganda. The country promoted abstinence and monogamy as a means of stopping AIDS. Bill boards in Uganda remind the population, “Graze in your own field, not in your neighbor’s.” The abstinence campaign was so effective; the infection has almost disappeared from their landscape.

South Africa, on the other hand, is watching its population growth come to a dead stop, according to its representative. They’ve been hit with a double whammy: AIDS and Contraception. The latter has reduced family size to 2.7 children per woman, while AIDS has shortened the life expectancy of South Africans to age 50.

So in the Gospel of Life, Pope John Paul II wrote, “The close connection which exists, in mentality, between the practice of contraception and that of abortion is becoming increasingly obvious. It is being demonstrated in an alarming way by the development of chemical products, intrauterine devices and vaccines which, distributed with the same ease as contraceptives, really act as abortifacients in the very early stages of the development of the life of the new human being.”

And in some countries these very things have a two-fold effect on the population. While the parents are using abortion and contraception to kill their offspring, they also are spreading the AIDS virus and killing off themselves.

However, abstinence was not on the agenda at the UN. In fact, when the week started, we lobbyists all wondered what the connection was between abortion and AIDS. We found out to our horror that the pro-abortion lobby wanted the right to continue to have sex even after they contracted AIDS without adverse consequences. And they wanted the right to abort the product of that encounter, the baby.

Our Muslim friend was a very feisty fighter behind closed doors where most of the negotiating on the final document went on. While he didn’t like the idea of Natural Family Planning, he was also passionately against abortion, contraception and homosexual marriage. It was he who told us that the pro-abortion countries tried to get pregnancy declared a cause of AIDS. He said the pro-life countries nipped that in the bud because in another year they would have demanded abortion become a universal right for humanity as a means of combating AIDS.

But our fellow lobbyists from the Population Research Institute told us that AIDS is not transmitted in pregnancy. It is transmitted at birth and by nursing, and anti-viral drugs can be administered to the pregnant woman at birth to prevent the transmission, while canned baby formula can be given to the family. No baby need ever be born with AIDS nor contract AIDS from his mother if all the resources dedicated to worthless condoms and contraception were given over to these other two options.

Lawrence and I talked all week non-stop from early in the morning to late at night with anyone who would listen to us. When we were tired we went to the UN cafeteria, and while sitting down found more people to talk to. At first, I would pray and let God guide us where to sit. We met important delegations this way. But as my feet grew more tired, I learned to take advantage of the New York culture, which is to only approach people you know. I realized I could sit in the cafeteria with two empty seats, and as people came looking for a seat, I would look them in the eyes, smile and beckon them to come sit with us. It worked! One person from South America, who got to know us this way, explained that he came over because no one talks to strangers in New York, so by implication he thought he knew us already.

But another stranger who did not come over to meet us, turned around repeatedly as he left the cafeteria looking at me trying to figure out how I thought I knew him. I still don’t.

On Thursday, they told us the lobbying was over, and now our only option was prayer. Plus we were to stay all night at the UN Thursday as a witness while the delegates struggled with one another behind closed doors. Larry and I went back to our hotel for showers and then returned to the UN about 9 p.m.

The pro-abortion lobby -- about 12 to 13 young women who self identify as lesbian -- sat in one corner of the room with a table of goodies that attracted the delegates whenever they came out of the room. We – about 10 men and women from Canada, the United States and Australia -- sat in the other corner of the room, some of us holding our Rosaries.

Surprisingly, the Rosary attracted another kind of person, a U. S. delegate, Roman Catholic and a member of the Bush team, who was fighting against the abortion language in the document. He asked Larry and me for our prayers for his sick child and his wife, who was without him that night.

About 11 p.m. I suggested to our group that we pray to Pope John Paul II to help us. His funeral was scheduled to begin in Rome at 3 a.m. New York time. 

We had no idea whether we were winning or losing except that one of our lobbyists had overhead a pro-abortion delegate on her cell phone. She was telling someone that her side was getting discouraged, and they were about to give up, but she wanted to keep fighting. We prayed for their continued discouragement.

Our veteran pro-life lobbyists told stories about how they stayed up until 7 a.m. in a similar situation at another conference. I have fibromyalgia and diabetes, and I thought to myself, I cannot make it to 7 a.m. So I remembered what St. Faustina, the Catholic Church’s apostle of Divine Mercy, had written in her diary. During a drought in Poland she had felt sorry for the drooping plants. She began to pray the Chaplet of Divine Mercy non-stop for rain. After three hours of such prayer, the heavens broke lose with a torrential downpour. Faustina Kowalska was the first saint Pope John Paul II canonized in the new millennium, and he reportedly loved her very much.

So it must have tickled him when I prayed for his intercession, and began to say the Chaplet from St. Faustina’s Diary non-stop starting at 11:30 p.m. Three hours later -- at 2:30 a.m. about an hour before the pope’s funeral would begin -- the delegates all walked out of the room, and went home. We still didn’t know what had happened.

The conference was to resume the next day at 10 a.m., but the start was stalled until 6 p.m. as last minute negotiations continued almost to the end. At that point, they handed out the final negotiated document in English. The European Union, which had helped negotiate it, refused to ratify or approve the document until it was translated into French some time the following week. Once, the language was explained to me by our pro-life Muslim friend, I could easily see why.

The Beijing and Cairo conferences did not create an international right to abortion, but the strongest anti-abortion language was contained in the reservations filed by individual countries and attached to the main document. Therefore to refer to these conferences without the reservations was to take a pro-abortion stance. The Population Commission’s final negotiated document referred to the Cairo conference “in its entirety” (including the anti-abortion reservations of individual countries). That was a whopping success for the pro-life cause.

But the document also sidestepped any implied right to abortion as a means of stopping AIDS. And the wording, “reproductive health services,” often interpreted to include abortion, was completely absent. In addition, the document avoided creating any implied right to homosexual marriage by referring to the people who get AIDS as “individuals with vulnerabilities.” If they had said, prostitutes, drug users and homosexuals, as the EU had done in its speech, it would have created a new group within the human family with the potential right to well . . . marriage.

The final negotiated document was approved by the UN Commission on Population and Development the following week. It was a complete victory for the pro-life, pro-family cause.

But we have another Catholic saint to thank besides Faustina and John Paul the Great. We also handed out pictures of St. Gianna Beretta Molla. She must have been one of the last saints Pope John Paul II canonized as she was declared a saint May 16, 2004. And she only died in 1962. She was an Italian physician, who pregnant with her fourth child, refused treatment that might save her life so that her unborn daughter could live instead. Gianna died nine days after the birth. Greater love hath no man than he give his life for a friend.

Lawrence met members of the Italian mission at the UN. After hearing Larry speak about the problems caused by abortion and contraception, they asked, “How can we change our culture?” 
Later in the cafeteria I gave one of them a picture of Gianna Molla with her children, and he asked me, “Oh, is she an American saint?”

“No,” I said, “She is Italian.”

St. Philomena: Child Saint from Roman Times Works Wonders in the 20th Century

by Susan C. Fox I learned to know St. Philomena as most people do - by testing her intercessory power with God. I had been working all summer to start the Legion of Mary at St. Philomena's Catholic Church in Des Moines, Washington, and it wasn't proving to be an easy task. There was a statue of St. Philomena in the back of the church - she held a lily and an anchor. And I thought, "Well, I wonder who she was?" Then I addressed her, "St. Philomena, if you had a devotion to Mary, the Mother of Jesus, when you were alive, will you please help me start Mary's army here in this parish dedicated to you?" This was August, 1994. The Legion of Mary was up and running by September. And very little further effort was required by me as the most amazing group of Filipino Catholics joined the Legion there and they began the serious task of door-to-door evangelization. So this started me wondering. Who is this lady in the back of the Church holding an anchor? How is she so powerful with the Mother of God? And with God Himself. Unknown to myself, I had stumbled across a spiritual gold mine that had been specially reserved by God for our times. On the feast day of Mary, Help of Christians, May 24, 1802, the bones of St. Philomena were uncovered in an underground cemetary on the road from Rome to Ancona. She had laid there in total obscurity for over 1600 years. But once her relics were transferred to a shrine at Muganano, Italy (near Naples), the miracles abounded. And as a result, her popularity spread to such a degree that within 35 years, she was declared a saint and named the "Wonderworker of the 19th Century" by Pope Gregory XVI. It is the only instance in which the Church granted the public cultus of a saint from the Catacombs of which nothing was known except her name and the bare fact of her martyrdom, according to Fr. Goodman, M.S.C., "Saint Philomena, Virgin, Martyr and Wonderworker." The bones that were uncovered on that fateful day were those of a 13-year-old girl. The burial stone held several symbols testifying to Philomena's virginity and martyrdom. The Roman emperor Diocletian wanted to marry Philomena, but he was already married, and she refused. So he tied her to an anchor and threw her in the Tiber River - a common form of martyrdom in Roman times. However, the rope tying her to the anchor broke and she did not drown. Two arrows on her tomb pointing in opposite directions apparently signify that he tried to kill her by arrows, but they turned around and struck the archers. And finally after she still refused him, he stabbed her in the back of the neck with a spear, and the bones revealed that was her actual means of death. Those symbols on her tomb, and the vial of her martyr's blood buried with her, were the only record remaining of Philomena's life when her remains were unearthed. Three separate apparitions to a nun, a priest and an artisan have since confirmed these facts, plus the information that Philomena may have been the daughter of a Greek prince, who converted to the faith just prior to her birth. As a result of his conversion, she was named Lumena in allusion to the "light" of faith her parents were given. And at her Baptism they called her Filumena or "daughter of light." And yes, according to these private revelations about Philomena, she had a great devotion to the Mother of Jesus, who even came to succor her while the Emperor held her in his dungeon. The most illustrious miracle worked by this little saint was the healing of Pauline Marie Jaricot, a French girl from Lyons, who started the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. Pauline had suffered a heart attack and was near death when she came to Rome in 1835 for an audience with Pope Gregory XVI. However, at the last minute she was too ill to go to the Pope, and he came to her instead. Believing the girl was not long for this world, the Pope asked her to bring an intention of his to the courts of heaven. But Pauline wasn't ready to give up. She was on her way to Mugnano to ask for a miracle from Philomena. "If on my return from Mugnano I were to come to the Vatican on foot, then would Your Holiness deign to proceed without delay to the final inquiry into the cause of Philomena?" Pope Gregory agreed to this bargain immediately, "for that would be a miracle of the first order." Nevertheless, he blessed the girl never expecting to see her again in this life. Pauline lingered in Rome for another month too ill to move, but suddenly got the strength to make the journey to Mugnano. On Aug. 10, 1835, during Benediction at the Shrine of Philomena, Pauline collapsed. Tears crept under her eyelids, a tinge of color returned to her cheeks, and her icy feet and hands were warmed. Pauline was cured. And she returned to Rome on foot where the Pope immediately began the inquiry into Philomena's sanctity. The date Aug. 10 is significant because this is the day, Philomena's relics arrived in Mugnano in 1805, and she was installed in the Church there in the early hours of Aug. 11, which is now her feast day. Philomena also played a significant role in the life of the Cure of Ars, St. John Vianney, who had a relic of the saint and dedicated a chapel to her as soon as he heard of her canonization. The humble Cure seemed to understand instinctively St. Louis Marie de Montfort's fourth principle of True Marian Devotion that it is more humble to have an intermediary with Christ: "It is more perfect because it supposes greater humility to approach God through a mediator rather than directly by ourselves." St. John translated that into a special relationship with St. Philomena. Many miracles were recorded by his biographers - the healing of the sick, the obtaining of money for worthy causes and the acquiring of knowledge. The humble Cure attributed these miracles to the intercession of his special friend, St. Philomena. "He could not bring himself to believe that miracles could be operated through his intercession, and he was unwilling that others should attribute them to a merit which he was certain he didn't possess. He himself ascribed them to the intercession of St. Philomena," according to Bruce Marshall's "Saints for Now." When the sick came to him for a healing, he told them to go and pray before the altar of St. Philomena, knowing that their recovery would be ascribed to her and not to him. The Cure became famous as the priest of the confessional, spending as much as 15 hours a day there. Always, he relied on Philomena for the answers. The book, "Saint Philomena: Powerful with God" by Sister Marie Helene Mohr, S.C. is basically the story of the numerous miracles that have occurred due to the intercession of this child saint who probably lived about 160 A.D., died a horrible death, and remained in total obscurity until 1802. I reflected on why a young girl whose life is almost totally unknown would capture the imagination of so many people in the 19th and 20th centuries - so many people in fact that there are shrines and churches dedicated to her as far away from Italy as Des Moines, Washington. I believe the answer is the fact that Philomena in her life imitated so perfectly the purity and suffering of Christ. Jesus is the innocent Lamb of God. Jesus is sinless, but nevertheless He took on the sins of the world that we might have life eternal. Philomena was one of Christ's innocent lambs, who died in union with Him, in order that sinners might be converted. According to the three private revelations of her life, each public attempt to kill her represented another opportunity for the pagan spectators to convert, and they did in great numbers. God dwells most perfectly in those without sin. Mary was born without original sin. Hence she was full of grace. There was not one speck of sin in her. Mary therefore also has a special relationship with those who are martyred to give themselves exclusively to Christ. Think about the modern Marian apparitions in Scottsdale, Ariz. They are occuring in a Church named after St. Maria Goretti, another virgin-martyr, but one from our times, who died to avoid the sin of impurity. Nothing happens by coincidence, but everything is gifted to us providentially by God. In 1802, God could foresee the needs of our century clearly. He could see the confusion about values that would leave many souls literally starving for God's grace. He could see a time when sexual immorality would be taken for granted, witnessed daily on television, in movies and newspapers. This is a time when getting married is an anachronism for most people, when abortion is an accepted means of birth control, and divorce is literally distroying the family. For this time, God saved the knowledge of a 13-year-old girl, full of the light of faith, who would endure arrows, drowning, and a spear rather than give up her vow of virginity to her Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. (P.S. St. Philomena's Catholic Church of Des Moines now has a Junior Legion of Mary for kids age 8 to 17. It has about 12 members. These kids are from all over the world - American, Vietnamese, Hispanic and Filipino. At their second meeting, I told the children of the life of St. Philomena, and how she helped bring the Legion of Mary to life in their parish. I ask St. Philomena to guard these and all of our children, and bring them into the pure light of faith.)

St. Anthony of Padua -- He found the Pearl of Great Price

by Susan Fox

"If you would be perfect, go sell what you have and give it all to the poor and you shall have treasures in heaven, and come follow me." 

These words of Jesus caused the rich young man in Matthew's Gospel to go away sad. He had kept all the commandments from his youth, and wanted to know what yet was lacking in his life. But he wasn't prepared for the answer, for - as Jesus told the disciples later - it is easier for a camel to pass throught he eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven. But confronted with the same conundrum, not every man in history has responded the same.

This is the story of the rich young man who left everything to follow Jesus. He came to be known as the "Hammer of Heretics" and "Wonder Worker" for the converts he made and the miracles he performed.

He is St. Anthony of Padua. Born in the year 1195 to a rich Portugese family, Fernando de Bulhom was the beloved child of a knight in the court of King Alfonso II of Portugal. As the only child of Don Martinho de Bulhom, Fernando was expected to marry and take over the running of the family castle. He shocked contemporaries when he chose instead at the age of 15 to become a priest in the Canons Regular of St. Augustine. There he was given floors to scrub, trained in the art of preaching and ordained at the age of 25.

But the happiness of littleness and the path of humility that he sought eluded Fernando in the Canons Regular near his home in Lisbon. Like Christ Himself, he was accused by his friends and relatives of being mad, and worse, selfish for abandoning his parents. Never mind that his parents approved of his vocation. 

When he was 17, he transferred to the priory at Coimbra because visits from his friends were disturbing his peace. After his ordination to the priesthood in 1219, he was assigned to be guestmaster at the priory in Coimbra. He was bitterly disappointed as his basic job was to greet the wealthy patrons of the monastery, using his family name and connections. 

But God was prepared to present Canon Fernando with a call within a call. Only 10 years before, Francis of Assisi - another rich young man who had given up everything to follow Christ - had started his religious order dedicated to a life of simple poverty. It had grown rapidly. Since Francis's great desire was to convert the Saracens, some of his brothers, including former nobles, came into contact with Canon Fernando in Coimbra on their way south to Northern Africa. Many of Fernando's contemporaries regarded these "religious beggers" as mad because of their radical poverty. They slept on the ground, begged for their food, and in the beginning there were few priests among them. This challenged the assumption of the time that the life of holiness is for priests and nuns only.

Canon Fernando was moved when these little Franciscan brothers came and begged for his blessing as a priest. He began to dream of joining them and going off to become a martyr like the five Franciscan brothers killed by Muslim heretics about the time of his ordination. Fernando had a great hunger to win souls to Christ and the life of sanctity. And he saw that the five martyrs caused the half empty churches in Coimbra to fill up suddenly. Not only that, but he heard the confessions of many who changed their lives as a result of the examples of these Franciscans killed by the Saracens.

Canon Fernando was a brilliant preacher, but he saw that words alone weren't enough to win priceless souls. He saw clearly that one's whole life had to become a living example of the life of Jesus. And in the Canons Regular such a life was not possible as the order was living in comfort. He won approval to leave the Canons Regular to join the Franciscans in 1221. This was no easy task as he had to have the approval of every member of his house. And they were reluctant to let a member of the de Bulhom family leave the order. By this time, his father was governor of Lisbon, and possibly the most powerful man in the city.

But Fernando's passion was to imitate the life of Christ, to be scorned by the world and counted as nothing. Once and for all, he shed the de Bulhom name, and became simply Friar Antonio of the Franciscan Brothers. When he was younger and still living at home, Fernando had hoped to become a knight rather than a lord. His father had not prepared him for that vocation because he wasn't physically strong. But when he left home to join the Canons Regular, Don Martinho de Bulhom's faithful young squire, Don Ruggiero had followed Fernando into the order. Ruggiero had been training to serve the de Bulhom family as a knight. Now when Fernando became Father Anthony, Ruggiero chose to follow him and become a Franciscan. 

It was perhaps a sign that God had chosen Anthony to be his knight-errant, and Ruggiero - a big strong lad - became the saint's squire. Anthony believed his vocation was to be a martyr in Africa, like his namesake St. Antony the Great, who had wrestled demons and founded western monasticism. But he had something to learn yet about humbly doing God's will. 
Arriving in Morocco, he was too ill to preach to anyone - let alone die of martyrdom. He tried to return to Portugal which would mean humiliation and failure, but the ship he was on went astray and he ended up in Assisi, Italy in 1221 in time to participate in a general chapter meeting of his order. He met St. Francis of Assisi there. Francis would have been 40 years old, and Anthony was 26. Out of the chapter meeting in 1221, Anthony was assigned to preach all over Italy. 

At the time, Europe was plagued with the Waldensian heresy, which denied the true presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the validity of the Sacraments if not administered by a holy priest. One of the hotbeds for this heresy was the Province of Romagna in Italy. And the source of the heresy was the city of Rimini. It was to Rimini that St. Anthony was sent to preach first. He was accompanied by his faithful squire, Brother Ruggiero. 

Everywhere else his eloquent sermons drew large crowds, but in Rimini, no one listened. After a time, Ruggiero began to argue that it was foolhardy to continue. One day about three months after arriving in Rimini, Anthony stood on the edge of a bluff overlooking the sea. And he thought that it was true. No one was listening. He prayed. At that moment, thousands of fish thrust their heads above the surface of the water. They seemed to wait. Anthony thought how much their ordered ranks looked like people who had stood quietly to hear him preach in the past. "Then hear the word of God!" Anthony cried, "O fishes of the sea and of the river, hear the word of God these heretics refuse to hear!" And so he began to preach to the fish about the mercies of their Creator. 

As he spoke, a crowd of 50 people gathered behind him. And at the end of his talk, he blessed the fish and dismissed them. They disappeared underneath the water immediately. The people who gathered were afraid. Some were still holding onto their stubbornness. But the following day when Friar Antonio preached, there was a large crowd assembled to hear him. Rimini was on its way back to the true Church. 

God was generous with His miracles. When Anthony was preaching one day in Rimini, he was challenged by one of the leading heretics of the town, Bononillo, to prove the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. Perhaps sensing that Bononillo believed, but wanted an excuse to drop his well-known objection to the Eucharist, Father Anthony calmly accepted the challenge. Bononillo's donkey was not fed for one day, and then he was brought to the village square. Father Anthony said Mass in a nearby chapel, and after the Consecration, he took the host out into the town square, held Our Lord up, and then bent to put the Body of Christ on the tongue of Brother Ruggiero. The hungry donkey was released to eat from his basket of feed. But at the moment Ruggiero received Communion, the donkey awkwardly bent his forelegs and knelt beside the big Franciscan brother. Bononillo dropped heavily to his knees and Father Anthony returned to the chapel to finish the Mass. Bononillo left his donkey in the square eating the feed, and he ran to confession.

Do not believe that Our Blessed Lady played no role in the life of St. Anthony of Padua. For a time Anthony had been assigned to Toulouse, France. There his preaching to the heretics had drawn large crowds as usual. However, the radical poverty of the Franciscan order again challenged the corruption within the Catholic Church itself. The French bishops ordered Anthony to preach a sermon on Our Lady's Assumption on the Feast of the Assumption, Aug. 15 at a council of bishops assembled in Montpellier, France. It was a test of his orthodoxy. At that point in time, the Church had not definitively stated that Our Lady had been bodily assumed into heaven at the end of her life. Some believed in the Assumption, some were neutral and others opposed it. A group of French Franciscans - fearing the order would be thrown out of France because of the topic - pressured Father Anthony to deny the Assumption. Commissioned to preach by St. Francis himself, Father Anthony refused to recognize their authority. On the eve of the feast of the Assumption, Our Lady herself appeared to him in the church of Sainte Marie, and assured him of the truth of her bodily assumption into heaven. The next day, he preached such a tender sermon on the Mother of God that none of the bishops assembled dared question him afterwards. 

At the time that Anthony was sick in Africa, St. Francis had been fighting his own battles. There was a movement to mitigate his original rule of simplicity, humility and poverty. The chapter meeting held in 1221 that sent Anthony out preaching ended in Francis' favor, but Francis retired from the running of the order a couple years later, received the stigmata in 1224, and died in 1226. God had not called just one saint from the early Franciscans. Anthony took up Francis's cross after he ceased to run the order. And by living the example of radical poverty managed to keep the original vision of the founder alive. He was appointed minister provincial of Romagna, and succeeded in bringing his Franciscan brothers back to observing the rule by counseling them on their vocation and by living the rule himself. When he sat down to dinner, and cut himself small portions, and ate silently, he forced the other brothers, who might otherwise have ate well and noisily, to do the same. Anthony settled in Padua in 1226 after St. Francis' death. He died on June 13, 1231 from exhaustion and dropsy at the age of 36. 

St. Anthony of Padua was a man who was never satisfied with taking the easy way out as a noble, a preacher or a priest in the order of St. Augustine. He felt deeply the need to imitate Christ by owning nothing and even extinguishing his own noble background. He was called to imitate Christ's humility. During his life he was tempted to pride and almost lost his vocation when a family friend accused him of shirking his responsibilities toward his family by becoming a priest. But he escaped the temptation by moving to Coimbra. By going to Africa, Anthony was tempted to do good - even great things for God by dying as a martyr among the heretics. But he learned the value of doing God's will alone by returning to Portugal, then Italy where his true vocation as a preacher and miracle worker lie.

In short, St. Anthony of Padua lived the example of the life of Christ. As such he was an early reformer of the fledgling Franciscan order and a fiery defender of the Blessed Virgin Mary. His miracles imitated those of Christ Himself. He raised the dead, healed the sick, preached the gospel and helped the poor. He worked to abolish debtors' prisons and worked unceasingly to bring the truth of Christ's message to the heretics. It is perhaps not surprising that he is always pictured as a bald man in Franciscan garb holding the Christ Child. During his lifetime, witnesses saw St. Anthony holding the Infant Christ, who seemed to be teaching him. Perhaps the greatest lesson taught by the Christ Child was the one in Matthew's Gospel about the rich young man who could not give up his possessions to follow Jesus.

"Amen. I say to you .. . Everyone who has left home or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or lands for my name's sake, shall receive a hundredfold, and shall possess life everlasting. And many that are first, shall be last: and the last shall be first." (Matthew 19:28-30)

Baptism: Work of the Son and Holy Spirit

By Susan C. Fox

I do a lot of walking in my own neighborhood. In passing my neighbor’s gardens, I have often noticed that God’s plan for

their life is revealed in the way they keep their yard. Some hunger for great perfection, real holiness, and this is revealed

Image of the Holy Trinity 

in the fact that not a blade of grass in their lawn is out of place. There isn’t a single weed. Others may have weeds, but to look on their flowers is to see a riot of color, revealing a love for Beauty that could only be satisfied in seeing the Face of God. Others, like me, plant nothing unless it is fruitful. Beauty is secondary. We plant tomatoes, potatoes, carrots and corn. These Gardeners desire great fruitfulness in the Holy Spirit.

But have you ever wondered why people put those wishing wells in their garden? I did. And finally one day, I understood that my neighbors with wishing wells were hungering for goodness -- a goodness from another or a better time. Pure and simple, they were longing for the Goodness of God. Well, I thought, that settles that question.

Walk with God

But God wasn’t done with the garden image yet. Shortly after that, near Christmastime, I was walking past my neighbor’s yard, and I saw that he had displayed a very large Nativity scene in his wishing well. He stood Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus on the well. It was very clear that the goodness that he longed for was the Birth of Christ. But not just the

Birth. The Nativity scene represents the whole longing of humanity for the Incarnation – the Life, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. My neighbor had unexpectedly put a face on that longing for Goodness with a capital “G.” He taught me that after the fall of Adam and Eve, the whole of humanity is groaning and searching to recover that beautiful relationship – that real friendship – that we had with God when we walked with Him in the Garden of Eden. Only Baptism in the Holy Spirit through the Birth, Life, Death and Resurrection of the Incarnation will restore us to God’s friendship and make us His children. Here the whole of salvation history was summarized by one family’s decision to put a Nativity Scene atop a wishing well, a decision I may well add, inspired by the Holy Spirit of God. 

The Holy Spirit is First to Welcome Us into the Kingdom of God

 It is interesting to note that the Holy Spirit is the first to bring

us to faith and to give us new life. This new life is to ‘know the Father and one whom He has sent, Jesus Christ.” (John17:3) For this reason, the Church calls the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life. But He is the last Person to be revealed in Scripture, and often the most hidden. It seems like I am always noticing that He was there, not that He is here. I can see His effects, His work, but not His Presence. I was teaching my godson the catechism one day, and he said something so profound I knew the author was the Holy Spirit. 

I wanted to grab the Holy Spirit

I wanted to grab the Holy Spirit on the spot and hold onto Him, but the boy had already spoken, and there was only the echo of His words remaining in my heart. So also in Scripture we see the Author is almost silent about Himself. He reveals God and makes known to us Christ, His living Word, but the Spirit does not speak of Himself. The Spirit who has spoken through the prophets makes us hear the Father’s Word, but we do not hear the Spirit Himself. When the Father sends His Word, he always sends His Breath. The Son and the Holy Spirit are distinct but inseparable in their joint mission of redemption. 

Christ is Visible; The Holy Spirit is Hidden

But in the Gospels, it is Christ who is seen. He is the visible image of the invisible God, but it is the Spirit who reveals Him. The Holy Spirit, Lord and Giver of Life, is the same spirit of God who moved over the waters at Creation bringing everything into being. He is the Breath of God, breathed into man, making him into the image and likeness of God. And He is the Uncreated Gift, who now offers us the friendship of God through Baptism. 

Heart of Stone changed to Heart of Flesh

Ezekiel prophesized about this future restored friendship with God, when he wrote: “For I will take you away from among the nations, gather you from all foreign lands, and bring you back to your own land. I will sprinkle clean water upon you to cleanse you from your impurities, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. A new heart I will give you and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. You shall dwell in the land which I gave to your fathers; and you shall be my people, and I will be your God.” (Ezekiel 37:24-28) With the prophets of the Old Testament, we can pray, “Oh Lord and Giver of Life, give me a new heart. Write your law of love upon my heart.” 

The Law of the Holy Spirit

This is the law of the Holy Spirit: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with your whole heart, with your whole mind, with your whole strength and with your whole being. And you will love your neighbor as Christ has loved you.” The Blessed Virgin Mary -- she who was full of the Spirit of God from conception -- had this law written on her heart. Under the influence of the Holy Spirit, she exclaims mightily, “My whole being proclaims the greatness of the Lord.”(Luke 1:46) 

So in the entire Old Testament, the personality of the Holy Spirit is completely hidden. We see the Father clearly, shepherding His people, parting the Red Sea, bringing them out of slavery, meeting Moses in the burning bush. But the Holy Spirit and the Messiah are only hinted at. The biggest hint that both were coming and would have a joint mission of redemption is in Isaiah. Isaiah is sometimes called the Fifth Gospel, or the Gospel of the Old Testament. He wrote: “There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. And his delight shall be the fear of the Lord.” (Isaiah 11:1-2) This is a veiled prophecy of the coming of the Messiah, the One who will be anointed by God Himself. 

The Anointed One

Jesus “is the Anointed One in the sense that he possesses the fullness of the Spirit of God.” (Dominum et Vivificantem by Pope John Paul II) The Spirit is the Anointing. The Father

does the anointing. And Jesus Himself will be the mediator in granting this Spirit, this Uncreated Anointing, to the whole People of God. That is why when Jesus was given the job of reading in the synagogue in Nazareth, he opened the book of Isaiah, and read, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18-19) He closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant. All eyes were fixed on the Lord, and then He said to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” 

Aha! He was telling them He was the Messiah, God’s Anointed One, the one in Whom the Holy Spirit dwells as the gift of God Himself, the one who marks the new beginning of the gift of life, which God makes to humanity in the Spirit. Later on Palm Sunday, the crowd would cry, “Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.” (Luke 19:38) The Pharisees recognized that this came from Psalm 118, which refers to the kingship of the Messiah. And they urged Jesus to silence his disciples. 

And Jesus answered that if they are silent, the very stones would cry out. What would the stones say? “Jesus is the Christ! He is the kingly Messiah! He is God’s Anointed One.”

The very stones would cry out!

And who would cause the stones to cry out? The Holy Spirit. It is His job to reveal the Messiah. St. Gregory of Nyssa said that the notion of anointing suggests that there is no distance between the Son and the Spirit. “Indeed, just as between the surface of the body and the anointing with oil neither reason nor sensation recognizes any intermediary, so the contact of the Son with the Spirit is immediate, so that anyone who would make contact with the Son by faith must first encounter the oil by contact. In fact there is no part that is not covered by the Holy Spirit. That is why the confession of the Son’s Lordship is made in the Holy Spirit by those who receive him, the Spirit coming from all sides to those who approach the Son in faith.” (De Spiritu Sancto) 

So my neighbor with the Nativity scene in his wishing well was wishing and hoping for the coming of the Messiah and His Holy Spirit. When the infant Christ was presented at the temple, the Holy Spirit drew the righteous and devout Simeon to the side of Mary and Joseph. St. Luke tells us Simeon was looking for the “consolation of Israel.” That’s an Old Testament code word for the Holy Spirit. The New Catholic Catechism tells us: Two prophetic lines developed in the Old Testament, one leading to the expectation of the Messiah, and the other pointing to the announcement of a new spirit. These converge on a small Remnant of the Jews, the poor people of Israel who return from the Exile and await in hope “the consolation of Israel” and the “redemption of Jerusalem.” (Paragraph #711) 

My Eyes have seen Your Salvation

The Holy Spirit had revealed to Simeon that he would not see death until he saw the Christ, God’s Anointed One. So with the Holy Spirit upon him, Simeon took the baby into his arms, and said, “Lord, now let your servant depart in peace, for my eyes have seen your salvation.”(Luke 2:29-30) 

Many signs accompanied the Birth of the Incarnation, and the beginning of his public ministry. Inspired by the Holy Spirit, St.

St John Baptist

John the Baptist foretold the mission of the Incarnation when he said, “I baptize you with water; he who is mightier than I is coming, the thong of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” (Luke 3:16-17) In the Old Testament, God led his people at night as a pillar of fire. He appeared to Moses as a burning bush. On one occasion, the prayer of the prophet, Elijah, brought down fire from heaven on the sacrifice of Mount Carmel. The New Catholic Catechism tells us that this event was a “figure” of the fire of the Holy Spirit, who transforms

what He touches. And finally, when Jesus came he said, “I came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled.” (Luke 12:49) He refers to the purifying fire of the Holy Spirit, which will burn and consume us until we are transformed through a new birth in Baptism into a new creation, remade in the image and likeness of Jesus Christ.

Transforming Suffering into Redemptive Love

And now we get to the heart of the Holy Spirit’s work in the crucifixion. For when we are baptized, we are baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection. We are made priest, prophet and king. A priest is a sacrifice. So the next time they hold up one of those cute little babies at Mass and pray that he or she be made a priest, prophet and king, remember you are asking that the child be martyred. I don’t think most parents know that. In his encyclical on the Holy Spirit in the Life of the Church and the World (Dominum et Vivificantem), Pope John Paul II speaks of the Holy Spirit’s work in the crucifixion, a work of transforming suffering into salvific love. The pope says, “In the sacrifice of the Son of Man, the Holy Spirit is present and active just as he acted in Jesus’ conception, in his coming into the world, in his hidden life and in his public ministry.” He cites the letter to Hebrews, where the author after recalling the sacrifices of the Old Covenant in which the “blood of goats and bulls” purifies man from sin, adds, “How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” (Hebrews 9:13) 

Specifically, in the fervent prayer of His Passion, Christ enabled the Holy Spirit to transform his suffering into redemptive love. There is a paradox at work here. We cannot say that the instruments of torture, the cross, the nails, the whips, etc. are the work of the Holy Spirit. These are a work of the devil. Sin has caused the suffering of Christ. In Christ crucified, there suffers a God who has been rejected by His own people. On the eve of His Passion, Christ speaks of the sin of those who do not believe in Him. He complains, “They do not believe.” (John 16:9) It is a distant echo of that earlier sin of man’s first parents, who through disobedience turned away from the truth contained in the Word of the Father. But from the depth of God’s suffering, His rejection by his creature, the Holy Spirit draws a blessing. 

In the Cross, Love is at Work

In the depth of the mystery of the Cross, love is at work. Love brings man back again to share in the life of God Himself. For, that is the gift that is restored to us through the cross. The Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, takes the suffering of God and restores God’s Life in us through Baptism. St. Paul said, “The Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” Think of the freedom of the Immaculate Conception, who – without any sin or blemish – was free to say, “Yes!” when the angel invited her to be Mother of God. The Holy Spirit, through St. Elizabeth, cried out, “Blessed is she who believed that God’s promises to her would be fulfilled!”(Luke 1:45) Blessed is she who believed.

Jesus complains about the sin of those who don’t believe, but Mary, the new Eve, is the one who believed, and in the freedom of her faith, said “Yes!” Baptism is the means by which the Lord and Giver of Life restores to us the freedom of sons and daughters of God. Without it, Jesus said, we cannot enter heaven. “Truly, Truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know when it comes or whether it goes; so it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” (John 3:5-8) 

That is what is meant when we pray, “Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created, and you shall renew the face of the earth.” Our new birth occurs when God the Father “sends the Spirit of His Son into our hearts.” Then we receive a spirit of adopted sons by which we cry, “Abba, Father!” (Galatians 4:6) Therefore, this new birth in Baptism, this divine sonship planted in the human soul through sanctifying grace is the work of the Holy Spirit. In Baptism, the Spirit, who gives life to man and the whole universe – visible and invisible – now renews the life of man through the mystery of the Incarnation. 

In the prologue of the Gospel of John, the Evangelist explains that the True Light, Jesus Christ, came into the world through the Incarnation. “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.” (John 1:14) But “He was in the world that had its being through Him, and the world did not know him. He came to his own domain and his own people did not accept him. But to all who did accept him he gave power to become children of God, children who were born not out of human stock or urge of the flesh or will of man but of God himself.” (John 1:10-13) That is the effect of Baptism in Christ Jesus. We have a new birth! We are purified, given a clean heart! Never let anyone tell you that the Sacrament of Baptism is not important. 

Never leave anyone with the impression that it is okay to let your children chose or reject Baptism when they grow up. Baptism is the seed of eternal life. It is the spring of living water welling up in your hearts unto eternal life. And God went to an awful lot of trouble to bring you Baptism. Remember Jesus said, “I am the vine. You are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. If a man does not abide in me, he is cast forth as a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire and burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you will, and it shall be done for you. By this my father is glorified, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be my disciples. . . If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than he lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:5-13)

Love as Christ has Loved

Notice that Jesus does not say, love your neighbor as yourself. Now that you know Christ, now that you are baptized into his love, you must love as Christ has loved. You must have total self-consuming love that will even give its life for a friend. You must follow Him to the cross. This kind of branch is full of lots of green sap. Implicitly, the Holy Spirit is the sap of the Father’s vine, which bears fruit on its branches. The Father is the vinedresser. Every branch that bears fruit, he prunes so it might bear more fruit. The Holy Spirit is the sap bearing fruit on the vine, and Jesus is the vine. St. Stephen, one of the first seven deacons of the Church, like all the martyrs of the Catholic Church, bore this kind of sap within him. 

The Acts of the Apostles describes Stephen as “full of grace and power” with a face shining like an angel. Despite the threat of stoning, he did not hesitate to tell the truth, to

declare to the Israelite people their whole salvation history, how they rejected the prophets and finally the Christ, the Righteous One, the Lamb of God sent to them to save them from their sins. This last One, the Messiah, they betrayed and murdered. “You stiff-necked people ... you who received the law as delivered by angels and did not keep it,” (Acts 7:51-53) Stephen told them. They ground their teeth when they heard these things. But St. Stephen, “full of the Holy Spirit,” gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God; and he said, “Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing at the right hand of God.” (Acts 7:55-56) And they stoned him to death. But as he died, he prayed that God would not hold this sin against them. A man named Saul watched the whole proceedings, and in his heart agreed to the murder of Stephen. But Stephen had prayed for Saul when he asked forgiveness for his persecutors. St. Augustine says that “if Stephen had not prayed to God, the Church would not have had Paul.” Saul became St. Paul and in the end enjoyed the same happiness as Stephen, the happiness of martyrdom for Christ. 

In our own time in China, a young 15-year-old girl named Anna Wang enjoyed a similar martyrdom for the faith. She was offered the chance to repent of her belief in Jesus Christ, or be killed. She refused, even though her step-mother urged her to renounce her faith. So her tormentors cut off her arm, thinking this would deter the girl from persisting in her faith, but still she refused to renounce Christ Jesus. She seems to have had a similar vision to St. Stephen’s for near the end she said, “The gates of heaven are open.” It was almost as if she were telling her tormentors that they, too, could have heaven. They were welcome. And then they killed Anna Wang. 

Precious in the eyes of God is the Death of His Saints

“Precious in the eyes of God is the death of his saints. Victory and power and empire forever have been won by our God and all authority for his Christ, now that the persecutor who accused our brothers day and night before our God has been brought down. They have triumphed over him by the Blood of the Lamb and by the witness of their martyrdom because even in the face of death, they would not cling to life.” (Revelation 12: 10-12) We have all heard there is one Lord and there is one Baptism, and this is the reason that the Catholic Church does not re-baptize Protestants converting to the Catholic faith. But in researching this topic, I actually found that Jesus talks about three kinds of baptisms. 

There is the Baptism of water and the Spirit, which each Christian receives in the Sacrament of Baptism. There is the baptism of fire and the Spirit, which each Catholic receives at Confirmation, and there is the baptism of blood and the Spirit, which the holy martyrs experienced at their death. All are works of the Holy Spirit, and all evolve from the Sacrament of Baptism. Baptism means immersion in Greek. It means to “go under.” The first immersion we experience – most of us were baptized as children – is the immersion in the waters of Baptism. 

Water -- Outward Sign of Inward Grace

The water is an outward sign of an inward grace. Noah and his family escaped through a purifying worldwide flood to begin anew the human race as children of God. At Baptism, He, who is called the Spirit of Adoption, descends on us and makes us sons of God. We who were far away from Him because of sin are reconciled to the Father through the joint mission and work of the Spirit and the Son. This first immersion is the Baptism of water and the Spirit of which Jesus spoke to Nicodemus. Our Protestant brothers and sisters think of this as an emotional experience in which they are “born again” and accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. But it is not an emotional experience; it is a supernatural experience, a sacrament of the Catholic Church, a work of God the Holy Spirit, Lord and Giver of Life. 

This baptism involves a purgation. The Holy Spirit’s job is to convince the world of its sin. This is a necessary step for salvation. If you confess your sin in human society, you are punished. But if you confess your sin to God, you are saved.

On Pentecost, after the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles as tongues of fire, the apostles were confirmed in their faith, and were given the courage to proclaim it. Peter exclaims, “Let the house of Israel therefore know assuredly that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.” (Acts 2:36) The crowds – through the power of the Holy Spirit -- were smitten with remorse, and they asked the apostles, “What shall we do?” And Peter responds, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” (Acts 2:38) 

You Shall Be My Witnesses

Here we have the crowd on Pentecost invited to both the first and second baptism, and Peter has already received both. The second baptism is into fire and the Spirit. Jesus spoke of this baptism by fire when He said, “I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I long that it be enkindled.” And after the Ascension, while staying with the apostles, Jesus charged them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father. “For, John baptized with water, but before many days you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit ... You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.” (Acts 1:5-8)

It’s interesting, but one of the ways the Holy Spirit works in us is to clarify and prioritize. He calls us to a spirit of repentance and confession of our sins, but he also ends confusion. The miracle of Pentecost is that when the apostles preached, various peoples who spoke a multitude of languages understood them. This is the opposite of what happened when the languages were confused at the Tower of Babel, which was the punishment for man’s pride and infidelity.

Pentecost is the reversal of this confusion of tongues thanks to the clarifying grace of the Holy Spirit. Now this second baptism is given to us in the Sacrament of Confirmation. The Catholic Church teaches that our initiation into the Catholic faith is only completed once one has received this important sacrament, which confirms us in our faith, and gives us the courage to proclaim it. I wondered why it is that when we receive the Sacrament of Confirmation today, many times it seems like nothing. That was my experience. No one sang in tongues, and I felt very uncomfortable through the whole ordeal, and afterwards wondered what had taken place. My husband said the problem is poor catechesis. I think he’s right. People are not properly prepared for the sacrament, so very often the grace of Confirmation is recognized and understood later in life. 

The Baptism of Martyrs

The third form of baptism follows from the second. It is the baptism of blood and the Spirit. Jesus’ apostles were arguing among themselves as to who was greater in the Kingdom of God. James and John asked if one could sit at his right hand and the other at his left hand when He came into his glory. Jesus replied, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?” He meant the cross. He was asking, are you willing to give your life? This baptism is the obedience unto death that Christ gave to His Father on the Cross. It is the complete submission of your mind, heart, and will to the Will of God. It is St. Paul saying, “It is no longer I that live, but God that lives in me.”

Out of this kind of immersion in the will of God, the Holy Spirit is revealed and made present as the Love that works in the depths of the Paschal Mystery, as the source of the salvific power of the Cross of Christ, and as the gift of new and eternal life (Pope John Paul II on the Holy Spirit). God offers us, who are less than nothing, the opportunity to associate ourselves with the Paschal Mystery through our death to self.

When Jesus died on Good Friday, it was the day before the Jewish Sabbath. And the Jews requested that the bodies of the three crucified men might be taken down from the crosses that day, so they would not remain up on the high holy day. “So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first and of the other who had been crucified with him.” Breaking their legs insured their swift death due to suffocation. “But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water.”

The Birth of the Church

St. Augustine comments that this moment actually represents the birth of the Church, the Bride of Christ, who will be revealed at Pentecost. “Here was opened wide the door of life, from which the sacraments of the Church have flowed out, without which there is no entering in unto life which is true life. . . Here the second Adam with bowed head slept upon the cross, that thence a wife might be formed of him, flowing from His side while he slept. O death, by which the dead come back to life! Is there anything purer than this blood, any wound more healing!” 

This third kind of baptism is closely associated with God’s plan for the life of the witness. St. John the Evangelist identified St. John the Baptist as the “witness to the Light.” Remember St. John was filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother’s womb. For when Mary visited Elizabeth, she opened her mouth and spoke, and the babe in Elizabeth’s womb leapt for joy. In the prologue to John’s Gospel, he says John wasn’t the Light, but came to “bear witness” to the Light. And, of course, we know that this witness – like St. Stephen’s – involved giving his life. For St. John the Baptist was beheaded. 

Faithful and True Witness

Jesus, the High Priest in the book of Revelation, is called the Faithful and True Witness, for he gave his life for his friends, all mankind of every generation and nation. And the apostles are called witnesses to Christ’s Resurrection. Most of them were martyred as well. The Church, as bride of Christ, is called to continue to witness to the Resurrection in every generation. “The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’” They say, “Come, Lord Jesus.” “And let him who hears say, ‘Come.’ And let him who is thirsty come, let him who desires take the water of life without price.” (Revelation 22:17) This witnessing closely mimics the work of the Holy Spirit. 

For, while John witnessed to the Light, and the apostles to the Resurrection, the Holy Spirit is also called a Witness to Christ. Jesus tells us that many times in the Gospel of John. And in fact that is why it is difficult to get your arms around the Holy Spirit because as soon as you reach for Him, He draws you to Christ and the Father. He is the Uncreated Witness to the Incarnation, which is His greatest work. 

Ironically, his holy spouse, the Blessed Virgin Mary acts in an identical self-effacing way. You say, “Mary.” She says, “Jesus.” St. Louis Marie de Montfort declares that “because Mary remained hidden during her life she is called by the Holy Spirit and the Church, ‘Alma Mater,’ Mother hidden and unknown.”

To encounter the Uncreated Witness to the Incarnation is to go through a purification. This Witness draws us close to God, and on such a journey of longing we must decrease, so He can increase. The Holy Spirit inspired people to repentance at the preaching of John the Baptist, and made them seek baptism in the River Jordan. Going down into that water was a humiliating exercise as it meant that those baptized were admitting they were sinners. Standing in the confession line is the same kind of exercise, and it is the Holy Spirit who draws us to the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Let Him draw you often to the waters of Reconciliation. 

That’s what happened to the woman at the well. Christ offered her a spring of water welling up into eternal life. But first she had to confess, “I have no husband.” (John 4:17) In fact, she had five. The Holy Spirit inspired people to repentance at the crucifixion. Jesus in his final baptism of blood, cried out, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!” (Luke 23:46) And after this He breathed his last. When the Roman centurion saw what had taken place, he said, “Surely this was the Son of God.” (Matthew 27:54) And all the multitudes who stood around to see Jesus die, went home beating their breasts, a sign of repentance. On the way up to Calvary, the women wept for Jesus. This was a dangerous thing to do because it was forbidden to cry for a condemned criminal. 

It was the Holy Spirit, speaking through the Apostles, who brought the first converts to baptism on Pentecost. It was the Holy Spirit, who inspired my grandmother to press my mother to have me baptized when I was an infant. I’m sure if you undertake to read the Gospels with the idea of finding the work of the Holy Spirit, you will be shown where He is hiding Himself. I’m sure if you look at your own life with the idea of finding where the Holy Spirit moved decisively on your behalf, you will also see the effects of his work, and perhaps along the way you will meet the Lord and Giver of Life, recognizing Him, as the disciples met our Lord, Jesus, on the road to Emmaus. 

Susan Fox

The second Vatican Council called for a new study of and devotion to the Holy Spirit as a necessary complement to understand the work of that council, which sought to explain the ever-new, but never-changing faith handed down from the Apostles in a way that the modern world could understand. May the Holy Spirit accompany you in that journey. “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”

Want to learn more about the spiritual formation that led to this piece? Go to Disciples of Jesus and Mary

Enjoy this piece? A New Poem on the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit is available to read at LESSONS THAT LEAD TO GOD