Cardinal Antonelli's dinner ware.  It's nicely understated and I do like the sage color.  I also wonder if he has any idea how many diapers and how much food this china represents he for some couple who lovingly had children God gifted them and they couldn't afford.

I don't normally pull things off of Lifesitenews because it's mostly all propaganda in the form of news, but this one is just too good to pass up.  The good Cardinal calls IVF a shameful form of commerce and then the article ends with all kinds of commercial reasons to encourage western couples to raise bunches of children. 

Vatican Cardinal: Artificial Procreation A "Shameful Form Of Commerce".
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/oct/10100511.html
With evident joy, Cardinal Ennio Antonelli, the president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, on Tuesday celebrated the opening Mass for the Human Life International World Prayer Congress for Life in Rome.


The cardinal noted the dire situation of the world with regard to the culture for life: “Today, the hardness of heart that grieves the Lord and the Church, has widely spread around the world: abortion and euthanasia have become socially respectable choices, and are even recognized as human rights, the human embryo is considered testing material, the rampant killing of innocent human lives increases.”

He noted that the “40 million abortions” which occur worldwide each year are “equal to the victims of World War II” being killed each year.

Nevertheless the president of the Pontifical Council for the Family gave the pro-life activists hope, telling them: “It is God that has raised and supports your efforts. Tonight we want to thank Him together because He has chosen you as his friends and collaborators, because He gives you strength, intelligence and perseverance to go against the dominant culture, the political power, the rampant corruption.”

Speaking out against in vitro fertilization, and other forms of artificial procreation, Cardinal Antonelli said, “Today, many people - not just couples but also singles and homosexuals - claim the right to have a child through artificial insemination and do not hesitate to resort to shameful forms of commerce. But there is no right to a child, because a person cannot be produced, acquired and owned as an object for one’s self gratification.” (Parental ownership of children has been the legal norm for millenia, and lots of children have been 'produced' for parental self gratification or economic reasons, which is why they were considered property of the father.)

The cardinal explained the teaching of the Catholic Church on the matter by speaking of the “the right of the child to be generated by an act of love objectively expressed in conjugal intercourse.”  (How does a non existent person have rights?  The only way this is true is if we grant acceptance to the notion that our individual selves exist before incarnation.)

Cardinal Antonelli concluded in an appeal “especially” to “rich countries” to be open to children. “It is necessary, especially in rich countries,” he said, “to raise awareness in public opinion and among married couples for a generous and responsible procreation.” ('Responsible' in Catholic speak apparently doesn't pertain to third world countries, or maybe Cardinal Antonelli means something else entirely.)

“In the EU, two thirds of households have no children,” he noted. “We are facing an aging population and the subsequent rapid decrease of the population,” he warned.

The resulting serious problems are easy to foresee he said. They include “decrease of productive forces, the increase in spending on pensions, healthcare and assistance and subsequent huge immigration without integration.” (These are commercial and cultural (one could say 'racial' )reasons for having children, not because they are 'gifts' from God.

After the Mass Cardinal Antonelli exchanged warm greetings in several languages with conference attendees who applauded him enthusiastically.

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Cardinal Antonelli sure does sound like he's advocating a child birth as a form of commerce in this 'pro life' talk of his.  I wonder why he doesn't see immigration as the solution to the demographic problems he lists for Europe and by inference North America.  I wonder if it has anything to do with keeping Eupope and North America in the hands of white Christians, as opposed to brown Moslems. 

Kind of like in the US where the Tea Party faction is pretty open about their desire to keep the US in the hands of white Christians.  The kind of white Christians who are unwilling to pick lettuce or pay enough for lettuce to make picking lettuce attractive to legal US citizens.  I like lettuce, so I am interested in Tea Party solutions to this very real problem should the Tea Party elect enough white folks to make this a consequence of their idea of immigration reform.  Maybe Walmart will decide to send some of it's massive multi cultural work force out to pick lettuce for it's stores.  Then we'll have yet another reason to shop at Walmart.

I guess the reason this article brings out my snarky side is because the Catholic pro life movement is not really about life at all.  It's about fetal life, and fetal rights.  And now Cardinal Antonelli wants to extend those rights beyond the existence of life itself.  This notion of pre existent rights brings up some serious sin questions.   Does a non existent child's right to be conceived in love mitigate any of the sin if that loving act of conception is engaged in by a non married couple.  Or does the very act of not being married pollute the conceptual waters, trumping the conceptual act of love?  I would guess the answer is the not being married part is the determinant since sin always trumps any notion of love when it comes to Catholic sexual morality. 

I keep looking for verification of that postulate in the New Testament sayings attributed to Jesus.  The postulate that sin trumps love or should determine a Christian's response to another human being. I still haven't found any place where Jesus says sin trumps love. Someone should point that out the Archbishop Neinstedt who denied communion to students who were wearing rainbow pins at Mass the other week.  I'm not sure what sin exactly these students committed, but what ever Neinstedt determined they had committed, it was sinful enough to deny them Communion.  Perhaps this was more of case of his paranoia trumping their baptismal right to the Eucharist.  Which says what about him and his exercise of pastoral ministry?

On the other hand, there a more than a couple of statements of Jesus's in the NT to the effect that love transcends life, which leads me to wonder if it isn't way past time Catholics started a pro love movement.  We might find that in the open presence of love, people don't sin nearly as much as they do in the presence of paranoid condemnation and fear mongering.  I doubt I will ever see this happen because there is no rational with in this paradigm for exploiting others for the sake of commerce.  And Cardinal Antonelli's talk certainly proves that at the end of the day, he really is shamefully all about commerce.