Thursday, October 7, 2010

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.

7 comments:

  1. Comments like Antonelli's unintentionally reveal just how much the Curia and hierarchy are out of touch with the real lives of the laity.

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  2. Don't they though, but I also think they might reflect that the curia are in touch with the unreal lives of some other laity.

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  3. Yes, Khughes, these old men have driven completely off the rails. Years and years of damage to the Church. These men express omniscient delusions! It's all very sick!

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  4. What they are not getting: people who do not exist do not have rights at all. No human rights, no civil rights. That's because they do not exist on this plane of reality, and don't need 'em!
    It makes as much sense as my writing a work of fiction and saying the characters I created have the right to vote. It's absurd!
    However, that's a great set of dishes M. le Cardinal has. Much too nice to shatter over his pointy head.

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  5. We sure do need a "pro-love movement."

    Cardinal Antonelli's dinnerware is a symbol of the elitist and commercial driven heart of the Vatican these days. Remember that the next time the collection plate is passed through the Church. Is this where you want your hard earned money to go to, so that the fat cats in the Vatican can keep up with the wealthy lifestyle while you struggle to keep a roof over your head.

    Does the Cardinal or anyone in the Vatican ever speak out against sex slavery? Do they ever speak out against the amount of children who are malnourished, starving, have no education, no shoes to put on their feet, no future, no eyeglasses to even see or read, no role models from the Church to change anything positive in their lives at all? Do they ever ever ever do anything that will help improve the lives of real people?

    No. They do not. They hem and haw about birth control and sex, sex and more sex. Sick. It is so sick and pitiful to keep witnessing this sick focus on sex. Shame on them - hypocrites - brood of vipers!

    It is just too pitiful of them to keep ignoring every issue except about sex. They are sex fanatics. Fetal fanatics. Dirty minded sex fanatics is all they are!!

    We should elect another Pope because these ignorant people in the Vatican are nothing but snakes! We should elect another Pope folks. It wouldn't be the first time in history that the Church did so. These guys are rotten to the core!

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  6. The focus on sex might have something to do with the fact that men focus on sex far more than women. We forget to our peril that this is an all male teaching authority and it's direction is determined by all male thinking. In that thinking it's not women who count, it's all about men dominating other men. Throw a heavy portion of self hating gay men in this equation and it's got to be very heady stuff for the self hating gay men. No wonder it's women and children who pay the price for their taste for power---and china.

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  7. Maybe there is a little pill that the sex & fetal fanatics can take so that they will think more about helping women and children who already exist. I wish!!

    All the talk about abortions and birth control from these sex and fetal fanatics disregard the fact that there is really an explosion of births on the planet Earth.

    I wish their heads weren't up their whatevers and that they could focus on creating the conditions needed to truly promote LIFE.... Life, as in people Being enabled to create a world which reflects the Love of God and all of Life.

    What the world has now are men ruling the world and sending their young to wars or engaging in businesses that do not create life but create the weapons of mass destruction and the tools for economic slavery, a life of bitterness and sorrow for billions of people.

    It is a great tragedy to witness these delusional men whose selfish and self-centered lives do not bring life into the world that would sustain life or promote life, but actually bring or enable slavery, death and every other vice into the world.

    word verif: sorroo

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