The family planning and abortion "clinics" promote their wares everywhere, they make lots and lots of money from their business.
As catholics with the gift of faith our business is to ensure that we ourselves and everyone we have contact with experiences God's love through us. With all our sinfulness and weakness we each do our best to keep God's law and never knowingly harm anyone. We are human, we fail, but we have been given the Sacrament of Penance so that we can confess our sins no matter how grave, get God's forgiveness and start anew.
Through ignorance and arrogance I rejected the teaching of the Church on contraception without having read the Church's relevant documents and having had no discussion wth those who were learned in those matters. I suspect there are many people who believe as I once did and who need leadership and teaching from our church
Could our spiritual leaders our shepherds please have a year for the promotion of the teaching of the church on love, marriage, sex, openess to life, planning a family, the evils of contraception? Where is political correctness and the desire to go with the flow and not upset the apple cart going to get them and us on the day of judgement.
There is a way to turn things around, it may take some time, but the gangs of today can become the saints of tomorrow (we are a church of sinners eg the great Saint Paul was a great persecuter of christians prior to his conversion)if we trust in God and if we all use our God given talents and leadership skills.
As catholics with the gift of faith our business is to ensure that we ourselves and everyone we have contact with experiences God's love through us. With all our sinfulness and weakness we each do our best to keep God's law and never knowingly harm anyone. We are human, we fail, but we have been given the Sacrament of Penance so that we can confess our sins no matter how grave, get God's forgiveness and start anew.
Through ignorance and arrogance I rejected the teaching of the Church on contraception without having read the Church's relevant documents and having had no discussion wth those who were learned in those matters. I suspect there are many people who believe as I once did and who need leadership and teaching from our church
Could our spiritual leaders our shepherds please have a year for the promotion of the teaching of the church on love, marriage, sex, openess to life, planning a family, the evils of contraception? Where is political correctness and the desire to go with the flow and not upset the apple cart going to get them and us on the day of judgement.
There is a way to turn things around, it may take some time, but the gangs of today can become the saints of tomorrow (we are a church of sinners eg the great Saint Paul was a great persecuter of christians prior to his conversion)if we trust in God and if we all use our God given talents and leadership skills.
Ronni O'Gara
Dear friends,
ReplyDeleteI am glad to have found your blog (because of Porta Coeli). I am marking it and will return to it, as I am a sidewalk counselor every Saturday and I cannot know 'too much.' It might take only one little fact to save a baby's life.
I would like to say that I used also to volunteer in a crisis pregnancy center--for several years. I don't, now. I found that even though the staff, both paid and volunteers, was almost entirely Catholic, and even though there was a chapel with 24 hour adoration, and in the workers' area there were statues and prayers and all the things that go with our Faith--it wasn't actually offered to the women who used our services. It was not offered systematically to women who were never going to abort, identified themselves as Catholics, and were prior clients in repeat pregnancies outside of marriage. Even at the Christmas party, there was only Santa Claus. I asked about this to a very thoughtful woman in a decision-making position, but she did not get back to me after promising to do so(although we had a history of successful collabortions, so she certainly knew how to reach me), and I stopped volunteering. Because, I mean, what do they need if they do not need Christ? There is nobody who needs Christ more! Needs the Church more! Needs Eucharistic Adoration more? (but clients were never invited, and there was a big sign on the inside of the chapel: Keep This Door Closed; this was purportedly to keep abortion-seeking women from knowing the true mission of the place, but it would have been a pretty simple matter to arrange the entrances differently so as to allow for a separate entrance for the two situations).
Then my buddy and I looked harder at the places we'd been recommending to women after their abortions, and found that they were being offered secular counseling, not the Faith. This seems to be true for every site of before or after abortion assistance except the Sisters of Life. I don't have their address handly, but they are easy to find. They seem to offer Catholicism to their clients--especially their live-in site.
Anyway, I would like to ask your help. My buddy and I from the sidewalk made up a brochure to give to the women post-abortion that invites them to the Faith, to confession, to instruction, etc. If you could, would you please go to my site and read it, and then give us some feedback? We really want to help women, we realize it is delicate, we realize we're in such a hostile environment anyway that you only have like two seconds to either capture their attention, or not, and we need all the wisdom we can get. But we are determined to not shy away from giving women the most important help of all. Here's the address and thanks ahead of time:
http://thewhitelilyblog.wordpress.com/catholic-brochure-for-post-abort-women/
By the way, there's an old post on a save we had last year that you might enjoy--I'm sure it will ring a bell with anyone who's stood outside an abortion mill in January:
http://thewhitelilyblog.wordpress.com/2009/01/07/another-ordinary-day/#more-255
Hello, I like the leaflet and the post you gave a link to. It's always good to have good resources to use with Mothers in crisis.
ReplyDeleteIn our Centre we do invite all our clients to talk about God and we often invite them to the Chapel. We also have a Mass at the monthly Mother's Meetings that we invite them to, as well as a Catechism session. Many Mothers of all faiths and none gladly attend both. There is no pressure on them to do so.
I will say I think I visited the Centre you mention, I am pretty sure it is the same one. They are actually the source of all our inspiration for what we do here in London. They save thousands of babies each year, and that cannot happen without God's blessing being upon the work.
Of course it is important to talk to the women about God but even more important to talk to God about the women we serve - and there were certainly many people praying for the women when I was there. I will say, on the day I visited, a client and her husband were in the Chapel with their newborn and had come back to give thanks there.
I also noted that in the training materials and resources they gave us there was a lot of information about living chastity and the Counselling they gave seemed to me to rather like a first step to encouraging a woman with no experience of doing so to examine her conscience and make a moral decision. I didn't find it remotely secular, and here in England virtually all pregnancy centres use a totally secular and non-directional model of counselling (we don't).
Sometimes Christian Centres promote their own spiritual beliefs at the expense of trying to save the baby, which is also a mistake. This type of Centre publishes reports at the end of the year which typically say: 50 girls kept their baby and 250 were baptised into our Church.
Yet I would say our first duty is to intervene in trying to stop the killing of the child. Often, often, often the decision to keep the child is the beginning of a deep and lasting conversion, even though it may take time to bloom. The witness that a group of Catholics make by giving their time to help Mothers in crisis in itself encourages many of these women to consider the Faith.
Dear hearts, thanks for putting my address and links; I am hoping for feedback.
ReplyDeleteYes, you can be secular and save babies. There are threads within Capitalism that are already waking up, like South Korea's Planned Parenthood which recently changed its name and entire mission to one of promoting births. China is starting to splinter, with some realizing the one-child policy was suicidal. In fact, we can project into a dim future in which instead of trading food for abortions, as is common now across the dark world, the change would be to trade food for baby workers. The demographics are predicting it. The secular state is capable of it. And their brochures will 'feel' religious. That's easy! Empty superstition and a picture or two of Christ.
Did you know that Mother Teresa did not offer the Faith to her dying? That is how she survived in India. Such work is in service to a secular state, not to souls.
But I am glad your center is not doing that! Good luck. Count your baptisms AND your babies and don't be ashamed of it! I hope I have perhaps alerted you that you can be co-opted.
I once stayed with a couple in Italy who had adopted 2 children from one of Mother Theresa's orphanages in India. The children were delivered to the adoptive parents with Miraculous Medals around their necks and it was made clear that the children had been baptised. In the current situation in India Mother Theresa's sisters have been under a lot of pressure not to preach the faith, but of course they do so in everything they do. They are preaching the Gospel daily in the lives they lead anyway, but in fact although they have to be very quiet and humble about it they do evangelise all the people they serve. It is a mistake to judge what they are doing by what they say publicly about their work there. They have to be extremely careful in what they say (without telling any untruths of course). Mother Theresa did indeed offer the Faith to her dying. That's how she became a saint.
ReplyDeleteMore people keeping their babies because they are allowed to, or because they receive more support, can happen without their being offered Christ.But the change of heart of a woman set on abortion, that cannot happen without the real involvement of Christ. And that is what is happening in thousands each year in the Centre you are referring to.
Their methods and counselling are not secular.
We delight in the baptisms of clients and their children. We still exist to witness to our faith primarily through assisting women spiritually, physically and emotionally in her crisis pregnancy.