Robbing Children of their Heritage

The news has affected my sense of identity and belonging. "Who am I?" is a hard question to answer when I don't know where I came from. I'd like to have the comfort of knowing whom I resemble. It's amazing how one can miss a sense of identity and wholeness because no one has ever said, "You act just like your mama when she was young." I guess I act just like my donor. And, as my thoughts, opinions and behavior are almost 180 degrees from most of my family members, I've never felt like a "piece of the puzzle" at family gatherings especially around my father's side of the family. This isn't something I sensed strongly-I thought I acted differently because I was from Tennessee and they were from Texas-but the feeling was always there. I'll admit putting it into words is hard. As well as grappling with who I am and where I belong, I have a more difficult obstacle since the secret's been out: trust. I've wondered if there are other secrets being kept from me. I shouldn't have to doubt my mother. But I've found myself questioning whether I was told the truth. How can I know for sure that there was a donor as she says?

Advocates of donor babies argue that biology is not an issue in parenting; the love and care a child receives is all that matters. I can understand a couple's desire for a child, and I don't deny that they can provide a great amount of love and caring, no matter how conception occurs. In a world where history is a required academic subject and libraries have special sections for genealogy, I don't see how anyone can consciously rob someone of something as basic and essential as heritage. Parents must realize that all the love and attention in the world can't mask that underlying, almost subconscious feeling that something is askew. I greatly appreciate the sacrifices my mother has made and the love my family has given me. But even while being enveloped in my father's sister's warmest embrace, I feel a strange little twinge of something deep inside me like I'm borrowing someone else's family.

www.newsweek.com/whose-eyes-are-these-whose-nose-186074

Bernanos:An Ecclesial Existence: "Sources of the Self"? (Charles Taylor) and nothingness.

“Doubt concerning oneself is not humility. I even think that at times it could be the grandest, almost delirious form of pride: a kind of ravenous jealousy that makes a wretch turn against himself and devour himself. The secret of hell must lie here.”

Such affirmations are only intended to point to the presence of hell in this world. In order to isolate the essence of hell more plainly, Bernanos sets about excluding the passion and fire of revolt, since these are too intimately bound up with the wholesome and necessary vitality of our temporal existence: “Elemental woe is calm, solemn, like a king on his throne, mute as a shroud”, says Fiodor in Joy. “As for despair: it confers on us an empire equal to God’s.” And, speaking of the child he once was, Bernanos himself says: “I’d rather see him in revolt than jaded by disappointment, because most frequently revolt is but a form of transition, while disappointment of this sort no longer belongs to this world: it is brimming and dense as hell itself.” In the countess the country priest comes up against “all the harshness of hell”. What Bernanos puts in highest relief, however, is the coldness of hell, no doubt echoing Dante unconsciously: “I am cold itself. The essence of my light is unbearable cold”, Satan declares to Donissan. “His masterpiece is a peace that is mute, aloof, frozen, comparable to the thrill of nothingness.” Chevance says to Cénabre: “Alas, Sir, in blasphemy some love of God may still be found. But the hell you inhabit is the coldest of all.” And Chantal says to her father: “The world for which our Lord did not pray, the world you think I know nothing about—pshaw! It’s not so hard to find it: it’s the world that prefers cold to hot.” In his one and only sermon—at the grave of the murdered shepherd—the Curé de Fenouille says to his “dead parish”: “All of you feel chilled to the bone, frozen cold. People always speak of the fires of hell, but no one has ever seen them, my friends. Pure cold is hell!”

Bernanos: Lust and Blindness v Pure in heart see God, know themselves

The whole secret of Joy, moreover, is surely that Chantal—although immersed without knowing it in the abyss of God’s simplicity—is wrenched from this holy shelter by the complicated sin she wishes to take upon herself, and she is dragged into an environment wholly alien to her in which she can only be a victim. But it is Chantal’s secret that, even in an atmosphere of sin and of clever and cynical machinations, she can, by the power of her simplicity, remain the dominant character who knows how to defeat her enemies—apparently with their own weapons but in reality with a superior secret weapon. Or, as Bernanos wrote to a religious shortly before his own death: “It’s true that the Gospel is written for the simple, and that only simplicity gains us access to it. But, if there do exist souls who have received the gift of simplicity, there are many others who have not received it. So, for the sake of these, it is perhaps good to make oneself complicated in order to lead them elsewhere little by little.”29 It belongs to the “economy” of simplicity (in the old theological sense of the term) that it can take on the form of sin and the form of the reflective intellect without losing itself.

Now, there exists another name for simplicity, for a divine quality communicated to us by grace that is defined by the singleness and seamlessness of the divine Being: this other name is purity. The Middle Ages spoke of the “pure” Being of God. But, in man, purity is a quality that can be conceived only as applying to the totality of man’s being, consisting of both body and soul. In its specific form as chastity, purity is the precondition for the simplicity characteristic of the person who can and wants to know himself, not in himself, but in God. Impurity and unchasteness are not merely (as Thomas Aquinas usually describes them) an external obstacle to pure knowledge untroubled by the senses; they are, in fact, the internal destruction of the light that shines only in God. Unchasteness, according to the country priest’s profound meditations, is secretly the same thing as unbelief, for faith is the evidence and knowledge of things in God, not in man himself, while unchasteness is one and the same as the curiosity to know oneself and all things only in oneself, a truth about which Freud has taught us a great deal. Unchasteness is also one with madness, because reason remains intact only when it transcends itself in the direction of God. The abuse of the sexual faculty for loveless self enjoyment presupposes, as a basic spiritual attitude, the abuse of the rational faculty for loveless self-knowledge, and this can be nothing other than madness: “I have not lost my faith, because God has deigned to preserve me from impurity. Such a comparison, alas, would probably make the philosophers smile! And it’s obvious that the most disorderly of personal lives could not put a reasonable man so far off course that he would, for example, begin to doubt the truth of certain axioms in geometry. But there is an exception: madness. After all, what do we know about madness? What do we know about lust? And what do we know about the secret dealings between these two things?”30 The Curé d’Ambricourt then reminisces about his youth as a very poor boy, about all the abominations he witnessed: “What would have been the use of understanding these tilings? I had seen diem. You don’t understand lust; you see it. I had seen those wild faces, suddenly frozen into an indefinable smile. Dear God! Why don’t we realize more often that the mask of pleasure, stripped of all hypocrisy, is precisely the mask of anguish? . . . What if madness and lust were really one and the same thing?”31

Sitting in his confessional, a priest can be overcome “as by a kind of vertigo” by those eternally identical whisperings that are “like the writhing of worms and the stench of the grave”: “The image of a perpetually open wound emerges, through which the substance of our wretched species is flowing out. What accomplishments could man’s brain not have attained if the poisonous fly [of lust] hadn’t laid its larva within it!” Neither Bernanos nor his hero, however, can be accused of prudery or, what amounts to the same thing, of sexual obsession. No one has dealt with this theme more soberly than our author. This gives him the right to call things by their name: “Whoever has any experience of sin cannot ignore the fact . . . that lust is constantly threatening to smother both virility and intelligence under its parasitic vegetation and hideous luxuriance. Since it can create nothing, lust is reduced to staining—in its very seed—the frail promise of humanity. Lust is probably at the origin, at the very source, of all the blemishes of our race.” And the young priest concludes with this decisive insight:

Purity is not something prescribed for us like a punishment. Experience shows that it is one of the mysterious but self-evident conditions for that supernatural knowledge of oneself—of oneself in God—which is called faith. Impurity does not destroy this knowledge; rather, it abolishes the need for it. You no longer believe because you no longer desire to believe. You no longer desire to know yourself truly. This profound truth—the truth about yourself—no longer interests you. And it is useless to say that the dogmas that only yesterday had your assent are still present in your mind, that only reason rejects diem. What’s the difference, if we can only really possess what we desire? This is so because for man there is no such thing as total and absolute possession of anything. You no longer desire. You no longer desire your joy. You could only love yourself in God, so now you no longer love yourself.32

Thus, only faith is truly an act involving the whole of man: it is not a transcendence of the spirit over the body; it is an act whereby both the body and the spirit, together, transcend toward God. We can, then, understand the following reflection, which the country priest interjects in the midst of his dark night of the soul, when he feels his faith is wholly hidden or even that it has been taken from him: “At tunes it seems to me that [my faith] has withdrawn, that it’s subsisting in a place where I wouldn’t have looked for it—in my flesh, in my wretched flesh, in my blood and in my flesh, my perishable but baptized flesh.”33

All of this explains why Bernanos, as also Claudel, thunders so loudly against the alleged ideal of self-knowledge. The only true self-knowledge occurs in God, and there man does not see himself but, through faith, God. Tins vision of God is the truth of what man is. To look

The Civic Project of Christianity

"First, a purely juridical order devoid of metaphysical and theological judgment is as logically and theologically impossible as a pure, metaphysically innocent science. One cannot set a limit to one’s own religious competence without an implicit judgment about what falls on the other side of that limit; one cannot draw a clear and distinct boundary between the political and the religious, or between science, metaphysics, and theology, without tacitly determining what sort of God transcends these realms. The very act by which liberalism declares its religious incompetence is thus a theological act. Its supposed indifference to metaphysics conceals a metaphysics of original indifference. A thing’s relation to God, being a creature, makes no difference to its nature or intelligibility. Those are tacked on extrinsically through the free act of the agent."

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/02/the-civic-project-of-american-christianity

“HOLY Scripture speaks of four marriages. The first in its historical and literal sense, the bodily union of a man and a woman; the second allegorical, the union of Christ with His Church; the third tropological or moral, the union of God with the soul; the fourth anagogical or eschatological, the union of God with the Church Triumphant.”

~St. Thomas Aquinas: “Sermons, First Sunday after Epiphany,” 20.

Statement: Obersturmgefell

"The only people with standing in this case were children of same-sex couples. Gay couples themselves might get a marriage rather than a civil union, but they are nonetheless able to get a divorce and change their identity to heterosexual again, if they feel so inclined. The right to a relationship with one's own mother and father is more universal, lifelong, and fundamental than the right to marry, yet the Court has given an adult class the non-essential right to marriage at the expense of an essential (and existential) right for a group that truly needed equal protection and due process (children). It is troubling that Justice Kennedy's decisions did not need to cite birth certificates and custody as rights tied intrinsically to marriage, yet he did, gratuitously strip away the rights of future citizens to the care of their mother and father as well as of their right to know where they came from. The complete disregard for the research and testimony from children of gays in both the majority opinion and the dissenting opinions is as chilling as it is ominous. The Supreme Court will be haunted by the grievances of citizens forcibly estranged from their parents and deprived of their heritage because of this ruling, for decades if not centuries to come."

Robert Oscar Lopez

A Professor of European History/Philosophy Discovers Islam

On the question of Islam- I was horror struck when I read the Koran

and tripply so when I read much of the hadith. on any Christian viewing

Mohammed is a demonic force- examples such as his inistence upon stoning

adulterers, taking as concubines the victims of execution, his failure to

understand mercy, his reintroduction of the rigidity of the law (in fact

judaism was not that rigid), his fusion of the political and the heavenly, his

paltry view of heaven. If you do not know a geo-political journalist (the only

journalist I know who is steeped in theology) who goes under the name spengler

and writes for Asiatimes online go read him. Medieval christians were not

opposed to islam bvecause they were ignorant but they new what they stood for,

I think Europe will be Islamic or a tthe very least will be engulfed by civil

wars due to islam within the next thirty years (demographics alone suggest

this). having been a great fan of sufism (and i still am) I had imagined the

Koran to be in its spirit it is not. Khomeini and bin Laden are good muslims. i

have no doubt of that.

(email errors retained)

"It is strange that some theologians have difficulty accepting the precise and limited doctrine of papal infallibility, but see no problem in granting de facto infallibility to everyone who has a conscience."

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

Guild System and Political Economy

"Meanwhile, side by side with this emancipation of mankind
in the direct line of descent from the old chattel slaves of the
Roman villa went, in the Middle Ages, a crowd of institutions
which all similarly made for a distribution of property, and for
the destruction of even the fossil remnants of a then forgotten
Servile State. Thus industry of every kind in the towns, in
transport, in crafts, and in commerce, was organised in the
form of Guilds. And a Guild was a society partly co-operative,
but in the main composed of private owners of capital whose
corporation was self-governing, and was designed to check
competition between its members: to prevent the growth of
one at the expense of the other. Above all, most jealously did
the Guild safeguard the division of property, so that there
should be formed within its ranks no proletariat upon the
one side, and no monopolising capitalist upon the other."

Hiliare Belloc 'The Servile State' p39

Regina Coeli

Regina cæli, lætare, alleluia:

R. Quia quem meruisti portare, alleluia,

Resurrexit, sicut dixit, alleluia,R. Ora pro nobis Deum, alleluia.

 Queen of Heaven, rejoice, alleluia.

 The Son whom you merited to bear, alleluia.

 Has risen, as He said, alleluia.

 Pray for us to God, alleluia

'Tyranny of Liberalism' - Progressivism

James Kalb ‘The Tyranny of Liberalism’

“The progressive view appeals to those who gain from central bureaucratic rule. These include the academically credentialed; social scientists and other “experts”; lawyers, especially judges, legal scholars and leaders of the elite bar; elite journalists, whose importance increases as more things are treated as national public policy issues; and religious leaders who identify with national elites and want to be respectable, comfortable, and also prophetic. They also include those with an uneasy relationship to the dominant traditional and informal institutions bureaucratic rule supplants-- unmarried persons, artists, and also homosexuals and others unable or unwilling to live in accordance with traditional moral standards.

Progressivism increases the size and importance of the classes that support it. For example, it multiplies the power and numbers of “experts,” whose position depends on bureaucratized rule.”

Kierkegaard on Nominal Christians

Søren Kierkegaard

"There arose in Christendom a class of Christians so strange and curious that they might be exhibited for money in a sideshow. For in the course of time there emerged in established Christendom freethinkers and other spirits of that ilk, who attacked, insulted, derided Christianity worse than the worst pagan mockers had done. But as these men were nevertheless born in Christendom and were living in Christendom where all are Christians; and as they themselves presumably did not consider it worth the trouble, or perhaps accounted it too great a sacrifice, to renounce the name of Christian; and as Christendom, by reason of its extraordinary extension no doubt, did not possess elasticity enough to shake off from it such Christians as these - so these men continued to call themselves Christians."

Thomistic Psychology: Critique of Terruwe and Baars

Fundamental to Aquinas’ understanding of emotions is that they are passive. It is better, when discussing the details of Aquinas’ theory, to not use the word emotion at all, since there is no single Latin word that corresponds to it (there is no word “emotion” in Latin). For instance, when the Fathers of the English Domincan Province translated a Latin word into “emotion” in English, it was generally not the word “passio,” which they translate into “passion,” but rather “affectio” or “commotio.” Terruwe and Baars retranslate “passio” itself into “emotion,” perhaps because this has a greater emphasis on movement. Gradually they forget that “passio” does always mean a passive power, a “moved mover,” never an unmoved mover. And this is a crucial mistake.

For Aquinas, as for Aristotle before him, the passions are only active in response to some active principle – in most general terms, what they call the “apprehended appetible,” something that can be chosen as good (and hence be the object of an appetite) that currently resides in one of the powers of apprehension (either the intellect, the internal senses, or the external senses) as an unmoved mover. Aristotle uses the metaphor of a ball-and-socket joint: for the arm to wave about, the socket of the shoulder must be stationary. The arm itself while moving is a moved mover; the shoulder is the unmoved mover, without which no movement could originate. The same is the case with the powers of apprehension. Only in response to something actually apprehended can the

passions be put into operation: they are moved movers.

As such, the authors’ claim that the passions could have “lives of their own” is foreign to the Thomistic framework. For a passion to be in operation, it must be responding to some current thought, image, or sensation in the person. If it is not responding to one of these, it is not in act.

Repression in Aquinas

Is there room in Thomistic rational psychology for the concept of repression? One could argue that the word itself tempts the imagination too much into forming an image of one emotion pressing down another, or (as Terruwe and Baars suggest) one emotion placing itself physically as a wedge between reason and another emotion. As an appetite of the soul, emotions are necessarily object-directed. They do not exert any motion except toward or away from their objects themselves, and never act as levers or wedges. To respect this, a more accurate word is avoidance, which certainly has a place in Thomistic psychology.

Aquinas says that all of the powers of the soul require attention in order to carry out their acts (I-II, 77, 1). The will can choose to focus on any given object; it can do so either actually or habitually. Should the will choose to consider, for instance, an injury that was done to one, it will incite the passion of anger or sadness. Should it choose to not consider the injury, it will tend to not incite those passions. This is independent of the judgment of the particular reason, which may, in a given situation, judge that an injury has taken place. The point is that such a judgment, once made, may be deliberately unattended, leaving the passions un-incited. If one has done this repeatedly, the process may become habitual, taking place with only a minimum of attention.

This is the natural process by which the will directs the appetites. It is necessarily involved in the exercise of the virtues of fortitude and temperance, which perfect the irascible and concupiscible appetites. Its mode of operating is termed persuasion, since the will cannot fully command the movement of an appetite as it does the movement of a limb; rather, it must choose to focus attention on some particular object that then itself “persuades” the movement of the passion. St Thomas remarks that everyone knows this by their own experience: if we choose to consider sad things, we start to feel sad, and so on. This natural dominion of persuasion which the will exercises can have the effect of not inciting a certain passion habitually, if the will finds that passion aversive. This would constitute avoidance of that emotion, which may be the most general form of avoidance possible, since the will would have to dis-attend whatever could instigate the emotion.

More specific forms of avoidance would simply involve not attending to particular memories, images, or thoughts that the particular reason judges as unsuitable and the will finds aversive. The word “repression,” on the other hand, implies that some force of willpower is applied to the passion directly, as if by command, as one would move a limb. It misses the important fact that man governs his passions by persuasion, not by command.

The other way in which man governs his passions by persuasion is by bringing considerations of truth to bear on the judgments of the particular reason. The particular reason, also called the cogitative power, is grouped by St Thomas with the internal senses of memory and imagination, as those powers of the soul that consider particulars, and work in unison with the intellect. The cogitative power is most closely aligned with the intellect; the former judges particulars, while the latter attends to universals. Guided by the intellect, the particular reason can evaluate whether or not its judgments are true, and whether any valid generalizations can be made from some particular consideration. If exaggerated judgments had been made, these would tend to produce exaggerated emotional responses: for instance, if a cook were to burn a particular meal, and made the judgment, “I can’t do anything right, I’m a failure,” he would likely feel quite sad. If he decided to question this judgment and review the situation, he may recall that he has in fact done many fine meals, that his employers are always praising his work, and so on. By choosing to investigate the distorted judgment to bring it into conformity with reality, the cook rules his passions by persuasion.

Thus persuasion by the will has two modes of operation: the first, more quick but more primitive, by directing the soul’s attention; the second, more laborious yet more mature, by rationally engaging particular judgments. The first mode may be used in avoidance of aversive stimuli, and may occur habitually; the second requires a higher action of the will, in that it must direct the tandem work of the intellect and the cogitative power in an active process of enquiry. Shifting attention does not achieve resolution of a particular judgment, but it does allow the person greater time for rational enquiry; and so both processes are ultimately aimed, in the healthy individual, to a life in which the passions are subject to reason.

The Formation of Virtue

The authors contrast the state of one with repressed emotions with the state of the emotionally mature individual. In their chapter on the therapy of repression neuroses, they state:

Another indication that the obsessive-compulsive patient is not free in sexual
matters is the increase in fear and restlessness that follow when he foregoes the
gratification of the sexual urge. In the non-neurotic person the freely renounced
act of masturbation is followed by calm and peace, and, in time, an ever greater
ease in guiding and directing his sexual desires in such a way that he leads a truly
moral life. This is in stark contrast to the obsessive-compulsive neurotic whose
repressing emotions gain in intensity over the years, and sooner or later lead to
obsessive preoccupation with sexual thoughts and fantasies, and compulsive
performance of acts he has always willed not to commit. Because his disordered
neurotic condition is foreign to human nature, time is always against him. Sooner
or later his outwardly successful repressive mechanisms will break down with all
its frightening and disabling consequences for him.” (ibid, p 117-118)

This passage in significant, both from a psychiatric perspective, and from the perspective of Thomistic moral philosophy.

The authors stress the importance that, in order for their advice to apply to any individual, that person must be diagnosed beforehand with an obsessive-compulsive neurosis. If there is no OCD, there is no proper application of mortification therapy. The difficulty with this is that the authors themselves are not consistent in their identification of true obsessive-compulsive disorder, at least from the perspective of modern psychiatric diagnosis.

As was mentioned above, an obsession is an unwanted, irrational, repetitive, intrusive, and anxiety-provoking thought. True obsessions always have these characteristics. By their nature, obsessions are repugnant to the will of the individual who suffers from them, and they strike their intellect as absurdities (which they fear nevertheless). The preoccupation with sexual thoughts and fantasies which Baars and Terruwe describe cannot be called an obsession if the object of their thoughts is something the person truly desires, for then the thought would not be unwanted. Nor are sexual thoughts irrational – they naturally occur to every healthy human being. True sexual obsessions occur on taboo themes (incest, homosexuality, violence) and strike their sufferers as hideous; rather than fantasizing about them, their sufferers make every effort possible to suppress

them. A person who voluntarily entertains sexual fantasies, at least on a given topic, can be safely said to not have obsessions on that topic. It should be said that this goes against the popular notion of obsession, which may be better described as a monomania – a high school girl who has a crush on a boy may have repetitive, intrusive thoughts of him, and may describe herself as “obsessed” with him – but unless these thoughts are also unwanted, irrational, and anxiety-provoking, no clinical obsessions exist.

Compulsions are behaviors which neutralize the obsession, and include such behaviors as hand washing, ordering, checking, seeking reassurances, repeating actions, and performing ritualized mental acts. The goal of the compulsion is to reduce the distress caused by the obsession; they are not pleasurable acts in themselves. A better adjective to describe acts that have something pleasurable as a goal is impulsive. In general, people with OCD tend to be much less impulsive than people without OCD, especially if it is an impulse about which they obsess. Even more significantly, people who obsess on a given theme – i.e., a young mother who suffers from obsessions of stabbing her baby – are extremely unlikely to act on them. With some themes there has not been any single case identified where a person has acted on the obsession – which is why doctors do not notify Child Protective Services if the mother has homicidal obsessions, and they do not counsel that the mother spend time away from the child. (This distinction between homicidal

thoughts that occur in a psychotically depressed individual and one with OCD is not particularly difficult to make, but one should always refer to a psychiatrist to make it.) The idea that people who have obsessions will inevitably act on them in a compulsive way involves fundamental misunderstandings of the nature of both obsessions and compulsions.

From a Thomistic standpoint, the passage cited above shows a misunderstanding of the virtue of continence. Continence is a virtue in the will, by which the person chooses to not follow vehement desires for pleasures of touch. It is distinguished from temperance, which is a virtue that resides in the desires themselves, by which those desires are properly ordered in accordance with reason. To the degree a person has temperance, they are not moved by wayward desires; if a person has wayward desires but chooses not to act on them, they are continent but not temperate. Temperance is a greater good than continence, since in the temperate man even his sensitive desires are subject wholly to reason. Still, continence is a necessary virtue since it shapes the passions, getting them accustomed to act in accord with reason.

The continent will necessarily experience tension as they resist their vehement passions, and it is by resisting their passions that they gradually forge temperance in themselves. The tension only subsides when temperance is achieved. What the authors state is true of the “non-neurotic person” is true only if that person has the virtue of temperance – the virtue to which continence tends, according to the maxim that in matters of virtue and vice one proceeds from the imperfect to the perfect.

It is difficult to conceive in Thomistic terms how Baars and Terruwe’s method leads one along the inclined plane from incontinence to continence to virtue. To have disordered desires but to not act on them is a virtue that they have turned into a vice; to “tolerate” acting out on a disordered desire with the purpose of restoring order to another disordered passion, and to thus attain the easy serenity of virtue, violates the most basic principles St Thomas taught on the nature of the will and the passions as subjects of virtue and vice.

Kevin D Majeres, MD