Movie Woes

I just watched the movie "The Handmaid's Tale." That is two hours of my life that I will never get back. I cannot begin to describe the awfulness. It is based on a book that seems to be required reading for high school students. Every single thing in the story is against everything I stand for. The "good guys" and the "bad guys." Everyone is completely misguided about sexuality.

The bad guys are sterile fundamentalists who use "breeders." These are the handmaids. I can't begin to tell the story since it is so depraved. The "good guys" find comfort in promiscuity. They are the rebels.

Neither side values monogamy. It seems to be looked at as not natural. The supposed fundamentalists value concubines and the rebels seem to think that monogamy can't be done. I can't really write anything coherent about this awful story tonight. I just didn't want to forget.

It was written by a feminist in 1985. The whole story is degrading to authentic womanhood.

Two Posts I Didn't Want to Lose (Long read)

I participate in a Catholic bulletin board, including a thread on infertility. Since we never know when something might be lost on the internet, I wanted to save these two posts because they say a lot of what I wanted to say. The first is a response to a woman who had had IVF and was upset because we Catholic women didn't agree with her choice. She basically said, "Don't judge me because you have never been in my shoes." This was my post explaining very much how far I had traveled:

Yes, I have walked more than a mile in your shoes. For you to presume I haven't, is very telling in your reply. I have no idea whether or not you were in a state of sin in using IVF. That is not my job. (You probably weren't since you were given improper counsel, but again, not my place to know.) I am positive however, that IVF is an immoral act. Objectively speaking IVF is immoral. Opinion doesn't change fact, but intent can lessen culpability.

As my wise father says, "There are two things we must examine; wrong acts and the state of personal sin. One we must judge, the other we cannot. 'Judge not lest thee be judged' has entirely to do with a judging the state of another's soul. It has nothing to do with judging actions on the part of others and ourselves. To instruct the ignorant and admonish sinners are two of the spiritual works of mercy! I have been thankful in my life for those who instructed me in my ignorance and admonished me in my sinfulness. It has made me a better person.

I know the pain and heartache of infertility. I knew I was infertile for years and years before I married. I agonized over if I was even called to marriage. I always knew I wanted to be a mother, but wasn't so sure how I would do at the wife side of things. Would I forever resent being "only" a wife? Was I called to the religious life where I could have children in spirit, if not in flesh? Was it right to marry a man who said, now, that he was fine with never having children, but would those feelings change?

And oh the slaps in the face I received for my beliefs! At 23 and single, I was told to "have a baby or have a hysterectomy." Twenty-three, and they were already telling me to go outside my faith. Doctors who claimed to be Catholic were willing to do anything just to, "put a baby in there." The paths I went down in response were more painful than any others in my entire life. I fell into the pits of sin. I have repented of them all, but there are scars that stay.

But the light of Christ was always there. I found that the Church has always been consistent even if Her followers weren't. I also found that Church teaching had a freedom that nothing else had to offer me. Instead of being limited by Church teaching, I found I was healed. It didn't mean I could suddenly conceive, but it meant that I fully understood my role as a wife independently of my role as a mother. My infertility prepared me more fully for marriage.

My infertility reminded me that God wants husband and wife to be together even during (natural) infertility. It has helped me to be a voice for living authentic sexuality according to God's design. Infertility gave me the insight to help others keep from turning their marriage bed into a "stud farm." When you only ovulate every six months or so it is a real lesson in humility when God tells you to abstain during fertility! But he had a better plan in mind than mine. My two precious children are on HIS time, not mine. He, and only He, knows best.

As I enter the new phase of my life, being told by God that I am done expanding my (very small) family, I wait with joyful anticipation for whatever he has in store for us. So we enter into abstinence phases yet again, and I try to use that time for prayer to more fully accept God's will for my life.

And the second is an open letter asking for prayer:


I have been wanting to bring a request here for quite awhile and yet I haven't for many reasons. But because God is God, He has given me the chance now to say it.

I need prayer of a very different kind. As many of you know, I have struggled with infertility and yet was eventually able to conceive my two naturally. (Thanks prolifewife for your thoughtful defense of my place in this thread, and for all others who have treated me with compassion even though I am technically "on the other side of infertility" now.)

In fact that is why I haven't brought my prayer request to this thread. I am now really on the other side now. Through much prayer we have discerned that we are called to be done expanding our very small family. I am so sad about it, yet very peaceful in knowing that it is God's will. I haven't brought my prayer request here because I have felt so entirely humbled by knowing that I am in a place in my life that others here might envy. How do you ask for prayers for help being "done" having babies in a group of people where some have never even started?!

But the thing is, it feels a lot like I felt when I was infertile. It is a big fat 'NO' from a Father who knows so much more than I, and I want to stomp my feet and throw a temper tantrum like the tiny child I am. I even know the 'why?' of it, yet I don't want to accept it. Why couldn't He just heal my many, many physical problems instead? Why is the answer that I get no more children? Have I not done a good enough job with the ones I have? Have I not "earned" any more? Of course I know in my mind the answer to these questions, but my heart hasn't accepted it yet. I know in my mind, that some of the people who can't have babies, "deserve" them the most.

And then there are the big families. Those wonderful ones you see at Mass who are going a little crazy and their patient parents spend most of the time helping those many children become better people at the expense of hearing the gospel words themselves. And I look at them with jealousy in my heart crying, "I'm willing! Just please heal me!" And then I see the parents who have one child or five and yet don't really want to be parents so they do a slack job, and I just want to slap them silly. Again, "I'm willing! Please heal me!" And then there are those days when I do a slack job, when I fall into my own selfishness and realize that maybe I just saw them on their off day. And I am humbled yet again.

And then there is that moment once again where I realize what I am really mourning. It is that fluttering in my belly that says new life is present, that moment I felt in my dreams before I conceived, and feel again, now, in my dreams as I again mourn an empty womb. Since I know what it feels like in real life, I almost, but not quite wish I didn't know what I will be missing. But then I see the eyes of my friend who miscarried before she felt movement, and admonish myself and offer up my sadness in place of her own. I admit, the pain to never feel the flutter, is more acute. There is nothing that aches more.

Infertility has so many aspects to it that there are too many to name. I look into the eyes of my son who looks exactly like me and the eyes of my daughter who looks nothing like me and wonder, "Would I love them less if I suddenly found out they weren't really 'mine'?" No I couldn't. They are on loan from God for no matter how long I have them with me. Whether they came from my body or someone else's, I have the privilege of being their mother. I carried them, but they look different enough that they might as well be from someone else.

And finally I remember authentic Catholic teaching that we are ALL called to motherhood and fatherhood. The nuptial meaning of the body unites us as children of God and parents to all other children. I remember I need to continue in the act of procreation even when it doesn't reproduce. I still need to participate in the race to the end even when I am tired. I still need to leave the door open to God in case his answer wasn't just a 'no,' and was instead a 'not now.'

Please pray for me for an acceptance of God's will, not just in my mind, but in my heart as well. And please, especially for those who struggle with infertility more than I, please forgive me for asking in the first place. As I mourn the end, I will offer up all I can for the many couples who have never been able to start.

Disgraceful Reporting about the Pope

This post needs very little from me. The link explains it much better than I could. It seems that journalistic integrity flies out the window when the topic is the Catholic Church. In this case journalistic integrity flew out the window, dodged a few cars, played chicken for awhile and finally ended up smashed on a windshield. It is official: nothing is sacred any more.

“Associated Press” Disgraces Itself With Error-Ridden and Malicious Attack on Pope

Define Irony

My pastor has struck again. Usually, I write on ways to better communicate and help people better understand Catholic teaching. I do my darndest to show fidelity to my pastor, my bishop, and of course, my most Holy Father. Usually my concerns are about what has gone wrong with secular society and how that has spilled over into what people believe about the Church. Usually. This posting is different. Since my pastor has side-stepped our bishop and then bashed the Holy Father, I am not going to post with fidelity to him. And he has done it all while not noting the plank in his own eye while pointing out the speck in another.

In fairness I need to post a link to the article. But not knowing how long our local paper will keep it active, I am trying to decide how much to pick out and quote or how much to merely comment on the article. The title of this post however, is due to a direct quote so I will show that in context.

The article is here: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2010/04/06/1142699/a-stronger-younger-pope-is-needed.html#ixzz0kauO0i2i

And the part I am specifically addressing is quoted here:

It is my opinion, for what it is worth, that 10 years ago many American bishops should have been retired. They might be nice people; they just made terrible errors in administrative judgment. I think the same thing should happen today throughout Europe. I think it would be best if Pope Benedict were to retire. He may be a saintly man, but he is much too old to lead the church through this mess. We need a strong leader who will call the church to humility and penance for our past.

The central focus of the sex abuse scandal always has to be the victims. With that in mind, I have confidence in the good people who make up the church. Our managers have failed us in the past years, but management has never been the heart of the church: God is the center and that has not changed.

[Emphasis by me]

He basically claims he was "asked to weigh in" on the most recent sex abuse scandals and how the allegations are currently handled. While he does not identify the person or persons who asked him to weigh in, he does a fair job of explaining, albeit vaguely, for anyone but the fairly knowledgeable Catholic, the process the Church now has in place for preventing future occurrences and weeding out past ones. He begins to go off the rails when he claims that while the Church herself has a good system in place, there are still problems at the diocesan level.

His solution is that most bishops should have retired 10 years ago, especially and specifically including our most Holy Father in that list of the "much too old for strong leadership" category. (I was really glad our bishop responded to the article and set a few things straight because our pope is not too old, and Father was speaking without any authority whatsoever.) Now all of this was just one man's opinion and while I completely disagreed with his assessment of the facts, I do feel he has a right to voice his opinion on the age and competency of his fellow priests as long as he is very clear it was merely his (ahem, ill-informed) opinion.

But where I finally took umbrage was to the bolded sentence in the above quote, "They might be nice people; they just made terrible errors in administrative judgment." It is in bold again so no one can mistake my reason for my break in my normal blogging style. Administrative judgment, eh? Errors? Let me take you back to 2004 and show some "terrible errors in administrative judgment" concerning the exploitation of children.

There is currently only one person in the Catholic clergy who has been accused (and convicted, I might add) of crimes against children in the valley, and possibly in the entire diocese which includes the whole state of Idaho. That person was a deacon found to have copious amounts of child pornography on his computer. Which parish you might ask? Mine. Under the "watchful eye" of my pastor. Now I will grant that the awful images were on a computer at his employment and not at the parish. But it was a crime against children by someone in close contact with our pastor.

I do not hold Father personally responsible for the crime since he was not the perpetrator, but I do hold him accountable for the "terrible errors in administrative judgment" he showed after the fact. When was Father informed of the crime? Oh, sometime in late Spring, early Summer. When was the deacon relieved of his duties? Oh, sometime in early Fall! When did I come in contact with the deacon? When I was arranging for my infant son's baptism after he was born in mid August. There was only one good thing that came out of my son's illness at birth, a delayed baptism. He was too sick to be around people, but not so sick that he was in danger of death. So we delayed his baptism...until early November. The deacon had just been relieved of his duties a few weeks before.

Our entire parish was up in arms with our pastor's handling of the situation. We all felt so lied to. This was 2004! We were fresh on the heels of when the first scandals broke. Our priests and bishops had promised a "transparency in dealing with past abuse cases." It even went so far as our bishop writing a letter of apology for his part in a transfer in another diocese decades before. We knew that many people, back then, believed a pedophile could be rehabilitated. We understood that if you had only been in contact with one person, you would do what appeared to be the "normal and correct way of handling it." Our bishop asked our forgiveness and came clean with it. We didn't need to know the details because he was being upfront about it. We laid it to rest fairly quickly.

But when the scandal broke in our parish many people felt so betrayed that our pastor KNEW and yet he DID NOTHING! This was 2004! What did our pastor think; that because they were only images that real children weren't in danger? Didn't he learn anything? Pedophiles begin their crimes by those who are closest to them. This man was a husband and father. This man handled small children over a baptismal font! And yet this pastor felt it was fine to keep this under wraps for months on end. How absurd!!

The opinion piece by my pastor in our local paper brought up some very strong feelings in me. When my newborn son was in the NICU it was this deacon who came to give him a blessing. While I know because of my faith that the office of deacon gave my son the blessing, so it was therefore valid, I still can only see the image of a pedophile handling my newborn son. For my pastor to have the nerve to go to our paper and accuse others of "terrible errors in administrative judgment" based almost solely on their age is beyond ridiculous. That he does so now, in the shadow of his own reprehensible errors, is the definition of irony.