The CatholiCity Message
Volume XVIII, Number 9 – July 29, 2014
Dear CatholiCity Citizen,
Wow. That never happens. I just sat down to write this Message and...nothing happened. Me, staring at a blank screen. But my posture was excellent. Writer's block. Since seventh grade—for almost forty years—God has spared me, except once, during college. Then, as now, I fell back on the oldest trick in the trade...write Whatever Pops Into My Idiot Skull! So here I am, writing about writer's block. Rage, rage against the blank page. And all that. Hmmnn, now that I've started, I have so much stuff popping into the Ole Skull that I can't type fast enough...
Conversation Unblock
A while back, in Reader's Digest, I read an article about a pleasant way to begin a conversation, especially with someone you have just met. Ask the other person to share the most interesting, annoying, emotionally moving, life-changing, or striking thing he or she has experienced, read, or seen during the last month. I always learn something new and so will you.
Children: Another Way Catholics Are In This World But Not of It
Back by popular demand—thank you for all your emails—the second in our ongoing series of How Catholics Are Different. Devout Catholics welcome children. Actually, because being open to life is how you live your lives, few CatholiCity Citizens need me to explain the challenges, joys, and suffering of living the supernatural vocation of parenthood. We love children, in principle and in the flesh. We raise children to love children and to be open to more children. Here is what I wrote in our new booklet, A Bright Future for the Catholic Church in America:
For all their cultural variety, devout Catholics, being Catholic, live their faith in a day-to-day struggle for holiness. Their openness to bearing children and embracing the challenges of raising them is the result of a love for each other, for children, and for God; having children is not undertaken as a grim duty to repopulate a decimated institution. The expansion of the third generation (of devout Catholics since the 1960s) truly is the fruit of love between spouses in individual "domestic churches," in cooperation with God's grace and with a firm reliance on His providence based upon a supernatural gift of faith.
A mere fifty years ago, societies across the planet welcomed children as priceless gifts from God. I have one brother and nine sisters, prompting my father to claim we Macfarlanes were "the wealthiest" family precisely because we had the most kids. Most of the Catholic families on our street had five, six, seven, or eight children. It was not uncommon to see dozens of young kids playing outside after school (Kickball! 1-2-3 Ring-Elario! Acorn Fights!). There were two major religions, "Catholic" and "Public," but even the Jewish and Protestant families usually had more than two kids.
That world is gone. The parents who had these large families during the 1960s and 1970s are now septuagenarians and octogenarians or have passed on. Spotting pregnant women—even during Sunday Mass, much less in public--is now rare. Within a decade, most people alive in the United States will not have experienced a culture where children were considered a blessing and gift unless they grow up within a devout Catholic family or have a close relationship with such a family.
If you, my dearest friends, have been open to life and have been blessed with children, your pregnancies and your large families are, sadly, signs of contradiction in our post-Christian society. If you wanted children but were unable to have them, your suffering must be intensified in a world that goes out of its way to spurn them. Dads and moms: your vans and diaper bags and your sacrificial love might as well be roman collars or religious habits. Our Lord said, "Let the children come to me," and your heart echoes his Sacred Heart.
The Entire World is Anti-Children
China's One-Child, forced abortion, forced sterilization policy is now decades old. Not only is the United States's birthrate hovering just below replacement level, it is now our official federal government policy to supply birth control and abortifacients free-of-charge. The percentage of Americans getting married is at an all-time low. The percentage of Americans who will live their entire lives childless is at an all time high and is increasing steadily.
The United Nations has spent endless millions on initiatives aimed at reducing population levels through contraception, sterilization, and abortion. It is nearly impossible to find a western nation which does not have severely negative birthrates (with "Catholic" Italy, France, and Spain topping the list). The birthrate of "Catholic" Mexico has crashed faster in the last decade than any country in recorded history. Short of a massive religious conversion, Russia, whose women typically have multiple abortions, is going to shrink by tens of millions during the coming three decades. Panicked government incentives in Russia, Quebec, and elsewhere offering financial incentives for couples to have children have not budged the needle.
Additionally, I've chronicled how nine of the ten fastest collapsing birthrates worldwide belong to Muslim countries—with the trend extending to Muslim populations within non-Muslim nations. Islam is not going to dominate the world without Muslims. It's not just your suburb or city: the entire world is becoming more and more closed to human life. We have front seats to the most bizarre spectacle in history: watching humanity commit suicide over the span of a century.
Death Toll is Now Beyond Comprehension
Five years ago, my father diligently researched numerous scientific studies to estimate the number of deaths in the womb due to surgical abortion and the even more prolific non-surgical extermination methods (contraceptive pills, IUDs, implants, and morning-after drugs). Tragically, these non-surgical methods are either designed primarily (and as a secondary effect, in the case of the pill and implants) to prevent fertilized eggs (immortal human beings) from implanting in a mother's womb. The general public has never been told the truth about the abortifacient reality of the pill. Couples who use the pill can expect to eliminate two or more pre-born human beings per year. (I understand how difficult it must be to read this for those who used the pill or the other methods without knowledge of their abortifacient effect.)
I do not have space to reference the many studies, but my father's research revealed that roughly 320,000,000 humans have suffered pre-birth extermination since 1970. The current population of the United States is 317,000,000. In 2014, the number of humans beings conceived and eliminated in their mothers' wombs in the United States over the past forty-four years exceeds the current population of the United States. Also in 2009, the rabidly pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute proudly announced that the worldwide number of surgical abortions had exceeded 1,000,000,000 since 1970—meaning the non-surgical unborn death toll is multiple billions more.
We all sense it is difficult to grasp a number as large as 320,000,000, not to mention multiple billions. For example, one would have to attend over 7,442 Cleveland Indians home games in a packed stadium of 43,000 people for over 90 years to physically see 320,000,000 people. Or perhaps this: on a clear moonless night in the countryside a person can see roughly 2,000 stars. One would have to look up every night for 438 years to see a cumulative 320,000,000 million stars—or from today until the year 2452—or go back in time to 1576, two hundred years before the United States was founded—and begin looking every night.
So 320,000,000 is almost incomprehensibly large. 320,000,000 innocent, immortal, American human beings, male and female.
And every single one of them has a Guardian Angel.
At the conclusion of today's message, along with tens of thousands of your fellow CatholiCity Citizens, you and I are going to pray to these angels, because we love children, and their innocent blood cries out to God for justice.
Quotations
The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of the father's role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts--a child--as a competitor, an intrusion and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered dominion over the dependent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters. And, in granting this unconscionable power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or other sexual partners.
Mother Teresa
Since life is but a play, we are none of us kings or cardinals or poor men in reality; we are all us mere children of our Father.
Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson
It is surely a tragedy that we have lost what the primitive Church seems to have had: a devotion precisely to the Boy-Christ. For he should stand, for the Christian, not of course for a nostalgic yearning after a vanished youth, not simply for a longing for eternal recovery of youth, but again for something very matter of fact: for the preservation, for the recovery, here and now, of certain qualities of mind and soul which we associate with childhood, and which are part of the search for God, but which we all too easily lose.
Gerald Vann
It doesn't get any better than this.
A father to a mother after their little children jumped up on the bed on a Saturday morning
Behold the child, by nature's kindly law,
Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.
Alexander Pope
Unfortunately when I have compared myself with the saints, I have always found that there is the same difference between the saints and me as there is between a mountain whose summit is lost in the clouds and a humble grain of sand trodden underfoot by passersby. Instead of being discouraged, I told myself: God would not make me wish for something impossible and so, in spite of my littleness, I can aim at being a saint. It is impossible for me to grow bigger, so I put up with myself as I am, with all my countless faults. But I will look for some means of going to heaven by a little way which is very short and very straight, a little way that is quite new. It is your arms, Jesus, which are the lift to carry me to heaven, and so there is no need for me to grow up. In fact, just the opposite: I must stay little and become less and less.
Saint Therese of Lisieux
Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide.
James Burnham
Children are the hands by which we take hold of heaven.
Henry Ward Beecher
Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, 'Do it again.' And the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, 'Do it again,' to the sun; and every evening, 'Do it again,' to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
G.K. Chesterton
On their deathbeds, people regret working too much and all the other mistakes and bad things they ever did and any number of other things. No one ever regrets having had another child.
Tim Coyne
Children love me and I love them. This is pretty much my entire imitation of Christ.
Thomas J. Smith
Joke I Tell at My Sons' Sporting Events
If you're a parent or grandparent, you are familiar with the situation. You show up at your kid or grandchild's game/event and there are other parents and grandparents you've never met. What to say? Well, you could ask them about the most interesting/amazing thing they've experienced/read in the last thirty days, and there's always the good old "Which one is your kid?" or, while looking out wistfully with an exaggerated look of wonder at the field/court/rink, you could say out loud:
"Wow. This is so cool. This entire game's in hi-def! Everything looks as if it were completely real!" Pause. Wait until they get it. They will either laugh or give you a funny look. Then, pantomime clicking a TV remote toward the game and in a mock serious tone add, "Let's see if there's anything else on..."
Some Upcoming Feastdays
- Thursday, July 31. Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Founder of the Jesuits, who taught, "If you wish to reform the world, reform yourself."
- Monday, August 4, Saint John Vianney. Patron of Parish Priests, who taught, "All the good works in the world are not equal to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass because they are the works of men; but the Mass is the work of God. Martyrdom is nothing in comparison for it is but the sacrifice of man to God; but the Mass is the sacrifice of God for man."
- Friday, August 8, Saint Dominic, Founder of the Dominicans, who taught, "A man who governs his passions is master of his world. We must either command them or be enslaved by them. It is better to be a hammer than an anvil."
- Monday, August 11, Saint Clare of Assisi, Founder of the Poor Clares, "Love God. Serve God. Everything lies in that."
- Thursday, August 14, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, who taught, "Never be afraid of loving the Blessed Virgin too much. You can never love her more than Jesus did."
- Friday, August 15, The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Holy Day of Obligation. Lo, though some dioceses subsume this feastday into Sunday, let's all go on Friday!
As this CatholiCity Message came a little late in the month and my next will come earlier in August, I'll save some feastdays until then.
Speaking of Speaking
My public speaking calendar usually opens up in the fall and winter, so if you live in northern Ohio or southeastern Michigan and are interested in having me come speak and distribute materials at your church or group, reply to this email. (Farther away, you'll need to help cover the cost of travel.)
Prayer to the Guardian Angels of the Lost Children
I coined and have often used the phrase: "this God-hating, baby-hating world." I think the statistical review above regarding the 320,000,000 children destroyed in the womb through surgical abortion and non-surgical abortifacients in the United States justifies its repeated use. Every human being is given a guardian angel. Let us all, tens of thousands of us together, pray to these hundreds of millions of angels, a great number of whom have never been directly called on before, and ask for their help in making our world one where all men and all women love God, love Jesus, and bring children into the world with love, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit...
Dear Angels of the Lost Children, hear our prayers, listen to our heartfelt plea, then go before the Holy Trinity in your great shining potent multitude, on behalf of the blood of your unborn wards, and join us as we ask our loving, just, and merciful Father to change the entire world, now, in accord with His perfect will, right now, for the sake of the sorrowful passion of Jesus, to change whatever needs changing, now, using whatever supernatural means necessary on earth and in heaven, at the earliest possible moment, to end the slaughter of these most innocent souls in our countries and to provide for the spiritual and temporal needs, the conversion and sanctification, the healing, perfect health, long life, freedom from evil and temptation, and the growth in the power to do good for all CatholiCity Citizens, our spouses, our children, our lost children, our relatives and friends, and for all our worthy intentions. Amen.
The Mary Foundation and I will be exhibiting at the National Catholic Singles Conference in San Diego on the coming weekend of August 8-10. Stop by and say hello.
So much for writer's block, eh? Thank you for being such a faithful part of our work and our lives. Please don't forget to support us financially. We're getting hammered in July, and we especially need monthly donors.
Every word in this message was composed by a 630-month-old fetus. I'm praying for you every day at Mass...
With Saint Joseph,
Bud Macfarlane
