As our kids age: We continue to worry and pray

		Grand Mom  Audrey  Mettel Fixmer

On a recent Friday morning my daughter Elizabeth and I headed off to Mass with heavy hearts. Another daughter, Gretchen, was facing open heart surgery that morning.

She lives in Colorado, but her cardiologist advised that she go to the world famous Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. because hers was a rare heart disease. Gretchen's two children and two of my other daughters were with her, so Elizabeth and I were in charge of the prayer brigade at home.

During the petitions at that Mass, Father Bill asked, as usual, if anyone had a request, and I immediately spoke up, "For my daughter, Elizabeth, who is having open heart surgery at this very moment." With that I felt the charge in the atmosphere and an elbow in the ribs - from Elizabeth! I turned to her and said defensively, "Well, we are so accustomed to praying for you!"

The power of prayer

It's true. Elizabeth is a walking example of the power of prayer. Time and time again she has faced life-threatening illnesses.

She has been on the Prayer Chain List at our parish for so many years and has bounced back again and again. Today she is enjoying good health and is serving our parish in several ministries.

I am grateful that I am living into old age. It's nice to have the privileges of a good, long life, but here's the other side of the coin: You have to watch your children age and suffer through life's sorrows too: failed marriages, career setbacks, and life-threatening illnesses.

You no longer have to worry about what to feed them or what time they are coming in, or measles and chicken pox, but you exchange one set of worries for another. They are still your kids and you worry. Always!

Blessings of strength

We have been blessed over and over. Our son, Tom, was diagnosed with mantel cell lymphoma last fall and has survived months of chemotherapy, hair loss, and bone marrow involvement.

He is still able to go to work at his police department and to enjoy his sons and grandsons. And he bravely admits that even if he did have to face death now, he has had a good full life. I'm hoping, of course, that he will have much more.

I am happy to say that now, three weeks following her surgery, Gretchen is healing well and can go without her oxygen tank all day. We are enjoying an extended visit with her, cherishing every moment she is with us.

One of my church lady friends, Adeline, is not so lucky. She has just buried her third child of the six that she brought into this world, in addition to losing her husband. She is so strong that I cannot help but feel she gets her strength from her faith.

Caring for children

It is no wonder one can look over the crowded chapel for daily Mass and be reminded of a field of dandelions gone to seed: all white heads. Most of them are parents, grandparents doing the only thing they can do now for their children: pray.

We can't make decisions for them, nor put a kiss and a band-aid on their "owies." But we can pray.

It's a good thing that we believe in the power of prayer, because that's one thing we can do not just in church but everywhere: in the kitchen while we are stirring a pot, in the garden pulling weeds, and in bed on those long nights when sleep escapes us.

We change our lifestyle as we age because we need to go with the flow. When arthritis sets in, however, we don't exactly flow; we slow. And we sit.

So I have taken up knitting again. Like prayer, knitting is so portable. It goes anywhere: to waiting rooms and hospitals, on long car trips, and visits to the sick. And you always have something to show for your time and effort.

I think it's all part of God's plan, don't you?

"Grandmom" likes hearing from other senior citizens who enjoy aging at P.O. Box 216, Fort Atkinson, WI 53538.

Contraception:
Experience reinforces wisdom of teaching

		A Culture of Life  Professor  Janet E. Smith

The Catholic Church does not condemn the use of contraception because it is an act that has bad consequences. Rather, it teaches that since contraception is an intrinsically bad action, it is predictable that it will have bad consequences.

The Church teaches that contraception is wrong because it violates the very purpose and nature of the human sexual act and therefore violates the dignity of the human person. The experience of the last several decades has simply served to reinforce the wisdom of the Church's teaching.

Better understanding

But it is not only on a practical level that we have a better understanding of the Church's teaching; our theoretical understanding has also been much advanced. Often it happens that the Church does not know very fully the reasons for what it teaches until it is challenged.

The Church's condemnation of contraception went unchallenged for centuries. In attempting to explain its condemnation, the Church has deepened its understanding of marriage and the meaning of the sexual act.

Again, John Paul II, with his claim that the sexual act signifies total self-giving and his insight that contraception diminishes that self-giving, made an enormous contribution to our understanding of the evil of contraception.

Why it is wrong

As we consider the reasons why contraception is wrong, let us first consult a few Church statements that suggest the strength of its constant teaching against contraception. Casti Connubii states:

"No reason, however grave, may be put forward by which anything intrinsically against nature may become conformable to nature and morally good. Since, therefore, the conjugal act is destined primarily by nature for the begetting of children, those who in exercising it deliberately frustrate its natural power and purpose, sin against nature and commit a deed which is shameful and intrinsically vicious."

It continues:

"Any use whatsoever of matrimony, exercised in such a way that the act is deliberately frustrated in its natural power to generate life is an offense against the law of God and of nature, and those who indulge in such are branded with the guilt of a grave sin."

Natural law

Humanae Vitae, 11 puts it this way: "But the Church, which interprets natural law through its unchanging doctrine, reminds men and women that the teachings based on natural law must be obeyed, and teaches that it is necessary that each and every conjugal act remain ordained to the procreating of human life."

Further on it states (HV 12), "The doctrine which the Magisterium of the Church has often explicated in this: There is an unbreakable connection between the unitive meaning and the procreative meaning of the conjugal act, and both are inherent in the conjugal act. This connection was established by God and cannot be broken by man through his own volition."

Babies and bonding

The Church condemns contraception since it violates both the procreative and unitive meanings of the human sexual act. It diminishes an act that by its very nature is full of weighty meaning, meaning that is unique to the sexual act.

To engage in an act of contracepted sexual intercourse is to engage in an act that has the potential for creating new life and an act that has the potential for creating tremendous emotional bonds between male and female and simultaneously to undercut those potentials.

Sex is for babies and for bonding; if people are not ready for babies or bonding, they ought not to be engaging in acts of sexual intercourse.

Professor Janet E. Smith is the Fr. Michael J. McGivney Chair of Life Ethics at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, Mich. These columns, syndicated by www.OneMoreSoul.com, are excerpts of a longer work by Smith.

Da Vinci Code:
It's an opportunity waiting to be seized

		The Catholic  Difference  George Weigel

I was on the road a lot during Lent. And from sea to shining sea, nary an airport bookstore was without a Da Vinci Code display, in anticipation of the May release of Ron Howard's film.

One tries to ignore the hype - "the greatest cover-up in history!" - but there's something depressing going on here. Why do intelligent people think that The Da Vinci Code has some basis in historical fact? Why do Catholics imagine that a novel which suggests (and not so subtly) that the entire structure of faith is a lie is, well, no big deal?

The good news, though, is that the film's release is a great opportunity for bishops, priests, and deacons to dedicate Eastertide 2006 to preaching the truth of Christian history.

'Woefully ignorant'

One of the reasons why so many Catholics have been vulnerable to the novel's preposterous claims is that most Catholics are woefully ignorant of the church's history. How, for example, did the original Christian confession about Jesus of Nazareth - "Jesus is Lord" - came to doctrinal articulation in the Nicene Creed: "God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God; begotten not made, one in Being with the Father"?

	Related items this week: • The Da Vinci Code movie: Catholic leaders urge caution • Sidebar -- Confused? Questions? • News brief -- Author Amy Welborn discusses Da Vinci novel and movie • Editorial -- Movie release: It is indeed a teachable moment • Letter -- Response to Da Vinci Code

If you don't know, at least in broad strokes, how the Creed of the Council of Nicaea came to express the New Testament faith of the church, you're going to be vulnerable to Dan Brown's risible suggestion that it was all imperial politics in the age of Constantine. So I can well imagine a month's worth of sermons on the development of Christology, the church's theology of Jesus as Son of God.

Suspicions of Bible

Then there's the question of the integrity of the New Testament itself. The historical-critical method of Biblical analysis has immeasurably increased our knowledge of the Bible. Yet, filtered through inadequate homiletics and catechetics, historical-critical readings of the New Testament have also created suspicion about the historical reliability of the Gospels in many minds.

"That's just a story," is a phrase too often encountered in casual discussions about the Gospel accounts of the life of Christ. Yet I think it's safe to assume that the Second Vatican Council didn't reclaim the Bible for the people of the church so that the people of the church could learn to be suspicious about the Bible.

I've often recommended the work of Anglican exegete N.T. Wright as an antidote to this suspiciousness, and let me do so again: if there is one book to give a friend troubled by The Da Vinci Code and its portrait of the life of Jesus, it's Wright's The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is (InterVarsity Press), in which impeccable, contemporary scholarship is deployed to defend the historicity of the Gospels, including the historicity of the resurrection.

Based on a set of lectures Dr. Wright gave for evangelical leaders in the late 1990s, The Challenge of Jesus is accessible to any intelligent reader, and provides a far more fascinating account of the complexities of Jewish life and messianic expectation at the time of Jesus than anything to be found in Dan Brown's fevered imagination.

Jesus Decoded

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has a Web site, www.Jesusdecoded.com, that's full of resources for those who want to turn the Da Vinci Code fuss into an evangelical and catechetical opportunity. In addition to a devastating critique of Brown's understanding of Leonardo da Vinci by Elizabeth Lev, the Web site includes a very useful "When they say . . . you say . . ." essay by Catholic author and blogger Amy Welborn, "What Do You Say to a Da Vinci Code Believer?"

Ms. Welborn is always interesting and always feisty: for example, "There is enough truth in The Da Vinci Code to be seriously misleading. Yes, the sources, like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and The Templar Revelation, exist. But they don't reflect serious historical scholarship. You're not going to find a university history department on the planet that uses the works that provide the meat of The Da Vinci Code theories as part of the syllabus." Indeed.

Got lemons? Make lemonade. The Da Vinci Code is an opportunity waiting to be seized.

George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.