Roe vs. Wade anniversary:
Recall challenge, renew commitment

		Eye on the  Capitol  John Huebscher

Anniversaries help us mark the time and measure the distance we travel. When the memories are happy, we look back fondly and savor a recalled joy. If the memory is one of pain or disappointment, we reflect on that sadness and perhaps the lessons learned from the experience.

So it is every January when we take note of yet another anniversary of that day in 1973 when the Supreme Court defined the practice of terminating human life in the womb to be a fundamental right. We recall the moment. We mourn the lives never lived to completion.

But looking back is only the half of it. For anniversaries are time to renew commitment.

If the anniversary is happy, we resolve to sustain the moment, to keep the flame burning, to sustain the relationships begun at that moment we celebrate. If the anniversary marks a tragedy or loss we resolve to move forward.

	Related articles this week: • Guest editorial -- Being pro-life: Continue to speak for the unborn • Mailbag/Letter -- Governor wrong to veto legislation on fetal pain • Mailbag/Letter -- Pray for decision reversal

We promise to honor the memory of the person lost or to continue the cause that was defeated. When we mark an anniversary in this way, we make a promise that the hurt or wound of the past will not ultimately defeat us.

Take heart in witness

So it is again this January. As we ponder the day when human life was disvalued, we take heart in the ongoing witness that Catholics and others give to the value of human life.

We take heart that, despite the status of the law, the public continues to judge abortion by a moral code that supercedes the limits of legal dictates. We also take heart in noting that a nominee to the very court that gave us Roe vs. Wade does not have to publicly promise to uphold it as a condition to be confirmed.

We can also savor this January the many ways that Catholics and those of good will affirm human life and dignity.

We savor the leadership of our nation's bishops in calling for a responsible transition in Iraq and a "serious civil dialogue" that can help our nation chart a course of action that meets the "moral and human dimensions" of the situation in that nation.

We savor the public witness of Catholics and others in Wisconsin in their opposition to restoring the death penalty to Wisconsin.

We savor the efforts of those who work to extend affordable health insurance to all, knowing that concern over access to health care compounds the anxieties of pregnant women who may feel little "choice" but to terminate a pregnancy.

We savor efforts of those who work to secure the right of all parents to choose a good school for their children and to jobs that pay a living wage so they can provide for their families.

Never accept premise

In these varied ways, those who value the sanctity and dignity of human life, whether undermined by legalized abortion or indifference in other ways, refuse to accept the premise of Roe vs. Wade - that life derives its worth from the choices of others.

So even as we recall January of 1973 as a defeat in the cause of human life, may we take heart this January that so much resolve endures to respond to the appeal set forth by John Paul II that "together we may offer this world of ours new signs of hope, and work to ensure that justice and solidarity will increase and that a new culture of human life will be affirmed, for the building of an authentic civilization of truth and love"(Evangelium vitae, no. 6).

John Huebscher is executive director of the Wisconsin Catholic Conference in Madison.

Connection:
Catholic schools and Catholic press

		Grand Mom  Audrey  Mettel Fixmer

January is Catholic Schools Month and February is Catholic Press Month. In my mind it is no accident, but rather "A Marriage Made in Heaven."

Those of us in the senior ranks, who attended Catholic elementary schools and high schools, and even colleges, have no idea of how Catholic education has developed since we were kids unless we remain active in our parish schools.

I recall in grade school singing Requiem Masses every day in Latin! That was the extent of our participation in the Mass. No wonder I can still sing "Dies ire dies illa" and see that casket draped in black before the altar. Those were the Memorial Masses.

Today the Memorial Masses are still said on weekdays, but there is no casket, no Latin, and the priest says the name of the deceased out loud during the offertory. The school kids, when they are present, sing a variety of lively hymns in English.

Current participation

In our parish the school children are present at Mass only one day a week, and their participation is whole-hearted and beautiful to see. They not only do the readings and participate in a dialogue with the priest rather than listening to a dull sermon, but the class assigned to this honor is invited to gather around the altar before the consecration. Their solemn expressions indicate a sense of wonder as they watch up close the holy moment when Father says, "This is my body . . ."

These are things anyone can observe from the pew. What we don't see is what takes place in the classroom.

I had the privilege of serving on a committee that studied the school inside out and upside down a few years ago, and I can attest to the fact that in our parish school the teachers are all top notch, degreed, and in love with their work. Religion classes are faithfully taught, but all of the education is child-centered rather than doctrine-centered. This makes for happier, more balanced kids, who are confident of God's love rather than fearful of His wrath.

Press as partner

Why do I see the Catholic press as a partner to Catholic education? Simply because reading Catholic newspapers, magazines, and books is the logical way to grow in our faith. Okay, I can't discount attending daily Mass and letting the Spirit direct us, but the church is a living body and we need to nourish our relationship with it by feeding it a diet rich in good literature.

The diocesan paper you hold in your hands is the meat and potatoes of our spiritual diet. But if it stops there, you will be missing out on some other treasures that are available to you for pennies.

In our home we subscribe to the weekly Catholic Reporter and several monthlies: The Liguorian, St. Anthony Messenger, Catholic Digest, and my favorite, U.S. Catholic. We find very little overlapping and lots of variety of opinions. Within the church there is a great deal of freedom to think and form judgments.

Recent opinions

In the November issue of The Liguorian I enjoyed the "Report Card on the Church: Forty Years After Vatican II." Forty years later "seems an apt time to reflect on how effectively the Church has implemented its teaching." The grades ranged from A- in our understanding of who we are as Church to D in the structures and exercise of Church leadership.

Written by Richard Gaillardetz, Ph.D, professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Toledo, the article concludes "we are still far from having implemented the bracing vision of a renewed and revitalized Church offered to us in the 16 remarkable documents of the Second Vatican Council."

Another article gave some practical advice on how to deal with difficult people by applying lessons from the saints.

The new February issue of U.S. Catholic announced such news items as: Pope Benedict XVI will banish limbo when he finishes the job started by John Paul II by ratifying the new teaching that limbo does not exist. "No word yet on relocation for limbo's former residents," they add.

Their lead article this month is on "Super Catholics," those lay men and women who are joining new movements within the church including the Opus Dei, which got a bad rap in the novel The DaVinci Code.

And then the wonderful article by Sr. Barbara Reid, the professor of The New Testament at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, "Leading Ladies of the Early Church."

How come we have never heard of Nympha (Col. 4:15), Lydia (Acts 16:40), Apphia (Philim. 1:2), Cloe (I Cor. 1:11), and Prisca (Acts 18:24)? They are all there, working alongside the apostles as deacons, patrons, and heads of local communities. Why have they been overlooked? Because they are women?

Sister Barbara concludes: "Perhaps the women of our past can open the way to new possibilities for the future."

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

'Modern age':
Church dialogue got off to rocky start

		The Catholic  Difference  George Weigel

In his Christmas address to the Roman Curia on true and false interpretations of Vatican II, Pope Benedict XVI asked why the church has had such a difficult time opening a dialogue with "the modern age." His answers are provocative and turn some of the conventional accounts of modern history inside out.

"Catholicism and modernity" got off to a bad start, the pope suggested, when the Galileo trial opened a fissure between the church and natural science. Immanuel Kant's philosophical attempt to define "religion within pure reason" then seemed to eliminate any notion of a divine revelation to which the church was accountable.

Most dramatic breach

The most dramatic breach came after 1789, when the French Revolution proposed and bloodily enforced an "image of the state and of man . . . intended to crowd out the church and faith."

A liberalism with no room for God was not a liberalism with which the church could co-exist. And how could there be a dialogue with science when science "claimed to embrace, with its knowledge, the totality of reality to its outermost borders," a claim that made the "hypothesis of God" unnecessary?

Church reaction

European ideas and European politics thus led to a reaction under Pius IX: what Benedict called "a harsh and radical condemnation of this spirit of the modern age."

Yet Pius' broadsides were no less "drastic" than the rejection of Christianity by those who most self-consciously embodied the spirit of the "modern age."

There were other currents at work in modernity, however, and they eventually made their presence felt.

Other currents

Here, Benedict is worth a longish quote:

"It was becoming clear that the American Revolution had offered a model of the modern state that was different from that theorized by the radical tendencies that had emerged from the second phase of the French Revolution. Natural sciences began . . . to reflect [on] their own limits, imposed by their own method which, while achieving great things, was nevertheless not able to comprehend the totality of reality.

"Thus both sides began . . . to open up to each other. In the period between the two world wars and even more after the Second World War, Catholic statesmen had shown that a modern lay state which is not neutral with respect to values can exist [by] tapping into the great ethical fonts of Christianity. Catholic social doctrine . . . became an important model between radical liberalism and the Marxist theory of the state.

"Natural sciences . . . realized ever more clearly that [their scientific] method was not comprehensive of the totality of reality and thus opened again their doors to God, knowing that reality is greater than what a naturalistic [scientific] method can embrace."

Powerful forces

Several points are worth teasing out of this trenchant analysis.

First, the harshness of the 19th century confrontation between Catholicism and "modernity" was, so to speak, bilateral. Powerful forces in European culture and politics aimed at nothing less than the eradication of Christianity, or, at the very least, tethering the church to an all-powerful state.

As Benedict concedes, Pius IX's language was the language of condemnation; but there was, in truth, a lot that needed condemning (as Anglican historian Owen Chadwick made clear in A History of the Popes 1830-1914 and as another British scholar, Michael Burleigh, will underscore in his forthcoming Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War.)

New developments

Secondly, the American Revolution, which institutionally separated church and state while affirming the transcendent origins of the "truths" on which democratic politics had to be based, was an entirely different matter than its French counterpart. Thus "1776" helped compel the development of doctrine that eventually led to Vatican II's Declaration on Religious Freedom (a point that might be pondered, not only by Lefebvrists, but by Communio contributors convinced that America is, at bottom, an ill-founded republic).

Thirdly, Catholicism and science can have a mutually beneficial dialogue when the church remembers that it's not in the geology business and science remembers that the scientific method cannot measure, much less account for, all there is - which is, I take it, the central point at issue in the current round of the Darwin wars.

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