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More than 20 years ago, Dr. David Eddy, writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, described how his mother, though not suffering from a terminal illness, chose to end her life through VSED (voluntarily stopping eating and drinking).
We often hear it said that having a job gives people dignity. That is not quite right. The dignity inherent in every human being is a gift from the loving God who created us.
This human dignity is ours when we are too young to work. And we retain it when we are too ill, too disabled, or too old to work or when unemployed.
Editor’s note: During this Year of Consecrated Life, this is the fourth in a series based on the Second Vatican Council’s document, Perfectae Caritatis (Decree on the Adaptation and Renewal of Religious Life) written by Abbot Marcel Rooney, OSB, former abbot primate of the Benedictine order who now resides in Madison.
When the Second Vatican Council called for the renewal of Religious Life, it was not speaking primarily about the externals which characterized that life, such as the Religious habit to be worn, the living arrangements of communities and individuals, etc.
Rather, from the outset, the council was concerned about the deeply interior renewal of this special sign of the Church’s life.
Q My mother insists on living in the home she and dad shared for the past 50 years. Dad passed away about eight years ago.
The issue is the “homestead” — a farm that is over 100 years old.
The house is in desperate need of repair but that is only one issue.
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In the years preceding the Great Jubilee of 2000, John Paul II held a series of continental synods to help the Church in different locales reflect on its distinctive situation at the end of the second millennium and to plan for a future of evangelical vigor in the third.
These special assemblies were easily named in the case of the Synods for Africa, Asia, and Europe. But when it came to the synod for the western hemisphere, John Paul threw a linguistic curve ball that made an important point.
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Third in a series of reflections by Fr. Robert Barron on the life of Cardinal Francis George.
The second major feature of modernity that Cardinal Francis George identified is an extreme valorization of the physical sciences, or in his own words, “the imposing of scientific method as the point of contact between human beings and the world and society into which they are born.”
The founders of modernity appreciated the sciences not only for their descriptive and predictive powers, but also for their liberating potential. Bacon, Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, Kant, and many others held that the mastery over nature provided by burgeoning physics, chemistry, medicine, etc., would free the human race from its age-old captivity to sickness and the strictures of time and space.
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Anna Jarvis (1864-1948) is recognized as the “mother of Mother’s Day.” She never married or had children, but as a child she heard her mother wish that there was a day to honor all mothers, living and dead.
She started the custom of wearing carnations on Mother’s Day. White carnations were her mother’s favorite flower because they symbolized a mother’s pure love. Today, red and pink carnations are given to honor a living mother and white carnations to honor a deceased mother.
In 1870, Julia Ward Howe, shocked by the Civil War’s bloodshed, organized a mother’s day for peace. This prepared the way for today’s Mother’s Day.
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| Morgan Smith |
As I drove home from my friend Andrew’s funeral, I noticed in myself a deep sadness. This sadness was and is a tension that is related to a huge question: Why?
I was so moved. When I stood in line to enter the church, I was looking at all the faces — these faces from my past that I now only see at funerals. A sea of shock, dismay, and disbelief.
Andrew committed suicide recently. This was the furthest thing that anyone would have ever expected him to do, and it feels so strange to type those words.
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Second in a series of reflections by Fr. Robert Barron on the life of Cardinal Francis George.
The one who would proclaim the Gospel in the contemporary American setting must appreciate that the American culture is sown liberally with semina verbi (seeds of the Word).
The first of these, in Cardinal Francis George’s judgment, is the modern sense of freedom and its accompanying rights.
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According to the New York Times, during a White House luncheon in 1954 Winston Churchill said, “To jaw-jaw [talk-talk] always is better than to war-war.”
While clearly not a pacifist, the United Kingdom’s World War II prime minister had seen upfront the absolute horror of war and became convinced that tirelessly striving to resolve disputes through respectful dialogue was always preferable to war.
