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by E. Christian Brugger, Ph.D., Senior Fellow in Ethics
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“I want to have children with you.” These are the opening words of the
U.S. Bishops’ new document on reproductive technology, Life-Giving Love
in an Age of Technology,
issued on November 17
(www.usccb.org/LifeGivingLove/lifegivinglovedocument.pdf ). The
document is addressed specifically to married couples suffering from
infertility and considering their options. It attempts to balance a
sincere empathy for their bitter experience of loss with clear guidance
on ethically legitimate alternatives: “The Church has compassion for
couples suffering from infertility and wants to be of real
help to them.” The text acknowledges the temptation they can
experience to cut a ‘faustian bargain’ in order to secure the object of
their desperate desires. And it encourages them to hope in God even in
the face of human disappointment. Specifically, it asks whether
certain forms of assisted reproduction are consistent with the
flourishing of marriage and with the duties we owe to nascent human
life. In the words of the statement: “Some solutions offer real hope
for restoring a couple’s natural, healthy ability to have children.
Others pose serious moral problems by failing to respect the dignity of
the couple’s marital relationship, of their sexuality, or of the child.”
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12/01/2009
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by Helen Alvaré, J.D. and E. Christian Brugger, Ph.D.
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The Church has identified herself as an “expert in humanity”
[1]. But who has the temerity to claim
to be an expert in the female half of humanity? The complete identity of the female—call it
the nature of ‘femaleness’—is hidden in the complex body-soul unity which
constitutes the human person. And so an
understanding of the female body is one key to unlock this complex reality. But an understanding of the body is not
enough to understand the person. Although
human persons are always bodily and human bodies always personal, persons are
not reducible to their bodies. They are their
bodies, but they are more than their bodies, because the animating principle
that makes their bodies to be living
bodies is a non-material soul. But
is there such thing as a properly “female soul”? Can spirit per se be engendered? These
are weighty questions.
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09/17/2009
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by Helen M. Alvaré, J.D., Senior Fellow in Law
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In two previous columns I suggested that a not insignificant cause of
the current rates of out of wedlock pregnancies in the US is a
breakdown of healthy relations between women and men. Past attempts to
address high rates of nonmarital pregnancies failed to note this
possible cause. To be clear, I am not suggesting that all prior
attempts to curb such pregnancies (e.g. policies in areas such as
education, job-training, sex-education, child support enforcement,
social welfare, and marriage) were wrong or illogical in themselves,
only that they were incomplete. At the same time I would have to note
that some policy responses may have actually exacerbated the situation.
Those involving large-scale birth control distribution, for example,
and abortion on request, were not only unsuccessful, but sent messages
about the meaning of male/female relationships that very likely sent
nonmarital birth rates to higher levels. [1]
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09/03/2009
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by William E. May, Ph.D., Senior Fellow
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“Boys will be doofuses.” Kevin Ryan, in an essay with this title on
“MercatorNet” [1]
begins with a citation from Mark Penn, “the social trend guru,” in
which Penn declares: “Men are now lagging women in every major category
from lifestyle to health, from education to employment.” Ryan considers
some major causes of this phenomenon. The primary factor for this, he
thinks, is that “many, many boys are lacking what the psychologists
call ‘role models,’ most important of which is a visible, present
father.” In a short time, “the shape of the American family has
undergone radical surgery and the part most obviously cut away is Dad.
A 50 percent divorce rate, plus simple walk-away separations are well
known factors in the dismal family landscape.” (Ryan claims that this
trend began at the end of World War II. I believe he errs in this--it
began, as I will show, with the rise of feminism and widespread use of
contraceptives associated with that rise during the 1960s).
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08/26/2009
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by Helen Alvaré, J.D., Senior Fellow in Law
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In my last column, I concluded that while public and private actors
have taken many different and sometimes logical approaches to reducing
out of wedlock pregnancies, they have also missed a crucial aspect of
the problem: the difficulties men and women are experiencing in their
relationships with one another, as evidenced by their unwillingness to
commit to one another, even after a baby is conceived. These
difficulties surface particularly in qualitative studies/narrative
accounts of individual and unmarried-couple single parents. They are
also logically apparent, based upon the real differences between the
meanings and consequences of decisions about sex and commitment, as
between the unmarried and the married. In other words, the very
structure of nonmarital childbearing -- i.e. sex within an
uncommitted relationship – and as compared with marital childbearing,
indicates that the process is very likely to foster (and sustain)
conflicts between men and women, and ill effects for their children.
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07/23/2009
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by William E. May, Ph.D., Senior Fellow
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When God made man, he did not make a conscious subject aware of
itself as a self to which he then added a body as an afterthought.
Rather, when he made man, "male and female he created them," and he
blessed them, saying: "Be fertile and multiply" (Gen 1:27-28).
In other words, when God created man he created a bodily being,
made in his own image and likeness and thus endowed with the gifts of
intelligence and free choice, sexually differentiated into male and
female. And he loves specific, individual human persons, male and
female, and not humanity in general. He made them to be the kind of
beings they are (human in nature), namely, bodily persons sexually
differentiated into male and female, precisely so that they could
freely receive from him the gift of his own divine life (grace) so long
as they freely choose, with his help, to give themselves away in
love--in a sincere gift of self--and thus form a communion of persons,
ultimately the communion of saints living fully the life of the Triune
God.
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04/30/2009
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by William E. May, Ph.D., Senior Fellow
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Introduction
Long ago St. Augustine distinguished three cardinal goods of marriage:
the good of offspring (bonum prolis) who are to be begotten lovingly,
nurtured humanely, and educated religiously; the good of steadfast
fidelity (bonum fidei) between husband and wife; and the good of the
sacrament (bonum sacramenti), which entails both the holy bond of
indissoluble unity (sacrum vinculum) and sacramental sign (sacramentum
signum), the good of the sacrament in the strict sense as the good
pointing to and inwardly participating in Christ’s bridal union with
his spouse, the Church (St. Augustine developed his teaching on the
threefold good of marriage principally in On the Good of Marriage (De
bono coniugali),On Marriage and Concupiscence ( De nuptiis et
concupiscentia),and The Literal Meaning of Genesis ( De genesi ad
litteram). Subsequent Catholic tradition made these goods its own,
constantly affirming them; in fact, Pope Pius XI structured his 1930
encyclical On Chaste Marriage (Casti connubii) around these three
Augustinian goods..
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03/31/2009
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by William E. May, Ph.D., Senior Fellow
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I will examine and criticize the position of Lisa Sowle Cahill, a
married woman and mother who is professor of moral theology at Boston
College and highly regarded by her peers, on the issue of human
sexuality by focusing on her views regarding the significance of
“single sexual acts,” contraception, and in vitro fertilization.
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03/13/2009
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by colfi_admin
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I will examine and criticize the position of Lisa Sowle
Cahill, a married woman and mother who is professor of moral theology at Boston
College and highly regarded by her peers, on the issue of human sexuality by
focusing on her views regarding the significance of “single sexual acts,” contraception,
and in vitro fertilization.
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03/13/2009
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by William E. May, Ph.D., Senior Fellow
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Feminism comes in different varieties. Some forms are compatible with
Catholic/Christian teaching on human sexuality; others are not. In a
two-part essay I will consider the heterodox feminist understanding of
human sexuality and of norms governing sexual activity proposed by some
Catholic theologians that is quite different from and opposed to the
understanding of human sexuality and its norms held firmly by the
Catholic Church.
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02/25/2009
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by William E. May, Ph.D., Senior Fellow
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A major and most important difference between the culture of life and the culture of death is the different ways in which they understand the meaning of human acts. The culture of death understands human acts primarily in terms of what our acts get done in the external world, i.e., it assesses and evaluates human acts in terms of their consequences or states of affairs that they bring about, whereas the culture of life, while recognizing that human acts get things done in the external world, assesses and evaluates them primarily in terms of what they have to say about ourselves, about what they do to us as persons who make ourselves to be the kind of persons we are in and through the acts we freely choose to do every day of our lives.
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01/29/2009
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by William E. May, Ph.D, Senior Fellow
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Here I examine Charles J. Reid, Jr’s “Marriage: Its Relationship to Religion, Law, and the State,” Douglas Laycock’s “Afterword,” and offer final comments.
I summarized pp. 157-176 of Reid’s chapter in Part I of this review; in them he showed that traditionally in Western civilization and particularly in Anglo-American history marriage was regarded as “a divine institution.” Here I focus on the section “Marriage and the State” (176-187) and on his “Conclusion” (187-188).
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12/11/2008
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by William E. May, Ph.D, Senior Fellow
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In Part I, I said I would devote two articles to this important book. Because of the dramatic change in the political atmosphere caused by the 2008 presidential and congressional elections, I now think that three articles are necessary. This one, Part II, takes up the chapters by Robin Fretwell Wilson and Chai R. Feldblum, whose proposals were made when a quite different political situation was in place. Part III will consider the chapters of Charles R. Reid and Douglas Laycock and offer final reflections.
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12/03/2008
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by William E. May, Ph.D., Senior Research Fellow
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Edited by Douglas Laycock, Anthony R. Picarello, Jr., and Robin Fretwell Wilson and published by The Becket Fund and Rowman & Littlefield Publishers in 2008, this book is over 300 pages. Pages xi-xiv+1-207 include the essays by the editors and contributors, pages 209-298 provide notes and are followed an Appendix (pp. 200-310), an Index (pp. 311-326), and “About Contributors.”
The book is so significant I will devote two articles to it. In this, Part I, I summarize the essays, offer personal comments, and identify those papers that demand the closer study, analysis, and critique to be given in Part II.
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10/30/2008
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by Helen M. Alvaré, J.D.
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The Supreme Court of Connecticut has rendered that state the latest in the growing number of states asserting a state constitutional mandate to recognize marriage rights for same-sex couples. (Kerrigan v. Commissioner of Public Health). In Kerrigan, Connecticut’s highest court held that it was a violation of the state’s constitutional equal protection guarantee to allow same-sex couples all of the benefits associated with marriage, by means of the “civil union” classification, but to deny them the status of marriage.
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10/15/2008
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by Helen Alvare, J.D.
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The California Supreme Court decided several weeks ago that doctors specializing in assisted reproductive technologies may not assert their religious freedom as a defense to California’s Civil Rights law requirement that businesses provide services without discrimination on the basis of clients’ sexual orientation. A fertility clinic willing to treat heterosexual patients must therefore also treat homosexual patients.
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10/02/2008
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by Elizabeth Moncher, MS, MSW
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1. Ms. O’Leary, can you begin by helping us understand what is meant
by feminism, and whether there are particular distinctions among
feminists that are important to recognize?
It is important to distinguish liberal feminism from radical feminism
and these from the search for authentic womanhood based on the truth
about the human person.
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07/10/2008
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by Matt Hanley
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If you were looking for another indicator of the cultural malaise to which our young are subjected today, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) delivered last week. At the 2008 National STD Prevention Conference in Chicago, March 11th, they issued results of a nationally representative survey which found that slightly more that one in four (26%), or 3.2 million, teenage girls between ages 14 and 19 have contracted a sexually transmitted disease (STD). Among those infected, about 15% had more than one disease. Some groups had about twice the national average – nearly half of young African American women or adolescents in the survey had an STD.
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03/20/2008
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by Culture of Life
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Dr. Jennifer Roback-Morse is Research Fellow at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty and former Research Fellow at the Stanford University Hoover Institution. In an interview with Culture of Life Foundation, Dr. Morse discusses her research on abstinence education programs and what she calls “Comprehensive Abstinence Education”.
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03/07/2008
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by Dawn Eden
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Contributing writer Dawn Eden is author of The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On (Thomas Nelson) and an internationally recognized speaker on chastity. During the past year, her writings on culture-of-life issues, faith, and popular culture have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Sunday Times of London, the National Post of Canada, and First Things.
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01/16/2008
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by William E. May
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The use of condoms to prevent transmission of a disease is intrinsically evil because the object freely chosen that specifies the moral nature of the act is not the marital act, an act in which husband wife give and receive one another and become literally “one flesh,” but a different kind of act, one that in no way unites them but rather changes utterly the “language of the body.” by William E. May, Michael J. McGivney Professor of Moral Theology Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family
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11/13/2007
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by Joe Capizzi, Ph.D.
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Writing in the Washington Post, Michael Kinsley thinks he has cornered opponents of embryo-destructive research into contradicting themselves. In fact all he does is reveal his ignorance of the pro-life movement.
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07/12/2006
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by Joe Capizzi, Ph.D.
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Conservative Protestants are beginning to join faithful Catholics in recognizing the harm done to society by widespread contraception.
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05/09/2006
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by Catholic Medical Association
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This is a summary or condensed version of the statement of the Catholic Medical Association on the diagnosis and treatment of Same Sex Attraction. The extended version is also available on the Culture of Life website.
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03/08/2006
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by Culture of Life
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Strong majorities of Americans oppose gay marriage. Supporters of SSM (Same Sex Marriage) therefore seek to change the subject to just about anything: our sacred constitution, federalism, discrimination, benefits, homosexuality, gay rights. Our goal is simple: Shift the conversation rapidly back to marriage. Don’t get sidetracked. Marriage is the issue. Marriage is what we care about. Marriage really matters. It’s just common sense.
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01/31/2006
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