Saint Ignatius of Laconi

Saint Ignatius of Laconi

Ignatius is another sainted begging brother.

He was the second of seven children of peasant parents in Sardinia. His path to the Franciscans was unusual. During a serious illness, Ignatius vowed to become a Capuchin if he recovered. He regained his health but ignored the promise. When he was 20, a riding accident prompted Ignatius to renew the pledge, which he acted on the second time. Ignatius’s reputation for self-denial and charity led to his appointment as the official beggar for the friars in Cagliari. He fulfilled that task for 40 years, despite being blind for the last two years.

While on his rounds, Ignatius would instruct the children, visit the sick, and urge sinners to repent. The people of Cagliari were inspired by his kindness and his faithfulness to his work. Ignatius was canonized in 1951.

- From Franciscan Media

Pax et bonum

Profession!

On May 9, 2022, Adrienne Kirby, John Ocon, Susan Reid, and Kathy Smith professed as Secular Franciscans. 

John is from my Fraternity, The Glory of the Most High, while Adrienne, Kathy, and Susan are from The Immaculate Heart of Mary Fraternity. 

Here I am accepting John as a professed member.

John Ocon, Kathy Smith, Father Anthony, Adrienne Kirby, Susan Reid

What a wonderful celebration. Alleluia! 

Pax et bonum

Pro-choice lies (2005 post)

A reprint of an old blog post from 2005 - 

 

NARAL lie? Heaven forbid!

The National Abortion Rights Action League is running a television ad that implies Supreme Court nominee John Roberts supported a clinic bomber. The ad cites a brief that Roberts filed, and shows images from a bombing.

The problem is that the brief cited had nothing to do with clinic bombings, and in fact, was filed some 7 years before the bombing depicted in the ad. The ad also fails to mention that Roberts had earlier condemned clinic bombings, and said that abortion-facility bombers should be “prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

Even objective groups have described the ad as “misleading” and “false.”

In other words, NARAL is lying.

That someone in the pro-choice camp would resort to lying should hardly be surprising.

Legal abortion in United States is built on lies.

Pro-choice activists in the 1960s and early 1970s trying to get abortion legal claimed that were more than a million back-alley abortions a year, and that 5,000 to 10,000 women were dying at the hands of back alley butchers.

But Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who co-founded NARAL, later admitted that the numbers were made up.

“I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, and I suppose that the others did too if they stopped to think of it,” he wrote in Aborting America. “But in the `morality’ of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics? “

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported only 39 deaths as a result of abortion in 1972. Nathanson estimated that the figure was actually in the hundreds.

Nathanson also said that there were approximately 100,000 illegal abortions annually, not the more than a million claimed. And many of those abortions were performed not by “back-alley butchers,” but by doctors and other medical personnel.

In other words, the pro-choice activists lied.

Norma McCorvey – the Jane Roe of Roe v Wade – initially said that her pregnancy was due to a gang rape. She later admitted that she lied. So the case proceeded to the Supreme Court based on a lie.

During the debate over the procedure known as partial birth abortion, pro-choice activists claimed that there were no more than 500 such procedures done each year, and that the majority were done for health reasons involving either the mother or the baby.

But in a television interview on ABC’s Nightline at the time of the debate, National Coalition of Abortion Providers executive director Ron Fitzsimmons said, “I lied through my teeth."

Fitzsimmons said the number of such abortions was much greater – he estimated 5,000 – and that "they're primarily done on healthy women of healthy fetuses." He added that "the abortion-rights folks know it, the anti-abortion folks know it, and so, probably, does everyone else."

In other words, the pro-choice activists lied.

The NARAL ad raises the specter of “pro-life violence” and the image of clinic bombings.

There’s no denying that bombings did take place. But they were soundly and consistently condemned by pro-life organizations – a fact that the pro-choice organizations conveniently fail to mention.

As for the deaths – one would image there have been dozens or hundreds of killings and other acts of deadly violence committed by self-proclaimed pro-lifers.

Actually, there have been seven such killings. Only one resulted from a bombing, and the last killing took place in 1998.

Seven is still too many. They are wrong, and the people who committed them do not deserve the title “pro-life.”

As for the total number of actions of physical violence – murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, rape, etc. – Human Life International reports that there have been a total of 27 such incidents involving pro-lifers (as of 2004).

Again, these actions are to be condemned – as genuinely pro-life organizations and individuals have consistently done.

Still, the myth of pro-life killers is a lie.

On the other hand, Human Life International documents 116 cases in which pro-choicers were charged by civil authorities with murder, manslaughter, and infanticide in connection with abortion, and the "Blackmun Wall" records the deaths of 347 women who died because of legal abortions.

Total: 463.

That’s 463 deaths vs 7.

And that’s not including the more than 46 million babies aborted.

So who’s more violent when it comes to causing serious physical harm to others?

If you keep repeating lies, people come to believe them. The pro-choice camp is aware of that. Certainly the mainstream media has usually fallen prey to the lies.

But when considering whom they really are serving, maybe pro-choice activists need to remember who is the "Father of Lies."

Pax et bonum

Lies, Damned Lies, and ...

Pax et bonum

The Coat Hanger Abortion Myth

Support for abortion is based on a myriad of lies, including the number of women who were dying from illegal abortions before Roe, claims about "back alley abortions," the rape claim in the Roe case itself, and even the use of the word"choice."

One of the myths is about using coat hangers to abort.

While it may be true that some desperate women may have tried to abort that way, such cases would have been rare. Abortions then were overwhelmingly performed by other means - and many of the abortions were done by doctors and nurses.

A number of groups and writers have examined and dispelled this myth. Among them:

Life Dynamics - "Hanging the 'Coat Hanger Abortion' Myth Out to Dry"

Pro-Life Action League - "The Coat Hanger Abortion: Fact Or Fiction"

My Life In Reflection (blog) - "Debunking the Coat-Hanger Myth"

There are more - but the above articles give a good overview.

Pax et bonum

Pro-Abortion Hochul (two clerihews)

New York Governor Kathy Hochul

with her abortion support is quite vocal.

If the Supremes rule it's not in the Constitution

she wants to make it a New York institution. 

Later 

New York Governor Kathy Hochul 

while campaigning met a worried local. 

She acknowledged the voter's concerns about inflation, 

then focused instead on her own obsessive support for abortion.

Pax et bonum

The Year So Far For This Blog

I had a slow April when it came to posting. But that's in keeping with the year so far. At this point last year I had 121 posts. This post is just my 91st this year.

I think one of the issues is that I'm trying to be more circumspect about what I post. I'm paying more attention to whether something is appropriate for a Catholic and a Franciscan to publish. I'm particularly trying to avoid saying things that are sarcastic or mean-spirited. 

I'm also posting less poetry. That's due to writing fewer poems (see reason above) and to the realization that magazines I submit to are increasingly counting posting a poem on a blog as a previous publication, and so they won't consider publishing it.

And I'm feeling particularly burned out these days. Things that used to inspire me are leaving me flat.

I'm sure things will turn around. 

At least I hope so!

Pax et bonum