Pro-Choice Nun Says Mary Expressed “Choice”

To Early Riser's comment about Cardinal George of Chicago being the "Barney Fife" of bishops. Cardinal O'Malley of Boston is the See No Evil, Hear No Evil of American prelates. Who else would allow such a lavish public faux canonization (aka, funeral) of a notorious public sinner: Ted Kennedy? He is just one in a long line of spineless Boston prelates who wimped out when it came to the Kennedys.

My first post was a direct quote from the article cited in the original post.

Right… and you said that you liked it, without expounding. Given that, are you really surprised that (after saying that you liked her outspoken defense of dissent, especially in the context of defending the so-called "right" to kill unborn children) I, or others, take it as either your deliberate attempt to goad orthodox Christians into a fight, or your striking ignorance of Catholic teaching, or both?

You really need to get your snark-meter checked.

🙂 Sorry, friend. Mine is functioning quite nicely. If something walks like a troll, talks like a troll, and snarls like a troll… well…

Calling Sr. Quinn a demon/minion of satan/insane is not dissent, its a personal attack.

Calling her a demon is a personal attack, true… though I can understand the exasperation which would lead someone to say it. Calling her a minion of Satan is perhaps closer to home (if perhaps she's an unwitting one). Calling her insane may well be an act of charity… since it assumes that she may not be responsible for her inhuman behaviour.

RE: Sixtus, he obviously had no problem with dissent on the Immaculate Conception issue,

Point of information: if there is as yet no established Church teaching, there can't be "dissent" against it.

You really need to get this straight. The Church was certainly disposed toward believing the truth that the Blessed Virgin was conceived without sin of any kind, but it was not–as you rightly pointed out–put forth as doctrine in a conclusive way. So long as neither side sinned incidentally in its debates on the matter, they were quite free, morally speaking, to go on debating (perhaps within additional local guidelines) until Rome settled the matter conclusively.

But abortion is completely different; it was condemned as a heinous sin from the dawn of Christianity (which you can easily see, if you take the time to scroll back on this thread alone, and read the references that people took such care to offer you). It can be derived from the natural law. It's not at all dependent on Divine Revelation, as such, to be known (whereas the Immaculate Conception cannot be derived solely from the Natural Law).

And if it is cathartic for you to offer your unsolicited opinions of my comments to the uncaring tubes of the interweb have at it, Mr. Quixote. It matters not to me.

Believe it or not, I have no personal animus against you (though you've annoyed me a bit, with many of your comments); I merely find it necessary to correct you when you speak ignorantly and/or mistakenly about Catholic doctrine… for the sake of listeners who might otherwise be led astray by your mistakes.

A suggestion: Catholicism is a discipline about which you don't know nearly enough to "teach", declare, etc., yet. If you must be inflammatory on blogs, stick to politics. Opinions are much more the currency of choice, there.

do not assume I am not Catholic.

I didn't assume anything of the sort, one way or the other. I merely said that you were strikingly ignorant of Catholic doctrine and of general Catholic principles. Given the sad state of catechesis in our culture, I know–full well–that many Catholics are almost completely ignorant of their Faith's teachings (to say nothing of their training in virtue).

Perhaps this will help: what you are now, I was, once… and not so long ago. I do not call you ignorant to insult you, nor to pronounce you "intrinsically hopeless" or the like; I know, firsthand, what it's like to be ignorant of the Catholic Faith (as a cradle Catholic). I say it to encourage you to fix what's broken, as I did with myself. You have a great many things wrong (including your attitude); now, do something constructive about it.

While there has been general agreement that abortion is almost always sinful, the church has not been as consistent as you suggest.

Spoken as a true outsider! Don't you even listen to yourself? You chafe when I rebuke you with what you consider a "preachy" style, but then you turn around and arrogantly undercut the very Church you claim to embrace! Which part of "this teaching has not changed, and remains unchangeable" do you not understand, Craig? Is the English unclear? Or are you calling Pope John Paul II, who approved the Catechism (and everyone who helped to write it), a liar, while you are the only one who's correct? And if the Church is as uncertain as all that (and not the voice of Christ in the world), then whyever are you still Catholic? Why follow such a dubious guide? (Is it for the donuts on coffee-and-donut Sunday?)

While various members of the Catholic hierarchy have opposed abortion as evidence of sexual sin, they have not always viewed abortion as homicide, as I demonstrated with the Penitential of Theodore.

And I've said, again and again: that's irrelevant. St. Thomas didn't think it to be homicide, but he condemned it as a grave sin, nonetheless. Likewise with St. Augustine. (Think, man: masturbation and fornication, and even willfully missing Sunday Mass are mortal sins, but none of them are homicide, in the physical sense!) Your point, even if I granted it, would not help your case, one jot.

The Didache itself is not some document that was universally accepted throughout the history of Catholicism.

Nor were the books of Revelation and 2 Peter "universally" accepted throughout the history of Catholicism (until the Councils of Hippo and Carthage settled the matter, and the Council of Trent defined it to the point of being completely idiot-proof), etc. That scarcely helps your point.

It was rejected as spurious and not accepted into the New Testament (except in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church). After being suppressed, it was not "rediscovered" until the late 1800's.

This makes for somewhat diverting theatre, Craig, but it's virtually meaningless. (Do you truly live the rest of your life like this: by prolific insinuation?) The fact that an artifact is belatedly recognized as genuine does not thereby make it "not genuine", even temporarily; the fact that the Blessed Trinity was not well-defined in the early years of the Church does not somehow disprove the raw fact. Just so: the fact that the evil of abortion hasn't been appreciated and proclaimed with the completeness that we know today, says nothing about the fact that it was always condemned as evil. You'll find that I asserted nothing more or less than that, on that point.

Have a nice day.

🙂 Work on being less sarcastic, friend; then perhaps I'll have an easier time believing that such well-wishes are sincere.

I don't know if this will shed any light on the matter of why the Church ALLEGEDLY did not condemn abortion in ancient or medieval times as strongly as it does now… but here's my understanding for what it's worth.

What we know today about the process of conception — that a new human being is created when a male sperm and female ovum join in the fallopian tube — wasn't discovered until the 19th century, when microscopes and other scientific instruments became widely available. Prior to that, of course, people knew that sexual intercourse led to pregnancy but did not know exactly HOW that was accomplished.

Back in Augustine's and Thomas Aquinas' time, the prevailing theory of how conception occurred was that the male "seed" alone contained the ENTIRE potential for new life, and the female simply provided the environment in which it could grow (the womb). If conditions were right, so they assumed, the "seed" sprouted and she became pregnant; if not, the seed and the lining of the uterus were sloughed off with her next menstrual period.

Since there were no such things as pregnancy tests, stethoscopes or ultrasounds in those days, the only way to know for sure that the "seed" had taken "root" in the womb and received a soul/spirit of its own would be when it began to move and grow in the womb (quickening). Prior to that, there was simply no way to tell for certain if the "potential" human life contained in the male seed had started to grow or not. A woman might certainly suspect that she was pregnant if she had missed a menstrual period, started having morning sickness, etc., but other conditions, such as disease, hormonal imbalance, or malnutrition could mimic those symptoms.

Under this theory, also, any deliberate act that led to destruction or waste of the male seed (masturbation, withdrawal, etc.) was seriously sinful not only because it involved indulgence in sexual pleasure outside of its intended place (marital intercourse) but also because it destroyed potential human life. These acts were regarded with somewhat the same level of moral condemnation then, as some of today's moral theologians regard the potentially abortafacient properties of the Pill.

The bottom line is that abortion and contraception were BOTH regarded as grave offenses against human life from the earliest days of Christianity. The main difference now is in our more precise knowledge of how conception occurs, when a new, separate human life begins, and what actions genuinely destroy new life.

Augustine and Aquinas' theories about ensoulment and the relative sinfulness of abortion before vs. after quickening were based upon the scientific knowledge available to them at the time. That "knowledge" is now long outdated and has about as much relevance to today's abortion controversy as Ptolemy's theory of an earth-centered universe has to modern space travel.

Elaine