By now you’ve all heard the horrific details about Lauren Handy, the so-called pro-life activist who was keeping five frozen fetuses in her home. There are still unanswered questions about how these dead bodies were obtained, and whether they were all (or if any of them were) actually aborted; for example, one was still intact and attached to the placenta, and another was en caul. There is some speculation that Handy, with or without the group she belongs to (Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, or PAAU), intended to use the corpses in a publicity stunt of some sort. I don’t know. My friend Mary Pezzulo at Steel Magnificat writes about all of it here, and you should read her article. It’s the only really good thing I’ve read about the whole ugly story.
Exploitation of the dead is not pro-life. It is contempt for life.
BY: Scott Eric Alt • April 4, 2022 • In the News; Pro-Life Issues
Critics of Pope Francis claim to love tradition while time and again tradition turns out to be utterly foreign to them. And thus, in just the most recent example, the traddies decide that a Marian title from a Byzantine hymn that dates to before 1000 A.D. — well-known among Eastern Catholics and Orthodox Christians — must be a reference to Pachamama and proof of the heresies of Pope Francis. The irony is that genuine Catholic tradition also teaches that the pope is protected by God from leading the Church into error and that Catholics owe the pope religious submission, not rebellion (or as demon consultant Taylor Marshall puts it, “recognize and resist”).
Pope Francis and the world’s bishops reconsecrate — I emphasize: reconsecrate—Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary today; and where the English text refers to Mary as “Queen of Heaven,” the Italian text calls her “terra del cielo,” which means “earth of heaven.” The Fatimistas, who seem to think the pope is religiously bound by every last granular detail of a private revelation, are apoplectic. Demon consultant Taylor Marshall was initially non-committal and insisted he was “studying” the matter. Then, after an intense application of every ounce of intellect he could muster, Dr. Marshall decided that “earth of heaven” could be nothing other than a reference to Pachamama.
“I exhort you as your fellow elder,” St. Peter writes, and it’s hard to know who first tried to use this verse as a proof-text against papal primacy. Why, Peter himself says he’s just one among many! So why does the pope lord it over the whole Church? One thing it’s not hard to know is that the Church Fathers are full of assertions that Peter does have primacy, and not one of them ever cites 1 Peter 5:1 to refute the idea. If the text does deny papal primacy, apparently none of the Church Fathers were aware of it. Dear reader, you’re welcome to search an index of Scripture references in the Church Fathers if you think you can find any of them citing 1 Peter 5:1 to deny the primacy of Peter. Surely they were aware of the text — Cyprian refers to it, as do Tertullian and Jerome — but none of them think it means that Peter is no more than the equal of all other bishops.
St. Francis de Sales, among others, disputes the notion that a pope could teach heresy: “In truth, it is necessary that we should follow him simply, not guide him; otherwise the sheep would be shepherds. … Now all this has not only been true of St. Peter, but also of his successors; for the cause remaining the effect remains likewise. The Church has always need of an infallible confirmer, to whom she can appeal; of a foundation which the gates of hell, and principally error, cannot overthrow; and has always need that her pastor should be unable to lead her children into error. The successors, then, of St. Peter all have these same privileges.”
The crack apologist and fivepoint Calvinist who calls himself “TurretinFan,” and who is known to us as Mr. X, first got upset about this manuscript in 2008. Then, he got upset again in 2009. Now in 2021, after a blogging sabbatical of six weeks, he has decided to let us know that he is upset again. Maybe that explains his absence; he couldn’t bring himself to log onto his blog and has spent the days in severe prayer. I don’t know. It’s not hard to imagine why Mr. X is so upset; the mansucript in question is the “Homily of the Papyrus of Turin” [HPT]. The (lost) original dates to around the 4th century — the one extant manuscript is from the 6th — and Catholic apologists like to cite it as an early example of Marian veneration.
I won’t deny, if you insist, that secularism is a problem for the Church; I won’t deny, for it would be foolhardy, that elitism exists, even among prelates. But it’s a feverish, undisciplined mind that would try to attribute these things, without evidence or example, to a global conspiracy of bogeymen who are out to get Christians. Archbishop Gomez desperately wants to be persecuted. His recent — hideous — address, delivered in Madrid on November 4, is titled “Reflections on the Church and America’s New Religions”; and you may read it if you insist, but keep in mind, dear reader, that part of my duty as a blogger is to read such painful things so you won’t have to.
At the National Catholic Reporter, Msgr. Irwin is exercised by the bishops’ draft document The Mystery of the Eucharist in the Life of the Church. His main concern is that the language of the document is too outmoded; “it reflects 400-year-old theology,” he says, rather than developments since Vatican II. It uses musty words like “transubstantiation”; it insists on obscure distinctions between “venial” and “mortal” sin; it uses the term “Real Presence,” for Jesus’ sake! “Are these terms,” Msgr. wonders, “aimed at people who no longer attend Mass,” or are they aimed instead at the bishops themselves?
I am astounded that I have to set out to prove this, but there we are; the Church’s biggest mission field is the Church. Let’s start with the Catechism of the Catholic Church (a very good place to start). There, in §1989, we read: “The first work of the grace of the Holy Spirit is conversion, effecting justification in accordance with Jesus’ proclamation at the beginning of the Gospel: ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ Moved by grace, man turns toward God and away from sin, thus accepting forgiveness and righteousness from on high.” Conversion (whether initial conversion or continuing conversion) is all gift and all grace
There is a bizarre current of thought, among Catholics antagonistic to social justice, that says that such concerns detract from the call to holiness. The “SJWs,” they will declaim, “never talk about holiness. It’s all about social evil, never their own need for Christ.” Apart from the fact that this is so absurdly and demonstrably untrue, the saints — both declared and undeclared — never once speak of justice and holiness as though they are in conflict with each other. The very notion is uncatholic. You can not be holy unless you pursue justice: That idea runs through the entire Old Testament, and the entire New.
Over on the aptly-named Daffey Thoughts, David Griffey attempts, ineptly, to deconstruct my blog post exposing some Catholics’ idolatrous attitude about Scott Hahn. “Most conservative Catholics I know,” Griffey blares in his headline, “do not believe Scott Hahn is the fourth member of the Holy Trinity.” Only “most”? Does Griffey mean to suggest that some conservative Catholics do think that Hahn is the fourth member of the Trinity? Fact is, I don’t know anybody who thinks that a trinity has four persons (that would be impossible), still less that Scott Hahn is one of those persons. Nor did I suggest any such thing in my post
Its addiction to fake quotations is an indictment on pop apologetics. Did you know that St. Augustine never said “Roma locuta est; causa finita est?” It’s a handy epistrophe; it’s a fair enough paraphrase; but it was not what Augustine wrote. Here are Augustine’s exact words, from Sermon CXXXI. (The context is Rome’s condemnation of Pelagianism.) “For already have two councils [Mileve 
Mr. Steve Skojec, formerly of One Luther Five, is no longer bothering to hide his dissent from the dogma of papal infallibility. He’s not trying to nuance a distinction out between the rare occasions when an infallible statement is made and everything else a pope says. Anyone who tried to do that would need to explain why they worry themselves over what Pope Francis says at all, since he’s not exercised that charism as far as I can tell. But Mr. Skojec has integrity, casts nuance to the winds, and says that the dogma itself is a sham. Let’s peer — briefly, for it is painful — into his Twitter feed
Chaput, writing at First Things, is all wrought up by the thought that Pope Francis has surounded himself with toadies and therefore can’t handle constructive criticism from his loyal servant Raymond Arroyo. He would impress upon our minds a “little wisdom” from St. Bernard of Clairvaux. Bernard wrote: “The most grievous danger for any pope lies in the fact that, encompassed as he is by flatterers, he never hears the truth about his own person and ends by not wishing to hear it.” I suppose, though Chaput does not mention a little wisdom from St. Catherine of Siena.
And that’s false. Gaudium et Spes 27: “Whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia or wilful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as disgraceful working conditions, where men are treated as mere tools for profit, rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed. They poison human society, but they do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury. Moreover, they are supreme dishonor to the Creator.”