A court in Poland has ordered a priest, Father Marek Gancarczyk, to pay a fine of $11,000 because the Catholic paper, of which he is editor, described a woman seeking an abortion as “wanting to kill her child”.

He has refused to pay.

The judge, in passing the sentence, treated Fr Gancarczyk to a lecture on theology. “Christianity is a religion of love and this is what the language used by Catholic press should be like,” she said.

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Polish law permits abortion only in cases of rape, serious handicap in the baby, or serious health risk to the mother. In this case, the mother had an eye condition. She was denied an abortion because her doctors decided the pregnancy would not seriously damage her health.

The local archbishop, Father Damian Zimon, said, “No state law can undermine God’s commandment and the order of Jesus Christ . . . . Recall the words of Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta: ‘The greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion . . . if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?’ ”

The Catholic Association of Journalists in Poland commented, “We consider this verdict an attempt to gag Catholic media, also directed against freedom of speech in the wider sense . . . .We call on all journalists who hold Christian values not to be afraid to write the truth about abortion, about abortionists and about the supporters of this Holocaust of the 21st century.”

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Two points that Australians might ask themselves:

(1) is our law permitting any woman, any time, to have an abortion, simply by telling her doctor she wants one, good enough?

(2) at least one priest, somewhere, is willing to suffer imprisonment, or whatever the court comes up next time, rather than compromise the Church’s teaching of love and respect for all human life, including the unborn babies.

Father Marek Gancarczyk

The Queensland Bligh government intends to “reform” surrogacy laws – their philosophy being, apparently, that a baby is a toy — that anybody who wants one has a “right” to one.

A different attitude might be to put the “rights” of the child first.

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Should not the state always do everything possible to try to give every child at least the chance to start life with the love and care of their real mother and father?

Isn’t it wrong to separate a child, in cold blood, from his birth mother — and then falsify his birth certificate to make it “legal”?

Dumping a child, without his consent, into complex, unnatural relationships, expecting him to like it or to lump it?

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Remember the baby in the Mary Beth Whitehead surrogacy case (USA, 1986). The child she bore was confiscated by police. During subsequent “access” times the baby sought birth-mother Mary Beth’s breast, for both nutrition and comfort. The court-appointed supervisor wouldn’t let her nurse, “lest it create a mother-child bond”!  

Too late, mate — and very stupid.

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What is it like to be a child subjected to surrogacy? The infertility experts don’t know. The social scientists don’t know.

The politicians certainly don’t know. And they certainly don’t want to know.

No one knows except the surrogated people themselves.

Thousands of adult surrogacy-victim Australians are involved in support groups such as Tangled Webs, whose policy is clear:

A child should only be removed from his or her genetic parents in extreme circumstances as a last resort for their safety. The desire to provide children for infertile couples etc. does not override the child’s need for and right to this vital relationship with his or her genetic parents . . . No-one has the right to a child. To claim the right to a child is to treat that child, another human being, as an end to satisfying one’s own desires, as an object and not as a person . . . . (http://www.tangledwebs.org.au/dc.php)

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Yes, to demand the right to a child is to treat children as an item of property, just as slaves were once considered the rightful property of their masters — and women were once regarded as the property of their husbands.

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Two recent news items regarding so-called “emergency contraception”:

(1) Researchers now claim that a new morning-after pill has been shown to prevent pregnancy when used up to five days after sex — longer than any “protection” developed so far.

(2) Pentagon officials have decided to require all U.S. military bases around the world to provide abortifacient (“morning-after” or “plan-B” or “emergency contraception”) pills for the troops.

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These kinds of pills will abort a newly-conceived embryo by preventing its implantation into the wall of the mother’s womb.

Their manufacturers prefer to call what they do “contraception” rather than “abortion”, knowing that some people are a bit funny about abortion — even thinking it is wrong – which could be bad for sales. They try to claim that pregnancy begins at implantation, not at fertilisation of the egg.

Everybody knows, of course, that from the moment the DNA from the sperm and the egg unite, they form a new and unique human being — nothing further being added by implantation.

Other problems with “morning-after” pills include the fact that they are useless in preventing sexually-transmitted diseases . . . .

One might have hoped the military would focus on discipline and proper behaviour — because lives depend on it — rather than promoting risky activities.

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In the earliest days of contraceptive and similar pills, Pope Paul VI warned that contraception leads inevitably to practical atheism and irresponsible deeds.

You cannot defy the natural law and still have a relationship with the Creator of that law.

In Pope Paul’s words:

“If we do not want the mission of procreating human life to be conceded to the arbitrary decisions of men, we need to recognise that there are some limits to the power of man over his own body and over the natural operations of the body, which ought not to be transgressed.”

Having decided to ignore that warning, modern man (and woman) are now badly bogged down in a morass of unnatural, bizarre and sub-human technologies — such as in-vitro fertilization, cloning, genetic manipulation, and destroying human embryos in cold blood for certain kinds of stem cell research.

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2010 is the 50^th anniversary of the “contraceptive” Pill coming onto the market.

The advent of the Pill changed human history.

It ended the era, dating from the beginning of time, during which matters relating to sex were spoken of mainly in private — even bashfully. The new epoch of discussing it boldly at every opportunity had arrived.

Likewise it ended the age of considering the principle of contraception (interfering with the act of sex so as to deliberately make it sterile) to be unnatural. From the 1960s, it became increasingly a matter of little moral consequence one way or the other.

The main motivation for one’s actions, sexual and otherwise, switched from being something to be accounted for to God and to others, especially one’s family, to being a matter of doing what turns one on, and the others could get used to it.

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Yet the new age of self-indulgence turned out less of a triumph for carefree liberty and licence than some had hoped.

It was noticed that women and girls taking the Pill were more at risk, not only of behaviour-related sexually transmitted disease, but also of breast cancer, cervix cancer, blood clots and — now they are telling us — of weak bones (osteoporosis) as well.

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And after the Pill became available, Pope Paul VI reiterated the Church’s opposition to artificial contraception, warning that the Pill would lead to “marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards.”  

This was in his famous encyclical letter, Humanae Vitae, published on 25 July 1968.

Humanae Vitae  is a good read. It can be found at: www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae_en.html

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Pope Paul’s comments were initially pooh-poohed as scare-mongering. But, if anything, he under-stated the dangers. Hasn’t the whole concept of marriage as the institution keeping our families and our society stable, now been largely lost?

Even mentioning that marriage is better than de facto relationships or casual sex or same-sex coupling today risks accusations of “discrimination”, “hate-crime” etc.

A former “Miss Universe” has allowed a naked photograph of herself to appear on a magazine cover.

She now tells reporters she did it to raise money for the Butterfly Foundation which helps people with eating disorders.

The idea being that even beautiful people have “flaws”, as in this photo, which makes the lady look a bit tubby.

She says the whole performance was done with “a good intention to promote healthy eating and lifestyle”.

OK. It is not for this blog or its readers to brood unduly on what her intentions were.

The point about saving people from obsessively striving for a “perfect” body is, however, a valid one.

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When the young Mary MacKillop started teaching in the first school set up by Father Woods in 1866, she and the other recruits started wearing plain black dresses. They soon switched to brown alpaca cloth, mainly because that was cheaper.

When Father Woods wrote the “Rule” of the newly-formed Josephite Order, he gave instructions that the Sisters wear clothes “of poor material . . . for the poor must endure the consequences of poverty.”

Dressing like the poor people was an important principle.

So was modesty. Mary MacKillop remembered the words of Saint Paul in the Bible, “I wish women to be decently dressed, adorning themselves with modesty.”

When starting a youth group in Adelaide, Mary made it a requirement that those attending “must dress with simplicity, modesty and neatness.”  

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There is a balance to be struck when deciding what to wear and what kind of a “body image” to seek. The key word to keep in mind is “decent”.

Try to keep yourself looking decent. Nothing more. Nothing less.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with being beautiful — there are no prizes for looking repulsive — but for a girl, beauty is a great responsibility.

She must decide what to do with her beauty. Her beauty is going to draw attention to her at the physical level — not easy to handle without falling into pride and taking pleasure in one’s ability to manipulate lust-prone males.

A beautiful female has a special need to keep close to God — to avoid temptations herself, and to avoid putting temptations into the minds of those around her.

God obliges you to use whatever beauty you have, the same way you must use everything else you have — you must use it for the glory of God and to show God that you love him.

The constitution of the nation of Ireland goes on trial this Wednesday in Europe’s Court of Human Rights, because Irish law defends human life from the moment of conception.

Ireland’s laws prohibit abortions unless the mother’s life is in danger.

The Constitution of Ireland says, “The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate, that right.”

Three women claiming they were “forced” to travel to England to be aborted have launched the case.

If they succeed, countries throughout Europe and the rest of the world will be affected, especially those like Poland and Malta whose laws recognise the human-ness of unborn humans.

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The Irish people are being double-crossed. Ireland’s recent signing of the Lisbon Treaty came after receiving guarantees that Ireland’s pro-life constitution would remain unaffected.

Recent history shows that this European Court of Human Rights is a kangaroo court of the worst kind, anyway. Two years ago, this same court, following a case where a Polish woman claimed to have lost her sight because Polish law prevented her terminating her pregnancy, ruled against Poland, based on the testimony of one doctor supporting her claim — despite eight other specialists having stated that the “ongoing deterioration in eyesight was unrelated to her pregnancy” . They credited one GP’s opinion over that of eight experts, in order to reach their desired result.

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Legal proceedings of this kind may be tried in Australia by those wishing to further radicalise our already harshly anti-life culture.

If so, it may be handy to have a prime minister like Mr Abbott, who has previously shown signs of willingness to go in to bat for the vulnerable unborn.

Mr Abbott seems also the kind of person willing to thumb his nose at uninvited international interferences in our affairs.    

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