Tag: pro life
Gianna –The Catholic Healthcare Center for Women
My eyes were opened the other day at the Natural Family Planning seminar for clergy we had at Saint Joseph Seminary especially with the introduction of a new center for women’s health in midtown Manhattan. The Gianna Center is an incredible development –even a gift of the Holy Spirit– for the Church not only in New York, the Tri-State area but indeed for the entire United States. In fact, the brand new center is due to be launched on November 23, 2009 two blocks from Grand Central Station.
Looking at the Gianna Center you will find a wholistic (comprehensive) approach to women’s healthcare. Their approach in working with issues of reproduction is to intensely pay attention to a woman’s cycle to correct problems without suppressing or destroying the ability to naturally conceive a child. The medical approach here is to work for high effectiveness that respects the dignity of person, adhering to Christ and the Church, and giving a healthy alternative to IVF (which is against all these things).
Gianna will provide a full spectrum of obstetrics and family practice medicine. It will also be a center for medical ethics that is faithful to the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. Likewise, it will teach the methods of Natural Family Planning and NaProTechnology.
The Gianna Center is the convergence in medicine of faith and reason. It brings together the heart of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ today: God loves us so much that He wants us to be in relationship with Him through His Son in the Holy Spirit living in happiness. In speaking of the heart I am not indicating the subjective feelings of the person that may be as variable as there are people in the world. But what I am suggesting here is that the heart is the locus of our affection for reality as it is presented to us and not as what we want it to be. Another words, we need to deal with the God-given reality that we have in front of us, it is the condition of our happiness desired for us by God. Dealing with reality in this way is the same way we have to deal with the size of the foot we have at the end of our leg: we can’t alter its size because it is given. The reality in this case is the cooperating with God in bringing human life into this world as God has intended it to happen.
Hence, putting (keeping?) faith and reason together was the work of Pope John Paul II and it is the current work of Pope Benedict XVI. It is the daily work of the members of groups like Communion & Liberation and Opus Dei aiming as Luigi Giussani said in the Religious Sense, toward “the sense of responsibility toward destiny.” AND in my opinion the work of the Gianna Center brings together faith and reason because it has the affection for human reality as it is presented to the world because it is God-given.
The Gianna Center is the brainchild of Joan Nolan and Dr. Anne Mielnik. Of course, no project worthy of mention is done in a vacuum. It’s ably assisted by Dr. Kyle Beiter, Jamey Johnston and Jena McFadden and co-funded by Saint Vincent’s Hospital and the John Paul II Center.
Contact information
15 East 40th Street, Suite 101
New York, NY 10016 USA
212-481-1219
gianna@svcmcny.org
NFP (Natural Family Planning): formation for a fertile life
Saint Joseph Seminary – Dunwoodie was the setting today for a clergy seminar on Natural Family Planning (NFP) sponsored by the Archdiocese of New York Family & Respect Life Offices, The Couple to Couple League International and with the generosity of others as well. Some 40 clergy types (priests, deacons and seminarians) attended. It was a blessing to have Dr Theresa Notare, Dr Kyle Beiter, Richard & Vicki Braun, Dr. Jack Burnham, Fr John Higgins, Andrew & Tracey Pappalrdo, and Erik & Anne Tozzi as presenters.
So what did I learn today?
YOU can control YOUR reproductive health care sensibly and morally without spending tons of money and selling your values. The point of the day was to introduce us to the most wholistic, safe form of family planning that there is today. This approach is pro-life, pro-woman, pro-faith, and pro-humanity. NFP is totally Catholic. It shows that it’s possible for a husband and wife to communicate and to collaborate with each other on all facets of life, especially the facet of sex and reproduction.
Continue reading NFP (Natural Family Planning): formation for a fertile life
Breast cancer & abortion link
Confirming prior research a team of doctors released their findings in the World Journal of Surgical Oncology that there is a 66% increase of breast cancer among women who have had an abortion.
You can read the news article here.
Can Barack Obama Be Converted on Abortion?
Jesuit Father Edward Oakes has a brilliant essay on changing President Obama’s mind on abortion.
You need to read the essay.
Glendon’s Daughter Comments
Yesterday (April 29, 2009), Tom McFeely, of the National Catholic Register posted a brief story relating the “back story” to Mary Ann Glendon’s declining the Laetare Medal.
Catholic writer and art historian Elizabeth Lev is Mary Ann Glendon’s
daughter.
In a post at
PoliticsDaily.com, Lev — who lives in Rome and is a regular contributor to
Zenit news service — discusses her mother’s decision to refuse to accept Notre
Dame’s Laetare Medal.
Lev explains that Glendon’s action, undertaken because of
Notre Dame’s honoring of pro-abortion President Barack Obama, must be
considered in the context of Glendon’s proven commitment to defending the human
rights of all vulnerable people, born and unborn.
And, Lev said, in light of that commitment it’s silly to
dismiss her mother’s principled action as merely a gesture by someone who cares
only about the pro-life cause.
“Professor Glendon was to have been honored for not only for
her scholarship, but for her second career, her pro-bono work — ranging from
the civil rights movement of the 1960s to the great civil rights issues of the
present day — namely, the defense of human life from conception to natural
death,” writes Lev. “Her concerns range from the aging and dying population to
the unborn to the well-being and dignity of every life, regardless of race,
religion, or economic status. Her outstanding work in this field has earned her
the respect of the most brilliant minds of the international community,
regardless of whether they agree with her position. So again, to see her merely
as ‘strongly anti-abortion’ instead of as a tireless defender of the dignity of
life, is to reveal not only a lack of understanding of the subject’s work, but
also the writer’s real interest in this question.”
Fund for Life established at Notre Dame Univ.
The University
of Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture
establishes “The Notre Dame Fund to Protect Human Life,” a fund
to support pro-life activities. Here’s the summary of this new
initiative and the press release.
PS: poke around
the Center’s website, especially the list of Board of Advisors and notice the
names of those who lend their political & religious influence to this
project.
No to abortion, yes to life: Spain is in a fight over Pro-Life
The headmistress of Purísima Concepción y Santa María Micaela school, a parochial school in Logroño in northern Spain, Sister María Victoria Vindel gave this presentation to her students about horror of abortion. The slideshow is provocative and graphic
Spain’s very left leaning government is trying to overturn its country’s abortion laws. To procure an abortion in Spain is currently a crime. Sister Vindel is being attacked by those who want to “progress” into the 21st century of nihilism. Pray for her and the others taking up the fight against abortion.
The drama of life and death in reality
Turn, O Lord, and deliver their souls for there is none in death who will be mindful of You!
The dead from Italy’s earthquake last week are mourned. A Mass of Christian Burial was offered on Good Friday by Tarcisio Cardinal Bertone, Secretary of State to His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI with the bishops and priests of the region.
We beseech Thee, O Lord, deliver the souls of Thy servants, that being dead to this world, they may live to Thee and whatever sins they have committed through human frailty, do Thou wipe away by the pardon of Thy merciful goodness.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine. Et lux perpetua luceat eis. Requiescant in pace. Amen.
A gloomy Holy Saturday: the courseness of humanity
The gloominess of today’s weather leads to a gloomy feeling that all is not well in the world. Of course, it is Holy Saturday which in itself is a bittersweet experience: the Paschal Mystery is intense and the drama of the sacred Liturgy causes me to reflect more deeply on important matters: human desire, cooperation with truth, faithfulness, interior and exterior peace, love, salvation, God, Chris’t atonement, etc.
The spiritual intensity of the day has led me to think of how some cultural commentators are looking at life through the lens of Christian faith seeing a dismal experience of Christianity and the reduction of man and woman to the courseness of existence. I am beginning to see that we are living a dark period of history. Let me give three examples that depress me, all come from today’s edition of the New York Times: “Washington Churches Eye a Prize: The Obamas,” “In Another Recession Sign, an Uptick in Vasectomies” and “Spain Steps Into Battle With Itself on Abortion.” For me, these articles show to what extent that many people are willing to go to reduce the experience of faith to a commodity, life to a matter of “rights and progressivity” and the sexual intercourse to economy and self-centeredness. All three articles strike me as examples of desperation because know of them really demonstrate to me that following Christ (or any religious sensibility) means anything. Has truth, the dignity of human life and a healthy sexuality been totally replaced by radical subjectivity, nihilism and hedonism?
The Spanish interlocutors make the claim of trying to change the current abortion law as a matter of humanity suggesting that not to change the law is to live in a barbourous society. It’s quite the opposite: you’re humanity is diminished by acting selfishly and cruelly toward the unborn. How is killing the unborn giving a woman a dignified humanity when abortion is part of the matrix? The abortion proponents argue that they want a state that is “progressive,” like other Western nations except Ireland. To what are they progressing? Death? A culture where death is the hallmark and not life.
On Holy Saturday I have to say that our society is leaping toward madness and not to great freedom and certainly not toward communion with God and life with Him.