Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Talk About Offensive

As I was reading my daily blogs today I came across an American division in Michigan of Planned Parenthood. Let me give you a brief background:

Planned Parenthood in the United States is a government funded organization of about 250 million dollars a year. This indicates that the government in the US is now funding a group who is promoting offensive material against a visible religious group. Please refer to the following picture...

This disgusts me. This is a bumper sticker from said Planned Parenthood group. If you want to see other such bumper stickers go here:

http://www.ppscm.org/centerstore/bumpstick.html

So there are the American tax dollars hard at work. I haven't found such things yet, but I'm sure it's out there. If you want incoherant arguments and lack of consistency, visit a planned parenthood site.

-Harrison

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I completely understand your frustrations with this organization. If PPh didn't perform abortions, I'm sure you would find it a perfectly acceptable medical facility. After all, they are equipped to provide women's health care to low-income individuals.

Note that PPh doesn't survive entirely on federal funding. They receive numerous donations, grants and many services are rendered by student physicians, studying nurses and so forth.

Also note, each state provides funding to PPh. Washington and Oregon, for example, receive incredible amounts of state funding. They have a program that allows low-income/students to receive completely free preventative health care. Most other PPh states do not offer this service; there is some sort of fee assessed, even if on a sliding scale.

What's the official Catholic position toward birth control, that is, pre-conception?

Harrison said...

Yeah, I know there's other sources for funding, I shoulda mentioned them.

The Catholic position on birth control is simple, we don't allow it. We allow Natural Family Planning since it is perfect norms with both Holy Scripture and Tradition.

The idea behind our saying no to birth control is that birth control is restrictive to the open loving act that happens in the nuptial embrace (aka sex).

Pope Paul VI put out the encyclical "Humanae Vitae" - On Human Life or On The Regulation Of Birth. He put out this encyclical and later said "In order for this encyclical to be understood in its fullest, we must have a total understanding of the human person created in God's image and likeness". Unfortunately, he was not alive long enough to put together such a lengthy project.

With his death came John Paul I, who died very quickly and brought the rise of John Paul II. He was definitely the right Pope for the right time. His main focus as a Priest, Bishop, and then Cardinal, was the focus on the human person. He wanted to know how he could explain objective truths about human sexuality while maintaining each individuals experience. He began this project with Love and Responsibility when he was a Bishop. This book has been termed the "philosophy of the body". He continued this until he became Pope. Once elected, his first 139 Wednesday Audiences were dedicated to what he has termed the "Theology of the Body". Through the Theology of the Body, JP II explained what it means to be a human person by studying in depth scripture. It is a Theology that is entirely scriptually based and beautiful. Through this, if one is interested to look it up, the human person (body and soul) is explained as a subject, not an object. Love is supposed to be not only self giving for the two people involved which is their total love for each other, the "knowledge" aspect of the sexual embrace, but it is also supposed to be generative. In the Catholic Church, all families are to be opened to life because it is how the human person, in their masculinity and femininity, express the inner life of the Trinity. This is not to say that God is sexual, but marriage is an icon of the Trinity, it is something that points us towards what the inner life of the Trinity is. I can go on and on, and if you want more I would be willing to post in more depth over the next few weeks some posts on Theology of the Body. It's something I've been studying intensely lately. Basically, in marriage, the couples are supposed to be open to life completely for sex is supposed to be something that is not limited, but fruitful, a total, full, expression of love.

-Harrison