Personal Update 212

No. 212 October-November 2026

- The Abolition of a Reasonable and Valuable Wait

- The Purpose of Islam in the Western World

- Know your Enemy — It’s not Israel, it’s Iran

- Pope Leo XIV and the Defence of Life

- Mid-Term Elections, Democrats and the Babies

- Cold and Heartless… Household Waste’

- The New UK Prime Minister is a Catholic?

- Assisted Suicide voted down in England and Scotland

- Are the German Bishops Intent on Apostasy?

- Another Addition to the Generation of Mexican Martyrs

- The Plague of Pornography Destroys True Love

- Book Review: The March to Martyrdom of St Ignatius of Antioch

Dear Friend of Family & Life,

Please accept this Personal Update, no. 212, enjoy reading its contents and maybe show it to your friends and neighbours. Much of its content is not found in our social media outlets like printed newspaper and popular magazines.

I start with the pending Bill to cancel the three-day wait, obligatory for a woman seeking to have her pregnancy aborted since the 2018 abortion law was passed,. At present, this Bill is being examined by the Oireachtas Committee on Health, which listens to the opinions of witnesses and questions them on any proposed amendments.

The Abolition of a Reasonable and Valuable Wait

The Oireachtas Health Committee heard Dr Cliona Murphy, the Clinical Director of the HSE’s Women and Infants Health Programme on September 23 this year. The subject was the Health (Abolition of Three-Day Wait Rule ) (Amendment) Bill, no. 47 of 2026, passed in Dåil Eireann in June this year.

Dr Murphy stated that there was no “clinical requirement” for a mandatory three-day waiting period; in other words, the abortion surgery could be done on the same day of the first GP consultation without any risk to the woman.

Of course, no one had claimed that the need for the wait was clinical, if that means a surgical risk. The three-day wait is a recognition that taking the life of an unborn child is a major and irreversible decision which should not be taken without some reflection, something that Dr Murphy would not appear to consider since she had no problem with supporting the above Bill.

She informed the Committee that since 2019 all 19 maternity units of the country now provide abortion services, and the number of GPs who provide early “medical abortions” stands at 498 out of 4,900, although the second figure apparently was not mentioned.

Under questioning by Peadar Tóibín, the Irish College of General Practitioners (ICCP) admitted it did not consult its members on this Bill, even though a considerable number of GPs want the three-day wait to remain in the law, nor did it investigate why so many women did not return for a second visit.

As a group of GPs assert, there is no clinical reason to remove this wait, and many women are uncertain about their decision, and they have written to TDs asking them not to remove the wait. Tragically, the ICCP delegates to the committee shared the same position of Dr Murphy above, and yet they claim to represent the views of its members.

The abortion lobby speaks about the waiting period as though it were an unreasonable obstruction to “compassionate reproductive healthcare”, as described by Marie Sherlock, Labour’s spokesman for health. Keep in mind that this lobby wants women to have unconditional freedom to have an abortion up to completed birth. In reality, the three-day wait is a modest and humane recognition of the seriousness and finality of an abortion for the mother and her baby.

Two Pro-Life Witnesses

On September 30, Dr Andrew O’Regan and Dr Kirstin Fuller were called as witnesses before the Health Committee of the Oireachtas. Both strongly oppose the proposed amendment to remove the three-day wait, and do not offer abortion services to their patients. In the words of Dr O’Regan, “It is an undeniable fact that children are alive today because of this three-day wait… 72 hours reflection prior to an irreversible procedure ... is a moderate safeguard", and there is "no clinical reason to remove it, but there are very important reasons to keep it.” He pointed out that an abortion is a “two-patient” event and his duty is to care for mother and baby.

Dr Fuller told the Committee that between 12019 and 2024, some 10,000 women did not return for the second GP visit for an abortion. That, she noted, is almost 18 percent of women who wanted an abortion but after the first visit changed their mind. Eliminating the three-day wait would increase the number of abortions, already counted at a “massive” 65,000 since 2018, that is “one in six pregnancies” in Ireland, despite the 2018 promises that abortion would be “rare”. She has no doubt that many women regretted their abortion, and without this waiting period women would be unlikely to find other ways to solve the problem of an unwanted pregnancy. Dr Fuller told the chairman of the Committee that, while there is no clinical reason to wait, “I would argue that there's something much more important... there are lives.” As she pointed out, doctors on both sides of this controversial issue want the three-day waiting period to remain.

The Purpose of Islam in the Western World

Too often today, we hear so-called experts and the “progressive media” claiming that we share the same belief in God as Islam, and Islam is a religion of peace. This is a major error. Just because the Quran speaks of Jesus, Mary and Abraham as Isa, Maryam and Ibrahim does not mean Muslims have the same beliefs as Christians.

The laws of western democracies assume that different religious beliefs and practices should be treated even handedly and can co-exist in peace. Yet, Islam is a religion founded on the declared purpose of crushing all other beliefs, and this imperative is made explicit in the Quran, its guiding document.

The illusion of a peaceful Islam should have been shattered by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which brought about a new world disorder, much like the sacking of Rome in 410 by the Visigoths which inspired St Augustine to write the City of God. This atrocity was the model jihad to achieve world supremacy of Islam by any means.

Inculturation and Taqiyya

The normal practice of immigrants is to find the place where their own people have already settled, and they can continue speaking, dressing, eating and worshipping as they are accustomed. Children born in a new country more often than not leave their cultural background and assimilate with the general population, as in Britain and Ireland.

This has happened much less with Muslims than with other immigrant peoples. The clerical leaders support Islam’s demand for separateness. The young are discouraged from becoming close friends with non-Muslims, their women often wear full covering and shield their children from national life. Harsh punishments await those who change their faith, or enter into romantic unions with non-Muslims, and honour killings are not unknown.

It should not be a surprise that the Muslim project of coming to a once-Christian nation is jihad, achieving Muslim domination of a non-believing people. Certain well-known Muslim scholars and clerics make no secret of this purpose, while our experts foolishly write them off as “radicals”, and point to those who appear to have adopted western culture.

What the experts ignore is the practice of taqiyya, which permits Muslims to act as if they knew nothing of jihad and are shocked at any jihadi terrorist act. Taqiyya is the deliberate deception, permitted by Muslim scholars when faced with grave danger or when the cause of Islam demands it. One result of taqiyya is a lingering suspicion of those who appear to be assimilated to national culture.

The Difference between the Dictator God and Yahweh God

Unless we understand the difference between the Islamic God and the Christian God, we cannot begin to save our civilisation in the West — we cannot save free speech, the sanctity of the human person, and the vision of God that Jesus showed us. Islam operates by different standards, and it will impose them on us if we let it.

When Islam speaks of Allah, it speaks of a being that is absolutely One and Unique (tawhid). There are no persons sharing the divine nature, a belief deemed to be the unforgivable sin (shirk, see Quran 4, 48). Without Allah’s revelation to Muhammad, we know nothing about God’s existence and nature from the created world. This is in contrast to the Christian understanding of the world’s creation in Genesis and the theories of the Greek philosophers like Aristotle and the great theologians of the Middle Ages like Thomas Aquinas. The Allah of the Quran is not the Yahweh of the Old Testament. God orders the world’s creation and the rules for humans. Why? The only reason for right and wrong is God’s diktat. God is the absolute will, and there’s no place for the Logos, the Word of God.

The Quran presents Muhammad as the last and most important prophet who completed Allah’s revelation to the human race, and the one who received the dictated speech of Allah from the Archangel Gabriel, which became the Quran, six centuries after the Gospels. In no uncertain terms, Muslims refuse to subject the Quran to historical criticism, as has happened to the Christian Bible in the modern period. In fact, Muhammad was the author of the Quran, and it is a matter of belief how this happened.

A Very Different Picture

Who is Jesus of Nazareth or Isa in Arabic? According to the Quran, Surah 5, 116, Jesus explicitly denies any claim to be divine as well as instructing his followers not to worship him or his mother. Nor did his crucifixion happen, but “it was made to appear so to them.” He performed miracles as permitted by Allah, and also predicted a future messenger named Ahmad, something not found in any other written source. The Jesus of the Quran is a very different person from the Jesus of the Four Gospels, as shown by Surah 19, 35: “It is not for Allah to take a son.” Jesus is one with the Father, and truly died on the Cross and rose from the dead. Surah 4, 157 clearly states, “In fact, they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, but it appeared to them as if they did”, and Christians are “cross worshippers”.

Consider the Abraham in the Book of Genesis and the Quran’s Ibrahim, Surah 19, 41-48 and 26, 69, which describe how Abraham challenged his father and his tribe for worshipping idols. He asks, “What is that you worship besides Allah?” They reply, “We worship idols, to which we are fully devoted.” Leaving aside the fact that this condemnation of idolatry is nowhere found in Jewish and Christian writing, and that the story prefigures Muhammad’s preaching in Mecca and the rejection of the Meccans. Today, this invented Abraham is used as a rebuke of “Christian idolatry” in the worship of Christ in the Eucharist and the use of statues and paintings in churches. Muslims name Christians as “cross worshippers”. Muhammad had a problem with the real Abraham in the book of Genesis, so he invented his own version. So, in Surah 3, 67, we read: “Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian, but he was a Monotheist, a Muslim. And he was not of the Polytheists.”

It should be clear that Muhammad used biblical figures from Adam to Jesus, refashioned as prophets of his own mission or proto-Muslims to enhance his standing as the last prophet to the human race, again without any support from the Bible. Their names are the same, but they are different people.

Addendum: When the Catholic convert, Gavin Ashenden, a former Anglican clergyman, discovered that the Church of England cathedral in Bristol had opened its doors to the local Muslim community to celebrate the Ramadan iftar meal during Ramadan, he was aghast and wounded. In 1975, Gavin had dedicated his life to God on the same spot where the Muslims were now sitting on the floor. Their meal was preceded by the adhan, the Muslim profession of faith, proclaiming the one and only God and his messenger Muhammad.

Let’s conclude with a quote of Gavin Ashenden: “Islam, by contrast, is a religion structured around power — a power that imposes submission on others.” We have to be clear-eyed about the difference between Jesus and Isa, between the Quran of Muhammad and the Gospel of Jesus. “We cannot afford… to have poorly trained theologians stage interfaith ceremonies in which that difference is either papered over or, worse, quietly contradicted.”

Know your Enemy — It’s not Israel, it’s Iran

(A Personal Reflection by Lord Maurice Glasman.) It is the Jewish New Year today (Rosh Hashanah, September 11-13), a time of reckoning for the year that has passed and of wishes for the year ahead. Last year began badly with the stabbing of Melvin Cravitz by Jihad al-Shamie in Heaton Park Synagogue on Yom Kippur. It set the tone.

The year cascaded into an endless drama relating to illegal boat crossings that climaxed last week with 300 men in black, wearing balaclavas, trying to stop a crowded dinghy escorted by the RNLI from docking in Portsmouth harbour.

The most significant event in my year, however, did not take place in Britain. I noticed, doomscrolling X, that a rebellion had started in Iran. I was sceptical. There had been many over the years and none had come to anything. The Islamic Republic has a supremely effective and brutal system of repression, usually combining rape, torture and killing. But it was also the class basis of the uprisings that made me doubt. The previous protests were led and supported by the more secular middle class — call it north Tehran. South Tehran — the working-class and poor — remained stoically indifferent and went about its business. The Islamic Republic retained sovereign control.

As I followed this new uprising, I noticed three significant differences. First, south Tehran was fully present. The weightlifters, the wrestlers, the footballers and the cab drivers were out in force. What they call in Persian the “Bazaaris”, the market traders, went on strike. And the protests spread to smaller towns and villages. I could only liken it to the Solidarity uprising in Poland in 1981: young and old, rich and poor, east and west. And in this case, headscarf and no headscarf. This was unprecedented.

Second was its size. An estimated 12 million came on to the streets between December 28 and January 7. For three days the regime lost control of Mashhad, the second largest city in Iran. Tehran was tranquil by day but belonged to the protesters at night.

Third, and most strikingly, were the sights and sounds. The crowd proclaimed “Javid Shah” — Long Live the King. The flag they flew was the pre-revolution Lion and Sun. And the biggest chant of all was “In akharin nabarde, Pahlavi barmigarde” — This is the final battle, Pahlavi will return.

This was a popular counter-revolution to replace the Islamic Republic with a restored constitutional monarchy. But then, on January 8 and 9 the internet was cut off. I tried to speak to friends in Tehran who days before were grilling me on how we restored the monarchy after Cromwell. And there was nothing.

During those two days a minimum of 50,000 unarmed people were shot dead by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and their proxies. I have spoken to doctors in Tehran who say 20,000 death notices were issued from hospitals alone for those two days. That does not include those who were zipped up in bags and stashed in wholesale mortuaries, which then charged families to retrieve their sons and daughters. The revolution was killing its children. It always does.

I arrived back in parliament full of energy but all I met was indifference. I thought the fall of the Islamic Republic was in our national interest. The restoration of a constitutional monarchy would be the adoption of our system, the threat of terrorist atrocities would be removed, an ideological vanguard of hate and murder defeated. Huge cultural, commercial and academic partnerships would open up as the human and natural assets of Iran became open again. Persian poetry, food and music is a glory of the world. Access to their drone production system alone would complement our support for Ukraine and help rebuild our armed forces.

I invited the Pahlavi crown prince to parliament but no party leader would meet him. More people came to an event I hosted on Grimsby than to a personal audience with the leader of the Iranian opposition.

The seizure of state power by Ayatollah Khomeini’s political theology in 1979 brought something new and virulent into the world. Khomeini combined an almost Maoist sense of permanent revolution, cell organisation, technological control and charismatic leadership with an end-times theology based on sacrifice, suffering and death. The IRGC is there to defend the revolution, not the people of Iran. It is guided by the principle of universal jihadi violence.

Since the January uprising neither the mullahs nor the politicians matter. The supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei is in hiding, like the 12th Imam. The IRGC are in full control and ready to slaughter their people again.

In the 47 years since the revolution, we seem to have learnt little of the beliefs and goals that constitute the Islamic Republic of Iran. More to the point, we do not seem to understand it as a sustained menace, that it is hostile to our interests and existence.

Our national interest can be defined as using our sovereign power to defend our inheritance of liberty and democracy through both arms and diplomacy. This requires us to define those who are hostile and build alliances with those who share our concerns. This, in turn, requires us to distinguish between our friends and enemies. It is entirely legitimate to challenge Israel on its settlement policy but in terms of intelligence on terrorist threats and military technology, Israel is our friend and the Islamic Republic of Iran is our enemy. They preach death and they mean it. The blowing up of the Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green in London has been traced to Tehran, as were 12 other terrorist plots. The IRGC, along with Albanian and Iraqi Kurds, are central to the people-smuggling that led to the recent debacle in Portsmouth. The goals of prosperity and peace would be greatly enhanced by their defeat.

I call on my government to expel the Iranian embassy, seize their assets and recognise crown prince Pahlavi as the choice of the Iranian people to lead their transition. The war is not between the US, Israel and Iran. It is between the Islamic Republic and the Iranian people. One side is armed, the other is not. One is few, the other many. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 brought a new and virulent ideology into the world that we lose sight of at our peril.

NEWS FROM AMERICA

[By Brendan Gleason] As we have always stated here, this column concerns itself with President Donald Trump’s pro-life actions, policies and statements only. All else, whether in domestic or foreign policy, is outside our scope and our conversation.

Prayers for Pope Leo XIV

Like people everywhere, pro-lifers in the United States are praying for the health of Pope Leo. They are also giving thanks for his strong defence of everyone targeted by anti-life forces.

Pope Leo XIV and the Defence of Life

The theme of Pope Leo’s apostolic visit to France, September 25-28, was, “That the World May Have Life” (“Pour que le monde ait la vie”) (As the Vatican said, this referenced John 6:51, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world”.)

Returning to Rome after the visit, Pope Leo characterised his intent in this way:

By the very fact that when I went to France, I went primarily to preach the Gospel, to preach the Good News, to reaffirm what Jesus Christ Himself says when He says I am the way, the truth, and the life, so to speak the truth that Jesus offers us.

But in addition to the context of the Gospel and divine life, the word “life”, of course, has a right to life connotation in public discourse everywhere. Throughout his four days in France, Pope Leo forthrightly defended vulnerable people who need protection, from unborns at their moment of conception on up to the ill, disabled, infirm and aged.

Pope Leo denied this was politics: “…when the Church speaks about defending life, when it speaks about questions of social doctrine, we're not entering into politics, we're applying the Gospel to people's lives”. He said, “The Church, because of Jesus Himself, wants to be close to those people and to affirm the values that life itself I think holds for all of us.”

Pope Leo and Lourdes

When he visited Our Lady’s shrine at Lourdes, the Pope said, “The human person is ‘worthy’ simply by virtue of existing and of being destined for eternity. Our dignity cannot be measured or debated.” He blessed and visited with many ill and disabled people and said:

I know that for some of you, because of particular illnesses and, at times, terrible pain, your horizon may appear dark, uncertain and without hope. But no human law should ever make you lose the certainty of your dignity. On the contrary, it is precisely in the name of this inalienable dignity of the human person that we must reject the temptation to cause death under the guise of false compassion.

Pope Leo continued, “It is impossible to regard causing death as something normal. What is legal is not necessarily moral.” He added this exhortation:

Here in Lourdes, the city of the sick and of hope, I appeal to the entire healthcare community to remember the profound meaning of your vocation, which is to care for a suffering person, not to eliminate that person. Yes, dear friends, be passionate servants of life.

Pope Leo XIV: Dignity of the Ill

On his flight back to Rome, Pope Leo reflected on his visit to Lourdes. He again stressed everyone’s inherent value:

A message that I wished to openly reaffirm: every human life, in whatever condition, even in the most extreme frailty, retains its inviolable dignity and deserves to be cared for, accompanied and relieved of suffering with human compassion and with the aid of the means offered by science. For this reason, Lourdes represents for the entire world a sanctuary of the civilization of love.

‘What the Church Really Believes’

Also on his flight back home, Pope Leo spoke of his pro-life messages in France and said, “So, I would say, if that's politics, I did that, but it was not to get involved in French politics. It was to teach what the Church really believes.”

Pope Leo: Everyone’s Duty

Iin his address at the Élysée Palace in Paris on September 25, Pope Leo said, “Let us not forget that mutual respect and the protection of every human life is a duty incumbent upon each and every one of us.” Pro-lifers hope and pray that more and more people take that to heart.

Mid-Term Elections, Democrats and the Babies

Many opinion polls about the elections on Tuesday, November 3, are predicting that the anti-life Democrats will retake the House of Representatives and that they have a good chance of winning the Senate as well. Experience shows that the party out of power almost always picks up some seats in the mid-terms. The Republicans might keep control, but that is iffy.

Mid-term elections fall halfway between the presidential elections. Each time, all 435 seats in the House are up for grabs. This year, 35 of the 100 Senate seats are at stake.

Pro-lifers point out that in any election in today’s abortion-saturated America, the biggest winners and losers will always be the unborn babies whose lives are literally at stake. Politicians come and go, but babies in the womb are always the targets of the pro-abortion candidates.

Democrats Plotting

The Democrats are already licking their chops in anticipation of victory. Some plan to file articles of impeachment against President Trump and members of his administration. Others plan to begin probes of Republican officials—and of pro-life leaders and the rank and file. The Democrats always do their utmost to increase abortions and persecute pro-lifers.

Proof of that is their 84-page playbook for their first 100 hours in control of Congress. They plan to “Re-establish a federal right [sic] to abortion care [sic] and end restrictions that prevent people covered through federal health programmes from receiving abortion coverage.” The abortion coverage would allot billions for abortion and sink the Hyde Amendment, which since 1977 has saved 2.7 million babies by banning the use of taxpayers’ money to kill them.

Joe ‘The Thing’ Biden

Joe Biden rightly earned the nickname “The Thing”, at least among some Americans, after a political campaign stop on March 2, 2020. That was when he started to quote the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence but immediately got into trouble because, too late, he realised that what the Declaration actually says completely contradicts what his liberal ideology wishes it to say.

Biden began, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” That was accurate. But then he continued, inaccurately, “All men and women”—inaccurately, that is, because the Declaration says, “All men” in the clear and commonly accepted usage that “all men” means “all mankind”.

Then Biden veered even farther off course by saying, “are created, by the, you know, you know, the thing”. He obviously could not reconcile his liberal ideology with the Declaration’s immortal actual words, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” As we have covered in our last two issues, far too many leading Democrat politicians do not admit we have rights that come from God.

That Pesky Right to Life

Parsing Biden’s words is much more than mere quibbling, of course; words can have incalculable consequences. He caught himself before saying “their Creator” and “unalienable Rights” because that would be incompatible with the official Democrat line. Since citing God four times in their 2004 party platform, the Democrats in 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020 and 2024 each time have omitted the word “God” except for one tangential use, “God-given potential”.

So the last time the Democrats mentioned our Creator favourably was a generation ago.

The Declaration affirms our Creator-endowed “unalienable Rights” that include, first of all, the right to Life. The abortion-zealot Democrats cannot get around that, so they hide it. Recall that in a speech on January 22, 2023—the 50th anniversary of the US Supreme Court’s 1973 abortion diktat—abortion fan Kamala Harris, then Biden’s second-in-command and now a potential repeat candidate for the presidency in 2028, acknowledged the Declaration’s rights to Liberty and the pursuit of happiness but left out the right to Life.

Also, pro-lifers recall that in his official message for Christmas 2022, the abortion enthusiast Biden could not bring himself to include the Name of Baby Jesus. Instead, he wrote, “the birth of a child—a child Christians believe to be the son of God.”

Jefferson: Our Rights Come from God

Unlike Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and other present-day Democrats, the Founders of the United States of America knew that God is the grantor of our rights and that those rights are unalienable, not subject to infringement or attempted abolition by government. As Thomas Jefferson, for example, wrote in his A Summary View of the Rights of British America in 1774, “The god [sic] who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time: the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.”

In 1781-1782, Jefferson penned his Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVIII, in which he listed the evils of slavery—true, he still did not free his slaves—and issued this warning to America and the world:

And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever…

Last issue, we wrote of now newly Blessed Fulton J Sheen’s book, A Declaration of Dependence, which he published on Independence Day 1941. In it he affirmed that our rights come from God and not the state. In the book, Bishop Sheen, as he was popularly known during his lifetime, issued this warning: “When we deny God as the foundation of our rights, we shall no longer have rights. We are independent of dictators because we are dependent on God.”

Were they widely known today—which they are not, due to America’s dumbed-down government education system—the warnings of Bishop Sheen and Thomas Jefferson would stand as firm rebukes to Biden and his ilk.

Biden Accepts Abortion Giant’s Award

On September 24, Joe Biden addressed a Planned Parenthood of Delaware gala in Claymont, Delaware, and received a 2026 Service Award from the abortion giant. “This is an incredible honour”, he gushed.

He told his admiring audience that he was “outraged and appalled” by the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision of June 24, 2022, which threw out Roe v Wade, the same court’s 1973 diktat that nullified all state laws that protected unborn babies.

Biden also bragged that after Dobbs, he doubled down on aborting babies: “We took action. We signed executive orders to protect access to reproductive [sic] healthcare [sic].”

Mrs Jill Biden got in the act, too. Boasting that her husband “stood with Planned Parenthood”, she elaborated:

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, I watched Joe confront the reality that our granddaughters would grow up with fewer rights [sic] than the generation before them. But he was not willing to accept that. As president, he used the power of his office to defend access to reproductive [sic] healthcare [sic].

Mrs Biden added that Joe Biden “stood with Planned Parenthood and millions of Americans in defending the fundamental right of women to make their own decisions about their own bodies and their own futures.” This “right” that she extols was the “right” to kill babies.

Pro-lifers note that pro-aborts such as the Bidens remain furious about Dobbs for two reasons: first, obviously, that it binned Roe, and second, that in doing so it held that there never was any constitutional “right” for anyone to kill little ones in the womb. The pro-aborts’ myth that Roe discovered an invisible constitutional right to kill babies is just that: a myth.

Hey, Joe! About the Babies…

Joe Biden calls being saluted by Planned Parenthood “an incredible honour”. Pro-lifers ask, “Hey, Joe, what about the 434,450 babies whom PP killed in their latest reporting year?”

Biden’s FBI Spied on Catholic Priests

A report from President Trump’s Justice Department on August 26 revealed that under self-professed Catholic Joe Biden in 2023, the once revered Federal Bureau of Investigation employed pro-abortion groups’ and individuals’ utterly baseless lies to initiate federal probes of pro-life, Latin Mass Catholics in Virginia—including even Catholic priests.

In an op-ed on September 1, longtime pro-life leader Gary Bauer castigated the Biden FBI for its “Richmond Memo” that triggered the probes. He reported the following:

The Biden FBI actually spied [on] multiple Catholic priests. They pulled the credit card records, telephone records and flight records of Catholic priests. One priest was subjected to a “secondary” investigation at Boston Logan International Airport. After he left the airport, FBI agents followed him and then surveilled the home he went to... The FBI’s Richmond Field Office claimed these Catholic priests were recruiting violent domestic extremists among so-called “radical traditionalist Catholics.”

The agents who preposterously targeted Catholic priests and laity got positive job reviews and raises under Biden. But under President Trump they have been sacked.

Judge Defies Dobbs, Invents a ‘Right’

On August 13, a federal district court judge in Idaho declared there is a constitutional “right” to kill babies and therefore the state of Idaho may not protect all unborn babies. That completely contradicts and defies the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision of 2024, which holds there has never been any such “right”, and state governments may protect the little ones.

Fortunately, on September 3 the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals granted a temporary halt to that arbitrary and baseless edict while it considers Idaho’s appeal of it; so, Idaho can continue to protect its unborn infants and their mothers, for now.

Pro-life observers call the federal district court’s pro-abortion diktat an instance of judicial lawlessness. US Supreme Court rulings such as Dobbs are binding on the states. But pro-aborts and the Left overall do not let “trivialities” like mere Supreme Court precedents stand in their way. Pro-lifers hope the 9th Circuit Court will now affirm Dobbs and save babies.

California Anti-Life Laws

At 1,040 miles long and 560 miles wide at its widest point, California is the USA’s third-largest state. It has a whopping 180 abortion businesses, and the Democrat politicians who control the state and have made it an “abortion sanctuary” by law want to keep things that way. Governor Gavin Newsom cannot run for another term in office, but despite his “lame-duck” status he remains an abortion fanatic and continues to copper-fasten abortions ever more tightly into California law. On September 27 he signed 10 bills to do just that.

Take your pick, but probably the worst of these 10 new laws will force the student health centres at the University of California and California State University campuses to offer abortion drugs to students. Others will let non-physicians such as nurse practitioners abort babies.

Nevertheless, the many faithful pro-lifers who run pro-life centres, and pray and sidewalk counsel outside California’s abortion facilities continue to save many babies and help many mothers, squarely in the face of the state’s hostile abortion regime. Their quiet courage, perseverance and devotion are manifest proofs that the pro-life cause will never go away.

Cruz Defends Justice Thomas

On August 30, Senator Ted Cruz (Republican-Texas) told NBC’s Kristen Welker that leftwingers are bigoted toward US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He explained:

Well, I would say that there is a bitterness that is directed to Justice Thomas that is profoundly unfair. If you look at Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia was every bit as conservative as Justice Thomas, but yet Scalia didn’t have the scorn, the contempt, the derision. And the left, I think, has a real bigotry. They look at Clarence Thomas and they say, how dare a black man believe what he believes. And Clarence Thomas is someone who is not going to be told what to believe.

Cruz and Miss Welker were not discussing Justice Thomas’s pro-life convictions at that moment. But his right to life beliefs have always been a huge reason that pro-aborts have hated him. Justice Thomas, of course, voted yes in the Dobbs decision in 2022 that tossed Roe v Wade, and since 1991 he has always been an eloquent voice in defence of unborn babies.

Justice Alito Stays On

Like Clarence Thomas, Justice Samuel Alito is a resolute pro-life voice on the US Supreme Court. Pro-aborts wish he would retire, but he recently said he believes he is still a positive force on the Court and will stay on for another term before evaluating his future.

Justice Alito is 76 and has served on the Supreme Court since 2006. He authored the majority opinion in the Dobbs ruling, including these memorable words: “The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.” He also wrote that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences.” No wonder the pro-aborts want him off the Court.

‘Cold and Heartless… Household Waste’

“Diabolically cold and heartless” is pro-life scholar Mary Rice Hasson’s description, as quoted by pro-life columnist George Weigel, of instructions from a pro-abortion group on how to abort your baby after the 10-weeks age limit set by the Food and Drug Administration.

WARNING: Distressing content. The instructions are for mothers to abort their babies who are between 14 and 20 weeks in the womb. After advising, “keep using Misoprostol every 3 hours until you pass both the foetus and the placenta.” The group admits, “The foetus will be several inches long, and you may see a head, arms, and legs.” Then they offer this sickening, cold-blooded counsel:

“WHAT SHOULD I DO WITH THE CONTENTS THAT PASS? This depends on where you live and what you prefer. If everything is small enough to flush down the toilet, you may do that. If you are around 15-16 weeks or later, the pregnancy may be too big. To lower legal risk, you can wrap it in many layers of plastic and place it in the garbage with other household waste.”

Note that this pro-abortion group reduces the little baby girl or boy, made in the image and likeness of God and until now safe in the womb, to utterly dehumanising terms: “the contents”; “everything”; “the pregnancy”; “it”; and, worst of all, “household waste”.

This, and exactly this, is what people vote for when they vote for pro-abortion politicians. Your scribe has never had to use a “distressing content” warning in these pages until now, and he is doing so with a tear in his eye.

Death Penalty

The then-Army Medical Corps psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan, shouting “Allah is great” in Arabic, shot to death 13 people and wounded 32 more on November 5, 2009. He was due to deploy to Afghanistan on November 28 and said he wanted to stop US soldiers from killing Muslims there.

In 2013 an Army jury sentenced him to death for premeditated murder and attempted premeditated murder. The Pentagon announced in early October of this year that the death penalty would be carried out on December 3, by a standard military firing squad—and that they would livestream the execution.

That plan, as we know, has provoked such worldwide outrage that, at last report, the livestreaming might not happen. Vice President JD Vance has said he will not watch the execution and he is not sure the livestreaming will take place. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (Louisiana) warned that the live execution would become a recruiting tool for future terrorists. President Trump has said he is still deliberating about the livestreaming.

Archbishop Timothy Broglio, head of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA, announced on October 12 that: “I oblige any Catholics assigned to ⁠the firing squad to request to be excused from this action contrary to the teaching of the Church.”

Archbishop Paul Coakley, head of the US bishops, has said, “In no way can Hasan’s actions be condoned, but this decision is a barbaric promotion of a culture of death and must be reconsidered.” He added that a public execution “will only further undermine the moral fabric of our nation and be a blight on the conscience of its people.”

As we go to press, President Trump decided to cancel the public execution of Hasan.

RIP Charlie Kirk, One Year On

Thursday, September 10, was the first anniversary of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the pro-life and conservative hero whose incisive yet gentle cultural and political commentary and charismatic demeanor converted hundreds of thousands of young Americans to his causes.

Mr Kirk’s widow Erika, mother of two, has written, “Still, I can stand and say without a shadow of a doubt that God is good.” She wrote of her husband’s intent and ability to bring people to faith: “My husband was one of one. I was blessed to be his wife, and I understood his assignment here on Earth, which he more than fulfilled…”

In August, at the start of the 2026-2027 school year, Mrs Kirk asked Charlie’s student followers, by far most of them pro-life, to continue his mission of holding discussions on their campuses. She urged them to never let opponents intimidate them:

[Charlie] deliberately went into places where there was disagreement and invited people who saw the world differently to talk to him… Your [literature] table might get flipped Someone might call you every name imaginable… What are you going to do about it?... Are you going to decide it is easier to keep your head down and get through the semester? No. You keep going.

Erika Kirk clearly is a woman of great courage and determination. As her late spouse Charlie said, “Never give up. Never surrender. And always go for the win.”

Pro-life leaders agree that this is valuable advice for all pro-lifers as well.

March for Life 2027

The 54th annual National March for Life will take place on Friday, January 22, 2027, on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Every year, as many as 100,000 pro-lifers assemble from near and far for a rally and then a march along DC’s historic streets. The purpose is to give prayerful public witness to the humanity of preborn babies and to remind politicians and the news media, the legal profession and academia that the pro-life cause is alive and well.

This year’s theme is, “The Truth is Pro-Life.” The organisers explain, “Come January, we’re inviting the world to take a clear look at the facts surrounding abortion and what they reveal about LIFE.” The march always welcomes visitors from overseas (hint, hint).

Walk for Life West Coast 2027

The 23rd Annual Walk for Life West Coast will be on Saturday, January 23, 2027. Each year, tens of thousands of pro-lifers from around California and beyond gather in downtown San Francisco for a rally at Civic Center Plaza and then a march along Market Street. The city’s police are friendly toward the march and always provide excellent security.

The perennial themes of the Walk are that “Abortion Harms Women” and that “Women Deserve Better than Abortion.”

OneLife LA 2027

The 13th annual OneLife Los Angeles is set for Saturday, January 23, 2027. Pro-lifers from around Southern California will gather downtown at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, hold a pro-life programme nearby and conduct a pro-life walk. Later in the afternoon, there will be a Mass for unborn babies. The event focuses on protecting vulnerable people of all ages.

The Archdiocese of Los Angeles, which sponsors the event, says, “The mission of OneLife LA is to unite communities and inspire positive action through an annual event that promotes the beauty and dignity of every human life from conception to natural death.”

More pro-life news from America for you next time. God bless – Brendan

The New UK Prime Minister is a Catholic?

The arrival of Andy Burnham to Number 10 Downing Street may well be welcomed by Christians, especially Catholics. The religious education in his school days have made him value his Christian faith in politics as well as in his personal life.

The social teaching of the Church was foremost in his aims as various government posts and as mayor of Manchester. This has allowed him to work with other churches to deliver change in housing, food security, and children and youth support.

On individual moral questions like assisted suicide, gay unions, abortion and women priests he remains silent, no doubt recalling former Labour leaders who took a strong line, much to their loss. Apparently, Burnham is not a Sunday Mass Catholic, even though he comes from a family of strong practice, and still professes the Catholic Faith. It would seem that his faith is of the liberal genre, focused on how Christians should care for the poor rather than their own religious life.

On the issue of assisted suicide, again introduced in the House of Commons, Burnham insisted that before the legislation is voted on, the “funding of palliative care and social care” should be properly fixed. At the same time, he has decided to abstain when the Bill comes up for the crucial vote. Assisted suicide is a hot potato, without doubt, but is hiding under the table the way to express your faith?

Like any professional politician, Burnham is an expert of deflecting risky questions in public. His own Catholic faith is one subject that could wreck his political ambitions in a few days, and he is reticent on particular questions. On one hand he told the Pink News in 2015, “I have been repeatedly at odds with the Catholic Church for all of my time as an MP.” On the other hand, he stated in a lecture, ”I’ve always traced my politics back, back to that [Catholic] upbringing.”

Addendum: Another problem facing Burnham is the failings of maternity care in the NHS. Maternal deaths or the mortality rate for women who die during or soon after pregnancy in the UK are now the highest per head in Europe at 12.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2023, compared with 10.6 in 2009. Baroness Amos, who chaired the National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation, says the failings are far worse than anticipated. A staggering 748 recommendations for improvement have been made in the past ten years after the catastrophic scandals at East Kent, Shrewsbury and Morecambe Bay were uncovered, yet the service is still deteriorating. Highlighting systemic failings, Baroness Amos warned of poor ward hygiene, women going without meals, bleeding out in bathrooms, a dismissive, misogynist culture and lack of compassion among clinical teams, with midwives stretched to exhaustion.

Assisted Suicide voted down in England and Scotland

Good news! On September 11, the Commons votes 286 to 270 against the bill, Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, after dozens of Labour MPs who previously backed it stayed away. Lauren Edwards MP had promised to re-introduce the bill, and see it becoming law. Whatever the supporters of PAS may say, this second collapse of the Bill should end such efforts for many years. In March this year, the Scottish Parliament in Hollyrood voted down an assisted dying bill for the third time, 69 votes against, 57 in favour.

I have read the comments about the Westminster vote with growing amazement. Most are from advocates of AS, and celebrated “self-determination” as if it’s all that matters. I have a pain, which won't go away, so pull the string that opens the pentobarbital capsule, which flows into your bloodstream. How simple-minded! Those who oppose assisted suicide, and suicide itself, are written off as “busy bodies” and “religious lunatics”. Is the meaning of human life reduced to a mere “my life, my choice”?

Let's leave aside religious belief and moral ethics. Legalising assisted suicide opens the door to more than individual choice. As the cost of the health service rises year by year, so does the number of older people, while the birthrate falls. Who is going pay the medical bills in the near future? Should governments and health insurance agencies encourage assisted suicide? Seemingly, the answer in Canada is Yes, since it is the only solution.

We euthanise our much-loved pets when they become old, sick and in pain? Does human dignity make us radically different from animals? If not, then anything goes in the therapeutic society.

Lastly, how can we be certain, when we ourselves chop and change on major issues? When faced with sickness of body and mind, how can anyone be sure? Unlike other life choices, in this case there's no turning back when you pull the string.

Vatican Says ‘No’ to Lay Preachers at Mass

The official decision of two dicasteries arose from a request of the German bishops to permit laymen and women to preach the homily during the celebration of the Eucharist. The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, and the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments joined together to reject the request. Not unexpectedly, the resulting criticism complained that the decision ignores a growing pastoral need in Germany and neglects the gifts of lay people in the Church.

Without doubt, there are many lay people who are well qualified in theology and other sciences, and are able to teach, catechise and give courses on Scripture and theology. The Second Vatican Council emphasised the gifts of the laity to teach by reason of the sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation. (Lumen Gentium, §§ 31-38) Without doubt, the shortage of priests and the clustering of parishes have led to problems for the clergy, and raises the question why the Vatican turned down this seemingly reasonable request.

The main question is “What is the homily?” rather than “Who is capable of preaching it?” Reserving the homily to bishops, priests and deacons is not just a matter of rules but follows from the nature of the Eucharist and the liturgy.

The Church possesses authority over the Liturgy, not because She owns it but rather since she is the faithful steward and not an owner free to change it. The worship of God as performed by Christ in his life on earth is the source of the Church’s worship of God.

Theological competence and skill in speaking are not primary considerations. Conducting the eucharistic liturgy is not a classroom action or a lecture in a college, but is the sacramental teaching of Christ in the Scriptures and the ritual actions. What is at stake is the sacrament of Holy Orders, which empowers a priest to perform the Eucharist, during which he breaks “the bread of the Word”, by explaining and applying the Scripture readings of the day. St Justin Martyr writes of the homily in his description of the Sunday Eucharist in the First Apology, § 67, as performed by the bishop or priest.

Are the German Bishops Intent on Apostasy?

The German Bishops’ Conference, firmly in the grasp of the country’s theologians, has shown no indication of abandoning its “differential” attitude to Church teaching, or of what to teach in Catholic schools and colleges. Since Pope Francis clashed with the bishops’ Synodal Path and its doctrinal deviance, pastoral novelties and a wish “to be Catholic in a different way”, the German church has given up trying to attract the support of other churches.

When Pope John Paul II published his encyclical, Veritatis Splendor, in 1993, the German bishops and theologians understood that his purpose was to correct the German Church for its aberrations, and in this they were largely correct. The encyclical was occasioned by “an overall and systematic calling into question traditional moral doctrine” as well as by “detaching human freedom from its essential and constitutive relationship to truth”, leaving each individual justified in making his own decisions and life choices (§ 4).

Within a year, a collection of articles, critical of the encyclical, was published in Germany, because, as its editor explained, her theologians had a duty to police the Church’s theology, and, in this case, disagree with the Pope. Maybe, German theologians must be smarter than a Pole.

There’s been little improvement since 1993; rather German resistance to orthodoxy has got worse. Clearly, the settled truths of Catholic faith are just one option on the menu of choices. What began with contraception, moved on to homosexuality, and more recently to the transgender ideology. In October last year, the German Bishops’ Conference published a report by its Commission on Schools and Education, with the title, Created, Redeemed, and Loved: Visibility and Recognition of the Diversity of Sexual Identities in Schools.

“Diversity” means more than male and female, and is an open door to the imagined “identities” of the LGBTQ+ campaigners. A Catholic broadcaster claimed that “teachers… should foster a classroom climate in which children and young people feel seen and taken seriously as they explore their sexual orientation and gender identity.” The purpose is to allow students to form their own reasoning and judgement. What is this so-called education, if it is not a do-it-yourself morality?

Addendum: Women priests? No, not even deacons. The Study Commission on the Female Diaconate, set up by Pope Francis, made clear that “historical research” and theological investigation exclude the possibility of women deacons. The Commission was comprised of two priest theologians, two deacons and five women scholars, and gave a clear negative reply to the issue. It was not the job of the Commission to define doctrine, which belongs to the bishops and the pope.

As for the need of further study, this was reserved for the nature of the “deacons” of St Paul, one of which was the “deacon/servant” Phoebe in Romans 16, 1-2. Without doubt, women had various official duties in the Early Church, as these two verses show, but there is no evidence that women were ever ordained to assist the bishop/priest at the Eucharist. Their role was to assist at the baptismal ceremony of naked women where men’s assistance was deemed immodest. Now that baptismal waters are confined to the head, this assistance is no longer needed.

The American Women’s Ordination Conference, founded in 1975 to have women bishops, priests and deacons, was angry and abusive, as expected. If women expected the harassed Pope Paul VI to open the door, Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI made no secret that the Church, not only wouldn’t but couldn’t ordain women. Don’t forget that it was the “liberal” Pope Francis who appointed the above commission.

Even in a Catastrophe, Information is Tightly Controlled

You remember August 26 when an avalanche of ice and rock on a mountain of over 17,000 feet high triggered a deadly flash flood and mud slide, sweeping away Gyirong Port, a much used border crossing post between Tibet and Nepal. Since the catastrophe, at least 1455 people are confirmed to have been killed, and over 5,000 people are missing, presumed to be dead. The China Communist Party (CCP) decided that just 20 people lost their lives on the Tibetan side of the mudslide at Gyirong Port, in contrast to the confirmed deaths of more than 1,000 on the Nepal side. It also stated that there were 600 “missing” while number of “missing” in Nepal is well over 5,000.

Exactly why the CCP should state these obviously false numbers is hard to understand. Maybe, China’s precarious hold over the Tibet Autonomous Region was the reason for downsizing the extent of death and destruction. However, under Chinese law, contradicting an official statement like the number of deaths can lead to a citizen’s prosecution for spreading “false information” and merit a prison sentence. This example, so unexpected, shows how the Chinese regime controls what information its citizens receive and what it conceals. Under this heading, a major issue is the freedom of religion.

According to Aid to the Church in Need, serious violations of this freedom happened in 62 countries across the world in 2025. In 24 of these, believers experienced open and violent persecution; in 38, religious belief was subject to various forms of discrimination. Some 5.4 billion people live in a society where professing a religion leaves them subject to discrimination, violence and even death.

The People’s Republic of China treats religious belief as a “social disorder” and a source of “social subversion” to be eradicated, even though some religions are “authorised”, that is controlled and barely tolerated by the regime.

In certain Islamic states, where religion is fused with political power, those of a different religion are considered “heretical” by the Muslim majority and suffer constant discrimination, no matter how hard their members attempt to conform with the laws and social standards.

Indirect Persecution

A third kind of persecution is more indirect, and has occurred in so-called democratic states. Often a new religion with odd practices is stigmatised by the media, and harassed by the government and accused of evil behaviour, which almost always are found to be without substance.

One such is the Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light, an offshoot of Shia Islam in 2015. Its members are accused of slavery, sexual offences and forced marriages. In Pakistan, the Ahmadis face dangerous violence from fanatical Muslim groups; since 2024, three members were murdered by “unknown assassins” while the police and authorities made promises to punish the criminals but achieved nothing. In the UK, about 500 police raided the headquarters of the much-travelled Ahmadi sect near Crewe, Cheshire last April, making several arrests on wild allegations.

In Japan, the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, known as the Moonies, has suffered a prolonged campaign of legal harassment, known as “lawfare”, and this year a Tokyo court ordered the dissolution of a religious organisation of the Family Federation. In neighbouring South Korea, the wife of the deceased Reverend Moon, the founder of the Moonies, was arrested in 2025 and sentenced to two years in prison.

These are just two cases where accusations too easily become the proof of crime, even though these countries are proud of their human rights record, in particular freedom of religion.

The media today are happy to support the majority views, with the blessing of the government and their own commercial profit, and are unwilling to go against the current. A much older problem is the inherited suspicion of religion in the Age of Enlightenment, assuming that religious persons are irrational and willing to believe anything. Unfortunately, the above two churches lend support to this view.

You may be correct to point out that these “churches” hold crazy doctrines, but keep in mind: bending the law to suppress them today may be used tomorrow to clap you into jail.

Another Addition to the Generation of Mexican Martyrs

On September 15 this year, Father Román de la Cruz Hernández, 48, was murdered, and his bullet-riddled body was left on the roadside near his parish of Santa Cruz, Huejutla, Hildalgo, Mexico.

Since 1990, the number of priests murdered is more than 60, according to the Catholic Multimedia Center. Added to this number are murdered members of religious orders, seminarians and lay apostles. The Catholic church in Mexico is looted and profaned on a weekly basis, and Catholics are routinely subject to death threats and extortion from criminal gangs. These figures exist despite the fact that 78 percent of Mexicans self-identify as Catholic.

Mexico ranks at the top of the Latin American states in the number of thefts of sacred art and crimes of arson and vandalism on churches and religious buildings as well as priests and religious murdered.

The Cristero Rebellion of 1926

What are the reasons for this litany of anti-Catholic horror? Outstanding is the longstanding aggressive secularism among the upper classes of Mexican society. After gaining independence from Spain in the early 19th century, the Church’s traditional power and privilege became the target of the anti-clericals who were inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution and Freemasonry. They believed the Church and her priests were obstacles to progress, and enacted a series of laws to confiscate church property and persecute priests and religious, as in the 1917 Constitution.

In 1924, Plutarco Elías Calles became president, and launched a set of new laws against the Church, fining priests for wearing a clerical outfit in public, preaching about the government or teaching in a school. The 28 bishops of Mexico responded by closing all 12,000 churches in the country, an action which added to the popular fury against the government.

By 1926, a state of guerilla war existed between Catholic militias and the state’s military forces. These rebels were known as the Cristeros for their battle cry, Viva Cristo Rey! Pope Pius XI wrote an encyclical in 1926 where he claimed that priests are treated as “criminals and the insane”. He called Calles’ laws “illegal, unjust and inhuman”. One result of this war was a generation of martyrs, priest and lay, executed by the state for their faith, even though many were not armed and fighting.

After three years of warfare, in which an estimated 90,000 people were killed and many more left the country for good, the clergy and the political leaders reached an agreement, restoring the Church’s legal freedom and the rights of the clergy as well as the return of the churches and property confiscated. In return the Cristeros ceased their attacks in June 1929.

Sadly, the welcomed peace was not permanent and the state’s persecution continued, and the Cristeros returned to target teachers who supported the anti-Catholic government. A new system of secular and socialist education, designed to “liberate” children from religious belief, led to teachers to be seen as the instrument of persecution of the Church. Sporadic and sometimes brutal violence was waged against teachers, which included “de-earing” them.

After 1940, President Lazaro Cardenas became less anti-Catholic than his predecessor, eventually cancelling much of the socialist agenda that had caused this popular uprising against the government. Since then, the political leaders have become respectful of the large Catholic vote, and support the family and the Church.

Today, the serious problems for Mexico are the brazen activities of the organised criminal syndicates, widespread corruption and the ingrained violation of human rights. At least six states carry a “do not travel” warning from US agencies.

Addendum: The fifth centenary of the Guadalupan event will be celebrated by the Church in Mexico in 2031. Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared to Saint Juan Diego several times in December 1531 at the foot of the Tepeyac Hill, near Mexico city. Today, the Guadalupe Basilica marks the site and the miraculous image of Our Lady on the tilma or cloak of Juan Diego.

The Church of England’s Dubious Future?

After the new Archbishop of Canterbury’s scandalous award to a well-known supporter of Bin Laden, the author of the 9/11 terrorism, many Anglicans are asking if there is any future for the Church of England? For five centuries, the English state church has permitted a coalition of various reforms to co-exist, from the strict low-church Puritans to the sacramental Anglo-Catholics. Compared to the Roman Catholic’s universal and single version of Christianity, it was an experiment which praised tolerance and generosity but led to today’s incoherence and contradiction.

It was also a church where the final authority was political, not religious, namely the monarch and the Westminster Parliament. This became obvious in 1928 when Parliament twice rejected a revised version of the Book of Common Prayer. The 1930 Lambeth Conference was far more significant; Resolution 15 decided that artificial contraception was permitted, thereby separating sexual reproduction from sexual recreation, and opening the door to today’s unrestrained sexual hedonism.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the non-believing theologians emerged, questioning the existence of Christ as the Son of God in the book, The Myth of God Incarnate in 1977. Another radical theologian was Don Cupitt, a one-time CoE clergyman who ended up reducing the Church’s traditional doctrine to “empty radical humanism” in two books, The Sea of Faith and Taking Leave of God. “Everything is non-real including God.” Non-theism replaced belief, retained as an encouragement of ethical living. The Creed was optional.

The early years of this century were the occasion of the CoE’s acceptance of an incoherent sexual ethic under the leadership of a majority, embracing the ideologies of feminism and the LGBT+. If Christians cannot agree on what God is or even if he exists, there is agreement on “nice” behaviour to others, a “feel-good happiness” and a confidence that everyone goes to heaven (?), all of which is a long way from the teaching of Jesus.

So, it should not be a surprise that the new leader of the CoE is Dame Susan Mullally who accepts abortion and same-sex unions, and who awarded in person the Pakistani Imam Hafiz Ashrafi for “outstanding work for interfaith reconciliation” on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks which killed close to 3,000 people. He also has praised polygamy, called jihadis terrorists “freedom fighters” and wants the UN to make it illegal to criticise Islam. A week later, the award was withdrawn after the revelation that in 2007 Ashrafi gave Bin Laden the honorific title of “Sword of Islam for serving Muslims by waging jihad against infidels.”

The Plague of Pornography Destroys True Love

Pornography is turning sex into an extreme sport, and it’s not just children who are being damaged. Most of my generation seems to accept that pornography is a triumph of free speech, and only evangelical weirdos could object to it, like the joyless Mary Whitehouse. But the simple but apparently unsayable fact is this: pornography is bad. And not just for kids. For everyone. And it has eaten the world.

But to say you don’t enjoy pornography is seen as an admission that you don’t like sex, which I didn’t understand then and still don’t.

Even aside from the normalisation of “rough sex” (a euphemism for degrading and dangerous sex), the fact that more than a quarter of children in this country have looked at online pornography by the age of 11. The ubiquity of pornography has made it impossible to date. No—and again—not just for kids. For everyone.

I am too much of a realist to believe pornography can be banned. But it should not be shruggingly accepted as a part of life. It should be seen for what it is: a psychological and social menace, as addictive as narcotics, as damaging as cigarettes, as destructive as pollution.

The people who pose for them, the “porn stars”, are deeply damaged. The ceaseless supply of blank-eyed young women who insist they find it “empowering” is the ridiculous propaganda of the porn industry.

The basic objection to pornography is that it is a major distortion of human sexuality from being an act between two loving persons into an aroused imagination, fed by watching pornography. And, of course, the Internet. Pornography doesn’t satisfy, it creates a bodily desire for more. Hence the emergence of “rough sex” and ludicrous stunts, as shown on Britain’s Channel Four.

It should be no surprise to learn that pornography leads to separate lives and divorce. Sex is no longer connecting, to the detriment of all. Pornography is a psychological and social menace, as evil as narcotics and pollution.

But the graphic online images of sex are rewiring teenagers’ brains. Options on mainstream porn sites include words like incest, attack, kidnap and destroy. In 2022, the majority of reported sex crimes against children were committed, not by adults but by other children, including 6,813 rapes. Teens, half of whom have accessed porn by the age of 13, now see violence, choking and anal sex as a template for their sexual behaviour.

Porn is more of a problem than many realise. It’s embedded in daily life, seen as a right, like consuming chocolate. Porn culture is so normalised, it’s barely noticed.

Just how much has changed? Thanks to the Sexual Revolution and the unfettered use of Internet, pornography is cool. Why is porn cool? The TV drama Adolescence explored the destructive impact of social media on teenage relationships.

How can this problem be resolved?

First, parents need to supervise access to the Internet in the home. Children shouldn’t be given smartphones until they are 16. Their computer use needs to be monitored. They should be told porn is a drug and it reduces hunger for real relationships.

Adults are asked to pledge not to watch porn again and recommit to this every day. They should choose goals such as stronger relationships, more energy, improved self-control, focus and clarity and a better sex life.

Addendum: The British police want prostitutes called “sexual entrepreneurs”.

The Church’s True Welcome to Sinners

There was plenty of talk about the Church’s lack of “welcome” to certain groups of people, Catholic or otherwise, generated by the Synod on Synodality. Allow me to quote Pope Francis’ message on a Trinity Sunday:

“Do we welcome them as brothers and sisters? Do we offer everyone the food of God’s forgiveness and Gospel joy? Does one breathe the air of home, or do we resemble more closely an office or a reserved place where only the elect can enter?”

To my mind this suggests a very strange and foreign church, which didn’t exist in the Fifties when I was growing up. When I was ten years old in 1945, I remember the photo of what British soldiers found when they entered the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in the closing days of the Second World War. It showed a pile of emaciated corpses, with dead eyes and open mouths, and totally naked. This ghastly photo showed the unfortunates who had lost not just their lives but their dignity as persons. They were just unwanted garbage to be dumped in a hole in the ground.

Later I read the autobiography of Rudolf Höss, for over three years the Nazi Commandant of the notorious Auschwitz extermination camp in Poland. I learnt that he organised the deaths of some 2,500,000 people—by cold and starvation, disease, slave labour, physical torture, and, above all, by the Zyklon B poisonous gas. The victims of this Nazi “cleansing” were Russian and Polish prisoners of war, Roma gypsies, criminals and political dissenters, and most of all, Jews of all ages.

Höss disappeared when Germany surrendered in May 1945 but was tracked down in 1946. He was tried before a Polish court and sentenced to death in April 1947. Shortly before execution, Höss returned to the Faith of his childhood, and made a last confession to a Jesuit priest who also gave him Holy Communion with the Last Rites.

If that isn’t the face of a welcoming church, then what is? It is hard to think of a more evil man than Rudolf Höss who organized the mass killing of men, women and children. Where else would he have been more hated than in Poland, which suffered so monstrously from Nazi brutality. Yet the Catholic Church in Poland offered this mass murderer an open door to “the food of God’s forgiveness” before he died.

What seems to be forgotten today is Höss’ confession. The priest would have asked him if he had true sorrow for his actions, did he regret them and renounce the Nazi ideology that justified him in Auschwitz. Had Höss replied that he still support the extermination of the Jews, he would not have received absolution from the Church. Today, if someone confesses that he is in a marital union, contrary to Church teaching, he must be sincere in his desire to amend his life. Otherwise he is rejecting the Church’s teaching on marriage. Confession is not just about the past but also the future. True sorrow comes with a firm “purpose of amendment” and a pledge to “avoid the occasions of sin”.

Near and Far

* In Italy, couples with children will be outnumbered by couples with no children within 21 years. Istat, the Italian statistics company, warned that the Italian population will drop from 58.9 million in 2025 to 45.8 million in 2080, and over 65s will be 36.8 percent of the population… unless people change, although there are few signs of that happening.

* The Two Law Books of Soviet “Justice”. The advent of Bolshevik rule in Russia introduced a dual system of justice. The civil law about regular crimes and ordinary criminals continued, even as an alternative system dealt with the political deviants. Their opposition to the Workers’ Paradise dehumanised them in the government’s view, and needed a specialised remedy in the form of the GULAG.

Lenin set up his first concentration camp in 1918, and made CHEKA the state’s instrument to crush treason and expand the camps. This secret police unit operated independently of the ordinary laws, and was answerable to Lenin alone. What started as CHEKA, became GRU, OCPU, NKVD, KGB and the current FSB of Putin. Stalin used the NKVD to remove the “wreckers and saboteurs” of his rapid industrialisation of Russia. The phrase “enemy of the people” was a sentence of death during the Great Terror/Great Purge from 1936 to 1939.

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The Importance of Standing Orders

Is a standing order a possible gift for you? The amount of your monthly gift to save babies is entirely up to you, and it’s for you to decide if it is to be monthly or every two months, and you may cancel it at any time. Even a small monthly amount is more valuable than you might think. That’s because Standing Orders help us to plan with certainty, and maintain our most vital baby saving activities, year in year out.

A number of your fellow Family & Life supporters already have monthly Standing Orders for €20, €25, €50 and €100. Others, whose material blessings allow, have pledged regular gifts of €150 and €250. Unlike our opponents we don’t have a millionaire benefactor to bankroll our work, and still less generous government grants. We do, however, have you! And for that we are eternally thankful because without your prayers and financial sacrifices, Family & Life would have closed its doors long ago.

Requiem in Aeternum

We pray for the following friends and supporters of Family & Life who have died recently: William Trubuil, Francis Hendrick, Fr Cahal Price, Padraig McCarthy, Pat Flanagan, Gerard O’Reilly, Barbara Stitt, Michael McGrath, Liam Slattery, Teddy Turbett, Harry Kelly, Seamus Kenna and Peter Browne.

Every month Fr O’Boyle offers the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass for the intentions of our supporters and the repose of the souls of our deceased donors as well as the members of the Eternal Friends Society.

Please remember them in your prayers. God bless you and yours,

Contributors: Brendan Gleason and David Manly

PS Have you ever been bitten by a cat or a dog? Did you know a kittycat can bite you with 80 to 100 pounds per square inch (PSI) of force? Or that even a Golden Retriever can chomp you with 190 PSI?

Now try to imagine an African wild dog (310 PSI), a lion (650 PSI), a bear (1,000 PSI) or a tiger (1,050 PSI) tearing into you. Those beasts hungrily awaited the early Christians in the Colosseum in Rome. What courage those first believers showed!

But the bravest of the brave had to be St Ignatius of Antioch, who was actually eager to die in the Colosseum. While being marched there from Asia Minor as a prisoner, he wrote to the believers in Rome, “Let me be fodder for wild beasts. That is how I can get to God. I am God’s wheat, and I am being ground by the teeth of wild beasts to make a pure loaf for Christ.”

The astounding true story of a super-saint

It’s been said that no other writer of the early Church has shown “such passion, such blazing intensity, such an ardent thirst for God as St Ignatius, travelling in chains… toward the Colosseum.” Now a unique book by theologian and EWTN TV personality Professor Regis Martin illuminates for us the Saint’s life and the inspired letters he wrote to his fellow Christians from captivity.

It’s March to Martyrdom: Seven Letters on Sanctity from St Ignatius of Antioch, from Sophia Institute Press. His story astounds us: he actually urged the faithful not to try to rescue him. In his day a Christian had to have “a level of spiritual heroism far beyond the reach of most”, says Professor Martin. Because our times, like the Saint’s, might “appear bleak and challenging”, he says we can learn much from him about being braver Christians aflame with love of Christ.

The Saint’s death warrant was signed personally by the ruthless Emperor Trajan. Knowing well the horror that awaited him, the condemned man trudged hundreds of miles through towns that Sts Paul and Barnabas had evangelised half a century before.

“May nothing seen or unseen begrudge me making my way to Jesus Christ”, the holy bishop insisted. “Come fire, cross, battling with wild beasts, wrenching of bones, mangling of limbs, crushing of my whole body, cruel tortures of the devil—only let me get to Jesus Christ!”

“It was the love of Christ, the Person of the Man-God”, says Professor Martin, “Who had come to possess his very soul that moved him to make his final gesture of complete self-giving.” The faith of St Ignatius, he contends, was light years away from that of Christians today who “prefer a soft Christianity where distracting pleasures shift from Calvary to this passing world”, and who live in a “comfort zone we’ve constructed to keep out God.”

Soul-saving wisdom from a heroic martyr

Professor Martin begins by situating the Saint among the Apostles and other towering figures from whom he learned the Faith. Because the early Church’s doctrines and practices were often disputed, his letters forcefully instructed the faithful on such issues as the “absolute centrality” of Christ, the authority and duties of a bishop, the supernatural reality of the Church, the stupendous reality of the Incarnation, Mary’s virginity and maternity and the power of humility against evil.

A golden thread running through these epistles is the “sense of solidarity, both profound and heartfelt”, shown by the faithful who “at no little risk to themselves” visited him during his long journey, to comfort him or to receive counsel from him. He exhorted them repeatedly to remain loyal to Our Lord via perfect union with their bishops and priests, “as to the apostles of Jesus Christ”.

Ignatius was a saint, Professor Martin observes, “Only he did not know it, which is a sign of his sanctity.” The holy man wrote that he needed “to be on my guard and not heed flatterers”, and that he didn’t know whether he deserved martyrdom. “What I need is gentleness by which the prince of this world is overthrown.”

In his letters, though, the Saint was decidedly ungentle in denouncing heretics and schismatics, whom he called “mad dogs”. Heresy, which Professor Martin deems a greater danger to the Church than even “the most brutal of imperial persecutions”, was to the holy bishop “a deadly poison mixed with honey and wine”. “Be deaf”, he warned Christians, “to any talk that ignores” bedrock doctrines, a list of which he provided as if he foresaw the Nicene Creed.

The secret of his holiness: do you possess it?

For St Ignatius, to be martyred would prove he was a “real disciple” of Christ. And yet, said theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, persecution is “the normal condition of the Church in her relation to the world, and martyrdom is the normal condition of the professed Christian.”

That’s why Vatican II, in Lumen Gentium, teaches us that “The Church… considers martyrdom as an exceptional gift and as the highest proof of love”, and that “all must be prepared to confess Christ before men and follow him along the way of the cross through the persecutions which the Church will never fail to suffer.”

St Ignatius of Antioch’s life and death “transformed the world and the Church”. The secret of his power was a love for His Saviour so incandescent that almost two millennia later it still dazzles us.

That love also challenges us: do we possess even a fraction of it? How much are we willing to suffer and sacrifice for Our Crucified Lord? As the persecution of Christians intensifies worldwide, including in our own land, we must ask ourselves: what will we do if it comes for us?

Professor Martin’s book can help us. In 136 beautifully-written pages, he guides the reader through the bishop’s noble letters, revealing depths of meaning that will enkindle courageous resolves in our souls. St Ignatius of Antioch, help us to endure martyrdoms large and small!

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