Friday, November 1

All Saints, All Souls, All Fetuses

But Jesus said to them, “Suffer the little children, and forbid them not to come to me; for the kingdom of heaven is for such.”   [Gospel of Matthew, 19:14]
 
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Friday, November 1, is the Feast of All Saints, and Saturday, November 2, is the Feast of All Souls. These days of remembrance and prayer open the solemn month when fall is ending and winter is beginning. Each November, Catholics pray especially for the dead. “Our beloved dead” is a familiar phrase, heard often at this time, and the adjective in it is comforting:  We remember the people that we love and who love us.

But there are more categories of dead than this. What about the neglected dead, the marginal dead, the forgotten dead? Who prays for them? The Archdiocese of San Francisco has an annual Requiem Mass for the Homeless Deceased. On November 23, at Church of the Visitation in San Francisco, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone will say a Mass for the souls of the chronically homeless who have died. All are welcome to attend, and information is here.

And then there are the unrecognized dead, the unacknowledged dead, the dead whose humanity has been officially suppressed and willfully unrecognized, even in our law. Those are the dead, the millions of tiny dead, who are at the center of this strange judicial proceeding.

Although they are central, they are silent. They are pivotal, but tacit. We tiptoe around them, just as we might around a sleeping baby that we don’t wish to rouse. This proceeding is not, in fact, about them; and that is where the strangeness of it can be felt. One feels it in the deep contradiction that lies at the heart – if we can call it a heart -- of the industry that has brought this lawsuit. It’s an industry in which “human tissue” has value, but human life has none. The product of this industry is “fetal demise,” and one of its byproducts is “human tissue.” Thus, the fetuses are essential to the business, and yet they are declared to be negligible, to be nothing in themselves.

The contradiction, of course, is that the purveyors and processors of “fetal demise” deny their subjects the categorical protection that each of us enjoys by virtue of his or her human identity; yet it is only the fact of the fetus’s human identity, deny it though you might, that gives his or her bodily remains their market value as sought-after “human tissue” after the baby's death.

For these young souls and bodies, insult is added to injury. To the injury of abortion is added the insult of harvesting. Who prays for them, the dead who are harvested and marketed?

The avidity of the processors of these tissues, and the profits realizable by transfers of fetal remains, can only be suggested in this trial, generally in the brief snippets of undercover video that the defense is permitted to show. As the Court has consistently reminded the jurors and the counselors, these things are not on trial here. Indeed, as we all know, abortion is legal, and “tissue donation” is legal, and the payment of a fee for such donation is legal; and this case is explicitly not about such profound matters as human life and human death.

It is in essence a business dispute:  The plaintiff abortion-providers are suing the defendant abortion-investigators for interfering illegitimately in their professional endeavors by breaching contracts, breaking agreements, conspiring to damage their commercial enterprises, and causing them actual costs and damages for which they should be compensated.

Today’s session, Friday, November 1, was spent in hearing witnesses for the plaintiff, Planned Parenthood. The witnesses described in detail the security procedures that the abortion professionals provide for the national and regional conferences which they hold in hotel ballrooms and convention centers. The witnesses painted word-pictures of the atmosphere of insecurity and fear in which, they say, abortion providers must live and work, and they provided “data” to support this claim. The final witness of the day tried to associate David Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress with this miasma by describing the fearfulness of a doctor with whom Daleiden had conversed on his hidden camera during his visit to the Planned Parenthood Rocky Mountain clinic.

To this layman sitting in the gallery, it seemed clear that the attorneys for the defense, in their cross-examinations, effectively rebutted these presentations:  they vitiated the word paintings, invalidated the proffered data, and detached the defendants from association with violence of any kind.

Readers who want to dive deep into detail can check the website of Life Legal Defense Foundation next week, when full transcripts of Friday’s proceedings are likely to be published.

For a two-minute summary on videotape of what was seen in court today, you can see two defendants in the case, Troy Newman, founder of Operation Rescue, and Sandra Merritt, one of the undercover operatives of Center for Medical Progress, talking with Joe Scheidler, founder of Pro Life Action and “the godfather of the prolife movement”, on the sidewalk outside the Federal courthouse just after adjournment. The videotape is on Prolife Action’s Facebook page

The court reconvenes on Monday, November 4, and is scheduled to be in session every day through Friday, November 8. We will learn next week if the trial will extend beyond the days currently calendared.

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Prayer for Aborted Babies

Heavenly Father, you have given us the gift of freedom to love and to follow in your ways and commands. Please forgive those who destroy human life by aborting their unborn babies. Give these unborn children the opportunity to enjoy you for all eternity, if it be according to your ordinance. Assist me in being one in solidarity with your little ones by taking to heart the words of your Son, "Whatever you did for one of these least brothers of Mine, you did for Me." (Mt. 25:40).  Therefore, allow me today, Father, to adopt spiritually an unborn child, and to offer my prayers, works, joys, and sufferings for that little one, so that child will be able to be born and live for your greater honor and glory. We pray this in Jesus' name, in union with the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever.    Amen.

[excerpted from Catholic Online, www.catholic.org ]

                       --- by J. A. Gray, correspondent