LIZ Ceballos-Yale pointed out that Piers Morgan is British and not Canadian. Thanks Liz; my apologies to Canadians. I thought all handsome anchors are smart and Canadian like Peter Jennings.
However, since Piers Morgan is British, I find his reaction to Pope Francis’ reasonable remarks on the, shall we say, over the top Muslim reaction to insulting if childish cartoons even more puzzling. The British are famous for loving their mothers. It is mum this and mum that and very little about dad who tended to be distant. But I am glad because my best friend in law school was Nova Scotian and related to the Scotch whiskey interest over there; the one who grew up thinking that nannies were Swiss so yayas abroad are in good company.
I admire English Catholicism even more. It has produced sublime classics, like Newman’s Apologia and Knox’s Enthusiasm, Ford’s Parades End and Waugh’s Brideshead along with the martyr Edmund Campion, the saint Thomas More and the exiled English Jesuits who returned to die in agony trying to take down a queen with a weaker title and the wrong religion from the British throne. It was risky to be Catholic in Britain and worse it was embarrassing.
Ronald Knox complained a century ago about the English Catholic’s tendency to apologize for his faith under the social pressure not to be gauche or baduy by holding strong religious beliefs. Strong religious commitment, Pope Francis warned, invites the sneers of the sophisticated seeking the approbation of Satan who graces the inside covers of lifestyle magazines. Like all outsiders Catholics in Protestant countries are either poor and Irish throwing bombs or pretending they have no strong beliefs to avoid denying them. Filipino Catholics can be like that but with less excuse in a Catholic country. This was evident in the RH debate where the Catholic position was dismissed as marginal by surveys; self-defeated by lack of preparation and always on the defensive when it should have been offensive as in my father’s time.
Yet John Paul II was the conscience of the world and Benedict its leading philosopher.
The Catholic position is that historically birth control is part of the Nazi agenda to weed out the weak and cull the colored unless they are useful to the small but dominant race. But that way leads to Auschwitz. It is the anti-life and pro-choice position that needs defending because it is a simple matter of choice if you don’t want to run the risk of producing a life. You can choose not to fornicate.
There is no compulsion to do it unless you are a monarch in need of an heir and as far as I know the only thing royal in our country is a brand of spaghetti.
It can’t be that tough to forebear as the very proper Lord Chesterfield told his son. “The pleasure is brief and the position is ridiculous.”
Indeed life is so precious, and that of the young so filled with promise, that its misuse and abuse defy explanation even by the Pope. Francis confessed his inability to answer the abandoned girl’s question, “Why are children hurt and why are they not protected when God is so good and so powerful.”
The prochoice avoid the question by proposing instead that no child would be abused if it weren’t born in the first place.