{"id":380,"date":"2008-01-17T08:30:44","date_gmt":"2008-01-17T08:30:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2008\/01\/as-january-22-approaches.html"},"modified":"2008-01-17T08:30:44","modified_gmt":"2008-01-17T08:30:44","slug":"as-january-22-approaches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/01\/as-january-22-approaches.html","title":{"rendered":"As January 22 approaches"},"content":{"rendered":"

…information about events around the country is easy to come by.
\nThomas Peters has an extensive post on the DC March for life and will be covering it. <\/a>
\nThe West Coast Walk for Life will be this Saturday. <\/a>
\nFor almost the past year, Catholic bloggers of the Dallas area have been fasting and praying on Fridays for an end to abortion, their motivation being, in essence, “it began here (with Norma McCorvey’s case), let it end here.” Julie D. of Happy Catholic has details on this and the Dallas area Walk for Life on Saturday. <\/a>
\nKathy of Hymnography Unbound has written a pro-life hymn she’d like to share, especially for those traveling to and walking in the various events over the next few days<\/a>
\nLooking at the numbers: Stephanie Simon of the LA Times has a story about declining abortion rates.<\/a>
\nFinally, Fr. Robert Araujo, S.J. has an excellent, challenging post over at Mirror of Justice,<\/a> addressing the important question raised by another MOJ blogger on where the institutional Church was during political repression in Argentina. Fr. Araujo <\/a>writes:<\/p>\n

Several MOJ contributors (including Rick Garnett, Richard Stith, Michael Perry, Michael Sacperlanda, and Tom Berg) have recently addressed issues relating to the roles of Catholics and other Christians in public life\u2014be that life in the liturgy of the Church, in prayer, or in the political and public events of the day. I think that many well informed people (lay, clerical, and religious) have the impression that the role of the laity in particular is something new in the Church that resulted from various promulgations of the Second Vatican Council that would include the Decree on the Laity and the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. But this would not be an accurate assessment. While the role of the laity can be traced back much earlier (and I agree with Michael S. that Professor Eamon Duffy\u2019s excellent book The Voices of Morebath<\/em> demonstrate this in one particular country, i.e., England, but we should also not forget about the roles of people like Thomas More) we need to take stock of what Pope Pius XII said in his first encyclical letter Summi Pontificatus<\/em>
\nThis collaboration of the laity with the priesthood in all classes, categories and groups reveals precious industry and to the laity is entrusted a mission than which noble and loyal hearts could desire none higher nor more consoling. This apostolic work, carried out according to the mind of the Church, consecrates the layman as a kind of \u201cMinister to Christ\u201d in the sense which Saint Augustine explains as follows: \u201cWhen, Brethren, you hear Our Lord saying: where I am there too will My servant be, do not think solely of good bishops and clerics.\u201d You too in your way minister to Christ by a good life, by almsgiving, by preaching His Name and teaching to whom you can. (N. 89)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Throughout this letter, Pius XII identifies and discusses the important role of lay Catholics, especially in the temporal spheres of human existence.
\nWhen times get difficult for people, as Michael P. points out regarding the junta years in Argentina, what happens? Where is the Church? What are its members doing to avoid catastrophe? As Rick points out, we are sinners, and we do not always respond well to the circumstances at hand. But, by the same token, it is important to recall that some folks do what they can to stop the nonsense of the day. It may not be much, but they do what they can\u2014which people later down the line may say was not enough. But what would these post-event critics have done differently if they could have done anything?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/blockquote>\n

He continues with examples from Nazi Germany, and concludes:<\/p>\n

But there is yet another story that I would like to relate today involving our own country, the United States. We are troubled by a war, by poverty, by white collar and conventional crime, by infidelity, by drugs, by terrorism, and by many other problems. To borrow from Michael P.\u2019s question: \u201cwill someone please tell us what the\u2026 bishops of the Catholic Church\u2014my Church, our Church\u2014were doing during\u201d in these times? But this question should not be restricted to the successors of the Apostles since it involves all of us. Archbishop Burke\u2019s formulation of the question seems more appropriate to me: how can the people of our beloved country permit such horrible evils to happen at all or to go on for so long? Again I will suggest that people tend to do what they can. Individual bishops, individual dioceses, individual parishes, individual priests, individual religious, and individual members of the laity do what they can and what is proper to their calling to address the evils of our time. The fact that we individually and corporately may be doing something is not to say that we are doing everything that we can.
\nI would like to conclude this posting with this thought. I, for one, think that one of the greatest evils that has been going on in this United States is the wake of Roe. I suspect that I have not always been welcome by colleagues in the teaching profession because of my views on this grave matter, but I try to do what I can to stem the tide of this evil even though my actions are at best very modest. But I must acknowledge that other brave souls have shown me how to use the tools of reason and explanation to meet the challenges of this calling to which all of us have been summoned and to which some of us have responded. As of the most current count, there have been over forty million abortions performed in the U.S. since Roe was decided. That is a lot of death with no end in sight despite the claims by some persons in or seeking public office that the nation must keep the procedure legal but rare.
\nWhat can be said of those who are haunted by this iniquity? And how can the people of our beloved country permit \u201csuch horrible evils to happen at all or to go on for so long\u201d? Let us begin by realizing we do what we can do and what we cannot, but let us also not fail to ask what more can we do? We can be a minister to Christ, that is what we can do, and there are many ways of responding.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…information about events around the country is easy to come by. Thomas Peters has an extensive post on the DC March for life and will be covering it. The West Coast Walk for Life will be this Saturday. For almost the past year, Catholic bloggers of the Dallas area have been fasting and praying on…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-matthew-25"],"yoast_head":"\nAs January 22 approaches - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/01\/as-january-22-approaches.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"As January 22 approaches - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"…information about events around the country is easy to come by. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}