The site itself is a good idea, but needs to have more active participants and more bloggers willing to write creative, and helpful, posts. Right now I do not see much work being done to actually reach out in evangelization with this blog.

Some ways to do this includes: recruiting more people to write on here; having links to other blogs, especially those written by Byzantine Catholics, and more open dialogue and participation on other blogs by those who post here.

You must get out in the blogosphere even as you must get out in the world.

I hope you consider some of these ideas.

Did anyone see this interview on the O’Reilly Factor this past week?

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Here is part of the Transcript…

BILL O’REILLY, HOST: “Factor follow-up” segment tonight, authorities in Kansas still investigating the late-term abortionist Dr. George Tiller, to see if he has violated state law about reporting the rapes of underaged girls.

Tiller will abort babies at any time up until birth, sometimes citing the depression of the mother as a medical reason.

Joining us now from Washington is Kelly. Got pregnant at age 13 in Maryland and had her fetus aborted by Tiller. OK, so you were 20 weeks pregnant when you brought the situation to your parents’ attention, I understand. In the state of Maryland, you could not have an abortion that late, but your father and mother, I guess, decided to take you to Kansas, where Tiller advertises on the Net. Everybody knows who he is. He’ll abort babies at any time. So your parents take you there. You go into the clinic. Pick it up from there.

KELLY, FORMER DR. TILLER PATIENT: Well, it was a five-day process. And when I first went in, they have counseling that they offered. It’s a group counseling with other women that are going through the same thing. And during the five days, they insert expandable whatever into the cervix to slowly dilate you through the five-day process.

And about the third or fourth day Dr. Tiller came in and injected into the amniotic sack a saline solution, which suffocated and burned my baby to death. And on the last day they put you in a room with other women — there’s, like, maybe six to 10 beds in a big room. And every woman is lying there. And they kind of go down the line and whatever’s ready, you know, they decide that you’re dilated enough and they put you in wheelchair and wheel you out to another room.

And in this other room there’s basically a toilet, and they told me to sit on the toilet, lean on the nurse, and push, push my baby into a toilet. And after that they wheel you into another room, to remove all the, you know, afterbirth.

And really, that’s the only two times I ever saw the doctor was when he injected the saline solution and when he finished the process by removing the afterbirth. And this is all very graphic, and I think that that’s very important that people know that that’s going on in our country.

O’REILLY: Sure. Absolutely. And I applaud your courage. Now, did the doctor say anything to you?

KELLY: No. I mean — you know, what I remember today is that no one ever said anything to me about what was going to happen during that five-day process or what was going to happen when I left that clinic or 10 years down the road what was going to happen.

O’REILLY: All right. But Tiller himself, when he injected the fetus with the killing agent and then when he took the afterbirth, he never said anything to you at all?

KELLY: “This will all be over soon.”

O’REILLY: “This will all be over soon.” What happened to the body?

KELLY: I have no idea. I left my baby dead in the toilet.

O’REILLY: All right. Then when you got out from after the process was over, you went where?

KELLY: After he had finished the process that day?

O’REILLY: Right.

KELLY: To a hotel room and then back home.

O’REILLY: So you just left the clinic right after you discharged the baby, the dead baby, and you put your coat on and went out to a hotel.

KELLY: Yes.

O’REILLY: How do you feel about that, the whole thing?

KELLY: I’m disgusted. I’m disgusted that women are told that they have a choice, yet no one tells us what that choice is or what that choice is going to do to us or to the baby, for that matter. I mean, very few people, I think, know that this is what happens. It’s not just an easy solution. It just — it’s not an answer to any problem. It just creates other problems.

O’REILLY: What happened to you after the abortion?

KELLY: Many things. I mean, I was traumatized, so I had lots of symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder. I had very low self-esteem. I was promiscuous, I used drugs, I had eating disorders. Lots of horrible things.

And when I think that, you know, what would the worst-case scenario be, that I have my child? That would have been better than having gone through all of the affects of the depression, suicidal thoughts, all of that that happened afterwards.

O’REILLY: Now Kelly, don’t beat yourself up. You were 13 years old, you were 14 when the abortion happened, you know. You know better now. You’re courageous. You came on. You told the nation what’s happening in Kansas. Very few people will do that. And you know, we appreciate your courage very much. Thank you.

http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2006/dec/06121304.html

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What are your thoughts on the interview?

Mike

You would do well to read the early Fathers before making such statements.

True, we were made with organs which have their value and use after the fall. Yet that is assuming their original purpose was for procreation. Moreover, one can say “how did the fall create death” when “it is obvious we ate, and that meant the taking of life of some sort or another.”

The Fathers definatley saw Mary as a restoration — and in that restortation it is not her parents that enjoy the benefit, but her: the birth of Christ is seen as the return to the original method of reproduction (they looked at Adam and Eve, and saw Adam was son of none; Eve was reproduced without sexuality; Christ is reproduced without sexuality).

I am not saying sexuality is bad, nor that God cannot and has not elevated it to a good - but we must keep in mind that our modern attachment to sex and acting like the hyper-sexuality we have in our culture is normative is rather off.

God certainly saw it was good for humanity to reproduce; God saw virginity better. Therefore, I have not entered a “puritan” conception (though if you read the Fathers, many of them are far more puritan than the Victorians!), because I have not said sexuality is bad. I have however criticized a false notion of sexuality, and the idea that Mary’s birth was not seen as a miracle — it was on many levels. Moreover, I feel there is a significant lack of understanding of the theology of the IC: the whole IC states that Mary is cleansed at the point of conception, not that the act of conception was without concupiscence. She is the restoration, not her parents; and in that restoration, the Fathers said she also showed us the restored act of begetting.

Now we might disagree with the Fathers, and we might want to advance ourselves with modern science and philosophical ideas found in personalism. I agree to a point, and I think sexuality does go for more than mere reproduction. It is also a good, but we must keep its good on its relative level. But we must not fall into the traps of our modern culture and read backwards our culture into the past.

Christopher West’s marvellous series on Theology of the Body addresses this well. Before the Fall, Adam and Eve looked at each other with a desire to fulfill and bless the other. Part of this pre-Fall mentality would have been to unite in blessing to the other.

After the Fall, Adam and Eve (and we now) looked upon each other with lust, that is, the desire to USE THE OTHER for satiation rather than in blessing.

The nuptial embrace is a picture of the delight of union with Christ in eternity, in which embrace we will seek only to give ourselves to our beloved Bridegroom. As we empty ourselves of self, giving ourselves completely, we will find not emptiness, but fullness and fulfillment by our being filled with Him.

The Church has admitted that while procreation is the first and primary responsibility of sexual union, there is nonetheless a validity to the pleasure of sharing of love in the relationship which goes beyond that. Thus, sexual relationships after the time of childbearing are neither prohibited nor frowned upon by the Church.

Brother Ed

I don’t think its a modern idea at all, that we were called to sexuality before the fall. If we weren’t, why did God create the generative organs? God created, and saw that it was good, including male and female reproductive organs.

I have read Fathers that believe that before the fall we were not subject to lust, but not that we all reproduced virginally. Chrysostom holds the sexual act in such high esteem that he uses it as his image of the liturgy itself, which is a spiritual insemination of the Church by God, following St. Paul and Ephesians 5.

If you read again, I say not miracle but restoration. The point is, of course, that Mary is not some sort of freak, some sort of product of a divine dispensation so radical as to make her not human. She comes on the scene in an ordinary way, through sexual intercourse, an ordinary way restored to its primeval ordinariness, when, in God’s plan, all children would be born free of the damage of sin.

From our point of view, it’s a miracle. Let me make an analogy: the paralyzed man is cured by Christ, and shouts that it is a miracle, he can walk. It is a miracle, but the miracle is not in giving him powers he never had before, or transforming him into something super-human. Rather, it is a restoration of what his nature should have been all along. Thus is Mary also a restoration of what we should have been all along.

You could say “miraculous restoration,” if you prefer.

I would also disagree when you say this is not a miracle of God. It most certainly was. St Anna was by this time barren. She was not expected to be able to have any more children. That she did was a miracle, and it indicative of the whole miracle involved in the conception of the Theotokos: that indeed grace was imparted to make this conception immaculate. With one we are hinted at the other. We are at least shown that God is at work.