Pope’s last addresses call on Catholics to stay strong on marriage, abortion, eugenics, euthanasia

From: LifeSiteNews.com

It was an emotional day at the Vatican as Pope Benedict XVI, in two of his last public addresses, called again on Christians to continue to defend the lives of innocent unborn and vulnerable people and to uphold the sanctity of natural marriage. In this morning’s regular Wednesday general audience he warned that Christians will face great pressure to give up their commitments.

“Even those who come from a Christian family … must renew daily their decision to be Christian, to give God the first place in the face of the temptations continuously suggested by a secularized culture, in the face of the criticism of many of their contemporaries.”

But this must not deter them from proclaiming the truth: “The temptation to set one’s faith aside is always present and conversion becomes a response to God that must be confirmed at various times throughout our lives,” he said.

“It is not easy to be faithful to Christian marriage, to practice mercy in our everyday lives, or to leave space for prayer and inner silence.


“It is not easy to publicly oppose the decisions that many consider to be obvious, such as abortion in the case of an unwanted pregnancy, euthanasia in the case of serious illness, or the selection of embryos to avoid hereditary diseases.”

The tone of the Ash Wednesday homily was sombre, befitting the occasion of both the first day of Lent and the mood of Catholics around the world at Pope Benedict’s almost unprecedented and shocking revelation on Monday. In the homily, he warned ominously against divisions and “sins against the unity of the Church”.

He referred to “the prayers of priests, who, with tears in their eyes,” pray to God, asking, “Spare your people, Lord! Do not let your heritage become a disgrace, a byword among the nations! Why should they say among the peoples, ‘Where is their God?’”

“This prayer leads us to reflect on the importance of witnessing to faith and Christian life, for each of us and our community, so that we can reveal the face of the Church and how this face is, at times, disfigured,” the pope said.

“I am thinking in particular of the sins against the unity of the Church, of the divisions in the body of the Church.”

He called upon those listening to live Lent “in a more intense and evident ecclesial communion, overcoming individualism and rivalry is a humble and precious sign for those who have distanced themselves from the faith or who are indifferent.”

Towards the end of the Mass, the pope stood quietly while prolonged applause erupted spontaneously from the crowd. One observer present said that although the tone of the Mass was deeply reverent, “as all papal Masses have been under this pope, it was simply impossible to stop people pouring out their affection and deep sorrow at his impending departure from the throne of Peter.”

The Ghosts of Eugenics

A great article on an under covered chapter in American History

FROM: USA TODAY

" Three generations of imbeciles is enough," thundered Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., in the 1927 Buck vs. Bellcourt decision, legalizing forced sterilizations nationwide.

A triumph of the "eugenics" movement, which aimed at breeding "better" humans, the decision was embraced by dozens of states, from Virginia to California, leading to more than 60,000 forced sterilizations by the 1960's. The sterilizations were aimed at ensuring no offspring for poor people exhibiting "feeblemindedness, epilepsy, criminality, insanity, (and) alcoholism," among other "unfit human traits," in the words of Yale historian Daniel Kevles. 

And much to the shame of science, eugenics was embraced by leading researchers, perhaps none more notable than mathematician Karl Pearson.

Whatever statistics you've learned are most likely Pearson's handiwork, or descend from his thinking. Founder of the first university statistics program at University College London, he pioneered the " Chi-Square" and " P-value" probability statistical tests that researchers everywhere use even today to validate their results. Pearson in 1925 also founded the journal, Annals of Eugenics, "which shall devote its pages wholly to the scientific treatment of racial problems in man."

But in 1954, the journal adopted a new name, Annals of Human Genetics, which it still bears today. And the current issue represents a housecleaning for the publication. The journal's editor, geneticist Andrés Ruiz Linares of University College London, has opened its archives from 1925 to 1954 to researchers, and is running reports by historians on the journal's past embrace of scientific racism and targeting of the disabled. 

The New Eugenics

FROM: Nice Deb

Wanna take a stab at what the eugenics movement has shape-shifted into?
James Delingpole unabashedly spells it out in his latest post at The Telegraph:

As I note in my really-quite-soon-to-be-published book Watermelons, the values of the eugenics movement and of the modern green movement are closely connected.
Here, for example, is a popular 50s environmentalist called Harrison Brown in a book called The Challenge of Man’s Future (1954), discussing how to make the human species healthier:
“Thus we could sterilize or in other ways discourage the mating of the feeble-minded. We could go further and systematically attempt to prune from society, by prohibiting them from breeding, persons suffering from serious inheritable forms of physical defects, such as congenital deafness, dumbness, blindness, or absence of limbs.”