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Contents © 1999
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

March 1999

...Sociologist Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, who is currently convening focus groups of twenty-somethings to discuss "sex, love, and first unions," says that "the Monica Lewinsky-type depersonalized sex --without any sentiment --is increasingly common among kids and that's certainly not a return to Victorian values."

...Another such device has been used to reduce crime.... Since 1991 the prison population has grown by more than 60 percent.

...The divorce rate has dropped, but at the same time more people are living together without marrying. Four million couples now cohabitate, up from two million in 1978.

--"The Prophylactic Society," American Spectator, February, 1999

PERHAPS THE ONLY THING you can do, then, is to point [Generation X] towards towards Golgotha, a story that we can make sense of. Show us the women who wept and loved the Lord but couldn't change his fate. Remind us that Peter, the rock of the Church, denied the Messiah three times. Tell us that Pilate washed his hands of the truth, something that we are often tempted to do. Mostly, though, turn us towards God hanging on the cross. That is what the world does to the holy. Where the cities of God and Man intersect, there is a crucifixion. The best-laid plans are swept aside; the blue prints for the perfect society are divided among the spoilers. We recognize this world, ripped from the start by our parents' divorces, spoiled by our own bad choices, threatened by war and poverty, pain and meaninglessness. Ours is a world where inconvenientlives are aborted and inconvenient loves are abandoned. We know all too well that we, too, would betray the only one who could save us.

--"Talking to Generation X," First Things, February, 1999

ABORTION FACILITIES CONTINUE DECLINE: In 1982 there were 2908 facilities performing abortions in the U.S. These included hospitals, individual physicians' offices and free-standing abortion mills. In 1992 the number was 2380. In 1996 it was down to 2042. At this time, approximately 90% of all abortions are done in free-standing abortion mills. The decline has occurred almost entirely in facilities that did fewer than 400 abortions a year. It would appear that local public opinion has been substantially responsible for the closing of these smaller facilities who could not stand up against the opposition of their communities, as a significant percent of their income was derived from other medical practice, which is vulnerable to boycotting. Full-time abortion chambers are not vulnerable to this kind of pressure.

--Right to Life of Cincinnati Newsletter, January 1999

THE "NO-DATING" MESSAGE of Connie Marshner (October 1998) sounds the trumpet in a Catholic forum and needs to be echoed repeatedly.... Not surprisingly, support for the "non-dating" message comes primarily from homeschooling parents, both Protestant and Catholic. Rare is the "non-dating" parent who finds any support from parents who use the Catholic school system, especially for high school.

Conservative Protestants have taken the lead in this aspect of promoting teen chastity. Joshua Harris has two talks on audiotape and a book titled I Kissed Dating Goodbye. This topic does not appeal to teenagers. I encourage parents to get the tape first since Josh is a very engaging young speaker. "Sex Has a Price Tag" by Pam Stenzel (both English and Spanish) is excellent on chastity, the pro-life message, the message of indissolubility of marriage, and the message that teens should always be in groups. Parents could not ask for a better chastity speaker for their teenager. The Harris and Stenzel materials are available from the Couple to Couple League (513-471-2000).

--Homiletic and Pastoral Review, February 1999

ON DECEMBER 30, SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN (R-Az.) filed papers with the Federal Election Commission establishing an "exploratory committee," a step often taken by candidates before they formally declare their candidacies.

...McCain has usually voted in opposition to abortion. However, he has voted repeatedly for federal funding of research involving transplantation of tissues or organs "harvested" from aborted babies, a policy opposed by NRLC (National Right to Life Committee).

In addition, in 1995, Senator McCain voted for an unsuccessful proposal (referred to by NRLC and other opponents as the "teen mother's child exclusion") intended to discourage any state from using federal welfare funds to provide cash assistance for the care of babies born to unwed teen mothers.

In research on McCain's 16-year tenure in Congress, NRLC has found no record of any pro-life McCain amendment to any bill, nor of McCain stepping forward as an initiator or leder on any pro-life issue.

...On January 4, Senator Bob Smith of New Hampshire filed papers with the Federal Election Commission officially declaring his candidacy for president.

Smith's voting record has been solidly pro-life during his six years in the U.S. House (1985-90) and eight years in the Senate (1991-present).

He was the original chief Senate sponsor of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act in 1995, and has played a key role on other pro-life issues as well. During the 1997-98 Congress, he was the prime author of two legislative proposals to restore sweeping protections for unborn children, one a constitutional amendment and the other a statute.

"The most pressing issue of our generation is abortion, because it goes to the most fundamental right --the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," Smith said in 1998.

--"Senators John McCain, Bob Smith Take Steps To Run for President," National Right To Life News, January 22, 1999

'FIDES ET RATIO' HAS ALREADY PROMPTED some commentators to observe the irony of the Church's efforts to educate the modern mind. At the end of the last century, the popes had to defend the legitimacy of supernatural faith against the pretensions of secular rationalism; now, at the end of the 20th century, it takes a pope to defend reason against unreason.

When Fides et Ratio (98) asserts that the crisis of truth is linked to the current crisis in morality, the encyclical returns to a central theme developed in Veritatis Splendor. There the pope makes the political claim that without a consensus about objective truth, the foundations of free society will erode. Two years later, he went on to point out a significant indication of this wholesale threat to the human good, namely, the culture of death. So dire are our present circumstances that in Evangelium Vitae, he made the bold assertion that, today, God must shore up reason, because the eclipse of God has impaired the human.

--"The Reason for Reason: Fides et Ratio," Romanus Cessario, Crisis, January 1999