Discover Your Hidden Treasure
By Melanie Baker
How would you respond if while out one night with friends one of them admitted to you that she had no interest in being Catholic because Catholics can’t think for themselves? Or that they seem always to be preoccupied with guilt?
How would you respond if one day your thirteen year old suddenly announced that he no longer believed in God?
What did you say when the news was swimming with Nancy Pelosi’s claim that St. Augustine himself did not believe a baby already three months in the womb could be considered a human life?
And what are you saying in response to the January 20 statement by Secretary Kathleen Sebelius of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regarding her decision that almost all employers’ health plans must fully cover contraception, sterilization procedures and abortion-causing drugs?
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Benedict’s Corner: You Can Make a Difference
By Melanie Baker
Benedict’s Corner is a weekly summary of our Holy Father’s latest words on topics related to HLI America’s mission.
Pardon the cliché, but you can make a difference. Really. Each one of you reading this blog right now is willed, personally, by God, and entrusted by Him with a share in His mission that only you can accomplish. I know this might sound like a sales pitch, but it isn’t. It is wonderfully, and gravely, true.
The fact that we each are called to make a difference was the theme of Pope Benedict XVI’s addresses this past week.
At the end his Sunday Angelus, (during which the Holy Father stressed the importance of the spiritual director who helps one to discover the voice of God in his life), Pope Benedict commented on the plight of migrants, emphasizing that they are not statistics but men and women, children and elderly in search of a place to live in peace. What is more, in their suffering they are not only the recipients of the new evangelization but are also called to be, themselves, its protagonists. Again, each of us is called to make a difference! Though one may be a victim of circumstances and truly suffer grave injustice at times, this “victim” status does not deprive a person of the irreplaceable contribution he or she offers not only to natural society, but also to the divinely instituted society of the Church.
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Every American Catholic Must Fight for Religious Freedom
By Denise J. Hunnell, M.D.
On January 19, 2012, Pope Benedict XVI addressed a group of American bishops in Rome for their ad limina visits and gave them their marching orders. He let them know, in no uncertain terms, that America cannot rest on her laurels of religious freedom. The Church and all she represents are under assault in the United States:
[I]t is imperative that the entire Catholic community in the United States come to realize the grave threats to the Church’s public moral witness presented by a radical secularism which finds increasing expression in the political and cultural spheres. The seriousness of these threats needs to be clearly appreciated at every level of ecclesial life. Of particular concern are certain attempts being made to limit that most cherished of American freedoms, the freedom of religion. Many of you have pointed out that concerted efforts have been made to deny the right of conscientious objection on the part of Catholic individuals and institutions with regard to cooperation in intrinsically evil practices. Others have spoken to me of a worrying tendency to reduce religious freedom to mere freedom of worship without guarantees of respect for freedom of conscience.
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Proposed Sex Education Standards are an Assault on Religious Liberty and Parental Rights
By Denise J. Hunnell, M.D.
If you, like most parents, are anxious about how to impart a healthy and moral view of sexuality to your children, a coalition of ”experts” want to come to your rescue. They have decided what your children need to know about sex and when they need to know it.
The Journal of School Health published the special report, National Sexuality Education Standards: Core Content and Skills, K–12. The purpose of these standards is to make a radical agenda normative for all public schools in the United States.
According to the “experts,” what should your child know? By the end of the second grade, your child needs to, “Identify different kinds of family structures,” which means that they not only want your child to know about traditional two-parent families, single-parent families, blended divorced families and gay-parent families, but they want them to see each of these as equally acceptable and good. In addition, by the end of the second grade your child should be able to, “Provide examples of how friends, family, media, society and culture influence ways in which boys and girls think they should act.” Notice how family is lumped in with the media, society and culture as just another source of influence to be critically evaluated – by children in the second grade.
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