Humanae Vitae and Donum Vitae by Monsignor Philip J.Reilly

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1 Humanae Vitae and Donum Vitae by Monsignor Philip J.Reilly To be here with so many people who are truly Pro-Life, and all the wonderful speakers, with the bishop, and with all the people who are committed to the work of the Church, and proclaiming courageously the Gospel of Life to the world; to be here with you is for me a joy. You know I am the chaplain of a group of Sisters who are Contemplatives, and they sort of live in a different world than we live in, they think differently. When I was leaving the Monastery of the Precious Blood, one of the sisters, Sister Mary Clare said: Father, be not afraid of tomorrow, God is already there. We should trust in the Providence of God concerning tomorrow, for God being eternal is already there. So be not afraid! This optimistic attitude about tomorrow is what we need, especially those involved in the pro- life movement, today. You know there was a mother superior in Tipperary, Ireland, and she was dying, and all the sisters were gathered around her bed. And they wanted to get some final words of wisdom from her. They thought she s getting weaker and weaker so they said, we should give her a glass of hot milk. Maybe that will strengthen her, and she will say a few final words of wisdom to us. So they gave her a glass of hot milk, but she was not drinking it. Some of the sisters went to the back kitchen, and they saw there, a bottle of fine Irish whisky, that had been given to them last Christmas. So they decided to put a good portion of it into the milk. Then they brought it back to the sister and she just started sipping it slowly, and then more vigorously, and she finally finished the whole glass. And since she was getting weaker and weaker, the good sisters said to her: Before you die, we need some wisdom. What are your final words of wisdom to us, of what we should do? And she said: Whatever you do, Don t Sell the Cow! We need wisdom. The late Holy Father, Pope Paul VI said, the lack of wisdom is part of the difficulty of properly understanding our sexuality, and of life itself. We don t see the whole vision that God intended, without wisdom. In our times there are three Church documents with the word Vitae: of life. They are: Humane Vitae, Donum Vitae, and Evangelium Vitae. It is interesting to note that the three documents were written by three different Popes. Pope Paul VI issued Humane Vitae on July 25 th,1968; and on March 25 th, 1995 Pope John Paul II issued Evangelium Vitae, and the man who signed the third document, Donum Vitae, issued by the Declaration of the Congregation of Faith, on February 22 nd, 1987, was Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, and God approved that Document by making him Pope Benedict XVI. So do we need any more authority as to the wisdom contained in these three documents, whose authors were three Popes? Yet you might ask, why are there three documents? Is not one document about life sufficient? The reason, that three were written instead of one, is because the Church was responding during the past forty year, 1

2 each time the culture of death grew. In the Sixties, the culture of death began attacking Marriage itself and the process of pro-creation. Pope Paul VI responded by writing the encyclical, Humane Vitae. By 1987 human life in the womb from conception to birth was under attack, so Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI responded by writing Donum Vitae, The Gift of Life. Finally by 1995, human life was under attack not only in the womb, but from the womb, to the grave itself. And so Pope John Paul II said: we now have a veritable culture of death. So what do we do? And so he gave us the Gospel of Life Evangelium Vitae. And so you must read all three in order to know the Church s wisdom on what is wrong with the culture of death, and how to live the culture of Life. In Humane Vitae there are several things, that I would like to stress. The first is in section seven of, Humanae Vitae, where Paul VI said, you can not judge an act, out of context. You can not decide something is right or wrong, by looking at a single part, and not at the whole of it. For example, when you say, you can use a contraceptive, because there are too many people, you are only looking at the demographic part. Or you say, we haven t enough money, then you are focusing on the economic part. Or you say, you don t have good health, and you see only the health dimension. In each illustration only a mere fragment, or part of the whole is being looked at, and thus the whole vision or wisdom is lost by making a judgment based on the part, not the whole. And so it is with marriage, we have to look at the whole vision. He continues by saying we have to understand who man is, in order to make a judgment about anything that man does. If we do not, then our judgment will be incorrect. He goes on to reaffirm the Church s position, as the bishop did this morning, by saying that man is from God, and is returning to God. Man is made in the image and likeness of God. A man must see who he is, and what his nature is, and only then, can he become fully what he was created to be. When man becomes fully what he is, what he was created for, that is true happiness. Only in that way, can man reach perfection. Each of us then must reflect on the purpose, the reason we were made, and what our nature is, in order to see the whole and be truly happy and achieve Gods design for each one of us.if you had made yourself, it would be different, for you could change what you are. But God made you. So your job is to reflect, to understand what you are, and then act accordingly. Your actions should follow, from what you are. In the beginning, in Genesis, we are told that God made man in His image, in the image and likeness of God, and that He made us male and female. For most of us, it is clear to us that our spiritual souls are in the image of God but we forget that so also are our bodies. In creating man, male and female in His likeness, the Image of God is also in our sexuality. For God said let us create man in our image. Let us make then male and female. God is Trinity, and it has been revealed to us that in God, there is Paternity. There is One who begets and there is, Jesus Christ, the One who is begotten. And the Love of the One who begets, for the One who is begotten, is the third Person of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit. When the Word took flesh; when God, in the Person of Jesus Christ, took on our human nature from the Blessed Virgin Mary, He gave to that human 2

3 nature His own existence. Christ in his Person, brought together the union of the Human and the Divine. This union in His person we call the Hypostatic Union. God came into our midst, not simply to proclaim who He is; not simply to communicate Truth to us, but the ultimate purpose, why Jesus came was that He wanted to enter into a mystical union of Life and of Love with Gods People. Through all the scriptures this mystical union is expressed in marital terminology, namely, God being the called the Groom and Israel being the Bride. In the New Covenant, this union of life and love of Christ with the People of God, we call the Mystical Body of Christ. The marital couple makes present in a very special way the Church, namely, the union of Christ with the Bride.For St. Paul, states in Chapter 5 of Ephesians, that there is a real analogy between the union of the Christian couple in marriage and the Mystical Body of Christ. St Paul calls the Sacrament of Christian Marriage, a great mystery for it goes beyond symbolism. It is not, as if, but indeed, efficaciously makes present the Mystical Body, the Church. In Christian marriage, Christ is truly loving the Bride and the Bride, Christ. That is why the woman loses no dignity in obeying Christ, in her husband and the husband must sacrifice himself, as Christ did, for his Bride, the Church. When God made us, human beings, He made each of us with a soul. Like God our spiritual soul is spirit and thus our spiritual soul reflects the image of God in a very special way. He also created each of us with a body. And so a human being is unique in that, in order for an act to be a human act it must act with body and soul together. We are not an animal; acting without a soul; nor are we an angel, acting without a body. So in order to be a human act, the body and soul must act as one. Now before we choose how to act, God gave us a mind, an intellect, so that we can think, before we act with our free will. He gave us our mind, so we can reflect before we act, or we make fools of ourselves. We can reflect on who we are. We look at our eyes and ears, and we say the eye is for seeing, the ear is for hearing. If the eye was beginning to loose its ability to see, I could use an artificial means to help it achieve its purpose, called glasses. If the ear started to loose its ability to hear, I could use an artificial means to assist it; a hearing aid. But it would be insane, would it not, to take a pencil and put it in the eye to stop it from seeing. It would be against nature, it would destroy it, it would perish. When we reflect on our life giving powers, namely our fertility, it is rather clear that those life giving powers are for life. Life is what they are geared towards. The sexual act is a special means of exercising those life giving powers and giving the gift of your fertility to another. One may ask the question who may use this act? To this question, the world today frequently projects the wrong answer, totally distorting the truth about marital love. Today people are portrayed as first having sexual relations with another, and only then, as it were, asking the other, who are you. There is no commitment or permanent relationship. Such acts which are primarily limited to the body, exclusive of the soul of the other and often deliberately shut out God and human life, are not truly human acts. Who then may use this act? The normal but too often today the less followed path, is where two people meet each other, find common interests, and start to grow in friendship, and then as their personal love increases, so also increases a strong sexual 3

4 attraction between them. Then they will want to give themselves to each other, totally, including the gift of their fertility. Namely, they have a desire for a permanent life giving union together. The Church calls this the state of Marriage, and elevates it to a Sacrament. In marriage, a man and a woman enter into a contract before God. Their vows to each other are blessed by the Church, and ratified by Society. In this union they give themselves totally to each other in love..for them, the sexual act, whereby the man and the woman give the gift of their fertility completely to each other, is at the same time the expression of their total, exclusive love for each other. Now if a married person performs the sexual act, while deliberately not giving to the other person the gift of there fertility by using a contraceptive, the act is in violation of the Covenant or the marriage contract. The action is not truthful. When the ultimate purpose of the act is no longer the love of another person, by sharing ones fertility but rather only to experience the sexual pleasure even, at the cost of suppressing life and God s action, the sexual act is not an act of love but of lust. In the Covenant or contract of marriage you give, before God, everything to the other. If after you have made this vow of giving yourself totally to the other, you then take back your fertility, or block it, the sexual act becomes similar to the person who puts the pencil in the eye. If you choose to prevent the sexual act from being life giving, from producing fruit, you are as it were putting the pencil in the ear and you shut out love, you shut out God. You can use artificial means to help nature achieve its purpose, but not being God, we have no right to recreate, modify or destroy human nature but only to acknowledge, respect and promote human nature. Thus a couple that uses contraception within marriage, negate their marriage contract. For the contract was to give yourself totally to the other, including the gift of your fertility. When you separate the sexual act from life, from love, from God, you destroy it and the act becomes destructive to the person and the soul. But on the other hand when the act is performed within marriage, with two people open to life, and an openness to their love for each other and open to bearing fruit, the act is a source of grace to the couple and an act pleasing to God, the Creator of Marriage. Pope Paul the VI stated in Humanae Vitae that God has wisely arranged the natural laws and times of fertility so that successive births are naturally spaced, since life does not arise from every act of conjugal union. God created the woman s body so a woman can actually only conceive during a very short period of time within the monthly cycle. During the monthy cycle, only for twenty-four hours can a woman s ovum be fertilized by the sperm. The man is the problem; he is fertile all the time! But if both the man and the woman were only able to conceive for a very short period of time, the human race would disappear off the face of the earth. Imagine trying to coordinate that! The procreative aspect of marriage or conception can occur from the sexual act only for a short period of time during the cycle but by God the Creator s wise design, the unitive aspect of the conjugal act, namely the expression of the love and intimacy of the husband and wife, occurs and is nurtured throughout the whole cycle. As a creature we must learn how God, the Creator, made our nature and respect it. 4

5 Since I am going on forty- six years as a priest, I lived through the sixties and Vatican II, and the turmoil that followed. after Vatican II. The Church Fathers at Vatican II, had always confirmed that we should not interfere with the sexual act itself, but the question was, suppose you take a chemical pill, before the act, that enables you to be infertile when you perform the act; would that also be considered a contraceptive act? So that was what, Pope Paul VI was responding to when he came out with Humane Vitae. May I give you an example to illustrate what Paul VI said about the morality of the birth control pill. Suppose its late at night and you were driving down the street and someone steps off the curb and walks into the traffic, right in front of your car, and you do not see him and your car hits him, and he is killed. And the family of the person killed, comes running over, and you say I m so sorry it was your son, I did not see him, he walked out in the middle of the street. I did not intend to do this, it was a terrible accident! and the Parents can understand. But suppose a person was walking into the street and it was broad daylight, and you say to yourself, I don t like that fellow and you step on the gas pedal and decide your going to run him down. And you kill him. Then the parents come running over and say what happened?, and you say well you know your son walked into the street, and he drives me crazy, so I decided to run him over. The parents say what, you killed him, and you say well yes, I didn t like him. Now the second act is totally different from the first. In the first act you have intentions, purposes, circumstances that make it an accident and you never meant to hurt or kill anyone. Now in the second act your intention was to kill him and that was the purpose you fulfilled. Not only the act itself determines its morality but the intention and purpose effects the morality. Paul VI presented the example of two people who take something beforehand that causes them to be infertile at the time of the sexual act. The first person has a serious medical condition, and is taking a medication that just happens also to cause the person to be infertile at the time of intercourse, but that is not the person s purpose for taking the medication. The Holy Father says the act has a Double Effect, and it is not a contraceptive act because it is not the person s purpose or intention to prevent conception and the act itself of taking medicine is not an intrinsically evil act as is the contraceptive act, whether it is done to avoid children or aids. You cannot use an evil means to achieve a good end. To avoid aids or a child, the ultimate answer may be the cross of abstinence or even separation. Indeed this same improper moral way of thinking is now being used to justify even an abortion. When a person takes medicine the means is not evil. Now the situation is different where the person deliberately takes something beforehand, namely some chemical, that will stop the act from being fertile. It will break the Marriage Contract you have made to give yourself totally to the other, including your fertility, your life giving powers.. The second act is preformed with the intention to stop the person from having a child. The second person says I won t give you myself completely, won t give you my fertility; I will chemically destroy the possibility of this act producing life. Paul VI in Humane Vitae said that is a contraceptive act and it is wrong! He said it falls into the category of all the other contraceptives that are interfering with Gods design. If you have intercourse, and by Gods plan and design Life could be conceived but you deliberately shut out the Creator, you, so to speak, deliberately put the pencil in the eye, and shut out the purpose. You are then acting as the 5

6 Creator not the creature, the Arbiter not the steward. You are not respecting Gods creation but destroying Gods creation. Such an act is intrinsically wrong, and you must not do it. So what is Gods design? The gift of fertility giving by God to the man and the woman is to be giving to each other in Marriage. By choosing marriage as a vocation, you have been chosen by God to participate in His work. God said: Together let us make man in the image and likeness of God. In order for you to come into existence, it required a special act of creation by God. We use the term reproductive rights but humans can not reproduce humans! No human has ever been reproduced since each is completely unique from the last, in body and in soul. In order for you to have come into existence it required a special act of creation by Almighty God. When God made your soul at the moment of conception, it exists forever. The Universe was altered,. It was really changed forever. That is why man is so unique from all other creatures. Man was made by God, for God, and He asks man and woman to cooperate in this act of creation. Thus we use the word procreation. Humans are procreated, they are not reproduced. Therefore in a contraceptive act, you are not only, not giving yourself totally to your partner, namely fulfilling the unitive aspect of Marriage, but you are also shutting out the procreative aspect of Marriage since you are shutting out life. The act itself is no longer beautiful, indeed it has lost its true meaning. Some people say, suppose a family has five children, isn t that sufficient. In that case shouldn t they be able to take the contraceptives according to the principle of totality? The Holy Father responded. He said: No. He said you must be talking about two things of the same species. You can not switch from a physical evil to a moral evil. So for example with Aids, people say why can t they use condoms since it would prevent people from dying, like the double effect and therefore would be justified. Again you are trying to avoid a physical evil (the death of someone), but by means of an immoral act. You are allowing an intrinsically evil act. You cannot mix the two. Now if you need to stop a greater evil by doing a lesser evil that is different. For example you have a very bad abortion law, and someone is introducing a bill to make it less; you can support that bill, but you can not support the doing of an abortion directly itself.. So with the family that has five children and do not have the means to support more children, they can, use nature, and abstain from relations, during the fertile period. Pope Paul VI said there is a big difference between respecting the woman s sexual cycle by using it in the way God designed it, then preventing the cycle to function by a contraceptive act..natural Family Planning is not Catholic Birth control. In NFP the couple takes into account that during most of the cycle, by Gods design, you can not conceive life. When the couple uses only the non fertile time of a cycle, in that case the sexual act nurtures the unitive aspect, namely the love of the man and woman for each other. In NFP the couple also learn what is the fertile time of the woman s cycle and either abstain for the moment, or deliberately have relations to cooperate with God in bringing a child into the world according to God s wise design.. NFP is healthy and brings the husband and wife together, it dose not like contraception isolate them and expose them to the risks of stopping a healthy function of the body with a chemical. 6

7 Now the Holy Father, Paul the VI said in section seventeen of the encyclical, Humanae Vitae; there are consequences that will come, if we do not follow Gods design and Gods purpose for the sexual union. Paragraph seventeen of Humanae Vitae is worth reading again, it is very prophetic. In it, Pope Paul VI almost predicted their would be a need for the documents, Donum Vitae, and Evangelium Vitae. He prophesied that the consequences of not following Gods design would be incredible. First he said that women would be treated as objects of lust, rather than love. He said that young people would not wait to get married. What were they waiting for? What dose that contract of Marriage mean if I have to abstain before I am married and you,who are married, are using contraceptives anyway. Why should I wait? The Holy Father said that there would be tremendous promiscuity, and that it would abound among married people as well as young people. He said, It will destroy marriage, and infidelity will be rampant, and that marriages will not last He said, what you do as individuals to solve your problems, than how can you stop the Government, the State, from solving there problems in the area of economics, and population in same immoral way. If we look at the state of the world today, and its present culture, we well know that all these things have happened as a consequences of the rejection of Humane Vitae. In Humane Vitae the Pope was affirming the proper moral process of procreation and the Pope was affirming the importance of marriage and the family, as God designed it, as the only natural place for life to come into existence. Namely human life should come into existence, in the context of a man and a woman loving each other. Every human life should be the result of an act of human love. And the new human life should be accepted unconditionally, without having to meet standards, rules, regulations set up by others for the new life to continue to exist. The process of procreation is God s beautiful design and the child being the fruit of the marital act of love of the father and mother, is a finite reflection of the inner life of the Trinity, namely, the love of the Father who begets and the eternally begotten Son s love for the Father, being the Holy Spirit. In the context of family, human life is brought to a natural perfection, and is able to reach the fulfillment that God intends for it.. So when you attack this marital act you re not only attacking marriage as God designed it but your putting human life at great risk.. You are also going against a Sacrament of the Church. In the beginning God gave a share in His Divine life to our first parents, when he made their immortal souls. When they conceived a new child God intended at that moment not only to create the new soul but to give to the soul at the moment of its creation, a created share in God s own life. This new life of God was lost to the descendants of Adam and Eve as a result of the Original Sin. But in the new Creation in Christ, through the Sacrament of Marriage, God restores the life giving supernatural aspect of marriage. For.the baptized married couple now not only give themselves to each other but they give Christ. They give to each other a share in God s life through and in Christ. Moreover Sacramental Marriage not only is an analogical reflection of the inner life of God, namely the Trinitarian love, where there is true generation without dependency or difference in time, for each Person eternally shares fully, the same substance, nature and existence but it is also a reflection of Christ s love for the Church and the Church s love for Christ. 7

8 Marriage then is a wonderful, incredible way of life that God alone created which analogically reflects the love Christ for his Church, and even the love the Divine Persons in the inner life of God. So when you take human life out of the context of Marriage, where do we go? We have learned in the Encyclical Humane Vitae to separate human sexuality and love from God and human life, is wrong. So now we will see in the Declaration of the Sacred Congregation of the Faith, namely, Donum Vitae, to separate human life from human sexuality and Divine love is also wrong for the inherent worth of each human life is lost, with terrible consequences for humanity. Life was meant to come into existence through a special human act, namely by a man and a woman in an act of love, in an act of giving themselves totally to each other with God, in the context of Marriage. But when you move life into the laboratories, and grow human life there, you remove any awareness of God s presence and love. You remove Human and Divine love from human life and you dehumanize it, you depersonalize it. You can now destroy it. You can manipulate it. You can do, whatever you want with it. And the inherent worth of this human life, in front of the technician, the scientist, is lost. Besides many of the scientists in the labs are almost neo-darwinian in their thinking. For them human life is treated only like a higher form of animal life. The lesser evolves into the higher. Everything is constantly changing for the better, as the weaker, the imperfect are eliminated by natural selection aided by the conscious decision of the lab technician, who is religiously, eugenically cleansing the human race by helping nature rationally make the proper selection of who lives and who dies. Although everything is changing, we are told to trust that through the wise decisions of the men in the labs who are assisting nature in the selection of the fittest, we are in a state of constant progress. God the Creator and Original sin, and the need of a Redeemer are completely excluded from their thinking. Many of these people working in these laboratories do not look upon human life as a unique expression of God s love. Indeed for them you don t need to postulate the existence of God as the source of human life. For some ultimately you don t need God, indeed some are declared atheist. For them human life is no longer viewed as the result of a Human and Divine act of love in the State of Marriage created by God and raised to the level of a Sacrament in the New Order of Grace And so what do we have in the reproductive laboratories today? We have the absurd situation now where the unitive aspect of marriage is totally disregarded. Namely that human life should come into existence out of an act of human love cooperating with almighty God. Now when growing life in the lab, the inherent worth of that life is lost to the point that we think that the child s life is an object to be used for others. When you or I go to a hospital, you are a patient and that which is done to you, should be done for you, for your benefit and must be of long range benefit to your health. But when they are treating a human life in the laboratory, they don t ask for consent. They don t say can we have consent to do an experiment on you for the sake of someone else in this hospital or someone who will be born years from now. In other words we are involved in a type of technological tyranny, in which we again exist not for our own sake but for the sake of the species, for the sake of the State, for the sake of others. In the labs human life is being 8

9 manipulated and treated for the sake of others as a common practice, like for example, when they are doing embryo stem cell research, that is not for the benefit of that life They say recently we discovered a new way to take the embryo stem cell that would not kill the embryo. Namely as the zygote multiplies into a blastocyst stage, they take the 8 th cell and from that cell, we are going to develop all the different parts of the body, and it doesn t seem to destroy the embryo. Isn t that okay? Well it s not okay. It is wrong for all the reasons already mentioned. Actually in the United States this practice of taking the 8 th cell from the growing embryo, has been common since The reason why they take the 8 th cell, in the infertility clinics, is to see if the unborn has Down-syndrome with the intent, if it has, of destroying the new life. Embryo screening also known as pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, namely the PGD test, is a common procedure with in-vitro fertilization, namely, where an egg and sperm are mixed in a lab dish and then implanted into the womb. In the PGD test, administered before implantation, a cell from a days old embryo is removed to allow the doctor to examine it for genetic defects. From the single cell zygote, they can genetically see if the infant is a boy or girl. When they want to destroy the cell, they tell you it is a nothing. There are 60 thousands genes in this one cell zygote from which they can tell you that at the age of fifty, you will have heart trouble but they tell us it is nothing when they want to experiment or eliminate the zygote. They can tell you everything from the beginning, because the single cell zygote is an incredible, irreducible complex organism. From the first moment of your existence as a human being, your genetic makeup is different from every other person. The zygote contains all your genetic information that is going to be played out through the rest of your life. We should allow every song to be sung, to be played. We should allow each life to grow for each one is a special song of praise of God. And each one has so much to give and no song should be left unsung. But what they do is, they take the cell and examine it to see if it is genetically deficient or not. Is it genetically perfect or not. If it is not, then that life is destroyed, the new song is never sung. In the genetic cleansing of the human race, we eliminate those whom we consider would be a burden. But we eliminate them in a very intelligent fashion, namely making sure the weaker, the imperfect are destroyed. Those who would suffer, we save from such a cross by eliminating them. We are implementing in the womb a euthanasia program! If the child was born in the context of Family, namely where God intended life to be conceived, the child wouldn t have to pass a test in order to be born or to continue to exist. In the family, you are loved and accepted unconditionally because you are you. Each child is considered precious to God no matter what the condition. But in the infertility clinics, you now have to pass a test in order to continue to exist. Most parents, who go to the infertility clinics, lack any sophisticated knowledge in genetics and are simply told after the PGD test, it is better that we try again. You see human life has become a product, a commodity. And although the woman ordered only one, because many times the embryo doesn t take, and the process of getting the ovum is expensive and painful, they will have the woman fertilize more ova than needed and they will freeze them and so to speak put them on the shelf for later 9

10 10 attempts. If the woman decides it s enough and I m not going to try anymore, they then have all these extra human embryos frozen on the shelves. Which, by the way, would not be there, if the Law was that no life can be grown in the labs that is not implanted in the womb. However, sometimes all four take and they then will go into the womb on the 12 th or 13 th week with a needle, and put it into the heart of three of the four unborn children, since the mother only ordered one. Many people are also going to the infertility clinics, because their sperm or ovum isn t working properly. Where do they get a healthy sperm from? Where do they get the ovum from? In a local New York City Paper, before I came here to Fatima, I saw an advertisement, which was directed towards young women, indicating that if a young woman would donate her ovum and it was used in a completed cycle, (a baby would be born from her ovum )she would receive eight thousand dollars. They have similar advertisements in the newspaper of many major colleges and universities. The advertisements indicate that the students can easily pay for their college tuition by doing a wonderful act of charity, for an infertile couple, if they donate their ovum, or donate their sperm.. They have many sperm and ovum banks, where records are kept of the IQ, the background, the race, etc of the donors. You order what you want. When infertile couples go shopping in this situation, it gives new meaning to the words designer genes, since the couple intends to buy a designer baby rather than cloths. At what point in her life does a woman have in her ovaries, all the ova that she will have for the rest of her life bearing years. It is at eight weeks gestation in the womb. After eight weeks, the little girl in the womb already has all the ova she will have for the rest of her life. What is the significance of this? Well another source of the ova can be from the aborted babies. So you can have an ovum from an aborted child, being fused with the sperm from some college student, on a petri dish in a Lab, which is then implanted in a mother who is actually now a surrogate mother while the biological mother of the child was unjustly killed before the child was conceived and the actual father doesn t even know that the child exists and most likely doesn t even care. And the so called father who is there, has no relationship to the new child. How far we have come! And we call this progress. When they do embryo stem cell research and they remove the stem cell, it actually kills the new life. Where do they get these embryos? When the women goes into a infertility clinic, they deliberately fertilize many ova because they are going to use the extra embryos for stem cell research. The abortion clinics supply the infertility clinics, the infertility clinics supply the stem cell research labs, that supplies products for the pharmaceutical companies and cures for sick people in hospitals, all to be subsidized tragically by tax payers monies. In this increasingly barbaric society, everything is becoming interconnected, entrenched. And all this happens once you deny that only in the context of marriage should a human life come into existence, and every human life should be welcomed and loved unconditionally.

11 11 On July 25 th 1968, Pope Paul the VI in the Encyclical Humanae Vitae warned us of the terrible consequence for humanity if we frustrated God s design for marriage and the process of procreation, by insisting on deliberately separating human love and sexuality from human life and God. Again on February 22 nd 1987, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger in the Document Donum Vitae warned the world would become tragically blind to the inherent worth of each human life, once we separated human life, from human love and sexuality, from human and Divine love. In this Brave New World, the inherent worth of human life is being reduced to a commodity, an object to be used for the sake of others. May I conclude by relating a story about an ancient village in which some wise men saw the moon reflected in a pond. And the so called wise men were taken up with the moon in the pond. They decided they were going to get to the bottom of this. So they got some rakes and sticks and they tried to get the moon out of the pond. They just dragged up the mud in the water and lost the moon. What some so called modern wise men try to do today is, they try to understand human life and human sexuality by going down deeper and deeper into the mud, namely insisting man comes from some form of lower animal life, and that man explains himself by himself. We search for wisdom in the wrong place and like the so called wise men in the village, we lose even that which is in front of us. If the wise men had looked up to the Heavens, they would have seen the moon and they would have realized that the moon in the water was a reflection of the moon in the heavens. The Church today urges the so called wise men of our times not to look down, don t go into the mud to understand human love and sexuality, but rather look up. Man and his sexuality is a reflection of the living God. It s a great and incredible gift. Wisdom comes with looking up to Christ and finding one s meaning in Christ. Looking up to God, the Trinitarian God, is the way to understand the meaning of ourselves and our human sexuality. Indeed it is the wise way to understand the ultimate meaning and purpose of human life itself.