Beware of False Prophets

Every once in a while, a series of apparently unrelated events seems synergistically to create an inspiration for spiritual reflection. One such example began with a homily given by our pastor on Wednesday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time, from Matthew 7:15-20, about our ability to identify the "bad fruits" of false prophets by focusing on the teachings of Christ. This was followed that same morning by several Google News articles about the continued asinine antics of former President Donald Trump. Two days later, the New York Times published an article about the unmarked remains of children supposedly under the care of Catholic schools in Canada. That evening, I ran across an old wedding photo of my paternal grandfather and grandmother (above). In church the following morning, we prayed for the people involved in the collapse of a condominium in Florida. In his homily, our beloved pastor promised to make some remarks next Sunday about President Joe Biden's stance on abortion, which prompted this discussion. Feel free to join in.

Comments about the Church and faithful Catholic Joe Biden reminded me of the relationship between the Church and my faithful Catholic grandfather, also named John Lindorfer. The surviving twin son of a traditional Catholic German immigrant family, Grandpa earned his living as a self-taught carpenter, a skill that he passed on to my own father. He fell in love with another first generation German-American, one of eight Lutheran siblings, two years younger than he.

Unfortunately, the Catholic Church was not able to verify Grandmother Katherine's legal and religious legitimacy. Catholic bishops of that era were leery of allowing members of their flocks to marry anybody else unless the other party agreed to be treated like a pariah, which Grandma was not about to do! Grandpa was given a choice; give up his inflexible Church, or the love of his life! Grandpa chose love, the mark of a Christian! From all indications, his Church and his family promptly abandoned him! My grandparents' wedding day was not altogether a happy one!

Things were not easy in St. Paul, Minnesota during World War I for a German surnamed first generation American tradesman with a bride who had, maybe, a sixth grade education. Both of the Lindorfers worked hard to make ends meet and provide a proper home for my infant father and his blind older sister, my Aunt Grace. But times were hard, and Grandpa's untimely death when his son was seven years old left Grandma a destitute widow. Faced with no savings, no family support, and no way to make a decent living, Grandma sent my father to live with some fellow Lutheran Christians on an Amish farm. There he worked daily for his keep from before dawn to after dusk, essentially ten years a slave. He never recovered from the belief that he had been "given away."

Grandma never recovered, either. Unlike her husband's family of German Catholics, German Amish worked together and helped each other. As the apparently illegitimate sister of seven other siblings, however, Grandma was pretty much on her own. She managed to educate herself enough to get a job as a laboratory technician at the State University of Iowa hospital, which allowed her eventually, with no help from her in-laws, to enroll my father to its college of pharmacy. But to the end of her days, she despised the Catholic Church and was bitterly indignant about what it had done to her and her family, a feeling she passed on to her only son, along with her Lutheran faith.

I can't imagine Grandma's reaction when he announced that he was planning to marry my Catholic mom. The Catholic Church probably found it relatively easy to extract a promise from him that he would not "interfere" in the religious education of her children. Dad kept his own religion strictly to himself, but he was a devoted and loving father, especially given the austere circumstances of his own upbringing. My mother would drag him to mass on Christmas and Easter, where he would sit as a stony-faced witness to the liturgy that had so cruelly rejected him and his mother and still regarded his own father as an eternally condemned "fallen away Catholic." To his great credit, he willingly provided the financial and other resources to ensure the baptism and education of my brother and me in the Catholic Church, including expensive sectarian grade school, high school, and college. He was as good a husband as he was a father, especially during the half of his married life when my mother was chronically ill and no doubt romantically distant. You can read what kind of a man he was here.

Of course, my brother and I didn't appreciate his conspicuous personal holiness at all. We were taught that dad was a heathen, that he was bound for hell if he didn't "convert" to the "true faith." I have spend most of my long life getting rid of that abominable, and decidedly unChristian, attitude! It seems to me that my Catholic teachers should have helped me do that!

Having witnessed firsthand the difficulties inherent in a "mixed marriage," I certainly agree with the bishops about not underestimating their potential difficulties. On the other hand, most of these difficulties seem to me to be due to the bishops' own recalcitrant, "holier than thou" attitude toward an essential human institution in which they, themselves, refuse to participate. Marriage itself, of course, is intrinsically a natural human activity, like breathing, that has nothing to do with the religious affiliation of the partners. It is of much greater antiquity than anyone's church, or any other human institution. God Himself is the author of every marriage, sacramental or otherwise.

Sacramental marriage, of course, is a liturgical act that introduces one into the liturgical order and creates rights and duties in the Church between the spouses and towards their children. The clergy are powerless actually to control it, because it is the religious expression of a basically natural activity, as Grandma and Grandpa demonstrated. It seems to me that Grandpa's religion would have produced "better fruits" if it had demonstrated a attitude more appropriate to the teachings of Christ in its own "rights and duties" toward my struggling grandmother and my abandoned father. My cursory relationship with the "other Lindorfers" years later revealed their lingering condescending attitude toward me and my non-Catholic relatives and friends. They are "part of my family" only by the accident of their birth, for which neither of us can take any credit - or blame!

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit a certain obvious bias about all this; if Grandpa hadn't married Grandma and fathered her children, my own father would never have existed at all! I like to think that one of the uncountable "good fruits" he produced was me!

Part of the current "Catholic" attitude to which I take issue is the way in which so many bishops and other clergy have all but taken Donald Trump as their savior over his political "stance on abortion." They have failed to condemn, as social commentator and comedienne Samantha Bee noted, his "stance" as a "race-baiting, tax cheating, investor swindling, worker shafting, dictator loving, pathologically lying, attorneys general bribing, philandering, narcissistic, serial con artist bully," not to mention a multi-felony convicted criminal, who loves money, the root of all evils! They seemed not to care that he had the same attitude toward morality, ethics, civil rights, ethnicity and religion as Adolph Hitler, but he didn't have a day of preparatory military or public service! Ms. Bee claimed that he was "the most breathtakingly unqualified ignoramus to ever heave his spray-tanned bulk within striking distance of elected office." She said that his entire being was a lie, that he didn't have the attention span to read a fortune cookie, much less an intelligence briefing!

His "stance on abortion" has so far resulted in lack of respect of the most ancient human activity of motherhood and a patchwork of vague, confused, contradictory and obfuscatory laws and court decisions from mostly men. They do nothing to help disadvantaged and frightened pregnant mothers to carry out their sacred duties as generators and protectors of human life, or to provide moral and ethical guidance on the difference between compassionate care of the mother and child and murder of a living human being. On the contrary, it has already resulted in the production of only the first of untold generations of unwanted children who will likely see themselves as pitiful "mistakes," a feeling they will no doubt pass on to their own "accidental" children. History has yet to judge the full disastrous impact of this unconscionably evil man's Presidency on our Nation, the suffering people of the world, and democracy itself!

There is anecdotal evidence that fewer fetal lives are being saved than the maternal choice opponents would suppose. An article published on the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the 2021 ban on abortion in early pregnancy in Texas was associated with unexpected increases in infant and neonatal deaths in Texas between 2021 and 2022. During this period, infant deaths in Texas increased from 1985 to 2240, or 255 additional deaths, a 12.9% increase, whereas the rest of the US experienced a 1.8% increase. Descriptive statistics by cause of death showed that infant deaths attributable to congenital anomalies in 2022 increased 22.9% in Texas but decreased by 3.1% in the rest of the USA. Somebody with more ethical training and authority than I needs to be addressing the moral and societal concerns of pre- and post- delivery medical treatment of suffering babies doomed to die and how, to what extent, and especially if the Nation's churches should get involved. "Leaving abortion up to the states" isn't working very well! Neither is the belief that one is morally prohibited from voting for "anyone who is pro-choice."

Trump, of course, realized that abortion was a divisive political concern, and that claiming to be "pro-life" would likely appeal to gullible voting clergy and laity who considered recognition of a mother's God-given right to freedom of conscience and freedom to make moral decisions an absolute disqualification for any elected office. On the other hand, more American deaths than all the those in combat in WWII are the direct result of his deliberate disregard of the Covid pandemic! In addition, he resumed the federal death penalty by executing more prisoners than any President other than 3+ term wartime President Franklin Roosevelt and the first by a lame duck President since Grover Cleveland. I fail utterly to see how these facts could possibly be compatible with a "pro-life" attitude.

What I presumed my pastor was planning to talk about were recent media reports about conflict between President Joe Biden and his Church officials regarding his own "stance on abortion." I admit that I didn't pay much attention to these, because they seemed vague and ill-informed, and I don't get my information about what our bishops are doing from commercial media anyway. As I understand it, some Catholic bishops are allegedly considering employment of the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Body of Christ as a political weapon against President Biden, a devout Catholic, with respect to this issue. If they did, in fact, leak this information in an effort to bring political pressure to persuade him sinfully to violate his oath of office as President of the United States, or if some news reporters just made it up, I say shame on them! In any case, none of them seems to be denying the allegation! Shame on them again!

My "stance on abortion" is exactly and precisely what the Catholic Church teaches about respect for human life, specifically, the Catechism of the Catholic Church paragraphs 2270-2275. I have a similar "stance" on the ethical treatment of "in vitro" fertilized human ova, about which Trump, and most of the Catholic clergy I know, have said absolutely nothing! Anyone who claims otherwise is at best mistaken and at worst is a false prophet and a liar! In addition, my personal comments on abortion have been on the Internet for over a quarter century. You can email me about either if you care to.

Recently some clergy, such as, for example, Catholic Bishop Joseph V. Brennan, have publicly opposed vaccination against the pandemic corona virus, and possibly others, (and then in some cases changed their position), on the grounds that doing so possibly represents some morally relevant cooperation between those who use these vaccines today and the practice of voluntary abortion long ago. The Pontifical Academy of Life has resolved this issue at "Note on Italian vaccine issue," July 31, 2017 which updated a 2005 publication, "Reflections on the Ethical Nature of Vaccines." I think this pretty much resolves the issue, with respect to abortion, anyway. Bishop Brennan has joined Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of San Francisco in his support for attempting to prevent reception of communion by Catholic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi because of her support for legislation protecting maternal rights. Since Speaker Pelosi is a United States Legislator and Bishops Brennan and Cordileone are not, one has to wonder if the position of the two good bishops is consistent with a their own Church's teaching on freedom of conscience. It seems to me that if either of these most reverend gentlemen are serious in their concern for the unborn, they should be doing something to secure civil rights for them, including those frozen embryos in cryogenic storage throughout the world, about whom the Catholic bishops as a group have said precious little, if anything! If anyone wants to discuss this with me, feel free to email me. I suggest he read my comments on Mississippi Initiative Measure 26 first, however.

I have some additional comments of my own on The Morality of Vaccination on the Internet, for those who might be interested.

In talks about this subject with my clergy, they refer to the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade as if they actually understood it. I frequently find myself being denigrated by them, accused of "splitting hairs" because they are speakers for God and I am (officially, anyway) not. On the other hand, I am a registered professional safety engineer. Engineers deal with raw, untainted, absolute truth, which may be why Jesus never warned anyone to "beware of false engineers!" We have a totally objective measure of the "goodness of our fruits;" if we claim a building is properly constructed and safe to occupy and suddenly it collapses and kills its residents, we are false engineers regardless what anybody, or any number of people, say or believe about it.

We also do not have the option of threatening those who disagree with us with censure, excommunication, or eternal damnation because they don't do or believe what we tell them to. We do our works in private, not to be seen by others, wearing broad religious symbols and special garments with decorated borders. We don't get the best rooms at feasts and the chief seats in church and greetings of "teacher, teacher" in the marketplace! We also do not have the luxury of being forgiven for destroying other people's lives or letting our fellow citizens die from a preventable disease because "we're pro-life." Baseless allegations are not facts!

Regardless of what I or anybody else thinks about it, this is in fact the holding of Roe v. Wade

"The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides a fundamental "right to privacy" that protects a pregnant woman's liberty to choose whether or not to have an abortion. This right is not absolute, and must be balanced against the government's interests in protecting women's health and protecting prenatal life. Texas law making it a crime to assist a woman to get an abortion violated this right."

Maybe the American clergy, Catholic and otherwise, ought to try to do something positive!

They didn't do anything about it during the deliberation in Roe v. Wade. The current argument is that the holding is irrelevant because an unborn child has "human rights," and that "Among such fundamental rights one should mention in this regard every human being's right to life and physical integrity from the moment of conception until death." (with which I, of course, agree). However, in his opinion, Justice Blackmun wrote:

"The appellee and certain amici argue that the fetus is a "person" within the language and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment... If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant's case, of course, collapses, for the fetus' right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the [14th] Amendment. The... appellee conceded on reargument that no case could be cited that holds that a fetus is a person within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment."

Those who maintained that the fetus is a human being could not provide a single instance to support their contention - not one! Perhaps they might have been able to do that if the Catholic Church had ever actually recognized the unborn as "persons" by counting them as members of Catholic parishes, or as among the number of children in Catholic families, or having liturgy that specifically acknowledges the presence or participation of pregnant mothers and their unborn children. And certainly our formal profession of faith could more accurately claim that Jesus "became a human being and was born of the Virgin Mary," instead of "He was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man," which we say now!

One Catholic pastor's view of "who are Catholics"
What I think it should be

Unborn children are referred by the Church as "citizens," but the Fourteenth Amendment specifically requires "citizens" to be "born or naturalized in the United States." United States citizens all have to be born! None of them gains United States citizenship by a fiat of the Catholic Church, the bishops' beliefs notwithstanding.

If anyone knows of any way in which the United States Catholic bishops actually recognize the unborn as persons in any meaningful sense other than to talk about it and oppress others who believe differently, I would really appreciate hearing from you!

Mississippi Initiative Measure 26, voted on November 8, 2011, would have definitively resolved this issue by defining "person to include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the equivalent thereof" in the State of Mississippi. The Mississippi Catholic bishops essentially ignored it! In the pulpits of the churches I attend, it wasn't even mentioned! When I asked my pastor about it, he replied, "The Church doesn't get involved in politics." My feeling is that the Church should get involved in civil rights issues, which defining "who are persons" surely is!

I believe that the all the money spent on the annual "March for Life" would be better spent on providing compassionate support, comfort, medical attention and other necessities to women, especially young women, contemplating abortion, with the purpose of making other options more attractive. It seems to me that marching around obstructing traffic and terrifying teenage girls are "bad fruits" that ought to be pruned from the tree of Christian life.

Here is a photo of Catholic teenagers from the Catholic Diocese of Covington, Kentucky allegedly preventing abortions in Washington, DC by "not getting involved in politics!" One has to wonder whether they donated as much money to the Diocese pregnancy support services as they spent to make the trip - or on the "non political" "MAGA" caps and jackets!

"Pro-life activists" might also improve the moral suasion of their cause by refraining from murdering already born people, such as Doctor David Gunn, Doctor and Korean War veteran John Britton, clinic escort James Barrett, receptionists Shannon Lowney and Lee Ann Nichols, police officer Robert Sanderson, Doctor Bernett Slepian, and Doctor George Tiller, among others.

According to the National Abortion Federation, since the decision in Roe v. Wade, in the United States and Canada there have been 17 "pro-life" motivated attempted murders, 383 death threats, 153 incidents of assault or battery, 13 wounded, 100 butyric acid stink bomb attacks, 373 physical invasions, 41 bombings, 655 anthrax threats, and 3 kidnappings committed against abortion providers. Between 1977 and 1990, 77 death threats were made, with 250 made between 1991 and 1999. In 1985, 45% of clinics providing reported bomb threats, and 15% did the same in 2000. One fifth of clinics in 2000 experienced some form of extreme activity. I have not heard a single voice raised from the pulpit about these "bad fruits" - not a single one!

Of course, the US Catholic bishops would probably all agree that the fifth commandment forbids direct and intentional killing as gravely sinful and an action can be indirectly voluntary when it results from negligence regarding something one should have known or done. I would argue that this obliges the bishops to condemn violence and murder equally vehemently against others as much as against the unborn. One may not do evil so that good may result from it.

In my discussions (!) with my own clergy, they often refer to "the teaching of the Church" as if it is obvious to what "teaching" they refer. Since the entire official "teaching of the Church" consists of countless libraries of text in various languages, I consider such a reference to be so vague as to be meaningless. With regard to contemporary political concerns, however, the Catholic Sisters' Network Advocates for Catholic Social Justice has published a pre-election "scorecard" comparison of Donald Trump's and President Joe Biden's policy positions in the areas Pope Francis names as "equally sacred" to the defense of the unborn, with references to his apostolic exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate, his general audience of June 3, 2020, and his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium.

Trump scores over President Biden in only one of them, "Overturn Roe v. Wade." The impact of that achievement, given what has so far transpired, is not at all settled. It has certainly not achieved any rights for the unborn, but it has but the United States of America on record as categorically denying one of the most fundamental unalienable rights of every single pregnant mother anywhere on earth!

One concern about negligence and doing evil so that good may come of it, with respect to children anyway, arises from recent media reports about discovery of graves thought to be those of indigenous children in religious Canadian residential schools. There appeared to be suggestions, or outright accusations, that the deceased were murdered or starved to death, but I think it is reasonable to assume rather that they may have been victims of lack of sanitation, available medical care, or government funding for sufficient food. I assume that there was insufficient funding for grave markers or headstones, and it may have been that the bodies were haphazardly buried as a reasonable sanitation measure during one or more pandemics to which indigenous children might have been especially susceptible. Here is some of what I found out from Healing and Reconciliation Through Education by Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre.

The residential schools system ran for over a hundred years in Canada, starting in formally in the 1870's and lasting until 1996. Mission schools, industrial homes and hostels dated back even further into the 1830's. It is estimated that 150,000 indigenous children from different nations, including the Inuit and Metis, went through the residential schools system. These schools were administered and run by religious orders in Canada with monetary sponsorship from the Canadian government. Legislation put in place ensured that it was a legal requirement for all indigenous children to attend these schools; consequences of refusal ranged from a loss of First Nations Status, heavy fines, or even jail time.

"When the school is on the reserve, the child lives with its parents, who are savages, and though he may learn to read and write, his habits and training mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. It has been strongly impressed upon myself, as head of the Department, that Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men." - Sir John A. Macdonald, first Prime Minister of Canada

The goals of this system were primarily concerned with culture and language, students would be required to speak English or French while at residential schools and the punishments for speaking their indigenous languages would have been severe. On their arrival to the school students would be first split by gender, forcibly washed, have their hair cut, have any personal items removed, receive a new uniform and sometimes a new name if theirs was not in English. Student's connection to their home community was severed through the long distances between communities and the schools, through the removal of cultural possessions, the removal of language, and through forced separation from siblings they had at the institution.

No doubt most, if not all, of the people responsible for this abomination were well intentioned, and truly believed that what they were doing was for the benefit of the children and their descendants. Unfortunately, they overlooked what I consider is a self-evident fundamental truth, that it is the parents, not the Church, not the government, and certainly not the childless clergy, who are, in fact the personal representatives of the Creator and the custodians of the welfare of their children. This fact is rooted in the biology of human reproduction, a direct creation of Almighty God, whose image and likeness the parents are, and is not subject for its legitimacy to any human institution. I submit that the fact that the word "parenthood" appears only twice in the entire Catechism of the Catholic Church is ample demonstration of the insufficiency of formal Catholic teaching on this overwhelmingly important subject.

In my opinion, we need more emphasis on what "Honour Thy Father and Thy Mother" means!

To me, this is not at all surprising. Very few members of Catholic clergy are or have been parents. I consider the increase of from 898 to 18,036 permanent deacons since Roe v. Wade, a 20-fold increase, to be a welcome, and perhaps divinely inspired, influx of devout men who have the beneficial influence of wives, without whom it is not good that they be alone and the experience of biological fatherhood to bring to their profession of proclaiming the Gospel. But no member of the Catholic Clergy has ever been a mother, and it is the mother who is the sole and sufficient divinely-appointed custodian of the unborn child. The clergy (of any religion) can talk about it, teach about it, help or hinder it, or make rules about how it should or should not be done, but it only the pregnant mothers actually do it, which ultimately makes that decision, right or wrong, their call! If sombody thinks the decision is wrong, it seems to me to be an act of Christian charity to do what it takes to make the right one, especially if doing what it takes to help people make right decisiions is their job!

On the other hand, all members of the Catholic clergy are men, and men have been controlling women throughout history, in every society on earth, by brutalizing them, enslaving them in various ways, and even torturing and killing them if they don't do what the men think they ought to. It is the same technique used to control African slaves in this Country prior to the passage of the 13th Amendment. It's called "keeping them in their place!"

I maintain that the natural biological function of the father is to provide for the physical, economic, nutritional, psychological and emotional needs of the mother immobilized by the natural biological requirements of childbearing and rearing, which he makes possible by fathering the child. The proper function of the government is to protect the rights of the parents. To the extent that its own laws allow it to do so, it includes helping to protect the child's own welfare as well. It is the proper function of those governed, and their legislative representatives, to assure that the law is just and proper, and it is the function of religions and their leaders, not just Catholics, to teach what that means in this context. In the United States, it is the function of the Supreme Court to determine what the law and its effects actually are, so that all those responsible can know when and how it should be enacted, applied, changed, or abolished.

But no one, regardless of his or her position or station, has the right, much less the duty, to usurp the divine right of the mother to determine what is best for her unborn child. The function of religion is to teach, help, guide, enable and counsel. not coerce! The author of life is no less the author of freedom of choice. The right to the exercise of freedom, especially in moral and religious matters, is an inalienable requirement of the dignity of the human person. The Church, as the representative of Jesus Christ, has the responsibility to guide and support the mother, especially the expectant mother, regarding the moral implications of her profound responsibility, and to help her discharge it properly, morally, and well.

As far as its relationship with government is concerned, historically the Catholic Church has not done well when it has become entangled with government. Such entanglements led to the overwhelming shame of the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, not to mention the frequent denigration of other devout peoples' religion and ill-advised political propaganda that I hear from the pulpits in my own church. In the United States, it is prohibited by the First Amendment, which erects a "wall of separation" between church and state. The President is duty bound to respect this separation. Unhappy experience of history demonstrates that the Church should do likewise.

In Matthew 28:19-20 and Mark 16:15, the Bible records the commission Jesus gave to his desciples, the spiritual ancestors of the modern bishops. The were to: (1) go out into the whold world, (2) teach all nations what he commanded, (3) preach the Gospel and (4) baptise them "...in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit," There isn't a single word about making parents have unwanted children, limiting the rights of women to make controversial moral decisions, or punishing them, possibly by burning them to death in the public forum, for making those decisions different from what the exclusively male clergy thought was appropriate. He did, however, have a great deal to say about being good neighbors and loving and helping each other - and a lot to say about self-righteous clergy, too!

It was Donald Trump, not Jesus, whose response to alledged misconduct was "Lock Her Up!" I submit that people who claim to speak for God should know the difference between him and Jesus!

The desire to worship and owe allegiance to a supreme being seems to be rooted in human nature. Historically, this desire has led to the establishment of forms of government based upon religious belief. Many Americans, for example, believe, incorrectly, that the United States is a Christian country and that our laws are based on Scripture. Unfortunately, no political theocracy in history has survived, because the prophets of the religion on which it is based have become corrupt. They end up using the overwhelming coercive and retributive power of the state to force members of their society to believe, say and do what they want, and sadistically torture them to death in the public square, if they exercise their right of freedom of conscience to do otherwise. If Christianity had to rely only for its legitimacy on the honesty, sincerity, piety or righteousness of its clergy, it would have disappeared long ago!

Today our Nation is faced with problems of Biblical proportions that rival the plagues of Egypt: pollution, floods, drought, heat waves, wildfires, rioting, senseless murder, grasshoppers, insurrection, and a pandemic that has killed over 1,100,000 of our countrymen and reduced our national life expectancy by 1.8 percent. Our government, under the leadership of our "Catholic President," is trying mightily to solve these problems. It appears to me that the "fruits" of the leadership of the Catholic Church in the United States could be greatly improved at the very least by being at least as supportive of our President as the Pope is. If the bishops can't do that, they could at least remain respectfully silent (or perhaps shut the hell up)!

Statistically, our Church has not been doing at all well since the Roe v. Wade decision. It might benefit from an adjustment of priorities of its clergy. This is reflected by the following statistics for the Catholic Church in the United States taken from Georgetown University Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. Sacramental data are totals from the previous year. The two population figures are from Wikipedia. Figures are adjusted for population growth which, absent other factors, one would assume would reflect growth of the number of potential members of the Church as well.

As a Catholic, I have the greatest respect for the offices of legitimate clergy, especially of all Catholic bishops who, Catholics maintain, are successors to the Apostles. They are the Church's official teachers of truth when in communion with the Pope and in conformance with established doctrine, part of which is contained in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The foregoing statistics indicate that they might not be close enough to the problems of the lay Church today to know the best way to deal with them. Their track record regarding sexual morality is certainly nothing to brag about!

I think the best way is to be positive; it is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness. By simply condemning abortion and working for its eradication by any means necessary, they may be blinded to the fact that abortion is not the worst thing that can happen to an unborn child. My experience is that clergy of any religion often suffer from amblyopia prophetis, a form of intellectual blindness that is an occupational hazard for all speakers for God, especially those who do not have wives to confront them when they're behaving like brain-damaged political candidates! It is often caused by oculitis trabis, irritation of the eyeball caused by having a plank in it! (Matthew 7:5, Luke 6:42) Regardless, the worst thing that can happen is to be born into a hostile family!

As a child, I knew one such person, a little girl. Her Catholic father was my father's boss, as a result of which her Catholic mother, basically a mean habitual drunk, was an acquaintance of my mother. During her alcoholic episodes, the unwilling mom would savagely beat the child and scream at her, "I hate you! I wish you had never been born! I hope you die!" I can assure you, it would have been far better for that little girl if she had gone home to God instead of being born into to a life of unending physical and psychological torture!

The Catholic clergy, of course, did nothing to prevent her suffering! They didn't know or care! Abortion was, of course, illegal at the time anyway.

Our next door neighbor demonstrated what I consider is the proper attitude with unwanted pregnancies. He and his family temporarily adopted a pregnant teenager who had been abandoned by her relatives as my grandfather had been abandoned by his. They all lived together as a relatively normal family until the morning the young mother went into labor. The neighbor took her to the hospital, where she delivered and gave the baby up for adoption. We never saw the young mother again.

It was rumored by some of the old ladies in the neighborhood that the old man was actually the father of the child. Maybe so, but he fulfilled the duties of fatherhood by caring for the mother, providing for her needs, and doing what he could to give the baby a loving and caring family. Good for him!

This, to me, is the way to prevent abortions. My experiences growing up in the post-Roe v. Wade environment lead me to believe that Almighty God ("Nature," if you prefer) has provided every unwanted unborn child with at least one alternate set of loving parents who don't have a child and desperately want one. With modern computer technology and social media communications, it should be relatively easy to promote ways to find each other and make everyone, including the Catholic bishops, happy. I have proposed a means of doing so since the last millennium. I outline it here. If anyone wants to discuss what to do about abortion with me, start by reading this. Maybe some concerned Catholic bishop could interest President Joe Biden in it!

As for Joe Biden, he is not really "the Catholic President." Like John F. Kennedy, he is "the Democratic President" who happens to be a Catholic. Like me, they took a sacred oath to "protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Additionally, they were sworn to "faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States." These are objectively good things! If a Catholic can legitimately become President, he is also legitimately bound by this oath regardless of other considerations, including what other people, including clergy, think he should be doing or that he "is in the public eye." If religious leaders believe that a provision of the Constitution is immoral, it is they who have the obligation to change it, as adult citizens and those governed, by whose consent the law derives its legitimacy. But the President has a moral, as well as a legal, obligation to enforce the law. as interpreted by the Supreme Court, as it stands.

President Biden's bishop is the Most Reverend Wilton Cardinal Gregory, currently Archbishop of Washington, DC and the only African American cardinal. He has already stated that he is "not going to veer" from the long-established practice of allowing The President to receive Communion, and he alone is the one who makes that decision. I respectfully suggest that his fellow bishops ought not to tell him how to do his job, especially by use of the public media!

In his comments to reporters after his recent audience with Pope Francis, President Biden reported that the Pope told him to "keep receiving Communion." That's pretty clear to me!

Regarding my grandparents, I am eternally grateful that they discharged their duty before God to assure the welfare of their own children, one of whom became my father, in spite of almost insuperable difficulties, many of them imposed by the intransigence of bigoted and hypocritical Catholics, both laity and clergy. May God grant to all my ancestors the reward of their faithful service, and may they rest in peace!

As far as the bishops are concerned, I respect their positions as teachers and spokesmen for God's Church, for they sit in Moses' seat. But Jesus himself condemned his own religious authorities who "bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders: but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.. He also said that who would be great shall be a minister, and those who would be the chiefest, shall be servant of all. One of the titles of the "chiefest" of all the Catholic bishops, the Pope, is the Servus Servorum Dei, the "Servant of the Servants of God." It seems to me that makes each bishop the servant of those to whom he ministers, who should take care to avoid the habits that Jesus condemned, and to be responsive to the needs of the people he "serves." If one of them is my servant, I have a right to make judgments about his service to me.

I was four years old when Ralph Leo Hayes became Bishop of Davenport, Iowa. From that time until I joined the Army and the "flock" of the military ordinary, Bishop Hayes was "my" bishop. As Episcopus Davenportensis, it was his sacred duty to oversee the activities of the priests he had deputized to assist me in the salvation of my immortal soul. He did nothing to protect me from the likes of William Wiebler, Lawrence Soens and other child molesting priests who taught at my high school and eventually bankrupted the Catholic Diocese of Davenport, Iowa with the damages it had to pay to their victims, Part of these came from my Lutheran father who was thus forced to subsidize their nefarious conduct by the contributions he made to the church that abused him!

Bishop Hayes also seems not to have done much to prevent these clerical perverts from poisoning the minds of Saint Ambrose Academy students, including my own, with warped ideas about the morality of natural, rational sexuality. As a soul whose servant Jesus claimed he "shall be," I am less than satisfied with his "service," to say no more!

To be fair, the most Christlike man I have ever met was the Most Reverend Joseph Lawson Howze, the first bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Biloxi, Mississippi, and the South's first Black Catholic ordinary. Raised a Baptist, he converted to Catholicism at age 24. Initially, he studied to be a physician and later taught science in the public and Catholic school system before being ordained a priest in 1959. I consider it a singular honor of my long lifetime that we knew each other personally enough to regard each other as friends. May the Lord grant him eternal rest, and may perpetual light shine upon him!

Like Bishop Howze, the first bishops of the Catholic Church were not raised Catholic. Not one of them began his professional life as a clergyman. Jesus recruited his bishops from middle class working men; his first Pope was a fisherman by trade. Maybe Jesus was onto something!

I think that most Christian bishops, Catholic and otherwise, bear the distinguishing mark of a true Christian, that of loving one another, according to Matthew 5:43-46, 7:1 and following, Matthew 19:19 and 22:39; Mark 12:31-33; Luke 6:27, 32, 35 and 10:27; John 13:34-5 and 15:12, 17; Romans 12:9-10 and 13:8-10; Galatians 5:6 and 13-14; Ephesians 4:2 and 5:2; Philippians 1:9; 1 Thessalonians 3:12 and 5:8; Hebrews 10:24-25 and 13:1; James 2:8; 1 Peter 1:22 and 3:8; 1 John 3:11, 18, 23, 4:7-8, 11-12, 20 and II John 5. The ones I have known certainly do. One of them is also a Franciscan monk!

On the other hand, United States Catholic bishops can be identified by their large, ostentatious hats and garments with fancy, enlarged borders. They almost always have the places of honor at gatherings, and have their own special chairs in their cathedrals. The last one to whom I spoke responded to the call of "Archbishop, Archbishop" in public...

He was also wearing a conspicuous golden cross on his chest, and a black wool suit!

Pope Francis shakes hands with Joe Biden, then vice president, at the Vatican, in 2016. Photo by Andrew Medichini/AP

John Lindorfer