Is the Church "imposing"? Or is it someone else?

It happened again yesterday when I was debating atheists on StrangeNotions.com: a man threw out the ubiquitous accusation that the Catholic Church is trying to "impose" her view of marriage on society.

The charge is so common now, used so reflexively by gay "marriage" supporters, that I think most Catholics just ignore it altogether. But I've decided to stop letting it slide, and I've started giving the accusers a short lesson on the meaning of the word "impose".

When I googled the word "impose", this was the first definition that popped up, so let's use it for our discussion:


im·pose  
/imˈpōz/
Verb
[To] Force (something unwelcome or unfamiliar) to be accepted or put in place.


Now, if you've been following the issue of gay "marriage" and the massive, pull-out-all-the-stops push for its acceptance in America, something should immediately jump out at you when you evaluate that definition. Do you see it?

Just in case it's too obvious to see, let's break it down....

Marriage as union between male and female has been a reality (a non-controversy, a given) not only for the entire history of America, but essentially for the history of mankind. Since I cannot stop repeating the brilliant words of Hillary Clinton on the subject (shortly before her historical knowledge "evolved" along with the political winds), here are they are again:

"[Marriage is] the fundamental bedrock principle that it exists between a man and a woman going back into the mists of history, as one of the founding foundational institutions of history and humanity and civilization, and that its primary, principle role during those millennia has been the raising and socializing of children for the society in which they are to become adults.”

Bam!

And this basic understanding of the inherent heterosexuality of the conjugal union is what we would call the status quo.

A bride and a groom are needed for a marriage = status quo.

Traditional view of marriage (woman + man) = status quo.

Enter the gay "marriage" movement, with its advocates working very, very hard to change the basic understanding of marriage. In other words, the gay "marriage" movement is trying with all its might to change the status quo.

When a movement or group comes in and labors to replace what exists with something new that it demands, that is called imposition. It's imposing. The gay rights movement (and not the Church!) has actually been imposing its view of marriage upon society.

To refer back to the definition above, let's just add the words to test it: The gay "marriage" movement has "forced (something unwelcome or unfamiliar) to be accepted or put in place".

See, that fits.

And the force for acceptance has been powerful, as it's been imposed from the top down. Meaning, the clamor and cry for the redefining of marriage did not grow upward from the people (as the 1960s-era civil rights movement did), but was instigated by the elites, led by lawyers and judges and professors. The whole point of forced acceptance was to displace society's status quo understanding of marriage, which had been comfortable and quite acceptable to the people.

But now let's go back to left's narrative, this accusation that "the Catholic Church is imposing its beliefs on society!" What would society have to look like for that claim to have any truth in it?

Picture this: An American society exists in which gay couples are marrying just as they have since "the mists of history". The sight of two grooms on their wedding day is as familiar and pleasing to the average American as baseball and apple pie. Lesbians shopping for their wedding gowns (with the brides later being escorted down the aisle by their two sets of married dads) would simply be part of the cultural landscape, unremarkable in any way. Children would know from a young age that when they grow up, they can marry either boys or girls; it's simply understood. The concept of traditional marriage is unheard of and unwanted.

Enter the Catholic Church into this America, heavy-handedly "imposing" her beliefs, using her police force, her courts, her unlimited power to fine and imprison and ruin… wait, never mind, she doesn't have anything like that; that's the state telling citizens that they must no longer accept the status quo but instead must change their minds and values and accept the Catholic Church's understanding of marriage as heterosexual in nature right now! Or, or… or else!

Hmmmm.

It'd be a pretty weak imposition by the Church without the power to fine and jail and all, but of course, the entire scenario is completely false, and so the claims that the Catholic Church is imposing her beliefs on society is ludicrous.

Okay, back to reality. The truth is that all the movement, all the force, all the pressure, all the demands "to accept or put in place something unwelcome or unfamiliar" is coming from one side. And it's not the Catholic side.

So the next time someone tells you that the Catholic Church is "imposing" her beliefs on society, you might want to say:

Princess Bride

Bye-bye Facebook!

So, I finally deactivated my Facebook account. I'm sure it's only temporary, but for me it's necessary. I have so little discipline when it comes to chatting and posting and reading on Facebook, and although I think it serves a great purpose (we need to have a Catholic presence there!), it has become for me, at this time of my life, a great time-suck that keeps me away from my vocation (wife and mother). And, it's part of the reason that this blog has begun to wither on the vine a bit.

Also, if I were to add up the amount of minutes (hours) I have been spending on Facebook compared to time spent in prayer, well, let's just no go there at all.

I will miss my conversations there, and the ability to link good news stories like crazy, but I also really have missed the great comment box conversations we've had here over the years. I want to get back to that. I want meaty discussions on cultural issues, and I also want to get back to teaching the Faith, simply and clearly.

Although summer at the Miller home is probably not conducive to a whole lot of concentrated writing and editing of good posts -- as we speak there are five boys crazily playing some kind of running, jumping, tagging, slamming, injuring-your-brother game right next to me, and the second story on which we are situated is bouncing up and down; I keep wondering when we all are going to collapse into the garage below -- it will at least be easier if I am not constantly drawn to the siren named Facebook.

Disciple and discipline are related words. I need the latter to be the former.

Thanks for sticking with me, guys, and hopefully I will have something of substance back on this blog soon.

Light summer reading!

Finally catching up with my kids and am reading Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.

I highly, highly recommend it. Dostoevsky's timeless understanding of the human heart and the human condition is astounding. And what a story teller!

Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1821-1881

My admiration for those great minds who have come before us knows no bounds.

Next up, Brothers Karamazov!



UPDATE: For another great summer reading idea, check this out!

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Just Curious: What made you turn from pro-"choice" to pro-life?

A couple of weeks ago I received an interesting email from a reader, and I thought it would make a great "Just Curious". She said in part:

It occurred to me that you might be interested in inviting your readers to share if they've seen pro-abortion people change their hearts and minds....and how it happened. I imagine you and your readers would have some great insights that could inspire and help others!  

I'm also mulling the idea of doing more. It would be fascinating to hear stories from those who participate in sidewalk prayer as well as volunteers in crisis pregnancy centers. When I say stories I think I really mean witness. This is all so foreign to me and yet I already know that this is where I'm headed! I can't not do something.

So in honor of this woman's sincere desire to be a better pro-life witness, I'm just curious:

1) What made you (or someone you know) turn from pro-"choice" to pro-life?

2) Sidewalk counselors and crisis pregnancy center volunteers: What graces have you witnessed or consolations have you received in your ministry?

I am allowing the comments to be anonymous for this post, at least for now. Let's see how it goes.

Update! Because so many of you helped Uju in her quest to keep Africa pro-life...

...I just had to share this with all of you!

A few days ago, I received the most amazing email from our dear friend Obianuju Ekeocha ("Uju"), who first came to my attention when she courageously wrote her open letter to billionaire Melinda Gates. She later wrote an excellent follow-up for the Bubble.

Since that time, her Nigerian bishop asked her to put together a pro-life conference back in Africa (Uju currently lives and works in England). Suffice to say, she was stunned and overwhelmed, not having the first idea how to begin such a monumental task. But the Lord provided the grace, and after this appeal (remember?), you provided the means. So many of you stepped up generously and donated enough funds to pay the airfare for top-notch pro-life speakers to headline this groundbreaking African conference.

Here are Uju's own words soon after she arrived for the big event:

Dearest Leila !!!!

Of course you would know that I will at least send you a mail from Nigeria! There is internet connection but it is not at my fingertips as I have it in the UK where composing an email is only as difficult as picking up my iPhone. Here I actually have to connect a modem to my lap top and then pray for a good reception.

Anyway, I am so glad that I can at least write you at this time.

I am well and Nigeria is as lively as ever. As you may have seen in my blog, I am so so so busy during these days and nights as I try to prepare the landing ground for dearest Nicole and the 2 other Americans. Everyone is so excited about their coming. 

Having said that, Brian Clowes of Human Life international has already arrived yesterday (Sunday) and has already given 2 powerful talks and he has also met HUNDREDS of people. He spoke to about 600 seminarians and afterwards he told me that he had never seen so many seminarians in his life! And that is only one of our 4 major seminaries in this region.
Leila, there is such a high excitement here because my people are about to wake up to the great importance of defending the Culture of life .

By Wednesday our conferences begin and I actually did not realise that I had been chosen to give the commencement speech !!!! Ok. I should have known that our Blessed Mother still has a few surprises for me at the fringe of her mantle. Please pray for me to do bravely.

I was invited by the archbishop to his place last Saturday and after our meeting he spoke with my dad and gave me such high praises and compliments. And of course this was a real honour unto my dad and my entire family.

Again I would beg for your prayers because so much responsibility has been placed on my little shoulders and as the yoke of our Lord is neither burdensome nor heavy I will gladly surrender to it.

Many more things are about to unfold and I pray for our Lord to give success to the work of our hands for the glory of his name.

Ok dearest sister, I will stop here and go to bed, mass is 6am !!! I will continue to pray for you and your intentions here in Nigeria because I know how much encouragement that I got from you. Feel free to share whatever I’ve said here.

Much love to you and yours.

Uju
From Enugu, Nigeria


Shortly after this email was written, our own Nicole (Mom and Then Some) arrived in Nigeria. Months earlier, upon hearing of Uju's desperate need, Nicole had selflessly and joyfully offered her pro-life expertise as president of Delaware Right to Life. After working tirelessly across an ocean ever since, they are together at the conference at last! In this photo (which makes me giddy!), Nicole is on the far left, and Uju is next to the bishop:

I love these beautiful people! Ahhhhh!

I cannot wait until the ladies are able to give a full account when it's all over.

Thank you all from the bottom of my heart for what you have done to help Uju and Nicole facilitate this miracle.

Be sure to check in with Uju's Culture of Life Africa blog and Culture of Life Africa facebook page for more updates. And please pray!

How they met!

Who said that blogging is a waste of time? Not me! Well, at least not in this case! Indirectly, it was blogging, after all, that led my daughter to find the "Athanasius" of her dreams (even if she didn't giggle)!

If you are a longtime reader of the Bubble, you may remember that for the first couple of years I had the following written at the end of my greeting on the right sidebar: "For fun, I like to make matches between devout Catholic singles. I'll let you know when one of those matches works out."

True that I have not had much success (understatement) in my matchmaking endeavors over the past several years, but attentive readers may have noticed that my sidebar has changed to this: "One of those matches seems to be working out…."

Indeed! When I prayed to God to give me just one "big" match and I'd be satisfied, I never expected it to be my own child. Our Lord is delightful and surprising! And for fun, He allowed the Catholic blogosphere to be the means by which this couple found each other.

I began this blog in April 2010, and by the fall of of that year, some of my Catholic blogging peers had become good facebook and email friends as well, including the beautiful young Mary Mascarello who blogged at The Screllos (now private). I had never met Mary in person (still haven't!), but our email friendship was strong. That November, we were joking via email about the need for Mary to set up my daughter with a relative or someone she knew, so that we could be related. I told her my daughter's "type" and told her to get on it, ha ha. She did! She almost immediately remembered a young man she had just met at a Theology on Tap meeting, and my daughter can summarize from there:

My mom, the ever-aspiring matchmaker, has always wanted to find me a good Catholic man to marry. I will grant her partial credit for this victory. In fall 2010, she gave her friend, Mary, the task of finding my future husband. Mary, who lives in the midwest, said she had met a nice-looking young man at Theology on Tap. She told my mom about him and I received an odd text from my mother saying, “His name is Carter”. Then I received a phone call telling me she had found my future husband. So the facebook creeping commenced…. he was tall, dark, handsome, loved Augustine and Aquinas. Meanwhile Mary had told Carter about me. He sent me a facebook message right before he was off to the March for Life in D.C. and before I was headed abroad to study in Orvieto, Italy. 

The breathtaking duomo that crowns Orvieto was begun in the 13th century.
Very near to it is where St. Thomas Aquinas compiled his Catena Aurea.

He asked if he could write me letters. Of course I said yes. After all, what is more romantic than writing letters to a young man across the ocean from my room in a cobblestone, hilltop town? That’s right. Not much. On the first day of class, I received my first letter. The next day I spent a long time at the little paper shop down the street picking out the perfect stationery. We wrote letters back and forth across the ocean. I’d tell him about my Italian adventures and he’d tell me about the happenings in his life. We discussed literature, theology, our shared Catholic faith. When I came back to the states, we kept exchanging letters. 

Finally, he alluded to wanting to meet me. We decided to meet at a half-wayish point – at the University of Dallas, where my best friend went to school. Over my birthday weekend, eight months after we began writing letters and only a month after I had first heard his voice on the phone, I met the love of my life and future husband.

Fast forward to the proposal. By May 2012, Carter had moved to Arizona to be closer to my daughter, and we all knew it was just a matter of time before the lovebirds would be engaged. Again, I'll let my daughter take it from here:

On Christmas Day 2012, Carter was with his family in his hometown and I was with mine in Phoenix. After the Miller clan had opened an abundance of presents, Mom said she saw one last present behind the tree. To my surprise, there was a pretty all-white stocking with a white rose in it. There was no to/from tag, but inside the stocking was a small package. I opened it up to find the very first letters Carter had ever sent me. I was very, very confused because to my knowledge I had these letters in a special box down in a different town, where I was attending school. My mom played the fool and I called Carter, who pleaded ignorant. 

That night on my pillow I found another white rose and more letters. Over the next two days the white rose/letter combination kept appearing places… on my suitcase, in my shoes. Since no one would tell me what was going on, I dubbed this mysterious rose/letter giver the “Christmas gremlin”. On the 27th I left for Carter's hometown and apparently the gremlin had followed there, as the roses and letters continued! On the night of the 28th, I received the most recent letters Carter had sent me and I knew as I went to sleep that night that I would be engaged come the next day! (Well, that and the fact that when I had showed Carter a new lace dress my mom’s friend had given me, he told me I should “wear it tomorrow”.) 

Very early the next morning I awoke to a bed sprinkled in white rose petals and a new letter, which told me that it was snowing and to meet him in the backyard. Knowing what was about to happen, I naturally took about half an hour to 45 minutes getting ready. I walked downstairs and Carter was standing in the kitchen. He led me outside and guided me down the deck’s snow-covered steps (although it was not snowing!) to our favorite tree in the yard. And it was in this snowy winter wonderland that my future husband got down on one knee and asked for my hand in Holy Matrimony. And I said, “Of course!"

Yes, that is snow on his knee! No, she was not feeling the cold!

And there you have it! My passion for matchmaking and blogging has borne good fruit, thanks to the grace of a generous God (and the faithfulness of two great young people). Thank you for sharing in our joy as we prepare for the wedding which is fast approaching. Please keep this couple in your prayers, and let us pray for the strengthening of holy marriage in general, and the purity of young people. Despite the darkness and despair in this world, we must always be a people of great hope! God is an awesome God!

Engagement photos by Lexi Moody Photography

Pope Francis knows the difference between redemption and salvation. Do you?

AP

Secularists and believers alike seem confused by the recent words of Pope Francis when he affirmed that all people, even atheists, are redeemed:

"The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone!"

Despite what one might conclude after reading the flurry of frenzied headlines that followed, the Holy Father was saying nothing new; the fact that Jesus Christ redeemed the world is age-old, standard Christian teaching. Consider the prayers we traditionally use for the Stations of the Cross:

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless You, because by Your holy cross, You have redeemed the world.

Yes, the whole world -- which includes all atheists, all sinners, all people, even all things -- was redeemed by the Blood of Christ that was shed for us on Calvary. Jesus paid the ransom (the word "redemption" literally means the "buying back" of a thing), and His atoning sacrifice opened the gates of Heaven, which had been previously closed to humanity due to Adam's sin.

"For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all…."  1 Timothy 2:5-6

The Cross redeemed all. Bam!

But (and it's a big but)… not everyone will choose to accept the redeeming love of God and its invitation to salvation. While God didn't need our cooperation or permission to redeem us, without our cooperation and permission He will not save us. God is a gentleman, and He will not bring us into union with Him unless we desire that union. Redemption has come to all of us, thanks to Christ's atoning work on the Cross approximately 2,000 years ago, but salvation is an individual choice that we each must make, a gift that we can accept or reject even up to our dying breath.

So when Pope Francis said that everyone is redeemed, even atheists, he was correct! It's a basic Christian tenet taught by Scripture, Tradition, and every pope before him -- but one that implies nothing about any individual's salvation. I wish that more journalists (and more Christians) were well-versed in the basics of the Faith, but the buzz and controversy gives us an opportunity to teach and clarify these truths for the world.

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For an even better explanation, check out Brandon Vogt's article on StrangeNotions.com:

Did Pope Francis Really Say All Atheists are Redeemed?

Still no time to blog...

…so here are some things that inspired me this week:

A priest for forty hours

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Have a beautiful Pentecost Sunday, the birthday of the Church!

 Jean II Restout

The irony of the CBSNews headline:

See, Gosnell is only guilty of murdering three babies, because the thousands of other babies he killed (same ages, same sizes) were killed legally.

It's sort of like when the Nazis killed the Jews. It wasn't murder, you understand, because in Germany at that time, the law said it was okay.

And if men make laws saying that it's okay to target and kill certain groups of human beings, then, well, it must be okay, right?

There are surely no other abortionists guilty of murdering any other babies day in and day out, they are only efficiently providing "reproductive health services". Aside from those three murdered babies (an anomaly!), all is well in Abortionville, USA. Nothing to see here, move along now….

Life is good!

Been off the grid for a couple of days and had a wonderful time at our eldest daughter's college graduation!

We are so proud of her, and we are looking forward to our other daughter's high school graduation in just a few weeks!

And I must say, it's been so peaceful, beautiful, incredible not to be reading and talking about all the darkness in the world, not debating about down being up and up being down, but instead just being grateful to the Lord for every grace and blessing (which is easier to do when one walks away from screens for a bit)!

In keeping with the joy theme, I hope to tell you in the next post how my daughter and her fiancé met, so stay tuned!

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