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Voices Online Edition
Vol. XXIII, No. 4
Advent - Christmas 2008
Table of Contents
2... Letters to the Editor -- NFP Instruction Online | Raising Sons | Kudos for “Who Wants a ‘Defective’ Baby?” | WFF Web Site
3... Inside Voices - Fear and Hope — by Helen Hull Hitchcock
4... USCCB November Meeting Report -- Bishops Respond to Crisis on Life Issues, Catholic Teaching — by Helen Hull Hitchcock
6... Statement on Life, FOCA — Cardinal Francis George
7... Overcoming myths and false claims -- What Really Reduces Abortions? — by Richard Doerflinger
Voices Young Writers Awards
8... God Is With Me — by Roland Rebuyon
9... Stand up for Life: A Call to Action! — by Sarah Sheehan
11..Whether Tolerance is a Virtue — by Elizabeth McFadden
14.. Bioethics Watch: The Sarah Palin Effect: The Power of a Mother’s Example — by Nancy Valko, RN
16.. Faith and Reason - The Religion of Secularism — by Burke Mees
17.. Catholic Education is not “The Other Side” — by Donald DeMarco
18.. “You Did it to Me”: For a New Culture of Human Life, Chapter IV of Evangelium Vitae — Pope John Paul II
In Chapter IV of Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae — The Gospel of Life — the focus is on the obligations of all Christians to serve life, in ways appropriate to their state in life. The encyclical is dated March 25, 1995 — the Solemnity of the Annunciation. Its four chapters present fundamental doctrine on the “incomparable worth of the human person”, and call on all people to overcome what the pope described as the “culture of death” with “a new culture of human life”.
The opening sentence announces this universal call: “The Gospel of life is at the heart of Jesus’ message. Lovingly received day after day by the Church, it is to be preached with dauntless fidelity as ‘good news’ to the people of every age and culture”.
29.. A Culture of Life at the Service of the Gospel of Life — by Mary Ellen Bork
32.. How We Subvert God’s Plan — by Joanna Bogle
35.. Novena de Navidad
39.. Affirmation for Catholic Women
Cover: Adoration of the Shepherds (panel, 1482-85) by Dominico Ghirlandaio. Santa Trinità, Florence.
Advent: Every Child Born is a Sign
Hope is indelibly engraved in the human heart because God our Father is life, and for eternal life and beatitude we are made.
Every child born is a sign of trust in God and man and a confirmation, at least implicit, of the hope in a future open to God’s eternity that is nourished by men and women. God has responded to this human hope, concealing Himself in time as a tiny human being.
Saint Augustine wrote: “We might have thought that your Word was far distant from union with man, if this Word had not become flesh and dwelt among us” (Conf. X, 43, 69, cited in Spe Salvi, n. 29).
Thus, let us allow ourselves to be guided by the One who in her heart and in her womb bore the Incarnate Word.
O Mary, Virgin of expectation and Mother of hope, revive the spirit of Advent in your entire Church, so that all humanity may start out anew on the journey towards Bethlehem, from which it came, and that the Sun that dawns upon us from on high will come once again to visit us (cf. Lk 1: 78), Christ our God. Amen.
Pope Benedict XVI
From his homily for the first vespers
of the first Sunday of Advent,
December 1, 2007 - St. Peter’s Basilica
