A reader sends in a link to this report, just published online:

A new study of Texas’ Inpatient Hospital Discharge Public Use Data Files for 2000 through 2003 shows that the six US Catholic hospital systems operating in Texas reported providing contraceptive devices and medications as well as sterilizations of men and women in violation of human dignity and the Gospel (study may be downloaded from Catholic hospitals betray mission). Over 9,600 women were explicitly diagnosed for direct sterilization. 900 additional operations to interrupt fallopian tubes and 57 events related to legally induced abortion or “termination of pregnancy” were reported in circumstances that may also have violated Catholic hospital directives. The study does not include data on the hospitals’ provision of these procedures on an outpatient basis.

Though this data is from the earlier part of this decade, one wonders if it’s not part of a continuing trend. Consider this article in yesterday’s edition of the Washington Times:

Federal authorities are investigating the actions of a Catholic charity in Richmond which helped a 16-year-old Guatemalan girl to receive an abortion in January, in possible violation of Virginia law.

In possible violation of Catholic charity, too.

Bishop Arthur Serratelli of Patterson, NJ, in his diocesan newspaper The Beacon (via Whispers in the Loggia), writes a sound defense of the proposed new translation of the Mass. Or more accurately, a sound defense of the spirit in which the translation was made:

But there is something more at stake than pleasing individual tastes and preferences in the new liturgical translations. The new translations aim at a “language which is easily understandable, yet which at the same time preserves . . . dignity, beauty, and doctrinal precision” (Liturgiam Authenticam, 25). The new translations now being prepared are a marked improvement over the translations with which we have become familiar. They are densely theological. They respect the rich vocabulary of the Roman Rite. They carefully avoid the overuse of certain phrases and words.

The new translations also have a great respect for the style of the Roman Rite. Certainly, some sentences could be more easily translated to mimic our common speech. But they are not. And with reason. Latin orations, especially Post-Communions, tend to conclude strongly with a teleological or eschatological point. The new translations in English follow the sequence of these Latin prayers in order to end on a strong note. Many of our current translations of these prayers end weakly. Why should we strip the English translation of the distinctive theological emphases of the Latin text? A slightly non-colloquial word order can lead the listener to a greater attention to the point of the prayer. . . .

A language suited for the Liturgy: this is the one of great advantages of the work being done on the new translations. There is more to the Liturgy than the human language of any age or any one country. In the new translations of the Roman Missal, a conscious effort is being made to suit the human word to the divine action that the Liturgy truly is. As Pope Benedict XVI has said, the “central action of the Mass is fundamentally neither that of the priest as such nor of the laity as such, but of Christ the High Priest: This action of God, which takes place through human speech, is the real “action” for which all creation is in expectation. . . .This is what is new and distinctive about the Christian liturgy: God himself acts and does what is essential” (The Spirit of the Liturgy p. 173).

Bishop Serratelli is right: It’s not just an argument about taste. At the core is an argument over the nature of the liturgy itself. Is the Mass a time to teach the faith and worship God or a time to feel good about ourselves? Is the liturgy a foretaste of the communion of heaven or a party for our own enjoyment?

Not that these actions are mutually exclusive. We should enjoy the liturgy as a foretaste of heaven, and we should rejoice in the truths it proclaims. But the fundamental question remains: Is the Mass primarily about us or is it about God? According to Bishop Serratelli, the new translation of the Mass better points us toward its proper focus: the author of our salvation and the source of our joy.

The limerick is—or ought to be—the poetic genre ideally suited to the blogosphere: Short and pithy, quotable and memorable, feisty and funny and fine. And sometimes, just sometimes, it actually reveals a kernel of wisdom through the show of wit. Here are two eminent examples, from the respective fields of lapsarian theology and linguistic zoology:

St. Augustine thought he had found
The sin by which mankind is bound:
“It was not,” so said he,
“The fruit on the tree,
But the lust of the pair on the ground.”
—Bob L. Staples

The bustard’s an exquisite fowl
With minimal reason to growl:
He escapes what would be
Illegitimacy
By the grace of a fortunate vowel.
—George Vaill

Via Liberating the Limerick by Ernest W. Lefever.

In yesterday’s daily article, I wrote about the War on Abstinence being waged by Planned Parenthood and the ACLU. At the top of the Drudge Report this morning are news reports from Gloucester, Massachusetts, about seventeen girls—all under the age of sixteen—who made a pact to become pregnant together.

Not surprisingly, the Time magazine story pushes Catholicism as the problem and contraception as the answer right in the second paragraph: “The question of what to do next has divided this fiercely Catholic enclave. Even with national data showing a 3% rise in teen pregnancies in 2006—the first increase in 15 years—Gloucester isn’t sure it wants to provide easier access to birth control.”

But there was no contraception failure here. Nor was limited access to contraception the cause. These were intentional teen-age pregnancies—something a comprehensive sex-ed program doesn’t speak to. It appears that the students saw childbearing and rearing as a means to finally discovering unconditional love:

Amanda Ireland, who graduated from Gloucester High on June 8, thinks she knows why these girls wanted to get pregnant. Ireland, 18, gave birth her freshman year and says some of her now pregnant schoolmates regularly approached her in the hall, remarking how lucky she was to have a baby. “They’re so excited to finally have someone to love them unconditionally,” Ireland says. “I try to explain it’s hard to feel loved when an infant is screaming to be fed at 3 a.m.”

This seems in keeping with the fascinating book that came out a few years ago by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage.

How will Planned Parenthood and the ACLU—with their emphasis that sexual autonomy rules the day—persuade these women that putting marriage before motherhood is the way to go?

In yesterday’s Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby writes of the the dangers of depopulation and of how having more people can help society. A sample:

Like other prejudices, the belief that more humanity means more misery resists compelling evidence to the contrary. In the past two centuries, the number of people living on earth has nearly septupled, climbing from 980 million to 6.5 billion. And yet human beings today are on the whole healthier, wealthier, longer-lived, better-fed, and better-educated than ever before.

The catastrophes foretold by Malthus and his epigones - some of them in bestsellers like “The Population Bomb,” which predicted that “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now” - have never come to pass. That is because people are not our greatest liability. They are our greatest asset - the wellspring of every quality on which human advancement depends: ambition, intuition, perseverance, ingenuity, imagination, leadership, love.

True, fewer human beings would mean fewer mouths to feed. It would also mean fewer entrepreneurs, fewer pioneers, fewer problem-solvers. Which is why it is not an increase but the coming decrease in human population that should engender foreboding. For as Phillip Longman, a scholar of demographics and economics at the New America Foundation, observes: “Never in history have we had economic prosperity accompanied by depopulation.”

Via Real Clear Politics