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Dear Friends,

Here we are at the start of a new year. What will it bring us? What will WE bring to the year? What will YOU do to advance the cause of Life in 2004? There is at least one thing that everyone CAN do and that is to pray. That is the very least that we can commit ourselves to.

Can you pray together with another/others once a month, or once a week? What about initiating (or continuing) in your parish the celebration of the Day of the Unborn Child coming up soon (25th March) when Jesus took human flesh into the womb of Mary. How will you celebrate this greatest of days? Nothing will be achieved without prayer. Inform yourself and you will be equipped to inform others.

Can you support financially a pro-life apostolate, which could do so much more if they had the funds? Victims of Abortion is one deserving and needing your assistance, and Human Life International who play such an important role in promoting Catholic Church teaching struggle to pay the rent and other expenses.

One way to help is to buy the inspiring Weekly Planner 2004 – an attractive A5 spiral bound month-at-a-glance, week-at-a-glance diary with feastdays, every week a pro-life message, including how to refute 25 most common pro-abortion slogans from The Basic Pro-Life Training Course. By the end of the year, you’ll be better equipped to promote Life, and God knows how many babies you might save. I am enclosing for your convenience an application form.

Can you organize a meeting in your home/parish to raise awareness of this apostolate? I would be happy to receive invitations and come to help out. Now that Miriam will be going off to university I will be more free, God willing, to promote this apostolate.

Last News I said that I’d publish Dr. Deirdre Little’s talk on Humanae Vitae, but I am afraid that it is not yet available – so hopefully it will be in the next News. In the meantime, mark your diary tentatively for the last weekend in May (29th-30th) in Bellingen, when we may continue our discussion and prayer together for the cause of Life in our diocese. We may even be able to offer a top-line speaker. More later………

In this edition:

 LET THE DONOR BEWARE - Organ Donation Week 17 – 24 February

 Nadir Martello reflects on Grandparents

 GET A LIFE! Emma Whitely relates her experience as a Helper of God’s Precious Infants

 A letter from Michael of Brisbane Courage.

LET THE DONOR BEWARE!

Organ Donation Week 17 – 24 February

Recently, I walked into Medicare and saw on the wall a large poster announcing Organ Donation Week. Alarm bells started ringing! On previous visits, I had seen brochures urging us all to consider organ donation, and when we renew our drivers’ licenses, we are faced with the question again. This promotion makes me quite uncomfortable. No doubt, during Organ Donation Week, we will see in the media the happy, satisfied faces of those who’ve ‘signed on’ to the register of organ donors.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not against organ donation. A very good friend of mine ten years ago donated his kidney to his sister. Today both he and his sister live full and happy lives.

I did an internet search on organ donation but found only articles extolling the wonders of organ donation, but nothing pointing to the dangers and pitfalls. I then tried a search on ‘brain death’ and a Pandora’s box opened to me, some of whose contents I want to share with you.

The article ARE ORGAN TRANSPLANTS EVER MORALLY LICIT? - by Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Nebraska; Bishop Robert F. Vasa of Baker, Oregon; Prof. Walt Weaver, Clinical Associate Professor, Nebraska University School of Medicine; Dr. Paul Byrne, Neonatologist and Clinical Professor of Paediatrics at Medical College Ohio; Dr. Richard Nilges, Neurosurgeon of Valparaiso, Indiana; and Josef Seifert, Rector of the International Academy of Philosophy in Furstentum, Liechtenstein - is too long to print here but it may clarify this issue somewhat. You will find the complete article at http://www.catholic.net/rcc/Periodicals/Igpress/2001-03/essay.html or if you send me a SAE and two 50c stamps, I will send you a printout. (They answer the title question in the affirmative, and explain under what conditions they are licit.)

In recent years, I met a person who had been, according to doctors, “brain dead”. The spouse had been repeatedly requested (harassed) for permission to take the organs for transplants but the spouse consistently refused. This “brain dead” person eventually recovered and went on to start up and run a new business.

In another case, a 79-year-old man, pronounced ‘brain dead’ was to have his life-support disconnected as soon as his family had said their last goodbyes. But when his 2-year-old grandson ran into the room and yelled ‘Grandpa’, he woke up, sat up, and picked up the little boy. Six months later, he was back to normal. Doctors could give ‘no explanation’ for his instant recovery.

These incidents, while both ending happily, are cause for concern, especially in view of the increasing disregard for the value of human life of the disabled and chronically ill, the push for “living wills”, the prescribed starvation and dehydration to death of those callously regarded as having “a life not worth living”.

This combination of “brain death” and organ donation is one that places every idealistic and generous person at risk of having a shortened life – if they do not hear the full story.

Grandparents

By Nadir Martello

Today, when nothing is definite, the word family also has lost its definition as the construct of a given society made of two parents of different sexes with a child/children. Within the Christian context, a sacred and most venerated image of the Holy Family still is the picture of the three persons - Mary, Joseph and little Jesus.

Not long ago though, family also meant a particular group of people who had their origin and were related to each other by consanguinity. In those days it was quite common to see that the family was kept together by two grandparents, and two parents with children. Today this composite is quite rare.

Now without going in details to find out why it is so, I want underline a fact, in my opinion very important, that is the role of grandparents in the family. It is undeniable that older people have much more experience than younger, and maturity comes with age. Traditionally though, grandparents represent wisdom, firmness, stability, and security. Their role was to pass on to the next generation their knowledge and skill. They were the first custodians of the family tradition, for on this their survival, name and future depended. And while their children were busy working in the field or in the workshop, they looked after their grandchildren at home with care and love that only grandparents are capable of.

I don’t think we can stress this enough. I only came to the realization this morning of how important it is to talk about the role our grandparents played in the past. It is good and commendable to be pro-life. However, I never see anything written which touches, even slightly, the role of the grandparents within the family. How good is it to talk ad infinitum about the rights of child, the rights of the mother and the rights of any individual in a culture of death, if we exclude, or totally ignore, the role of grandparents within the family?

The real problem is that we have isolated old people and sent them into nursing homes, ‘where they are well looked after and well fed,’ we say. Yes, they are well looked after and well fed alright, till they die, if not of dementia, of boredom, or of lack of affection that only family can give them.

We went from the extended family to the nuclear family made up of three or four members. Even that is challenged now by the homosexual lobby with their political agenda, which, if nothing else, is anti-family and anti-life. To compound the situation, the state takes away from the family what was its prerogative, i.e. its authority to raise children according God’s plan and the natural law. No wonder the family today is in trouble!

Being pro-life nowadays in a culture of death is praiseworthy, but if life has to be revalued according the Gospel, we should bring the role of grandparents within the family life into the equation. Grandparents are the faithful custodians of family tradition without which there is no real family, but only a makeshift.

We talk of a family ‘tree’ and tree is the perfect analogy. Like a tree with its roots, trunk and branches - the roots are the grandparents; the trunk is the parents, and the branches are the children. You cut the roots of the tree and it dies. So it is when there is only a nuclear family, with no grandparents, no religion, no faith, and no nothing – it withers.

If we believe the Bible, we should ask ourselves why people before the flood lived so long. The answer is God wanted them to transmit their knowledge and experience [science] to their children, and their children’s children, to the third and fourth generation. That, of course, goes against the theory of evolution, which states that our ancestors came from apes. That is utter nonsense. Our ancestors had all the knowledge they needed to live and to pass on to the next generation for their benefit and ours and for the future.

If we know anything today it is thanks to our forefathers. As the saying goes, ‘we see further into the distance than them, because we stand on their shoulders.’

 By Emma Whiteley

Reprinted from KEEPING IN TOUCH Newsletter for Catholic Homeschoolers

20 year-old EMMA WHITELEY was homeschooled, and is presently studying 3rd year Medicine in Newcastle. We are sorely in need of pro-life doctors, and pro-life doctors are greatly threatened by today’s anti-life environment, so let us pray for Emma’s efforts – on the streets, in the university, and for her future. OUR LADY OF GUADALUPE, ENFOLD HER UNDER YOUR PROTECTIVE MANTLE.

On the second Saturday of every month, it never rains in Newcastle. That is because, between 9.30 – 11.30 every second Saturday, Our Lady takes care of the half a dozen or so people who stand outside the Lambton Road Day Surgery in Broadmeadow, praying for an end to the slaughter that takes place in the building behind us.

I must admit that when I first began attending the prayer vigils, I was a little concerned that people might have no idea what we were actually there for. We held no pictures of aborted babies, no particularly arresting slogans, and we handed out no pamphlets to passers-by, unless they asked for them. Just pictures of Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Divine Mercy, and a couple of posters offering support for mothers and babies.

But as the months went by, God began to show me how He was working – not in earth-shattering sorts of ways, but in what might be considered rather small things – an occasional honk of the horn, a yell of support or hatred, as the case may be, even a few fingers from passing cars……..

”GET A LIFE!” is quite a common slogan and a pun I find sadly ironic – it’s all very well to tell others to get a life when you’ve got one yourself. Yes, it was quite obvious that people knew why were there. I never feel the power of God – nor the power of Satan - so forcibly as when I stand outside that abortuary, praying for the souls inside. The eternal conflict between the forces of good and evil comes to a head in this place, where the very survival of humanity is at stake. On the one hand we are surrounded and accosted by people and institutions which hate us with the deadly hatred born of selfishness, and a deeply rooted, if almost completely suppressed, knowledge that they are wrong…….. and on the other hand we are surrounded and protected by the armies of God, the angels who are fighting for us, and with us, in this very real battle against the modern day forces of Satan.

There are times when the struggle seems almost impossible. Especially on days when the sun beats down heavily, and the fumes from passing cars make one’s head ache, and even more people than usual have yelled obscenities from their windows….

But establishing the Culture of Life is not the work of a few second Saturdays…. It is a lifelong struggle, and just as sin begins in men’s hearts, so also does the truth. Let us pray for the conversion of our own hearts and minds that we may in turn bring about the “evangelization of our contemporaries”. (Pope John Paul II)