Posted on 03/15/2009 4:55:37 AM PDT by GonzoII
Heaven or hell, it is our choice. Which will it be? Will we choose the place and state of perfect and eternal happiness where we will see, face to face, the sight of God? Or, will we choose the place and state of eternal punishment, which consists of the deprivation of the sight of God (pain of loss) and the eternal fires (pain of sense)?
Many years ago, comedian Flip Wilson used to lament, "The devil (deb-il) made me do it!" It was a joke then and it is a joke still today. The devil cannot make anybody do anything. In fact, too many of us blame our weakness and concupiscence on the devil. At our 'Particular Judgment,' [1] we will not be able to blame the devil for the choices we made, for God created man as a rational being, with free will. "God willed that man should be left in the hand of his own counsel." [2] With this free will, each of us makes the decision to love God or to reject Him.
How can we attain Eternal Salvation? We were not left as orphans, on our own. We were given divine teachings to guide us along the way.
We have the teachings of Christ and His apostles from Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition. [3] We have The Church's infallible teachings, which enable all men to maintain their consciences well formed.
(Excerpt) Read more at renewamerica.us ...
The issue of Choice means we must all make a choice. We must either accept the teachings of the Church or consciously choose to live outside of the Communion of Saints. There is no room for ambiguity or ambivalence. There have been a number of claims by some in the Catholic Community that the position of the Church is ambiguous or at least conflicted on the subject of abortion. Others contend that it has and continues to evolve making an absolute impossible. This is completely wrong. The Catholic Church has always condemned abortion as a grave evil. Christian writers from the first-century author of the Didache to Pope John Paul II in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae ("The Gospel of Life") have maintained that the Bible forbids abortion, just as it forbids murder. Some prominent pro-abortion Catholics have defended their position by citing a single out of context position by St. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae in which he states that humans do not have their souls at the first moment of conception. What is lost in this citation is that Aquinas was speaking as a physician, not a theologian, and was referring to the medieval biological theory of delayed animation. In the theory of delayed animation a fetus is created through a series of many “generations and corruptions”, at first vegetative, then animal, and finally, when the body is sufficiently organized, intellectual. Aquinas stated that, with respect to the completion of the generative process, the parents only dispose the matter, while God directly creates the form. ‘‘The movement of an instrument, that prehuman entity, ceases when the effect has been produced in being’’ (Summa Theologiae I, q. 118, a. 1, ad 4).
As medical technology advanced, and with it the establishment of the cell theory, the discovery of the female ovum, and=2 0a proper understanding of the sperm, egg, and fertilization, the theory of immediate animation became generally accepted and with it the understanding that the essential generative act takes place at fertilization. Aquinas never proposed nor supported the concept of delayed hominization, that is a fetus not becoming a person with a soul until sometime after it became a unique individual.
It was Mother Theresa who said; "Any country that accepts abortion, is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what it wants." We need to do a much better job of helping women who face problem pregnancies, but we don't "help" anyone by allowing or funding an intimate, lethal act of violence. We can't build a just society with the blood of unborn children. The right to life is the foundation of every other human right -- and if we ignore it, sooner or later every other right becomes politically contingent.
The Catholic Church has given us the unambiguous clarity to be certain in our judgment of abortion. If we as individual Catholics do not really believe in the humanity of the unborn child from the moment life begins, then we should stop lying to ourselves and others, and even to God, by claiming we're Catholic when we are not.
That is of course correct, also the Natual Law dictates to our reason that abortion is the killing of an innocent life. Our reason can be darkened by Original Sin, enter the Catholic Church and we can be "certain in our judgment", I thank God for making a member of the Church, I'm not tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine".
“enter the Catholic Church” as in “enters the scene”.
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