Per Ipsum

Ten years of Franciscan education left me with the concept of poverty deep in my consciousness. It was, to great extent, exactly that, a concept. "Blessed are the poor" "Holy indifference" "Live simply that others may simply live" All those words have swirled around my spiritual and practical adult life. Now in my seventieth year I find myself returning to them again and again and wondering if I ever understood the idea at all. In Light in the Darkness Elizabeth Leseur writes eloquently about silence, humility, and renunciation in ways I've never heard them before. Perhaps I wasn't listening. Perhaps as age takes its toll and losses mount, as they inevitably do in life, I understand them better. She even had me with "mortification," an old-fashioned word that would have made me cringe at twenty, but which begins to make sense in marriage or in any life with others when you look at the things life actually sends you. It comes d...

I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. John 14:6 Let me make on thing clear up front: abortion is the deliberate killing of innocent human life. It is an abomination. I make that statement as bald as I can because I am about to outline thoughts that may challenge many in the so-called pro-life movement. I believe that, as heinous as abortion is, there are circumstances in which it is the least evil choice. Women who find themselves in desperate straits have sought to terminate pregnancy throughout history. In our own day the both sides of the issue talk about "cases of incest and rape," to describe particularly desperate cases of pregnancy, often at the expense of a woman's mental health. Both those cases involve coercion and forced unwanted pregnancy, a violation of a woman's right to the integrity of her own body up to the point of conception. There are also cases in which a woman must choose between her...