‘It’s only scar tissue, anyway.”
There was a clip of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen making the rounds earlier this month.
He was addressing the women in the audience of a talk he was giving: “Just think, my dear ladies, of how many mentally disturbed women we are going to have in the United States in the next ten or 15 years when the guilt of abortion begins to attack the mind and soul.”
He referred to a story of a doctor with a woman looking for an abortion, making the scar tissue comment. And then the doctor asked: “What did you intend to call the scar tissue?”
This came less than halfway through a talk Sheen was giving on confession. He talked about how “sin is a reality in the world.” Sheen said, “We have to face it, for we are all sinners. Everyone.” He went on to emphasize that “we cannot begin to receive the mercy of God until we recognize that we are sinners.”
“Now what happens when we repress guilt and sin?” Sheen asked, making clear that we do “do that.”
We suffer. That’s what happens. The mind. The body. The soul.
“When any sin gets into the soul, we are disturbed. The mind is unhappy.” It’s a dangerous thing, indeed, when we act as though “there are no sinners . . . just patients . . . and . . . no penitents.”
“When our conscience is not where it ought to be,” the archbishop continued, “then we suffer.” For, “in moments of quiet, the guilt is there.”
When it comes to abortion, Sheen said: “The guilt may not manifest itself at once.” And, yet, “years from now, the guilt will come out in a peculiar way.”
It doesn’t just evaporate.
“For the present,” he said, “they justify it on the grounds that everyone is doing it.” But it’s not merely scar tissue. It’s a baby. And it’s not just women who take abortion pills who are “doing it.” It is every single person who pressures her, who does not offer her a lifeline, who looks away from our cultural delusions, manipulations, and lies.
Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen was beatified yesterday. This is a huge moment for the Catholic Church in America. From the anti-Catholicism of the Know-Nothings in the mid-19th century to Emmy-winning Sheen beating Milton Berle’s ratings on the first television sets in the United States 100 years later.
We’ve had some immigrant saints like Italian Mother Cabrini, whose mortal remains are a hop, skip, and a jump from the George Washington Bridge in Upper Manhattan. We have legit homegrown ones — the first being Kateri Tekakwitha, known as “The Lily of the Mohawks.”
My favorite personal biographical fact may be that I serve on the board of the Our Lady of Martyrs Shrine in Auriesville, N.Y. Saint Kateri was born on those grounds in 1656, in the Mohawk village of Ossernenon. Jesuit priest Saint Isaac Jogues was murdered — by tomahawk, then beheaded — there on October 18, 1646. His assistant, Jean de Lalande, a lay Jesuit missionary, was killed the next day. If “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,” as Tertullian said, then this is the holiest land in the U.S.
When John Paul II embraced Sheen at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York in 1981, he said: “You have written and spoken well of the Lord Jesus. You are a loyal son of the Church!” I never got to meet Sheen, but for a long time, I used to pray at the tomb of Fulton Sheen when he was in New York — his tomb was subsequently moved to his hometown of Peoria, Ill. — before going to National Review headquarters for the day. I would pray for his canonization, and I would pray that he might ask Jesus to help me throughout the day. Please give me the words to speak well of You, to show You. To help people know You are here for us. That there is nothing to fear. That mercy is ours for the asking. You are asking us to receive it.
Even before I really knew what it meant, I knew it felt impossible for people to believe they could be forgiven.
I think of Fulton Sheen and John Paul II together often. They are now our contemporary saints. And, of course, there is what John Paul II famously said addressing women who have had abortions, in his Evangelium Vitae (“The Gospel of Life”). It can never be shared enough:
I would now like to say a special word to women who have had an abortion. The Church is aware of the many factors which may have influenced your decision, and she does not doubt that in many cases it was a painful and even shattering decision. The wound in your heart may not yet have healed. Certainly what happened was and remains terribly wrong. But do not give in to discouragement and do not lose hope. Try rather to understand what happened and face it honestly. If you have not already done so, give yourselves over with humility and trust to repentance. The Father of mercies is ready to give you his forgiveness and his peace in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. To the same Father and his mercy you can with sure hope entrust your child. With the friendly and expert help and advice of other people, and as a result of your own painful experience, you can be among the most eloquent defenders of everyone’s right to life. Through your commitment to life, whether by accepting the birth of other children or by welcoming and caring for those most in need of someone to be close to them, you will become promoters of a new way of looking at human life.
Listening to Sheen talk about conscience, I can’t hear it only in terms of a woman who had an abortion, a man who walked away from her, the family who pressured her, the community who was not there for her, the doctor who did harm. I think of all of us and the role we play in keeping abortions happening in America. There are sins of commission, and there are sins of omission.
But the good news is God’s mercy. As Sheen said at the end of that talk on confession: “We can start all over again. The Lord’s mercy is unlimited. We just have to trust in him.”
With this Sheen moment, we are given an opportunity to keep learning from this great teacher and imitate his imitation of Christ with courage and clarity in love. Love is our mission — to bring souls to the font of all mercy, which is God Himself. The same God this country was founded on. Bill Buckley was never shy about pointing to Bethlehem. The archbishop, of course, showed Him in the most official of ways. We are not a nation of Sheens, but we are at our best when we recognize we are not the ones we have been waiting for, but have been the beneficiaries of great gifts, the most foundational life and the freedom to choose to believe in the King of the Universe.
Pro-Life Hot Husband’s Wife on the Prowl — Helping Women Get Real Health Care
Let me explain the “Hot Husband” business. Wired magazine basically tried to put the Babylon Bee out of business this week with an over-the-top, gratuitously mean-girl hit piece on Emma Waters. The gal isn’t even 30, and the folks at the New York Times have had their way with her not once, but twice. She seems to be the left’s favorite right-leaning lady to go after. Emma works at the Heritage Foundation focusing on family and fertility — on real health care, a living, breathing counter to the scandal of women’s health care I’m often found raising alarms about, because way too many of us have lived it, frankly. Mainstream medical protocols don’t even pretend to look for the root cause of a symptom. There’s throwing of hormonal contraception at teen girls. There’s pushing an infertile couple toward expensive artificial fertility treatments that are known more for their expense than their success. Like with denying sin, the protocols tend to increase the human misery. And, even if there comes a baby, there are also the excess embryos that get destroyed or frozen. Most couples weren’t thinking about essentially paying rent on a freezer equivalent of a U-Haul storage unit for their unborn children whom they have even less money to raise now.
Anyway, Wired was catty about her credentials, her clothes, and her cooking. Except her husband owes her a dinner or something — because somehow he repeatedly came off with something to brag to his friends about — the piece repeatedly referred to him as “hot.” She may have been a “child bride,” but at least she can show him off?
I suggested to her that she officially insist on being referred to as Mrs. Hot Husband Jackson Waters going forward. Because the whole insinuation of the piece was that she was turning the clock back on women, as the saying goes, but only when Hot Husband has granted her her limited allowance of leadership time.
Controlling but hot is the way the new-right chicks want their men.
This is so maddening because there are real child brides and there is real sex trafficking, and this horror happens throughout the United States. It’s not merely a foreign concept. Sometimes we are just not a serious people. That’s when evil can have its hour — when we’re distracted attacking someone who is making a good contribution to the world.
I had a full-on rant about the piece — live-tweeting or live-X-ing as I read it. And, before you give me a hard time for a long social-media response, I promise you the article in Wired is much longer. I am not quite sure I remember a time before I started reading that piece, in fact.
From the rant (please bear with the casual social-media style):
*** “pro-Natural Procreative Technology, by which infertile heteros of breeding age clean up their diets, reduce their plastics, and ultimately get knocked up according to God’s will.”
RESTORATIVE REPRODUCTIVE MEDICINE is a wee bit more complicated than that — it deals with serious and heart-wrenchingly painful infertility — but I suppose you’ve got the back-to-basics gist, as you dismiss what we generally don’t try
***“In her work, Waters fastidiously avoids mentioning gays, singles, or women over 40. When I ask her about this omission, she gets defensive: ‘It’s not about the desires of adults. It’s about the rights and well-being of children.’”
That’s not defensive. That’s focused on the family. There are exceptions. But to have exceptions you have to have something in the first place. Sometimes we actually should talk about moms and dads and babies and how it can be done. Too many people have seen how it does NOT work. It actually can! With human beings and all our crazy, but it can and does!
Emma Waters is doing some wonderful work. It’s, frankly, taking some of the principles that Pope Paul VI prophetically presented and consequences he cautioned us about in Humanae Vitae, long before Emma and Hot Husband were on the scene. Had my baptismal tribe done a better job these past decades telling the truth in the face of the immiseration of the Sexual Revolution, she wouldn’t have to be subject to the Weird Wired Window into the Mental Machinations of the Culture of Death.
Other Things
The outpouring of love for Dovie Eisner since we learned of his death has been something spectacular. I can’t even imagine what his family is going through — he was in a coma for over a year. His parents were at his bedside as much as humanly possible, and more.
He was in a coma, and, yet, very much alive. Unresponsive, but by faith a lot of us had some certainty there was a reason for the mystery of his long suffering.
It was one thing suffering from his disability; he had learned to live with that and still talk up a storm and dream brilliantly. But then to be so long without being able to communicate.
Some of us were sharing his last piece over and over throughout the assisted-suicide fight in New York State and the loss and struggle that continues in different ways now that it’s legal.
But it wasn’t until I read Maddy Kearns’s piece, “The Bravest Man We Ever Knew,” that I had a proper cry.
Pope Leo is in France this weekend, and six altar servers with Down syndrome will be at Mass with him in Paris on Saturday.
The majority of children with Down syndrome are aborted in France, as in most of Europe.
From one young man there: “The pope is going to bless me and all people with Down syndrome. I am delighted, and it truly touches me!”
Edward Pentin: How England’s Assisted-Suicide Bill Was Defeated
Leigh Snead: She Has Stage 4 Cancer. I Have Two Sons With Disabilities. We Both Fear What ‘Choice’ Could Mean.
Fox News: Ex-Democrat shares abortion pill experience that left her ‘hemorrhaging in the bath’
Ericka Andersen: Alive but threatened: Why we need born alive infant protection laws
(Be relieved! Despite Wired, the Babylon Bee is not out of business): Canada Clarifies That By ‘Assisted Suicide’ They Mean ‘Totally Unsolicited Murder’
Around National Review
• Editors: No on Virginia Amendment 1
• Jamie Bryan Hall: Increased Ectopic-Pregnancy-Related Deaths Show Why FDA Must Reinstate Abortion Pill Safeguards
• John Gerardi: No, You Can’t Be ‘Kind of’ Pregnant
• Wesley J. Smith: Another Canadian Euthanasia Horror
Me:
• Insist on Jimmy Lai’s Release
• Celebrating — and Imitating — America’s Dolly and America’s Sheen
• Why Life Is Worth Living: Fulton Sheen on the Power of Love — with Mike Aquilina
• Driving Mother Teresa: A Photographer Remembers His Friend, the Saint — with Michael Collopy
• The Life of Christ: Who Fulton J. Sheen Lived For — with Matthew Bunson
Upcoming
• September 26, 1–3 p.m., John Paul II Shrine, Washington, D.C. — “Works of Love are Works of Peace.” Meet Michael Collopy, a photographer who had a 15-year-friendship with Mother Teresa. Some of his work with her is currently on display there in a temporary exhibit.
• Thursday, October 15, Father Benedict Groeschel Award Gala, New York City, benefits Good Counsel Homes
• January 22, 2027: Life Fest rally, Washington, D.C. — The Knights of Columbus and Sisters of Life
God love you! That used to be Fulton Sheen’s sign-off. I can’t think of a better one.
Go read some Sheen this weekend. Or at least watch him on Firing Line. Bill Buckley had his signature smile and glimmer in his eye during one particular exchange with Jeff Greenfield toward the end.
Thank you as always. Please keep in communication and come again. And share the word and add five new subscribers to The Lifeline mailing list with this link here. We have a lot of work to do. We’re not meant to do it alone. Help build the army of the culture of life and civilization of love by growing our list here. A small thing, perhaps, but every small thing counts.
And, yes: God love you!