The Week in Review: 14-20 January, A.D. 2007

The big news, I suppose, is not from this week, but this upcoming weekend:
The 34th Annual March For Life - January 20, 21, and 22 - Washington, D.C.
Read all about it here -

http://www.marchforlife.org/

And, just to remind yourself what it's all about,
Amazing pictures that show triplets bonding -- in the womb....

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/health/womenfamily.html?in_article_id=429098&in_page_id=1799&in_a_source=&ico=Homepage&icl=TabModule&icc=picbox&ct=5

Meanwhile, some legislatures are preparing to do battle with Roe...
Georgia Prepares to Battle Roe v. Wade
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2007/jan/07011507.html

While other legislatures just get more and more ridiculous...
CALIFORNIA BILL WOULD BAN SPANKING YOUNG CHILDREN...
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/16487654.htm?source=rss

Here is the CMA's take on the HPV Vaccine,
Catholic Medical Association Press Release on HPV Immunization
http://www.cathmed.org/pressreleases/hpv_vaccine_jan07.htm
There is a link at the CMA site to their downloadable position paper as well.

From the National Catholic Bioethics Center,
Correction to the Fifth Edition of Health Care Ethics - Care of Permanently Unconscious Patients
http://www.ncbcenter.org/07-01-13-HE5.asp

First test-tube baby in the world gives birth – without IVF
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2545718,00.html
This week, we're discussing early human embryology in out little stem cell series, as a foundation to understanding embryonic stem cells, IVF, and a whole host of related topics. Next week we'll get into IVF a bit more specifically, since, at this point, IVF embryos are where many (not all) human embryonic stem cells come from. I'll grant you, a blastocyst doesn't look much like those hugging triplets, but the blastocyst is a biological human being just as surely as are the triplets, you, or I. And, when Louise Brown, born in England, 25 July 1978, began her life, she began it in a petri dish, and was a blastocyst, exactly as we will discuss next week. And, as a blastocyst in a dish, she could just as easily have been dissected for her parts rather than being placed in her mother's womb, to grow, be born, and one day bear children of her own. We will all do well to keep that in mind.

The stem cell wars are not going to go away. It'll be a race to the bottom, folks.
New York Legislature Pledges to Outstrip Competitors in Funding Ambitious Embryo Research Project
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2007/jan/07011702.html
Pro-life groups decry House backing for embryonic stem cell research
http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=8368

Just to see what our brethren in the UK and north of the border are up to.
UK, Canada Ran Neck and Neck in 2006 Race to Exterminate Religious Freedom
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2007/jan/07011704.html

And, to keep us from becoming smug here in these United States,
2006 Losses of Religious Freedom Should Make American Christians Wake Up
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2007/jan/07011504.html
Congress preparing to criminalize critics-
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53813

And now,
51% of Women Are Now Living Without Spouse...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/16/us/16census.html?ei=5065&en=fd431ee3a6bf026f&ex=1169528400&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print The tone of this article suggests that the writers (three of the four of whom are women) think this is a good thing. It is filled with quotes from women - many in their mid or late 50's, and divorced, or never married - who are now liberated, and living fulfilling lives. There are also quotes from their daughters (granddaughters?) who have never been, and presumably, will never be, married. Yet our civilization will cease to survive without the family unit. Perhaps, if one has renounced the family, one doesn't really care too much about the future beyond that encompassed one's own life span. Meanwhile, those Muslims keep making babies...

In the miscellaneous department, first this:
2 cousin companies bet market for RFID chips will extend to humans before long
http://www.wnd.com/redir/r.asp?http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/jan2007/sb20070111_186325.htm?chan=smallbiz_smallbiz+index+page_today%27s+top+stories

And, this...
WEATHER CHANNEL Climate Expert Calls for Decertifying Global Warming Skeptics...
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressRoom.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=32abc0b0-802a-23ad-440a-88824bb8e528
Some time back, I ceased being under the illusion that there was any objectivity in medical research, understanding that instead that the public opinions of "medical experts" were instead shaped primarily by (1) the political agendas of the liberal left, and secondarily by (2) big money. I am saddened, but not surprised, to see the same thing happen to meteorology.

And, finally, this...
Air Force colonel reports lights 'not of this world'; Snaps images above Arkansas- 'I have no idea what they were'...
http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53820

Why, you might ask, am I putting this in here? Well, not because I believe in UFO's. I don't. And, I know it has nothing directly to do with Catholicity and medicine. However, I do believe that we threw away our future when we turned our back on manned space exploration. The NASA of 1969 (not to be confused with the NASA of 2007) was completely capable of developing a colony on Mars, and could have done so by the mid 1980's. All it lacked was money: we, the people, said it was a waste of money. How much money, instead, have we spent since 1969 on pointless dead end social programs, not to mention cat and dog food? Despite the hundreds of billions we have poured, and still pour, down the drain labeled “entitlements” (far, far more than we ever spent on the moonships), today we have a vicious and ever expanding class of persons who truly live lives outside the boundaries of what was once known as "western civilization", and cats and dogs on weight control programs and Prozac. And, for good measure, the nation which once could send three men to the moon for a week can today barely get a man into low earth orbit. Here's a thought experiment: suppose, just suppose, that the NASA of 1969 had really been able to carry out its (then) very realistic plans of moon and Mars colonization in the last decades of the 20th century. Today we would have permanent colonies on the moon, and on Mars, and a growing and developing interplanetary transport system. How would our world be different?

Stem Cells Part III: Early human embryology.

As we saw last week, an embryonic stem cell is a form of pluripotent stem cell. Pluripotent stem cells are stem cells which can, in theory, give rise to mature cells derived from any of the three embryonic germ layers; in other words, any mature cell type in the body. Since an understanding of early human embryology is essential to battling in the stem cell wars (along with a lot of other battles), it’s time to review a bit.

In the beginning, there is mittelschmerz, that “middle pain” which so often occurs, along with ovulation, a couple of weeks after the end of menstruation. At ovulation, the ovary spits out a mature oocyte - an egg - and it lands in the opening to the fallopian tube, the muscular tube connecting the ovary with the uterus. The tube begins its peristalsis, the gentle muscular contractions milking the oocyte down the tube towards the womb. On the way, the oocyte may find itself within a swarm of sperm, the sperm having swum all the way up there after being left within the vagina. One of these sperm may penetrate the zona pellucida, the thick covering around the egg. Since the genes in the egg came from the mother, and the genes in the sperm came from the father, if this penetration of egg by sperm is successful, the mother’s genes are combined with the father’s genes, and a new, genetically and physiologically distinct single celled creature comes into existence, a being which is genetically human, and neither mother nor father. This is the moment of conception. It isn’t really a moment, of course, as the process of sorting of the parental gene contributions into a new genotype takes many hours. Nevertheless, a new single celled being results from this process, a totipotent stem cell (because it gives rise to all the cell types of the body, as well as the cells of the placenta), the human zygote.

Normally, in vivo (in life) conception takes place within the fallopian tube. After the first 36 hours or so of its new life, the single celled zygote divides into two cells. After another 36 hours, the two cells become four, then eight, and so on. Meanwhile, this embryo is now known as a morula, a “ball of grapes” (all of these stages, from zygote on up to, but not including, the fetus, are known as embryos), and is now making its way down the tube. The passage from ovary to uterus through the tube takes 5 to 7 days, and during this time the embryo has developed from the single celled zygote to the multi-celled morula. At the morula stage, the cells are already they are beginning to differentiate. The outer layer will become the trophoectoderm, the precursor to the placenta, while a central cavity is beginning to form within the inner mass of cells. The cavity will be known as the blastocoel, and once it forms, the embryo will be known as a blastocyst. At this point, about 5 to 7 days after conception, the little human embryo comes to the end of the fallopian tube, and enters the uterus.

After floating around for a day or two in the uterus, the embryo implants. By this point, the trophoectoderm, the outer shell of cells, has begun to form what will become the placenta. Meanwhile, the inner cavity, the blastocoel, has enlarged, and the inner cell mass, numbering around 30 cells, has begun to develop into two distinct layers. One of these layers will become the structures of the amniotic cavity, which will support and cushion the growing child throughout intrauterine life. By the beginning of the third week after conception, gastrulation occurs, where the primitive streak, the precursor to the central nervous system, appears. Now, the other layer of the inner cell mass begins to develop into the three germ layers we spoke of earlier, the precursors to all the mature cell types within the body. Not too long after this, a beating heart can be found.

There’s two important points to keep in mind about the sequence we’ve just gone through. First: conception, in vivo, occurs in the fallopian tube. Second: for the first 8 or 9 days of a human embryo’s existence, it’s free floating. The human embryo, from the zygote through the morula to the blastocyst stage, is increasingly being referred to as the pre-implantation embryo.

Everything we’ve just described occurs in vivo. However, conception of a zygote, and growth of that zygote up through the blastocyst stage, also can occur in vitro, in a petri dish. In fact, in is done, routinely, thousands of times a year, in in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics all across these United States. IVF is a billion dollar business, but that’s beyond the scope of this piece. Suffice it to say that oocytes are obtained from a woman, placed in a petri dish with sperm obtained from a man, and viola! Zygotes. The zygotes are allowed to develop in the dish to the morula stage, and are then graded according to quality (I’m not kidding). The best ones are selected for implantation in some woman’s womb, where they may (or may not) grow into full term babies. The rest go into the freezer. How many of these leftovers are there in freezers across our land? No one knows for sure, but best estimates from folks within the IVF industry put the number at around 400,000. What happens to these frozen IVF leftovers? Most are just sitting there, waiting. Some, though, are obtained by researchers, who will use them to obtain embryonic stem cells. And with this background, we will let the matter rest until next time.

A stinkpot by any other name.

First posted on Introibo ad altare Dei 7 December 2006

The United States Supreme Court has recently heard arguments the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which was passed by Congress and signed by President Bush in 2003. Subsequently stuck down by six federal courts, the whole affair is now in front of the Supreme Court. During the proceedings, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted that partial birth abortion was "basically the same" as the procedure used in the second trimester, making it difficult to distinguish how a doctor could be prosecuted for performing the one procedure but the other. Although I'm certainly not privy to Justice Ginsberg's mind, her reasoning might go like this: the Partial Birth Abortion Ban bans only "partial birth abortions”. However, there's no meaningful difference between how a "partial birth abortion” is performed, and how other second or third trimester abortions are performed. Since the Ban doesn't ban these other abortions, but only "partial birth" abortions, banning only one procedure makes no sense. When asked by Justice Ginsberg if the two procedures were "basically the same", Solicitor General Paul Clement, arguing for the ban, said, "I don't think so, Justice Ginsberg."[1] With all due respect to Solicitor General Clement, I think Justice Ginsberg is correct on this one.

There are 6.6 million pregnancies in the United States each year.[2] About one quarter of them, 1.3 million, end in deliberate abortion.[3] The number of abortions has held more or less steady for years now, although it does not include the number of abortions caused by abortifacient contraceptives. That number is unknown, but it’s a topic for another essay. So, at what point in gestation are abortions typically executed? Most - 88% - are performed in the first trimester, before 13 weeks.[4] About 10% are executed between 12 and 20 weeks (second trimester), with about 1.5% of all abortions being "late second trimester or third trimester", over 21 weeks gestational age.[5] By the second trimester, the baby has grown too large to abort by simply vacuuming her out (the usual first trimester method). Instead, a dilatation and extraction or D&E, also known as a "sharp curettage" is performed. The cervix is dilated, followed by "mechanical destruction and evacuation of fetal parts."[6] In other words, the living unborn baby is cut into bits prior to removal. In late second trimester it recommended that the fetus be killed prior to the sharp curettage, by injecting a lethal medicine directly into the baby's heart.[7] This is not done out of some odd sense of mercy, as one would kill an animal prior to butchering it rather than butchering it alive. It is done because, as the National Abortion Federation Clinical Policy Guidelines 2005 states, "avoidance of a live birth is an important consideration."[8] You bet'cha. It's hard to imagine worse press for the local abortion clinic than to have a live, mutilated, armless, legless, or partially eviscerated aborted child lying around, mucking and mewling, gasping out her short life in her own blood and meconium. This is not rare event, as the London Timesonline has recently observed.[9]

By the third trimester, the baby is quite large. In fact, the age where she could have a reasonable chance of survival outside of the womb is around 24 weeks. However, if the mother chooses to abort her instead, she’s too big to simply chop up, so an alternative procedure was developed in 1992 by Dr. Martin Haskell, known as intact dilation and extraction (D&E or D&X).[10] Quoting Williams Obstetrics exactly, “In political parlance, this procedure has been termed partial birth abortion.”[11] How is it done? The physician first mechanically dilates the mother’s cervix. He then ruptures the amniotic sac, and snakes a long, thin, curved forceps into the cervix, slides it up, past the baby’s head (the baby is usually head down by this point in the pregnancy), along her body, up, up, until he can grab one of her feet. Once he’s clamped onto a foot, he pulls it, flipping the baby around feet first, and he keeps pulling until he pulls the foot and leg out of the cervix. He then grabs the other foot and pulls it out as well, sliding the baby’s bottom, belly, and torso out of the womb, until only the head is left up in there. Now the physician applies gentle traction on her tiny body with one hand, while, with the fingers of the same hand, he pushes the lip of the cervix out of the way, to expose the back of her neck and base of her skull. With the other hand, he pushes the point of a pair of closed scissors into the base of her skull. He removes the scissors, inserts a sucker, sucks out her brains, and her skull collapses.[12] She is now rendered dead, and the lifeless body is delivered the rest of the way. How often is the D&X performed? Using 1,300,000 abortions per year as a working number, 1.5% of which are done at over 21 weeks, this makes about 8600 abortions per year. Since D&X is the procedure of choice, it's not unreasonable to conclude that most or all of them are done using this procedure. How can this freak show happen 8600 times a year in these United States? Because, as Dr. George Annas, Chair of the Department of Health Law, Bioethics and Human Rights at Boston University School of Public Health has noted (more than once),
“An almost born child is not yet born, and is not a person under the Constitution.[13]

So, when Justice Ginsberg was saying she could see no difference between “partial birth abortions” and abortions bone earlier, I don’t know if she meant a D&X done at 40 weeks vs. a D&X done at 20 weeks, or a D&X vs. a sharp curettage. But I agree with her, in principle: there’s no meaningful difference between sucking the unborn baby’s brains out, chopping her to bits, or vacuuming her out if she’s small enough.

Endnotes.
[1] "Justices have pointed abortion discourse." Mark Sherman, Associated Press, 8 November 2006.
[2] Saraiya, M. et al, "Estimates of the Annual Number of Clinically Recognized Pregnancies in the United States, 1981-1991." American Journal of Epidemiology 149(11): 1025-1029, 1999.
[3] "Facts in Brief: Induced Abortion in the United States" The Alan Guttmacher Institute, Washington, DC/NY,NY, 2005. Available at www.guttmacher.org.
[4] Obstetrics: Normal and Problem Pregnancies, 4th Ed. Gabbe, S.G., Neibyl, J.R., & Simpson, J.L. (Ed's) Churchill-Livingstone, 2002. See Section entitled "Fertility Control and Health".
[5] ibid.
[6]Williams Obstetrics 22nd. Ed. McGraw-Hill, 2005, Ch.9 , pg 243.
[7] Gabbe, pg. 640.
[8] National Abortion Federation Clinical Policy Guidelines 2005, pg.17. Available at NAF website, www.prochoice.org
[9] "Fifty babies a year are alive after abortion." Timesonline, 27 November 2005, The Sunday Times edition, at www.timesonline.co.uk
[10] Haskell, M. “Second Trimester D&X, 20 wks and beyond.” and a companion article, “D&E for late trimester abortions.” Originally presented at the 1992 meeting of the National Abortion Federation, and are available in original form through the Priests for Life website, www.priestsforlife.org/partialbirth.html
[11] Williams, pg. 243.
[12] There are numerous technical descriptions of the D&X procedure, including the original cited above. I developed this one from Gabbe (ibid), pg. 640.
[13] G. Annas, quoted in Gabbe (ibid), pg. 1350.

Feast days of the week 21 - 27 January 2007 (1962 liturgical calendar).

First part of the Liturgical Year: the Christmas Cycle. [i]
Season after Epiphany.

"This period, which begins the day after the Octave of Epiphany, is an extension of Christmastide. Jesus asserts His Divinity - not by the appearance of angels or the Star of the Magi, but speaking Himself as God. He subjects our hearts to His teachings, explaining His Divine doctrine with parables and manifesting the truth of His words and works by many miracles.
At the time of our Lord, Palestine contained four provinces: Peraea, Judea, Samaria, and Galilee. It was in the province of Galilee that the miracles and preaching of Jesus took place.
At Cana, He changed water into wine - His first miracle - at the request of His mother. At Nazareth, He preached His doctrine - and 'all wondered at these things that proceeded from the mouth of God,' says the Communion of the fourth, fifth, and sixth Sundays after Epiphany with the words of Luke. In Galilee, a word from our Lord cleansed the leper. From the shore of the Lake of Genesareth, He miraculously stilled the storm. All these miracles He performed to show His Apostles that He was God.
The Christmas cycle has a fixed character, and the Feasts of the Nativity and Epiphany always fall on December 25 and January 6."

Sunday, 21 January, 2007
Third Sunday after the Epiphany
"Jesus, our Redeemer, is God; He works wonders; the Angels of Heaven adore Him; Jews and Gentiles will be obliged to recognize His royal Divinity."
Epistle: Rom 12:16-21.
Gospel: Matt 8:1-13.

Monday, 22 January 2007
SS. Vincent and Anastasius, Martyrs
“St. Vincent, deacon of Saragossa in Spain, suffered martyrdom in the persecution of Diocletian A.D. 304.
St. Anastasius, a monk of Persia, was put to death with seventy other Christians under Chosroes A.D. 628.”
Lesson: Wisdom 3:1-8.
Gospel: Luke 21:9-19.

Tuesday, 23 January 2007
St. Raymond of Pennafort, Confessor
"St. Raymond, eminent minister of the sacrament of Penance, was a priest of the order of St. Dominic, celebrated for his virtues, his miracles, and his writings on Canon Law. He died A.D. 1275."
Lesson: Ecclesiasticus 31:8-11.
Gospel: Luke 12:35-40.
Commemoration of St. Emerentiana, Virgin and Martyr
“St. Emerentiana, Virgin and Martyr, foster-sister of St. Agnes, was stoned to death at the tomb of her friend. A.D. 304.”
Lesson: Ecclesiasticus 51:13-17.
Gospel: Matt 13:44-52.

Wednesday, 24 January 2007
St. Timothy, Bishop and Martyr
"St. Timothy, who is the best-known disciple of St. Paul, was Bishop of Ephesus in Asia Minor. He was stoned to death by pagans A.D. 97.”
Epistle: 1 Tim 6:11-16.
Gospel: Luke 14:26-33.

Thursday, 25 January 2007
Conversion of St. Paul
"Saul of Tarsus was full of hatred for Jesus and His Disciples. From a bitter persecutor he became an ardent apostle and the irresistible preacher of the Gospel."
Lesson: Acts 9:1-22.
Gospel: Matt 19:27-29.

Friday, 26 January 2007
St. Polycarp, Bishop and Martyr
“St. Polycarp, a disciple of St. John the Apostle, was Bishop of Smyrna for seventy years, and was martyred under Marcus Aurelius A.D. 169.”
Epistle: 1 John 3:10-16.
Gospel: Matt 10:26-32.

Saturday, 27 January 2007
St. John Chrysostom, Bishop, Confessor, and Doctor of the Church
“The holy Patriarch of Constantinople received his surname 'Chrysostom (golden-mouth)' because he was the most eloquent preacher and the most prolific writer of the Greek Church. He was persecuted by the empress Eudoxia and her courtiers. He died in exile A.D. 407”
Epistle: 2 Tim 4:1-8.
Gospel: Matt 5:13-19.

[i] Remarks are abstracted from The Daily Missal and Liturgical Manual, from Editio Typica of the Roman Missal and Breviary, 1962
(Baronius Press Limited, London, 2004, in conjunction with the Fraternal Society of St. Peter, www.baroniuspress.com)

The Week in Review: 7-13 January, A.D. 2007

H.R. 3: Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2000 Passed 253YEA’s, 174 NAY’s

http://www.house.gov/

As of 2:30 PM EST on Thursday, 11 January, the bill was to be sent back for an amendment preventing human cloning. They're so silly - don't they understand that without cloning, embryonic stem cells are close to useless as therapeutic devices? Apparently they did, because the instruction failed, 189 YEA’s to 238 NAY’s. Eight minutes later, they took Role Call #20, and the bill passed, 253 YEA’s to 174 NAY’s.
Of interest (to me, anyway), Mike Michaud, the Representative from Maine's second district, and a politician who touts his Catholicism(see next item regarding Catholic politicians and our courageous and manly Bishops), is a co-sponsor of the bill. He did, of course, vote for it. Since I pay taxes to the great State of Maine, I suppose I contribute to his care and feeding in some way (sigh).

New D.C. Archbishop Washes Hands Over Nancy Pelosi Political Exploitation of Catholic Mass
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2007/jan/07010811.html
The scandal, of course, isn't that Pelosi does this. Like all politicians (see Maine's Michaud, above), she's merely a political creation and not expected to be cognizant of real things like religious truths. The scandal is that, as usual, our Bishops, and the Vatican, stand to one side, in frightened silence, as politicians claiming to be Catholic once again make a mockery of the Church.

Christians hail ethical source for stem cells
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53705
Jeff Miller over at The Curt Jester (http://www.splendoroftruth.com/curtjester/)got it right with his 9 January post on the placenta cells: they will not solve the tissue rejection problem. That is why embryonic stem cell researchers repeatedly point out that so-called therapeutic cloning will be a necessary component of any medical future that utilizes products of embryonic stem cells in medical therapy. We'll get to cloning in due course in our little stem cell series...

Britain Set to Ban Human-Animal Hybrid Embryonic Research
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2007/jan/07010504.html
Chimeras are no joke. The National Research Council said this about human-animal hybrids (chimeras): "...such conclusive evidence (of proper functioning of the products of embryonic stem cells) requires testing in blastocyst chimeras as is routinely done in (mouse embryonic stem cell research).[1] We'll talk about chimeras when the time comes...

A follow up to December's call for FDA input on vaccines using aborted fetal cell lines is available here:
ABORTED FETAL CELL LINES - MANY THANKS TO ALL

http://www.cogforlife.org/fdaalert.htm

More on Plan B.
New Report Admits- Emergency Contraception Does Not Reduce Abortion
http://www.cogforlife.org/fdaalert.htm

More on the HPV vaccine.
Parents block plans to vaccinate nine-year-olds against sex virus
http://news.scotsman.com/politics.cfm?id=34172007

More on The Ashley Treatment.
Surgery to stunt disabled girl's growth raises ethical questions
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/conditions/01/04/ashley.treatment.ap/

Finally, I've linked this over on the right. It really works!
ProLife Search
http://www.prolifesearch.com/

[1] "Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research" National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, National Academies Press, Washington, D.C. 2005:pg. 33, "Scientific Background". My emphasis. www.nap.edu and www.national-academies.org

Stem Cell Basics, Part II: What is a stem cell?

(Comment: At this point, being a low tech household, I lack the ability to provide diagrams. But, I'll work on it...)

All God's creatures have stem cells. Birds do. Bees do. Even flowers and trees do. Mice do, and men do, and much of the research on stem cells has been done in mice, although, of course, it is also done now, and will be done much more frequently in the future, in men. So, we'll begin at the beginning. What is a stem cell?

A stem cell, according to the National Institutes of Health, is "a cell that has the ability to divide (self replicate) for indefinite periods - often throughout the life of the organism. Under the right conditions, or given the right signals, stem cells can give rise (differentiate) to the many cell types that make up the organism. That is, stem cells have the potential to develop into mature cells that have the characteristic shapes and specialized functions, such as heart cells, skin cells, and nerve cells."[1]

What does all that mean? Fully mature tissues and organs are comprised of cells that are said to be fully differentiated. Every single cell within my body contains its own, complete copy of my genetic code, my genome. However, within each individual cell, only those specific parts of the code necessary for that cell to do its job are turned on. The rest of the genetic code is turned off. Thus, one of my liver cells looks like, and functions like, a liver cell because, within it, only those parts of my genetic code related to "liver cell-ness" are activated, while the rest of the genome is suppressed. My liver cell can only be a liver cell, and if it replicates itself, it can only make another liver cell. That's what is meant by differentiation. If I look at liver cells through the microscope, the morphology or microscopic appearance of the cells is that of liver cells, not, say, brain cells. This is true even though the two tissue samples may have come from the same individual and share the same genome. That is what is meant by "fully differentiated".

A stem cell is undifferentiated. Under the microscope, it doesn't look like any particular type of cell. It doesn't have the long axons of a neuron, or the striations of a muscle cell. It looks like the generic cell one finds illustrated in basic biology textbooks: a largish cell with a nucleus, where the DNA of the genome resides, and surrounding cytoplasm which house the little molecular machines which do the life work of the cell, all wrapped up in a cell membrane. But, this generic cell doesn't have any of the specialized molecular apparati or unique morphology of a fully differentiated cell. This lack of specialized form under the microscope reflects a lack of specialized function: the stem cell doesn't do anything special. It doesn't transmit nerve impulses or help you pick up the groceries. It just replicates, and makes more undifferentiated copies of its undifferentiated self. It does this self replication, under normal circumstances, within the organism. However, it can also be convinced to replicate itself in the petri dish. This property of self replication is not a property that fully differentiated cells, in general, possess. Mature neurons do not replicate under normal circumstances, nor do mature blood cells, mature muscle cells, nor many other differentiated cell types. This property, self replication, takes care of the first part of the NIH definition.

Concerning the second component of the definition, differentiation. We've seen that the stem cell is undifferentiated in its off-the-shelf form. What gives the cell importance is that it can develop and mature into any number of mature cell types. The most undifferentiated cell, for example, is the single cell zygote, the fertilized egg, the first step in the growth and development of a new creature. There is no qualitative difference between a human zygote, a mid term fetus, and a newborn. The difference is quantitative only. This fact regarding the nature of the human zygote is why the Church teaches it must be treated as a new human person, and must be kept in mind throughout the discussion on embryonic stem cells. The zygote is a totipotential stem cell, because it will go on to form every cell and tissue type within the body, as well as the placenta. Next on the list of stem cell types would be pluripotent stem cells. There are three germ cell layers in the early embryo: the endoderm (inner layer), from which parts of most internal organs develop; the mesoderm (middle layer), from which muscle, blood cells, and so forth develop, and the ectoderm (outer layer) from which skin, nerves, and the central nervous system develop. Pluripotent stem cells are stem cells which can give rise to differentiated cells from any of the three germ layers. Conversely, pluripotent stem cells don't give rise to placenta, umbilical cord, and placental membranes, like the totipotent zygote does. Embryonic stem cells, which will be the focus of next week's essay, fall into this pluripotent stem cell category. Finally, people speak of unipotent stem cells. These are stem cells which, under normal circumstances, give rise to mature cells of only one germ layer. In general, adult stem cells are unipotent. For example, a hematopoietic stem cell is a stem cell found in adults which can give rise to any of the red blood cells or white blood cells (mesodermal germ line origin) but not, under normal circumstances, an ectodermally derived skin cell.

So, some stem cells have greater flexibility and plasticity than others. Pluripotent stem cells can develop into a wide variety of mature cell types; unipotent stem cells have a more restricted menu. Can unipotent adult stem cells be convinced to be more flexible? Yes, but we get ahead of ourselves. The purpose of this week's little essay is to define stem cells in general. Next week, embryonic stem cells.

[1] "Stem Cells: Scientific Progress and Future Directions." Report prepared by the National Institutes of Health, June 2001. See Ch. 1, "The Stem Cell." available in downloadable format at http://stemcells.nih.gov/info/scireport/2001report

The HPV Vaccine.

posted on Introibo ad altare Dei 5 December 2006

Human papilloma virus, or HPV, is a virus which causes cancer of the cervix in women. The only way HPV is transmitted is by sexual intercourse, one doesn't get it from a toilet seat or by shaking hands. Since virtually all cervical cancers are related to HPV infection, it is correct to say that cervical cancer is a sexually transmitted disease. Interestingly, those of us who used to put it in those terms were pooh-pooh'd not infrequently. Now, however, with the advent of Merk's Gardasil HPV vaccine, everybody is talking about HPV, cervical cancer, and the vaccine. Let's flesh in some details.

There are over a hundred subtypes of HPV, and over thirty of these are associated with cervical diseases including genital warts ("condylomata") in both ladies and gentlemen, cervical dysplasia (pre-cancerous cervical changes) and frank, invasive cancer. The viruses don’t cause cancer directly, they cause dysplasia. The dysplasia may, in turn, progress to cervical cancer if left untreated. The dysplasia is detected by the Pap smear and its more modern derivatives. If the Pap smear detects dysplasia, especially of the high grade variety, a biopsy of the cervix is recommended. If the biopsy confirms the high grade dysplasia, a LEEP (loop electrosurgical excision procedure) is usually performed, where a thin strip of the cervix containing the abnormal tissue is removed. This is frequently, but not always, curative. Here are some important points: first, dysplasia is not invasive cancer. It is a precursor to cancer. Secondly, a lot of dysplasia spontaneously regresses without further treatment. Thirdly, some cervical dysplasia, if untreated, progresses. Progresses to what? Invasive cervical cancer. But the important thing is this: the progression is slow, orderly, and well understood. That's why the Pap smear works so well as a screening tool for cervical cancer: it detects the precursor lesions before they become cancer. HPV infection is the most common sexually transmitted disease in the world, and prior to the widespread use of the Pap smear in the 1950's, cervical cancer was the most common cancer killer of women worldwide. It still is in parts of the world where Pap screening is not done. In the U.S., cervical dysplasia is very common. LEEP’s for high grade cervical dysplasia are very common (this procedure is done several times per day in my hospital). Cervical cancer, however, is relatively uncommon, due to the Pap smear (5000-7000 cases in the U.S. annually). Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a vaccine that would prevent all this?

Enter Merck and Gardasil. Approved for use by the FDA in June, 2006, it protects against the four most common types of high risk HPV,[1] which account for 70% of cervical cancers, and 90% of genital warts. It’s a three shot series given at 0, 2 and six months, and need for a booster is unknown at this time. A second vaccine is under development by GlaxoSmithKline. On June 29, 2006, the Advisory Council on Vaccine Practices (ACIP - the group which formulates vaccine recommendations for the CDC) voted to “recommend” universal vaccination with the HPV vaccine for all girls age 11-12, but beginning as early as age 9[2]. ACIP recommendations, once accepted by the CDC, take the de facto force of law, as local school boards and others turn the recommendations into requirements. The ACIP recommendations that all adult nonpregnant women (>19 years old) be vaccinated were published in the CDC’s publication, Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Reports (MMWR) on 13 October 2006. The recommendations for the universal childhood vaccinations are scheduled to be published in November, but are unavailable as of this writing. Not too surprisingly, the medical machine, as represented by the New England Journal of Medicine, is all for this,[3] and well funded pro-teenage contraception organs like Advocates for Youth are simply livid that those religious conservatives might not think universal HPV vaccination for children is such a swell idea.[4]

Why isn’t it a swell idea? First. The vaccine does not remove the need for Pap smears nor will it do anything for a lady already infected. Second, it doesn’t do anything about other sexually transmitted diseases, although it’s easy to imagine a 12 year old (remember, that’s the target audience) who thinks it does. For that matter, I can easily imagine a 20 year old who might think it does, but that’s neither here nor there. Thirdly, there are concerns that the FDA has "fast-tracked" licensure of Gardasil, without adequate study of its safety in little girls.[5] Fourth, and most importantly, no one knows what effect universal vaccination of 9 year olds might have on adolescent tendency to have sex. However, the data of the past forty years of social experimentation suggest that it would tend to increase sexual activity. That’s been the outcome of all the other experiments on early immersion of young children into the fetid world of “sex ed” and teenage contraception, and there’s no reason this should have a different effect. Regarding the morality of the vaccine itself, its manufacture does not involve aborted babies[6]. So the moral problems attached to, say varicella or rubella vaccines do not apply here.

HPV is a sexually transmitted disease. You don’t get it if the person next to you coughs, and you don’t get it from a water fountain or a toilet seat. Requiring HPV immunizations for young girls (and that is what ACIP “recommendations” amount to: requirements) is, in my view, no different from requiring that all school age girls be put on contraception. The decision to vaccinate one's little girl with Gardasil should reside strictly within the family. Legislating its use is inappropriately paternalistic. The National Catholic Bioethics Center has summarized it appropriately:

“The NCBC considers HPV vaccination to be a morally acceptable method of protecting against this disease, but asks that civil authorities leave this decision to parents and not make such immunization mandatory.”[7]

[1] “HPV and HPV Vaccine: Information for Healthcare Providers” Centers for Disease Control, August, 2006. www.cdc.gov/std/healthcomm/fact_sheets.html
[2] “ACIP Provisional Recommendations for the Use of Quadrivalent HPV Vaccine”. available at www.cdc.gov
[3] Steinbrook, R. “The Potential of Human Papillomavirus Vaccines.” NEJM 354(11):1109-1112; 16 March 2006.
[4] “Will the Politics of Teen Sex Stop a Cancer Vaccine?” Advocates for Youth Media Brief, www.advocatesforyouth.org
[5] "Merck's Gardasil vaccine not proven safe for little girls." National Vaccine Information Center, Press Release, 27 June 2006. www.909shot.com/PressReleases/pr62706gardasil.htm
[6] Gardasil package insert, Merck & Co., 2006. Available at Institue for Vaccine Safety, www.vaccinesafety.edu/package_inserts.htm
[7] NCBC Statement on Vaccination against Human Papilloma Virus (HPV). National Catholic Bioethics Center, 11 July 2006. www.ncbcenter.org/06-07-11-hpv_vaccine.asp

Feast days of the week 14 - 20 January 2007 (1962 liturgical calendar).

First part of the Liturgical Year: the Christmas Cycle.[1]
Season after Epiphany.

"At the time of our Lord, Palestine contained four provinces: Peraea, Judea, Samaria, and Galilee. It was in the province of Galilee that the miracles and preaching of Jesus took place.
At Cana, He changed water into wine - His first miracle - at the request of His mother. At Nazareth, He preached His doctrine - and 'all wondered at these things that proceeded from the mouth of God,' says the Communion of the fourth, fifth, and sixth Sundays after Epiphany with the words of Luke. In Galilee, a word from our Lord cleansed the leper. From the shore of the Lake of Genesareth, He miraculously stilled the storm. All these miracles He performed to show His Apostles that He was God.
The Christmas cycle has a fixed character, and the Feasts of the Nativity and Epiphany always fall on December 25 and January 6."

Sunday, 14 January, 2007: Second Sunday after the Epiphany.
"The marriage in Cana of Galilee is commemorated: the first miracle of Jesus. Mary, full of charity, asks of Jesus His first miracle. Jesus, at the request of His Mother, anticipates the hour appointed for the manifestation of His Divinity to His Disciples, so that He puts His power at the service of His love."
Epistle: Rom 12:6-16.
Gospel: John 2:1-11.

Monday, 15 January 2007: St. Paul, the Hermit.
“The founder of the eremitical life retired at the age of fifteen into the desert and lived there in exercise of prayers and penances for more than a hundred years. He died in A.D. 343.”
Epistle: Phil 3:7-12.
Gospel: Matt 11:25-30.

Tuesday, 16 January 2007: St. Marcellus I, Pope. Martyr.
“St. Marcellus I defended the rights of the Church with heroic resistance. On this account he was exiled by the heretical Maxentius. He died A.D. 310.”
Epistle: Col 3:12-17. I Peter 5:1-4, 10-11.
Gospel: Matt 16:13-19.

Wednesday, 17 January 2007: St. Anthony the Hermit, Abbot.
“The Father of community life led the life of a hermit from the age of eighteen, but later he instituted the monastic life in common. He died at the age of 105 years A.D. 356."
Lesson: Ecclesiasticus 45:1-6.
Gospel: Luke 12:35-40.

Thursday, 18 January 2007: Ferial.
Epistle: Rom 12:6-16.
Gospel: John 2:1-11.

Friday, 19 January 2007: Commemoration of SS. Marius, Martha, Audifax and Abachum, Martyrs.
“The Persian nobles Marius and Martha came with their sons Audifax and Abachum to Rome, to visit the tombs of the Apostles SS. Peter and Paul. They were cast into prison, tortured and martyred A.D. 270.”
Epistle: Heb 10:32-38.
Gospel: Matt 24:3-13.

Saturday, 20 January 2007: St. Fabian, Pope, and St. Sebastian, Martyrs.
“St. Fabian, Supreme Pontiff, suffered martyrdom in the persecution of Decius, A.D. 250.
St. Sebastian, an officer in the imperial cohort, was pierced with arrows in the persecution of Diocletian; but he recovered, and the emperor condemned him to be flogged to death. A.D. 284.”

Commemoration of St. Canute.
"This King of Denmark sought to spread the faith in his kingdom and therefore his enemies put him to death, while praying at the foot of the altar, A.D. 1086."
Epistle: Heb 11:33-39.
Gospel: Luke 6:17-23.

[1] Remarks are abstracted from The Daily Missal and Liturgical Manual, from Editio Typica of the Roman Missal and Breviary, 1962
(Baronius Press Limited, London, 2004, in conjunction with the Fraternal Society of St. Peter, www.baroniuspress.com)

Urgent Action Needed Before January 11, 2007

Urgent Action Needed Before January 11, 2007

Please Contact your Member of the House of Representatives, asking him/her to oppose H.R. 3: To amend the Public Health Service Act to provide for human embryonic stem cell research, and to request that they support ethical alternative stem cell research methods that do not require the killing of human embryos. The National Catholic Bioethics Center has provided the attached written testimony in opposition to H.R. 3, which would fund embryonic stem cell research, requiring the destruction of conceived human embryos. On Thursday, January 11, 2007, the U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on H.R. 3. A similar bill passed both houses of Congress last year and was vetoed by President Bush, because it would fund research which required the killing of human embryos. A vote in the Senate is expected on such legislation at some time in the future. Please contact your member of the House of Representatives asking the Congressperson to oppose H.R. 3 and to support ethical alternative stem cell research proposals which do not require the killing of human embryos. Contact information on your Congressperson can be found at http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/

NCBC letter to Members of the House of Representatives.

Stem Cell Basics, Part I: Introduction

It is said that the topic of "stem cells" is searched on the internet more frequently than any other topic. I don't know how one would know that for certain, but it seems like a reasonable supposition. I do know that the topic is broad, complex, and profoundly confusing; I also know that it will once again be in the news as our new Congress has vowed to make stem cell research - specifically, embryonic stem cell research - a front line item. This is important. Forty years ago, the Supreme Court outlawed anti-contraception laws in our land with the 1965 ruling, Griswold vs. the State of Connecticut. The ruling was a carefully constructed component in the decades-long drama to legalize abortion, and it was a move which opened the way for the 1973 Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision. These two Supreme Court decisions changed our civilization's conception of what a human person is. Prior to Griswold, contraception was illegal because the corpus of Christian teaching, both Catholic and Protestant, said it was, and our civilization was one which recognized that the laws of man should not contradict the laws of God. Griswold overturned that belief. Prior to Roe, our civilization believed that a biological human being and a human person were one and the same, and that all biological human beings were subject to the protection of the laws of our land as human persons. Roe overturned that belief by uncoupling the legal relationship between "biological human being" and "legal person", because unborn biological human beings are not persons under current American law.

U.S. abortion laws are now among the most liberal on the planet. Most countries, and all European countries, have numerous restrictions on abortion (most Americans are unaware of this). These restrictions are related to gestational age - it is generally illegal to abort babies beyond a certain gestational age, although the exact age varies from country to country - and there usually must be some stated reason for the abortion, even though the list of acceptable reasons is pretty broad. The point is, there are limitations on abortion in Europe and most other countries, one has to go to places like China and Russia to find abortion as freely and easily accessible as it is here at home. In the U.S., one can abort a full term baby for no reason whatsoever up until the moment the baby's head is fully out of the cervix. Since we now believe that not all biological human beings are persons, it should come as no great surprise to find that many of the more muddle-headed among us now believe that some non-human entities - dolphins, for example, or maybe chimps or computers - should be accorded the legal rights of personhood. We now reside in a civilization which accepts what is nearly infanticide, will soon accept outright infanticide, and is seriously considering conferring legal personhood upon animals and even machines. And folks say the Catholic Church is backwards for opposing this lunacy? Regardless, the result of all this has been the transformation of the American civilization into something our grandparents or great grandparents would not recognize.

Stem cells are the next big step in this transformation. What we as a society conclude regarding embryonic stem cell research will have greater impact on what our civilization looks like in the future than any other medical/moral item you can name, even bigger than the anti-contraception and pro-abortion laws. Why? Because the technology of stem cell creation and it's outgrowth - human technology manufacturing platforms - will invest so many aspects of medicine that the time will come where the only way an individual can avoid being tainted with it will be to avoid medical treatment altogether. Further, the creation of embryos for the purpose of disassembling them for their stem cells will lead to cloning, first therapeutic cloning, then fetal farming, and later, recreational cloning. There is no doubt in my mind, this will happen, as surely as night follows the day. The Catholic must be informed, and be smart, about what faces us.

The topic of stem cells is broad and complex. We can break it into bite sized chunks over the next several weeks, looking at various aspects. The outline will go something like this.

1. What are stem cells? Adult vs. embryonic stem cells.
2. Where do adult stem cells come from, and how are they used?
3. Where do embryonic stem cells come from, and how are they used?
4. In vitro fertilization.
5. Cloning.
6. Patent laws and other legal matters.

This outline is subject to change, but I thought it a good starting point. I will also develop a glossary of commonly used terms, developed from standard references. Obviously, all of this material is available on the web in various formats ranging from really infantile presentations to impenetrable dissertations. My point is to try to summarize it all, briefly but not too briefly, to get us all "on the same sheet of music" (to use a hackneyed Navy phrase) so that we can all be reasonably equipped to go out and face the conductors. Like abortion and contraception, embryonic stem cells and their progeny will soon touch many aspects of our medical and moral lives. We need to be smart about this stuff now.

The Ashley Treatment.

A story surfaced this week on a girl "frozen in time", to use news writer's hyperbole. In short, Ashley is a nine year old girl diagnosed shortly after birth with "static encephalopathy of unknown etiology". Exactly how this diagnosis differs from what was once known as severe/profound mental retardation escapes me, but I may simply be dating myself. Nevertheless, the end result seems to be the same - the mental and motor capabilities of the little girl are arrested at a level more or less equivalent to those of an infant a couple of months old. She can smile, she can cry, she is aware of her environment, and kicks and wiggles and seems to like music. However, she cannot move herself, feed herself, hold her head up, roll over or change her position in bed. She is, as the parent's website says, "tube fed and dependent on her caregivers in every way." Today she is nine years old, weighs 65 pounds, is reportedly otherwise healthy with no medical problems, and lives at home with her parents and two siblings.

At age six, the parents undertook a series of procedures to prevent Ashley from attaining full adult size and sexual maturity. All of these procedures were performed at the Seattle Children's Hospital, and have been reported in peer reviewed medical journals. The procedures included high dose estrogen therapy to prematurely fuse the growth plates of the long bones, thus limiting final height and weight, hysterectomy to remove the uterus (the ovaries were left in place), and surgery to remove the breast buds, to limit breast growth. Although these procedures are certainly unusual for a six year old, none of them alone, or together, is especially dangerous, complex, or uncomfortable for the patient. Indeed, simple hysterectomies in adults are every day procedures, breast bud removal is quite common (in boys, generally, for gynecomastia, though I also see it done in young girls who have supernumerary breasts), and there is considerable experience with high dose estrogen use in girls for height limitation (I certainly don't agree with it or condone it, but it's not a medically mysterious procedure). In short, there's nothing experimental, dangerous, or heroic about the procedures themselves. It's the reason that the procedures were done that is producing the media spotlight.

The parents undertook these procedures for their little girl, quite simply, because they believe that the procedures posed little risk, and they would help greatly in the maintenance of her life and well being. I think the parents make powerful arguments supporting their course of action, and I refer you to their website here. http://ashleytreatment.spaces.live.com/blog/

This is not an easy case. Although I have no idea whether Ashley's parents are Catholic, this is a Catholic website and we should think about the problem using Catholic principles. Are the parent's actions clearly condemned under Catholic moral principles? Let's consider. First, their intent is good. Having no reason to disbelieve their website, I accept that their motives are primarily in Ashley's best interests, and one thing which is clearly in her best interest is to remain in a home surrounded by family, rather than to end up in an institution. Caring for her at home indefinitely is much more feasible if she's 65 pounds and sexually immature, than if she's full adult weight and size, and sexually mature. It's also a reasonable supposition that, subsequent to these procedures, her overall health might be better, longer. The question, in my mind, is, given that their intent is good, have they engaged in an evil means to secure their intent?

To answer that question, we first answer the following: (1) given that a deliberately contraceptive act is never justifiable, does the removal of Ashley's uterus fall into this category? The primary reasons for her hysterectomy (according to the parent's website) relate to medical management as she ages, although "inability to become pregnant" is an acknowledged secondary "benefit". In other words, the main reason for her hysterectomy appears to be medical management, with contraception a secondary effect. As the primary reason for the hysterectomy was not contraceptive, and in light of the fact that Ashley would not ever be able to become pregnant in any way which is morally acceptable, can her hysterectomy be justified under the principle of double effect? (2) Does her overall treatment, which has, after all, had a profound effect on her body, diminish her dignity or do her violence as a person? In order to answer that, I think we would first have to define exactly what the question ‘diminish or harm her dignity as a person’ means in Ashley's case.

In addition, her treatment raises other profound questions. If it's OK for Ashley, for what other sorts of handicapped persons might it, or something like it, be acceptable? How handicapped does one have to be before this sort of thing is acceptable? What sorts of medical problems might a 45 year old, 65 pound, sexually immature Ashley have, that she might not have had if she'd been allowed to mature normally? What will a 45 year old, 65 pound sexually immature Ashley look like? She's not "frozen in time", and she certainly won't look like 9 year old Ashley.

So, if I may offer a layman’s opinion at this early stage, I am unconvinced that what Ashley's parents have done is clearly wrong, given my admittedly incomplete understanding of Catholic medical ethics. But their actions do raise a lot of important questions and concerns, and they set a dangerous precedent in our civilization, a civilization which shows itself increasingly unable to grasp the meaning of what it is to be human; i.e., created in the image of God. I'm sure there will be more to come on this issue from reliable Catholic priests, ethicists, and thoughtful laity

Feast days of the week 7 - 13 January 2007 (1962 liturgical calendar).

First part of the Liturgical Year: The Christmas Cycle.

Octave of the Epiphany.

Sunday, 7 January, 2007: First Sunday after the Epiphany - The Feast of the Holy Family.
"The special devotion which sets forth the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph as the model of virtue for all Christian households began in the seventeenth century. It commenced almost simultaneously in Canada and France: - the Association of the Holy Family being founded in Montreal in 1663, and the Daughters of the Holy Family in Paris in 1674. Numerous other congregations and associations under the Patronage of the Holy Family have been established since that time, and they are spread over the world. The archconfraternity was established by Bl. Pius IX in 1847. In 1893 Leo XIII approved a Feast for Canada, and Pope Benedict XV extended the Feast of the Holy Family to the whole Church and ordered its celebration to take place on the Sunday after Epiphany."
Epistle: Col 3:12-17.
Gospel: Luke 2:42-52.

Monday, 8 January 2007: Ferial.
Epistle: Col 3:12-17.
Gospel: Luke 2:42-52.

Tuesday, 9 January 2007: The Most Holy Name of Jesus.
Epistle: Col 3:12-17.
Gospel: Luke 2:42-52.

Wednesday, 10 January 2007:Ferial
Epistle: Col 3:12-17.
Gospel: Luke 2:42-52.

Thursday, 11 January 2007: Ferial
Epistle: Col 3:12-17.
Gospel: Luke 2:42-52.

Friday, 12 January 2007: Ferial
Epistle: Col 3:12-17.
Gospel: Luke 2:42-52.

Saturday, 13 January 2007: Commemoration of the Baptism of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Lesson: Isaias 60:1-6 (as on the Feast of the Epiphany).
Gospel: John 1:29-34.

Remarks are abstracted from The Daily Missal and Liturgical Manual, from Editio Typica of the Roman Missal and Breviary, 1962
(Baronius Press Limited, London, 2004, in conjunction with the Fraternal Society of St. Peter, www.baroniuspress.com)

Feast days of the week 31 December 2006-6 January 2007 (1962 liturgical calendar)

Feast days of the week 31 December 2006-6 January 2007 (1962 liturgical calendar)[i].

First part of the Liturgical Year: the Christmas Cycle.
Christmastide.

Sunday, 31 December, 2006: Sunday within the Octave of Christmas.
"The sacred Liturgy, in revealing to us the supernatural Sonship of our Lord Jesus Christ, which affects our souls more especially at this time of Christmas, makes the Divinity under the aspect of Fatherhood resplendent in our eyes."
Epistle: Gal 4:1-7
Gospel: Luke 2:33-40

Monday, 1 January 2007: Octave Day of the Nativity (Holy Day of Obligation).
"In the Old Law, by the Rite of Circumcision, every male Jew became a member and shared in the privileges and blessings of the chosen people of God. A Jew who failed to be initiated by the ceremony was excluded. Our Lord was Son of God by nature, and absolutely sinless, and therefore did not need adoption into the membership of God's children. Yet, He submitted to the law. The Church also honours on this day the holy Name of Jesus, given to the Divine Child at the Circumcision, and the Divine Maternity of Our Lady."
Epistle: Titus 2:11-15 (of the First Mass of Christmas)
Gospel: Luke 2:21

Tuesday, 2 January 2007: The Most Holy Name of Jesus.
"This Feast is kept on the First Sunday of the year; but if this Sunday falls on Jan. 1st, 6th, or 7th, the Feast is kept on Jan. 2nd. Its origin is traced to the sixteenth century, when it was celebrated by the Franciscan Order. In 1721 Pope Innocent XIII made the keeping of this solemnity universal. The Name Jesus, i.e. the Saviour of the world, was brought by the Angel Gabriel from God, "For He shall save His people from their sins."
Lesson: Acts 4:8-12
Gospel: Luke 2:21

Wednesday, 3 January 2007:Ferial
Epistle: Titus 2:11-15 (of the First Mass of Christmas)
Gospel: Luke 2:21

Thursday, 4 January 2007: Ferial
Epistle: Titus 2:11-15 (of the First Mass of Christmas)
Gospel: Luke 2:21

Friday, 5 January 2007: First Friday, Ferial
Epistle: Titus 2:11-15 (of the First Mass of Christmas)
Gospel: Luke 2:21

Saturday, 6 January 2007: Feast of the Epiphany (Holy Day of Obligation in Great Britain, Canada, and Australia).
"The word 'Epiphany' means 'manifestation'. The Church in the Mass, commemorates a triple manifestation of Christ: to the Magi, to the Gentiles; in His Baptism, when the Voice from heaven declared, 'This is My Beloved Son'; and in the miracle of changing water into wine at Cana."
Lesson: Isaias 60:1-6
Gospel: Matthew 2:1-12.

[i] Remarks are abstracted from The Daily Missal and Liturgical Manual, from Editio Typica of the Roman Missal and Breviary, 1962
(Baronius Press Limited, London, 2004, in conjunction with the Fraternal Society of St. Peter, www.baroniuspress.com)

Pray the Rosary

I wrote this piece in the summer of 2004, and it was published in the May, 2005 edition of New Oxford Review.[i] I thought I would reproduce it here, as a prayer for the new year.

Pray the Rosary.

I went to a Rosary devotion a few nights ago, the first I have ever been to. It is held every Wednesday evening at the small chapel I and my family have been attending for the past year or so, a chapel where the Tridentine Mass is said under the auspices of the Encyclical Ecclesia Dei. We stumbled upon this place after doing what I had sworn we would never do subsequent to our conversion to Catholicism: church shopping. But the parishes we went to early in our conversion were so awful, and the priests taught things contrary to the Faith so frequently, that shop we did, and now here we are.

The chapel began life as a small frame house with large attached garage on a couple of acres of land. The original attached garage was expanded and converted into what is now the chapel proper. Recently a small classroom wing has been added. The fire marshal will allow 160 people to be seated in the chapel; my experience is that it's closer to that number than not on any given Sunday. The fittings are very simple: wooden pews, wrought iron altar rail, a tasteful, modestly carved wooden altar with the requisite marble component. Statues of St. Mary, St. Joseph, and St. Michael guard the altar and the Tabernacle, and the Tabernacle is smack in the middle of it all, right under the golden crucifix and beneath the six high candlesticks, so that you know where the focus of the Mass is and you're never confused about where to perform your genuflection.

The Tridentine Mass itself wasn't totally alien. As both my wife and I come from a "high" Episcopal Church background, and are used to formal liturgy, altar rails, and kneeling for Communion, so we are also used to the idea that the space between the railing and the altar is a holy place; you don't go mucking about in there just for the heck of it whether you're a priest, altar boy or layman. Now, assisting at the Traditional Latin Mass, following the liturgy really hasn't been the problem it is frequently advertised to be: there's lots of simple outlines available. The one put out by The Coalition for Ecclesia Dei costs a couple of bucks, has the Latin and English side by side, and has little line drawings of what the priest is doing, along with marginal comments on what's going on as well as what you should be doing (kneeling, standing, not receiving Communion if you're not in a state of grace, whatever). Follow the booklet and the Mass closely, and in a couple of weeks you'll have the swing of it, and have learned a bit of theology besides. It's not that difficult. The greatest challenge, really, in our family's adaptation to the Tridentine Mass has been managing our four small children. They're not badly behaved, as 6, 4, 2 and two month old children go; it's just that they're, well, children, and the polite 4 year old question, "Is it over yet?" sticks out ever so much more during the silent Tridentine consecration than it ever did in the Novus Ordo liturgy. "This too," I tell myself, "is but a season."

My family is away now, and I am alone, and each day I come home from work to a house which, to my momentary surprise, is completely unchanged from how I left it in the morning. So, I decide to go to the Wednesday evening Rosary.

I'm not a complete stranger to the Rosary. I've prayed it most days for the past few years, having begun back when we lived in Italy, soon after our conversion to the Faith. It was a 50 minute commute to work and I had this Rosary tape which I would listen to, and I gradually learned it as I strove with the Neapolitan traffic day in and day out. Praying the Rosary was better than cursing, I figured, and it is a fact that I was never involved in an accident, nor was my car broken into or stolen, the entire time I was there. Ask anyone who's done much driving in bella Napoli how unusual that is.

So I went to the Rosary devotion at the little chapel after work, arriving there just a bit before 7 PM, when it was to begin. A dozen or so people were there, apparently regulars. An elderly gentleman began the session, dedicating the prayer to the various intentions of both the chapel and the Universal Church and finally, pointedly, for the conversion of Islam. Next came the Our Father and the Creed. Then, the Rosary.

"The first joyful mystery, the Annunciation." Wait a minute. Wednesday is supposed to be the Glorious Mysteries, not the Joyful Mysteries. I figured I must have missed something, but all these were silent thoughts as I kneeled and said the Hail Mary's along with everyone else. I have heard it said that Mary gave her fiat, her assent to the Lord, twice. The first time was at the Annunciation, when the angel Gabriel was sent from God to the little Galilean town of Nazareth, and to a young woman barely out of girlhood, a virgin, betrothed to a man named Joseph of the house of David, whose name was Mary. And when the angel came to her he said,

"Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women."

And Mary, though afraid, aligned her humble will with that of the Creator of the universe, and allowed His will to be done to her according to His Word. And the Word became flesh, and Mary bore a son, Jesus, fully human and fully Divine, and Mary became the mother of God. One day God would again ask of His humble creature, and she would again assent, though it would pierce her soul as with a sword, and from that assent it would become possible for all men to be saved.

"The third joyful mystery, the Nativity."

My mind tends to wander during prayers, which is at a minimum poor prayer hygiene, if not an outright venial sin. I try to at least keep it's wandering along paths relevant to the prayer. So. Here we have God, the Creator of the universe, the Creator of time, becoming a man. Not simply God wearing a man-suit, as some of the early heretics believed, but fully human, while remaining fully Divine. Why? It's a big universe out there; can it really be the case that God is that interested in us? Perhaps we really are created in His image. It's a mystery. Our youngest child is a sometimes fussy, sometimes smiley, sometimes spitty-uppy little baby who suckles with earnest intent like the hungry hungry hippo in one of the children's books which litter our house. Our oldest, who is six, so wanted a baby brother, and now he rocks the baby, and holds him, and stares at him. Not too many months ago, this little baby was a zygote, a fertilized ovum, floating down a fallopian tube, silently dividing into a small ball of cells. His first major exercise was to differentiate into an outer cell mass, which would become his placenta, and an inner cell mass, which would become him, the baby proper. He was also, at that point, a rich source of embryonic stem cells because he had only just begun the fantastic process of growing and differentiating into the hundreds of different tissue types, and trillions of cells, which make up a person. Today, in the United States of America, there is no earthly reason that he couldn't simply have been destroyed at that point for his parts, his stem cells. In fact, exactly that is done every day with the "spare" embryos from in vitro fertilization clinics. Indeed, we don't even need the "spares"; embryos are created for the express purpose of "harvesting" their stem cells today, right here, in the good ole' US of A. Some countries, England, for example, have enacted legislation prohibiting a researcher from implanting one of these embryos in a womb and allowing her to grow. So, we have the interesting situation of defining a class of humans – embryos created to harvest for their parts – whom it is illegal not to kill.

For that matter, if the baby's mother took birth control pills he could have been silently and unknowingly aborted because one of the accepted mechanisms of action of oral contraceptives (they have several different mechanisms) is to render the uterine lining unsuitable for implantation. So this tiny baby, at this point called a blastocyst, would have been ejected in what might have seemed to the mother as a slightly heavier than usual menstrual period. I recently had a conversation with a physician colleague, a highly educated, intelligent and articulate man with a strong classical education. He, like most physicians, strongly endorses abortion, contraception, embryonic stem cell research, in vitro fertilization, and all the other derivatives which are just coming into being.

"Humanity is relative," the tall, handsome physician said. "We make these decisions. Those who oppose these things impede progress."

Now, I'm all for progress. I like air conditioning, flush toilets and local anesthetics. On a more serious note, the convergence of multiple fields of research in basic biochemistry and molecular biology has put us on the verge of truly effective treatments for at least some lethal cancers in a way similar to the revolution in microbiology in the last century which lead to the control of many infectious diseases. But there are things we should not do because they are flagrantly immoral and gravely sinful against God, and the field of medicine is becoming that sort of minefield.

By now the Rosary had progressed to the fifth joyful mystery, the decade of Hail Mary's, and the Fatima prayer ("lead all souls to Heaven, especially those in most need of Thy mercy.") I figured things would be wrapping up, and I felt good about it. I'd come out on a weekday evening, prayed with others in a chapel, and now my knees hurt and I needed to get up and go to work in the morning. The elderly gentleman stopped leading, and now a woman's voice from a pew behind me began.

"The first sorrowful mystery: the agony in the garden."

Oh, dear. Now it's clear: we're going to do the entire 150 decades. These people are serious. Well, nobody forced me to come here.

"Hail Mary, full of grace..."

The sorrowful mystery with which I feel the most affinity is "the carrying of the cross". Although I have been showered with blessings, I am all too often more than ready to view them as burdens, and that I must shoulder them as my cross. But in truth they are easy burdens, and their occasional inconveniences count as nothing in comparison to the gift of eternal life my Savior has offered to me, if only I will accept it. But of the sorrowful mysteries it is the fifth one, the crucifixion, that is the most poignant. It is here that the Blessed Virgin Mary gave her second assent to God, her second fiat. Unlike St. Joseph, who tradition tells us died prior to Jesus' entry into public ministry, Mary was not spared the torment of watching her son's crucifixion. She didn't fight God on this, but prayed and accepted His will, all the while allowing her soul to be pierced by the sword Simeon had prophesied in the temple over 30 years before. She gave the assent of her own free will, just as Jesus had in the garden of Gethsemane the night prior to His death: "Not my will, but Thine, be done."

"The first glorious mystery, the Resurrection."

Some years back, the Anglican priest who led me out of atheism and back to Christ observed, concerning the so called "rock opera" Jesus Christ Superstar, that what he didn't like about it was that it ended with the crucifixion, and completely ignored the resurrection. In so doing it missed the entire point of Christianity: Jesus' victory over death.

"What," this fine mentor used to say, "does the atheist have to offer the dying man?"

Almost every day I get stuff in my mailbox from various Catholic organizations needing money to do good things. Every one is worthwhile, and I cannot possibly give to them all, or even most of them. And collectively, their efforts seem so futile, so puny against the massive juggernaut of evil which is engulfing our nation. When we endorsed abortion a generation ago we obscured the moral dividing line between ourselves and Nazi Germany. That line becomes ever more faint. Today, at the dawn of true human engineering, when we are willing to create babies in order to disassemble them for their parts, we are approaching a level of technological barbarity which would have made those old Nazis stand up with applause. Meanwhile the heart of our society, the family defined by God, is being deconstructed by the leaders of our nation, not just the "elected" leaders but the de facto leaders: the judges, the media, Hollywood superstars, all those whom we allow to do our thinking for us. In place of the family they substitute aberrations and downright lies: "blended families", single parent families, and now something called "homosexual marriage." I feel powerless to stop it. I look at my children, who look back at me with trusting, innocent eyes, and I silently grieve and rage at the remorseless destruction of the world I will leave to them.

What came after the Resurrection? The Rosary tells us: the Ascension into Heaven. The Descent of the Holy Spirit. These are the promises of the Christian faith; the promises of God. They are the promises that, no matter what happens in this old world, God has His Providential Plan, and we are part of it. That doesn't mean that we should be passive, and accept the evil which is engulfing us. No. We should resist it, no matter how meagre our arsenal of earthly weapons. We should not despair, and we should never, never give up hope, and we should always remember that this world is not our final destination. And, we should pray the Rosary, and ask for the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary. She's got some horsepower. After all, she's the Queen of Heaven.

"Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee.
Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners,
now,
and at the hour of our death."
Amen.

[i] TP Collins, "Pray the Rosary" New Oxford Review, May, 2005. By permission, New Oxford Review, New Oxford Review, Inc. 1069 Kains Ave. Berkeley, CA 94706.