Tag: Christianity

Polish Jew Janusz Korczak (1878-1942) was a medical doctor, author, and children’s rights advocate.

He was also a hero of the Nazi era who, even today, remains largely unknown.

Biographer Betty Jean Lifton tells the story in “The King of Children” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $10.91).

Born Henryk Goldszmit in Warsaw, Korczak — the pen name he later adopted as a writer — had difficult beginnings.

His father, who may have suffered from syphilis, was in and out of mental institutions for seven years — reducing the family to poverty — and died, possibly by suicide, when Korczak was in his late teens.

The event haunted him to the point where in early adulthood he decided that he was unfit to be a husband and father.

Instead, he would lead a monk-like existence, making a vow to “uphold the child and defend his rights.”

He studied medicine at the University of Warsaw from 1898 to 1904, worked as a pediatrician from 1905 to 1912, and served for a year as a military doctor.

At a fundraiser for the Orphans Aid Society in 1909, he met Stefania (Stefa) Wilczyńska. In 1910, he quit his successful practice as a pediatrician to become the director of an orphanage for Jewish children. Stefa became his right-hand woman.

The original site was in a working-class neighborhood at 92 Krochmalna St.

Warsaw was the city Korczak loved and essentially never left. His goal was to create a just community there, aimed at moral education. Children are entitled to be taken seriously, he insisted. They have a right to be treated by adults with tenderness and respect, as equals, not as slaves.

He drew up a Children’s Constitution. The orphanage eventually published its own newsletter, developed its own peer-review court of justice (the children were allowed to “sue” not only each other, but Korczak as well), and produced plays. Property was bought in the country where the children could attend summer camp.

While Korczak was eccentric and dreamy, Stefa was a no-nonsense organizer. It was Stefa who made sure the children’s clothes and ears were clean, who lined them up for inspection before school, who made sure they had their mid-morning snack sandwich.

Some say the tragedy of her life was an unrequited love for Korczak, who though unfailingly gentle (if firm) with the children, could be abrupt and cold toward her.

Meanwhile, he gave lectures, taught, wrote newspaper articles, hosted a radio show, and authored children’s books. “King Matt the First,” the most popular, featured a Peter Pan-like boy monarch who struggles to establish a democratic society and is exiled.

Always, Korczak wanted to show the children a world that was fair, humane, and filled with beauty. Always he tried to demonstrate in his life that no matter the surroundings, the individual could sacrifice, exercise integrity, and hold his or her head high.

He and Stefa had had many opportunities to leave over the years but turned them all down. Now Jews were being rounded up, deported, shot like dogs in the streets.

He started what is now known as his “Ghetto Diary” shortly after Warsaw fell to the Nazis in 1939, and finished it during the last three months of his life in the hellscape of the Warsaw Ghetto. 

After years of going out each morning to beg for food and money for the children, he was sick, weakened, malnourished.

Still, the children were Korczak’s obsession. He took meticulous notes on their behavior, psychology, and spirituality.

“The interesting world no longer was outside of me,” he wrote. “Now it is within me. I exist not to be loved and admired, but to act and to love. It’s not the duty of my surroundings to help me, rather it’s I who have the duty to care for the world, for people.”

The Nazis began routing people with no warning from their ghetto hovels and herding them onto trains. “Resettlement in the East,” they explained: code for the extermination camp at Treblinka.

One morning, the dreaded knock came, along with the cry, “All Jews out!”

Ten staff members and 192 children, clutching their little books and toys, left the orphanage for the last time. Along with thousands of others they stood in the broiling sun all day without food, water, or toilets.

As they were about to board, a friend of Korczak’s rushed up, offering to broker a last-minute reprieve.

“Out of the question,” Korczak replied. “And leave the children alone to panic?”

When their turn came, the children, well-trained as they were, walked to the train in orderly rows of four. One boy held aloft the flag of King Matt, green on one side, a blue Star of David against a field of white on the other.

Korczak, in the lead, grasped a child by each hand. Stefa, faithful to the end, marched with her own brigade behind.

The Jewish police, stepping aside to let the procession pass, instinctively saluted. The train doors closed.

No one who passed through them was ever heard from again.

“The Poles claim Korczak as a martyr,” Lifton notes, “who would have been canonized if he had converted; the Israelis claim him as one of the Thirty-Six Just Men, whose pure souls made possible the world’s salvation.”

Let humankind claim him — and Stefa — and the children they accompanied to the gates of the netherworld.

For the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.

Photo: monastyr.org     

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit! Amen!

On this day the Holy Church established a special commemoration of one of its great-martyrs, Greatmartyr Theodore the Tyro (“the Recruit”)In memory of this occurrence, the Orthodox Church annually celebrates the holy Great Martyr Theodore the Recruit on the first Saturday of Great Lent.

“>Theodore the Tyro. The word “tyro” means “recruit”. Why was St. Theodore called the “Recruit”? Because shortly before his martyrdom for Christ he, fulfilling his civic duty, was conscripted for military service.

At that time the persecution of Christians began again. It turned out that there were Christians among the military squad, including the soldier Theodore. He was an outstanding young man in every way: tall, superbly built, handsome and very intelligent. He was not immediately tortured, at first they kindly suggested that he offer a sacrifice to the pagan gods. It would seem that he was not expected to renounce Christ: he was told just to throw a pinch of incense at the feet of a pagan deity. One could think that St. Theodore would have sacrificed very little— what is so bad about throwing some incense at the feet of a heathen idol? After all, you can continue to believe in Christ.

Similar circumstances sometimes develop in our lives. It seems to us that they do not force us to renounce our God, but having violated His commandment, we are just making a petty deviation from the Law. And, unfortunately, we very often do it. And the holy Great-Martyr Theodore, whose memory the Church is celebrating today, shows us an example of keeping spiritual purity when temptations appear and the enemy wants to spoil our fasting. The saint refused to do what he was asked to do, because he knew that he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much (Lk. 16:10). According to the practice of that time, St. Theodore was subjected to various tortures. And the torturers finally decided to burn him alive. This is how the holy Great-Martyr Theodore the Tyro suffered for Christ.

The Holy Church honors his memory on February 17 according to the Church calendar. But why does the Holy Church pray to the holy Great-Martyr Theodore the Tyro at the Vespers for Saturday of the First Week of Lent?

The holy great-martyr suffered in about 305–306. Over fifty years later, Julian the Apostate, the nephew of the holy Emperor Constantine the Great, reigned over the Byzantine Empire—a man who had at one time served in church (he was blessed to wear a sticharion) and seemed to believe in Christ. But when he became Emperor, he decided to bring his empire back to idolatry.

Julian was somewhat afraid to fight with Christianity openly. So he decided to commit a malicious evil deed. He called the pagan priests and ordered them to collect the blood of animals after offering sacrifices to idols, and in the First week of Lent, to sprinkle it on all the food sold in the markets. The priests did so, and no one was notified about it. But God is not mocked (Gal. 6:7). On one of the nights of the first week of Lent the holy Great-Martyr Theodore, who had suffered for his faithfulness to Christ, appeared to Archbishop Eudoxius of Constantinople. He warned the Christians about this danger and they stocked up on the necessary food in advance. Thus, Heavenly protection saved the Church of Christ from defilement (as the enemy of mankind had planned), and the Christians preserved their purity.

The question involuntarily arises: would it have been a sin if, unaware that sacrificial blood had been sprinkled on the food, those people had eaten it? Someone may say, “There is no sin in this, because they did not know about it.” But God prevents even sins unknown to man. There is a very important lesson in this story for us: We must always be cautious in our actions and words, and try not to let anything defile our fasting. And Lent exists so that we may understand what we do, what thoughts we have and what words we pronounce.

We bless the koliva with honey or sugar as a symbol that fasting is sweet and the Lenten food that we eat is sweet, because it is with the grace of God. There is a great difference between eating the most humble food with the grace and love of God, as the Wise Solomon says in his Parables, and eating the most luxurious food without love and without the grace of God. This “sweetness” is not just the material sweetness of food created for us by God, the taste of which the Lord takes care of as well. It’s true sweetness, spiritual sweetness.

If you listened attentively to the Old Testament readings at the Divine Liturgy today, then you heard that the first reading from the Book of Genesis reminded us about a terrible and tragic event in the history of mankind—our ancestors’ fall, when Eve and Adam ate fruit from the forbidden tree. Man in the person of Adam and Eve realized that he had renounced God and lost a great deal by violating the commandment. But God did not banish Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden at once. Adam decided to hide from God—that is, he did a crazy thing, since it is impossible to hide from God. And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? (Gen. 3:9). God expected Adam to repent. Not only did Adam fail to repent, but he also blamed God and Eve: The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat (Gen. 3:12). Eve should have realized that Adam was doing the wrong thing. She should have fallen at God’s feet and said: “My God! It’s my fault. Forgive me and my husband.” But Eve said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat (Gen. 3:13).

How much this resembles our own lives! Remembering Adam and Eve, we can say, “How unreasonable they were! If they had said, ‘Lord, forgive us!’, there would have been no expulsion from Paradise, no death, and to this day we would all have continued to live in Paradise.” It’s easy to condemn our ancestors. But we do exactly the same; we come to confession and judge our neighbor who is “plotting something against us”, our “bad” daughter-in-law, boss, husband, and so on. But repentance should be in sincere contrition: I am alone immensely guilty before my Creator; I do not fulfill His commandments.

Tonight we will come to the sacrament of Preparing for ConfessionNow tell me: Is Confession profitable or needful? Certainly it is profitable and even essential; because, just as it is impossible to cleanse a vessel without ridding it of all uncleanness, so it is impossible to purge your soul of sins without confession.

“>confession. And first of all, let us condemn ourselves. Let’s try to pull out the root of sin that is in our hearts. Because this thorn of sin defiles me and moves me away from my God. This is what Christ’s Holy Church reminds us about today, so that we can all spend the days of Lent worthily, so that nothing can defile the greatness and holiness of these days, so that this period can be salvific for us. We prayed about this today to the holy Great-Martyr Theodore the Tyro. May God grant that through his prayers and the prayers of all the holy ascetics of faith and piety, the Lord might vouchsafe us to spend the Lenten days worthily, so that this time would be pleasant and saving for us. Amen.

If there can be said to be a vanishing population in the United States, one demographic immediately stands out: people living with Down syndrome. But how can they be truly disappearing when there are an estimated 400,000 such Americans, whose lifespans are at the same time — through medical advancements — increasing to 50-plus years old?

The answer — as a Catholic University of America Institute for Human Ecology panel informed its audience March 19 — lies in the same arena of medical advancements: selective abortion based on a test result.

An estimated 70%-90% of children with a definitive in utero diagnosis of Down syndrome are aborted. The Journal of the American Medical Association notes that “Down syndrome is the most common chromosomal disorder, affecting approximately 1 in every 700 births.”

“I am filled with great sadness when I realize I might be the last generation of people with Down syndrome,” said disability and pro-life advocate Bridget Brown, reading from a letter she wrote to the people of Iceland after learning the nation had all but “eliminated” the condition by aborting virtually 100% of children who test positive for it in the womb.

“The world may never again benefit from our gifts,” reflected Brown, a young woman with Down syndrome who serves on the National Catholic Partnership on Disability’s Committee on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities.

Mary O’Callaghan, a developmental psychologist based at the University of Notre Dame — who also chairs the NCPD’s Ethics and Public Policy Committee and whose youngest son has a dual diagnosis of Down syndrome and autism — shared Brown’s urgent tone.

“The history of prenatal testing is very much tied up with the history of Down syndrome in our country within the last 60 years or so,” O’Callaghan said, noting the increased expansion of the practice — especially since the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists began officially recommending more than 40 years ago that all women over the age of 35 receive prenatal screening.

Confusion among parents, O’Callaghan noted, is not uncommon when it comes to the accuracy of even contemporary tests, as well as their screening versus diagnostic ability.

“Taken as a whole, the threat that prenatal testing and diagnosis poses to children with Down syndrome, I think is much more urgent than it was in 1978,” O’Callaghan said, referring to the year the U.S. Catholic Conference (a predecessor to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops) released its pastoral statement on persons with disabilities. “Testing is more widespread; it’s much earlier in pregnancy,” she said.

“So much has changed since 1978,” said panel moderator J.D. Flynn, “in terms of the way that we talk about, and think about, and engage with people who have disabilities; in terms of the way that people with disabilities advocate for themselves; and in terms of the way that we think about inclusion, especially in the structures of our church.”

Flynn, a canon lawyer and co-founder of The Pillar, a journalism project focused on the Catholic Church, is the father of two children with Down syndrome. He noted the USCCB is in the process of re-drafting its Pastoral Statement on Persons with Disabilities.

Nonetheless, progress for people with Down syndrome can be characterized as only incremental.

“As those with Down syndrome are increasingly showing us their ability to flourish in the midst of families and wider society, the targeting of them for selective abortion in medicine has become even more aggressive,” O’Callaghan emphasized. “So despite all the gains we’ve made in the area of disability rights, I’d say we’re in a much worse place with respect to abortion and Down syndrome — at least in terms of medical policy and practice.”

Tracy Winsor, co-founder of Be Not Afraid, a case management support service for parents carrying to term following a prenatal diagnosis, agreed.

“I think in a general sense, oftentimes, the conversation around any prenatal diagnosis — which obviously would include Down syndrome — is based on the idea that you want to make it as easy as possible for the parents to terminate the pregnancy, if that’s what they’re inclined to do,” Winsor said. “That seems to be the effort that’s made. And so very often — across the board, without regard to diagnosis — we see kind of (the) worst-case scenario presented to parents as they look forward. That’s a challenge.”

False positives — associated with a mother’s age and increasing with the rarity of a condition — can also have a devastating impact upon parental decision-making, Winsor said.

“For a woman who’s 28 years old — if she receives a positive screening result of Down syndrome — there’s a 44% chance that it’s a false positive. That’s kind of high,” Winsor explained. “And what we find in practice, is that if that’s a woman who says, ‘Wait a minute — I just thought I was going to find out if this was a boy or girl; I didn’t expect this answer; I’m not going to pursue additional testing,’ then, oftentimes, the medical community will start responding as if that test is diagnostic.”

Panelists agreed that advocacy and accuracy are essential: parents who are expecting a child and receive a Down syndrome diagnosis must be connected with someone in the Down syndrome community, since hearing their positive experiences can be a strong motivator to choose life.

Asked what she would say to a mother who just learned her baby has Down syndrome, Brown’s reply was both succinct and hopeful.

“Make plans based on dreams and not on fears,” she said. “Believe in yourself and your child.”

Texas Catholic and community groups are holding an event in El Paso called “Do Not Be Afraid: March and Vigil for Human Dignity” the evening of March 21 in the wake of what organizers called “dehumanizing laws and policies” toward migrants in the Lone Star State.

Organizers called the event “a decisive moment of community resistance and prayer” in response to the passage of Senate Bill 4, a controversial law that makes it a state crime for unauthorized migrants to cross into Texas from Mexico; Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s lawsuit seeking to shut down Annunciation House, a Catholic nonprofit serving migrants; and the first anniversary of a fire that killed 40 people in immigration detention across the border from El Paso in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and injured about two dozen others.

The event, organizers said, is intended to “affirm our welcoming borderland identity, protect our freedom to put faith into action, lift up the rights and dignity of those who migrate, defend our humanitarian workers, (and) commemorate those dying at the border.”

Bishop Mark J. Seitz and Auxiliary Bishop Anthony C. Celino of El Paso and other “faith and community leaders from across the borderlands” host the event, which starts at 6:30 p.m. at San Jacinto Plaza, where participants will meet and then march to Sacred Heart Church for the vigil at 7 p.m.

Paxton’s suit targeting El Paso’s Annunciation House, as well as Texas’ passage of SB 4, comes as some Republicans have grown increasingly hostile toward nongovernmental organizations, including Catholic ones, that provide resources such as food and shelter to migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border.

A state judge March 11 temporarily blocked the Texas attorney general’s demands for the records of Annunciation House, indicating both that Paxton’s effort seemed politically motivated with a “predetermined” outcome in mind, and that it must go through appropriate due process in the state court system.

Paxton in February filed suit in an attempt to shut down Annunciation House, accusing it of “human smuggling,” in a move denounced by Catholic immigration advocates, including Bishop Seitz.

Meanwhile, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision late March 19 once again blocking Texas from enforcing SB 4. Earlier the same day, a divided U.S. Supreme Court lifted its temporary pause on the law and sent the matter back to the federal appeals court, which in effect briefly allowed the state to enforce the law while litigation proceeds.

Federal law already makes it illegal to enter the U.S. without authorization, and most portions of a similar 2010 Arizona law were later struck down by the Supreme Court. Immigration advocacy groups in Texas filed a lawsuit over the bill prior to the Justice Department’s challenge.

In a statement about SB 4 emailed to OSV News, Jennifer Carr Allmon, executive director of the Texas Catholic Conference of Bishops, said, “The church supports the right of a sovereign nation to control its borders. We want the federal government to enact effective and humane border management as part of a framework of comprehensive immigration reforms. All law enforcement agencies can and should cooperate with each other but should not take over each other’s responsibilities or jurisdiction.”

“The obligation to control the international border lies with federal authorities,” Carr Allmon continued. “We understand the situation at the border has become untenable, but this law is not the solution. We advocate for immigration and refugee policies that protect family unity and allow newcomers an opportunity to contribute and participate more fully in our communities.”

“Targeted, humane and proportional border security policies are also a critical part of addressing the broken immigration system in the United States,” she said. “We extend our prayers to our brothers and sisters experiencing the harsh realities of this journey, and for all who encounter them. We ask all people of goodwill to join us in praying and working for a secure border, to protect the vulnerable and for just immigration solutions to protect all human life.”

The Hope Border Institute, a group that works to apply the perspective of Catholic social teaching in policy and practice to the U.S.-Mexico border region and is one of the partners organizing the El Paso event, wrote in a post on social media, “Thank you to our incredible partners for joining us for “Do Not Be Afraid: March & Vigil for Human Dignity.”

“Join us in our commitment to creating a community of respecting human dignity. We hope to see you there!” the post said.

Pope Francis has dismissed the former bishop of Bruges, Belgium, from the clerical state 14 years after Pope Benedict XVI accepted his resignation following his admission that he sexually abused his nephew.

Roger Vangheluwe, 87, was informed March 20 by the apostolic nunciature in Brussels that Pope Francis had ordered his laicization effective March 21 after “serious new elements” in his case led the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith to review his file, Vatican News reported.

After a new investigation, which included listening to the Belgian cleric’s defense, the dicastery presented the case to Pope Francis March 8 with the recommendation that he be removed from the clerical state.

Pope Francis approved the recommendation during an audience March 11 with Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, dicastery prefect, Vatican News said.

The Belgian Catholic website Kerknet.be reported that the nunciature’s announcement concluded by saying, “The Holy Father once again expresses his closeness with the victims of abuse and remains committed to eradicating this scourge in the Church.”

After a television documentary series, “Godvergeten” (“Godforsaken”), aired in Belgium in 2023, Kerknet.be reported, Bishop Johan Bonny of Antwerp and Auxiliary Bishop Koenraad Vanhoutte of Mechelen-Brussels went to the French abbey where Roger Vangheluwe resides and asked him to renounce the title of bishop emeritus.

“A few days later, Vangheluwe informed Bishop Bonny that he had sent a letter to the pope. What he had written in it he would not say,” Kerknet.be said.

The website also noted that many abuse survivors and Belgian officials wanted Pope Francis to take some action against the former bishop before a possible trip to Belgium in September.

In 2010 Vangheluwe admitted that he had sexually abused one nephew over the course of 13 years, beginning when the child was 5 years old. A year later, in an interview, he admitted to abusing a second nephew and said that lasted less than a year.

He had told the Belgian station VT4 that he did not consider himself a pedophile.

Ordained to the priesthood in 1963, St. John Paul II named him bishop of Bruges in December 1984 and he was ordained to the episcopacy the following February.

The Belgian bishops’ conference said in a statement March 21 that they repeatedly had asked for his laicization “for years.”

“Along with the victims of abuse and many others in our society, the bishops of our country have always considered it shameful that Roger Vangheluwe was able to officially remain a bishop and priest, despite the very restrictive measures put in place since his forced resignation,” the statement said.

The statement also suggested that the “serious new elements” referenced by the nunciature included “the statement of a victim who recently testified formally against Vangheluwe.”

The bishops thanked the victims and survivors for having “the courage and strength to denounce their attacker. Their example has inspired many other victims who, in turn, will no longer let their abuser go unpunished. The bishops hope that this laicization will help the victims recover from the abuse that so deeply affects them and their loved ones for life.”

The statement noted that while “Roger Vangheluwe’s laicization means that, in principle, he can now go wherever he wants,” it has been agreed “with the abbey where he currently resides that he can continue to stay there in seclusion. The bishops have insisted that he do so.”

England’s decision to halt routine prescriptions of puberty blockers following a review is “absolutely very important news” — and shows that research is a “game-changer” in the debate over gender transitioning for children, two U.S.-based experts told OSV News.

NHS (National Health Service) England announced March 12 it would no longer automatically prescribe puberty suppressing hormones to child patients at its gender identity clinics, joining a growing list of countries that includes Denmark, Finland, France, Norway and Sweden to limit such usage.

The move follows an interim report by Dr. Hilary Cass, a former president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, whom NHS appointed in 2020 to conduct an independent review of its gender identity services.

Cass and her team found that there were “gaps in the evidence base” for puberty blockers, which arrest the onset of puberty by inhibiting sex hormones.

The drugs — which in the U.S. are approved by the Food and Drug Administration for precocious, or premature, puberty — have in recent years been prescribed in an off-label capacity to children expressing confusion about their gender.

However, a number of clinicians and researchers have raised concerns that administering the blockers to children who are not experiencing premature puberty can have negative, long-term effects on brain and bone development, as well as metabolism.

Those risks are real, said Dr. Patrick Lappert, a retired board-certified plastic surgeon and deacon at Annunciation of the Lord Parish in Decatur, Alabama.

Deacon Lappert, who has spoken nationally about the risks of puberty blockers, told OSV News that the sex hormones acted on by these drugs “are responsible for the massive process of regulation of the developing child — including their skeletal growth, the development of muscle mass, the development of coordination, coordinated movement, as well as the development of higher executive functioning of the brain, their ability to make decisions, (and) their ability to recognize and logically sort through problems.”

Puberty blockers “utterly shut that (process) down,” he said, adding they leave a child’s “affective development (and) … subjective emotional life development that is part of their future adult sexuality … arrested completely.”

While proponents of puberty blockers say the regimen is evidence-based, “there’s no science in there,” with clinical studies of “the lowest quality,” said Deacon Lappert. “There is no scientific basis for doing this to children at all. It’s (based on) anecdotal reports unsubstantiated by long-term data.”

Yet the “emergence of research, particularly substantive evidence reviews, assessing the risks and benefits of treatments for ‘gender confusion’ … has been a game-changer not only in health care settings but also for the cultural conversation,” said Mary Rice Hasson, Kate O’Beirne Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, where she co-founded and directs the Person and Identity Project.

Hasson told OSV News the “small, poorly done studies that were largely unchallenged” over the past 20 years supported the view that “puberty suppression (was) ‘fully reversible.’”

“But as the number of identity-distressed young people spiked, some publicly regretted ‘transitioning’ and began to speak out,” Hasson said.

One of the most prominent voices is that of Keira Bell, who legally challenged the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, which operated the NHS gender identity clinic where Bell had sought her transition. Although a British appeals court later overturned her legal win, Bell has maintained she was “treated like an experiment,” and continues to warn that many children and teens actually seek transitioning to address mental health and other disorders.

Hasson said the outcry has put medical professionals on notice.

“Clinicians in Sweden, the U.K. and Finland began scrutinizing the outcome data and found appallingly little evidence of benefit, but clear evidence of harm,” she said.

Hasson cited a February 2024 study by Sallie Baxendale, professor of clinical neuropsychology at University College London, which found “no evidence” that the cognitive effects of puberty suppressing-drugs “are fully reversible following discontinuation of treatment.”

On the contrary, “there is some evidence of a detrimental impact of pubertal suppression on IQ in children,” wrote Baxdendale.

“We know that research is making a difference, because six European countries, including the U.K., already have reversed course, based on substantive evidence reviews showing lack of benefit and high risk of harm,” Hasson said. “They now limit or oppose medicalized interventions for identity-distressed minors.”

At the same time, she added, “the U.S. is a tougher environment,” since “ideology sets the narratives.”

Deacon Lappert agreed, saying that “all of the language that is offered in support of doing this to children is … political, ideological language.”

“Major medical associations generally align with progressive agendas and follow the lead of the activist-led World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which promotes ‘standards’ written by gender clinicians themselves,” Hasson said.

In addition, she said, “gender clinicians and hospitals with gender clinics have a profit motive in offering medicalized interventions in minors,” who enter the system “with healthy bodies, but wounded minds.”

Hasson said the harm experienced “at the hands of gender docs” makes them “become medical consumers for life, dependent on successive, expensive medical interventions in their pursuit of something they can never have: the body of the opposite sex.”

She called for “severe financial penalties” against medical providers and clinics that engage in “these horrendous practices” in order to end them.

Rather than puberty blockers and surgical procedures, Hasson pointed to what she said “has always worked” in addressing gender confusion for children: seeking individual and family therapy, developing deeper relationships with family and friends, cultivating healthy interests and skills, and limiting harmful influences, particularly from social media.

“The decision by the National Health Service in England is a very welcome sign,” Deacon Lappert said. “And it joins a large chorus of voices that are basically crying out to stop doing this to children.”

What is a monastery? How do monasteries work? St. Benedict (A.D. 480-547), who is considered the founder of Western monasticism, offered this counsel as an essential rule for his monks: “Stay in your cell and it will teach all you need to know.” Properly understood, this is a rich metaphor, not a literal counsel. When he is telling a monk to stay in his cell and let it teach him what he needs to know, he is not referring to a literal monk’s cell in a monastery. He is referring to the state of life in which a monk or anyone else finds himself or herself. 

Sometimes this has been expressed in Christian spirituality as being faithful to your duties of state. The idea here being that if you are faithful in love and in good heart to the situation in life in which you find yourself, life itself will bring you to maturity and virtue.

For example, a mother who gives herself over in selflessness and fidelity to raising her children will be brought to maturity and altruism through that process. Her home will be her monk’s cell and she will be metaphorically the abbess of the monastery (with some very young monks) and staying inside that monastery, her home, will teach her all she needs to know. She will be raising children, but they will also be raising her. Motherhood will teach her what she needs to know and will turn her into a wise elder, a biblical and archetypal Sophia.

The process of aging is a natural monastery. If we live long enough, eventually the aging process turns everyone into a monk. Monks take four vows: poverty, chastity, obedience, and perseverance. The process of aging which moves us (seemingly without mercy) toward marginalization, dependence on others, and into a living situation from which there will be no escape, in a manner of speaking, imposes those four vows on us.

But, as St. Benedict counsels, this can teach us all we need to know, and has a unique power to mature us in a very deep way. Monks have secrets worth knowing. So does the aging process.

This can be particularly instructive vis-à-vis how we can make our final days and our death a more radical gift to others. In the first centuries of Christianity, martyrdom was seen as the ideal way for a Christian to end his or her days here on earth. It was seen as a radical way of imitating Christ and giving your death away as a gift.

Of course, this had to be rethought after Christianity became the state religion and emperors no longer martyred Christians. What followed then were various attempts at doing this, metaphorically martyrdom. One fairly popular way of doing it was that, after raising their children and reaching retirement, a couple would leave each other, and each would go off to a separate monastery and live out the rest of his or her life as a monk or a nun.

Classical Christian mystics speak about how in the last phase of our lives we should enter something they call the dark night of the spirit, namely, that we proactively make a radical decision grounded in faith to move into a situation in life where we can no longer take care of ourselves but must trust, in raw faith, that God will provide for us. This parallels Hindu spirituality which suggests that in the last, fully mature stage of life we should become a sannyasin, a holy old beggar.

I suspect that most of us will never proactively cut off all our former securities and, on purpose, place ourselves in a situation within which we are helpless to provide for and take care of ourselves. But this is where nature steps in. The aging process will do it for us. It will turn us into a sannyasin and put us into the dark night of the spirit.

How? As we age and our health declines and we find ourselves more marginalized in terms of having a vital place within society, we will progressively lose our capacity to take care of ourselves. Eventually, if we live long enough, for many of us it will mean moving into an assisted facility, which is in effect a natural monastery.

This metaphor is also apropos for what it means to (by conscription) enter the dark night of the spirit and what it means to be a holy old beggar, a sannyasin. In essence it means this: When someone is in an assisted living facility, irrespective of whether he or she is a millionaire or a pauper, the rules are the same for everyone. Since you can no longer take care of yourself (and indeed you don’t have to) you live a monastic life of obedience and dependence.

In assisted living, you live by the monastic bell and you die as a holy old beggar.

The following homily was delivered by Bishop Irenei of London and Western Europe on the Sunday of the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, being the Sunday of Forgiveness, 4 / 17 March 2024, in the Cathedral of the Nativity of the Mother of God and the Holy Royal Martyrs in London, England.

    

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit:

What does it mean to forgive? Is it an exoneration? Is it acceptance of a wrong? Is it dismissal of the pain or hurt caused by a wrong that has been done?

These are common understandings, but they are misconceptions. They are ideas that often prevent people from being willing to forgive, since they seem either impossible, or even undesirable when we witness the true extent of evil sometimes done in this world, and sometimes to us. Yet these are things that true What to Do If You Can’t Forgive Someone Who Has Offended YouForgiveness Sunday has come and gone, but the need to continue forgiving our offenders remains. How can we do this when we are greatly offended, when we mentally understand the need for forgiveness but our heart resists it in every way possible?

“>forgiveness should not, and cannot, be.

To forgive is not to exonerate one who has committed wrong: to say he bears no responsibility, or that he is exempted from the reality his wrong has created. This legalistic reading might be how the term is used in society, but it is not so in the spiritual life. When the Saviour forgave His executors from the wood of the precious Cross, it was not an exoneration of their act. It was not a statement that somehow the wrong they were doing was not real, or was not truly wrong.

To forgive is, likewise, not to embrace a wrong, as if to state that it is thereafter deemed ‘acceptable’ that a wrong was committed. When the Saviour forgave Judas the betrayer, which surely He freely and wholly did, this was not to accept as right the betrayal. Judas should not have betrayed his Lord; man should not have betrayed his God — and the forgiveness he meets in Christ does not change this. The wrong is still a wrong, and it being forgiven does not mean it is accepted or acceptable, and more than it means it is dismissed as exonerated.

Nor is forgiveness to dismiss the pain that comes from wrongdoing. When the Mother of God forgave those who had killed her Son, the Creator of the universe, which she surely and wholly did, she did not, in this act, pretend that she no longer felt the grief occasioned by their act. Her forgiveness did not eradicate her tears.

Forgiveness, real forgiveness, is the liberation of the human heart. It is an act that we undertake in the face of wrong, but it is not chiefly an act for the wrongdoer, but for the one who has been wronged. When we forgive, something happens within us; and if we can find the strength to step away from worldly understandings, then we will see it as a necessary step in attaining the freedom to grow in Christ and in His holiness.

To forgive is to cast away the chains that another’s words or actions have fastened around our heart. It is to recognise that to continue to live in a manner defined by their actions, and our responses to them, is to be enslaved. And we seek not to be enslaved, but to be set free.

To forgive is to seek what is good, above what is evil. It is to see in the other — even the one who wrongs us, or goes so far as genuinely to hate us — that which his wrongdoing seeks to hide from us: the beauty of a creature struggling to be free from sin, so often failing in this task, yet worth more than simply being considered the sum of his faults and transgressions. For we seek not to destroy our brother, but to save him.

To forgive is not to dismiss the flaws we behold in another; but it is to begin to see them in light of the flaws and sin we see also in ourselves. Hatred of another’s wrongs is harder to maintain when we are honest about our own; and condemnation is harder to justify, when we realise that we are ourselves in need of Have Mercy on Me, O God, Have Mercy On Me!Yes, my brethren, this prayer comes to an end at the universal Dread Judgment of God, not before: It will stop when the fate of every one of us will be decided forever, before the face of the whole universe.

“>mercy. Can we withhold mercy to another, whose acts clearly demonstrates that he needs it, and then expect to receive it ourselves?

To forgive, my brothers and sisters, is to be honest: about ourselves, about each other, and above all about God and how He sees each one of us. It is therefore a commandment, not a suggestion: one cannot live in Truth without being truthful, and one cannot be honest and truthful before God without forgiving our neighbour — the neighbour who seeks our forgiveness, as well as the one who does not. The one who loves us in return, but also the one who hates us. We can do as Christ does, and as He commands; or we can walk away from Him altogether. There is no other path.

Today, therefore, let us each be honest Christians, and so start anew to taste the presence of real love by seeking each other’s forgiveness, and granting it as our Lord commands. Amen!

St. Nicholas of Flue was born in 1417 near the Lake of Lucerne in Switzerland. He was married at age 30, and had 10 children. He was a devoted husband and father, and also donated his talents and time to his community, and was an excellent moral example.

In his private life, Nicholas cultivated a strong relationship with God. He had a strict regime of fasting, and spent a great deal of time in contemplative prayer.

When he was 50 years old, Nicholas felt called to live as a hermit. His wife and children approved, so he left home to live in a hermitage a few miles away. While he was there, he gained a reputation for personal holiness. Many people sought him out to request his prayers and his advice.

For 13 years, Nicholas lived as a hermit. But in 1481, a dispute arose between the delegates of the Swiss confederates at Stans, which could have led to a civil war. Nicholas was called to settle the dispute, so he drafted several proposals until an agreement was made.

St. Nicholas then returned to his hermitage, and died six years later on March 21, 1487, surrounded by his wife and children.