1967 November

A young man, nineteen years old, trudges up a hill in Berkeley, California. Asked by his parents to leave his New York home, he hitchhiked across the country with a friend. He has moved from crash pad to crash pad, and slept in backyards and in the grassy hills behind the University. He has been taken in by an Episcopal priest and his wife, and gets room and board in exchange for house-cleaning and baby-sitting.

His lips move as he climbs, and in his hand is a cheap rosary. Though intrigued and attracted by the mysticism of the East, he will not turn his back on the Lord. This rosary is his first contact with the depth of Christian prayer. It doesn't mean that much to him; Mary means next to nothing; the Salve strikes him as cloyingly excessive, but he prays doggedly.

1974 July

The same man, on vacation from his second year in an Episcopal seminary, walks along a country road in Long Island. He has lost that first Rosary, but he prays, keeping track with his fingers. Not especially concerned with the order of the mysteries he suddenly realizes this:

Mary said, "Yes." Because she said, "Yes," Love himself came into her. Love grew in her in a place even deeper than the heart. And at the proper time she brought Love into the world.

"That's what I want! That's why I want to be a priest!" he exclaims, though not aloud. "I want to say 'Yes,' to Love; I want Love to grow in me; I want to bring Love into the world." Now, suddenly, Mary is his Hero, his pattern, after Christ.

1975 February

A child is dying. He was born with almost no brain, and now his breathing doesn't work. He is a month old, the first child of a lovely young couple. His dying is dreadful. He stops breathing and there is silence. He turns pale, then blue, as the chaplain and the couple hold their own breath. Suddenly he gasps, and everyone jumps at the sound. He takes a deep breath. And the cycle repeats. There's no telling how long this will go on.

The chaplain and the couple hit it off - friendship at first sight. With silence, gallows humor, prayer, they fend off the horror and the sorrow, dipping their toe in the pain which is coming to them. The chaplain gives them his phone number and goes home to bed.

After midnight the chaplain wakes in tears, not knowing why. As has become his custom he reaches for his rosary, hoping to fall quickly back to sleep. But as he prays, instead of dropping off to sleep he becomes more awake, and preternaturally calm.

The instant he finishes the Rosary, the phone rings. The baby has died and the parents would like to see him.

He drives into Boston, meets the couple. They weep and pray together and walk around the outside of the hospital in the unusually temperate dawn. It is perhaps the most sorrowful and yet, somehow, the most resolved of all the pastoral encounters the man has in his 15 months as a chaplain.

1981 July

One night at compline in a Trappist foundation in Missouri, the man, now an Episcopal priest, but searching and searching hard, hears the Salve Regina sung by the monks. He hears the beauty. When his one and only child is born he makes sure to sing it to her every night.

2001 September

The Television says that we are to stay off the phone. Our parish has no full-time priest. The no longer young man, now a Catholic layman, calls the TV station to ask them to announce that there will be a Rosary prayed that evening at the parish. Maybe two dozen people show up, and we pray a solemn Rosary together praying for our enemies, the bereft, and our country. This is the beginning of a weekly Rosary which continues to this day in that Parish.

Of course, I am the man. And all these years later I can say, I must say that somehow Mary saved my life and brought me closer to my Lord. I am still foolish, and not a very good man, as men go. But I know I am loved and I know I am devoted to God, to our Lord, who commended his mother to me through the gift of a Rosary, and to our Lady, who commends me to Him through the gift of her love. I simply cannot write discursively about this. It is too close to my heart.

I know of nothing, save the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, which a man can touch with his hands, that has more power; and that power is love.


Harold Koenig is a former Episcopalian minister and a convert to Catholicism. His many talents include sheep ranching and weaving. He was received into the Dominican Third Order in January 2008.

My Unborn Child,

I hope that this note finds you well. I realize that you can't see yet, let alone read, so I will read this note aloud to you.

Your mother and I are so excited to meet you. We marvel daily about how miraculous it is that you are constantly growing inside your mom's womb, even while she is going about her day: walking to work, working, walking home, eating, sleeping. You have blessed us with your presence even before we have met you and before we can hear your heartbeat through her stomach. We are so excited to meet you in a way that is difficult to fathom, but undeniable.

We look forward very much to feeling you kick inside her womb, something neither of us have felt before.

We are so excited, in fact, that we have a joke where we lightly poke your mom in the stomach and pretend you respond by flailing and objecting to being pushed around.

God truly has blessed us by creating you and endowing you with the gift of life at the very moment of your conception. Even then, God knew the person that you would become, growing in the light of his grace.

As the Psalmist says,

For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.
(ESV Ps 139:13-16)

We promise to love you always, to cherish the gift of your life, to help you learn to love God and walk in His ways. I will cradle you against my chest when I pray the liturgy every morning and evening, comforting and entertaining you with the rhythmic bowing and praise of God for all of His wonderful blessings and for the immeasurable gift of His Son in atonement for our sins.

When you are born, we will rejoice ecstatically to finally meet you, look upon you, hug you, and kiss your brow. We will be astounded at your presence, if only because we knew that there was a time when you were not and that now, with your cries and strong grip of our fingers in your small hands, you have proven that you very much exist.

May God continue to bless you each day of your life, both now and after you are born.

Love,
Your Father


Kevin Mitchell is a PhD student in Church History at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He was received into the Dominican Third Order in January 2008.

It all seems simple enough. You go to your physician, or take your child for a well child visit, and at the end you are recommended to have certain immunizations to prevent disease. Usually your biggest concern is whether the vaccination is safe and necessary (topics which will not be covered in this article). Have you ever wondered from where the vaccine is derived and whether it is morally permissible to use it?

A little known fact about vaccines, and one about which I was not aware at all until about eight years ago, is that some of them are derived from cell lines taken from aborted fetuses. To explain in simple terms, cells were taken at the time of abortion from the fetuses and placed into culture to grow multiples of the same cell. Once such a "line" is developed, it can be cultivated to grow over many years.

Two of the more well-known cell lines are WI-38 and MRC-5. WI-38 cells were obtained from an abortion performed in 1962 and MRC-5 cells from one in 1966. These cells were grown in culture and used to develop vaccines against certain viruses. The resulting situation is that many vaccines given today are linked to these abortions morally.

Which vaccines are involved and are they linked to cooperation with abortion to such a degree that Catholics and others who are pro-life are obligated to refuse them?

The vaccines that are derived from fetal tissue are chicken pox, rubella (found in MMR shots), Hepatitis A, certain polio vaccines, rabies, and shingles. For most of these, there is no alternative available in the US.

Historically, this has been a contentious issue among Catholic pro-life physicians and patients. It cannot be argued that everyone would prefer a vaccine without such taint. However, what are the responsibilities of the physicians and patients for preventing disease in them and/or their children? Is the degree of cooperation in receiving a vaccine related to an abortion that occurred over 40 years ago enough to justify putting your or your child's health at risk now?

Solid Catholic moral theologians have come down on both sides of this issue. People of good morals have chosen both to use the vaccines and to conscientiously object to their use. Physicians have done the same.

In June 2005, the Pontifical Academy for Life examined this issue, and wrote that doctors and parents who resort to the use of these vaccines for their children carry out a form of very remote mediate material cooperation with the abortion that produced the cell line for the vaccine. This category of cooperation means that the person does not share the evil intention of the initial abortion, does not cooperate in the actual execution of the abortion, and is far removed temporally from the sinful event.

In this analysis, it is acceptable for a physician, parent, or patient to use these vaccines. It is also acceptable for a physician or family to abstain from offering or using the vaccines - as long as it can be done without risking the health of children or of the population as a whole. An example of endangering the population as a whole can be seen with rubella. This disease is highly dangerous to a fetus if acquired by a pregnant woman, and lowering the immunization rate in a population may put individuals in that population more at risk.

However, to avoid passive cooperation—not doing what one should do to protest an evil and try to remedy it - it is our responsibility to be advocates for developing new vaccines that do not share the taint of being developed from abortion cell lines. We can do this by contacting politicians, vaccine manufacturers, and using the mass media to make the public aware of this issue. If we are silent, then we are accepting the status quo.

In December 2008, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) released a document Dignitas Personae, which addresses many of the current life issues, including vaccination using abortion-derived cell lines was discussed. The CDF agreed with the Pontifical Academy for Life that the degree of cooperation is remote enough that physicians and patients can use these vaccines, but that we all have a responsibility to make our desire for non-tainted vaccines known.

How do we improve public awareness of this issue and contact vaccine manufacturers? A good place to start is Children of God for Life: www.cogforlife.org. There is an online petition and contact information you need to get started. Also, speak with your physician as well - he or she may not be aware of this issue and you can educate them about to what you have learned.

Let us work for the day when any person (including an aborted fetus) is not used for the benefit of others, but each maintains his or her dignity in the eyes of all persons - to see each other as God sees us.


Karen Poehailos is a Family Medicine Physician. She was received into the Dominican Third Order in January 2007.

Explanatory Note:

In late March "conscientious objection" of health care providers became a pressing political issue. In the course of public discourse an article came to my attention. A very accomplished professor who is also a lawyer and a physician, Dr. Julia A. Cantor, suggested that appeals to conscience are somehow selfish.

The Article: Conscientious Objection Gone Awry - Restoring Selfless Professionalism in Medicine
Published March 25, 2009
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/NEJMp0902019
The Author: Julie D. Cantor, M.D., J.D. -- Dr. Cantor is an adjunct professor at the UCLA School of Law, Los Angeles.

The title of this article should set the alarm bells a-clanging for all Christians who think about morality. The opposition of conscience and selflessness strikes at the heart of the idea of conscience and, indeed, of reason itself.

Dr. Cantor argues that physicians and other health care workers ought not to obey their conscience, at least not with impunity, in their practice of medicine. As she approaches her principle argument she criticizes various laws and DHS interpretations of them which, in her view, might make it too easy for health care workers to refuse to perform services connected to procedures they think morally wrong.

As a possible example of the problem of allowing people to follow their conscience, she suggests a surgeon who opposes transfusions, which, owing to the teachings of the Jehovah's Witnesses, is barely possible. She also imagines a doctor who won't treat diabetes because he thinks gluttony is a sin. This seems improbable at best. Of course, her principle concerns are abortion and other reproductive matters.

Her legal criticisms and accounts of actual and hypothetical problems arising from allowing people to follow their conscience lead to the most interesting aspects of her article:

Medicine needs to embrace a brand of professionalism that demands less self-interest, not more.

Please note that here Dr. Cantor presents following one's conscience as an instance of self-interest.

Patients need information, referrals, and treatment. They need all legal choices presented to them in a way that is true to the evidence, not the randomness of individual morality. [Emphasis added.]

And here she characterizes morality as random.

Federal laws may make room for the rights of conscience, but health care providers - and all those whose jobs affect patient care - should cast off the cloak of conscience when patients' needs demand it.

There is at least an irony if not a self-contradiction in the advice that anyone "should cast off the cloak of conscience." One wonders what horror might be revealed if the principle guide to right and wrong were cast off.

Some Christians will note the irony of the publication date of this article. March 25th is the Feast or Solemnity of the Annunciation. Since it is nine months before Christmas, on this day many Christians remember and celebrate the conception of Jesus - God, the Son of God - in the womb of Mary. The Annunciation is not principally a Marian feast, but rather a feast of our Lord. It is taken as a given, it is celebrated, that the "conceptus" in Mary's uterus was fully human and fully divine.

Before we go further we should clarify that any person in any kind of exchange ought to make clear the limits of what he is willing to consider, and any person seeking help is due a truthful account of the kind of advice the person providing the help is willing to give.

When I was a hospital chaplain, a patient of mine had endured considerable pain for many years because, as it turned out, her physician thought oopharectomies were wrong, and he did not tell her so. He also did not tell her what her diagnosis was, evidently because he feared that she would go elsewhere and get the surgery of which he disapproved. In failing to tell her what he knew, he committed a kind of fraud. She had contracted with him not for spiritual guidance but for information about and the treatment of a medical condition. He gave her neither. This is clearly culpable. Even if he were right that all oopharectomies were wrong, he would still not be right to lie or to conceal the truth in order to prevent the possibility of her doing what he thought she ought not to do.

Further, I would agree with Dr. Cantor that a physician who, for example, thinks some aspects of artificial insemination or embryo implantation are wrong ought to consider an area other than fertility and ought certainly to tell patients about his or her moral considerations and their consequences for treatment.

A sister lay Dominican offers this opinion:

A physician is certainly not obliged either to commit fraud or to decline to enter certain specialties in order to practice in accord with his/her moral beliefs. I am a family physician, trained at the University of Virginia for medical school and residency. In accordance with the teachings of the Catholic Church, since 1996, I have not prescribed or referred for contraception, abortion, or sterilization in my medical practice.

In designing my practice flow, I am careful to let patients know before they see me about my beliefs in these matters. It is a prominent item in my practice brochure, and when women call for gynecologic care, they are told that I will not prescribe the Pill for them. If a patient somehow escapes these messages and comes in for a gynecologic appointment, I sit down with the patient before the exam and explain this. If a patient prefers to be seen by a provider who will write the Pill for her, then the patient may simply leave, at no office charge, to set up an appointment elsewhere.

If a woman presents with a medical condition for which the birth control pill is an option for treatment, such as polycystic ovarian syndrome or endometriosis, I certainly will let the patient know that the Pill is one option for treatment, but that I believe other methods are preferable medically and explain why. If the patient still wants to use the Pill, again, she is free to find another provider of her care.

I will not provide a "referral" or give names to patients as to whom they might call for such treatment. Such a referral would constitute asking someone else to do a task I consider morally wrong, and thus commiting another wrong.
(from personal correspondence.)

On the other hand, prudential judgment alone advises that many of us are not aware of those approaches to sexual and reproductive medicine which do not violate moral law. It is a given in our culture that artificial birth control and abortion are not only normal but normative. So other practices and treatments, even those which might have significant medical advantages, are not discussed. Christians have a duty to inform themselves.

Perhaps not every physician takes an approach so judicious and open as that of this physician, but the failures of individuals, even the failures of poorly "formed" consciences, do not justify this article's mischaracterization of conscience or its errors in moral reasoning. This article is most egregiously wrong in its derogation of conscience.

The central flaw in Dr. Cantor's argument is revealed by this question: By what means is the reader to determine whether her arguments are morally sound? She advises that we cast away the "cloak of conscience." But it is conscience, rightly understood, which tells us whether or not her advice is correct.

She says that we need less self-interest. In fact, Catholic physicians with properly formed consciences already lose patients to other physicians. If Dr. Cantor's recommendations are made law (or regulation), physicians may lose not only business but their license to practice or even their freedom if they follow the leadings of their conscience. How is that self-interested?

Dr. Cantor characterizes morality as "random". Certainly in an age when little valuable moral instruction is given in high school or college, the number of persons able to form and articulate a coherent moral position may lead to a certain impression of randomness. But one could say the same of physics. Neither physics nor morality is random, though those competent or even willing to state opinions about either are randomly encountered, or so it may seem.

What Dr. Cantor's position finally comes down to is that people whose consciences forbid actions of which Dr. Cantor approves should abandon their consciences for hers! Dr. Cantor has too small and too nihilistic a concept of conscience and of morality. She thinks conscience is a refuge while morality is a randomness. But these opinions are self-contradictory. One cannot start out with the premise that "what I should do" is an arbitrary and random idea and then form an argument that one "should" do anything.

Many relativistic thinkers commit the error of beginning with the premise that there can be no absolute moral law and then trying to build an absolute moral law as a consequence of that premise. This would incline one to think, even without an appeal to revealed religion, that the premise is at least untenable and probably utterly wrong.

The obviously accomplished and learned Dr. Cantor wants to tell us what laws and regulations we should have. But she denies the very act, conscience, which guides us to the formation of moral judgments and imperatives. It's not just that she wants to lift us up by our own moral bootstraps. She starts by denying the existence or power of bootstraps. Then she tries to lift us up by her bootstraps!


Harold Koenig is a former Episcopalian minister and a convert to Catholicism. His many talents include sheep ranching and weaving. He was received into the Dominican Third Order in January 2008.

The Holy Father has declared the year from June 29, 2008 to June 29, 2009 to be the Pauline Year. The whole Church is invited to pray for St. Paul's intercession, to study his letters, and to consider his words and his life. Dominicans will eagerly accept this invitation, because Paul embodies the Pillars and ideals of the Dominican charism and call: Apostolate, Prayer, Study, and Community.

After Mass at St. Peter's Basilica on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, in the portion of his greeting given in English, the Holy Father prayed, "Through the intercession of the Apostles Peter and Paul, may all Christians bear clear witness to the truth and love that sets us free." (http://www.zenit.org/article-23061?l=english)

The call to bear witness to the liberating truth and love of God in Christ was at the heart of Dominic's life and of our lives as well. To be Christian, and especially to be Dominican, is to bear witness.

Apostolate is more than merely reporting. To be an apostle is to represent our Lord in such a way that He Himself is in some respect bound by what we do. This is perhaps not so clear in its application to the acts of the laity, but it seems sure that the Word of God is not heard where it is not spoken and is heard loud and clear when the testimony of loving and obedient lives is united to evangelization, teaching, and personal spiritual interactions with those with whom we live and work in our everyday lives.

In his homily at the inauguration of the Pauline year (http://www.zenit.org/article-23067?l=english), the Holy Father pointed out how at the moment of Saint Paul's call, our Lord affirmed clearly the identity of the Risen Christ with His Church, with us:

[Paul] answered: "Who are you, Lord?" And he received the reply: "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting." By persecuting the Church, Paul was persecuting Jesus himself. "You are persecuting me."

Our call to our apostolate is a call to recognize and to realize that identity. And perhaps the most challenging aspect of the realization is in our openness to suffering:

In a world in which lying is powerful, truth is paid for with suffering. He who wishes to avoid suffering, to keep it far from himself, will have pushed away life itself and its grandeur; he cannot be a servant of truth and thus a servant of faith.

Prayer, through which we are given the courage to face suffering and the endurance to bear it in love, is critical to the apostolate of any individual. In prayer we take our problems, joys, failures, and successes to God. Through prayer God gives us the inclination and strength of will to be His servants. In prayer God gives us not only knowledge of Him, but His very self.

In his homily Pope Benedict XVI reminded us of how St. Paul revealed in Galatians 2:20:

. . . what is the most profound source of his life: "I live in the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me." All that Paul does starts from this center.

Our center is in Jesus also. In prayer He reaches out to us, and we to Him.

Study is, of course, necessary for an appreciation of St. Paul. Pope Benedict XVI not only is a magnificent example of studiousness, but also reminds us of St. Paul's affirmation of studious consideration and thought:

"Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things." (Philippians 4:8)
(Quoted in an address given by His Holiness on July 2, 2008, http://www.zenit.org/article-23091?l=english)

In this Pauline Year, one could do far worse than to study prayerfully the great letters of Paul and to appreciate not only his ideas, but his zealous and selfless persistence in his apostolate. Certainly we have here an instance, a life, of the fruits of contemplation being handed to all of us.

Community, understood in one important way, is the embrace of living and working with those members of the Dominican family closest to us in time and space. The brother whom we have seen (cf. I John 4:20) teaches us the Love which God shares with us, and St. Paul's urgings to "maintain the unity of Spirit in the bond of peace" (Ephesians 4:3), his pleading that we forbear one another and forgive one another as the Lord has forgiven us (cf. Colossians 3: 13) and his evident affection for the Philippians, whom he calls "my joy and crown" (Philippians 4:1) show clearly what community means in everyday practical terms.

But St. Paul also shows us the mysterious plan of God to make one community of those who are far off and those who are near, a community overcoming divisions of ethnicity or sex or social status. And that community finds itself in the Body of which Christ is the head. Into that Body we are grafted by Baptism (I Corinthians 12:13), and our incorporation is realized and deepened in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar:

So Christ becomes one spirit with his own, one subject in the new world of the resurrection. In all this, the Eucharistic mystery is visualized, in which Christ constantly gives his Body and makes of us one Body: "Is not the bread we break communion with the body of Christ? Because, though being many, we are only one bread and one body, as we all share in one bread."
(I Corinthians 10:16-17, quoted in His Holiness’s homily at the inauguration of the Pauline Year.)

So the Dominican Pillar of Community which has its day to day manifestation in our interactions with one another must also be understood to present to our lives the profound community into which our loving Lord has graciously called us and all His Church.

The Holy Father's declaration of the Pauline Year is a gift to the whole Church and in a special way to us Dominicans who are invited to find our way of life exemplified, informed, and strengthened by the life, words, and intercession of the great Apostle.


Harold Koenig is a former Episcopalian minister and a convert to Catholicism. His many talents include sheep ranching and weaving. He was received into the Dominican Third Order in January 2008.