Burn of the Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Well done Don. God Bless you.
Dan, good comment. But the critical point is not when the unborn “thinks,” (however thinking might be defined), but when does self-awareness arise, i.e. that the unborn or born is conscious of itself. An interesting study was done by Phillipe Rochat (Five Levels of Self-Awareness as they Unfold in Early Life) that showed self-awareness was likely to be present in the unborn.
It has been established that the unborn dream. Since our dreams recall images we have experienced in our waking life, and since a unborn child has experienced limited sensory input, I wonder of what their dreams consist.
@ Tom Byrne.
Weeks of history in the womb, but millenniums of memories as a created soul. The creation of soul and staging arena prior to assignment infused at conception. (?) Who knows? Not I.
But it is fun to ponder.
Our parish is blessed with new life.
We have infants and toddlers crawling and yelping all over the place. I am lost in their innocence and their gaze into my soul. In trying not to cause burdens upon mom at Mass, I will not engaged in non-verbal communication with the one year old staring at me on their mother’s shoulder, but I can’t help but think of the great mystery of their being. Where they were just 21 short months before.
A whimsical thought is that they were enjoying God’s company for thousands of years prior to their assignments. If so, they would have much to dream about.
Philip Nachazel, you’re a good man and a good Catholic, but the preexistence of souls–a’ la Origen et al.–is a condemned error. (Constantinople II, I believe it was, anathematized the notion of the preexistence of souls.) They are created at the moment of infusion: they are the “form” of the body’s “matter.”
Thank you Fr. J.
Now I need not wonder any longer.
🙂
Thank you for the teaching Father.
Fr. J.
There is no past and no future with God as God is omnipresent here and now and all human rational souls are present to God and infused at conception of the human body.
Therefore the heresy is more about the infinite Supreme Sovereign Being than about human souls.
All unborn begotten souls worship God by their very existence. The unborn children have implicit baptism of desire since Jesus Christ is baptized in the River Jordan.
Morally and legally innocent the newly begotten human beings are the standard of Justice for the nation; to answer the question asked at Roe: What are the unborn good for?
The sovereign personhood endowed with the rational human soul realizes “the Creator” since concupiscence has not darkened much of his being.
Man cannot measure the unborn person’s thoughts about Gd or his silent prayers, yet the child in the womb has self-awareness each to his own degree and that cannot be denied to him in freedom of religion as Faith is instilled by God and religion is man’s response to the gift of Faith from God
Man’s instruments cannot measure a sovereign, innocent person’s love for God.
The Immaculate Conception is the standard for all unborn. “My soul doth magnify the Lord…” before all ages.
Why do we let these moral midgets bully mankind into believing that man proceeds without a rational, human soul, the form of the human body?
Hitler adopted Margaret Sanger’s eugenics for the final solution.
Hitler put a hole in his head. Was it to let the truth in or the evil out?
I remember nurses baptizing miscarried children, the especially beloved of God.