This year we have heard much talk on women’s rights and women’s healthcare.
Unfortunately the natural and divine rights of women never form part of the discussion.
When God created woman using whatever method served the ultimate good of women, He instilled into natural law His divine plan for women. Believers and non-believers who are properly educated know of the existence of Natural Law. Human logic cannot deny the existence of Natural Law. Nothing that follows a fixed process is random. It submits to a series of laws that allow the process to repeat itself. These fixed processes are laws that exist independent of human will.
The first and most significant process is conception. Without conception, a species becomes extinct. The conception of a human being secures the continuity of humanity. The child that is conceived has a purpose, to secure the future of the human race. To fulfill his or her mission, the child must emerge from the womb into the greater world of man. Therefore he follows the logic.
A human being in the womb has a mission and a place in society. To fulfill that mission and fill in the place that only she can fill, because of her singularity, she must emerge from her mother’s womb. Therefore, we can logically conclude that a human being has the right to be born.
The right to be born is inseparable from a woman’s right to bear children. But a right that is a burden is not much of a right, unless we understand pregnancy as a burden. If pregnancy were a natural burden, how can it also be nature’s way of securing the continuity of the human race? Can we honestly say that the preservation of humanity is a burden imposed on the female of the human race? Such a conclusion is absurd to the extreme. The conception and birth of a child, under any circumstance and with whatever abilities or disabilities, is not a burden placed or imposed on women.
Conception and pregnancy is one right and at the same time a duty belonging to mother and child. Women who conceive have a right to carry a child to term. They also have a duty to protect the child’s right to be born. A child comes into the world to fulfill a mission, to occupy a place in society that no one else can occupy, and to secure the generativity of the human race.
Therefore, women have a natural right to be mothers. To shame them or frighten them to avoid motherhood is a heinous violation of a natural law that is given only to women. It is a covert form of mind control.
The right to motherhood must be protected by other rights: healthcare, education, safety, protection from abuse and exploitation, equal pay for equal work, and the right to extend herself to family, friends, public service, and to participate as an equal partner with men in business and governance.
For the sake of clarity, equal does not mean the same. A ten-year-old child has the same rights as her mother, but they are also very different. The ten-year-old only gets to exercise these rights when she has the physical, intellectual, and emotional ability to do so.
So too it is between men and women.. Each has the right to those life domains in the measure that he or she is able to do so. The measure of a woman’s ability to exercise other rights is never determined by her male counterpart. The measure to which a woman exercises her rights is dependent on her natural abilities. Neither women nor men can interfere with or deprive one of abilities endowed by nature and by nature’s Creator.
Christmas week was a very active one for us. On December 23rd, Brother Jay and Brother Bernardo flew into Virginia to spend Christmas with Katherine Marie Therese, Brother Jay’s brand new granddaughter. It was her first Christmas. But there was much more to it. We’ll get to that shortly.
Earlier that day, Daniel’s mother and Brother Jay engaged in a conversation about a liquor that the Carthusian hermits have been making for hundreds of years. The more they talked about it, the more enthusiastic they became about finding it. Thank God for Google. The first problem was identifying the name of the liquor. Brother Jay is a “master googler”. We found the name of the liquor, Chartreux, named after the Charterhouse where the hermits have lived for about 1,000 years.
gh medicine? Originally, the Carthusian hermits made this liquor for medicinal purposes. It’s no surprise that it smells like cough medicine without the artificial cherry flavor. Let’s put it this way. The stuff smells and tastes so awful that an ounce is about all you can drink in one evening. I don’t mean one sitting. I mean a full evening. The positive here is that you’re literally indulging in Catholic spirits that have been around for about 800 years. If you’re looking to make contact with your Catholic roots and traditions, here is a drink that you can use as an aperitif or as a cure for any disease imaginable.
by baby Katherine’s play mat, chair and some other contraptions. If you’re not careful, you can trip on a piece of infant equipment and find yourself sitting in an infant carrier.
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Franciscans of Life 
