22 Comments
Sep 3, 2021Liked by JD Flynn, Ed. Condon

Just want to say thank you for pulling the extra takes from the papal interview, neither of which I saw much reporting in elsewhere. Subscribing to The Pillar is worth at least that one cupcake, if not a baker's dozen of them.

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Sep 3, 2021Liked by JD Flynn

Hello, I love your site and news letters .Thank you for all you do. I know for the subscription. There is 5 per month or 2 different yearly options. I was wondering if there was a way to raise the monthly amount I would like to give? The monthly option is easier to commit to.

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Ed Condon's insights on the Texas abortion law are precise and correct. The law is exclusionary, it is not pro-life. Bravo Mr. Condon!

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Sep 3, 2021Liked by JD Flynn

Better than a cupcake! 🧁 The value of the piece (and the others I have received recently for free) led me to subscribe today. Best wishes, your fellow brother in Christ.

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Excellent work as always, and I particularly appreciate Ed's thoughts on the Texas case. We hear so much about Biden and other pro-abortion Catholic politicians, but why so little about former Justice Kennedy and other Catholic judges who have written significant court decisions (in Kennedy's case, like PP v PA and Obergefell) that are on grave matters contrary to the Catholic faith?

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When you write about the sad choice of abortion, it is worth mentioning that in many cases, women don’t necessarily choose abortion; it may be the only choice they think they have. Many more conservative types who decry abortion also decry what they consider “welfare programs” (also known as socialism). My state has chosen three times not to extend Medicaid coverage, for instance, even when a Republican governor got an approved modified plan. Our current governor cut off extended unemployment because people “were sitting on the couch” instead of working. When one talks of ending abortion in the abstract, it’s necessary to picture a 15-year-old girl, impregnated by her father, and kicked out of the house. She has no skills, no education and nowhere to live. Or think of a poor family, barely getting by (with no health insurance and no rural hospital because they’ve all closed due to no funds) and no day care, or maybe no school because covid is raging through a largely unvaccinated (Republican) state. Or think of a young woman, who did not get pregnant by herself, where the father has walked away and left her to figure out what to do next. Men can walk away; women can’t. In the Catholic schools, women will be fired; men who impregnate their girlfriends won’t. Why? Because the woman displays the pregnancy.

With respect to the TX law, I had two tragic miscarriages years ago. It is often necessary to have a D&C after an incomplete miscarriage. A D&C is the same procedure as an abortion. So The hospital and doctor who performed the procedures, and even my husband who drove me to the hospital, could be chased down and sued by vigilantes. How wouldI, in tears, prove it was a miscarriage, not an abortion?

Please consider, Ed and JD, as men you will never have to face this life-altering, tragic decision.

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Sep 4, 2021Liked by Ed. Condon

“We have created, in reality, two parallel societies: one for believers in religion, nature, biology (and women’s rights), and the dignity of all human life, and another for those who believe in cutting edge psychology, perpetual revisionism, and the absolute primacy of the will.”

That’s a sentence that’s not leaving my mind anytime soon.

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I'm glad you touched on the Bishop Sycamore scandal this week on the podcast. I've been reading about it a lot this week. It's equally fascinating and sad insofar as some of the conditions the coaches forced the players into. But I have a theory about why the school is named Bishop Sycamore. I think they were trying to fool people into thinking it was a Catholic school since there are a lot of Catholic high schools named after bishops. And there are also a lot of Catholic schools that are very good at football. So I wonder if they were hoping that potential opponents and/or ESPN would see "Bishop Sycamore", think it's probably a Catholic school, think therefore that they're probably good at football, and thus get schools to schedule them who didn't bother doing any more research (and apparently there were a lot of people not doing research on them.)

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I was excited to see you had written an explainer on the church's teaching concerning abortion and related policy; both my Catholic and non-Catholic family members do not seem to know or understand what the Church says about policy or why she says it, and i was eager to send them an article that eloquently articulated the matter. However, after reading it, i don't think the explainer would be of much value to them. I haven't yet met someone who explicitly disagrees with the principle of respecting and protecting human life, even in regards to the issue of abortion. I have, however, met many who claim that a child is not truly alive until it is born (or until X milestone of development etc.), and that to say life begins at conception is a strictly religious claim. By these or similar arguments, my family would dismiss your implicit premise (that a zygote/fetus/embryo is a living human person from conception) and with it the rest of your article.

For instance, my sister, holding a BS and MS in microbiology with a focus in neuroscience and currently working in the medical field, claims life begins at a certain point of nervous system development. She often supports this claim with the phenomenon of "brain dead" individuals, and the common consideration that they are in fact dead even if machines can keep their body functioning (i.e. it is not an act of murder to 'unplug' one such individual and let them die). Most of our talks end up hinging upon the existence of an immortal human soul, which she disputes. Not only does she believe that the existence of an immortal human soul is a strictly religious claim (so that it has no place in the policy of a nation upholding freedom of religious belief), but she does not understand that the immortal human soul is the source of the dignity of the human person, and the foundation for the principle of respecting human life that guides so much of law.

How can people dispute something so evident and even tangible as the life of a child in the womb? I think the obviousness of life beginning at conception is largely lost on my generation because many millennials and gen z-ers have rarely or never encountered a pregnant woman, seen an unborn child move in his mother's stomach, felt an unborn child kick, or talked with a mother about her experience of pregnancy. I know that was the case with me until my conversion brought me into closer proximity with younger, vibrant families and new life.

Even if written primarily for an audience of Catholics who fully accept and believe the Church's teachings, I think an ideal explainer on abortion would give us the fundamental principles to understand and refute the culture's reasoning so that we can engage it more successfully and rest more secure in our beliefs. In my opinion, this would mean walking through and explaining how we are certain that human life begins at conception—that the immortal human soul is undeniably and even apparently present from the beginning—and how the immortal soul is ultimately the foundation for any principle of respect for human life. I know I would specifically appreciate both of your insights on the latter of these claims.

I'm commenting this as food for thought if you decide to go deeper with or revisit this issue later. Thank you for all the work and thought you put into your articles.

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