The Purging Of Tradition And Moral Order

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – Folks, that’s a reflection of all the things we talk about.  Isn’t it just another of the latest examples of our purge of tradition and our purge of true moral order and code?  We don’t have a code.  You make it up as you go along.  If it’s inconvenient or it might cost you a couple of shekels, you just bail.  You just abandon it for pure selfish reasons.  It’s tragic and sad. Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

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Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

AG:  Mike, what did you think about the story regarding the Catholic Health Initiative’s not recognizing a fetus as legally a person until it is born?

Mike:  You’re talking about the Colorado case?

AG:  Right.

Mike:  Just to set this up, there’s a gentleman and his wife.  She is eight months pregnant with twin boys.  She goes to St. Thomas, a hospital in Colorado.  They treat her.  She’s going into premature labor.  She ultimately has a coronary and dies.  As she dies, the twin boys she’s carrying also die.  The father decides that he is going to file a lawsuit.  It was one of those CNN stories we get from time to time that doesn’t have a print button.  I’m going to read it off the teleprompter.  The twin boys do not survive.  The wife dies.  This is in Canon City, Colorado; Stodghill is his last name.  It was St. Thomas More Hospital in Canon City, Colorado.  She was admitted vomiting and short of breath and died at age 31, her unborn boys perishing with her.  That was New Year’s Day 2006.

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Stodghill, left behind to raise their then-2-year-old daughter alone, sued the hospital and its owner, Catholic Health Initiatives, for the wrongful deaths of all three. After two years of litigation, defense attorneys for the hospital and doctors entered an argument that shocked the widower.

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Mike:  This is not the church here making this.  This is the, as I understand this, hospital corporation that was running the hospital on behalf of the church.  There is somewhat of a distinction to be made.  It doesn’t make it any less offensive.  The lawyers representing the Catholic hospital then shocked the world and said: No, we can’t be held for wrongful death.  Those boys weren’t alive, they were fetuses.  They weren’t boys, in other words.  Of course, the husband continues his lawsuit to the point that the alleged Catholic charity — there are so many things that happen in the name of Catholicism today, folks, that are just so repulsive.  This is another one that probably has no connection to the church other than being one of these things the church has to do in our overly-bureaucratic and legalistic world in order to run a hospital.  They have to hire people like this and employ them to manage their affairs.  So Stodghill continues the lawsuit even after he loses.

[reading]

The hospital and doctors then sued him for over $118,000 legal fees and attempted to garnish his wages. The defendants offered to forget the fees if Stodghill dropped his appeal. He refused and filed for bankruptcy to avoid having to pay the claim, which he says he can’t afford as he struggles to raise his now-9-year-old daughter, Libby. Stodghill has petitioned the Colorado Supreme Court to hear his case, and he’d like to hear from the Catholic Church. Representatives of the Catholic bishops of Colorado declined to comment. [Mike: You have Catholic Health Initiatives, they are the ones pursuing the legal case against the gentleman.] They would not speak to CNN on camera, but said in a statement, “In this case…as Catholic organizations, (we) are in union with the moral teachings of the Church.” [Mike: Explain that one to me.” Stodghill wears a tattoo on his chest with his unborn sons’ footprints, their names and the words “our sons.” He wants the church and his state to see them the same way.

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Mike:  What the man is basically doing is pursuing the lawsuit.  In order to get any kind of a judgment against the hospital, he then has to have a court — this is in Colorado — or some sort of a legal finding that they were not “mere” fetuses, that those were his children and it was a wrongful death that occurred.  Of course, the Catholic charity’s defense is that it’s not a wrongful death because they weren’t children, they were fetuses.  This is just totally counter — I don’t know how that organization can say they’re in harmony with Catholic teachings, because Catholic teaching says life begins at conception.  Somebody has a screw loose here.

AG:  It says the representatives of the Catholic bishops wouldn’t comment on the litigation but they did say that they’re going to review Catholic Health Initiatives’ practices “to ensure the fidelity and faithful witness to the teachings of the Catholic Church.”  To put it crassly, it would seem you want to say it one way, in terms of a fetus being a child and a human life, but then lawsuit happens.  Two children, two fetuses perish.  We’re not going to view it that way due to the costs that might be incurred?

Mike:  We don’t want a financial mess.  We’re all for this pro-life thing, but if it costs us any money, screw that, we’re out.  That’s convenient.

AG:  It sounds bad.

Mike:  It makes people that are not Catholic look at the Catholic Church and go: Oh, so that’s how you play?  Yeah, that’s what I heard about you guys.  You know what that is, Andrew?  That’s how you get a “THAT’S why I’m not a Catholic,” they’ll proudly proclaim.

AG:  It was one of the top headlines on CNN last night when I found it.  Just the idea of the headline saying, “Lawyers for Catholic hospital argue that a fetus is not a person,” when you look at that, knowing the importance that the Catholic Church in particular pays towards the unborn, to have that headline scream out there is tough.  You want to have it one way, but if there’s a financial burden, we’re going to pass the buck and say it’s not a child or a person.

Mike:  You have other instances of this.  For example, there’s this group of alleged nuns that runs around and claims they are abortion care providers.  I can’t remember what their alleged order’s name is.  There is a distinction to be made.  Anyone can run around out there and claim because they go to the Novus Ordo mass, the New Order mass, and they’ve joined a parish somewhere.  The Church doesn’t have any qualifications, or not many anymore, for actually being a Catholic.  They have bailed on their traditions in many instances and bailed on the canon and sacraments and traditional extraordinary high or low mass and all the other parts of the tradition in order to placate the Protestants out there.  They’re making the Church more modern or what have you.

This is the end result of this.  You don’t have any doctrine.  If you don’t say you’re for this because this is a Church teaching, which means, if you translate it correctly, not a teaching of the Church.  It is imparted or implied that it is a teaching handed down from the very mouth of Jesus Christ.  Properly read and properly understood, that’s what anything that passes as Catholic doctrine ought to mean and ought to say.  Of course, that’s been controversial ever since Henry VIII.  That’s been controversial since the first ruminations of the so-called Reformation.  Here we are here today with ample evidence of that and there’s just one little news story here.  You would think, to be consistent, that someone in an official capacity would have to denounce this and say: No, that is not in keeping with the Church’s teachings.  I don’t know what teaching the Catholic Health Initiative is referring to, but it’s not one of ours.  That’s just sad.

Folks, that’s a reflection of all the things we talk about.  Isn’t it just another of the latest examples of our purge of tradition and our purge of true moral order and code?  We don’t have a code.  You make it up as you go along.  If it’s inconvenient or it might cost you a couple of shekels, you just bail.  You just abandon it for pure selfish reasons.  It’s tragic and sad.  For all those that are real, heartfelt and actually abide by the liturgy of the word and the Church’s traditions and teachings — and that includes going right down to the compulsory attendance of the high and extraordinary mass, the holding sacred of all the Holy Days of Obligation, which every Sunday is one, things like fasting on Fridays.  These are canonical.  These are not supposed to vary from generation to generation.  That’s why you have canon.  That’s why you revere it.  That’s why you defend it.  Unfortunately, such is not the case.

So then, under what moral authority, if this is to pass off as policy — of course, it isn’t yet.  Let me emphasize, this is not the position of the Church and certainly not of Catholics, what’s happened in this case in Colorado.  How do you then correctly vilify and then cast from your midst in shame and public disrepute the men who performed the ghastly procedure that is covered in the film After Tiller performing the third trimester abortions, executions?  This is inconsistent and incompatible with tradition.  That’s where the problem comes in.  This is just another example.  That’s what’s troubling about this.

Debbie was on here Friday and we were talking about the Hansel and Gretel movie.  I commented that Hansel and Gretel, stupid Brothers Grimm fairy tale, why would you want to pass some stupid fairy tale like that down to your kids?  You’ve got to modernize it and make it full of all sorts of witchery and demons and stuff it was never full of before and basically steal the Brothers Grimm title, steal their intellectual property and use it for your own ingratiation.  That’s just another part of discarding the tradition.  There’s no tradition to defend here.  We don’t even defend private property or intellectual property rights.  This shouldn’t come as any surprise.

I saw a trailer or promo piece for the Hansel and Gretel movie.  It also stars Famke Janssen.  On some movie I was watching over the weekend, in between films, they showed Jeremy Renner and the young lady who plays Gretel, I guess.  It was an extended trailer of the making of the movie.  They were boasting about how they had modernized the story.  Audiences would not like the original tale so they had to modernize.  They had to put their own spin on it.  It’s just out with any tradition that we can find and end with one of our own making and choosing.  That is cultural fire, ladies and gentlemen.

End Mike Church Show Transcript