I have been captivated by the thoughtful, insightful, and often brilliant writing on what I will call authentic womanhood versus feminism by such Substack contributors as Elisabeth Stone and Abigail Austin. In fact, after reading Elisabeth Stone’s “Born to Be a Feminist,” especially the part about her grandmother’s “bitterness and poison” about not doing “her own thing” and instead settling down into marriage and family life, I could not help but see the sharp contrast between such a perspective on life compared to that of my mother, whom we only recently buried after she passed away at ninety-six-years of age. I thought it might be profitable to share a smidgeon of my mother’s story. And I do so on the anniversary of the day she gave birth to me, 12 November 1960, sixty-five years ago.

Margaret Mary Costello was born in 1929 in Weaver, Minnesota. Her father, Patrick Edward Costello (Ed) was a hard-working, educated, intelligent, dignified, and devout Irish Catholic, who attended Mass on Sunday and holy days, prayed his rosary daily, and did not drink because he did not like beer and he feared that he might like whiskey too much. Her mother, Vera, was an intelligent, educated, kind, complicated woman, a convert to the Catholic Faith, whose past included some traumatic events that may have contributed to some level of neurosis. Margaret grew up with one sibling, her beloved sister, Pat, (who would also attend the College of St. Catherine on scholarship, become a librarian, and who, though two years younger, would marry three years earlier and also have four daughters and three sons). At a young age, Margaret’s teacher walked her home to tell her parents that she should move up a grade. At seventeen she attended a leading Catholic women’s college on an academic scholarship. She graduated with a degree in library science and English and embarked on a nine-year odyssey of work, service, and adventure that many a feminist might have envied. And yet, she never considered herself a feminist.

Photographs of Margaret before she became Mom made us wonder at her pitching hay, riding a horse, wearing an Inuit parka in Alaska, standing atop the continental divide, holding a shotgun in one hand and a bird she had bagged in the other. We remember paraphernalia from her former life: a view finder with slide reels of her travels in the west, Mickey Mouse ear hats, an Inuit cup-and-ball game. It was not to prove something that she excelled in academics, edited the newspaper, served as senior class president, enjoyed football, ventured out to the Iron Range, Green Bay, California, and Alaska. She never renounced men, or marriage, or children. She just lived her life with intrepidness, wonder, and faith, hope, and love. In fact, she once told me that she never had any desire to be a feminist because the men in her life had treated her so well. Of course, her unwavering commitment to the Catholic Faith influenced her experience and outlook.

She just lived her life with intrepidness, wonder, and faith, hope, and love.

At twenty-eight, she settled in Stillwater, Minnesota, where she met Jim Ritzer, also a devout Catholic, whom she married and with whom she raised seven children. What she thought of marriage and family might well be summed up by a conversation I had with her one day upon returning home from kindergarten after I had for the first time met someone—call him Billy—whose parents were divorced.

“Billy’s parents are divorced.”

“Oh, that’s very sad.”

“Would you and Dad ever get divorced?”

“No.”

“How do you know?”

“We took vows.”

“Billy’s parents took vows too.”

“We meant them.”

Any doubts I may have had about the earthly permanence of my parents’ sacramental union were thus dispelled. (See “One Big Family.”)

Another memory was aroused when my sainted sister Mary was trying to coordinate a day for Mom’s funeral that would accommodate all seven of us siblings and families, especially a sister in Montana who had only recently undergone serious surgery. Mary was concerned about whether there could be an open-casket wake over a month after Mom had died. I said to Mary, “Well, you know Mom’s opinion on the subject.” Mary said, “No, what was it?” So I recounted what my mother (at least half Irish) had opined on the subject when she and I were going to attend a funeral for a relative some forty years or so before:

Oh, the Irish and their wakes. They have the casket open and everyone comes up and says, “Doesn’t she look wonderful?” No, she looks dead. Put me in a pine box. Cover it with the lid. Hold the funeral. Put me in the ground and throw dirt over me.

This put Mary at ease, though we did hold an open-casket wake and, ironically, Mom did look so wonderful that I and several other people remarked that we thought she would at any moment open her eyes, sit up, and speak to us.

Full though her life was, with plenty of joys and wonders, it also involved challenges, sufferings, and heartaches. She had several health challenges and surgeries, including a perforated ulcer that was misdiagnosed for several years as “change of life” that destroyed her duodenum and involved chronic intense pain that took its toll on her and the family until finally discovered and corrected by surgery. (One doctor had said to her, “I don’t know what your problem is; I met your husband and he seems like a nice guy.” She said that if she had not been doubled over, she would have hit him.) She relied on her intrinsic Catholic faith to forge her way through all of it.

Margaret and Jim centered their lives, their marriage, and their family in the Catholic Faith.

The following obituary, amalgamated by her children, summarizes her abundant life:

Margaret was born to Patrick and Vera (Odell) Costello in Weaver, Minnesota, on 22 June 1929. She spent her early years in the Mississippi River Valley and would later fondly recall adventures with extended family throughout southeastern Minnesota. When Margaret was in fourth grade, her father accepted the job of grain buyer at Hamm’s Brewery, and the family moved from Wabasha to St. Paul.

Margaret attended Harding High School, where she was editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, Saga, and graduated salutatorian in 1946. She then attended the College of St. Catherine on an academic scholarship. She studied Library Science, served as president of her senior class, and graduated at the age of 20 in 1950, with a bachelor’s degree in English.

After college, Margaret went to work as a teacher and librarian in several communities, including Mountain Iron, Minnesota (where she experienced Iron Range culture) and Green Bay, Wisconsin (where she often saw her beloved Green Bay Packers eating lunch at the YMCA). In the summer of 1956, she and a friend traveled by car to the California coast and back, before the construction of the Interstate Highway System. She then ventured north to accept a summer research position at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, prior to Alaska’s statehood.

Finally, Margaret followed her heart to where she had long hoped to settle, beautiful Stillwater, Minnesota, and accepted a librarian position at Stillwater High School. She loved her new job, but tragically lost her library in the 1957 school fire, and then went to work at the new high school. While working at Stillwater High, she found herself admiring a house under construction that she would pass on her way to work. Eventually she met the designer and builder of that house, a fellow daily communicant at St. Michael’s Church, James (Jim) Ritzer, an army veteran and Stillwater native. She would later say that her life did not begin until she met Jim.

Margaret and Jim were married at St. Michael’s Church in Stillwater in 1958, and in 1959, welcomed their first daughter, Mary. Peter, Mark, Gretchen, and Thomas followed. In 1966, they moved to Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, where Rebecca and Catherine were born, and Margaret and Jim raised their seven children as members of Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary Parish. Jim worked as a landscape architect, and Margaret attended the University of Wisconsin and acquired her Wisconsin teacher’s license and returned to her profession within the Sun Prairie School District.

Margaret retired from teaching in 1991, and she and Jim moved to rural Menomonie, Wisconsin in 1998. In their retirement they savored the beauty of the land, foliage, birds, and animals of Reverie, their home in the woods. They also loved attending Mass, praying the Rosary, traveling, entertaining family and friends, watching the Packers, and volunteering for their church and community. They returned to the St. Croix River Valley in 2020, where Margaret enjoyed her final years among the wonderful folks of Croixdale and Boutwells Landing, built on what had been the farm she and Jim had bought and on which they had raised their family until they moved to Wisconsin.

Margaret and Jim centered their lives, their marriage, and their family in the Catholic Faith. Margaret taught her children the importance of faith, hope, charity, humility, frugality, challenging work, sticktoitiveness, and adventure. She also imparted an impressive understanding of, and appreciation for, literature and English grammar. She was an expert multi-tasker: raising a family, working full time, cooking, sewing, helping elderly neighbors, and volunteering for her parish. We will miss her devout faith, sincere smile, kind heart, selflessness, clear logic, quick rejoinders, witty sense of humor, and expansive vocabulary.

Rest in peace, Mom, in the Beatific Vision, toward which your faithful life long tended. We pray you have already heard these words: “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

Margaret’s funeral may be viewed here.

Her obituary slide show here.

Please like, share, comment, or subscribe as you feel inclined.

Thank you,

P. A. Ritzer

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Introduction

Young adults have been flocking to the Catholic Church in recent years, prompting many to question why. Charlie Kirk, not too long before he was martyred, answered that question in an interview with Tucker Carlson. Mr. Kirk said: “First of all, they want something that has lasted. They want something that is ancient and that is beautiful, something that has stood the test of time, something that’s not going to change, something that’s all of a sudden not going to all of a sudden just flip around and have some sort of, you know, transgender story hour.” Yes.

Earlier in the same interview, Mr. Carlson railed against baby-boomers, launching his salvo with: “They’re repulsive. They’ve always been repulsive.” From there, boomer identity slid downhill in the wake of his colorful illustration of its self-absorption that supported the conclusion at which he first arrived in boyhood: “I hated them then. I hate them now.” Fair enough.

And yet, as one born into the latter part of the boomer generation in late 1960, destined to grow up in the 1960s and 70s through no fault of my own, I offer not necessarily an excuse but instead an explanation of why at least the later boomers might have drawn the ire of their successors. We had no catechism. And we were raised in the Church in the catechism gap, the repercussions of which, I believe, have been vastly underestimated. I sought to bring light to that dilemma and its repercussions and to encourage a better way forward in the following article.

This article was originally published under the title “In Anticipation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: The Perspective of One Raised Between the Catechisms” in the Summer 1994 edition of The Living Light: An Interdisciplinary Review of Catholic Religious Education, Catechesis, and Pastoral Ministry an “official publication of the Department of Education of the United States Catholic Conference.” It was later republished in abbreviated form as “Raised Between the Catechisms” in Catholic Digest, September 1994. It appears here, with the permission of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), in three parts, in the form in which it was submitted for publication in 1993 with some minor editing.

IN ANTICIPATION OF THE CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH: THE PERSPECTIVE OF ONE RAISED BETWEEN THE CATECHISMS

The Living Light, Summer 1994

INTRODUCTION

We stand on the threshold of the third millennium, poised to receive the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC). Our position in salvation history demands of us a responsible reception of the CCC, because the CCC provides a unique opportunity for renewal in the ongoing conversion of the Church. Indeed, it comes to us through that process of renewal begun at the council of renewal, the Second Vatican Council.

In recognizing the CCC as the catechism of that era, which opened with Pope John XXIII’s 25 January 1959, announcement that he intended to invoke the twenty-first ecumenical council, we must also recognize the catechetical needs of the generation raised within that era without benefit of its catechism. As one of that generation, I offer some reflections on my own catechetical experience and some conclusions I have drawn from it.

In a few short years a generation of little children stepped across that epochal line between the old and the new, unaware of their place in salvation history and the implications it would have in their lives.

CATECHESIS IN PERSPECTIVE

I had a rare opportunity to publicly articulate and clarify some of my concerns about the catechetical experience of my generation at a gathering of catechetical leaders of the Diocese of ______ in the fall of 1992. Richard Reichert, Consultant for Adult Education and Human Sexuality for the Diocese of Green Bay, gave a thoughtful presentation on the reactionary mode of the Church after the splintering of Protestant denominations and the Council of Trent in the 16th century, and the consequent reactionary catechesis of that period, a catechesis that concentrated on defining the Catholic Church in opposition to those Protestant denominations. Mr. Reichert contended that the Second Vatican Council finally brought to an end the Tridentine era and its catechism as one of the few, if not the only, ecumenical councils to be called not in reaction to a heresy, but rather as a means of renewal.

As I listened, I realized that we were still talking about the catechetical experience of Mr. Reichert and his contemporaries, which comprised the large majority of those assembled. But the period being discussed had passed over thirty years ago. What about the Vatican II generation, those of us whose catechetical experience began after the start of the Second Vatican Council?

In order to address the serious catechetical needs of those in their mid-thirties and younger, catechetical leaders must shift their focus from the catechetical experience of those who made the transition from pre-Vatican II to Vatican II to the catechetical experience of those of us who grew up in the Vatican II era. Though the transition was not without its difficulties, even trauma for some, it is time to let go and move beyond that period to address the dire catechetical needs of that generation raised within the trauma, unaware of their ecclesiological and catechetical context.

When Mr. Reichert invited us to comment, I pointed out that while it is true that Vatican II was not called in reaction to a heresy, still the catechesis that developed around it was a reactionary catechesis to the catechesis in place before Vatican II. I said that I was born in 1960 and graduated from high school in 1979 (the year of publication of Sharing the Light of Faith: National Catechetical Directory for Catholics of the United States). I literally grew up in the 60’s and 70’s, and I remember nothing from my religious education classes except playing volleyball, having rap sessions and deciding whom we would kick out of a fallout shelter if the bomb dropped, all of which I could have done without religious education.

“He is absolutely right. I was a part of that. We painted rocks for class.”

I do not remember learning much about the Church, its history, structure, magisterium, and Scriptures, and I wanted to know. I do not remember ever seeing anything resembling a textbook in high-school religious education. I wanted to know how we got from Jesus to the Church of the twentieth century, what were the differences between the Protestants and us, why there were different Christian denominations, what made sacraments so special and from where sacred Scripture had come, among other things. I knew my own personal theology, in which evolution figured prominently, but had no way of knowing that it was consistent with Catholic teaching, and misrepresentations of Catholic teaching by non-Catholics and the press did not help matters any. I do not remember ever hearing of Vatican II, let alone knowing what it was, until I went to college. And, again, I wanted to know. I finally decided to study theology at the graduate level, with no other motivation than personal enrichment, to learn basic information about the Catholic Church and its story.

Certainly, parents were responsible as primary educators, and I know that I learned a good deal more at home about Catholicism than did most of my contemporaries [thus, all of my siblings are still practicing Catholics with no divorces]. Still, I think even parents assumed that we were learning more than we were at Catholic school and religious education, because they assumed a systematic religious education similar to the one through which they had learned. But things were changing drastically.

Ours is the generation that arrived at school one day to find Sister in a new, abbreviated habit. On another day we learned that the school would no longer attend daily Mass. My sister, one year ahead of me, learned to confess her sins according to species and number. I cannot remember hearing of such a thing until my sister told me about it well after I had participated in the Sacrament of Reconciliation a number of times. My second grade class was the last one at our parish to march two by two into the church, girls in white dresses and veils, boys in white shirts and dark ties, to receive our First Holy Communion as a class. My brother, one year behind me, and our younger siblings received their First Eucharist at home Masses. In a few short years a generation of little children stepped across that epochal line between the old and the new, unaware of their place in salvation history and the implications it would have in their lives.

Our parochial school was not staffed primarily by the sisters as in days gone by. In eight years of parochial school only two of my teachers were sisters. Still, almost all of the teachers in our school were excellent, but many were young without much background in religious education. At the same time, even the more experienced teachers were expected to adjust to religious education materials that concentrated more and more on personal experience, self esteem, relationships, and less and less on religion.

We must face the fact that my generation is almost wholly ignorant of the catechism that helped mold the majority of Catholics who directed our catechesis.

Amidst all this, Catholics were unsure about what they could teach and with what vocabulary they could teach it, as self-styled progressives denigrated much of pre-Vatican II catechetical content, method, and terminology. Most Catholic parents and teachers probably wanted to support Vatican II initiatives, and they themselves struggled with the changes it brought to their own experience of the Church, but unlike our parents and teachers, those of us growing up in the period did not have the pre-Vatican II experience from which to put it all in perspective.

As I expressed a condensed version of the above, Mr. Reichert nodded his head, and when I finished he addressed the others present, “Ladies and gentlemen, this young man’s catechetical experience is the experience of most of the parents of children in our religious education programs. What does that tell you about where we have a lot of work to do?” And those gathered answered with him, “The parents.”

Mr. Reichert continued, “He is absolutely right. I was a part of that. We painted rocks for class.” He admitted that that was the mood of the times and that catechesis suffered for it.

Further elucidation of this situation might be gleaned from a comment made by Matt Hayes, a member of the United States Catholic Conference’s Ad Hoc Committee on the Implementation of the Catechism. At a recent workshop on the CCC given in the Diocese of _______, Mr. Hayes admitted that many are anticipating the CCC with skepticism because, though it will be a major catechism, the catechetical context for its reception is a minor catechism, namely the Baltimore Catechism (1885), derived from the last major catechism of the universal church, the so-called Roman Catechism of 1566.

And this demands that we stop apologizing for Catholic teaching that was commissioned by Jesus and handed on through the apostles and their successors.

Some may argue that this view ignores such catechetical documents as the General Catechetical Directory (1971), Sharing the Light of Faith: National Catechetical Directory for Catholics of the United States (1979), and the Apostolic Exhortation on Catechetics (Catechesi Tradendae) (1979). I would disagree. I believe that though these are important documents, they are virtually unknown to most Catholics in the pew, and even to many of those charged with directing catechetical programs. Furthermore, unlike these documents, the Baltimore Catechism was a catechism, in a form accessible to the Catholic in the pew, so widely distributed and implemented over such a long period of time that its use and eventual removal affected the catechetical experience of the Church of the United States in a unique and lasting way. Accordingly, the Baltimore Catechism can be properly said to be the catechetical context for the reception of the CCC by the Church in the United States.

If then the Baltimore Catechism is the catechetical context for the reception of the CCC, then for many it is a context of ignorance. Like most of my contemporaries, I have never seen the Baltimore Catechism (except possibly some snippets of it, as of some relic, in a graduate ecclesiology course). This is notwithstanding the fact that I am thirty-three years old and have attended Catholic elementary school and junior high, religious education in high school, a Jesuit college and graduate school in theology.

As a director of religious education, I am fully aware that many catechetical leaders, who dismiss with a shudder the Baltimore Catechism as one might dismiss a period of imprisonment, not without torture, would consider this ignorance of it to be a true sign of the great strides made in religious education since the Second Vatican Council. I leave it to theologians to debate the merit of that point of view. Whether or not the Baltimore Catechism should have been used in our education is not as relevant or important as the blunt fact that it was not. We must face the fact that my generation is almost wholly ignorant of the catechism that helped mold the majority of Catholics who directed our catechesis.

Thus, it is time to realize that if the Baltimore Catechism is the practical context for the reception of the CCC, then the vast majority of Catholics in the United States in their mid-thirties and younger have little or no knowledge of the Catholic Church, its foundation, its history, its Scriptures, its theologies, its sacraments, its hierarchy, its magisterium, its relationship to Protestant denominations, its relevance in their lives. They have never heard of the Baltimore Catechism. Consequently, it is time to stop reacting to the Baltimore Catechism and the methods used to teach from it, and it is time to offer a substantial religious education that puts demands for learning on those who are instructed by it, just as the Christian life puts demands for living on those who are called to it. And this demands that we stop apologizing for Catholic teaching that was commissioned by Jesus and handed on through the apostles and their successors. The Church is not perfect, given the sinfulness of its members, but it was founded and commissioned by Jesus (Matthew 16:18-19; 18:18; 28:18-20) and has a profound theological and magisterial tradition, and that needs no apology.

Part Two to follow shortly.

Please like, share, comment, or subscribe as you feel inclined.

Thank you,

P. A. Ritzer

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Recently, on August 12, 2025, former President Barack Hussein Obama (@BarackObama) wrote on X:

Since we passed the Affordable Care Act, Republicans have tried over and over to repeal it. And over and over, they’ve failed — in part because millions of people now depend on the ACA for quality, affordable health care.

Now Republicans are trying something different: quietly weakening the law and hoping you won’t notice. We can’t let them.

The Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, has wreaked havoc on health care in the United States. It was sold by one lie after another: “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” And the Democrats were so desperate to create the dependence that Obama touts above, and thereby intrude into this intimate area of our personal lives and to control this huge swath of the economy, that they pulled out all stops. Remember the extra ballots suddenly turning up all over Minnesota to get Al Franken “elected” and the Arlen Specter flip to give the Democrats the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster?

What was especially galling was the complicity of Catholic leaders in getting Obamacare over the line. I suspected that much of that complicity arose out of a misplaced trust and loyalty of many Catholics and Catholic Church leaders in and to the Democratic Party and a consequent growing entanglement of the Church with government at all levels, which may have compromised Church leaders. Before the Sixteenth Amendment and the federal income tax in 1913—when all taxes combined for the average United States citizen took only 3% of his income—churches and other religious and civic organizations did not look to government for the means by which they built and ran churches, hospitals, schools, and other charitable institutions. They relied on individuals, from rich to poor, who chose through free acts of the will to cooperate with grace and do good, which was good for the soul of the giver as well as for the recipients of the good work. And it was also good for the soul of the nation, all that charitable giving, all of that good work, all that grace infusing the culture and begetting more good work and virtue.

But since the income tax and Woodrow Wilson, FDR, LBJ et al., it appears that churches and other “nonprofits” rely more and more on government, which must first confiscate the money from citizens who are forced to pay by law. Lost is the free will giving, the free cooperation with grace, the good works, the virtue. The money may still be made available to various causes but without the grace and virtue, replaced in no small part by resentment at the confiscation. And, of course, this leaves far less for the giver to freely contribute to the the causes he would choose to support. Moreover, when a giver freely contributes, the giver most likely does so to the church or organization that would use the contribution to do charitable works of which the giver approves. Whereas with government confiscation and spending, the government may spend that money on things, like Planned Parenthood, to which the taxpayer objects. Furthermore, when churches accept money from government, the money will almost certainly come with strings attached, leading to compromises. How much more likely are church leaders to look the other way, or to not speak out on matters of morality, or even find themselves complicit in evils when they are reliant upon money coming from the government which may be supporting or promoting evils like abortion, transsexualism, same-sex unions, in vitro fertilization, etc.

And to be clear, in no way am I suggesting that the Church should embrace a party other than the Democratic Party. Would that it would have no attachment to any political party or politician whatsoever. Would that it would take no money for anything from any government at any level. Would that the Church would instead advocate for lower taxes and smaller government and thus more freedom for and greater ability of its members to contribute to the good work that it might then be more accountable to carry out.

Below is the article “Obamacare, the Church, and the Stupak Amendment” that I wrote in reaction to our archdiocese asking us to support the Stupak Amendment in 2012. Here are other articles that that I wrote that treat of related topics: “Can a Catholic Be a Democrat?,” “The Corruption of Church Organizations,” “The Corruption of Catholic Church Organizations Beyond Human Trafficking.”

Obamacare, the Church, and the Stupak Amendment

Posted by P. A. Ritzer on 16 February 2012

15 February 2012

Copyright © 2012 by P. A. Ritzer

In light of the Obama Administration’s recent attack on the Church, religious liberty, and freedom of conscience, I think back to the unseemly process by which Obamacare passed the Congress and how the Stupak Amendment conciliated Church leadership. On Sunday, November 8, 2009, we received an “Urgent Action” insert in our church bulletin directing us to contact our representatives and let them know that we wanted them to support the Stupak Amendment to the Obamacare Bill, an amendment that would prohibit funds “authorized or appropriated by” Obamacare to be used for abortion except in cases of life of the mother, rape, and incest. Rarely have I felt such a rush of shock and righteous indignation in a church. I knew the Stupak Amendment for what it was, a ruse to give cover to so-called pro-life Democrats to secure the passage of Obamacare. Thus I was infuriated that some Church leaders were taking the bait and getting reeled in to set up the Church for the assault that President Obama, his administration, and the Democratic Party would naturally—given their commitment to big government and the culture of death—unleash upon her through the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Obamacare. (Of course, Bart Stupak, and his cohorts, eventually knuckled under to pressure and dropped support for his own amendment after being given the cover of a meaningless executive order from the President.) I immediately wrote the following to a Church leader. I have here omitted the leader’s name and responses and other identifying portions out of respect and have omitted greetings and closings and have otherwise lightly edited these communications.

Copyright © 2009 by P. A. Ritzer

With all due respect, I feel conscience bound to let you know how deeply upset I was by the “Urgent Action Parish Bulletin Insert” we received at Mass this morning. I will be blunt in unburdening my mind, heart, conscience: These Democratic bills cannot be fixed; they must be stopped! There is no fix for them.

The Democratic Party has proven over nearly thirty years that it is committed to the culture of death! They “Borked” judicial nominees who would have been strict constructionists unlikely to find a “right” to abortion in the Constitution, and placed on the Supreme Court and any federal court (and Obama is trying to create more federal courts to stack) judges whose one requirement was to be pro-abortion. They used taxpayer money to promote and coerce abortion and contraception around the world, imposing them, with the help of the United Nations, on the poorest of peoples, except when Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush could stop them by executive order, which they circumvented nonetheless. Most opposed an attempt by Republicans to ban partial-birth abortion, a ban which Bill Clinton vetoed. They promote the destruction of the Sacrament of Matrimony. And more and more, they support euthanasia and assisted suicide. And now comes Mr. Obama, whose tedious obfuscation cannot hide his radical commitment to abortion in the great tradition of such notable Democrats, and Catholics, as Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Tom Daschle, Nancy Pelosi, Kathleen Sebelius—it is scandalous! Why on earth would we ever want to hand over more control of healthcare to government, when we see what these people will do with the power we have already handed over to them in contradiction of the distrust of government enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

On the other hand, the party that has had a pro-life platform for the last thirty years, the Republican Party, does offer real healthcare reform that would make it more affordable and available without handing over more control of it to government. We hear about Stupak: what about the party that has maintained a pro-life platform, at great cost to itself, for decades? Why aren’t we working with them to oppose this monstrosity. So what if the Democrats have the votes. We should oppose them regardless!

What more does the Democratic party need to do to prove to us all that it is the Party of Death? Why on earth would we as rational people think we can work with a party so radically committed to the exploitation of women and girls and the slaughter of unborn children, and, more and more, the destruction of the Sacrament of Matrimony, and euthanasia. Those of us who have never been Democrats do not understand this accommodation of the Party of Death. We find it hard to see the great virtue in the party that was pro-choice on slavery: the party of the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, and the internment of Japanese-Americans. We do not see the virtue in the party that launched the attacks on personal property and the reduction of free human beings to impoverished dependency called the New Deal and the Great Society. We see, instead, how such attacks and reductions could create a dependent class robbed of initiative and responsibility ever dependent on the Democratic Party which would thereafter depend on their votes. And now they want to take over healthcare—God forbid! Have we not seen enough in the bankrupt programs of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and all the problems they have wrought.

We are all free (though less and less so under Democratic governance, especially if Obama gets his way about ending charitable deductions) to give to the charities of our choice. The churches, other private institutions, and localities, in the spirit of the doctrine of subsidiarity, used to provide medical and other services with the freedom to do so according to their moral codes. But the more we support the big-government Party of Death, and its programs, the less freedom we have to support the charities of our choice according to our values, and we give up that freedom to a party that embraces and promotes the culture of death, which is absolutely consistent with its big-government tradition.

Years ago, I met the priest who was the godfather of Avery Dulles when he entered the Church. He gave me an article he had written about his own conversion to Catholicism. In it he recounted how he would visit different churches in Germany during the Third Reich. As I remember it, he said that the Anglican churches did not say much so as not to rock the boat. The Lutheran churches spoke out about their right to religious freedom. But the Catholic churches preached that Hitler, Himmler, Goering, and Goebbels were wrong because Jesus Christ was right.

Obama, Biden, Pelosi, and Reid are wrong because Jesus Christ is right. We must oppose them because we must embrace Him.

The following is my response to the recipient’s response.

I remain blunt, as anything less seems to me a waste of time. I do not understand how the bills [Obamacare] can be fixed by amendments when the ideology behind the giant power grab, which is the basis for Democratic healthcare reform, is the same that has promoted, guaranteed, and funded the most aggressive and far-reaching attack on the culture of life in this country.

Yes, I am partisan. I make no apology for it. (Nevertheless, where the Republican party is wrong, I will oppose it.) One party, the Republican, is flawed, as are all human institutions; the other, the Democratic, has long been committed to evil, to the culture of death. I believe that the Democratic Party’s ongoing drive to expand government and control more and more aspects of our lives are part and parcel of their evil commitment to every aspect of the culture of death. Are there some Democratic leaders who are pro-life? Well sure, but less and less so when their party requires a vote. I make no judgment on their souls (I pray for them daily) but do judge their party, its actions, and the real consequences, intended and otherwise, of their actions. I would be irresponsible and a bad citizen to do less.

Today we Americans will countenance the cutting and tearing apart of another 4000-some children in the sanctity of their mothers’ wombs, and we will leave their mothers and fathers with the baggage. And the great Democratic Party will have had as much, if not more, to do with making sure this takes place than any other institution in the country. And we are still talking about it! The Republican Party has taken the principled stand on slavery, human rights, and abortion when it was difficult to do so. In each case, it was opposed by the Democratic party. When the Democratic Party believes that a pro-life position will get it power, it will convert. Until then, it must be defeated.

As for what the Republicans have and have not done. They did pass some healthcare reforms, like health savings accounts. Should they have done more, like tort reform and enabling competition between insurance companies across state lines? Probably. (But among their priorities were two wars, and the Democrats—not to mention the press—were opposing every healthcare reform they attempted.) But many of us believe that the current “crisis” in healthcare has been manufactured by the Democratic Party to set up this enormous power grab, and that much, if not most, of the problems in healthcare have been created by other government meddling in the form of the likes of Medicare and Medicaid. As I was growing up, my family was anything but wealthy, but my mother was able to give birth to seven children in the hospital, and my parents were able to pay the bill. This was pretty much the norm among the families I grew up around in Wisconsin. Today, after forty years of government healthcare solutions like Medicaid and Medicare, a family could go bankrupt doing the same.

The following is my response to the recipient’s response.

I fear the blindness of partisanship that has a majority of Catholics helping to put the Party of Death in power.

I wrote the above over two years ago anticipating the recent attacks on the Church, and worse to come, if we did not stop this anti-Constitutional takeover of healthcare by Obama and the Democrats. We have got to deal with reality here. This is tyranny as only the Democratic Party can serve it up. And the Democratic Party is the Party of Death. This is not about well-groomed, well-dressed, well-fed, fat-cat Democratic politicians throwing around the antiseptic word “abortion.” This is about the truth of what that word represents: a horrific reality of human savagery and carnage; of exploitation of girls and women, mothers; of emasculation of boys and men, fathers. The Democrats have tried too long to keep this issue at bay by playing it as if it ought not be on the table, just as they did with slavery in the founding years of the Democratic Party with the Richmond-Albany axis. Just keep it off the table and let it fester and let people suffer and pretend there is nothing worth considering about it. They managed to some extent to do it with slavery until the Republican Party rose up in reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and defeated slavery and fought for full recognition of the rights of African Americans—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, and the Civil Rights Acts, etc.—despite the Democratic tyranny of the Ku Klux Klan, and lynchings, and Black Codes, and Jim Crow, etc. The unborn and their mothers and fathers need the Republican Party to be their champion as it was for slaves and freedmen. And we all need the Republican Party to reverse this anti-Constitutional, dictatorial power grab by President Obama and the Democrats. And we need to regain a love for life and freedom that welcomes the baby and stands up against government oppression.

Thank you,

P. A. Ritzer

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Take heart. Your obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is not you. It is not your conscience. It is not your desire. It is not your inclination. It is not your compass. It is a part of you, of course, but it is a defective part of you, a sick part of you, thus a disorder. It mysteriously afflicts body, mind, and soul, and thus is physical, mental, and spiritual by nature, an opening through which the devil torments you. It is like the Pharisees, in opposition to Jesus, or the circumcision party, in opposition to St. Paul. It is destructive as they were destructive. They sought to destroy Jesus and St. Paul. And if Jesus and St. Paul were right, then the Pharisees and circumcision party were wrong, and then it stands to reason that your OCD is wrong. In that light, it is interesting to note that both the Jewish and Catholic traditions have long recognized, addressed, and offered remedies for scrupulosity, which is at least related to OCD if it is not just OCD from a different perspective .

OCD is that obnoxious, intrusive, subtle or brash, attention-demanding deformity that would distract you, accuse you, convince you, afflict you, tyrannize you, occupy you. But, as a disorder it has no right to do any of that, does it?

So, that means you may have to change your relationship to it. You may have to decide to recognize it as the deformity it is. You may have to live with it, but you may want to start to corral it, dissociate it, disempower it, ignore it. You may want to stop running from it, hiding from it, wrestling with it, attending to it. You may want to just let it be, let it throw all that it has at you and let it all just go on by. What it throws at you is from it, not you, and it cannot hurt you if you let it go on by, if you attach no danger, morality, or ownership to it. Changing your relationship with it will take practice, and it will take patience, but is it not worth a try?

Remember the prayer of St. Teresa of Avila: “Let nothing trouble you. Let nothing frighten you. Everything passes. God never changes. Patience obtains all. Whoever has God wants for nothing. God alone is enough.”

Spiritual help can be found in the confessional and in counsel with priests, rabbis, or ministers that are knowledgeable about OCD and scrupulosity, and in a plethora of books like Dan Burke’s Spiritual Warfare and the Discernment of Spirits. Knowledgeable psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors can help with the mental aspect of it, as can books like Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz’s Brain Lock. And the physical nature of OCD may make it vulnerable to modification by means of nutrition. Dr. Michael Nehls, MD, PhD, (Michael’s Substack) has long extolled the benefits to mental health of micro-dosing lithium as in his article “Lithium, the Essential Trace Element.” Dr. James Greenblatt, MD, shares nutritional approaches to treating OCD in “Integrative Therapies for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.” And there is plenty more research out there for him who will look.

And then, of course, when the suffering does afflict you, there is the age-old Christian practice of joining our spiritual, mental, and physical sufferings to those of Jesus Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, and in all of his Passion, and offering them up for the benefit of our brothers and sisters living and dead.

Peace be with you and God bless.

Thank you,

P. A. Ritzer

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Introduction July 2025

So, as the Trump administration rescues us from the evils of the “Green New Scam,” and as President Obama’s, Hillary Clinton’s, the Democrat Party’s, and the shrinking mainstream media’s complicity in the Russia collusion hoax, election rigging, and other varied and assorted malfeasance is increasingly exposed, we might remember that such Democrat folly and corruption is nothing new, and that, if they ever regain power (their perennial object), the Democrats will plunge us right back into such inane villainy. May memories be jogged so as prevent such a calamity by the following article from my P. A. Ritzer blog of 19 September 2011.

Old Establishment Media Enabling Republicans to Do Dirty Work?

29 September 2011

Invested as heavily as they are in the Obama presidency and in all things Democratic, the old establishment media (OEM) (aka mainstream media) has surprised many by pursuing the erupting Solyndra scandal with some degree of tenacity rather than dismissing it or covering it up as has been their wont with Democratic scandals. Some believe it is because they wish to see President Obama, who is fast becoming a liability, replaced by Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate for the presidency in 2012. Rush Limbaugh conjectures that it may just be the press’s way of letting President Obama know that he had better not abandon the left-wing ideology, or that perhaps it is just a “random act of journalism.”

As more and more of the Solyndra mess comes to light, it is apparent that the scandal reaches well beyond Solyndra and that the green-jobs and clean-energy nonsense was even more of a scam than we skeptics thought, “creating jobs” that are costing us taxpayers hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a job, the money going to these foolish if not fraudulent projects sponsored by donors and bundlers for Obama’s 2008 campaign who would then be in good shape to donate to him again in 2012. There’s a great use for “stimulus” dollars, one for which we taxpayers, and our children and grandchildren, are going to be paying heavily. There was a time when the OEM could have controlled the story, but with the plethora of new-media outlets in existence today, they can no longer do so. As newspapers shut down and the OEM loses market share to competitors who actually seek to uncover the news rather than an angle favorable to Democrats, it may just be that the OEM is being forced to cover the story as they ought just to compete in their industry. It would help explain the Democrats’ attempts to regulate broadcasting and the internet.

But there might be more to it. As President Obama’s radical policies make him and the Democratic Party ever more unpalatable to the average American, could it be that the OEM is helping uncover this scandal so as to dump it in the laps of the Republicans. The president’s popularity is falling hard, and he is dragging the party down with him: witness Scott Brown, Chris Christie, Bob McDonnell, the mid-term elections of 2010, and New York 9, as well as the talk of replacing him with Hillary Clinton. But does the Democratic Party, especially given its racist past, want to dump the first African-American president?

Would it not be better for the Democrats if they could rid themselves of a growing liability and do so in such a way that would leave the Republicans holding the bag? Though it is unimaginable that someone would consider impeaching the first African-American president, could it get to the point where that possibility “’tis a consumation devoutly to be wish’d” by Democrats? And if there is overwhelming evidence of corruption, if not criminal activity, can the Republicans in the House look the other way? It need not go all the way to impeachment. Investigations and hearings might fill the bill for the Democrats. They could saddle the Republicans with the dirty work, all the while standing by their man and secretly hoping the Republicans do enough damage to require them to run an alternative candidate. And if the Republicans fail, the Democrats might be able to turn it all back on the Republicans and play the victim card for the president to rally support for him, the candidate they would be stuck with.

Just something to keep in mind as we learn the stories behind Solyndra and Crescent Dunes and Tonopah Solar and First Solar and SolarReserve and SunPower and Abengoa Solar and Steven Chu and Argonaut and George Kaiser and Steve Mitchell, and then there’s ‘Fast and Furious’ and Obamacare and ACORN and the NLRB. . .

Copyright © 2011 by P. A. Ritzer

Thank you.

P. A. Ritzer

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Again, thanks.

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Introduction June 2025

Considering that one prediction of climate catastrophe after another has fallen by the wayside since the publication of this piece on my P. A. Ritzer blog on 3 July 2014, I thought it might be fun to republish it here. Among the many discrepancies between reality and the global-warming narrative, a few stick out to me. Of course it goes without saying that we have to concede that the extremists have switched out the term “global-warming” for “climate change,” which, though it gives far greater latitude to the extremists to make their case, at the same time, it ought to restrict the effectiveness of their scare tactics to the very few (one hopes) who believe the climate of the earth has remained ever static.

Where and when was the first Catholic diocese in the new world?: There is an interesting question for any history buff, whether of the Catholic persuasion or not. And the answer may surprise you. No, it was not the Diocese of Baltimore founded in 1789, or the Diocese of Quebec (1674), or the Dioceses of Mexico (1530), Puebla de los Angeles (1525), Santo Domingo (1511) or Puerto Rico (1511). No, the first diocese in the New World was the Diocese of Gardar founded in 1124. But wait, say you, ‘twas 1492 when “Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” True, so true, but 500 years prior to, Erik through the waves did hew, with intrepid crew, in 982. Erik the Red that is. In fact he hewed through many a wave before that, but it was in 982 that Erik first settled in Greenland after all that hewing. Nor were his nautical adventures complete, for after returning across the waters to Iceland, he led others over to Greenland in 985 or 986 to create two settlements.

Thereafter, his son Leif, who had converted to Christianity and been commissioned to “cooperate with priests of the expedition in propagating” the Catholic Faith by King Olaf Tryggvason of Norway, introduced Christianity to Greenland in the year 1000—before the Great Schism and over five long centuries before Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, John Calvin, and Henry VIII—when it was still the case that to be Christian was to be a member of the Catholic Church. This eventually led to the establishment of the Catholic Diocese of Gardar by 1124. This diocese appears to have grown to have 2,800-4,200 or more inhabitants with 280 manors, 16 churches, and 2 monasteries. The inhabitants of the diocese raised cattle, sheep, and goats, and hunted on land and sea, and fished. But as the Medieval Warm Period gave way to the Little Ice Age, the climate began to grow increasingly harsh in the latter part of the 14th century, so that, eventually, the inhabitants were required to eat even their breeding stock before they either perished or abandoned the settlements in the 15th century just a few decades before Columbus’ first reached the New World. The Greenland settlement lasted 450 years or so. In comparison, the United States of America is not yet 250 years old, and it has been only 418 years since the establishment of the colony of Jamestown. The point though, is that long before the industrial age, or the automobile, or jet airliners, there existed the Medieval Warm Period and then after that the Little Ice Age. Hmm.

Bovine flatulence: Ok, the United States has some 90 million head of cattle, and they are supposed to be helping create the greenhouse gases that are supposed to be creating global warming or climate change, which is bad or cataclysmic or something. But bison grazed the grasslands of what would become the United States long before any cattle were brought here by Europeans, and experts have estimated their numbers to have ranged between 60-100 million. Besides taking into account the bison’s greater mass, one must also include the higher numbers of other indigenous grazers like elk, deer, pronghorn, and more. Seems there must have been a lot of flatulation going on out there before Europeans or even indigenous people ever stepped upon the continent. Seems kind of natural. So, how bad is that?

Democrat Beach Mansions: We have all heard how global warming was going to raise sea levels to unprecedented levels, leading to disastrous flooding of New York and other cities. For instance, when Katie Couric on the Today Show on 24 May 2006 asked former Vice President Al Gore, of Inconvenient Truth fame, “What do you see happening in 15 to 20 years if nothing changes? . . . Even Manhattan would be in deep water,” he replied: “Yes, in fact the World Trade Center Memorial site would be underwater.” And yet, not long before that, Gore had purchased a $9-million, ocean-view home in Montecito, California. Huh. Also in 2006, Obama Science Czar John Holdren went even further, predicting: “As global temperatures rise, they may cause the massive West Antarctic Ice Sheet to slip more rapidly. Then we’ll be facing a sea-level rise not of one to three feet in a century, but of 10 or 20 feet in a much shorter time. The Supreme Court would be flooded. You could tie your boat to the Washington Monument. Storm surges would make the Capitol unusable.” OK, so why did Barack Hussein Obama—a true global-warming, climate-change believer—after he left the White House, purchase an $8.1 million-dollar, 8,200 square-foot home in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, D.C.? Makes one wonder. Well, it just may be that the Obamas, of-the-people Democrats that they are, hedged their bets with two or three other multi-million-dollar homes that they could flee to when the waters of the global-warming deluge were lapping about the Supreme Court. Could that be why they also purchased a 6,892-square-foot house on 29.3 coastal acres on Martha’s Vineyard for $13 million? Well, I may be missing something, but that does not make a lot of sense to me. I was privileged to visit Martha’s Vineyard a few times in my youth, and if I knew the oceans were going to rise, it would be one of the last places I would build even a shack let alone a mansion. But, fear not, should their Kalorama home and their Martha’s Vineyard home succumb to the rising waters, they could still stay high and dry in their $18 million home in Waimanalo, on . . . the island of Oʻahu . . . in . . . Hawaiʻi. That’s beachfront property again, . . . with rare private-beach access. Huh. Must be really steep beaches, because, I mean, if the ocean rises, that would affect all ocean-front beaches, right? Because, uh, aren’t all the oceans connected? Just asking.

©2025 P. A. Ritzer

3 July 2014

We know that the global-warming alarmists have warned us that if we keep burning “fossil fuels” the oceans will rise and flood huge portions of the inhabited world (e.g., see National Geographic, September 2013). The dreaded sea-level rise, which President Obama’s election was supposed to slow—in his own words: “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”—is supposed to happen because the Arctic and Antarctic ice will melt. Nevertheless, despite record amounts of carbon in the atmosphere, the volume of ice on Antarctica has reached record high levels according to government scientists [according to the well-worth-reading “Gov’t Scientists: Antarctic Sea Ice Is Growing — Because Of Global Warming” by Michael Bastach, July 03, 2014 in Daily Caller]. And to what do these scientists attribute the record levels of ice? You guessed it: global warming. You all know how warming makes more ice. So, since more ice in the Arctic and Antarctic means lower ocean levels, and record ice levels are reached due to global warming, should we not want more global warming to lower ocean levels? Just asking.

Honestly, at what point do people tire of liberals and their Big Lies, designed to scare people into ceding more of their liberties to liberals: Big Lies like overpopulation (truth: reproduction rates have fallen dangerously below replacement levels in most of the “developed” world) and global warming (truth: no global warming for 18 years), so big that the whole world is at stake, so big that there is nothing anyone can do but the liberals who will gladly trample the liberties we throw down so that they can give us another utopia like the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy or Communist China, Cuba, North Korea . . .

Copyright © 2014 by P. A. Ritzer

Thank you.

P. A. Ritzer

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P. A. Ritzer, Volume 35

Please see all twelve parts of “The Big Lie of Overpopulation and the Fear that Drives It:” Part One: “One Big Family;” Part Two: “Truth Pierces the Veil of Propaganda;” Part Three: “Elon Musk, Bill Maher, Mark Steyn, Ronald Reagan, and Paul VI on Demography, Life, and Murder;” Part Four: “Nature, Control, and Sin;” Part Five: “Psychology, Communication, Love, Communion, and Sacrament (Not Necessarily in that Order);” Part Six: “Sexual Morality, Hope, and Healing;” Part Seven: “Compelling Observations about Human Procreation from Roseanne Barr, Tucker Carlson, and Calley and Casey Means;” Part Eight: “The Deep, Broad Root of the Culture of Death;” Part Nine: “In Vitro Fertilization and Transhumanism as Illuminated by Nicole Shanahan and Mattias Desmet;” Part Ten: “‘A Truly Human Civilization’ vs. the F-Word Culture;” Part Eleven: “Fear, Control, and Death;” and Part Twelve: “Making Room and the Courage to Love;” and please see also “The War on Women and Population Control.”

Those who so covet, who would rather have people killed than be inconvenienced, who demand that those who oppose their evil be implicated in it, those are the people who are bitter about large families, who resent them, who do not hide their judgment of and disdain for them. Large families have their stories of their experiences with such people. There are examples above.

Why do they resent large families? What does it matter to them how many children others bring into the world as long as the families take care of themselves and do not infringe on them? Could that resentment stem from a mixture of stinginess and regret? Mattias Desmet points out that people with meaningless jobs harbor “feelings of resentment and revenge toward those who have meaningful work.” Might that not be true of people who have contracepted—who have taken the meaning out of their relationships and closed them to life—toward those whose relationships are open to life and thus have profound meaning?

And that, right there, might be the great genius of large families: making room.

Could it be that large families put the lie to all the reasons they fornicated, contracepted, did not marry, constrained their love to minimize the number of their children, had abortions, demanded fewer people in the world and implicated others in all that evil? Could it be that they envy and resent the fullness of life that they see in large families that is lacking in their lives? Who are you to have all those kids when I had aborted my child or children, or had my tubes tied or had my vasectomy so that we did not have so many kids, so that we could afford all the things we wanted in life? Who are you to love into existence and raise all those kids, when I was afraid to do the same, afraid of what it would take from me, of what I would be required to give? Who are you to prove my stinginess wrong with your generous love? I remember my dad saying years ago, with deep sympathy, that he wondered if women thought about the children they had aborted when they lay all alone in nursing homes. May God grant them repentance and peace. On the other hand, I recently visited my nintey-five-year-old mother in her beautiful care facility, and her nurse from Ethiopia told me how wonderful it is that my mother gets so much attention from her children and grandchildren. The nurse is a mother of five.

The consideration of selfishness above brings to mind a recent experience we had at a hotel. It was a modest hotel in a small town with a commensurate breakfast accommodation in the lobby. My wife went down to get us coffee and tea and returned much later than expected. She complained that a woman took her time at the automatic coffee machine (hardly Starbucks) mixing various automatic coffees, blocking all other people from the machine, to achieve her ideal blend, as the line of frustrated guests behind her grew. My wife expressed to me her exasperation with the woman blocking all others and said that, had she allowed others to get in around her, they could have got their drinks as she concocted her composite brew. I observed that I doubted that the coffee-mixing lady was from a large family, as images emerged in my mind of my wife and her ten siblings and their family members merging supplely and happily in and out of food and drink offerings at family events. Of a different race and culture from my wife’s, the large family from which I hail is geared more toward the line-up-and-take-your-turn persuasion but all with the sense that one needs to move along and not take too much out of consideration for those with whom one is sharing the feast (and then go back later and load up again of whatever is left). I was perhaps in my teens when I first wondered at people who could walk four abreast in a hall or on a sidewalk, or stand in the way of everyone else in a narrow passage and not give way to others. It struck me then that they could not have grown up in a large family to be so oblivious to the needs of others, to the need to make room for others.

As one makes more room in one’s heart, one expands his capacity to love.

And that, right there, might be the great genius of large families: making room. Large families are blessed with an essential disposition, intuition, and capacity for making room. People in large families continually make room for others. They make room for the new baby who comes home with their mother from the hospital, for each other at the dinner table, for each other in the car, for each other in the pew. They know how to make room as well for the guest. This making room is a choice on the part of the parents. Out of that rolling, loving choice emerges a living reality for the parents and for the children, for whom it becomes a living norm exercised in a myriad of daily choices. Unlike Bill Maher, they are not afraid of running out of resources.

In all those choices, members of a family are not just making room for others in their physical surroundings. They are making room for them in their minds. And they are making room for them in their hearts. As one makes more room in one’s heart, one expands his capacity to love. If family members can make room and watch their house, table, car, and their minds and their hearts accommodate more people whom they love, they are not threatened by the idea of making room for more people to share this vast planet. They are not afraid that there are not enough resources because they have lived a life of sharing and doing with less when necessary.

It does not look like the metrosexual and the mini-dress babe on the endless fornication vacation but more like two red-eyed young parents tag teaming it through the night to care for a sick child their sacramental love brought into the world.

And as a family member makes room for others, he is continually conditioned to think about how whatever he is doing right now affects others within the space he shares with them in the house, at the table, in the car, in his head, and in his heart. And he settles into his place among the others in his family, in the world, in the universe. He finds his place with others and the Other. Mattias Desmet puts that in a special perspective: “In a sense, all of life consists of an attempt to find space for oneself in the relationship with Others. . . . The more man advances in this process, the more energy and creative power he will have. . . . It is on this track that the future of humanity lies and not on the mechanistic-transhumanistic track.”

And there, in considering the capacity of making room within a family, of finding one’s place in relationship to others, we touch upon the great fear that drives the overpopulation lie and the contraception lie and the abortion lie and the big lie of the entire culture of death. The great irony is that the very thing that people who peddle and buy those lies are seeking is the very thing that they are so afraid of. What else could scare people so much that they would murder their own children rather than accept it? Love. They fear love, the very thing that they are erroneously seeking.

So, the fear that drives the lies is the fear to love. Not the make-me-feel-good, get-all-I-can infatuation, but the real die-to-yourself, fully committed love. It is not about controlling or becoming the it for the other by whatever desperate means necessary, but about laying down one’s life for the other. It does not look like the metrosexual and the mini-dress babe on the endless fornication vacation but more like two red-eyed young parents tag teaming it through the night to care for a sick child their sacramental love brought into the world. And because of that true selfless, sacrificial nature of real love, the fear of it is not uncommon, whatever we may think. In fact, it is a fear that we must each face, acknowledge, and work to overcome. The culture of death is the result of our refusal to do so.

And yet, by courageously choosing love, one lovingly chooses courage: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.”

And so, to love requires courage. Everyone on earth seeks the benefits of love, but far too few of us have the courage to make room for love, to abandon ourselves to love. And yet, by courageously choosing love, one lovingly chooses courage: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” Ah, there is the antidote to the fear that drives the big lie of overpopulation and the culture of death of which it is a part. And thus that stepping-off-a-cliff kind of courage that can launch one into love is itself properly grounded in the love out of which all other love flows, the love of God. As I wrote in Love and the Art of Bookstore Book Signing:

Love is relational, requiring a lover, a beloved, and the love between them. ‘God is love’ (1 Jn 4:16). Thus God is relational, trinitarian: the Father giving himself to the Son, the Son giving Himself to the Father, the Holy Spirit being this exchange between the Father and the Son. Love is giving of the self. It is desiring the best for the other. It is especially manifested among humans in the Sacrament of Matrimony, the spouses giving themselves to each other in a way that brings forth new life, most dramatically in conception of children: trinitarian in the husband, the wife, and God present in the sacramental union; trinitarian in the husband, the wife, and the child conceived, brought forth, and educated. Human marriage is thus a type of the trinitarian life of God, as is the marriage of God and the Church. And marriage is fruitful, because love is ultimately fruitful in every good way.

That true love, God’s love, has plenty of room; it knows no bounds; it is ever expansive, ever giving, never exhausted. It knows not the pernicious stinginess of the little false gods of control.

That true love, God’s love, has plenty of room; it knows no bounds; it is ever expansive, ever giving, never exhausted. It knows not the pernicious stinginess of the little false gods of control. It will go to the Cross and suffer ignominious subjection, torture, humiliation, and abandonment for its beloved. Most of us are not called to that extreme but are called to lesser acts of love in communion with that ultimate act. Mattias Desmet touches upon it whether knowingly or not:

To the degree that we can connect with what is outside ourselves, we are able to transcend our own boundaries and our own world of experience gets expanded to an existence that extends endlessly in time and space. Through resonance with the greater plain, we participate in the timelessness of the universe, like a reed rustling in the eternal air of life.

And that professor of psychology asserts that it is when a child recognizes that his parents are not omniscient and omnipotent that the child is faced with a choice between “fear or creativity.” If the child chooses creativity it develops a “fledgling sensitivity” to “fiction and poetry,” and “a basis for its identity and principles about how to behave” and “the child finds, in stories and poetry, echoes and scents of the lost maternal paradise of its earliest months of life.” This “creation of individuality. . . . connects man with the Other and leads to resonance with (love) objects instead of psychological isolation and (self-) destructiveness.” Connecting with the Other looks like a good thing, psychologically. It looks a lot like love of God and love of neighbor, the greatest commandments that sum up all of God’s law.

The thing about us believers in the God of love is that we pray for, and invite, and are ever eager for others to join us in that love, even and especially our enemies.

With the love of God comes faith and hope. Without the courage to love, and the faith, hope, and love it enables, desperate love-seeking degenerates into extramarital sexual relations, contraception, abortion, demanding there be fewer people on the earth, all of which leads to deeper and deeper selfishness, loneliness, disappointment, frustration, and despair that cannot imagine the freedom and fullness of love that meets the criterion that Jesus pronounced. The greatest love involves one laying down one’s life for his friends, one dying to oneself so as to live.

The good news is that it is not too late to love if you are still alive on earth. We all fail at love in various ways and to varying degrees; thus sin. But until we die, we can do something about it. We can repent and give ourselves over to love. If you do not believe that God can love you due to your sins, read the passion narratives in the gospels, or meditate on a crucifix, and ask yourself if the God who would do that for you does not love you enough to forgive whatever you bring to Him in repentance. For those who have given themselves over to the culture of death in contraception, abortion, extramarital sex, population control, etc., conversion can propel you out of the culture of death to life. Liberate yourself from the side of fear, despair, hate, murder, destruction, selfishness, and control and join the side of faith, hope, and above all, love. All of us must continually repent of our failures to love. Christianity offers a profound opportunity for that conversion, especially in the Sacrament of Reconciliation in the Catholic Church where forgiveness is sacramentalized.

And in that vein, this sinner has hope for conversion in so many people throughout the earth. Take an example like Russell Brand who famously speaks of his former life of hedonism and who now very publicly shares his ongoing conversion to Christianity. I see conversion in so many of the folks mentioned above: Tucker Carlson, Mattias Desmet, Roseanne Barr, Calley and Casey Means, Nicole Shanahan, Robert Kennedy, Jr. I suspect that Elon Musk may be heading into it. And I have hope for Bill Maher. In fact, I do not see how much longer Maher’s intelligence and honesty can accommodate atheistic liberalism, though I do hope that he does not wait until it is too late. The thing about us believers in the God of love is that we pray for, and invite, and are ever eager for others to join us in that love, even and especially our enemies. It will not yet be perfect love because we are all still sinners in this fallen world, but it will be true love with the promise of perfection in eternal life when we all hope to live in the very life of God. No matter who you are or what you have done, we would love to have you join us.

God bless.

Thank you.

P. A. Ritzer

Please like, share, restack or comment.

Again, thanks.

©2025 P. A. Ritzer

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P. A. Ritzer, Volume 34

Please see all twelve parts of “The Big Lie of Overpopulation and the Fear that Drives It:” Part One: “One Big Family;” Part Two: “Truth Pierces the Veil of Propaganda;” Part Three: “Elon Musk, Bill Maher, Mark Steyn, Ronald Reagan, and Paul VI on Demography, Life, and Murder;” Part Four: “Nature, Control, and Sin;” Part Five: “Psychology, Communication, Love, Communion, and Sacrament (Not Necessarily in that Order);” Part Six: “Sexual Morality, Hope, and Healing;” Part Seven: “Compelling Observations about Human Procreation from Roseanne Barr, Tucker Carlson, and Calley and Casey Means;” Part Eight: “The Deep, Broad Root of the Culture of Death;” Part Nine: “In Vitro Fertilization and Transhumanism as Illuminated by Nicole Shanahan and Mattias Desmet;” Part Ten: “‘A Truly Human Civilization’ vs. the F-Word Culture;” Part Eleven: “Fear, Control, and Death;” and Part Twelve: “Making Room and the Courage to Love;” and please see also “The War on Women and Population Control.”

And so for decades now we have been groomed by our culture to want to be able to play like children with the cosmically powerful—physically, mentally, and spiritually—gift of sexuality without consequence; with absolute, perverse, and irresponsible disregard for its reproductive nature; leaving mass wreckage in the wake. “Everyone has sexual sins.”

This brings us back to artificial birth control. Control again. Is that what the overpopulationist fears so much so as to support the slaughter of innocents, loss of control? That would not make sense because they do not have control. But they may well fear the loss of the illusion that they have control or are capable of having control or just the desire to have control. Is that it? The loss of control that they do not have but want to have? That seems to make sense. They may fear the loss of the control that they want, and perhaps believe they should have, but do not have. That would explain their deep emotion. It would fit with the hubris displayed. It would fit the mechanistic ideology. As quoted above (Part Nine), Mattias Desmet writes of the “ever-present, totalitarian undercurrent that consists of a fanatical attempt to steer and control life in far-reaching ways on the basis of technical, scientific knowledge” (italics added). And like the narcissism treated of above (Part Five) it emerges as a result of the “societal increase of fear and insecurity” and manifests itself in what Desmet calls “regulation mania,” and “regulitis.”

Desmet further observes:

Whenever a new object of fear arises in society, there is only one response and one defense in our current way of thinking: increased control. The fact that the human being can tolerate only a certain amount of control is completely overlooked. Coercive control leads to fear and fear leads to more coercive control. Just like that, society falls victim to a vicious circle that inevitably leads to totalitarianism, which means to extreme government control, eventually resulting in the radical destruction of both the psychology and physical integrity of human beings.

Wow: “The radical destruction of both the psychology and physical integrity of human beings.” No small thing. In fact, in order to overcome the uncertainty and insecurity and consequential anxiety of the human condition due to the ambiguity resulting from the complexity of human communication through symbols, totalitarians would, and have tried to—whether as Maoists, Stalinists, Nazis, or present-day globalists—reduce human communication to that of animals, which consists of “unambiguous and self-evident signs.” As Mattias Desmet observes, “Totalitarianism is the ultimate attempt to rid ourselves of this uncertainty by withdrawing into a (pseudo)scientific certainty and merciless logic, by trying to reduce symbols to signs, and by trying to annihilate all variety in cultural expression.” And therefore Professor Desmet can conclude: “At this point, we are able to pinpoint the psychological essence of totalitarianism: an attempt to reduce the polysemy of human language to the monosemy of a sign system.” From that of man to that of animals. Totalitarians would, and have tried to, reduce human beings to beasts. And all in an attempt to gain more and more control in response to fear after fear after fear.

There is the leveler, there is the delusion buster, there is where gods die before the immortal God.

Fear and control: that brings us back to how we questioned above why Bill Maher was afraid of overpopulation, given that he apparently was very well off and comfortable. The same could be said for others who want to control population like Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, Al Gore, Barack Hussein Obama, the Democratic Party, the Chinese Communist Party, or any others of the megalomaniacal class. For those individuals who are concerned about overpopulation—even if it were going to happen, which it will not—they would be dead by then anyways. In that same vein, perhaps the main reason people need not fear overpopulation is just that people die. And therefore, as the developing nations catch up to the life expectancy of the developed nations, the population will level off. Makes sense.

But what if that is the problem? Death? What if they cannot accept death? Well then, they would have a very different perspective on the world’s population. If they want to live forever in this life, it would only be fair that everyone else be able to do the same. Then there would be cause to worry that the earth could overpopulate. Then the world really would overpopulate, if nobody ever died. And then there would be cause to see other people’s lives as a threat to their own. I think there is something to that.

Still, though a nagging sense of fairness may contribute to their fear of overpopulation, we well know that the elitist globalist types have no problem causing or concurring with the deaths of others, whether through abortion, forced famines, extermination camps, or wars to bring about their utopias. It is not that they do not accept death; they are fine with it when it works for them, when they think they can control it.

Ah, control again. It would fit their professed world views and activities that they want to control death, to be in control of death. These control freaks can even deceive themselves about the control they believe they have or wish they had when it comes to life and death. And the life, not just the lives, of others are a threat to that deception. If your perspective is warped from a delusion that you will be able to control death, you could well see other people on the earth as a threat to your well-being. Abortion, forced famines, extermination camps, war—and add euthanasia, contraception, IVF, transgenderism, and mass trafficking of humans beings as if they were animals—all allow them to delude themselves that they have control over life and death.

It may well be that the sense of the immortality of the human soul that we all share to varying degrees may in these godless controllers be mistaken for a sense that they can extend their lives in the earthly world indefinitely.

But then comes their own deaths. What if they do not want to consider their own deaths? What if they do not want to accept their own deaths? The one thing that is inescapable, death. There is the leveler, there is the delusion buster, there is where gods die before the immortal God. “Death comes for us all, my lords. Yes even for kings he comes,” said Thomas More. Nicole Shanahan added about the tranhumanists, in the interview with Tucker Carlson cited above (Part Nine): “The people who are afraid to die; they don’t want to meet Lady Justice. And that’s what I think this transhumanism is all about. I think it is a deep fear of death.”

I think Ms. Shanahan is profoundly correct. I believe these folks are afraid of death, and are afraid that there is a reckoning at death, and so they seek to defy death when it comes to them. It may well be that the sense of the immortality of the human soul that we all share to varying degrees may in these godless controllers be mistaken for a sense that they can extend their lives in the earthly world indefinitely. And it appears that one way they seek to extend their earthly lives—so fitting for the gods they deem themselves to be—is to convey their mortal lives into their inanimate machines rather than reckon with the immortal life granted by their Creator in which their delusions of control must disperse as the fogs of hubris that they are, and in which they will be held accountable for all the sins they have wrought in their pride.

There seems to be a twisted irony in the notion that these folks seek the control, the power that is impossible for them to realize, that believers ascribe to the God that the fearful reject or do not believe exists. Thus there seems to be a subconscious acknowledgment of the God they reject in their own longing for the power and control essential to the Deity. Is this not a desire for self-deification, and does not this desire for self-deification point to the need for the Deity that they so obviously are not? Hence, they are in rebellion, and their fear includes that of being relegated to the proper order, of facing reality which would require: the ruination of their imagined self-idolatry, the exposition of their true relationship with and rightful subordination to God, and the recognition they are not God and that God does not need them but that they need God. Like their ancient fallen master they proclaim: “I will not serve.” Instead they stand before God and his laws and defiantly proclaim: “You are not going to tell me what to do, I will have control, I will make my own petty rules, I will make sure we limit the number of children people bring into the world so that it corresponds to my vision of creation.” By what colossal act of pride could they in all their ignorance possibly know how many people are the right number on the earth for everyone to have enough? How could they even consider that they could know?

All the more pathetic is this eternally disappointing longing when considered against the belief that God invites us all to “become partakers of the divine nature.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church elaborates on this true divinization through quotations from fathers of the Church: “For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God” (St. Irenaeus). “The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods” (St. Thomas Aquinas). “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God” (St. Athanasius). One might pause and consider how consequential it is that Bill Maher’s father abandoned that promise precisely in rejecting the Church’s teaching on contraception.

All the more pathetic is this eternally disappointing longing when considered against the belief that God invites us all to “become partakers of the divine nature.”

St. Irenaeus’ witness to the Word provides an occasion for us to once again ponder in a larger context Mattias Desmet’s contention that the human condition is profoundly influenced by “an intrinsic, irreparable lack” in human language. Here we might consider that contention in light of creation: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.” Appropriately then, God spoke forth creation: “And God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. . . .’” The Word is one of the three persons of the Holy Trinity and spoken forth begets creation and, after the fall of man, incarnation: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.” The Word, communication, language are integral to the communion of the Triune God; there is every reason to recognize that they would have no small place in man created in the divine image. That provides the context for our consideration of Desmet’s contention in light of Eden, Babel, and Redemption in Part Five of this series: “Psychology, Communication, Love, and Sacrament (Not Necessarily in that Order).”

Be that as it may, beyond the perceived threat of others, the yearning for control, and the deification of self, could it be that population-control extremists are afraid of having others threaten the possibility, the desire, the appetite, even just the idea, to have whatever they want whenever they want it? Are they afraid that more people on the earth might threaten that inclination? Whatever their fears, there is no way around recognizing the raw selfishness from which those fears flow. We are all prone to selfishness since the fall of man. And behind the population-control mantra can be heard the age-old child’s cry, Gimme! “Gimme this, Gimme that!” as the toddler pulls everything he can get his hands on unto himself.

And ultimately, selfishness at its extreme is: “I am all that matters, and others are here for me to use, and if they get in the way of what I want, they should not exist or be removed and therefore can be justifiably eliminated (‘murdered. . . .kind of’).” Most of us fall somewhere short of that extreme, but how far from the extreme is the position that it is better that others be aborted than that I consider the possibility, the very idea, that I may not be able to have all that I want, that I may not be able to experience the world in the way I want, that someone else may make my life uncomfortable? “Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him.” Thus, it would be better for me if we murder babies in the womb now rather than consider that I, me, mine may not have all that we want later. And thereby is displayed the appalling selfishness of imposed population control to fit the plan of the elite and how they think the world should work with its brutal slaughter of innocents in the womb and forced sterilizations.

And how much more evil is the pro-abortion, sterilization, and population-control position when those who hold it implicate the rest of us in it by using tax dollars, that citizens are forced to pay by law, to pay for abortion and global population-control programs? How evil is the need to implicate the whole human race in their own deadly selfishness? Diabolical. But we can follow that selfishness and opposition to religion far deeper into the overpopulation lie, the height of barbarity into which the controllers want to incriminate us all.

There is that need to control, that self deification again: “Not only will I do it my way but I will implicate you in it by forcing you to support it with your tax dollars.” Incorporated in that need to pull others into their crimes through tax-and-spend coercion is that ugly stinginess of Communism (and the preliminary stages to it). In Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth about Compassionate Conservatism: America’s Charity Divide–Who Gives, Who Doesn’t, and Why it Matters, Arthur C. Brooks through deep and thorough research arrives at the unmistakable conclusion that conservatives and Republicans are far more charitable than liberals and Democrats, largely because conservatives and Republicans are more religious, with all that that entails. In general with exceptions, conservatives give where they see need. In general with exceptions, liberals tax—even the givers—and spend where they will, even if it is anathema to many of those from whom they taxed the money.

Again, we are all given to selfishness and covetousness due to original sin. That being the case, it should be no surprise that it is religion that encourages us sinners to whatever generosity we muster. And out of that qualified generosity comes the perspective that tax-and-spend liberalism betrays that sinister stinginess in which others must contribute to and be implicated in what the liberal wants done however evil, including slaughtering helpless and innocent unborn babies. And in their tax-and-spend coercion the liberals also expose the greed and covetousness in their stinginess. Raise taxes to make other people pay to take care of the poor so that I may not be made uncomfortable by their poverty, their existence. And the poor naturally make those who have more than enough uncomfortable because, perhaps if they were to give, there need not be the poor, though that is by far an oversimplification that gives credence to Jesus’ words: “For you always have the poor with you.”

Thus is the selfish mentality: “I will not willingly give. I will allow it to be taken from me as long as it is being taken from everyone else, and better, if it is taken more from the others, the rich—who are everyone other than I—whose wealth and privilege I covet. In fact we should raise taxes on those who I believe have more than I do, or who do not have the opinions I have, and make them pay for what I believe should be done, however evil.” Accordingly do the Democrats give our tax dollars to Planned Parenthood to “kind of” murder unborn children, and to other population-control organizations.

And that is where we will wrap up Part Eleven. The final Part Twelve should follow shortly.

Thank you,

P. A. Ritzer

Please like, share, restack, or comment as you feel inclined.

©2025 P. A. Ritzer

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit paritzer.substack.com/subscribe

P. A. Ritzer, Volume 33

Please see all twelve parts of “The Big Lie of Overpopulation and the Fear that Drives It:” Part One: “One Big Family;” Part Two: “Truth Pierces the Veil of Propaganda;” Part Three: “Elon Musk, Bill Maher, Mark Steyn, Ronald Reagan, and Paul VI on Demography, Life, and Murder;” Part Four: “Nature, Control, and Sin;” Part Five: “Psychology, Communication, Love, Communion, and Sacrament (Not Necessarily in that Order);” Part Six: “Sexual Morality, Hope, and Healing;” Part Seven: “Compelling Observations about Human Procreation from Roseanne Barr, Tucker Carlson, and Calley and Casey Means;” Part Eight: “The Deep, Broad Root of the Culture of Death;” Part Nine: “In Vitro Fertilization and Transhumanism as Illuminated by Nicole Shanahan and Mattias Desmet;” Part Ten: “‘A Truly Human Civilization’ vs. the F-Word Culture;” Part Eleven: “Fear, Control, and Death;” and Part Twelve: “Making Room and the Courage to Love;” and please see also “The War on Women and Population Control.”

Nevertheless, mechanistic ideology persists among those who benefit from mass formation and totalitarianism. And it is not just Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and Big Pharmacy Benefit Managers that practice mechanistic thinking and want to intrude into your sexual intimacy. Humanae Vitae further presaged the evil that godless government could, with contraception, visit upon its population not that many years before the Chinese Communist Party’s One-Child Policy and all the population-control programs pushed upon developing nations:

Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Again, this was written just years before the CCP’s One-Child Policy. Humanae Vitae also points out the limits imposed upon mankind by the laws of nature and of nature’s God to safeguard the reverence due to “the whole human organism and its natural functions:”

Consequently, unless we are willing that the responsibility of procreating life should be left to the arbitrary decision of men, we must accept that there are certain limits, beyond which it is wrong to go, to the power of man over his own body and its natural functions—limits, let it be said, which no one, whether as a private individual or as a public authority, can lawfully exceed. These limits are expressly imposed because of the reverence due to the whole human organism and its natural functions, in the light of the principles We stated earlier, and in accordance with a correct understanding of the "principle of totality" enunciated by Our predecessor Pope Pius XII.(21)

What a piece of work. Imagine Satan rubbing his hands and chortling at such an accomplishment: the profoundly beautiful act in which man and woman give themselves to each other within a sacrament of the Church to join with God in the ecstasy of creating another human being with the supernatural destiny of living forever in the very life of God pulled down to the filthy, perverse, destructive depths of a profound act of aggressive destruction.

Humanae Vitae recognizes the Church’s responsibility to proclaim “the entire moral law” toward “contributing to the creation of a truly human civilization:”

It is to be anticipated that perhaps not everyone will easily accept this particular teaching. There is too much clamorous outcry against the voice of the Church, and this is intensified by modern means of communication. But it comes as no surprise to the Church that she, no less than her divine Founder, is destined to be a “sign of contradiction.”(22) She does not, because of this, evade the duty imposed on her of proclaiming humbly but firmly the entire moral law, both natural and evangelical.

Since the Church did not make either of these laws, she cannot be their arbiter—only their guardian and interpreter. It could never be right for her to declare lawful what is in fact unlawful, since that, by its very nature, is always opposed to the true good of man.

In preserving intact the whole moral law of marriage, the Church is convinced that she is contributing to the creation of a truly human civilization. She urges man not to betray his personal responsibilities by putting all his faith in technical expedients. In this way she defends the dignity of husband and wife. This course of action shows that the Church, loyal to the example and teaching of the divine Savior, is sincere and unselfish in her regard for men whom she strives to help even now during this earthly pilgrimage “to share God's life as sons of the living God, the Father of all men.”(23)

Given all of the above, I would encourage Ms. Barr, Mr. Cernovich, Mr. Carlson, and all of us for that matter, to eschew use of the f-word as a common-sense contribution to thwarting the culture of death. About the f-word I wrote in “The Devil’s Bargain Behind ‘Let’s Go Brandon:’”

The f-bomb prohibition fell within this same realm of respect. As Fr. Ganshert told my sister’s class when he went in to address wanton profanity, the word referred to the act by which their parents had brought them into the world. Pause on that. The act by which their parents had brought into the world those human beings endowed with the supernatural destiny of entering into God’s very self. That act was supposed to be beautiful, self-giving, life-giving, holy, sacramental, and private. The f-bomb pulled that act from sublimity to plunge it into filth.

And how well the f-bomb’s degradation fits our society today. Life-giving has been long stripped away by contraception to transform the act from one of self-gift to one of selfishness and rejection. Once so transformed there is justification for hooking up, cohabiting, adultery, pornography, untold perversities, and the vicious silent slaughter of any human beings conceived by the act so profaned. It continually descends from matrimony to the f-bomb.

But it is far worse than that. It is not enough that we have so degraded this act of life and beauty. The f-word weaponizes it, transforms it into an act of aggression with intent to do the receiver of it profound harm if not destruction. Is it any wonder that sexual abuse and assault in all their horrific forms infect our culture, from film studios to churches? That is not to say use of the word has done all this, though there may be a chicken-and-egg aspect to the whole thing, but that use of the word reflects the practice in the current culture of death.

What a piece of work. Imagine Satan rubbing his hands and chortling at such an accomplishment: the profoundly beautiful act in which man and woman give themselves to each other within a sacrament of the Church to join with God in the ecstasy of creating another human being with the supernatural destiny of living forever in the very life of God pulled down to the filthy, perverse, destructive depths of a profound act of aggressive destruction.

Nice trick. He gets conservatives to twist authentic justifiable outrage over the atrocities of the left—like abortion, impeachment hoaxes, violent destructive riots, rigged elections, the Afghanistan withdrawal catastrophe, and dangerous vaccine mandates—into an obscene perversion of the beautifully cosmic, unitive, procreative, sacramental act to pronounce their nullification of the demented man who is the face of the dehumanizing leftist Democrat machine. (And by the way, what kind of people would take a cognitively impaired elderly man, even one as corrupt as Joe Biden, and use him this way?) Why would conservatives cooperate with that?

Ah, well, they have been long prepared through manipulation by the very totalitarians by whom, you would think, they would be loath to be manipulated. Hollywood, to sum it up in one word, though it extends well beyond. Hollywood let the f-bomb drop in movies in 1967, and at around the same time, brought forth the first R rating. And then the culture was bombarded with the f-bomb and perversities that the average American had not been exposed to, at least not in anything like the quantity presented on the screen big and small. Previously, The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Leave it to Beaver, and several other television programs of that era entertained and touched on subjects that mattered without the obscenity that has become so prevalent in our culture today. And they did so with real humor, not the joke-and-insult volleys of later shows.

On the big screen, John Wayne, Jean Arthur, Jimmy Stewart, Maureen O’Hara, Gary Cooper and their peers could fight wars, fall in love, engage in conflicts, evoke everything from tears to laughter and manage to do so creatively, brilliantly, even provocatively in films that would easily fit the requirements for what would eventually be a PG rating. Even then, people might object to some of their productions on a moral basis, but they could do so without having first been subjected to the graphic assault on decency launched by so many films of the last several decades.

Long ago I recognized that entertainment held a far more insidious potential to tear down virtue than the news. I saw the effect it had on our generation. The manly and womanly virtue of chastity would not have withered so detrimentally had it not been so commonly run down in films featuring the handsome and gorgeous discarding it without the consequences—pregnancy, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, damaged psyches—suffered by those average Americans who emulated their “sophistication.” And then there was the whole genre of the anti-hero, outlaws and criminals pitched in high-end visually alluring productions that made us sympathetic to them and their crimes: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, anyone?

Why would the entertainment industry glamorize unchastity and seduce their consumers into such destructive behavior with all its consequences like the fall from grace, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, mental illness, and the general degrading of our culture?

It is interesting that our generation, raised in the 1960s and 70s, started out with television shows like Leave It to Beaver, The Andy Griffith Show, My Three Sons, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and the like, all of which depicted the goodness of the attraction between boys and girls, and men and women, and people dating. And all of those programs took for granted the virtue of chastity in relationships and how it resulted in respect between boys and girls, and men and women. But by the mid-1970s the popular “family show” Happy Days had reduced dating to “making out” with no clear boundaries indicated. Happy Days occupied the more “wholesome” end of the spectrum. Other offerings in the television and film media wreaked far greater havoc on chastity.

Humanae Vitae addressed this as well:

We take this opportunity to address those who are engaged in education and all those whose right and duty it is to provide for the common good of human society. We would call their attention to the need to create an atmosphere favorable to the growth of chastity so that true liberty may prevail over license and the norms of the moral law may be fully safeguarded.

Everything therefore in the modern means of social communication which arouses men’s baser passions and encourages low moral standards, as well as every obscenity in the written word and every form of indecency on the stage and screen, should be condemned publicly and unanimously by all those who have at heart the advance of civilization and the safeguarding of the outstanding values of the human spirit. It is quite absurd to defend this kind of depravity in the name of art or culture(25) or by pleading the liberty which may be allowed in this field by the public authorities.

Of course, a very different atmosphere was created. One may ask why. Why would the entertainment industry glamorize unchastity and seduce their consumers into such destructive behavior with all its consequences like the fall from grace, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, mental illness, and the general degrading of our culture? There are plenty of reasons, not least of which are hedonism and greed, but one truism that cannot be overlooked is: Misery loves company. If it is somewhat common for people in the entertainment industry—apparently often enough under duress—to have the beauty and wholesomeness of sexuality and childbirth and family stripped away for the momentary pleasure of sexual gratification, would it not also be common for them to justify their lifestyles by portraying them as normal and good. And would it not be common for them to, whether overtly or subconsciously, intend those portrayals to lure others into the deprivation of the truth, beauty, and goodness of the wholesome lifestyle they have forfeited or been deprived of? Would that not comport with our fallen human nature? “Ay, madam, it is common.”

And that is where we will wrap up Part Ten. Part Eleven should follow shortly.

Thank you,

P. A. Ritzer

Please like, share, restack, or comment as you feel inclined.

©2025 P. A. Ritzer

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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P. A. Ritzer, Volume 32

Please see all twelve parts of “The Big Lie of Overpopulation and the Fear that Drives It:” Part One: “One Big Family;” Part Two: “Truth Pierces the Veil of Propaganda;” Part Three: “Elon Musk, Bill Maher, Mark Steyn, Ronald Reagan, and Paul VI on Demography, Life, and Murder;” Part Four: “Nature, Control, and Sin;” Part Five: “Psychology, Communication, Love, Communion, and Sacrament (Not Necessarily in that Order);” Part Six: “Sexual Morality, Hope, and Healing;” Part Seven: “Compelling Observations about Human Procreation from Roseanne Barr, Tucker Carlson, and Calley and Casey Means;” Part Eight: “The Deep, Broad Root of the Culture of Death;” Part Nine: “In Vitro Fertilization and Transhumanism as Illuminated by Nicole Shanahan and Mattias Desmet;” Part Ten: “‘A Truly Human Civilization’ vs. the F-Word Culture;” Part Eleven: “Fear, Control, and Death;” and Part Twelve: “Making Room and the Courage to Love;” and please see also “The War on Women and Population Control.”

Another extension of the culture of death into human sexuality and fertility is in vitro fertilization (IVF), which has taken its place in the news lately, in a most disappointing way, with President Trump’s support of it. In vitro means in glass. In glass. Fertilization, conception of human beings, in glass. How does that comport with the Christian understanding that every child has the right to be conceived in a loving act between a man and woman in the Sacrament of Matrimony? Instead we have scientists harvesting ova and sperm from two people; brewing up a batch of embryos (each of which upon fertilization has an immortal human soul); evaluating the embryos for suitability in their little project; choosing the most suitable; then implanting, freezing, or discarding their siblings. And if too many of them “take” upon implanting, they can always be clinically murdered by “selective reduction.” These are all human beings being treated like the products of a science experiment if not a baking class. No one has the right to play the false god and devalue human life like that.

And there are a whole host of other contingencies involved in IVF that are beyond the scope of this article. It is diabolical. There are humane alternatives for the infertile, like treatments developed at the St. Paul VI Institute and adoption. In yet another Tucker Carlson interview in Rosenberg, Texas on 18 September 2024, Nicole Shanahan, running mate of Robert Kennedy, Jr., said of IVF:

Being a mother turned out to be a very convoluted experience, it turns out in this country right now. And, if you’re a liberal woman, you’re told, “Go harvest your eggs and freeze them.” They tell you that now really early on. . . . I walked away with an understanding that science is also not what they’re telling us today. That there’s this corporate world that, in the case of IVF, runs the IVF clinics. And the science of IVF is actually not based in well-researched, well-documented foundational science. Um, it works—it was discovered out of cancer-research dollars—but if you actually look at the investment in women’s health, it’s, it’s not there. And ovarian function, it’s the least studied organ in the body, arguably the most important. . . .

And so I started to fund the science, and, and that’s when I, I first came across transhumanism. And transhumanism is very real. It’s this idea that technology can replace human function. Um, and so I put $100 million into understand how to make and keep healthy women healthy, but all these transhumanists, all these transhumanists—right, what a novel idea, let’s keep women healthy so that we can have healthy babies, the most important thing in the world. Um, but the transhumanists wanted to build artificial wombs with these grants. They wanted to study IVG, um, which is creating gametes, eggs, out of the human stem cells just from your skin. And there’s a company, uh, called Conception, that actually just had mice give birth to five pups, um, with two male, uh, donors. And, and so, you know, I, it’s very real, transhuman. I’m, I’m in Silicon Valley, I’m in tech, I, I see all this stuff daily. Um, and it made me question, you know, if we are at a time in human history where we have to pause to really think about where this is all going. And I was slowly being labeled anti-science as a result of that.

Outdated! The world view that is continually pushed on us as science-based by every aspect—not just scientific and medical, but political, social, educational, broadcast—of our culture is “outdated.”

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Instead, Ms. Shanahan’s concern about transhumanism—which is in effect de-humanism—and “where this is all going” and her questioning if “we have to pause,” far from being “anti-science,” may in reality be an awakening from the mechanistic, technical “science,” that has held sway since the Enlightenment, to the real, authentic science into which quantum mechanics, complex and dynamic systems theory, and chaos theory give us a glimpse. According to Mattias Desmet in The Psychology of Totalitarianism, transhumanism “is a contemporary iteration of the mechanistic ideology that considers it desirable, even necessary, that future humans merge physically and mentally with machines.” He further writes: “The fourth industrial revolution, in which man is expected to physically merge with technology—the tranhumanist ideal—is increasingly seen as an unavoidable necessity. . . . Anyone who refuses to go along with the technological solution is naive and ‘unscientific.’”

Professor Desmet elaborates:

The greater the impact of mechanistic science on the world, the more it becomes clear that we’re creating problems for which we can hardly find a solution. . . .

It is here that we, together with Hannah Arendt, situate the undercurrent of totalitarianism: a naive belief that a flawless, humanoid being and a utopian society can be produced from scientific knowledge.(26) The Nazi idea of creating a purebred superman based on eugenics and social Darwinism, and the Stalinist ideal of a proletarian society based on historical-materialism are prototypical examples, as is the current rise of transhumanism. . . .

As Hannah Arendt states, totalitarianism is ultimately the logical extension of a generalized obsession with science, the belief in an artificially created paradise: “Science [has become] an idol that will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man.(28)”

And Desmet exposes not only what the mechanistic ideology has done to people and culture but how it is, in fact, obsolete:

The mechanistic ideology has put more and more individuals into a state of social isolation, unsettled by a lack of meaning, free-floating anxiety and uneasiness, as well as latent frustration and aggression. These conditions led to large-scale and long-lasting mass formation, and this mass formation in turn led to the emergence of totalitarian state systems.

Therefore, mass formation and totalitarianism are in fact symptoms of the mechanistic ideology. . . .

This ideology sees the universe as a logically knowable, predictable, controllable, and undirected mechanical process. And above all, it sees the universe as a dead and meaningless given, as the blind, mechanistic interaction between dead, elementary particles. While such a view of the world and matter imposes itself as the only scientifically valid view, a thorough examination teaches us that, from a scientific point of view, this world view is actually outdated.

Under the influence of mechanistic ideology, the step from progressivism to the Animal Farm is a short one.

Outdated! The world view that is continually pushed on us as science-based by every aspect—not just scientific and medical, but political, social, educational, broadcast—of our culture is “outdated.” Outdated. Reflect on that. And the totalitarianism that results from it is ubiquitous and insidious:

However, it would be a capital mistake to identify the phenomenon of totalitarianism only in totalitarian regimes. There is an ever-present, totalitarian undercurrent that consists of a fanatical attempt to steer and control life in far-reaching ways on the basis of technical, scientific knowledge. Technocratic thinking always walks on two legs. On the one hand, it appeals to people by intimating a positive image of an artificial paradise with which it claims we can be delivered from all adversity and suffering. On the other hand, it imposes itself based on anxiety, as a necessity to solve problems. With every “object of anxiety” that has emerged in our society in recent decades—terrorism, the climate problem, the coronavirus—this process has leapt forward.

But Professor Desmet makes it clear that we need no longer fall under this totalitarianism. He asks the question: “Do we view man as a biochemical machine that has to be technologically monitored and pharmaceutically adjusted, or as a being that finds its destination in mystical resonance with the Other and with the eternal language of nature?” He writes that, within the complex and dynamic systems theory and the chaos theory, “perhaps a person’s greatest task” is:

To discover the timeless principles of life, in and through all the complexity of existence. The better we can sense those principles, the more we feel that we start to understand some of the essence of life and that we are connected with the majestic, ordering principle that speaks to us from across the universe. And the more we stick to our principles, . . . the more real these principles become and the more we develop, as human beings, a real sense of existence and fortitude.

“Do we view man as a biochemical machine that has to be technologically monitored and pharmaceutically adjusted, or as a being that finds its destination in mystical resonance with the Other and with the eternal language of nature?” —Mattias Desmet

The discovery and commitment to principles is not limited to individuals alone but also to societies:

A society primarily has to stay connected with a number of principles and fundamental rights, such as the right to freedom of speech, the right to self-determination, and the right to freedom of religion or belief. If a society fails to respect these fundamental rights of the individual, if it allows fear to escalate to such an extent that every form of individuality, intimacy, privacy, and personal initiative is regarded as an intolerable threat to “the collective well-being,” it will decay into chaos and absurdity. The belief in the mechanistic nature of the universe and the associated overestimation of the powers of human intellect, typical of the Enlightenment, were accompanied by a tendency to lead society in a less and less principled manner. . . . In the final analysis, it was no longer a question for Enlightenment people to adhere to commandments or prohibitions or ethical and moral principles, but to move through this struggle for survival in the most efficient way possible based on “objective knowledge” of the world. This culminated in totalitarian and technocratic forms of government, where decisions are not made on the basis of generally applicable laws and principles but on the basis of the analysis of “experts.” For this reason, totalitarianism always chooses to abolish laws, or fails to implement them, and prefers to rule “by decree.” This means that, each new situation will require the formulation of new rules on the basis of a (pseudo)rational assessment of such situation. History abundantly illustrates that this leads to erratic, absurd, and ever-changing rules, which ultimately destroy all humanity in society.

Under the influence of mechanistic ideology, the step from progressivism to Animal Farm is a short one.

But quantum mechanics, complex and dynamic systems theory, and chaos theory liberate us from the mechanistic ideology of the Enlightenment to again seek an authentic humanism in light of “consciousness” and “the Other.” Professor Desmet articulates a hopeful future: “Chaos theory heralds, maybe even more than quantum mechanics, the era that historically and logically follows the Enlightenment; an era when the universe is once again pregnant with meaning.”

A universe “pregnant with meaning.” How much does that intuitively resonate with each one of us? True science has moved beyond the barren atheism of mechanistic ideology. Professor Desmet quotes Max Planck, the theoretical physicist who originated the quantum theory, “Both religion and science require a belief in God. For believers, God is in the beginning, and for physicists He is at the end of all considerations. To the former He is the foundation, to the latter, the crown of the edifice of every generalized world view.” And Desmet makes clear that, “Great scientists have left the logical-factual discourse of science behind and returned in an enlightened way to the type of discourse that during the Enlightenment was initially deemed subordinate: a poetic or mystical discourse, a discourse that shows an original respect and a genuine awe for the unnameable, for that which time and again eludes the human mind.” Please do not gloss over that. Consider it again and what it could mean for the culture and world in which we live: “a poetic or mystical discourse, a discourse that shows an original respect and a genuine awe for the unnameable, for that which time and again eludes the human mind.”

And that is where we will wrap up Part Nine. Part Ten should follow shortly.

Thank you,

P. A. Ritzer

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©2025 P. A. Ritzer

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit paritzer.substack.com/subscribe