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T h e A p o l o g i s t ’ s E y e
This Chad Wasn't Pregnant
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This Rock
Volume 12, Number 1
 January 2001 
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In case you hadn’t heard, there’s a nice footnote to last fall’s loony presidential election. As noted in The Washington Times and elsewhere, the Anglicized name of the patron saint of disputed elections is Chad.
St. Chad—whose Celtic name was Ceadda—was born in ancient Britain, probably around 620. His Saxon people were pagan, but St. Aidan had baptized his parents. As a youngster he was sent to the bishop of Northumbria to be educated. Later, he seems to have gone to the Irish monastery-schools established by St. Patrick and then to Iona, where he was ordained priest. After the death of two of his brothers in a plague, he eventually became head of a small abbey near Whitby.
Chad is best known for not being the archbishop of York. When he was elected and duly installed to that position, some bishops objected to his ordination because his consecration had not been rightly performed. Unlike his bickering American counterparts today, in order to preserve unity Chad withdrew in favor of the other candidate. He is said the have told St. Theodore, then the archbishop of Canterbury, "If you decide that I have not rightly received the episcopal character, I willingly lay down the office; for I have never thought myself worthy of it, but under obedience, I consented to undertake it."
Theodore was so impressed with Chad’s humility that he ordained Chad bishop of Mercians instead, where he served until he died in March 672. He was venerated as a saint soon afterward. All accounts of his life are based on that given by Venerable Bede, who had been instructed in Holy Scripture by Trumberct, one of Chad’s monks and disciples.
"Keep us, we pray, from thinking of ourselves more highly than we ought to think, and ready at all times to step aside for others, in honor preferring one another, that the cause of Christ may be advanced.
TV Truth—for a Change
On the issue of abortion, commercial television is a moral wasteland. But every now and then a few sprigs of green thrust through.
Last December 3, the Turner Classic Movies channel aired a newly restored 1916 silent film called Where are my Children? Tyrone Power Sr. stars as a district attorney who loves children but whose wife has secretly had abortions. Her abortionist botches a job, resulting in the death of a young woman. In prosecuting him, the DA gets a look at the abortionist’s appointment book and is shocked to learn that his wife and several of her friends have had abortions. The DA confronts his wife and calls her a "murderess." She repents and prays that she might have a child.
The eighty-four-year-old plot reflects familiar attitudes. One of the characters says babies should not be born if they are "unwanted." But the film takes the opposite perspective. When a woman becomes pregnant, the gates of heaven are seen opening as the spirit of the child descends. When the baby is aborted, the spirit returns to heaven, and the subtitle notes: "Another of the ‘unwanted’ ones returns."
At the 65-minute film’s end, the DA’s wife is haunted by the question, "Where are my children?" She sees visions of the children that might have been—but they fade away and the gates of heaven remain shut.
More significant—because it was a modern work—was the November 19 episode of the CBS series Touched by an Angel. "The Empty Chair" depicted the delayed consequences that follow an abortion. In the show, Bud and Betsy Baxter, cohosts of a morning television show in Omaha, Nebraska, for 12 years, lose their job when the TV station is sold and the new owners cancel their show. It turns out that Betsy had an abortion just before they took the TV job because a baby would have interfered with their plans, and the unexpected end of their show forces the unresolved issue back to the surface.
In a profound moment, Betsy, addressing the angel named Monica (played by Roma Downey), says, "You know, Monica, they can talk all they want to about politics and choices and rights. I did. And then you’re in that room and you’re putting your clothes back on and you know that when you walk out that door, you’re leaving a piece of your soul behind that you’ll never, ever get back."
After the couple gets into a shouting match as they try to deal with their long-suppressed emotions, Bud ruminates, "Ironic, isn’t it? You make all these plans for the future, and then one day it’s the wrong future, and you don’t have what you sacrificed for."
At one point Monica asks Betsy if she’s ever heard of post-abortion syndrome—difficulty in sleeping, difficulty with intimacy, workaholism, inability to relax or bond with children and husbands. "Maybe that’s just the price you pay," Betsy says. "No," Monica replies, "it’s a consequence of a choice, but it’s not a punishment from God. That’s not how He works."
Like many women of her generation, executive producer Martha Williamson says, she had an abortion. In a way, this was her penance as she helps other women deal with it and, she would hope, not have one.
When we run across accurate depictions of abortion that cut against the pro-abortion mentality of our culture, it never hurts to take five minutes and write a quick note or dash off a quick e-mail to the network thanking it for its honesty.
Will Catholic Universities Be Faithful?
During their annual November gathering, the U.S. bishops’ conference appeared to back down from academic theologians as they debated implementation of guidelines on the bishops’ authority over Catholic universities.
While final policies regarding Catholic higher education are not due to be set until the conference’s meeting next summer, the bishops debated the formulation of a new policy that would require theologians to receive a teaching mandate from their local bishop.
Cincinnati archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk, who chairs the bishops’ committee on the matter, said it’s strictly up to a college what to do with a professor who does not receive such a mandate. In other words, Archbishop Pilarczyk said, a bishop can announce that a theologian lacks the mandate, but other than that "he doesn’t have the right or the power to say, ‘You get fired and you don’t.’"
The issue has been hanging fire since August 15, 1990, when Pope John Paul II released the apostolic constitution on Catholic universities, Ex Corde Ecclesia. Canon law clearly states "it is necessary that those who teach theological disciplines in any institute of higher studies have a mandate from the competent ecclesiastical authority" (canon 812). But battle cries of loss of "academic freedom" by many Catholic university administrators and faculty make it difficult for the American bishops to implement the Vatican directives without instigating a full-fledged mutiny.
The Pope addressed the issue in a November 10 address at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Rome. "Intelligence certainly has its laws and paths, but it gains everything when the person who seeks is holy," the Holy Father said. "In fact, sanctity places the scholar in a condition of greater interior liberty, with effort charged with meaning, which sustains his exhaustion with the contribution of those moral virtues that forge authentic and mature men."
For this reason, John Paul II said, "culture and sanctity are the binomial of the success for the construction of that integral humanism of which Christ, revealer of God and man, is the supreme model. The classrooms of the Catholic university must be a qualified laboratory of this humanism.
Sporting Prelate
The current pope was an athlete in his youth—soccer (in his school in Wadowice, Poland,) ski-jumping (from Kasprowy Wierch, the highest peak of the Tatra Mountains), and canoeing (in 1958 he was canoeing with a group of youths when he received the news that he had been named auxiliary bishop of Krakow). But does holiness leave room for sports fandom?
Apparently so. John Paul II convened the Sports Jubilee in Rome the last weekend in October, where he attended a soccer match between the Italian national team and a team of foreign players. (The first fault verified by the referee in the 0-0 game occurred after fifteen minutes of play, a veritable record—who would commit thuggery in front of the Pope?) On that day the Pope said sportsmen "are called to turn sport into an occasion of meeting and dialogue beyond all barriers of language, race and culture. Indeed, sports can offer a valid contribution to peaceful understanding among peoples and to the affirmation of a new civilization of love in the world."
Late in November, he attended a private game played for him by the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team. The team has played in the Vatican before: for Pius XII in 1951 and ‘52, for John XIII in 1959, and for Paul VI in 1963 and ‘68. Curley "Boo" Johnson, in his twelfth season as a Globetrotter, is Catholic. "I met Mother Teresa when we went to Calcutta, and that’s the closest I’ve come to a living saint," he said before he met the Pope. "I have a cherished picture of her touching me, blessing my head."
Mannie Jackson, the Harlem Globetrotters owner, named Pope John Paul II an honorary Harlem Globetrotter following the Pope’s general audience November 29 before a crowd of more than 50,000.
An Unlikely Source
There aren’t many mainstream Hollywood types who will speak out against abortion. By most measures, actor, attorney, and game-show host Ben Stein would qualify, and, in a speech to two hundred Boston College students in November, he gave an earful of the pro-life message.
In his trademark monotone, Stein said he believes that this country has already seen two revolutions: the American Revolution and the Civil Rights movement. A third one has developed recently—the Right to Life revolution.
"It has been medically demonstrated that babies show signs of life and personality in the womb," he said. "Babies get extreme pain when they are murdered in the womb and to murder them strikes me as extremely outrageous." He showed the most antipathy toward partial birth abortion. "When you say you can murder a child halfway out of the womb, you’re not far from saying you can murder it a day or two out of the womb," he said.
He recounted a case in California where a man shot the pregnant owner of the house that he was robbing. The shot killed the fetus but not the mother, and the man was charged with homicide. "Why is he charged with homicide and an abortionist is not?" he asked. "What’s the difference?"
Stein compared the pro-life movement to the anti-slavery movement: "The early abolitionists were considered crazy. It took a moral revenge for people to realize something bad was happening there. The people up North loved the black man enough to start a movement. This now is a movement of love towards America’s unborn."
Stein is certainly no mouthpiece for the Moral Majority. He said he’s "hugely in favor of people having as much sex as they want, but I don’t consider homicide to be a form of birth control."
The actor, who has taught law at Pepperdine University in California, has a child that he adopted in the mid-1980s. He explained how he is thankful every day that his boy is alive. "This kid is an angel sent by God," he said. "Every moment I look at him I think, this kid could have ceased to be. And I’m literally on my knees thanking the woman [for not aborting].
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