Fr. Hans

Barbarity in the American Heartland: Terry Schiavo’s Struggle for Life

By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

I never believed that I would live in a country that would, in effect, execute a brain-damaged woman who never hurt anyone in her life. The story of Terry Schiavo should outrage every decent American. While our soldiers valiantly fight and die across the sea so that complete strangers can enjoy human rights, here at home an American woman who suffered severe brain damage fifteen years ago after a heart attack is about to be subjected to death by dehydration and starvation by order of a judge. Today, her feeding tube was removed.

The humanity of every society is determined first and foremost by how it treats its most helpless citizens, and a nation that is prepared to murder a feeble and vulnerable woman who can breathe, but not eat on her own, must take a deeper look at the source of its ethics.
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Charles Colson on fear and God

Charles Colson writes in the WSJ (article available seven days only):

Americans are still spellbound by the saga of Ashley Smith, the young Atlanta widow held hostage by murder suspect Brian Nichols. Reporters covering the story seem mystified that anyone at the mercy of an escaped inmate — one who had that very day killed another woman and three men — could remain so calm…The reason was that, as she herself implied in later interviews, Ms. Smith had learned to trust God.

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Toward Tradition says…

… to Michael Schiavo and Judge George Greer: “What part of ‘Thou Shall Not Kill’ do you not understand?”

Mercer Island, WA – Toward Tradition and Rabbi Daniel Lapin urge the husband of neurology patient Terri Schindler-Schiavo, and Judge George Greer, who issued her death warrant, to recognize that starving an invalid is murder, not mercy.

Florida Circuit Court Judge Greer Thursday last week re-interpreted the law, calling food and water “medical treatment,” thus allowing Michael Schiavo to withdraw Mrs. Schindler-Schiavo’s feeding tube. This also ignores the rights of Terri’s primary caretakers and loyal defenders, her mother and father. The court has ordered all food and water withheld beginning this Friday, March 18th; it is expected to take her between 1- 2 weeks to starve or dehydrate to death. One wonders if they will attempt to withhold air as well.
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Fr. Patrick Reardon on Orthodox Christian Lent, prayer, fasting, and baptism

The word “Lent,” now associated exclusively with the observance of the liturgical year, originally meant “spring” and had no directly religious significance. In English usage, however, its reference was gradually limited to the season of preparation for Pascha, a season that does, in fact, coincide with spring.

In languages dependent on Latin, the word for Lent is some variant of “forty,” derived from the Latin *quadragesima*. This is a period of forty days of fasting in imitation of the Lord himself, who observed exactly that length of time in fasting prior to the beginning of his earthly ministry. Lent is also associated with the forty day fasts of Moses, on Mount Sinai, and of Elijah, as he journeyed to that same mountain. Doubtless it was this combination of Jesus, Moses, and Elijah together on the mountain of Transfiguration that prompted many believers to read that Gospel story near the beginning of Lent.
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Freedom Fighters

Jamie Glazov writes in Front Page Magazine”

The winds of liberty are blowing throughout the Middle East. A peoples’ uprising is transpiring in Lebanon, as citizens of that tortured country courageously confront, in mass numbers, their Syrian oppressors and demand their evacuation. This inspiring scene brings us back to the powerful images of Eastern Europeans rising up against their communist dictators in 1989 and driving them from power.

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Patriach Bartholomew on the “Immaculate Conception”

From: 30 Days

The Catholic Church this year celebrates the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. How does the Eastern Christian and Byzantine Tradition celebrate the Conception of Mary and her full and immaculate holiness?

Bartholomew I: The Catholic Church found that it needed to institute a new dogma for Christendom about one thousand and eight hundred years after the appearance of the Christianity, because it had accepted a perception of original sin – a mistaken one for us Orthodox – according to which original sin passes on a moral stain or a legal responsibility to the descendants of Adam, instead of that recognized as correct by the Orthodox faith – according to which the sin transmitted through inheritance the corruption, caused by the separation of mankind from the uncreated grace of God, which makes him live spiritually and in the flesh. Mankind shaped in the image of God, with the possibility and destiny of being like to God, by freely choosing love towards Him and obedience to his commandments, can even after the fall of Adam and Eve become friend of God according to intention; then God sanctifies them, as he sanctified many of the progenitors before Christ, even if the accomplishment of their ransom from corruption, that is their salvation, was achieved after the incarnation of Christ and through Him.
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