Northwest Regional Forum Shows Catholic Pride A Review By THOMAS A. DROLESKEY "Who wants to be a millionaire?" Fr. Rawley Myers asked as he began the opening address, "The Saints Show Us Christ" at the third Pacific Northwest Regional Wanderer Forum, held Saturday, May 27 in Seattle. "And, of course, everyone seems to…. Catholics, spiritually, speaking, are all millionaires….We have the greatest books ever written." Fr. Myers said that he reads Chesterton every day, noting that the late essayist's writings are as current today as ever. "When you read G. K. Chesterton you see how wonderful and beautiful the Catholic faith is." But Catholics today are pretty lazy and want things, even reading, done for them, he said. "Unless you have read a Catholic book in the past year - a wholesome, Catholic book - you can't complain." The road to personal sanctity starts with individuals who take their faith seriously, Father said. "If Catholics in this country stood shoulder to shoulder we could do anything." He gave as an example a woman in his parish. "This woman, through her perseverance, got adoration of the Blessed Sacrament after daily Mass in the morning until the evening Mass. I go there and I see the love of Jesus in the eyes of these old women, usually grandmothers, who spend so much time before the Blessed Sacrament. Where do I get my inspiration? Just look at the face at one of these old grandmothers praying on her knees for an hour before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. Oh, what faith they have, these women! People say that the Church is falling apart. The theologians are falling apart, not the faith of the people," Father Myers said. He urged prayer and Eucharistic piety as the foundation for a solid spiritual life and said the direction for this comes from reading the lives of the saints. "For if parents do not know the saints their children will not know the saints. And that is tragic. Read the life of a saint-and then you will know what being a Catholic is." Steven Mosher, the head of the Population Research Institute, in Front Royal, VA, told the one hundred-plus forum participants about his research in China - and his discovery of forced abortions there -which led him to convert to the Catholic faith. In his talk, "Finding God in China," Mosher said he was doing research for his doctoral dissertation at Stanford University when he discovered the policy of forced abortions, and later publicized it. Pressure from the Red Chinese government on Stanford prevented him from receiving his doctorate. This raw example of political correctness and academic censorship was profiled on 60 Minutes in the early 1980s. "There was nothing more striking during my experience in China than my encounter with the one child (per family) policy," Mosher told the audience. He said that it was in March of 1980 that the local party secretary told him that he had just received a new directive from the party commanding more efforts to limiting population in the province of Canton. Population growth had to be limited to one percent. Mosher asked the party official how this was going to be done. The party secretary said that it was very simple. "There were 8,000 people living in the village that I control and by the end of the year there can be no more than 8,080 people." There would be a house-to-house survey. Women found to be pregnant with their second, third, or fourth child would be told that they would be forcibly aborted if they did not give consent to aborting the pregnancy. Even a newborn was killed because the family had already met its quota. It was this policy that made Mosher pro-life. "Here was a tiny human being, helpless and innocent, who was being put to death for no other reason than that the State decreed that its life should end. It was evil. And in that evil I saw that I could go one of two ways. . . . I wasn't willing to live in a universe which was made, a universe where little babies could be killed with impunity, a universe where little babies could be killed with lethal injection at birth. I didn't want to live in a universe where everyone was concerned with the here and now. And if you seek the good it will always lead you God, and it did in my case as well." The second part of his talk dealt with the threat posed to the United States and the West by Red China. He stressed that the Red Chinese mean to dominate the world, that they have no regard for innocent human life. "We think of all nation-states being fundamentally equal….That's our whole view of the world. China doesn't view the world that way. China views the world as having a single, controlling power…." and their leaders "are determined that that (power) will be China." He continued, "The notion that trade and market forces will change China into a free market democracy is a notion we have already given a twenty-year trial to. And the results are clear: China is arguably today a more repressive dictatorship than it was fifteen years ago. There are more people in prison today, there are fewer dissident groups in China today, in fact there are none that I know of that are active in China today….I believe the clock is ticking. China believes that one power will dominate, and its leaders intend for that country to be China." Quoting Karol Cardinal Wojtyla's 1969 address to Chicago academics, Fr. Robert Levis began his talk, "A Call to Catholic Reason": We are standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation that man has ever gone through. I don't think that wide circles of the American community or wide circles of the Christian community realize this fully. We're now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, between the Gospel and the anti-gospel. This confrontation lies in within the plans of Divine Providence. It's a trial which the whole Church must take up. It's a trial of not only the nature of the Church but also of a thousand years of culture and of Christian civilization and all its consequences for human dignity. Part of this confrontation, Fr. Levis noted, is the result of bad catechetics. What has happened, Fr. Levis argued, is that we have unofficially canonized experience and marginalized doctrinal norms and apostolic tradition. "Whose experience?" he asked. "Anybody's experience - your experience, my experience. This is especially true in the realm of catechetics, where children in most places in this country are not taught the faith but spend most of their time drawing pictures and coloring images in books. This has led people of all ages to believe that the final arbiter of truth and falsehood in the Church is someone's experience of gender, race, or social location. Scripture and Sacred Tradition have been abandoned, doctrine has been dumbed down. All that a Catholic needs to be is kind and nice to others, not holy as the Church has defined sanctity for nearly two millennia." The supernatural is no longer real to Catholics. The antidote to all of this, Fr. Levis said, is the Mass. It will be the restoration of reverence in the Mass which will restore the true sense of the faith to the faithful, as well as to help restore order in the world. "Be a sacrificial victim to Christ's love….We must offer all we have and do to the Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary to the Blessed Trinity….We must be victims, letting God choose our crosses, not ourselves." Dr. Thomas A. Droleskey spoke on being Catholic and American, stressing that a love for country must be premised first of all in a love for the true faith. "Our Lord is meant to be the center of each of our lives. He is meant to be uppermost in our minds and hearts when we arise each day and when we retire each night. We are to be aware at all times of the fact that the purpose of human existence is to know, to love, and to serve the Triune God in this life in order to be happy with Him for all eternity in Heaven." And that means living the Faith even in our public lives, even in our political lives. "What even many practicing Catholics fail to understand fully is that they do the Devil's bidding for him by accepting the abandonment of our Lord in politics and government as simply a natural part of the way things are supposed to be. They accept the lie of secularism, which asserts that there is some nondenominational, pluralistic way to resolve social problems." Shedding Christ in the public arena "gives the Devil free reign in civil society. For just as it is the case that he rules in a person's interior life if our Lord is not given primacy of place there, so is it the case that the Devil rules in our social life if our Lord and His Holy Church are expelled from public view, if Catholics, of all people, are ashamed of Christ and His doctrine before men…. "Yes, it really is Christ or chaos in our own individual lives and in the life of society. We must reject the false claims to salvation made by political ideologies, and we must reject the ethos of Americanism, which tries to convince us that the injunction given by our Lord to the Apostles - to teach all nations what He had revealed to them - does not apply in the concrete circumstances of the American republic. None of the evils we wish to eradicate, including abortion, will be ameliorated as long as fail to speak and to act as Catholics."