Transcript of the Talk on the Sanctity of Human Life

Society built on Lies – Transcript of the Talk on the Sanctity of Human Life
by veilofveronica


Picture of Church of the Visitation in Westphalia, TX that was totally lost to fire. I find this picture to be very prophetic. Our Lady has warned us time and again to turn back to God and of what will happen if we don't.

I gave a talk at the Carmel Center on the Sanctity of Human Life. This is a transcript (with a few tweaks) of the talk I gave. Many of you have heard parts of my story before, but I hope you will still read it as it pertains to the Sanctity of Human Life. As we live in a world of shootings and murder, now more than ever, we need to recognize that we are the walking wounded, who have believed the accuser, and don't know how much we are loved by God.

Good Afternoon, it’s wonderful to be here today. I am sure you all are thinking, wow, Father Andrew Bulso looks so strange…. Unfortunately he was unable to make it today so I am here in his place to talk to you about the Sanctity of Human Life. Please pray for our Priests.

My name is Susan Skinner and I am a wife to my husband Jason and a Mother to 3 children, two teens and one tween and one child lost to miscarriage. I am also a Catholic blogger at Veil of Veronica, I have written for the National Catholic Register and I am a columnist at Catholic Stand. I am the RCIA and Adult Faith Formation Coordinator, A Spiritual Director and a member of the Deliverance Ministry there.

I want to begin my talk on the Sanctity of Human Life with a quote from Saint Teresa of Calcutta;

"We must not be surprised when we hear of murders, of killings, of wars, of hatred. If a mother can kill her own child, what is left but for us to kill each other."

I begin with this statement because it is so profound and speaks to the devastation we see across our society today. And to how we as a society got where we are, where life can be tossed aside easily. And I want to share with you a personal story that may seem out of context, but I assure you it is not. I tell this story because it impacted profoundly my view of Catholic Church teachings on the Sanctity of Human Life.

I will begin by telling you a little bit of my background. I am a cradle Catholic. I grew up in a home that prayed to Rosary together. I went to 16 years of Catholic school. I was well catechized by my parents. But I also grew up in the 80’s and 90’s, a tumultuous time, a wild time. Though my parents taught me well and I valued what they taught me, I also had adopted a worldly view when it came to certain aspects of the faith. By the time I got married, I was a grocery store Catholic, picking and choosing which teachings I would follow. I was always ardently against abortion, so this made me conclude I was very pro-life, and that I very much valued the sanctity of life.

I had my first child about 18 months after my wedding, on the Feast of Saint Stanislaus of Krakow, patron of moral order, though I didn’t realize it was his feast at the time. I suffered very severe post-partum depression and anxiety. In fact, the voices in my head barraged me so badly with images that I could not control that there was a point I didn’t value my own life. I remember clearly one day sitting in the bathtub thinking I couldn’t make the voices stop so I will just put my head under the water and never come up. At that moment in time I got a very clear image in my head of my sister. I knew that she would be sad, so I instead of sticking my head under the water I looked to my left and I saw a Rosary on the side of the bathtub. I picked it up and began to pray it. I don’t think I realized the spiritual warfare that was going on around me at the time. I thought I was suffering a physiological response to a drop in estrogen, or at least that’s what the Doctors told me.

The journey from there was one of many ups and downs. The doctors wanted to help me get better giving me the best advice they knew. I went to counseling. I took medication, I exercised, tried to sleep as much as you can with a new baby, and of course, took birth control because they told me, as the world tells you, you cannot have another baby who will be such a burden. And I believed what they told me. I didn’t see or realize at all what was happening.

I followed the advice and within a year I would feel almost normal. I got to a place of “good enough” but that place was filled with ebbs and tides of high anxiety mixed with some depression. But I was functioning. I prayed on and off, mostly begging God to stop my anxiety.

I remember when I went off birth control and was pregnant with my second son how upset my doctor got with me, verbally reprimanding me in a very hostile tone telling me how I was putting myself in jeopardy. As I hung up, I felt sad that she was not happy for the new life that had been created.

I hung up the phone and I prayed to God and I told him, “Jesus, I trust in you.” After a pregnancy filled with complications. I gave birth prematurely to a healthy baby boy on September 29, the Feast of the Archangels. I didn’t know that at the time either, even as I named him after one of them.

My husband and I decided, myself somewhat reluctantly, we were done having children.

I went back to my comfort zone of praying sometimes, going to church regularly, and using birth control. At some point, I decided the birth control was making me fat, so I went off of it. In hindsight, my worldly view was still used by God to bring us the great blessing of our daughter, born of the feast of Saint Polycarp. Little did I know what was about to happen in my life that would make me hear the words of Saint Polycarp, when he went before the Roman proconsul, “hear me declare with boldness, I am a Christian and if you wish to learn what the Doctrines of Christianity are, appoint me a day, and you shall hear them.”

 

Those words mean a lot to me, as I stand here before you today to proclaim them myself.

About a year and a half after my daughter was born, I got a call from my friend Veronica, who was the mother of my oldest’s son’s best friend. Veronica wanted to know if my son could sleep over. I got sick to my stomach, and I didn’t know why because my son had slept over her house plenty of times before. I told her he couldn’t sleep over but that I would bring him over and let him play for the day and I would pick him up before dinner. At 4 o’clock I drove out to her house to pick him up. I chatted with her about how wonderful our boys were. She was so positive, pouring life into them about what blessings they were. I drove home for an uneventful evening.

I got a call the next morning from another friend who was distraught and crying. It seems, she told me, that someone shot and killed my friend Veronica in her home and she lay dead right there where I had stood talking to her less than 24 hours before. I found out later there were 4 bullets in her head.

In all the sufferings of my life I don’t think anything could have prepared me for this. I felt like I had been punched in the stomach. I couldn’t breath and I couldn’t stop crying. I actually laid down on my bedroom floor and wailed. It seems that Veronica and her husband were going through a divorce and he decided to hire a hit man to kill her. I couldn’t understand. I couldn’t fathom it.

I cried out to God. I screamed at him. How could you let this happen? Why Lord? And in the middle of my fit of rage at God, He answered me.

He said, “I don’t want this, people choose this.” He had been waiting a long time for me to talk to him, really talk to him. I asked God, “what, what in the world can I do, in this awful place?” He answered me. He said, “Susan, good in the world starts with you.” I began to think. I thought about how I had seen Veronica and her husband in church together and I wondered, how can a person who would murder sit in church? God answered me again. He told me that her husband did not start out a murderer, but that his sin had grown in his heart and gone unchecked, and had lead down a long dark path. I remembered the bible verse that stated, “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”( Matthew 5:28) That was the moment that verse made sense to me. I never had understood it. I had always thought, “how can a thought be a sin?” But after her murder it made sense to me. Sin starts with a thought, a suggestion thrown your way, it moves to your heart and takes over until you act on it with your hands, sin helps you to justify and dehumanize. And if we never take the time to examine our conscience, or think about what is right and what is wrong, well then, we can really go down a wrong path.

So Lord, “what can I do?” He told me that the only person I could control was myself. That I can choose to love and spread that love outward. For me this meant examining my own conscience and trying to become a better person. Did I love my enemy? or even my neighbor, for that matter? The answer was a resounding, NO. Oh my, I thought, I have not always spread love and left people better off for knowing me. I realized too in these personal moments of conversation with God how I had compromised on the things that he had asked of me.

 

In the months to follow I came across Pope Paul the VI encyclical, Humae Vitae and I was astonished at the words I read. He spoke of the consequences of contraception, divorce, adultery, abortion, the general lowering of moral standards, the government becoming involved in promoting contraception and involved in the most intimate decisions of husband and wife, a place where God should actually be the center of their decisions.

I was shocked and ashamed as I read these prophetic words. I had considered myself a good Catholic. I was not. As I laid crying in my room realizing all of the ways I had been blind, I thought about confession. I had always hated this Sacrament, but here in this place, I found it to be a gift. A gift I was grateful for.

I went and made the biggest confession of my life. In telling my sins, I was able to encounter Christ. In this Sacrament, I received the grace that Jesus offers to us when we choose to ask for it. I took a good hard look at myself and my selfishness started to burn away because of the love I encountered in confessing.

I also realized the way I had judged others, and how much I had bought into a view of the world that promoted myself and didn’t reach out to others. I thought of Veronica. In Catholicism while Jesus is in His Passion, walking His way to Golgotha, bloodied and beaten, He comes across a woman named Veronica. Veronica wipes the face of Jesus. A small kindness. This man, this God man, was bloodied, beaten, tired, in agony, and this women, Veronica, provided a brief respite, if you will. A few seconds where the sweat and blood were wiped away, and for a moment, however brief, He felt love from this woman. It did not stop His Passion, His suffering, but in a world that was mocking Him, scourging Him, that woman’s touch with the cloth must have felt glorious. So He imprinted His image on her cloth. Veronica, means “True Image”.

I understood what it meant to value the sanctity of life that God creates, and I knew in a moment that the Doctrines of our Church are true.

When this veil is lifted, it is like coming out of a fog. Life is a gift, from conception to natural death. I realized that there is an active entity seeking to steal, kill and destroy. And Satan has done a very good job. By convincing us that contraception is okay he has stolen our fertility. He slaughters our children in abortion. 56 million a year worldwide, more than all other causes of death combined. He is destroying marriage and the family. And we have been trained to think by him. It’s why Saint Paul tells us to take captive every thought.

But Jesus told us;

... from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother [and be joined to his wife], and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, no human being must separate.”

It’s no wonder that Satan wants to distort even what it means to be male and female these days. We know as Catholic’s that what God made is good, made in His image and likeness. Yet Satan wants to convince us otherwise. He does everything he can to get people into bed before they marry and everything he can to stop them in bed after they’re married, and we have listened. Listened to a voice that serves the wrong kingdom. And we as a society have created laws to serve the wrong kingdom. I am very much aware as a child born in 1972 how my life was protected by LAW. In fact, when I look at my ancestry, it doesn’t require me to look very far before I find a scenario where today I may not exist if we had had today’s laws back then.

When my Grandmother was in her 60’s she found out she was adopted. Her mother, the woman who raised her, never told her she was adopted and the father she thought died in a war, may never have actually existed. What she did find out was that she was born with a different name than the one she had, and that the woman who she thought was her mother was not. Many of my family members have tried to investigate her ancestry, and have pieced together some scenarios, but due to the death of the woman who raised my Grandmother as her own, and a lack of the birth records, we will perhaps never know the full truth, though we have a good idea.

The thought that has struck me time and again is that because her birth seemed so shrouded in secrecy, there was shame attached to it. In today’s day and age that kind of shame, the kind that breeds secrecy like that, would make a woman abortion minded. Some of the scenarios that I have been told that surround my Grandmother’s arrival on this earth are scenarios today where people would have an abortion. Whatever the case, I can’t help but think if my Great-Grandmother had been pregnant today, she may have been a woman at huge risk for aborting her child. That my Grandmother lived, I can perhaps attribute to the fact that the LAW protected her life. I often think about this. That if abortion had been acceptable back then, I may not exist. Though I know there was probably much suffering surrounding the birth of my Grandmother, the joy that was brought forth into the world by her and her family line has been boundless. There is no shame in that.

The impact of this on my family personally is profound. My grandmother, with her murky story of coming into existence, had 12 children. I there are at least 54 grandchildren, and many, many more great-grandchildren. We are doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, firemen, policemen, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters. If my grandmother had been aborted there are literally now hundreds of us who would not exist.

I was once told online that if my ancestor had been aborted, I wouldn’t be around “to give an (expletive),” so I should just be pro-abortion. That statement presupposes that my life has no meaning, that my brother and sisters, that my cousins, my nieces and my nephews, we don’t matter to the world. I know for a fact that is not true. We matter. We matter to those who love us, to those whose lives we have impacted and most importantly to God, who knew us before He formed us in the womb. Every life is precious.

The impact of abortion goes far beyond mother and child, it impacts generations, generations that are lost. We often seem to narrowly look at the specific person who is in an unplanned pregnancy situation - even more so only the woman and not the man. But what I found to be true in my own family made me pull way back and see the countless lives that were affected by the one choice of my great grandmother. This is something we need to be talking about. We need to help others pull back and see the generations of human lives that are cutoff from life by this one choice.

When it comes down to it, the mentality that accepts abortion, is a mentality that devalues. It is a very narrow view, thinking of only the immediate situation and not considering others that may be affected. This devaluation of human life spreads from being pro-choice, eventually permeating all aspects of society. This is because the source of the pro-choice argument is a lie. Although a lie can sometimes seem like it is in the best interest of the person, as you logically follow that lie from its source, we eventually find ourselves in a place where starving a person in the hospital becomes acceptable, or eliminating the life of a healthy baby who may have an unfavorable genetic makeup is the recommendation of the doctors. Moreover, the elderly are deemed unnecessary once they need so much of our care and help and so we find ourselves tossing them aside, in the name of mercy. Where we end up by following the lie is where good is called evil and evil is called good. This is what Saint Teresa of Calcutta means by what she said. But she and Pope Paul VI take it even further when they include the mentality of the acceptance of contraceptives, this is where the real breakdown began. Contraceptives allowed sexuality to become twisted, and children become commodities to be bought and sold and created in a lab.

ArchBishop Fulton Sheen stated; Once the idea is introduced that one may take the life of a person because he is not useful to the state, then it will not be long before we are taking his life because his ideas are not the same as those of the state. In 1936 Hitler introduced the idea of mercy killing under the lying title of ‘Charitable Foundation for Institutional Care.’ The basic principal was that those who could not be of benefit to society should be killed. Up to the outbreak of the war 275,000 people were put to death. Once the door was opened for destroying the sanctity of a single personality, there was nothing to stop wholesale slaughter.”

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What a truly wonderful and honest talk.

Susan talks about Spiritual Warfare going on around us and this is so very,very true. The night before last I was getting read for work on the night shift and just before going out decided to take the dogs for a quick walk around the area where I live. I had alread checked the weather forcast and although it is August I had seen that it is to rain everyday for the next fortnight. This is , I believe a Judgemnt , one of many falling on Ireland for its Apostasy.

Although not yet nine in the evning the light was very grey and grim , the rain falling in a gentle haze. Although i am normally very happy and at peace I fel a grim, grim coldness and sadness in my heart. Feeling of prossion and the uslessness of all things came over me.

It was onyl the next day as I walked in summer sunlight I realsied I had been the subject of an attack. But it seems to me if such a thing could hit myself, someone who prays constantly and goes to mass daily as my job pemrits how much harder must life be for people who are far from God; who seldom or never pray? Worse how much harder will it become for them when the World changes and things become stark?

The answer is as Suan found the Light of Prayer, the Light of the Rosary, our only refuge.

Our LAdy , Satr of the Sea, pray for us who have recourse to thee!!

 

I have heard it said that attacks are fierce on those who are trying to be holy (especially religious) and also families, and that many others are already in satan's pocket... But I also believe he attacks the lowly, those he can push to suicide and/or evil deeds. There is NO doubt that he is unrestrained right now and doing mega damage!

 

Thank you sparrow for posting this.

 

My pleasure.