President of Notre Dame Pro-Abortion?

In a recent article from Catholic.org, it would appear that Fr. Jenkins of Notre Dame sits on the board of directors for the Millennium Village project and uses his position to direct Notre Dame monies to fund the project. This organization says that its goal is to help reduce poverty in Africa in part by creating their villages where abortions and contraceptives are available to the public. But as Catholicism teaches, and as Patrick Reilly (President of The Cardinal Newman Society) points out, "Any Catholic university that supports a program to reduce poverty by eliminating poor children has a serious problem. No Catholic should be taking a leadership role in an effort that distributes contraception or promotes abortion."

This is again another disgusting element of the already sickening scandal rocking the Christian world. Fighting poverty is a good thing - but doing so by killing the poor is vile. Where's the social justice in that? How is that helping the poor? What's worse are programs rising in India, China, and Scandinavia in which racial and gender-based abortions are acting as the new genocide in an attempt to breed the "best" humans. Isn't that just what Hitler was doing? Most people don't know this, but Hitler was loved by one certain American: the founder of Planned Parenthood. But beyond abortion, other countries are seeing a steep decline in their population from both abortion and contraceptives. Italy, a "Catholic" country, has the lowest birth rate in the world. Experts say by 2050 there may be no Italians left as the country will be replaced by immigrants - mostly Muslims from Africa.

The Islamic world, by the way, has an average birth rate of 8.1!

But I believe the root problem of all this is that "Christians" are losing their root in the Gospel. Pope John Paul II wrote an encyclical called Evangelium Vitae (the Gospel of Life) - because that's exactly what the Gospel is. When Christians turn away from life in all its forms, they lose their own Christianity. St. Paul tells us in Ephesians that husbands are supposed to love their wives as Jesus loved the Church. But how did Jesus love the Church? He laid down his life for her to make her holy. In other words, love is shown in life-giving, self sacrifice.

Our modern world, however, believes only in life-taking selfishness.

It's sad Christians are falling for that worldview. But it does make sense why Christians abort, contracept, divorce, and commit substance abuse at about the same rate as non-Christians - because at this point, there's really no difference between an average "Christian" and a non-Christian. This is how nominalism is killing the faith in America. "Nominal" Christians are simply people who call themselves Christians but do not live Christianity. Nominal comes from the Latin word "nomina" which means name. Thus nominal Christians are Christian in name only.

(By the way, denominationalism amongst Christianity, means "from the name" and is thus the reason why Catholicism is not a denomination. Catholicism is the name from which Protestant denominations derive.)

In conclusion, I just want to point out something that theologian Christopher West said recently. West is a scholar on Pope John Paul II's theology of the body in which the pope sought to synthesize the positive aspects of modern sexuality with the Gospel while not succumbing to the evils that have arisen in the past 50 years. In this particular quote, West notes the division that has taken place between faith and reason (which has particularly happened in politics!). Most people think that that theology has little practical importance - but just see how the fact that "God is love" affects the entirety of our lives:

"The problem is we have kicked God out of the bedroom. Do the math on that. If God is love, and we kick him out of the bedroom, then what's going on in your bedroom? It ain't love."

So true. Apparently Fr. Jenkins doesn't believe this - and that's exactly why he shouldn't be running Notre Dame.