Question of Faith
A weekly question of faith answered by Cleveland Catholics. Fr. Damian Ference, Vicar of Evangelization and Deacon Mike Hayes Director of Young Adult Ministry in the Diocese of Cleveland co-host with frequent guests from the Diocesan Office who join in the conversation.
Question of Faith
Is There a Relation Between War and Contraception
What is the link between war and contraception, and why might these be considered the most profitable investments in today's world? Join Father Damian Ference, Deacon Mike Hayes, and Maria Wancata as they explore Pope Francis's provocative remarks made during a recent conference in Italy. We dissect the Holy Father's bold view, delving into the criticism of overpopulation theories, the impact of secularism, materialism, and consumerism on birth rates, and the modern challenges young couples face in balancing work and childcare. Reflecting on 50 years of societal changes, we underscore the significance of intergenerational relationships and shifting household priorities.
In the second part of our episode, we tackle the challenge of nurturing virtuous habits and the importance of long-term growth, drawing from Deacon Mike's own weight loss journey as a metaphor. Echoing Pope Francis's teachings on accompaniment, we discuss the demanding yet attainable nature of church doctrines on sexuality and fertility. Our conversation also emphasizes charity and tolerance in teaching doctrine, while offering mercy and encouragement to those who struggle. Don't miss out on our previews of upcoming faith events like the Faith and Science conference and the beginning of Theology on Tap. Join us for an engaging and thought-provoking episode that encourages understanding and support within our community.
St Vitus is this week's church search and check out their open mic night.
The readings for the 23rd Sunday in Ordinary time can be found here.
On today's Question of Faith. Is there a relation between war and contraception? Hey there everybody, this is Question of Faith. I am Deacon Mike Hayes. I'm the Director of Young Adult Ministry here in the Diocese of Cleveland.
Speaker 2:And I'm Father Damian Ferencz, the Vicar for Evangelization.
Speaker 3:And I'm Maria Wancotta, Marriage and Family Ministry Specialist.
Speaker 2:Yes, you are hey. Welcome back, maria.
Speaker 1:Always good to have you.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Good softball season for you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, personally I always love playing. It's my favorite pastime.
Speaker 2:Although I was at the softball all-star game last week and you weren't there, you were tending to your primary vocation.
Speaker 3:As wife and mother. Yes, it's fall sports season which comes before.
Speaker 1:Which is just more sports for you. Yeah, yeah, every night of the week.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I keep getting invited to play with a friend on Tuesday nights and I can't, I can't during the fall.
Speaker 1:Is it really every night of the week?
Speaker 3:Is there a league somewhere?
Speaker 1:No, no, no, I mean for your kiddos.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's cross Monday through Thursday practice, soccer practice and games pretty much every day except Sunday, wow, okay, yeah, I forget what those days are, like you know, yeah. But soon enough they'll be over so that's right.
Speaker 1:Cherish them while I can. Yeah, that's right, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:So it was maybe last week. I was on X, formerly Twitter, and I found something interesting and I sent it over to deacon mike, because our holy father, as you know, just likes to keep people on their toes and he puts things in very strange ways. Like he has said, if you throw away food, you are stealing from the poor. Um, abortion is like calling a hitman out for somebody like this. This is the kind of thing that he says.
Speaker 1:All not wrong.
Speaker 2:No but he's just got a very colorful way of saying what he says, which is great, and so he said something recently. I sent this over to Deacon Mike and I thought this would be fun to talk about on the podcast. So he equated war and contraception and found a relationship between the two. And, maria, you have the article before you, so maybe you can summarize what he said.
Speaker 3:Yeah, these comments were actually from our conference in Italy in May the general state of the birth rate and he made the remark that the most profitable investments today are weapons and contraceptives and that one destroys life and the other prevents it what's funny is that he said this in may and I only heard of it for the first time last week sam, we were just saying that before the show started.
Speaker 3:It's very interesting, yeah yeah, but even just a couple weeks ago fox 8 ran a story on the declining birth rate in the us, so this topic continues to come up. Oh yeah, the topic.
Speaker 2:The topic is not, that's not a surprise. The fact that the Holy Father said something that like that and then I didn't hear about it for a long time is a bit of a surprise. So, because a lot of times people pick up on that, that's true, yeah, anyways. So do you want to read a little bit more about what he said, or explain what his comment was, and was it? It wasn't part of a prepared text, it was part of a comment afterwards.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. So some of his main thoughts were that he began the speech by criticizing the idea of overpopulation and that the problem is not how many people are in the world, it's not children but selfishness. And then he posed the question what kind of world are we building? And that the low birth rate is a consequence of not seeing another human being as a gift and it shows an overall lack of hope in the world, and that homes are now being filled with objects instead of children.
Speaker 3:And so really kind of the secularization, the materialism, consumerism that we see in our culture and the world, the materialism, consumerism that we see in our culture and the world, and that, um to kind of reframe everything, he called for policies that enable mothers to not have to choose between work and child care, um giving young couples the chance for a stable, stable home and to buy a house.
Speaker 3:but also he went back to um what he says, a lot about the value of grandparents and the elderly and building these intergenerational relationships, because the youth are fearless but the elderly have wisdom and they need to pass that wisdom on.
Speaker 2:And the youth are fearless to a point, but there is a lot of fear there when it comes to commitment, to getting married and then being willing to bring children into the world. That's scary for a lot of folks and again, as you mentioned, a problem of secularism one of many is this notion that children can be a burden and you have to have everything completely lined up in your life in order to welcome you know, welcome children into the world. When the truth is you, you learn how to be a parent by being a parent, just like you learn how to be a priest by getting ordained and going and doing priestly stuff and you learn how to budget by having things come up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know and and prioritizing like this now is part of our family and was we. This person didn't exist before, but now does, and that switches the whole way that you, you approach living, even right yeah, here's.
Speaker 1:Here's a great example of this that will paint a little picture of this. So 50 years ago, what do you think the number one household purchase was for a family like moving into a new home? What do you think they bought first, made sure that they had in their house.
Speaker 2:Well, because of the way you asked it, I'm going to say a crib.
Speaker 1:No, but that's a good guess, actually A fridge.
Speaker 2:You're much closer with a fridge Washing machine.
Speaker 1:No, now you're cold again. The stove and the fridge were about right. What?
Speaker 2:would you Dining room table?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's the one, yeah, the dining room table. Yeah, right, and chairs. Now, what's the number one thing that people buy? Wi-fi.
Speaker 1:Yeah a computer or television would be the one. About 10 years ago it was a television. Now I think the computers have it. Home computers have eclipsed or phones have eclipsed those items, but that shows you where we've moved. Right, you know what was most important was to keep the family together, make sure we were having a meal together every single night, and you know now it's not so much. You know now the center of almost every living room is a television set.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And the chairs are not necessarily pointed toward each other I'll say, uh, we moved into a new house 13 years ago and it was one one that we built like from, like those I don't know box homes, but like most of them now don't come with a floor plan, with a dining room.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And you know I watch a lot my wife watches a lot of these home shows and I get, you know, suckered into them. Yeah, and I'm sitting there watching. And the other day there was an older home it was actually in Cleveland, which was funny on one of these and there was an older home and they said, well, because this is an older room, look at all the room that the dining room had, I was like that's interesting.
Speaker 3:And I said to Mary and I said oh, we can talk about this tomorrow.
Speaker 2:This is interesting and you could probably make a relation to that in mass attendance. Because if you don't know how to eat with your family. If you don't have a family, then how would you? Why would it be important to you to be part of a family of faith where the Lord provides himself as food in the Eucharistic sacrifice?
Speaker 1:Plus, family traditions that get passed along usually get passed along at the dinner table. I remember going home with a friend for Thanksgiving and we went it was to her family's house and we all sat around and the mother at one point said, okay, everybody and we all kind of were like, oh, we're going to say something now, what's going on? And she said you know, we all have a question that we have to answer. Where did you see Jesus today?
Speaker 3:And everybody had to go around.
Speaker 1:I was not part of their nuclear family, obviously, but I had to participate in this and I was like this is really nice, you know? Yeah, it was nice.
Speaker 3:No meals are very important and there was a study issued earlier this year from the CARA Institute on raising Catholic children or children that stay Catholic and it was. Having dinner meal together as a family is one of the most important things in passing on and keeping the faith with your children.
Speaker 2:Interesting. One of the things about what the Holy Father does in equating war and contraception here reminded me of a lot of what John Paul II did in recognizing our desire to control and to solve bigger problems with simple solutions that are often immoral. So you have an unwanted pregnancy, you abort. Someone violates you, you punch back or you bomb back. Someone takes somebody's life, then you electrocute them or you know whatever the what is the other?
Speaker 1:lethal injection yeah lethal injection.
Speaker 2:Um, you, you want a easier life, or you're you know you decide to artificially contracept, and we could get into there's. There's ways that you can space children, um, naturally, but that's not what the holy father is talking about here, um, so there's this tendency, especially in American culture, to have everything you want and then what you don't want. You can take a pill for that, whether it is for cholesterol or diabetes or birth control, and there's certain, obviously, people have certain issues where you need to take particular medications for these. I'm not saying that those aren't valid, but I think too easily as a culture, we attempt to solve our problems by the easy fix, the quick fix, rather than what virtue teaches is building new habits over time and choosing the good, and that's hard, especially at first. Like Deacon Mike, you've lost 17 pounds, correct, is that right? Because I saw you in your jersey last week in the softball game.
Speaker 2:I'm like Deacon Mike looks pretty good. Well, thank you very much, but my guess is that it wasn't easy to do that, because I've seen what you've been eating at meals on Tuesdays and all that. So you take on some new habits and then things happen, but it's like the long haul and that's hard. It's hard to build up those new habits. Slow and steady though, yeah, but that's how virtue is built and that's how things last that way. So I think in some ways that's also what the Holy Father is getting at, and it's not like he's wagging a finger and saying this to make people feel terrible about themselves.
Speaker 2:I think when the Pope or anybody speaks prophetically, what ought to be coming from the heart is let me point out a truth to you that can actually set you free over time, and Bishop Barron likes to say, you challenge the person to the degree to which you're willing to walk with that person in growing, and I think that's a big part of our job. So if a couple is contraceptive, or if they're outside of marriage or having sex, or if political leaders are coming in and talk to us about bombing people and weapons, then it's our job to sit and have intelligent conversations, helpful conversations, listen to explain what it is that is like reality. So those are my, like you know, 5,000-foot or 30,000-foot ideas on like. Philosophically, I think what's going on here is this notion of I'm going to be in control of this whole thing, rather than letting God be in control and participating with the natural rhythms of life or the natural law or whatever you want to call it.
Speaker 1:And, I think, the accompaniment part that you just mentioned before. I think that's important because, like a lot of people will say, well, it's easy for Pope Francis to say this, or any celibate male for that case, because they don't have to deal with whatever comes after childbirth Sure. Okay, not an unfair point, but the accompaniment part is what he's talking about. He's like no, no, no, this is all of our problems. Yeah, you know, literally it takes a village right. We all have to support each other in these things.
Speaker 2:Yes, keep talking, because I'm going to pull something up. That's really good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that's fine yeah, and but I mean I think that you know you don't have to completely walk in somebody else's shoes to accompany them through those kinds of things. At the same time, you don't have to accompany someone. You don't have to walk and say you don't have to be the other person in order to judge somebody's wrongness of something either. You know, if I see someone shoot somebody, I could say no, that's wrong.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:To take an extreme example.
Speaker 3:you know, yeah, and in reading through a few of the articles about his remarks and watching some videos of it, I mean he was correctly assessing a situation that across the board there's a decline in birth rates and that that shows a lack of hope, a fear of starting family, of having children, and other things are replacing filling that void, and so he recommended some ways that policies could be adjusted for that. But I mean it speaks to a broader issue, one of not understanding how our fertility is integrated to the human person, even for women, understanding how our bodies work, how our cycles work and what, even like health science, that that shows us and that contraception is. It neutralizes you, it shuts down a natural function of the body and with all of that that impacts marriages, it impacts relationships.
Speaker 1:So impacts the environment.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and it is a big issue, a moral issue that we all need to be addressing and thinking about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can say this and I think we should say this way more often than we do that the church's teachings on sexuality are difficult but possible.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And they're also true.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so. But I think when you just say, well, this is what the church teaches, and also admit that it's hard, there's a reason we have this sacrament of reconciliation, there's a reason we need support. What I was trying to pull up here and I did is from Humanae Vitae. This is paragraph 29, and I love it. And he's talking about not—this is Paul VI.
Speaker 2:Yes, he says Now, it is an outstanding manifestation of charity towards souls to omit nothing from the saving doctrine of the church. All right, teach what the church teaches, but this must always be joined with tolerance and charity, as Christ himself showed in his conversations and dealings with men. For when he came not to judge but to save the world, was he not bitterly severe towards sin, but patient and abounding in mercy towards sinners? Then he goes on, so speak with full confidence, convinced that while the Holy Spirit of God is present in the magisterium, proclaiming sound doctrine, he also illuminates from within the hearts of the faithful and invites their ascent. Teach married couples the necessary way of prayer, prepare them to approach more often, with great faith, the sacraments of the Eucharist and repentance, and let them never lose heart because of their weakness and I don't think we're very good at that. Like people get weak and then lift them up and don't chide them for it, be like, okay, come on back.
Speaker 1:Like the Lord is merciful and he never stops in his mercy, I think that's really important, I think most married couples I know who have struggled with these things, that you know that I've been graced to hear their stories is that they all say you know, look, none of us have done this perfectly. You've all run into something one way or the other, and maybe it gives people hope to admit that from time to time Say, hey, look, I'm not perfect. This doesn't work for me all the time either. I'm sinful. At times I fall into bad practices and things like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and that's one part of our life. That's part of one part of our our life, and the Lord wants all parts of our life. And there's and, and I think, because sexuality is so um intimate and so private. Sometimes we think oh my gosh, these are, these are terrible, um and so charged, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they sell newspapers and the other thing is when it comes to like carnal sins, like food and sex, you know, when you've done it, because you're either overweight or you puke or you're pregnant or something, there's no way to say. I'm not sure if I was really prideful there. It's very obvious because it's so external and this is why the deeper sins are the sins of envy and pride and lack of humility, and those even go deeper, the cold-blooded ones rather than the hot-blooded ones. I mean, sin is sin, certainly, but yeah, it's. I think the Holy Father. I'm glad he said what he said, because it gets us talking about important things and what is often passed off by a secular culture. Yeah, obviously everyone contracepts.
Speaker 2:He's like no no no, we should rethink this again. So it's helpful.
Speaker 1:There you go. Okay, I think we covered that one. Always good. Thank you, pope Francis, for continuing to push the envelope on these things. He does, he's not afraid to do that, certainly he's not afraid to do that In one way or the other too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he's an equal opportunity offender. Truly, his job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. He does it, he does it well, he does it well, all right.
Speaker 1:So hey, on Thursday there's going to be an open mic night at one of your favorite parishes Father, st Vitus.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, my classmate Father John Ratar is the pastor there. They have a nice hall. That's probably where the open mic night's going to be, huh.
Speaker 1:Beautiful church. I'm looking it up right now.
Speaker 2:It's on.
Speaker 1:Lausch, Actually it's at Goldhorn Brewery. Oh, okay, so it's not at the parish, but Young Vitus is sponsored, so it's on September 5th, if you're listening, and then food at 6 o'clock and the acts will start at 6.30. If you want to perform or you're interested, you can follow Young Vitus Ministry on Instagram or you can text 216-317-4666.
Speaker 3:Any type of performance Musical Poverty on Instagram or you can text 216-317-4666.
Speaker 1:Any type of performance Musical Poetry.
Speaker 2:It just says what to perform. Maybe Mary Fugate will go there and do ballerina, do ballet, do ballerina. It's not like Dr Steve Brill Do ballerina.
Speaker 1:Check it out Exactly. And then our readings for this coming Sunday, the 23rd in Ordinary Time. People brought to him a deaf man who had a speech impediment this is from Mark and begged him to lay his hand on him. He took him off by himself, away from the crowd, he put his finger into the man's ears and, spitting, touched his tongue and he looked up to heaven and groaned and said to him Epheta, that is be opened. And immediately the man's ears were opened, his speech impediment was removed and he spoke plainly. He ordered them not to tell anyone. But the more he ordered them not to, the more they proclaimed it. I love that part.
Speaker 2:Well, I love it because it's so incarnational. I mean, he takes him off away from the crowd, finger in his ears spitting, touching his tongue. He's groaning. I mean, if anyone thinks Christianity is abstract, they would be wrong. Just by reading this gospel. It's very earthy and incarnational.
Speaker 1:I think it's a call to us too. How are we not open? Sometimes there's more than one way of being deaf. There are plenty of folks that I don't want to listen to, that I kind of ignore and push to the side, like society pushed this deaf man to the side as well.
Speaker 3:That's the phrase I had highlighted be opened. The man tells all of us to be open to receive him.
Speaker 1:And even back in the first ring, say to those whose hearts are frightened be strong, fear not. Here is your God. He comes with vindication. People get pushed aside. Fear not, God's still on your side.
Speaker 2:We're back to those young couples who are like I don't know if I could be committed.
Speaker 1:I don't know if I could be committed.
Speaker 2:I don't know if I, if you're not, if you're not if you're not there, you go. All right, Maria. Thanks again for coming by. Always good to have you. Thank you. No softball update, but maybe volleyball or bowling in the future. That's the rumor.
Speaker 1:If I got the time. I got the time, If you got the money.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, we can find the money. We can find the money. People are interested. Let us know what you'd like to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, we'll see if we can do it for you. All right, coming up in a few months. Faith in Science out in Akron, so our Faith in Science conference. Brother Guy Consolmongo is coming in. He's the head of the Vatican Observatory and he'll talk about creation, so that'll be good. And then we'll have our Ignite conference at the end of February, so that's coming up as well. So some of the bigger things that are heading down the pike, and, of course, theology on Tap will start in just a few weeks, and so you and I will be interviewing some of our young adult leaders to start the season at Theology on Tap West.
Speaker 2:Tuesday the 17th it's in my calendar see you then.
Speaker 1:Alright, so this has been Question of Faith. I'm Deacon Mike Hayes.
Speaker 2:Father Damian Ferencz.
Speaker 1:Maria Wankata. We'll see you all again next time.
