Pope Francis has died

> According to Archbishop Diego Ravelli, Master of Apostolic Ceremonies, the late Pope Francis had requested that the funeral rites be simplified and focused on expressing the faith of the Church in the Risen Body of Christ.

Always struck me as a simple man and that likely contributed to people liking him more when compared to his predecessors. RIP.

He spoke more openly about issues like poverty, climate change, and inclusion–his encyclical LAUDATO SI’ is a great read–, and he often used language and gestures that the "common man" could relate to.

Perhaps the way he dressed so simply–with the plain white cassock–also emphasized his overall approach: less focus on grandeur, more on service.

The vast majority of abortions are performed because the pregnancy was unwanted, not because the mother’s life was in danger or what have you. But why was the pregnancy unwanted in the first place?

This is the question you must begin with, because the answer cuts to the psychological heart of the matter. The reason is that we have redefined sexual intercourse in terms of sexual pleasure first. We’ve demoted procreation to secondary status instead of recognizing it as the primary reason for sexual intercourse with pleasure characterizing it rather than defining its function. The absurdity of it is apparent given the anatomical, physiological, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of sex. All of that for pleasure? This is like claiming the digestive system exists and the act of eating exist for pleasure. We would typically associate with such things gluttony, bulimia, and other eating disorders.

Historically, sexual self-restraint has always been a problem for some more than others, of course. Some have more trouble with restraint with respect to food or drink or whatever. Addictions have always existed. However, the cultural norms surrounding such questions have varied. Some cultures have been puritanical. Some have been depraved. Others have managed to channel sexual appetite in healthy ways that respect the dignity of those involved (which, given its nature, aims toward spousal love and the flourishing of the family, including the parents as parents). Ours is not the latter. In the 1930s, we saw the beginning of the normalization of contraception, and this normalization had the effect of splitting the pleasure of sex from the entirety of the act and promoted it to the status of primary end. This opened the door to the sexual revolution and the sexual exploitation of others, especially women. Abortion, paradoxically, only becomes relevant in this context, because only in a contraceptive context is pregnancy conceived as aberrant and contrary to the nature of the sexual act. So contrary to a successfully waged misinformation campaign by people like Margaret Sanger, abortion rates only rise in a society with a culture that normalizes contraception where it becomes a “solution” for the failure rate of contraception.

Is that what we want? Do we wish to continue to dehumanize ourselves by by outsourcing our humanity? Technology extends human ability or fixes broken human function. Do we want to put the cart before the horse and reinforce that error by building a culture and a technological ecosystem around error instead, and in doing so, entrench ourselves in that error? Instead of technology truly serving the human good, do we want instead to abolish the human in service to a dystopian ideology? This is what addicts do. They serve their addictions and build their lives around them.