Today the Catholic Church celebrates the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. The feast day takes the same day as the famousBattle of Lepanto(Oct. 7, 1571) in which Don Juan of Austria defeated the Moors. (I’ll leave it to the history experts to battle out the details.) But the victory was largely attributed to the intercession of Our Lady.

This was back in the day when people fighting religious battles thought that maybe they ought to make sure that their own souls were in order; so chaplains had a very active presence among the soldiers. The night before the battle, as the story goes, the troops prayed the rosary aloud. I don’t have the sources handy, but I’ve heard accounts of how the opposition was affected at the sound of hearing thousands of voices praying therosary. [For those unfamiliar with the rosary, it is basically a meditation on the events of the life of Christ through a devotion to Mary his Mother (Our Lady). The events are all from the Bible. And the prayer is a form of asking Mary’s accompaniment in our meditation, which makes sense since she knows him so well.]

I thought of Chesterton’s poemThe Battle of Lepantowhich has an almost haunting refrain that refers to Don Juan of Austria. Take a minute to relax, have a glass of wine and read the poem. It reads well aloud.

Yesterday, it was announced that Robert G. Edwards, the grandfather of IVF, will receive a Nobel Prize for his work. I’m glad to see that the Vatican and others stepped up with goodresponses.

Msgr. Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, head of the Pontifical Academy for Life (and one of my former professors), made the excellent point that Roberts’ work opened “the wrong door” for infertility treatments. IVF has been a difficult topic to address, not least of all because there’s been very little public conversation from the public face of the Catholic Church. It’s also difficult to discuss because we basically have to counter a very powerful argument, namely that smiling, beautiful baby that makes a husband and wife feel complete and satisfies grandparents.

In reality, IVF doesn’t really address infertility, it just circumvents certain forms of it. Compare that with Dr. Hilgers work on NaPro technology which effectively restores fertility in an overwhelming number of its female patients (90%?) and helps to improve a woman’s overall health. And it accomplishes this without the moral dilemmas of leftover embryos, egg harvesting, the commoditization of the child, savior siblings, women’s health, etc. And it often costs a whole lot less than IVF.

No matter how emotionally satisfying the successful results of IVF may be, there are serious questions about the dignity of the human person that need to enter the discussion.

IVF isn’t about getting a couple any baby; it’s about giving them the specific baby that they want. As a friend of mine who was considering adoption put it, “Whether I have that baby or someone else does, there’s no guarantee that the baby will be virtuous, intelligent, kind, or anything.”

There are some things we can’t control, even with IVF. We delude ourselves if we think that we can and if we think that’s a good thing. Let’s face it, most of us are not physically perfect or morally perfect. Many of us would be culled using the selection processes now available for IVF. In many ways, IVF is about loving only on certain terms, not unconditionally. Talk about a brave new world…

Saw the new Wall Street movie this weekend, Oliver Stone’s follow up to his 1987 film of the same name. Prepared by watching the first movie on Netflix (Watch Instantly) earlier in the week. I’m not sure that I would have understood the new film as much without having seen the first. Several characters from the first film make fun cameos.

It’s entertaining, but I wouldn’t call it a great film. The character of Gordon Gekko doesn’t entirely hang together and neither does the plot. Perhaps one of these aspects causes the other. I don’t know. There’s a good story there, but it gets lost. The ending is a complete disappointment. As my husband put it, it’s like those stories that you write when you’re in grade school – the ones where you run out of time, ideas, or both. You end the piece: “And then I woke up. It was just a dream.”

I think the movie is supposed to make viewers wish they had all that money and were living this glamorous Manhattan lifestyle. Some people might feel that way, but it makes me grateful that I have a far simpler life. In fact, there’s one scene – very brief – in the movie that definitely evokes this. Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf), sort of a Wall Street upstart, goes to meet Bretton James (Josh Brolin) at the mansion he calls home. James is one of the masters of the universe, as Tom Wolfe might put it. When Moore arrives, James is shown hosting a private concert in his home. The camera pans the audience, not unlike Wolfe’s description of the women at a similar party in his novel Bonfire of the Vanities. The women are parodies of themselves: stretched, tucked, plumped beyond recognition. That scene alone was enough to make me not desire the lifestyle that Stone tries to make appealing and sexy.