Pastor’s Corner — October 26th, 2025
Next Weekend: All Saints’ and All Souls’ Day (Nov 1 and Nov 2)
On the Solemnity of All Saints (November 1) the Church honors all the saints and martyrs in Heaven and All Souls’ Day (November 2nd) is a day to pray for the souls of the faithful departed. Because it falls on a Saturday this year, All Saints’ Day is not a holy day of obligation, but All Souls’ Day is because it falls on a Sunday.
All Saints’ Mass (not a holy day of obligation)
Saturday, November 1st at 8am
All Souls’ Masses (Sunday holy day of obligation)
Saturday, November 1st at 5pm
Sunday, November 2nd 7:45am, 9:30am, 11:30am, and 5pm
For those who don’t usually come to our All Souls’ Day Mass, we will be wearing the customary black vestments.
Outpouring Saturday November 15th at 7pm
I know I mentioned this in last week’s bulletin, but I wanted to repeat it this week in case anyone missed it. Save the date for Saturday November 15th for our bi-annual “Outpouring: Evening of Prayer.” I want everyone to have the opportunity to experience a greater outpouring of the Holy Spirit in their lives and for you to encounter God’s love more deeply. If you need more grace in your life, more love, or you just want to encounter his love more deeply, please put this in your calendar. I really hope to see you there.
US Bishops and Others Rightly Criticize Trump Administration Policy on IVF
I’ve written on in vitro fertilization (IVF) many times over the years. Frankly, it is a very serious moral issue facing the Church today, especially given our view on the dignity of every human life, created in the image and likeness of God. No matter how difficult the suffering of infertility can be, we cannot ever approve of IVF for several reasons. It still seems that many do not understand that the process of IVF actually necessitates the killing of children in order to “make” them. I wonder how many people know that in the United States more children are killed through IVF than in abortion each year.
In response to the Trump administration’s news supporting IVF, the US Bishops published a strong statement on Oct 17th about it. Ryan T. Anderson, easily one of my favorite Catholic public policy writers, published an article “Trump’s IVF Policy Could be Worse, But It’s Still Bad” It’s worth quoting him at length:
The entire thrust of the policy is to make something unethical (IVF) more widely practiced. Such a policy is itself unethical. So while Americans won’t be required to violate their conscience, our public policy will promote IVF more now than ever before.
None of this is necessarily to cast aspersions on those pushing for IVF. President Trump, in his remarks at the White House on Thursday, showed compassion for the many Americans who struggle with infertility, and he clearly has real affection for children. He wants to be a pro-baby, pro-family president. His motivations are good.
But there is a stark contrast between these motivations and the ethical challenges with IVF—challenges that most Americans know little, if anything, about. And that contrast was on vivid display during the White House policy announcement. Sen. Katie Britt called President Trump the most pro-IVF president in history. An IVF industry representative praised the president for the new policy, showing crony capitalism is alive and well. RFK Jr. told President Trump that Trump “was doing God’s work” in promoting IVF. Falsehoods were repeated about the Alabama court ruling that initiated this most-recent wave of IVF frenzy. And no attention at all was paid to the ethical concerns with IVF, or to the medical reality that IVF doesn’t actually treat infertility.
When a reporter asked President Trump what his response was to pro-lifers with concerns, he seemed unaware that there were concerns: “I don’t know about the views of that . . . I think this is very pro-life. You can’t get more pro-life than this.” But IVF as practiced today entails massive killing and freezing of embryonic human beings. IVF doesn’t treat underlying causes of infertility and doesn’t respect the dignity of the human person in his or her creation, where people should be begotten, not made.
Many couples experiencing infertility ache to start a family. Doctors don’t always impress on them the human costs of IVF. For one birth, doctors might create ten to twenty embryos, transfer several of the “most promising,” freeze the rest, and if more than one implants, abort the others. So the typical IVF cycle results in multiple dead and frozen embryos. And unlike in European nations, there are almost no laws in America regulating how many embryos can be created or destroyed, or how frozen embryonic human beings can be treated.
To some, this casual disregard is no accident, because IVF itself treats children as products of technical manufacture. It thus fails to respect the equal dignity of human beings in their very origins. Children are to be welcomed as the fruit of an act of marital love. Relating to a child instead as a producer relates to a product is the seed of all the abuses of the IVF industry—the casual creation and destruction of “spares,” the filtering out of “defectives,” the selection for sex and other specs (such as eye or hair color), the commodification of (often poor) women’s bodies as incubators. The fundamental moral concerns about IVF are not sectarian….
Alas, the White House event displayed no sensitivity to—or even awareness of—these concerns. But it wasn’t an outlier. Most Americans are unaware of these concerns. Indeed, truth be told, most church-attending Christians are blissfully unaware—because the Church has done such a poor job of teaching these truths.
Your servant in the Lord,
Fr. Mathias