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In Orlando, Florida on Monday a judge ordered a 17-year old Rifqa Bary into emergency custody of the state’s Department of Children and Families. The girl fled her Muslim family in Ohio saying she was afraid her father would hurt or kill her or send her back to their native Sri Lanka because she had converted to Christianity. Yesterday’s Orlando Sentinel reports that the girl sought refuge with Florida pastor Blake Lorenz and his wife Beverly who she met through an online prayer group. According to WBNS-TV News , an attorney representing the girl’s mother said the parents were allowing their daughter to explore her Christianity. The parents say that Rifqa was not afraid of her family until she made contact with Orlando Pastor Blake Lorenz.

Unfortunately, honor killings are not a myth in our country. To my knowledge, Rifqa is not a citizen, but there are some legal loopholes to grant her some sort of asylum.

As an American, I can’t really empathize with religious oppression. Working with and talking to Vietnamese Catholics has given me a little taste of what it is like, but I acknowledge that I have never had the experience of the bible vs. the bullet. I pray that the Holy Spirit continues to guide and protect Rifqa.

Photo: Amina and Sarah Yaser, the two girls murdered in an honor killing in Texas that Rifqa makes reference to in the video.

I’ll be keeping tabs on this story, and if I find a link to a secure source for donations to her legal fund I’ll let you know.

Jena just made a great post on this topic that I would also like to address:

“We recently went on a vacation to visit family out to sunny Southern CA, aka, birthplace of the bikini…Seriously, I realized that EVERYONE who is under the age of 60 wears a bikini out there….

And it did two things to me, made me self-righteous AND alternately JEALOUS…

Does it REALLY matter if I wear a bikini, I mean we don’t know anyone out here, and seriously I look halfway decent in a bikini, especially a cute one with a skirt, and even more seriously, shouldn’t I be giving my husband something to compete with all the other skin he is seeing and having to look away from?”

Obviously Jena, came to the right conclusion, that public modesty DOES MATTER. But I think she most certainly has a point…

I went to the beach last Friday for a BBQ with a mixed group of male and female friends including that one friend of mine who designs cute modest swimwear, two girlfriends who are on the Decent Exposure core team, and…a Franciscan friar.

I did not bring my swimsuit precisely because I knew I was not going to put it on with a friar in my presence, LOL, and my girlfriends did not get completely down to their full (modest) swimsuits either. However, also with us was a visiting group of girls from Croatia, who despite being professing Catholics apparently did not adhere to the gospel of modesty.

Honestly, it was one of the weirdest beach trips ever. I usually don’t really notice girls in bikinis, but it was almost as if a line had been drawn between my “modest friends” and our bikini-clad Croatian visitors.

That being said, the Croatian girls did not take off their cover-ups until they were well away from our group and in the water. Some of them didn’t take off their cover-ups at all. All around us of course, every girl was wearing a bikini.  Our friar was not in his habit (the grey/brown robe friars wear with a rosary around their waists) beacuse he took it off to play volleyball, but I would have been so curious to see how other girls on the beach would have reacted to our presence.  Walking anywhere in Los Angeles with a bunch of grey-robed bearded men is a sure way to grab attention and random conversation.  But I digress…

I’m not married, but if I was and my husband was there at the beach with me, I’d probably feel a littl twinge of jealousy too. You know what they say—most of the time we women are not dressing to impress guys, but to compete with other women. We talked about this with the girls enrolled in Decent Exposure, and I quoted an old mentor of mind that really was the one who planted the seeds of modesty in me:

“A demure woman does not have to show what she has. She is what she is.”

Seriously, I heard that while I was in high school, and I still remember it word for word unto this day. It’s true. We are Christian women. We are dynamic, educated, funny, smart, MODEST, Christian women. Our confidence comes from within from a source that burns eternally. And with that eternal fire comes love, an active decision to do what is best for the other.

Married women are able to love their husbands in a physical way, but more often than not, an individual woman’s husband is not going to be the only man at the beach. Just like he’s not going to be the only man at the mall or at church. We dress appropriately for any occassion because we LOVE. We love ourselves, the men in our lives, AND the men that are not in our lives because they are our brothers too.

 To quote speaker Christopher West, “Lust can’t wait to take. Love can’t wait to give.”  When being modest doesn’t feel so hottest, remember that modesty is about love, and love is an action verb girls.

That was my initial reaction to the “motherhood” photoshoot French Vogue did in its current issue which seeks to explore the “wackiness” and “humor” of motherhood…or something like that… 

The explanation for this shoot doesn’t make a teaspoon of sense.

My official response that I originally wrote on Facebook:

I fully respect any woman who doesn’t want to have kids. Kids aren’t accessories to put in the closet, so if you don’t have the desire to put in the hard work it takes to raise a decent human being, then PLEASE refrain from procreating. 

However.

What pissed me off was the sheer disrespect shown by FV and its staff for children and motherhood that resulted in creating this poor excuse for a fashion spread that masks extreme narcissism as some sort of edgy statement. ugh.

Oh and by the way, glorifying child neglect and abuse isn’t entertaining or edgy either.

I am in the process of being interviewed about Modestia and the overall topic of modesty for Faith and Family Magazine, and I was asked to define what John Paul II called the “feminine genius” in my own words. My answer was the following:

I think I would define the “feminine genius” as the innate quality of love within the woman, especially the Catholic woman, to sacrifice the desires of the self for the betterment of the self and society. A friar friend of mine preached a story about what he thought was the perfect example of the feminine genius:

He was eating dinner with some brother friars and one of his lay female friends when a group of young people in their 20s came into the restaurant. His female friend watched the group for a while and then turned to him to ask if he was going to go over to talk to them. It was late at night and he hadn’t finished his meal, so he sort of whined a “No, not right now.” She pushed him to get up and go talk to them…at this point in the story he exclaimed, “See, this is the feminine genius at work!” She pushed him a little more until he left their table to go talk to the group. After greeting them and giving them some holy cards, the topic of conversation turned to chastity, sex, and the nature of love. One of the girls at the table thought he was stupid, another girl at the table started crying and said he was right.

As simple as the story may seem, my friar friend would not have been able to present Christ to those young people had his female friend not listened to that innate quality of love and compassion, that feminine genius that told her someone at that other table needed to hear the Gospel. That’s the feminine genius!

UPDATE: The woman has been freed! (Due to too much international attention.)

From Life Site News:

A Muslim Uyghur woman who is more than six months pregnant remains under guard in a hospital in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region awaiting a forced abortion by population control authorities who don’t want her to have a third child.

Arzigul Tursun fled from her village and went into hiding to avoid the abortion but was subsequently found and taken to the Municipal Watergate Hospital in Yining.

Radio Free Asia reports that Tursun’s husband, Nurmemet Tohtasin, said that “police, Party officials and the family planning committee officials, all came and interrogated us, and threatened that if we didn’t find Arzigul and bring her to the village, they would confiscate our house, farmland and all our property.”

Arzigul and Nurmemet already have two daughters at their home in the village of Bulaq. According to the Washington-based Uyghur Human Rights Project, Arzigul fled Bulaq when officials first urged her to have an abortion, but she returned after her family received threats of asset seizure.

“We considered our two girls,” Nurmemet said in a telephone interview with the Uyghur American Association. “If the house and properties were taken away, how would they live? So my wife came back home and went to the hospital.”

An AP report said that physicians have delayed performing the forced abortion because of rapidly developing international interest in the case due to pressure from pro-life and human-rights groups who have expressed concern that Tursun’s health could be threatened by the abortion.

U.S. Rep. Christopher Smith, a New Jersey Republican and House Ranking Member on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, wrote to China’s ambassador to Washington, Zhou Wenzhong, on Thursday to demand that “the nightmare of a forced abortion” not be carried out.

“I appeal to the Chinese Government not to forcibly abort Arzigul, a Uyghur woman now in the custody of China’s population police and awaiting the nightmare of a forced abortion,” wrote Rep. Smith.

“The Chinese Government is notorious for this barbaric practice, but to forcibly abort a woman while the world watches in full knowledge of what is going on would make a mockery of its claim that the central government disapproves of the practice, and of the UN Population Fund pretense that it has moderated the Chinese population planners’ cruelty. Human rights groups and the U.S. Government will be watching very carefully to see what happens to Arzigul and her family.”

China maintains a one-child-per-family rule on the majority Han Chinese, but allows minorities, including Uyghurs, to have more than one child. If minority couples are urban dwellers, they may have two children, while rural farmers may have three children.

While Tursun is registered as a rural dweller, her husband is registered in an urban area. This initially caused some confusion among population control officials, but they eventually demanded that she submit to the abortion.

Despite official denials, it has been documented that the Chinese Government regularly relies on forced abortion to enforce its one-child population control program.

China’s official Tianshan Net states that population control policies in Xinjiang region have prevented the births of some 3.7 million people over the last 30 years.

To contact the U.S. embassy of the People’s Republic of China with your concern:
Ambassador Zhou Wenzhong
2300 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington DC 20008
Phone: (202) 328-2500
Fax: (202) 588-0032
Email: chinaembassy_us@fmprc.gov.cn

There was an excellent essay published on CatholicCulture.org about Pope Benedict XVI and the role of women in the church. As you may know, the Bible Synod is wrapping up, but what you may not know is that there were a number of women, some of them quite young, in attendance.

Some gems from the essay:

…[B16] oversaw the publication of the CDF document On the Collaboration of Men and Women. Long convinced that women suffer the most from the confusion of gender roles in the modern world, he helped to shape a document that would clarify the unique nature of women while at the same time affirming that women have a role to play in every aspect of society. Benedict thus appears positioned to take the conversation on women in the Church to the next phase.

In reading his encyclicals and other writings, I don’t see why certain Catholics have such hostility toward the Holy Father. He is a brilliant man, and like the writer implies, understands the problems we women face in this modern age.

Those who identify themselves as conservative are often quick to dismiss feminism. One may not agree with the conclusions of feminist thinkers, but this in no way reduces the significance of the questions they have addressed.

Very true. Once I get some more time I’m going to write a different post on feminism and the Catholic woman. I’ve seen websites for “ladies against feminism” and such, which I think is a slightly misguided viewpoint. Now that I’m thinking about it, I may start another thread entirely unpacking JP II’s teachings on the feminine genius. But more on that later.

Women religious from around the world, most particularly from the western part, addressed their role within the Church and asked for more power. Mother Teresa responded simply that these women needed to fall in love with their spouse, who is Jesus.

Good ‘ol Mother Teresa, a true feminine model for us all.

When you have some time, I would highly suggest sitting down and reading the entire essay. You can find it here.

~Rebecca