Community Corner

Letter: Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church Finds 'No Reason to Rejoice' in Planned Parenthood Opening in San Rafael

The following is a letter from Father Patrick Michaels in response to the news that the Mill Valley Planned Parenthood will close when the renovated full-service San Rafael Planned Parenthood center opens in the summer.

I am saddened that we live in a society that has so little regard for human dignity, free choice, and the life of the unborn. I have a deeper grief, that as a society we can rejoice over our ability to end a life rather than work together to cherish and sustain that life. How can we have respect for our own lives when we think so little of the life we create?

Sexual intercourse, one aspect of human sexuality, which is a beautiful gift we have for the sake of bonding our lives to another and opening our lives to the co-creative process, has become a recreational activity for our own pleasure. Rather than a gift of ourselves, it seems to have become a gift to ourselves. Our ability, right, and responsibility to choose how our bodies are gift, is diminished to how we can bow out of all three. Still more jarring is how casually we dismiss a life we carry, a consequence of our choice, as though it were a mistake or burden.

Life is challenging. The largest challenge is to recognize that we cannot live it in a vacuum, where it is defined narrowly by my desires and wants. It is by societal definition shared. We do have a responsibility to one another, and especially to those who have been entrusted to us who do not have an active say in whether they are conceived or get to come to birth. Neither I, nor the community of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church, can find any reason to rejoice in such a misguided and self-destructive agency in Mill Valley or San Rafael.

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Fr. Patrick T. Michaels
Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church


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