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With the Holy Father still in the hospital, Catholics across the globe are praying for him, including cardinals gathering every evening in Rome to pray the Rosary. “And as the Holy Father desperately needs our prayers and is begging for our prayers,” as Msgr. Roger Landry tells us, we discuss all the ways Catholics can pray for the Vicar of Christ at every Mass, in every Rosary, and especially in these hours of need.
We chat with the former chaplain to the late Queen Elizabeth of England, Gavin Ashenden, all about his powerful conversion story after an encounter with the devil which left him clinging to the Marian prayer. As Ashenden says, “Evil subsided and went away–the Rosary worked.”
Dr. Marguerite Duane joins in the wake of the White House executive order on IVF to share why “infertility is not a disease” and why naprotechnology addresses the underlying issues that IVF ignores. Naprotechnology – the women’s health science of natural procreative technology – monitors and maintains women’s reproductive health by providing treatments that cooperate with her normal reproductive cycle.
Bios
Monsignor Roger Landry is a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts. He writes for numerous publications, speaks on radio and TV, and is the author of the book, Plan of Life: Habits to Help You Grow Closer to God. A graduate of Harvard and the Pontifical North American College in Rome, he served as Attaché to the Holy See’s Permanent Observer Mission to the UN in New York. Father Landry traversed the full 1500-mile Eucharist Pilgrimage in 2024 and joined the historic Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis, an event which coincided with his 25th year in the priesthood. He was recently appointed the new National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in the USA.
Gavin Ashenden is an author, columnist, commentator, and Associate Editor of the Catholic Herald. Formerly an Anglican bishop, he served as Chaplain to the late Queen Elizabeth II of England from 2008 until 2017. In 2019, he converted to become a Roman Catholic, and currently co-hosts the Catholic Unscripted podcast. Originally trained at Bristol University as a lawyer, he attended Oak Hill Theological College to study for the priesthood and was ordained in 1980. He completed postgrad study and earned his doctorate from Heythrop College, University of London. He is the author of Charles Williams: Alchemy and Integration, and The Warning: Testimonies and Prophecies About the Illumination of Consciousness. He spent 23 years at the University of Sussex as a senior chaplain and lecturer, and four years as presenter of the Faith and Ethics radio program for BBC, as well as presenting the international Faith & Ethics podcast.
Dr. Marguerite Duane is Co-Founder and Executive Director of FACTs, a group of healthcare professionals who work to educate the medical community about natural and fertility awareness based methods of family planning. She is a board-certified family physician and trained Creighton medical consultant, and an Adjunct Associate Professor at Georgetown University. She is a physician with Modern Mobile Medicine and has served on the board of the American Academy of Family Physicians as well as the Family Medicine Education Consortium. She received a Bachelor of Science with Honors and a Master of Health Administration from Cornell University. Dr. Duane earned her M.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and completed her family medicine residency at Lancaster General Hospital in Pennsylvania. She publishes frequent articles on natural family planning and fertility tracking. Dr. Duane cherishes her role as wife to family physician, Dr. Kenneth Lin, and as a mother to four children.
The following transcript is machine generated.
Episode 306 Transcript
| Ashley | Hello friends, and welcome to Conversations with Consequences. We are the radio show and podcast of the Catholic Association where we aim to change the culture one conversation at a time. You can listen to conversations with consequence US on the EWTN Global Catholic Radio Network Saturday mornings at 7 a.m. Eastern or catch the encore at 5 p.m.. We are also on Sirius XM Channel 130. Of course, our radio show is also a podcast. Go to the Catholic Association dot org or directly to wherever you listen to your podcast on your hostess, Ashley McGuire. This week on the show, we talk with Dr. Margaret Doyin about all the amazing work of Nypro technology and how this really addresses the issues, the underlying issues affecting fertility rather than just going around it. And it's such a timely topic as we know, because last week the White House issued an executive order requiring expanded access to IVF. And, you know, this was, I think, very shocking and saddening to the pro-life movement because as we know, it's it's an industry that's really unfortunately built on the destruction of unborn life. But I think, you know, we absolutely owe it to couples that are struggling with the costs of infertility to accompany them. And we have so many incredible resources and there's been so much advancement. And really, I think the Catholic Church has pioneered that. I know that, you know, narrow technology in that world is not specifically Catholic, but certainly Catholics were the pioneers of that. And what really distinguishes Nabarro technology and Dr. Duane really does a wonderful job of fleshing this out with us. Is it addresses the underlying issues that cause infertility. And as she points out, she says that infertility is not a disease. It is a reflection of a disease. And so in order to have a healthy pregnancy, first you have to have a healthy body. And IVF does absolutely nothing to address that. Instead, if anything, it makes your body less healthy because it's it's so fraught with so many hormones and toxins. And so it's a really fascinating interview. And we were really blessed to have her on. And we also had a wonderful conversation with with Monsignor Roger Lee and Jim still getting used to that, our TCA resident chaplain, about keeping our Holy Father in prayer. And we discussed just the beautiful images pouring in of of Catholics all over the world, be it in the streets of Argentina, where the Holy Father is from, or packing St Peter's Square or just sending out tweets of well-wishes and and the beautiful letters that children are writing him, some of them who are in the pediatric wing of the hospital that he's at. So that's a wonderful conversation as well. But first, Betsy, you had a great interview this week, chatting with the former chaplain to the queen of England. How exciting. He has an amazing conversion story and has so much to say. |
| Betsy | I'm Betsy Fentress and we have the pleasure of welcoming to the show Catholic convert Gavin Ashenden. He's a former chaplain to the Queen of England and associate editor of the Catholic Herald, and we'll be discussing his own conversion and also his beloved United Kingdom and the future of Catholicism in Britain. Thanks for taking time to join us today. |
| Gavin Ashenden | It's wonderful to be here, Betsy. Thank you for having me. |
| Betsy | You have such a unique history with the crown as well as your conversion. Would you mind sharing a little bit of your story of how you came to Catholicism? |
| Gavin Ashenden | Yes, I'd be very happy to. Then of course, there are simple ways of telling it and more complex ways of telling it. The very simplest way, I think, is that two things came together at once. My discovery of the Eucharistic Miracles, particularly when I started in 1994 and being, I would say, be experiencing a rather nasty attack from from the other side of the tracks, which led me to pray the rosary as a means of dealing with it. But the fact is, I can now look back and see that I'd been prepared really from the very beginning for for a love of Catholicism, a love of the Catholic Church, a love of Catholic spirituality, a love of the history of the Catholic Church, she said. It just took me 40 years to to find my way through the thicket to the point where where it became accessible to me. |
| Betsy | Well, I've been listening to a lot of your stories, and I have to say, one of the bright moments was when you were feeling really this kind of demonic presence in your bedroom over a series of evenings. And at some point your wife, who is allergic to pollen, asked you to close the window and you said it is an open and will you tell us a little bit about that, that the center of the room and her funny story about it's about time. |
| Gavin Ashenden | Yes. Well, I could either concentrate on the domestic on a domestic squabble or more helpfully talk about this very strange experience, which even now I find difficult to make sense of in conversation. I, for reasons I don't understand, at about 5 to 1 in the early morning for three nights running, Hal opened up in my bedroom and stopped at about 5 to 5. 4 hours later. It was just the most dreadful experience. In the first evening it happened. I was kept awake and I wondered. I was terrified. I was having a nervous breakdown. And so I the next morning I phoned a friend of mine who was a Catholic diocesan exorcist and said, Look, these these dreadful things have happened. I do I need to go and see a psychiatrist or is it as I think it is, a really dreadful demonic assault? And he rubbed his hands together and said, I'm awfully sorry, you're perfectly sane. It's it's it's something that's. So what on earth do I do? I couldn't sleep. What happens if it comes back again tonight? Which it did. And the next night he said, well, you'll have to pray the rosary. Now, at this point my Anglicanism was exposed because the trouble is, and I don't mean to be rude, but Anglicanism is, is entirely is much derivative of Catholicism, but insofar as it's derivative, it, it borrows the surface rather than doing the practice. Knew quite a lot about Mary. I knew quite a lot about medieval mysticism. I knew a little bit about the rosary. I even had rosaries. I just didn't pray it. It was something I knew about. I associated with I, I appreciated from a semi distance. And I said, look, I just don't think I'm ready to actually pray the rosary. And he rather impatiently said, Well, he was from Yorkshire and he said, It's up to you. It's how early you can choose. So well. |
| Betsy | The ending of that story is that your wife says that there's a smell of roses in the air after you've been praying the rosary for three days. And she said, You said it's our lady. And she said, Well, it's about time somebody showed up. You've been rattling those beads for three days. |
| Gavin Ashenden | Yes, that's exactly right. We're having an argument over whether the window being left open or closed. I knew I'd closed it and and she was she'd been woken up by the smell of roses. |
| Betsy | And that is incredible story. |
| Gavin Ashenden | And blamed me for being the window open. But as it happens, I was my duty to close the windows and I had closed and I and I was a bit impatient because the last thing I was worried about was the smell in the room. But as it happened, I mean, I once again, I knew perfectly well that our ladies apparitions are often accompanied by by that particular gift. So the but I mean, there were two elements to it. One is that that evil subsided and went away. The rosary worked. It had a power and a an authority That was quite astonishing. And I mean, most of us in our prayers, you know, we we bleat prayers towards heaven and rather hope that being heard, you know part of. |
| Betsy | It like she. Right. Yeah. |
| Gavin Ashenden | Yes. Part of us believes in prayer. But this is you know, the secular part of our mind that wonders always, what am I doing? Is it can the universe actually hear my on my my silent greetings? And, you know, that's just part of being spirit and flesh at the same time when inevitably, C.S. Lewis described us as being essentially amphibians, living both in time and space and in the world of the spirit at the same time. And it's a difficult thing to do. So we are conflicted when we pray. But one of the things I found is that the way in which the praying, the rosary in this awful period of three nights had happened had been so very effective. What started off with me being really in the most terrible place, slowly moved to a diminution of the power and force of this accusing terrifying, destabilizing and toxic experience until it was gone. |
| Betsy | Well, you came into the church, your wife came into the church and reflecting back sense, do you feel a deep sense of peace since that time when you came into the Church. |
| Gavin Ashenden | Of course, people always use the phrase I've come home and and I can immediately see why. The thing is, the so much the Protestants long for, but they can't have unless they become Catholics. And I know this is culturally a bit difficult because we like to be inclusive. We we like to not treat one thing as superior to the other. We like to give people that due and say there must be some deep integrity in that journey within our approach. But it's all these things are a generosity of spirit, but they don't really tell the truth. The fact is that we desperately need the company of the saints. We need the prayers of the saints. We need. We need the proximity of angels. We need power of relics. We need miracles, particularly the miracle of the mass, which is which happens daily without an end. We we need a heavenly Mother. We we we need the sacrifice of the mass to be represented in time and space, to hold back the deluge of evil. We need a Holy Father in Rome. We need apostolic continuity. It's all as a Protestant service. You have to do without these. Now you have the Bible, and that's terribly helpful. And sometimes you have a wonderful tradition of him singing. And that's also a very beautiful And I must say, the Protestants have developed an understanding of the body of the Christ, which is something Catholics could be usefully refreshed by. And and sometimes, you know, the gifts of the Holy Spirit. But on the whole, that's all they've got and they need a great deal more. And being a Catholic gives them everything they need. |
| Betsy | That was an amazing list that you just gave us. And I going to write all those things down as as part of my apostolic mission. I want to go back. You mentioned the Saints. You have a special love of Martin of tours. Would you tell us why? Yes. |
| Gavin Ashenden | Well, I was an Anglican academic and one of the things that made it difficult to become a Catholic was that we were warned as intellectuals or would be intellectuals that much of the history of Catholic spirituality was hagiography. It was designed to big people up by by people who admired them. And it was therefore it was overwritten and exaggerated, and you just couldn't take it literally. I came across the biography Saint Martin and was astonished at how direct and powerful it was. It became immediately accessible. If you accept the existence of demons and the devil once, once you accept those, it it reads formidably powerfully. And I loved the journey that he made from being a Hungarian mercenary to a successful Roman officer, to somebody who was simply overwhelmed by his encounter with Jesus as a catacomb. And then, although the stories often told of so, he suddenly came across a poor man and gave me half of his cloak. And, you know, the next day I saw Jesus in a dream. It was, of course, a longer journey than that and more complex one. But what I liked about him was that he lived at the end of the decline of the Roman Empire and was surrounded, as we are today, again by pagans. And I think people don't understand what paganism is. They think of it perhaps as rather historically is a rather agrarian or simplistic worship of rural gods. But but essentially it's the default instinctive position in humanity outside the incarnation. And because our culture has completely lost sense of the incarnation, it has resorted to a neo paganism. It's it's incoherent, it's full of superstition. It reaches out desperately for forms of magic or self-induced psychological, positive thinking, anything that it can lay its hands on to help, apart from the living God who presents himself as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, anything apart from the Trinity as Father and Son, Holy Spirit. And so what's and Martin did was in the power of the Spirit. He confronted Pagans and showed them that the God he worshiped was more powerful than the gods they worshiped. And it was. It was such so. So extraordinarily well done that that he converted much of the Northwest Europe single handed almost. And when you when I read about him, I thought, well, this is this is what we need today. And one of the things, of course, is that he's totally and completely Catholic. |
| Betsy | This is true. Yeah. |
| Gavin Ashenden | Inevitably. So his Catholicism is part of the of the power of his apostolate. And it seemed I often even before I became a Catholic, I would I would talk to him and say how much I admired him and liked him and basically said, look, my generation has got to do again today. What you did in yours. We're going to need your help to help. |
| Betsy | I hope he's been giving you good advice. |
| Gavin Ashenden | I have a great sense of of his companionship and his prayers, as I have of also Padre Pius, whom I'm much drawn by. I would say my my two sort of closest friends on the other side are son Martin and Padre Peer. |
| Betsy | Those are good friends to have you talk a lot about in your podcast and your videos, Paganism and the Return of the Dark Gods. And so one of the things that I found really compelling was ideological possession. Would you talk about that and how it is captured people at university and really the culture at large? |
| Gavin Ashenden | So this involves this involves three things, I think. I mean, first of all, the spiritual complex as we understand it, but also it involves Jordan Peterson and and the definition of what we mean by possession. So let me let me say first of all, that we need to redefine possession because Jordan Peterson uses it in a different form. I think he uses it in the popular form. But let's let's go from Catholic experience to towards Peterson in order to to try and unwrap this a little bit Catholic experience. Is that in exactly the same way as we find in the Gospels, those who follow Jesus confront evil in a number of forms, if you like. It's sort of diluted, diluted and undiluted. Our Lord confronts Satan in the wilderness. He confronts him in the maniacs. He confronts him in Gethsemani. He confronts him on the cross and and he defeats him at every stage. One should say that the devil's real counterpart is, of course, not the income of the Son of God, but Son Michael, if you like, you have some Michael on one side and and the devil on the other as as the fallen angel. Now, because partly where we're privileged to be made in the image of God, although it is the devil's work to undo and to spoil God's wonderful enterprise of making a creature to love him and worship him who is both material and spiritual at the same time. We are to some extent, we've been given a certain natural protection from evil because we're made in the image of God. And as we grow towards Him, also the likeness that protects John is greatly strengthened by the Sacrament of baptism and of course by perceiving the mass. But there are ways in which we abandon that protection so that it's a bit like antibodies and viruses and becoming ill. And if if we abandon that protection and place ourselves, we make ourselves much more vulnerable to evil. And most of our most of our experience with evil is silent. It just comes in the form of temptation. And and I would say actually, words of accusation and condemnation in our head. Many of the things that people rush to therapists for are actually part of the spiritual struggle, not not their psychological incompetence. But there's some overlap and a real characteristic that you're being. You're in the middle of a spiritual war struggle is that when when you hear an accusation in your head and above all despair, these are the marks of the devil. However, very, very few people are actually possessed. We're mainly oppressed. And this oppression is part of the spiritual struggle that we run to Jesus and our Lady for our lady, particularly because for for reasons that require a bit of theological unwrapping the devil particularly doesn't like her and what she stands for as the second to be. But leaving that as a separate conversation for a moment. But people have disbelieved in the devil until very recently and in a popular way, making it very hard indeed for them to them to come to Jesus. Because if you don't believe in evil, it's hard to know exactly what you might want to be saved from. Right. And this notion of being saved has been difficult for our generation because they don't want salvation, they want therapy. And the reason they want therapy, not salvation, is because they see they see the greatest threat to be their own lack of self-acceptance. They don't see it to be the moral acquisition of a creature in rebellion against God. And this is a very serious mistake. It's so serious that on the whole, people remain deeply troubled, despite the fact they run to therapists for help, because what they really need to do is to run to our Lord and his mother and make use of the very powerful Ministry of Deliverance and freedom that the Catholic Church offers. Now, how do you get people from believing in therapists to believing in a in a conflict of good and evil? Well, the answer in our generation seems to be by getting them to listen to Jordan Peterson, because although Peterson is completely wedded to a young interview of the world and that's that's a real problem nonetheless. And paradoxically, he has thought his way through to an understanding that the world really is in the grip of good versus evil. And so the way in which without going to the full conclusion of that and accepting Jesus as savior and repudiating the devil, renouncing the devil and repenting of his sins, nonetheless, he's managed to to diagnose the human condition by talking about ideas as as if they were themselves satanic and to some extent they can be. And so he takes the idea of possession and he says, I've noticed that I'm surrounded by people who are possessed. They're not possessed by the devil. He doesn't think, but they're possessed by toxic ideas to the extent that they lose their autonomy, they lose their personality, they lose free will, they lose peace of mind. They lose a capacity to operate as human beings. And that in real trouble. And I would say that the work mind virus is an example of this. I mean, increasingly finding that the world is of culture is divided into two people, two kinds of people, those who are caught by the work mind virus and cannot think their way free of it. And those who are not caught by it. And it's very difficult to have a conversation with someone who's possessed by one of these ideas. And I think Peterson is enormously helpful in reminding us that actually we live in a highly conflicted situation. And even if you don't believe in the devil, you might notice that ideas have the power to possess and imprison people from which they need to be set free. |
| Betsy | Well, let's talk about the one of the ideological things that's captivating England right now, which is the assisted suicide movement. |
| Gavin Ashenden | Yes. |
| Betsy | How has how did that get to be such a an embraced idea in your country? |
| Gavin Ashenden | Well, once again, we have to decide what language we're talking. And are we talking in the language of spiritual discernment or are we talking about psychology or philosophy or even even economics? So the simple Catholic answer is that we are beset by demonic temptation. And the the the scripture tells us that the devil is a murderer and a liar. And so wherever we find what I mean, Freud describes the same thing. But again, like Peterson, he gets the diagnosis from Freud, very helpful in reminding us that this is a cultural tunnel, but also of death. And we find ourselves besieged by death, the death in that we've persuaded ourselves it's okay to kill 60 million babies in abortion death because we are considering now sacrificing our elderly through euthanasia death because we're through the whole trans ideology we are, and where we're neutralizing our children and making it impossible for them to be fertile. So at one level it's satanic, it's another level. It it comes from a pursuit of pleasure. Our society has decided that that the most important thing about being a human being is, is to enjoy ourselves. And so we've taken to Twitter the culture of irresponsible party of of drug taking, of obsession, an addiction to sex, and a series of other appetites that we have, including alcohol, oil and drugs. And this pursuit of pleasure means that we are unable to cope with the idea of suffering, suffering, become something to be avoided at all costs. Now, you can't get old, as I've discovered, without engaging in a certain amount of suffering and you have to find a, if you like, a reason for suffering to make it bearable and worthwhile. Now, as as Christians, we can find a number of reasons we realize that our bodies are mortal and giving way, but is compensated by the fact that Christ grows closer to us as we grow older. We have a more vivid sense of life in the spirit, if you like, shift our investment from our bodies and our biology to our soul. It's helped to by understanding that we're sharing something of Christ's suffering on the cross. So Paul has this very annoying magic phrase about making up what is lacking. And then as we offer up our suffering, we realize that there's a redemptive role in suffering. And indeed, even if you're not a Christian, people have realized that that through suffering a deeper kind, a deeper and more honorable kind of humanity is forged. However, if you pursue the rather infantile, immature and solipsistic route of saying, well, I want pleasure and I don't want to suffer, then a whole lot of other things fall into place, which are really very problematic. And one is that you're tempted to kill off old people the moment they seem to not be managing very well because it's all so many problems, it solves the fact that they're suffering and don't understand it. It solves the fact they're a burden on the economy. It solves the fact that you then have to don't worry about your conscience in terms of looking after them much better just in an adolescent way to get rid of the problem by sweeping it under the carpet, putting it to death. |
| Betsy | So how do we. |
| Gavin Ashenden | Move working through it? |
| Betsy | Excuse me? How do we move forward? We're just about out of time. But I thought, let's let's end on your hope and your belief that that the Catholic Church will be the beacon of light in all these issues, a devotion to our lady. Do you have any other final words on that? |
| Gavin Ashenden | I do want you see, the very exciting thing about the position we're in is that that all the things we like about our culture, about about were pervade were presented and created by the Catholic Church. They're part of Catholic spirituality. And and so there's no doubt in my mind at all that the only way to regain the fruit of Catholic obedience is to become Catholic. And the Catholic Church is the own. It's not in the organization of the world, but it's the organization that created the most beautiful thing that most wonderfully looked after the weak and the helpless. It educated them free. It cared for them free. It it it provides a gateway into the sacraments and above all, the wonderful miracle that the mass there isn't anything like Catholicism. And the thing Protestantism of Blessed though they are, is that it's a kind of half lived Christian ity. If you if you understand what it is to be a Catholic. So we have a very difficult time in world history, but there is no other answer other than the Catholic Church to put itself together, to believe in itself, and to realize that we have the privilege of saving people not only from themselves, but also from a degenerate culture that is like a quicksand, suffocating them and destroying. |
| Betsy | Well, we are so happy that you are on our side. You can find Gavin Ashton on social media and make sure to catch his podcasts on YouTube called Catholic Unscripted. Thank you for joining us. |
| Gavin Ashenden | I do them with my dear colleagues Catherine Bennett and Mark Lambert. We're a trio. Yes. Do please come and join us. We love to have your company. Thank you for inviting me on the WGN. |
| Betsy | Thank you. |
| Mary Fiorito | Welcome back to Conversations with Consequences here on EWTN Radio. I'm your host, Mary Fiorito. |
| Ashley | And I'm Ashley McGuire. |
| Mary Fiorito | And we are happy to have with us today Dr. Marguerite Duane. She's going to flesh out for us the amazing world of natural technology. As so many families struggle with issues with their fertility and having children. This is a much better route than the dangerous world of IVF. Thanks for joining us today, Dr. Duane. |
| Dr. Marguerite Duane | Thank you so much for having me, Mary. |
| Mary Fiorito | So tell us a little bit about your professional background before we get started. |
| Dr. Marguerite Duane | Absolutely. So I am a board certified family physician with additional training and expertise in women's health and specifically within the realm of restorative reproductive medicine. So I am trained as a Creighton medical consultant to utilize NABARRO technology in addressing a wide range of women's health issues. And I'm also additionally trained in FEM, which stands for fertility, education and medical management and neo fertility. I nabarro fem and neo fertility are the three leading restorative reproductive medical approaches that seek to identify and address underlying root causes that can contribute to infertility, irregular cycles, painful periods, a whole wide assortment of hormonal health issues both both in women and men. So in addition to that, you know, from a clinical perspective, I employ these methods in my own direct primary care practice. I also, in 2010, collaborated with another family physician, Dr. Bob Motley, to launch an organization called Facts about Fertility. And the mission of Facts is to educate our medical colleagues, physicians, nurse practitioners, midwives, students, residents about the science underlying the female cycle and reproductive health, and the use of natural methods of family planning or fertility awareness based methods, as we like to refer to them. How these really can serve as a fifth vital sign for women. So women can learn to identify and address reproductive health issues. So I really wear a couple of hats, you know, my clinical hat as a family physician, my role as executive director of facts about Fertility. And then last summer, I actually joined the faculty at Duquesne University. Duquesne launched a new College of Osteopathic Medicine welcoming their first class in the summer 2024. And simultaneously, they actually launched a new center for fertility awareness, education and research. And I was brought on to integrate this education at every level of the medical school curriculum, because the reality is, is as physicians, other medical professionals, we do not learn about this as a basic, fundamental part of our medical training, which is why many women and men may not know that there are a whole wide array of options that are available to be able to address underlying hormonal health issues and infertility. |
| Mary Fiorito | Well, I know that you're all. Go ahead. I'm sorry. |
| Ashley | But following up on that, the the issue of infertility is almost becoming a crisis. It seems to be growing. And, you know, I think this is a burning question for all Americans, including those who haven't struggled with the pain of infertility, which is, you know, why why is this on the rise? And do you have, you know, with your why expertise, any insights as to what is happening? |
| Dr. Marguerite Duane | Yeah, absolutely. And the statistics do bear out that the rates of infertility are increasing. When I started my work in 2010, one in eight couples were thought to be infertile based on the research. Currently it's now one in five couples. And in the medical profession, it's one in four. Physicians are infertile. So it's it has increased significantly. I will say probably the leading reason why infertility rates have increased is the number one risk factor for both men and women, for infertility is age. So as we get older, our fertility drops both in women and in men. And the age at for first birth in the United States has increased dramatically. Now it's upwards of around 27 or 28 years old. And what people may not realize is we often think of like, you know, a woman's biological clock ticking at around the age of 40. And certainly fertility does drop off at 40. But a woman's fertility, her ability to get pregnant actually begins to decrease at about age 32. You know, that was a shocking fact for me to learn, because I didn't even get married until I was 33 and to think like, wow, my fertility is already decreasing. It drops off again at about age 35 and then again at about age 40. Our current culture really is pushing couples to, you know, become well-established in their career, complete all of their training, purchase their house in their two cars, and make sure they're ready before they start trying to have a baby, not recognizing that while they may now be material ready to have a child biologically, they're really well past the point when they can get pregnant without assistance. And again, unfortunately, our culture, you know, pushes people to wait. And then when they struggle, they said, well, we have this quote unquote solution of artificial reproductive technologies or IVF, which, you know, is we can discuss really, really isn't necessarily a solution. But but age is absolutely one of the leading risk factors. The other thing are the increase in chronic disease and metabolic diseases. So, you know, with the increasing rates of obesity and diabetes and insulin resistance, these are leading causes that can affect a man and woman's ability to to ovulate or to create the sperm that are needed for the you know, for fertilized ocean to occur. So we're seeing a rise in chronic disease, obesity, insulin resistance, high blood pressure. These are all factors that are contributing the other factor and I think this is really important when it comes to women, I mentioned how the female cycle can really serve as if it's vital sign. And I really encourage girls once they start cycling, once they start getting their period to learn to chart their cycle so we can identify whether or not it's normal. In adolescence, we often see, you know, young girls with irregular cycles or painful periods. And the reality is, is if a 14 or 15 year old girl goes to her doctor and she has irregular cycles or painful periods, the way we are conventionally trained in medicine is that the pill is the panacea for all that ails women. So if a woman has irregular cycles, you put her on the birth control pill, if she has painful periods, you put her on the birth control pill. If she has PMS symptoms, we put her on the birth control pill. What I learned when I was a resident at length stood in the hospital when I first learned about natural methods or fertility, where two space methods. I learned that the hormonal birth control pill doesn't actually treat those symptoms. It suppresses a woman's form and makes it appear as though she's having regular cycles may alleviate some of the symptoms. But the underlying cause of the painful periods or the irregular cycles may not be being addressed and in fact, may actually be continuing to worsen. So women will go on, you know, birth control, 15, 18, 20 to treat symptoms, only to go off at a decade later to discover that their body has really been unhealthy for over a decade and they haven't really gotten the diagnosis or the appropriate treatment to address those underlying causes, which in many cases will lead to infertility, because in women, the two leading medical conditions that lead to infertility are polycystic ovarian syndrome, which often manifests with irregular cycles and endometriosis, which often manifests as painful periods. And again, if we're not diagnosing the condition but merely treating the symptoms, women are going to struggle with infertility later on in life when they when they want to try to have children. |
| Mary Fiorito | MARGARET The IVF issue has really sort of exploded because of President Trump's recent executive order, which is confusing a lot of people because exactly precisely what it's going to do is still unclear. But it's obviously putting IVF forward as a sort of the method to treat infertility. Obviously, as Catholics, we have moral and ethical concerns along with practical ones about IVF. Can you unpack those, please, for our listeners? |
| Dr. Marguerite Duane | Sure. Absolutely. And let me be clear, I really try to take a focus on the issues from the scientific perspective, like what is good medicine, what is good health care? And I think what's critically important for your listeners to understand is that infertility is not a disease. Let me repeat that. Infertility is actually not a disease. Infertility is a symptom of other underlying diseases and the disease, like the underlying causes, the underlying diseases can be things like endometriosis, polycystic ovarian syndrome, low sperm count, anatomical or structural issues such as fibroids. These are the diseases that lead to the symptom of infertility. IVF or in-vitro fertilization treats infertility as if it is the disease. So if the if infertility is the disease, you can't have a child. Infertility seeks to create a human embryo outside of the woman's body by combining the sperm and the egg. And it has tube or in a petri dish, and then implanting that human embryo, that newly formed human life at its earliest stages, typically at about 5 to 7 days post fertilization, transferring that human embryo back into the woman's body. Well, if the issue was creating the baby, then IVF should have a 100% success rate once you create the baby. But the reality is, is when women have those embryos transplanted back, the success rate isn't even close to hundred percent. It isn't even 50%. It really depends on the woman's age, but it may only range from 3 to 30%. So the issue is, is it's not a matter of creating the baby. It's creating a healthy body and bodies to both the male and the female to allow for the human being, for it, for fertilization to occur, for that embryo to be formed, and for the woman to then be able to grow that child. So, again, you know, another common cause of infertility or contributing factor to infertility in women may be a disease called hypothyroidism. That's a very, very common condition. And if a woman's thyroid levels are abnormal, she is at a higher risk of miscarriage. And so if you have a woman with hypothyroidism and you create an embryo and you put the embryo back in the body, but you haven't treated the underlying hormonal issue, she may not be able to carry that pregnancy to term. So, yes, there is a multitude of issues. I think first and foremost is that IVF fails to recognize fundamentally that infertility is a symptom of other underlying diseases and it's not a disease in and of itself. Clearly, from a Catholic perspective, there are the moral issues that IVF seeks to create human life outside of the human body, outside of that sexual union, which has a whole host of issues. The other issue is this just the financial issue. I mean, to be honest, I know many people were surprised with Trump's executive order because he proclaims to be, you know, the most pro-life president ever, which if you're promoting IVF is that's actually not a consistent message, because in the IVF process, one of the biggest issues is the destruction, the overwhelming destruction of human embryos. At the rate stages. But I was surprised purely from a financial perspective, because IVF is incredibly costly. And again, it doesn't get at the root underlying causes of infertility, whereas restorative reproductive medicine, when provided by physicians or other clinicians trained in that biotechnology or fem or neo fertility, the effectiveness, the safety, the affordability is much, much, much greater than than it is with IVF. |
| Ashley | Do you have a sense that maybe the tide is turning a little bit? I think for so long, you know, now nanotechnology technology was associated with Catholics and what they called Vatican roulette and wasn't thought of as very scientific. And the advances are just extraordinary. I think, you know, it's very ahead of the curve. And I know you're looking at it from a scientific perspective, but now there's you know, my daughter's in a teen film class, which is teaching adolescent girls just how to observe their bodies. Do you sense that there's kind of a an appetite for the type of work that you're pioneering? |
| Dr. Marguerite Duane | Absolutely. And I've definitely seen it in the last 15 years, you know, through my role at Facts about Fertility. And I see the people that are coming to our conferences, the students that are taking the electives. So facts began when we started offering an elective at Georgetown and now it's officially approved as a fourth year elective. So we have students from all over the country and all over the world that take our elective. We've talked over a thousand students in the last in the last decade, and over half of them do not identify as Christian or Catholic. I I'm a big promoter of fertility, where to space methods for everyone. I like to say nobody's ovaries are Catholic, right? Your ovaries year ovaries, hormones function the way they are, the way they do because you are a female regardless of your faith. And so it facts. We're really focused on sharing the science so that every woman has access to this information. And we're seeing there's huge interest among the general community and this has helped to open the doors, right? So I have presented at a wide array of conferences, you know, both faith based and secular. I presented at the Title ten Family Planning Conference, which, you know, very heavily promotes all kinds of birth control and abortion, but also recognizes fertility awareness based methods, you know, should also be an option. And in so I think we are seeing that and I think Ashley you may appreciate this with your daughter learning how to chart like all women want this because when we educate women about their body works, we really empower them. Like they become body literate, they understand their body, they can read their body. And so women from all walks of life, whether they're married or single, whether they're young or old, whether they're healthy or struggling with symptoms, this can be incredibly, incredibly empowering. And so, yes, we are seeing huge interest. And again, I see this in in the and the students that are enrolling in our elective and the people that are attending our FACS conferences. |
| Mary Fiorito | Well, speaking of your fax conferences, I know you have one coming up and you're going to have a special guest from from Ireland. Can you tell us about it and then let our listeners know how they can attend it in person or virtually? |
| Dr. Marguerite Duane | Yeah, absolutely. So Facts about fertility hosts an annual in-person conference and a virtual conference this year. Our annual in-person conference will be March 21st and 22nd at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And our lead speaker on Friday morning is Dr. Phil Boyle, who is a family physician who originally training in Annapolis technology and then developed neo fertility. Dr. Boyle is one of the leading researchers and experts in the fields of restorative reproductive medicine, especially when it comes to addressing infertility, both in women and in men. So his talk is aptly titled Infertility Caring for the Whole Couple. And it's so critically important. And he has done the research to show that when you use a restorative reproductive medical approach, you can have a live birth rate that exceeds well over 50 live births per 100 women years. He's published a study where he looked at couples who were struggling with infertility, who failed IVF on average, failed two cycles of IVF, and 33% of these patients were able to conceive and carried a term and have a baby when using the restorative reproductive approaches that he teaches and he'll be speaking about at our Pittsburgh conference so people can visit our facts about fertility dot org websites to register for the conference. It is in-person only, but we will be integrating this content into our online continuing medical education course and our online continuing medical education course is already available. There are 13 parts. Certainly medical professionals can earn continuing medical education credit, but we welcome anyone who wants to learn more. You know, whether you're a medical professional or a patient or person just really wants to understand their body. We have opportunities to sample some of this unique content or enroll in, you know, sections like lifestyle and its effect on fertility or the latest in Femtech. |
| Mary Fiorito | Okay. Well, Doctor Duane, thank you so much. And again that that website for our listeners please. |
| Dr. Marguerite Duane | It's facts about fertility dot org and we would love to see people at our conference March 21st and 22nd of note the registration deadline is is March ten and if people have questions they can email us at info at facts about fertility. Dot org. |
| Mary Fiorito | Well, Dr. Margaret Duane, thank you so much for being part of the show today. And to follow all of our work at the Catholic Association, you can look us up at the Catholic Association dot org. Thanks again for joining us today. |
| Dr. Marguerite Duane | Thank you. |
| Ashley | Welcome to Conversations with Consequences on EWTN Radio on your hostess, Ashley McGuire. And I'm Betsy Fentress, and we are happy to have with us again Monsignor Roger Landry. He's a member of our TCA team and joining us in person every week so we can learn more about his new position as the national director of the Pontifical Mission Societies. And today, with the Holy Father in the hospital, we wanted to have him on to talk with us about the importance of prayer. So thank you for making time for us again this week. Monsignor. |
| Msgr. Landry | I am always delighted to join you in a consequential conversation. Ashley and Betsy. And there's no more consequential conversation than the one we have with God in prayer. And as our Holy Father desperately needs our prayers and is begging for our prayers, we want our prayer to be efficacious with regard to the graces he himself needs in order to deny themselves to his boss, Jesus Christ on the cross, making up what was lacking in Christ sufferings in Pope Francis's own flesh for the needs of the church. And so at every mass we pray for the Holy Father. For those of us who prayed the Rosary, normally the first our Father goes to the Holy Father, and then sometimes while praying our Father, Hail Mary, glory, be firm at the end. We pray for him in the liturgy, the hours we pray for him with one of them. Very beautiful hymns that we say Thomas can see everyday and may the Lord protect them and bless him here on Earth and free him from all those enemies. And so prayer for the Pope as good sons and daughters of the church is not an optional part of our Catholic faith, but a core part. It's so true and it's been so encouraging to see the true outpouring of prayer everywhere, whether it's in Saint Peter's Square or on Twitter. And it's just such a reminder of what it is to be Catholic. And that and the important role that the Holy Father has in symbolizing the unity as the head of one body. The prayers these last couple of nights this week from Saint Peter's Square for the Holy Father is the church at our best? Just everybody, including sometimes there were some photographs of those who have been on Pope Francis's good side and who have suffered as a result of some of the decisions that he's made that they themselves would prioritize. Going to pray for the Holy Father shows a deep characteristic about who we are, that just as Jesus prayed for everybody, we are called to love people and our prayer first and foremost, and to see that expression of faithful, filial love for the one we call our Holy Father was really quite beautiful and we need to be more and more the church at our best. There are some people, including here in the United States, who over the last few years have been marked more by criticism for the Holy Father than by a prayer for the Holy Father and the Holy Father has made some decisions about which people can have differing opinions and some serious concerns. That's all fear. But to the extent that we might criticize one thing or the next, that is a greater inducement to prayer, not a lesser. And so this week it's been really moving to see how all 1.3 billion are united as brothers and sisters in praying for our Holy Father on Earth. |
| Ashley | When we were getting ready for this podcast, I was thinking about how my mother every morning said the morning offering out loud. And she said for the petitions of the Pope. And I thought, This is kind of interesting because now we are doing petitions for him, but mostly in the morning offering. We are uniting our prayers with his petitions. |
| Msgr. Landry | It is a great Catholic practice for us to pray for what other people are praying for. So I often pray for whatever our lady is praying for right now, for whatever Jesus is interceding before the Father. One of the great prayers that I make for people on their birthdays or on their feast days or their anniversaries is Lord, I am praying for whatever Betsy is praying for today, for whatever Ashley is praying for. And if Jesus prayed for Peter that his faith may not fail, how much more shall we? Should we be praying together with Jesus for the living, Peter, that not only his faith won't fail, but that his faith will strengthen our faith? |
| Ashley | Monsignor, we don't have a lot of time with you today, but we'd love to hear with what time we have left about a recent experience that you had in front of the mortal remains of Saint Francis Xavier Cabrini in New York. Within the context of this year's Jubilee of Hope, can you tell us a little bit about that? |
| Msgr. Landry | So the shrine of Saint Francis Xavier Cabrini, where a relics are under the altar in Washington Heights, New York, a part of upper Manhattan, is has launched a Jubilee of Hope speaker series. And they asked me to kick the whole thing off. And I spoke about how Saint Francis Xavier Cabrini by being a saint, the church has pronounced her to be heroically virtuous in seven virtues, one of which is hope that she was a real hero of hope, and that each of us in this Jubilee of Hope is called not just to be a little bit more hopeful, but to become truly heroic, valiant and hope. Saint John Paul, the second, called her a messenger of hope for the world. Pope Francis called her a missionary of hope for the world. And she brought that hope to 67 different institutions all over the world, because as Pope Benedict said when he was in the United States in 2008, our hope is not just an interior attitude where we look on the bright side of things. Our hope is a person, Christ Jesus is our hope. As Saint Paul wrote in his first letter to Saint Timothy. And so Saint Francis Xavier Cabrini brought that hope, Jesus Christ, to so many across the world. That's what missionaries do every day. That's what we're trying to do. It Conversations with consequences. And that's what every Catholic son or daughter is called to be. To the extent that by our baptism we're called to be a saint, it means we're called to be heroic in faith, hope, love, prudence, courage, moderation and justice. And so Saint Francis Xavier Cabrini is a real signpost for us in this year of how to grow to hopeful heroism. |
| Ashley | In this Jubilee year. If we can't get to Rome, can you give us some ideas of how we might partake as pilgrims here? |
| Msgr. Landry | So in every diocese the bishop has named at least a few churches, this cathedral and some others where you can get all the indulgence of the jubilee just by going there, you can't nominate a door in those churches as a holy door like in Rome. But the indulgences that would come through passing through a holy bore are able to be received. An every diocesan cathedral in the country. And in some of the other churches, especially in the bigger dioceses, too. So Saint Francis Xavier Cabrini Shrine here in New York is one of those places. So we were able to get up to two plenary indulgences on a given day. And so I just encourage people, if they don't know already, where to go in their diocese, to call their diocesan headquarter and ask and then go and take their family and take some friends so that we might be able to be filled with heroic hope close to home. |
| Ashley | Well, I know that my diocese just announced where our location is, and I texted it right away to my husband said, we got to take the kids. So I encourage all of our listeners to do as Monsignor says and find out where you can go so that we can all partake together as one body in Christ in this wonderful Jubilee year. So we thank you, Monsignor, for your time. And to find out more about the Catholic Association Board, follow everything we do at the Catholic Association Board. Thank you, Monsignor. |
| Msgr. Landry | Great to be with you. Ashley and Betsy, thanks. |
| Ashley | And we'd like to thank all of our guests and listeners for joining us today. Make sure to follow us on social media. And as always, you go with our prayers. |
