Catholic News 2
PARIS (AP) -- Two attackers invaded a church Tuesday during morning Mass near the Normandy city of Rouen, killing an 84-year-old priest by slitting his throat and taking hostages before being shot and killed by police, French officials said....
BERLIN (AP) -- Top security officials in Germany called Tuesday for tougher security screening of asylum-seekers and also announced that more police officers will be hired following four attacks in the country in the span of a week - two of them claimed by the extremist Islamic State group....
SAGAMIHARA, Japan (AP) -- A young Japanese man went on a stabbing rampage Tuesday at a facility for the mentally disabled where he had been fired, officials said, killing 19 people months after he gave a letter to Parliament outlining the bloody plan and saying all disabled people should be put to death....
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Without mentioning Donald Trump by name, first lady Michelle Obama stood before the Democratic convention on Monday and drew a sharp sketch of the Republican nominee that stood in harsh contrast to her gauzy portrait of Hillary Clinton as a woman who has looked out for children and the disadvantaged all her life....
PARIS (AP) -- The Latest on the hostage-taking in the French region of Normandy. (all times local):...
Denver, Colo., Jul 26, 2016 / 12:48 am (CNA).- Megan Finegan and Kaylin Koslosky are not theologians, journalists, or youth ministers. But the 22-year-old friends believe that they can minister to other young women by writing a new book about femininity. Their book, “Daughter of the King: Wait, Where’s My Crown?!,” addresses issues young women face in today’s society from the perspective of young women themselves.Finegan recently graduated from Benedictine University and is now a paralegal. Koslosky is finishing up her last year at Colorado State University and is hoping to teach high school science.In what they hope will be a fun and easy to read format, the two friends discuss faith, relationships, beauty, modesty, and what they call “twenty-first century buzz topics” like homosexuality and abortion.“We just felt incredibly called by God to help Him get this message out there to His daughters--our peers,” Koslosky told CNA.Koslo...
Denver, Colo., Jul 26, 2016 / 12:48 am (CNA).- Megan Finegan and Kaylin Koslosky are not theologians, journalists, or youth ministers. But the 22-year-old friends believe that they can minister to other young women by writing a new book about femininity.
Their book, “Daughter of the King: Wait, Where’s My Crown?!,” addresses issues young women face in today’s society from the perspective of young women themselves.
Finegan recently graduated from Benedictine University and is now a paralegal. Koslosky is finishing up her last year at Colorado State University and is hoping to teach high school science.
In what they hope will be a fun and easy to read format, the two friends discuss faith, relationships, beauty, modesty, and what they call “twenty-first century buzz topics” like homosexuality and abortion.
“We just felt incredibly called by God to help Him get this message out there to His daughters--our peers,” Koslosky told CNA.
Koslosky and Finegan said competition and judgment are prominent in today’s culture, but this book takes a different approach.
“We’re here with you now, and it’s hard, and we’re still struggling with this information too,” Finnegan said, “but this is the truth and this is what we’re striving for, but it’s a journey.”
“And this is what’s helped us,” Koslosky added.
Though the two frequently finish each other’s sentences and joke that they share one brain, they have many different life experiences as well.
“We have touched on every topic faced by high school and college women nowadays,” Koslosky said.
In addition to their testimonies, Finegan and Koslosky offer tips and personal discoveries in every chapter. They said they also researched the topics, citing more than 30 sources.
“(The book is) just resurrecting a deeper beauty and understanding that who we are is beautiful and the life we bring to the world as women,” Koslosky said.
According to Koslosky, the idea for the book came from “Megan’s mouth.”
In the summer of 2014, the two prayed a novena to St. Anne.
“She and I would meet up at the adoration chapel and talk about the reflection of the day and it would be about all these feminine virtues,” Finegan said.
“We were like yelling at each other, agreeing, but yelling because we were so passionate about it,” Koslosky said.
The idea of doing something about it popped up, but was forgotten as time went on. It was not until the Feast of the Assumption on August 15 of that year, that it resurfaced.
The two women were in the car driving to Mass when Koslosky began talking about how she loved the books she was reading on feminine virtue.
Finegan said she loved those books too but they would always lose her attention part-way in and that, “honestly, I feel like we need someone in our generation to write to us because I’m tired of 40-year-olds writing to us when really, our generation is different.”
They pointed out that the culture of dating had completely changed and with the influence of technology, everything was different. The two agreed that someday a college student should write a book when Finegan said, “I feel like we should do that.”
“I was like, ‘Nope, do you know what it means to write a book?’” Koslosky recalled.
“That’s long. We are busy people,” she said.
That fall semester, Finegan was leaving for a study abroad trip in Florence, Italy and Koslosky was getting ready to coordinate a large retreat for her college’s campus ministry. They were both loaded up on school credits and said they did not have the time.
But they prayed about it that day and said, “It was a weird Mass experience.”
Koslosky said she began to laugh and was full of joy. She thought, “We have to do this.” Finegan said she knew God was asking a lot and she was scared, but once she gave it all to Him, she had peace about the idea.
“Both of us were dead in,” they said.
As Mass continued, they began to write things down on a little notebook Koslosky had in her purse.
“We get to her [Kaylin’s] home and we just like start looking at what we had written down and we typed it up and we had an outline and intro done,” Finegan said.
Neither of the young women were writers, but they said journaling was how they prayed best. During the fall semester, they tried writing more, but it was not very productive. So that Christmas break, they gave themselves one week to get it all done.
“Each day we wrote a section,” Koslosky said.
They would begin the day with Mass, then go to a coffee shop next to St. Thomas More Catholic Church in Centennial, Colorado and write as much as they could. If something were too difficult to write, they would go to Adoration.
“The really hard, vulnerable parts, Jesus had to help us with,” Koslosky said.
“We are very vulnerable in this book,” she continued. “Here’s our entire life; everything we’ve done wrong, everything we’re not proud of, but here’s what God’s done with us.”
“And that’s what’s amazing.”
According to Koslosky, they wrote the book in six days.
“On the seventh day, we rested,” Finegan chimed in.
After it was finished, the young women did not know what to do next. Koslosky said, “We didn’t know the words platform or book proposals.”
But that summer, Koslosky happened to meet Curtis Martin, the founder of the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS), and Finegan met international Catholic chastity speaker Jason Evert, at separate events.
Not only did the interactions encourage the two to continue with publishing the book, but FOCUS said they would sell it, and Jason Evert offered the young women a place to build their platform on his website, the contact to his own editor, and the advice to self-publish.
One of Koslosky’s blogs for Jason Evert, entitled “I Never Knew a Bikini Could Hide So Much,” was the top blog post on chastityproject.com for 2015.
On August 15 of this year, the book dedicated to Mary will be published.
The two authors said they just want other women to know, “No matter what you’ve done or where you’ve been, or what your past is or isn’t, you’re beautiful, you’re loved and you’re a daughter of the King.”
They described the book as a starting point for any young women to delve deeper in their faith or open their minds to the possibility of truth in its pages. Finegan and Koslosky hope it is just the start of a journey and are offering further resources on www.restoreyourcrown.com.
Washington D.C., Jul 26, 2016 / 03:04 am (CNA/EWTN News).- When Maggie* was in high school, she stayed after class to talk to ask a teacher what to do about a very personal concern she felt her physician was not taking seriously. What she learned led to the discovery of a brain tumor, and treatment for the growth which had been affecting the teen for years. The tools she needed to find and treat this growth came from an awareness of her fertility and natural cycles.“It wasn’t so much that I was trying to avoid pregnancy or get pregnant – it’s that there was something legitimately wrong with my body,” Maggie told CNA.By the time she was in her late teens, Maggie had noticed that her cycles had never regulated, and had no idea what that meant except that it wasn't normal. While for the first years after a young woman begins to menstruate her cycles are of varying length and heaviness, they typically regulate within a few years. But several years after...
Washington D.C., Jul 26, 2016 / 03:04 am (CNA/EWTN News).- When Maggie* was in high school, she stayed after class to talk to ask a teacher what to do about a very personal concern she felt her physician was not taking seriously. What she learned led to the discovery of a brain tumor, and treatment for the growth which had been affecting the teen for years. The tools she needed to find and treat this growth came from an awareness of her fertility and natural cycles.
“It wasn’t so much that I was trying to avoid pregnancy or get pregnant – it’s that there was something legitimately wrong with my body,” Maggie told CNA.
By the time she was in her late teens, Maggie had noticed that her cycles had never regulated, and had no idea what that meant except that it wasn't normal. While for the first years after a young woman begins to menstruate her cycles are of varying length and heaviness, they typically regulate within a few years. But several years after her own cycles began, Maggie was concerned that they never had settled into a normal pattern – in fact, she sometimes would have as few as one cycle a year. In addition, she also faced rounds of headaches.
One day, Maggie approached her college-level biology teacher, who also happened to be a practicing Catholic, looking for an explanation for her concerns and asking what to do. The teacher told her to ask her pediatrician, but also put her in touch with her church’s fertility instructor to see what could be done.
Maggie said her pediatrician immediately assumed that she was pregnant: an impossibility, because she was not sexually active. When the pregnancy tests came back negative, the doctor responded, “‘I don’t know what your problem is’ and brushed me off,” she recalled.
Meanwhile, the local parish’s natural family planning (NFP) instructor saw the teen’s distress and put her in touch with a Catholic fertility physician who could teach Maggie how to observe and chart the signs of her fertility.
Understanding Fertility
“A sign of health in a woman is a normal, regular cycle,” Dr. Lorna Cvetkovich, a gynecologist and obstetrician at Tepeyac Family Center in Fairfax, Va., explains. “We know what a normal cycle looks like,” she continued, “so at any time the parameters fall outside of those, then that’s a clue that maybe they’re not ovulating, they may have a luteal phase defect, they may have fibroids. It can show you all sorts of things.”
For women whose cycles fall within a normal range, normal bodily processes present themselves in a predictable pattern.
In the first part of a woman’s cycle, called the follicular phase, hormonal signals from the pituitary gland trigger the follicles (egg-containing structures within the ovaries) to prepare an egg for ovulation and to secrete estrogen into the woman’s body. This rise in estrogen levels triggers changes in the kind of fluid the cervix secretes, as well as thickening the uterine lining, making them more able to support the conception process.
After ovulation a woman's body secretes progesterone, which causes a sharp increase in a woman’s basal, or resting, body temperature, as well as a preparation of the uterine lining for possible implantation. If a pregnancy occurs, the basal body temperature and hormone levels may continue to rise, whereas if pregnancy does not happen, the resulting dip in hormones triggers a drop in temperature, menstruation, and the beginning of a new cycle.
In a healthy woman who is not pregnant, this cycle will repeat every 21-35 days.
These changes can be observed by any woman, and can be used by married couples as a valid method to achieve or delay pregnancy, according to the teaching of the Catholic Church, which teaches that it is immoral to disrupt this natural cycle with the use of contraceptive pills, implants, barrier methods, or by having incomplete intercourse. Using these observations to help in the discernment of family size is known as natural family planning.
However, the same observations and data – commonly collected into charts for easier analysis – can be used to help diagnose gynecological issues such as ovarian cysts and growths in the uterus, called fibroids, as well as hormone deficiencies and other abnormalities affecting bodily functions. The information can also be essential in pinpointing issues surrounding pregnancy, such as the exact date of conception, infertility, and miscarriages.
This information is such a valuable insight into a patients health and symptoms – and an invaluable tool for doctors practicing reproductive medicine. “I just think it’s invaluable, and I don’t really know how people practice [gynecology] without having the charting,” said Cvetkovich. “There’s just so many uses, and it adds so much to your evaluation of the patient.”
Cycles and Diagnosis
Disorders in other bodily systems – such as the endocrine system – can manifest in a woman’s menstrual cycle and her chart. “Thyroid plays a role in almost every function of the body, so it may show up as a sign in the cycle,” explained Cvetkovich.
For Christine, charting her bodily signs helped her to catch an issue with her thyroid that might otherwise have been missed. After charting for four years, she started noticing that some months there was no ovulation that could be detected by temperature or with chemical tests for the hormones that trigger ovulation.
“I had what looked like a really long cycle, and then eventually, what to the uninformed observer would look to be a light period. But because I knew I hadn’t peaked, I was able to identify it as estrogen breakthrough bleeding and not a real cycle,” she explained.
“It seemed like my body was trying to ovulate, and not really getting there.”
She approached her doctor, explaining she was not ovulating and that she would like to find the cause for something that was out of the ordinary. The doctor then ordered comprehensive blood tests, and found that some of her thyroid-stimulating hormone levels were elevated beyond normal – in fact, her levels were twice as high s they had been a year ago.
After receiving treatment, her cycles returned to their normal pattern.
“I didn’t have a lot of signs or symptoms of hypothyroidism, aside from missing ovulation,” Christine noted, saying she wouldn't have picked up on the disorder had she not been charting. “ I wouldn’t have realized there was an issue,” Christine she added, reflecting on the fact that she probably would not have even received the treatment she needed.
“Whenever I’m sharing my experience with NFP with somebody, I’m always quick to point out not only all of the standard benefits, but that it enabled me to know my body and know there’s a problem that so many people wouldn’t be aware of."
How Fertility Awareness Helped to Find a Tumor
After a local NFP instructor put Maggie in touch with physicians familiar with fertility awareness, she became more aware of what was going on in her own body. She learned to observe her basal body temperature and cervical fluid signs – and noticed that while sometimes she had a more typical menstrual cycle and her chart showed the usual peaks and dips of a healthy young woman, at other times her cycle was irregular and her temperature was more elevated.
Even though she was not sexually active, “my body was acting like it was pregnant,” Maggie said. The doctors at the Catholic fertility clinic sent Maggie out for blood work, which showed a high level of prolactin – a hormone present during pregnancy and breastfeeding. She took this information back to her pediatrician, and then to an endocrinologist, who ordered an MRI scan of her brain.
“There was a tumor pressing into my pituitary, pressing into my frontal cortex,” Maggie explained.
“When I first heard the word ‘tumor’ I freaked out,” she related, but thankfully, “it wasn’t cancerous,” but a benign growth which explained both her irregular cycles and some of her headaches.
Maggie received the treatment she needed to shrink the tumor, and told CNA that “things are pretty much normal now.” While the tumor is still there – “it’ll never really go away, unless I get surgery," she related; “what’s happened at this point is that it’s checked.”
While since receiving treatment she has no need to monitor as rigorously all of her signs and symptoms, knowledge of her fertility and its signs has given Maggie tools she can use use if the tumor starts to grow again.
“I have this, and I know these are indicators to know [if] something is wrong with my prolactin.”
Fertility – 'A Public Health Issue'
Cvetkovich suggested this level of awareness can be useful for any woman looking to take care of their health.
“I think that anytime you put someone more in tune with your body, they’re just going to know that things are wrong earlier. I think that’s what it’s all about, knowing what’s normal for you, and being in tune with it.”
She commented that many of her fellow physicians, as well as the general public, have grown accustomed to relying on hormonal contraceptives to address disorders, a practice she said “makes people very distant from their bodies and from their cycles.”
“We’ve lost the idea that having a normal monthly cycle is health – that’s normal. Being fertile is normal. I think that’s where NFP brings us back to, really: to reality.”
Maggie agrees, saying that some of her initial struggle in receiving treatment was a result of people “missing the point that fertility isn’t sort of an accessory to being a human woman – it’s an integral part of how our bodies work.” Awareness of how women’s bodies work, and how to tell when they’re not working correctly, is important for everyone.
“It’s a public health issue.”
*Name has been changed to protect privacy.
This article was originally published July 31, 2015.
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