Scary Science Stories #3: The Mind Parasites

No this isn’t about Colin Wilson’s Lovecraftian novel The Mind Parasites. It’s about something else.

Suppose that there was a parasite that needed to get into the gut of a cat in order to complete its reproductive cycle.

How can this parasite get into the guts of cats?

Well, a good way would be by first infecting things that cats like to eat–like rats.

But cats don’t like to eat dead mice. They like to eat living ones.

So, if you’re the parasite, you want to do whatever you can to make sure that your mouse gets eaten before it dies a natural death and starts decaying.

The problem is that rats don’t like to be eaten by cats. In fact, they have a panic/avoidance reaction to cats. So strong is this reaction that the scent of cat urine produces a panic reaction (which human scientists use when they need to induce fear in rats) and they flee places cats have marked with cat urine.

If you’re the parasite, that’s no good for you. The rats have an inbuilt cat-avoidance mechanism.

But maybe you can disable it.

Let’s suppose that you form cysts in the rat’s body, including in its brain. Maybe you can turn off its panic/avoidance mechanism.

If so, then your rat will stop being afraid of places that cats have marked and will spend more time in places where cats hang out, thus increasing the chances that cats will eat them.

In fact, maybe you can get the rat to become attracted to the smell of cat urine, causing him to have a suicidal attraction to cats.

If so, good for you.

Now suppose also that you–this parasite–happen to also infect HALF of the human population.

And suppose that there is evidence linking you to schizophrenia in humans.

Is there such a parasite?

There is. It’s called toxoplasma gondii.

GET THE STORY.

MORE HERE.

Incidentally, the first story mentions several other behavior-altering parasites as well. It does not, however, mention one that I’m curious to know about.

A number of years ago I saw a documentary that talked about a parasite that infects snails and causes them to get eaten by birds. This parasite does two things: It makes the snail have a compulsion to crawl up onto the tops of leaves, so birds can see them, and it makes the snail pulse in weird colors–again to attract the bird’s attention.

If anybody knows the name of that parasite, please let me know.

Not that I have any snails I want to get rid of. It’s just hate not being able to remember the name of something so eerie.

Vote! Vote! Vote!

The voting phase of the 2006 Catholic Blog Awards is now underway!

I hope that when you vote y’all will remember your humble JimmyAkin.Org (a.k.a. Defensor Fidei in the voting), which–much to my surprise–was nominated for a startling number of categories this year:

  • Best Apologetics Blog
  • Most Theological Blog
  • Most Informative Blog
  • Most Insightful Blog
  • Most Intellectual Blog
  • Most Creative Blog
  • Most Bizarre Blog
  • Most Bizarre Blog Post, and
  • Best Blog By A Man (I pointed out the group blog nature of JA.O, but
    those in charge thought it was sufficiently identified with me that
    they preferred to put it in this category)

Despite being nominated for Most Intellectual Blog, I want to stump for this award to go to someone else.

Ed Peters’ blog In the Light of the Law is devoted exclusively to high-end canon law issues. My blog also tackles high-end issues, but it also includes a lot of other stuff (e.g., humor material), meaning that its overall intellectual density per square inch of blogspace is lower, so I’m recommending votes for Ed’s blog in this category.

I’m also recommending SouthernAppeal in the categories it is running for, though The Anchoress may give it a run for its money in the political category this year.

Have fun voting!

VOTE HERE!

Why Have Babies?

The question I dealt with earlier about why one should not baptize a baby and immediately murder it to ensure its salvation brought to mind a related question that struck me back when I was a Calvinist.

The question was this: Why should one have babies at all since they will just grow up to become sinners–even saved ones–who commit more offenses against God and thus add to the evil in the universe?

The solution that I came up with at the time is that new people don’t just add new offenses to the grand ledger of the universe. They also add good to the universe. They add natural good based on what God has given them by nature, and they add supernatural good based on what God gives them by grace.

To the extent that people add good to the universe, it makes the evil they add more tolerable in a sense.

Whether they ultimately add more good than they do evil is something that only God knows, but we do know that it is his will that the human race continue until the end of the world. It’s that "Be fruitful and multiply" think, y’know?

There is another consideration here also: ultimate justice. It isn’t just that they’re adding evil to the universe and that this situation will remain unredressed, with the universe acquiring an ever more and more negative moral charge. God will ultimately balance the scales (to mix metaphors). Those who have done evil and refused to repend and accept God’s grace will ultimately get what’s coming to them. Even the saved who are forgiven their sins will still have to repent of them and deal with their consequences, either in this life or purgatory.

This also allows the evil that is done in the world to be tolerable for the sake of the good that is also done. It’s not like the evil will go on forever, unaddressed. It’s something that is only temporarily allowed so that the good in the universe can also flourish.

I’d also add one point that I would not have added as a Calvinist: God is simply not risk averse. In order to get new saved immortal beings who freely chose their salvation he is willing to risk letting them have freedom. The biggest threat to our salvation is our free will, but God is willing to let us have freedom because he’s not just after saved souls but after a certain kind of saved soul: those who have chosen him.

If he, then, is willing to take the risk that a given baby may grow up to ultimately reject him, who are we to question that?

Our job is to have the babies and point them toward God as their ultimate destination, not to decide beforehand that the risk is too great and prevent them from exercising the freedom that God wills them to have.

We can thus help children along the road to heaven by giving them spiritual goods, like the gospel and baptism (when they’re too small and trusting to reject either of these things), but we must also allow them to grow into that maturity of reason and freedom that would allow them to reject the graces they have been given if they choose to do so.

If God is willing to take that risk, we must be willing as well.

We can’t murder them right after baptism, and we can’t refrain from having babies just because we’re afraid of the risk.

We have to live our lives in accordance with God’s known goals. We must be fruitful and multiply, and we must do what we can to ensure that The Circle Will Be Unbroken, but we cannot do this in a way that seeks to eliminate human freedom and the risks that accompany it.

Freedom is essential to what God is trying to do with us.

The Gospel According To Su Doku

While browsing in the religion sections of chain bookstores, I often find pop-spirituality books with titles like The Gospel According to Peanuts or The Gospel According to Harry Potter; even, I kid you not, The Gospel According to Oprah. I’ve never even scanned through these titles, so I can’t tell you much about them, but I assume they talk about the Christian values you can expect to find in these sources. The Amazon.com ad for the Oprah book says the author, for example, "praises Oprah for using her entertainment pulpit to promote such positive spiritual values as gratitude, empathy, forgiveness and self-examination."

Uh huh.

Well, anyway, in light of these contributions to "gospel values," it occurs to me that what the world now needs is a Gospel According to Su Doku.

Perhaps you are unaware of Su Doku?  Sometime last year, I started noticing books on the subject popping up in bookstores, but ignored them. Then at a Christmas party this past year, I was given a book of Su Doku puzzles and started learning. Basically, it’s a number-placement logic game popular in Japan that recently became fantastically popular in the West when the London Times began running puzzles alongside the crossword puzzles.

In Su Doku (Japanese, "single number"), there is a grid of nine blocks, with each block sectioned off into nine squares. The object is to place numbers from one to nine horizontally, vertically, and within each block without repeating a number. Never a numbers person, I didn’t think I’d like the game very much, but I was wrong. It’s a fascinating process and a lot of fun.

So, what’s my Gospel According to Su Doku? Well, it’s more an Apologetics Lessons Learned while playing Su Doku.

  • Work in small sections, blocking off extraneous information until it is needed. But remember that there is a bigger picture. The information you insert into the puzzle in one block must agree with the rest of the puzzle. If you put the wrong number in even one square, you’ll ruin the whole puzzle. Sweat the small stuff.
  • As you add more numbers to your puzzle, you will be able to solve other sections of the puzzle that you previously were unable to solve. Information in one area increases the information you have to be able to solve the rest of the puzzle.
  • As the numbers increasingly fall into place, you eventually reach a "tipping point" and soon the whole puzzle falls into place. Where once you could spend ten minutes trying to find a single number to fit, now you are plugging in the numbers in seconds flat.

What does this have to do with apologetics?

  • You should be wary of giving people more information than they request at any one time because they may not yet be ready to accept it. But keep in mind that there is a larger picture and that the information you give now is not a self-sustaining construct but a piece of a larger puzzle.
  • As you receive answers to questions about the faith in one area, you soon find yourself able to resolve other apologetics difficulties either you or someone else may have. For example, an answer about the proper understanding of the Incarnation here may lead to a better understanding of Mary somewhere down the line.
  • In the conversion process, there is eventually a "tipping point," after which you are no longer struggling to place the information you’ve received into its proper place but are merely "filling in the blanks."

Now, I just have to find time to puff these pearls of wisdom into a 80,000-word manuscript and I’ll have the next Gospel According To… book ready to market!

Baptism & Murder

A reader writes:

Dear Mr. Akin,

You recently wrote,

"If it were easier to be saved as a non-Catholic than as a Catholic then God would have perversely commanded people to enter a suboptimal situation; one would then maximize one’s chances of salvation be entering a state that is out of conformity with God’s known will, which is crazy."

This implicates a question I have been concerned about for some time: if a baptized person dies before committing any actual sins, then he is assured of salvation, correct?  But this seems to lead to the disturbing and obviously wrong conclusion that, in terms of assuring their salvation, it would be optimal to murder newborn infants immediately after baptizing them.

To state this in terms of your quote above, "one would then maximize one’s child’s chances of salvation by committing an act that is out of conformity with God’s known will."  Which is crazy, but also seems to be true!  So why isn’t this situation analogous to the one you were talking about?

We know that God wills a number of things:

  1. He wills our salvation.
  2. He wills that we have reason.
  3. He wills that we have free will.
  4. He wills that we have good in this life as well as the next.
  5. He wills that we have greater glory in the next life based on the good we have done in this one.
  6. He wills that the human race continue.
  7. He wills that his Church spread the gospel to the unevangelized for their salvation.
  8. He wills that we not be murdered.

When trying to figure out the answer to the "Why not murder newly baptized babies?" question, one must keep the different goals in mind. It is true that God wills our salvation, but that is not the only thing that he wills. If it were his only will for us then the thing to do would be to take the most expeditious route to heaven, in which Christianity would become a kind of suicide cult. But this is not the only thing God wills for us, and Christianity is not a suicide cult.

Notice what would happen if the murder-after-infant-baptism policy were adopted:

  • Goal #1 would be facilitated for the babies in question.
  • Goal #2 would be thwarted because the children would not be allowed to grow up to exercise the reason that God made integral to their nature.
  • Goal #3 would be thwarted because the children would not be allowed to grow up to exercise the freedom that God made integral to their nature.
  • Goal #4 would be thwarted because they would have their earthly lives taken away from them.
  • Goal #5 would be thwarted because babies would not have the chance to grow up and do good.
  • Goal #6 would be thwarted because the human race would die out in one generation if this policy were enacted by everyone (though that would not be the case, because . . . ).
  • Goal #7 would be thwarted because the Church would go extinct before it could carry out its mission of evangelization.
  • Goal #8 would be thwarted for obvious reasons.

Also, the few remaining adult Christians would end up locked away in prison or put to death themselves, because no successful society can tolerate mass murder and suicide cults in its midst. There are laws against these things for a reason, and that reason points us in the direction of why God doesn’t want us to commit these abominations.

The fact that God has more than one goal that he wishes to achieve with us means that he allows them to exist in tension with each other. He doesn’t just will our salvation. He wills our salvation AND these other things.

The biggest tension among the goals is that between #1 and #3, and that’s where the biggest mystery lies. God could just fix all our wills on good and put us in heaven, but he apparently wants the saved to freely choose their fate rather than having it thrust upon them.

That’s true of us adults, and it’s true of infants.

This is accomplished, in the case of infant baptism, by allowing the child to grow up and exercise the free will that God made integral to their nature.

He’s willing to allow baptism to infants to provide for their spiritual development as Christians on their way to the mature use of reason and free will, and he’s willing to allow it as a guarantor of their salvation in the case that they don’t make it to the age of reason, but he is pursuing more than one goal with respect to babies, and all his goals for them must be kept in mind.

Starting a Church to lower people’s chances of salvation, though? That’s just plain crazy. (And contrary to goal #7.)

St. Valentine’s Day

Today is St. Valentine’s day–a celebration that is among the top five holidays which have had their Christian meaning forgotten in contemporary culture (along with Easter, Christmas, Fat Tuesday [Mardi Gras], and Halloween).

But it’s still popular, and certainly if you have a special someone, you need to do your part and get or do something nice for them.

In some ways, St. Valentine’s day is the hardest one of the Forgotten Five to articulate is Christian meaning. I mean, Easter is about the Resurrection, and Christmas is about the Nativity. Fat Tuesday is about the last chance to enjoy things we will give up for Lent, and Halloween is the preparation for the day celebrating all of the saints in heaven.

But what is St. Valentine’s day about? Obviously, about St. Valentine–but he lived so long ago that we don’t really know very much about him (other than that there was one and he was a martyr). The facts of his life have become enmeshed with Christian legend, and it’s hard to know much about him for sure.

Many of those legends connect him with helping out lovers in various ways, which explains why all the married men (among others) have got to get flowers and candy on the way home from work today (don’t forget!).

Still, it would help us better appreciate the day if we knew what there is to know about St. Valentine, which is why you should also

GET THE STORY.

Happy St. Valentine’s Day, y’all!

Evangelizing A Non-Catholic Minister

A reader writes:

I have some advice to ask. I have a niece who my wife and I nearly raised after her sister went through some hard times.  During college she met a wonderful young man who was going to study for the ministry and after graduating from College went on to Baptist Seminary where he graduated. He took a church and for a year he struggled as a young pastor to keep the congregation from splitting over a number of old seated issues.

After about a year of attempting to heal a broken church they decided that it was time to return home where they could be closer to family. After moving home, they are having trouble finding a congregation; our nephew has taken a counseling job where he can use his theological and pasturing skills while also providing for the family.

My question is that I have been feeling an intense sense that I should share the stories of many of the protestant ministers who have returned home to Rome but I am concerned that this might not be received in the right spirit. My wife and I are both converts, I converted in High School along with my entire family, she converted prior to our marriage.

Do you have any advice as to how I could start the conversation with my nephew? My sprit feels that there might be an openness on his part. 

I don’t know the young man as well as you, or what your relationship with him is, so my ability to offer advice is limited, but I’ll give you what thoughts I can.

It seems to me that I’d be as simple and direct and non-threatening as possible. I’d say something like:

You know, John, my wife and I weren’t always Catholic. We became Catholic, and it has really meant a lot to us. I know that you have a great desire to follow God, and I think God would want you to investigate whether he wants you to follow him as a Catholic.

It may not be something that you have ever seriously considered before–in fact, you may have been taught a number of things about Catholicism that would have kept you from considering it before. But many people have looked into Catholicism and become Catholic in recent years, including many Protestant ministers.

Maybe the fact that you are now searching for a church shows you that this is a good time to look into it yourself.

If you’re open to it, I’d like to give you this book/tape to read/listen to. If you have questions or want to investigate further, I’d be happy to help point you to resources. You may find that many of the things you have been taught about Catholicism aren’t true or at least that Catholics have a better basis for them than you thought. That’s what many of these ministers found.

I wanted to share this with you because of how much I and my wife care for you and our neice. We’ve found that being Catholic has really meant a lot to us, and I know it would really mean a lot to you and our neice, too.

Then I’d give him Surprised By Truth volume 1 (the purple one) since it is a book of short, theologically-oriented conversion stories, many of them by Protestant ministers who became Catholic. Or, if he wouldn’t be up for a book, I’d give him the tape Protestant Minister Becomes Catholic by Scott Hahn.

If he’s receptive, you may also talk to him about what being Catholic has meant to you and how much you value it.

If he’s an admirer of John Paul II or Benedict XVI (as many Protestants are), you might cite them also as men of great wisdom who have found value in the Catholic faith. You might also consider giving him a copy of Pope Benedict’s new encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, as something that he might find valuable to read.

(Incidentally, if you google "God is love" then Deus Caritas Est is the first thing that pops up. If only B16 were Internet-savvy enough to fully appreciate how cool that is. CHT to SDG for pointing this out to me.)

A copy of the Catechism or the Compendium that will be out at the end of March also could be good.

Don’t load him up with too much stuff all at once, though.

Other readers may have other suggestions, but I hope these help!

Reader Apologetics Invitation

A reader writes:

One thing I come across in the blogosphere are occasionaly bloopers about the faith.  Ironically when discussing the current brouhaha about the Muhammed cartoons and jihad DJ Drummond of Polipundit makes the following staement (after stating he is a Protestant):

"Take the Reformation of Christianity. I’m not saying, at all, that Christianity is morally the same as Islam, yet I am all to well aware that the catholic Church in Europe was guilty of some very nasty excesses, what with prohibition against lay people reading the Bible on their own, and against personal ownership of Bibles. I recall reading of arrests and trials and tortures of innocent people, for the purpose of advancing the fortunes of favored individuals and punishing their enemies. I recall the histories of indulgences granted by the Church, manipulation of governments and heavy tax burdens levied on the people with no choice but to endure it. These injustices lasted for centuries with very few dissenters, and small wonder – the Church hired men to devise means of torture, to literally wrack confessions from malcontents and so suppress any thought of revolt. Few men indeed had the courage to speak up during those years."

I could probably debunk this but don’t have the time (I’m Mr. Mom this week as my wife is visiting her sister) or the writing skills that you have.  Could you craft a little rebuttal here?  Please!  For crying out loud, he is going after Islamist and he let his anti-Catholic skirts show.

There’s a lot in the quotation that you offer, and I’m afraid that I don’t have time to write a rebuttal at the moment.

BUT I have a lot of really smart readers, and I’m sure that they’re up to the task of addressing and correcting this.

Feel free to add your suggestions for how to respond in the combox or

GO OVER TO THE POST IN QUESTION AND ADD YOUR COMMENTS IN THE COMBOX THERE.

Be sure to observe the to cardinal rules of combox apologetics, though:

  1. Be polite. Be very polite. (Unfailingly, excruciatingly polite.)
  2. Be brief. Be very brief. (Unfailingly, excruciatingly brief–which is part of being polite.)

Naming Guardians For Children

A reader writes:

My husband and I are young, both practicing, orthodox Catholics, with two children and one on the way.  We have been writing up our wills — no immediate reason other than preparedness, we are both healthy — and we now need to decide whom we should name as our children’s legal guardians in the event that both of us die or become incapacitated.  There are two obvious choices.

Option 1:  Mr. and Mrs. X. are our good friends, the same age as us and with three children .  Our families spend many hours per week together, and our children regard each others’ family as an extended family.  Our kids love them.  They share many of our values and our parenting style, plan a large family, and are even NFP users.  They, like us, are homeschoolers.  They are Christians.  They are, in short, perfect.  *But* — they are not Catholics.

Option 2:  My husband’s parents.  They love the kids and the kids love them.  They are practicing Catholics and in fact they are my older son’s godparents.  But they are also 60 years old — will be nearly eighty by the time our youngest turns 18 — and live hundreds of miles away.  We are concerned that if we should die suddenly, sending them to live with Grandma and Grandpa would be more stressful on them than for them to stay with their longtime friends, and also that the grandparents’ health will eventually fail.

Are we morally required to choose my husband’s parents over Mr. and Mrs. X for the sole reason that they are Catholic?  Assume that Mr. and Mrs. X would respect our wishes that our children at least receive education in the Faith and won’t stand in the way of their receiving the sacraments — but I’m pretty sure it would be unreasonable to expect them to take the children to Mass every Sunday, or to bar them from taking the children to their own church.

What expectations should we set, if we do choose them?  Is it sufficient for us to place enough resources at Mr. and Mrs. X’s disposal that the burden on them to raise children in two different faiths would be not so large?  I feel torn — my Catholicism tells me that to be certain they are raised securely in the faith is the most important thing, yet my motherhood feels they will be happier, healthier, and safer in our friends’ home.  Of course, it’s all theoretical — hopefully we won’t die suddenly — but if we do then this will turn out to have been the most important decision we ever make.

This is a tough situation. I’ll offer you what help I can, though.

The purpose of parenting is to prepare children for life–and not just this life, but for the next one as well. This is why parents have a responsibility to see to the religious education of their offspring.

Given the fact that what happens to us in the next life is infinitely more important than what happens to us in this one (given the fact that the next life is infinitely long and will either be really good or really bad), the proper religious education of offspring seems to have a transcendental value.

Since God mandates that all adhere to the Catholic faith for their salvation, it must be understood that–even though God allows others to be saved on certain conditions–that adherence to the Catholic faith must at least maximize one’s chances of salvation. (If it were easier to be saved as a non-Catholic than as a Catholic then God would have perversely commanded people to enter a suboptimal situation; one would then maximize one’s chances of salvation be entering a state that is out of conformity with God’s known will, which is crazy.)

In view of these considerations, it seems that parents have a responsibility of transcendental value to do what they can to encourage their children’s adherence to the Catholic faith.

This does not mean making them say Rosaries every waking minute of the day. That actually would harm their religious development. (More is not always better. We are expected to live in a human mode in this life, not a superhuman one.) But it does mean ensuring that they will be raised to believe in the Catholic faith and to participate in its rites according to their age and capacity.

This means, among other things, regularly attending Mass. Once they have hit age 7 (CIC, can. 11) they will be obliged to attend Mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation unless they have an excusing cause. Of course, if your guardians refuse to take you to Mass then that is an excusing cause, but the point is that the Church feels that it is very important to attend Mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation or it wouldn’t have gravely bound the faithful to do so.

It is scarcely consistent with the proper religious education of children to have them attend Mass only infrequently (this is not the way to raise them to be regular Mass-attenders as adults), and so it would seem that the parents’ responsibility to best prepare their children for the next life would strongly argue against putting children in a situation where their religious practice will be so neglected–at least as long as there is an alternative.

Since there is an alternative in this case, it seems to me that the thing to do would be to put in grandma and grandpa–at least as placeholders until such time as your friends become Catholic (it sounds like they’re already pretty Catholic friendly) or until you make other Catholic friends who would be willing to take them.

This arrangement may mean placing a higher good over a lower good (their eternal good over their temporal good), but it seems to best reflect the fundamental ordering of values in Christian morality.

Hope this helps!

Offering Your Communion For Someone

A reader writes:

I recall reading once that one could offer the reception of Holy Communion for the benefit of someone else.

Can you clarify this? I have been offering the reception as of late for a priest who was badly injured in a car wreck. (He was in a coma, but now he is out of the coma and continues to recover.)

Is it acceptable to offer the reception of the Lord for the intentions of someone else? I would hate to think I was doing something sacreligious.

This is not something that is provided for in the Church’s official documents, but it seems to be something that is part of folk Catholicism, at least here in America (perhaps elsewhere as well).

Understood in one sense, this would be problematic, but understood in another sense, it is not.

If someone had the idea that they were transferring some or all of the graces that they would otherwise receive to someone else–i.e., serving as that person’s proxy–then this would be a false understanding and the reception of Communion would be done in a superstitious manner that misunderstands what happens in Communion.

God’s grace is not something that we can control and manipulate in this manner. If he gives us grace via a sacrament then we receive that grace. We can’t direct it to somebody else.

What we can do, and this is what leads to the second and non-problematic understanding, is ask God to bless somebody else. In fact, we do that all the time through intercessory prayer.

The question would be why we would want to do so at Communion time. Well, for a start, it is the most intimate way that we encounter God liturgically. By asking God to bless someone else at this particular moment is to underscore how important the request is to us. It’s one thing to ask God for a favor when you’re laying at home in bed. It’s another thing to ask God for a favor when you are in church and are receiving him in holy Communion.

We also please God when we receive Communion worthily, and this also gives us a basis for asking God for a favor. We can say to him, "Lord, if I have pleased you by receiving you in Communion, please bless my friend."

Further, this is a place in which God is giving us his grace, and we can ask–if we choose–that he share with someone else part of the blessings that he is bestowing. But we can’t ask that he give them all to someone else, because that would contravene God’s known will, which is that we receive is grace when we receive Communion worthily.

If offering Communion for the sake of someone else is understood in these latter senses then it is not theologically problematic.

Indeed, we can point to the custom of saying Mass for particular intentions as a parallel (e.g., "This Mass will be said for the intentions of the Jones family"). The fixed prayers of the Mass are not changed to include that intention, but the priest is asking God to fulfill a particular intention or set of intentions in association with the Mass. The kind of considerations outlined above would also undergird the concept of Mass intentions: We’re asking God to bless someone else, without the idea that those assisting at the Mass will be deprived of grace.

It is ultimately the priest, though, who controls what intention a Mass is said for. We layfolks don’t. What we do is worship and receive Communion, and the custom of offering our Communion for certain intentions parallels the priest’s offering of the whole Mass for certain intentions.

Note that you don’t have to run through all this theology in your head or run through detailed verbal requests when you do this. Having understood all this, you can simply say to God, "Lord, I want to offer my Communion for this intention." You don’t even have to use words when you do that, for God knows what your intentions are even when they aren’t expressed in words.

Hope this helps!