March 23, 2001
Two recently published reports
have amounted to very bad news for advocates of legalized child-killing.
According to one report, researchers in the United Kingdom have
concluded that there is a definite link between a woman’s likelihood
of developing breast cancer and a history of abortion. The other report
deals with a study on the impact of embryonic stem cells culled from
aborted babies and then transplanted into the brains of people suffering
from Parkinson’s Disease. Not surprisingly, the condition of the
Parkinson’s patients worsened significantly — with some
experiencing uncontrollable movements of the arms and legs —
rather than improved following transplantation of the stem cells.
While it is very important to marshal
all of the medical and scientific facts empirically demonstrating the toll that
morally illicit acts take on the human body, those of us who know right
from wrong should not lose our head over the recent findings. They are
not going to produce a groundswell of new opposition to abortion or to
the harvesting of embryonic stem cells. I don’t mean to minimize the
importance and usefulness of the findings for one second, but
here’s why most people will remain indifferent to them, assuming
they even sink into their consciousness at all.
First, most people get their news in
little snippets. Sure, an increasing number of people surf the Internet for
the full details about the snippets they hear on the radio or TV or that
they read in some print medium. But most people are impervious to the
real world, interesting themselves in the superficial details of their own
lives, in sports, in entertainment, in anything that does not require them to
invest too much intellectual energy. Information goes in one ear and out
the other.
Second, the spin doctors for the
pro-death movement go to work almost immediately to discount any findings
that reflect poorly on abortion and eugenics, providing false assurances to
the passive listener/reader that not enough is known at this point to come
to the conclusions reached by the studies they are attempting to discredit.
Thus, those who might be prone to give serious thought to the issues
are given an “out” to block from their minds any real reflection
— reflection that could force them to reexamine their uncritical
acceptance of the premises of the culture of death.
Third, contraception and abortion are
unlike any other issues facing a society. Those committed to legalized
abortion are concerned for the most part with venereal pleasure, whether
licit or illicit, which can be immunized from its ultimate end: namely, the
conception of a child. Absent a profound conversion to the true Faith,
many people trapped in lives based upon the pursuit of wanton venereal
pleasure see no good reason to change. Indeed, it is how they define their
very existence, whether in or out of wedlock, whether heterosexual or
homosexual. Saint Augustine is only one of countless numbers of people
over the centuries who conquered the demons of lust to live a life befitting
a child of God; but, despite his realization that he was offending God,
even he had difficulty giving up his attachment to vice. “O Lord,
grant me chastity, but not yet,” the great Doctor of Hippo wrote in
his Confessions. Those steeped in lives of unrepentant sin want to
hold on to their behavior, which explains why sodomy is still rampant
twenty years after the advent of AIDS.
Fourth, the purveyors of sex
instruction (both in public education and in Catholic schools and religious
education programs) have convinced nearly three generations of young
people that it is neither possible nor healthy for them to deny carnal
gratification. Thus, any and all news that casts doubt on the propaganda
transmitted throughout their lives is rejected at once. It cannot be that the
very premises upon which the so-called sexual revolution has been based
are defective, can it? No, other studies will disprove any link between
breast cancer and abortion and between heart disease and contraception.
Other studies will prove that embryonic stem cells taken from aborted
babies or fertilized in Petrie dishes do help Parkinson’s sufferers.
Do not discount sex instruction as one of the vital elements helping to
addict young people to lives of slavery to sin. Indeed, even secular British
psychiatrists came to the conclusion last year that all forms of “sex
education” were harmful to children. That report made no impact
except in The Wanderer and a handful of other journals that have
opposed all of the rot of sex instruction from its very inception.
Admittedly, there are truly intelligent
people who read newspapers and watch TV, people who are prone to
think rationally and to consider disturbing news with sobriety. Dr.
Bernard Nathanson, for example, got out of the abortion business in 1973
for purely scientific reasons: he had become convinced that a fetus was a
living human being and that he had been responsible for presiding over
the death of about 73,000 human babies. It took him another decade to
come to a belief in God and another decade after that to be received into
the true Faith. So, yes, there are people out there who will investigate the
recent studies about breast cancer and the failed nature of embryonic stem
cell transplantations. To be sure.
However, scientific arguments take
one only so far. The light of natural reason can be clouded by many
things. While technically capable of such reason because of their very
humanity, some people descend into so much debauchery that they
become unused to rational thought, living their lives on the sensual or
material levels alone. There is literally no reasoning with a lot of
thoughtless people today, people who just do not engage in rational
thought, living only to eat, drink, and be merry. They are not going to be
convinced by scientific arguments. They must be taught to love God, our
First Cause and our Last End, in order to help them reform their lives.
Indeed, even a non-baptized person, if he has begun to open the eyes of
his soul to the world as it really is, has been prompted by God the Holy
Spirit to start the process of discovering his true identity as a creature of
the Father who has been recreated by the Son on the Cross.
You see, as horrible as they are,
contraception and abortion are twin manifestations of the collapse of
Christendom, which was precipitated by the series of events I outlined in
“From Luther to Clinton to Gore” four months ago in my
newsletter Christ or Chaos. Human beings are supposed to
do good and avoid evil because they love God, Who has created them in
His own image and likeness and Who has Redeemed them by the
shedding of His own Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy
Cross. A person must first come to love God in order to be able to see the
world clearly through the eyes of Faith. A man must first come to love
God in order to see himself clearly, to know fully who he is and Whose
dignity he carries within his immortal soul.
Naturalistic, earthbound arguments
do not hold sway with the lion’s share of people. There is a simple
explanation why that is so. Our very nature is made by God to know, to
love, and to serve Him. Our hearts are never completely satisfied until we
do get to know Him through His true Church. Indeed, the attachment so
many people have to the false gods of this passing world is an expression
of their longing to worship something superior to their own selves. The
worship of false gods, though, always ends in exasperation or self-
annihilation, both in bodily and spiritual terms. Only the fullness of
God’s revelation of Himself through His true Church can satisfy the
longing of human hearts to know surety and stability in a world of
uncertainty and mutability.
Thus, while it is a genuinely good
thing to point out the facts provided us by truly dispassionate, objective
studies in the scientific and medical spheres, we should not expect the
culture to change in any way as a result of those studies and findings. No,
we must be about the business of praying and working for the only
antidote that is known to redirect a culture of death and transform it into
a culture conducive to the promotion of eternal life: the Social Kingship of
Jesus Christ. For it is only when people live and work in the shadow of
the Cross that they come to understand that every sin has repercussions.
And that some sins have direct repercussions on the health and integrity
of our mortal bodies. The true incentive people need to live upright lives
must be to please the Triune God through His true Church with every
beat of their hearts, consecrated as they should be to the Immaculate
Heart of Mary and the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Natural reason and scientific facts can
lead people to God, no doubt. He is the Author of all truth. However, it is
only a profound love of Him and the fullness of His Divine Revelation that
leads human beings to know things as they truly are — and then to
choose wisely in conformity with what they know pleases God, redounds
to the salvation of their own immortal souls, and gives good witness to
others that our sole motive for right living in this life is our desire to
participate in an unending Easter Sunday of glory in Paradise.
As I keep saying, you cannot find
secularism with secularism. You can only fight secularism with Catholicism.
We must never shirk from the effort to convert people to the true Faith.
God will work out the rest as He sees fit in His time, according to His
Holy Will and by means of His ineffable grace. Our responsibility is to help
everyone see the world and themselves clearly through the eyes of the
true Faith. In that way, more and more people will understand that
contraception and abortion and eugenics are evils that do not merely fail
to resolve human problems but actually worsen them and increase the
cycle of violence and deceit in our fallen, fractured world.
Viva Cristo Rey!
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