RESPECT FOR LIFE

UNIVERSALLY, THE most powerful and gratifying natural bond is that shared by mother and child. Consequent to this is the empowerment of the human person in all activities which ...provide for the proper enjoyment of life. A mother who carries her pregnancy to full term deserves our highest admiration and respect. Mothers and fathers who choose for life tend to enjoy a more confident, expanded sense of self. Expressions of regret are rarely part of their vocabulary. These credible people are committed to creating sound families, and by implication, building a just society.

WE LAMENT the tens of millions of aborted babies whose absolutely innocent and impeccable will to live is mercilessly repudiated by judges and legislators whose political activities are mere leisure by comparison. No tragedian could devise so morbid and oppressive an irony as that played out by self-styled progressive lawmakers "who trust in themselves that they are righteous and despise others", who spurn the cries of the poor even as they exuberantly revel in the bellowing and whooping of their partisan politics.

NO EFFECTIVE mainstream means--specifically the print and broadcast media in the United States--presently exists by which Catholics in the United States may be properly informed of the magnitude of atrocities and martyrdom confronting Christians in the Third World. Catholics who celebrate the feast days of martyrs throughout the Church year remain largely unaware that more Christians have lost their lives in the 20th century, just for being Christian, than during the previous 19 centuries combined.

THE MAN or woman, whose sleeping conscience is awakened by the shame of offenses against life, recognizes a need for pardon which no doctor or abortion clinic can bestow. Ministering in the Lords name, the Church welcomes all who sin against life and leads them to Christ for the healing medicine of pardon and reconciliation. Our Lord desires to lift the heavy yoke of sin from their shoulders. He bids them to take upon themselves his yoke of life and to learn from him: "For I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."

We must rouse ourselves, however, to vigorously oppose this president and his cabinet secretary who are trying to force the Catholic Church to financially support contraceptive regimes which she has opposed from the beginning. If this HHS novelty attains the force of law, the decree will mark the first time in our nation’s history that the Federal Government has assailed the First Amendment cornerstone guaranteeing freedom of religion. In these days, a decree has gone out from President Obama that all the United States should be enrolled in birth control. Tomorrow, what will a new decree impose on all of us? Abortion? Infanticide? Euthanasia?

ONE HAS only to look at the appalling record of human slaughter in the twentieth century--the rotten harvest of squalid disunity among men and their secular institutions--to return to his senses regarding human-driven interpretations of power and its absolute arrogation of human lives. The carnage in human lives must include the tens of millions of aborted children: herein is an object model of dissent against God's authority and law. One cannot advocate abortion without first consciously transmogrifying an innocent and helpless unborn child into an invasive agent. Only then is it possible to distort the abortion as a therapeutic intervention necessary to save the lifestyle of the mother and by implication the freedom of the father. Permeating this dark and ominous celebration of betrayal and death is the chant, my right to choose...my right to choose...my right...my right.

THE RELATIONSHIP between man and woman in holy matrimony is characterized by integral fruitfulness: 1.) a self-less love for one another in the context of conscientious cooperation with God, and 2.) the establishment of a home in which children are conceived and reared in accordance with the mind of Christ. Christ is the guarantor of the family's spiritual and existential integrity and the minister of its fulfillment. The human person enjoys a physical reproductive capability which finds its counterpart in the potency and potentiality of the soul. Consider that the gifts of human personhood are ordered to one another. Physical fertility properly yields to spiritual fecundity in the hierarchy of personal goods--to preclude the eternal soul's generative powers from succumbing to disorder and senescence. Notwithstanding the primacy of the soul, man's physical fertility is finite and more than deserving of protection from loss or desecration.

COUNTLESS PRO-CHOICE fathers declare war on the life of their unborn children. They condemn the unborn child as an enemy of pleasure and a threat to their well-being. They threaten their female companions with abandonment and artificial widowhood...When a father seeks the death of his innocent unborn child, his grievous offense against humanity will not go unanswered. His punishment will be severe; in fact, it has already begun....You who would father a child but be no father: "Judge not, that you be not judged." Prophet of death, you refuse to see the gloom that has fallen over your own eyes! What is your life worth if the child you beget has no worth?

THERE IS an urgent need for the transcendent perspective. It is essential that public policy and bio-tech discoveries be situated in a genuine anthropological context. Presently no forum can match the uniformly potent moral and pastoral voice of the Catholic Church. As a divinely instituted authority under the guidance and protection of the Holy Spirit, the teachings of the Church exist: 1.) that its members may be clearly directed, and 2.) that each nation of the world may be animated to give its citizens what is rightly due to them as human persons, especially the care and preservation of their lives.

WHO CAN argue that contraception is not the revolution by which man's indispensable freedom from sexual excess or exaggeration has been overthrown? That it has not been the vector propelling the feckless, agitated sexual promiscuity of recent decades? Or that contraception and abortion are not allied in a mutual renunciation of human life, against a joint target of innocent and helpless children, and together induces a vacant emptiness in the humanity of countless human beings--most especially in vulnerable teenage boys and girls--for whom the psychological or emotional stress of offenses against life remains tragically unresolved? And finally, that the promotion and practice of contraception is precisely the reenactment of the sin of appropriation committed by Adam and Eve against the organic unity and uncompromising integrity of divine truth?

CONSIDER THE story of a male named Adam, a resident of New York, for whom the sliver of time between birth and death was five years. His deathquickly subsumed in the melancholic history of New York City's brutal killingsnevertheless is memorable because Adam was a child, and he was five years old, and his merciless parents beat him to death for eating a piece of cake. The pathologists who conducted the autopsy stated that during Adam's short lifetime, nearly every bone in his body had been broken.

BY GROWING in holiness and being attentive to its conservation, one experiences virginity as an ongoing immersion in the fullness of the mystery of humanity; thus the similitude of virginity and holiness with true freedom as both means and end. Man pursues beauty because God is beautiful, he seeks truth to discover God who is true, he pursues virginity because God is virginity itself, the splendor of integral, harmonious and fruitful perfection. Virginity is the proof of justice, the eloquent witness of the faithful disciple's confident self-respect and his determination to give to others what they are due in the eyes of God.

CAIN CAST a shadow across the human experience which persists to this day. That a human being, enjoying or claiming communion with God, would kill his own kin--indeed his innocent brother--forever remains a ghastly offense in the human consciousness. The Natural Law of God, implanted in the soul of every man born of woman, voices the commandment: "You shall not kill." Should the world last another millennium, should civilization reach heights of sophistication and bio-technology unimaginable to us today, it is impossible for the killing of human beings to evolve beyond its prime-evil and barbaric origins.

IN RECENT years, tens of thousands of innocent victims have been mowed down by the murderous scythe of terrorism, a violent new manifestation of evil: amorphous, radicalized and predatory guerrilla movements which target government and civilian institutions and ordinary citizens as enemies of their cherished cause or -ism. With diabolical intent, these movements usurp for themselves the power to accuse, condemn and execute innocent persons. They pass sentences of death on hundreds, even thousands, of persons far removed from governmental affairs. Their monstrous, evil deeds are an affront to the order of nations and an assault on the well-being of all men and women of good will. Irrespective of the number of words churned out by media, these crimes remain unspeakable horrors for every survivor and nations that grieve with them. Most of the victims will never know what happened. More often than not, it is difficult to determine what terrorists hope to accomplish by vagrant acts of shocking savagery.

IF ONE learns nothing else, but that God is the absolute origin and mediator of all human life, of everything that is true and good, and puts this wisdom into practice [cf. Mt 7:21], he is worthy of being called Christian. Blessed are the strong who bestow self-less charity upon the weak, Gods tender love will be theirs. Blessed are they who show compassion upon the least of their brothers and sisters, Gods outpouring of divine mercy will be theirs. Do all these things and know that your name is recorded. Where? In heaven's book of eternal life: "Also another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, by what they had done." Written by whom? Our Lord who preserved life and never destroyed or corrupted it.

UNLESS IT is able and willing to argue coherently for the cause of human life, the fact of a nation's existence itself carries little or no weight as a claim against the future. Absent comprehensive repentance for sins against life and dramatic conversion by the institutions which proselytize death, a society cannot rebut the charge that it has become so degraded as to render its existence impossible to justify for its own sake. No constructive program or secure future exists for the society that excludes the defense of its weak and innocent members.

THE ADVICE columnist makes no mention of love in her family recipe. Her functional family formula is altogether silent on the subject of reconciliation--and no wonder because she would have to confront the reality of right and wrong. Personal sacrifice and the respect of one's family name in the community has no place in her criteria. Look for evidence of ethics or morality. Look for evidence of faith. You will not find it. Any family lacking these foundational social and religious values is like a tree cut off at the roots [cf. Mt 3:10], a house built on sand. [cf. Mt 7: 24-27] The family that adopts MYOB mutilates its own intimate society and no therapy or secular proselytism of active homosexuality, same-sex marriages, abortion, euthanasia, and the abolition of sacramental marriage can repair the damage.

IT IS vital that human ecology recognize the value of chastity and the conservation of sexual potency in any definition of human personhood. That man's creaturely existence is graced by extraordinary gifts--humanity, personhood, dignity, sexuality, faith and reason, to name but a few--is well documented; nevertheless, the stewardship of the uniquely human gifts is taken for granted by most persons. In days to come, what will the Master say when he returns to settle accounts with those to whom he has entrusted the treasury of humanity? All mankind groans in longing for the day that the uniquely human gifts are accorded their proper worth and presented to God, not dissipated and annulled, but returned to him as one would return with interest a borrowed sum of money. Let human sexuality be understood, therefore, as an investment by God of his grace and divine favor.

IN THREE short and brutal decades, policy makers and media celebrities of this nation have crippled the norms of marriage and family by proselytizing lifestyle as an institution and validating it with so-called new norms of openness, inclusiveness, tolerance and acceptance. With supreme irony, it can be said that the American variant of this ersatz institution was conceived by contraception and birthed by Roe vs. Wade. The effort to confer legal status and authority on the notion of lifestyle has centered on the radical defense of mass-marketed contraception and abortion. The empowering of the cult of individualism and the swarm of so-called lifestyle laws has not been benign, nor has it developed as if in an emptiness of time and space or exempt from cause and consequence. Both the cult of individualism and the obsession with lifestyle have emerged as mortal enemies of the traditional family.