In Crisis
Forty years ago this month, the Supreme Court of the United States
struck down every law in the land protecting the right of any child
simply to be born. All at once, amid the sound and fury of imploding
statutes, the most dangerous place in America became a mother’s womb.
Since Roe v. Wade authorized an almost unrestricted right to
abortion, the lives of millions of innocent human beings have ended
before their time. And in the aftermath of the decision made on January
23, 1973, great and alarming numbers of our fellow citizens have come
to terms with a culture of death. What this means is that millions of
people in this country are more or less culpably indifferent to the
human status of the unborn child, ethically untroubled therefore by the
gaping hole their absence has left in the larger human community. Nor
do their sensibilities appear to have been the least bit ruffled by the
violence with which the abortion industry conducts its business. People
are not disturbed by what they choose not to see.
But for those who will not acquiesce in the killing of defenseless
children, who remain haunted by the faces of so many unseen babies,
their lives suddenly snuffed out by those who should love and care for
them, the struggle continues despite the impacted complacencies of all
those who will not defend them. Yes, even despite the arrant
institutionalization of a practice that, more and more, everyone,
including those who both welcome and profit from it, acknowledge as the
deliberate destruction of human life.
In other words, the Right to Life Movement simply will not go away.
Galvanized by the words of the eighteenth century British statesman and
philosopher Edmund Burke, it persists in the conviction that “The only
thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” It
is really quite astonishing the extent to which pro-lifers have remained
totally resistant to the Spirit of the Age. Why? Because they know it
to be evil. And so, unwilling to give in to the counsels of despair,
which everywhere argue the futility of all attempts to end the killing,
they are resolved to redouble their efforts to stop it. Because—so they
believe—the iniquity of abortion will only go away when enough good
people cease to do nothing about it.
It should not require any great leap of imagination to produce a
snapshot of a world where wickedness is in retreat because of a few good
souls determined on making a difference. How vastly transformed the
face of the last century, surely the most bloody on record, had only
enough good people mobilized early on to oppose the evils of Hitler and
Stalin! The ultimate hideousness of the campaign to exterminate
European Jewry, for instance, could hardly have succeeded in the face of
early and vigorous opposition from even a handful of brave and
honorable men. Or put it this way: but for the silence of so many of
their neighbors, families and friends, the genocidal mania of one moral
idiot could so easily have been thwarted. Think of all that bitterness
and hatred festering away in some fever swamp of private pathology; none
of that larger megalomania left to engulf whole continents and peoples.
In the light of how things actually turned out, of course, how
perfectly pathetic and irresolute were the politicians of that day. Not
to mention those millions of morally insensate souls on whom they
depended for their support. What happened to the soul of Christian
Europe that kept it from upholding the ordinary decencies of the moral
life?
Perhaps it had lost that “horrible moral squint,” of which a corrupt
Cardinal Wolsey complained to Master More, when it became irritatingly
clear to him that the latter would not bend to the King’s demands.
“You’re a constant regret to me Thomas. If you could just see facts
flat on, without that horrible moral squint; with a little common sense, you could have been a statesman.”
And how do we see things? Have we too lost the squint? Is our level
of moral heroism any higher? We like to think of ourselves as good and
decent people, yet we allow an annual extermination of a million or
more of our children, simply for want of an Amendment to the
Constitution guaranteeing their right to life. Absent that guarantee,
they continue to be sacrificed on the altar of reproductive freedom. No
other issue commands the moral high ground as this one does; for
without the basic right of a child to be born, there can be no talk of
any other right. No one is safe so long as that right has been
jettisoned for the sake of either ideology or convenience. To
paraphrase Mr. Lincoln, who, in the midst of a bloody Civil War well
understood the urgency of the question: “If you can kill some people,
then you can kill any people.”
Certainly there is no other issue on the table of comparable
importance to the Catholic Church in this country than the need to
restore reverence for human life, most especially in its smallest and
most vulnerable state. It is, undeniably, the one teaching about which
there can be no ambiguity as to where precisely the Church stands. She
is entirely on the side of life. This is why the initiative taken by
some bishops to withhold the Eucharist, the Sacrament of Unity, from
those so-called Catholic politicians whose complicity with abortion
breaks the bond of that unity, is both welcome and long overdue.
When professed Catholic politicians pass laws promoting the
“abominable” practice of abortion (to use the language of the Second
Vatican Council), they are not only dishonest in their exercise of bad
faith regarding the truth about human life, that it possesses a dignity
that they have cravenly refused to defend; but that, in addition, their
egregious failure to champion the cause gives the gravest possible
scandal to the faithful. Lay Catholics are surely entitled to feel
secure in the maintenance of the Church’s right to pass on The Gospel of Life, to
recall the title of Blessed John Paul II’s beautiful and prophetic
encyclical letter, which he issued in 1995, exactly ten years before
returning home to God.
“When the Church speaks,” wrote St. Catherine of Siena, who did not
hesitate to catechize princes and popes regarding their duties before
God, “it is Jesus himself whom we hear.” When Catholics in public
office refuse to heed her voice, disdaining the sound of that voice even
when it pronounces in the most apodictic way the truth of the moral
law, then it is only fitting that certain consequences follow, chief of
which is that they have disqualified themselves from fellowship with the
People of God at the Altar of the Lord. They have broken faith, in
fact, with the very One who has most clearly and intimately identified
himself with the least and the lost, namely, his and our own brothers
and sisters in the womb.
The birth of a child, someone once said, is God’s opinion that life
should go on. What a terrible blight we loose upon the world when, by
the choices we make, we tell God that we are no longer interested in
life. That life should not go on. Then Thanatos becomes our god, and
we are no better than the Phoenicians, for whom the worship of Death, of
Moloch, exacted a most terrible price: the sacrifice of their own
children. Without little ones, there can be no future. Is that why
the Phoenicians are no longer with us?
