Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

In Ramah is heard the sound of moaning, of bitter weeping! Rachel mourns for her children; she refuses to be consoled because her children are no more (Jer 31:15).

Today is the feast of the Holy Innocents when we celebrate the deaths of those babies Herod slaughtered for the sake of holding onto power. If one contemplates the pathological megalomania of a person who has no hesitation against killing little babies to assert his “will to power,” it is obvious that we live in a fallen world. As much as we have progressed from the days of Herod, in learning, in technology, in modes of travel and communication, even in our understanding of the human person, our society does not appear to have progressed much in terms of authentic humanity.

The Brussels Journal published a story last week about recent statements from a European Union advisory panel which found that the right to kill an unborn baby trumps just about every other right, including the right of doctors who understand that this is murder, from refusing to perform abortions. The opinion was given in response to a proposed treaty between Slovakia and the Holy See in which it was agreed that Catholic hospitals in Slovakia would not be forced to perform immoral procedures, including abortion. In response, this panel of “experts” asserts that EU agreements with countries acknowledging conscientious objection is a violation of EU law because it may deprive women of an international right to abort their babies.

What’s wrong with this picture? I mean besides the obvious absurdity that the slaughter of innocent children is an international right or that some how even if it were generally acknowledged as being a right, that sovereign countries should be required to submit to morally corrupt international rights. The first thing is that it attempts to deprive the human person of his fundamental means of acting as a human. The faculties which distinguish us from animals and allow us to act and love as we were created are through the use of intellect and free will in order to make moral decisions and choose morally good actions. This panel wants to replace this fundamental process we call conscience, a process which makes us human, with an automaton’s blind following of state edicts. Paradoxically, this is what these folks accuse obedient Catholics of doing.

This type of thinking has much more in common with Robespierre and his reign of terror than with the lofty ideals of equality, fraternity, and liberty that both claim to support. They cloak the tyranny of their oligarchy by promoting sexual license as true freedom but they limit freedom of thought and action to likeminded ideologues. It is no coincidence that these folks exhibit such a paranoid fear of losing their “freedom” that, like Herod, they resort to killing human beings as a means of holding on to their power. For Robespierre it was killing those who represented any sort of potential ideological threat to his new Republic. For the dark angels of the culture of death, they demand the deaths of the gifts of life because babies give lie to their claims that sexual copulation has a more fundamental end than pleasure and self-gratification. Rachel continues to bitterly weep for her lost children: those deprived of mortal life and those depriving themselves of eternal life.