Forty-Five Years of Roe v. Wade: How Long, O Lord?
Don’t blame yourself for never having heard of the Brothers of Charity. Not many American Catholics have. After all, they are a Religious Order an ocean away in Belgium where they operate the largest chain of Catholic psychiatric hospitals in that once Catholic country. However, in the past few months the Brothers of Charity have crowded all the headlines in both Europe and North America. And not for reasons that will comfort Catholics. The Order has decided to permit euthanasia to its nonterminal patients. When queries about the firm opposition of the Church, the board of the Brothers of Charity replied that truly Christian values “should privilege a person’s choice of conscience over a strict ethic of rules”. Clearly, the good Brothers have forgotten the role of conscience. It does not create its own moral norms, rather it guides absolute moral norms to their proper fulfillment in particular situations. Moreover, dismissively referring to God’s commandments as “a strict ethic of rules” is unsettling to a Catholic mind. A fortiori, from a group of Consecrated men.
Such a shocking turn did not appear out of nowhere. Recall that Belgium legalized euthanasia in 2002, the first country with a majority Catholic population to do so. Within two years, more than eighty percent of Catholic health care institutions and nursing homes in Belgium’s Dutch speaking Flanders region permitted euthanasia. A seemingly supine clergy offered no resistance, some even cheering the ghoulish development. Take Father Marc Desmet, a palliative care specialist who frequently counsels patients who are considering euthanasia. He recently remarked, “I do not say what they have to decide”. Or another Belgian priest, Father Gabriel Ringlet, author of a popular book on “spiritual accompaniment to euthanasia,” has encouraged people to develop their own “unofficial rituals” for the practice. It would not have been rash to expect a hailstorm of censures from Church leaders. But, there was – nothing.
All of this is quite apposite on the eve of the forty-fifth anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Abortion did not only cheapen the life of the unborn in the womb, but the lives of us all. The tentacles of this debasement reach to the very roots of secular man’s self-understanding. The matrix of all his moral decisions lies in the sheer exercise of his will, leaving the voice of truth as some long-discarded tool of oppression. Antecedents begin with Kant’s Autonomous Self, emancipated from all external constraints on his freedom, through Rousseau’s emancipated self who struggles with the condition “of being born free, and now finding himself everywhere in chains”. Mill carries the crusades of the Imperial Self forward with his “maximization of freedom,” only brought to a climax in Nietzsche’s Übermensch and Sartre’s existential prison. For four hundred years these thinkers waged a philosophical scorched-earth policy, destroying the slightest trace of a properly “common sense” thinking (viz. natural moral law). Thus allowing to settle upon the culture a cordial mood for the breezy acceptance of the moral enormities we witness today. Even more chilling, reservations about such moral collapse have come to be seen as déclassé by the genteel bien pensant.
Such a climate places Catholics in an untenable position. Not only are we resented for defending an unpopular position, but now once universally cherished moral laws are successfully construed as bias. The Secular Left has effectively turned reality inside out: the strange and unnatural has become the familiar and normative. Many a good Catholic demurs from the heat of this battle for fear of being branded a bigot, insensitive to The Other. Mission accomplished.
Chesterton’s remark must not be forgotten: “When man forgets the supernatural, he does not become natural, he becomes unnatural”. His uncanny wisdom makes hm unusually prescient. Most troublesome about today’s parade of novel enthusiasms such as LGBT and the transgender fever is the sheer unnaturalness of it all. Once God is abandoned, as Dostoyevsky reminds us, all is permissible. Without God, man becomes a blank canvas waiting for his creative brush. Only God’s hand, seen through the fixed designs of His creation, can keep man anchored in the truth. Indeed, it is the only guarantee of man being himself. Anything else is a deception, tumbling down through Alice’s Looking Glass.
This forty-fifth anniversary of abortion in the United States is only the latest symptom of disease that had long been growing in the blood stream of Western Civilization. Holy Church alone can stanch the mushrooming plague. But Good Catholics have long charged into the battle over these long fort-five years. The problem is that they often find themselves nearly alone. When they look for their leaders, most are not even leading from behind. Worse still, more than a few seem to give tacit permission, if not explicit license, to those aggressively advancing the disease. Abortion, euthanasia, and an assortment of other moral breaches should have prompted deafening howls of resistance from the First Estate. But not infrequently Catholics hear the timid voice of a bare few. For instance, one major Church leader in the past few months delivered a major address at a prominent venue, calling for Catholics to “let go of cherished beliefs and long-held biases”. What exactly can that mean? Could he have possibly intended what his words actually said? What is the ordinary Catholic to think? Even an adroit finessing from the most dissimulative academic could not blunt the actual intention of such a summons. How else explain the stunning developments throughout the Church Universal except to a calculated silence on the part of its Catholic leaders, if not worse?
On this forty-fifth anniversary, Catholics must be resolved to this New Normal. Providence has placed us in this time, and under these conditions, for His purposes. Of one thing we are certain: He requires us to engage in an unending, thankless battle for His truth. Questions will not fade. Isolation will discourage. Betrayals from those in the highest places will sting. Failures will often outnumber triumphs. Through it all Our Savior calls us to fidelity to the unchanging Truth of His Church, even as some insist it has changed. Isn’t that the deepest suffering? Father Sertillanges once warned, “The greatest suffering is not for the Church, or with the Church, but by the Church”.
T.S. Elliot wrote in East Coker: “For us/ there is only the trying/ The rest is not our business”. A perfect expression of man’s vocation in this Valley of Tears. We work and toil and labor. Still, with all our long-suffering, there will linger legitimate complaints, insoluble questions, or disturbing contradictions. But those things are not our business. They are God’s.
Latin Mass Magazine | Christmas 2017
