Bishop Doran's Column
Rockford, Illinois(8/10/2006)
I want to touch on this matter before we get too close to the November madness.
As human beings, as citizens of a “first world country,” as Americans, and as
Catholics, most importantly, we have to take count of the circumstances in which
we live. We know that the only creatures of God that outlast time are those
created having intellect and will. All other things, with the passage of time,
break up or break down.
Many of the issues that confront us are serious, and we know by now that the
political parties in our country are at loggerheads as to how to solve them. We
know, for instance, that adherents of one political party would place us
squarely on the road to suicide as a people.
The seven “sacraments” of their secular culture are abortion, buggery,
contraception, divorce, euthanasia, feminism of the radical type, and genetic
experimentation and mutilation. These things they unabashedly espouse, profess
and promote. Their continuance in public office is a clear and present danger to
our survival as a nation.
Since the mid-1940s we have been accustomed to look askance at Germans. They
were protagonists of the Second World War and so responsible for fifty million
deaths. We say, “How awful,” and yet in our country we have, for the most part,
allowed the party of death and the court system it has produced to eliminate,
since 1973, upwards of forty million of our fellow citizens without allowing
them to see the light of day. They have done their best to make ours a true
culture of death. No doubt, we shall soon outstrip the Nazis in doing human
beings to death.
I do not think that we should spend a great deal of time in lamentation over the
children whose lives have been snuffed out by the barbaric practice of
therapeutic abortion. They passed from their lives quickly in this world and
have gone into the hands of the Lord of Life and Mercy for all eternity. We must
make it clear too, that many who have sought to have practiced on themselves
therapeutic abortion are in many instances driven to it by persons heedless of
their welfare, or by well-meaning but inept parents or guardians who regard
abortion as a solution and not as what it is — an immense problem. There are
some, I think few, largely given over to immoral lives who regard abortion as a
good, but their number is not great.
What we have to remember is that violence breeds violence. When we tolerate
unjust attacks upon the tiniest innocents among us, we habituate ourselves to
violence. And so we have allowed these barbaric practices to corrupt our laws,
our medical practice, and even our ordinary lives. How accustomed we have become
to the immense loss of life in our wars throughout the world! Those who have
killed millions under their mother’s hearts cannot be expected to balk at a mere
few thousand killed in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Somalia, in Darfur, in Bosnia,
in Madrid, in London, in Baghdad, in Beirut, in Washington, in New York. The
violence of abortion coarsens the lives of all of us.
Once it was said, “... for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.”
(Matthew 26:52) So we see the rise in the number of predations among youth, even
among the youngest, the rise of domestic violence. We speak of road rage as a
common thing. It is true what the theologians have said, that sin darkens the
intellect, and weakens the will.
Having sown the wind of abortion we now reap the whirlwind. This appears in
every quarter of our culture and on every day. And that just from the first of
the “sacraments of death” of our secular human culture.
The toleration of sexual perversions among inverts, widespread contraception,
easy access to “no fault” divorce, the killing of the elderly, radical feminism,
embryonic stem cell research — all of these things defile and debase our human
nature and our human destiny. Should we cry out with the prophet “To the
mountains, ‘Cover us,’ and to the hills, ‘Fall on us’” (Hosea: 10:8), lest other
peoples see and, God forbid, imitate us?
I ran across, in one parish, prayers of the faithful with the intention that “we
pray for those who work and demonstrate for the cause of life and the unborn,
the aged and the defected, that they may persevere in spite of the ridicule they
receive sometimes, even from pastors and priests.” I shudder to think that might
be true. We know from the sad experience of recent years that some Catholics
(even among priests) are so warped and perverted from their Catholic vocation,
that they are capable of enormities. But, they should know that it was no
prelate or bishop or pope that said, “Suffer the little children to come to me
and do not hinder them” (Matthew 19:14). The Invisible Head of the Church will
one day come to judge the living and the dead and the world by fire,
particularly those who have either by acts of omission or commission, destroyed
innocent human life.
It is the duty of every Catholic to support the work of the parish Pro-Life
directors and commissions and to work for the extirpation from our society of
all those who in any way foster or promote these things. I wholeheartedly
endorse the activities of our Pro-Life Office in the sure and certain knowledge
that divine justice will not allow those who act against human life to prosper.
These unholy sacraments of our secular culture are the seeds of the destruction
of our nation.
Think for yourself: what nation that kills its young, perverts marriage,
prevents new life, and destroys the family, kills those deemed useless, makes
the war of the sexes into a real war, and manipulates the genetic basis of human
nature, can long endure?
