Pro-Life Morning of Reflection from Diocese of Worcester on Vimeo.
And how, I find myself asking, how can people believe all this stuff?
I’m talking about the 81% of our fellow citizens who think that the Supreme Court made a mistake in overturning Row v Wade. Or the 71% in favor of same-sex marriage. Did you know that 57% of Christians say that casual sex outside marriage is perfectly all right, or that almost half see nothing wrong with pornography.
Where do they get all this from? It’s an important question for us to ask.
For while we can and should protest, lobby and cajole on behalf of life, the reality is, we have made little progress in convincing our fellow citizens and even our fellow Catholics of the essential importance of the Gospel of Life.
Which is why, in this talk, I would like to reflect for a bit on one of the root causes of the widespread embrace of the anti-life agenda in this country of ours.
Because when Jesus tells us to love our enemies, part of loving them is striving to understand them. So let’s give it a try, with the help of two eminent founding fathers of this nation.
You remember the founding fathers, the ones who fought for the principle that “all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.” These were men of the enlightenment, inspired by great philosophers, and recognizing the rights of man as the basis for all government and all public morality.
And while many choose to selectively cite indications that their religious beliefs, these men of the enlightenment espoused religious beliefs and moral conceptions that differed greatly from Catholic teaching or belief.
The Enlightenment, of course, emerged from a growing appreciation of science and logic, and the primacy of individual thought, observation and analysis. Each man’s intellect was the way to know truth, while kings and other hierarchies were seen as archaic obstacles to be overthrown.
On this point, the historian Jonathan Israel suggests that inextricably bound up with the Enlightenment’s insistence on the
basic principles of democracy is an espousal of : “full freedom of thought, expression, and the press; eradication of religious authority from the legislative process and education; and full separation of church and state.”
In other words, the elimination of the divine right of Kings is just a couple of lines away from the elimination of the Divine and his institutions and laws.
For example, our second president is often cited as insisting in his farewell address to Congress that religion is “a necessary spring of popular government.” Add to that Mr. Adam’s description of himself as “a church going animal.”
But when you get down into the theological weeds, the beliefs of that Church get a but more muddled. For example, Mr. Adams refused to believe in the Trinity or the Divinity of Christ, while wondering whether any “free government [could] possibly co-exist with the Roman Catholic religion.”
Rather, Mr. Adams insisted, each article of religion must be defined by each individual’s mind. “Let the human mind loose,” he insisted, “It must be loose. It will be loose.”
Some have suggested that Mr. Adam’s mind constructed a brand of Unitarianism, freed from what he called “Superstition and Dogmatism,” and those churches which, in his words, mix authentic divine revelation with “‘millions of fables, tales and legends’ to create ‘the most bloody religion that ever existed.’”
Mr. Adam’s successor and frequent correspondent, Mr. Jefferson advanced the free-thinker’s religion even further, as we read in an oft-quoted letter to his seventeen year old nephew Peter Carr.
Mr. Jefferson admirably took responsibility for Peter’s education when the toddler’s father died. A decade later, while serving as our first Secretary of State in Paris, Jefferson wrote to the school boy to give him the best advice for acquiring real knowledge.
Moral truth, he warned him, is innate, a “sense as much a part of his nature as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling,” and not “the truth, as fanciful writers have imagined.”
Thus did Mr. Jefferson suggest that the real danger for the student of religion was being “led astray by artificial rules.”
“…Shake off all the fears and servile prejudices under which weak minds are servilely crouched,” he counsels his nephew, “Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god…” “you must…neither believe nor reject any thing because any other person, or description of persons have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven…”
It is not unreasonable, I would suggest, to see in this suggestion an echo of the Garden of Eden, where the devil whispered into the first ears, do what you want and “your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods…”
Always remember, the person who marches against Church teachings on the Gospel of Life is not a bad person. They are simply a person who believes what the founding fathers of our nation have whispered into their ears: “You choose, your choice. It’s all that matters.” Recreate the world in your image and likeness and you will be like gods.
The problem is, of course, that with a world created in our own image and likeness, there is no place left for God. Only what the Indian nonfiction writer Pankaj Mishra called “the crude 19th century calculus of self-interest.” A world in which divine revelation is not received, but where each man is a God and his enemy necessarily becomes the demon.
It is a reality born of the founding fathers, but accelerated in our day by our widespread addiction to the high-arousal feedback loop of a social media, that reinforces my prejudices and tittilates my infallibility, leading me down a rabbit hole of aimless bluster.
And are we really any different than most of the world? When our media diet consists of only that which reinforces our conclusions and our infallible views? Do we challenge our preconceptions? Do we pray? Do we let the scriptures challenge us? Do we seek to grow in love and virtue? Or do we wake up desperately searching for posts and tweets that will tittilate us and reinforce our infallible world view?
Sure. we purport to be the good guys, seeking to protect life and follow the Church. And to an extent, we are. But sometimes we forget that the pursuit of virtue is an act of humility, requiring me to let go of what I believe and embrace the truth revealed by God, an act of letting go of self-love and opening my arms on the Cross with Jesus. Of discerning and doing God’s will and not my own.
Perhaps Jesus was thinking about social media when he said, “He who loves his profile on social media will lose himself.” I think that’s what he said. At least I saw it on the internet somewhere.
And while many of the insights we have received from the enlightenment, such as the rights of man and the primacy of conscience are good, there is also the dark side of selfish little children repudiating virtue and denigrating and defiling religion.
That’s why people want to be able to kill their babies and old people, choose their gender and sleep with anyone they want. Because they (and too often, we) think that it’s all about us.
Hope
There are however, signs of hope, or at least ambiguity, as some truths are self-evident even to those of little faith.
That’s the reason why most pregnant mothers, when faced with an ultrasound, choose life; for they see not so much a clump of nondescript cells, as a child, their child, a child dependent on them for her life.
And it’s why, amazingly, 80% of Americans believe the unborn child has rights and 52% support extending the legal rights of personhood to that child.
And it’s why while 71% are in favor of same-sex marriage, 48% of people believe it will change society for the worse!
And it’s why while 57% of Christians say that casual sex outside marriage is perfectly all right, 85% still believe that cheating on your spouse is morally wrong.
All of which is, at least confusing, and perhaps a demonstration of the fact that any morality based on the shifting sands of self interest and the discordant voices of social media influencers is bound to be at least a little confusing.
In the words of Pope Francis, today we often find people judging what is moral in response to their own immediate convenience “and all else becomes relative.” He goes on:
Hence we should not be surprised to find, in conjunction with the omnipresent technocratic paradigm and the cult of unlimited human power, the rise of a relativism which sees everything as irrelevant unless it serves one’s own immediate interests. There is a logic in all this whereby different attitudes can feed on one another, leading to environmental degradation and social decay.
He then gets to the root of the problem with a “culture of relativism.”
It is the same disorder which drives one person to take advantage of another, to treat others as mere objects… The same kind of thinking leads to the sexual exploitation of children and abandonment of the elderly who no longer serve our interests…In the absence of objective truths or sound principles other than the satisfaction of our own desires and immediate needs, what limits can be placed…?
Thus does the Holy Father echo our beloved Pope Benedict XVI who spoke so many times of the “dictatorship of relativism [which] threatens to obscure the unchanging truth about man’s nature, his destiny and his ultimate good.”
Allow me, then, to close with our Beloved Pope Benedict’s call to evangelize the culture, seeing in the proclamation and living of the Gospel of Life the last and only lasting hope of those whose lives are threatened by the Culture of Death.
There are some who now seek to exclude religious belief from public discourse, to privatize it or even to paint it as a threat to equality and liberty. Yet religion is in fact a guarantee of authentic liberty and respect, leading us to look upon every person as a brother or sister.
For this reason I appeal in particular to you, the lay faithful, in accordance with your baptismal calling and mission, not only to be examples of faith in public, but also to put the case for the promotion of faith’s wisdom and vision in the public forum.
Society today needs clear voices which propose our right to live, not in a jungle of self-destructive and arbitrary freedoms, but in a society which works for the true welfare of its citizens and offers them guidance and protection in the face of their weakness and fragility.
May God make it so.
