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| The ancient port city of Carthage, on the Mediterranean coast of what is now Tunisia. Prosperous and strong, it was for centuries a commercial and military rival of Rome. When threatened with difficulty or defeat, its citizens practiced child sacrifice. The Romans destroyed Carthage and famously sowed salt in its fields. |
It used to be about choice, so they said. We knew what they meant, they knew what they meant, but it was a lofty euphemism that put a calico dress of all-American freedom on the death’s-head doll that made people coo and chuck it under the chin. Now, it is the act itself that is advanced and advocated, embraced and asserted, and the dress-up words are discarded. Their plan is clearly named for what it is, even while they still dissemble. How savage! How pagan! How…inhuman.
To rally around an act so violent that to see it done elicits instant revulsion in man, woman, and child; and to name it as a good, to demand it, recommend it, assert it as a rightful part of the program of governance and social order by that unequivocal name, is as breathtaking as would be crowds in the street demanding death for any other class of human being. But you cannot draw the curtains and hide until this mob passes, for they patrol the avenues of information and the boulevards of entertainment. They speak up at social gatherings and look for anyone who dare dissent, ready to punish. All, all to promote and demand and assert …abortion.
In these same past few weeks when people on rostrums and people at microphones, people with yard signs and people with clipboards, were afoot in our country asserting the Most Important Thing to require of our government is abortion, we here at our parish had a little funeral. It was a gentle funeral with a tiny casket. You may have heard one of our families lost an infant a few days after her birth. She came early, yes, but in the ‘window of viability’. Then she got sick and died, but not before she received divine life by Baptism into Christ. And so our sadness was lit by hope; confidence that she enjoys already the fullness of everlasting and glorious life for which you and I and everybody who pauses to think about it desire for ourselves.
Other families came and cried, came and prayed, came and helped. Other children came and did all that children do when at Mass in our church, but even they were sober, for they could read the room, and they had seen the little casket. This is a great grief, the death of a tiny child.
And outside our doors, beyond our lawn and vibrant trees, the signs waved and the voices boomed and the votes were cast in favor of abortion. How many have witnessed this horrific ‘remedy’ they are prescribing’? How many know the great wounds it leaves on the ones who give themselves and their tiny ones into the clutches of this cult of child sacrifice?
For even if a great altar to Moloch that ravenous demon himself depicted a grim stone idol with fiery eyes were to be built in our midst, and lines of helpless and terrified women and men were to fling their tiny progeny onto its blood-soaked stone and consuming flames, in hopes of – what? Another chance? A better time? Deliverance from fear or sadness or want? Even if that vile and terrifying abomination were to stand where every citizen could see, it would not be a more vivid horror than the angry, open, and teeth-clenched advocacy by fashionable, educated, popular and powerful people demanding asserting and imposing abortion.
Meanwhile our own state, our neighbors and friends, the stiffly smiling Stepford citizens, took the time and took the effort to assure to insist on an abundant and unvexed flow of abortion, as if a limit or restriction would be a privation of life and goodness. We live in upside-down land! The election has come and gone like a knot in a line plumbing the depths of the deepest sea, but the clamor is undiminished. And still the armies of advocates and activists bang their drums for more, like the relentless walking dead in a fiction film, neither mollified by advancement nor deterred by defeat, clamoring always for more victims. Protests are planned and programs prepared; pyres will be kindled to light bloodthirsty vigils.
Our nation’s political working-out of embrace versus revulsion of this modern-day slaughter of the innocents is not within our power, but neither is it beyond our reach. Equanimity demands, and pragmatism insists, that we who know Christ not be single-issue citizens, but we recognize in our midst the open portal of everlasting horror and disgrace (Daniel 12:2). Unless we reject and refuse all who advocate and advance this grisly grinding of human flesh and lives, we ourselves will not escape the consequences of abortion.
Monsignor Smith
