Update:
One of my favorite authors, HW Crocker III, his one volume history of the Church, Triumph, is superb, writes about his and his wife’s experience in this area:
Our fifth child was a Down Syndrome baby. We had no warning beforehand – and it was quite a shock. The doctor took me aside and told me that, in addition to other complications, our new daughter would need heart surgery when she was about four months old. She had that surgery, and her recovery was longer and more difficult than expected.
Indeed, it was very touch and go. The doctors and nurses were great. But in a different place, a mother and a father might be counseled, “You didn’t ask for this. Years of sacrifice lie ahead for you. We could, gently, release this child from life. She will suffer no pain. Indeed, she will never feel or know anything.”
Such counsel is being offered right now, in hospitals around the world. It’s commonly offered whenever Down Syndrome turns up in a prenatal screening.
And it certainly seems de rigueur these days for actresses to proclaim that their abortions enabled their careers; they expect applause for this announcement. Getting rid of those unwanted babies has allowed them to star in commercials selling toothpaste or cell phones or in movies about superheroines walloping men twice their size (thanks to special effects). The girl bosses have ascended on a stairway of children’s skulls.
This is progress – or so we’re told. But progress needs to be defined, and in this context is merely progressing away from Christianity. Child sacrifice is hardly a new thing. Sacrificing children to idols is typical of pagan societies. Today’s idolatry of choice is making idols of ourselves. Christianity abolished child sacrifice and the old idolatry. If we are to abolish child sacrifice again, we will need Christianity to triumph over the new idolatry.
Go here to read the rest. Without love we are but sad beasts indeed.
A sign of the moral illness of some in this age— that not only would a married couple collaborate in such an atrocity: but that they would publicly, proudly declaim it.
They are not monsters.
As any good fairy tale from Beowulf through Tolkien shows, monsters must be killed.
They are people. People, even those with hideously grotesque morals, should be saved, saved from the permanent divine consequences of those morals.
We can’t even begin to cooperate in Christ’s rescue plan for them until we acknowledge that they are human, not monsters.
That’s not easy, though, because it means acknowledging that we ourselves are of the same race, the same class of beings, as those that self righteously and serenely kill their own innocent child.
We must uncompromisinly condemn the actions of such men and women, but we must be careful of casting them outside of humanity. That is beyond our power anyway- just as it is beyond their power to cast that poor child outside the human race by refusing to acknowledge the humanity of that “lump of cells.”
Myself, I think only angels and men have the capacity to become monsters. Animals are innocents. They can react badly by mistreatment or training, but there is no moral element in it.
If they have to tell you that they’re not monsters …
This calls to mind the practice of infant sacrifice in Carthage. The country had a lot going for it but persisted in its barbaric practice, probably brought with its colonization from Phoenicia to North Africa. The country was quite successful for over five centuries. However, it became too ambitious and roused the ire of a later established competing entity on the Italian peninsula, Rome. Rome, while no paragon of morality, adhered to principles referred to as Roman Virtue and used it to cover for its eventual destruction of Carthage. In turn, its virtue took a bad turn in 44BC, and was itself destroyed by barbarians. All of this should remind that if virtue is its own reward, then it must follow that evil also has a price to be paid. Jesus wept for Jerusalem. Who will weep for us today?
Yet hope lives. Don: have you any comments on the recent ruling of the Alabama Supreme Court that frozen IVF embryo’s are children? All the Leftie commentators at NRO are screaming like scorched cats.
The shoe is on the other foot is my commentary on the Alabama decision!
I felt sick to my stomach, absolutely nauseated, when my former spouse aborted our middle child. That I am an accomplice to murder makes me capable of monstrosity. I wish I had had the conviction and gumption to have said, “NO!” I still mutter strange things to myself because of that. Those two up above will forever live with a guilt that does not go away. They tell themselves they aren’t monsters because deep inside they know that they are, and they’ll want to kill themselves. I speak from experience. There is only One Person Who can change that, the One Who died on the Cross. It’s a wonder I didn’t jab a needle of heroin into my veins over what happened.
“She will suffer no pain. Indeed, she will never feel or know anything.”
Nonesense. All children have knowledge from being innocent.
We have too many “snowflake babies” children born from frozen embrios to disqualify the Alabama decision.
Let them howl at the moon the truth will out.
I’m not surprised by this attitude. When people are treated as an ends to a means and nothing more than a commodity then the dignity of the human being is lost. If you have a child in the west, this is the common attitude of the medical profession.
And yet there has never been a time in history where society has advocated for the disabled and their rights more than now.
What can’t the medical profession connect the dots towards respecting human life and equality for those “less abled”.
“Without love we are but sad beasts indeed.” That is unfair to the beasts of the field.
Ah Jack, but I believe they are usually happy.
[…] is It About Our Bishops That Keeps Them So Supine? – Regis Martin, S.T.D., at CrisisLove & Monsters: Updated – Donald R. McClarey, Esq., & H.W. Crocker, III/The American CatholicChastity in Dating: […]