Marching for Murder

Pushing myself to get down for a lecture on Christ the King College in Richmond, Virginia, as I drove our motor home late on the evening of April 22, 2004, I noticed three very large and seemingly plush charter buses pulling out of a service area on Interstate 95 in Delaware, just north of the Maryland border. Each of the buses bore the prestigious trademark of Mercedes Benz on its back. They hailed from the State of Vermont. It dawned on me within a few minutes where those buses were headed: to the March for Murder in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, April 25, 2004. Sure enough, three buses turned off of Interstate 95 in Baltimore, Maryland, to head south on the Baltimore-Washington Expressway. As a perverse replication of the March for Life, which is held each year on the anniversary of the dreadful decision of the United States Supreme Court in the case of Roe v. Wade, which was rendered on January 22, 1973, the March for Murder will draw thousands of American citizens who believe in the right of women to butcher the fruit of their wombs under cover of law.

Some might protest to say that those who support a "woman's right to choose" to kill the natural fruit of human conjugal relations, a child, are simply exercising their "rights" as American citizens. Therein lies a very significant problem, you see. No one has the right to contend, no less to promote actively in public, that innocent children may be butchered in their mothers' wombs under cover of law. Well, what about free speech? An American slogan, that's all. No one has the right in the Divine positive law or the natural law to choose to do that which is evil. One may have the physical ability to choose to evil. However, one does not have the right to choose to do that which is evil even though he has the ability and the desire to do so. Thus, no one has the right to advocate that evil be protected under cover of civil law. There is no freedom to promote that which is injurious to the salvation of souls and thus to the right order of civil societies, to say nothing of that which is opposed to the precepts of natural justice. Anyone who even proposed to promote the sort of evils that will be trumpeted in this nation's capital on Good Shepherd Sunday, April 25, 2004, would be subject to arrest and punishment if we lived in a Catholic nation that recognized the Sovereignty of the Social Reign of Christ the King and Mary our Queen.

Yes, a Catholic should believe in censorship. Those things that are injurious to souls and hence to societies can never be brought temptingly before the eye of man. Consider, for example, the words of Pope Leo XIII in Immortale Dei, his great encyclical letter on the Christian Constitution of States, issued in 1885: "Whatever, therefore, is opposed to virtue and truth may not rightly be brought temptingly before the eye of man, much less sanctioned by the favor and protection of the law. A well-spent life is the only way to heaven, whither all are bound, and on this account the State is acting against the laws and dictates of nature whenever it permits the license of opinion and of action to lead minds astray from truth and souls away from the practice of virtue." We should be in the forefront of reminding our fellow citizens that individuals who seek to promote abject evils, especially the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance, are enemies of the common good and of the right ordering of individual souls.

Those who support the destruction of innocent human beings under cover of law rend their garments and gnash their teeth when they are confronted with such truths, calling anyone who would dare to speak or publish words in favor of censorship as fascistic, intolerant, bigoted, mean-spirited and hateful. However, it is the pro-baby killing advocates who practice censorship in every aspect of our popular culture, especially in our "entertainment" and media outlets as well as in all levels of public schooling (from pre-school right on up through professional and graduate programs). Without claiming to be censorious, the pro-aborts engage in a form of censorship and thought control that would make Vladimir Lenin quite proud indeed.

As Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn noted at Harvard University in June of 1978: Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges. Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block dangerous herd development."

As we know only too well, though, the pro-aborts do engage in open violence against those who dare to point out with graphic photographs of dead, mangled babies the horror of the American Holocaust. Pro-lifers are spat upon, have human waste products dumped on them, beaten, kicked, confronted with the most vile forms of speech imaginable. This violence has been visited upon pro-lifers who have engaged in peaceful acts of civil disobedience by police officers, as happened in West Hartford, Connecticut, in June of 1989 when police officers took off their name plates and badges and started to beat up people who were staging a non-violent sit-in at an abortuary. (We should never call an abortuary an "abortion clinic;" clinics provide health services. The murder of a preborn human being is not a health service. We should use the terms "abortuary," "abortion mill," "death chamber," "killing center.") This example of unbridled police violence on pro-lifers was captured on video-tape. A civil lawsuit is to be litigated in Connecticut soon as a result of this infamous display of American intolerance for those who dare to assert the primacy of God's laws over us men and our civil societies.

 

Our response to those who march for murder illicitly is to pray for them. While some brave souls will be in the nation's capital on Sunday, April 25, 2004, to serve as a witness to the inviolability of all innocent human life without any exception whatsoever, exposing themselves to the potential of real violence being exercised against them by pro-death advocates, the best thing we can do on the Second Sunday after Easter, Good Shepherd Sunday, is to spend time before the Blessed Sacrament in prayer, praying Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary in reparation for the sin of abortion itself and for the fact that we live in a nation that permits this sin to occur under cover of law and to be promoted in public assemblies. We must pray for the conversion of all those women who have killed their children and who have not as of yet found their way into the hospital of Divine Mercy that is the confessional. We must pray for all of the fathers who have helped to coerce or to encourage the mothers of their children to execute their own flesh and blood. We must pray for the baby killers themselves, as well as for their nurses and receptionist--and for those in the media and politics and law and education and entertainment who are their co-conspirators in the American Holocaust. We must pray for all those who manufacture, sell, prescribe, use or fund by means of government programs the evil of contraception. We must pray for an end to all forms of sex-instruction, whether sponsored by the state or by the Church herself. We must remember that the prayers of Saint Stephen won the conversion of the fire-breathing hater of Catholics who presided over his own stoning to death, Saul of Tarsus. The prayers of Saint Maria Goretti won over her murderer, who attended her canonization by Pope Pius XII. We must understand that Our Lord's injunction, given to us in the Sermon on the Mount, to love our enemies and to do good to those who hate us is the path to undoing the cycle of violence that has its ultimate source in Original Sin and our own actual sins.

 

We must pray for the conversion of this nation to the Social Reign of Christ the King and Mary our Queen. We must pray for the Chief Shepherd on earth, the Vicar of Christ, Pope John Paul II, so that he will permit himself to be shepherded by the authentic patrimony of the Church so that he can oppose the evils of modernity by explaining to the world that these evils have their specific proximate origin in the rejection of Catholicism as the binding force for individuals and nations. We must pray that the Holy Father will actually consecrate Russia to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. (After all, it was in Russia that baby-killing under cover of law in the Twentieth Century was first permitted by Vladimir Lenin in 1918.) We must pray that he will come to see that the Second Vatican Council and the spirit of the Novus Ordo Missae are enshrinements of many of the errors of modernity, that there is no secular, religiously indifferentist way to oppose evils such as abortion, that we must seek the Catholic of the entire world, which will be made all the more possible by the restoration of the Traditional Latin Mass, which is resplendent in the total beauty of the true Faith all of its constituent parts. And we must pray that the Holy Father--and those who succeed him--will choose as bishops men who embrace the authentic Tradition of the Church, not make war against it. It is all the more difficult to battle such evils as abortion and sodomy and contraception in the midst of the world when the Church herself refuses to speak with the clarity that characterized the Popes of the past.

 

We must also pray for our own conversion. Each one of our sins is responsible for wounding the physical body of the God-Man, Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, on the wood of the Holy Cross. They are responsible for wounding His Mystical Body, the Church, in the world in which we find ourselves at present. They are responsible for inclining us to be less courageous and less authentically Catholic in how we speak and act. They are responsible for inclining us to be lukewarm, to be forgetful about our prayers, to be heedless of the need to engage in acts of personal penance and mortification of our senses. We are not blameless for the problems of the Church and the world. We need to pray and to work for our own conversion on a constant basis, in cooperation with the graces won for us by the shedding of Our Lord's Most Precious Blood on Calvary, doing so so as slaves consecrated to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart.

There are thousands upon thousands of anonymous American citizens who are on the front lines of the abortion battle every day. They volunteer their time in Crisis Pregnancy Centers. They run homes without charge for unwed and/or abused mothers. They pray Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary every day in front of the abortuaries, heedless of the sacrifices they must make or the inclement weather conditions they must endure. These true heroes of this point in salvation history are helping to build up the Mystical Body of Christ. They are saving lives and souls by their personal witness to the inviolability of all innocent human life, made as it is in the image and likeness of God Himself. Those who cannot be so personally involved may nevertheless support them by their own prayers and sacrifices. Although abortion is, as I have noted above, a consequence of the false foundations of modernity and the modern state, we are called to combat it as best we can given the obligations of our particular states-in-life.

 

We do not, however, combat abortion by fawning over public officials who are not completely pro-life and who support pro-abortion politicians in their own political party and take measures that actually promote chemical child-killing by means of contraception here and around the world. For any leader of a pro-life organization to give the appearance that we are "making progress" because of this or that political program or public policy is to lie to those who trust in that person for information and leadership, to say nothing of failing the cause of converting those in public life who are thus reaffirmed in their half-measures and craven political expediency. We must fight against the evils of our day as Catholics, not as partisans of any political party or any political program of half-measures that accepts baby-killing under some conditions in general, if not as a regrettable reality about which we can do little at this time because the country "is not ready" to end abortion.

 

This country and the world will never be "ready" to end abortion unless all Catholics, starting with the Vicar of Christ, speak as Catholics and exhort all people everywhere into the true Church, outside of which there is no salvation. Each of us must as individuals be subordinated to the Social Reign of Christ the King, accepting everything contained in the Deposit of Faith Our Lord has entrusted to His true Church without any bit of doubt or dissent whatsoever. Each country must collectively, as Pope Pius XI noted in Quas Primas in 1925, do so in order for there to be even the remotest possibility of as much order and justice that is achievable by fallen man in this vale of tears.

 

Let us use this coming Sunday, Good Shepherd Sunday, as a moment of prayer and reparation, invoking quite especially the prayers of Our Lady of Guadalupe, who is the Patroness of the Americas and of the preborn. Let us invoke her powerful intercession to convert the pagans and barbarians of the United States of America and Canada as we approach the 500th anniversary of her appearance to Saint Juan Diego, which effected the conversion of over nine million pagans and barbarians in Mexico and many other parts of Latin America.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us, pray for those who support and who participate in the American Holocaust.