By DONALD DeMARCO
We are repeatedly advised that what we eat, drink, and breathe is either beneficial or harmful to our bodies. As sensible consumers, we take this advice seriously. Therefore, we avoid bad cholesterol, high sugar drinks, and protest air pollution.
By the same token, we are told that what we see, hear, and read are either good or bad for our souls. In this case, however, we do not take the advice very seriously at all. Therefore, not always acting as sensible people, but acting in accordance with our freedom of choice, we view salacious material, listen to acid rock, and read trashy novels.
But what we put into our minds does not stay in our minds but eventually expresses itself in our actions. People of religious faith have always understood that good music, fine literature, and beautiful architecture are important factors that properly shape our souls. And it is through the soul that our behavior is shaped. We can be obsessed with physical fitness, but neglectful of our soul in which our moral attitudes are formed. We think, naively, that the philosophy behind abortion can be contained and not spill over into society.
We fail to realize, however, that we live, not in a culture of freedom, but in a culture of death. And we are shocked when death strikes in unexpected and horrific ways. There is no greater enemy to freedom than unexpected, tragic death.
On April 20, 1999, two students at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colo., murdered 13 people (12 students and one teacher) and wounded 20 others, before turning their guns on themselves. What could the world make of such a tragic event? How could it possibly happen, especially in an upscale community?
At least four of the victims were Catholic. Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput, OFM Cap., promptly responded to their families to offer counseling and condolences. He remained in touch with the parents of at least one of the victims for several years afterward. Soon after the tragedy, on May 4, 1999, the good bishop testified before the United States Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, He expressed his conviction to the committee that people in society are not being taught to value human life:
“When the most dangerous place in the country is a mother’s womb, and the unborn child can have his or her head crushed in an abortion, even in the process of being born, the body language of that message is that life is not sacred and may not be worth much at all.”
Unfortunately, his words were not taken with the seriousness in which they were delivered or put into practice. Columbine has become a byword for more school shootings since that time, culminating in the recent unspeakable tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, that claimed the lives of at least 19 children and two teachers.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal executes it. Yet it is difficult for people to connect the dots. The alleged “right” to kill the unborn breeds an attitude that spreads throughout culture, poisoning the atmosphere, as it were, and undermining the view that all human life is sacred. Pernicious ideas that float on the wind find entrance points in the minds of the young.
As the distinguished American sociologist, W.E.B. du Bois, has stated: “The chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime.”
While no direct link can be made between abortion on demand and the shootings at any one particular school, it stands to reason, nonetheless, that a disregard for the value of the life of the unborn will extend to a diminishment of the value of life of everyone. Abortion cannot remain as merely abortion. In referring to abortion, novelist John Updike has remarked: “Death, once invited in, leaves his muddy boot-prints everywhere.” Abortion affects the mother, marriage, the family, and the whole of society.
We live in a Culture of Death, which means that death is not localized, but is omnivorous. Pope St. John Paul II has clearly expressed how death permeates culture: “Whoever attempts to destroy human life in the womb of the mother, not only violates the sacredness of a living, growing, and developing human being, and thus opposes God, but also attacks society by undermining respect for all human life.”
In Evangelium Vitae (n. 58), he tells us: “The acceptance of abortion in the popular mind, in behavior and even in law itself, is a telling sign of an extremely dangerous crisis of the moral sense, which is becoming more and more incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, even when the fundamental right to life is at stake.”
Abortion cannot be confined to the closet. It is more than an act. It is the approbation of a philosophy that disregards the value of human life. As a philosophy, it spreads its contagion to other areas of life including suicide, euthanasia, and outright murder.
One cannot disrespect some human life without disrespecting all human life. This is a most reasonable point. Our society, dedicated as it is to unlimited abortion, fails to see this. It is blinded and muzzled by political correctness that has created arbitrary values as a substitute for real values.
Murderous mayhem will continue to be facilitated as long as moral myopia prevails.
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