By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
You know the stereotype: hidebound, uneducated Christians clinging to their guns and religion, rejecting new ideas, and particularly science, out of fear of being wrong or found guilty of enslavement to mere superstition. When it comes to the humanity of the preborn boy or girl, however, the Christians have science on their side.
You don’t have to read Catholic sources to learn this. Take a look at theatlantic.com:
“The first time Ashley McGuire had a baby, she and her husband had to wait 20 weeks to learn its sex. By her third, they found out at 10 weeks with a blood test. Technology has defined her pregnancies, she told me, from the apps that track weekly development to the ultrasounds that show the growing child. ‘My generation has grown up under an entirely different world of science and technology than the Roe generation,’ she said. ‘We’re in a culture that is science-obsessed.’
“Activists like McGuire believe it makes perfect sense to be pro-science and pro-life. While she opposes abortion on moral grounds, she believes studies of fetal development, improved medical techniques, and other advances anchor the movement’s arguments in scientific fact. ‘The pro-life message has been, for the last 40-something years, that the fetus…is a life, and it is a human life worthy of all the rights the rest of us have,’ she said. ‘That’s been more of an abstract concept until the last decade or so.’
“But, she added, ‘when you’re seeing a baby sucking its thumb at 18 weeks, smiling, clapping,’ it becomes ‘harder to square the idea that that 20-week-old, that unborn baby or fetus, is discardable’.”
But this is one more matter that will, in the end, be settled only by faith.
There are many things science cannot prove. The fact of the Lord’s Resurrection and the Virgin Birth are among these. The necessary things of our faith including the articles of the Creed cannot be proven. We must receive them in faith. Relics are not necessary for belief and are not matters of Revelation as are credal articles.
The true nature of those who support legalization of the murder of preborn human life is seen by their selective use of science based on the needs of the moment. While science increasingly proves the evidence of human life in the womb at earlier and earlier stages, the huge abortion industry circles the wagons to protect profits gained from predation on the vulnerable and the young.
We prepare in these beautiful days of Advent to celebrate once again the mystery of the Savior’s birth. We welcome through the liturgies of the Church the God-Man into our midst in the reality, above all, of the Holy Eucharist. The baby born of Mary thousands of years ago is present in the consecrated Host also because He is the same Lord who as a Man died on the cross, offering that Body totally for us once and again and again in every Holy Mass.
At Christmas each year we accept a Life which began in the womb as each of us did, the whole world joining us in celebrating Christmas once again with many of the Catholic signs that have been handed down. In particular the ubiquitous crèche, with Mary and Joseph and the Shepherds and three Kings surrounding the Holy Child, proclaims once again the revelation of the entire faith in the Incarnate God born as a Baby that night.
The faith itself demands the acceptance of that Child, poor and vulnerable, born in a stable, to parents traveling among strangers far from home. The Lord Himself, proclaimed the reason for Christmas all over the globe in these days, began life as every other child must, at first difficult to recognize as human, but human nonetheless. Things begin small in God’s plan. But because they are so small we cannot see them does not mean they are not there. Even science, itself a human tool and subject to human limits and failings, cannot enter fully into every mystery of the Creator God.
Even after birth we sometimes struggle to recognize the humanity of others. Those who have mutilated themselves physically to radically alter what God in His wisdom has made or those morally unrecognizable because of their heinous crimes against humanity are among those who present themselves in distressing disguise. These challenge our mission to love every human person in ways very much like the experience of the many today who fear the unborn child.
We fear change or loss. Like death which takes away everything we can see or possess, other events sometimes are also seen as a change which brings loss. Others make demands upon us with their needs and wants. In a world which has abandoned truth for material satisfactions, love also takes a back seat. We proclaim our need for love all the time, but we can only truly love God and other human persons because only they can return love in a way which communicates it has been received and accepted. Things may look beautiful at first but soon they press upon us with their needs: to be cleaned, maintained, repaired, or stored when we have accumulated too much.
The truth about love for any human person, born or preborn, is that it must be freely given. That is what makes it full, human, and beautiful. Even in this matter God will not force our hands. In His love He has made us free so that we may answer the call to live as He does by loving as does He.
Our faith in this season, so centered upon the birth of the Child Jesus, must continue to grow as He did. And with the life of Christ we learn to grow in faith, all the way to Calvary, so as to place our trust in something we cannot see: that this Child, unlike every other, has the divine power of life and will triumph over the grave. And our trusting faith will confer upon us no less than a share in that life.
God loves all. Science which studies what God has made confirms what faith knows to be true: Every preborn child in the womb is human from the moment of conception, no less true whether seen or unseen.
Our eternal life began with love for a vulnerable Child. We must live with love for no less than every child. The radical demand to love the preborn boy or girl, whom we cannot see, is a crucial one. We cannot be saved without it because, in its absence, we fail to love as God does. And without His love we cannot be saved.
Thank you for reading and praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever.
@MCITLFrAphorism
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