Sunday 6th October 2024

Home » Frontpage » Currently Reading:

Humanae Vitae, The Coronavirus, And The Law Of Cause And Effect

February 22, 2020 Frontpage No Comments

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

As the Chinese Communist Party reels from the terror and chaos caused by the spread of the coronavirus, everyone is looking for someone else to blame for the deadly epidemic. Given the nature of China’s totalitarian state, it might be years, if ever, before we know the truth. In the meantime, given the law of cause and effect, we can accurately identify the foul spirit that motivated it.
In chapter two of Humanae Vitae, St. Pope Paul VI observes that a “rapid increase in population . . . has made many fear that world population is going to grow faster than available resources.” That fear can compel man to defy the Church’s teaching about marriage and the family that “is based on the natural law as illuminated and enriched by divine Revelation,” he observes. As a result, man can be tempted to assume for himself the power to regulate life.
Pope Paul wrote as the sexual revolution exploded across the West. He was not naive — yes, population controllers had already taken a firm hold on international governments and institutions. But he was also calmly and unashamedly faithful. After all, “No member of the faithful,” he wrote, “could possibly deny that the Church is competent in her Magisterium to interpret the natural moral law.”
One might observe today that such an observation renders a population of the truly “faithful” to be mighty small indeed. To look at it another way, though, there are countless men who do deny the law of God, and the Church’s right to interpret it. Absent the authority of the Church or “The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” what state will confer on every man the power and authority to be his own lawgiver?
Not many — and not for long. The “autonomous man,” as political philosopher Gerhart Niemeyer calls him, cannot last in a lawless world. This Hobbesian condition quickly invites — even guarantees — the all-powerful Leviathan. Pope Paul saw the danger of such moral chaos, and warns of its consequences: “Finally,” he wrote, “careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law” (HV, n. 17).
The language isn’t apocalyptic, but the prediction sure is: And in today’s China, those “public authorities” are personified in the Communist Party of China (CCP) under the leadership of President Xi Jinping.
Pope Paul writes that “Marriage . . . is far from being the effect of chance or the result of the blind evolution of natural forces. It is in reality the wise and provident institution of God the Creator.” But on marriage, as in everything else, the CCP has no regard for the “precepts of the moral law.” The Party turns Pope Paul’s timeless truth upside-down, and it relies on no less an authority than Karl Marx himself.

Karl Marx, Family Man

Karl Marx hated the family. He hated his own family, and left them destitute while he spent countless hours in the Reading Room of the British Museum. But Marx hated the family that God created in His own image and likeness even more. This hatred inspired his theory of the “class struggle,” a vile contrivance that unleashes and empowers today’s gaggle of apostles of Prometheus.
That’s right. The class struggle was born in the family, and Marx’s desire to destroy it.
After Marx’s death, his collaborator Friedrich Engels observed that “The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male.”
There you have it. Since Adam and Eve, the woman has been made a slave, subject to her husband. Forget Genesis. Marx manufactures his own myth, and expunges the spiritual and the eternal. For Marx, woman is a mere “instrument of production.” The marriage act was for Marx the first “division of labor”; in the Marxist lexicon, God’s design for man, woman, and the family is the ultimate source of evil in history. This natural and spiritual unity constitutes the “bourgeois family,” and Marx hated it. So he attacked the family by reducing it to a crude one-dimensional fraud.
“The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation,” Marx and Engels write in the Communist Manifesto. But notice: It isn’t the natural family that reduces the family to a crass materialist blob. It’s Marx. And he does so in order to destroy the natural protection that defends the family from the state.
Once that natural barrier dissolves, the state can do whatever it wants. The atomized individual has no protection because state power has no limits. The “sentimental veil” of divine and natural law merely serves to condone “oppression,” and for Marx — and Xi Jinping — the laws of history give the party absolute and unlimited authority to “liberate” its subjects from such “exploitation.”
By what moral standard? Well, to paraphrase Lenin, “Anything that furthers the Revolution is ethical.”

Carte Blanche For
The Black Death

Since 1979, Communist China has killed hundreds of millions of unborn children in its forced abortion program. Their excuse? The “fear” that Pope Paul had identified eleven years before. Why, progress requires population control! Keep in mind that President Xi’s “Marxism with Chinese characteristics” is supposed to liberate Marx’s “oppressed” bourgeois woman. Instead, in one of the ideology’s classic contradictions, Marxism has oppressed her again. Her menstrual cycle is posted in public to make things easier for the abortion enforcers. She is monitored by Thought Police whose advanced technologies would make Big Brother’s torturers envious. The government claims the right to kill her children, subject them to vivisection, and sell their body parts to the highest bidder.
By the inescapable logic of cause and effect, the Party has decided that, if it can kill the most innocent by the millions, it can kill anybody.
And that brought the coronavirus, known as COVID-19, to the world stage.
The Wanderer spoke to Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, who first exposed China’s forced abortion policies in the West.
“China has all but admitted that the epidemic began when the virus escaped from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China,” Mosher says, “and we have the evidence.
“On February 14, China’s President for Life, Xi Jinping, hosted a political meeting called to address the means of stopping the epidemic and setting up a system to prevent similar outbreaks in the future. ‘In order to protect people’s health,’ Xi reportedly said, biosafety should be ‘integrated into national security,’ biosecurity laws should be drafted, and a national system to control biosecurity risks should be set up.”
“The very next day,” Mosher says, “China’s Ministry of Science and Technology released a new document entitled ‘Guiding opinions on strengthening biosecurity management in microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses at the same level as the new coronavirus’.”
Of course, the coronavirus was developed as an integral part of the Party’s “national security,” designed to use on foreign adversaries, not only as a weapon, but also as a threat, Mosher says After all, the Chinese could use the virus as a very effective tool of extortion, threatening any number of world players with a pandemic offensive if they did not comply with China’s demands.
But now the extortion victims are China’s own citizens. And the Party has decided that, well, we will be more careful in the future.
“You’ve heard about closing the barn door after the horse has gotten out,” Mosher said. “This is locking down the bioweapons lab after a lethal virus has escaped.”
In China, the power of life and death has indeed “passed into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law.” Once again, Humanae Vitae was right.

Share Button

2019 The Wanderer Printing Co.

Vatican and USCCB leave transgender policy texts unpublished

While U.S. bishops have made headlines for releasing policies addressing gender identity and pastoral ministry, guidelines on the subject have been drafted but not published by both the U.S. bishops’ conference and the Vatican’s doctrinal office, leaving diocesan bishops to…Continue Reading

Biden says Pope Francis told him to continue receiving communion, amid scrutiny over pro-abortion policies

President Biden said that Pope Francis, during their meeting Friday in Vatican City, told him that he should continue to receive communion, amid heightened scrutiny of the Catholic president’s pro-abortion policies.  The president, following the approximately 90-minute-long meeting, a key…Continue Reading

Federal judge rules in favor of Gov. DeSantis’ mask mandate ban

MIAMI (LifeSiteNews) – A federal judge this week handed Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis another legal victory on his mask mandate ban for schools. On Wednesday, Judge K. Michael Moore of the Southern District of Florida denied a petition from…Continue Reading

The Eucharist should not be received unworthily, says Nigerian cardinal

Priests have a duty to remind Catholics not to receive the Eucharist in a state of serious sin and to make confession easily available, a Nigerian cardinal said at the International Eucharistic Congress on Thursday. “It is still the doctrine…Continue Reading

Donald Trump takes a swipe at Catholics and Jews who did not vote for him

Donald Trump complained about Catholics and Jews who did not vote for him in 2020. The former president made the comments in a conference call featuring religious leaders. The move could be seen to shore up his religious conservative base…Continue Reading

Y Gov. Kathy Hochul Admits Andrew Cuomo Covered Up COVID Deaths, 12,000 More Died Than Reported

When it comes to protecting people from COVID, Andrew Cuomo is already the worst governor in America. New York has the second highest death rate per capita, in part because he signed an executive order putting COVID patients in nursing…Continue Reading

Prayers For Cardinal Burke . . . U.S. Cardinal Burke says he has tested positive for COVID-19

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — U.S. Cardinal Raymond L. Burke said he has tested positive for the virus that causes COVID-19. In an Aug. 10 tweet, he wrote: “Praised be Jesus Christ! I wish to inform you that I have recently…Continue Reading

Democrats Block Amendment Banning Late-Term Abortions, Stopping Abortions Up to Birth

Senate Democrats have blocked an amendment that would ban abortions on babies older than 20 weeks. During consideration of the multi-trillion spending package, pro-life Louisiana Senator John Kennedy filed an amendment to ban late-term abortions, but Democrats steadfastly support killing…Continue Reading

Transgender student wins as U.S. Supreme Court rebuffs bathroom appeal

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday handed a victory to a transgender former public high school student who waged a six-year legal battle against a Virginia county school board that had barred him from using the bathroom corresponding…Continue Reading

New York priest accused by security guard of assault confirms charges have now been dropped

NEW YORK, June 17, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — A New York priest has made his first public statement regarding the dismissal of charges against him.  Today Father George W. Rutler reached out to LifeSiteNews and other media today with the following…Continue Reading

21,000 sign petition protesting US Catholic bishops vote on Biden, abortion

More than 21,000 people have signed a letter calling for U.S. Catholic bishops to cancel a planned vote on whether President Biden should receive communion.  Biden, a Catholic, supports abortion rights and has long come under attack from some Catholics over that…Continue Reading

Bishop Gorman seeks candidates to fill two full time AP level teaching positions for the 2021-2022 school year in the subject areas of Calculus/Statistics and Physics

Bishop Thomas K. Gorman Regional Catholic School is a college preparatory school located in Tyler, Texas. It is an educational ministry of the Catholic Diocese of Tyler led by Bishop Joseph Strickland. The sixth through twelfth grade school provides a…Continue Reading

Untitled 5 Untitled 2

Attention Readers:

  Welcome to our website. Readers who are familiar with The Wanderer know we have been providing Catholic news and orthodox commentary for 150 years in our weekly print edition.


  Our daily version offers only some of what we publish weekly in print. To take advantage of everything The Wanderer publishes, we encourage you to su
bscribe to our flagship weekly print edition, which is mailed every Friday or, if you want to view it in its entirety online, you can subscribe to the E-edition, which is a replica of the print edition.
 
  Our daily edition includes: a selection of material from recent issues of our print edition, news stories updated daily from renowned news sources, access to archives from The Wanderer from the past 10 years, available at a minimum charge (this will be expanded as time goes on). Also: regularly updated features where we go back in time and highlight various columns and news items covered in The Wanderer over the past 150 years. And: a comments section in which your remarks are encouraged, both good and bad, including suggestions.
 
  We encourage you to become a daily visitor to our site. If you appreciate our site, tell your friends. As Catholics we must band together to rediscover our faith and share it with the world if we are to effectively counter a society whose moral culture seems to have no boundaries and a government whose rapidly extending reach threatens to extinguish the rights of people of faith to practice their religion (witness the HHS mandate). Now more than ever, vehicles like The Wanderer are needed for clarification and guidance on the issues of the day.

Catholic, conservative, orthodox, and loyal to the Magisterium have been this journal’s hallmarks for five generations. God willing, our message will continue well into this century and beyond.

Joseph Matt
President, The Wanderer Printing Co.

Untitled 1

Catechism

Today . . .

This week at the Synod on Synodality — revolution or much ado about nothing?

Perhaps it is in the very nature of the Synod on Synodality to take steps back after having taken several steps forward. But the tone of the opening days of the synod’s final general assembly makes it apparent that, for the moment, there is no talk of revolution within the Church.  That tone was set days before the gathering got underway this week at the Vatican, when in his speech in Belgium on Sept. 27, Pope Francis…Continue Reading

Wyoming doctor fired by GOP governor for opposing child ‘sex changes’ asks to be reinstated

(The Daily Signal) — Wyoming’s governor removed a doctor from the state’s board of medicine because the doctor supported a law banning “gender-affirming care” for minors. The doctor is suing, and his lawyers are filing a motion Tuesday asking the court to reinstate him on the medical board. His legal team also revealed that more than 5,000 Wyoming residents have signed a petition asking the governor to reinstate him

Pro-life leaders express disgust with ‘fully booked’ mobile Planned Parenthood unit at DNC

(LifeSiteNews) — Planned Parenthood was “fully booked” with 25 appointments to dispense abortion pills at a mobile center on Monday and Tuesday during the Democratic National Convention (DNC). “Twenty-five innocent human beings whose lives are being ended at the DNC. And this is done as a political statement,” pro-life activist Lila Rose remarked Tuesday on her podcast.

Pope Francis acknowledges conference for ‘LGBT Catholics’

Pope Francis this week said he is “united in prayer” with those participating in a conference for Catholics who identify as LGBT taking place this weekend in Washington, D.C. Father James Martin, a controversial Jesuit priest who founded the pro-LGBT group Outreach in 2022, reportedly asked Pope Francis if he would like to send a greeting to the group’s 2024 gathering, taking place Aug. 2–4 at Georgetown University. Cardinal Wilton Gregory of Washington is scheduled to celebrate Mass on Saturday at…Continue Reading

Senators Slam Army After Presentation Calls Pro-Life Americans Terrorists

Senators James Lankford (R-OK) and Ted Budd (R-NC), along with Representative Richard Hudson (R-NC) and their colleagues, sent a letter to Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth demanding answers after an anti-terrorism training conducted at Fort Liberty, North Carolina depicted Pro-Life Americans as terrorists. “We write regarding social media reports that anti-terrorism training conducted at Ft. Liberty, North Carolina depicts Pro-Life Americans as terrorists. Specifically, the slides identify National Right to Life, ‘Choose Life’ license plate holders, and…Continue Reading

The King of Kings

Cindy Paslawski We are at the end of the Church year. We began with Advent a year ago, commemorating the time awaiting the coming of the Christ and we are ending these weeks later with a vision of the future, a vision of Christ the King of the Universe on His throne before us all.…Continue Reading

7,000 Pro-Lifers March In London

By STEVEN ERTELT LONDON (LifeNews) — Over the weekend, some seven thousand pro-life people in the UK participated in the March for Life in London to protest abortion.They marched to Parliament Square on Saturday, September 2 under the banner of “Freedom to Live” and had to deal with a handful of radical abortion activists.During the…Continue Reading

An Appeal For Prayer For The Armenian People

By RAYMOND LEO CARDINAL BURKE (Editor’s Note: His Eminence Raymond Cardinal Burke on August 29, 2023, issued this prayer for the Armenian people, noting their unceasing love for Christ, even in the face of persecution.) + + On the Feast of the Beheading of St. John the Baptist, having a few days ago celebrated the…Continue Reading

Robert Hickson, Founding Member Of Christendom College, Dies At 80

By MAIKE HICKSON FRONT ROYAL, Va. (LifeSiteNews) — Robert David Hickson, Jr., of Front Royal, Va., died at his home on September 2, 2023, at 21:29 p.m. after several months of suffering and after having received the Last Rites of the Catholic Church. He was surrounded by friends and family.Robert is survived by me —…Continue Reading

The Real Hero Of “Sound of Freedom”… Says The Film Has Strengthened The Fight Against Child Trafficking

By ANA PAULA MORALES (CNA) —Tim Ballard, a former U.S. Homeland Security agent who risked his life to fight child trafficking, discussed the impact of the movie Sound of Freedom, which is based on his work, in an August 29 interview with ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. “I’ve spent more than 20 years helping…Continue Reading

Advertisement

Our Catholic Faith (Section B of print edition)

Catholic Replies

Editor’s Note: This lesson on medical-moral issues is taken from the book Catholicism & Ethics. Please feel free to use the series for high schoolers or adults. We will continue to welcome your questions for the column as well. The email and postal addresses are given at the end of this column. Special Course On Catholicism And Ethics (Pages 53-59)…Continue Reading

Color Politics An Impediment To Faith

By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK The USCCB is rightly concerned about racism, as they should be about any sin. In the 2018 statement Open Wide Our Hearts, they affirm the dignity of every human person: “But racism still profoundly affects our culture, and it has no place in the Christian heart. This evil causes great harm to its victims, and…Continue Reading

Trademarks Of The True Messiah

By MSGR. CHARLES POPE (Editor’s Note: Msgr. Charles Pope posted this essay on September 2, and it is reprinted here with permission.) + + In Sunday’s Gospel the Lord firmly sets before us the need for the cross, not as an end in itself, but as the way to glory. Let’s consider the Gospel in three stages.First: The Pattern That…Continue Reading

A Beacon Of Light… The Holy Cross And Jesus’ Unconditional Love

By FR. RICHARD D. BRETON Each year on September 14 the Church celebrates the Feast Day of the Exultation of the Holy Cross. The Feast Day of the Triumph of the Holy Cross commemorates the day St. Helen found the True Cross. It is fitting then, that today we should focus on the final moments of Jesus’ life on the…Continue Reading

Our Ways Must Become More Like God’s Ways

By FR. ROBERT ALTIER Twenty-Fifth Sunday In Ordinary Time (YR A) Readings: Isaiah 55:6-9Phil. 1:20c-24, 27aMatt. 20:1-16a In the first reading today, God tells us through the Prophet Isaiah that His thoughts are not our thoughts and His ways are not our ways. This should not come as a surprise to anyone, especially when we look at what the Lord…Continue Reading

The Devil And The Democrats

By FR. DENIS WILDE, OSA States such as Minnesota, California, Maryland, and others, in all cases with Democrat-controlled legislatures, are on a fast track to not only allow unborn babies to be murdered on demand as a woman’s “constitutional right” but also to allow infanticide.Our nation has gotten so used to the moral evil of killing in the womb that…Continue Reading

Crushed But Unbroken . . . The Martyrdom Of St. Margaret Clitherow

By RAY CAVANAUGH The late-1500s were a tough time for Catholics in England, where the Reformation was in full gear. A 1581 law prohibited Catholic religious ceremonies. And a 1584 Act of Parliament mandated that all Catholic priests leave the country or else face execution. Some chose to remain, however, so they could continue serving the faithful.Also taking huge risks…Continue Reading

Advertisement(2)