By PEGGY MOEN
HOWTH, Ireland, AD 821 — The Vikings captured “a great booty of women” here that year, according to the Annals of Ulster, condemning them to a lifetime of slavery.
Howth is a peninsula east of Dublin, and it is easy to see on a map what a clear shot the Vikings had.
It is less easy to imagine the horrors the ill-fated women experienced as the barbarians tore them away from their homes and families.
What followed for them, however, was far worse.
Shane Hegarty wrote for The Irish Times April 10, 2014 that the Vikings “became part of an extraordinary trading network that stretched north to Scandinavia and south to Africa. It meant that being grabbed by a Viking party could mean an unfortunate victim would eventually travel thousands of kilometers and through several hands.”
The assault on Howth was not an isolated episode. During the Viking Age, the longboat terrorists attacked much of Christendom, including the well-known 793 invasion and devastation of the Scottish monastery at Lindisfarne.
One thing must be said in defense of the Vikings, however, despite their dastardly deeds. They were pagans. At least for the most part, they had not yet heard about the Gospel of peace and God’s love for life. (St. Olaf, king of Norway, lived from 995-1030.)
But the Irish who voted to overturn their once-Catholic country’s pro-life Eighth Amendment have no such excuse. One can only conclude that they prefer George Soros’ money to Pope John Paul II’s love. See page one for a LifeSiteNews article by Claire Chretien that details the influx of foreign money and media on the side of death.
In 1979 — that is, within the living memory of many Irish voters — the sainted Pope visited Ireland and warned of what would come if they pursued prosperity over piety.
In Limerick, he said:
“Ireland in the past displayed a remarkable interpenetration of her whole culture, speech and way of life by the things of God and the life of grace. Life was in a sense organized around religious events. The task of this generation of Irish men and women is to transform the more complex world of modern industry and urban life by the same Gospel spirit. Today, you must keep the city and the factory for God, as you have always kept the farm and the village community for Him in the past. Material progress has in so many places led to decline of faith and growth in Christ, growth in love and in justice.”
The Polish Pope added: “Here in Limerick, I am in a largely rural area and many of you are people of the land. I feel at home with you as I did with the rural and mountain people of my native Poland, and I repeat here to you what I told them: Love the land; love the work of the fields for it keeps you close to God, the Creator, in a special way.”
He also specifically condemned and warned against legalized abortion, then a distant possibility.
But it’s taken less than four decades for John Paul’s worst nightmare to come to fruition.
And not by accident.
Along with the devolution of rural, Catholic Ireland, the forces of death were cunning as well as rich.
In the UK Catholic Herald, February 9, 2018, David Quinn wrote that May 25 was a likely date for the vote on the Eighth Amendment and commented:
“The government doesn’t want to delay holding it much past the end of May because after that many university and college students, thought likely to vote for a repeal of the Eighth in heavy numbers, will be on holiday.
“If the vote is held in the autumn, that would not be long after the Pope’s scheduled visit to Ireland for the World Meeting of Families, which takes place at the end of August. Would his visit be a fillip to the pro-life movement? He is popular with ordinary people, Catholic and otherwise. It is hard to believe his trip would not assist the pro-life cause even if he never directly refers to the referendum. This is why the government would much prefer to have the vote over and done with as quickly as possible.”
Fighting the Vikings of old might, in some respects, have been easier.
The Vikings’ stealing and selling of Irishwomen means that Celtic DNA will show up in all sorts of unexpected places, particularly as ancestral DNA testing becomes more global.
But the DNA of aborted Irish babies will disappear from the Earth.
An article by Andrew Lawler, National Geographic, December 28, 2015, is entitled: “Kinder, Gentler Vikings? Not According to Their Slaves” and features an artist’s rendition of a bare-chested Viking offering a slave girl to a Persian merchant in a Volga River trading town.
There will never be any artistic portrayals of the abortions that follow in the wake of the Eighth Amendment’s collapse. How could there be?
Lawler’s National Geographic article noted how recent scholarship has argued that Vikings were more civilized than previously thought. And, indeed, some did settle in Ireland and farm and raise families. But, says Lawler, excavations and updated analyses – “from iron collars in Ireland to possible plantation houses in Sweden” — suggest a brutish Viking culture based on slavery.
However that debate turns out, once the culture of death ends — and it will, as it is, after all, based on death — there will be no debate about the morality of the perpetrators. No one will want to defend the indefensible.
And the ideology of progress will collapse with it, confounding its mindless followers.
Ireland may have become more like other Western countries by embracing abortion, but it’s leaving itself with a culture little worth defending, or even visiting.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress