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Pope Paul VI was right
A few recent events reinforce my previous conviction. Murderers with automatic weapons regularly start shooting at innocent people—I am thinking now about the massacre on the observations deck of the Empire State Building in New York, a few days later six policemen were wounded by heavily armed robbers. This occurred in February of this year; about the same time it was announced that scientists had successfully cloned a sheep. The latter scientific success opens up the possibility of cloning human beings, an act that would be utterly immoral and detestable. But it will happen because so many members of the scientific community are not Christians and so do not follow Christian principles of morality. The thinking of many scientists is: If it is possible let’s try it. Whether or not it is moral does not particularly concern them. An indication of how low we have fallen was the demand of a militant homosexual group in New York that government money be allocated to develop the cloning of human beings so they can clone themselves and thus produce more homosexuals. They based their demand on their “reproductive rights” which, they claim, are given them by the Constitution of the United States! We have come a long way from the Ten Commandments, the natural law, and ordinary common sense. Catholics and priests who pay attention to the Magisterium of the Church should not be surprised by these developments. All of this was predicted by Pope Paul VI in his historic encyclical letter On the Regulation of Birth (Humanae Vitae, 1968). In explaining and proclaiming God’s law about human procreation and the evil of all forms of artificial contraception, the Pope clearly predicted what the consequences would be of the general acceptance of artificial birth control by our society. He said that “a wide and easy road would thus be opened up towards conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality” (#17). He predicted further that contraceptive practices would lead to a loss of respect for women; such practices would put a “dangerous weapon” in the hands of governments (e.g., China’s policy of forced abortion after one child). The Pope predicted that these ills and many more would logically follow if the norms for generating human life are “exposed to the arbitrary will of man.” Since man did not make himself but was created by God, who gave him a definite nature and an objective moral law binding on all, man does not create truth and goodness but finds them as pregiven. Thus, Paul VI says, “one must necessarily recognize insurmountable limits to the possibility of man’s domination over his own body and its functions.” Therefore, contraception, abortion, cloning and euthanasia are immoral and forbidden by God. In the relativism of our culture, our intellectuals, helped and encouraged by the mass media, have lost their bearings and, like the Titanic, are steering our civilization towards disaster. Perhaps it will take a worldwide catastrophe, similar in magnitude to the flood in the time of Noah, to turn men’s minds from the worship of self to the worship of the one true God and to respect for his law. It happened to Samaria in 721 B.C. It happened to Jerusalem in 587 B.C. It could happen to the United States any day. Kenneth Baker, S.J., Editor |