Feast of the Holy Innocents 2020
I first saw one of these toys back in the late 1950s when my uncle brought it to Christmas dinner. It’s been re-invented in the last decade and it’s a robot parallel to modern Western society. In its present incarnation, it’s a black plastic box with a switch on top. When you turn on the switch, a lid opens, a yellow hand comes out and turns the switch off. Its only recognizable goal when you turn it on–is to turn itself off. That’s the society we have created. What do I mean?
St. John tells us today that God, and light, and goodness, truth, faithfulness and justice are all linked together, and made so by the blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Conversely, sin, darkness, evil, lying and unrighteousness are all of a piece, and tied up with the lie that we have not sinned. Saying that makes Christ a liar and makes us fit for unending unhappiness, eternal misery. The misery begins not when we die, but when we enter into that covenant with evil that is a mortal sin. Now, even so, if we do sin, sincerely repent and confess that sin as Jesus has taught us, Jesus acts as advocate with the Father, and because He is expiation for sin, we will be forgiven. And, in fact, the whole world can be forgiven because of that one act of righteousness on Calvary. So even if a whole society, steeped in sin, repents and asks forgiveness, millions of souls can be saved, millions brought into His Church and ultimately into the kingdom of heaven.
It doesn’t take much study of history to understand why our society stands condemned before Our Lord, and risks horrible wrath. It goes back to the 1940s, when a scientist named Carl Djerassi developed a hormone pill for Syntex Corporation that interfered with fertility. It was tested on poor Puerto Rican women as a means of reducing the population of people who were considered undesirable. The ultimate target were Catholic women and African Americans. It was eugenics literally on steroids. When you consider the ultimate goal, the lack of informed consent among the human guinea pigs, and the hiding of the trials from the government, you can see the structure of sin underlying the birth control pill from its inception. Within a period of eight years from 1963, it reduced the fertility rate in the United States by fifty percent. In so doing, as Pope Saint Paul VI predicted in 1968, it led to a depersonalization of women, increased divorce, an epidemic of sexually transmitted disease, and a myriad of other problems. Worst of all, it led to an overall moral decline that has given us human egg harvesting, IVF, rampant sexual confusion and a huge reduction in marriage rates while producing a population in which at least a third of children grow up without a father in their lives. In fact, a well-known pundit has been writing for decades that contraception and abortion is the root cause of much urban violence.
When we interfere with God’s clear plan for a family to be formed from one man and one woman cooperating with their bodies to procreate and educate children, we hobble that family and frequently destroy it.
Now, in just a few days, it appears that there will be a formalization of the victory of Satan and his evil plan when we move from the most pro-life U.S. administration in history to the most pro-child murder one, in just a twenty-four hour period. Promises have been made to the culture of death that, in their plan, will lead first to a hobbling and ultimately the destruction of the pro-life movement. Worst of all, their preferred sex-education programs will aim at controlling how we think and speak about families, sexuality, relationships and human reproduction. And every single facet of that black operation conflicts severely with God’s natural law and the ten commandments.
Abortion, fostered by Planned Parenthood and its allies, has, lamentably, made King Herod look tame and reasonable. Herod, who was immortalized by Caesar Augustus in the words: “I’d rather be Herod’s pig than his son,” because of Herod’s record of murdering his children. So, yes, Rachel is mourning over her lost children, hundreds of millions to artificial contraception and at least sixty million to abortion, including abortion from the modern birth control pill. Is there any hope for life in the midst of a culture of murder?
The psalmist tells us that we would be swept away except for the support of the Lord, our God, who made heaven and earth. There have been times in the history of the Church when things looked really bad, as they do now. But human life will, I know, escape, because Jesus has by His Resurrection conquered both sin and death. In ways we do not understand, Our Lord will help us and bring to naught the plans of the murder coalition. But we must keep fighting, and giving praise to the name of the Lord.
