Pro-Life Work and the New Evangelization
The New Evangelization of the nations and the renewal of pro-life work go hand-in-hand, for at their core is what we must call the primacy of the individual human person. The person is everything. Win over just one person to Christ and you have won the world. Too often today, probably as the recycled leftovers of a tired and disgraced Marxism, we all tend to focus on what I call the primacy of Bigness, where aggregation and collectivism looses sight of the individual person for the sake of the group. As far as I can tell, this is the milieu previous pro-life work operated in and this is what cost us the so-called culture war.
Here is the still point of my website's thesis: I believe we already lost the culture war. But not all is lost! There are moral and spiritual principles that we need right now that can bring about both the New Evangelization of the world, and the revitalization of pro-life work right here at home. This website will layout Catholic pro-life moral principles and consistently apply them to four main life issues: abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty and warfare.
Many conservative Catholics will be pleased with my moral reasoning condemning the first two issues, and probably call me a “Commie Leftist” or an “Unrealistic idealist” or even “pacifist” and “isolationist” for my treatment of the second two. Those self-styled members of the Catholic Left may want to pass over the first two with mutterings of being “personally opposed” but “who are we to force our beliefs on others?” and so forth, but just may react with glee at my keen social awareness for treating so directly the second two categories of the death penalty and war. Such tragedy is what happens in a polarized society that is equally covered with the residue of the Culture of Death.
Pope John Paul II on the Culture of Death:
This culture is actively fostered by powerful cultural, economic and political currents which encourage an idea of society excessively concerned with efficiency. Looking at the situation from this point of view, it is possible to speak in a certain sense of a war of the powerful against the weak: a life which would require greater acceptance, love and care is considered useless, or held to be an intolerable burden, and is therefore rejected in one way or another. ( EV, 12)
I do know that I am not a communist, nor a Leftist, liberal, progressive, radical or whatever other label some find convenient to place on people or positions they regard as uncomfortable and desire to dismiss. I have never been those things and never will be. I do not think that I even know how to raise my social awareness to the status of “keen.” I also know that I am not a patriarchal, condescending, authoritarian white male seeking to project my narrow, black-and-white view of reproductive rights on liberated women swimming in a sea of moral grey. So, Left or Right, I am sure to displease, unless you are willing to honestly and strenuously apply our Christian moral principles.
What I know is this: that Jesus Christ is the Eternal and Only-Begotten Son of the Father and that his teachings are Truth itself, no matter how in season or out of season they may be, nor how much those teachings cause one’s persecution, even by fellow Christians. He alone is good and he alone will judge each man. The Beatitudes, not the DNC nor the GOP, form the measure of each and every Christian. Grace, not polling, saves my soul. And what sends me to Hell is only one thing: my sin- what I have done and what I have failed to do. This whole website is my attempt to preach the Gospel in all of its full “rigor and vigor” (CT,30), to proclaim what Jesus Christ desires for His people, to lay out a New Evangelization for pro-life work that gives all Christians a truly consistent ethic of life, making no exceptions to homicide simply because it is public, patriotic or popular.
I will conclude this post with the words of the Prophet Jeremiah (20:9-10):
“If I say, ‘I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,’ there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot. For I hear many whispering. Terror is on every side! ‘Denounce him! Let us denounce him’!”