Pope Paul VI ignited the flame of Catholic evangelization with both Vatican II and "On Evangelization in Our Time"A Conversation with My Cousin
Recently I had a conversation with my cousin who runs a pro-life ministry helping unwed pregnant mothers who are in broken situations to find a home and a life. He does amazing work and has helped heal a lot of lives and saved a lot of babies from the abortion mills of Houston, Texas.
He was asking me about the in’s and out’s of being a Catholic lay evangelist and how it was going. “Too often,” I told him, “Catholics are so busy catechizing- which means taking a person deeper into the mystery of Jesus Christ- that we overlooked the fact that they have never, ever been invited to fall in love with Jesus in the first place. That initial proclamation and invitation just never happened.”
“I never heard a Catholic talk like you,” He said to me. “My parents left the Catholic Church because no one mentioned having a personal relationship with Jesus.” The practice of the Faith was just mechanical, mindless, and culture-based.
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” Matthew 5:9
It is hard to talk openly about war being just or unjust while your own country happens to be in the middle of one (or two, or five). But, hey, if Christianity were easy, everyone would be doing it.
War is a tricky thing because, though most of the humanity’s dark history is filled with unjust and evil wars, every single one of those wars had people cheering them on, justifying them with all sorts of clever rationalizations and emotionally charged propaganda.
That means we Catholics need to be on our A game when it comes to this whole “Just War” idea, so that we are not caught on the wrong side of God’s desire for peace and thirst for justice.
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.
Libertarians would seem like natural allies of the preborn. The fundamental principle from which libertarianism is deduced is non-aggression axiom. This axiom is simple: it is never right to commit aggression (violence) against another person, except in the case of self-defense. Common sense would seem to dictate, then, that abortion, the most grievous kind of aggression, would be opposed, but that is not the case for the majority of libertarians.
The Libertarian Party platform itself is pro-choice, saying the government has no place intervening between the woman and her womb's occupant. It's a private matter, they say, and a woman has the right to her own body, ignoring the claims of the preborn person to life, liberty and his/her own bodily integrity.