Last week, the British public were presented with two pieces of news that, in another age, might have jarred more noticeably than they have done in the current climate.
The first was the news that baby loss certificates would be given to bereaved parents who lose a baby before 24 weeks of pregnancy, giving them “formal acknowledgement that their baby existed”. The second was the news that MPs are set for a historic vote that could allow women to perform their own abortion after 24 weeks up to birth.
If we acknowledge that a pre-24-week “clump of cells”, as some would have it, is actually a baby, at the same time as pushing for the destruction of that clump of cells after 24 weeks by not calling it a baby, then we have reached a level of dissonance where we might just as easily accept that a person can be a “they”, a woman can be a man, blokes can give birth and breastfeed…
Ah.
In 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary – in line with claims that we live in a “post-truth” world – announced that its word of the year was “post-truth”, which it defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. I’d say the claims were true – if I wasn’t so confused.
We are almost 10 years on from the OED’s declaration and as things have got darker, and the clowns circle ever closer around us on their 2 wheeled unicycles, I have never been more grateful for the light of my Catholic Faith, a light by which I can lead my children.
Catholic teaching emphasises the importance of clear and sound principles, which Pope Pius XI highlights in Divini Illius Magistri, a manifesto for modern parents seeking to reclaim their rights as the primary educators of their children:
“And so, in the spirit of the Divine master…we have directed a helpful word…Be insistent in season and out of season; reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine. Such insistence is called for in these our times, when, alas, there is so great and deplorable an absence of clear and sound principles.”
In his 1885 encyclical Immortale Dei, Pope Leo XIII warned against opinions that lead to the exclusion of God and the supremacy of man, stressing the importance of upholding Christian virtues in both private and public life: “Let this be understood by all, that the integrity of Catholic faith cannot be reconciled with opinions verging on naturalism or rationalism, the essence of which is utterly to do away with Christian institutions and to install in society the supremacy of man to the exclusion of God.”
He added: “It is unlawful to…respect privately the authority of the Church, but publicly reject it; for this would amount to joining together good and evil, and to putting man in conflict with himself; whereas he ought always to be consistent”.
A more perfect example of man in conflict with himself could not be found than that presented by those two headlines last week.
Our children are growing up in a world that has obscured, denied or corrupted truth in the interests of ideology and relativism, while modern media has become like a corrupt and faulty faucet, drip-drip-dripping lies into young minds, such that they struggle to recognise what distinguishes them from beasts, where they come from and where they are going to.
German philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand prophetically announced that “one of the most ominous features of the present epoch is undoubtedly the dethronement of truth”.
We can now see what a world detached from truth looks like. It lacks coherence, it lacks integrity, it is unanchored, unmoored, it drifts around offering everything and nothing; it claims a person is both valuable and disposable, “woke” when asleep.
It proclaims to stand for the right to be free but fails to create true conditions for freedom; it no longer recognises and secures rights, but produces and takes them away; it champions liberty using tyrannical means, it atomises families – the building blocks of a nation – and expects a collective and national identity to be maintained.
It is the living embodiment of a nonsense poem, promulgating a philosophy that cannot produce a man for all seasons, but will instead produce a bunch of them’s for the good times of summer only.
But we do not have to accept these lies. We Catholics are in a privileged position of being anchored in truth – “In season and out of season,” as Pope Pius XII reminds us.
Ignoring the rich teachings of our Church, overlooking the fact that she is not just Holy Mother, but teacher too, is like being locked in a room with a key to the door on the floor that you can’t be bothered to pick up.
To anyone who has looked at the modern world and wondered “How did we get here?” and “How do we get out?”, the key can be found in the deposit of faith Christ himself gave to us. But we have to receive the gift and let it change us, not leave it unwrapped under a long-rotten Christmas tree.
Those who dare to unwrap the gift will be able to see the incoherence of these two recent developments regarding baby loss certificates and the de facto removal of an abortion time limit, which at one end recognises the life of a baby and at the other justifys its destruction. In that recognition a person will be forced to realise that, despite what they (the media, “activists, experts, etc.) claim, you really can’t have it both ways.
It is undeniable that what these parents have lost is their own baby; it is a truth confessed through the language we instinctively use, the compassion we show and the ways we behave, and the deaths of those babies are rightly being acknowledged.
But the outcome of the potentially historic vote on adjusting the 24-week abortion limit will reveal just how far from truth we have fallen.
Photo of an ultrasound scan of a baby, roughly five months after conception; images taken in February 2001. (Photo by DIDIER PALLAGES/AFP via Getty Images.)
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