Human thinking no match for faith!

One of the great comforts of being an orthodox Catholic Christian is that our adherence to the faith of the ages affords us a joined up philosophy for life. Because we really do believe in the full revelation of Jesus Christ, bound in scripture, we have genuine confidence in our tradition. And because of this confidence we feel certain in our trust of the living Word of God which comes to us in Word and Sacrament each day.

To uphold this eternal faith in Jesus Christ -the same yesterday, today and forever- is both liberating and radical. It leads us to a life of humble obedience and faithfulness, quite different from the modern practice of merely going to church and paying lip service to a vaguely Christian tradition! Living the faith of the ages is most certainly NOT that ghastly habit, so often found in modern Anglicanism, of merely cherry-picking our way through the Gospels obeying the bits we admire.

Understand that only such uncompromising and orthodox faith, the sort in harmony with Church teaching down the ages, can be certifiably said to come from the apostles. For this is the only faith which is present through the ages. And paradoxically it is only this deeply traditional faith that is never in danger of growing ‘out-dated’. Why? Because it never marries the spirit of the age but always stands up for the spirit of God! In times of Christian sympathy and in times of persecution its voice never changes.

This is the Catholic and Apostolic faith that provides a different way of living than that of this world. This is the light in the darkness and the salt in the world. It may not be popular, with its emphasis on self sacrifice, obedience and self control, but it is a profound and beautiful thing. A joined up way of life in which every living person is cherished and where all are equally called to lives of service. Oh that the world could live according to the Gospel for just one day…there would be no murder, hatred, destruction or sorrow.

But that is not the world we live in. Instead we Christians must swim against the tide of worldly opinion. And what a confusing, muddled and ghastly environment this creates. In the secular West it means we must live our lives in an increasing culture of death. The elderly can be extinguished when no longer useful, the babe in the womb lives in peril and there is pain, hurt and hatred almost everywhere we turn.

One famous school of modern worldly thinking is that of feminism. Like most things it is not all bad but rather founded on principles that none can deny are admirable. Who could not agree that women need to be respected and given opportunity in life? Who would not want their daughters, wives and friends to be able to work on an equal footing to men? But that is not the only message that feminism puts forward. Sadly it also leads us into dangerous waters by putting forward a philosophy of self and rights. And worse still it has always proudly promoted abortion believing it a tool for freeing the emancipated woman.

What bitter but predictable irony we witness when the fruit of this thinking is considered. In the economist last week (biretta tip to a regular informant!) a frightening report informed us that cheap and easy abortion has led to a bewildering fact. In cultures where sons are prized, women are missing in their millions—aborted, killed, neglected to death. For those who oppose abortion, this is mass murder on a scale that should harrow the soul.

This is how the Economist puts it:

Imagine you are one half of a young couple expecting your first child in a fast-growing, poor country. You are part of the new middle class; your income is rising; you want a small family. But traditional mores hold sway around you, most important in the preference for sons over daughters. Perhaps hard physical labour is still needed for the family to make its living. Perhaps only sons may inherit land. Perhaps a daughter is deemed to join another family on marriage and you want someone to care for you when you are old. Perhaps she needs a dowry.

Now imagine that you have had an ultrasound scan; it costs $12, but you can afford that. The scan says the unborn child is a girl. You yourself would prefer a boy; the rest of your family clamours for one. You would never dream of killing a baby daughter, as they do out in the villages. But an abortion seems different. What do you do? For millions of couples, the answer is: abort the daughter, try for a son.

And so we arrive at the disturbing fruit of pro abortionist thinking, a warping of nature through unintended social engineering. It means that China now has a huge deluge of single young men who have no hope of finding a spouse which in turn results in an angry and restless generation who inevitably descend into lives of violence and despair. To understand the scale of this consider that China alone stands to have as many unmarried young men—“bare branches”, as they are known—as the entire population of young men in America.

Now the feminist will naturally pull me up short and claim that this catalogue of infanticide is due to cultural chauvinism and not feminist ideology. They would have a point whilst missing the point I am making! Certainly chauvinism is the reason it is the girls who are butchered but that role could easily be reversed if one added just a fraction of the anti-male rhetoric one finds in feminist thinking! So instead of blaming a gender let us focus on the true culprit here….the belief in abortion as a tool for lessening female emancipation. Quite clearly the feminist passion for advocating ‘pro choice’ has ensured that it is, albeit unintentionally, part of the problem and not the cure for the many female babies whose lives are under threat. For one cannot marry our culture of death and then seriously claim to stand up for rights and freedom.

And so the irony is that the Catholic, who may well believe that men and women are equal but called to be different, is doing far more for women’s rights than the noisy army of Germaine Greeresque modernists putting forward flawed rhetoric. It is the faith of the ages that leads us to treat everyone, male and female, with love, dignity and respect. It is the modern secular mindset that powerfully fights for someone’s rights in one breath whilst extinguishing souls in the next. And that is why so many hospitals have become bewildering places of ethical paradox….the tiny baby being lavished attention under life support machine in one room as countless tiny bodies are washed down the drain in the next. It is not life that is celebrated in the West today but choice. The select choice of the privileged few who move mountains to ensure the victims, those who in reality pay for such choice, are shielded from public attention.

Give me the joined up thinking of Catholicism any day over the confused, conflicting and compromised logic that lies at the heart of Broken Britain and the wider secular West. I choose life even as the majority around me choose death.