DEATH WISH!
THE IMPENDING SUICIDE OF A ONCE GREAT NATION
BY REV. JOHN CORAPI, SOLT, STD
A large number of endangered, unwanted, and unborn children held a town hall
meeting on the 4th of July--alarmed at the brutal and untimely killing of millions of
their brothers and sisters in recent years. That the murderous war waged on
them had the full force and respectability of the law made their plight all the more
terrifying.
Their complaint was humble and it was simple. They were not distressed by
rising gas prices, or the deteriorating economy in general. They were not even
frightened by the exponential increase of natural disasters. The threat of global
warming or global terrorism did not greatly disturb them.
They had become an endangered species, and little had been done to answer
their terrified and silent screams from the womb. They decided that the barbaric
treatment that they and their fellow unwanted unborn human beings have had to
endure for perilous decades was unconscionable and unbearable. They cried out
to their Creator for inspiration and protection, and then unanimously they put forth
a declaration. It began as follows:
“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to
dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to
assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which
the Laws of Nature and of Nature ʼs God entitle them, a decent respect to the
opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel
them to the separation.
WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT, THAT ALL MEN ARE
CREATED EQUAL, THAT THEY ARE ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATOR WITH
CERTAIN UNALIENABLE RIGHTS, THAT AMONG THESE ARE LIFE, LIBERTY
AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS….”
THAT AMONG THESE IS LIFE; THAT AMONG THESE IS LIFE; THAT AMONG
THESE IS LIFE!
The first and pre-eminent right is the right to life. This truth the Founding Fathers
were sure of, and anyone with any common sense at all is equally sure of it. 232
years after the Declaration of Independence was signed the amount of common
sense that seems to be operative in many spheres of influence—most notably
the courts and the political arena--can easily be poured into a very small thimble.
The United States of America seems to have a death wish, and we have traveled
far down the road to having that wish realized.
When law divorces itself from common sense and spawns the illegitimate
offspring of distortions of law, resulting in illegal laws—based neither on the
natural law nor divine law--this undermines law itself, generating disdain for the
law. Erosion of trust in the courts, or the system in general, is inevitable.
The genesis of the death wish is rooted in the fall of man that we see in the Book
of Genesis. The substance of the fall is wrapped up in Lucifer ʼs pride, transferred
to Adam and Eve—“You can be like gods, knowing good and evil.” The unholy,
yet inevitable, consequence of that pride is disobedience—eating the forbidden
fruit. The ultimate end is death, as God said it would be. That ʼs the way it was in
the beginning. That ʼs the way it is now. Thatʼs the way it will be until time
breathes forth it ʼs last moment.
The prototypical sin is pride, the pride that seeks to exalt the creature above the
Creator: “I can be like God.” Then, subjectively and arbitrarily, man tries to assert
himself, imagining that he knows what ʼs good and evil for himself without
reference to God and God ʼs law. This was the fall of the angels and the fall of
man. The attempt by creatures to usurp what is only the province of God. Only
God knows what is good for His creation.
In recent years it took the form in a self-inflicted heart wound when some
dissident Catholics rejected the teaching of the Church, a teaching that clearly
held that artificial contraception is intrinsically evil. Then, as Pope Paul VI had
warned, it metastasized into abortion. From abortion it degenerated even further
into partial-birth abortion. It was then a short and easy step to infanticide.
The exclamation point at the end of the death wish is that now there is yet
another candidate for the office of president of the United States who has in an
extraordinary way done everything possible to breathe life into all of the barbaric
elements of the death wish. He and his party make no apologies for their support
of abortion, partial-birth abortion, and even infanticide. It ʼs hard to believe that we
have degenerated to the point that we ʼll murder a helpless baby should it escape
the violence of an abortion and be born alive. Can a Catholic vote for such
persons? We are told, “yes” for a “proportionate reason.” What, I might ask, is the
proportionate reason so weighty as to excuse supporting those responsible for
what is tantamount to genocide?
The judges and politicians that support such barbaric practices are truly guilty of
genocide: genocide—the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic,
racial, religious, national, or social group. “What is the group so targeted?” you
might ask. The group is unwanted, unborn children--tens of millions of them.
The Supreme Court justices that gave us Roe v. Wade will have to plead
temporary insanity in the court of history. There will be no defense in the highest
Court that is the judgment seat of almighty God if they do not repent of the
incalculable evil they have wrought.
Yet, despite the life and death importance of this travesty of authentic law, there
will be no serious discussion among political candidates, or anyone else. It is as
if society has been bewitched, blind to the splendor of truth, deaf to the cries of
the most innocent, most vulnerable, and most utterly helpless.
From artificial contraception to abortion to partial-birth abortion, then on to
infanticide we march toward the abyss of oblivion, a society marked for death. Is
it any wonder we can rationalize the killing of the elderly or the sick through
euthanasia? The tragic murder of Terri Schiavo is a logical extension of a morally
numb society ʼs mad march toward its own suicidal death. She wasnʼt sick. She
wasn ʼt dying. They murdered her, starved her to death--one of the cruelest forms
of death. She was innocent, yet subjected to a most cruel and unusual
punishment. Why? Because she was helpless? Because she was too much
trouble, too hard to look at?
As Abraham Lincoln asserted, “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its
author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die
by suicide.” We are dying by suicide, moral and spiritual suicide, and the moral
demise of a nation almost always precedes the ultimate demise of a nation.
Many of our leaders, political and legal, are reminiscent of the horrid witches in
Act 1 Scene 1 of Shakespeare ʼs “Macbeth,” chanting shrilly to a morally sick
public all too eager to be confirmed in their sins,
“Fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air.”
Good is evil, and evil is good. The truth is a lie and lies are the truth, hover
through the fog of moral relativism and the filthy air of a world gone mad with the
madness of sin.
The words of the prophet thunder through the ages, “ Woe to those who call evil
good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness” (Isaiah
5:20).
We have inverted the poles of the moral power grid. We have begun to call the
negative pole the positive, and the positive the negative. This inversion of reality
begets disaster: The power fails, the lights go out, darkness falls—and indeed, if
your light is darkness, how deep, how very deep will the darkness be! (cf. Mt
6:23).
This death wish has marched toward its logical and inexorable conclusion
with little opposition from leaders--political, legal, or religious. The world knows
the Catholic Church and any self-respecting and faithful Christian roundly reject
abortion and all of the other nails in the coffin of contemporary society, but the
defense of life has been weak. Weak leadership, whether in society in general, or
in the Church in particular, is punishment for sin. The Old Covenant has
examples enough of the Chosen People being turned over to exile and their
enemies because of infidelity. They lamented, “We have no priest, prophet, or
king.” These were taken away because of infidelity. In recent times large
numbers of Catholics and other Christians rejected Pope Paul VI ʼs landmark and
prophetic encyclical Humanae Vitae, on Human Life. A majority of the bishops of
Canada did so publicly, formally, and in writing with their infamous Winnipeg
Statement.
The great Archbishop Fulton Sheen lamented bitterly in the 1970s that the
prophetic spirit of Christ had all but been extinguished in the contemporary
Church. Today there are many CEOs, all too few Apostles. Are we afraid of a
fight? Do we fear rejection, misunderstanding, or derision? Are we cowed and
intimidated by fallacious notions of the separation of Church and state? Could we
be afraid of persecution? Could we be afraid of losing our tax-exempt status?
Have we declared détente with evil?
The clock is ticking. Midnight is approaching. Time is running out for our nation, a
nation that once was great, and could be great again if enough of us wake up
and renounce this curse of a death wish. Will God turn his friends over to His
enemies as He has done multiple times in the past? Will radical Islam overrun
us? Will the planet cook? Will one too many natural disasters grind us into dust?
Will we collapse economically? All of the above? Perhaps these are all merely
effects of the underlying cause—a death wish that chokes the life out of us.
In the end it is likely that President Abraham Lincoln had it right: “Intoxicated with
unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of
redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.”
Thus forgetting that we are one nation under God, we become a nation gone
under (President Ronald Reagan).
And, indeed, “If destruction be our lot we ourselves will be its author and finisher.
As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
May God grant us the grace to awake from this deadly moral slumber, renounce
the death wish, and live like truly free men and women—in the glorious freedom
of the children of God.
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