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Thursday September 09, 2010
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Editorials
Editorials
We did have an attractive offer from the Ottawa region. However, after prolonged negotiations, Catholic Insight’s Advisory Board and the Board of the magazine’s owner, Life Ethics Information Centre, decided against what we perceived would have been too radical a change in the direction and contents of the magazine. For sixteen years, the role of our magazine has been to inform Catholics about the political, social and religious culture of Canada and to do so by standing firm with the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. In other words, by setting forth authentic Catholic teaching we present our readers with a standard to judge the affairs of state in Canada and elsewhere, if not on all issues then at least on some of them. But among these is the most important issue of all, the dignity and sacredness of human life from conception to natural death. This stand has not made Catholic Insight a popular magazine, either inside or outside the Church. Outside the Church, Western society has witnessed the explosion of atheist secularism and relativism. Today, society’s elite would like to scuttle Christian legal, moral and religious values altogether. Our own particular experience of this hostility has been the attempt to classify Catholic Insight as “hate literature.” Inside the Church, these past forty years were marked by a massive dissent from Catholic teaching by theologians, bishops, priests and laity. This is only now subsiding, following the heroic battle by Pope John Paul the Great, and a new tranquility brought by Benedict XVI. Together, internal dissent and outside secularism have created what we now know as the great apostasy, in America and Europe. Not too surprisingly, internal Catholic dissent and external secular attacks have targeted the same Catholic teaching: the defence of human life, the family, and the weak and unprotected in the world. Contraception, killing the preborn, divorce, sterilization, pornography, homosexual activity, embryonic stem-cell research, in-vitro fertilization, sex outside marriage, the killing of the sick and the elderly by withholding water and food (euthanasia), and genetic engineering are popular among Canada’s pagans, especially the “educated” ones in universities, hospitals, schools of medicine, and “science” laboratories. Meanwhile, politicians, judges and lawyers — encouraged by the media — have so confounded the legal system today that the rights of parents and families, and even of individuals, are under constant threat. As these menaces are growing in strength rather than declining, Catholic Insight felt we must continue to help you recognize them. We must not resign ourselves to defeat. We must fight back. Why? Because the assault is not against us but against God, against His laws, against His commandments. Why not just give up the abortion fight as a lost cause?, asked Pope Benedict (C.I., Oct. ‘08, pp. 17-18). His answer: because that would be given up on the instructions of God. For most of the 20th century large parts of Europe and Asia suffered horribly under communist atheism. Today, it is the turn of Western Europe and North America, with this difference: we are being alienated from God by the mellow embrace of consumerism and by what we believe to be freedom of thought. Thus we are hardly aware of the seductions that help us turn our back on Him who is our Creator and Redeemer. Dissent within the Church has left neither clergy nor the faithful unaffected. Many have become nominal Catholics, at best: Catholics in name only. Among them are politicians who are indifferent to the human life issues. On the other hand, many of the clergy are fearful to speak out. Again, in this edition we are forced in conscience to express our regret at the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops for its “guide” during the October 2008 election. We are also dumbfounded with the Quebec Bishops Conference for its unconscionable hands off attitude vis-ŕ-vis the new repression of Catholic teaching and its substitution by a secular religion course which has been composed by religionless bureaucrats. It is being imposed upon every student in Quebec. We must speak “in season and out of season.” May the Lord protect and guide us all as we face new perils. © Copyright 1997-2009 Catholic Insight
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