It sounds like a parody in a tragic comedy, like an even more-inverted Monty Python come full circle: Attendees at the recent Demo(n)cratic National Convention were offered ‘free abortions and vasectomies‘:
Planned Parenthood Great Rivers, which operates in parts of Missouri and Illinois, will park its mobile health clinic near the DNC on Aug. 19 and Aug. 20, according to The New York Times. Medication abortions are reportedly available on both days, with vasectomies being exclusively offered Monday.
Even prescinding from the vicious moral disorder involved in each of these ‘procedures’, admittedly of different gravity – one the direct murder of an unborn child, the other the removal of one’s reproductive powers – one would think that their irrevocable nature would require some level of aforethought and consideration, and not require the immediate services of a ‘mobile health clinic’, like a roving hot dog truck at a baseball game.
The mind reels, recalling Hannah Arendt’s description of the ‘banality of evil’ in the bureaucratic Nazi regime, mass murder reduced to numbers and statistics. Ho hum. Another baby dismembered, and another man sterilized, all in one, easy convenient RV.
A recent article sums up what a the current ‘Democratic’ governance of America would entail:
A Harris-Walz presidency would be noteworthy not simply for the extremity of their abortion and gender policies, but also for the fanatical zealousness with which they pursue them. With no close contender, theirs would be the most anti-life, anti-woman, and anti-family presidency in the history of the country. Unborn and unwanted newborn children would be exterminated. Women would be reduced to objects for the sexual satisfaction of men. Women-only spaces would be eradicated. And parents would lose authority over the medical care of their own children.
Read the rest. Never mind Catholics – no one of sane and sober mind can vote for these two ideologues, hiding beneath a veneer of forced laughs and ‘joy’, masking deep and abiding evil.
So, what about the presence and prayer of Cardinal Blase Cupich? His conscience is his own, before he will stand before God. But we might say that it’s one thing to pray for the Democrats – in the sense of interceding, like Moses for the apostate Israelites, arms outstretched, beseeching the mercy of God before His justice is manifest. It’s quite another to pray for them, in the sense of supporting their cause, or even seeming to support their cause. His opening prayer for this debacle did not include any reference to Christ, and odd that his pectoral cross was surreptitiously in absentia, hidden in a pocket. His first few words urged the participants to ‘protect God’s handiwork’, but I guess that doesn’t include the unborn, who, as the Psalm sings, are knit together in their mother’s womb. The cardinal also prayed that they become ‘instruments of God’s peace’, but as Mother Teresa said, as long as we have abortion, we will never have peace. And what of his exhortation to promote ‘human dignity’? Of what are we worthy, especially the most vulnerable, if not life itself? The prayer was anodyne, sure not to offend anyone, except those who recognize what was missing, and that to which the Cardinal was giving his episcopal blessing.
Today’s reading from Ezekiel (34:1-11) should give some food for thought for our shepherds, who – from the perspective of the lowly man in the pew – are not only too comfortable with those who promote the culture of death, but also, for all appearances, leave the swathe of its amoral proponents, heads bowed in that secular stadium acting as a quasi-cathedral, too comfortable in their own seared consciences – as are we all, to some degree, I fear.
A reckoning is on its way, and none of us should feel complacent, far less compliant, in this blood-dimmed tide washing over the world. The centre may not seem to be holding – but hold it will, for the true centre is Christ, whose Cross and Truth will stand, dum volvitur orbis.