Today marks the anniversary of the last two executions in Canada. On this cold December day in 1962, Arthur Lucas and Ronald Turpin – the former convicted of killing a police informant, the latter of killing a police officer who pulled him over for a traffic stop – were hanged at the Don Jail. May God rest their souls. Capital punishment was removed from the Criminal Code in 1976, and from the military not that long ago, in 1998. A cold comfort, for those hesitant on the meting out of the noose, or, now, the needle, or on the receiving end of it, for a scant seven years on from when these two unfortunate men met their Maker – hopefully, crying out with the good thief that at least they in some way were getting back and expiating in some way what they had given out – Canada would legalize death sentences for the unborn, for no other ‘crime’ of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, in the womb of a mother who no longer wanted them, or who was coerced into believing so.
Tomorrow is the great and momentous election in Britain, fittingly the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patroness of life, and of the unborn. More on that later, but, for the present, Johnson or Corbyn, Brexit, or Remain? Of course, there is far more at stake, for the latter is an avowed Marxist, whose policies will spell the death knell for an already dying England. Johnson may delay the decline, and provide some palliative care, but unless the island nation can discover her Christian roots, and her reason for existing and living – the same could be said for Canada, America and all other nation’s based, however loosely, on God’s true revelation – her nadir and dissolution are nigh.
As an aside, on this day in 1688, James II, the last Catholic king of England and the last of the Stuarts – who had been defeated in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ by the Protestant William of Orange and James’ own Protestant daughter Mary – threw the Great Seal into the bottom of the putrid Thames as he fled to France. A fitting symbol.
Ponder: The name ‘Moe’, as in, ‘Mohammed’, is the most popular baby name in England, and across much of Western Europe, and has now crept into the top ten of the United States, of all places. Demography is destiny, after all.
And it seems that Bishop Sheen’s beatification delay is due to some possible, maybe, alleged irregularities in his monitoring priests at the end of his tenure in the diocese of Rochester. It seems the problems actually arose, and were mishandled, in the time of his successor, so we may pray that the road ahead becomes clear, in God’s good will.
We may for now take comfort in the title of the good Bishop’s television program, Life is Worth Living. It always is, and always will be, not least as we await the Christ child, who came to bring us the fullness of life, without end.