Another Islamic bombing, one that adds sacrilege to sacrifice, as the target were participants in Sunday Mass at the cathedral of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in the southern Philippines. At least twenty dead, scores more grievously injured, including a delayed bomb deliberately set to target rescuers.
Pray for the dead, the wounded, the perpetrators.
Evil in the name of religion is a particular kind of blight, for not only does it kill bodies, but destroys souls by the scandal that reverberates. Our one solace may be found in today’s Gospel, that a house divided against itself cannot stand. As Pope Benedict XVI warned in his 2006 Regensburg Address, any religion that eschews reason will fall back upon violence and coercion, which are inherently self-destructive, even if they take some unwitting casualties along the way to their own demise.
Only the Church – the pillar and bulwark of the truth – will stand unto the end. So, even if her true nature be defaced and obscured by her own scandal and weakness, we should see past them, to the truth that is hidden behind the veil.
On that note, along with yesterday’s feast of the priest and doctor Saint Thomas Aquinas, it was also the 31st anniversary of the Supreme Court’s 1988 striking down of the abortion laws put in place in 1969 under Pierre Elliot Trudeau, making Canada one of the very few notorious places on earth with no laws about abortion, besides the few medical ‘laws’ that govern the procedure (as in, one must be a physician; that is, if one would use that term for an abortionist). The Court intended Parliament to formulate new laws, something they have never done, leaving the tragic decision between a woman and her ‘doctor’.
The same Saint Thomas who appeared in a vision to the notorious Serbian abortionist Stojan Adasevic responsible for tens of thousands of abortions, performing up to 35 a day, making him a mass-murderer on a tragically mythic scale. Then, one night in a dream, he saw countless children running around a beautiful field, joyful and laughing, from 2 to 24 years old – the span of time he had been doing abortions, presumably – with a large man in a black and white habit watching him and them. Stojan managed to ‘catch’ one of the children – the vision seemed quite real – who cried out ‘Help! Murderer!’ Eventually, as the dream kept recurring, Stojan asked the man his name and…well, I will allow an excerpt from the article to continue the story:
My name is Thomas Aquinas,” he responded. Stojan, educated in communist schools that pushed atheism instead of real learning, didn’t recognize the Dominican saint’s name.
Stojan asked the nightly visitor, “Who are these children?”
They are the ones you killed with your abortions,” St. Thomas told him bluntly and without preamble.
Ah, yes, the unmatched clear and precise mind of Saint Thomas getting right to the point. Respondeo and all that.
Stojan did one more abortion – on one of his cousins, as a last ‘favour’ – and the gruesome event convinced him not only to give up pre-born infanticide once and for all, but to dedicate the rest of his life to protecting the unborn. Would that Thomas might visit a few more politicians and doctors…
One last point: Stojan thought that Thomas himself was doing some sort of heavenly ‘penance’ – sort of a saintly Jacob Marley – in reparation for his teaching that human life begins at 40 days after conception, thus allowing a window for early abortions to be done, a canard still used by anti-life apologists. But not so. Saint Thomas simply taught, in accord with the correct Aristotelian principle, that a certain ‘complexity’ of matter – the body – was required in order to receive the human soul. Quicquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur: Every received is received according to the mode of the recipient.
And in accord with the less-correct Aristotelian biology of the time, it was thought that the body had to develop, over the forty days, to reach that level of complexity. If Thomas had the knowledge of DNA and the pluripotentiality of the human zygote that we do, he would have held ensoulment at conception.
But besides that, the Dominican was always against abortion – along with the Church – seeing the whole process of life’s coming-to-be as sacred, which is also one of the primary arguments for the sacredness of the marital act, and the wrongness of contraception, which, again as the Church has always taught, leads quite directly by an inevitable road to abortion.
Would that we all – including Andrew Cuomo and his blinded legislators, doing the bidding of the dark lord himself – could see with the same clarity as Thomas, whose great mind should in some way illumine us all as to how things really are, and, as he himself would put it, what the truth of things is. And never mind his more esoteric and sublime truths on such things as the hypostatic union and transubstantiation, but even those more basic facts that even children and fictional elephants can see, but so many adults cannot, or stubbornly refuse to, such as, a person’s a person, no matter how small.