27^th Sunday, Year B, “Respect Life” Sunday October 5, 2003

“From the beginning of creation, God made them male and female...”

There is nothing so advantageous as making a good start at things. Beginnings, the first things, often determine the success of our endeavors. This is true in many senses. For example, in the area of education, if one learns things aright the first time–or, at least, in the earlier times–he is sure to be spared the frustration of many consequent failures. In science or math, one needs to grasp first principles before all else, lest there follow incomprehension and error. (Even in the practical arts, as in playing the piano, if one starts with a poor teacher who does not correct a bad hand position he will have a hard time in making correction later in life.). This is true in morals as well. The first Commandment is the most important of all commandments, containing within it, all the others. Even though it is often passed over all too quickly in our examinations of conscience it remains the fundamental law of God that is the foundation of the whole of our moral obligation. We must always return to the beginnings of things, to the fundamentals. And they should not be taken for granted.

Today is designated Respect Life Sunday. Here is another sense of the importance of getting things right from the beginning, the beginning of human life. We now have before us, in the State of Michigan, a proposal for a legal definition of birth. This would spell out for legal purposes just when a child is said to have been born. At first hearing, this may seem too simplistic a matter to deserve serious consideration. ?Must we be returning to the beginning of the moral alphabet, defining the moment of birth, when there are so many other grave moral concerns that demand our attention? But, as I already indicated, if we don’t get it right at the start, we are likely to make a host of blunders. This proposes a definition needed to assure that all human lives will be protected by law. The bill states that ‘birth’ begins when any part of a child becomes visible outside his mother’s body. One thus known as ‘born’ would be assured his legal rights. To say that such a measure is not enough is surely true. We need to protect life from the moment of conception and not merely from birth. But this matter merits our thoughts and our prayers because it touches on the hideous practice known as “partial-birth abortion”, certainly among the most savage forms of killing that human wickedness has thus far devised.

It is said that the Governor of our State will soon review this bill and act on it, probably against it by a veto. She is quoted as saying that “Nobody likes partial-birth abortion, but it is a private and medical decision, and it must have an exception in it for the life and health of the mother.” In effect, she is saying that she will likely allow baby-killing in the very act of child delivery. Her astonishingly cruel and cool remark brings to mind that very incarnation of vengeance and brutality from antiquity, Medea, who now seems to have found her modern counterpart. (I wonder, by the way, whether or not there would be any action taken against the Governor, who poses as a Catholic, by the Church should she make this move. And I wonder whether there would there be any groundswell of protest from the faithful Catholic laity. We will have to wait and see.)

In turning my attention now to the Gospel, I find that our Lord’s firm injunction against divorce and remarriage as equivalent to adultery pales in comparison with the barbarism of what we call partial-birth abortion. Can one imagine Jesus being asked a question on the morality of that? Could there ever be a doubt about what His answer would be?

The dire state of our present moral condition has much to do with having lost our grasp on the first and primary things. We have wandered far afield from God’s laws and our obligation to conform to them. it seems that the only enduring moral imperative left for us moderns–to the extent that we are people of this age–is that each one should do as he pleases: Choice (capital C) is all; my Will is my god. Even the perverse Pharisees of Jesus’ day open this Gospel with a question that recognizes, however ill-intentioned, that He is the source of moral authority. “Is it lawful...” they asked Him. We, the self-absorbed, have surpassed their deviltry by recognizing no binding norms of conduct except than the one that bids to us to do as we well please. And this is not merely a new norm of moral action for people of the technological age; it is also the creation of an anti-religion. Once the authority of Christ and His Church have been scuttled, there is no other seat left, no other source of appeal for truth apart from our own whims, desires, and our evil proclivities. And this is a terrible darkness and a void that leaves us very much alone in a godless and self-centered world.

We have heard that Jesus embraced the children and blessed them: “The kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” It takes a certain childlike spirit to accept everything that Jesus proposes, to be loyal abiding Catholics, and even to be retain the innocence of an outlook on the world that respects the rights of God and recognizes obedience to Him. These are indeed first things, lessons that we may never have mastered, or that we have forgotten, or, more probably, that we have renounced, but they are lessons without which we stand to miss the glories of the promised kingdom of heaven for the sake of being, each one, a god unto himself.