Freedom or Decadence?

 

      This past Thursday I journeyed over to Asheville to visit a couple in the hospital and bless their two newly-born daughters (identical twins, their fifth and sixth child).  One of the infants, due to a malformation in the placenta, almost died from severe blood loss, but she survived due to the wise decision of the parents and doctor to do a c-section.  But she, Adelaide, had to be kept in the intensive care unit for a few days until the doctor was sure that everything was back to normal.  And it was there that I, with the father and mother, visited little Adelaide, blessed her, and watched with some emotion as the mother held her daughter for the first time.

      This intensive care unit was amazing:  incubators plugged into all kinds of high-tech apparatuses to monitor, feed and provide medicine and nutrition; young parents bending over their children in love and hope for their well-being (and in some cases, for their lives); young mothers sitting, watching their struggling infants, some of whom were smaller at their birth than many are when they are aborted. 

      The sad irony was obvious:  all this effort, concern, expertise and love to protect and save infants’ lives, even as in this country over fifty million have been aborted since Roe v. Wade.  As I watched the nurse ready little Adelaide to be placed in her mother’s arms and observed as this young mother, with such wonderful maternal, feminine charm, held her new-born – a revisiting of the scenes of Christmas, of Our Lady with her Child – I could not help but ask myself, “What on earth are we doing in this country?”  My mind went back to those awful scenes at pro-life rallies, where young women (and older as well), counter-protesters, bereft of all charm and dignity, were shouting obscenities in favor of killing innocent children:  “Get your rosaries off my ovaries,” etc. – vulgar slogans that behind the pseudo-witty rhyme actually mean, “I’ll do whatever I want; that’s my freedom, and if I have to kill in order to maintain this ‘freedom,’ I will do so and won’t let you stop me.” 

      I know, I know, the constant rejoinder, comprising as they do only about 1% of the cases:  “But what rape and incest?”  Yes, what about these evils (rape and incest, but surely not the baby in the womb) which supposedly call for an even worse evil – the murdering of innocent children, any one of whom could have been one of those precious infants there in the hospital’s intensive care unit?  But this bluff – and bluff it is – has been called many a time to no effect:  when offered the sad compromise of restricting abortions to the above categories, the pro-choice crowd reveals its true, or rather, demonic agenda – unlimited abortion for whatever reason and the necessity of taxpayers to finance it.  “Freedom of choice” is their mantra.  But I ask myself as I step back and look at the state of this country, what is the good of such a “freedom”?  Is this, “choice,” what we Americans now designate as real freedom, the “liberty” to kill the innocent, most of the time only for the expedience of convenience? 

      This nation is decadent, perhaps beyond rescue.  The machinery of killing innocent children continues to flourish, and most Americans – including prominent “Catholic” members of Congress (apparently with the “blessing” of many a bishop) – try to salve what’s left of their conscience by being “personally opposed” but firm in their commitment to “freedom of choice.”  That insidious phrase is the very motto of decadence – as if freedom, real freedom, is merely a matter of choice.  That pathetic little idol could be blown away by the merest efforts of reason, but the question is, Is there much reason, rationality left?  For decadence hates rationality; it hates the light of reason; and it hates the voice of reality.  And the “brave” defenders of abortion do not make a rational defense; rather, they emote; they shed crocodile tears and blather about choice and use what little reason they have left to come up with pithy bumper-stickers to espouse their cause. 

      And here is the crux of the matter:  that in a decadent society, our own, where more money is now being spent of pornography than on professional sports, “reason” has only one role to play in the social/ethical realm, and that is to come up with defenses for aberrant behavior.  The way of genuine human nature, which the Church adheres to and fosters with the divine revelation of Christ, is just the opposite.  Freedom flows not from mere “having a choice,” but from the Truth.  There is needed here the very important distinction between real freedom and the human faculty of will that is relatively free; but how we exercise our wills – choosing either good or evil – determines whether we will be free or enslaved.  Freedom does not come from sacrificing the innocent but from living the truth.  “If you continue in my word,” our Lord said, “you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:31, 32).  Now, not a single command of Christ, what He means by His “word,” is contrary to reason.  He exhorts His followers with even the extraordinary demand that they love their enemies – again, nothing irrational – and many moderns cannot even bring themselves to love their own children. 

      We have been sold a mess of pottage, indoctrinated with the flimsy idea that freedom is choice (when we are quite capable – look around you – of choosing that which will enslave us), and are expected to tow the line of this groundless “dogma” of choice.  And groundless it is, its vacuity and brainlessness so starkly revealed by a simple walk through a maternity ward in a hospital or by pausing a moment and listening to the frantic and frenzied “defense” of abortion propounded by people who have lost all sense and fill up the void with slogans and jargon and vulgarities. 

      The Church has never been at a loss for explaining her vision of human life, giving cogent and comprehensive arguments for this cause.  For those, though, who refuse to think because they are so attached to a sick ideology, there is that scene of a young mother holding in her arms her child, the flesh of her flesh, and her love for that infant is its own defense; it is totally credible; it is written upon our very nature as human beings.  And if even this will not move people to reconsider, to reason, to ponder the sacredness of human life, then they are willful idiots.  They are decadent, people bereft of any real freedom, simply slaves to themselves, their urges and their “choices.”