I note with pleasure that the priest is a VIrginian. Sic Semper Tyrannis
One Fr. John De Celles, speaking in Old St. Mary’s Church this weekend, delivered a homily to rebuke Nancy Pelosi, who publically offered a gross distortion of the Catholic teaching on aborticide. It is, if you will, the modern version of St. John the Baptist rebuking Herod, another figure who saw nothing wrong in slaying innocent children.
Here is the homily.
For those of you who doubt the antiquity of the teaching:
I also note Fr. De Celles touches on the antiquity of the antislavery teaching in the Church:
For those of you who are not Aquinas scholars, note that the Angelic Doctor never taught that aborticide before ensoulment was licit, merely that the penalty should be less, considering that possibility of honest ignorance on the point of whether destroying an unborn human destroys a human.
ADDED LATER
This is from New York’s Edward Cardinal Egan. His rebuke to Pelosi was firm:
We are blessed in the 21st century with crystal-clear photographs and action films of the living realities within their pregnant mothers. No one with the slightest measure of integrity or honor could fail to know what these marvelous beings manifestly, clearly, and obviously are, as they smile and wave into the world outside the womb. In simplest terms, they are human beings with an inalienable right to live, a right that the Speaker of the House of Representatives is bound to defend at all costs for the most basic of ethical reasons. They are not parts of their mothers, and what they are depends not at all upon the opinions of theologians of any faith. Anyone who dares to defend that they may be legitimately killed because another human being “chooses” to do so or for any other equally ridiculous reason should not be providing leadership in a civilized democracy worthy of the name.
Thank God that someone is speaking in such clear and honest words.
Myself, I always wonder what they do with the tiny corpses. I do not mean specifically those performed days, hours, or minutes before the expected birth, or even the infanticides where the baby is coming out feet first, and his skull is punctured with scissors. What is done with the remains? Are they buriedm decently, or ground up for dogmeat?
After all, if they are not human beings, these fully-formed children in their last trimester, no liberal could have any objection to eating them, harvesting the organs, or stuffing them to mount on a wall, or any other use or abuse an unhealthy imagine can invent.
I do know that a truckdriver once tossed a bunch of baby corpses into a ditch I believe in California, and some small boys on their bikes came across the unsightly, open grave. Lovely sight to come across, little tinybaby hands sticking up out of the wet leaves, little skulls with empty eyesockets, toothless mouths who never suckled at the breast of the woman who ordered them killed.
The boys, of course, did not know the babies had been taken from their mother’s wombs five seconds or five minutes before that mystical and mysterious "choice" that makes another human being human, so to their unpracticed eyes, the babies looked like dead babies.
I am assuming, of course, that the abortions were successful. We know that in the case of unsuccessful abortions, when you fail to lose the patient, and the baby accidently lives, the nurses (if they can be called that) put the crying child down in some soiled back room and wait for it to die.
The town was shocked, and offered, at its own expense, to bury them in a graveyard, inventing names to put on the headstones and everything. The townsfolk were not as sophisticated as your average liberal, and they thought it wrong to bury a baby without some sort of name on the headstone.
The town was sued by the ACLU, who attempted the block this simple act of decency.
A friend of mine told me today that we do not even keep records of the number of abortions done. The same way Holocaust deniers currently deny a horror still within living memory, my friend assumes that future generations will deny what this generation has done, and is doing. Myself, I think the future will look back on this age as we look back on the Aztecs, or the sacrifices to Moloch at Carthage: a people indulging in a sin so grisly as to defy belief or explanation.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
