Mysterious Disappearances

I continue to blog about the Holy Father’s  visit to Lebanon Sep 14-16.

The wealth of any country is found primarily in its inhabitants. The country’s future depends on them, individually and collectively, as does its capacity to work for peace. A commitment to peace is possible only in a unified society. Unity, on the other hand, is not the same as uniformity. Social cohesion requires unstinting respect for the dignity of each person and the responsible participation of all in contributing the best of their talents and abilities.

The energy needed to build and consolidate peace also demands that we constantly return to the wellsprings of our humanity. Our human dignity is inseparable from the sacredness of life as the gift of the Creator. In God’s plan, each person is unique and irreplaceable.

A person comes into this world in a family, which is the first locus of humanization, and above all the first school of peace. To build peace, we need to look to the family, supporting it and facilitating its task, and in this way promoting an overall culture of life. The effectiveness of our commitment to peace depends on our understanding of human life. If we want peace, let us defend life!

This approach leads us to reject not only war and terrorism, but every assault on innocent human life, on men and women as creatures willed by God. Wherever the truth of human nature is ignored or denied, it becomes impossible to respect that grammar which is the natural law inscribed in the human heart. The grandeur and the raison d’être of each person are found in God alone. The unconditional acknowledgement of the dignity of every human being, of each one of us, and of the sacredness of human life, is linked to the responsibility which we all have before God. We must combine our efforts, then, to develop a sound vision of man, respectful of the unity and integrity of the human person. Without this, it is impossible to build true peace.

Address to leaders of government and the nation, Sept 15, 2012

Reflection – There is no peace possible without respect for human life and its sacred value. It is easy to point the finger at other countries where war and violence claim the lives of so many. It is easy to point the finger at countries where blatant violations of human rights are the order of the day: North Korea and China are always handy for that purpose.

But in Canada our esteemed parliamentarians just this week soundly defeated a motion that’s only effect would be to establish a committee to discuss when human life begins from a medical point of view. Our current law, based on cutting edge science from the reign of Queen Victoria, I believe, says that a human life begins only when the baby completely exits her mother’s body. A woman cabinet minister, Rona Ambrose, who voted in favour of the motion, is being pressured to resign for ‘betraying her sex.’ And Canada continues to have legal abortion through nine months of pregnancy, and roughly a hundred thousand human beings are legally killed each year in my beloved country as a result.

We Canadians love to vaunt ourselves as a nation of peace and of peacemakers. We especially love to preen our moral superiority to those nasty people living to the immediate south of us.

So I say to my fellow Canadians reading this: we are not morally superior to anyone. We are not a nation of peace. Every ‘Canadian value’ we love to claim for ourselves is utterly belied and nullified by abortion—we really are no better than the Germans in the 1930s who quietly went about their lives while all their Jewish neighbours mysteriously disappeared. An awful lot of my younger brothers and sisters have mysteriously disappeared in the past 40 years – 4 million is the conservative estimate.

There is no peace where human life is disregarded, despised, destroyed. And this is the state of the nation in Canada, and (let’s face it) most Canadians are just fine with it that way.

Lord have mercy on us.

 

So… who’s going to Lifechain today?