Calx Mariae issue 13, Summer 2021

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MARIAE CALX

Rebuilding our Christian civilisation

The story mission of PATRON OF THEand UNIVERSAL CHURCH PROTECTOR OF THE FAMILY THE PRO-LIFE MOVEMENT

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INCLUDING:

ABORTION, THE CRISIS IN THE CHURCH, AND THE POWER OF THE PAST by DR JO S EPH S HAW

Frequently asked questions REGARDING THE MORAL LICEITY OF THE COVID-19 VACCINES A V O I C E O F T H E FA M I LY P U B L I C AT I O N

ISSUE 13

SUMMER 2021

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MARIAE CALX

ISSUE 13

SUMMER 2021

CONTENTS 2

From the editor

3 Frequently asked questions regarding the moral liceity of the Covid-19 vaccines

by John Smeaton and Maria Madise 10 The Mass in Ireland: Today’s trials in light of past persecutions

by Liam Gibson 21 What do the unanswered criticisms of Amoris Laetitia teach us today?

by Prof. Roberto de Mattei 25

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FOCUS: The story and mission of the pro-life movement

26 Fifty-five years of fighting for life A conversation with John Smeaton 45

Rome March for Life 2021

49 Abortion, the crisis in the Church, and the power of the past

by Dr Joseph Shaw

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45

52 Punishment or mercy?

The divine hand in the age of the coronavirus Maria Madise reviews the new book by Roberto de Mattei 54

A letter from a Benedictine monk

59 June: the month of the Sacred Heart A sermon by Fr Thomas Crean OP

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54

FROM THE EDITOR

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EDITOR Maria Madise EDITORIAL BOARD Liam Gibson John Smeaton DESIGN & PRODUCTION EDITOR Selina Fang EDITORIAL OFFICE VOICE OF THE FAMILY Unit B, 3 Whitacre Mews, Stannary Street, SE11 4AB, London, United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0)20 7820 3126 Email: editor@voiceofthefamily.com www.voiceofthefamily.com/calxmariae PUBLICATION IS SPONSORED BY:

DISCLAIMER: Great care is taken to credit photos and seek permission before publishing. If you have a query regarding copyright, please contact the Editor. No part of this magazine may be reproduced without written permission.

Donations for the continuation of this magazine in print will be gratefully received by Voice of the Family at the address above or online via:

www.voiceofthefamily.com/donate

Calx Mariae is published by Voice of the Family, formed in support of Catholic teaching on the family. The following truths are particularly at the heart of Voice of the Family’s work: 9 Marriage, the exclusive, life-long union of one man and one woman, is the foundation of a stable and flourishing society and is the greatest protector of children, born and unborn.

9 The procreative and unitive ends of the conjugal act cannot licitly be separated; the rejection of this truth lies at the root of modern attacks on life and the family.

9 Parents are the primary educators of their children and the protection of this right is essential for building a new “culture of life”.

CAL X M ARI AE

I S S N : 251 7 -64 5 5

Calx Mariae seeks to contribute to the rebuilding of Christian civilisation by providing features and analysis in the areas of life, family and culture. Our aim in producing this magazine is to strengthen our readers in the faith and in their witness to the truth about human life and the family.

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have sometimes imagined having a conversation with a great grandmother, telling her about our time of peace and prosperity, while we work hard to save babies from being killed before they are born. Whilst the external threats of war, famine, religious persecution so well known to her are gone, what we are facing today is the internal devastation of man who has manifestly separated himself from God. How often have we heard during this coronavirus crisis people expressing a desire to go back to “normal”? Yet, is it not the case that reality before the pandemic was not at all normal? It is not normal that 60 million children a year are being killed in the womb. It is not normal that two men or two women can be “married”. It is not normal that little girls are being taught at school that they can become boys and vice versa. When we desire to “go back to normal”, we must be mindful that the way to normality lies far beyond the lifting of Covid restrictions. Furthermore, the restrictions that deprive us of our comforts and liberties, as well as of life’s essentials in many cases, could in itself be a call back to normality. Sacrifices that we have not chosen, which are frustrating and perhaps do not even correspond to our idea of a sacrifice, are not outside the scope of Divine Providence to open the eyes and purify the minds of people who need to turn back to God. If we do that, this crisis can certainly be a great blessing. If not, this time is indeed wasted and a stronger intervention needed.

This issue of Calx Mariae is dedicated to the pro-life movement. For people of faith, life is not the most important value but it is the first because without life all other rights or privileges are meaningless. John Smeaton, the CEO of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, reflecting on his 47 years of service, said at the Rome March for Life: “The pro-life movement is part of a much wider and deeper historic crusade for the restoration of Christian civilisation. Let’s not forget that we fight for ‘going back to the real normal’; we are united in the fight to end abortion completely and in the restoration of a civilisation where human life is valued without exception. It really is not normal to kill children in the womb. May this time that is marked by a sense of isolation, distance, and separation, also be a time to unite with ever greater force and to be united in the truth of Christ.” (see p. 45) The inherent links between the doctrinal and liturgical reforms coinciding with the moral revolution which the pro-life movement mobilised to resist are analysed

by Dr Joseph Shaw. (see p. 49) What was once Catholic Ireland suffered the longest ban on public Masses during the past year. Liam Gibson considers the restrictions inflicted on Catholics in Ireland in the light of historic persecutions. (See p. 10) But is it a coincidence that a people who invoke the name of the Holy Trinity in their constitution and, at the same time, were the first to authorise same-sex “marriage” and abortion by a popular vote, suffered such a withdrawal of God from their midst?

The Covid crisis offers a multitude of distractions for Catholics and non-believers alike from fear of the virus to crusades against government measures. Yet, we must take care not to lose sight of what we are fighting for. We fight for every life, born and unborn, to be protected so it can flourish in the knowledge, love and service of God and be with Him forever in heaven. We are not only pro-life but pro-eternal life. Nothing happens outside of the designs of Divine Providence. To acknowledge this is not a call to be passive, on the contrary, this is a reality in which we must act for His glory and interests, even if – and perhaps especially when – it means some denial of our own will.

© VOICE

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regarding the moral liceity of the Covid-19 vaccines

by J O H N S M E AT O N a n d M A R I A M A D I S E

T

he debate regarding vaccines against the coronavirus has become more heated rather than cooled down since Calx Mariae published an initial article on the topic (Autumn, no. 11).

Prominent figures in this debate have taken the view that it is morally illicit under any circumstances for a Catholic to have recourse to the vaccines in light of the fact that virtually all currently available options have been developed using cell lines from aborted children at some point in the course of production or testing. However, in their understandable concern to redress the appalling weakness of so many bishops and bishops’ conferences throughout the world in forming the consciences of the faithful on abortion, they appear to have chosen the wrong target and, thereby, they risk increasing confusion and distress amongst the faithful. The horror of abortion, which rightly informs discussion on the evil of abortion, does not add weight to the point they seek to make in the current debate regarding the moral licitness of receiving abortion-tainted vaccination.

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pro-life action

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS On the other hand, pro-life organisations all over the world are being contacted by distressed supporters, not least the elderly, who have taken the vaccine and are now worried that they have committed a mortal sin because of what they have heard from some trusted pro-life source or other. Many others are being dismissed in their families and communities as not fully pro-life or fully Catholic for considering the vaccines morally licit. Therefore, in a few months, the moral issue of the vaccination against the coronavirus has shifted from a discussion of an ethical question to a tragic dividing line between people who oppose abortion, culminating in a call for a new pro-life movement which would focus on the issue of vaccines.

However, the only binding authority for the faithful in this matter is the Church, and our primary concern must be to seek the truth constantly in the light of her teaching. Whether we find ourselves in a situation where vaccination is a hypothetical option, or whether it is a recommendation or even

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virtually an obligation, we must ensure that we are well informed on the moral principles involved so that we are able to navigate this minefield in which we find ourselves threatened by irruptions amongst our families and between the best of friends. We must make proper distinctions between the various political, medical, scientific and moral questions attached to this issue. And we must be able to remain focused when talking about the moral liceity of the vaccines against the coronavirus without confusing such discussion with political or medical debates.

Politics is changeable and it is not possible to give people medical advice that can be applied universally; but we can and must study the ethical issues at stake which do indeed apply universally.

To date, the most comprehensive and easily accessible study of the moral question that we are aware of is On the Moral Liceity of the Vaccination, written by Professor Roberto de Mattei.1 Also available online, this is a very helpful tool for deepening one’s understanding of this contentious issue.

Hopefully other substantial contributions will be published soon. In this short article, however, we do not endeavour to give an exhaustive overview of the principles of moral theology involved, but only address some of the most frequently asked questions by ordinary pro-life people today concerning the moral liceity of the Covid vaccines.

What does the Church teach about the vaccines produced or tested with foetal cell lines?

Catholic teaching is set out by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in Dignitatis Personae2 (re-affirmed by CDF in December 2020)3 and by the Pontifical Academy for Life’s (PAV) 2005 letter on this subject.4 Dignitatis Personae mostly deals with the culpability of those using foetal remains in scientific research.5 The PAV’s letter considers the principles for assessing co-operation with evil, in the case of the rubella vaccines, which are also produced with foetal cell lines.

These documents assert that vaccines produced with foetal cell lines are not morally illicit to take for a proportionately serious reason if there are no realistic alternatives. They also make an important distinction between the evil in procuring and ex-

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ploiting foetal cell lines on the one hand and using the resulting products on the other.

A person who takes the vaccine produced with illicitly created cell lines is not responsible for, or defiled by, the evil done by others in the past. Practically speaking, it is impossible to contribute to the performing of the evil action, because it has been completed. In this sense, it is irrelevant whether the evil action happened recently or decades ago; albeit we are emotionally more sensitive to evil that has taken place recently, we are equally unable to participate in it. Murdering unborn children, deriving their cells, developing and using the cell lines in medical research and production, selling therapeutics which have been produced with foetal cell lines, and, in the end, receiving the vaccine are actions linked chronologically to one another, but the moral assessment of each of these actions remains distinct at every stage.

In short, the Church teaches that receiving vaccines developed with foetal cell lines is permissible if there is a proportionately serious reason for doing so (and the existence of a pandemic is a serious reason), if there is no realistic alternative (that is, if there are no ethically irreproachable vaccines available) and if one’s moral objection to using the remains of aborted children in the production of the vaccine is made evident (according to one’s capacity to do so).

One could also put it this way: Catholic teaching requires the faithful to conscientiously object to the use of foetal remains by the pharmaceutical industry and to militate for an end to the practice but it allows the use of the resulting therapeutics when no alternative is available. The bottom line is that the vaccines of illicit origin are not illicit per se, that is, they are not intrinsically evil. If they were, no circumstances could make their use permissible.

Circumstances and reasons make the reception of the vaccines more or less justified, but they do not render it an intrinsic evil.

One might ask what is the weight of an individual moral discernment in this question? We must remember in this connection that there are no neutral human acts: all human acts are either good or bad, to a greater or lesser degree according to the circumstances. However, we must not only CAL X M ARI AE

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“We must be able to remain focused when talking about the moral liceity of the vaccines against the coronavirus without confusing such discussion with political or medical debates.

Politics is changeable and it is not possible to give people medical advice that can be applied universally; but we can and must study the ethical issues at stake which do indeed apply universally.” seek to avoid sin and do what is good; we should also seek perfection. Striving for perfection follows from a lawful act but it is different for each of us, according to the concrete circumstances in the light of God’s will.

Can this teaching be really trusted? Since the documents in question were only issued within the last fifteen years and given how much error and ambiguity are propagated by today’s Vatican, should we not consider them to represent unsound modern teaching rather than the motherly wisdom of the perennial Church?

It must always be borne in mind that teachings are considered ambiguous and erroneous in cases where they are in a clear contradiction with previous authoritative teaching since the Church cannot contradict herself. However, in other cases, such as the advice on vaccination, there is no conflict. On the contrary, this guidance is drawn from moral principles set out by St Thomas, and especially by St Alphonsus Liguori, a doctor of the Church known for his towering contributions to moral theology, as well as moralists after him. Of course, they could not have discussed the question of vaccines nor the use of foetal cell lines in their development, things which did not exist at the time, but they established the principles for assessing co-operation with and benefitting from evil which must be applied to these issues.

We must also consider the teaching of St Paul with regard to the moral question that divided the Christians of Corinth: namely, whether it is permissible to eat meat of the animals that had been S UM ME R 2 021

ST ALPHONSUS LIGUORI

sacrificed to idols. This was a question pertaining to the first commandment, which is even greater than the violation of the fifth. In his first letter to the Corinthians, St Paul assured the faithful that eating meat sacrificed to idols is not sinful. (1 Cor 8:4-13) The 2005 statement of the Pontifical Academy for Life did not invent the teaching but considered and confirmed the application of general principles to a concrete matter. With regard to the principle of remote material co-operation, it is impossible to exclude abortion from the evils where this moral principle applies. Where would this leave pro-life medics who have to make countless courageous decisions in their day to day working lives, in order to avoid formal co-operation in abortion? And by rejecting any benefits from past evils, where would it leave every person, every family, around the world, 5

pro-life action

“In her teaching, the Church establishes principles, not circumstances. If the vaccines were evil on principle because of their abortion-tainted nature, no circumstance would render them licit. The circumstances require discernment by individuals and families. They are best placed to decide whether the level of risk is sufficient to justify the use of these pharmaceuticals.”

What is the scale of the use of foetal cell lines?

taking ordinary everyday medications which are also linked to the use of cell lines derived from aborted children? (For details, see the next question.)

If we were to reject the principles in question, it would have huge implications for the life of the Church today, when it is hardly possible for Catholics to buy, use or participate in anything without some degree of association with grave evil. Even within the Church the level of abuse of the most sacred things has reached the point where many Catholics could find it difficult to receive the sacraments if they were to be held responsible for what took place outside of their receiving the sacrament validly and with a good intention.

If, on the other hand, we were to say that abortion is a crime so great that the general principles of moral law do not apply to it, we would be taking abortion out of the moral law, thus making it difficult to condemn abortion based on the principles of this law.

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Since 1977, HEK-293 has become the second most commonly used human cell line in the development of drugs, therapeutics and vaccines.6 Examples include Ibuprofen (anti-inflammatory painkiller)7; Amoxicillin, Penicillin (commonest of the antibiotics)8; Insulins (for diabetes)9; Halaven, Methotrexate, Capecitabine, Gemcitabine, Carboplatin, Vinorelbine, Doxorubicin (chemotherapeutic agents for cancer)10; Desflurane, Isoflurane, Sevoflurane (anaesthetic agents)11, and this list is very vast, without even mentioning many commonly used non-medical products. Also, the medications used to treat Covid-19 in its early stages (such as Hydroxychloroquine, Regeneron and Ivermectin), are connected to the use of HEK-293 cell line.12 Later other cell lines were developed that are also widely used in the pharmaceutical industry, including the most easily available Covid vaccines.

Of course, the fact that something is widespread does not make it acceptable or licit. If these and many other medications were intrinsically evil, every Catholic should stop using them immediately under pain of sin, no matter how widespread they have become or necessary they are deemed for one’s health. But despite the illicit elements in their production, the medications themselves are not evil; on the contrary, they are good. The fact that these cell lines are ubiquitous only helps underline how the principles used to discern the liceity of any of these therapeutics must be capable of being applied consistently to all.

The issue of using foetal cell lines in medical research and production, therefore, is beyond enormous, since these cells are the workhorse of the pharmaceutical industry. Healthcare is an essential CAL X M ARI AE

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part of the economy and medication is an essential part of healthcare. Scandalously, the production of medication is currently relying heavily on these cell lines and thus we can say that the economy is currently relying heavily on these cell lines.

Whilst there is no apparent solution to the problem, our hope always comes from knowledge of the truth. We must not lose sight that the fundamental evil to fight is abortion which makes the production of abortion-tainted vaccines and medications possible in the first place. However, tragically, abortion is rarely opposed with appropriate vigor.

Thankfully, because the foetal cell line is not an indispensable component in the vaccine per se, there is a growing list of Covid vaccine candidates that do not use foetal cell lines.13

Should it still not be recommended that one avoids these vaccines, on the basis that they are unnecessary and could be dangerous?

What is necessary for achieving a goal is not always morally licit and what is morally licit is not always necessary. An infertile couple may consider IVF necessary to bear children, but it is morally impermissible. A definite Catholic principle is that the ends cannot justify the means. On the other hand, it might be morally permissible to use vaccines that have been derived from foetal cell lines, but they may not be universally necessary.

Whether or not the vaccination is really necessary or could cause dangerous side effects are different matters from its moral liceity. It can be validly argued that vaccines against the coronavirus have not yet been sufficiently tested and that the long-term side effects and their efficiency against the various variants of the virus are unknown.

However, none of these legitimate questions can be answered by doctrine or moral theology, but only by medical science. Also, while the doctrinal and moral questions can be answered today, with the help of existing and proven principles, it may take years to definitively answer the questions regarding medical science because we are dealing with new therapeutics. Therefore, one can easily understand all those who, while considering it lawful, decide not to receive the vaccine. However, this is a prudential judgment each person can make not a commandment of the Church.

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In her teaching, the Church establishes principles, not circumstances. If the vaccines were evil on principle because of their abortion-tainted nature, no circumstance would render them licit. If it is licit in certain circumstances, it is not evil by nature. The circumstances require discernment by individuals and families. They are best placed to decide whether the level of risk is sufficient to justify the use of these pharmaceuticals. On the other hand, to respect the discernment of individuals and families, vaccination must remain voluntary.

In short, whereas concerns about the abortion-tainted nature of the vaccine might form part of a personal prudential judgement not to receive it, it is divisive and leading the faithful astray to promote this position as, objectively, the correct understanding of the teaching of the Church and binding on all.

But what is the value of focusing on the moral issue when so many problems with these vaccines have been reported? And is it not very theoretical, minimalist, and defeatist to emphasise the moral liceity?

To defend the truth is never defeatist. Today especially, when there is so much confusion about authentic and false teaching, including even the most basic questions, we must defend the integrity of the Church’s doctrine, the structure of her moral tradition. This structure is being eroded by mixing up the issues – the production of drugs and the using of drugs, equating abortion with benefiting from drugs of illicit origin, untenable distinctions between abortion-tainted vaccines and other drugs which are also abortion-tainted, and so on.

Ideas have real consequences, even if they are not evident immediately. Great revolutions have always started from ideas which sometimes take many years to materialise but are no less dangerous because of that. Harm done to the faith and morals is more serious than harm to the health and body, because this harm is done to the eternal health of the soul.

Our mission must be to keep people faithful to the Church’s teaching which is the only hope to defeat abortion. We cannot fight abortion by undermining Catholic moral tradition thus weakening Catholics’ confidence in the Church’s teaching both on related issues and generally.

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pro-life action

The beautiful fabric of the Church’s teaching is ours to protect today as never before; not one thread can be pulled out without affecting its entire pattern, not even for what may seem more or better than she could offer or mistakenly more heroic. Defending the intactness of this fabric is especially important today when it is being wildly pulled and torn from every direction.

eryone of us will almost certainly require at some stage in our lives.

Splitting the Church and the pro-life movement, on the other hand, by promoting erroneous teaching on principles guiding the moral discernment of the faithful will only serve to delay appropriate action being taken by church leaders and could cost the lives of untold numbers of unborn children.

Do we need a new pro-life movement to tackle the vaccine issue?

What then can be done?

The most effective way to oppose the production of therapeutics by means of cell lines of aborted human foetal origin, is to fight abortion with ever greater commitment. The current debate has shown that, in the ranks of faithful Catholics, there is a lot of will and energy to fight. But it would be a terrible strategic mistake to channel this not against the real evil of abortion but against its side effects.

Furthermore, calls for a new pro-life movement risk dividing the pro-life movement irreparably: Firstly, because they appear to represent those who uphold Catholic moral teaching in respect of abortion-tainted vaccines and other therapeutics as resigning themselves to the crimes of abortion and the exploitation of the body parts of unborn children.

And secondly, because they place the responsibility on those who have none. The Church wants her children to be faithful, and also heroically faithful, but she does not place demands on them which are impossible to fulfil. And we must be careful not to place burdens on people that are not required by the Church. There is a duty not to “bind heavy and insupportable burdens and lay them on men’s shoulders”, the warning of Our Lord in the Gospel (Mt 23:4).

Instead of a new pro-life movement, we urgently need to call on church leaders to form the consciences of the faithful on Catholic teaching on the sanctity of human life. Their failure to do so has led our health services worldwide to be dominated by the culture of death. The bishops must fight to make abortion illegal. New cell lines must not be initiated. Church leaders need to call on governments and industry to stop exploiting the unborn in producing medications and vaccines which ev-

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Many may believe that they are trapped in a hopeless situation by thinking mistakenly that they are gravely sinning for taking their daily medications or that they must refuse the vaccine against Covid at all costs. Alerting others to the teaching of the Church can save people’s faith and inspire them to fight abortion ever more strongly. By upholding and sharing Catholic teaching with your family, friends, colleagues, fellow parishioners, doctors and clergy, you can also efficiently make known your objections to the using of foetal remains in biomedical research which is a vital witness in today’s anti-Christian and anti-life culture.

Conclusion The legalisation of abortion has corrupted medical science as well as medical practice. Until the primary evil of legalised abortion is addressed, there is no compelling reason for the world to make the exploitation of the aborted child’s body for various purposes extinct.

The exploitation of unborn children is so widespread in scientific research that the magnitude of this problem and the complexity of its implications may seem overwhelming. It is extremely difficult, if it is even possible at all, to extricate legitimate research, therapies and pharmaceuticals from those that use foetal cell lines. In ending this practice, discernment is required “lest perhaps gathering up the cockle, you root up the wheat also together with it”. (Mt 13:29) Nevertheless, the Catholic faithful and all men and women of good will should work on their own level and using the means available to them, calling on politicians and companies to stop such exploitation which deeply offends human dignity created in the image and likeness of God. CAL X M ARI AE

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“The Church wants her children to be faithful, and also heroically faithful, but she does not place demands on them which are impossible to fulfil.

And we must be careful not to place burdens on people that are not required by the Church.”

Endnotes: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

But above all, we must not dismiss the authentic teaching authority of the Church on the grounds that, sadly, there has been so much abuse of authority. The scandals that have been emerging from the Vatican in recent years and months, including shareholdings in pharmaceutical companies that produce abortion drugs, have not helped maintain trust in authority. However, the answer is not new morality, a new church, nor a new pro-life movement. This approach which appears absolutist is actually liberal in essence, because it allows each of us to set up our own moral authority. On the contrary, instead of a new morality that ultimately threatens us with even more doctrinal anarchy, we must, in this trying hour for the Church and for the world, unite evermore strongly in the perennial teaching of the Church. This is our way forward in a spirit of charity which grows from the love of the truth.

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8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

Roberto de Mattei, On the Moral Liceity of the Vaccination, Edizioni Fiducia, 2021.

Available online at: https://libri.edizionifiducia.it/on-the-moral-liceity-of-the-vaccination/ Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dignitas Personae – Instruction on Certain Bioethical Questions, 8 Sept 2008; https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20081208_dignitas-personae_en.html Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Note on the Morality of Using Some Anti-Covid-19 Vaccines, 21 December 2020; https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/ congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20201221_nota-vaccini-anticovid_en.html Pontifical Academy for Life, Moral Reflections on Vaccines Prepared from Cells Derived from Aborted Human Foetuses, Rome, 9 June 2005; https://www.immunize.org/ talking-about-vaccines/vaticandocument.htm Dignitatis Personae, no 35.

“Today, HEK-293 cells are frequently used in cell biology and biotechnology, second only to HeLa, the first human cell line.” This cell-line is derived from the Human Embryonic Kidney tissue of a baby girl aborted in the Netherlands in 1972 or 73. The number 293 indicates that it was the 293rd experiment [note that this is different from the number of abortions carried out for obtaining this cell-line] carried out by Dr Frank Graham, a Canadian working at the University of Leiden. HEK293 Cell Line, See: http://www.hek293.com/ Rahim Ahmadi et al, “The Effect of Aspirin and Ibuprofen on the Proliferation of Cervical Cancer Cells (HeLa) Compared to Non-Cancerous Cells (HEK 293) in Cell Culture Medium” (2018), Qom Univ Med Sci J 12, 5 pp. 16-24.

Zhenjiang Yang et al, “Azithromycin Causes a Novel Proarrhythmic Syndrome” (2017) Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology, 10, p. 4. Dorothea Brüggemann, “Nanoporous Aluminium Oxide Membranes as Cell Interfaces” (2013), J Nanomaterials, 2013.

A. S. Molsted Wanschera et al, “Production of functional human insulin-like growth factor binding proteins (IGFBPs) using recombinant expression in HEK293 cells” (2015), Protein Expression and Purification, 108, pp. 97-105.

Zengguang Xu et al, “The stimulatory activity of plasma in patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer requires TLR-stimulating nucleic acid immunoglobulin complexes and discriminates responsiveness to chemotherapy” (2014), Cancer Cell International, 14, p. 8.

Koichi Nishikawa et al, “The Actions of Sevoflurane and Desflurane on the γ-Aminobutyric Acid Receptor Type A: Effects of TM2 Mutations in the α and β Subunits” (2003), Anesthesiology, 99, pp. 678–84; Mahmud Arif Pavel et al, “Studies on the mechanism of general anesthesia” (2020), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117, 24 | 13757-66.

Regeneron (monoclonal antibody drug cocktail to treat moderately serious COVID-19) - Noura S Abul-Husn et al, “A Protein-Truncating HSD17B13 Variant and Protection from Chronic Liver Disease” (2018), N Engl J Med 378, pp. 10961106. Ivermectin (anti-parasitic also drug used to treat COVID-19) – W Nörenberg et al, “Positive allosteric modulation by ivermectin of human but not murine P2X7 receptors” (2012), Brit J Pharma, 167, 1, pp. 48-66. Hydroxychloroquine (used to treat malaria, inflammatory diseases and COVID-19) – Chenghao Xu et al, “Chloroquine and Hydroxychloroquine Are Novel Inhibitors of Human Organic Anion Transporting Polypeptide 1A2” (2016), J Pharma Sci, 105, 2, pp. 884-90.

See for example, Lozier Institute, “Update: COVID-19 Vaccine Candidates and Abortion-Derived Cell Lines”, 3 March 2021; https://lozierinstitute.org/updatecovid-19-vaccine-candidates-and-abortion-derived-cell-lines/

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analysis

THE MASS IN IRELAND today’s trials in light of past persecutions

by L I A M G I B S O N

O

n hillsides and in stony pastures, in wooded glens and ruined shacks – the Mass Rocks that dot the landscape of rural Ireland are the beads on the unbroken chain that Irish Catholics clung to through the grinding years of often bloody persecution. Many overgrown, neglected, anonymous, and unknown, others venerated and preserved, these monuments are an outward symbol of the indelible mark that centuries of persecution have left on the identity of the church in Ireland.1 With recent legislation by the Dublin government making religious services in public virtually impossible, many have invoked the image of the Penal Days when the Mass was legally suppressed. While Catholics in Ireland today face none of the physical dangers endured by their ancestors, the witness to the faith of those who suffered is still relevant. It was the Mass for which they died and it was the Mass that sustained them. This is a story of heroic fealty and of a people who risked the loss of everything rather than be separated from the sacrifice of the Mass.

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ECCLESIA INTER HIBERNOS Long before Henry Tudor (1509-1547) broke with Rome, there were two distinct churches in Ireland.

One native and Gaelic-speaking – the ecclesia inter Hibernos – and the other an off-shoot of the church in England, controlled by the English crown.2 Efforts to end irregular habits and customs which had taken hold in the native church (such as the hereditary appointment of bishops and the use of a wooden table for Mass rather than a stone altar) had already begun before the arrival of Norman lords but the Anglo-Irish church soon became the primary vehicle to implement the reforms Rome required. Ironically, however, when England became Protestant, it was the insular character of the Gaelic-speaking church that meant that most Catholics, both native and Norman, remained loyal to the pope.

The antipathy which the Anglo-Irish hierarchy had always shown to the native church soon gave way to enmity and persecution. Bishops loyal to

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“While Catholics in Ireland today face none of the physical dangers endured by their ancestors, the witness to the faith of those who suffered is still relevant.

It was the Mass for which they died and it was the Mass that sustained them.”

Henry were installed in vacant sees while those who refused to acknowledge that his supremacy extended to spiritual matters were deposed and exiled.

Monasteries, religious houses, church lands and other property were seized by the crown. The Annals of the Four Masters, compiled between 1632 and 1636 by Franciscan friars in Donegal and Leitrim, records the widespread devastation which followed the Protestant revolt: “A heresy and a new error sprang up in England, through pride, vain-glory, avarice, and lust, and through many strange sciences, so that the men of England went into opposition to the Pope and to Rome. They at the same time adopted various opinions, and among others the old law of Moses, in imitation of the Jewish people; and they styled the king the Chief Head of the Church of God in his own kingdom. New laws and statutes were enacted by the king and Council Parliament according to their own will. They destroyed the orders to whom worldly possessions were allowed, namely, the Monks, Canons, Nuns, Brethren of the Cross, and the four poor orders, ie the orders of the Minors, Preachers, Carmelites, and Augustinians; and the lordships and livings of all these were taken up for the King. They broke down the monasteries, and sold their roofs and bells, so that from Aran of the Saints to the Iccian Sea there was not one monastery that was not broken and shattered, with the exception of a few in Ireland, of which the English took notice or heed.”3 Many abbots and superiors were martyred and Catholics, who had lost access to their buildings, had no option but to find suitable locations to assist the liturgy and receive the sacraments out of sight of the King’s agents. It was probably during this S UM ME R 2 021

period from 1533 until the death of Henry’s son Edward VI (1547-1553) that Mass Rocks first made their appearance.

The joy that greeted the succession of Mary Tudor (1553-1558) and the restoration of papal authority in Ireland proved to be short-lived. Under Elizabeth (1558-1603), the Dublin Parliament passed the Act of Uniformity to enforce compliance with the Book of Common Prayer. The liturgy had been translated into English in 1550 but now altars were replaced with tables and the vestments of the clergy were simplified. While the new rite “omitted all mention of any true sacrifice” it “retained expressions capable of referring to the Real Presence”.4 At the same time, a new calendar was introduced eliminating fasts and drastically reducing the number of feast days. Failure to attend Protestant worship was met with a fine. Adherence to the Catholic faith became synonymous with treason and the martyrdom of priests and bishops resumed.

In 1567, Myler Magrath, Bishop of Down and Connor, apostatised and in 1571 he was installed as the Protestant Archbishop of Cashel. He died in 1621, having reconciled with the church. Fr Dennis Murphy SJ notes of Magrath: “It is not generally known that he renounced the faith only after enduring much suffering, such as the cutting of his ears, the slitting of his nose, in London, where he had been seized when on his way from Spain to Ireland.”5 In 1603, the ancient links between Scotland and Ireland led many Catholics to expect that the reign of James Stuart (1603-1625) would bring official toleration of their faith. Catholics in Munster reclaimed the churches in Waterford, Cashel, Cork and Limerick as well as Wexford and Kilkenny. The response of the crown came swiftly with Charles 11

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Blount, 8th Baron Mountjoy, James Stuart’s Deputy in Ireland, threatening the Catholics with violence.

Mountjoy’s secretary, Fynes Moryson, was later to write of him: “If they did not desist from the public breach of his Majesty’s laws in the celebrations of the Mass, he would think them fit to be prosecuted with the avenging sword of his Majesty’s forces.”6 Soon soldiers roamed the country in pursuit of priests. Any they captured were hanged on the spot. When a group of nobles and gentry petitioned Mountjoy to suspend the banishment and execution of priests until they could have a trial, he threatened them with a similar treatment. In Dublin, he ordered 16 of the city’s Aldermen to hear divine service in Christ Church, now an Anglican cathedral. When they failed to attend nine were fined £100, the rest £50 and all were imprisoned in Dublin Castle. Other leading Catholics were exposed to the same penalties while the lower classes were fined twelve pence each time they missed Protestant services. It was clear that no Catholic would be permitted to hold property or a position of prominence.

In 1607, the position of the Ulster chieftains, Hugh O’Neill, Rory O’Donnell and their allies was becoming increasingly untenable. One of their concerns, as O’Donnell explained, was the growing pressure to abandon the Catholic faith: “The Lord Deputy told me in [the] presence of many noblemen and gentlemen that I must resolve to go to church, or else should be forced to go thereto. Which threatening speech wrought that impression on my heart, that for this only respect of not going to church I resolved rather to abandon lands and living, yea, all the kingdoms of the earth, with the loss of life than be forced utterly against my conscience and the utter ruin of my soul to any such practices.”7 The loss of civil and military leadership which followed the departure of the Ulster chieftains was to have major consequences. With no one capable of protecting them, the Catholics of Ulster were

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driven off their lands which were given to English and Scottish Protestants.

King James, as an infant was taken from his mother Mary Stuart, and raised as a Protestant.

Now, he sought to do the same to the children of noble families by ordering them to be sent to London to be educated in the English religion. In 1622, he established the Court of Wards which allowed the crown to take control of any estate if the heir was a child, leaving the widow and her other children dependent on her dowry. The court would then appoint a guardian, who had a right to sell the estate and even arrange a marriage for his ward. This was done supposedly for the “increase of the revenue and the good education of the King’s wards in religion and learning”. This was, however, unlawful.

It was only 11 years later that the Irish Parliament granted legal authority to the exercise of this power to James’ son King Charles (1625-1649).8 Under Charles’ government, the legal penalties which Catholics faced were not always strictly enforced. However, the promises he made, in exchange for extortionate sums paid to the crown,9 were repeatedly broken. Eventually, the patience of Catholics in Ulster also broke and they rose up to recover their confiscated lands and redress of their grievances. When, on the eve of the English Civil War, the Puritan Parliament in London decreed the absolute suppression of the Catholic religion in Ireland both the native Irish and Old English factions joined the rebellion. Eventually, a treaty with King Charles was reached but with his execution in January 1649, the plight of Irish Catholics radically worsened. Later that year Oliver Cromwell (1653-1658) set out on a Puritan crusade to conquer Ireland for the Commonwealth.

While negotiating the surrender of New Ross in County Wexford, Cromwell made his intentions clear stating: “…if by liberty of conscience you mean the liberty to practice the Mass, I judge it best to use plain dealing, and let you know that where the Parliament of England has power, that will not be allowed…”.10 Having defeated the Catholic and Royalist alliance, he set about implementing this policy. Naturally, the priesthood was the first target of Cromwell’s war on the faith in Ireland. The Jesuit mission to Ireland reports: CAL X M ARI AE

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“…[O]n January 6th, 1653, there issued against the Catholics an edict of Cromwell, commanding all priests, under pain of death, to leave Ireland within twenty days. The same penalty, together with the forfeiture of all their property, was denounced against all laymen who should dare to harbour or protect any ecclesiastic in any way or for any pretext whatsoever… The clergy suffered many and grievous persecutions under former English Governors, but before this time they were never reduced to the lowest extreme of misery…”11 A bounty of £5 was paid for information leading to the capture of any priest who remained. It was made a capital offence to shelter them and “… anyone meeting a priest accidentally was subject to have his ears cut off and to be flogged naked through the streets if he did not inform on him.”12 The case of Daniel Connery illustrates the predicament the laity now faced. Connery, who was convicted of harbouring a priest was condemned to death.13 While his sentence was commuted to

perpetual banishment, his property was confiscated. His three daughters were transported to the West Indies to be sold as slaves and his wife died destitute.14 On 26 September 1653, Parliament ordered all Catholics to be transported to the province of Connaught, the poorest and least arable counties in the west of the island. Under pain of death, they had to leave their lands no later than 1 May the following year to make way for English settlers.15 The percentage of land held by Catholics decreased from almost 70 per cent in 1641 to about 10 per cent by the end of the 1650s.16 Roughly one-third of the Catholic population lost their lives through fighting, famine and disease.17 By 1659 an estimated 50,000 men, women and children had been shipped as slaves to the West Indies and Virginia.18 Most of those who remained, in the words of Robert Kee, “were sentenced in their own country to a life of social ignominy and handicap”.19 With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the position of Irish Catholics improved but hopes that Charles II (1660-1685) would fulfil the terms of the treaty of 1649 proved false and anti-Cath-

THE RUINS OF MUCKROSS ABBEY (IRISH: MAINISTIR LOCHA LÉIN AND MAINISTIR MHUCROIS) Founded in 1448, Muckross Abbey was built as a Franciscan Friary. The Abbey was attacked and reconstructed many times until it was finally assaulted in 1654 by Cromwell’s forces. It was subsequently burned down and today only ruins remain.

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olic legislation remained in place. Then in 1678, surrious claims of a “Popish Plot” to overthrow the king led to Peter Talbot, Archbishop of Dublin, being thrown into prison where he died two years later. And on 1 July 1681, Oliver Plunkett, the Archbishop of Armagh, who had been taken to London, was hanged, drawn and quartered, the last Catholic martyr to die in England.

In 1688, a plot to overthrow Charles’ Catholic brother, James II (1685-1688), was successful. On 12 March the following year, James landed in Ireland to raise an army to fight William of Orange (16891702) who had seized the throne. It was only at this point that the English crown finally took steps to ease the suffering of the Catholics in Ireland. This reprieve was, however, short-lived. When defeat sent James and his troops into exile, the civilian population was left with no defence against the vindictive cruelty of the new regime.20 “...THE OPPRESSION, IMPOVERISHMENT AND DEGRADATION OF A PEOPLE”21 Beginning in 1695, a series of Penal Laws were enacted to make life as a Catholic unendurable.

“Papists” could not bear arms or own a horse of a value greater than £5. They could not buy land valued at more than £5 or take a lease for more than 31 years. Those who owned land were compelled to divide it on their death equally among their sons, making farmland less profitable and more easily acquired by non-Catholics. If one son became a Protestant, he would inherit the whole estate. If he converted before his parents died, he would become the legal owner reducing his parents to the status of tenants for life.

No Catholic could educate his children in the faith or send them abroad for education – “no person of the Popish religion shall publicly or in public houses teach school, or instruct youth in learning in any private house within this realm”.22 The only education that did not expose Catholic children to Protestant proselytism was the illicit “hedge schools” which began to spread across the country.23, 24 If caught, however, Catholic schoolmasters would be subject to the same penalties as priests.

No Catholic could act as a guardian of a Catholic child. A Catholic tradesman could employ no

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OLIVER PLUNKETT (IRISH: OILIBHÉAR PLUINCÉID) 1 November 1625 – 1 July 1681.

Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland who was the last victim of the Popish Plot. He was beatified in 1920 and canonised in 1975, thus becoming the first new Irish saint for almost seven hundred years.

more than two apprentices in his workshop. No Catholic could vote, hold public office or practice law.

With their churches destroyed or commandeered, Masses were offered in private homes, moving from house to house within a locality. No bell or outward sign was to be fixed to any place of Catholic worship. All magistrates were required “to demolish all crosses, pictures, and inscriptions that are anywhere set up and are occasions of any popish superstitions”.25 The aim of these restrictions was to force as many Catholics as possible to abandon the faith.

Some commentators argue that the Penal Laws were the result of Protestant insecurity,26 the greed of the Protestant Parliament in Dublin for Catholic land and wealth27 or the political need to weaken those still loyal to James and his heirs.28 Each of these reasons may be partially true. However, when we consider the Oath of Abjuration which apostate Catholics were required to swear, it becomes clear that the principal motivation was hatred of the Mass: “I do solemnly and sincerely in the presence of God, profess, testify, and declare that I do believe that in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper there is not any transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ at or

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after the consecration thereof, by any person whatsoever; and that the invocation or adoration of the Virgin Mary or any other saint, and the sacrifice of the Mass, as they are now used in the Church of Rome, are superstitious and idolatrous.”29 The target of the harshest laws was, of course, the bishops and the clergy. Over 400 Jesuits, monks and friars were exiled in 1698. Those who remained could only say Mass if they registered with local officials, provided two sureties, each in the sum of £50, and were forbidden to leave the county in which they were registered. In 1704 the government of Queen Anne (1702-1714) passed legislation for the: “...banishing all regulars out of the kingdom and to prevent Popish priests coming into the same.”30 It stated: “No popish parish priest shall have any popish curate or assistant, and every popish priest that shall neglect to register himself shall depart out of this kingdom before the 20th July, 1704, on pain of being prosecuted as a popish regular clergyman. And all such popish priests that shall neglect to register themselves and remain in this kingdom after July 20th, shall be esteemed popish regular clergymen and prosecuted as such.”31 As Henry Jefferies explains: “Registration offered a degree of toleration to priests in the parish for which they were specifically registered but to none other. It was to provide a baseline for the gradual elimination of the institutional Catholic Church in Ireland. With no bishops permitted under the terms of the Banishment Act, no priests allowed into Ireland from overseas, and no priest allowed to minister except for those registered in 1704, the Irish Catholic priesthood would die out over time and not be replaced. A comprehensive register of priests was drawn up, and a renewed drive was made against Catholic bishops. In 1706 the only Catholic bishops in Ireland were the incapacitated archbishop of Cashel and the imprisoned bishop of Dromore. The future prospects for S UM ME R 2 021

the Catholic Church in Ireland seemed bleak indeed.”32 Unregistered priests were subject to imprisonment and transportation. If they dared to return they were to be hanged, drawn and quartered. From 1709, registration also required taking the oath abjuring the authority of the pope. In 1710, with a bounty of £100 for the capture of any Catholic bishop, Hugh McMahon, entered Ireland in secret and made his way to the diocese of Clogher in southwest Ulster.32 From there Bishop McMahon drafted a Relatio status describing for Rome the conditions in his diocese:34 “…from that time the open practice of religion either ceased entirely or was considerably curtailed according as the persecution varied in intensity. …priests have celebrated Mass with their faces veiled, lest they should be recognised by those present…”35 Priests like their parishioners were impoverished.

They said Mass in soiled and tattered vestments and most of the sacred vessels in the diocese were made of tin. And with the closure of the Mass houses, the priests and the faithful were forced to return to the Mass Rocks. Information on where and when the liturgy was to be offered in a particular area would be spread discreetly. The Bishop noted: “Over the countryside, people might be seen signalling to each other on their fingers the hour that Mass was to begin in order that people might be able to kneel down and follow mentally the Mass being celebrated at a distance.”36 In 1719, the Privy Council in Dublin recorded: “The [Irish] Commons proposed the marking of every priest who shall be convicted of being an unregistered priest…remaining in this Kingdom after 1st May 1720 with a large ‘P’ with a red hot iron on the cheek. The council generally disliked that punishment, and have altered it into that of castration which they are persuaded will be a most effectual remedy.”37 This measure was too much even for the London government which prevented its passage into law.

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Taken together the Penal Laws were so extreme and potentially damaging to Britain’s diplomatic relations with the Catholic powers of Europe38 that enforcing them uniformly and consistently proved difficult. Because of this, some historians have sought to minimise the level of persecution.39,40 It is not, however, unusual for a penal code to be enforced selectively since they are generally applied only when those in authority deem it necessary.41 By the mid-1740s, a degree of toleration had begun to appear and the provisions of the laws were gradually repealed under George III (17601820) in 1778 and 1782. Then, with the help of Edmund Burke, permission for a seminary in Maynooth was grudgingly granted in 1795. Fearful of revolution spreading from France, the government was eventually persuaded to make concessions to the church. Finally, on 13 April 1829, the Catholic Emancipation Act received royal assent.42 When enforcement of the Penal Laws was at its height, only 33 priests took the Oath of Abjuration and only 5500 Catholics officially converted to the Established Church. These came largely from the gentry and were probably motivated by the hope of protecting their estates from subdivision or the desire to have their younger sons enter the legal profession.

The centuries of persecution had not succeeded in ending the practice of the faith but by the time they were repealed, a substantial portion of the Catholic population had been reduced to a state of unremitting poverty. Writing to a friend in England in 1764, a Protestant gentleman living near Dublin described the conditions of the lower farming class as “little better than a state of slavery”.43 By 1776, Catholics, who made up three-quarters of the population, owned just five per cent of the land.44 A French traveller in Ireland in the 1790s recorded his shock at the degradation and nakedness of the Irish poor living in huts that did not seem made for humans.45 The heroism of those who remained faithful to the Church under such harrowing conditions can only be attributed to an extraordinary grace. On 27 September 1992 Pope John Paul II beatified a representative group of those killed between 1537 and 1714.46 This is a very small number of the 16

countless Irish martyrs whose deaths have gone largely unrecorded and whose names are known only to God. • Patrick O'Hely, Franciscan Bishop of Mayo, 31 August 1579 • Conn O'Rourke, Franciscan priest, 31 August 1579 • Wexford Martyrs, 5 July 1581: Matthew Lambert, Robert Myler, Edward Cheevers, Patrick Cavanagh, John O'Lahy, and one other unknown individual • Margaret Ball, 1584, Dublin • Dermot O'Hurley, Archbishop of Cashel, 20 June 1584 • Maurice MacKenraghty, Chaplain to the Earl of Desmond, 1585 • Dominic Collins, Jesuit lay brother from Youghal, County Cork, 31 October 1602 • Conor O'Devany, Franciscan Bishop of Down & Connor, 11 February 1612 • Patrick O'Loughran, priest from County Tyrone, 11 February 1612 • Francis Taylor, former Mayor of Dublin, 1621 • Peter O’Higgins OP, Prior of Naas, 23 March 1642 • Terence O’Brien OP, Bishop of Emly, 31 October 1651 • John Kearney, Franciscan Prior of Cashel, 1653 • William Tirry, Augustinian priest from Cork, 12 May 1654 In a culture increasingly hostile to the church, Ireland’s martyrs still stand as a sign of contradiction – “an eloquent and magnificent sign which we are called to contemplate and to imitate.”47 There are several lessons to be learnt by considering the history of the church in Ireland. These are just a few of them: • loss of leadership leaves the laity more vulnerable to coercion and an assault on their rights; • Catholics who will not renounce the faith will be hounded out of public life; • the right of parents to educate their children will be denied, they may even be threatened with having their children taken from them;

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ILLUSTRATION OF A PRIEST CELEBRATING MASS IN SECRET DURING THE PENAL ERA IN IRELAND

“It was the Mass for which the Irish people suffered and it was the Mass which sustained them through that suffering. And it is the Mass that promises to evangelise Ireland once again.”

• the powers of this world will break their promises; • only with the grace of God can we remain faithful.

TODAY’S TRIALS IN LIGHT OF PAST PERSECUTIONS Unfortunately, the honour conferred on the church in Ireland by the beatification of these 16 martyrs was eclipsed by other events that year. In May 1992, the faithful were shocked by the sudden resignation of the Bishop of Galway, Eamon Casey, after a man came forward claiming to be his son.48 Yet, within a matter of months, this scandal paled in comparison to an unfolding litany of child abuse convictions that brought disgrace upon the universal church and the vilification of the Catholic priesthood.

And in November, through a perverse reading of the Irish Constitution, the Republic’s Supreme Court ruled that a 1983 pro-life amendment,49 which was intended to protect children from aborS UM ME R 2 021

tion, actually authorised it when a woman threatened suicide.50 The equivocation of the bishops on how the faithful ought to vote in the subsequent referendum became a recurring theme in the years ahead.

The impact of these events has in many respects conditioned the bishops’ largely passive response to the rapid de-Christianisation of Ireland over the past 30 years. In his prologue to the recent republication of Our Martyrs, Dr Michael Kinsella, Director of Aid to the Church in Need, Ireland writes: “…though the Penal Laws on which Our Martyrs focuses have since been repealed, it does not mean Ireland is now free from its own form of ‘soft persecution’, a pernicious phenomenon common across the West. For, in a great and tragic irony, when Ireland finally became free to worship God in peace and love, it chose to reject Him through violence and degeneracy; where once our churches were full with praise 17

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“One reason God may have permitted this situation to arise is to bring about a deeper appreciation of what we have taken for granted. Losing access to the Mass for a time may be both a chastisement and a warning.” and worship, now we abandon them amid pride and invective; where once our ancestors attended Mass rocks at risk of death, now we risk eternal death in pursuit of sin; where once martyrs died defending the Faith, now we live to destroy it. This form of persecution is doubly malevolent because these evil forces have cynically convinced Irish people to become their own persecutors. We now endure a political and corporate class who seek the total and final extinction of Christianity – and thereby Christians – through the toxic influence of Communism and its ideological lackeys of progressivism and secularism.”51 One result of this toxic ideology has been to make the Irish reject the faith of their ancestors. In 2015, the Republic of Ireland became the first country

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in the world to legalise homosexual “marriage” by popular vote. In 2018, abortion was legalised in the same way. The consequences of such a repudiation are described for us in the letter to the Hebrews: “Lest there be any fornicator, or profane person, as Esau; who for one mess, sold his first birthright. For know ye that afterwards, when he desired to inherit the benediction, he was rejected; for he found no place of repentance, although with tears he had sought it.” (Hebrews 12:16-17) In 2021, the church in Ireland saw one of the most rigorous lockdowns in Europe with the longest ban on the public reception of the sacraments.

Opponents of the restrictions introduced by the Dublin government argued that they violated the

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religious rights and freedom of worship guaranteed

by Article 44 of the Irish Constitution.52 The police were used to enforce statutes that many claimed were unlawful. Between 26 December 2020 and 10 May 2021, church services were banned and priests threatened with punitive fines for the public celebration of the Mass or administering the sacraments. Even after services recommenced, access to churches was arbitrarily limited to 50 people regardless of the size of the building. This means that, for the vast majority of people, the ban on public Masses effectively remained in place.

While these restrictions seem unnecessarily vindictive, we cannot pretend that today’s hardships compare with the physical dangers faced by Catholics in previous centuries and yet they have done what the Penal Laws failed to do. An objective observer would be forced to conclude that the reason the restrictions continued for so long was due to the indifference of the laity and the prevarication of the hierarchy. With a minimum of protest, the bishops have applied and (in some instances) exceeded government recommendations. And, by accepting the unjust and potentially unlawful closure of churches, the bishops have effectively agreed that the public practice of the faith, the first precept of the Catholic Church, is not essential.53 One reason God may have permitted this situation to arise is to bring about a deeper appreciation of what we have taken for granted. Losing access to the Mass for a time may be both a chastisement and a warning. The many sacrifices of the martyrs, no doubt won countless graces for their descendants but if the Irish people fail to value that legacy, what we have been given could be taken from us (cf Luke 19:26-27).

In the ancient Latin rite of the Mass, every action is filled with meaning. Several interpretations have been attached to the migration of the missal.

After the reading of the epistle on the south side of the altar, the missal is removed to the north side where the gospel is proclaimed. One interpretation of this action is that it symbolises the Jews’ rejection of Christ. The gospel is taken away from the people in the south, the Jews, and brought to the people of the north, the gentiles (cf Acts 13:46-48). Just before the end of the Mass, however, the action is S UM ME R 2 021

reversed and the missal is taken from the north and brought back to the south. This signifies two things, the apostasy of the gentiles (cf 1Tim 4:1-3) and the conversion of the Jews (cf Romans 11:25-26).54 The apostasy the church is currently experiencing is certainly on a scale never before seen. And yet, even in Ireland, there are signs of renewal.

Like most of the Western world, there has been a noticeable increase in interest in the ancient rite of the Mass. Only three months before the emergence of the coronavirus crisis, the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest expanded its apostolate in Ireland to Belfast. The Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, formerly a Presbyterian church, opened in December 2019. Ironically, while Catholics north of the border have not been as severely constrained as their counterparts in the Republic, the restrictions on the mainstream church may have served to increase the number of Catholics learning about the Mass of their ancestors. In April 2021, the Institute announced that its female apostolate, the Sister Adorers of the Royal Heart of Jesus Christ Sovereign Priest, a semi-cloistered community, will soon take over the former Convent of Mercy in Ardee, Co Louth. Anecdotal evidence indicates that the Society of Saint Pius X and other traditionalist apostolates in both Britain and Ireland have experienced a similar increase in Mass attendance.

The witness offered by every Catholic martyr is inextricably linked to the Mass because “the offering of their lives is the greatest manifestation of the living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which constitutes true spiritual worship (cf. Rom 12:1)”.55 It was the Mass for which the Irish people suffered and it was the Mass which sustained them through that suffering. And it is the Mass that promises to evangelise Ireland once again.

Endnotes: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

See Hilary Joyce Bishop, “Memory and Legend: Recollections of Penal Times in Irish Folklore”, (2018) Folklore, 129:1, pp. 18-38.

See Maurice Sheehy, When the Normans Came to Ireland, Mercier, (1998).

The Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland by the Four Masters [Annála Ríoghachta Éireann], John O'Donovan (ed), vol. 5, (1848-51), pp. 1446-7.

Catholic Online — Book of Common Prayer.

Dennis Murphy SJ, Our Martyrs: Record of the Catholics killed for their faith under the Penal Laws 1635-1691 Fallon, (1896) reprinted Michael Kinsella and Damien Richardson (eds), Aid to the Church in Need (2021), p. 134, f. 451.

Moryson’s Rebellion, p. 293, cited by Murphy, p. 10.

Murphy, p. 13.

Ibid., p.18-20.

Murphy cites: “Six subsidies of £50,000 each, payable in four years…”, Ibid., p. 23.

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10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

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22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

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37.

38.

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46.

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Michael McNally, Ireland 1649-52 Cromwell’s Protestant Crusade, Osprey (2009), p. 65.

Ex. Report of the Irish Mission, SJ in 1654. Spic Ossor, i. 40 cited by Murphy, p. 26.

Murphy, p. 28.

Threnodia Hiberno-Catholica, Sive Planctus Universalis totius Cleri et Populi Regni Hiberniæ. I vol. 12 mo; Innsbruck, 1659. By FM Morison, OSF. In the library of Trinity College, Dublin, cited by Murphy, p. 28.

For an account of the ordeals suffered by Irish slaves in the sugar plantations of Barbados see Sean O’Callaghan, To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland, Brandon, (2000).

Ibid., p. 45.

Neil Hegarty, The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People, Random House, (2012), p. 13.

Robert Kee, The Green Flag vol 1: The Most Distressful Country, Quartet, (1976), p. 16.

O’Callaghan, p. 9.

Kee, p. 16.

Under Article I of the Treaty of Limerick, which ended the Williamite War, Catholics were guaranteed “such privileges in the exercise of their religion […] as they did enjoy in the reign of Charles II.” Negotiators also secured safe passage for James’ troops out of the country. Once they had departed, however, the Treaty was broken and the Penal Laws enacted.

“It was a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance; and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement, in them, of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.” — Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe MP on the subject of the Roman Catholics of Ireland...” in The Works of Edmund Burke, vol III, Little & Brown, (1839) p. 530.

Act,“to restrain foreign education”, 7 Will. III. c.4, XIV, cited by Murphy, p. 39.

Kee, pp. 19-20.

As late as 1804, Bishop James Murphy of Clogher reported to Rome that ninety per cent of the laity of his diocese were illiterate “owing to their great poverty”.

Catholic Directory, Veritas, (2007), p. 95.

Act 2 Anne c.6, An Act to prevent the further growth of Popery XXVII, cited by Murphy, p. 46.

Jonathan Bardon, A History of Ulster, Blackstaff, (2007), p. 168.

S J Connolly, Religion, law and power: the making of Protestant Ireland 1660-1760, Oxford, (1992), p. 263-313; cited by Charles Ivar McGrath, “Securing the Protestant Interest: The Origins and Purpose of the Penal Laws of 1695” [1996] Irish Historical Studies, 30, 117, pp. 25-46.

Fr Murphy addresses this argument stating: “We may willingly allow that rulers so keen-sighted as Elizabeth, Cromwell and William III were quite alive to the political advantages which they might secure by forcing the Irish into the English Church. But this being allowed, the character of the persecution by which the Irish Catholics were tried, remains the same. It was still a religious persecution.”

Murphy, p. xi.

An Act 2 Anne c.6, An Act to prevent the further growth of Popery XV, cited by Murphy, p. 45.

Murphy, p. 47.

An Act for Registering the Popish Clergy, 2 Anne c.7, III, cited by Murphy, p. 47.

Henry Jefferies, “Penal Days in Clogher” [2009] History Ireland, 3, 17.

There were four brothers from the McMahon family Heber, Hugh, Bernard and Ross who held the see of Clogher. The last three would go on to become Primates of Armagh.

The Catholic Directory states: “There is no better description of the operation of the Penal Laws than the account of the Diocese of Clogher sent to Rome in 1714.” p. 94.

Cited by Jefferies.

Bardon, p. 169.

Ibid., pp. 168-9.

Murphy cites Plowden’s attribution of the partial toleration to the efforts of Lord Taaffe, the Austrian Ambassador to England who was an intimate friend of George II (1727 – 1760). Plowmen, History of Ireland, iv. 61. Murphy, p. 61, f. 242.

See Marianne Elliot, Catholics of Ulster, Penguin, (2000).

James Kelly, “The Historiography of the Penal Laws” in John Bergin, Eoin Magennis, Lesa Ní Mhunghaile, and Patrick Walsh, (eds) New Perspectives on the Penal Laws, Dublin: Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society, (2011), pp. 27–54.

Aaron Graham, “Slave codes and penal laws in eighteenth-century Jamaica and Ireland: a comparative and historiographical survey” [2018] Jamaican Historical Review.

Kee points out that steps were immediately taken to limit the number of Catholics eligible to vote when the franchise qualification was raised from 40 shillings to £10 freehold. p. 186.

Ibid. p. 22.

Bardon, p. 168.

Kee, p. 22.

Catholic Online, 17 Irish Martyrs.

47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

53.

54.

55.

John Paul II, Ecclesia In Europa, 13, 28 June 2003. The pope’s remarks referred to the European martyrs of the Twentieth Century but are equally true of the Irish Martyrs.

Michael O’Regan, ‘Obituary: Eamonn Casey’ The Irish Times, 13 March 2017.

Bunreacht na Éireann, Article 40.3.3° The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right. — Eighth Amendment, 7 October 1983.

Attorney General v X, IESC 1; 1 IR 1 Murphy, pp. vi-vii.

Bunreacht na Éireann, Article 44.1: The State acknowledges that the homage of public worship is due to Almighty God. It shall hold His Name in reverence, and shall respect and honour religion.

1°. Freedom of conscience and the free profession and practice of religion are, subject to public order and morality, guaranteed to every citizen […]

5°. Every religious denomination shall have the right to manage its own affairs, own, acquire and administer property, movable and immovable, and maintain institutions for religious or charitable purposes.

The first precept (“You shall attend Mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation and rest from servile labour”) requires the faithful to sanctify the day commemorating the Resurrection of the Lord as well as the principal liturgical feasts honouring the mysteries of the Lord, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the saints; in the first place, by participating in the Eucharistic celebration, in which the Christian community is gathered, and by resting from those works and activities which could impede such a sanctification of these days. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2042.

“The Epistle, the carrying across of the missal, the Gospel and the Creed, are to remind us that the Gospel was first preached to the Jews, and being rejected by them, was proclaimed to the Gentiles, many of whom believed and were baptised.”

Francis Spirago, The Catechism Explained, Benzinger, (1899) p. 540.

Ecclesia In Europa, 13.

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opinion

WHAT DO THE UNANSWERED CRITICISMS OF AMORIS LAETITIA TEACH US TODAY?

by ROBERTO DE MATTEI

F

ive years ago, on 8 April 2016, the post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia, the most controversial document of Pope Francis’ pontificate, was published. This document is the outcome of a process initiated by Walter Cardinal Kasper’s intervention in the February 2014 consistory. Cardinal Kasper’s thesis on how the Church should renew its marriage praxis formed the leitmotif of the two synods on the family in 2014 and 2015. Unfortunately, the final exhortation Amoris Laetitia turned out to be even worse than Cardinal Kasper’s report. While the German cardinal had asked some questions, Amoris Laetitia offered the answer, opening the door to remarried divorcees and implicitly authorising more cohabitations. This is why, in 2017, philosopher Josef Seifert went so far as to say that Amoris Laetitia “has the logical consequence of destroying the entire Catholic moral teaching”.

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However, the countless criticisms of Amoris Laetitia – in books, articles, interviews – have made history even more than the document itself. Among these criticisms, two stand out in a particular way.

The first is the Dubia presented to the Pope and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on 19 September 2016 by Cardinals Walter Brandmüller, Raymond Burke, Carlo Caffarra, Joachim Meisner; the second is the Correctio filialis de haeresibus propagatis, addressed to Pope Francis on 11 August 2017 by more than 60 Catholic scholars and pastors of the Church, which, within a month of the publication of the document, became 216 theologians, professors, scholars of all nationalities.

Both the Dubia and the Correctio filialis have had a worldwide impact, but neither of these documents has received a response; despite the fact that a request for an audience was made to Pope Francis on 25 April 2017 by the four authors of the “Dubia”, two of whom (Caffarra and Meisner) are now deceased. The refusal of the Successor of Peter to receive the cardinals who are his advisors seems inexplicable, all the more so since Francis wished to make “welcome” the trademark of his pontificate,

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stating in one of his first homilies (25 May 2013), that “Christians who ask… should never find doors closed”. On the other hand, on 15 March 2021, Luis Cardinal Ladaria, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in response to a dubium regarding the question “Does the Church have the power to give the blessing to unions of persons of the same sex?”, defined the blessing of homosexual unions as “illicit”, given that “there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family”.

This statement, which reaffirmed Catholic doctrine, caused an explosion of dissent, especially in Germany. The silence on the issues raised by the Dubia and Correctio filialis, on the other hand, has caused great exasperation in the traditional Catholic world.

This contradictory governing practice risks leading the Church toward a grave schism, or rather toward a process of religious fragmentation that could have catastrophic consequences. The primary responsibility for this situation lies with the supreme shepherd, rather than with the bewildered flock. The number of maddened sheep is bound to increase until Rome makes its voice heard in a clear and definitive way. In this confusion, the publication of two serious and well-documented books offering a bleak picture of the current religious tragedy, is all the more timely.

The first, compiled by Voice of the Family, is an electronic publication titled The Unanswered Concerns about Amoris Laetitia: Why the Apostolic Exhortation Remains a Danger to Souls.

A team from Voice of the Family was present in Rome at both the Extraordinary Synod in October 2014 and the Ordinary Synod in October 2015. Voice of the Family produced in-depth analyses of the most important synodal documents from the perspective of pro-life and pro-family advocates and distributed these to cardinals and bishops 22

throughout the world. Indeed, as the introduction to the volume notes, “there are statements in Amoris Laetitia which directly contradict the authoritative teaching of the Catholic Church, and there are further statements that undermine it without directly contradicting it”.

The second volume, Defending the Faith against Present Heresies, is edited by Professors John R.T. Lamont and Claudio Pierantoni and has a preface by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò. Both works contain the texts of the Dubia and Correctio filialis. The Voice of the Family book also includes “Theological Censures against Amoris Laetitia” by forty-five theologians and the May 2019 “Declaration of the Truths Relating to Some of the Most Common Errors in the Life of the Church of Our Time”. Lamont and Pierantoni’s book also contains the “Open Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church”, “An Appeal to the Cardinals of the Catholic Church”, and the protest “Contra recentia sacrilegia”. In his introduction, John Lamont recalls how these documents came into being; the book also includes contributions by Anna M. Silvas, Fr John Hunwicke, Claudio Pierantoni, Claire Chretien, Roberto de Mattei, Robert Fastiggi and Dawn Eden Goldstein, Joseph Shaw, Michael Sirilla, Edward Peters, Edward Feser, Fr Brian Harrison, John Rist, Peter A. Kwasniewski, Maike Hickson, Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap, Pauper Peregrinus, and Professor Lamont himself.

Re-reading these texts today is instructive, both in terms of form and substance. In recent years, the theological substance of the issues has been lost and the language has often become coarse and aggressive. These two collections of documents, on the other hand, help us to understand how Catholics speak within the Church. It is a pity to see a loss of this theological substance and balanced style in the controversies that have emerged regarding the vaccination against Covid-19. In this debate, CAL X M ARI AE

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use their own conscience as a point of reference, but the perennial Magisterium of the Church.

The eve of possible schisms is not the time to divide the Catholic world but to unite it on the basis of the Tradition of the Church. Claudio Pierantoni in his “Reflections on a New Dialogue between Traditionalist and Conservative Catholics”, explains how many documents presented in the book he edited with John Lamont are the result of the happy encounter between the representatives of “Catholic Traditionalism” and “Conservative Catholicism” from whose ranks he comes. “May this book be a testimony and an example of the joint effort that has been carried in the last four years, and an encouragement for the years to come,” he writes. I make Professor Pierantoni’s wish my own: to form, in these difficult times, “a new more compact front of orthodoxy”. What is needed is a convergence and alliance of different initiatives of clergy and laity, each at their own level and according to the possibilities available to them, to confront the chaos that threatens us, entrusting ourselves and the success of our battle to the help of God, without Whom no success will ever be possible. These two books that have been published point the way.

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some critics of Amoris Laetitia have been accused of inconsistency for accepting the statements of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on vaccines issued in 2008 and 2015. The answer to this objection is simple. The signatories of the Correctio filialis never criticised the authority of the Pope or the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, because the Church is a hierarchical society and it cannot do without a supreme authority. Instead, they criticised a document promulgated by the supreme authority, finding it in contradiction to the previous Magisterium of the Church. In adherence to theological and moral truths, the ultimate court is one’s conscience; but an external objective principle or norm is required on which the conscience can be founded. This external law is stated by the Church through her Magisterium which is, in this sense, the proximate norm of our faith. If this is expressed in an equivocal or ambiguous manner, denying even implicitly on a practical level a truth of faith, concerning, for example, the conjugal union, Catholics have the duty to remember that the doctrine on sacramental marriage cannot be modified by any ecclesiastical authority, not even by the Supreme Pontiff. Those who criticise Amoris Laetitia do not

Amoris Laetitia

FI V E Y E A R S L AT E R: Why the apostolic exhortation remains a danger to souls

Available on: www.voiceofthefamily.com

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The story and mission of

THE PRO-LIFE MOVEMENT

T

he pro-life movement is a source of light in our dark times but its very existence reveals more about this time than any other phenomenon. It tells us that something as basic as the right to life cannot be taken for granted. The fact that abortion – or the euphemisms that disguise it, such as reproductive health and rights – is championed as a human right by powerful governments and international institutions today, shows that so-called human rights have become fundamentally inhuman.

In the language of numbers, last year about 140 million babies were born worldwide. At the same time, roughly 60 million children were aborted; to say nothing of the lives lost to abortifacient pills and devices or in IVF procedures.

Legal abortion has killed more people than all wars in recorded human history put together and devastated families worldwide at their very bosom. A mother’s womb that should be the safest place for life, statistically, is the most dangerous.

With these sobering figures in mind, there is no escaping the fact that most of us alive today, in one way or another, have survived abortion, an evil that has saturated our entire culture. And therefore, we must lend our voices to those who have none. We have no other option than to fight for a complete end to this evil: for every child is conceived to be born and not only born but also cherished and spared from all other attacks on life, both physical and spiritual, that threaten us between birth and death. Ultimately, we want all those who have received the gift of life on earth to be born in heaven and so we must remember that we are not just pro-life but pro-eternal life. For this reason, the mission of the pro-life movement to save lives is inseparable from the mission of the Church to save souls. And it is because of this intimate link that the deeper the crisis of the Church grows, the more extensive the pro-life fight becomes. From this perspective, one can easily see that the pro-life movement as we know it today exists because of the crisis in the Church.

In this FOCUS section, we look at the history and mission of the pro-life movement, in conversation with John Smeaton, who has dedicated virtually his entire career to it; we share some beautiful memories from the March for Life in Rome and delve into the critical factors that weakened the Church’s opposition to the culture of death and created the urgent need for a movement to fight for life.

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FIFTY-FIVE YEARS OF FIGHTING FOR LIFE A conversation with John Smeaton John Smeaton, the chief executive of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, has been involved in the pro-life movement at the national and international level for the past 47 years and this year he will pass on his responsibilities to the next generation. At this special moment, Calx Mariae had the unique opportunity to ask him to reflect on the mission and purpose of the pro-life movement, and also on its limitations.

John Smeaton studied English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and taught English at a secondary school. He became involved with SPUC, the first pro-life campaigning group to be established anywhere in the world, after graduating from Oxford. He became the national director of SPUC in 1996 and has been at the forefront of campaigns not only against abortion but also euthanasia and same-sex “marriage”. John Smeaton is the vice-president of International Right to Life Federation and a co-founder of Voice of the Family. He and his wife Josephine have four children and six grandchildren and a great-grandchild.

CALX MARIAE: Having dedicated 47 years, almost your entire career to working for the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) at the national as well as at the international level, how would you define the pro-life movement? Why does it exist?

JOHN SMEATON: The aim of the pro-life movement and the reason for its existence are to oppose and to defeat the idea, which dominates virtually the entire world, that there is such a thing as a life not worthy to be lived; and to create a society in which God’s law “Thou shalt not kill” is not only written into national and international law, it is also upheld and energetically defended by our fellow-citizens.

I must add immediately two further observations: the pro-life movement is part of a much wider and deeper historic crusade for the restoration of Christian civilisation; and, secondly, the aim of the pro-life movement is immeasurably beyond the capacity of the relatively small organisations in various countries which go under the pro-life banner to achieve on their own.

Of necessity, in addition to abortion, we are opposing and seeking to defeat a wide range of related evils – from contraception and in vitro fertilisation, to euthanasia, same-sex “marriage”, relationships and sex education and attacks on parents as the primary educators of their children, all of which

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serve to undermine the inviolability and value of human life.

These are evils rooted in a revolution, a rebellion against God and His Church, the seeds of which were planted many centuries ago. It’s a revolution which has waxed and waned historically around the world but which, universally, reached a new dramatic climax in the 1960s since when there has been a catastrophic collapse in Christian civilisation and in the recognition of truths universally upheld just a couple of decades before.

The pro-life movement, therefore, is a counter-revolutionary movement and, in order to achieve its aim, its members must be prepared to become not only saints – which everyone is called to be – but martyrs, which opponents of abortion and evils related to abortion are called to be. And even without being martyred, we must joyfully embrace a spirit of sacrifice in order to work towards our goal.

Alan Smith, co-founder of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) in 1966, understood the spirit of the age, what the newly-conceived pro-life movement needed to do and the spirit with which to do it. Two days after the House of Commons passed the Third Reading of the Abortion Act on 14 July 1967, he wrote to Elspeth Rhys-Williams (now Elspeth Chowdharay-Best), his fellow co-founder: CAL X M ARI AE

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“Is it a coincidence that the Commons passed the Third Reading on the 14th of July? As you have observed before the British Establishment is losing faith in itself in the same manner as the ancien régime … We must realise that in the struggle against the Enemy we are no longer the Establishment; we have lost control of the media of communications … Faith can give us an indifference to success or failure in this world but we must always continue to fight. Rather than to go meekly in the tumbrils to the guillotine, it would be preferable to die fighting at the barricades. Heroism in defeat is even more noble than heroism in victory.”

In the conclusion of his letter to his SPUC co-founder of over half a century ago, Alan Smith makes a striking prophecy which, in my opinion, correctly expresses the scale of the challenge facing the prolife movement. He writes: “… The grim prospects ahead should not hypnotize us into inaction: ‘And there shall be Martyrs and Saints.

And if blood of Martyrs is to flow on the steps

We must first build the steps; And if the Temple is to be cast down We must first build the Temple.’”

(T.S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock) Fifty-five years on, Alan Smith remains an active member of SPUC’s Executive Committee and Council.

CM: What have been the biggest changes for the pro-life movement since it all began 55 years ago?

JS: There are numerous fundamental changes which have resulted in the pro-life battle extending from fighting against the Abortion Act to fighting against a whole range of threats against human life from conception to natural death as well as threats to the family, the first protector of human life.

Many of these changes emerge from the wider context we are working in; for example, the change in attitude of leaders of the medical profession and leaders of the church towards the inviolable sanctity of human life. In answering your question, therefore, it’s necessary also to look at the bigger picture: the world in which the pro-life movement has to work.

John Smeaton’s former pupils help in SPUC’s new office in Westminster in April 1978. Phyllis Bowman, SPUC’s first national director, is pictured to the left and John Smeaton is seated to her right.

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Firstly, let’s consider the medical profession which, as represented by its national bodies, has moved from opposition to the Abortion Act to supporting abortion decriminalisation.

When the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children was founded, Sir John Peel, the president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG), wrote to Elspeth Rhys-Williams, one of the Society’s founders, saying he felt “sure that the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists would be extremely interested in sending a representative to serve on the Committee”.1 However, an Abortion Law Reform Association2 spokesman predicted at the time that doctors’ resistance to Parliament’s decision would collapse – and, sure enough, their position became more and more pro-abortion until 50 years later, Professor Lesley Regan, immediate past president of the RCOG, led calls for abortion to be decriminalised and said that abortions should be treated no differently from other “medical procedures” – including something as simple as removing a bunion. (Daily Mail, 16 September 2017).

Another huge change in the socio-cultural environment for the pro-life movement has been ever-increasing curbs on the freedom to spread our message. For thirty to forty years, SPUC’s trained volunteer speakers could scarcely keep up with demand for talks in schools on life and death before birth, involving slide presentations of the development of the child before birth and also the reality of abortion – and providing young people with information on the ill-effects of abortion for mothers, and exposing the false claims made about so-called unwanted children, backstreet abortion, population control and other topics. However, the state’s ever-increasing ideological control of education has greatly limited our access to schoolchildren whilst government legislation requires them to be signposted to contraception and abortion services.

Also, over the past fifty-five years, we have seen legal and political decisions both nationally and at the European levels outlawing health professionals’ right to conscientious objection to participation in abortion and euthanasia, and banning pro-life activists from giving witness outside abortion clinics.

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Baroness Sue Ryder of Warsaw signing SPUC’s UK-wide petition calling for the suggested technique of taking eggs from aborted infants to create embryos for infertile women, and for experiments, to be stopped in the Society’s successful campaign against this practice in 1994.

In his important book Abortion Matters, available from SPUC, Dr Anthony McCarthy, SPUC’s director of research and education, writes: “Universities are witnessing pressure to ban prolife groups whose members wish to engage in serious debate about the moral questions that abortion raises. For example, the Students Association at the University of Strathclyde banned ‘anti-choice groups’ on the grounds that such groups violated the ‘safe space’ of the students.

In the US, students at DePaul University were banned from using a pro-life poster proclaiming ‘Unborn Lives Matter’, for fear it might provoke other students.3 DePaul is the largest Catholic university in the USA. “In France in 2016 the Council of State upheld a ban on the television broadcasting of the video ‘Dear Future Mom’. The ban was originally imposed by the French Broadcasting Council because the film featured people with Down’s syndrome smiling and this was ‘likely to disturb the conscience of women who had lawfully made different personal life choices’.4 “In France again, a bill was passed at the end of 2016 to ban websites that ‘exert psychological or moral pressure to discourage recourse to abor-

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tion’. The law catches not only websites that are misleading but also those that seek to dissuade women from having an abortion (‘sites ... qui ... cherchent à dissuader les femmes d’avorter’). Website owners caught by this measure could face fines of up to 30,000 euros and prison sentences of up to two years. Quite apart from being an extraordinary attack on freedom of expression in a country famed for proclaiming the importance of liberté, the measure seems in tension with the 1975 French law which – in legalising abortion – called for women to be informed of the alternatives.5 “Back in the UK, an official NHS website encourages pregnant mothers to speak to organisations that provide abortions on a commercial basis, but not to speak to crisis pregnancy centres that are run by pro-life volunteers on a charitable basis. The extraordinary reasoning given is that the latter would not provide impartial advice.”6 Another important change which has occurred has to do with the faith and the faithful. When SPUC was being formed in late 1966, early 1967, there were mistaken efforts to keep Catholics out of the front line of the battle against abortion.

SPUC was the first pro-life campaigning group to be established anywhere in the world. There were no Catholics present at the launch meeting held at the Wig and Pen Club, in The Strand, London, on 11 January 1967. This was a deliberate move on the part of the newly-formed Society as the minutes of the Executive Committee of SPUC held on 17 November 1967 clearly show: “Lord Barrington [SPUC’s national chairman] suggested that he should write to the Chief Rabbi asking if he were interested in SPUC, and if so if he would like a representative to serve on the Executive. This was agreed, and Miss Court [later Phyllis Bowman] was asked to contact the Quakers. It was decided that Lady Wootton should be invited to join. After discussion, it was agreed that the climate of opinion did not yet allow Roman Catholics to be asked on to the Executive: prejudice was still such that if

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one were to join, the Society would be labelled a front organisation for the Church of Rome.”

However, within a few years, both the Society, beginning at the local level, as well as the pro-life movement more widely, had become a movement comprised overwhelmingly of Catholics and that remains the case in 2021. Catholics joining SPUC and other pro-life groups was a spontaneous movement of the people; it was both an essential and prophetic development pointing to the reality that the prolife movement is part of a much wider and deeper historic crusade for the restoration of Christian civilisation. There is no way the pro-life movement can bring about the paradigm shift needed to defeat abortion without the Church.

Tragically (truly tragically) keeping out of the front line against abortion was a policy adopted by Cardinal Heenan, the Archbishop of Westminster (1963-1975) and Catholic primate of England and Wales at the time of the passage of the Abortion Act. Last year I met a retired doctor, Dr Stephen Brennan, who was attending a SPUC meeting at which I was speaking in Newcastle upon Tyne, and we spoke about the cardinal. Afterwards, he sent me the following message: “Dear John, Thank you and your team for a great day, encouraging as always. That little historical story [I told you] was as follows: As a medical student in London, our University Catholic Chaplain, Fr Bruce Kent (he left the priesthood later as you will know) took about 20 of us medical students to see Cardinal Heenan one Saturday morning in 1965 or '66 (before the Act). We got a nice glass of sherry! We didn’t say much but listened.

The main two points the Cardinal made were: 1. It would probably be best, as Catholics, not to make too much of a fuss, as this would be likely to increase the support for the David Steel [abortion] Bill … and 2. Anyway, we shouldn’t worry too much, ‘the Doctors won’t let it happen’ (too much faith in the Hippocratic Oath I suppose).”

It was a great strategic error on the part of SPUC and Cardinal Heenan to downplay Catholic opposition to David Steel’s abortion bill. The third 29

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reading of the bill on 14 July 1967 was passed by 163 votes in favour to 87 against. 380 MPs failed to vote out of the 630 MPs elected to Parliament. I have no doubt whatsoever that the bill would have been heavily defeated if there had been a concerted effort on the part of the bishops throughout Britain to urge the millions of practising Catholics at that time to write to, or meet, or to telephone their MP. 7 In fairness to Cardinal Heenan, he denounced the Church of England’s committee on the abortion bill in the February 1966 edition of the Westminster Cathedral Chronicle, saying it deliberately “rejects what it recognises to be the traditional Christian view that the killing of the fetus is a form of homicide”. And of David Steel’s abortion bill he said: “Once we take the control of the span of life out of God’s hands we have no principles to guide us … If it is justifiable to kill the fetus which may be born deformed because, for example, the pregnant mother has contracted German measles, it is hard to see why children who manage to be born deaf, blind or otherwise handicapped should not immediately be put to death.”8 Cardinal Heenan’s opposition to abortion in the public square was tragically muted in 1966, but at least when he did say something, he was unequivocal and absolutist.

By way of contrast, over the past fifty-five years, Catholic prelates, with notable exceptions, have become less and less visibly opposed to attacks on the sanctity of human life, even to the point of

Dana Rosemary Scallon pictured with John Smeaton at SPUC’s national conference in 1996.

Dana, who won the Eurovision song contest in 1970, and was elected to the European Parliament in 1999, led the successful public battle to stop abortion legalisation in Ireland in the 2002 constitutional referendum.

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co-operating with policies that include abortion and related anti-life, anti-family laws.

Tragically, for example, unequivocal and absolutist opposition to abortion was not the position of the Catholic bishops in Ireland in 1992 and in 2001/2002 as I explained in full in an article in Calx Mariae (no 1, Summer 2018).9 The people of Ireland, in 1992, were invited by their bishops to vote in favour of an intrinsically unjust law which would permit abortion when there was a real and substantial risk to a woman’s life, including a psychological risk. And in 2001, the Irish bishops issued a statement supporting Irish government proposals which, in the words of the late Mr Justice Rory O’Hanlon, a former High Court judge “was contrary to the moral teachings of the Catholic Church” and was “the most serious attack yet witnessed on the integrity of our Constitution” which, he argued would “definitely liberalise Irish abortion law greatly so as to increase abortions in Ireland”. By the grace of God, the people of Ireland voted against both of these abortion proposals – safeguarding unborn children for many more years until the disaster of 2018 when the Irish electorate voted to strip unborn children of legal protection. It was the Catholic bishops of Ireland who had led the way to this disaster by dealing a succession of tragic blows to the formation of the consciences of Irish citizens.

Meanwhile, in England and Wales, the Catholic bishops have given the green light to both the abortion policies as well as to the LGBT+ agenda of the British government which are implemented in the legislative changes10 making Relationships Education compulsory in all English primary schools and Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) compulsory in all English secondary schools. The approach taken by the bishops has a long history which has been fully explored in an article by Dr Tom Rogers in Calx Mariae (no 10, Autumn 2020).

The Catholic bishops’ support for this new RSE regime is naturally considered of great importance by the British government. Nick Gibb, who was Minister for School Standards, commented in a House of Commons debate on 25 June 2019: “I am very content that we have secured the support of the Catholic Church, the Church of England and organisations such as Stonewall [a CAL X M ARI AE

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“Catholics joining SPUC and other pro-life groups was a spontaneous movement of the people; it was both an essential and prophetic development pointing to the reality that the pro-life movement is part of a much wider and deeper historic crusade for the restoration of Christian civilisation.” militant anti-Catholic pro-LGBT body] for the guidance we have created.”

What I have mentioned thus far concerning Catholic prelates in Britain and Ireland is just the tip of the iceberg. Arguably one of the biggest developments over the past half-century to change radically the nature and magnitude of the pro-life battle has been the suppression of parents, by both governments worldwide and Catholic Church leaders worldwide, as the primary educators of their children. Only prayer and fasting asking for divine intervention, combined with heroic witness on the part of parents and the pro-life movement, will be effective in overcoming this catastrophic situation.

CM: Let’s explore parental rights a little more – how in particular does the suppression of parental rights negatively influence the pro-life battle?

JS: At the time of the passage of the Abortion Act 1967, the prevailing ethos concerning the role of parents and the family still reflected the principles enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The distinguished US attorney and bioethicist, William L. Saunders Jnr, in a speech at the Doha International Conference for the Family in Qatar in 2005, explained how the UDHR was drafted so that it upholds marriage between a man and a woman, the family founded on marriage, and parents as the primary educators of their children.

Article 26 (3) states: “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children”. And William Saunders says: “As article 16 recognised the priority to the state of the family founded upon marriage, article 26 recognises the priority of the wishes of parents regarding the education of their own children S UM ME R 2 021

L to R: Joseph Shaw, Latin Mass Society chairman, John Smeaton, SPUC CEO, and James Leatherland, Catholic Man UK chairman, pray at Westminster Cathedral before delivering a letter to Cardinal Nichols challenging the bishops’ support for government legislation on Relationships and Sex Education. September 2020.

over any designs of the state. Remember, per article 16, the State is obligated to protect the family. If the State presumes to usurp the rights of parents to choose the education of their own children, it damages the family, violates its own obligations, and undermines the foundation of a just society and State.”

William Saunders’ important talk went on to explain the historical significance of the Universal Declaration’s insistence on parents as the primary educators of their children. Quoting Professor Mary Ann Glendon, former US ambassador to the Holy See, William Saunders points out that the UDHR’s protection of parents is rooted in the world’s bitter experience of Nazi Germany and was “influenced directly by recollections of the National Socialist regime's efforts to turn Germany's renowned educational system into a mechanism 31

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“By removing parents as the primary educators of their children in the intimate area of human sexuality, powerful governments and the international birth control lobby, funded by those powerful governments with our taxes, are establishing acceptance of contraception and abortion in the darkened hearts and consciences of future generations of adults.

This development has radically changed the nature and magnitude of the pro-life battle – with Catholic leaders’ support for what has happened.” for indoctrinating the young with the government's programme”.

“In other words,” William Saunders comments, “one of the most important lessons drawn by the framers of the Declaration from the experience of the Second World War was that parental choice in education is a fundamental plank of international peace and security.”

However, despite the UDHR, described by the UN as a milestone document in the history of human rights, in recent decades in Britain, our government has been pursuing a policy of providing access to abortion and birth control drugs and devices to children under the age of sixteen without parental knowledge.

In our work at the Human Rights Council, lobbyists for SPUC have often met country delegates from developing nations who were preparing reports for United Nations compliance committees.

The Committee on the Rights of the Child is the UN’s compliance committee for the Convention on the Rights of the Child. There is nothing in the Convention on the Rights of the Child that can reasonably be construed as approving abortion or access to abortion for children under the age of consent. However, this does not stop the Compliance Committee from making recommendations promoting access to abortion for children under the age of consent without parents’ knowledge or consent. Such recommendations are implemented in countries worldwide.

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The Coalition in Defence of Primary Educators, led by Catholic Man UK, the Latin Mass Society and SPUC, make reparation in Walsingham, the great English Marian shrine, for the bishops’ support for compulsory relationships and sex education. December 2019.

These policies have been championed by the Catholic bishops in Britain. In Catholic schools in England and Wales, for example, and with the cooperation of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, children are given access to abortion and contraception without parents’ knowledge or consent – a fact SPUC has been reporting to the highest officials in Rome for many years.

In the Calx Mariae article to which I referred earlier, Dr Tom Rogers explains in detail the exact nature of the Catholic bishops’ current support for the British government on these matters. The final (June 2019) RSE Guidance and Regulations, CAL X M ARI AE

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backed by the bishops, includes the promotion of abortion, contraception and facilitation of underage sex. Secondary school children should be provided with “the facts about the full range of contraceptive choices, efficacy and options available”, and signposted as to where and how to obtain abortion and contraception services without parental knowledge or consent. Carrying an unborn child to term is presented as simply one of the possible “choices” when pregnant, alongside that of having an abortion – “about which pupils should receive medically and legally accurate impartial information”.

Government policies removing the right of parents to be the primary educators of their children has also received significant support from Pope Francis. During a flight to Rome from Panama in 2019, Pope Francis told reporters: “I believe that we must provide sex education in schools”.

In the Pope’s call for classroom sex education, he went on to mention parents, but in a somewhat negative way. The Pope said “the ideal” is “to begin at home, with the parents”. But, he added, this is “not always possible”, either because of the family situation or because parents “don’t know how” to teach their children about human sexuality. “The school makes up for this,” he said, adding that if sex education is not provided the “void” will be “filled by any ideology”.

In saying this, Pope Francis ignored the geopolitical reality known, to one extent or another, by parents worldwide – that, in their sex education classes, schools, both non-Catholic and Catholic, are communicating to children the State’s and the international pro-abortion lobby’s ideology on matters relating to human sexuality. And this ideology deliberately seeks to exclude parents’ rights and responsibilities towards their children.

The Pope also promoted sex education in a sub-section of chapter 7 of his Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia, published in 2016. He does so without a single reference in that chapter to parents, albeit parental rights are mentioned earlier in another context. And he does so without giving clear warning of the contraception and abortion agenda of the sex education programmes which prevail worldwide in our children’s schools, including in Catholic schools.

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On 24 October 2015, 94 per cent of the bishops attending the Ordinary Synod of the Family in Rome voted to approve a paragraph in the final report which rejects the right of parents to choose to be the sole educators of their children in sexual matters. The sentence, in paragraph 58 of the document, reads: “The family, while maintaining its primary space in education (cf. Gravissimum Educationis, 3), cannot be the only place for teaching sexuality.”

This paragraph – and Pope Francis’s position – is directly contrary to the teaching of the Catholic Church.

In his encyclical Sapientiae Christianae (10 January 1890), on the chief duties of Christians as citizens, Pope Leo XIII teaches: “By nature, parents have a right to the training of their children, but with this added duty that the education and instruction of the child be in accord with the end for which by God’s blessing it was begotten. Therefore it is the duty of parents to make every effort to prevent any invasion of their rights in this matter, and to make absolutely sure that the education of their children remain under their own control in keeping with their Christian duty, and above all to refuse to send them to those schools in which there is danger of imbibing the deadly poison of impiety.”

By removing parents as the primary educators of their children in the intimate area of human sexuality, powerful governments and the international birth control lobby, funded by those powerful governments with our taxes, are establishing acceptance of contraception and abortion in the darkened hearts and consciences of future generations of adults.

As I said earlier, this development has radically changed the nature and magnitude of the pro-life battle – with Catholic leaders’ support for what has happened making the task of the pro-life movement virtually impossible without heroic witness on the part of parents and the pro-life movement combined with earnest prayer, fasting for divine intervention.

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CM: You have repeatedly referred to governments giving children access to contraception, indicating clearly that contraception somehow feeds the abortion industry. Has this always been the prevailing view in the pro-life movement?

JS: Certainly not. A major international figure in the early years of the pro-life movement would frequently say to me: “I don’t mind if a woman takes contraception until it comes out of her ears – that’s doing what she likes with her own body. But abortion kills another person’s body, the body of the unborn child.”

Nowadays, by way of contrast, more and more pro-life leaders are studying the empirical evidence which shows that one of the greatest catalysts of the spread of abortion has been the abandonment of the natural law relating to human sexuality and sexual ethics. Many of them have become supporters of Voice of the Family, the publisher of Calx Mariae.

In her book, Adam and Eve after the Pill – Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution, Mary Eberstadt, research fellow at the Hoover Institution, describes the central teaching of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae (25 July 1968) on the regulation of birth, as “perhaps the most unfashionable, unwanted, and ubiquitously deplored moral teaching on earth”. She then goes on to show that the teaching enshrined in Humanae Vitae is in fact the “most thoroughly vindicated” moral teaching on earth “by the accumulation of secular, empirical, post-revolutionary fact”. In this connection, Mary Eberstadt cites Nobel-Prize winning economist George Akerlof. In a 1996 article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Akerlof explains “why the sexual revolution, contrary to common prediction …[has] led to an increase in illegitimacy and abortion”. Mary Eberstadt in Adam and Eve after the Pill also says: “The years since Humanae Vitae have … vindicated the encyclical’s fear that governments would use the new contraceptive technology coercively”.

In Humanae Vitae Pope Paul VI predicted that coercive birth control by governments would result from couples’ decisions in the privacy of their married lives to separate the procreative and unitive ends of the marriage act. When we consider the fulfilment of this papal prediction, our minds naturally turn to China or to India or to other countries whose cruel policies are well known throughout the 34

world. However, we should also think of our own countries: nations in which our pro-life movement has taken root – in the West, in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Once again, I refer to anti-life sex education programmes which give schoolchildren access to contraception and abortion and eliminate the role of parents as the primary educators and protectors of their children. These programmes are intended to be a form of coercion on our families.

After two billion abortions and rising, the greatest slaughter in recorded human history, many pro-life leaders have taken on board the extent to which the separation of the procreative and unitive ends of the conjugal act has been a catalyst for the culture of death, advancing in every nation on earth: • through contraceptive drugs and devices which, other than barrier methods, according to the manufacturers, can cause early abortions in their modes of action; • through in-vitro fertilisation, which involves the instrumentalisation of the human embryo and the destruction or loss of up to 23 human embryos for every one baby born alive; • through same-sex marriage which, amongst many other things, makes it virtually impossible for the pro-life movement to oppose in-vitro fertilisation without being seen as the enemy of those with homosexual inclinations who demand the so-called right to a child through IVF procedures; and • through sex education, so relentlessly promoted by powerful Western nations, and by tax-funded non-governmental organisations, and, tragically and increasingly, by the surrender of the leadership of the Catholic Church – a surrender which is so completely devastating for our families.

CM: There are so many issues you have mentioned: abortion, contraception, IVF, sex education, parental rights, euthanasia – and then there are other issues, such as biomedical experimentation and research using human embryos, organ donation, brain death. Is there not a bit too much on the pro-life plate?

Would it not be better to choose our battles and concentrate on a single issue in order to gather maximum support and success, instead of putting it all together?

JS: As I mentioned earlier, the pro-life movement is part of a much wider and deeper historic crusade CAL X M ARI AE

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Two hundred young people attended SPUC’s 50th anniversary youth weekend conference in 2017 to hear inspiring international speakers, including Dr Anthony Levatino, a former abortionist.

for the restoration of Christian civilisation. Each pro-life group has a specific part to play in that crusade and how important our part has been, we will only know at the last judgment.

There are only so many of us in the pro-life movement. Resources are extremely limited. Different groups will focus on different battles according to their capacity and calling.

Abortion is clearly the number one issue for the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children as its name and as its long history show. However, it is vital for pro-life groups and individuals to remain constantly aware of how an issue like relationships and sex education (RSE) relates directly to our battle against abortion – since those campaigning for RSE have as their number one priority giving young people in school access to abortion and contraception, as I have explained earlier. Equally, we ignore the link between abortion and contraception at unborn children’s peril. All contraceptive drugs and devices, other than condoms, have, as one of their modes of operation, stopping the human embryo from implanting in the lining of the womb – thus killing the unborn child. Also, the contraceptive mentality itself is fuelling the abortion industry because contraception encourages sexual behaviour where children become “unwanted”, if one was to use that awful word. And when contraception fails, abortion is sought. In countries globally we have seen that contraception becoming more available did S UM ME R 2 021

not reduce, but significantly increased the number of abortions. Euthanasia is also linked to abortion through the same mentality: if it is acceptable to kill “unwanted” or sick children before they are born, it is only a matter of time before killing elderly and sick people becomes acceptable in society.

What pro-life groups urgently need to do, whilst focusing on their particular issue, be it abortion or something else, is to keep their supporters as well informed as possible on what is happening on related issues. We are in the middle of an all-out war against life. We must keep our supporters posted on what our enemies are achieving on other fronts.

How can we not warn them, for example, of the danger of their being euthanatized in British hospitals if they become incapacitated? A leading pro-life doctor told me recently that that will certainly happen to us if we become incapacitated and go into hospital in Britain today. We must equip people with the relevant information about what action to take now, well in advance, to safeguard their life and the lives of those dear to them.

In SPUC’s case, on certain occasions, we have found it necessary to wage all-out battles on matters which, although they appear to be separate issues, in reality, are closely related to our number one priority of protecting unborn children. The battle against relationships and sex education is one such issue.

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Another example is that in 2011 SPUC decided to fight against same-sex “marriage” legislation as a pro-life organisation. Statistical evidence on abortion clearly shows that marriage as an institution protects children, both born and unborn; same-sex “marriage” represents an attempt to redefine marriage, thus undermining marriage and family life, as a growing body of academic research clearly shows.

It is this undermining that lessens the protection for unborn children that true marriage provides.

Legalising “same-sex marriage” is not a question of being kind to people with same-sex attraction and letting them get married if they want to. It is a question of the destruction of the family, the oldest human institution in the world, which protects the mental and physical wellbeing of men, women and children. No other grouping offers such a high level of security and stability that human beings need to flourish. Research shows overwhelmingly that children growing up within marriage do better in terms of health, educational success, happiness, careers and their own marriages. It is precisely because children matter, that real marriage between one man and one woman matters so much.

British Government statistics show that in the UK children conceived outside of marriage are 4 to 5 times more likely to be aborted than those conceived within marriage. SPUC’s experience is that we simply cannot afford to ignore other issues which are linked in one way or another with abortion.

Yes, we lost the battle against legalised same-sex “marriage” but it was vital to fight it. Laws are powerful but so are ideas. Through our grassroots and national campaign against this wicked legislation, which deprives children of a father or a mother, we have kept alive within society an understanding of the truth about human nature and about the truth and meaning of human sexuality. As Pope John Paul II memorably put it in Evangelium Vitae, number 97: “In particular, there is a need for education about the value of life from its very origins. It is an illusion to think that we can build a true culture of human life if we do not help the young to accept and experience sexuality and love and the whole of life according to their true meaning and in their close interconnection. Sexuality,

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which enriches the whole person, ‘manifests its inmost meaning in leading the person to the gift of self in love’. The trivialization of sexuality is among the principal factors which have led to contempt for new life. Only a true love is able to protect life. There can be no avoiding the duty to offer, especially to adolescents and young adults, an authentic education in sexuality and in love, an education which involves training in chastity as a virtue which fosters personal maturity and makes one capable of respecting the ‘spousal’ meaning of the body.”

CM: What do you consider the most serious mistakes that have been made in the pro-life battle?

JS: If we want to protect the unborn from abortion, the practice of campaigning for laws which expressly permit the killing of certain unborn children needs to be completely abandoned: for example, laws which permit unborn children to be killed in the case of rape, or disability, or before the human heart begins to beat.

A law which permits the killing of certain unborn children is not a just law. It is an unjust law which, in the words of St Thomas Aquinas “ceases to be a law and becomes instead an act of violence”.11 Pope John Paul II in this connection, citing the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and its 1974 Declaration on Procured Abortion, said: “In the case of an intrinsically unjust law, such as a law permitting abortion or euthanasia, it is therefore never licit to obey it, or to ‘take part in a propaganda campaign in favour of such a law, or vote for it’.”12 The meaning of this statement quoted in Evangelium Vitae (no 73) is 100 per cent clear, and yet during the past fifty years, pro-life leaders, myself included, have backed legislation which permits abortion in certain circumstances on the basis that such legislation is an improvement on an existing law and will save lives. Our pro-life movement must stop backing unjust laws or “acts of violence” as St Thomas Aquinas calls them. Doing so sends the message to friends and opponents alike that abortion can be the right thing to do. Is it not likely that one of the reasons why the evil of abortion is so overwhelmCAL X M ARI AE

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“After two billion abortions and rising, the greatest slaughter in recorded human history, many pro-life leaders have taken on board the extent to which the separation of the procreative and unitive ends of the conjugal act has been a catalyst for the culture of death, advancing in every nation on earth.” ingly accepted in particular circumstances by our fellow citizens, including our fellow Catholics, is that pro-life groups themselves have almost universally been prepared to accept legalised abortion in certain circumstances?

Many of us have justified our campaigns in support of unjust laws by quoting the very next paragraph in section 73 of Evangelium Vitae, where Pope John Paul II famously wrote: “A particular problem of conscience can arise in cases where a legislative vote would be decisive for the passage of a more restrictive law, aimed at limiting the number of authorized abortions, in place of a more permissive law already passed or ready to be voted on … In a case like the one just mentioned, when it is not possible to overturn or completely abrogate a pro-abortion law, an elected official, whose absolute personal opposition to procured abortion was well known, could licitly support proposals aimed at limiting the harm done by such a law and at lessening its negative consequences at the level of general opinion and public morality. This does not in fact represent an illicit cooperation with an unjust law, but rather a legitimate and proper attempt to limit its evil aspects.”

For over 25 years perhaps the majority of pro-life leaders have interpreted this paragraph as meaning that politicians may vote for, and campaigners may campaign for, laws which of themselves expressly permit abortions. But this is contrary to reason. In the paragraph immediately preceding this one, Pope John Paul II wrote: “In the case of an intrinsically unjust law, such as a law permitting abortion or euthanasia, it is S UM ME R 2 021

John Smeaton meets Pope John Paul II at a gathering of pro-life leaders who fought successfully at the 1994 UN Cairo conference on population and development against an international agreement calling for abortion on demand worldwide.

therefore never licit to obey it, or to take part in a propaganda campaign in favour of such a law, or vote for it.”

According to Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, “the principle (or law) of non-contradiction is the firmest … without the principle of non-contradiction we could not know anything that we do know”.13 On the basis of the principle of non-contradiction, therefore, it is not possible for this statement to mean both one can vote for an unjust law and one cannot vote for an unjust law – on the basis of one’s motives in doing so or for any other reason.

In other words, pro-life leaders and philosophers need to stop tying themselves up in knots trying to work out what Pope John Paul II meant when he wrote about limiting the harm of existing legislation; instead, we should simply recognise the fact that the constant, unchanging and unchangeable truth 37

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“As soon as we concede the principle that we must never carry out abortions, whatever the circumstances, we are lost spiritually, morally and politically... Once we go down this road, we start to think that moral absolutes do not matter so much – that the Church’s teaching does not matter so much, just as long as we can stop some abortions.

And finally, we and our campaigns will not matter so much.” taught by the Catholic Church is that an unjust law ceases to be a law at all and becomes instead an act of violence for which it is never permissible to campaign or vote for.

Imagine it was lawful in our countries to kill the children of Catholic parents or to kill the children of Muslim parents. Imagine a member of your parliament put forward legislation to stop the killing of white Catholic children but which authorised the killing of black Catholic children. It would clearly be wrong to vote for such a law and to campaign for such a law, however many lives, allegedly, such a law would save.

Another fundamental error made by many prolife leaders is committed by those who argue that it is not abortion to remove deliberately a “pre-viable” baby from his or her mother’s womb, such as by inducing labour pre-viability. Now, what is intended here definitely constitutes an assault on the baby: an assault which kills that child. The assault is intended, even if death as such is not. This is not an operation targeted just on the mother – it is very deliberately targeted on the baby and the baby’s own tissues. It is not like an ectopic pregnancy operation where the operation is (or should be) targeted on the damaged tube of the mother which is removed, affecting the baby as a mere side-effect.

This is not just my opinion. It is the position of the Catholic Church – and a truth of the natural moral law binding on all.

In 1988, the Pontifical Council for the Interpretation of Legislative Texts was asked the following question: 38

“Whether abortion, as per canon 1398, is to be understood only with reference to the expulsion of an immature fetus, or also with reference to the killing of the said fetus, by whatever means it may be accomplished, and at whatever time, from the moment of conception.”

And the Pontifical Council’s reply, officially approved by Pope John Paul II, made clear in 1988 that a person is equally guilty of the crime of abortion if they either remove an unborn child from his or her mother before viability or kill an unborn child by other means. Deliberate removal of babies before they can survive outside the womb is morally wrong. That is the teaching of the Church and has been stated explicitly for well over a hundred years.

Our pro-life movement must be opposed to all abortions – never ever, as I have said, promoting or tolerating any form of abortion, even if we think it may save a mother’s life. As soon as we concede the principle that we must never carry out abortions, whatever the circumstances, we are lost spiritually, morally and politically. We would not kill a mother to save her baby. We would not lethally assault a mother to save her baby. Nor should we assault a baby to save the mother. Once we go down this road, we start to think that moral absolutes do not matter so much – that the Church’s teaching does not matter so much, just as long as we can stop some abortions. And finally, we and our campaigns will not matter so much.

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legislation which do not involve voting for an “act of violence” as St Thomas Aquinas puts it. I recommend Dr Colin Harte’s book Changing Unjust Laws Justly for further reflections in this fundamentally important area.

Above all, we must remember that our Parliaments, our Legislative Assemblies, our Houses of Congresses will not change laws which permit the destruction of unborn children until the hearts and minds of our fellow citizens have been changed – and only an unequivocal witness to the sanctity of innocent human life can succeed in convincing our fellow citizens of the inherent evil of abortion. If instead, our witness to the world is that direct abortion can be justified in certain circumstances, it is no longer treated as an inherent evil and we will convince no one, least of all legislators, to stop the killing.

CM: Can you point to any victories SPUC has won as examples of success in the pro-life movement?

JS: Every baby’s life saved and mother’s health and happiness spared from abortion is a victory. I pay tribute to the extraordinary work of the pro-life caring organisations, too many to mention, which work day and night providing selfless help to mothers with whom they make contact through their courageous witness and promotion of their services. And it is courageous, even heroic work they do, as powerful media organisations endeavour to entrap dedicated

John Smeaton lobbies at the UN Cairo conference (1994) where he led a worldwide team of 200 pro-life leaders successfully campaigning against an international agreement calling for global abortion on demand.

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volunteers and experienced professionals as they try to reach out to women experiencing acute difficulties of one kind or another.

SPUC’s political, academic and educational work, plus our legal interventions, involve much unglamorous labour – not least at the local level by our army of volunteers who lobby MPs, traipse round their neighbourhoods giving out our information, speaking in schools, holding “pro-life chains” of witness, and an endless round of other tasks.

Very rarely, but every now and then, it is as though the terrifying reality of abortion simultaneously becomes very clear to a significant number of people living in the UK and, as a consequence, SPUC has been able to take decisive political action because of popular revulsion towards the killing of unborn children. Those of mature years and long memories in SPUC will recall certain occasions over the past 55 years when the consciences of our fellow citizens have been deeply stirred by some major development in Parliament or in the courts.

For example, in 1994, some doctors in Britain launched a campaign to be allowed to develop techniques for taking eggs or ovaries from aborted infants to create babies for childless women. Remarkably, for once, public revulsion to such a grotesque practice was widely reported by the media and the views of the pro-life movement were given major publicity. From January 1994 until the middle of summer, SPUC led a massive national effort to rally public opinion against the creation of babies from the eggs of aborted infants. Firstly, we launched a public petition campaign and gathered 500,000 names against the practice. Next, we distributed nearly a million leaflets to households across Britain and roused churches nationwide. As a result, Parliament was swamped with a protest unlike anything it had ever seen according to politicians at that time.

Tens of thousands of letters and telephone calls to Parliament sent a message to politicians and the message was not ignored. The House of Lords, following a vote in the House of Commons, provided the pro-life movement with an historic victory when it voted by 57 to 35 to outlaw the use of eggs from aborted girls in creating embryos for implantation into infertile women.

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Bear in mind how extraordinary and unexpected a development this was. Only three years after Parliament had voted by a massive majority in favour of destructive human embryo experimentation, despite SPUC’s campaigning efforts, the Society found itself in a position to use its decades of campaigning and political experience to rally public opinion to get a law passed by Parliament to stop in its tracks the exploitation of little girls killed in the womb. Against all the odds, as we pointed out at the time, “we had won an important legislative victory on the sanctity of human life” because a pro-life chord had been struck in the hearts of ordinary people and SPUC seized the moment with the result that, for once, our pro-life cause was able to win the day.

I believe, and I know from experience, that in their heart of hearts the British people are revolted by abortion, by the killing of helpless tiny children in their mothers’ wombs.

What we did in 1994, was the result of building a peaceful army of door-to-door and church door educational activists throughout the country, and (on the basis of solid research and clear briefings for supporters and politicians) launching swift, timely, well-judged political action when a good opportunity presented itself.

Using such an approach, in 2008, SPUC defeated attempts by the pro-abortion lobby effectively to decriminalise abortion when our opponents were poised to remove virtually all remaining protection for unborn children during the passage of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act. Seizing the moment and using such an approach, in 2010, SPUC successfully halted attempts to make relationships and sex education compulsory but, tragically, that historic battle was lost in 2018 when the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales backed the government’s legislation.

And in 2015, using the same approach, SPUC in concert with other pro-life groups and church leaders, inflicted a significant defeat on the euthanasia lobby in the House of Commons. MPs voted by 330 to 118 to reject Rob Marris MP’s bill to enlist doctors to assist suicide for certain people. The vote of 330 represents an absolute majority of MPs. What SPUC did in 1994, in 2008, 2010 and in 2015 in Britain, we also did in Northern Ireland and in the Republic of Ireland.

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Some of the pro-life movement’s and SPUC’s greatest historical achievements have been in Ireland, namely constitutional protection for unborn children in the Republic of Ireland in 1982, where Phyllis Bowman, my predecessor, played such an important role, and, in Northern Ireland, where there was over 50 years of successful resistance to pro-abortion legislation in a part of the world which is constitutionally part of the UK, a nation that promotes legalised abortion throughout the world.

What a scandal this was for the pro-abortion lobby in the UK: the nation which is the home of the headquarters of International Planned Parenthood Federation, the biggest abortion-promoting organisation in the world!

And amongst our many victories in the prolife battle in Northern Ireland was our defeat of the British Government in the courts in 2009 and 2010. Jim Wells, a former minister of health and the longest ever serving Democratic Unionist Party Member of the Legislative Assembly, expressed the importance of SPUC’s achievement like this: “If the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) had done nothing else in its 45-year history than defeat Northern Ireland’s health department abortion guidance in the high court, that achievement alone would have justified its existence. I ad-

Jim Wells MLA, former health minister and deputy speaker of Northern Ireland Assembly, opens the new SPUC office in central Belfast in 2019. Also attending were Baroness Nuala O'Loan, Jim Shannon, DUP MP for Strangford, Alban Magginness, the former SDLP MLA, Christopher Stallford, DUP MLA for South Belfast, Pat Convery and Declan Boyle, independent Irish nationalist councillors on Belfast City Council and Declan O'Loan, SDLP, a member of Ballymena Borough Council.

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mire the courage SPUC had in defending in the high court Northern Ireland’s legal prohibition of abortion. The action could have destroyed SPUC financially. However, if SPUC had not taken the case, our meeting today would be occurring in a very different atmosphere and environment.” Jim Wells said that SPUC was the “cavalry riding over the hill” safeguarding Northern Ireland from the Department of Health’s attempt to widen the practice of abortion. By the grace of God, SPUC’s actions have saved tens of thousands of lives, albeit the British Government and Parliament have now tragically imposed barbaric abortion legislation on the Province – legislation which not a single Northern Ireland politician voted to introduce.

Another major legal victory was in 2011, in what became known as the “bedroom abortions” case, legal arguments submitted by SPUC’s lawyers helped to prevent a change in the law that would have allowed abortions to take place in the home.

Mr Justice Supperstone, when making his ruling, cited the argument put forward by SPUC’s lawyers on the advice of Paul Tully, SPUC’s long-serving general secretary at the time. Sadly the government introduced abortion at home in 2018 – but tens of thousands of lives were saved during those precious seven years.

All these victories show that we in the pro-life movement can slow things down, but ultimately, without the help of the Church, the culture of life cannot advance.

CM: So what is the role of religion and Catholicism in the pro-life movement? Should it be kept out of the pro-life battle?

JS: On the contrary, pro-life organisations and the wider community must be fortified by unequivocal, unyielding voices of Catholic Church officials and bishops throughout the world.

The pro-life movement must surely show humility. Many of the moral principles by which people have lived throughout virtually the whole of human history are being systematically outlawed by the legislatures of powerful nations and unjust laws are being all but imposed on less powerful nations and States worldwide: think of the moral law that parents are the primary educators of their children; or of moral laws governing sexual behaviour; or of the

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increasingly successful efforts, in relation to the sanctity of human life, to outlaw medical professionals’ conscientious objection to abortion and euthanasia.

What’s more: those same moral laws are being rejected in ordinary families worldwide, and the code of morality by which the overwhelming majority of people have lived throughout the history of Christendom is being transformed, including within our own Catholic communities and families, especially on matters relating to the sanctity of human life and sexual ethics. Think, for example, of the widespread acceptance amongst our Catholic families of cohabitation, of the acceptance or refusal to criticise homosexual relationships, of the acceptance of birth control including abortifacient birth control, of the acceptance of legalised abortion in certain circumstances, of the acceptance of explicit sex education in schools, and of in vitro fertilisation and euthanasia.

Pro-life organisations need urgently to be reinforced by the prophetic and unequivocal voices of bishops throughout the world faithfully preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ – for two reasons: because without Christ we cannot do anything; and because the full Gospel message about the truth and meaning of human sexuality and the sanctity of human life, teaching which is also part of the natural law written on all human hearts, is nowhere more fully spelt out than in the teaching of the Church.

To my good pro-life colleagues who argue that we should keep the Church out of the pro-life battle, I respectfully put a variation of St Peter’s question to Our Blessed Lord: To whom shall we go? The Church has the words of eternal life.

In 2014 I had the privilege of addressing the Catholic bishops of Nigeria in Abuja. I told them: “Bishops have a unique apostolic moral power, to preach the Gospel of Life. I was strongly reminded of the unique apostolic moral power of the bishops recently when I listened at Mass on the Feast of the Ascension, to Christ’s last words to the apostles on earth, when, according to St Matthew: ‘Jesus came up and spoke to them. He said: “All power is given to me in heaven and in earth. Going therefore, teach ye all nations …

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Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.’”

“These words were addressed to the apostles and they are meant, above all, for the successors of the apostles. Bishops have a charism bestowed on them by Jesus Christ just before His Ascension. That’s why Pope John Paul II emphasised in Evangelium Vitae: ‘Bishops ... are the first ones called to be untiring preachers of the Gospel of life’ – because when you speak the Gospel truth in love, your words reverberate with authority, both in the hearts of the faithful and in the hearts of people who do not know Christ – just as Christ’s did.”

Of course, there is a terrifying paradox here. Never before has the world needed the authority of the church founded by Christ so much to save it from complete disaster. And never before has the church founded by Christ appeared to be less visible. The hungry sheep look up and are not fed in the overwhelming majority of our home dioceses or by the Vatican authorities. If I have one prayer only as I approach retirement as SPUC’s CEO, it is that, by the grace of God and through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, there will be a miraculous transformation of bishops throughout the world which will set the pro-life movement on fire.

Britain is a protestant country where the culture of death has taken centre stage and where Boris Johnson, a strongly pro-abortion prime minister is in power. I believe that even in protestant Britain if we had one good bishop proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ, one good bishop proclaiming the truth about human sexuality if we had one good bishop preaching and urging teachers and parents to train young people in the virtue of chastity, teaching people about the cruelty and injustice of abortion …

I believe that this one good bishop could do more in 47 days to end abortion than I have done in 47 years. Jesus Christ astonished people because he spoke with power – and he has passed on that gift to the apostles and to the bishops of our day, the successors of the apostles.

Albeit, as the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children’s chief executive, I lead a non-confessional group, I have never hidden my 42

Catholic faith during the years working for the Society. There is no reason why any pro-lifer should do so.

Indeed, there is something even more precious than the sanctity of human life, and that is the divine life truly present in the Holy Eucharist in Jesus Christ’s Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. Our greatest treasure on earth is the Blessed Sacrament.

Tragically, just as it is impossible to number the unborn children – made in the image and likeness of God – killed worldwide not only under permissive abortion legislation, but also those killed as a result of abortifacient contraceptive drugs and devices, and through IVF procedures, it is also impossible to calculate the desecrations of the Body of Christ in the sacrilegious treatment of the Holy Eucharist brought about by the practice of Communion in the hand.

The truth about the sanctity of human life before birth cannot triumph without the recognition of the truth about Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist. Only when we restore the understanding of the sanctity of divine life present in the Holy Eucharist and act accordingly, will we recover the proper understanding of the sanctity of human life.

CM: What should the pro-life movement say and do about abortion-tainted vaccines?

JS: The pro-life movement must seek, in every way, to intensify its battle against legalised abortion. That is both the appropriate moral and the appropriate practical response to the terrifying reality of not only abortion-tainted vaccines but also abortion-tainted everyday medications taken by more or less everybody who is alive today. Readers of this issue of Calx Mariae can see what some of those medications are in an article which addresses the most frequent moral questions concerning abortion-tainted vaccines. (See page 3) And we need to urge our bishops to take the lead in this. It is not enough for our bishops to reassure Catholics and people generally that it is not sinful to take abortion-tainted vaccines – just as it is not sinful to take abortion-tainted medications. They should be using the opportunity provided by the Covid pandemic, and the unprecedented public awareness of the evil use of the remains of aborted CAL X M ARI AE

fift y-five years of fighting for life

“The truth about the sanctity of human life before birth cannot triumph without the recognition of the truth about Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist. Only when we restore the understanding of the sanctity of divine life present in the Holy Eucharist and act accordingly, will we recover the proper understanding of the sanctity of human life.” babies in the creation of various medical products, to urge the faithful and all men and women of goodwill to call for an end to legalised abortion and the industries legalised abortion has spawned.

The appalling phenomenon of abortion-tainted vaccines and medications are the fruit of the culture of death. And, as I explained earlier there is no way, humanly speaking, that pro-life groups on our own can reverse or move on from this great paradigm shift towards the culture of death in which our children live and breathe.

For very many years, in talks, blog posts, and articles in pro-life and Catholic journals, I have been calling on church leaders to take the lead in

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the pro-life battle. Instead, they not only sit on the sidelines, Catholic leaders, including the pope and the bishops of England and Wales, have actually taken the side of the pro-death lobby.

We urgently need to call on church leaders to form the consciences of the Catholic faithful on the teaching of the Church on the sanctity of human life. Their failure to do so has led our health services worldwide to be dominated by the culture of death.

The bishops need to fight to make abortion illegal.

Church leaders need to call on governments and industry to stop exploiting the unborn in producing medications and vaccines which may be needed by every person on earth at some stage in their lives.

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CM: What hope do you have for the future?

JS: The pro-life movement has, over the decades, become more firmly established, professional and accomplished in its work in many diverse spheres of activity in various nations, including landmark academic research and educational initiatives, and securing important political and legal victories, resulting in lives saved and women and families given life-changing assistance.

Despite the many threats and apparently overwhelming setbacks, the pro-life movement appears to be poised in 2021 to grow immensely in numbers, in influence, and in its strategic planning, including building ever-closer cooperation with orthodox members and leaders of the Catholic Church.

I am delighted that the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, as I retire as CEO, will be in very good hands to take our pro-life witness forward in the right way, based not only on what has been learned over the decades but also based on, and energised by, fresh ideas in order to carry out our campaigns more effectively.

There has never been a better time for the lay faithful to spread the Gospel of Life – encouraged by the rare exceptional bishops who, as faithful successors of the apostles, sacrifice the respect of their peers by courageously handing on the teaching of Christ.

In an entirely different and secular context, the English poet John Milton wrote: “The hungry sheep look up and are not fed”. The hungry sheep are all around us. At this time when so many are disturbed

by US politics and its possible consequences for life and for the family, as well as by historically unprecedented draconian Covid restrictions of freedom imposed in apparently every country throughout the world – now is the time for the pro-life movement to come out fighting and proclaiming the pro-life message in its fullness, namely that:

stable and flourishing society and is the greatest protector of children, born and unborn.

• Marriage and the protection for human life before birth is mortally wounded by giving legal recognition to same-sex unions.

• The procreative and unitive ends of the conjugal act cannot licitly be separated; the rejection of this truth lies at the root of modern attacks on life and the family.

• Parents are the primary educators of their children and the protection of this right is essential for building a new “culture of life”.

• A human being, made in the image and likeness of God from the moment of conception, is sacred and each and every human life is called to serve God in this life, from conception until natural death, and be happy with Him in the next.

• Marriage, the exclusive, life-long union of one man and one woman, is the foundation of a

11.

Now is the time for Catholics and pro-life people of all faiths and none to begin fearlessly to proclaim the whole truth about the sanctity of human life, marriage and the family.

Endnotes: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

12.

13.

Letter from Sir John Peel in SPUC’s archive.

The Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA) was founded in 1935 for the legalisation of abortion.

Eugene Volokh, “DePaul University forbids College Republicans’ posting of ‘Unborn Lives Matter’ poster”, The Washington Post, 24 Oct 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh conspiracy/wp/2016/10/24/depaul-university-forbids-college-republicans-posting-of-unborn-lives-matter-poster/?utm_term=. a25f3584a0cf Renate Lindeman, “C_E_N_S_O_R_E_D: video ‘Dear Future Mom’”, HuffPost News, 18 Nov 2016, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/c-e-n-s-o-r-e-dvideo-dear-future-mom_us_582f8e6fe4b0d28e55214ef6 Theodore Bunker, “New French Law Bans Pro-Life Websites That Appear Neutral”, Newsmax, 7 Dec 2016, https://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/French-LawBans-Pro-Life/2016/12/07/id/762667/; For a report in French, see http://www. marianne.net/ivg-les-senateurs-adoptent-penalisation-sites-web-faisant-desinformation-100246662.html See: http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/abortion/Pages/Introduction.aspx The potential social influence of the Catholics in the 1960s can be seen in the fact that 12% of marriages in England and Wales took place in a Catholic Church (compared with 6% in 2010).

Cardinal Heenan’s words proved to be prophetic. In a paper entitled “Infanticide” published in Utilitas, a philosophy journal in 2007, Jeff McMahon, a professor of philosophy at Oxford University endorsed infanticide as an option in certain circumstances. He writes: “The common view that infanticide is morally different in kind from abortion, is difficult to defend, given that there can be no intrinsic differences between a viable fetus and a newborn infant of the same age (calculating age from conception rather than from birth). To achieve consistency, we may need to abandon either the view that post-viability abortions can be justified, even to avert a significant harm to the pregnant woman or the view that infanticide is morally just as serious as the killing of an older child or adult”.

John Smeaton, “A true understanding of conscience: the necessity for heroic witness on the part of the pro-life and pro-family movement”, Calx Mariae, Summer 2018, pp 26-31.

Children and Social Work Act 2017.

Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 93, a. 3, ad 2um.

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Declaration on Procured Abortion (no 98), 18 November 1974, No. 22: AAS 66 (1974), 744.

Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Aristotle on Non-Contradiction: http:// plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-noncontradiction/

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ROME MARCH FOR LIFE 2021

For a culture that cherishes every life without compromise

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n 22 May, the Rome March for Life returned to the public square at the heart of Christendom with great success and was joined by leading politicians and prelates including His Eminence Cardinal Burke. Among the speakers were Monsignor Antonio Suetta, the Bishop of Ventimiglia-Sanremo, John Smeaton, CEO of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, Janusz Kotański, the Polish ambassador to the Holy See and Eduard Habsburg, the ambassador to the Holy See from Hungary, followed by moving personal testimonies. This was the tenth March on the public square (leaving aside the one last year when we had to give our witness online).

On the day of the march, Via dei Fori Imperiali was truly a glorious sight: crowded with children, families, religious and pro-life people against the dramatic backdrop of the Colosseum. Although the traditional march had to be replaced with a stationary demonstration as Italy is only beginning to relax its Covid restrictions, it was clear to all present that the March for Life is not about marching but about S UM ME R 2 021

its message given in the public square by the people who truly believe in it: “Yes to life from conception without exception or compromise.”

On the eve of the march, His Eminence Cardinal Burke celebrated Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament in the Church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, accompanied by the choir of Msgr.

Pablo Colino, former director of the Vatican Julia Chapel. His Eminence George Cardinal Pell as well as other prelates and clergy were also present.

Leading a meditation before the Benediction, Cardinal Burke urged the faithful to pray “that the respect, protection and care of every human life, created in the image and likeness of God and redeemed by the outpouring of the Precious Blood of God the Incarnate Son, be restored”. And added: “Let us go, with our hearts united with the heart of the Lord, under His banner and not behind the slogans of the world. Yes, the battle is tough.

Yes, we feel like David in front of Goliath. But Christ is here, especially in the Blessed Sacra45

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ment, to reassure us in our cooperation with Him in the work of salvation, to purify our hearts from fear, doubt, confusion, error and sin.”

The representatives of different groups present on the day of the march were too numerous to mention here. The area immediately in front of the stage, however, was lined with doctors, pharmacists and nurses in their white gowns, young women and a crowd of children.

Although the March for Life is apolitical, a number of politicians were present – indicating readiness on their part to work towards the repeal of the abortion law and changing all legislation opposed to natural law.

Abortion in Italy was legalised on 22 May 1978, with the passing of “Law 194” which made abortion legal for any reason within the first 90 days of pregnancy, and with a doctor’s certification after that. Since 1978 more than six million children are estimated to have been aborted in Italy. Italian culture which has always been associated with large families changed dramatically after the legalisation of abortion. Today, the Italian birth rate is among the lowest in Europe. In 2020 the number of births in Italy was the lowest since World War II. Two ambassadors representing nations which are taking a stand in defence of the family delivered

a strong message affirming the inherent link between the respect for life and the family and keeping the faith. Janusz Kotanski, Poland’s ambassador to the Holy See, outlined the progress made in his country to protect life and the family. He spoke of the fight for the abolition of eugenic abortion in Poland – a battle that has attracted international attention since Poland’s highest court ruled, in October 2020, that abortion on the grounds of disability is unconstitutional. “We must not be afraid!” the ambassador reassured the crowd, “The good always wins in the end. We just have to serve it with all the commitment and courage we have.”

Eduard Habsburg-Lothringen, Hungary’s ambassador to the Holy See, spoke of the fruits of the pro-family policies implemented by the Hungarian government over the past nine years, such as a 40 per cent increase in marriages, a 24 per cent decrease in divorces, a 30 per cent decrease in abortions. In 2019 the birth rate increased 9.4 per cent and marriages 100 per cent. He attributed these results to the real commitment to helping families and a change in mentality which recognised that many children are in fact a gift to society. “We need a change of attitude, making the family visible in society,” he said. “It is always a great help if key members of the government are not only Christians but speak and act as Christians. Because Christian faith and family go together! Let’s pray that Italy will be full of children again!” The ambassador, who is also the archduke of the House of Austria, concluded by leading the crowd in singing the Regina Caeli.

John Smeaton, chief executive of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, spoke of the lessons he has learnt in his 47 years working for the pro-life movement on the national and international level, emphasising, above all, the necessity of church leaders to speak out boldly against abortion.

He said: “The pro-life movement is part of a much wider and deeper historic crusade for the restoration of Christian civilisation. Let’s not forget that we fight for ‘going back to the real normal’; we are united in the fight to end abortion completely and in the restoration of a civilisation where

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human life is valued without exception. It really is not normal to kill children in the womb. May this time that is marked by a sense of isolation, distance, and separation; also be a time to unite with ever greater force and to be united in the truth of Christ.”

Two powerful personal testimonies followed. First there was Anna Bonetti, a 23-year-old pro-life activist, who was born deaf but is able to speak thanks to a cochlear implant and speech therapy. She said: “I converted to the pro-life cause the moment I learnt the shocking truth about the abortion of deaf children. In fact, the connexin 26 gene that caused my deafness, is identifiable by means of prenatal diagnosis, silenced in the silence of media hypocrisy. A diagnosis after which most of the children like me will never see the light of day.

For a long time, I felt like a mistake, a flawed piece of human fabrication.

But then I realised that the mistake was not me but the way in which society had seen me up to that moment and I believe it is essential to restore to everyone the dignity they deserve.

Sometimes there is the idea that being against abortion means being against freedom, in reality, the only freedom that is denied is that of the unborn child.”

Next, Anna and Dario Alinti, a couple from Milan, who had aborted their child in 1980 gave a most moving witness of the grief following an abortion.

Anna shared that she carried this wound inside her for over 40 years. “I was aware that no one could ever give me back what I had lost that day. I have never forgiven myself and I don’t think I could, although my husband and I have received many gifts: six children, including three in heaven, four grandchildren and one who is about to be born in a few months.” She went on to explain how “Rachel's Vineyard”, the ministry helping women and S UM ME R 2 021

families after abortion was instrumental in their conversion and healing, having trusted their child to the Lord as one of the martyred innocents. Her husband Dario made a moving appeal to men to care for their wives: “I regret not having been by the side of my wife, but having left her alone with the choice. If I had been by her side, she would not have done it.” His testimony was a strong plea to all men to stand beside women and show them an alternative to abortion, a tragedy from which there is no turning back.

Msgr. Antonio Suetta, the bishop of Ventimiglia-Sanremo, offered his bold and powerful message via a live video link. “I am here,” he said, “to bear witness to the commitment of the Church, of believers and of so many people of sound conscience to promote, serve and protect human life from its beginning to its natural end, in all its variety, and especially when life is most vulnerable and suffering.”

He encouraged those present with his unequivocal support when he said: “I look with affection and confidence at these people, whom I feel part of; who, as St John Paul II himself stated in Evangelium Vitae, ‘are the people of life’ (cf EV no 79) and who are called to act accordingly.”

“As a bishop of the Church of Christ,” he concluded, “I strongly feel the responsibility incumbent on pastors: ‘may they never be so grievously irresponsible as to betray the truth and their own mission by proposing personal ideas contrary to the Gospel of life as faithfully presented and interpreted by the Magisterium.’ (cf EV no 82) For this reason, I am here today: to give witness, strengthened by the courage that does not come from me but from Christ and also from you, the people of life. Truly, ‘for I have many people in this city’. (cf Acts 18:10)

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“History and the world are full of characters like Herod, and we can look at them plainly and serenely knowing that ‘non praevalebunt’. I conclude my greeting to you with affection and with a passage from the book of Sirach as a word of blessing: ‘Strive even to death for the truth and the Lord God will fight for you.’” (Sir 4:28) Virginia Coda Nunziante, President of the March for Life, concluded the event, by reiterating that since it began in 2011, the march has been a public witness to the inviolability of every life as a gift from God and to opposition to Italy’s iniquitous Law 194 which has resulted in the death of more than six million innocent victims. We must increase our commitment to being the voice for those who cannot speak or defend themselves, she noted, and for this cause, the march is, above all, a unifying event.

Before the final scene of this year’s March for Life in Rome, when many children and young people were invited to join her on the stage, Virginia Coda Nunziante defined the great task that lies ahead: “The battle against the pro-abortion culture must be fought in defence of the moral order of values – that is, of that natural and moral law which has its cause and ultimate end in God. We 48

have always submitted our battle to His glory and to His interests, as simple instruments of God, who is the director and always the winner.

“We must deeply desire that the whole of our society returns to being truly Christian because only then peace, harmony, and prosperity will be found. And I say this as an Italian citizen who deeply loves her country but also as a Catholic, perfectly aware that society must either convert or move towards an inexorable decline.”

And pointing to the children on the stage she said: “I am also convinced that the cause for life, the good of our country is in their hands: Our Lady will guide their steps in the future, as she has always guided us. We all have a great responsibility to protect these young children from an attack, unprecedented in history, to destroy their purity and innocence as well as to protect the innocents who are being killed in the womb.

“Today we have the satisfaction of having fought a good battle in defence of life, against abortion, without exception and without compromise.

“We return to our homes with a heart full of trust in the future because Divine Providence never fails to help those who take sides in defence of Truth and the Good.”

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ABORTION, THE CRISIS IN THE CHURCH, AND THE POWER OF THE PAST

by DR J O S E P H S H AW

T

he Abortion Act of 1967 was a critical moment for the cause of life in Britain. It is not a coincidence that this Act was passed in the context of the sexual revolution, and was accompanied and followed by various revolts against authority world-wide, by university students and others, in 1968. It is also not surprising that the historic pressures which led to all these events also had their effect on the Catholic Church. The loss of self-confidence which the Church was experiencing in the years leading up to 1967, and which continued thereafter, decisively weakened the Church’s response to the proposed legislation, and has undermined her support for the pro-life cause ever since. It is this loss of self-confidence which I want to examine in this article.

The Second Vatican Council was announced in 1959 and ran from 1962 to 1965. It was not called to combat a specific heresy, as Councils often have been, but addressed itself instead to a wide range of topics. As has been noted in Calx Mariae before (see issue no 11), all but one of the “schemata” approved

by Pope John XXIII as the basis for discussion were rejected, and new ones created. The result was a very open-ended discussion, in which everything seemed to be up for debate: or at least, those things which the well-organised liberal party at the Council wished to put forward. After the Council ended, it was widely said that many changes which the official documents had resisted were nevertheless implied by the “spirit” of the Council, and would come sooner or later, and indeed in many cases they did. The first act of the Council (in December 1963), Sacrosantum Concilium, its conclusions about the liturgy, set in train a complete revision of the Mass, which culminated in the 1970 Missal. A thorough revision of Canon Law was also mandated S UM ME R 2 021

by the Council; the new Code finally appeared in 1983. While these vast projects were still underway, it was argued, by those who found such arguments convenient, that the existing rules did not reflect the will of the Council, and accordingly should be ignored. In the case of the liturgy, starting in 1964 a series of intermediate guidelines were issued, and “experimentation” positively encouraged.

In short, the febrile atmosphere of expectation and debate before the Council gave way, before the end of 1962, to a period of intensifying chaos.

The chaos went beyond the liturgy and canon law. Pope Paul VI felt it necessary to reiterate many basic truths of the Faith, notably in his documents Mysterium Fidei (1965) and the Credo of the People of God (1968), as well as Humanae Vitae (1968). One can see much of Pope John Paul II’s later, prodigious, output in the same light: attempts to shore up, in one area of faith after another, the fundamental doctrines of the Church.

This effort had the unfortunate effect of reinforcing the idea that the perennial teaching of the Church could not be taken for granted on the basis of documents promulgated before the Council.

DISPERSION OF THE FATHERS, SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL. LOTHAR WOLLEH (1930-1979).

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Until a doctrine had been restated, perhaps in a modified form, for the Catholics of today, it seemed to be open to question. Even when this had happened, people could hope for further alterations: if it has changed a bit, can’t it change some more?

The documents of the Council and of the Popes after it tended to confirm this attitude, again, by their reluctance to refer to pre-Conciliar documents.

Sacrosanctum Concilium was deliberately stripped of scores of references to the previous Papal Magisterium immediately before it was approved by the Pope. Someone in the Council’s secretariat did not wish to place the document into the context of the teaching and practice of many centuries: it was to be a fresh start, year zero.

Indeed, as the reform unfolded the Church’s liturgy was not so much adapted as replaced, and when people asked for the older version, they frequently met with a very hostile response. Polemical attacks on the ancient liturgy, developed by extremists before the Council, gained wider and wider currency during and after it: it excluded the people, the order of texts was irrational, its prayers showed a defective theology, it was not suitable for “adult Christians”, the Mass-goers of the past were like “dumb spectators”, it was incompatible with 50

“active participation”, it stifled creativity and inculturation, and so on.

Mockery of the older liturgy was often accompanied by liturgical abuses. In part this was a matter of pushing the boundaries of the rules, which kept changing to allow more of the things liturgical radicals wanted: though never enough. But the abuses went further than this. They sought, like the polemic, to undermine the prestige of the old liturgy. They held up sacred things to ridicule, profanation, and destruction. Near me in Oxford historic vestments were sold to a group of actors, and relics burnt in a crematorium. There was an epidemic of altars being destroyed.

In the celebration of the liturgy itself, some priests deliberately ridiculed holy things. To give just one example, in his book Goodbye Good Men Michael Rose describes a priest celebrating Mass in a seminary taking the Communion plate, with crumbs of the Blessed Sacrament upon it after Communion, and instead of putting the particles into the chalice to be consumed, in front of everyone he blew them onto the floor.

The motives for liturgical abuses are many, including ignorance and convenience, and at the far end of the scale, a demonic desire to desecrate.

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Rose’s case shows how desecration can be given a putative justification in terms of the good of souls.

For I fancy the priest involved would have defended himself by saying that he wanted to combat exaggerated and erroneous eucharistic piety among the seminarians. Many priests thought of themselves as mandated by the Council, indeed by the Holy Spirit, to uproot the false piety of the people, so that something better could replace it. The destructive phase was more successful than the constructive one.

The liturgy is the holiest possession of the Church: it contains God’s very presence, and those things most intimately associated with that. It is the frame for the familiar ways we engage with that presence, in the intimacy of our souls. What progressives were claiming, and continue to claim, is that the Church had got the liturgy seriously wrong, and had done so for more than a thousand years.

This message destroyed the faith of many Catholics, including many priests and religious. It was resisted by others, and this created a bitter internal conflict in the Church which is still continuing.

For many Catholics who were not especially well-informed or ideologically committed, it simply caused confusion. Above all, for those inside and outside the Church, it did the opposite of what the Vatican II reforms were supposed to do. Instead of sending the Church on a renewed mission with greater confidence, it filled her children with self-doubt and made the Church look, to outsiders, disunited and unsure of herself. As Pope Paul VI is reported as preaching in 1972: “Referring to the situation of the Church today, the Holy Father affirms that he has a sense that ‘from some fissure the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God’. There is doubt, incertitude, problematic, disquiet, dissatisfaction, confrontation. There is no longer trust of the Church; ... And we are not alert to the fact that we are already the owners and masters of the formula of true life. Doubt has entered our consciences, and it entered by windows that should have been open to the light.”1

geridge, in her book Revolution in the City of God, as a stage other revolutions have also passed through.

The symbols of the old regime must be stripped of their power to command awe and allegiance, by mockery. This process cannot affect one part of the Church’s life and leave the rest intact: if the Church was wrong about the liturgy, she could be wrong about anything, and indeed many liturgical progressives wanted precisely to make this parallel.

For them, the undermining of the Church’s tradition of opposition to abortion and contraception was, indeed, the ultimate object of the exercise.

To say that the Church was not well-placed to oppose the sexual revolution and the imposition of legal abortion in the 1960s and thereafter would be an understatement. The response incumbent upon us today is a complex one, certainly, but I leave readers with a simple point. Many Catholics wish to make use of the authority of the Church as a teacher, an expert on human nature, and as a spiritual power, over so many centuries, in combatting the culture of death. They are right to do so. But if we are to do this, we cannot at the same time say that the Church got spirituality and liturgy spectacularly wrong from some distant era such as the fourth century until the late twentieth. Somehow, the overall credibility and prestige of the Church, taken as a divine institution operating over the millennia, must be vindicated. The issue of the liturgy is for this reason alone unavoidable for Catholics who take seriously the Church’s teaching on the sacredness of human life.

Dr Joseph Shaw teaches Philosophy in Oxford University.

He has published on Ethics and Philosophy of Religion and has edited a book on the liturgy: The Case for Liturgical Restoration: Una Voce Position Papers on the Extraordinary Form (Angelico Press). He is the Chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales and Secretary of Una Voce International. He is married with nine children.

Endnotes: 1.

Paul VI, Sermon on the Feast SS Peter and Paul, 1972 (the ninth anniversary of his Papal Coronation; Italian text: http://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/it/ homilies/1972/documents/hf_p-vi_hom_19720629.html

The deliberate undermining of the prestige of the Church’s past is described by Anne Roche MugS UM ME R 2 021

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PUNISHMENT OR MERCY?

The divine hand in the age of the coronavirus

BY ROBERTO DE MATTEI

by MARIA MADISE

W

hilst there appears to be a never-ending stream of analyses of the implications of the coronavirus, one aspect of the current crisis that has received considerably less attention is the role of Divine Providence without whose loving guidance or permission nothing happens in world history.

This is the theme of Punishment or mercy? The divine hand in the age of the coronavirus, a collection of essays

by Roberto de Mattei, published

by Calx Mariae, an imprint of Voice of the Family. In a series of talks and articles published throughout 2020, the professor of history assesses the pandemic in the light of divine judgment. Referring to saints, popes, accounts of divine interventions recorded throughout salvation history, and recalling Our Lady’s prophetic words to the children in Fatima, Professor de Mattei demonstrates how God punishes the collective sins of men and nations through natural disasters. This is because nations, unlike individuals, do not have an eternal life and therefore receive their reward or punishment on earth.

Punishment as well as true mercy are unpopular concepts for modern men, including many modern Catholic men, because both refer to sin and the need for repentance; furthermore, both confirm the reality of heaven and hell. De Mattei reflects on how it is precisely in the times in history when man has grown insensitive to his offences against God, that He intervenes.

Throughout this collection of articles, written as the crisis unfolded, Professor de Mattei causes us to reflect on the fact that despite the contradictions and confusion that accompany the changing narrative of the coronavirus, they should not derail us from

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considering the hand of God, who is present in every moment and every place of the world. “The only certainty that we have today,” he writes, “either in the case of coronavirus being a natural scourge, or a planned pandemic, is that nothing happens in history that is not willed by Divine Providence, and that God uses mass disasters to punish the sins of mankind.”

And he goes on to ask: “How can we rule out that the instrument of this chastisement might actually be Communist China? Is it not true that in Fatima in 1917, Our Lady foretold a terrible chastisement of humanity if it did not convert?”

On the eve of the Communist Revolution, Our Lady predicted in Fatima that the errors of Russia would spread throughout the world, causing great suffering, unless Russia was consecrated to Her Immaculate Heart. And we may indeed wonder whether the coronavirus, which spread from Communist China and changed our globalised world beyond recognition, might not in fact be a divine reminder that the call to penance has not been taken seriously.

Our Lady showed the three children hell, where the souls of poor sinners go and she told little Jacinta that more sinners go to hell because of sins of impurity than for any other reason.

Today many of these sins are state policy of the most powerful nations. Abortion and so-called same-sex marriage – two of the four sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance – are enshrined in national constitutions of formerly Christian nations. More children have died worldwide through legal abortion than people killed in all the wars of recorded human history. And throughout the

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world, countless children are being corrupted by school sex education, often with the endorsement of Catholic bishops.

And, we might wonder, before they came to an abrupt halt due to the pandemic, how many of the sacrilegious and irreverent Masses which Catholics today accept with indifference, including countless desecrations of the body of Christ through the universal practice of Communion in the hand, are really an affront to God that surpasses even the atrocities just mentioned?

De Mattei is clear in his analysis that Church leaders bear the chief responsibility in the failure of so many to resist the errors of Communism, a creed diametrically opposed to Catholic truth.

“The third part of the [Fatima] secret,” de Mattei writes, “extends to the Church. The sin of the men of the Church, who have the mission of guiding the faithful to eternal life, is not only their moral decadence but ... their apostasy from the faith.”

However, throughout his reflections, de Mattei urges “tranquil courage”. We should be dominated neither by fear of the virus on the one hand nor by suspected powerful secret forces controlling political

reaction to Covid-19. Instead we must fear God who “leads us to recognise the divine hand in the tragic events of our time” in order to unite us with Himself.

De Mattei also reminds us that the message of Fatima allows us to consider current events as a source of hope: “God is infinitely just, but His last word is always that of mercy…Our Lady herself invites us to take refuge in her arms, with these words of mercy and hope which dispel every fear: ‘In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph.’”

John Smeaton, the CEO of the Society of the Protection of Unborn Children, noted that “2020, the year of the coronavirus, will be researched by scholars, churchmen and the man in the street far into the future – and reading Punishment or mercy? The divine hand in the age of the coronavirus, is an excellent place to start”.

Details: Publisher: Calx Mariae Publishing 2021 Paperback: 138 pages Price: UK £9.00/ EU €10.50/ USA $12.50 Available at: www.voiceofthefamily.com

New book

PUNISHMENT OR MERCY? The divine hand in the age of the coronavirus

by R O B E R T O D E M A T T E I

A collection of articles and presentations from March 2020 to January 2021.

Available to order from www.voiceofthefamily.com CALX MARIAE PUBLISHING

fa i t h of o u r fat h e r s

A letter from a Benedictine monk

THE WEAPONS OF OBEDIENCE IV: JUSTICE

SAINT BENEDICT. ENGRAVING BY F.L. SCHMITNER (1703-1761). WELLCOME COLLECTION, LONDON.

Calx Mariae is pleased to continue the series of letters from a Benedictine monk. Each letter discusses one of the most important virtues and principles in the Rule of St Benedict – the rule on which the Western monastic tradition and Christian civilisation in Europe were founded.

In the Prologue of his Rule, St Benedict, the patron saint of Europe writes: “We have therefore to establish a school of the Lord’s service, in the institution of which we hope we are going to establish nothing harsh, nothing burdensome. But if, prompted by the desire to attain to equity, anything be set forth somewhat strictly for the correction of vice or the preservation of charity, do not therefore in fear and terror flee back from the way of salvation of which the beginning cannot but be a narrow entrance. For it is by progressing in the life of conversion and faith that, with heart enlarged and in ineffable sweetness of love, one runs in the way of God’s commandments, so that never deserting His discipleship but persevering until death in His doctrine within the monastery, we may partake by patience in the suffering of Christ and become worthy inheritors of His kingdom.”

After looking at humility, obedience, prudence, fortitude, and temperance in the Rule of St Benedict, in this edition we continue with the virtue of justice. May these reflections on one of the core virtues of monastic life help us to fulfil the duties of our state in life.

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“Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you.” (Mt 6:33) These words of Our Lord from the Sermon on the Mount summarise the last chapter of the Rule of St Benedict. In it our holy father tells us, “Whoever you are, therefore, who are hastening to the heavenly homeland, fulfil with the help of Christ this minimum Rule which we have written for beginners.” This, my brothers and sisters, is our great purpose in life: to hasten to our heavenly homeland. Indeed, our Lord tells us to “rejoice in this, that your names are written in heaven”. (Lk 10:20) At the moment of our baptism, our names were written on the guest list for the eternal wedding feast of the Lamb, and we RSVP for that unending banquet every moment we live in conformity with the will of God. It is for this reason that we take St Benedict as our guide and follow his Rule, that we may confirm that most desirable of reservations by living in a way pleasing to God. And yet St Benedict himself, in his great modesty, calls his Rule “little”; it is only a beginning, a “basic training”, so to speak, that allows us to start the path that leads to all holiness. It is for this reason that he gives as the title for this chapter, “On the fact that the full observance of justice is not established in this rule”.1 “Observe my Rule, by all means,” he wishes to tell us, “but do not think that by doing so you have reached the full measure of holiness”, or in other words, “of all justice”. By so speaking he keeps us humble, so that we do not get puffed up when we find ourselves living according to the Rule. But his manner of speaking also makes clear that justice is synonymous with holiness and, indeed, interchangeable with it. Holiness consists in being interiorly just, in possessing and being governed by the virtues of prudence, fortitude and temperance, as well as faith, hope and charity. We are holy, and just, to the degree that we have these virtues.

In reflecting on and writing to you about the cardinal virtues in my previous letters, it became abundantly clear to me that I possess them very insufficiently, and have a long road ahead of me in order to perfect them. If you also found yourself falling short of the perfection of the virtues, and like me, perceive your own faults and imperfections more than your virtues, be not dismayed! There S UM ME R 2 021

is a great hope for us in the fifth step of humility, which, St Benedict tells us, “is that the monk hide from his Abbot none of the evil thoughts that enter his heart or the sins committed in secret, but that he humbly confess them. The Scripture urges us to this when it says, ‘Reveal your way to the Lord and hope in Him’ (Ps 36:5), and again, ‘Confess to the Lord, for He is good, for His mercy endures forever’ (Ps 105:1). And the Prophet likewise says, ‘My offense I have made known to You, and my iniquities I have not covered up. I said: “I will declare against myself my iniquities to the Lord”; and “You forgave the wickedness of my heart”.’” (RB 7; Ps 31:5) Indeed, Scripture says that the “just man is the first to accuse himself ” (Prov 18:17), teaching us that it is characteristic of justice, and therefore holiness, to confess our shortcomings so as to receive God’s mercy. It is, moreover, through faith in Jesus Christ that we obtain mercy, for “if thou confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in thy heart that God hath raised him up from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For, with the heart, we believe unto justice; but, with the mouth, confession is made unto salvation. For the scripture saith: Whosoever believeth in him, shall not be confounded…and whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord, shall be saved”.

(Rom 10:9-13; Isaiah 28:16; Joel 2:32) Accordingly, St Ambrose says that the foundation of justice is faith.2 And it is in this faith – that God alone is able to set things right in our soul through His grace – that we are able to grow in interior justice.

It is characteristic of this interior justice, finally, to radiate outwards in our relationship with others so that we give to each person what is his or her due, that we treat them as is appropriate, and thus our relationships with others are stamped with equity, honesty and impartiality since they are formed by the virtue of justice.

For St Benedict, it is in God first and foremost that we see the virtue of justice. The first principle to be observed is that “with God there is no respect of persons”. (RB 2; Romans 2:11) By this is meant that God does not “play favorites”. He

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CHRIST THE JUDGE (1447). FRA ANGELICO. CAPPELLA DI SAN BRIZIO, ORVIETO.

does not love one person more than another on account of exterior, carnal or visible things (such as race, lineage, or wealth, or physical qualities such as beauty or strength, or intellectual abilities), as human beings tend to do. On the contrary, He has boundless love for each and every one of us, and desires our happiness and eternal salvation more than we ourselves desire it. To this end, He provides each person with the necessities of life as well as the necessary means of salvation. This does not mean, however, that God’s love is “equal” in the sense that He does not love and reward some people more than others; but rather that He has a different way of determining who is more meritorious and, therefore, more loveable. Now God loves Christ above all; thus, He loves us more to the extent that we are Christlike, to the extent that He sees His dearly beloved Son in us, that He sees the virtues of His Son alive and operative in us, His adopted sons and daughters. Consequently, St Benedict says that “only for one reason are we preferred in His sight: if we be found better than others in good works, humility and obedience”. (cf. RB 2)

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The Abbot, therefore, and each monk in his own way, is called to imitate the love and justice of God. He is to manifest an equal love towards all in the sense that he energetically seeks and spends himself for their salvation; but he can, and indeed, should, love and appropriately reward some more than others if he finds that they excel in the Christlike virtues of good works, humility and obedience.

(RB 2) Furthermore, the Abbot is to ensure that distribution of common necessities is made according to need. St Benedict’s explanation of this principle in RB 34 is so rich for our consideration of justice that it seems only fitting to quote the entire chapter: “Let us follow the Scripture, ‘Distribution was made to each according as anyone had need’ (Acts 4:35). By this we do not mean that there should be respecting of persons (which God forbid), but consideration for infirmities. He who needs less should thank God and not be discontented; but he who needs more should be humbled by the thought of his infirmity rather than feeling important on account of the kind-

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ness shown him. Thus all the members will be at peace. Above all, let not the evil of murmuring appear for any reason whatsoever in the least word or sign. If anyone is caught at it, let him be placed under very severe discipline.”

The first thing to be observed is that St Benedict models his monastic community on the ancient, primary community of the Church in Jerusalem. St Ambrose, in the same homily quoted above, makes the remarkable statement that “the Church is in a certain sense a pattern of justice, the common law for all: she prays in common, works in common, and is tried in common.”3 Now the monastery is the Church in miniature, as expressed by the Latin word ecclesiola. What St Ambrose says about the Church is equally applicable to the monastery: it too is a pattern of justice because all the members are so united in Christ that they pray in common, work in common, and are tried in common, for “we being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another” (Rom 12:5) and “God hath tempered the body together…that there might be no schism in the body; but that the members might be mutually careful one for another. And if one member suffer anything, all the members suffer with it; or if one member glory, all the members rejoice with it”. (1 Cor 12) We must have these thoughts in mind in reading chapter 34 of the Rule: that in the monastery, as in the Church, we are all members of the same body, and we should allow our personal needs to be met by our fellow members while we rejoice that the needs of our brothers are met, even when those needs are different, or more demanding, than our own. He who needs more should be humbled by the extra attention that is rendered to him, while he who needs less should be grateful that he is stronger and can do with less. This, according to St Benedict is justice in the monastery: not only that the Abbot provides for the different needs of his monks, but also that the monks rejoice in having the needs of their brothers met. And it is this kind of justice which engenders genuine and lasting peace, not only in the monastery, but as in every family as well.

Implicit in all of this is the fundamental truth that we are different, not identical! Justice is true when

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it gives to each according to the truth of who he or she is, of what his or her needs truly are. This is far from the false concept of justice and equality that reigns in our liberal, materialistic society, which seeks to eliminate all differences – even the most basic and undeniable differences of bodily sex and gender – so as to establish an “absolute” equality and an “absolute” justice. But this rejection of reality and truth ultimately results not in justice, but in countless injustices, as an ancient maxim of Roman law states: “the height of justice is the height of injustice.”4 What, indeed, could motivate such a drastic elimination of differences, and thereby establish such reckless injustice? It appears that only one foe could inspire such a diabolical scheme – that inseparable friend of the devil himself: envy. It is envy that hates differences and thus it is the perennial enemy of justice. But let us be clear: what envy truly hates is the happiness of others, and therefore it seeks to eliminate any difference that would increase the happiness of another. On the other hand, whenever such differences lead to the misery of another, envy rejoices in these differences and seeks to confirm them. That is justice according to envy: that others be miserable, and I alone be content! Envy ruins communities, destroys marriages, separates friends, inspires hatred between siblings, terminates thriving careers and suffocates the prosperity of others.

Now most people do not experience this awful vice in such an extreme manner, but we all have to deal with, and fight against it, to some degree.

Usually it manifests itself in the tone of one’s voice, in facial expressions, in uncharitable comments, in cold silences, and very often, in murmuring. What is murmuring? It is quietly sowing discord while trying to appear innocent and harmless. It is expressing discontent so as to make that discontent multiply in the hearts of others. It is complaining about one’s lot to others so as win their sympathy.

When fueled by envy, murmuring is playing the victim. But murmuring can also be fueled by avarice – the insatiable desire to own more, to have more.

Now there are many similarities between avarice and envy, but in the end, they are quite different.

Avarice seeks to amass wealth and power. It may trample on others in order to get such things, but 57

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THE CRUCIFIXION (C.1420–23). FRA ANGELICO. THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK.

that is unintentional. It does not aim at causing harm to others per se. Envy, on the other hand, does not rest until another’s happiness is diminished, if not destroyed. Now perhaps we can understand why St Benedict hates “the evil of murmuring” so much, for it manifests avarice and envy!

In order, therefore, to have justice in our relationships with others, we must rid our hearts of all envy and avarice, as St Benedict tells us in chapter 4 on the instruments of good works. And we must conscientiously try to live according to the Golden Rule, “Never do to another what you do not want done to yourself ” (Mt 7:12; Tobit 4:16), which was considerably important for St Benedict, for he not only includes it in the instruments of good works, but repeats it at least two more times in the Rule.5 According to the same list of good works, however, and the Gospel of which it is a summary, there is still more to the virtue of justice. “For I tell you, that unless your justice abound more that of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” (Mt 5:20) For Christ through St Benedict tells us “not to return evil for evil; to do no wrong to anyone, and to bear patiently wrongs done to oneself; to love one’s enemies; not to curse those who curse us, but rather to bless them; and finally, to bear persecution for justice’s sake”. The fourth step of humility expands upon this in speaking about “those faithful ones who by their patience fulfil the Lord’s command in adversities and inju58

ries: when struck on one cheek, they offer the other; when deprived of their tunic, they surrender also their cloak; when forced to go a mile, they go two (Mt 5:39-41); with the Apostle Paul they bear with false brethren and bless those who curse them (2 Cor 11:26; 1 Cor 4:12)”. What all this means is that the perfection of justice is to be found in the imitation of Christ, of Him who bore injustice for our sake, and lavished mercy and forgiveness upon those who persecuted and killed Him. This was the first of His seven words to come forth from the Cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Lk 23:34) It is on the Cross that “the Lord hath revealed his justice in the sight of the Gentiles”. (Ps 97:2) In concluding this meditation on justice in the Rule of St Benedict, I would like to leave you with chapter 72 on good zeal, which I think is the most beautiful and inspiring exhortation in the Rule, and an eminent summary of the virtue of justice: “Just as there is an evil zeal of bitterness which separates from God and leads to hell, so there is a good zeal which separates from vices and leads to God and to life everlasting. This zeal, therefore, the monks should practice with the most fervent love. Thus they should anticipate one another in honour; most patiently endure one another’s infirmities, whether of body or of character; vie in paying obedience one to another – no one following what he considers useful for himself, but rather what benefits another; tender the charity of brotherhood chastely; fear God in love; love their Abbot with a sincere and humble charity; prefer nothing whatever to Christ. And may He bring us all together to life everlasting.”

Endnotes: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

De hoc quod non omnis iustitiae observatio in hac sit regula constituta.

Homily at Matins for the III Sunday of August; Ex libro Officiorum, cap. 28, n. 136.

Ecclesia quaedam forma justitiae est, commune jus omnium: in commune orat, in commune operatur, in commune tentatur.

Summum ius summa iniuria.

Et quod sibi quis fieri non vult, alio ne faciat. See also RB 61:14 and 70:7.

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JUNE: THE MONTH OF THE Sacred Heart A S E R MO N BY F R T H OM A S C R E A N O P

You shall draw water with joy out of the Saviour’s fountains (Isaiah 12:3)

W

e may sometimes be tempted to wish that we were living at a different period in the history of the Church. Would it not have been fine, we may think, to have lived in the early centuries of Christianity, when the lives of the apostles and the miracles which converted the pagans were still vivid in the memories of the faithful? Or, would it not have been fine to have lived in the Middle Ages, when Christendom was strong and great cathedrals were being erected in every city? Yes, it would have been good to have lived in such times; yet, God in His goodness gives to every age certain blessings which other ages lack, and we who are the children S UM ME R 2 021

of the Church in these later days enjoy therefore some advantages which our ancestors in more ancient times did not possess.

Of these advantages which we possess, certainly one of the greatest is the revelation, for our devotion and for the sacred liturgy, of the mystery of the divine Heart of Jesus. Of course, there was never a time when the Church was ignorant of the love of Christ for His people, both for His people as a whole and for each of the faithful in particular.

But the Holy Spirit willed that this love be brought before the minds of Christians more vividly in these later days. The first of the instruments which He chose for this task was the German Benedictine St Gertrude, sometimes called St Gertrude the Great.

She was only twenty years old when, in the year 59

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1281, she was visited by St John the Evangelist, and told about the future glorification in the Church of the Heart of Jesus. St Gertrude asked St John why he had not spoken more about this subject in his gospel, and in particular why he had not described what he had experienced in reclining on the Heart of Christ at the last Supper. The evangelist replied that when he had written the gospel, the Church was still young, and that his task had been to write a short word about the earthly life of the uncreated Word of God. The revelation of the riches of the Sacred Heart had been reserved, he told St Gertrude, for a later day, when the love of men had already begun to grow cold.

St Gertrude wrote down what had been revealed to her, but her writings were greatly treasured by a few souls, but they were not much read outside religious houses. So, four hundred years later, when Protestantism had now begun, so to speak, to cover much of the Christian world with ice, our Lord spoke to St Margaret Mary, who was twenty-six years old, and living in an unremarkable convent in France. He told her that she was to have a new feast instituted in the calendar of the Church! By the time that she died, in 1690, she had the happiness of seeing her own community kneel in reparation before an image of the Sacred Heart; but the feast itself was not yet in existence. Another life-time would pass before, in 1765, a pope would grant to the church in Poland the right to celebrate a Mass and office in honour of the Sacred Heart. And finally, after another hundred years, at the request of all the bishops of France, Blessed Pius IX extended the feast to the whole Church.

Yet, although this glorification of the Heart of His Son is a gift of God the Father to the Church in these later days, it was foreshadowed by the Holy Ghost from the beginning. If we turn to the books of Moses, and the most famous of the manifestations of God, what do we find? In the book of Exodus, God appears to Moses in the midst of a thorn-bush. Our translations sometimes just call it a ‘bush’, but those who know Hebrew tell us that the Hebrew word used in this passage means specifically a thorn-bush. It is on fire, but it is not consumed.

And the Lord speaks to Moses from the midst of the fire and of the thorns with a message of mer60

DORATION OF THE HOLY HEART OF JESUS. The flaming heart is in the middle, surrounded with rays of light. There are several emblematic religious scenes around the heart. In the lower part: Saint Joseph holding the Child Jesus. PIARISTA MÚZEUM, BUDAPEST

cy: I have seen the affliction of my people, and knowing their sorrow I have come to deliver them. It is an image of the Heart of the Saviour, the Saviour who has come down from heaven to deliver men, His heart on fire with merciful love for them, yet pierced with the ingratitude of the human race, as with so many thorns.

But we can go back still further than Moses.

If we read the life of the first Adam, what do we CAL X M ARI AE

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find? He is cast by God into a deep sleep, his side is opened, and a bride is fashioned for him from what comes from his side. It is another image of our Lord, the second Adam. After He had been cast into the sleep of death upon the Cross, one of the soldiers with a spear opened his side, and immediately there came out blood and water.The blood and water which flowed from the Heart of Christ are built into the Church, by the power of the Holy Ghost. The water washes us in baptism; the blood nourishes us in Holy Communion. A bride is fashioned for the divine Bridegroom.

Certainly, the Heart of Christ was beating with love for mankind, from the moment that it was formed in the womb of the Blessed Virgin by the power of the Holy Ghost. From the beginning of the incarnation, the human intellect of Jesus saw the divinity, and seeing all things in the divinity, He saw all the human beings who have ever lived or who will ever live upon the earth. In seeing them thus, Jesus also loved them with human will; He not only loved mankind as a whole, but had for each human being a unique love.

Among other men, the heart exists first, and charity only comes later, for example when a person is baptised. In the case of the human nature of our Saviour, the opposite is true. His charity existed first, and it was this charity itself which set His heart in motion. Such is the teaching of the Benedictine abbot, Dom Guéranger. He writes: “His love set in motion those beatings which made the Blood of redemption circulate in his sacred veins.”

Yet, since the Passion of our Lord, His divine heart has a new motive for love. For the Church, and we as members of the Church, have been formed by the blood and water that flowed from His sacred side. We are the fruit of His great labour.

So the same Dom Guéranger speaks thus:

Heart; and that human Heart could not be won, without the divinity also being moved to mercy.”

In other words, the Church’s prayers cannot fail to touch the Heart of her divine Bridegroom, and this Heart will supply for our deficiencies. I finish with some words with which the editors of the writings of St Gertrude the Great summarised her revelations: “At one time, the divine Heart is shown to her as a treasure, which holds all riches within it; at another, it is a harp played upon by the Holy Spirit, and the music which comes from it gladdens the Blessed Trinity, and all the heavenly court. […] It is a golden thurible, whence there ascend as many different sorts of fragrant incense, as there are different races of men, for all of whom our Redeemer died upon the Cross […] It was in this Heart that was formed and composed he Lord’s Prayer, the Pater noster; that prayer was the fruit of Jesus’s Heart. […] When our life is at its close, that Heart is the peaceful abode, the holy sanctuary, ready to receive our souls as soon as they have departed from this world; and having received them, it keeps them in itself for all eternity, and beatifies them with every delight!”

“Christ being now in possession of her who has wounded his Heart, he gives her, in return, full power over that sacred Heart from which she has issued. There lies the secret of all the Church’s power. If Adam, our first father, sinned, it was because Eve used, and for evil, her influence over his heart, by misleading him and us in him; Jesus saves us, because the Church has won his

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O beatam cordis aedem!

Te cui caelum dedit sedem purgat suis manibus.

Animose puer verre, monstra tuo vultu terre, tere tuis pedibus.

“O blessed temple of the heart! Let him to whom heaven has given his abode clean you with his own hands.

Spirited boy, sweep away! Frighten the monsters with your look, crush them under your feet.”

THE CHRIST CHILD SWEEPING A BROOD OF REPTILIAN MONSTERS OUT OF THE BELIEVER'S HEART WITH A BROOM (C.1600). ENGRAVING BY A. WIERIX (ANTWERP). FROM COR JESU AMANTI SACRUM NO.10. WELLCOME LIBRARY, LONDON.

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MARIAE CALX

MAGAZINE Rebuilding our Christian civilisation

Voice of the Family’s quarterly magazine Calx Mariae (Heel of Mary) seeks to contribute to the rebuilding of Christian civilisation by providing essential coverage and analysis in the areas of life, family and culture.

WOR L D W IDE S HIPPING AVAIL ABL E F O R M O R E I N F O R M AT I O N, P L E A S E V I S I T:

voiceofthefamily.com/calxmariae

“…she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel” (Gen 3:15)