A Sermon by Father Konrad zu Lowenstein, FSSP
Scene the First
This commotion in the street, this inept and brutal joy, alcohol and disorder! What is being celebrated here? A civil massacre. Where are we, dear faithful? France in 1789 in the Reign of Terror, with the Revolutionaries murdering their nobility, raising aloft on a pike the liver of the Princesse de Lamballe? No, we are on the streets of Dublin in 2018. Not Rachel mourning her children because they are no more, but the rabble rejoicing that they are no more: rejoicing in the 'decriminalization' of abortion. A long word! sophisticated! But less sophisticated the reality behind it: the murder of an innocent child. But if this is no longer a crime, then what is a crime? Or if this is no longer a crime, what is it? 'Health Care'. And what if the child does not want the care? Too bad! It will be cared for anyway. It has no Stimme, no voice, no say, no vote. If it cries, the State will not hear.
When some months ago some of our hardier parishioners stood by the road-side with pro-life placards, the reaction of the public was mixed. One gentleman, seeing the placard 'Do not kill Babies' wagged his finger admonishingly. Had he not passed so quickly, one could have said: Good Sir! May I ask you? - I would be interested to know - were you ever a baby yourself? Or perhaps like Adam you came into existence already an adult? Or like some mythological deity maybe you sprang fully clad from the thigh of Zeus? But if you were once a baby, you don’t seem to regret having survived till to-day.
They have bent their bow, a bitter thing, to shoot in secret the undefiled. They will shoot him on a sudden and will not fear. They are resolute in their wickedness. They have talked of hiding snares: They have said: Who shall see them?' (Psalm 63).
Scene the Second
Germany. A gentleman pulls back the muslin curtains of his flat and motions to his 'partner' to come up. In the house opposite: a little girl seated at a table strewn with books, in the company of her parents. What is this? A crime is being perpetrated before their very eyes! Aux armes citoyens! Take up you mobile-phones: Call the police, the school, the state! Away with them and lock them up! But what is the crime? Harbouring Jews like Anna Frank in the 1940's? No, bringing up a child in the knowledge of God in the year 2018: in the knowledge that God is the Creator, that He made man after His own Image, that He created him male and female, that He told them to go forth and multiply and fill the earth; to know, to love, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next.
Home-schooling in Germany is a crime punishable with imprisonment – for choosing not to send the child to school to be told that there is no God, that we descend from the apes, and the apes from gasses; that each one chooses whether he is male or female; that desires are there to be satisfied wherever they may lead, that the true philosophers are the atheists such as Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx, and that Martin Luther was a hero. This, then, is the crime: not killing the innocent child but bringing him up in the knowledge and fear of God.
Scene the Third
A secondary-school teacher speaks out against the prevailing ideology. The Head Master: 'My dear friend, it was not very prudent what you said. You realize that there are penalties for this type of thing. I should dismiss you from the school, but in fact you will just have to re-take the year of probation. But please, mi raccommando, nothing like that again! What has he done? Spoken against the Communist Regime in Russia, China, or Albania? No, he has spoken up against perversion in Italy, the heartland of Catholicism, and in a Catholic school too: he has dared to criticize unnatural relationships. He has become guilty of 'bullying', ‘hatred', ’racism' if you please.
In his encyclical Immortale Dei, Leo XIII teaches that the state's duty is 'to assure its citizens of all possible means for the acquisition of that supreme and immutable Good to which they aspire', that is to say the salvation of their souls and the Beatific Vision. A tyranny, by contrast, will seek its own good at the expense of the people. We have seen this phenomenon in Communist Russia and China, but the same is now true of the European Union. The so-called liberal, libertarian, democratic State has become a tyrant, totalitarian state: as insensate, ruthless, and murderous as all the others. In fact its victims are more numerous (although they are unseen, because unborn, and although the State wears a smile on its face). And meanwhile the surveillance becomes more acute, its iron, vice-like grip tightens.
‘In times of insurrection words themselves change their meaning’ writes Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War, book III. They instigate their insurrection, their revolution of actions and words. Murder is presented as care, perversion as ‘gaiety’, the condemnation of perversion as racism - really the European Union should found a Ministry of Euphemisms to keep pace with the flood of evils they are so feverishly promoting.
We observe in this remarkable linguistic oeuvre not only the inversion of good and evil, but also an element of insanity. What has murder to do with care, perversion with merriment, or its condemnation with the maligning of an ethnic group? We are reminded of the slogan inscribed on the locked gates of the extermination camps: Arbeit macht frei: Work sets free. What work? What freedom? The words lose reference to reality because the reality in question is too terrible to name.
Causes and Effects
What is driving the state? Nothing else but power. They are seeking to break down society, by breaking down the family which constitutes its atomic cell: The individuals that will remain will be fewer in number and isolated, and thus easier to control. The motivation is power: to possess and to revel in possessing: in other words it is the concupiscence of the eyes and the pride of life.
If these are the concupiscences that are driving the State, what is driving the people is that of the flesh. If there were no lust, there would be no unwanted children in the first place. The root cause is, then, that they cannot or will not control the movements of Fallen Nature. And they now feel entitled to follow their desires wherever they may take them. Would that the promoters of perversion had put in the effort to heal themselves, rather than inflicting their disordered passions on entire nations!
Their lust has made them blind. They do not see, they do not even understand, that human nature has a given essence, a given identity, with given finalities. They do not understand in other words that there is such a thing as the Natural Law: the Will of God as expressed in our nature; and that by submitting to it, one can realize that which is good for that nature, and thus lead peaceful, happy lives, good lives. They do not see that the unborn is child. For blindness is one of the Daughters of Lust, together with the hatred of God.
But behind the people and the state is another will: the will to destroy on the part of him who was a murderer from the beginning: the will to destroy the family by destroying each one of its finalities: procreation by contraception, with abortion as a back-up solution; education by bad parental example, by bad discipline and instruction, by negligence, by schooling designed to pervert; the finality of self-sacrificing love by substituting it with sensual love inside and outside of marriage, presenting this as the ideal and indeed as a necessity for all. His intention is to destroy the family, its individual members, and society itself: particularly in their relationship to God: man as in the image of God, marriage as in the image of God’s love for the Church, and society in its orientation to become the Mystical Body of Christ, which is the Church.
Such then is the cause of the evil that surrounds us: I with my lust say the people, I with my power says the State, I with my hatred of God, says the devil, born of envy, born of pride: I - I echoing in the void to which it has reduced the world: I who have made myself God, knowing Good and Evil, determining Good and Evil, creating all things, including myself: a nobis sumus: we are from ourselves: we have no need of another, even of a Creator. We rise up in our insurrection, in our revolution: against God: against Eternity.
If this is the cause of our present malaise, then where is it taking us? The triple concupiscence and the devil, its inventor, are seducers: they draw man away from God. God however is Objective Reality in the ultimate sense: Objective Reality, Being Itself, Absolute Truth, the Perfect Good. In drawing man away from God, then, they draw him away from Objective Reality to subjective reality which is madness; from Being to nothingness; from Truth to falsehood; from Good to evil.
What madness greater than imposing atheism on entire nations? What madness like pretending that marriage (the office of motherhood) can be between two males or two females, bringing up as their own the children that they cannot bear? What madness like welcoming new-born babies with joy in one hospital ward and murdering them in another? or like keeping old people alive lovingly in one place and slaughtering them in another - in the name of Dignitas, a reality they depict as so venerable and sublime that only the Latin tongue can do it justice. What nothingness like the nothingness around us: individuals, families, and society destroyed: the elimination of entire generations. No diffusion of goodness, no fruit (or but little), only reductions, void and emptiness. What falsehood, what lies, what evil! What a world created by man and the devil when they play God!
The cry of the child is not heard by the State, but it is heard by the world of the pure spirits. Wer, wenn ich schriee, mich hoerte denn aus den Ordnungen der Engel? Who if I should cry would hear me then from the choirs of the angels? asks the poet (Duino Elegies1.1, R.M.Rilke). And the cry rises up, together with the cry that cries to Heaven for vengeance, and comes to the ears of the Lord of Hosts.
In Him is all Power; by Him, in His Infinite Wisdom and Goodness, all in the world is either willed or allowed. ‘Christ yesterday and to-day, the Beginning and then End, Alpha and Omega. His are all times and all ages. To Him Glory and Empire through the universal aeons of Eternity’. What good He will draw even from these evils we do not know. For us it is to live the best lives we can and trust in Him and His Blessed Mother.
‘And now, o ye Kings, understand: receive instruction, you that judge the earth’. (Psalm 2). ‘Serve ye the Lord with fear, and rejoice unto Him with trembling. Embrace discipline, lest at any time the Lord be angry, and you perish from the just way. When His wrath shall be kindled in a short time. Blessed are they that trust in Him’. Amen.
