Today is the feast of St. Thomas Becket who was martyred on this day in 1170. His martyrdom reminds us that secular fundamentalism is not a new phenomenon.
T. S. Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral” tells the story of Becket’s defiance of secularism in terms that accentuate the perennial nature of the conflict between Church and State, between religion and politics, between the things that are God’s and those which are Caesar’s. And let’s not forget that yesterday was the feast of the Holy Innocents, a timely reminder that the innocent have always suffered at the hands of sinners. Indeed, the greatest tragedy of sin is not the suffering that it brings to the sinner but the pain that it causes to the innocent. The archetype of the innocent victim of sin is of course the crucified Christ but the Holy Innocents, butchered by secularism in the wake of Christ’s birth, serve as prophets of the doom that awaited the Christ Child on the Mount Doom of Golgotha.
Readers of the St. Austin Review will be reminded perhaps of the painting of the massacre of the innocents that adorned the cover of our recent issue on the theme of “religion and politics” (Sept/Oct). The selection of such a painting for such a theme makes the important connection between the destruction and deadliness of secularism, whether it be the worldliness of Herod or the wickedness of Hitler. Today, of course, we can’t think of the Holy Innocents, the newborns butchered by secularism, without thinking of those other innocents, the unborn butchered by abortion. In the darkness of these thoughts, we should point an accusing finger at Margaret Sanger, the racist founder of Planned Parenthood, who sought, like Hitler, to exterminate the untermenschen. Not only did Sanger hope that abortion would reduce the number of black people in the world, a hope that has been fulfilled by Planned Parenthood’s success in persuading a disproportionate number of black women to kill their babies, but she and all proponents of abortion believe that the unborn are literally untermenschen, that they are subhuman and can be destroyed at whim. The fact that this sick and sickening contempt for unborn babies flies in the face of the evidence of both science and religion does not deter the abortionists who are blinded by the ideology of the culture of death.
Enough of such darkness. Let’s rejoice at the paradoxical placing of the twin feasts of St. Thomas Becket and the Holy Innocents within the octave of Christmas, the most joyful season of the Christian year. The birth of Jesus points to His Death and to the Resurrection and the Life beyond His Death. The holy martyrs and the holy innocents share in Christ’s resurrection as they had shared in His Death. We don’t mourn the great St. Thomas Becket, we pray to him; we don’t despair at the death of the Holy Innocents because we know that they have been raised from the dead. The whole delightful paradox is summed up in four succinct lines from “The Holly and the Ivy”, one of my favourite Christmas carols:
The holly bears a berry
As red as any blood
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
To do poor sinners good.
Joseph, that’s one of my favorite carols too. I like the way you weave the two feasts together with each other and with the opposition between secular state power and the Church.
I’m not sure, though, about Margaret Sanger. She was certainly racist, promoted birth control as a way to decrease the ‘undesirable’ parts of the population, and inspired nazi as well as American eugenics.
But according to George Marlin at the Catholic Thing website (http://bit.ly/scBmeI), she was opposed to abortion, which she regarded as “dangerous and vicious.” She seemed to share the common illusion that promoting contraception would reduce abortion.
If Marlin’s interpretation is right, it is especially ironic that the organization she founded is now not only a major promoter and purveyor of contraception, but also the largest and most vociferous perpetrator of the slaughter of innocents known as abortion.
Dear Paul,
Read Humanae Vitae.
Dear Dena,
I know and admire Humanae Vitae, but I am not sure how it relates to Joseph’s assertion that Sanger was a proponent of abortion and my wondering if that is correct. On a quick re-read, I cannot find where HV mentions Sanger or her views on abortion.
Dear Paul,
HV wasn’t about Sanger. It was about contraception, and contraception/sterilization (“population control”) is what Sanger was about.
In denouncing contraception, HV prophesied legal abortion (among many other things that people scoffed at but which have all come to pass.)
Dear Dena,
Exactly! An important and prophetic document. I just wasn’t sure why you told me to read it, since neither Joseph nor I mentioned contraception. But no matter, since we seem to agree on the substance of the issues involved.
I mentioned it because you saw no connection between Sanger and abortion in your original comment. HV explains the connection between contraception and the inevitable legal abortion which followed.
Dena,
It’s not that I “saw no connection between Sanger and abortion” — my point was that Sanger (if Marlin is right) saw no such connection and was publicly opposed to abortion. She did not see what HV showed decades later, that promoting contraception does not reduce the incidence of abortion (as she thought and hoped), but increases it.
There is a difference between saying that increased incidence of abortion was the unintended consequence of Sanger’s promotion of contraception (a point with which I agree but which was not the point at issue) and saying, as Joseph does in effect, that Sanger was a conscious and direct proponent of abortion.
Sorry if I did not make this sufficiently clear, but my little note was meant as a brief comment and not an essay in its own right–and Joseph made no mention whatever of contraception or its relation to abortion.
No matter, Paul. Sanger was one of those weird people who are actually passive catalysts and not the active personalities they’re made to appear by themselves or others. Because of her influence, great evil occurred. Whether she intended it or not is ultimately irrelevant, just or unjust as that may be.
Agreed! There is plenty to object to in Sanger’s views and record and their effects, intended and unintended. No need to attribute to her views she did not hold. Doing so undermines the credibility of her critics.