Part of an inclusive and more just society which respects the demands of nature
The Remnant’s Chris Ferrara has the latest and most penetrating take on the frightening Cecil-the-Lion/Planned Parenthood news story juxtaposition, on what this says about the state of the world, and where Pope Francis fits in.
Now this kind of touristic safari “hunting” goes on all the time. It’s a profitable business and generally nobody really cares. But if you’ve paid fifty grand to kill a celebrity animal in such a craven way, and then you lop off its head for a trophy, what can you expect but big trouble if news of the kill goes viral in our emotivist age? Yet while outrage over this incident is one thing, quite another is the fulminating hatred for Cecil’s killer, including demands for his imprisonment and even obscenity-laced threats to kill him in the same manner he killed the lion.
The world is braying for the blood of an obscure Minnesota dentist, to the point where he can no longer extract teeth for a living because he had to shut down his dental office in fear of violence. Yet America’s abortionists go on with their deadly extraction of human beings from their mothers’ wombs—hacking off human, not lion heads. These butchers are undeterred by anything more than a few dogged pro-life demonstrators who face federal prison if they dare to impede access to legally protected abattoirs. The Senate vote to defend Planned Parenthood on account of its trafficking in the organs of aborted babies has failed—of course—yet a resolution to condemn the killing of Cecil the Lion would undoubtedly have passed by a wide margin.
I believe the uproar and the threats of violence would certainly not have occurred without the professional outrage machine to gin them up. It’s not quite true to blame these phenomena on the common mind though. They aren’t necessarily organic events. They are created and exploited for a purpose.
Abortion goes on because it is not perceived by the generality of people to have any tangible social or even psychic cost. And so the abortion mills keep humming along as part of the background noise of American life. The outrage over Planned Parenthood’s profiteering in human organs is but an implicit confirmation of this: the ongoing mass murder of the unborn had long been accepted as part of the sociopolitical status quo; it was only the harvesting of the victims’ organs that had revived the public’s sense of cruelty to humans. But, oh well, the Senate vote failed. Time to move on to the next issue. And the slaughter of innocents will continue just as before.
What it’s all about, then, is that people have become weary of their own species. To be sure, they still love their loved ones as instantiations of it. But they do not hold the species as such in very high regard. Thus the human sacrifice of 10-year-old Jivan Kohar in a Hindu temple, as reported by CNN only days ago, was a story that immediately sank beneath the waves. The murder took place in Nepal, where the father of an ailing boy followed the advice of a Hindu “priest” to sacrifice someone else’s son in order to heal his own.
Did you know that human sacrifice could be a characteristic of Hinduism? We’re always taught that it’s so peaceful. Sometimes it seems that the Aztecs have regained Mexico and we know that life can be cheap in the Muslim world.
In fact, human sacrifice remains very much a part of Hindu ritual in various places. In 2006, for example, the Indian press reported the sacrifice of a three-year-old child, “one of dozens of sacrifices” performed by a local Hindu cult: “The two men then used a knife to slice off the child’s nose, ears and hands before laying him, bleeding, in front of Kali’s image.”
But in America the same sort of ritual takes place in abortion mills, where children are sacrificed even without reference to the imaginary favors of an imaginary deity but merely for personal convenience. And our nation lets it happen—year after year, decade after decade. Again, people still love their own but think little of the species to which they belong. As Aristotle observes in The Politics: “…when devoid of virtue man is the most unholy and savage of animals, and the most full of lust and gluttony” (Politics, 1253a). Man is weary of himself because he is weary of what he has become. No wonder people in our time are inordinately attached to their pets, who have never betrayed them like their fellow men. No wonder the public mind evinces vastly more outrage over the fate of Cecil the Lion than the fate of Kali the Human.
Our world is learning painfully that the other side of Christendom is not a utopia of love and tolerance. We don’t know God, so we don’t understand man. Our ancient animist forefathers weren’t any less intelligent than we are. They looked at the world around them and drew what logical conclusions they could without the benefit of revelation, noting their own smallness and fallen state, and giving too much honor and deference to their environment and the ‘spirits’ behind it.
Man’s weariness of his own nature has penetrated the human element of the Church along with the rest of the nihilistic spirit of this post-Christian age, giving rise to a Church that is now, in practice, post-Catholic in its approach to the world. That is why we are given a 185-page encyclical on the environment, addressed to “every person living on this planet,” while Francis and the Vatican remain silent about such matters as the Planned Parenthood affair, the ongoing massacre of Christians in nation after nation, and the human sacrifice of Jivan Kohar (and who knows how many others) in a Hindu temple only a week ago. And it is why Laudato si reduces millions of human sacrifices on the altar of abortion to “fail[ure] to protect a human embryo.” LS 120.
I think Mr. Ferrara may have just coined the defining term, “Post-Catholic Church,” and that is certainly what we have.
Last year Cardinal Tauran, head of the supremely ridiculous Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, issued a “Message to Hindus for the Feast Of Deepavali 2014.” No religion on earth has less regard for the human species than this one. Yet, ignoring this cult’s congeries of diabolical superstitions and its age-old oppression of inferior castes, Tauran declared:
As people grounded in our own respective religious traditions and with shared convictions, may we, Hindus and Christians, join together with followers of other religions and with people of good will to foster a culture of inclusion for a just and peaceful society.
We wish you all a HappyDeepavali!
Giving honor to error and to the enemies of Christ and his Church can only be morbid. Uniting all religions and the secular force which hates them under one cult of nature respects neither life nor God. It’s not the civilized paganism of Ancient Greece. It’s the demonic focus of the primitive, and the culture of death is always in its company.