Cultural upheaval often brings with it a shift or a crisis in values. Sometimes, these values are shockingly at odds with what has gone before. Germany during WWII is a good example of this. Germans found themselves increasingly in the middle of an agenda that had very ungodlike qualities.
But even after the Nazis, the ruling party, had been conquered in WWII, the deaths of 60 million people being the fruit of their evil agenda, the defense offered up was that most Germans were peaceful, good people who opposed the Holocaust. The same is said of Russia under Stalin or China under Mao Tso Tung. Those were wicked regimes, but most people were good and peace-loving.
Brigette Gabriel, a Lebanese activist, author and journalist, noted during a panel discussion that, essentially, the majority becomes irrelevant when it remains silent in the face of what a minority of people in power are doing. The peaceful majority in Germany did not stop the loss of millions of lives during WWII. In Russia, the peaceful majority was also irrelevant under Stalinist Communism.
The agenda driven by the minority had the power, and they ended up killing 20 million people. She noted that in China, most people were peaceful, yet 70 million people died under the tyrannical rule of its leadership. Again, the peaceful majority was irrelevant. We may think that none of this really applies to us. Yet, we are entering into a political season where abortion will be promoted as a sacred right that must be protected. Again, there is a minority who pushes and supports this, but they are the ones with the platforms that spawn and spew out compelling (albeit faulty) arguments for abortion. Never mind, we’ve already lost over 60 million babies to this massive slaughter of the innocents.
Beliefs really become irrelevant if we don’t defend them in the face of the attacks upon them. Often, we do not get engaged until we are directly affected. There was a powerful witness to this at a pro-life prayer vigil outside an abortuary in Albuquerque some years ago. A grandmother shared that she always opposed abortion but never felt the need to get involved until the issue hit her own home.
She explained that she and her husband had 5 daughters, and one evening, as she was sitting with her husband on the couch and drifting off, she suddenly heard a little voice say, “Grandma. They killed me!’
She was shocked and immediately told her husband, who responded by saying that that was impossible since none of their daughters was pregnant. Or so they thought. Upon investigation, they found that one of their daughters, indeed, had become pregnant and then had aborted the baby. This woman’s pro-life beliefs had had no impact because she had never publicly acted to change anything, never publicly defended the unborn.
This coming political season will be filled with many such issues that are fundamental to our survival as human beings made in the image and likeness of God, such as marriage, gender redefinitions, sexuality perversions. We can excuse ourselves by saying we want to stay out of politics, but that will not go far when we stand before God, giving an account of how we lived out our beliefs.
Our work here is to help bring about the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven. We cannot accomplish this without being willing to lay down our lives for the principles we say we believe in. Talk is cheap and lies are even cheaper. But one thing is sure: saying we are pro-life, pro-marriage, and pro-family is not good enough. It affects nothing without active engagement when it’s called for.
Pope St. John Paul II believed that these areas were the Gospel call to America in our day. In Denver, he told the young people, “America, defend life! This is no time to be ashamed of the Gospel.”
Would that every Catholic Christian in America take this as their call to action.