Octave Day of St Peter & St Paul – Trinity 7
6 July AD 2008
St Mary’s Church, Fredericton
Propers: Romans 6.17-23; Psalm 34.11-15; Mark 8.1-9
Thanks be to God that you, who were once slaves to sin, have obeyed from the heart that pattern of teaching whereunto you were delivered. In the Name of...
Henry Morgentaler is in the news yet again. Most of you have heard how the ordinary process of awarding the Order of Canada has been sidestepped for the first time in its history in order to get him on the list. And you have heard the outcry from across the country against his nomination. The citation stating the reason for his induction into the order says in part, “For his commitment to increased healthcare options for women...” In fact his only commitment is to the cause of abortion rights and to building as many abortion clinics and encouraging as many women to use them as he can in order to fill his own wallet.
I don’t talk about Morgentaler or the abortion industry too much because I get too upset. So I prefer to leave it to more rational-minded people while I write letters and give money to the pro-life cause and carry placards at pro-life rallies and pray for the conversion of souls every time I drive past the clinic on Brunswick Street. But whenever this issue makes a big splash in the news, I inevitably hear a comment or a get a question from a parishioner. Someone may say, “The baby’s not fully developed in the womb yet, so it’s ok to abort it.” Wrong! Someone may say, “I think that there are some cases when abortion is ok, like rape or serious birth defects or deformity.” Wrong again! When Christians say things like that, it’s time for the priest to step up to the microphone.
I used to think those things myself when I was a young man. But I realized years later that because my church, and my parishpriest in particular, were reluctant to weigh in decisively on the issue, I had no moral authority above me to lead me in the right way. So I was left to form my own opinion. In those days– the years right after the legalization of abortion in the U.S.– a lot of Protestant denominations hadn’t given the whole issue the serious biblical-theological consideration it deserved, and were therefore passively in agreement with the law of the land. However, some Christian groups, most notably the Roman Catholic Church (with Pentecostals and Orthodox tied for second place), took a stand against it and, refusing to back down, managed to convince most other Christian groups that abortion is wrong under any circumstance, and that it is murder on a scale equal to what Hitler did to the Jews, the gypsies and the homosexuals in Europe sixty-some years ago. It doesn’t matter one bit whether the child is the product of rape or is sure to be born badly disabled, or is simply inconvenient or unwanted by the parents. He’s still God’s creature, and is therefore entitled to life and love every bit as much as every other person.
Why should I listen to what the Church says? you may ask. Or as one woman said last year at diocesan synod, “That’s Catholic doctrine; that’s not what we believe.” Well, yes it is Catholic doctrine, and since we are Catholic Christians, that is what we believe– or at least it is what I believe and what every one of you ought to believe to your souls’ health, and what every Baptist and Pentecostal and Presbyterian ought to believe. For to be Christian is to be pro-life. There’s no two ways around it. If you’re not, then your thinking on this matter is in serious need of correction. It’s one of those things that the Church has discerned clearly from Scripture and has taught consistently from the very beginning. Take Psalm 139 for example: “you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb... Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them” (13, 16). Consider also St John the Baptist who leaptfor joy inside his mother’s womb when the pregnant Virgin Mary came to visit (Lk 1.39-45). But still, some will argue that they don’t need the Church to interpret Scripture for them. Fr Richard Sutter says, “Every clergyman– heck, for that matter, I bet every Christian– has heard someone say ‘I know the Church teaches … but I believe that ….’” But St Peter says that the Church is the interpreter of Scripture and that the individual has no right to private interpretation (2Pet 1.20-21). He means the whole Church, not the Anglican Church of Canada or the Atlantic Baptist Convention or some other subgroup, but the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church and its whole 2,000-year collection of teaching. Therefore, Fr Sutter says, “if the Church thinks a passage means one thing, and you think it means a different thing, well, guess who’s right” (anglicani.wordpress.com).
So how is the 2,000-year collection of Church teaching brought to bear on Henry Morgentaler and what he does for a living? It says that, “Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. From the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person– among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2270). Life begins at conception. And from there every one of us has gone through most of the ordered stages of human development. We began life as a fertilized egg, then we were embryos, then fetuses, then Mom gave birth and we were babies, then toddlers, then children. Adulthood follows, then old age and death if we’re not cut short by disease or accident. After death there is resurrection, which is where we reach our ultimate perfection, when life in its perfect fullness really begins. We are works in continual progress from conception until resurrection. We go through all these stages of development, each of which has its own name (embryo, fetus, baby, adult), but there is no time when each of us is not a fully human person. The newly fertilized egg is a person every bit as much as you are, sitting in your pew right now.
The Church has always taught this. And she has always therefore taught that abortion is murder, no matter the reason behind it. The Law of Moses decreed that anyone found guilty of killing an unborn baby was to be executed (Ex 21.22-25). The Didache, one of the earliest teaching documents of the Church after the New Testament (late 1stc.?), says, “you shall not murder a child by abortion, nor kill that which is conceived” (ch 2). The second-century Epistle of Barnabas says, “You shall not slay the child by procuring abortion; nor, again, shall you destroy it after it is born.” (ch 19). Tertullian (AD 160-225), one of the great early Fathers of the Church, says, “The embryo... becomes a human being in the womb from the moment that its form is completed. The law of Moses, indeed, punishes with due penalties the man who shall cause abortion”(A Treatise on the Soul, 37). And the Council of Ancyra (AD 314), seeking to be more lenient toward women who abort their babies, reduced the penalty of the day from lifelong excommunication down to ten years of penance (Can. 21). They acknowledged the seriousness of the crime, and at the same time wanted to be as merciful as possible to the criminal for the sake of her eternal soul. But then the Council of Trullo, over three centuries later (AD 692), ruled that “Those who give drugs for procuring abortion, and those who receive poisons to kill the fśtus, are subjected to the penalty of murder” (Can. 91). Obviously it had become a bigger problem again since the earlier Council.
Those were the days when the councils of the Church had the authority of the Emperor behind them. Nowadays the voice of the Church is largely ignored in the secular world. But since the word of the Lord remains unchanged for ever (Isa 40.8; 1Pet 1.25), the teaching of the Church remains binding on all Christians. And witnessing to the sanctity of life and taking a stand against people like Henry Morgentaler is the duty of every baptized Christian, in whatever way he is able. It’s also equally incumbent on us all to pray for the conversion of Morgentaler and everyone involved in the abortion industry.
This is the voice of the Church. This is how she has interpreted holy Scripture, and how it applies to our present situation in Canada this week. The Epistle to Diognetus, written in the early centuries of the Church, says that Christians, like all other men, marry and have children, but unlike others do not destroy their offspring (ch 5). This is how it should be with us in this century; and this is what all Christians should be saying with one loud voice in the halls of power in this country. St Paul, in today’s epistle, expresses his gratitude to God that the Christians of Rome “have obeyed from the heart the standard of teaching to which [they] were committed.” That standard (BCP, ‘pattern’) of teaching is the fullness of the Gospel of Life, the Good News of the Son of God who came into the world to free his creatures from the chains of death. Today our western society is being steadily overtaken by what Pope John Paul II called the culture of death.
This culture consists of people who have not received the light of Christ, who do not live in the hope of resurrection, and who therefore have no problem with killing unwanted babies and worn out old people. “The end of those things is death,” St Paul says. That culture sees only death in the end for all people, because it has not seen the glory of the resurrection. So it doesn’t matter to people of that mindset how or when anyone dies. What matters to them supremely is that they themselves enjoy life here and now, and to that end are able to clear away all obstacles to their present happiness, whether it’s an unwanted pregnancy or a parent in a nursing home. It is a life without hope, which is why they so badly need to hear the Good News of the One who died and rose from the dead in order to raise the world out of that kind of despair.
In light of this, Paul’s words to the Romans are every bit as fresh– and refreshing– to us: “thanks be to God, that you... have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness... now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” We need to proclaim that tirelessly in the public square, as I’ve said many times before, not because we need to put their bums in our pews, but because they badly need to hear what we have to say as witness to the resurrection and as children of the living God. And we must never give up hope that God will make things right in the end. Keep in mind always what the last verse of the hymn we sang earlier says:
Praise to the Lord, who, when darkness of sin is abounding,
Who, when the godless do triumph, all virtue confounding,
Sheddeth his light,
Chaseth the horrors of night,
Saints with his mercy surrounding.
