Good Morning, God and All...
While the sun shines brightly on this Saturday in Chicagoland, the coldest temperatures since Christmas and the threat of a snowstorm in the next couple of days remind me that it's winter outside. The darkness that accompanies the season is not only external. It's internal, too.
As if on cue, on Friday - the 48th anniversary of the US Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade - President Biden promulgated executive orders once again supporting his political party's definition of life, denying that life begins in the womb, not at the moment when birth takes place.
In 1973 there was a great deal of argument in the legal and scientific communities over defining when life begins. Science was divided. Religious congregations in the US, reflecting progressivism at the time, were also divided on the issue. While the Catholic Church has always defined the beginning of human life at the point of conception, many priests and bishops were silent on the subject. Christian denominations outside Catholicism leaned toward childbirth as the defining moment. Over the years, the gruesome statistic evolved: some sixty million souls were denied their chance at life; they were considered unwanted. After nearly five decades, science and faith were beginning to find their conscience and their voice.
However, the damage - in the legal terms of our flawed humanity - was already done. Once the judicial system has made its pronouncement, and the longer it remains in place, the line is drawn in the dust and reversing course becomes very difficult. Nobody in high office, whether it be congressional, executive, or judicial, wants to go on record admitting any decision they've made is wrong. It therefore becomes the burden of future generations to correct the mistakes of the past.
There were hopes that through attrition and new appointments to the high court that a reversal of Roe v. Wade could come about through new litigation. Former President Trump had delivered on one very important campaign promise, appointing many judges and three Supreme Court Justices who would take a more reserved and conservative approach to the cases brought before them. These new appointees would examine law and the Constitution under a narrower perspective; the viewpoint they believed the Founding Fathers took in the vast undertaking of framing the basis of our nation's laws.
Unfortunately, in the very short time the Supreme Court has supposedly been perceived as conservative, there have been some surprises in what cases the Court has agreed to hear, and in what decisions lower courts and judges have made. These judicial appointments appear to be what I'll call 'constitutionalists'. They have managed to separate what is morally proper from what is legally acceptable by their definition in established case law. What happens now is anyone's guess. With Congress and the Biden administration both pushing the envelope on the issue, will the badly defined concept of "reproductive rights" become part of the written code of law?
This is not the only moral question looming heavily our beloved country. Catholic pastors and bishops are still divided as to how large an issue this is. Sadly, some of the more vocal members of the clergy are trying to water down or ignore the issue, citing social issues of climate change, income inequality, capital punishment, and the rights to freedom of religious expression and speech granted in the First Amendment - not to mention the quagmire surrounding the Second Amendment.
If We The People have learned anything in these last several years, it's hopefully that we must take part in the process of seeing that our laws are just, fair, and observed. We must not allow unconstrained action on the part of our duly elected officials, no matter how their promises or overt intentions appear to us. Nor can we rely on media reports their activity or speculates on it.
Hearts can be changed, but only if we are united in our resolve to change our own waywardness and return to God and His plan for us.
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