THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE AND THE RIGHT CHOICE
by Fr. George W. Rutler
Edited transcript of a talk given by Rev. Geroge W. Rutler on October 15,
1989, at a dinner sponsored by Wisconsin Right to Life.
During the last presidential campaign I announced in church that I wasn't
going to mix politics and religion from the pulpit and so until election
day I would not discuss anything touching upon religion.
Of course, these days for good reason, we cannot make that separation
because everything that honest religion deals with affects the life of the
nation and the questions now being discussed in the political forum are
deeply illogical. We're not simply talking about tax structures and zoning.
We're talking about life itself. And when people say that we should not
legislate morality, we have to reply, "What else can we legislate?"
Everything that is deeply significant in the nation's life has some kind of
bearing upon the human soul. Now, there are various ways in which humans
understand the soul, but the essential agreement for most people is that
there is a soul, that life is not an accident, and that life is sacred.
The founding fathers of this country mixed religion with politics when they
said that very thing. It would have never occurred to them to separate the
concept of sacredness from civilized discourse.
Aristotle in his <Physics> wrote on the way the world works as he
understood it. Then he got into heavier matter, the deep workings of the
world which others called "metaphysics,"-beyond physics.
Everyone today has to understand, in some way or another, metaphysics. And
the first metaphysical question we ask, the first deep question we ask
about society is this What's it doing in the world? That's a very basic
question, and I can't think of any more basic one than that.
Many commentators would say that it is difficult for us to think in
spiritual categories now because the world is secularized. Well that's a
wrong concept. We cannot secularize the world. We cannot burn fire. We
cannot wet water. The historic complaint in the Judeo-Christian tradition
is not against the world, but against the fallenness of the world. The
rabbis explain this fall in the disobedience of Adam and Eve.
So, the complaint of metaphysics is not against a fallen world. It is
against fallenness within the world. The standing world, that which God
created, is good.
The problem is not secularization. The problem is not that people are too
worldly. The real problem is that people are not worldly enough. And by
that I mean this it is the function of any philosopher to observe the world
with a certain perspective, and not to get lost in it.
The entire prophetic tradition has been of that nature. Christ said that we
are to be in the world, but not of it. Very much like the artist backing
off from a canvas to get a sense of the whole picture.
The problem with the people we say are worldly, those who have denied this
Judeo-Christian vision of creation, is simply that they are, if you will,
of the world but not in it. They have all the things of the world, but they
are not really intimately involved with its mystery.
God asked Adam, "Why are you hiding?" And he replies, "Because I was
ashamed." "Why are you ashamed?" The answer, "Because I was naked." "Who
told you that you were naked?" Where was innocence lost?
Those who approach the life issue from the Christian historical cycle know
about the massacre of innocence. All history has witnessed time and time
again to various massacres of innocence, violence done against life and the
law.
I would cite a newspaper published in my parish-some of you may have heard
of it-the <New York Times>. The <Times> had an article on teenage
abortions, which the editors called "a sad necessity." And it said that
these teenage girls were "victims of innocence."
The first question is, Why do they call it sad? If there's nothing wrong
with abortion, if it is not immoral, what makes it sad? If it's freeing a
young girl shouldn't it make her happy? And shouldn't it make the editors
of the <Times> happy?
But more ominous was that phrase that they were "victims of innocence." You
see what is happening here- innocence becomes something that victimizes
humans.
If we're not worldly enough, as the prophets have deemed and as the saints
have deemed, if we are not like them- in the world, but not of it-and
instead if we are of the world, but not quite in it -we will really begin
to think that innocence is evil.
That essential mistake confuses innocence with naivete. Innocence to the
undeveloped secularist is near ignorance.
In yet another editorial, the <New York Times> quoted Governor Lamb of
Colorado, who's telling elderly people that they should kill themselves or
submit to being killed if they became an economic burden. That same <New
York Times> remarked in its official editorial, that Lamb spoke too soon,
though his mind was in a decent place. Well his mind was in Colorado, we
assume, which is a decent place, but that's not what they meant. They said
that what he was saying was right, but he spoke too soon. Too soon for
what? Too soon for the fulfillment of their agenda -and clearly that agenda
includes killing old people.
You see, we are dealing with a whole string of problems. Once we begin to
get the world wrong, we begin to get every stage of life wrong.
In justifying the governor of Colorado's position, the <New York Times,>
always willing to show its literacy, quoted a passage from Homer's
<Illiad>: "One generation of man will grow, while another dies." Anyone who
studied Greek probably had to memorize that. But anyone who studied Greek
very long would know that they were quoting it out of context to justify
euthanasia The fact is these people do not know how the world works.
Consider my own city, New York The city council one month outlawed smoking
in public places. You cannot smoke in restaurants in New York City now. You
cannot smoke on trains. The following month that same city council
legalized homosexual activities. Now I would submit that that is a
disordered understanding of how the world works. In New York now, the only
way you can get arrested for sodomy is if you commit it smoking a cigar.
This is contrary to what philosophers and theologians have called "natural
law." One of the Christian saints says that "natural law is that law which
is written by the Creator's hand on the heart."
Moses gave us from God ten great Commandments for living. These were from
God. God quietly also writes in the very order of creation certain laws.
And the Ten Commandments are helpful instructions on how to avoid the
calamity that attains when we disobey His natural laws. We're free, for
instance, to defy the law of gravity, but we also pay the price if we do it
by jumping off the Empire State Building.
At the beginning of what we could call the modern philosophical tradition,
voices like Hobbs and Emmanuel Kant denied the validity of natural law.
Natural law orders itself in the line of the good Based on the fact that
God made the world and said that it was goods natural law is what helps
order creation towards God as its goal.
Hobbs and Kant did not want to get involved with that theological idea, so
instead of setting the good as the standard conduct, they set what they
called "unaided reason"-the use of our own intellect. And this brought us
then into the period of what came to be called "rationalism" and which now-
at the end of the modern age-looks far more like rationalizing. There was
an interesting development in religious history about 1700 years ago, for
which we are still paying the price. It was a mistake called "Gnosticism."
Gnosticism means "knowledge" or "wisdom"-it's from the Greek. It was
declared a heresy in the third century, but it's influence is found in all
the major branches of religion in one manifestation or another. It takes
ten basic forms which crop up over and over again.
The first is that God is totally unknowable. This does not mean that God is
transcendent, as the great religions have always held. But Gnosticism says
that God can never be known in <any> way. It sounds quite pious. But what
it really is, is an excuse for not saying anything about God at all. We
then can dismiss theology from anything having to do with real life. We can
say religion should not be involved in politics, that the priests,
ministers, and rabbis have no business in any way speaking on a legal
issue.
The second tenet of the Gnostic vision is that God is contrary to matter.
Basically, it denies that God has even created the world. This poses
religion as in someway hostile to any kind of material reality. This allows
people to say that religion is an enemy of anybody who wants to live a
practical life. The press, in discussing abortion, will say religion is a
poetic and inspirational thing for those who want it, but it is a threat to
the integrity of people who want to get down to brass tacks about
pregnancies, motherhood, family life and society.
The third tenet holds that all you need is one basic secret to explain
everything, and that secret is this the human being is the power behind all
things. The ego is God. Now you can spend a lot of money going to retreat
camps in the mountains of Colorado, having various gurus give you boiled
down Gnosticism which was expressed much better 1700 years ago. "I've got
to be me." <Human potential fulfillment--positive thinking-possibility
thinking--and the like. "I've got to be me."
When this happens, authority gets confused. Anybody who has the power to
influence another's conscience becomes a legitimate authority, whether or
not that individual knows anything at all. We say that individual is
charismatic. Our country is now being given wrong moral advice by people
who have no familiarity with the entire spiritual tradition of Judeo-
Christianity.
Dartmouth College gave an honorary degree to Shirley MacLaine-a degree in
human letters. The movie star becomes the intellectual voice of the nation.
Not very long ago, the Congressional Agricultural Committee heard testimony
from three Hollywood starlets on agrarian reform. They were invited because
each of them had played the part of a farmer's wife in some film or other.
A star of the program, "MASH," who played a doctor was invited to address a
national convention of the American Medical Association. When Robert Young
played the part of Doctor Welby, he was astonished to receive a quarter of
a million letters a year from around the country asking medical advice.
This is the simplificiality of the culture which is born to that Gnostic
model. But it is that culture now which is trying to explain where life
begins and when it should end.
The fourth tenet of the Gnostic mentality is pessimism: all of nature is
the product of evil energy. And that means that all morality consists of
the survival of the fittest. If you're threatened by other people, they are
evil. They are nonhumans or subhumans. The twentieth century has made a
science of that. Marxism says that it's the owners of capital who are
subhuman and not entitled to civil rights. The fascists said the Jews were
subhuman. Blacks were subhuman The Slavs were subhuman. On and on down the
list The only people who were human were the writers. That again, is the
old Gnostic myth And it is no coincidence that the Nazis revived the old
Teutonic myths of supergods, to replace the God of Abraham and Isaac and
Jacob.
The ancient question is the question asked by Job, "Why is there, evil?" It
was asked because people believed that there was a God who made the world
good. And that's what made evil a problem. In a Gnostic world, people are
beginning to ask, "Why is there good?"
The right to choose is the right to choose good. But it will not be
exercised if we do not believe that there is such a thing as good. If we
think that the world is innately evil, we can only choose what is
convenient, what is comfortable, what suits our bodies. And if all of
creation is a threat, then any other form of life is a threat. A mother
will begin to be told-and she may come to believe-that the baby forming in
her womb is an invader from inner space-and she has to kill it. The
National Health Service only some four years ago officially classified
pregnancy as a communicable disease.
The fifth tenet of Gnosticism holds that every action that we do is
destructive, because the world is evil. Just by breathing-breathing the air
of creation-in some way begins to destroy us. We're all bulls in the china
shop so it doesn't matter how much china is smashed. And therefore, there
is no such thing as a moral hierarchy- there's no sin. We're not
responsible for damage, so we can say, "Don't impose your religious beliefs
on me. If you want to think it's a sin, all right, but it's not a sin for
me." I'm not comfortable with that.
How we misuse that word! Do you know what "comfort" means in Latin? To
strengthen! That's not the comfort of the Gnostic mentality. It's not the
comfort of the New Age mentality which says, "God is not judgmental AU I
have to do is feel good about my elf."
Why do abortion mills employ psychologists? It's to make these poor women
fed good about themselves. It's the only criteria. Not evil, or good, but
whether or not you fed okay. The sixth tenet says that evil does not lie in
disorder, but in order-that laws are an imposition, a violation of human
integrity. Roe v. Wade was Gnostic because it looked upon the entire
structure of natural law as an inhibition. It spoke only of the right to
privacy, which is not guaranteed at all in the Constitution, but it seemed
to find it. And any violation of privacy was considered hostile to an
individual.
The seventh tenet is that the one power that can thwart human nature is
sexual power. Now, this heresy had a long tradition in Greek philosophy in
the third, fourth, and fifth centuries before the Christian era. The whole
fertility cult syndrome was born of it. And so today, people say if they
want to exert power, they do it through an assertion of radical feminism or
through the politicization of homosexualism. We have now sexual politics.
We rebel against procreation.
We deny the difference between sexes because all energy consists in the
sexual act itself used selfishly. The choice then is in favor of what makes
sex a source of immediate pleasure divorced from its ends. Aborticn,
infanticide, euthanasia become assertions of sexual control over others.
The body becomes a weapon, rather than a home for life. "I have a right to
do what I want with my own body." The eighth tenet is that the universe was
created by evil powers-angels called "archons" Now I know this sounds
rather exotic and obscure, but there are departments in our universities
now teaching these tenets as new religions, new insights for man come of
age. Astrology is part of it; trying to figure out our place in inescapable
fate. There's no such thing as an inescapable fate. The whole Judeo
Christian tradition is one of the progress of the people to the Promised
Land, and destiny. The attainment of it depends on whether or not we obey
God-we have the freedom.
The Gnostic mentality denies that freedom, and that is why we can say we
are victims of innocence. Innocence is only ignorance. And we're lost.
Humans are the only gods, and, therefore, we can begin to control anything
we want, including life itself. All the now surrounding fertilization are
part of this mentality.
The ninth tenet says that the individual has no innate worth. All our human
dignity consists in the worth which belongs to the collective. Individuals
are worthless, only the collective counts, and that's why we can say there
are too many people. God never said there are too many people. The Gnostic
does.
Throughout His scriptures, God calls to individuals. He speaks through
little people, through shepherds and the like. He raises up kings from the
lowly. The great women of the Old Testament sing hymns of exaltation about
this. And in the Christian order, Jesus tells a parable about the Good
Shepherd, about the man who has ninety-nine sheep in the fold and has one
lost, and he goes out and looks for that one sheep. We've almost taken it
for granted, that gift of particularity, of respect for the individual.
Why is the red star now removed in Hungary and the old memorial flag being
raised? Why do you have this tremendous revolution going on in Russia? Why
do you have the young people standing in the midst of the world's biggest
square in Beijing? Standing in front of an Army tank? Is it because we have
no souls? It is because people who have been told for decade upon decade
that they have no dignity outside the collective whole are standing up and
saying, "We are human!"
And by God's good grace, when they win their battle, they will have another
battle. They may have to come here to the United States in the so called
"free world" and tell us that we have souls!
The tenth and last tenet of these Gnostics is the denial of the fatherhood
of God. God is an abstraction at best, but His fatherhood is meaningless
And this is basically a homosexualist view, or a monosexualist new, or an
asexual view of creation which says that fatherhood and motherhood are
simply biological accidents and do not say anything about the generative
principle of the God-head and the rob of mothers in nature. All
institutions are "its." Our country is an "it"-not our motherland. The
Church is an "it"--and not the Holy Mother Church, and so on.
Well, I've said enough about evil and good. Unless we understand good and
evil, we will get them confused and we will let other people confuse these
things for us.
Earlier this year, hundreds of thousands of women marched on Washington.
Many of them were dressed in white robes. And why were they dressed in
white robes? To demonstrate for the right-as they called it --to kill
babies.
The great saints of history wear white robes, and they're gathered around
the throne of God. But it's Satan-the one who through all history wants to
fool us -he does not wear red pajamas-he wears white robes. There's an old
story about St. Martin of Tours, who was saying his prayers one day in his
cell in his monastery. It was a cold, damp day and the room was dark. And
then he grew warm, and he looked up and the room was filled with light and
there, hovering over him, was a figure of Jesus with a crown on his head,
wearing the vestments that a priest wears at the altar. And he said,
"Martin, I am your Lord come back as I promised, and it's my good pleasure
of all the world first to appear to you." And Martin said nothing, so the
figure repeated himself, "I am your Lord." And Martin said, "Sir, may I see
your hand?" And he put out his hand. And he said, "Sir, may I see your
feet?" And he put out his feet. "And may I see your side?" and he showed
him his side. He said, "Sir, where are the holes?" And the figure
disappeared and the room grew cold. No one can look more like holiness than
the very antithesis of the good. The only difference is that he will not be
wounded for us. He will not take on us, and our history, and our problems.
He will dress like holy ones, but he will inflict wounds in us.
The great saints and the great prophets have always laughed when we laughed
and wept when we wept. Satan laughs when we weep, and he weeps when we
laugh. He never laughs more than when we kill life at its very beginning.
In Nazi Germany they coined the phrase, "Life unworthy of life." And the
Nazis wore white lab coats, and they taught this phrase in immaculate
lecture halls, and they used stainless steel scalpels to accomplish this,
and their great achievement was the concentration camp-the elimination of
unsuitable people. It all looked so neat.
We thought we won that war. But in 1985, in a convention hall in Spain-in
Barcelona-some 3,000 radical feminists gathered and, during that
convention, in a makeshift operation room built right next door, two babies
were aborted. And the bodies were placed in jars and brought into the
convention hall while 3,000 of these intellectual liberated people
applauded. "Life unworthy of life." Where have you heard the demonstrations
about that? Where have you heard the newspapers criticizing that?
The very voices that said there were too many silent voices when Germany
was doing what it was doing are the very voices now which are silent. And I
tell you this, if they remain silent, in some convention hall or in a
university, where the light of the intellect is venerated, they will be
carrying in crippled people and aged people on stretchers and killing them
while people applaud.
Don't say it cannot happen. It has already happened The question is, On
what scale will we be seeing it in the future? Forty percent of the work
force in Europe as of this year is Muslim. And that is largely because
Europe has not been reproducing itself. We are about to see a tremendous
change in culture such as we have never dreamed. In the sixteenth century,
at the Battle of Lepanto, western civilization as we know it was saved by
the defeat of the Turks. That was a naval battle, but now there is a change
going on which does not require a naval baffle or an army battle. It is a
battle consisting of biological fighting, between those who are willing to
bring life into the world and those who are not.
In the end, when anyone says we have a right to use our conscience as we
will, remember these words of John Henry Newman, the great Cardinal Newman:
"Conscience has rights because it has duties."
But in this age, with a large portion of the public, it is the very right
and freedom of conscience to ignore a lawgiver and judge, to be independent
of unseen obligations. And when we are independent of them, then we will
begin to break the laws of the lawgiver.
G.K. Chesterton said, "When you smash the big laws, you don't get rid of
laws. You get little laws." You get little laws such as the Supreme Court
began to give us in <Roe v. Wade>. And begin to make us think that we are
little.
The Fourth Lateran Council said, "The world was created." That doesn't seem
like big news, except today most people don't believe it. Many theologians
have stopped believing it.
But scientists are finding it out. Infinity, which said that there was no
creation, now is old hat. A friend of mine who is an astrophysicist, a
cosmologist, too, said that almost all the questions scientists are now
asking are theological. St. Thomas More said that the statesman has an
obligation to follow the laws given by God. He said that when statesmen
forsake their own private conscience for the sake of public duties, they
lead their country by a short route to chaos. St. Thomas More was the man
for all seasons.
Edward Kennedy was asked about him once. And Senator Edward Kennedy said
that he thought St. Thomas More was too rigid. St. Thomas More was a man
for all seasons and Sen. Kennedy is a weather vane.
And when Governor Cuomo first ran for governor of New York, he removed a
picture of Thomas More from the wall. He said he did not want to make his
non-Catholic associates uncomfortable. I don't think his non Catholic
associates would have been uncomfortable. I think Gov. Cuomo is
uncomfortable.
As young students at Oxford University we were given directions on dress
for dinner-when white tie was to be worn, when black tie was to be worn,
when academic robes were to be worn, and so on. And we were also told where
we could receive abortion information It doesn't matter what you do, as
long as you dress well when you do it. Well, they dressed very well on the
Titanic as they went down.
We have a choice. There are those who say that the choice is hard. I do not
think it's hard. I think it's difficult. But I do not think it's hard. The
choice is clear. We can make the choice.
Whom will we choose? St. Francis of Assisi, and what he said about life, or
Shirley MacLaine? John Henry Newman, or Isaac Asimov? St. Augustine, or
Carl Marx? John Paul II, or Phil Donohue? Abraham Lincoln, or Herod the
Great? Mother Teresa, or Molly Yard?
The first ones I mention defended innocent life, and the second group say
that we are victims of innocence. No one is a victim of innocence. We are
all victims of those who will not protect innocence.
We have liberty, but liberty only makes us free when we obey the great laws
of the universe. To be really free, to be civilized, we must not only
exercise our right to choose, but we must choose only that which is the
right choice, and the right choice is always the choice of life.
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