By Judie Brown
One of the greatest challenges in our nation today is a clear understanding of what it means to have free will—a gift from God that allows each person to choose the Lord’s way or the devil’s way. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states: “Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility.”
It is on this basis that far too many people freely choose to kill the innocent by claiming it is their choice, legal, and therefore acceptable. We have said this repeatedly, but it seems that fewer and fewer pay attention.
When lawmakers in South Carolina, for example, chose to forgo a debate about whether or not abortion is homicide, KFF Health News wrote that such debates are “toxic” and that the citizens of the state were not interested in the topic right now! In other words, politicking dictates morality and truth among those who fear electoral backlash if they choose to stand on truth.
In Arizona, lawmakers are attempting to manipulate Catholic priests who hear confession by considering making it a felony if a priest fails to violate the seal of the confessional by choosing not to report suspected child abuse based on what he has heard during someone’s confession.
There are so many things wrong with this proposal that we hardly know where to begin. Let us simply say that the priest who is listening and striving to help each soul who comes to him in confession is a priest in the presence of God and who serves in His place during the confession. Such a priest will be the very best moral guide that the individual bearing his soul during his confession could possibly hope to have.
There should be nothing political about choosing to confess one’s sins to a priest. There is no state law that should ever be used to blunt the grace of that sacrament. But in the world today it is doubtful that folks really know what grace is anyway.
These are just two examples of a fundamental problem that each of us must confront daily. That is why we must become moral guides when those around us are consciously seeking blind guides who will affirm their bad decisions and never point out any errors involved. Christ said, “If a blind person leads a blind person, both will fall into a pit.”
Eduardo Echeverria’s insight certainly applies in our day. In a new book entitled Redeeming Sex, he wrote:
Western culture is fading because its western roots are eroding. This failing culture has reached its lowest point in the emerging culture of death, which is antithetical to what John Paul II calls the culture of life in the 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae. There are four specific roots of the culture of death: individual autonomy; a debased notion of freedom detached from objective truth; the eclipse of the sense of God and, in consequence, of the human person; and the darkening of human conscience, indeed, moral blindness, resulting in a confusion between good and evil in the individual and in society.
These wise words cannot be taken lightly by anyone who sincerely wishes to save lives and souls from the clutches of the evil one. As the Lord’s prayer petitions, “Deliver us from evil.”