For the Innocent Unborn

A Catholic perspective on the morality and ethics of abortion.

(Image: Our Lady of Guadalupe)

(Editor’s note: Readers should be aware that the following essay contains provocative themes and reader discretion is advised.)

Praise be Jesus and Mary.

Recently, a mass grave containing the severed heads of some 150 female victims of vicious murder was discovered along the Mexico-Guatemala border. Upon investigation, it was discovered that this horrific scene was not the product of war or the calling card of narcoterrorism. These skulls, dated to approximately 900 to 1200 AD, were ritually sacrificed to appease the wrath of the demon gods to which their societies were enslaved. The barbaric practice of human sacrifice was and is practiced in virtually every ancient society. As detailed by historian David Emil Mungello, in Phoenicia and Carthage the pagans would ritually murder their own children in transparently religious ceremonies, while in pagan Rome and China, still to this day, unwanted babies are discarded in streets and rivers. But nowhere was the horror of this evil more pronounced than on our own continent. 

The basis of the religious and social order of pre-colonial Mesoamerican society was human sacrifice on an industrial scale. Consider this excerpt from Our Lady of Guadalupe by Fr. Philip Wolfe, FSSP:

A country where by using a razor-sharp obsidian blade, the still-beating heart of a man was sliced out of his chest and offered up, along with his body and blood, to placate the demonic gods the Aztec worshiped. Whereby imperial law, every town with a temple had to offer a minimum of a thousand human sacrifices to just one of the principal demons of their religion, to say nothing of the sacrifices which had to be offered to the other demons… Whereby the estimate of their own Aztec historians, the empire sacrificed one in every five children. And where, for at least one major festival, they were known to have sacrificed over 80,000 men.”

One thing ended the horrific practice of the slaughter of the weakest members of society, one historical event gave rise to the recognition of the dignity of the human individual and true moral freedom: the triumph of the light of the Christian Gospel over the darkness of paganism. For two thousand years the nation of the Hebrews was alone in the world in its recognition of the one true God and for two thousand years the Jews alone, from the covenant of Abraham on down, substituted the sacrifice of animals for human flesh and absolutely prohibited the practice of infanticide. But with the coming of Christ, the author of the Mosaic covenant, a new and more perfect law was made: marked not with the sacrifice of rams and goats, but the sacrifice of the Paschal Lamb of the New Testament upon the saving wood of the cross. With Christ begins the gospel age and the conversion of the gentiles away from paganism to monotheism and away from human sacrifice and towards the sacrifice of the God-man bloodlessly represented on the altars of the churches and basilicas of the whole world. 

With Christianity comes absolutely everything that is good, true, beautiful, and human in our culture: the treasures of the masses of Palestrina, the theology of Aquinas, the leisure of the seven-day workweek; all the fruits of Catholic, that is to say, Christian, culture. But nothing is more beautiful than the absolute respect given to the dignity of the human person, particularly that of the smallest and weakest in our society: the unborn. Already in the first century, the apostles taught: “you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is begotten.”

Is it any wonder then, that as our societies become godless, they become antihuman? They return to infanticide. Our country once was Christian, once the right of every unborn baby to legal protection was universally recognized in every state in the Union and every country in the civilized world. It was not until the totalitarian anti-christian revolution in Russia that the horror of abortion, conquered by the preaching of the apostles, returned to the world. Today Christendom is no more and the errors of Russia have spread to every corner of the world. Nowhere is this more the case than in our own beloved country. Today the practice of abortion on the federally protected altars of satan exceeds in barbarity and scale of all the sacrifices of the Aztecs. Instead of a razor-sharp obsidian blade, surgical tools and high-power suction instruments are used to crush, decapitate, and pulverize the bodies of human infants inside the wombs of their own mothers. Instead of hundreds of thousands, millions are annually sacrificed to the demonic gods of mammon.

This final solution to the unwanted pregnancy question has happened under the smug, self-righteous gaze of our supposedly liberal and enlightened ruling class. The same liberal class which dropped the atomic bomb on the civilian centers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the same liberal class which continues to arm and abet the House of Saud in its butcherous war of conquest in Yemen, and the same liberal class that, lest we forget, is solely responsible for the practice of black chattel slavery in the modern world (thanks a lot Obama!) and gave us the moral and constitutional horror which is the decision of Roe v. Wade (1973).

And now it is with a high degree of satisfaction, that I can write that the stage in the greatest crime ever perpetrated in the name of the American people, abortion, that began with the Roe Decision is over. We should be grateful, grateful for the lives of the millions of unborn who will be permitted to live because of this decision, grateful to the justices, particularly Samuel Alito, who reached this heroic decision, grateful to Donald Trump who succeeded where so many, far too many, Republican presidents failed in nominating actual conservative justices who would actually conserve the most fundamental human right: the right of the innocent to life. But, above all, we should be thankful to God and His Holy Mother who brought the divine logos into the world.

“It was through the Blessed Virgin Mary that Jesus came into the world, and it is also through her that he must reign in the world,” wrote Louis de Montfort in his True Devotion to Mary.

Let us return our gaze to Latin America, to where Our Blessed Lady miraculously appeared to St Juan Diego on a tilma of rough cactus fiber, inexplicably preserved to this day in the Cathedral built over the site of her apparition in Mexico City. In her eyes are the reflection of the archbishop and his servants to whom Juan Diego was instructed to present the tilma, on her cloak is an exact representation of the location of the stars over Mexico on December 12th, 1531: the longest night of the year and the date of her apparition, and resting on the moon is her foot: which crushes the head of the serpent god of the Aztecs, which ends the practice of human sacrifice in Mexico, and ushers in the benevolent reign of Christ the King in the Americas.

The overturn of Roe vs Wade is an important victory in our battle against the culture of death which has enslaved America, but it is only a first step. Our confidence is in God and His Mother, not majorities in the Supreme Court, and our task is still far from being accomplished. The anti-infanticide crusade will not rest until the right of every child, whether he be from Auburn or Albany, whether he be from North America or South America, whether he be from this hemisphere or the old world, is legally protected, cherished, and nurtured from conception to natural death. And I have total confidence that we will succeed in this lifetime.

-Alphonsus