What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. King Solomon
“Today’s families face challenges that previous generations did not face.”
We recite that cliché in somber tones, as if we were saying something profound. But King Solomon was right. There is nothing new under the sun.
A society run amok with sexual depravity? Look no further than Sodom and Gomorrah, or most of the ancient pagan world, for that matter.
Killing our children to free us to achieve for the corporate empires that rule our world? Change “career” to “good harvest” and “abortion” to “putting your children through the fires,” and you are right back in the pagan world, standing before Moloch.
Poison our elderly, disabled, sick, weak and frail in an act of “mercy?” Go back 70 years to the “useless eaters” of the Third Reich, being driven around in trucks with hoses piping the exhaust in on them. If that seems too pertinent, look at pagan societies that left their helpless members out, where the animals could kill them.
Sex selected abortion? Think of exposing baby girls by throwing them in the dump and leaving them to die.
What about drugs and the reign of terror exacted on families today by the drug addicts in their midst? What about incest? Or polygamy or Christian persecution?
There’s nothing new, not under the star we call Sol. It’s all been done before.
What was new was that brief period of sanity and humane-thinking produced by Christianity’s dominance in the Western world. It was not perfect. In fact, it was very much like the leaven in bread that Our Lord described it to be.
The Gospel message worked slowly through society over time, like leaven, lifting the Western world out of the pit, transforming its thinking about what it means to be human and creating the concepts of universal human rights, the dignity of human life and the equality of all people before God along with it.
This was always an unrealized ideal, but we were moving toward it, one Gospel-inspired step at a time. Now, we are going backwards. We are descending into the pit from which we crawled at an ever-increasing rate of speed.
Abortion will not, ever, lead to euthanasia. I said that myself back when I was advocating for legal abortion. I meant it. I believed it. I thought those who foretold what has happened now were daft.
But I was wrong.
Not so long ago, I thought the notion of gay marriage was comical and outlandish. I never believed that this nation would be so stupid as to do away with marriage as a legal construct.
But it has all come to pass. Abortion was a gateway drug of killing, and each year the reasons for killing grow. The sexual revolution was the beginning of a sexual nihilism that reduces women to chattel and family to a meaningless legal cypher dependent entirely on the will of its individual participants.
It would be easy to think that evil has triumphed, to run in circles, scream and shout. Except for one thing.
We’ve been here before. Humankind may be tossing 2,000 years of human progress on the bonfires of its own license, but the Gospels which brought us forward remain. We are not orphans with no father or mother. We are children of the living God, sons and daughters of Mary.
We have God made human in the flesh of Jesus Christ Who knows our weaknesses and has lived through times such as these Himself. We have His own mother interceding with Him on our behalf.
We have the catechism of the Church and the Ten Commandments; the Sermon on the Mount, the parables and 2,000 years of consistent Church teaching to tell us what to do. We are not lambs, being led to the slaughter. We are the children of God, on our way to Glory.
If ever there was a time when the fields were ready for harvest, this is it.
Our commission is the same one that Jesus gave on his last day with the Disciples.
Go into all nations, teaching them what I have taught you, and baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Saint John Paul II and an old hymn tell us everything else we need to know:
Do not be afraid and trust and obey.