Without A Return To Catholic Tradition, Abortion Will Continue

Amidst all the discussion and controversy regarding the SSPX and the Traditional Latin Mass in general, one pro-life individual asked why there was so much focus on the difference between the Latin Mass and the Novus Ordo Mass when babies are dying.  He wondered aloud how much did the Mass form makes.  I don't remember where I saw that question or who posed it.  I would have to answer him or her that the form of Mass makes all the difference in the world, and it's way past the time that each and every Catholic pro-life person admits that truth.

Consider the Ten Commandments and in what order God gave them to Moses.  The prohibition against murder, including abortion is the Fifth Commandment.  Yet too many pro-life people carry on as though it's the First Commandment.

The First Commandment is this: "I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt have no strange gods before me."  (from the Douay-Rheims version, Exodus 20).  That one is to be at the forefront of our hearts and minds.  In the New Testament, Matthew 22: 33-40, we read "Master, which is the greatest commandment in the law?  Jesus said to him: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind.  This is the greatest and the first commandment.  And the second is like to this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."  Again, note the order - God first, then our fellow man.

In practice, often pro-lifers invert that order, be that inversion ever so inadvertent.  Such was my own mindset for far too many years. 

Many of us adopted such mindsets to facilitate working with non-Catholic pro-life people.  What we failed to consider was exactly what lay at the root of people being non-Catholic, and how those origins were directly responsible for the horrors of abortion and other sins against life.

The Protestant Revolt was a large part of that.  Consider that when Martin Luther led his revolt, a prominent defender of the Faith against Luther's heresies was none other than King Henry VIII of England.  Not too long thereafter, Henry allegedly worried about not producing a male heir to his throne.  His wife at the time was Catherine of Aragon, daughter of the Spanish king Ferdinand and Queen Isabella (who sponsored Columbus' voyage that discovered the American continents)..  Henry petitioned the pope at that time to annul his marriage, but was refused.  At that point, Henry formally broke from Rome and established the Anglican church, with him as head.

So now we have about 20,000 protestant variations or denominations (at last count), but only One True Church.  It was the Anglicans that legitimized divorce.  They struck again at their 1930 Lambeth Conference, legitimizing contraception.  Abortion was legalized in many countries earlier than the Roe v Wade ruling.  With the first "woman bishop" and then first "gay bishop", the Anglicans showed themselves to be less-than-stellar leaders.  Eventually all the major protestant denominations allowed for baby-slaughter in their doctrinal statements, with varying degrees of permissiveness.

The Catholic Church remains the one Church that opposes all abortion.  However, during Vatican II, the popes and bishops allowed her vitality to be compromised by the mutilation of the Sacrifice of the Holy Mass.  She has always held that the Mass is the sacrifice by which Our Lord offers Himself to God in an unbloody manner under the appearances of bread and wine.  That definition, by the way, is taken verbatim from Question 357 of the Baltimore Catechism.  The proceeds of the Vatican II pastoral council greatly mutated that understanding of the Mass, trying to turn it into some celebration of this, that and the other.  A primary force behind that Mass was Archbishop Annibale Bugnini.  There is well-founded belief that Bugnini was a Freemason.

I have written quite a bit about the stupefying of Holy Mass and invite you to read those posts.   In particular, please pay close attention to this one.  At the top, you'll see that two saints, both priests, are quoted as saying that civilization itself would collapse if it were not for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.  Both of them offered the Latin Mass.

This brings me to a point that I believe Catholic pro-lie people need to accept.  We will NOT defeat abortion and other sins against life and family until we return to Tradition as it has always stood, not the bastardized mess that has come out of Vatican II.  Yes, I know that many changes in the Mass were not mandated by V2, but they wouldn't have happened without that jaded council.  No, I speak not only of Holy Mass, but all the Sacraments, for not one was unscathed by Vatican II.

I know this may make some of my friends uncomfortable, as they have sons who are Novus Ordo priests.  To them I say, "understand that owing to your pro-life activism, your sons already have targets on their backs.  Don't believe me?  You know how to contact me, and I will let you know what priests recently got canceled in the Archdiocese of Washington alone."  But you may well know them.

Let me also speak of another ancillary truth regarding ecumenism as found in the pro-life movement.  Many of us have worked with Protestants and others of non-Christian faiths and atheists.  No doubt these individuals are very good people and are often more zealous for life and family than are many Catholics today.  However, they still remain influenced by faulty doctrines and philosophies.  We therefore can work with them, but never under them.  We can take pointers from them regarding tactical matters, but never spiritual matters. 

A "case in point" is the Manhattan Declaration that was published in 2009.   It was the rage of all the pro-life social media pages, both Catholic and non-Catholic.  It was authored by both Catholic and non-Catholic thinkers.  We were all being urged to jump on the bandwagon for now this "new" unity would galvanize us to victory over abortion.  Many leaders glommed onto it immediately.

Others looked askance, and with good reason.

I was one of the latter.  I read the document, and at first glance, it did appear to be a comprehensive analysis of the spiritual, moral, and social ills of today.  But it didn't survive a second glance, for often, what is not said is just as important as what is said.

What was not said was that the acceptance of contraception ensconced in civil and religious thinking became the proverbial snowball on the hill that gathered both mass and momentum as it careened downward.  Indeed, I pulled it into Word and did a word search on "contraception" and found nary a peep.  That omission rendered the whole thing fatally flawed, for while it decried the sin of abortion, it erroneously condoned another, and probably more deadly, mortal sin - the use of contraceptives. That fad didn't last too long.  I believe it collapsed under the weight of its own deceit.

It doesn't take a genius to realize that the silence regarding contraception came about because of the non-Catholics who helped draft the Manhattan Declaration.  The Catholics allowed the Declaration to be published because they allowed their Catholic knowledge of the sin of contraception to be compromised for the sake of a specious consensus.

As far as worship goes, it's no secret that one key motive of the Vatican II authors of the Mass changes was to make Mass more appealing to Protestants.  But that happened by obfuscating the sacrificial nature of Holy Mass.  It was turned into some kind of communal meal instead of the sacrifice of Our Lord on the Cross.  Our Lord left instructions for how He is to be worshiped, and He left them through His Catholic Church.  After the Council of Trent (a dogmatic council as opposed to a pastoral council like Vatican II), Pope Saint Pius V issued Quo Primum (an Apostolic Constitution) that codified the Latin Mass and stated that no one was permitted to change it, under pain of divine wrath. I believe that we are experiencing that divine wrath today.

Again, I emphasize that I don't judge Protestant pro-life people.  Many of them are more solicitous for the babies than are the average Catholic in the pews.  That very zeal has led quite a few of them to convert to the One True Church.  Through their activism, they realized the shortcomings of the faith in which they were raised.  However, we too must keep those shortcomings in mind as we work alongside, never under them.  Keep them in prayer and never compromise the Truth.