Recently, the Pew Research Center came out with a study showing that fewer Americans intend to have kids than ever before. There’s a lot of data in the study, but the major points are this: 44% of non-parents ages 18-49 are not likely to have children. And 74% of those 18-49 who already do have children are not likely to have more. Those are staggering percentages with huge ramifications on our society and our Church. So what can we as Catholics do to encourage and support the growth of families?
cardinal Wilton Gregory called the perpetrators of the same stunt in DC as one with Judas. Locally, father Dave Swantek said that the beast is thrashing its tail because it knows it has lost. Let us pray it has, and let us pray for these very lost souls.
Both history and science fiction warn where this kind of thinking leads. The issue is not the bad science behind modern eugenics, but rather the bad idea behind all eugenics. It’s an idea that has claimed victims throughout history and must be rejected no matter how accurate our tests are. Christians have faced down dehumanizing practices before, since the church’s earliest days rescuing abandoned Roman babies. They were inspired and animated by a better idea: that every human being is intrinsically valuable because they bear the image of God.
Because love is a gift, recognizing the child as a gift creates a wholly different posture from regarding the child as a project, custom-made to specs dictated either by negative eugenics (no Down syndrome, no heart murmurs, no decreased IQ, no obesity in the genes) or positive eugenics (“right” sex, blue eyes, tall, athletic).
Of course charity and hope require that we extend our prayers for the new President. We pray for his success in all things noble and good. And yes, we also pray that his worst plans will fail miserably. As we should. Above all, we pray for his conversion. The light of baptism still flickers in his soul, despite the truly reprehensible policies he has promised. With God all things are possible!
“Home, by its nature, is meant to be a foreshadowing of heaven,” they wrote. “It is to be both satisfying in this earthly life while also offering a glimpse of things to come.” So it is that ordinary things like hot soup and a bedside lamp can contribute to the creation of a “sanctuary,” a place where its inhabitants feel a sense of belonging and peace.
We cannot help but notice Satan’s work in this: the de-prioritization of the human person, a recycled tactic from a fallen angel who could not accept God becoming human, the emphasis on a consumer culture that favors pets over those who are truly in need, and a diminishment in the call from God to be fruitful and multiply (cf. Genesis 1:28). Satan would rather we not follow Christ’s call to the cross but be entrapped in consumer comforts.
The fact that we should see the challenges of this time and place as an essential and defining aspect of our calling, rather than an accidental context in which we live out our calling, is implied throughout Scripture. God reveals Himself to us as a God Who is concerned with and Who works through particular times and places. Even as He does so, He is providentially orchestrating a cosmic-sized plan of redemption and renewal.
1. Much of the bad news is actually good news in the same way that cold showers are an unpleasant but effective medicine for drunks. The humbling of the American Catholic experience is good because its fruit has been inadequate. U.S. Catholic life has produced plenty of outstanding men, women, and achievements, including saints, but also – at least in the past seven decades – quite a few frauds, fellow travelers, and cowards.