We must get it into our heads that sin is real just as diseases of the body are real. I walked about for nearly a month with a blood clot in my leg, not wanting to believe it was really there. But the clot was under no obligation to respect my wishes.
Just as the same Chesterton spoke of the five resurrections of the Church, in his memorable The Everlasting Man, we are on the cusp of a sixth. Or, to borrow from the First Letter of the first-century Pope Clement, the Church is like the phoenix rising from the ashes. Look carefully, and you will see it. And it’s happening today. Before our very eyes.
With the headwinds of crisis still whipping against our faces, many might miss it. Moreover, its beginnings are small, like all great things. But it possesses remarkable strength. It is showing itself on every continent—but, surprisingly, strongest in America.
Full article here: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2024/10/the-way-forward-after-dobbs
Two data points illustrate the real economic factor. Consider who gets aborted and who gets an abortion: Four percent of babies conceived in marriage will be aborted, compared to 40 percent of children conceived outside of marriage. Meanwhile, 13 percent of women who have abortions are married, and 87 percent are unmarried. Nonmarital sex is the main cause of abortion. Marriage is the best protector of unborn human life. It wasn’t just the pedagogical impact of Roe in teaching about abortion that corrupted our nation; Roe exacerbated multiple generations of a sexual culture that incentivizes abortion.
But as in so much that our atheist reader finds unfair and a personal animus towards Francis, for a Catholic, dubia arise when words don’t match up. And since Rome won’t resolve them in ways that seem coherent, whether we want to or not, we’re forced to try doing it ourselves.
Western culture is experiencing a void because we lack conviction. The Void is waiting to be filled. The answer should be that Christianity will once more seek to lead people to Christ, but too many of us lack conviction. Our leadership has abandoned us for their own lack of conviction. Any member of the clergy who refuses to rock the boat and call us to do the same has misunderstood the calling of the Gospel and has chosen a counterfeit. Christianity without conviction and sacrifice is not Christianity. It is a counterfeit, a fraud.
Winters leads by example, and he leads – at the front of the battle, not eating in the frozen woods of Bastogne, so that his men can. And critically, he defends his men from weak and incompetent superiors.
Dick Winters exhibited the two key attributes of what is needed in a good shepherd in the Church, as in a good officer. In the first place, he was willing to lay down his life for his men – or his sheep. The sheep are, in fact, his vocation. He does not run away at the approach of the wolf: that is the work of the hireling, military or episcopal.