In 2010 the <em>Guardian</em> newspaper <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jun/30/pope-abortion-cardinal-marc-ouellet"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">published</mark></a> an article entitled “Pope gives top job to abortion hardliner”.
Pope Benedict XVI, the article claimed, “has handed one of the most powerful jobs in the Vatican to a Cardinal who said recently...” – get this – “...that abortion was wrong”.
The surprise expressed in the <em>Guardian</em> article is indicative of a philosophy that has captured Western civilisation, and destroyed the minds of its many adherents: moral relativism.
“Moral Practice has always been difficult for fallen humanity, but at least there was always the lighthouse of moral principles, no matter how stormy the sea of moral practice got,” says the philosopher Peter Kreeft.
But today the lighthouse has gone, and morality is lost in a fog of feelings.
London’s annual March for Life, which took place on 7 September, honked and beamed its way through this fog, causing the moral zombies to stop wandering aimlessly and look up, if only for a moment.
It stirs something deep inside, bringing discomfort to many whose head tilt towards the light is but an ancient muscle memory.
The reason we prefer moral relativism is because we don’t want to be uncomfortable; we fear that moral absolutism would make us unhappy by making us feel <em>guilty</em>, and we mustn’t have that.
Removing moral absolutes does indeed remove the sense of guilt, which makes us feel happier in the short term. “But guilt, like physical pain, may be necessary to avoid greater unhappiness in the long run,” notes Kreeft.
He adds: “So the question is, does reality include objective moral laws? If it does not, guilt is an experience as pointless as paranoia. But if it does, it is as proper as pain, and for a similar reason, to prevent harm. Guilt is a warning in the soul, analogous to pain as a warning in the body.”
With these warning systems turned off, what happens when we do not hear the murderer creep up, smell the smoke which warns of a fire, see the red light alerting us to stop?
CS Lewis writes in <em>The Poison of Subjectivism</em> that relativism “will certainly end our species and damn our souls”.
For decades now, billions of pounds have been poured into promoting abortion, defended in the name of “feminism”, radical freedom and an “to-each-their-own” attitude.
Most Western nations are so tethered to this worldview that even in the face of potentially catastrophic birth rates, they don’t dare change track. The result, unfolding before our very eyes, is death.
No fault divorce, contraception, targets to eradicate Down’s syndrome, sterilisation, low birth rates, abortion limits lifted, calls for euthanasia in the long term and freezing the elderly to death in the meantime – and all of it cloaked behind language that won’t disturb the warning system we call conscience:
“Medical Assistance in Dying”, so-called “reproductive rights”, not to mention “Abortion is healthcare” – prompting the March for Life 2024 slogan: “Abortion is not healthcare”.
“Calling abortion healthcare because it involves doctors and drugs is like calling the death penalty healthcare,” says Adam Smith-Connor, the army veteran accused of breaching an abortion clinic buffer zone by praying for his son Jacob and other victims of abortion.
Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day, founders of the Catholic Worker Movement, defined a good society as one that makes it easy for us to be good. But we cannot have a good society if we cannot even acknowledge that there actually is something that is “the good”.
When I spoke with Caroline, a mother of seven at this year’s March for Life, she said: “We had to explain to some of the younger ones what an abortion is, and when we did, they looked aghast, they couldn’t understand that people do it, let alone want to do it; that this would be something mothers seek.”
How much manipulation and obfuscation has taken place in our institutions? In our schools, in our universities, in our national health service, in our courts of justice and even in our Church, to move people from a place of instinctive horror to a place of, not just acceptance, but celebration of such a practise?
March for Life wakes people up, but it cannot stop there. The real battle is in the classrooms, in the institutions – it is the Battle of Ideas.
We need to take moral relativism behind the bike sheds and give it the thrashing it deserves. Why? Because ideas have consequences.
Philosophy may only be a way of thinking, but sow a thought, reap an act; sow an act, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny; it’s as true for societies as it is for individuals.
“Morality,” GK Chesterton said, “is always dreadfully complicated to a man who has lost all his principles”.
That is why institutions today need to restore principles and make morality easy again, so that rather than evoking a celebratory cheer, a look of astonishment is the natural response when presented with the idea of crushing a baby in his mother’s womb.
We need a government that will make it easy for us to be good. So how about free moral compasses for everyone! Funded, not by the savings made on the winter fuel allowance, but by the entrepreneur who was not aborted in the womb.
The cost if we don’t take this seriously is eternal life.
Kreeft warns: “As Christians, we know that salvation presupposes repentance and repentance presupposes a moral law. Moral relativism eliminates that law, thus trivialises repentance, thus imperils salvation.”
Thankfully, though, resounding through the streets of London was the cry, “We are the pro-life generation!” as young unashamed hardliners reminded <em>Guardian</em> columnists everywhere that a moral law exists.
<a href="RELATED: Five young Catholics explain why they are pro-life activists and marching for the unborn"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color"><strong><em>RELATED: Five young Catholics explain why they are pro-life activists and marching for the unborn</em></strong></mark></a><br><br><em>Photo: March for Life through London, England, 7 September 2024; screenshot from <a href="https://www.marchforlife.co.uk/2024/09/08/record-numbers-unite-to-say-abortion-isnt-healthcare/"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">marchforlife.co.uk</mark></a>.</em>
