Archbishop's web site Denver Catholic Register Parishes Catholic Pastoral Center
January 24, 2001
'It could never happen here'
Roe vs. Wade decision was a crime against humanity
The first of a two-part column from the Archbishop's address at the March for Life Rally at the State Capitol, Jan. 20
Back in the 1930s, a young German thinker looked around at the persecution and political violence in his country and wrote the following words of admiration for the United States:
He said, "American democracy is not founded on the [so-called] emancipated man . . . but upon the kingdom of God and limitation of all earthly powers by the sovereignty of God."
Why was that important to him? It was important because he could see in America a freedom based on the sanctity of every human life . . . a freedom rooted in the dignity which all people share as children of the same God.
He could see in America a nation founded by people who — despite all their sins — at least understood that political power is subordinate to a higher authority. America's founders understood that it's God who judges the strong; God who protects the weak; God who guarantees the rights of all persons, including the right to life.
And this young German thinker — in his own experience, in his own country — could compare America's blessings with the disaster that happens when leaders ignore God and begin to decide for themselves who qualifies as a human person . . . and who does not.
Of course, America in 2001 is a long way from Germany in the 1930s. But on a day when we remember the killing of some 40 million unborn children over the past 28 years through abortion, we can rightly ask: Are we really as far removed from the past as we think?
I suspect not, and here's why: Political systems are organic; they're ecologies. Bad laws and bad court decisions poison the roots of the way we live. They degrade the way we think — and that in turn results in more bad laws, more bad court decisions, more bad political behavior . . . and gradually we lose the ability to see what's right, and to do what's good. And that's where we find ourselves today.
When the Supreme Court issued its Roe vs Wade decision in 1973, it committed two distinct crimes against humanity. First, it legalized abortion on demand. It opened the floodgates to killing 40 million unborn children, and scarred the lives of millions of women and men in the process. Roe put the definition of human personhood up for grabs. It removed the unborn from human status — and in doing so, it set a precedent that now comes back to haunt us in the debates over infanticide and physician-assisted suicide.
Second — and in a way, just as brutally — Roe undermined our reasoning and our moral vocabulary. As a result, we're losing our ability to think rigorously about moral issues. The way abortion supporters hide behind the label "pro choice" simply proves this point. "Pro choice," as an expression, is completely divorced from the real, flesh-and-blood event of an abortion. It's sanitized. It's evasive. And it's dishonest.
When God gives Israel the shema in Deuteronomy 6:4 — "Hear O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one" — He tells His people to "bind [my commands] as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. And you shall write them on the door posts of your house and on your gates" (Dt 6:8-9).
God inscribes His presence on the heart of Israel — and His commands on the memory of Israel. One of those commands is to "choose life." And He follows that command with a warning and a promise:
"See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you this day, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in His ways and by keeping His commandments and His statutes and His ordinances, then you shall live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you . . . . But if your heart turns away, and you will not hear, but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, I declare to you this day that you shall perish . . . " (Dt 30:15-18).
Germany was one of the most cultured nations in Europe before the Third Reich. It became the greatest death machine in history. Nothing prevents us from growing into the same kind of creature, and in fact the seeds of that future are already among us in three sins we encounter and share as Americans every
