This Wednesday, September 22, is the September Face the Truth Day. The first stop is Daley Plaza at noon sharp. We will be there until 1:30. Next stop, from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m., is Adams at Wacker for the train crowd.
Hope you can make it. Our August tour was a great success with more than fifty stalwarts showing up for an early morning tour.
Bishop Gracida on the New Heresy
Fourteen years ago, I was invited to speak in the Cathedral in Corpus Christi and to march from a protest at a local abortion mill in a four mile procession of some six-hundred pro-lifers, including their strongly pro-life Bishop Rene Henry Gracida. Through the years Bishop Gracida has remained one of the strongest and most outspoken of the Catholic hierarchy and has recently delivered a paper called “The Arian Heresy Revisited.”
It is a masterpiece of encouragement to pro-lifers especially in the Catholic Church to see the comparison of a heresy, Arianism, that denied the divinity of Christ with the heresy of our day which denies or belittles the sanctity of life, or which Pope John Paul II calls the “culture of death.” What is encouraging is Bishop Gracida’s insistence that while much of the leadership of the Church of the fourth century supported some form of Arianism, the majority of the laity still believed in the divinity of Christ, giving St. Athanasius and the true believers the foundation they needed to condemn Arianism.
Gracida points out that in the Catholic church of today the rejection of belief in the sacredness of human life really began to manifest itself in the dissent which followed the publication by Pope Paul VI of his Encyclical, “Humanae Vitae.” That dissent, he says, has grown in the acceptance of one after another of the violations of the sacredness of human life in abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, assisted suicide, the promotion of human cloning and of fetal experimentation.
Our Hope Is the Pro-Life Faithful
But the fact is that the majority of Catholics, Bishop Gracida opines, are still firmly pro-life and oppose efforts to demean the sacredness of human life, thus laying the groundwork for a revival of the basic belief that all life is sacred. Gracida says that the Holy See makes it clear that all other social issues, such as poverty, hunger, sickness, and economic injustices pale in significance when compared with protecting innocent human life. Gracida says:
The vast majority of Catholics . . . indicate in poll after poll that they are pro-life and have resisted the propaganda of those who promote the heresy which denies the sanctity of human life. Here is reason for hope. Here is reason to be optimistic. The “sensus fidelium” of the majority of Catholics is strong and is growing stronger with each passing year. Each year in which we witness the holocaust of innocent victims the lessons of the fourth century give us additional reasons to be hopeful.
Bishop Gracida was full of hope and optimism back in October, 1990 when I marched with him and heard him speak, and now as the Bishop Emeritus of Corpus Christi he is still hopeful that a time will come when all Christianity is reunited in its belief in the sacredness of all human life, born and unborn.
