The Pastor's Pen

 

October 9, 2022, the Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time

What Day Is It? While we certainly don’t wish to overlook the contributions of indigenous peoples who populated the Americas before the arrival of Christopher Columbus, at the same time we should not fail to appreciate the truth that most of us would not be here if he hadn’t opened the door to this hemisphere to people from Europe by his voyage of exploration. So Happy Columbus Day and Happy Indigenous Peoples Day.

A Memorial Gift: A Thabor, the stand on which the Monstrance is placed for Eucharistic Adoration, has been given to the parish in memory of the late Bill Sullivan, frequently a daily communicant, by his family to honor their father’s memory and his faithfulness as a parishioner here at Christ the King during his retirement years. The Thabor was used for the first time on this past Friday during adoration in the St, Jude Chapel which takes place on each First Friday of the month following the 830 AM Mass and continues until Benediction at 5 PM.

Left Wondering How It Could Happen?: On our recent pilgrimage to view the Passion Play of Oberammergau the group also visited the nearby city of Munich famous for its annual Octoberfest. Munich is a historical and beautiful city but sadly must also be remembered as a place that saw the initial rise of the Nazi Party in Germany. As this party came to power throughout Germany in 1933, it was near Munich that they established Dachau as the first, and thus the model, for the many concentration camps they would establish throughout Central and Eastern Europe. In visiting Dachau we learned that it was a “work camp” whereas others that followed would eventually be established primarily as extermination camps. Yet whether the camp was a work camp or an extermination camp, the purpose was largely the same, to eliminate those considered dangerous or undesirable from the general population whether by exploiting them first by slave labor while starving them to death or by simply gassing them immediately in order to be rid of them. . We tend to be more familiar with the number 6 million as that of the Jews who lost their lives in this heinous system, but we should not forget that there were an additional 5 million others who were not Jewish who also perished. Yet how do human beings so cruelly and callously extinguish the lives of so many of their fellow human beings? First by hating their enemies including politicians who opposed their regime; , citizens who dared protest against it; and priests and other clergy who dared to point out its dangers from the pulpit. Yet ultimately it was by dehumanizing them and others like the Jews, the Gypsies, the handicapped, or the homosexuals whom the Nazis classified as undesirables in the perfect race and society they aimed to create as the Third Reich. We look back on this now and shudder that such horribly cruel inhumanity to one’s fellow human beings could have ever been possible among supposedly civilized people. Yet whenever people for whatever reason begin to regard other human beings as less than, or other than themselves, or obstacles to their plans then this creates the slippery slope that slides toward the justification of all manner of evil being perpetrated against them. When this dehumanization goes unchecked and unchallenged we should no longer be surprised that it can lead to great extremes of cruelty and injustice. . Yet we are left to wonder if we have learned all we should have from the horrors of the not-too-distant as millions of human lives are presently being exterminated each year by abortion while many people are blind or coldly indifferent to that horror. The remains of these little lives are also exploited for useful tissue and then incinerated as medical waste to make them completely disappear! In a public service campaign to promote abortion as a right, there are those who without any shame what so ever will openly admit to having chosen to abort their child as if it were a very good thing to do and a righteous exercise of what they value more than life itself which is an exaggerated notion of their own personal freedom. . The only way an any decent human being could do this is by resorting to a similar dehumanization of the human life in the womb such that the Nazis employed in their extermination of those whom they regarded as undesirable. That is why the child n in the womb is referred to as a “fetus” as if it were less than a fully human organism, and one can disguise their plan to eliminate their unborn child by calling it an exercise of their right to personal choice. Such thinking should be chilling; a human life because it is unplanned and thus unwanted is to be seen as a completely dispensable life, one that can be dehumanized and eliminated at the whim of those upon whom that life must depend temporarily. The immoral slope on which such thinking could continue to slide should rightly frighten us all. That is why the Church must defend without exception the sanctity of all human life from womb to tomb and continue its often lonely but truly righteous campaign to demand that all human life be acknowledged, respected, and protected in any society that would consider itself civil! October is pro-life month, so let’s pray that we will have the courage to swim against the contemporary currents that continue to devalue human life in so many ways.