We know what the word “sacrifice” means. It means the surrender of something precious to the god in whom a person believes. Sacrifices have been part of world religions since the dawn of recorded history. Without exception, the deities of all the religions of the ancient world demanded sacrifices in their honor. The Egyptians and Babylonians, the Greeks and Romans, the deities of pre-Christian India and of the continent of Africa required that their adherents offer what we call sacrifices in their name.
What is less well known, however, is that these religions also required the sacrifice of children as an oblation and even as a condition, for obtaining blessings from the gods. We read in the Office of Readings for today’s Divine Office that the Lord spoke through the prophet Jeremiah, charging the Jews of imitating the pagans in their practice of child homicide. Said the Lord, “They have built high places for Baal to immolate their sons in fire as holocausts to Baal: such a thing as I neither commanded nor spoke of, nor did it ever enter my mind.”
As we read statements like foregoing, we ask ourselves: how could human beings be so deluded as to seriously believe that their gods required human sacrifice as a condition for receiving divine favors? The key word is “deluded.” Thirty years of teaching comparative religion has taught me that there is no limit to the irrational, indeed insane, practices that religious mythology will not put into practice as a mandate from the deities in whom they believed. Thus we read in the history of the Aztecs in South America before Columbus that they would kill up to ten thousand children on a major feastday in honor of one of their gods. Although seldom mentioned, infanticide as a religious ritual was practiced in India before its colonization by Great Britain.
We return to the theses that should be explored far beyond the time we can give it in this conference. Abortion as the widespread practice that it has become today is incredibly a religious practice. It is inspired by the evil spirits who, in Christian terms, were and are the malignant deities of paganism. These deities, often goddesses, demanded the sacrifice of children to be propitiated. Unless children were killed and offered to these gods, they would avenge their anger against the people in the most devastating ways.
http://www.therealpresence.org/archives/Abortion_Euthanasia/Abortion_Euthanasia_005.htm
The future of the human race depends on the Catholic Church’s teaching on abortion. This is the statement I wish to prove in this lecture.
Before we go any further in my presentation, let me first explain what I mean.
I mean that the survival of the human race depends finally on the acceptance of the Catholic Church’s two thousand years’ teaching that the killing of unborn children is murder.
http://www.therealpresence.org/archives/Abortion_Euthanasia/Abortion_Euthanasia_007.htm
In my judgment abortion and euthanasia are at the heart of the crisis that is plaguing and destroying the modern world. I do not intend to address the issue of defending the rights of the unborn or the aged in this discourse. They obviously have these rights, and abortion and euthanasia are serious crimes against the rights of unborn children, the aged and terminally ill. Rather, our focus will be on the rights of God that are being violated by the crimes of abortion and euthanasia in the most homicidal century in human history.
I would like to address myself to two areas of our subject. First, to the sanctity of human life and then to the relationship between chastity and charity to the fifth commandment of the divine decalogue.
When God became man in the person of Jesus Christ and took human flesh of his mother Mary, he introduced an understanding of human life that was simply unknown or ignored in the pagan Roman Empire into which Jesus Christ was born. Abortion and infanticide were legalized in Roman law in the first century of the Christian era. It was assumed that the aged and the terminally ill would be destroyed.
All the political means being used in the modern world to protect the life of the unborn and the aged and terminally ill in our own country today are inadequate to meet the crisis we are facing. America is becoming a paganized nation. What Christ did was to introduce an entirely new meaning to human life. Because Jesus Christ raised natural human life to a supernatural level, human life is holy and human life is sacred. Human life belongs to God and the rights of God are being violated by abortion and euthanasia. And once we act upon that principle of our Christian, Catholic Faith, then the worldwide homicide that we are witnessing today will be stopped. It is up to us to stem the tide of the massive murder in the modern world.
http://www.therealpresence.org/archives/Abortion_Euthanasia/Abortion_Euthanasia_010.htm