Gotta love my school. Franciscan Students For Life getting a pro-life flash mob on in Pittsburgh:

Fear joyful movements.

Herod’s Slaughter of the Innocents is one of the few ways a man can get close to proving the existence of sin by mere example. The story has haunted me since I was a child.

And it haunts me now because it still goes on, in abortion clinics across the world, at a morbid, clinical pace of 4000 innocents a day. When Herod sent his soliders out to kill every boy under the age of two in Bethlehem and its surrounding area, he unwittingly spat out a blackened prophecy for our times.

Herod’s massacre was an attempt to kill the Christ-child. He could not bear the possibility that his own power be infringed – that he would ever have to stoop before another King, and a greater King at that. He was possessed by a prideful sovereignty; a panic over losing his kingly position. He was – by all available standards – a control-freak.

If we Catholics can say nothing else of the Culture of Death, may we not say she is the most rotten of control-freaks? Contraception and sterilization destroy fertility for control. Euthanasia allows us not to worry about treating or healing, and gives us ultimate control over our elderly. The overuse of the death penalty allows us to ignore justice and mercy in favor of easy control. Even the language – birth control, population control, safe sex – all of it demands control. Control of our situation at any cost. And where is this more apparent than in the act of abortion?

The false conception of “sovereignty” seems likewise apparent in the person of Herod. He was a king. As such he had authority, and it seems that his authority was legitimate. It was good. But to maintain that authority he – in true Roman fashion – had his own family members executed, his wife included. He was Jewish, but had rabbis killed who told him that he – in his brutality – was not living like a Jew at all.

The Culture of Death provides with a twisted concept of self-sovereignty. “My body. my choice,” as the mantra drones. To have power of one’s own body is a good, true and beautiful thing. But we have applied that to another body, and another person. Out of love for our own authority over our body, we kill. Out of Herod’s love for his own authority, he killed. In both cases there is a falsehood being followed, that the authority over one thing – our bodies, the state – is control over another – the lives of the Innocents, the lives of our family members.

Herod saw the Christ-child as an enemy. He could not have known that Christ came not to condemn the sinner but to save him, that Christ sought no earthly kingdom to rival his own. He simply misperceived Jesus as a threat to that most precious to him – earthly power and control. He flailed out viciously, in an effort to eliminate the threat. He slaughtered in fear; murdered in anxiety. His assumption – probably as a result of being so wrapped in the elite Roman culture of assassination, execution and betrayal – was that the Christ was nothing more than a potential infringement upon his life.

The Culture of Death – so wrapped up in the ‘me!’ – refuses to acknowledge the possibility that an unintended child might be anything but an enemy. There is no acknowledgement of the telling lack of women who, having avoided abortion, regret the existence of their child. The Culture of Death does not acknowledge that women who decide against abortion see their newborn as a gift. Does the child infringe on their lives? Oh, absolutely. But so do husbands, wives, friends, and any relationships worth calling a relationship. And so abortion marches onward against the child, refusing to acknowledge the possibility of a bad situation’s beautiful outcome.

Herod and the Culture of Death, they hold hands. At both sets of princely feet lie what can only be considered the greatest tragedy human history can bear – slaughtered Innocents.

Herod died in a mess of burning fever, ulcerated entrails, foul discharges, convulsions, stench, etc. (Josephus). In what certainly was a bitter, divine irony, he died of that which he could least control. All his life he killed to maintain his authoritative control; he died unable to control his bowels. So the Culture of Death will die by that which they are least able to control – us. The Culture of Life.

It is a beauty to see life making gains on every side; in legislation, in Planned Parenthood’s speedy decay, in education, in media, and in the majority opinion of the American people. We are winning, because we cannot and shall not be controlled by the tyrant Culture of Death. No, “Death, thou shalt die!”

The appalling strength of the abortion industry – in its daily destruction of 4000 American lives, its enormous wealth and seemingly limitless political clout – might lead one to believe that the pro-life battle is a losing battle. A good fight, to be sure, but a fight against a Goliath of such monstrous proportions that it will only ever remain a noble cause; never to be realized as a noble victory.

The truth, however, is that pro-life Americans have the incredible virtue of being both on the right side and the winning side. While federal decisions like Roe v. Wade still loom over the country, creating the impression that abortion has planted its flag of victory in American soil, individual states have been quietly passing unprecedented amounts of pro-life legislation, legislation that weakens the abortion industry from all sides.

For instance, on September 16th, the Virginia Board of Health approved emergency regulations likely to shut down 17 of 21 abortion facilities in the state. These regulations do not require some bizarre and unnecessary change to abortion facilities, only basic medical decency. Under the new regulations, abortion centers are required to meet the health standards of hospitals, to own standard pieces of emergency equipment – for incidents of cardiac arrest, seizure and the like – and to establish better sanitary conditions. Planned Parenthood, while claiming to hold the needs of women as the ultimate priority, is protesting, and rightly so; not one of their facilities meets the new requirements. Let us be completely clear: They are protesting the demand for their facilities to be clean and safe. These common-sense regulations only wait to be approved by the pro-life Governor Bob McDonnell before they are put into effect on January 1st. They will then devastate the abortion industry in Virginia.

Also this year, the states of Indiana and Kansas eliminated all taxpayer support of Planned Parenthood. They accomplished for themselves what our federal government could not, and are being imitated by similar legislation in Oklahoma, Texas, North Carolina and Tennessee. The year has seen a record number of bills being introduced and passed demanding personhood for the unborn, recognizing fetal pain, banning all abortions after 20 weeks of life, and requiring parental consent. This same trend of victory exists on a local level. ’40 Days For Life’ records 14 abortions facilities having shut down after their grassroots campaign of prayer and protest.
Why is the pro-life movement so successful on the state and local level? Because the majority of Americans are pro-life, and a super-majority of Americans oppose government funding of abortion. The will of the people is set firmly against abortion. Thus, the closer a decision is to the people – that is to say, the closer it is to local government and the further it is from the hulking bureaucracy of the federal government – the more likely the decision will be made in favor of life. This fact clearly illustrates the value of the Catholic socioeconomic principle of subsidiarity, which holds that all government should work at its smallest, most human element, in order for society to be truly just.

It is absolutely reasonable to claim that, if this trend of local victory continues, abortion will be illegal within ten years, or rendered impotent by local and State legislation. Make haste the day.