In case we’d forgotten…

abortion remains the gravest and most archetypal evil of our time. My point in addressing other evils of our time is not to minimize that, but to warn about being blinded by the magnitude of this evil, so that we ignore all other evils.

Many in the West made this mistake during the Cold War, being so blinded by the horrors of Nazism that they simply didn’t care about the horrors of Communism. It’s easy to become focused on defending one aspect of the Good while ignoring everything else. The shocking monstrousness of abortion (read the link above for a taste of it), like the shocking monstrousness of the Holocaust, can fill us with such revulsion and horror that we can become fixated on it and give a pass to other very serious evils, many of them actually contributory to abortion. The trick is to retain an unwavering opposition to abortion and fight it however we can, but not to allow the devil to trick us into giving a pass to other evils or, worse still, to support evils committed by allies in the fight against abortion. Such spiritual Yaltas can only make us prey to clever people who know how to manipulate well-meaning people. What we want is a real victory against abortion, not to have our opposition to abortion perpetually used by people who talk a good game, but use our vote to pursue agendas having little or no interest in the unborn, and sometimes in actual enmity to the unborn.

In short, the Church is engaged in a war on a wide variety of fronts. The sanctity of human life is, after the sanctity of God’s Name, the most critical of these fronts. But if we don’t pay attention to the other fronts or, worse, regard concern for them as somehow in opposition to the battle for human life, the enemy can and will come through the breaches in our defenses.

God bless Jewels Green for telling the truth about the horrors she has witnessed and may God strengthen us to fight this evil till it is defeated.

And, by the way, there is still much to hope for on this front. Here, for instance, is a story worthy of the Heroic Book of Failures: “Pro-choice rally draws 30 people“