One day a man, who was on his way to see his doctor, said to his wife, “I sure hope the doctor discovers that there is something wrong. I would hate to be told that the state of my health is good when I feel so bad.”
There are people today who would have us believe that modern society is alive and well when in fact there are very serious cancers destroying the very foundations of our modern society. Surely one of these cancers is the sin called abortion.
When we read the biblical account of how God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses we might ask ourselves why it is that God should take the time to give us the Ten Commandments. If we study the Ten Commandments we will discover that every one of them, with the exception of the third commandment (Remember thou keep holy the Sabbath day) could be arrived at by reason alone.
Again we could ask, why should God give us the commandments if they were already written in the hearts of men?
Perhaps this question could be answered by an example.
Many years ago I was parish priest of a large country parish – not large in numbers, but large in territory. It included seventeen towns and villages. On weekends I used to say five masses in five different centers – two on Saturday and three on Sunday. One Sunday morning after saying mass at St. Felix de Valois parish in Dunrea, Manitoba, I headed out for the town of Baldur, about twenty-five miles away, to say mass at the Catholic Mission Church of St. James. All of a sudden I saw a red flasher behind me, signaling me to stop. Apparently, without realizing it, I had been traveling a bit over the speed limit. I explained to the young RCMP constable that my winter tires were slightly oversized and because of this my speedometer was not quite accurate. The young officer was not impressed – he gave me a ticket!
In effect, he was saying, if you knew that your tires were slightly oversized you should have taken that into consideration. He was absolutely right!
Our conscience is very much like the needle of the speedometer, it can easily be bent out of shape so that it is no longer accurate. By constant and repeated sinful acts or by an attitude that is slowly but surely accepting false morality we can arrive at a point where wrong will no longer seem wrong and right will no longer seem right.
It is for this reason that God gave Moses the Ten Commandments. The hearts of men had become hardened, consciences had been twisted out of shape.
Normally when we experience remorse of conscience it is a sign that we have sinned. But we can reach that pitiful point, because our conscience has been so badly twisted out of shape, that we no longer experience remorse of conscience.
Some people will twist their conscience out of shape and then they will try to profit by their own delinquency by claiming that they are free of guilt because their conscience does not disturb them. We have an obligation to make sure that our conscience is accurate.
In Canada, because abortion has been legalized, many people think that it is morally permissible. For many, that which is legal is moral. The collective conscience of the nation has been twisted to the point where 65,000 little infants are killed every year before they see the light of day, and the nation’s conscience does not experience remorse.
In our beautiful national anthem we sing the words, “O Canada, we stand on guard for thee”. We who believe in God, we who believe in the sacredness of life, must always stand on guard. We must not let up in our efforts in combating this terrible sin. We must courageously continue in our struggle so that one day the conscience of our nation will once again recognize the sacredness of life.
The great St. Thomas Aquinas once described law in this way, “that which is according to right reason and for the common good”. A law which changes the womb into a tomb is not worthy of being called a law.
