The following is the text of a homily given by Father Peter Janssen, SM at the Mass for Life, held in Wellington on Friday 1 December 2023.
They say that all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. That’s true, but it may take a long time. The triumph of evil may be accelerated greatly if truly evil people are able to get good people to do evil things by convincing them, misleading them or forcing them.
By anyone’s reckoning, King Herod was a very evil man. His response to any real, perceived or potential threat from anyone was to kill them. His own eldest son and heir as well as many other family members were not spared. If this is how he dealt with his own flesh and blood, little wonder that he didn’t hesitate to kill all the baby boys in Bethlehem because within their number there should be the one who might replace him. What is the fundamental human right to life when earthly goods are at stake.
Death becomes not just one solution, or even the best one but the only solution. Beware when death is presented as the only solution to a problem. Those who do this are the worst kind of liars.
What war represents to men, abortion does to women. Killing, especially of the innocent, has always been seen as a grave evil. So, people need to be convinced or forced to accept it. In order to justify war the country’s leaders must convince the population, often through jingoism and propaganda, that killing people in war is the only option. In order to justify abortion they must convince the populous that killing the innocent in the womb is the only realistic option. In order to further this all who argue against it must be silenced or side-lined. For Herod the lives of the innocent counted for nothing against his possession of the kingdom. In the same way, what is the weight of an innocent life in the womb against the right to an education, a job, the chance of meeting Mr Right or just to continue having fun.
What right to life has a person nearing the end of his/hers, one who is past making any further economic contribution and is but a burden to those still active.
An accompanying lie is that nothing worse could befall a young woman than to suffer an unplanned pregnancy. For euthanasia the lie is that our rights do not flow from our humanity but that they have to be earned through our usefulness.
Despite efforts to suppress true scientific information and keep at a distance those who might help them find pro-life solutions to practical and psychological problems, despite the fallacious counselling that twists premeditated killing into meaning being compassionate, despite all the deceptions of the abortion industry, every mother who procures an abortion is a Rachel who cannot be consoled, weeping inwardly for her child who is no more. More than a Rachel, because it was not a corrupt king and his brutal soldiery who did this, but she herself and members of a corrupt and perverted medical establishment breaking their professional hypocritic oath. Heavily culpable are also legislators who rob medical practitioners of their freedom of conscience and force them to participate in acts that they find morally abhorrent.
Nevertheless, many in our society have bought into the lie that a person’s worth depends on their perceived usefulness, so that those who promote a culture of death are already proposing that Aotearoa/New Zealand follow the lead of Canada, Oregon, Belgium, The Netherlands and Switzerland where the criteria for obtaining physician assisted suicide or euthanasia are constantly being enlarged under their own momentum and the force of a logic that comes out of false premises. In Canada the so-called progressive legislators promised that this kind of killing would only take place in cases of unbearable physical pain. Very soon, however, psychological pain was deemed just a debilitating as physical and in Belgium the psychological discomfort of the parents, not even that of their child, can justify euthanising the child. In Canada and Oregon implied guilt over financial pain is now brought to bear on patients by a medical establishment that thinks it is more important to buy the very latest medical machinery and equipment rather than waste money on offering ordinary personal medical care to elderly patients. At least in Oregon, all this has caused a deep distrust of the medical profession, such that, family members feel obliged to bring a tablet computer into the ward of sick elderly family members to check what medications are being administered, what their purpose is and what the recommended dose is.
Let us right here right now affirm our appreciation of the gift of human life; our own and every person’s. This is an inalienable gift from God. No one has ever earned the right to life, nor should they ever be required to do so. To reject this first and greatest divine gift was always seen as the supreme act of ingratitude. Just so, no one, not even a mother does or should have any role in denying this right to anyone – no matter what a nuisance that life may be or appear to be.
Let us pray for our legislators and those who administer our laws that they see through the lies of the abortion industry and that those who practically decide and control who lives and who dies may refrain from forcing people to choose their own deaths by how they present the situation and options for those physically or mentally ill.
Let us pray for women in New Zealand and around the world who through misinformation, ideological propaganda and insufficient information have allowed themselves to be inveigled into having their child killed. From moral theology we know that nature never forgives, human beings sometimes, but God is always ready to forgive those who truly repent and seek his mercy.
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