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Published: Sunday, 24th October 2010
It recently occurred to me how easily and conveniently people can selectively ignore and disregard some aspects of reality in order to justify the otherwise unjustifiable. This leads to the distortion of the truth. What is accepted as truth by individuals is in fact often a perversion and in some cases even an outright lie. On the larger scale such selective breaks from reality might best be described as “social schizophrenia.” Schizophrenia, of course, is a psychotic disorder featuring severely impaired thinking, emotions and behaviours--a break with reality. Instead of living freely in the world as God created it, well meaning people find themselves confined to a world of confusing and elusive hallucinations that seems really real to them.
In extreme examples from slavery to oppression such as the penal times in Ireland, from the many historical accounts of genocide to today’s terrorism, it is simple see what is being highlighted here. American history, for instance, is marred by the sad fact that at one time African slaves were considered to be three-fifths of a person. Today we can easily see just how twisted it is to disregard the remaining two-fifths. It is a self-evident dictate of reason that a person must be acknowledged as a person in his or her totality, that is body and soul. For one to accept the notion of African slaves as three-fifths of a person is unreasonable because it denies their human dignity and destiny. In order to do so one has to be lacking in awareness by either consciously or subconsciously breaking from reality. The point is that what is unconscionable to us now was sadly at one time the so-called politically correct worldview, a way of thinking wrought with denial.
More challenging, perhaps, is diagnosing--or rather accepting--the “social schizophrenia” manifest in an increasingly secular-mined contemporary Ireland. Just compare the running of the State to that of the Church. Faith is no longer seen as reasonable, yet it is believed to be entirely reasonable to place one’s hopes and dream, one’s destiny, in the hands of the political machine.
It strikes me as strange that our party politicians, and other people who support party politics, have no qualms over towing the party line. One’s own humanity, that is freedom of thought, conscience and expression, is reduced to party policies where dissension would come at a dear price. How great it would be if someone who really cared about you and doing right could buck the system and rise to the top? Yet breaking ranks with one’s party would be considered unreasonable if not freakish. It is somewhat reminiscent of a cult mentality only washed up and sanitized. Talk about blind faith!
Yet, the opposite is true of those who strive to be faithful to certain Church teachings. If one wants to become a media darling, all he or she has to do is publicly dissent from Church teachings. This is especially true he is a priest and the dissension pertains to women’s ordination, homosexuality, or some other highly controversial moral issue. Any attempt to reprimand the renegades results in emotionally charged outcries of the inquisition or the crusades. So it goes that the dissenter receives accolades whilst the Church is considered medieval and the faithful remnant are slagged off as fundamentalist enemies of reason--yes, even Jesus freaks.
In reality, no political regime has ever been as concerned about the full-flowering of the human person and his destiny as Catholic Church. One would find this no less true today if he were to take an honest, rational look at the whole reality. It is faith that motivated medieval Catholic scholars to not only found universities but even to invent them in the first place. The same is true of hospitals and many charitable and educative works. It was faith that motivated the greatest artists and musicians. All of these have allowed humanity to grow in proportion to its experience of transcendent truth, goodness, oneness and beauty where human life is no longer drudgery but destined to share in God’s glory. These things were not even on the agenda of the secular nobility who routinely exploited its common subjects. The fact is that secularism ultimately dehumanizes whereas Catholicism faithfully lived humanizes.
Consider as a case in point the Supreme Court’s decision in the frozen embryo case (Dec 2009). The Court held that frozen embryos created through in vitro fertilization (IVF) are not the unborn protected by the Irish constitution. The fact is that the embryos are unborn and therefore are part of the protected group referred to as the unborn. The Court has capriciously created two classes of unborn embryos: those constitutionally unborn and those not, the former afforded legal protection while the latter not. They can be bought or sold like slaves, denied basic human rights because they happen to not be from a privileged class of people, wantonly murdered, or fall prey to technology terrorists who claim the higher good of science. Somewhere along the way there were severe breaks from reality so that the thoughts, emotions and behaviours of individuals became impaired, nay, schizophrenic. This has sadly spread on a large scale so that we can even speak of an IVF mentality.
No doubt I would find a lot more sympathizers if I stayed on safe ground, for example, explaining how bankers and politicians killed the celtic tiger which proved to be more of a celtic stray cat. Now there’s a hallucination for you! How painful it has been for this reality to set in.
Then again there was the hallucination that the pilgrim Church in Ireland (or elsewhere) is perfect. Somehow we missed the fact that the Church is composed of sinners on a journey to heavenly perfection with the help of God’s grace. We all confused religiosity for holiness and left our humanity on the back-burner. At some point we really stopped needing God, but no one would dare admit that. More damaging is the fact that churchmen themselves lost sight of reality. Consequently they stopped relying on god’s grace to overcome human weaknesses, be they sexual, administrative or otherwise. The sooner we all humbly seek a deeper, more personal relationship with Jesus Christ in the Church, the sooner we discover authentic humanity, and the sooner we rediscover the Way to real holiness. Only by acting in authentically human ways can inhumanity in all its ugly forms be stopped.
Yes! It would be so easy to stay on the politically correct topics. Yet, I will return to the far less popular proposition that among many other things the IVF mentality in Ireland is symptomatic of “social schizophrenia.”
Ireland claims to be pro-life. Many IVF supporters, however, conveniently push aside their opposition to the deliberate destruction of innocent embryo persons because of the one fortunate embryo chosen to survive. In reality, the lives of those dead embryos is no less valued than the life of the survivor. You may sometimes hear the term “IVF baby.” Maybe “IVF survivor” would be more appropriate. In fact, most times IVF is not even successful resulting in only dead embryos. The emotional weight of battling infertility is certainly heavy enough to cloud sound judgement. After all the desire for a baby is good. But here the dictate of Romans 3:8 must be remembered, namely, that the end does not justify the means.
Some IVF supporters take a more highbrowed approach saying that nature is wasteful when it comes to embryos. They dogmatically pronounce that 50% (1 in 2) of the embryos that are implanted in their mothers’ uteruses do not survive till birth. This is pure speculation. Research from the prestigious Mayo Clinic for example places the rate of miscarriage of known pregnancies somewhere between 10-20% (between 1 in 10 and 1 in 5). The Mayo Clinic literature also notes that usually miscarriages are caused by chromosomal abnormalities which make human life unsustainable. In some cases, an embryo never even forms as in the case of a blighted ovum (i.e. anembryonic pregnancy). In no cases, however, are embryos destroyed by murderous human intervention.
Besides the inherent deception that is part and parcel of the “nature is wasteful” notion (I am reminded of Dr Bernard Nathanson’s account of how pro-abortionists grossly exaggerated the number of death from back-ally abortion to gain emotive support for legalization), two other problems come to mind. (1) That dead embryos are “waste.” Remember the three-fifths of a person debacle? Would one refer to their deceased mother as “waste?” I think not! (2) Justifying the deliberate destruction of embryos because “nature is wasteful” disregards the moral substance of such actions to the extent that one is just acting naturally, just doing what nature does. But this removes those actions from the human realm. In other words, one’s impaired reasoning reduces his actions to the inhumane--the destruction of innocent human beings. It is like justifying putting carcinogens in drinking water because sometimes cancer happens anyway.
Then there is the reality by which procreation is naturally linked to the marital act in the context of exclusive marital love. IVF can sometimes involve third and forth parties from outside the marriage. But even if the genetic material is restricted to the married couple and it could be guaranteed that no embryos would be deliberately destroyed, the children conceived by IVF come into being in the technical sphere of a laboratory rather than in the human sphere of a specific act of marital love. Certainly technology has many extraordinary uses, but never in violation of God’s created order.
This feature is categorised under Life Matters