More from Frankenstein.

On September 5, 2007, Britain's Human Fertilization and Embryo Authority decided to allow the creation of hybrid (human-animal) embryos for use in medical experiments; these are to be killed after fourteen days. Bishop Elio Sgreccia, president of the Vatican Pontifical Academy for Life, called the ruling "a monstrous act against human dignity." He told the Italian daily Il Corriere della Sera, "the British government has given in to a group of scientists with a request which is absolutely against morality. It is necessary that the scientific community mobilizes itself as soon as possible." (Zenit, Sept. 6)

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The need for scientists who hold to the Judeo-Christian tradition to mobilize themselves is also the need of many other groups. In fact, nothing seems to be needed more today than individuals or groups of individuals to re-assert themselves, to speak out, to resist the deadening control of bureaucratic bodies.

One example is the case above. Another is the support by government bodies for the current drive by members of the homosexualist lobby to impose their standards, their lifestyle, their beliefs, such as they are, upon all of society, beginning with our children. Although their total number is only 0.6 percent of the population, and though their activists are even fewer, government agencies and school boards everywhere, including Catholic boards are bowing to their wishes. Catholic officials are so frightened with being charged with discrimination that they abandon their own principles even though Catholics still make up close to 40 per cent of Canadian society. Lawyers whisper in their ears that the law of the land must be obeyed. Period. No matter what those laws say.

The authentic Christian tradition is radically at odds with that view.

"When the Church demands religious freedom she is not asking for a gift, a privilege, or permission dependent on contingent situations, political strategies, or the will of the authorities. Rather, she demands the effective recognition of an inalienable human right ... It is not simply a matter of a right belonging to the Church as an institution, it is also a matter of a right belonging to every person and every people. Every individual and every people will be spiritually enriched to the extent that religious freedom is acknowledged and put into practice."

John Paul II, Cuba, 1998

Please, do not tell us that our rights are the gift of Pierre Trudeau and his Charter of Rights and Freedoms and depend on the interpretations of the Supreme Court of Canada.

The Western world is steadily moving from hedonism to thought control. In the brilliant article, The rhetoric of "choice" and the arrival of bureaucratic despotism (in this issue, pp 33-40), the author points out that its pre-eminent sponsors come from the scientific community. Its first dark features appeared in what the seculars still call "the age of enlightenment." The anti-Christian philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century "wanted to liberate human technology, to make man 'the master of his own home' and create a technological 'heaven on earth.' For this "liberation" they and their many imitators first needed to drive out and defeat the Christian Church, leaving moral anarchy in its place. This anarchy, however, will prove to be transitory, and will soon give way to the Frankenstein monster of bureaucratic, administrative tyranny. The whole process, he points out, "results in a massive, rationalistic devaluation of human life," while the populace is reduced to docility, and the belief that "state-funded science and medical research [can] render safe any degree of self-indulgence."

The real issues in our society are not the economy, or better school facilities, or better roads, but the devaluation of human life. The British approval for human-animal stem cells is only the latest step. The prevention of births, the killing of the newly conceived, the promotion of pornography and homosexuality, the killing of embryonic humans for stem cells, the attempts at extra-marital conception through I.V.F., and the whole philosophy of permissiveness are casing the breakdown of marriage. This, in turn, leads to poverty, violence, disease and the breakdown of society. These should be the election issues of our times. The issue of Truth, not self-indulgence, is what should be uppermost in the mind of citizens.

FATHER ALPHONSE DE VALK, C.S.B.

EDITOR