Deacon Keith Fournier
© Third Millennium, LLC
Catholic Online

On June 29, 2006, Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, the head of the Pontifical Council for the Family, was interviewed by the Italian news weekly “Famiglia Christiana”. He issued a serious warning that the Catholic Church could potentially be prosecuted one day for its clear defense of the right to life and the dignity of every human person from conception to natural death as well as its insistence that marriage is what it is and cannot be redefined by the State.

This Prince of the Church is correct. His words are a prophetic warning. Given social, legal and cultural trends in certain European Nations, as well as in the Americas, all faithful Christians, no matter what their confession or Church communion, could soon be in peril of prosecution by the State. This is not paranoia; it is a realistic assessment.

The good Cardinal expressed this concern in these words:

"I fear that faced with current legislation, speaking in defense of life, of the rights of the family, is becoming in some societies a crime against the state, a form of disobedience of the government, a discrimination against women….The Church risks being brought in front of some international court, if the debate gets any more tense, if the most radical opinions are heeded,"

In this same interview, he spoke of the ghoulish experimentation on human embryonic life masquerading as scientific and medical advance. This so called “embryonic stem cell research” always involves the killing of human embryos. Make no mistake, the Catholic Church favors all legitimate advances in medical science that respect the dignity of all human life and truly serve the common good. Thus, the Church strongly encourages adult stem cell research and fetal chord blood research. Both of these, unlike embryonic stem cell research, have actually shown great promise in clinical trials.

Like the little boy in the fable “the Emperor has no clothes” this courageous leader of the Church stripped away the veneer of empathy that has been spun by the new liars around this practice of “manufacturing” human embryos in order to destroy them as though they were property. He stated what should only be the obvious under Canon Law – as well as under any solid moral analysis- “scientists” who engage in such acts should be viewed in the same way as those who perform abortions. He stated:

"Destroying an embryo equals abortion and that excommunication goes for the woman, the doctors and the scientists who eliminate the embryo…." How refreshing it truly is to hear such clarity in an age of twilight masquerading as dawn.

The Cardinal did not stop at the issue of life in this interview. He also spoke with candor concerning the next dangerous assault on the common good, the efforts to destroy marriage - and the family founded upon it. He condemned efforts of the new cultural and social revolutionaries to give cohabiting homosexual and heterosexual paramours the same legal status as those who are truly married. He specifically noted Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and the Nordic countries, where, by legislative fiat, the power of the State and its penalties now require the acceptance of this counterfeit:

"We are changing the definitions about life: male and female, father and mother are disappearing. Everyone becomes a 'partner…. Civil unions are a legal fiction, two people who promise each other nothing, who promise nothing to their children nor to the state but want the same rights as marriage." He referred to homosexual “marriage” as "absolute nothingness".

After his interview, the proponents of the new Cultural Revolution drew their verbal swords. The drumbeats of persecution can be heard in the distance.

In 1999, Evangelical theologian, Harold O.J. Brown of the Howard Center for the Family, Religion and Society noted a similarity between the way the Roman authorities charged Christians of that era with "odium humani generis" [hatred of the human race] and the way the political and media establishment now charge contemporary Christians with creating a "climate of hate."

Ancient Rome lost its respect for the dignity of all human life while claiming to be enlightened. They practiced primitive forms of abortion as well as "exposure", the killing of unwanted newborns. Additionally, the Emperor Nero in the first-century A.D. was not only overt in his own homosexual relationships but sought to make such relationships normative in the empire and thereby give them an equal status with true marriage.

First and Second century Rome was one of the first mission fields of the early united Christian Church. Rome proclaimed itself the shining example to the world of its age, but sadly fell prey to moral debauchery. In an eerie parallel, the history of ancient Rome ...