U.S. Stock Market Plummets 635 Points: True Change is Needed

When there is no recognition of a preeminent right to life, the erosion of the entire structure of human rights follows

The financial collapse is part of a deeper crisis, a moral crisis. It is connected to the modern idolatry which elevates the accumulation of stuff over persons and has substituted license for ordered liberty. We are struggling under the boot of what Pope Benedict XVI rightly called a "Dictatorship of Relativism". Campaign 2012 stretches out ahead of us. The Nation we love requires true change.

P>NEW YORK, NY (Catholic Online) - In a scene reminiscent of the Dow's free fall in 2008, the indices of the US stock market plummeted on Monday, August 8, 2011. Investors succumbed to the fear that the global debt crisis, the downgrade of the US Credit rating and the increasingly tenuous state of the economy have caused.

We need to examine what brought us - and keeps us- here. We need to ask- honestly and forthrightly - what, and who, can help lead us out of the wasteland. We are headed into the most important election in years. The President of the United States held a Press conference on August 8, 2011. He attempted to "spin" the stock market's strong reaction to the obvious lack of leadership under which we suffer as a Nation.  

The financial collapse we face is part of a deeper crisis, a moral crisis. It is connected to the modern idolatry which elevates the accumulation of stuff over persons and has substituted license for ordered liberty. We are struggling under the boot of what Pope Benedict XVI rightly called a "Dictatorship of Relativism".

In an age which insists there are no moral truths, consumption trumps compassion. Our current condition is corrosive. Unchecked and uncorrected, it threatens authentic human freedom, whether that freedom is expressed in a market economy which purports to promote it or other structures of social, cultural and political life which are succumbing to its corrosive effects.

I can hear it now; anyone who dares suggest there is a connection between the market crisis and the moral collapse of our culture - is a "nut". Further, that anyone who claims our economic collapse has anything to do with our allowing the human person to become a commodity, a thing to be disposed of or used, is a "religious fanatic". Frankly, I do not care what detractors may think of my claim.

I care about my neighbors, the ones whose dream of owning their first home has become a nightmare. I received a call today from a couple who face the imminent death of a father while they face foreclosure. That banker recommended Adjustable Rate Mortgage" (A.R.M.) has been raised above their head like a financial "sword of Damocles" and threatens the security of their family.

The "experts" now refer to their mortgage, the fruit of their hard work and savings, as junk commercial paper. They call it a drag on the economy and blame it for the roadblocks in the advancement of others. Their elected officials authorized the "government" to "bail out" the Nation by buying it wholesale, with their tax dollars, in effect giving them a sort of double mortgage as a result. 

I care about my neighbors who can barely afford to put gas in their automobile and drive to work because special interests, knowing that we have the genius and ability to solve this energy crisis, have placed profits over people and the common good, with governmental complicity.  

I care about my neighbor who worries that their child is being taught at a public school - or rather not being taught at a public school - but cannot read or add. The problem is they cannot send them to a school of their own choice. Their concerns are camouflaged in the rhetoric of class warfare as special interests protect unions which have become like the bureaucracies they were originally intended to oppose. 

I care about my neighbors who grow angry that elected officials - often the ones who continually oppose constitutionally sound vouchers or credits which would empower all parents to make the same schooling choices they make for their own children - fail to recognize the urgency of the need for authentic educational reform. They refuse to see that parental choice in education is a matter of social justice.

I care about my neighbors who are tired of having Iraq and Afghanistan used as bargaining chips in a continual war of empty words by politicians. They are parents and grandparents who are immensely patriotic but worry every hour of every day about their sons and daughters placed in harm's way and whether or not they will be home in time for Christmas.

I care about my first neighbors, the ones living in the first home of the whole human race who are daily being dismembered, suctioned, burned or through "surgical strikes" with unregulated chemical weapons turned against them, routinely killed at the hands of a medical professional who once pledged to "do not harm".

There is a war on the womb in America promoted by "Abortion Hawks" who now seek to expand the field of battle and fund this evil war effort with tax payer money. All of this is one more bad fruit of the counterfeit "morality" of "supply and demand" which has now commoditized even babies. They are becoming "products" not persons to be respected and gifts to be received.

The consumer is told they have a "right" to select them, design them, and reject them, at will. The "medical professional" - who knows that the one being killed as he or she reaches into the womb is in fact a human person - responds to this consumer driven approach to birth and hides behind the constitutionally protected "right" to kill the child, all too often made by a confused mother who has routinely been lied to.

When a society fails to recognize that persons are more important than things, when it loses sight of the inviolable dignity of every single human person at every age, every stage and of every size, it soon devolves into a form of practical materialism, worshipping a new golden calf. It uses the language of human rights but the words mouthed have lost their true moral content.

When there is no recognition of a preeminent right to life, the erosion of the entire structure of human rights follows. Human rights do not exist in a vacuum; they are goods of the human person. To be "Pro-Life" is NOT to be a political Partisan or a "single issue" voter. Rather, it is to be truly human and to recognize that there is a hierarchy of rights. Without acknowledging the preeminent right to life, all derivative rights and the entire infrastructure of human rights is placed in jeopardy.

Without the freedom to be born, all of the talk about compassion for the poor is hollow and empty. Failing to recognize that our first neighbors in the womb have a right to be born is a foundational failure of our obligation in solidarity to one another. There can be no enduring lasting solidarity in a culture that kills its own children and calls it a "right".

Mother Teresa put it so clearly: "America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships.

"It has aggravated the derogation of the father's role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts -- a child -- as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered dominion over the independent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters. And, in granting this unconscionable power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or other sexual partners.

"Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being's entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be declared to be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign."

That little nun from Calcutta was a prophet. Campaign 2012 stretches out ahead of us. The Nation  we love requires true change.

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