This Holy Week occurs amid an intensifying battle between the cultures of Life and Death

Mar 27, 2024 by Dave Doveton

By Philip Campbell, Catholic Herald.

During his liturgical reflection for the Monday of this Holy Week, Dom Guéranger meditates: “This city [Jerusalem] is zealous for the exteriors of divine worship; but her heart is hard and obstinate, and she is plotting, at this very hour, the death of the Son of God.”

In our own age we face a culture that has a heart which is both hard and obstinate, described by Pope Saint John Paul II in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae as a “culture of death”. This culture has seen an “eclipse of the sense of God and of man” and as a result has “lost the sense of man, of his dignity and his life”.

John Paul II described a kind of “conspiracy against life” where huge sums of money were being invested into “developing products which are ever more simple and effective in suppressing life” and at the same time “removing abortion from any kind of control or social responsibility”.

Since writing this encyclical in 1995, the situation has rapidly worsened, particularly in the UK. Those conspiring against life are now working to remove any vestiges of “control or social responsibility” left in the law.

Just as the assisted suicide lobby tried to push their campaign at Christmas time, the pro-abortion activists, through some kind of dark coincidence, have chosen Easter as their time to push abortion decriminalisation.

With abortion seemingly so widely available, many may not be aware that abortion remains a criminal offence in England and Wales. The 1967 Abortion Act only provides a legal defence against prosecution in certain circumstances. No right to abortion exists in law.

The abortion lobby, however, wants all this to change, and are seeking to eradicate abortion from the criminal law entirely. This would mean abortion could be legally carried out for any reason and at any stage of the pregnancy.

Read here.