A CHURCH SILENT ON ABORTION CAN'T EXPECT NEW PRIESTS (First published in 'NZ Catholic, June 28)

How we all must have prayed for Lecretia Seales! She died at home in Wellington, in a hospital bed obtained with concerted efforts by  the hospice, friends and family, from natural causes after Justice Collins said no to her bid for doctor-assisted suicide.

But TVNZ’s Sunday and TvOne News - both biassed reportage, the latter outrageously so - showed the poster girl for euthanasia had advanced that cause no end.

Then there’s the cause for gender well-being.

‘Pardon me?’ I hear you ask.

Two days before Lecretia’s death, at a café in Wellington I said to our daughter Rose, ‘Why do they call him ‘Shortie’?’

Rose works nights at Ivy in Cuba Street. Ivy is a gay bar. Shortie, the waiter at our table, works nights at Ivy too.

 ‘Why do they call them Shortie,’ said Rose.

‘Pardon me?’ I said, and Rose explained how the pronoun ‘him’ is sexist. We should eliminate such gender-explicit expressions. ‘Im indoors suggested that being singular, a better pronoun for Shortie would be ‘it’. Peace-loving Rose made no reply.  

As well as nights bar-tending at Ivy, Rose’s days are spent doing honours in theatre at Vic. Politically speaking her milieu is ultra correct, far removed you’d think from yours or mine, but gender well-being is coming to a school near you.  

The Ministry of Education is advising schools to consider non-gender toilets, changing rooms and uniforms. Five year-olds need to question ‘gender stereotyping’.  Canada, cited as our model for doctor-assisted suicide, puts posters promoting the eternal triangle with ’Love Has No Gender’ signs in school toilets. 

The day after Lecretia’s death, in Hastings outside the hospital the group praying for women arriving for ‘terminations’ questioned  the churches’ silence around abortion. Maybe it’s because probably one in three Kiwi mothers has killed her own child. ‘The ones who can’t bear to hear the word abortion’, says Dr Theresa Burke, founder of Rachel’s Vineyard, ‘they’re sitting in our churches.’

We’re all implicated. It’s a guilty silence.

Blessed Teresa of Calcutta’s statement, ‘abortion is the greatest destroyer of peace today’, is illustrated by violence especially towards women and children, sex and drug abuse, eating disorders and the breast cancer generated by abortion.

We lament the lack of priests, and so we should. The fewer the priests, the fewer the Eucharists and people attending, the more sorrows our families and communities will have to bear. But when the Church by her silence condones rejecting God’s gift of human life, she can’t expect to be granted the priests whose sole purpose is to make that life divine.

Our natural reaction to societal degeneration is fear. But we’re designed by God to become supernatural,  called to personal holiness, by contemplative prayer to live like a child as St Therese of Lisieux did, in the arms of Jesus.

As Luisa Piccarreta did, fifty years on.

‘Stay calmly in my arms’, Jesus told Luisa, ‘with your eyes closed.  Everything I let happen to you is directed by me for your greater good.’