THE CHURCH IS CHARGED BY CHRIST WITH PROCLAIMING THE TRUTH (First published in 'NZ Catholic, December 13)

‘Truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long’, says Launcelot in The Merchant of Venice.

Shakespeare lived in a more innocent age. A Christian age. But now that legally speaking  abortion’ s not murder it’s been effectively hid a long time, with the result that the media are hiding not only abortion but the lucrative trade in fetal body parts.

In Ireland recently, sharing the dinner table at a B and B,  I realised just how easy it was for the Nazis to get away with murdering 6 million Jews. I waited till we’d finished eating before asking these Scandinavians and Canadians if they’d seen anything in the media about Planned Parenthood’s business of fetal tissue harvesting (including brains for transplantation into mice, but I didn’t spell that out).

There was a brief, stunned silence. Then a guy who’d said he’d spent three years in a Carmelite seminary said, ‘It isn’t happening.’

Now, the Nazis didn’t publish the statistics on the holocaust, but these days everyone’s informed about the abortion stats. The Nazis weren’t exposed online, but Planned Parenthood is. You’d think if the stats and pcs had been around in WWII, the holocaust couldn’t have happened.

Oh yes it could. If we’re not listening to Christ who ‘makes the deaf hear and the dumb speak’ (Mk 7, 37) we become spiritually deaf and mute. If the truth’s upsetting, we don’t want to hear or speak it. The human capacity for self-deception becomes boundless.

Consequently, New Zealand is now confronted with the spectre of euthanasia. A Protestant friend whose mother has Alzheimers’ says she’s asked ‘all the time’, when is she going to put her mother down. I was told recently by a prominent local citizen, a cradle Catholic, that he’d had friends in pain with cancer. ‘And they ‘did it’, he said. ‘If your dog had terminal disease you’d put it down. What’s the difference?’

‘The difference is, a dog doesn’t have a soul,’ I said. And he turned away.

At Mass now we’re given that truncated version of Matthew’s Gospel which ends soothingly with the sheep ushered into the Kingdom. What happens to the goats who didn’t care for ‘these least’: the frail, the elderly, the unborn and their mothers? We’re spared the reality, that ‘these will go into everlasting punishment’(Mt 25, 46).

Terrorism has filled the world with fear. Naturally, the Church doesn’t want to add to it. But supernaturally, the Church is charged by Christ with proclaiming the truth.

We hear and proclaim truth only by ‘the love of God which has been poured into our hearts’ (Rom 5,5). By ‘poured in’ St Paul means the love which is Truth itself, which is divinely infused by the Holy Spirit in contemplative prayer.

Vatican II spelt it out. In the official liturgy the Church prays for us all to be ‘fed with her (St Teresa’s) heavenly teaching’ and ‘imitate John (of the Cross) always.’

Contemplative prayer opens our ears, our hearts. And it’s for everyone.