Purify Your Bride

I went to a meeting of the CCBR. They are a pro-life group that tries to make the horrors of abortion known to the society at large. One thing they do is put pictures of aborted fetuses on large trucks and drive them around town. It is an interesting tactic. It makes people very uncomfortable. Even our normally orthodox bishop has come out against this tactic. He was influenced by a post-abortive woman who wrote him a letter complaining about a CCBR presentation. I can understand how people in general and especially people with that type of past might really react badly to such pictures. But should that kind of emotional reaction be our guide as to whether or not showing these pictures is right? Moral feelings are untrustworthy. We need to base our choices on Catholic principles of right and wrong. What do they say about it?

Well the bishop mentioned one principle of treating dead bodies with dignity. Is that a good enough reason to not show these pictures? What about showing the pictures of Nazi death camps? Is that wrong because human bodies are being displayed in an undignified manner? I have never heard that. Those movies and documentaries are hailed as masterpieces. Why? Because they expose an evil. Sure you can quibble that at some points they could have respected the bodies of the victims more but nobody feels that in general any showing of human bodies in this context is wrong. The ugliness is needed to make the magnitude of the evil obvious.

This reminds me of a theme John Paul II came back to over and over again. The idea of truth and love. We need them both to be effective. If we have truth and no love we come across as condescending legalists. Why are you imposing your morals on me? Often that question comes from a sense that christians don’t care but just want to win a moral argument. Sometimes that is true. We can do speak out on abortion just to feel holy and morally superior. Truth without love ends up being selfish.

But here we have an issue where people want love without truth. We want to have compassion on people and spare them having to look at the enormity of the evil they have done or at least ignored. The trouble is we miss offering people a chance to repent of their sin and reform their ways. We allow evil to remain hidden. God works in light and truth. The devil works in darkness and deceit.

If we are honest, the real reason we don’t want to proclaim a hard truth is not because we are concerned about the feelings of the sinner but we are concerned about ourselves. It is difficult to deliver a message that many don’t want to hear. They are likely to get very angry if you hit a nerve. They may or may not repent later but their initial reaction is often going to be to lash out at you. When we water down the truth so it won’t offend anyone we will get many more compliments.

So just as truth without love can lead to selfishness so can love without truth. It is only when we embrace both with all their challenges that we become powerful witnesses to our society. I am grateful to the folks at CCBR that seem to be doing a good job.