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A Chilean saint, Fr. Alberto Hurtado (d. 1952), often repeated the saying of the famous French priest, Lacordaire, in speaking of the pathway to holiness: “It is proper for the noblest hearts to discover the most urgent need of their epoch and to consecrate themselves to it.” Saints always have their feet on the ground and their minds on God or at least trying to discern the Will of God for the transformation of their societies. In this perspective there is little doubt that many of those who strive for holiness today will consecrate themselves to the most urgent need of our epoch: namely, putting an end to the wholesale slaughter of the innocents by modern day Herods and Pharaohs. It is to this end that this little book is written. This manual is meant to shake people up and call them to the battle to save lives and souls. The day is far gone and the need has grown increasingly urgent.
Modern American society and, by extension, the rest of the world that is influenced by American politics and culture, is be systematically dismantled before our very eyes by a spiritual e of evil that is not recognized as such. If the devil were to appear to the children of this age as he truly is, in all his ugliness and horror, he would be roundly rejected. So, of course he doesn’t appear as he truly is. This clever being, it is said, “disguises himself as an angel of light”(2 Cor 11:14)3 and has found countless illusory costumes in which to conduct his evil, all the while maintaining an appearance of political correctness and acceptability in polite society. Real Christians don’t fall for his deceit, though. We have eyes to see the truth because we are followers of the Truth, and it’s time to “consecrate” ourselves to the Truth in a new and bold way.
The idea that the devil is “prowling like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” (1 Pt 5:8) is not new, but most people are uncomfortable with the idea that the devil could be operating so freely in their world. Yet, those of us who have battled the monolith of abortion at close quarters have more than an intuition that abortion has a preternatural strength behind it and that it clouds the minds of men and women with a truly demonic perversion of values. The killing of babies as a form of sacrifice to demons has been roundly condemned by God and His Church from the time of the prophets to the present, but sometimes even the external face of the dirty business of child sacrifice shows a consistency from one generation to the next. For example, the newly dedicated Planned Parenthood killing center in Houston, Texas (2010) has an architectural design that looks uncannily like an Aztec pyramid, where the practice of human sacrifices took place for generations. The existence of demons transcends human time, so it is not surprising that the forms of their idolatrous worship should look fairly similar in different cultures and times.
It is a theme of the spiritual life that when an evil is practiced clandestinely for a long period of time, eventually it sheds its invisible covering and vaunts itself in its hideous garb. Furthermore, God in His Mercy has programmed reality in this way to expose the nefarious spiritual forces of the underworld for the eyes of all to see. Those who do not reject demons on the basis of faith may then reject them when they see with their own eyes the horrible works of their spiritual hands.
Immense Evil Needs Immense Good to Combat It
A spiritual evil like abortion needs a spiritual force of good to break its power and drive it out of this world. The abortion industry is not just powerful in worldly terms, nor is it just to be understood in its human dimensions. No human being or group of humans on their own can commit such immense atrocities against the human race without a diabolical intelligence and malice giving it power. The scope of the killing, the fervor of abortion’s missionaries of death and the seductive for~e of its ideology transcend the human intellect and will.
Erik Holmberg, in his 1988 documentary, Massacre of Innocence, very aptly details the effects of this evil in our world. Hee titles a section of his film, “The Effects of Child Sacrifice,” and lists six frightening results of such unfettered evil in our world. Abortion, he says,
1. Destroys human life;
2. Breaks God’s commandments and thereby puts the nation under a curse;
3. Opens the door for and empowers demonic spirits;
4. Binds the practitioners to the demonic spirits (in a blood covenant);
5. Locks women into perpetual travail and sorrow; and
6. Releases powers of deception and witchcraft over people, especially women.
Holmberg has summarized in a nutshell the nature of the evil that not only causes such destruction in itself but spills over into society in unforeseen and unintended ways.
When all is said and done, it is only the united Christian church, expressed most completely in the authority of the Catholic Church, that has the spiritual resources to end the culture of death; a work which it could accomplish overnight if it were to ever fully “consecrate itself” to the mission of driving out the demon of child sacrifice from our land. It is painfully evident to any objective observer that the Church has not yet fully taken up this mission. In fact, the lack of unity of Catholics in this country is largely responsible for the prolongation and intensification of the culture of death since the 70s. When Catholic bishops publicly contradict each other on the appropriateness of the nation’s Abortionist-in-Chief receiving an honorary degree at a prestigious Catholic university; when 54% of so-called Catholics vote for the most pro-abortion President and elect the most radical Congress in American history; when Catholic doctors prescribe abortifacient birth control, and Catholic hospitals look the other way with a wink and a nod at sterilization and abortion referrals from within their walls; when Catholic women pour into killing centers at the same rate as the pagan generation we are immersed in; when alleged Catholic politicians and public figures use their high-profile positions to aid and abet the prevailing evils or our day-the Church has clearly become part of the problem instead of being the solution to these evils. The Church at all levels, from the bishops to the people, has clearly failed to understand the demonic nature of the industry that practices its evil right down the street from many Catholic churches. It has also failed to marshal the spiritual resources at its disposal to stop it.
To this cause, the Church must revitalize its essential identity as Church Militant. All believers in Jesus Christ must be on guard and prays in the spiritual Garden of Gethsemane in which every child in this land is conceived. Unlike our Master who freely chose to suffer before them, babies have no choice about whether they will be allowed to be born or not, and that Garden of Decision (“choice”) could be followed by a remorseless Golgotha administered by the devil and his minions, at any point during all nine months of pregnancy. Unless the disciples of Christ truly awake from their slumber and unite in opposition to the heinous crime, the collective guilt of this industry will fall upon us all as a people, and Jesus will say to us, like He said to the weeping women of Jerusalem on His Way to Calvary, “Do not weep for me. Weep for yourselves and for your children. Catholics will not be held accountable if they fail to stop such an immense evil, but we will receive a withering judgment if we live amidst the evil and do nothing about it. The Medieval poet, Dante Alleghieri (1265-1321), is supposed to have said that “the hottest places of hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality,”
Even though the battle is difficult, we must nevertheless remember the words of St. Paul that, “Despite the increase of sin, grace has far surpassed it.” Our Hope in Christ tells us that what we look forward to is an abortion-free society at some point in the future. We are not so naive as to believe that we could eliminate abortion from the world entirely. That would be tantamount to eliminating sin from men’s hearts, but man’s heart of darkness is the one thing that has shown itself to be a constant reality throughout all human history. Sin and the works of the devil will be brought to an end on the day when Christ our King returns “to judge both the living and the dead and the world by fire,” as has been traditionally said of Him. Our hope is not in an end to sin in the world of space and time, but in an end to the evil of abortion as an institution and as an acceptable “choice” for men and women anywhere. To this end, Christ will use the hearts that are ready to pray and the hands that are ready to work, and He will, through His Church Militant, drive out the evil of abortion from our midst.
The Church’s Spiritual Warfare Against Abortion
The pro-life movement has an immense amount of resource material on issues and activities related to the effort to restore legal protection to the unborn child, but the present work is not meant to be an analysis of the pro-life issues per se. It is rather a spiritual commentary about the abortion industry and its evil spawn, the culture of death. Nor does it intend to analyze pro-life issues from a moral point of view, except indirectly. That is all done effectively in other places and by more capable minds. Here I examine the spiritual power that the Church can marshal in the defense of the most innocent of God’s children, the unborn-and their mothers-from abortion. I will also relate this effort to the need to repulse other demonic attacks against the sacred institutions of marriage and the family.
Let us never forget how powerful Christian spiritual strength is when marshaled against the institutionalized power of the devil. I distinctly remember praying a private prayer of exorcism at an abortion mill one day when a very angry woman drove into the parking lot and cursed me while she stomped defiantly into the clinic. I and the sidewalk counselors just continued our prayer, only to see this same woman almost run out of the killing center some short while later with a smile on her face! We wondered what happened. With tears in her eyes, she apologized for her behavior and was particularly sad that she had spoken such vulgar words against a priest. She said that she was very pleased that we had stayed to pray for her and remarked that she could feel the prayer literally “penetrating the walls of the clinic” that day! In fact she said that the prayer also penetrated her heart. She felt as if God had come into her heart. Soon afterward she went across the street to the pregnancy care center and was choosing a name for her baby to whom she ultimately gave birth. The prayer softened heart, but more importantly, it drove away whatever spirit of anger, fear or hatred that was coercing her that day.
May the Lord Jesus enlighten all who read these pages and the holy angels equip us “against the principalities and power”, the rulers of this world of darkness” (Gal 6:12) in the battle for babies, souls and, indeed, our very civilization.
Fr. Thomas J. Euteneuer ( from the Introduction to his book Demonic Abortion)
