France's recent healthcare law introduces new measures to ease access to abortion, eliminating for those who wish it the mandatory week of reflection before the procedure.
As for therapeutic abortion, the law passed in 1975 has evolved little from its original form. Its content, little known, has much to disturb our consciences. It stipulates that a child presumed to be handicapped may be terminated at any point during pregnancy. With advances in diagnostic techniques and their widespread use, today 95 percent of children with Down syndrome are aborted. This moved Didier Sicard, then president of France's national bioethics advisory committee, to declare: "We face a terrifying prospect—their extermination." For many, what is legal is moral. The abortion of handicapped children is presented as an act of compassion toward the child and its family.
Our consciences have been numbed. If euthanasia remains forbidden, infanticide in this form is present nonetheless.
Though the contexts differ, the name of Monsignor von Galen comes to mind—the bishop of Münster. I learned of his life when Benedict XVI beatified him in October 2005, and I was in Rome for the Synod on the Eucharist. His story shook me. In his time (1878–1946), Hitler feared him because he was one of the most courageous leaders of German resistance to National Socialism. I will not recount his many battles against the mounting persecutions of the Church and society; instead I focus on his heroic defense of the most threatened: people with mental and psychological disabilities.
The secret plan consisted of eliminating all persons "unworthy of life because they were unproductive members of the national community." Monsignor von Galen did not speak in euphemisms. In 1946, looking back at the past, he said: "God has given me a position that obliges me to call black black and white white." During the summer of 1941, in three homilies preached in his cathedral, he acknowledged: "They are unproductive, if you wish," but then he invoked the penal code and God's fifth commandment, "Thou shalt not kill." "God impressed this commandment upon the human conscience from ancient times, long before it became a crime."
Underground Homilies
The bishop, far from being reckless or foolhardy, understood the consequences of his words. He had his staff prepare a suitcase with his most essential belongings in case the Gestapo came to arrest him. His three homilies circulated clandestinely and made him famous throughout Germany and the world. The British RAF dropped 150,000 copies of the text over Berlin. Hitler was enraged: "We must capture him at once!" But Goebbels, his propaganda minister, dissuaded him. "Any reprisal against this bishop risks provoking a mass uprising of German Catholics, especially in Westphalia."
In examining this horrifying period, I have before me the investigation carried out over 32 years by Gotz Aly in a book titled The Abnormal. The book exposes the monstrous program and traces its slow implementation within an advanced society—a normalized eugenics. Hitler did not hide the financial dimensions of his demonic enterprise from his closest collaborators, an initiative meant to preserve the purity of genetically healthy Aryan youth.
Propaganda's Anesthesia
To gauge potential backlash and opposition, Hitler had questionnaires sent to all registered families: "Would you consent to a painless relief of life for your child if experts determined he was irredeemably idiot?"
The results shocked the authorities: the vast majority of parents accepted the principle. Propaganda had already deadened their consciences.
In the homily for Monsignor von Galen's beatification, it is said that we live "in an age apparently less threatening, yet equally problematic regarding respect for human life."
Have we not ourselves conducted cost-benefit studies in France to determine whether it is economically more advantageous to eliminate a handicapped child at birth rather than support him for life?
Monsignor von Galen deserves to be chosen as patron of those who dedicate themselves to defending life, to proclaiming that each person is unique in the world, that his life is sacred and inviolable, and that although it may be limited, it always has an irreplaceable mission to fulfill. In his fragility, he calls out the best in us. For Christians, every person is created in the image and likeness of God. In his magnificent apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis reminds us: "Every child is in the heart of God from eternity, and the moment of conception realizes the eternal dream of the Creator."
Marie-Hélène Mathieu, O.&L. n.211/2016
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