Preface to memo to Metropolitan Jonah
Your Beatitude:
Please consider: If we want to end something, in this case abortion, the most effective way would surely be to eliminate the cause, wouldn’t you say?
I hereby double-dee-dare you to finger the cause of abortion in the USA!
I think we can safely adduce as the cause of abortion those persons who are
- a) having SEX, be it casual, or “recreational” sex which typically is drug-aided, or “social” sex, or perhaps sex due to sex addiction, as Jenny Sanford said was her sad-sack husband’s problem – it’s all having sex, which of its nature is such as to lead to
- b) conception, which is thus quite likely to occur, I don’t have those mathematical calculations that Americans live by to back up any statement of what the odds are that conception will win over the attempts to prevent it - but for our purpose, namely, designating the CAUSE OF ABORTION, certainly you have to put CONCEPTION high on the list, because for sure ABORTION CAN’T OCCUR without CONCEPTION,
- c) BIRTH, since abortion being by definition prevention of live birth, the birth process must be at issue, or else you couldn’t abort it.
Only part of the time are civil laws causative of abortion, and then only indirectly so.
So wouldn’t you say, your Beatitude, that the one single common denominator, which must without fail precede ABORTION is some kind of engagement in SEX, even if it is some kind of funky sex, like artificial insemination? Wouldn’t you agree, your Beatitude?
One effective way to prevent sex which might lead to abortion would be to prescribe chastity belts for the entire united polity of the land. Someone suggested as much for our new Senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown. (And you would see the wisdom and prudence of such a measure if you checked out those Scott Brown sex pics that leave nothing at all to the imagination – I think the now Massachusetts Senator’s crotch, and attendant equipment, is printed right where the centerfold of the magazine goes down in. I’m sorry to present such information to a man of the cloth, and hierarch at that, but your job description makes it ad rem.) But chastity belts would be very expensive on a national scale, and I don’t think Obama could float such a measure with health care stuck in the mire as it is already.
Moreover, wouldn’t you say that, in the last analysis, since it is human beings we are talking about here, and since human beings, having been created in the image and likeness of God Himself, are endowed with intelligence and the free will to act upon it, that the ultimate cause of the horrendous prevalence of abortion in the United States of America is not our government, but the living, pulsating, thinking, feeling, and acting body politic itself? Indeed, isn’t this who is responsible for the government itself in a democracy?
And what institution has God ordained - establishing it as the very Body of His Beloved Son, in Whom, as St. Irenaeus wrote: God became man so that man would become God – as the locus of this divination of all men, through the indwelling in them of the Holy Spirit? I have to say quite openly – for the sake of the Church here in America – that you seem quite oblivious to the role of the Holy Spirit acting within the Sacred Space of the Church and nurturing the body politic in virtue and in that intimately loving knowledge of God and of one another in God Himself, which provides the culture of chaste love within which sex finds its rightful role in our lives of communion, and is rightly ordered to this holy communion rather than to abortion.
In this memo I present the main lines of an extensive study of the early martyr, St. Irenaeus’ teaching on how the Church is the Spirit charged-environment which makes our divinization possible, a study written by New Martyr St. Hilarion and marked by his rare brilliance and exceptional scholarship, subsequently defended by his own martyrdom, together with that of Patriarch St. Tikhon, as these two holy hierarchs struggled together to strengthen and vitalize the Russian Church which indeed we now see proclaiming Christ’s resurrection, as also ours in Him, victorious after the 70 year Golgotha of atheistic Soviet torture and irreligious brutality.
No doubt my good friend Abp. Hilarion Alfeyev, who bears the New Martyr’s name, stood in his shadow as he stated:
Chairman of the Department for External Church Relations: “It is impossible to solve religious issues by political means”
http://www.mospat.ru/en/2010/01/13/news11489/
On 12 January 2010, Archbishop Hilarion met with the Russian and foreign journalists at the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations. One of the questions regarded the interconnection between church and political problems in the post-Soviet domain.
While answering the question about the interconnection between church and political problems in the post-Soviet space, Archbishop Hilarion said in particular, “There is no doubt that such connection exists though it is not direct, and it is impossible to solve religious issues by political means, likewise it is impossible to solve political problems by church means, though relations among the Churches may contribute to the improvement of relations among countries, nations, and even between politicians.”
