Our People

Feast of the Holy Innocents, Martyrs

Holy Rosary Church and Shrine of the Unborn, Kellyville

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
28/12/2006

“Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days.” So began the 1992 novel, The Children of Men, written by the British murder mystery writer P. D. James. In it she imagined a world in which all men are, for whatever reason, infertile and there are no more children. So the death of a ‘young person’ of only 25 produces inconsolable public grief of Princess Diana proportions. Scientists are mystified and the best they can offer are efforts to extend the lives of those already born, as well as suicide pills for those past their use-by date.

In her novel James explores some of the chilling effects of such a sterile world. Some now treat pets and dolls as infants and ever-obliging local clergy offer Christenings in such cases. The churches by this stage have given up on ideas such as sin, judgment and redemption and replaced them with a sentimental humanism. In such a barren and forlorn world, future-looking words such as ‘justice’, ‘compassion’, ‘society’, ‘struggle’ and ‘the cross’ have lost currency. People have also lost interest in sex, the arts, long-term commitments and responsibilities. Children’s playgrounds are dismantled. No new building or infrastructure projects are attempted. Without hope of posterity there is nothing to build a future for, no-one on whose behalf to dream. ‘Universal negativism’ prevails. Old people are taken at night to a beach where a band plays them comforting old-time songs.  They change into white robes and are given posies to hold and are pushed out to sea shackled to barges which sink with them all on board. Thus England maintains its standard of living by ridding itself of the burdensome, excluding the desperate and importing slave labourers from the Third World. But England, like the rest of the human race, is doomed.

A recent movie version of this novel omits many of PD James’ insights into the social and emotional effects of infertility which she addresses to her Western readers. The fact is that by wholesale contraception and abortion, as well as infertility induced above all by surgery and sexually transmitted disease, the West has made itself increasingly sterile. We have managed to achieve a population implosion at the same time as a copulation explosion. As the novel explores, our attitudes to all sorts of things – marriage and family, the young and the elderly, relationships, commitments, you name it – are being deeply affected. The movie misses most of this, turning an exploration of Western barrenness into a rather simpler critique of Western immigration policies. I therefore recommend the book to you more highly than the film.

Well, you might say, that’s just science fiction. I hope so. But consider what the Australian Parliament agreed to last month. Following a most inadequate inquiry and very little public education or consultation, our Parliament agreed that from now on people can be created who are marked from the beginning for experimentation and dismemberment for parts – by IVF or cloning, with two or four or more genetic parents or with only one genetic parent, even from the eggs from aborted girls. The Patterson Bill must surely go down in Australian history as the most grotesque piece of science fiction ever to be passed into the law of our land.

Few ordinary Australians would know or understand what has just been legalised. All sorts of words were used to cover it up, all sorts of political ruses to rush it through, all sorts of false promises to make it sound ethical, desirable even necessary. If people knew, they would surely be appalled. Herod did not advertise what he was up to two thousand years ago. He lied about it to the Magi, telling them he wanted to go and worship Jesus himself. Actually he planned to kill the child. Herod might be called Patron Saint of spin. He was an earlier version of the PR companies that advised our embryo industry to call destructive embryo experimentation ‘therapeutic’. “Therapeutic cloning” was just trick language. So was all the pretence that embryo manufacture is to help infertile couples or embryo experiments to help those with diseases. The embryo industry does not really want to worship the new child: it wants to kill him. You can call that “therapeutic” if you like, but wise men will not be tricked: they will not join Herod in his ruse. Happily some of our Parliamentarians were wise men, though sadly not enough. A majority were swayed by Herod’s spin.

The Australian government has now approved another slaughter of the innocent.  Ethics has been the second victim after the embryos. The foundational principle of medical research ethics, primum non nocere, first do no harm, has been sold down the river in pursuit of experimental goals, commercial opportunity, retention of researchers and seductive claims of treatment for almost everything. Now some human beings are to be treated like plants, farm animals or lab rats, manufactured and farmed for spare parts, then dismembered. Some human beings will now be denied human dignity from the beginning and so that reverence to which all of us are entitled.

Today’s feast commemorates another such failure of respect many centuries ago. We might be tempted to say: nothing much has changed in two thousand years since the women of Bethlehem and the surrounding district wept inconsolably – or indeed in the three thousand years since Rachel wept for the children who were no more (Mt 2:13-18). We still kill our children in ever more monstrous numbers and ways, such as those recently licensed in Australia. And there is plenty of war, terrorism, preventable disease and starvation, drugs and the rest, to kill millions more of our young – and not so young. We might well be tempted to join in the ‘universal negativism’ of the people of PD James’ fictional world. But it is not true that nothing has changed in those two or three thousand years. Something has changed and we must never let ourselves forget it no matter how badly the children of men behave.

In PD James’ novel The Children of Men hope springs eternal. A virgin conceives and bears a son, without a human father. The desperate mother is granted a Josephite protector in the form of our hero. This holy family is pursued like the first one on this day two millennia ago. They must flee to protect the mother and child. For the world has forgotten how to reverence human life and love. But there is hope. The cry of a baby melts even the hardest of hearts.

Our first reading today reminds us that we Christians cannot live in the darkness of sin, nor of despondency either. As “children of the light” we must offer the children of men reason to hope. We have two great gifts, John reminds us: the gift of each other – communion with the saints in heaven and the would-be saints on earth; and the gift of the Blood of Christ – communion with “the One Who is Just”, God made man for us at Christmas. “He is the sacrifice that takes our sins away, and not only ours, but the whole world’s.” (1 Jn 1:5-2:2)

Time and again our late great pope, John Paul II, called upon the people of our time to become ‘the people of life and for life’. Together, he exhorted us, we must offer “new signs of hope, and work to ensure that justice and solidarity will increase and that a new culture of human life will be affirmed, for the building of an authentic civilization of truth and love” (Gospel of Life 6). Benedict XVI is doing such work. In his Message for the Celebration of the World Day of Peace of 1 January 2007 the Pope invokes “peace upon children, who by their innocence enrich humanity with goodness and hope, and by their sufferings compel us all to work for justice and peace.” Inviting us to reflect on the theme, The Human Person, the Heart of Peace, Pope Benedict insists on the importance of the recognition of and respect for the universal natural law as a foundation for dialogue, community and authentic peace. From such a foundation we will realize that “those with greater political, technical, or economic power may not use that power to violate the rights of others who are less fortunate.”

The Church as champion of human rights recalls again and again that life is a gift which is not completely at the disposal of human beings. Pope Benedict teaches that: “As far as the right to life is concerned, we must denounce its widespread violation in our society: alongside the victims of armed conflicts, terrorism and the different forms of violence, there are the silent deaths caused by hunger, abortion, experimentation on human embryos and euthanasia. How can we fail to see in all this an attack on peace? Abortion and embryonic experimentation constitute a direct denial of that attitude of acceptance of others which is indispensable for establishing lasting relationships of peace.” We must recover a sense of the natural equality of all persons, the absolute respect to which each is due, and the importance of the natural and human ecology. Relativisms eat away at such respect for self and others.

Today let us ask the Holy Innocents to join us and the Holy Father in our prayer. “To the Queen of Peace, the Mother of Jesus Christ Our Peace,” let us join him in entrusting our “urgent prayer for all humanity at the beginning of the year 2007, to which we look with hearts full of hope, notwithstanding the dangers and difficulties that surround us. May Mary show us, in her Son, the Way of peace, and enlighten our vision, so that we can recognize Christ's face in the face of every human person, the heart of peace!”