Haunting whispers

Found this over at Texas Catholic.

Haunting whispers
10/17/08
By Msgr. Mark Seitz

If any place on earth might rightly claim to be a fitting dwelling for restless souls, I can now say that I have walked its streets. The pathways of Auschwitz and Birkenau in Poland are empty now, except for the hushed voices of tourists whose vacation frivolity turns to sober reflections as they pass through the foreboding barbed wire fences.

Even though the sun shone upon this nightmarish place, the first chill north winds of Fall reminded us that this was no place for a picnic. As we looked upon row after row of buildings and sheds where human cargo were sorted according to age and health and nationality and religion and usefulness to the Reich, one begins to sense the depths to which human beings can descend.

People, like you and me, reduced to some utilitarian equation in this demonic economy. People, like you and me, following orders, preserving their lives and their way of life at the expense of others. Today, the cold winds blow through the silent streets that once held thousands of prisoners tattooed with a number in place of a name.

The wind whispers the story to those who will listen: a warning unheeded by many of those who even smelled upon that wind the sickening sweet odor of burning bodies.

Don’t imagine this to be a message relegated to past ages — an isolated unrepeatable moment of history. There are, in fact, many examples from past ages, and in our own time, when the sacred dignity of the human being has been denied and whole groups of people have been deemed good only for the utility of those with more power.

During this Respect Life Month, we are called to listen to all their haunting whispers. We are reminded of genocidal pogroms, massacres of helpless people, in places like Rwanda and Darfur, the horrors of trafficking in women and children from Asia and other parts of the world, the famine in North Korea caused by their semi-deified paranoiac leader, and we find the world community ineffectual in uniting to end these horrors.

Little wonder. Perhaps we have just become so accustomed to the killing in our midst that our sense of moral outrage has been short-circuited. There is no more nightmarish echo of the horrors of Auschwitz than the daily slaughter of thousands of our own helpless unborn children.

Does this sound like an extreme statement to you . . . an issue better left for others to resolve as they choose? Are you ready to close your ears to what the bitter wind would whisper? Because women and men sometimes feel compelled to obey the fear that grips them when they find that a child has been conceived, are you inclined to look the other way as your brothers and sisters are slain and thrown in a heap of “medical waste?”

As in former times their torn bodies are now incinerated like human sacrifices to the gods of self-will — who claim the power to decide who will live and die. The sickly-sweet odor of their bodies wafts over our land each day.

You have heard the voices of those who try to tell us that each person must be left to decide who is really worthy of protection and who is not — that those who speak for babies newly conceived are just extremists, that the unborn are not really human, that this is just one problem among other problems, like the economy and the war.

When will the cold wind whisper among the silent abortion centers — new monuments to human folly — haunting reminders of the depths to which human beings once descended?

Msgr. Mark Seitz, pastor of St. Rita, is a columnist for Texas Catholic.