By Ralph Capone, MD, FACP
As if our times aren’t insane enough or aren’t growing more unreal, this comes along.
Medicine has joined academia, the media, and the elite in their progressive march to a solipsistic existentialism, otherwise revealed to many of us, by the grace of God, as our enveloping nightmarish and dystopic society.
What happens when the medical profession engages the abnormal as normal? Disease, itself, loses its meaning and the art of diagnosis and treatment is threatened. Patients will present to doctors as an idea, a social construct, or even as a caricature but certainly not as a real flesh and blood human person, male or female, who share a common bond of biology and nature.
If the abnormal is acceptable to society as normal, and the medical profession increasingly adheres to this subjective view of human persons, then it’s only a matter of time for the normal to be abnormalized. An example of this today is the increasingly acceptable odd turn of phrase: “people who can become pregnant” as opposed to saying what is the normal term: “women.”
The roots of this are deep and complex. Secular indifferentism was codified in the so-called “mystery clause” written by Justice Kennedy in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1991. The mystery of life, of the universe, is for each one of us up for grabs, they say. There are no universals, they believe, nor is there an objective reality revealed to us by God nor available to us through our senses or intellect. And so, this is what progressivism would have us believe.
We know differently of course. Religious indifferentism has been equally or perhaps even more devastatingly promoted in our time and culture by the passive assertion (through the silence of the hierarchy) of the notion that there are multiple means of salvation. Our Lord said He is the way, the truth, and the life. There is no other ordinary way (although God can choose to work in other extraordinary ways, but He’s given us the normal way He wants us to follow). This truth, this reality shouldn’t really be controversial or up for grabs. Judgments or statements of religious truth as given by Our Lord taught emphatically and courageously by bishops and priests is just one way to counter the indifferentism in the society and the Church. In this way, the normal means of salvation, revealed to us by God, is rescued from indifference by our rational intellect as faith builds upon reason.
Faith and reason are the two wings which alight us on our homeward journey to God per Pope John Paul II. Once this is rediscovered through our own efforts and by the help of orthodox clergy, the chaff of progressivism and modernism which denies objective reality will be revealed as empty and soulless and discarded by many. We know that God loves us. That’s real. We know that there is sin that darkens our intellect and urges us to commit further evil.
The irreality of so much in our culture today attacks the human person made in God’s image and the family. Transgender ideology is just one front in this battle for our souls and the souls of our children. We must pray that such malevolent efforts to subvert society, the medical profession, and even the Church will end. What is aberrant mustn’t become the “norm” by persuasion, coercion, intimidation, or by force.
By God’s grace we must endlessly resist such efforts even as we pray for our detractors, our enemies, and especially those who have been unfortunately afflicted. By God’s grace we pray.
