By Judie Brown
The challenges to those of us who love God grow ever greater with the passing of each day. There are times when Saint Paul’s words to the Thessalonians seem much more appropriate to our own era than his. When he addressed the fact of wickedness, he said, “But the coming of the wicked one will be marked by Satan being at work in all kinds of counterfeit miracles and signs and wonders, and every wicked deception aimed at those who are on the way to destruction because they would not accept the love of the truth and so be saved.”
In our own day we see these counterfeit practices everywhere. The advocacy of polyamory—free love—is growing, as marriage is viewed as outdated by individuals who seek novelty in relationships. In fact, one writer explains that polyamory is a type of idolatry that sets aside the designs of God in order to sate the appetite of mortals.
The result is a twisted, wicked view of the sacrament of matrimony—the union of one man and one woman and something that God has designed to be beautiful and wondrous.
In that same vein, those who detest the procreation of children equate pregnancy with the contraction of a harmful disease like the measles. The Journal of Medical Ethics recently published an article by bioethicists who suggested this ridiculous comparison, writing, “Like measles, pregnancy is a self-limiting condition. It follows a predictable trajectory that usually ends in the patient’s recovery. Both pregnancy and measles also involve symptoms that can impair one’s normal functional ability.”
This type of analysis is disjointed, disrespectful of nature, and downright wicked.
Which brings me to one of the most devilish misrepresentations we have seen this week. In an article about Catholic schools, Brooke Stanton, one of the founders of Contend Projects, writes:
In some Catholic schools, students are being introduced to the erroneous idea that organisms including human beings begin to exist at birth. For example, in accordance with a science standard that explores the life cycles of most organisms, Catholic schools in Virginia are teaching second graders that plants and animals have life cycles from “birth to death,” without any type of clarifying statement that the human life cycle—our life cycle—begins before birth, at fertilization, and continues through the embryonic period, the fetal period, and then after birth, throughout the various stages of human development.
If this is not an attempt to defy God, deny science, and assault the intellects of young children for the express purpose of manipulation committed to sowing the seeds of deceit, I do not know what is! Yet this is the wicked era in which we live.
When the goal of the powers that be is to mainstream evil while proclaiming that it is scientific fact, the result cannot be anything remotely resembling truth.
We see this in regard to the abortion pill as well. Dr. James Studnicki completed three objective studies on the abortion pill, but now the publisher of those studies has retracted them. The problem with this action is the questionable motivation of a medical journal that is focused more on political fallout than it is on scientific inquiry and accuracy.
In addition, the Alan Guttmacher Institute recently claimed that abortions are increasing despite the Supreme Court Dobbs decision, but the process for collecting the data they use has changed! The wicked always find a way to pursue their bloody agenda, and this calls to mind the only explanation that makes sense when it comes to wickedness.
In an essay about the 1954 film The Caine Mutiny, Anthony Esolen writes, “If you’ve read Saint Augustine’s Confessions,you’ll recall that it was an apparently trivial bit of wickedness, boys stealing the pears from a neighbor’s tree just for the pleasure of stealing, and then feeding them to the pigs, that pierced to the heart of evil, or rather to the empty space where a heart ought to be.”
Sadly, that empty space fills with a wickedness that rebuffs the Lord of Justice and Mercy, harming souls and cruelly taking the lives of the innocent.
