Peace Without Poison

It created orphanages and took in abandoned children, illegitimate children, and orphanedchildren to care for them at a time when being born to an unmarried mother was a sin and whenpoverty and early death left scores of children parentless.It created hospices and hospitals to care for the sick, the old and the crippled at a time whensecular authorities had not assumed such humanitarian responsibilities.It taught man to be virtuous and to refrain from violence, to respect life, and to love one’sneighbor. It taught man to aspire to something higher than himself and to outgrow hislimitations. It taught man to turn the other cheek and to forgive so that peace can prevail andmen will not fall victim to new vicious cycles of violence and retribution. It taught men to havethe nobility of spirit not to answer mistakes with mistakes and be dragged down to the lowestcommon denominator, but rather to answer mistakes with acts of compassion and of grace so asto lift those who are stuck in the mud of their base instincts and in the darkness of their ownignorance into the light of the enlightened.But eventually the Church learned that the only way to break out of the vicious cycle of poverty,misery, famine and war and rescue man from being a victim of circumstances and a feather in thestorms of history is to control population growth and in so doing assume control of destiny. Andsince it could not do so by compelling people to refrain from copulating and thus limit births, itdid so by accelerating death and accomplished this by periodically spreading the plague, for it isa far lesser sin to send adults into an early grave before food scarcity drives them to war, then itis to kill children in their mothers’ wombs or kill innocents before they suckle on a tender breast.The burden of responsibility for population control must not rest with the unborn but with theliving. The Church has rightfully insisted and continues to insist, just as rightfully, that it isadults who must pay the price for their actions, not innocent babies and childrenAnd so the Church assumed the awesome responsibility of balancing life and death in society thesame way God does in nature: without exception, without cruelty, without partiality, withcomplete detachment. To earn the right to regulate human conduct and the strength to balancelife and death, the men of the cloth, then and now, have to renounce the world, refrain fromsexual pleasures, cut family ties, take the vow of celibacy, and dedicate their lives to God’swork, which is to preserve life, a task that demands the strength to kill, for the natural order isbased on that perfect equilibrium between life and death.The Church’s early awareness that expanding populations impinging on limited resources is theprimary cause of misery comes forth in the speech of Pope Urban II in 1095 when he summonedChristians for the First Crusade.For this land which you now inhabit, shut in on all sides by the sea and the mountain peaks, istoo narrow for your large population; it scarcely furnishes food enough for its cultivators.Hence it is that you murder and devour one another, that you wage wars, and that many among936 | P a g e