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Thursday, October 5, 2000
The Southern Cross, Page 5
Living the American Dream: clear thinking needed
F or a dozen years, I was an
adjunct English instruc
tor, teaching composition
and literature classes in
the evenings at a commu
nity college and four-year
university. Because I
taught evenings, most of
my students were non-tradi-
tional; they had families
and careers and were
issues, opinions voiced in
class were usually evenly
distributed. For example,
a discussion about gun
control would yield
comments both pro and
con. A discussion about
the effects of violence in
the media was also bal
anced. But when it came
Mary Hood Hart to what we Catholics call
returning to the classroom several
years after graduating high school.
The average student was in his or
her mid-twenties.
In composition class, students
were required to write a persuasive
essay about a controversial topic.
They were expected to provide logi
cal arguments and factual support
for their opinions. This essay was,
for many, quite challenging to write.
To help them to explore both sides
of the issues, I would lead class dis
cussions, encouraging debate.
When it came to most of the
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“life issues,” if there were any pro
life students, they were awfully
quiet. When discussion about those
issues took place students’ com
ments were almost always in favor
of abortion, the death penalty, and
euthanasia.
Because it was my job to encour
age the students to see all sides of
the issues, I had a perfect opportuni
ty to express my pro-life views
without using the classroom as a
bully pulpit. For example, when all
who spoke expressed opinions in
favor of euthanasia, I prompted
them to imagine what sort of argu
ments would be used against the
legalization of mercy killing. It was
through leading them to explore the
other side of the issue that I became
particularly troubled by their ten
dency to form opinions about life
issues without thinking them
through.
For example, most were quick to
say that suffering through a terminal
illness should be eliminated by pro
viding, at the patient’s request, the
means of hastening death if it was
determined the patient had no hope
of recovery. Yet when I asked them
how they would ensure the patient
was making a sound decision and
was not being influenced by rela
tives, health care providers, inade
quate medical insurance, or fears of
being a burden to others, it was
apparent they’d never given those
possibilities a thought.
It occurred to me then that for
most of these 20-something students,
busy with families, school, and
careers, the thought of chronic or
terminal illness, prolonged suffering,
long periods of hospitalization was
so far removed from their everyday
experience, they could not imagine
the state of mind they might find
themselves in were they to be so
afflicted. Every so often, someone
would mention a grandparent who’d
suffered through illness, and the
trauma the family endured as a result
of witnessing that suffering, but for
the most part, the arguments in favor
of euthanasia were focused on the
avoidance of suffering, as in “Why
should people be in pain if they have
no hope?” “I’d rather be dead than
so dependent on others.”
At the end of such a class session,
I would return home to my husband
and express fears about how a group
of adults pursuing higher education
could be so casual in their accept
ance of such potentially dangerous
practices. It seemed apparent that
until I brought them up, the poten
tial abuses of euthanasia seemed to
have eluded them altogether, and I
only hoped that, in my limited
capacity as their English teacher, I
would enlighten some.
My experience in the classroom
taught me that we who are pro-life
must use every opportunity to pro
vide people, especially among the
younger generation, with the skills
and facts to better understand these
critical issues. For many healthy,
upwardly mobile young adults busy
pursuing the American dream, just
the possibility of being sick or very
old and institutionalized (or, in the
case of abortion, enduring a less
than perfect or ill-timed pregnancy,
or in the case of capital punishment,
being victimized by a criminal) is so
unthinkable they resist thoroughly
considering the implications of laws
which promote a disregard for the
dignity of all human life.
Although pro-life activists are rou
tinely criticized as having “knee-
jerk” reactions, the truth is that many
members of the American public
respond superficially to issues
requiring serious, deliberate thought.
For them, to prevent suffering, finan
cial or psychological distress, and to
keep others from becoming burdens
to society outweigh the horrors,
risks, and abuses that are the natural
consequences of practices such as
euthanasia, abortion, and capital
punishment when these practices are
sanctioned by law.
Mary Hood Hart lives with her
husband and four children in
Sunset Beach, N.C.
Q uestion: The Holy Father is going to conse
crate the world to Mary this weekend. What
does this mean?
—Curious
A nswer: First of all, “The earth is the Lord’s
and its fullness, the world and all who
dwell in it” (Psalm 24:1). The “world” belongs
to God, who created it and keeps it in being. The
“consecration of the world to Mary” must be
interpreted in the context of God’s sovereignty
over all creation. Such a consecration can never
affect or transfer God’s sovereignty or our alle
giance to him. What can it do and what can it
mean?
Consecrating the world to the Mother of God
means entrusting the world, created by God, cor
rupted by the sin of Adam but redeemed by
Christ’s death and resurrection, to the “all-pow
erful and never-failing intercession” of the great
est of all the saints. It means imploring her to
intercede for us sinners, all of us, “now and at
the hour of our death.”
All Christian prayer is directed ultimately to
God the Father, the giver of all gifts, through
Questions and Answers
Christ the Son, in the Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ is
the one great intercessor, just as he is the one
great mediator between God and man; risen
from the dead, he lives to make intercession for
us to the Father.
But his intercession does not exclude the
members of his body, the Church, from interced
ing for one another, for they always intercede
“through Christ our Lord.” Christians have
prayed for one another since the earliest days of
Christianity. Saint Paul urges such intercession,
especially for those responsible for the commu
nity, in 1 Timothy 2:1.
Since the first century, Christians have asked
those who have “gone before us marked with the
sign of faith”—especially martyrs—to pray for
them. Some of the earliest inscriptions in ancient
Christian burial grounds include the saint’s name
and the petition, “Pray for us.”
Such petitions form the core of litanies of the
saints. In such litanies, it is clear that the saint is
being asked not to grant anything on his or her
own authority or by his or her own power, but to
“pray for us” to God, who alone has the power
to grant our petitions. The concluding petition of
the “Hail Mary” is of just this sort: “Pray for us
sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”
By consecrating the world to Mary, the Holy
Father, as Vicar of Christ is publicly and promi
nently asking the Mother of God to pray—as she
always does—for the whole world. By doing so,
the pope is reminding the world of its depend
ence on God and its constant need for prayer, as
well as fulfilling the request made at Fatima.
As Popes Pius XII (privately) and John Paul II
(publicly) have already consecrated the world to
Mary, one last question could arise: “Why is this
consecration being repeated?”
Just as it is customary for us to renew our bap
tismal promises at Confirmation and every year
at Easter, or to renew wedding or religious vows
or ordination promises on significant anniver
saries or special occasions, so the Holy Father
has decided to renew this consecration during
the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000, not because
the Blessed Virgin needs it, but because we need
to be reminded of our consecration to her and
our dependence on her intercession, in Christ,
before the Father’s throne.
—DKC