LSN: We see the crisis of abortion sometimes in isolation. We look at individual problems like the health care bill in the US, or the threat to national sovereignty presented by the Lisbon Treaty, or we look at a particular political party or candidate and we focus our attention on those things, but we need also to look at the larger picture. What does the abortion crisis, and the moral crisis, presage in the larger realm?
TE: A moral degradation precedes social and political degradation. And we see a take-over of the financial system. We see a dismantling of the free market as we know it, which is a hallmark of western democracy. We see a socialization of huge industries, such as the health care industry, even the insurance industry is part of this process of socialization. I say it is not remarkable that it is happening now.
You mention that it has already happened in Europe and we’re now catching up. Of course, because Europe legalized abortion, Europe had their moral degradation prior to us. And now they’re seeing a rapid systematic dismantling of their economies.
LSN: This should come as a surprise to no one, though.
TE: It’s not. It’s happened in every society that has reached its pinnacle of civilization and then collapsed. Look at Carthage, the Phoenician empire was much more powerful than Rome for a period of time. But Carthage had a religion that offered human sacrifice of babies. Eventually it degraded from within and collapsed on itself.
LSN: What do you anticipate then, with our global culture?
TE: We’ve got a serious crisis on the horizon. I’m not a prophet of doom but I don’t see this going any other way but a serious political crisis that’s going to affect the globe. The only way we can avert a global collapse is by a moral conversion. Once again, we have to reverse the process. Just to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, is not a way to stop the collapse, the sinking of the Titanic. We have to turn back to God. And if people get fed up and just elect another political party that is just as bad as the previous political party, it does nothing to stem the global crisis that’s going to come upon us. What we need is a conversion of heart.
LSN: How is this going to come about, barring a massive disaster?
TE: It’s going to be the natural result of suffering. People turn back to God when they suffer. People can turn back to God because they listen to reason. Or because they hear good preaching or because they have good moral leadership. It could also happen that way, where if the Church were living up to its vocation – and I mean mainly Church leadership – then the people have a fighting chance of turning this back.
LSN: But we’ve had martyrs, modern martyrs, so where’s the miracle? Where’s the big conversion?
TE: I think because the seriousness of the shedding of innocent blood through the 20th century into the 21st century, the spiritual deficit is too great. The scales are tipped too low, and I really believe that we’re going to need a great martyrdom in order to return the balance. Abraham Lincoln, believe it or not, said that the cost of slavery was all the blood shed in the Civil War. And I believe … how will we pay back the cost of abortion? Our trillion-dollar debt in the United States isn’t anything in comparison to the actual debt that we owe to reality and to God and to the human race even for the killing of innocents.
50 million is what is killed every year around the world. It’s a global genocide and it’s totally unrepented.
And with contraception and abortion, we’re basically committing mass suicide on a global scale.
LSN: Lots of people have been sounding the trumpet of warning for a long time…
TE: It’s human nature. Human nature doesn’t listen. My mother always says those who do not listen must feel. You get the message when you feel it hurting you and striking you back. I believe that is very much the way human nature operates. It’s the law of nature that we are slothful until we’re woken up. The Gospels have so many messages saying not only ‘stay awake’ but ‘wake up!’ and see what is happening around you and if you don’t then death happens.
LSN: Death happens?
TE: The principle is that what happens under the surface eventually comes out into the open. So the killing of babies eventually leads to the euthanizing of elderly and sick people. That’s the law. It happens infallibly. It’s part of the personal scale, eventually it becomes social, so that you can’t miss it.
The sad part is that we might as individuals and even as a majority of society we might see it, we might get the message. But we’ve elected these clowns who don’t get the message.
LSN: I’ll give you the case of the government of Britain forcing the closure or secularization of Catholic adoption agencies. When the British Labour government, in the person of Tony Blair, refused to give a religious exemption to the Sexual Orientation Regulations, the bishops shrugged and secularized their adoption agencies. So they’ve lost the Catholic service of adoption in Britain.
TE: And they may lose more. As the attacks against our values and institutions get more militant, they’re going to have to make those very hard decisions. Our point is that they’ve had the question of the salvation of souls as a perennial question for them and in a lot of those cases they haven’t done anything. Souls are being lost. Now they’re talking about the loss of health care institutions, which is nothing in value to compare with the loss of a soul. So maybe this is the way that the Catholic leadership will wake up and realize that there is so much that potentially can be lost here and get them back on their mission putting the salvation of souls as their primary concern.
I’ve always said, and I’ll continue to say it, for a bishop to be a real bishop, he has to be willing to go to war. That is a war not only with the secular culture but often times the most difficult part of that is the war with his own people. To make them truly Catholic and to witness to them.
LSN: Are there signs that the tide is turning?
TE: No. I don’t think the tide is turning. I don’t think we’ve reached that point yet. I think the crisis we were talking about earlier will be the way in which the tide turns. Again, I’m not predicting anything, I just have this intuition that the way things are going, they’re getting worse, they’re declining, they’re dismantling, and that can only mean some form of major destruction down the road. The ones who are now presently on the side of the angels are the ones who are going to get through that. And to bring others along with them back to God.
We can talk about the wonderful people who are already doing that, the saints who are out there on the streets, living their faith and making great sacrifices and those stories need to be told.
And we have to keep in mind that Obama doesn’t define life. I’m an exorcist, and I tell all the people who I work with that the demons do not define your life. They are painful and terrible, however long it may take to remove them and get you back to health, you have to keep this message in mind. That you are not defined by evil. You are defined by God, by Jesus Christ. And the return that some of these people have to make after living terrible lives, and paying the price for that, is part of the reason why God allows evil in the world. It serves a purpose in the overall work of the Kingdom. He allows evil in order to bring something good out of it. In fact something even better than it would have been had evil not been present.
LSN: So this unimaginably huge evil, 50 million people being killed a year…
TE: …will produce an unimaginably marvelous good, if we are men and women of faith and we look for it.
The paradox of the cross is that the greatest evil in history (creatures crucifying the creator), also became the greatest good (the opportunity for eternal life). So it is the same with our age, the greatest evil of our time (abortion) will also bring about God’s justice, but ultimately it will result in the salvation of many souls. God in all his omnipotence cannot stand idly by while this generation continues to barrel head first into the abyss of hell either by cooperation with evil, or by indifference. Jeffrey David
By Hilary White
Thomas Euteneuer
Edited by: Jeffrey David
This article needs to be on the front page of every newspaper worldwide. Politicians just have not figured out that when there is a breach of nature as abortion by men, the elements respond … everywhere, tsunami’s, earthquakes, bombings, a ripple end effect from ill conscience.
Thank you, Fr Euteneuer