Authentic Compassion.
Society has twisted the value of human life into being dispensable as soon as we are seen as having a less-than-happy life i.e., one of suffering. It welcomes “dignified mercy-killing” and abortion out of “compassion”. Society is losing its grasp on authentic compassion.
“But there is nothing dignified about either euthanasia or suicide, for each declares that life is utterly undignified and disposable.
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Christian charity calls us to embrace opportunities to selflessly care for the weak and vulnerable even though they may never repay our love and kindness.Likewise, the afflicted must not view their declining self-sufficiency as a diminishment of their worth. Admittedly, it is both humbling and frightening to envision oneself with an addled mind, foul breath, unkempt hair and the most intimate details of daily hygiene being beyond our capabilities. Yet, such images should not drive us to despair.
Rather, we should see this as a transition from doing to being: our purpose in life at that point is to be the recipient of compassion, generosity and love. Our disabilities can be the occasion for another’s sanctity.What greater cause can we serve than enabling holiness in others? How sad if we reject this calling out of either pride or fear.”
This article, written by Denise J. Hunnell, M.D., talks of the beauty and true humanity to be found in pain and suffering and how it calls others to a life of charity, as well as it calls us, the ones suffering, to humbly accept this charity, aware that it can bring sanctifying grace to those who freely give it! She defines compassion and compares its definition with how so many today have such a warped understanding of what compassion truly is.
The word compassion actually comes from Latin, and means “to suffer together.” We show authentic compassion when we suffer with someone, not when we get rid of him because his suffering makes us uncomfortable. There is no doubt that it is agony for a husband to watch the woman he married fade before his eyes due to physical or mental disease. This infirm woman is far different from the woman he married. Yet this suffering provides an opportunity for heroic generosity. Offering love to this woman who can no longer reciprocate imitates the love of Christ who took our suffering, weaknesses and sins upon His shoulders when He carried the Cross.
Though what Ms. Hunnell doesn’t delve into, I shall:
Pieces of the foundation of the perverted perspective on “compassion” can be found in Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger. She writes in her 1922 book, The Pivot of Civilization:
“This book aims to be neither the first word on the tangled problems of human society to-day, nor the last. My aim has been to emphasize, by the use of concrete and challenging examples and neglected facts, the need of a new approach to individual and social problems. Its central challenge is that civilization, in any true sense of the word, is based upon the control and guidance of the great natural instinct of Sex. Mastery of this force is possible only through the instrument of Birth Control.
[…]
Motherhood has been held universally sacred; yet, as Bouchacourt pointed out, “to-day, the dregs of the human species, the blind, the deaf-mute, the degenerate, the nervous, the vicious, the idiotic, the imbecile, the cretins and the epileptics—are better protected than pregnant women.” The syphilitic, the irresponsible, the feeble-minded are encouraged to breed unhindered, while all the powerful forces of tradition, of custom, or prejudice, have bolstered up the desperate effort to block the inevitable influence of true civilization in spreading the principles of independence, self-reliance, discrimination and foresight upon which the great practice of intelligent parenthood is based.To-day we are confronted by the results of this official policy. There is no escaping it; there is no explaining it away. Surely it is an amazing and discouraging phenomenon that the very governments that have seen fit to interfere in practically every phase of the normal citizen’s life, dare not attempt to restrain, either by force or persuasion, the moron and the imbecile from producing his large family of feeble-minded offspring.
[…]
But there is a point at which philanthropy may become positively dysgenic, when charity is converted into injustice to the self-supporting citizen, into positive injury to the future of the race. Such a point, it seems obvious, is reached when the incurably defective are permitted to procreate and thus increase their numbers.
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At the present moment, we are offered three distinct and more or less mutually exclusive policies by which civilization may hope to protect itself and the generations of the future from the allied dangers of imbecility, defect and delinquency. No one can understand the necessity for Birth Control education without a complete comprehension of the dangers, the inadequacies, or the limitations of the present attempts at control, or the proposed programs for social reconstruction and racial regeneration. It is, therefore, necessary to interpret and criticize the three programs offered to meet our emergency. These may be briefly summarized as follows:(1) Philanthropy and Charity: This is the present and traditional method of meeting the problems of human defect and dependence, of poverty and delinquency. It is emotional, altruistic, at best ameliorative, aiming to meet the individual situation as it arises and presents itself. Its effect in practise is seldom, if ever, truly preventive. Concerned with symptoms, with the allaying of acute and catastrophic miseries, it cannot, if it would, strike at the radical causes of social misery. At its worst, it is sentimental and paternalistic. (1)”
These words, written by the founder of the largest abortion business in America, have been echoed and expounded on by many others before, and certainly after Sanger. The idea that the weak, the feeble-minded and the moron class should be eliminated and squashed out through the sterilization of those within that class is the worst kind of eugenic and discriminatory ideology available.
“Well, certainly, I am not feeble-minded, so this type of thinking has nothing to do with me anyway!” we’ll all say.
How can you be sure? How can you be certain that you, you with your family history of breast cancer, of depression or “nervous disorders”, of arthritis, or because you did not have the privilege of attending a higher education program, YOU are not considered part of the “weaker race”, the degenerates, the “incurably defective” as Sanger coins throughout her entire life’s works?
Her idea of compassion would be to sterilize you with the sexually liberating Birth Control Pill, so that you don’t reproduce that kind of “weed” into society.
This ideology twists compassion to the complete upside down: ”I don’t want to take care of you and you can’t possibly WANT to continue making me take care of you, so let’s relieve us all of your life and of your future children.”
Sanger dedicates chapter 5 of The Pivot of Civilization to “The Cruelty of Charity”:
Even if we accept organized charity at its own valuation, and grant that it does the best it can, it is exposed to a more profound criticism. It reveals a fundamental and irremediable defect. Its very success, its very efficiency, its very necessity to the social order, are themselves the most unanswerable indictment. Organized charity itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease.”
Sanger describes that through this “Christian type of charity” the weak and degenerate are allowed to live on, sucking the life and resources out of a much more worthy society.
As nearly crazy as that may sound to many (I tried to describe Sanger’s ideology to a family member who absolutely rejected that it couldn’t be possibly accepted in society today), we see it vividly, erected in inner cities across the United States:
A society devoid of love and authentic compassion may freely objectify any human being it deems as unworthy, unwanted, or without reason for being, regardless of what proof science may provide us.
”it’s just a fetus, not a human being, just a clump of cells“
And here we are today, with a governmental administration staunchly in support of such an ideology. It’s real folks.
(1) Pivot of Civilization source: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1689/1689-h/1689-h.htm
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