Life, Afterlife, And Vanishing Christianity.

Two future parents are informed their unborn child will die shortly after birth. The baby is now 20 weeks old in the womb. The parents decide to bring the pregnancy to the end, and allow the child to live for as long as he can. They are, obviously, photographed with him. The child dies after around ten hours.

The usual Nazis mock the parents because they have decided to face months of difficulties – somehow these people don't get that pregnancy is one of the most natural processes one can imagine – for ten hours of life. To them, this is clearly what the old Nazis called lebensunwertes Leben, “life unworthy of living”. One must say XXI Century Nazis have learned Hitler's lesson by rote.

But this post is – stupid and blog worthy as the rant of XXI Nazis are – not about them. It is about the baby.

Has he been baptised?

In the article I have read from the “Pewsitter”, I found no mention of it. The controversy seems merely about the defence of human life. But this does not consider the fact that a human life is so infinitely worthy because it is the life of an infinitely worthy soul; and that issues concerning afterlife are, be definition, infinitely more important than the duration of this life's sojourn on earth.

And it pains me, it pains me to tears to think that perhaps the baby has been brought so near to an eternal destination of supernatural glory and the parents have thought of the photographer, but have not thought of baptism. They might have, of course, and the article has merely not informed us of it. But what a crushing thought to think that they might have not; or that they might have thought there is no need for it, because hey, God doesn't require that we follow His rules, right?

If the same article had appeared, say, sixty years ago about a child who died shortly after birth, there would have probably been no need for the information about the baptism. The child was baptised. Duh.

Nowadays, though, things aren't so easy. Pro-life doesn't necessarily mean “Christian”, or even “Believer”. It might mean either none of those, or some strange and vague belief in some strange and vague cosmic force. It might even mean a sort of home-made Christianity, that thinks it can do without Baptism!

If this is not so, and the child has been baptised, then even this sad event has a glorious happy end, and certainty of Paradise for a child now much better off than any of us, who are all at risk of damnation and struggling with sin, as the happy child is already enjoying inconceivable glory and supernatural happiness forever.

If it is not so, and the child has not been baptised, the child's destiny is – for all we can see, and as the Church teaches us to believe – Limbo, which is still an irreparable loss compared to the supernatural happiness of the Divine Presence; and for which, by the way, there was no need of the child being born at all. If Limbo it was, the child is – sub specie aeternitatis – not better off than if he had been aborted; earning the avoidance of a horrible death and ten hours of life on earth, but still losing the Great Prize.

Once again: I hope the child has been baptised. But it is very sad to reflect that in the middle of the sated, gizmo-saturated, HD Western society this might not have been the case; and that this might not have been the case because we are living in times of vanishing Christianity, in which faith in the Christian God is becoming for huge masses – and, in many ways, the occasional Pope – an echo, a vague and distant concept, or a faint belief in an all-forgiving, all-merciful, Hollywood-generated Force that does not require anything from anyone: not Christian morality, much less Baptism.

Mundabor