By Robert Royal
People often ask me what they can do—or what we all should be doing—to face the many challenges we face, not only the obvious ones like wars, injustices, poverty, and so on, but also the fundamental questions about what human life is and what our lives mean. There is no simple answer because the world is complicated, as is each human life. And that’s not bad. It’s how God has wanted to arrange things for us.
There is a famous passage in The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien, where Frodo laments that the Ring has come to him and that the Fellowship has been called to destroy it:
«I wish it need not have happened in my time,» said Frodo.
«So do I,» said Gandalf, «and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.»
There is no simple answer, but there is an easy one, easy to understand at least, though sometimes difficult to put into practice. And on the other hand, no one ever said that living a Christian life was easy.
I believe the first answer for all of us is to recognize that there will be—and must be—countless initiatives of various kinds to respond to our situation. And given how things are today, we shouldn’t expect the government, the Vatican, the hierarchy, or other large entities to initiate them. Aid for Women was founded right after Roe v. Wade. A lay initiative like this is not only very Catholic, it’s also very American. We see that something must be done, and we roll up our sleeves.
There are at least two major categories of such initiatives, one a ministry of action, and the other, similarly, a ministry of truth. We need to work on both as much as the gifts God has given us allow.
Here is St. Paul to the Ephesians:
To each one of us grace was given according to the measure of Christ’s gift… And he himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.
That was not only for that time. It is the life-giving truth now, though it is also an overwhelming task.
One way to see all this, however, is that God has a high opinion of us, higher than we have of ourselves. He believes we can do things that we don’t believe we can. (And in reality, a life without significant challenges would be a boring life). So, even when we feel the enormous gap between what we can do and what we think must be done, we can also recognize that we are being trained for something we can’t really imagine: the kind of perfect peace, enlightenment, and love that God originally wanted for us.
C.S. Lewis called this the «weight of glory», a great phrase that reminds us that we are going to be loaded with challenges in order to rise, a typical paradigm of the Christian paradox. Lewis describes it as «a weight so heavy that only humility can bear it, and that will break the back of the proud.»
What we face today is the re-evangelization of our entire society, something similar to how the first Christians converted the Roman Empire. We know that Christians practiced conspicuous charity, caring for the elderly, the sick, the poor, the marginalized, the imprisoned, the unwanted babies. Many became Christians because of those works of corporal mercy and love. You continue that tradition.
But there were other factors. One that seems especially important to remember is that, as a result of those Christian ministries, more Christians were simply born and survived: they were not aborted or exposed or left to die.
The original Hippocratic Oath, which all doctors took until recently, contained, among other precepts:
I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortifacient pessary.
«Do no harm» is still something that doctors claim to believe in. But what constitutes «harm» has been redefined. Many modern doctors and ethicists have come to believe, for example, that a patient who asks for poison—»assisted suicide» or «death with dignity» or whatever euphemism one wants to use—should receive that «treatment» as a right. The culture of death has inverted the original meaning of «do no harm» according to its own dark spirit.
The original Hippocratic Oath has been altered: now it allows doctors to abort without scruple and prescribe poisons to those who ask for them. But it is not human to kill someone, not even someone who wants to be killed. There are other, truly human ways to help people in desperate circumstances, aren’t there? As the late Pope Francis used to say, abortion is like hiring a hitman to solve a problem.
This organization is giving a different witness. The day will come—you and many others committed to this fight will make it possible—when all the madness of the sexual revolution, including abortion and our lamentable gender wars, will be seen for what it really was: a radical deviation from truth and humanity.
It’s interesting that Elon Musk has identified and spoken about something that should be obvious: that our contraceptive, abortive, child-fearing, and population-controlling culture has brought us to the point where it is no longer overpopulation, but demographic decline that threatens all developed nations. As far as I know, Musk has not yet connected this crisis to the ideology of contraception and sex detached from reproduction, nor to the at least 60 million missing Americans due to abortion since Roe v. Wade, and the countless millions more due to the spread of an anti-natalist ideology in the world.
I don’t want to go into the recent assassination attempt on Charlie Kirk tonight. But he was almost alone in our culture, especially among those who speak to young people, in saying: get married, have children, form a family, take on responsibilities—the normality of men and women throughout human history, except in the last few decades.
Sociology is not an exact science, and we must treat social surveys with caution, but all recent attempts to measure happiness in different sectors of society show that married people with children are the happiest, and the happiest among the happy are married women with children. You can put on a red dress and a white hood in protest because you’ve read The Handmaid’s Tale, but the real story is exactly the opposite, a lesson we are slowly relearning.
So, when we go out into the public square to address these vital issues, we must do so with great confidence that the defense of marriage, family, life, of helping every woman facing a difficult pregnancy, stands on solid ground. It is the truth, and as someone once said, the truth will set you free.
Which brings me to another topic: martyrdom. Now, for us, heirs to the tradition of the martyrs, to die peacefully or to be willing to be persecuted for the faith is not as surprising as it was for the ancients. In that culture, it was thought that only the rarest philosophers—a Socrates or a Seneca—were capable of facing death with equanimity. In fact, much of ancient philosophy was not an abstract exercise, as it often is in university departments today. It was a way of preparing for death. And yet, Christians—often poor, simple, ordinary people—were able to do, before roaring crowds in places like the Colosseum, what the great philosophers could not.
There is also a lesson here for us about what we must do. Christians are not being martyred—yet—in North America. But as I describe in the last chapter of my most recent book The Martyrs of the New Millennium, we are heading in that direction. Because as we all know, one can lose their job, be canceled online, be accused of spreading «hate» against women, LGBT or gender-confused children, or of ignoring «the Science» by obsessing over an outdated (i.e., Christian) ethic.
But we must persevere.
And, sadly, the institutional Church probably won’t help you much. I don’t see how, for example, a church leader like Cardinal Cupich here in Chicago can honor a promoter of abortion like Senator Durbin. As some have argued, if Durbin had been consistently anti-abortion in office, but only «personally opposed» to guards shooting people trying to cross the border, we know he would never have received a «lifetime achievement» award.
Bishop Paprocki and Archbishop Cordileone and a very small handful of other bishops have been brave in publicly objecting, almost white martyrs in my estimation: people who risk for the faith without being actually killed, though who knows in these times.
That’s how we all must be. I began by saying, along with St. Paul, that we have all received different gifts from God. And He wants us to use them in the concrete circumstances of our lives. I wish I could give you a simple formula for what that means, but it is the adventure of each of our lives to discover it.
God has placed us—each one of us—in these circumstances for a reason. Not to unleash our savage anger against evil. Not to believe that we are all good and the others all bad. But to do our part, whatever it may be, in mending the broken net of His love and in caring for all people, especially the most vulnerable. It is a high vocation. Be aware of it. Embrace it. In His grace, strive to be worthy of it.
About the author
Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent books are The Martyrs of the New Millennium: The Global Persecution of Christians in the Twenty-First Century, Columbus and the Crisis of the West y A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.