Saint Thomas and the Unborn
Today’s feast of the great priest and doctor of the Church, Saint Thomas Aquinas, is also the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s 1988 striking down of the abortion laws put in place in 1969 under Pierre Elliot Trudeau. The court ordered parliament to come up with a new law, which it has never done, thus making Canada one of the very few notorious places on earth with no laws about abortion, and the rest (China, Cuba, North Korea) are all communist dictatorships. That said, since the fall of Roe v Wade, some U.S. states now have Canadian-type jurisdictions. I will allow the reader to draw his own conclusions from that. (As a side note, and ironically enough, Iceland was the first nation to legalize abortion on this day in 1935, and they have just recently touted that they are now ‘Down Syndrome Free’).
One might retort that there are medical ‘laws’ that govern the procedure, for example, that one must be a physician, but would one would use that term for someone who kills children for a living? The Court ordered Parliament to formulate new laws, something they have never done, leaving the tragic decision between a woman and her, ahem, physician.
Speaking of whom, the same Saint Thomas who appeared in a vision to the notorious Serbian abortionist Stojan Adasevic responsible for tens of thousands of abortions, performing up to 35 a day, making him a mass-murderer on a tragically mythic scale. Then, one night in a dream, he saw countless children running around a beautiful field, joyful and laughing, from 2 to 24 years old – the span of time he had been doing abortions, presumably – with a large pensive man in a black and white habit quietly watching him and them. Stojan managed to ‘catch’ one of the children – the vision seemed quite real – who cried out ‘Help! Murderer!’ Eventually, as the dream kept recurring, Stojan asked the man his name and…well, I will allow an excerpt from the article to continue the story:
My name is Thomas Aquinas,” he responded. Stojan, educated in communist schools that pushed atheism instead of real learning, didn’t recognize the Dominican saint’s name.
Stojan asked the nightly visitor, “Who are these children?”
They are the ones you killed with your abortions,” St. Thomas told him bluntly and without preamble.
Ah, yes, the unmatched clear and precise mind of Saint Thomas getting right to the point. Respondeo – ‘I respond’, and all that.
Stojan did one more abortion – on one of his cousins, as a last ‘favour’ – and the gruesome event convinced him not only to give up pre-born infanticide once and for all, but to dedicate the rest of his life to protecting the unborn. Would that Thomas might visit a few more politicians and doctors…
One last point: Stojan thought that Thomas himself was doing some sort of heavenly ‘penance’ – sort of a saintly and heavenly Jacob Marley – in reparation for his supposing that properly human life begins at 40 days after conception, thus allowing a window for early abortions to be done, a canard still used by anti-life apologists. But it is not quite so. Saint Thomas simply taught, in accord with the correct Aristotelian principle, that a certain ‘complexity’ of matter – the body – was required in order to receive the human soul. Quicquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur: ‘Everything received is received according to the mode of the recipient’.
And in accord with the less-correct Aristotelian biology of the time, it was thought that the body had to develop, over the forty days, to reach that level of complexity. If Thomas had the knowledge of DNA and the pluripotentiality of the human zygote that we do, he would have held ensoulment at conception.
But besides that, the Dominican was always against abortion – along with the Church – seeing the whole process of life’s coming-to-be as sacred, which is also one of the primary arguments for the sacredness of the marital act, and the wrongness of contraception, which, again as the Church has always taught, leads quite directly by an inevitable road to abortion. As Tertullian put it in the third century: What will be a man is a man already.
Would that we all – including Joseph Biden, Justin Trudeau, Andrew Cuomo and all their host doing the bidding of the dark lord himself, however wittingly or unwittingly – could see with the same clarity as Thomas, whose great mind should in some way illumine us all as to how things really are, and, as he himself would put it, what the truth of things is. And never mind his more esoteric and sublime truths on such things as the hypostatic union and transubstantiation, but even those more basic facts that even children and fictional elephants can see, but so many adults cannot, or stubbornly refuse to, such as, a person’s a person, no matter how small.
I’m heartened that this vision – albeit private – gives hope that these babies seem to end up in heaven, which Pope Saint John Paul II cautiously implies in Evangelium Vitae (cf., #99) – perhaps as martyrs, like the Holy Innocents. May they intercede for us, and for all those hard or blind of heart, that they may see the light, and come to the truth.
Here, as an addendum, is a video of Dr. Adavesic:
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