More on the Irish Referendum: The Battle was Lost Years Ago!

Reap the wind and sow the whirlwind! God help Ireland and the complacent bishops!

Phil Lawler has an insightful (as always) article on the Catholic Culture website about the Irish referendum. It begins:

On the eve of Trinity Sunday, the people of Ireland voted to amend their constitution.

Just to put the vote in context, here’s how the preamble to that constitution begins:

     In the name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as           our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred,...

Did the voters invoke the authority of the Most Holy Trinity when they cast their ballots to allow for legal abortion on demand? Hardly. The referendum was held at a time when the people of Ireland are frantically tearing away any vestiges of the Catholic culture on which their society is based.

I can personally testify to this. When my mom, a friend, and I visited Ireland in 1990 the signs were everywhere that Ireland was going down. Homosexual agitprop was all over the daily papers. (The country legalized gay "marriage" by popular vote in 2015.)  Dallas, with its hedonistic lifestyle was on TV. I remember a conversation with a young mom in Londonderry who couldn't wait for divorce to be legalized. As we visited churches we heard people recite the rosary at super speed as if it was a race to reach the end.

We talked among ourselves about how abortion was coming.

After two weeks traveling in Ireland we joined an Irish pilgrimage to Medjugorje. On trying to warn our fellow pilgrims that there were clear signs of what was coming and urging them to fight, we got pooh-poohed. Ireland, they declared, would never accept abortion.

Ah...famous last words!

Only two years after our trip the X case concerning a girl impregnated by a family friend sparked demonstrations all over the country leading to a change in the law that forbade traveling outside Ireland to kill an unborn child. The camel's nose and neck were inside the tent.

What happened last Friday could have been foreseen. How could we see it 25 years ago and those most responsible for the faith in Ireland not? The referendum, as Lawler says, was lost years ago! And the biggest factor in that loss was the complacency of the Irish bishops:

From the perspective of the Church, then, this political battle was not lost last Saturday; it was lost some years ago, when the Irish bishops chose to be satisfied with a complacent, cultural Catholicism rather than an active and evangelical faith. Ireland has seen the same sad historical progression that we have already observed in Quebec and in Boston, where communities once dominated by believing Catholics have gradually evolved, passing through generations of public figures who nodded politely toward Catholic principles, to later generations who ignored Catholic principles, and finally a generation in full flight from its Catholic heritage, indifferent if not overtly hostile to the faith.

Fr. John Hardon advised families years ago to raise their children to be martyrs. Abortion, the murder of helpless babies in the womb for the sake of a culture of lust, is the harbinger of mass murder. We've seen it before throughout history. It's long past time for serious Catholics to put on metaphorical sackcloth and ashes and do penance in atonement for the evil of abortion. Some demons are only driven out by prayer and fasting.

I've been listening to Danny Boy this morning. It seems to me that the pipes are playing the death knell for Ireland