From Patrick Hardyman 

Blanchardville

To the Editor:

Sunday, December 1, will be the beginning of the season of Advent and our opportunity to read and hear the infancy narratives. When the pregnant Mary visited her older pregnant cousin Elizabeth, we read in Scripture, “And how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For at the moment of the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy.” (Luke 1, 43+44). December 25 is the day we celebrate the Incarnation or the birth of Christ. And sadly, we also hear in the month of December, King Herod’s plot to kill Jesus and the terrible “Massacre of the Infants”, two years and younger in the town of Bethlehem. (Matthew 2, 16-18).

In a recent letter to the editor, the writer was highly critical of Christians who oppose abortion. In his last sentence he writes: “The anti-abortion Christians gall and hubris is only exceeded by the danger of the soul of whomever assumes power that only God possesses.” He got it half-right. Our “inalienable” right-to-life comes from God and our duty and moral obligation is to defend and protect it, not destroy it. Those who do not are indeed at grave risk to their soul.

God did give us free will. We can accept his free gift of salvation or reject it by following our own sinful ways.

Maria McFadden Maffucci is the Editor in Chief of “the Human Life Review”, a scholarly journal founded by her late father Jim McFadden in 1975. In a piece written in the Winter 2020 issue and cited again in the 50th Anniversary Issue, Maria summarizes the purpose of the “Review”: “What unites our various subjects is the conviction that human life is sacred and deserving of protection, in life and in law. Because the culture at large, which includes the mainstream medical and legal establishments as well as the media, refuses to state the truth about human life — when it begins, how it is valued, what happens to society when we devalue it — our Review is needed more than ever as the source of the finest scholarship, literature, and commentary on what is truly at stake in the battle for life.”