"Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me..."

At Mass yesterday, Palm Sunday, we heard St. Luke's version of the Passion of our Lord.  In that Gospel reading Jesus says to the women on the way to Calvary: "Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep instead for yourselves and for your children, for indeed, the days are coming when people will say, 'Blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed.'" 

Throughout the vast majority of biblical time, a woman was considered blessed who had many children, and the barren were considered cursed.  From that mindset, it must have sounded very strange to the women of Jerusalem to hear our Blessed Lord's prediction of a cultural flip-flop of such epic proportions.  And I can't help but wonder if those days the Lord predicted have arrived.  We certainly have some of the cultural signs.

"Blessed are the barren," is the mindset of the culture that has itself sterilized.  "Planned Barrenhood" is the name of the chapter on sterilization in Patrick Coffin's book, Sex Au Natural.  If you are looking for a current and concise treatment of Humanae Vitae 45 years out, I highly recommend it.

It makes me wonder what kind of despair we are headed toward as a culture when spouses have good functioning bodily organs mutilated in order to reduce the sexual act to mere pleasure, thus taking the risk of using each other as objects of said pleasure.  As counter-cultural Christians, we have the task of supporting those spouses who are heroically generous by today's standards in being open to life. What a holy vocation to which they have responded! 

The Lord predicted in the next sentence, the people of that future culture would "say to the mountains, 'Fall upon us!' and to the hills, 'Cover us!'"  We Christians also have the task of showing the culture that life is worth living.  There is no need to despair. 

What about the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed?  There is no shortage of products on the drugstore shelves to keep wombs from bearing, once again increasing the risk of using another person as an object.  In our culture, there is also no shortage of attention payed to breasts.  And culturally, they aint talking about nursing as the Lord predicted.  All we have to do is turn on morning radio or evening television to get a small glimpse of corrupt cultural breast humor.  Then there are the immodest magazines in the supermarket checkout lanes lending to cultural immodesty once again objectifying the human body.  What are they telling adolescent girls on how they should dress?  Dare we even mention the rampant pornography industry?  This blog would go on and on.

I think it's time for heroic Catholicism.  Lukewarm will not get it done but only make the problems worse.  It's time for the faithful to combat these issues with everything we've got.  Only then will the dignity of the human body be restored and life promoted.