Nathan Ormond

“Human life is never a burden. It demands we make space for it, not cast it off. Of course the arrival of a new human life in need—whether the unborn child in the womb or the migrant at our border—challenges and changes our priorities. With abortion and closed borders we refuse that readjustment of our priorities, sacrificing human life to defend our economic security or to assuage our fear that parenthood will upend our lives. Abortion is a grave injustice. It can never be a legitimate expression of autonomy and power. If our autonomy demands the death of another, it is none other than an iron cage. I often ask myself these two questions: Is it right to eliminate a human life to resolve a problem? Is it right to hire an assassin to resolve a problem?”
― Pope Francis, Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future

“Interior intimo meo et superior summo meo”
― Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“Today, listening to some of the populist leaders we now have, I am reminded of the 1930’s, when some democracies collapsed into dictatorships seemingly overnight. By turning the people into a category of exclusion-threatened on all sides by enemies, internal and external-the term was emptied of meaning. We see it happening again now in rallies where populist leaders excite and harangue crowds, channeling their resentments and hatreds against imagined enemies to distract from real problems.

In the name of the people, populism denies the proper participation of those who belong to the people, allowing a particular group to appoint itself the true interpreter of popular feeling. A people ceases to be a people and becomes an inert mass manipulated by a party or demagogue. Dictatorships almost always begin this way: sowing fear in the hearts of the people, then offering to defend them from the object of their fear in exchange for denying them the power to determine their own future.

For example, a fantasy of national-populism in countries with Christian majorities is its defense of ‘Christian civilizations’ from perceived enemies, whether Islam, Jews, the European Union, or the United Nations. The defense appeals to those who are often no longer religious but who regard their nation’s inheritance as a kind of identity. Their fears and loss of identity have increased at the same time as attendance at churches has declined.

The loss of relationship with God and a loss of a sense of universal fraternity have contributed to this sense of isolation and fear of the future. Thus irreligious or superficially religious people vote for populists to protect their religious identity, unconcerned that fear and hatred of the other cannot be reconciled with the Gospel.”
― Pope Francis, Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future

“Migration is not a threat to Christianity except in the minds of those who benefit from claiming it is. To promote the Gospel and not welcome the strangers in need, nor affirm their humanity as children of God, is to seek to encourage a culture that is Christian in name only, emptied of all that makes it distinctive.”
― Pope Francis, Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future