A blessed Easter Octave Friday, which liturgically is a Sunday. There is an old adage about a ‘month of Sundays’, but the Catholic Church really does have a week of Sundays after the Solemnity of the Resurrection, the greatest feast in our calendar, the solemnity of solemnities, and the date from which all the rest of our liturgical year flows. So manducemus et bibamus, cras hodie Christus resurrexit, alleluia!
But the world rolls on in its seemingly inevitable slide towards insanity: Our vaunted Members of Parliament and Senators (the legislators, not the hockey team who cannot make the playoffs), those whose task seems either to make our lives ever-less free or to legislate immorality, just voted themselves a 1.8 and a 2.1 percent respective pay hike. Lo and behold. To paraphrase Plato, who guards the purse strings of the guardians?
The 338 MPs will see their salaries rise to $170,400 from $167,400, while Trudeau — who gets another $170,400 as PM — now will make $340,800, an increase of $6,000.
This raft of MP’s therefore, in salaries alone, costs us $57,595,200 per annum, and this does not take into account staffers, their, ahem, spending accounts, of which so much hay was made during the lamentable Mike Duffy trial, wherein they spent millions tracing the origins of a $64,000 cheque. Nor for that matter, their pensions, which are hefty and lifelong, even after a two-term ‘career’ as a Member of Parliament (Senators are for life). Winning a seat in parliament is even better than winning the lottery.
The late great American columnist Joseph Sobran, r.i.p., lamented the existence of such a class of permanent legislators. In the early days, the parliamentary system relied upon those who had other occupations; they would take turns doing the ‘service’ of representing their fellow citizens, taking on the burden of authority. Now, parliamentarians’ work seems to consist of ‘discovering’ new laws either to make us less free and/or less rich (raise the drinking age! ban smoking! ban fireplaces! bike helmets for all! carbon tax!) or to legislate immorality (homosexual ‘marriage’! sex-education in the classroom! transgender ‘rights’!). When was the last time you heard of a ‘good’ law being legislated? Even the good ones, in general, simply remove some of the bad effects of previous laws, and even that is rare. Given the inertia of our laws and customs, once something is put into law, it is nearly impossible to remove. And this inertia is almost always making us worse.
Case in point: It was announced today that Prince Edward Island, named after the fourth son of King George III and the father of Queen Victoria, but which was originally named Ile Saint-Jean (the name was changed after British occupation in 1798), will now permit abortion on its land so-far innocent of the blood of these littlest of martyrs. How I wish this were an April Fool’s joke, but any joke is on us, and the victims. This is what we pay our ‘legislating’ class to do. Saint Jean, prie pour nous!
And, in the classroom, a female teacher is in court today, charged with multiple counts of pedophilia, sexual assault and child pornography, using ‘children’ as young as 12 to act out her sexual fantasies. It would be difficult to convince me that this has nothing to do with the explicit sexual material in the curriculum, as mandated by McGuinty and Wynne tag-team. Add to this that teachers are hired without regard for their own moral lives or views, and that these ‘children’, also unhinged from any real moral foundation in or out of the home, are already acting out their pubescent sexual fantasies with each other. It was only a matter of time before a teacher also lacking a moral compass would eventually join in. Now even a young female teacher in the ‘Catholic’ system has been charged with sexual contact with a male student. Would you really want to put your child into the potential amoral miasma of our public schools?
But all that is old is new again. Allegations are now surfacing of rampant child sexual abuse in Hollywood dating back decades. Yes, I know that we should pity those who fall into such sexual sins for there, but for the grace of God, go I. But that is the very reason why the noonday devil of unbridled lust within each one of us must be caged and enclosed by strict laws and customs about sex. To let him loose is to invite havoc, mayhem and destruction.
I will close with the words of the great Pope John Paul II from paragraph 97 of Evangelium Vitae, which brings us back to abortion in P.E.I.:
The trivialization of sexuality is among the principal factors which have led to contempt for new life. Only a true love is able to protect life. There can be no avoiding the duty to offer, especially to adolescents and young adults, an authentic education in sexuality and in love, an education which involves training in chastity as a virtue which fosters personal maturity and makes one capable of respecting the “spousal” meaning of the body.
Amen to that.
A final question: When was the last time you heard the word ‘chastity’ mentioned in our legislature or our schools?