In a letter to the editor last week an Our Sunday Visitor reader responds to a previous OSV article asking if American Catholics are suffering from a conscience formation deficit and no longer taking abortion seriously:

The problem is that abortion is not the problem but the symptom.

For several generations we have tolerated a culture where our sexual values have been defined by Playboy. Over the years the culture has become increasingly more sexually explicit. Hardcore pornography has been readily available from most video stores and our home computers. Cohabitation is openly tolerated. In such an environment birth control and, yes, even abortion is accepted. If we don’t deal with these root causes first, we will never solve abortion.

Indeed, as I’ve mentioned on here numerous times, people did not wake up one day and decide that they had the right to murder their own offspring, but they did progressively decide that it was their right to have sex without limit or consequence. The widespread acceptance of sexual immorality has dulled many of our other moral sensitivities. It has lead to the dehumanizing of men and women as objects of lust and the unborn child as an undesirable consequence of a false idea of “sexual freedom” resulting in the acceptance of the murder of this unwanted human life no longer recognized as such. This is why John Paul II said that building a culture of life requires us to also teach others to accept and experience sexuality and love and the whole of life according to their true meaning and in their close interconnection (Evangelium Vitae, n. 97)

Help spread the message of sexual purity, sexual love as it is meant to be experienced, by giving the gift of TOB to your friends and loved ones. Better yet, get some materials and start your own TOB study group with friends or church members.

**just a little update – I finally got the video of Bishop Finn’s homily uploaded and posted on the previous post