According to Catholic faith, every sin can be forgiven during life because of God’s surpassing love (DS 349). However, the Scriptures speak of sins that cannot be forgiven in the sense that they constitute a terrible offense against the truth and the light, against the Holy Spirit (Mt 12: 31-32; 1 Jn 5:16). In speaking of sin this way, the Scriptures refer to a sin more radical than most mortal sins, for it is a sin whose nature blocks forgiveness. Since the time of Saint Augustine, theologians have provided us with a list of sins against the Holy Spirit, proceeding from initial impenitence through obduracy, presumption, despair, rejection of known truth, envy of the grace given to others, to final impenitence. Final impenitence leads to Hell, the eternal separation from God begun in this life through our free self-determining choices to turn from God and His law of love and to cling inordinately to some created good that, in effect, one puts in God’s place.
It is this final impenitence which Victoria Kennedy promotes when she advances the idea of a subjectivist conscience. In an op-ed piece for The Washington Post, Ms. Kennedy wrote, "The pro-choice position recognizes that the United States is a diverse, pluralistic society where a woman has a constitutional right to make a decision based on her own conscience, religious beliefs and medical needs." This is how Ms. Kennedy, who views herself as a "good Catholic," attempts to justify the killing of an unborn child.
It is most ironic that Dianne Williamson, enraged that Bishop Robert McManus has decided to rescind Victoria Kennedy's invitation to speak at Anna Maria College in Paxton, would write an opinion piece accusing Bishop McManus of closing his ears on Victoria Kennedy. For this is what the Culture of Death advocates do. They close their ears to the Lord Jesus. When a person rationalizes what is known to be wicked in the sight of the Lord, that person opens a chasm between themselves and God which continues to grow wider and wider until they can no longer hear His call and discern the word of truth that He has spoken.
Margaret Sanger was determined to free sex from the restrictions of Christianity. This, she said, would bring about an earthly paradise freed from te shackles of limitations on sexual desire. In her Pivot of Civilization, Sanger made it clear that she wanted everyone to reject the next world and any hope of obtaining Heaven and to replace this goal with that of building the earthly paradise based upon worldly happiness:
"I look, therefore, into a future when men and women will not dissipate their energy in the vain and fruitless search for content outside of themselves, in far-away places or people. Perfect masters of their own inherent powers, controlled with a fine understanding of the art of life and of love, adapting themselves with pliancy and intelligance to the milieu in which they find themselves, they will unafraid enjoy life to the utmost....Interest in the vague sentimental fantasies of extramundane existence, in pathological or hysterical flights from the realities of our earthliness, will have through atrophy disappeared, for in that dawn men and women will have come to the realization, already suggested, that there close at hand is our paradise, our everlasting abode, our Heaven and our eternity. Not by leaving it and our essential humanity behind us, nor by sighing to be anything but what we are, shall we ever become enobled or immortal. Not for woman only, but for all of humanity is this the field where we must seek the secret of eternal life."
Victoria Kennedy is an atheistic humanist. She just hasn't steeled herself to admit this. She has succumbed to a humanistic, pragmatic philosophy, a progressist atheism in which religion, as Harvey Cox put it in his Secular City, "..is in a sense the neurosis of culture." For Cox, "secularization corresponds to maturation, for it signifies the emancipation of man first from religion and then from metaphysical control." And humanity "must cease worshiping certainties. For when certainty enters a question, authority also enters as the implacable enforcer of certainties." And authority is viewed as the enemy of free intellectual research, scientific advancement, social development and moral maturity.
Dr. Dietrich von Hildebrand, in his book The New Tower of Babel, stressed that, "The egocentric sovereignty that modern man arrogates to himself bans everything that has the character of coming from above, of imposing bonds upon us, and of calling for an adequate response. Modern man also shuns all the factors in life which are gifts, which he cannot grant to himself: they remind him of his dependence upon something greater than himself and above himself. Thus truth in its implacable sovereignty - absolute truth that judges our reason instead of being judged by it - is denied." (p. 19). And ironically, those who want to shake off the demands of absolute truth and who come to view the Christian faith and its teachings as mere "superstition," fall "into the web of the most naive, uncritical (not to say superstitious) worship of unfounded opinions," for "He who shirks episteme (knowledge) inevitably becomes a disciple of doxa (opinion). (p. 19).
Our Lord told us that if we love Him, we will keep His Commandments. And loyalty to the commands of Christ is inseparable from loyalty to the commands of the Church He founded, of which He is the Head and with which He identifies Himself. Victoria Kennedy rejects this. She rejects Our Lord's commands made known through His Church. She has opted instead to work for Margaret Sanger's idea of an earthly paradise where man is his own god.
