BY ALEX STORY
Leo the Parisien drew a very large, peaceful crowd in Paris at the weekend.
He entered Notre Dame, the first pontiff to do so since the fire engulfed the Cathedral in 2019.
800,000 lined the streets of the French capital to hear his message.
Among other things, the Pope reminded Macron, France’s deeply unpopular president, that the right to life was the only right that truly mattered.
He warned a France that passed a euthanasia law last July against “offering of a programmed death” to her population, after the End-of-Life bill was passed into law in July and confirmed by her Constitutional Council last month.
Further, a couple of years ago France enshrined the right to abortion in the Constitution of the Vth Republic.
Some might say that it doesn’t really matter.
Every half a generation on average, France has a new constitutional order.
Indeed, since January 1789, France has had five republics, four monarchies, three main revolutions, two empires and, in Vichy France, a National Socialist state.
Enshrining anything in her constitution, wits would argue, is akin to preserving an egg sandwich in an unplugged fridge.
But, to others, it is more meaningful.
In France, the pope noticed, the state has enshrined into its laws the culling of its own population at both ends of life.
The death rate of the foetus (“offspring” in Latin) — that unforgivable non-descript and deeply inopportune tissue of matter, that miraculously turns into an unwanted baby if kept alive for long enough — is higher than it was for Dien Bien Phu foreign legionnaires.
Making it alive out of one’s mother’s womb, the most dangerous place on the planet, warrants La Croix d’Honneur for luck.
While not as high as in Britain, at nearly 40% of pregnancies terminated, the odds of being born alive in France are a coin toss.
With the beginning of life so keenly blocked, it behoved the French state to control its end.
The pope mentioned it. Macron ignored it because to recognise it would be inconvenient.
In short, culling your own people at both ends of life is the progressive thing to do. Turning the clock back just wouldn’t do.
The pope, however, blessed all: the men, women and children and the disabled, all born and alive.
Looking more closely at the event, six altar boys had Down syndrome. One girl, whom he blessed, suffered from hydrocephalus.
His message was: The handicapped, the poor and the rich, the young and the old are worthy of life.
As Saint Augustine wrote about the destitute, the wretched and the lost, on the eve of Rome’s fall:
Observe how much a poor man, who is destitute of almost everything, loves to live! Even if he is attacked by a robber or a wild beast… he begs for his life and does everything in his power to escape death, preferring his miserable life to non-existence.”
After the fall, he added:
How greatly all creatures, rational and irrational, shrink from death and love to exist.”
France’s political system disagrees.
The path to non-existence is de-facto seen as the most convenient, requiring a social system, bureaucracy and government filled with Nurse Ratched clones, who are, in Orwell’s words: “the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy”.
France, though, has many friends among “civilised” nations.
In the realm of suicidal empathy, she is only at the beginning of her journey, in the middle of the pack of civilizational lemmings.
Still, having started down that path, the pope’s message would be received like a stool in a punch bowl across much of the Western world, as it maniacally de-Christianises.
The advance of progressive 1920s and 1930s ideas are re-gaining ground fast in the countries that are either implementing mass “end-to-end self-culling” or wanting to do so, all in the name of modernity.
Choosing the peace of death over the tribulation of life, the Netherlands and Belgium re-launched euthanasia in 2002 after its overwhelming defeat in 1945.
Over the last two decades, Luxembourg, Spain, New Zealand and Canada, among others in South America, have become members of the same death club.
Associated members of this illustrious establishment are Austria, Germany, Switzerland along with 14 states in the United States, which allow assisted suicide if it is self-injected.
Great Britain, unfortunately, just missed out on membership a few weeks ago as parliament rejected Kim Leadbeater’s End of Life Bill by 286 to 270 votes.
But euthanasia, tears of joy, could be introduced to the British Isles soon.
Scotland is planning a vote to join the end-to-end self-culling club in her devolved assembly later this year or early next.
All the aforementioned countries, unsurprisingly perhaps, are suffering from low birth rates, aging populations and mass immigration, the latter being the inevitable, inescapable, unavoidable corollary to abortion.
These nations have sacrificed dynamism, survival and freedom for stasis, submission and slavery to the god of convenience, known as Moloch in the ancient world.
To illustrate, a two-year-old, it was revealed a little over a week ago by letter to the Dutch parliament from Health Minister Sophie Hermans, was euthanised in Holland.
The child, suffering from cerebral palsy and epilepsy, was “not continuously suffering unbearably“, the doctors said, adding “that reasonable alternatives remained”.
In response, Lord Alton said: “You start with a little euthanasia and this is where it inevitably leads. Make it legal and it simply becomes another ‘option.’“
Further afield, in Canada, an elderly woman was euthanised hours after having told doctors that she wanted to remain alive.
Rachael Thomas, a Canadian MP, said “this woman’s life was taken against her will. That’s called murder“.
In that country, euthanasia is, at 16,500, now the fifth most important cause of death.
The four out of the top five are either terminal diseases or accidents.
“Assisted Dying”, though, is different.
It is the only category which legally enables a person to kill another, sometimes, as we saw, without that same person’s consent.
And that, as Thomas said, is murder — and state backed.
The killer, in this case, wearing a physician’s overcoat — that bureaucratic armour — can commit his crime in a consequence-free environment.
Such stories will multiply, tempting societies to normalise barbarism, finding defenders for their degeneracy for long enough to keep the path to national deletion clean of obstacle.
When moral standards are wiped away, societies crash through the floor.
By mentioning the right to life, the pope, in peace, has put his finger on the West’s most important sin.
By their fruit shall you know them.
Alex Story is an Olympian, entrepreneur and writer on economic and social issues.