(LifeSiteNews) — Father Chris Alar, MIC, joins Frank Wright and John-Henry Westen on this week’s episode of Faith & Reason to discuss Elon Musk’s warning that we will see the end of human civilization if birth rates continue to drop, the juxtaposition between Russell Brand’s recent baptism and Kanye West’s announcement that he is interested in starting a porn company, and more.
LifeSite has been following the treatment of pro-life prisoners held by the federal government for violations of the Freedom to Access Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act.
One of the defendants, Heather Idoni, told LifeSite she was kept in solitary confinement for 22 days, with the lights in her cell never turned off. She was only allowed a two-hour period at night to leave her cell. Further, Cal Zastro, Idoni’s friend who has also been convicted of violating the FACE Act for a pro-life rescue in Nashville, Tennessee, told LifeSite that U.S. Marshals ushered Idoni into a court room for a pre-trial hearing in Michigan with her wrists, ankles, and waist shackled, as though she were a dangerous criminal, which took those in the courtroom, including the judge, by surprise. While the judge insisted that the shackles on Idoni’s wrists be removed, Marshals did not remove those on her ankles and waist.
Wright, reacting to Idoni’s treatment, says that when one considers that the FACE Act allows people to seek to destroy their unborn children without contact from those who would seek to preserve them, one sees a “profound moral inversion.” For Wright, what the Idoni case shows is that the law is upholding what is said to be a right, but is “effectively destroying” the rights of those who seek to protect life, which he calls the “fundamental right of all” and the “essential value of human life.”
“It is a demonstration of power,” he observes. “It is an attempt to humiliate people, but it must be remembered that it has done so in the service of a legal system that now is empowered by a profound moral inversion where the most serious vice is defended as the highest legal virtue.”
Fr. Alar, commenting on Idoni’s treatment, says that this is not an “isolated event,” recalling how Republican Sen. Josh Hawley brought up last December the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) memo from the agency’s Richmond office targeting traditional Catholics. Alar notes that the memo allowed the agency to call traditionalists “violent extremists.”
“That’s the course that we’re taking,” says the priest. “Instead of running down criminal gangs or drug cartels, the FBI is targeting Catholics purely based on their faith and belief in pro-life. It’s preposterous, and now it’s being even manifested, in not just being watched, or tracked, or analyzed, but now being outright … tortured and abused. This is a violation of every right that they have.”
This week, hip hop star Kanye West announced that he plans to establish a porn company. West has said publicly that he suffered from a porn addiction for almost four decades and attested to the negative impact it has on people’s lives. Several years ago he denounced Planned Parenthood as conducting a “black genocide,” and it looked as though he might convert to Catholicism after he was seen wearing a shirt with St. John Paul II’s picture on it and dedicating an album to Christ.
Alar believes West meant what he said about the destructive nature of pornography when he said it. However, the priest warns that as much as people love conversion stories and “instantaneous graces” that can change lives, conversion is not “that easy.”
“You have to … acknowledge the reality that it’s not just a spiritual battle, it can get into our psychology,” he says, noting that people struggling with alcoholism and sexual addictions need God’s grace to convert, but must also do their part to overcome the addiction, seeking psychological counseling.
From what he sees, Alar thinks West had a moment of grace but did not change his lifestyle. “Eventually it’s gonna come back,” says the priest. “You can’t be a drug addict or an alcoholic and continue to have the bottle around and just sipping a little taste at a time. It’s going to come back, and the spiritual side is first and foremost, but we have to follow it up with the psychiatric side, getting counseling, getting treatment, knowing how it affected our brain, physiology of the matter.”
Wright considers that celebrities have influence and that it is important to ask why their behaviors become “normative” and why they could change “for reasons other than their own personal autonomy.” To him, it has become an unfortunately obvious reality, seen in various recent celebrity crises, that many celebrities do not control their own lives, but have someone that manages their own personal and public lives.
While he admits that the suggestion could seem paranoid, he says it is important to recall that our liberal democracy has been “managed” by a group of elites that determine the issues people believe as democratic or right for about a century. Celebrities, further, are like a sort of “bread and circuses,” and that West, regardless of whether we like his music or not, is an influential figure.
“It’s significant that having had this moment, as it were, where he approached some kind of conversion to the truth, but he’s rowed back into a more, shall we say, culturally fitting position, one that sits much more easily with the kind of hyper-sexualized consumer managerialism that we’re told is normal,” opines Wright.
“Of course, his behavior will now help to normalize that, just as his own father’s behavior normalized the presence of pornography in his life and shaped his future attitudes,” he continues.
Alar adds that when seeking for a psychologist or therapist, one must be sure that they are solidly Catholic, having come into contact with one who recommend masturbation as a means to relieve anxiety and depression in an attempt to prevent suicide.
Elon Musk tweeted a video from the recent “Natal Conference,” warning that “if birth rates continue to plummet, human civilization will end.” The video Musk posted to X shows Kevin Dolan, the conference’s chief organizer, warning that most developed and developing countries are facing population decline “at a scale that makes that growth impossible to maintain,” while “the mainstream institutions that used to get people educated and employed, married and supporting a family, are in terminal decline and have become hostile to life.” Dolan also spoke to the economic impacts of a potential demographic bomb.
Wright, reacting to Dolan’s comments, called them an “extremely sobering and doom-laden prognosis,” adding that it can be seen in “major macroeconomic events,” and that we will face a major economic crash at some point. However, he also notes that it is possible to reverse the trend of depopulation if there is the political will to do so, as Hungary demonstrates.
“One thing that’s good about Musk’s statement, that if we don’t reverse the decline in births, civilization will end, is that it simplifies the issue,” he says. “He’s right. There isn’t any future without a human future, obviously.”
“I certainly think that this is simply one aspect of the politics of insanity and national suicide that is going to see a sharp correction and soon,” he predicts.
Alar looks at the issue beginning with eugenics. Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb was used as an excuse for “everything” from abortion to birth control, but the book did not consider the consequences of population decline, such as international instability. He analyzes the Ukraine war in this light, observing that Russia is the world’s largest landmass with a population half of the United States’, invading a country of 48 million people ethnically indiscernible from the Russians, as Russia cannot sustain itself.
Population sustainability, further, is about 2.1 live births, but even China is experiencing difficulty reaching the replacement rate. As populations age, further, the infrastructure no longer exists to support them since youth will no longer pay into elderly care, leading to the increase in euthanasia.
“This is a ticking time bomb with multiple facets to it, that it’s just going to cause so much more problems than just, ‘Oh, we don’t have enough people,’” Alar warns. “It’s going to lead to murders, it’s going to lead to euthanasia, it’s going to lead to war, and we were already seeing that, I think, in the invasion of Ukraine, because they are critically concerned in Russia about their population.”
For all this and more, tune in to this week’s episode of Faith & Reason.
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