"How are you?" I asked my priest-friend prior to the Mass we were preparing
to celebrate at his parish. "I'm angry," he replied. I thought perhaps I had
done something wrong -- until he clarified that he meant he was angry that
babies were being killed that day in his community.
Yes, I'm angry too. And here's to the precious beauty of anger! When it is
directed against evil, when it spurs us to righteous activity to root out that
evil, anger is virtuous. There can, in fact, be no love of good without anger
towards evil.
And I don't think abortion will end in this country until more people who
lament that it happens begin getting angry that it happens.
I quote British author William Hazlett (1778-1830), as given in Marcus Wood's
book "Blind Memory," in regard to slavery.
"Logical truth and practical reason are disparates. It is easy to
raise an outcry against violent invectives, to talk loud against extravagance
and enthusiasm, to pick a quarrel with every thing but the most calm, candid and
qualified statement of facts: but there are enormities to which no words can do
adequate justice. Are we then, in order to form a complete idea of them, to omit
every circumstance of aggravation, or to suppress every feeling of impatience
that arises out of details, lest we should be accused of giving way to the
influence of prejudice and passion? This would be to falsify the impression
altogether, to misconstrue reason and fly in the face of nature. Suppose, for
instance, that in the discussion of the Slave-Trade, a description to the life
was given of the horrors of the Middle Passage (as it was termed), that
you saw the manner in which thousands of wretches, year after year, were stowed
together in the hold of a slave-ship, without air, without light, without food,
without hope, so that what they suffered in reality was brought home to you in
imagination, till you felt in sickness of heart as one of them, could it be said
that this was a prejudging of the case, that your knowing the extent of the evil
disqualified you from pronouncing sentence upon it and that your disgust and
abhorrence were the effects of a heated imagination? No. Those evils that
inflame the imagination and make the heart sick, ought not to leave the head
cool. This is the very test and measure of the degree of the enormity, that it
involuntarily staggers and appalls the mind. If it were a common iniquity, if it
were slight and partial, or necessary, it would not have this effect; but it
very properly carries away the feelings, and (if you will) overpowers the
judgement, because it is a mass of evil so monstrous and unwarranted as not to
be endured, even in thought" (Wood, 15-16).
We must exercise reason, self-control, and virtue in our pro-life work. But
to pretend that we should abandon all emotion is the height of absurdity.
