“We are witnesses of a society in which, in many respects, morality has ceased to exist,” Cardinal Raymond Burke, head of the Vatican’s highest court, told the 129th annual Knights of Columbus convention Tuesday. “We are called ever more urgently to the new evangelization of our culture.”
“The problem,” reports John-Henry Westen for the Catholic advocacy site LifeSiteNews, “is ‘moral relativism,’ which Burke said ‘has even entered into the thinking of some theologians in the church and which has provided an ideological foundation for a culture which is predominantly marked by violence and death.’
The Pope, said Cardinal Burke, has “described a moral relativism, called proportionalism or consequentialism in contemporary moral theology, which has generated profound confusion and deadly error regarding the most fundamental truths of the moral order.”
Burke told the convention:
We think, for instance, of the justification of the murder of the unborn child in the womb as the exercise of the right of the mother to choose, weighing other goods, whether to bring to term the baby she has conceived; the justification of the abhorrent practices of the artificial generation of human life and its destruction, at the embryonic stage of development, as the means to obtain supposed cures for crippling or deadly diseases; the justification of the so-called “mercy killing” of those who have the first title to our care, our brothers and sisters who have grown weak through advanced years, grave illness or special needs, as respect for the quality of their lives; and the justification of the sexual union of two persons of the same sex as tolerance of so-called alternative forms of human sexuality, as if there were a true form of human sexuality other than the form written in the human body and soul by God.
Burke said the culture’s need to evangelize now is as dire as when the church first began.
“Even as the first disciples faced a pagan world which had not even heard of our Lord Jesus Christ, so, we, too face a culture which is forgetful of God and hostile to His law.”
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