In the last couple of weeks, videos have surfaced of Planned Parenthood “medical” officials casually discussing the harvesting and sale of body parts from aborted babies over casual lunches and matter-of-factly separating the wheat from the chaff of the tiny, harvested body parts.

Almost as soon as the videos started going viral on social media, so, too, did the rebuttals that the videos were fakes, that the means by which they were attained were unethical, that we should be careful in our approach to discuss these videos.

The fact of the matter is that we as human beings, and certainly we as Catholics, should be so horrified, so disgusted, so ashamed by what we heard discussed and what we have now seen in these videos, that we should be rendered speechless, both from terror and from tears.

We No Longer Fear

As a society, we no longer fear anything.

There was a time when stories about and images like these here horrified and frightened man. Not quite in the same way that horror movies of today frighten us, but in a way that forced the viewer to look into his own heart and consider, even if just for a moment, whether or not what he saw within that organ was the same sort of evil he had just heard in the story or saw in the image before him.

Today we, who are ever so sophisticated, who have smugly intellectualized God right out of existence, look at these images and find them cartoonish and over the top.

We, all of us, have become anesthetized, to one degree or another, to the horrific, to the dreadful, perhaps even to evil itself.

Francisco Goya: Saturn Devouring His Son

Now, more than ever, we should be afraid–very afraid. “Vengeance is Mine, and retribution, In due time their foot will slip; For the day of their calamity is near, And the impending things are hastening upon them.” –God

We are the sum of our whole and our whole is currently rotten to the core and the collective is too blind and too ignorant to see it.

Too Smart to Believe in Satan

I think I can safely say most of us don’t act upon homicidal ideation. What then of the homicidal functionaries of Planned Parenthood we see in the videos? Were they born evil? Are they possessed? Are they criminally insane? The answer I hear most often regarding the workers in this diabolic vineyard is, “No. They just don’t understand what they’re doing.”

Whether they do or do not, their actions are evil and they themselves are the purveyors of evil; carrying out their acts in the name of enlightenment, with the same cannibalistic ferocity of Saturn in the painting by Goya.

Charles Baudelaire is credited as saying, “My dear brothers, never forget, when you hear the progress of enlightenment vaunted, that the devil’s best trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist!” I think we can all agree, finally, that he does, indeed, exist and resides within the walls of Planned Parenthood and within the hearts of many who do its work.

“Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.” (1 Pet 5:8)

Watch these videos. I implore you. Yes, they are graphic. Yes, they are upsetting. Yes, they are going to haunt you…and they should. We must do everything we can to wake ourselves and those around us from the drugged stupor in which we are walking nowadays. We must be a witness to these lost lives. We must be a voice for them. We must be a voice crying out to Heaven!

The culture in which we now live is the excrement produced when pride and arrogance gorge on too much stupidity, ignorance, indifferentism, passivity, and moral relativism. We as Catholics must heed the words of St. Teresa Benedicta (Edith Stein), who was witness to another great holocaust of humanity, when she tells us, “The nation doesn’t simply need what we have. It needs what we are.” Indeed.

May God have mercy on us.