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As the economy in Europe worsens, babies are being abandoned at an increasing rate, so much so that charitable institutions have reintroduced a very old device, “the baby hatch.” Desperate mothers and fathers place their infants in the hatch at an agency, orphanage or church, an electric sensor goes off, and caregivers come to the rescue.
Something much like this was used in the Middle Ages, and for a significant time after — a secret door at a monastery, convent, hospital or church, where children whose parents could not care for them would be left (anonymously) and be cared for.
Child abandonment is nothing new. A little history lesson will go a long way in understanding today’s situation and the Church’s place in it.
In ancient pagan Rome, babies were abandoned out of desperation to be sure, but many, many more were abandoned because the Romans fully and happily approved of infanticide. If a baby was deformed or unwanted, he or she would be abandoned with no moral regrets whatsoever. Roman law even demanded that deformed infants must be killed, and exposure was the means to do it.
Abandonment through exposure was, then, very common and had nothing or little to do with hard economic times. The children who didn’t die were picked up by slavers and pimps.
When Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in 312, that began to change. Constantine introduced harsh penalties for child exposure, but also unprecedented remedies for the innocent children; the Christian imperium would “bestow freely the necessary support on all persons whom they observe to be placed in dire need.”
In the very Christian sixth-century Justinian Code, the Christian imperium declared:
“Those who expose children, possibly hoping they would die, and those who use the potions of the abortionist are subject to the full penalty of the law — both civil and ecclesiastical — for murder. Should exposure occur, the finder of the child is to see to it that he is baptized and that he is treated with Christian care and compassion. They may be then adopted … even as we have been adopted into the Kingdom of grace.”
Christianity changed everything, especially how to deal with desperate people and their babies. In evangelizing Europe, the Church changed its culture from a pagan affirmation of abandonment by exposure to Christian compassion, where the baby was abandoned into the arms of the Church.
Lesson No. 1: Christianity is the reason why both Christian and non-Christian charitable organizations in Europe are providing baby hatches. If it weren’t for Christianity, Europe would still be practicing pagan infanticide. But there is little doubt that, if Europe sinks more deeply into secularism, its current affirmation of abortion will bring it to embrace ever more cheerfully the ancient “right” of Roman pagans to infanticide. There won’t need to be any more baby hatches, or the hatches will be opened on the other side by those running something even more horrible than abortion businesses.
Lesson No. 2: The collapse of the European economy provides an unprecedented opportunity for the Church to display the greatest charity, the greatest self-sacrifice, the greatest love for those falling through the secular safety net — not just the babies, but the parents as well.
Pagan Europe embraced Christianity, in large part, because of the extraordinary love shown by Christians to the poor, the sick, the downtrodden, the persecuted — all those who found themselves desperate and in need of a miracle. The pagans could not match it, as the pagan emperor-revert Julian the Apostate grudgingly conceded.
Although he wanted to wipe Christianity off the face of the earth, he was forced to admit, “Nothing has contributed to the progress of the superstition of the Christians as their charity to strangers. … The impious Galileans provide not only for their own poor, but for ours as well.”
Julian’s attempt to turn the Roman Empire failed, and, as a consequence, Europe was Christianized. Christians won by the grace of God, but that was in no small part the grace of God, as witnessed in their extraordinary witness of charity: taking care of the desperate and abandoned, those who’d fallen down into, or never climbed up from, the very bottom of society.
The Church has that same opportunity today.
Europe, once strong, once Christian, is now both feeble and secularized. Its weakness and collapse are, in fact, due in great part to its secularization. Europeans abandoned their Christian heritage and embraced the secular state as their church, as a substitute for the Kingdom of God, as the provider of all things, the wiper of all tears, the solver of all problems and the hope for a new Eden on earth. The European welfare states are collapsing, in part, under the weight of their trying to take the place of God.
Whatever the complex causes of this collapse, the effect is real. Very real. Real people are really suffering. Real fathers and mothers are really desperate. Real babies are being abandoned. And here’s the really bad news: It’s only going to get worse.
And that’s why the Church has to be there.
Not the Church demanding that the European Union do something to take care of all the people falling through all the gashes in the social net.
Not the Church demanding that governments with impossibly huge deficits not cut their unsustainable and bloated social-welfare programs.
Not the Church lobbying the state.
But the Church, there on the front lines, spending its own money, using its own resources, using its own people, sacrificing itself.
That’s the Church that won Europe to begin with. That’s the Church that astounded the ancient pagans and can astound the modern secularists. That’s the Church that can win Europe back to the faith again.
Author and speaker Benjamin Wiker, Ph.D., has published nine books, with another coming out this fall with Scott Hahn, Politicizing the Bible: The Roots of Historical Criticism and the Secularization of Scripture 1300-1700. He is currently working on a book on the Church and the secular state. His website is BenjaminWiker.com.
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I read on the BBC website that the “baby hatch” idea is being opposed because it violates the child’s rights to know its parents or some such thing.But this is coming from the same folks who support abortion which kills a child before it can know its parents.Go figure.
Of course this assumes that the remaining one to five percent of Catholics in Europe have, after taxes and economic collapse, any resources left to do charity. Because the state is the defacto church for secularists they tax great portions of income from even the least wealthy to sustain the evil empire. It is similar in the US, the taxes paid to the school system god, the state god, the federal god, the mandate god, the sales tax god, the gasoline tax god, the current 10% surcharge god on hospital stays, recycle god, the sales tax on snacks god, the tobacco tax god, all add up to giant sized socialist poverty. Personally I think it is worse now than in pagan Rome, excepting the physical persecution, which is likely to come anyway. Never in the history of man has such powerful propaganda been in place to thwart the truth, it is indemic in almost every area of education, culture, and social interchange. The secular world-view is entrenched deeply and pervasively. The Orwellain re-writes of history and the mass hysteria via the breads and circuses have overloaded the senses and dulled any ability to think for many. Everything boils down to knee-jerk indoctrinated responses and patterns of thinking, very very pronounced on the left, for now, less so on the right. But as the polarization becomes even more pronounced there is danger that even clear thinking people of good-will who can see the problem may not remain untainted. Frankly, I don’t see it improving until society is brought to its knees, literally, by events. And those events will surely come, society’s response is what is in question. Dark times lead to dark ages, but unlike the past “dark age” which was an age of Christian light, and for that reason is much maligned, one cannot know about the next venture of civilization. The current civilization rejects its Christian roots, it is suicide on a grand scheme to do so.
Europe can be likened to a house long afflicted by black mold slowly eating it away from within. Once upon a time the residents had the wherewithal and willingness to clean it up before it did any real damage. But now they’ve grown weak and shallow, and are no longer willing to put in the work to keep the house standing.
They threw away the discipline of faith for the vapidness of materialism and the sterile dead end to which secularism ultimately leads. Let ‘em rot, that’s what I say. Better for the Church to save what it can before the structure falls apart. And though it is UnChristian for me to say it, I will not weep.
On this one, I had to put my €2 in. John, I am a missionary in Germany currently, and I am actually seeing signs of hope in Europe. People are seeking peace of mind in today’s uncertain times and are learning the secret of contentment - take it to God in prayer, leave it in His hands, then listen to Him for the answers.
vftmom247.wordpress.com
What a powerful article! I especially liked the line about the Church being on the front lines. I’m printing this up. It’s definitely a keeper. Also sharing it on my facebook page.
The crucial issue - and one mistake that needs to be stopped - is the notion that Europe was Catholic until quite recently, say until the 1970s.
In reality the only sector of European culture that remained Catholic beyond the initial industrialisation of any country were the ruling class and the declining peasant class that found itself crushed by more efficient farmers in Australia and the hot tropical regions where many more crops could be grown each year. The abandonment of high altitude pasture lands in Switzerland and other parts of the Alps is the clearest evidence for this.
As these farmers moved into cities to take up industrial work, they did not take with them their traditional Christian faith. Rather, the absence of any secure personal property gave them no incentive for conservatism, and the scarcity of land and money, along with as Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen have shown in their study of honor cultures the easy portability of the raw materials of the new industrial economy, gave then quite different incentives. Trying to seize resources from the wealthy was much easier and more profitable than trying to build one’s own resources as in the old farming economy or even the land-surfeited suburbs of Australia today. It was this that led Europe’s working masses to support radical political systems that called for the transfer of wealth from rich to poor - the only trouble is that, devoid of ores of common metals like iron, aluminium, titanium and manganese, Europe has no resources to give to its working masses.
Europe’s ruling classes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries certainly did have some knowledge that industrialisation would produce an atheistic culture - history shows that only mineral- and land-rich Australia and sub-Saharan Africa can maintain a religious culture in an industrial world - but they were never powerful enough even when they maintained strong conservative dictatorships to stop the tide.
European collapse is comming, and it will be immininent. There is an argument to be made that it is due to secularization, especially when we look at the demographic collapse.
http://zoltansustainableecon.blogspot.com/2012/08/europeans-next-native-americans.html
Let us not forget however that the church also had a historic role in keeping Europe back. When the church was at its strongest in Europe, the continent was the most backward relative to other regions or continents.
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