OUR HOLY FATHER TO RESIGN THIS MONTH, OTHER OBSERVATIONS AND EUTHANASIA DEBATE IN CANADA: A REVISIT

Key words: Holy Father, Resignation,  revisited, and Euthanasia Debate in Canada.

When I read the message taken verbatim from the Holy Father's mouth this morning, I thought I was dreaming but the global media echoed it over and over. It was reality. Again, I had to look at my calendar to see if it was some message on April 1st fool's day and it was Monday, 11 January, 2013. April was still far. Then news poured on my TV set as I scurried from one station to another that it was the first time the Bishop of Rome ever resigned. The last incident of this caliber was some 600 hundred years ago. 

I read that underscored message below from the horse's mouth once more  and the Holy Father's rationale for resigning was glaringly clear. I started speculating whether it was related to the apparent chaos in the modern global churches with several false prophets mushrooming all over the world and church attendance dwindling particularly in the northern hemisphere. 

With many having the feelings that if you pray to God now and request for something you must have an instant reply; with many thinking scientifically and other fervently believing that if you request for something or do not see or have a positive reaction to what you have requested, it does not exist. They fail to ask who has given them the brains to reason the way they do in the first place and the sciences they dabble with. It is God! To doubting Thomas, the answer is in evolution. They are wrong. They have started doubting even the very existence of God and some after inner deliberation taking atheism as their opportunity cost and that is very sad indeed. 

Many feel that there must be changes in the Church to reflect what they call modernism. They do not know that in zero AD, there were changes others then called modernism. Others strongly argue that women, homosexuals  and whatnot should be ordained as priests and priestesses; that the church should accept euthanasia, that is mercy killing of suffering persons; that homosexuals should be allowed to marry in the church and have equal rights like heterosexuals, and that abortion should be allowed even in the altar of the churches.  I see the list stretching ad infinitum as there will be others standing up that they should be allowed to marry their children, animals, immaterial things and so on as their human rights and animal or vegetation rights are being infringed upon by the status quo they look on as demode. O my God I see no end with the screwed, zigzagging ball rolling along our path of glory.  I see no end. Then I doubt you not for You are ever wonderful as often times you bring positive things through negative ones.

Others question where God is when there are atrocities like the shooting of innocent children in American schools and colleges, homes, malls, or senseless killings on the highways by drunken persons with their vehicles and senseless killings in Northern Nigeria, in Syria and Iraq, Somalia and Pakistan. Why the extremists of whatever beliefs vow that they can only win in bloody gory battle fields and not at the debating table. 

Where do we go when man suddenly believes that he was born for the gun or with guns in his hands and should never part with them whether he was mentally deranged or normal or just felt like taking a revenge on a neighbor who was annoying him or her with din called music he did not concur or using his gun to take from those who have worked so hard to have better living standard than he or she has. 

Where do we go when one group of persons suddenly stand up overnight and claim that their philosophies or beliefs, call it religions were better than those of others and call the others pagans. The Islamist are accused. They do not only see them as pagans but are urged by the devil within them to destroy those who would not sympathize with them as the work of God. Those are the works of the devil and not of God whatever you interpret or take God to be. He is the God of the mercy and not One that comes to inflict punishment on man or cause him pains.  His Son even died on the cross to save us from sin and hell fire. A man who does this or did this, will not allow us to take the lives of others we feel, with our shallow reasoning that we should revenge or kill for him. A god who revenges or kills is not the spiritual God many know and follow.

Many do not have clear explanations to these plethora of events ask if God were extant for He should intervene and stop those lunatics or those who for reasons we never even get to know have taken laws into their hands.  

Others believe that they have reached the acme of sciences and have searched the whole wide world, all the corners of the infinite universe and do not have any evidence of God. For that poor reasoning, using there animistic brains, they are of the conviction that all preaching in all churches or philosophical beliefs should be abolished, as when they die on earth it was over for them. On what grounds would they reason that way? Have the dead ever returned to tell us that they have gone to heaven and seen no God? I bet, if there was sanction to do this, no one would like to return to earth because some of our reasoning and deeds have made a hell of earth unlike what the Son of God had wanted it to be, a true preparatory passage to Heaven.  

Consequently, such persons do not even see the reason or reasons why they cannot destroy others when they are about to leave the earth for good. They would not even see the reason why if someone is terminally ill they should not end their life so fast. We have never seen anyone dying without pains even if it is for a second. We cannot talk for that person because we have never died that way and in a billion years we will never replicate the death of another person in us. We have never seen anyone making people like automobiles that could be destroyed at will when they were no longer functioning properly. 

Men are of the image of God and no one on earth and even in the universe has got the right to terminate their existence because they believe they are suffering or terminally ill. Have they ever asked themselves What is suffering? Who defines it for them? What criteria do they use with their poor reasoning? They forget that if their parents had feared parturition they would not have been born. Parturition is the atrocious pains their mothers felt when they were being delivered. Some woman have decided to be singletons because of those pains. It it a right thing to do? What is life? What is abortion? How many kill for economic reasons?

They do not want the aborted child for they do not have the money to bring it up! They cannot afford to see their parents in the vegetative stage as it is costing them so much money and the best solution is to destroy them under the euphemism of mercy killing! There is no end in sight. Why? These men and women who advocate mercy killing are trying to make a heaven on earth and that is imponderable. Men, lawyers and parliamentarians, epicureans who support this, have lost their reasoning and do not see reasons for existence. They better belay this and use their persuasive arguments and money to support medical researches in the treatment of the terminally ill and not to go for shortcuts with their euthanasia. They need their prayers as tomorrow they will see mass killing as doing the work of charity. They equate themselves to nonliving things and find life to be nothing or they equate themselves with soulless animals or inanimate things. These are falsehoods.

Such are some of our problems that the Holy Father and his priests and modern Christians or believers with ratiocination do face. As Pope Benedict rightly puts it, the weight of the problems is so much that anyone attempting to handle it ought to be level-headed and that means sound health which he is not in the position to have. He had been a witness of late John-Paul II whom he took over from and knows that a simple mistake could cause irreparable schism in the Catholic Church that is worst than that of Martin Luther and Protestantism, that is worst than King Henry VIII asking to be allowed to marry so as to have a male heir to the throne of England.  

Again, earthly gratifications and not celestial ones are broomsticks on which the devil rides on to  come and pin us down on this callous world for ever. He uses wealth, sexual gratifications, power, and money that many have turned to pray for more than their God to woo us to our doom. Those who are in denial and want to derail the church and turn the communion in it to be cocaine, liquor, drugs and marijuana and make it a money laundering bazaar other than what Jesus Christ created will interpret my writing as mumbo-jumbo. Is this oration what you think?

I am writing here as a faithful member of the Catholic Church who believes that in a perfect world we can live without guns, guards and even the armed forces. In one we can with our eleemosynary attitudes look after the terminally ill; keep our aged parents in our homes as in other cultures and do not see them as humbugged elements that should be killed and dumped so as to allow us gallivant in our wealth on earth. Then what will I do when all are not one and not reasoning like me? They will advance that my good views are decadent. 

I recall where everyone in 1856 in England advanced that any runaway slave entering the British ship or men-of-war was to be apprehended and returned to the slave owner. An erudite and a trained lawyer called  Sir William Vernon Harcourt saw it differently. He argued that if a runaway slave could enter a British frigate, wherever in the world he was to be free as those ships belonged to the British where any slave that entered its territory was free from slavery. With his penmanship in the Times, his idea was accepted and many souls were served. It is time not to shy away and listen to journalists and politicians and medics who have digressed from saving the lives of sick persons to the last second of their existence on earth but theirs. They are putting money before life and that is very wrong to be right my dear readers if you have read up to this point. They have lost their reasoning by using their God given wits to copying what they see in The Netherlands, and other devil led countries to cajole a great country like Canada to follow them. Let your head and God guide you and not your heart and bills you have to pay on Earth.

I would want to tell those who are running away from the church that there is nothing that you ask from God that is not given to you. There is nothing that you do or think of that He is not aware of. He is aware of it before you even think of it. Do not ask me why He cannot halt you from going astray. If you can ask yourself that very question, you will not go astray with the belief that you are impromentis or helping others. Your action is for self-gratification and not those you want to help. You do that of your free will. At dawn you can do what you want to break the laws of your nation but you fully well know that it is contradictory, yet you go on. No one is there to tie you with chains from stealing or committing other heinous transgressions. But you know that it is wrong to do so yet you do it. How can God help you?

Your problem and those of many others is that they want to see proofs. I will tell them that they are trying hard to fuse the spiritual and the physical world, to see Heaven while they are still on earth. Yes, they can see. We pray for a modicum of Heaven on earth and that may not happen now that we are not even praying, doubting before we even kneel down to pray, and perhaps not praying the right way. Jesus Christ knows Heaven and that is why he constantly tells us to say Our Lord's Prayer. How do we succeed when we think that the preacher is a jerk and a waste of time and some proponents of euthanasia are the ones burning our churches or selling them to infidels/you call them nonbelievers?

We even go far as to want to be actors in the Church to be seen that we are inputting what is expected of us and to be compensated even while on earth as others. We want to be showered with encomiums. That is the earthly scenario and NOT that of Heaven. We forget to find out why out of billions of us on earth, not even two persons are identical even identical twins. Such preachers or actors have their heaven here and not where God resides. They can bamboozle you and not God and none born or yet to be born will ever DECEIVE God.

Whatever your interpretation of the impending resignation of the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI on February 28, 2013 we have to pray and thank God for it is all His deeds. Whatever is happening at the highest part of the Church, we have to follow but God and not even his representatives on earth. God never sanctioned mercy killing and if we practice this because some persons we have elected for lack of what to do have decided to table and debate and with their persuasive talks deem it to be fitting to institute the ugly mercy killing, it is their will and not that of God true believers know or worship.  If the Pope is resigning for gerontological and health reasons, I will interpret this as Christian humility. How I wish old and feeble national head of states, particularly those autocrats of third or developing nation states were to emulate the Holy Father's example and resign and let younger persons take over the rein of power for peace sake, love of their countries and their neighbors as themselves. The End.

POSTSCRIPT

This oration was revisited on 09/02/2015 owing to euphoric debate on the resuscitation of euthanasia in Canada. The views underlined here are all mine and I will stand by them. Please share this not for my sake but for that of the preservation and dignity of humankind. VVN.  

Pope Benedict XVI announces his resignation at end of month

Full text of Pope's declaration

Dear Brothers,
I have convoked you to this Consistory, not only for the three canonizations, but also to communicate to you a decision of great importance for the life of the Church. After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry. I am well aware that this ministry, due to its essential spiritual nature, must be carried out not only with words and deeds, but no less with prayer and suffering. However, in today’s world, subject to so many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith, in order to govern the bark of Saint Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months, has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me. For this reason, and well aware of the seriousness of this act, with full freedom I declare that I renounce the ministry of Bishop of Rome, Successor of Saint Peter, entrusted to me by the Cardinals on 19 April 2005, in such a way, that as from 28 February 2013, at 20:00 hours, the See of Rome, the See of Saint Peter, will be vacant and a Conclave to elect the new Supreme Pontiff will have to be convoked by those whose competence it is.
Dear Brothers, I thank you most sincerely for all the love and work with which you have supported me in my ministry and I ask pardon for all my defects. And now, let us entrust the Holy Church to the care of Our Supreme Pastor, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and implore his holy Mother Mary, so that she may assist the Cardinal Fathers with her maternal solicitude, in electing a new Supreme Pontiff. With regard to myself, I wish to also devotedly serve the Holy Church of God in the future through a life dedicated to prayer.
From the Vatican, 10 February 2013

BENEDICTUS PP XVI