From Ms J. Calleja

One of the most horrifying and painful images of the Second World War is that of the doctor in a Nazi concentration camp hovering over a child lying prostate on a bed. This child had been subjected to one of those criminal medical experiments that some inmates of these camps had to submit to. The question to ask while reflecting on this is how a doctor whose primary mission should be that of caring and healing, sink to such depths as to consider a child simply matter for experimentation equating it to a guinea- pig or a mouse. The answer to this can only be one – that doctor had, over the years, allowed his conscience to die, and that voice, which is inside each and every one of us, that helps us to distinguish between what is good and what is evil and to assume responsibility for the acts performed, was no more.

Sadly, the behaviour of doctors who perform abortions or who cause the death of patients whose lives are deemed not worthy to be lived and who are sometimes left to die by being denied food and drink, can be deemed to be no different from those who experimented on Jewish or gypsy children during the last war. Their conscience has been killed off and once that happens there is nothing to hold one back from plummeting into the depths of every imaginable horror. A well-formed conscience is the necessary requisite for doing what is good and avoiding evil. “It judges particular choices, approving those that are good and denouncing those that are evil… When he listens to his conscience, the prudent man can hear God speaking.” Catechism of the Catholic Church - 1777.

However, human nature being what it is, we often try, through fear or pure self-interest to find plausible reasons for behaving the way we do, deluding ourselves that it is the best course of action to take in the prevailing circumstances. When Pilate faced Christ at his trial and heard all the false charges brought against Him, he must have instinctively felt that this man was innocent. Yet, he could not bring himself to follow the dictates of his conscience, condemned Jesus to an atrocious death and committed the greatest miscarriage of justice in the history of mankind.

Christianity has taught us that the end can never justify the means. Thus, the killing of the unborn can never be justified even in the case of rape or if the baby is destined to die after a short while, or if it means saving the life of another baby as in the case of conjoined twins. Christ has also urged us to do unto others what we want others to do unto us. In Malta, we have a number of immigrants living among us at present and this has brought us face to face with our responsibility as followers of Christ. We are a small country with limited resources but our Christian conscience dictates only one possible course of action to take. The immigrants, coming as they do from lands devastated by war and persecution, are children of God made in His own image in whom we see the suffering face of His Son. Therefore, we can only welcome and help them as much as we possibly can in the prevailing circumstances.

Unfortunately, Christians seem to be increasingly forgetting that they are “the sons of light” often living among the “sons of darkness” that the Lord spoke about and who are proving to be more and more “wise in their generation” than they themselves are. Sometimes, political correctness takes over and we end up making compromises with our conscience. We are averse to criticism forgetting that we are the heirs of those who, for their faith, faced wild beasts in the arenas of the Roman Empire. Opposition frightens us and we keep ignoring Christ’s blessing in the Sermon on the Mount “Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.” Would it not therefore be wonderful if Christians were to follow St Augustine’s advice “Return to your conscience, question it… Turn inward, brethren, and in everything you do see God as your witness.”

Jacqueline Calleja

BALZAN