The above is not mine, those words were uttered by none other than the stigmatist St Pio of Pietrelcina, who was also endowed with supernatural gifts and was not one to speak off the top of his head. Until I came across the saint’s pronouncement, the most dreadful practice of abortion would never have hit me that way.

The statement immediately brings to mind the very sad and tragic plight of the North American passenger pigeon. This species was so extravagantly numerous, some five billion of them! It is recorded that they travelled in gargantuan masses that would blot out the sun for hours, causing a frightening sound and gloom. The conservationist Aldo Leopold called the spectacle “a feathered tempest”. Today, the most abundant bird in North America in those days, and possibly the world, is no more. On 1 September 1914, Martha, the last remaining pigeon died at the Cincinnati Zoo. What brought about their extinction was merciless and persistent hunting and loss of habitat, in a word, deforestation. Thanks to the human being, this most beautiful and wondrous gift of God to Mother Nature is gone for good. When it came to possible legislation for their conservation it was foolishly reasoned that they were so plentiful that no amount of exploitation would endanger the species. Hence, the killing continued to their very end; this extraordinary abundant bird was hunted to extinction. Consult the internet and be knocked out by the impact, let the facts astound you and leave you breathless!

My question: do we envisage a perfect and dreadful parallel being drawn here in our day as regards the human species? The similarities are frightening. Our innocent babies are being relentlessly hunted down and slaughtered by the millions and the massacre keeps accelerating unscrupulously by leaps and bounds. The yearly quota goes up alarmingly. In a world where its population is fast ageing and much much fewer births are recorded, it was reported that in the first nine days of this year a million abortions took place worldwide. These amount to a staggering 77 per minute! What will stop the carnage? Nothing; dreadful legislation is all in favour of this hellish and awfully barbaric behaviour. When one of his confreres asked Fr Pio “but Padre, why suicide?”, Padre Pio, rather angrily answered, “you would understand this suicide of the human race if you could see, using your brain, the ‘beauty and joy’ of the earth, populated only by old people and depopulated of children: burnt like a desert”. Yes, in our day, they march for women’s rights and yet increasingly and untiringly kill tomorrow’s women, and of course also tomorrow’s men.

That is the killing! As in the case of the passenger pigeon, we also have the habitat at stake. Steadily our egoism is reducing our habitat into a big and unhospitable mess. Of course, this is all to humanity’s great detriment. Human activity has rendered the environment so hostile to survive in; there exists such excessive pollution and exploitation of nature. God gave us the rain forests, Earth’s very lungs, that we so relentlessly cut down and butcher. At the rate deforestation is happening, how is the Earth going to breathe in the not-so-distant future?

We have Earth’s protective ozone layer that we steadily perforate and ruin by human-generated and rising pollution. Our selfishness is causing so much harm by rising sea temperatures. Climate change is also accelerating, threatening so many wild species with extinction, that will eventually get to us humans, the way we are carelessly mismanaging our God-given and astounding heritage. We are destroying the environment we live in; this is God’s awesome order of nature we are referring to. We create dreadful disorder to what God in his infinite wisdom made so magnificently and miraculously orderly! We are being so senselessly abusive of Mother Nature and this in turn is kicking back and exceedingly in no uncertain terms. Natural disasters of our own are occurring more frequently and more savagely, bringing so much devastation and also claiming countless lives. In this regard too, as in the case of abortion, humanity is threatening its own existence by its stubborn and erratic behaviour. The saddest part is that the greater majority of us are conscious of it all and yet we fail to implement the available and essential measures to correct again the erratic activity of a humanity intent on self-destruction. Oh yes, there have been minor attempts, but they were far too little, nothing significant that would really make a difference. We are bogged down, endlessly wasting time in the debating and speculating stage, much of the time arguing without reaching agreement on any issue, never truly and concretely concluding. Meanwhile the general situation becomes ever more critical and we are wasting precious time of what little we have left to keep it from getting lost.  Simply, the Holocaust and human-generated devastation carries on with ever-increasing momentum.

Seemingly out of context, but certainly in conjunction with God’s awesome order of nature, one may bring into the argument the food situation. How healthy is the food that we produce and consume? Our whole diet, from A to Z, all that has to do with livestock, poultry and agriculture, is tampered with. Just newly-born livestock and poultry nowadays is earnestly and eagerly pumped up with growth-enhancing chemicals so that in no time it will be on our dining table. Only God knows how far all that we eat is from being genuine and harmless.

There was a time when eating vegetables was the healthiest of diets. This, by a long stretch is no longer the case. These days, farmers wearing heavy and sophisticated air-filtering face masks and protective gear from head to toe (you’d think they were astronauts) spray their crop with a variety of harmful pesticides. Surely, contaminated vegetables are what the hungry customer is consuming in our modern age. It is not just a matter of rinsing the product well under running water: the dangerous chemicals are getting in the soil and absorbed by the plant. The chemicals taken in by the plant just cannot be washed away and in turn this contamination naturally finds itself in our digestive system. We haven't a clue as to how much and what sort of poison we are consuming. No wonder that cancer and heart diseases have become as common as a simple cold. There are of course other serious and life-threatening ailments that are on the rise.

Apart from the fact that the most dreadful practice of widespread and legalised abortion is pushing humanity always deeper into post-civilisation and we are now definitely living the barbaric age, whether we care to admit it or not, all in all humanity doesn't seem to want to realize the way to its preservation and survival, that is becoming all the more urgent. I'm afraid that human folly is proving to be limitless and overpowering. It runs so deep; it stubbornly refuses to be exhausted. Will humanity realise this before it is too late? How awful, and what a terrible and ugly age we have brought on ourselves and what a hell of a legacy we are going to hand down to our younger generation; such a heart-stopping betrayal! Our heads hang miserably in bitter shame and guilt. With such extreme wrongdoing, evil and abortion, all running rampant worldwide, will humanity’s fate be that of the passenger pigeon?

Bro Leli Gatt is a Brother within The Salesians of Don Bosco