Originally published at crisis magazine
[Editor’s Note: This is the twenty-third in a multi-part series on the unsung heroes of Christendom.]
Perhaps there is no better test of the health of a culture than the way that it treats its children. The Canaanites sacrificed their own infants to Moloch; the Carthaginians slaughtered children to Baal; and the Aztecs and Mayans sacrificed children to feed their demonic gods until the Christian conquistadors put an end to the barbarism. Now, in our self-proclaimed “post-Christian” culture, mothers slaughter their own children on the altars erected to their own narcissistic self-empowerment or the narcissistic self-empowerment of their no-strings-attached sexual partners. Whether the name of the god demanding child sacrifice is called Moloch or Mammon or simply Me, its worship is ultimately demonic.
In pagan cultures, the person ordained to practice child sacrifice was a priest; in our own culture, it is a physician. Such physicians scorn the Hippocratic Oath, which all newly-professed doctors once took, in which they promised solemnly to “do no harm or injustice” to their patients. They refute especially these words of the Oath:
Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Similarly I will not
