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Toronto Cardinal Warns: Children "will get rid of their old people" when "unproductive"

By Hilary White
 
TORONTO, November 23, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In what might be the last pastoral letter from Toronto's Cardinal Archbishop, who was due to retire two years ago, Aloysius Ambrozic tells Catholics that he has had enough. Enough of relativism - disguised as "values" - in the Church and in society in general.
 
"The word 'value,'" the Cardinal writes has been neutralized to the point where it "admits that for someone else my value may be quite valueless."
 
Echoing Pope Benedict XVI's condemnation of the "dictatorship of relativism" that has come to be the guiding principle of most public institutions, Ambrozic writes that he reacts negatively to the word 'values' "simply because it contains a possibility of relativism and meaninglessness."
 
Decrying the fashion for "dialogue" in the Church held up by "progressives" since the Second Vatican Council, Ambrozic writes that "all discussion of values is senseless."
 
"While I admit something has value, somebody else may well see it as insignificant. There is the attitude that the dialogue takes place without any attempt to change anyone's mind. All discussion of values is useless. Any attempt to change anyone's mind is, in fact, unacceptable and even unecumenical."

Ambrozic writes that in the post-Christian secularized world, the only universal value left is egoism. "My ego is thought to be the only authority which counts. There is no truth and value apart from what I like or dislike."
 
Extreme relativism, the idea that there is no absolute truth except personal preference, is identified by pro-life advocates as the source of the problem in the life issues. Ambrozic joins his voice to that of the late Mother Theresa and Pope John Paul II who warned that total relativism will lead to totalitarianism.
 
"The point we must stress again and again is that our society is basing itself on an ideologically un-neutral notion of the sovereign individual."
 
Ambrozic, who hails originally from communist-held Slovenia, writes that the value of human life "is beginning to fray at both ends of the life spectrum."
 
"Our society has already accepted the principle of abortion, and there is a growing number of people defending euthanasia. Whatever the reasons proclaimed by them, children learning from this type of society will get rid of their old people as soon as they become economically unproductive."
 
Citing the philosopher Emmanuel Kant's idea of the "categorical imperative," the idea that moral behaviour was natural to man who did not need Christianity to be good, Ambrozic warns that without Christian moral law, that imperative is dissolving.
 
Kant did not realize that "two millennia of Christian teaching were needed in order to make the categorical imperative obvious and taken for granted," wrote Ambrozic.
 
"Further," Ambrozic warns, "he did not realize that the categorical imperative would diminish in content quickly as the intellectual basis for it was taken away."
 
"What Kant would consider as obligatory, in other words, is not thought of as obligatory at all by our non-believing contemporaries."
 
Read the full letter:
http://www.archtoronto.org/about_us/pdf/pl2006-english.pdf

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