Our Lady of Divine Providence

(PUERTO RICO, Posted April 10, 2007 www.RemnantNewspaper.com)  – You have probably heard little or nothing in the U.S. media about the fact that Puerto Rico is right now facing an extremely radical legislative project attacking traditional norms of marriage, human life, and family. So you may find this little report of interest.

Back in the 1950s and 60s, this island was used as a testing ground for the most revolutionary innovation of that decade, the contraceptive (and abortifacient) pill, with Puerto Rican women being used as human guinea pigs.

Well, once again the hard left has been pushing aggressively down here, aided and abetted from ‘up north’ by the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, militant homosexuals, the Freemason-friendly local press and other enemy forces. They have taken advantage of a project to revise the island’s Civil Code so as to “adapt it to the 21st century”, pushing for a whole slew of secular humanist changes to Puerto Rican law covering marriage and family issues: embryo experimentation and destruction, equal legal and economic “rights” for ‘gay’ and unmarried heterosexual couples (it will be “marriage” in all but name), sex-’changes’ being registered to officially falsify birth certificates (and so bring same-sex “marriage” in through the back door), adoption rights for unmarried couples and single mothers, sale of semen for in-vitro mothers, with the option of ‘designer-babies’ (selecting desired genetic traits from the ‘supermarket’ of anonymous semen vendors), freezing genetic material so as to allow in vitro procreation of infants whose father is already dead, along with other anti-human and anti-Christian measures.

On the brighter side, the island’s Catholic Church – along with plenty of Evangelical and Pentecostal Protestants – is mounting some firm resistance. Among other things, we have gathered so far 150,000 signatures to a petition (which I helped to draft) opposing the new proposed legislation, and we had a big public Catholic protest on Saturday, March 24.

Many thousands of faithful from parishes all over the island, including all the seminarians, plenty of priests and religious, and masses of young people, crowded the south side of the Capitol in San Juan, led by all of the island’s bishops and the Apostolic Delegate (the American Archbishop Timothy Broglio, who is also the Papal Nuncio for our next-door-neighbor, the Dominican Republic). It was very refreshing to see for a moment the social Kingship of Christ symbolized, at least, in a reminder of what Pius XI had in mind in his 1925 Encyclical “Quas Primas”, which introduced the Feast of Christ the King into the Liturgy in order to combat the exclusion of Our Lord from the public life of nations. 

We Catholics literally took over the whole Capitol portico and its massive steps, in a scenario that would have had the ACLU, Barry Lynn and his “People for the American Way”, and all other dogmatic Church/State separationists, in paroxysms of rage at the “unconstitutionality” of it all.

I confess I almost choked up, on arriving at the Capitol, to see a massive statue of Our Lady of Divine Providence, the island’s Patroness, enthroned on a high stone rampart at the side of the Capitol steps, while an enormous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe (“Empress of the Americas”) was hung between the very columns of the Capitol facade. It was reminiscent of beatifications and canonizations in St. Peter’s Square, when they always have colossal portraits of the new Saints or Blesseds hanging between the great columns of the Basilica.

For a moment old Christendom had made a proud re-appearance here in the original heart of the Christian New World! (The first diocese in the Americas with its resident bishop was established in Puerto Rico in 1511.) I can’t imagine a similarly defiant scenario with American bishops presiding at the Washington Capitol, or even any State capitol. It was really a manifestation of a united national Catholic Church clamoring for certain basic and traditional social norms of Christendom to be upheld by our legislators.

The media have been rather frustrated trying to fish out dissident “Catholics” to express support for the legislation and create the impression of a house divided. So far I’ve only seen a report of a lone liberal nun dissenting from the Church’s official opposition to the legislation. But even she belongs to a group that is semi-schismatic and not in good standing juridically with the local hierarchy.

Please keep Puerto Rico in your prayers, that this evil legislative project is defeated, through the intercession of Her who ‘crushes the head of the serpent’, and this island’s first Blessed, the lay apostle Carlos Manuel Rodríguez (1918-1963).

May all of you receive God’s richest blessings during this time of triumphal celebration of Our Lord’s Resurrection!

Yours in the Hearts of Jesus and Mary,

Fr. Brian Harrison, O.S.