Natural Law: You gota love it

Catholics are almost alone in their grounding in Natural Law. It's another
word for the common sense God gave us. Bishop Morlino from Madison, Wisconsin
says good things about popular culture's wrestling match with God's law.

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He said the mass media and "those who pander to polls" keep society focused on relativism. They employ inconsistency between civil laws and practices and the use of language which hides the true meaning of certain activities to keep people from applying the moral standards of natural law to everyday life, he said.

"Redefinitions, euphemisms and anomalies" are among the language games he said people use to make what under natural law would be morally unacceptable to everyone become an accepted part of the normal life, Bishop Morlino said. For example, he said, Supreme Court justices are urged to be "uniters not dividers" by upholding Roe v. Wade, the decision that legalized abortion nationwide.

Yet it is the Roe decision itself that divides the country in the first place, he said.
"Language games are very dangerous," Bishop Morlino said, citing the confusing use of the word "mother" in situations where a child is conceived by in-vitro fertilization, or an embryo is implanted in a woman with no biological connection to it, or a newborn baby is adopted by another woman.

He encouraged the audience of about 1,600 people from around the country to try to encourage the acceptance of natural law as the prevailing moral principle of society and to come up with a "catchy sound bite" that would help get the philosophy into general public usage.
Bishop Morlino described natural law as the innate understandings that humans of all backgrounds come to – that God exists, that human beings have unique dignity and that a union of one man and one woman for a lifetime is the way nature intended.

From commonly used language to societal priorities, the "moral relativism" decried by Pope Benedict XVI often seems to be the only way to cope with modern times, said Bishop Robert C. Morlino of Madison, Wis., urging participants at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast April 7 to work against that tide.