The Arian Heresy Revisited

Here is part of an article by Rene Henry Gracida, Bishop Emeritus of Corpus Christi.

Among the various heresies extant today, there is one which has grown to such huge proportions as to assume an importance which demands the attention of the bishops of the Church. It is the heresy which underlies the phenomenon which Pope John Paul II has repeatedly described as the prevailing “Culture of Death.” What is the heresy? It is the persistent pervasive denial of the sacredness of human life. The denial of the sacredness of human life has been manifested in the promotion of abortion-on-demand, in the tolerance of infanticide, in the legalization of euthanasia, in the legalization of assisted-suicide, in the promotion of human cloning, in the promotion of fetal experimentation.

The spread of this heresy has been helped by the numbing of our sensibilities because of the spiral of violence in recent times: by the gulags, genocide and ethnic cleansing. Now the growing rejection of belief in the sanctity of human life can be seen in the horror and suffering of children over the death of their parents in the Twin Towers in New York and the horror and suffering of parents over the death of their children in the school at Beslan, Russia.

In the Catholic Church the heresy of the rejection of belief in the sacredness of human life really began to manifest itself in the dissent which followed the publication by Pope Paul VI of his Encyclical Humanae Vitae. That dissent has grown in the acceptance of one after another of the violations of the sacredness of human life which I have listed above. This heresy has grown exponentially during the past three decades and has now assumed a status analogous to the great heresy of the Fourth Century: Arianism.

The heresy of Arianism propounded by the priest Arius in Alexandria, Egypt denied the divinity of Jesus Christ. According to Arianism, there are not three distinct persons in God, co-eternal and co-equal. This heresy held that there is only one person in God, the Father. Arians believed that the Son is only a creature, made from nothing, ex nihilo, like all other created beings. The great danger of Arianism was that it reduced the Incarnation of Jesus to a mere figure of speech. It robbed the redemptive act of Jesus’ dying on the cross of its efficacy, since only God could redeem fallen man. Man could not be redeemed by a mere man.

The great danger of the present denial of the sacredness of human life is that it not only demeans the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, it renders meaningless the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus. If human life was not made sacred by his Incarnation, why should He have died for it? And having died for it, what was the point if it is now not sacred?