Students need passionate theology instructors

Natalie Hudson

By RAMON GONZALEZ
WCR Staff Writer
Edmonton

A sound liberal arts education that teaches the young about human nature is the best response to the abortion culture, says Natalie Hudson, the executive director of the Right to Life Association of Toronto.

"The first concern of a genuine and appropriate educational method is the education of the heart of man, just as God made it," she said. "This kind of education is the very thing needed to respond to a culture that is saturated in relativism, the kind of relativism that allows our society to hold simultaneously that a wanted baby is a baby and an unwanted baby is just a glob of tissue."

Hudson made these comments before 70 people at the Provincial Pro-life Conference at King's College May 13. The former ballerina and high school teacher was one of four speakers at the event. She spoke on Youth in the Abortion Culture: What Have We Taught Them?

"Our abortion culture is teaching youth that people are expendable or that some can be killed if they get in the way," Hudson said. "It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so you can get what you want."

Each time Hudson asks students why abortion is accepted in society, she gets the same response. "I am always told with frankness that abortion is allowed in our society for those who are too young, for couples who don't want a child right now, for women who cannot afford a child, in cases of rape and for babies that are diagnosed with a disability," she said.

"In general, our youth do sympathize with these common justifications for abortion - not out of malice, not even out of some strong conviction that this is right. They are simply aware of these facts and to this present generation the reasons are sufficient or at least good enough to justify abortion."

But she said these youth are generally "open, malleable souls "who will likely do the right thing when they see and understand it. And so we have to offer the young an education in the transcendentals, she said - "an education that encompasses not only truth in its rational sense, but in beauty, goodness, justice and, most important of all, love.

"This kind of education is ultimately about freedom and this is termed liberal education."

Hudson said educating youth in a climate of relativism where abortion is accepted and widely practised "must of necessity entail much more on the part of educators than simply helping young people to be pro-life."

"Being pro-life may very well be the first or the springboard into a vast ocean of ideas and questions that are fundamental to a truly educated and thus free human being," she said.

"The abortion issue must fit into a broader education that addresses the questions about our nature and our very existence. Taken as an ideal, the kind of education that I am talking about would take the pro-life position as a given, as a first premise."

For this type of education to occur, "Catholic schools must stop putting gym teachers and geography teachers into the religion department," Hudson said. "We need teachers properly educated in the science of first things. We need educators who have made philosophy and theology their life's passion so that that passion can be imparted to our youth."

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