Human life is and has always been at the center of the great struggle between good and evil, between light and darkness. The struggle between the "culture of life" and the "culture of death".
Only Satan can delight in the death of the living: for death came into the world as a result of the devil's envy (cf. Wis 2:24). He who is "a murderer from the beginning", is also "a liar and the father of lies" (Jn 8:44). By deceiving man he leads him to projects of sin and death, even in many ocassions making them appear as goals and fruits of life.
Since the beginning of human history one of the many devil's deceptions has been the instigation of ritual killings of men, women and children in human sacrifices offered to different pagan 'gods' and 'godesses' (devils). Being the ones of innocent children the most deplorable of all.
We read in the Book of Leviticus how the Lord tells Moses about the serious crime of offering children to be immolated to Molech, referring to the Canaanite custom of sacrificing children to the god Molech. The little victims were first slain and then cremated. (Leviticus 20,1-5 and 18,21).
In the Americas, five centuries ago, cruel human sacrificing rituals were performed on a scale never approached, even remotely, by another peoples. Never before or after in human history a more open, long running, ritualized and institutionalized public showcase of the Culture of Death has been manifested.
No one will ever know how many were killed this way. Estimates start from 20,000 to 50,000 a year in several sources. Recently, Woodrow Borah, possibly the leading authority on the demography of Mexico at the time of the conquest, has revised the estimated number of persons sacrificed in central Mexico in the fifteenth century to 250,000 per year.
Chests were cut open and the hearts taken out. Aztec codex illustration.
Many methods were used. The victims had their hearts cut out or were decapitated, shot full of arrows, clawed, sliced to death, stoned, crushed, skinned, buried alive or tossed from the tops of temples.
The climax of these ritual killings came in 1487 for the dedication of the new and richly decorated with serpents temple of Huitzilopochtli, in Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City), when in a single ceremony that lasted four days and four nights, with the constant beating of giant drums made of snakeskin, the Aztec ruler and demon worshiper Tlacaellel presided the sacrifice of more than 80,000 men.
Children were said to be frequent victims, in part because they were considered pure and unspoiled.
In 2002, Mexican government archaeologist Juan Alberto Roman Berrelleza announced the results of forensic testing on the bones of 42 children, mostly boys around age 6, sacrificed at Mexico City's Templo Mayor, the Aztec's main religious site, during a drought. All shared one feature: serious cavities, abscesses or bone infections painful enough to make them cry. "It was considered a good omen if they cried a lot at the time of sacrifice,'' which was probably done by slitting their throats, Roman Berrelleza said.
The early Mexican historian Ixtlilxochitl estimated that one out of every five children in Mexico were sacrificed.
Our Lady of Guadalupe, Coatlaxopeuh, crushed this serpent in 1531.
Today we too find ourselves in the midst of an even more enormous and dramatic conflict between good and evil, death and life, the "culture of death" and the "culture of life".
Our Lady protecting the children from the snares of the devil.
John Paul II stated at Denver, on the occasion of the Eighth World Youth Day, "with time the threats against life have not grown weaker. They are taking on vast proportions. They are not only threats coming from the outside, from the forces of nature or the 'Cains who kill the Abels'; no, they are scientifically and systematically programmed threats. The twentieth century will have been an era of massive attacks on life, an endless series of wars and a continual taking of innocent human life. False prophets and false teachers have had the greatest success".
In our days millions of unborn children are killed every year around the globe, in procedures that in some places are not only legal but also officially supported and financed. In many cases the procedures follow the same rules as the sacrifices to the ancient god Molech: the slain and then cremation of the little children.
Just in the United States of America, right next to the land where Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared, more than a million children are killed every year. 32 million abortions were executed in the country just during the first 20 years after abortion was legalized in 1973.
These killings, which dwarf the numbers of the sacrifices of the Aztecs, are not longer executed under the sun in open air, on the top of a pyramid for all the people in town to see and hear, but hidden from anybody except the few personnel of the abortion providers, in facilities that can be found in many cases in shopping centers.
Like during the Aztec times, a variety of methods are used to kill. Like by vacuum aspirations or MVA; dilation and suctions curettage or D&C; saline amniocentesis, or salt poisoning abortions; D&E; "brain suction" or "D&X" methods, etc.
Picture from Priests for Life.
By the D&E method, a pliers-like instrument is used because the baby’s bones are calcified, as is the skull. The practicionist inserts the instrument up into the uterus, seizes a leg or other part of the baby's body, and, with a twisting motion tears it from the body and takes it out of the uterus. This is repeated until all body parts are removed. The spine must be snapped, and the skull crushed to remove them. The nurse’s job is to reassemble the body parts, to be sure that all are removed.
In the "D&X" method, used during the 2nd or 3rd trimester of pregnancy, the baby's legs are located and grasped with forceps.
One of the millions of aborted babies every year.
(Picture from Priests for Life)
Then the legs are pulled and the baby is delivered up to the head. With the head still intact in the vagina (the head at this stage is too large to pass through the cervix), the practitioner then inserts blunt surgical scissors into the base of the fetal skull and spreads the tips apart. A suction catheter is then inserted into the skull and the brain is sucked out. The skull collapses until the baby’s head can pass through the cervix.
The little bodies of the victims are then thrown in dumpsters, incinerated, or sent to be used for research which, under the pretext of scientific or medical progress, in fact reduces human life to the level of simple "biological material" to be freely disposed of.
May the Woman clothed with the sun, in the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Protectress of the Unborn, with her message of Love and Compassion crush the serpent again.