Last month we saw the voters of Ireland jump the shark. By two-thirds, they cleared the way for abortion on demand. But the shark is already hungry. Progressivism must feed, must kill and kill and always continue to swim. If it stops, it feels it will die.

The Irish government is about to feed that shark Irish lives. But it’s already hungry for more. For Christians’ liberties.

As The Catholic Herald (U.K.) reports:

Ireland’s Taoiseach [Prime Minister] has said that hospitals with a Catholic ethos will be required to perform abortions after new legislation comes into effect.

Leo Varadkar told the Dáil that individual medics and healthcare workers will be able to opt out but that this opt-out will not extend to publicly funded hospitals.

Two of Dublin’s biggest hospitals are owned by religious orders. The St Vincent’s Healthcare Group, which includes St Vincent’s University Hospital, is owned by the Sisters of Charity, while the Sisters of Mary own the Mater Hospital.

Let’s not forget that Varadkar lied his way into office. He ran as being pro-life. But that was years ago. The shark has progressed way past that. Now it wants to consume the freedom of religion and the conscience rights of doctors.

Soon those who run Catholic hospitals in Ireland may face a stark decision: Refuse government funding, or drench their hands in innocent blood. Doctors could lose their licenses for refusing to steer women to abortionists.

Ireland: A Cautionary Tale

Ireland began its life as a nation on a model much like ours. It didn’t enshrine an intolerant official religion. But it did de facto recognize the dominance of one religion. In America that was Protestantism, in Ireland, Catholicism. The Irish went too far in privileging the Catholic Church. It built state policies on close cooperation with churchmen. It used state coercion to send women with crisis pregnancies to church-run homes, which exploited them as cheap labor. They had no legal recourse. The Church was just that powerful. Likewise, victims of sex abuse had little hope of justice. A grossly exaggerated respect for the clergy, and fear of the Church’s power, left perverts above the law.

Legitimate outrage at abuses like those — trumpeted constantly in the media — has given millions of Irish the pretext for abandoning their faith. Church attendance has plummeted, and it was only among weekly churchgoers that pro-life voters formed a majority.

Now the pro-abortion lobby in Ireland wants to force Ireland’s Catholics not just to tolerate abortion. No, they must take part in it. They must perform this sacrifice to Moloch in Catholic hospitals. Doctors who won’t kill children must refer to doctors who will — becoming morally complicit.

Burn the Incense to Moloch

Even the American left hasn’t tried to force quite that choice here. The closest it came was when the Obama administration thanked the U.S. bishops for backing Obamacare by issuing HHS rules requiring every employer to fund the abortion pill. That effort died in court, thank God.

Soon those who run Catholic hospitals in Ireland may face a stark decision: Refuse government funding, or drench their hands in innocent blood. Doctors could lose their licenses for refusing to steer women to abortionists.

Who knows if Catholic hospitals can survive without that funding? That probably doesn’t matter. Let’s say they renounced government money. (As they should.) Will the frenzied pro-choice faction that now rules Ireland leave matters at that? No. They’ll pass a bill requiring every hospital, even without state funding, to kill the unborn. That’s just how this shark swims.

No Rights, Just Results

Progressives don’t really believe in limited government and individual rights — that’s for classical liberals. They believe in results. If parents are “miseducating” children with religious superstitions, then they’ll outlaw home-schooling. (See Germany.) If adoptive parents won’t help with “transgender transitions,” then the state will take the kids away. (See Canada.)

It’s not democracy, capitalism, or Classical liberalism that produces such bloodthirsty, sneering elites. It’s the haughty Progressive paternalism that dominates in Western Europe. In “normal countries,” as Barack Obama described them.

Now Ireland will be normalized. The steamroller’s revving its engines.

This attitude found no place at America’s founding. That’s why Progressives like Woodrow Wilson raged against our Constitution. Why his heirs have spent decades perverting its meaning through false court decisions, like Roe v. Wade and Obergefell. Why they seek to transfer ever more power to unelected bureaucrats, who know ever so much better than “retarded” voters. (The word used for Trump supporters by FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.)

It’s not democracy, capitalism, or classical liberalism that produces such bloodthirsty, sneering elites. It’s the haughty Progressive paternalism that dominates in Western Europe. In “normal countries,” as Barack Obama described them.

Now Ireland will be normalized. The steamroller’s revving its engines.

Bare Ruined Choirs

What should Irish Christians do? Obviously, they can’t perform abortions in their hospitals. Nor can doctors arrange them, even by steering mothers to doctors with seamier consciences. Whoever runs Catholic hospitals in Ireland must be ready to see them closed.

Not sold. To sell your hospital so that it can be used to offer abortions is no escape from the blood-guilt. If someone asks you to use your hunting rifle to shoot down a child, you don’t get off the hook by saying, coyly, “No, but I can sell you the rifle. It’s loaded. …” Wink, wink.

These hospitals must close. In fact, if the Irish government persists, they ought to be closed all at once. On the very same day. And they ought to be dynamited, the sites left piles of rubble. (Remember how Mother Angelica answered the threat of liberal bishops seizing her network: “I’ll blow the damn thing up before you get your hands on it!”)

Let them stand there as a reproach, like the ruined abbeys of England.

Let children ask their parents, “What’s that ruin over there?” And let the parents scramble to find some answer they can mutter. Let them turn away their eyes from the sites where Christians once healed the sick, till the day when the saints return and drive out all the serpents.