The specter of Venezuela looms over a complacent American electorate.
Mary Jo Anderson, a notable Catholic journalist and public speaker, gave a talk to an organization of Republican women in central Florida’s Volusia County on August 8. Her topic was Florida’s Amendment 4, a.k.a. Right to Abortion Initiative, a hot-button issue for discussion that preceded the group’s business meeting.
The agenda included an introduction to Faustina Guzman-Trump [no relation to Donald], a Venezuela-born candidate for the office of Republican Committeewoman in the county.
Ms. Anderson is currently writing an article on the Initiative that will appear shortly in Catholic World Report. Her own essay will be better than any preview here. Meantime, consider Guzman-Trump’s reasons for running for the office and her passionate alarum during the evening’s Q&A.
Posted on X the next day was Anderson’s capsule summary of the candidate’s comments. With quotations noted on the fly, it is a reliable paraphrase of the woman’s address.
[She] gave a riveting extemporaneous 10 minute plea. She was on fire. Wish you could have heard her. She had been a delegate in Wisconsin at the Republican national convention. She berated us for being naive, for not realizing the threat level—that if America falls it will be because we don’t stand up and fight back “while we can.”
She grew animated with her plea for everyone to “wake up”:
She berated us for being naive and trusting. She described life under Chavez and Maduro, the vicious reprisals for speaking up, the crushing poverty, and the anti-democratic theft of every “election.”
As more irregularities in the 2020 electoral process come to light, Guzman-Trump is convinced that “anyone with eyes can see 2020 was stolen. “And no one is doing anything to stop 2024 theft. If Harris and Walz are installed, it’s the end. They are both Marxists and have titanic egos.”
Grateful for the freedom and opportunities this country has given her, she was scathing in her disdain for the complacency of Americans who do not—or will not—recognize our own contemporary slide into totalitarianism: “You come to a nice dinner and chat about how awful inflation is, how awful the gas prices are, the danger of Amendment 4, and how sad to see drag queens at libraries.” But what are we doing to counter it? Not enough. That is the stark lesson of what she and her family lived through in Venezuela.
Listen Americans, I am telling you—no, no, I’m WARNING you—it is happening under your own eyes! Get up! Get mad! Be afraid. I’m afraid because I know what I am seeing. . . . I ask you—beg you—THINK! If America falls, where will you go? There is no where to go. China will rule the world. . . . I’m afraid because I know what I’m seeing.
I am warning you. You cannot sip wine and say: yes, yes, I hear you. You must stand up tomorrow at the courthouse, on TV, in Tallahassee, at work and at school. If you remain
silent NOW, you will be silenced forever.”
In sum, Guzman-Trump understands that what she and her family lived through in Venezuela was a portent of our own future if it stays on its current trajectory. Her interpretation of the drift of political culture here—i.e., the faux-populist posturing of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz’s ties to China— was affirmed by a woman in her mid-50s who stood up to say: “I’m from Russia. She tells you the truth.”
[Current polling shows Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in a dead heat. That means half the country looks at conditions in Venezuela and tells itself that it can’t happen here.]
A date with danger: hyperinflation and abortion rates
The candidate’s plea for vigilance against Marxist-style assaults on freedom and prosperity was separate from discussion of the abortion amendment. At the same time, there was a grim symmetry between her alarm and the evening’s topic.
Venezuela is one of the world’s most desolate economies. Before descending into political and economic chaos, Venezuela had been among the wealthiest nations in South America, especially between the 1950s and ‘80s. Until Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela was one of the twenty richest countries in the world, ahead of countries like Greece, Israel, and Spain.
Today it has the highest inflation in the world, rated at 360% in 2023 by the Council on Foreign Relations’s Global Inflation Tracker. Its rates have exceeded 700% several times in during the Chavez-Maduro regimes. According to the International Monetary Fund it reportedly reached an unthinkable 130,060 % in 2018. Rates still exceeded 9,000% and 2,300% in 2019 an 2020 respectively.
To Americans, hyperinflation is still primarily a word. To Venezuelans it is a life crisis. People wait hours on line for bread. There have been countless reports of scavenging for food through garbage. Prices for staples can rise daily. People are allowed into state-run supermarkets just two days per week, based on their ID card numbers. The collapsed economy includes the ruin of its health care system. Medical shortages range from antibiotics to cancer drugs. Childhood mortality and hospitalizations due to malnutrition are on the rise.
Despite its illegality, abortions also increased as the economy disintegrated. So too did maternal deaths due largely to hemorrhaging and infections from unsafe, nonclinical procedures. Intended to prevent feticide, Venezuela’s ban has achieved the opposite. Accompanied by shortages of contraceptives, comprehensive prohibition has led to a greater proportion of risky and clandestine abortions.
Amid the grinding realities of living—and parenting—under such extreme conditions, the comfort of sexual love between covenanted spouses is greatly needed. It is past time to question the reigning assumption that Humanae Vitae was rejected en toto. It was not. Church teaching about the inseparable connection between marriage, sexual intimacy, and procreation was not repulsed. Neither was rightful concern about a “contraceptive mentality.” No one challenged Church teaching on marital fidelity, on the generation of new life or the importance of parental responsibility. No one denied Church emphasis on the need for prudence and restraint.
The obstacle to full assent was the encyclical’s unpersuasive assertion that “artificial” birth control in a faithful, conscientious marriage is a grave sin, an intrinsic evil. Acceptance of the Church’s prophetic voice was stymied by Paul VI’s dogged insistence—against the advice of his own commission—that every individual sexual embrace must be open to conception in every instance. Any reservation, no matter the circumstances, is “against nature.”
Only man can make a garden.
Civilization itself is against nature. It interrupts the lethality and anarchy of untamed matter. From the invention of language and agriculture to the building of cities, industrialization, the phenomena of aviation, discovery of the structure of DNA—through this and more homo faber transforms material existence. Mankind’s God-given ingenuity intervenes in what we call nature and exerts dominion over it.
Only man can make a garden; there are none in nature.
• • • • •
“There is nothing natural about natural family planning.”
Harrison Butker made that comment in his much replayed commencement address. Catholic media ignored the remark; but it is correct. The word natural is a convention of speech. Every protocol under the umbrella of NFP is a technique. Yet technique, by definition, is not natural. It is a calculated method intended to gain a specific outcome. Endorsement of NFP was a papal feint. It avoided relaxing an unconditional ban on contraception while simultaneously acknowledging the validity of a married couple’s desire to control fecundity.
Paul VI’s adherence to an entrenched biologism did not ring true to the lived experience of great numbers of religiously serious and sensitive people. Rhetorical devices such “total surrender” or “total self-donation” become grotesque when used to describe an exchange of body fluids.
Louis Dupré, in Contraception and Catholics, wrote that no single act of intercourse could convey the gift of self in marriage. That gift is expressed “in a repetition of acts” over time. The meaning of “the marital act”—a flawed, cumbersome phrase—is not necessarily contradicted “when circumstances prevent them [spouses] from taking proper care of new offspring.” Dupré argued against absolutizing procreation by segregating the “marriage act” from its total spiritual context: “To consider it as an absolute value to be pursued at the expense of all others is to isolate it from the totality of existence.”
More precisely, from the totality of a living marriage. Married life is filled with daily gestures of kindness, generous efforts of concern and self-sacrifice. These, too, are marital acts though they have nothing to do sex.
• • • • •
In the end, the tragedy of abortion is worsened by wholesale condemnation of contraceptives. We have grown accustomed to see the squalor and chaos of contemporary sexual behavior as a result of dissent from Humanae Vitae. It might be time to consider—at the risk of censure and reproach—that the opposite is true: That the Church’s needed credibility as a guide on sexual matters was compromised by Paul VI’s reflexive rejection of the papal commission’s recommendation on birth control.
The Church has paid a high price for retreat from the old maxim: Abusus non tollit usum—or, the abuse of a thing is no argument against its use.
