The case of Massachusetts woman Lindsay Clancy has garnered national attention, in no small degree due to the alarming surge of women online and outside the courthouse expressing “solidarity” with and support for Clancy, who is on trial for the brutal murder of her three children, ages three, five, and eight. Clancy has admitted in court to taking each of the children into the basement, one by one, and strangling them to death with exercise bands.
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The trial has led a number of clearly unstable women to post TikTok and Instagram videos of themselves angrily screeching and hurling ice into bathtubs while their children cower in the background in fear and confusion or, perhaps even more disturbingly, clutching their young children with the words “Same, Lindsay” superimposed over the video.
There is much debate and discussion, in the wake of the trial, over postpartum depression, the pharmaceutical industry, and the social contagion effects of brain-rotting, attention-whoring social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, but I’m not here to weigh in on any of that. As a father and a Catholic, my own attention has been arrested by the fact that many American women seem to have forgotten one of the most fundamental aspects of motherhood. No doubt the prevalence of abortion over the past number of decades has played a role in this.
Ultimately, that’s what love is: sacrifice. Christ provided the perfect and ultimate example of love when He lay … scourged and shredded … upon the cross.
St. Josemaría Escrivá, the 20th century Spanish priest who encouraged laity and clergy alike to pursue holiness in everyday, once wrote, simply, “The way of love is called sacrifice.” Every mother and father is called to sacrifice for his or her children. While abortion and contraception may declare children to be an inconvenience to be disposed of or prevented, Christianity instead encourages parents to embrace parenthood as Christ embraced the cross. St. Francis De Sales urged his fellow Catholics, “Lovingly kiss the crosses that our Lord Himself lays upon your arms, without looking to see whether they are of precious or aromatic wood. They are more truly crosses when they are made of a wood that smells dirty and is considered useless.”
Parenthood is a sublime joy. My wonderful wife and I have a beautiful baby girl, nearly two years old, and we are expecting her baby brother later this year. My daughter has brought so much joy and meaning and purpose to my life. Parenthood can also, I know, be a trial. At such times, however, every mother and father ought to, in the words of Christ Himself, “take up his cross, and follow me” (Matthew 16:24).
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Sacrifice. For centuries, it was long understood in the West that one of the unique responsibilities of every generation was to care for the next, to preserve, better, and beautify the world for the next generation to inherit. In many cases, this meant sacrifice.
I am reminded of a scene from the film Cinderella Man, dramatizing the true story of heavyweight boxing champ James J. Braddock. During the Great Depression, Braddock (played by Russell Crowe) and his family are living in poverty, with barely enough food to survive. After a miserably meager supper one night, Braddock’s daughter says that she is still hungry. Her father describes to her a dream he had in which he enjoyed a thick, juicy steak and a heaping pile of mashed potatoes before sliding his plate over to her and telling her that he’s still full from his dream. That’s sacrifice: going without so that your children don’t have to. Not complaining about it, not wanting or requiring praise, simply giving.
Ultimately, that’s what love is: sacrifice. Christ provided the perfect and ultimate example of love when He lay bloodied and bruised, scourged and shredded, derided and denied upon the cross. Across much of the Western world today, the cross has been forgotten, neglected, and shunned. Social media contagion, mass psychosis, materialism, convenience culture, narcissism, egomania, the pharmaceutical industry and the prevalence of prescription drugs may all be contributing factors to the Lindsay Clancy phenomenon, but in the end it is as simple as forgetting the cross.
All of the great evils of today, from Clancy’s murders to the wanton slaughter of unborn children in their mother’s wombs, can be traced to forgetting and even inverting the lesson of the cross. The theologian Peter Kreeft wisely observed, “Abortion is the Antichrist’s demonic parody of the eucharist. That’s why it uses the same holy words, ‘This is my body,’ with the blasphemous opposite meaning.” Just so, those who would strangle their own children for the sake of convenience or ego are clearly inverting Christ’s own exhortation: “Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).
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