From the First Epistle of St. Peter: “But even if you should suffer for righteousness' sake, you will be blessed. Have no fear of them, nor be troubled, but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect”.
Yesterday I witnessed the marriage of a wonderful young
couple. The Nuptial Mass was a Solemn
Mass in the Traditional Roman rite. And as I listened to the epistle which is from the sixth chapter of the Epistle of St Paul to the Ephesians,
where Paul uses the analogy of the relationship of the man and woman in marriage to the relationship of Christ and
his Church, and then listened to the gospel from St. Matthew that relates the
discussion between Jesus and the Pharisess on marriage: “And He answered and
said to them, ‘Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning
'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his
father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one
flesh'? So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has
joined together, let not man separate."(Mt. 19:3-9): once again the clarity of our Lord's teaching struck me. The teaching is clear: marriage as a human institution is ordained by
God, and the bond of marriage is formed by God and is unbreakable.
As I listened to these traditional readings for the Nuptial
Mass I could not help contrasting them with Justice Anthony Kennedy’s written
majority opinion in the Supreme Court’s decision to declare "gay marriage" a
fundamental right. I had read the opinion
early yesterday morning. I had little
doubt that this is how things would turn out, since these decisions lately have
little to do with law and everything to do with promoting a social agenda as
members of the court see fit. We live in
an age in which Tradition with a capital T is always trounced by the “pursuit
of happiness”. Kennedy’s reasoning never
addressed the origin and history of marriage as a human institution and
certainly not as a religious institution.
That he nowhere mentioned procreation as a basic element in the
institution of marriage and one of the reasons for the human institution of
marriage was both remarkable and telling. The opinion was written in a way that
was so sentimentally over the top that even those who favored "gay marriage" must
have cringed at his words. The basic
premise is that everyone has the right to be happy, and if not being able to be
married gets in the way of that right, then the obstacle must be removed.
It is true that the Declaration of Independence speaks of
the pursuit of happiness as one of the unalienable rights of man within a section of
that document penned by Thomas Jefferson who probably got it from the English
poflosopher John Locke. But whatever
else we can say about these two personages, both Jefferson and Locke believed
that happiness could not be separated from moral virtue. For them the state of
being happy was not a subjective state of elation, not a feeling of
contentment. It was rather the result of
living a life according to the moral law.
St. Thomas Aquinas insists on the relationship between
happiness and virtue. Perfect happiness
(beatitudo) is not possible in this lifetime, but only in the afterlife
for those who achieve a direct perception of God. There can, however, be an imperfect happiness
(felicitas) attainable in this lifetime, in proportion to the exercise
of Reason (contemplation of truth) and the exercise of virtue.
But what happens when the pursuit of happiness is understood
quite apart from truth or virtue and is based on my own desires, what I want,
what will make me happy? Then we get the
self-absorbed individualism that is a mark of our society today. The questions of truth and virtue never come
into play. The question of whether "gay
marriage" participates in the truth of what marriage is or whether "gay marriage" is virtuous never came up and never will. Jesus’ stark answer to the Pharisees
is an assertion of the truth of marriage, what it is. St. Paul’s analogy of husband wife with
Christ and his Church is essentially speaking about how a man and woman live a
life of virtue within the marriage bond: mutual submission in love.
The question arises:
how did we get to this point and so rapidly? Of course the stock answer,
and there is truth here, is the secularization and de-Christianization of our
culture. But we must remember that
secularization is possible only if the Christian faith is no longer a real
force in our culture. And that is the
case to a large extent, even if the façade has not entirely disappeared. We think of this often in terms of Christians
who have abandoned any grounding in Scripture and Tradition like liberal
Protestantism, which has long abandoned any effort to counter license masking
as rights. But many Catholics in this
country have bought into the American confusion of freedoms and rights, and so
embrace concepts and the practical results of those concepts that are contrary
to the teaching of the Church. And they
have done so because of a terrible lack of leadership from those who are
entrusted with the office of teaching in the Church. We think of this usually in terms of bad
catechesis among our own people. And that is true. But what has been lacking for so very long is
real intellectual engagement with the world.
The president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops did
come out with a good statement against the Supreme Court’s decision on "gay
marriage". But it is no longer enough to
repeat Church teaching. There must be an
intellectual renaissance within the Church that will enable the Church to
respond in an intelligent and forceful way to the lies about the nature of man
and the meaning of life that pervade this society. The rapid rise and establishment of gender
theory that seeks to destroy an ontological understanding of sexuality, of male
and female was made possible in part by the intellectual silence of the part of
the Catholic Church. That silence must
end, and the battle must be joined using the gift of reason strengthened by
faith.
This is no time, my friends, to be despondent or to turn
inwards and circle the wagons. We must
have the courage to be true to the teachings of Christ by living those truths
in our own lives. Personal witness by a life lived in faith and hope will be
very important in the future in countering the father of lies. In today’s
epistle, St. Peter urges us that we should not fear those who act unjustly, that
we should not fear suffering for the sake of justice and truth, and that we
should always be ready to respond to those who ask us what the basis of our
hope is. May the Blessed Virgin Mary,
the Seat of Wisdom, intercede for us, that we may have the courage, the wisdom
and faith to be true to her Son and to bring His saving truth to the world in
which we live.
