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The Family: The Battle of Our Day
Homily St. Joseph Parish, Detroit
The Sunday during the Octave of Christmas is Holy Family Sunday. God became man, and lived in a family; his mother was the Immaculate Conception, his legal father was Joseph, the best of all dads history ever knew. In the light of this perfect family, we need to think about family in our day. There is a war against the family, and the light of Christ’s Gospel is the only hope the family has. That there is a war against the family would be impossible to deny. God invented the family to begin with, and has designs of love and mercy for the family. Yet the world today has taken it upon itself to correct God, as if anything good could come from that. Some of these evils attack couples, some ruin chastity both outside of marriage and in, some lead our hearts to love wicked things, some make us suspicious of God and the Church, some corrupt our youth. And all of them eventually attack women more than men. I will now name some of the most important these attacks on family and marriage in our day. Every time I do so, those who love these sins breathe threats, even physical threats, in my face afterwards. Know that threats and abuse will never make me back down from waging war on the sins which bring Catholics to hell; I love souls too much to keep silent. And I have the example of St. John the Baptist, murdered by Herod for naming his adultery. In an attempt to meditate on which of these many huge evils is the worst, they were all so bad, and in such different ways, I gave up the attempt. Yet I suspect the number one marriage buster in our day is contraception. Condemned infallibly by Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae, a document which brought all of the dissenters out of the woodwork, some even with Episcopal dignity (!), its practice is a matter of mortal sin. It is completely against the nature of marriage and marital love for couples to practice contraception, a grave sin against God and man. Besides contraception, we find the huge problem of abortion. These two, contraception and abortion, work hand in hand, to allow people to be slave to their sexual impulses instead of governing them with grace, reason and love. See, one can be completely irresponsible in his conjugal act, and while his first tool is contraception, his last tool, that last resort to insure that my act bring forth no life, is abortion. This is why pro-abortion people are so violently militant, for the whole movement is driven by an impurity whose passion is shown in their vehemence. The real root of abortion is promiscuity and unchastity. The contraception and abortion mentality are really one and the same, different colors of the same thing, wherein one uses and does not love the other. So much the same, that some contraceptives are even abortifacient. A further threat, yet a sacred and untouchable one by popular social standards, is the gay movement. Let it be clear what the Church teaches, and always will on the matter: Homosexual attractions constitute a disorder; and homosexual acts are mortal sins. This was the sin of Sodom, and Paul in Romans states explicitly and clearly that people who do these things and don’t repent will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. I have in the confessional helped those noble souls who are afflicted with this disorder, and they cry for their sins like all should cry for all sins; they strive to live humble and chaste lives, obedient to God’s law, and doing so, they will be the first in the Kingdom of God. Yet today there are those who organize. They fight, demand, and are full of hatred, despair and anger. Unless you go totally out of your way to assert that their sinful life style is good and maybe even holier than marriage, they resort to calling you names, “homophobe,” “breeder,” and the like. They want everyone to recognize their sinful unions as holy marriage; yet the very term “homosexual marriage” is an oxymoron, where the two terms completely exclude and negate one another. There are even clergy out there who advise me against ever preaching the news of salvation on this point, because of what public opinion might be, because of how the newspapers might attack me, because of the collection money it might loose, and even because of the bodily violence it may be met with. But standing before the Gospel of Life and the Gospel of Sodomy, I choose the name of Jesus and will preach his saving word even if it must cost me my health and life. And for any who are afflicted with these temptations, come to Confession, and drink deeply of the wells of God’s mercy, and there, only in God, will you find your salvation from slavery to sin. We will come back to the question of homosexuality on another day, to penetrate its nature, causes, the reasons the Church gives for its teachings, and to offer an apologetic for those who love the truth. A further attack on the family today is the widespread pornography on the internet. I have read articles on how many millions and millions of viewers, actors, dollars, web sites. Do we thing so much sin can live in our midst, and evil and violence will not come of it? Yet many with this sin hate the sin they do, and are chained to it. There are remedies to such problems, but the cure of divine grace will come only as quickly as one wants it to. Next, we live in a society filled with divorce and remarriage. It is so easy to get a divorce. It is so easy to get married again afterwards. Often young Catholics make this mistake, and decades later they want to address the problem of their invalid marriage, and it’s very hard and difficult. It’s too bad these souls didn’t have good priests close at hand to help them when all these decisions were being formulated years ago. Instead, even priests give bad advice. I was assigned a spiritual director in the seminary, and he was of the opinion that if one were in love, he should go and get remarried even if he were divorced, and to just forget all that bureaucratic red tape of annulment procedures… as if an annulment were simply a blessing of a divorce anyway, which some mistakenly take it to be. So let’s be clear, and all of you pass on the message to the next generation in your family: Catholics should not divorce. Sometimes separation for the protection of a spouse may be tolerated, and that may take the civil structure of divorce. But divorce is a lie about marriage: a valid marriage is always valid until death. And a divorced Catholic is not allowed to have relations with anyone, even if they have an invalid marriage by the state of Michigan or in another Church. This is what Jesus gave us when he instituted the sacrament of Holy Matrimony, and it is there for our salvation. Youth today are widely not prepared for marriage. I mean catastrophically, embarrassingly, and almost hopelessly unprepared for marriage. Huge numbers, even Catholics, fall into patterns such as these: They have no idea what a courtship is, they have sex before they marry, they never learn their faith in Catechism while they do lots of pointless little “crafts,” they were raised in homes where the car and money and TV and the house were all infinitely more important than they were, they have no prayer life and never prayed as a family, they lost their innocence in perverted sex education programs, and in the schools their agenda-driven professors have indoctrinated them on every point to think totally against the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Furthermore, I meditated briefly on some statistics about the size of families today. If there are just over two kids per family, and seeing the proportion of families with zero, one, two, three and four kids, the math works out like this: about 45% of Americans don’t have siblings. About 70% of Americans do not have a male and female sibling, and not just sibling, even cousin. Too many miss out on the prudent and chaste education families offer to learn deeply about members of the opposite sex. All this not to mention the ever climbing percentage of families without fathers. More can be said, too much more, I’m afraid. I’d like to include a small chapter on in vitro fertilization, but there’s not time today. Isn’t it telling, that there are so many attacks on the family, that one can’t number them all: and yet see that each point we mentioned individually should be enough to make any noble heart quake. The family is probably the great battle of our time, and so far the Catholics have given Satan too wide a birth, and the results are ruined families, abused children and women, irresponsible fathers, and a river of tears that would completely eclipse the tears St. Peter shed his whole life for having denied our Lord during the passion. So the choice is yours. You can just sign up to go with the institution, to worry about hurting the feelings of those who are leading your loved ones to the very fires of hell, to use the Enemy’s pathetic logic to justify your or your neighbor’s sinful life in family matters. Or you can step up to the Gospel, convert your mind with the help of God’s grace, humbly admit that God has it right and the world has it wrong. What a joy it would be for me in this parish if there were some who were courageous enough to establish some bold initiative to address the great battle of our time, the battle of the family. I have repeatedly invited parishioners to get a pro-life group going, and am very disappointed that there is almost no interest, and that nothing has yet come from my invitation. Yet sometimes I hear people hide behind that famous fake excuse, “Oh, there’s so much politics, I don’t like to get involved.” Nonsense! Politics? To you do I sound like a man enslaved to human politics? Furthermore, how can there be politics in a pro-life group or a pro-family group when these groups don’t even exist? It’s really a measure of your love: do you want to do something for God and the Church? Well then what are we waiting for? I for my part will help you to the degree I can, and help insure unity with Catholic teaching and practice. On this day of the Holy Family, then, let us not finish with nice platitudes on how cute it is to think of Mary nursing the baby Jesus. Let us stir ourselves to live the life Jesus came to live, full of work and suffering at the service of the Gospel, the one message of salvation for the whole world. Amen. |