Sunday 23 (B-2006): Ephphathah! Be opened!

Mark 7:31-37

The deaf and dumb man in our Gospel reading could be said to symbolize many a Christian believer of today.

There are certain, very powerful, sectors of contemporary society which seem to want especially Catholics to be just that: deaf and dumb.

And unfortunately, many Catholics, for a whole host of reasons, seem happy to give in to them.

Many secularists and atheists, who claim to be neutral as regards religion in the public square, want especially Catholics to be deaf to the Church’s teaching ... or at least dumb in speaking of it in public.

When it comes to their faith, Catholics are almost expected to suppress their prime faculties of communication!

And why? Because faith is said to be merely a “private thing.”

Still, it is curious, and hypocritical, that society seems to consider it okay for atheists and secularists to impose publicly their vision on everyone, simply because they are not labeled as religious.

Yet they are very good at making, proclaiming and forcing dogmas on people. For example, it is a dogma that religion is a “threat to democracy” and, therefore, that irreligion must be good for democracy.

What is sad is that many believers buy into this false logic.

But the truth is that our silence allows irreligion to take the upper hand and impose a “dictatorship of relativism” (Pope Benedict XVI) on the rest of society.

But is religion really the enemy of democracy (remember: democracy means “government by the people”)?

In other words, is God opposed to people?

To defend the people, must you oppose God?

If so, would that not mean that a democratic people would be obliged to fight against God as a civil duty?

For, if religion is bad for people, it would not be enough to “privatize” it. You would have to eliminate it altogether!

The atheist and secularist dogma which says that religion is a private affair is but a stepping-stone to religion’s total demise.

But in reality that dogma is false and is anything but friendly to humanity, no matter how much it says it is.

How can a dogma that denies God’s relevance or existence be for the true good of mankind when God created humanity? Even if you don’t believe in God, it is illogical to say that the Creator opposes his creation.

So, the dogma mentioned is in truth nonsense.

Without wanting to demonize individual atheists or secularists, since many of them do in fact respect the idea of religion, there is a certain kind of militant secularism around which wishes to impose the separation of God from society, and not just from state.

Where does this allergy to God come from?

The truth is that it has all the hallmarks of Satan.

His ongoing conspiracy is to eliminate God from the horizon of the human mind, and so to destroy humanity itself.

He has no interest in humanity’s well-being or independence or “freedom.”

If he could, he would rather we sinned without any pleasure attached to it, since pleasure is God’s gift, a gift Satan uses seductively in order to get his poisonous sting inside us.

By telling us we can be free of God he really wants to lead us into self-destruction.

This is just what he did at the beginning of human history: he succeeded in duping our first parents into believing that the limit God put on them (“you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden”) was to prevent them from “getting in on the act” of being “gods” too.

This same lying conspiracy goes on today.

In particular, it’s as if his instruction book read, “Keep the Catholic Church and its members quiet, and humanity will be free.”

The best way to do that, of course, is either to turn Catholics against the Church’s teachings and their consciences into blank checks for all manner of self-indulgence (naturally, with rationalizations and justifications!) or to bully them into being dumb.

Alas, even some priests and bishops allow themselves to be frightened into this kind of deafness and dumbness.

Political correctness, the fear of the media and of litigation all erode from believers’ hearts the courage, the love and the fortitude to speak of God’s beautiful vision of individual and collective human life and of its destiny in Christ.

What has happened to us?!

Where is the zeal of our forefathers?

Where is the fortitude of the Holy Spirit of our confirmation?

Where is the brilliant freshness of the victory of Christ over sin and death?

Why do we fear the world when Christ has conquered it and exhorts and empowers us not to be afraid?

Why do we prefer to listen to those who, in the end, can offer us nothing more than death since they effectively reject the Risen One?

Today evil does not advance as in times past by getting believers to deny the great truths of the faith (the Trinity, the divinity and humanity of Christ, etc.).

Instead, what are denied are the Church’s teachings on matters which affect people’s ordinary lives, especially questions of sexual morality and of the morality of social justice.

Moral teaching in these areas is dismissed as unrealistic, lacking in compassion and contrary to a certain notion of freedom which, in reality, is a form of slavery, divorced from truth and responsibility before God.

Many Catholics are believers when it comes to the Creed, but are atheists, and even anti-theists, when it comes to the doctrine of Christ and his Church on morality. Schizophrenic Catholicism?

They become like half-brothers or half-sisters to the man in today’s Gospel: deaf to the Church’s teaching on morality but able to recite, or perhaps just stutter, the Creed.

If this is the case, no wonder many Catholics are quite happy to obey the secularist command to go private in matters of religion. We have become like them, because we agree with their disagreement with the Church of Jesus.

We prefer the authority of reason to that of faith – probably because it better suits our interests or a compassionate understanding of reality which does not take the Gospel seriously.

I am not saying that individual people do not have complex and difficult human situations to deal with, which require great care, compassion and understanding.

But that cannot mean a wholesale sellout of moral truth! Because, at its core, that Truth is none other than Jesus Christ in Person.

 All of us believers share the guilt for allowing the full light of the Gospel to be hidden under the basin of political correctness, or fear of contradiction, or of social, legal or juridical hostility ... or because, on the basis of nothing more than reason, we have simply rejected Catholic moral teaching.

It’s not a matter of us standing at street corners, yelling out the teaching of Christ and the Church with harshness and antagonism.

But it is a case of listening with open ears and open hearts and minds to Christ, speaking in and through the Church, and of translating that teaching into practice with the courage and grace of our confirmation.

It is not a case of “be closed”, “keep quiet”, “shut up”, but of “ephphathah”, “be opened!”

It is a case of speaking the truth with respect and love without fear of hostile reaction.

It is above all a matter of witnessing by our actions, attitudes and lifestyle – to what?: to the truth that the best way to build up human society is to listen to the voice of God.

But the voice of God needs our voices to speak to our contemporary age and to translate the principles of Christian truth into action in every dimension of the fabric of our lives.

Western civilization was born from the beneficent influence of the Catholic Church upon society.

Have there been abuses by men of the Church? Yes!

But we must not attribute to the truth of Christ the sins of men!

Because some fail does not mean that the whole thing is rotten!

Genuine Catholic teaching is firmly against any kind of theocracy; but it is equally contrary to any kind of democracy which would seek to put a gag on the Creator and on those who believe in him.

While Caesar is not God and God is not Caesar, Caesar can only truly act as Caesar with respect for God.

It is the role and duty of Catholics, before God, to do their best to ensure that Caesar’s laws do not contradict the moral laws of God.

Let it be clear that while the Church defends and teaches those moral laws, they are not to be considered only as “Catholic doctrine.”

By definition, the moral laws of God are for every human being, they are universal.

They are rooted in God’s creative act of our human nature, just as fundamental human rights are also inalienable properties of that same human nature.

Why will we claim the rights given to us by God and then dismiss the laws given to us by the same God?

Why do we rationalize away the observance of the laws but show such indignation when human rights are violated?

The truth is that human rights are perceptible in human nature by virtue of our reason, not faith.

It is exactly the same for the law of God written into our human nature. It, too, is perceptible by reason.

God’s moral law is reasonable before it is the object of deeper reflection in faith!

It is therefore irrational to dismiss the universal moral law as a “Catholic thing.”

Arguably, people defend rights with such vehemence because rights are about “what you get for yourself”, while the moral law is denied with equal vehemence because it demands of us that we give of ourselves, to one another and to God. Morality costs.

In this sense, Catholics are in a unique position to help society discover the truth of their human nature, because over and above our reason we have the light of faith to help us understand more clearly what God has inscribed in human nature.

That is why our ears must be open to that moral law and our mouths must speak it without fear of any man, including Caesar.

With our open mouths we must also groan with Jesus for the painful self-deceit of much of modern society and cry out with him, “ephphatha!”: “be opened” to the love and truth of God! Thus be opened to fullness of true freedom and of true humanity!

Msgr. Peter Magee

Sunday, September 10^th, 2006

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