Sunday 32 (B-2006):
The Open Arms of Christ
Right and wrong are largely being replaced today by right and left.
If you’re on the right, then the leftists
are all wrong.
If you’re on the left, the rightists are
all wrong.
In other words, truth and morality are no longer
being measured so much by good and evil as by where you stand: on the right or on the left.
This way of thinking has also infected many in
the Church - and not just among the laity.
In the Church, the right-left slogan is coined
as conservative or progressive.
If you’re conservative, then the progressives
are all heretics and morally decadent.
If you’re progressive, then the conservatives
are all dogmatic Neanderthals and morally rigid.
This polarized way of thinking is destructive
in both civil and ecclesiastical life.
It is also rather superficial, and therefore heedless
of the deeper, more complex meaning of human existence.
It makes ideology into a god.
In so doing it pays lip-service to the living
God and erects divisive barriers between people.
My first thought on meeting someone and on listening
to them should not be, “I wonder is he/she on the right or on the left”, but, “here is someone the Lord
has given me to love.”
We need, in other words, to recover the authentic basic attitude towards
God and people.
The other is my brother because God is our Father.
What is this authentic attitude? It is the attitude
of grateful love towards God for giving us all his gifts, and of a sincerely welcoming love towards one another.
By this I don’t mean gushing or naïve camaraderie.
I mean that form of love which is a positive and
goodwill respect for the other.
From that initial form of love, other kinds of
love may, or may not, develop - so long as we don’t begin with ideological suspicion, rejecting out of hand those who
think differently from us.
The basic framework of our outlook should never be ideology, but theology.
God’s vision of the world and humanity,
his paths for our happiness and growth: these must be the basic inspiration which shapes our engagement with one another and
with the world.
What is right and wrong for God must be our right and wrong. By this standard, too, ought we to evaluate both right and left.
What the Lord wants for his Church, speaking through
the legitimate pastors he has appointed, is what we should want for his Church.
As regards the Church herself, Catholics should
neither be progressive nor conservative, but only faithful: faithful to Christ
leading us through the ministry of the Pope and the Bishops.
Only those truly in communion with Christ through
the shepherds he has appointed can be trusted to lead us to that abundant life.
It is a fantasy to conceive of the glory of the
Church as the victory of conservatives over progressives or vice-versa.
That is a political and politicized notion of
the Church.
It would desecrate the Church by turning her into
the tool of some fanatical faction.
That is precisely what Judas tried to do with
Jesus: turn him into the supreme Ideologue.
Not to put too fine a point on it: to do that
is to do the work of Satan.
But the Church is not “up for grabs”
by Republicans, Democrats or anyone else.
The Church belongs only to our Lord Jesus Christ,
who gave birth to her by “appearing at the end of the ages to take away sin by his sacrifice” on the Cross, feeding
her with his sacred Body and Blood, enriching her with the sacraments, the sacramentals, and every manner of grace and virtue.
He instructs her with, and entrusts to her, not
a “manifesto”, but the wisdom of his holy Gospel, and he gives her the Spirit in fullness to lead her to the fullness
of truth.
He sets her up as a sign of his own infinite holiness
to shine out as light to the world, like a city on a hilltop.
He gathers into her those who believe in his Name,
in his love and in his promises and by uniting them together in a beautiful mosaic of sacramental grace, he makes the Church
the sign and instrument of the unity of the entire human race.
Given this sublime nature of the Church it is banal and reprehensible
in the extreme to fuel division within her on the basis of ideology.
I do not doubt that people mean well, but, they
are thinking with the categories of the world, not with the mind-set of the Gospel.
They also contribute to the perception by society
that the Church is just a religious version of itself.
If the Gospel is not “power and utter conviction”
in the hearts of the children of the Church, then it only echoes the hollow rhetoric of the world.
If the sacraments are not received with living
faith as the source of our moral and religious transformation, then they devolve into magic.
What might also be at work in this politicization of the Church is
another sinister reality at large in the world today, especially in the West.
I refer to the loss of the sense of sin, the anesthesia
of the conscience.
Where “anything goes” nothing can
be wrong.
“What I want” and “what I like”
become dogmatic definitions of what is right and good.
This becomes more subtle when civil law or judicial
decisions take the place of the moral law of God.
It is often said that the state should not legislate
morality.
If that were true, then murder would not be a
crime.
Of course the state legislates morality! The question is which morality. The answer is, alas, often a selective morality, depending
often on special interests and ideology.
Because civil law or a judicial decision permits
something does not mean that it is morally acceptable.
The State is not the author of morality nor the
arbiter of right and wrong.
The fundamental precepts of morality, like fundamental
human rights, precede the state and are inherent
in the dignity of the human person as created by God.
Just as authentic human rights are discovered
as given objective truths in the human person through the light of reason, so the fundamental moral duties of the human person
are also discovered as given objective truths by the light of reason.
Both are given by God.
And it is in the face of God alone that what we
do is morally right or wrong, is sin or is virtue.
Legality should
be rooted in morality, but sadly it often is not so today.
Legality is supposed to protect and promote rational
and therefore right behavior between people. How can it possibly do so when it either violates authentic human rights or the
moral duties of the human being?
Alas, we cannot now presume that legal means moral.
That puts us in the difficult, but correct, position
of conscientious objection to some laws and judicial decisions which are patently immoral.
“If we say we have no sin we make God a liar” says St.
John.
No sin, no Savior from sin.
No sin, no salvation.
No sin, no freedom, for if we cannot say no to
God, neither can we say yes.
The truth is that human beings are free, that in the beginning they said no to God, that eternal, spiritual death would have been their destiny
if the Savior had not come.
By his blood, that is by the giving of his life
for us, our sin has been forgiven; only we must make that forgiveness our own by faith and hope working through love.
The Church of Christ is not an appendix to human
society and history: she is their pathway to eternity. She is their only hope, the visible sign and instrument given to them
as a guarantee that life, not death, will have the last word.
The Church thus speaks to the deepest, most intimate
core of every human being and offers the person of Jesus as the meaning and fulfillment of their existence.
The Church stands, often greatly misunderstood,
maligned and persecuted, in the midst of humanity.
But, despite her poverty and pain, she looks to
Christ who has entered heaven and “appears before God on our behalf.”
She represents humanity “eagerly awaiting”
the return of Christ when he “will appear a second time, not to take away sin but to bring salvation.”
What a glory it is to belong to this Church!
What a privilege!
So let us never think of her in terms of politics,
but as the open arms of Christ in this world, gathering all who come to him as their Savior, their wisdom, holiness and righteousness,
their life and resurrection.
Msgr.
Peter Magee
Sunday,
November 12th, 2006
Annunciation, DC: 5. 30 pm Vigil
Please note: the next homily will
be for December 3rd, 2006, the First of Advent
