By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
The past week’s 5-4 Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) decision to redefine marriage as no longer between one man and one woman is merely the latest step in a journey away from God marked on its path through our history also in 1973 by Roe v. Wade. These two legal interferences are rooted in the rejection of God and are merely the most dramatic consequences on the legal landscape of man and woman tearing themselves by the roots away from their identity as creatures.
We are not our own and must look to God as our source not simply as the beginning of life but also as the constant reference point as to how this gift must be rendered back in a worship, the glory of God our spiritual worship in holiness of life.
Some, like @aphelionroad on Twitter, found the occasion ripe for jabs at those of religious faith: “In other news, the world didn’t end in hellfire and the land didn’t split open to devour us sinners today.” Such ridiculous juvenile caricatures negate the potential for serious intellectual engagement, while further cementing the deep abyss into which men and women are hurling themselves today. It is a dark place unenlightened by God, which reflects only the self in complete absence of any reference to the Creator, the means by which creatures can alone discover who they are.
Archbishop Joseph Kurtz, president of the United States Conference of Bishops, called the redefinition “a tragic error that harms the common good and most vulnerable among us.”
His statement came along with a flood of reactions from the bishops of various regions, including Michigan, and individual bishops in Rockville Centre and Philadelphia, among others, who all attempted to frame the situation as together we all begin to face its implications for the future.
Michigan’s bishops warned that the SCOTUS ruling “sets Church marriage teaching in opposition to law and creates inestimable conflicts between the state and religious persons and institutions.”
Archbishop Charles Chaput, OFM Cap., of Philadelphia said the ruling was not a surprise. The surprise will come, instead, he wrote, “as ordinary people begin to experience firsthand and painfully the impact of today’s decision on everything they thought they knew about marriage, family life, our laws and institutions. The mistakes of the court change nothing about the nature of men and women, and the truth of God’s Word. The task for believers now is to form our own families more deeply in the love of God, and to rebuild a healthy marriage culture, one marriage at a time, from the debris of today’s decision.”
Donald Cardinal Wuerl of Washington, D.C., in a statement published on his blog expressed the concern that some Catholics may mistakenly think that, because the Supreme Court redefined marriage in the legal sphere, the Church may also have done so.
President Obama’s statement in the White House Rose Garden soon after the news of the SCOTUS ruling broke, that “love is love,” achieves a new high in contrived poignancy through truth-bending and emotional manipulation of all history and the sum total of reality.
Something we will have to repeat often in these days of cultural earthquakes and legal sea-change is that when we speak God’s truth about marriage we speak in love and have nothing further to prove, for Jesus is Love, and His Love is found in every word of His Gospel.
The human self-will unhinged from any external reference gallops apace toward a societal abyss in the glamorization of sodomitic pornography. Glorification of mortal sin is simply one aspect of the attempt to addict society to perpetual drunkenness on cosmic disobedience. That is simply a replay of Eden’s drama, which ended in the fall of our first parents, resulting in the original sin which marks us all.
What we now face is a society that has fully worked out the implications of marriage disconnected from any necessary connection to human reproduction. The SCOTUS marriage redefinition simply works out to its logical conclusion the divorce of childbearing from marriage, which began with acceptance of contraception in 1930 and its evil handmaiden of legalized abortion. Without any connection to the bringing new life into the world, the way was paved for saying that any two people can associate and call their union a “marriage”, including two men and two women. That same-sex unions are a backhanded compliment to the truth about marriage as inscribed by God in His creation only adds to the bitter nature of our national plummet.
Being Catholic means redefining self-will to conform to reality: much like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before His death on the cross. Does anyone weep with God? Have all the tears run dry? The earthly loneliness of Jesus Christ is upon us: the essence of His last Passion.
Will you choose Christ and the increasing marginalization — professional, social, and political — that comes with this choice? Or will you choose the world and all that ends with it? Now is the time when we answer with Peter, whose faithful witness echoes down through the ages in the Church. When questioned by the Lord, “Will you also go away?,” he answered Him: “Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.”
Of course there are immediate consequences for Catholic pastors and parishes everywhere in that, for many years, “The practice of indiscriminately presenting oneself to receive Communion merely as a consequence of being present at Mass is an abuse that must be corrected” (www.therealpresence.org/eucharst/holycom/denial.htm) has led to many approaching the Communion rail not properly disposed. It behooves pastors to remind their flocks that it is impossible to receive Communion in state of grace if one rejects Church moral teaching that marriage is only between one man and one woman.
Let us continue to teach all our children and all who sincerely seek the truth, in accord with the Catechism, that “the marriage covenant…has been founded and endowed with its own special laws by the Creator” (CCC, n. 1660). We will continue to look to God, the Creator of us all, to understand what is the gift of marriage and also seek from Him, as ever, the grace to uphold this truth.
Thank you for reading and praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever.
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(Follow me on Facebook at Reverendo Padre-Kevin Michael Cusick and Twitter @MCITLFrAphorism. I blog occasionally at mcitl.blogspot.com and APriestLife.blogspot.com. You can email me at mcitl.blogspot.com@gmail.com.)
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