By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
God is our Father. We call Him Father often even as we pray the words our Lord Himself taught us. What we mean by that one person to another can be very different. We also say “God is love.” We only know this however, because it has been revealed to us.
The identity crisis in the culture has affected fatherhood. With the concept of fatherhood itself poisoned, the revelation of God as our Father has a diseased and myopic reception in the world today.
Robert Cardinal Sarah is promoting his new book, written in French. About it he says, “I am pleased to announce the release in France — on March 20th — of my new book made with Nicolas Diat and whose title will be: ‘Evening approaches and the day is now almost over.’ My analysis will focus on the profound spiritual, moral, and political crisis of the contemporary world + RS.”
In a tweet about the Father-confusion afflicting the Church, as in the world, he writes: “There is a perverse tendency to distort pastoral care, to oppose doctrine, and to present a merciful God who requires nothing: But there is not a father who does not require anything from his children!”
Pastoral care is the meeting point between the Lord, in whom we see the Father, and souls in the world today for the sake of salvation. One can easily see how the idea of the pastoral has gone so far off the rails when, for example, Reinhard Cardinal Marx of Munich and Freising, Germany, is furiously trying to stanch the flow of souls from the Church in his country by racing downward to catch up with the rampant moral coarsening of behavior. He is in confusion himself about his role as a spiritual father. He is attempting to further redefine morals to match those dictated by the fads of the day.
George Weigel, among others, in “An Open Letter to Cardinal Reinhard Marx,” has challenged this idea of defining the Church downward as a bastardization of the idea of love. He reveals their underhanded tactics of moving the moral goalposts through delegating to others the task of doing the impossible, “changing” Church teaching.
“The CNA [Catholic News Agency] report also noted that your ‘synodal process’ (which, in a nice tip of the miter to Hegel, you described as a ‘synodal progression’) would involve consultations with the Central Committee of German Catholics. My dear Cardinal Marx, this is rather like President Trump consulting with Fox News or Speaker Pelosi consulting with the editors of The New York Times. If you’ll pardon the reference to Major Heinrich Strasser in Casablanca, even we blundering Americans know that the ZdK, the Zentralkomitee der Deutschen Katholiken, is the schwerpunkt, the spearhead that clears the ground to the far left so that the German bishops can position themselves as the ‘moderate’ or ‘centrist’ force in the German Church.
“You know, and I know, and everyone else should know that consultations with the ZdK will produce nothing but further attacks on celibacy, further affirmations of current sexual fads, and further deprecations of Humanae Vitae (based, in part, on the ZdK’s evident ignorance of the Theology of the Body and German hostility to John Paul II’s 1993 encyclical on the renovation of Catholic moral theology, Veritatis Splendor).
“Your Eminence, the German Church — the Catholicism of my ancestors — is dying. It will not be revitalized by becoming a simulacrum of moribund liberal Protestantism.”
Synodality gone mad, consultation ad nauseam, cannot help the situation.
Only love will change hearts. Only the love of the Father perfectly revealed already by Jesus Christ is worthy of the name. Cardinal Marx and other spiritual fathers in the Church can be fathers only in the Father. “Love is patient, love is kind.” Love waits and prays, sometimes in silence, watching for the prodigal loved one to return.
St. Paul almost anticipates the crisis in fatherhood afflicting the Church and the world today in Eph. 3:14-19: “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with might through his Spirit in the inner man, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have power to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
The battle today is about redefining love. The Church is the family born of God’s love and for encountering Him.
People from all spectrums like to talk about how treating people well and loving people is the most important of matters. And they are correct. But at the same time, on the part of some, there is a movement or an effort to redefine love in such a way that it becomes a hypocrisy, to claim that one loves people while one is promoting things which actually violate the Authority on love here on Earth and undermine the good of human persons. God is the author of love and God is the authority on love. He gets to decide what love is.
Love is holy. Christian is relational. God is love. Attempt to redefine love and you vainly attempt to redefine God Himself, an impossible task for the human person.
The Creator is a being we can only contemplate in His greatness and to whom we can only respond, with loving obedience and worship. Growth in holiness is growth in love.
You do not love people if you do any of the following things: spread porn, foment heresy, or destroy the Tradition that has grown organically through the Holy Spirit for 2,000 years. Jesus Christ is the fullness of the Revelation of the Father. The Church is called to protect and propound that Revelation in love.
If you’re trying to redefine marriage you try in vain to redefine love; if you think that somebody can kill an unborn child you try in vain to redefine love. Love says it’s never licit to do evil that good may come of it because such is not love. It’s never a loving thing to do evil under any circumstances if one is to love Love Himself. One can no more redefine love than redefine God. One will die forever trying.
Thank you for reading and praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever.
@MCITLFrAphorism
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