By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
The boredom of vast sectors of society with marriage and family life as the Church teaches in Christ is abundantly evident. Many Catholics, on life support with a mere vestigial or cultural relationship with Church teaching, identify more with the Godless agenda than with the voices of our bishops.
Beginning with the gutting of marriage in the 1960s through the popularization of contraception, fertility has increasingly been rejected as being a liability instead of a blessing. The profoundly anti-God and anti-human agenda, enabled by abundant availability of contraception and abortion, has in turn fed into other phenomena which serve to enable and glamorize marriages which are sterile by choice.
Pope Francis has condemned the rejection of children by those able to conceive who then seek compensation or alternative expression for the generative capacity by “pouring love on one’s pets.” He has also condemned “ideological colonization” which exports contraception and abortion in an attempt to control population in countries around the world by rich nations like the U.S.
Truth is not discrimination. Boredom with God’s plan for the family disguised as another viable choice is an evil rejection of truth and a lure of the Devil to destroy souls by drowning them in the search for endless and sinful self-aggrandizement.
The sterile mentality of contraception has in turn found its logical conclusion in abortion, promotion of homosexual activity and the redefinition of the family. According to this view the family can no longer by necessity be defined as one man and one woman who come together with the potentiality for bringing new life into the world; that conception violates the presupposition that someone may want to choose something else. Not to approve of a contrary choice would be discrimination and, of course, that is not acceptable. Who would approve of discrimination of any kind? An appeal to the emotions serves as a substitute for truth.
Church leaders who, in the name of the upcoming Synod on the Family in October, are attempting to promote choices contrary to God’s plan for marriage within the Church are simply agents of the larger movement to go beyond the nuclear family in a search for other forms of expression, as if man and woman are amorphous beings with no determinative identity. Any talk of restricting any potential choices for any human being is now no longer tolerated and reflexively labeled as discrimination and hate.
The infatuation with perpetual adolescence characteristic of the 1960s has now found its way into the boardrooms of major educational and charitable agencies and has insinuated itself into chanceries and Church offices at the national and diocesan level. The drive for “self-actualization” is still very much alive in many of our parishes with its chorus of “I want what I want and I want it now.” Woody Allen’s excuse that “the heart wants what the heart wants” comes from the same source.
These are the same folks who attack the pastor for not twisting parish functions, especially ones surrounding the Eucharist and sacramental life, to their personal tastes and search for elusive worldly gratification.
We now arrive at the moment when it now longer shocks us that a page on the German site katholisch.de, sponsored by the bishops of that country and dedicated to the issue of homosexuality, is bizarrely emblazoned with a photo of two men holding hands in the attempt to promote the view of a sham theologian who sees “sacramental character” in “committed, loving” same-sex unions.
Having children means, practically speaking, that one can no longer live as a child oneself because children cannot provide for the basic needs of other children. This is why children are hated and avoided by those who seek perpetual adolescence and why these persons cling to contraception and abortion as the security blanket that promises the comfort of a desired illusion of freedom.
Conversely and ironically, at the same time, the lobby that seeks to legitimize the redefinition of marriage borrows back the idea of children. Groupings of two men or two women commodify children by obtaining them for use as accessories in the search for respectability — which ends by being a backhanded tribute to marriage between two people that can actually generate a child: one man and one woman, a man-husband and a woman-wife.
More essentially, what is rejected is the spirit of obedience. Christianity is now counterrevolutionary because it is characterized by a life of obedience. For the Christian it is not self that determines one’s actualization, but God. As Jesus Christ made it the mission of His life and the purpose of the His death on the cross to do the will of His heavenly Father, so for the Christian. Christianity promises salvation and that only for those who imitate Christ’s obedience unto death.
Man and woman in marriage die to themselves in order to live for the spouse and for the children who may come of their union. Christ lives in His love by grace at the heart of their relationship because they live now not themselves but Christ lives in them, to paraphrase St. Paul.
There is no instrumentalization of human beings in God’s plan for marriage or in any relationship between human beings which qualifies as authentic friendship. Every human being is an end in himself or herself, created by God in His image for his or her own sake as one destined for life with God forever.
The mutual sexual complementarity of man and woman and the meaning of their bodies in the marital act is the antithesis of using others for one’s own gratification.
The caricature of the marital act in the sexual contact between persons of the same sex qualifies only as self-gratification because their contact is a sterile expression without any hope of resulting in new life as is true of the marital act it apes. Pleasure alone is not enough to justify any act involving another human being, especially when involving the grave faculty of sexuality which must always be joined to the end of fertility and that always within holy matrimony.
The drive for the redefinition of marriage has reached its apogee with its de facto legalization nationwide by the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision. The Church must now combat this frontal attack at the same time as she continues the joyful proclamation of God’s holy plan for true marriage in holy matrimony, between one man and one woman, to do which has always been her mission.
Truth is not discrimination and those who disagree with it have no right to discriminate against the Church as she faithfully proclaims the truth. As our bishops continue to proclaim, “disagreement is not discrimination.”
Thank you for reading. Praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever.
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(Follow me on Facebook at Reverendo Padre-Kevin M. Cusick and on Twitter @MCITLFrAphorism. I blog occasionally at mcitl.blogspot.com a APriestLife.blogspot.com. You can email me at mcitl.blogspot.com@gmail.com.)
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