Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament

For those who were not at my Masses last week, I had wanted to use Catechetical Sunday as a springboard to offer a three-part homily on Marriage, leading up to next week’s Gospel in which Jesus tells the people assembled what God created marriage to be.  We had flyers in the back of the Church explaining the Church’s opposition to current efforts to redefine marriage to include same-sex unions, and I wanted to include that as one of the many dangers to marriage.  If you are interested, last week’s homily is on the parish website, as will be today’s and next week’s. 

If I had to pick three main points from last week’s homily, they would be:  first, that the Church has a responsibility to speak out against any public actions that She sees as harmful or injurious to the people of God, the children that God has given Her, because He has entrusted Her with the duty to lead these children back to Him.  Secondly, that God created a perfect world, which was guided by His plans, His blueprint, the Natural Law, the rules by which the universe would operate in a perfectly-ordered way.  This perfectly-ordered way included an order within human beings themselves, in which their intellects controlled their passions, their inclinations, and because of this order they were able to live fully and authentically human lives, lives that matched what God had meant for humans to be.  The ability of the intellect to correctly direct the passions meant that man did not have to be a slave to his passions:  he had no reason to sin.  But when Adam and Eve did sin, when they tried to be God by attempting to have God’s knowledge, instead of being content with being fully human, disorder entered the world.  Man was subject to dangers previously unimagined, both from creation and from within themselves.  And the biggest danger was that their relationship with God had become disordered, and this disorder was reflected within themselves because their wills could now end up in a position of having to submit to the passions, without the proper guidance of the intellect. 

This state became a curse for all mankind, and was stated best by St. Paul, who told the Romans:  “For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want.  Now if (I) do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.  So, then, I discover the principle that when I want to do right, evil is at hand.  For I take delight in the law of God, in my inner self, but I see in my members another principle at war with the law of my mind, taking me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.”

Paul speaks to the Romans about many of the ways that man allowed his passions to be disordered, that man allowed himself to be alienated from God, that man allowed himself to be led away from God.  Among these he refers to some forms of same-sex behavior, but he also talks about many other instances of behavior that are not rightly ordered to being fully human, or rightly ordered to the ideal of marriage.  This is the third point I want to recall from last week:  that the ideal of marriage is that it is a permanent, exclusive and fruitful partnership between a man and a woman, a covenant ordered to the good of the spouses and the birth and education of children.  People marry because of the hope of the ideal, and not because of the lowered expectations that result from the failure of so many marriages, from the flawed image that is projected in our popular media and culture.  Paul lists adultery, lust, impurity, acts of anger, jealousy, and hatred.  None of these disorders would be properly attributed to marriage, and, as such, we would not then redefine marriage to include any of them.  We would not consider cohabitation to be marriage, primarily because it is anti-marriage by definition, it purposely avoids the ideal.  Among the other things Paul lists, we see that adultery, lust, non-marital relations or extra-marital relations, all serve to demean the exclusivity and the permanence of marriage.  Impurity, use of pornography, abuse, whether verbal or physical, all debase the partnership aspect of the institution of marriage, and the concern for the mutual good of the spouses.  In fact, any activity that has one or the other spouse looking only to his or her own interests and not to those of the couple constitutes a disorder to God’s plan, a lack of order that can only lead away from God. 

One could ask the question about why it is such a big deal, that this redefinition of marriage is not forcing any type of behavior on anyone.  But by redefining marriage to include same sex unions, we call something that intrinsically leads away from God by the name of something that leads to Him – it’s like putting up a traffic sign suggesting that a dead-end street will get us to our destination across town.  We then make opposite sex attraction and same-sex attraction two equal options for anyone to choose in their own definition of marriage.  This becomes especially important for our children, many of whom struggle with sexual identity in gaining a sense of themselves as they move to through adolescence.  Most of those who have same-sex attraction wish they were not subject to it – and the conflicts with which they suffer are not just societal, but existential.  It is only in acknowledging that it is not properly ordered, in much the same way that the temptation to lust, or impurity, or sexual addictions are not properly ordered, that we can address how each of us might adjust our lives to return to the ideal of being fully human, fully in control of our passions, fully and authentically as God created us to be.  We have only to look at the institution of no-fault divorce and consider what kind of effect it had on the permanence of marriage to appreciate how redefining marriage to include same-sex unions would also cause people to lose their sense of the ideal, to lower both their expectations of and their commitments to that ideal.

Having said that, the part that is more appropriately considered a civil rights issue, the right to visit a loved one in the hospital, or to make legal or medical decisions for them, to make sure that they inherit personal effects, many of these issues can be addressed through current legal means.  If there is the need for a special designation in order to accommodate other issues, such a designation could be defined.  But to take the ideal of marriage as instituted by our Creator and allow its saving qualities to be subverted, to redefine the ideal so that it actually encourages others to live in a way that leads away from God instead of toward Him, this is not the way to address these particular issues.

We will finish up next week discussing how Jesus explains marriage, as He makes clear how and why God created the institution, gave us the desire for this gift that continues His saving work.  This will include some consideration of divorce and how to consider situations that are abusive or dangerous, or just not healthy for the spouses.  As we continue this Eucharist, I’d like to suggest that we ask God to open our hearts to what His will is for marriage, for all of our marriages, and how best to use the gift of marriage as a means to be fully and authentically human, to live as God means for us to live, set on the path that will lead us back to the Father.

Upcoming Events

Church News

Centennial Sponsors