Fr. Anthony Brankin
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Full text of homily: I remember hearing Cardinal George [Archbishop of Chicago, USA] once say that what we call Catholic Social Teaching starts and ends with the family. If something that is proposed for us–and for our lives by the social scientists or the professors in universities or the government would be harmful to the family then it would be–right off the bat–immoral. No ifs ands or maybes–no qualifications, no conditions. If something is bad for the family–no matter how wonderful it might seem to others for other reasons, then it is bad.
And that certainly is a wonderful principle to guide us on our thinking about a million proposals designed by the movers and the shakers for our lives. If it hurts the family–it is no good. And this is so because the family is the basic unit of human society. The family is the first step–the first building block–the foundation for everything else in our lives and in our world.
That is why we need—every one of us–to start paying more attention to what is going on around us in politics, media, newspapers, the culture at large and determine whether or not whatever is happening is good for our families. And if we should discover that what we see is not good for our families-and does not lead them to God and does not help them to be good to others–or even be happy, then we must do everything possible to pull ourselves out of that mess and set ourselves free, and put our families on a more proper road to God.
Now this discernment process is not all that easy. Because we live and breathe and move and have our being in a world that we get so used to, that we don’t notice anything different anymore. A fish that lives in water really does not know that he is wet–his whole environment is wet and he has nothing to help him make the distinction about dry.
Remember the frog that is put in the pot of lukewarm water? The temperature of the water is raised one degree every 30 minutes. It is very slow and the frog never knows that he is boiling to death. He never knows the danger he is in because he is so used to his environment he cannot tell the moment when it is about to kill him.
Now there is no way we can avoid living within an environment–within a culture–within a context. This is the envelop so to speak–within which we live our lives. We live in modern America. And it is not Old Catholic Europe or Old Catholic Mexico. We don’t farm anymore–we don’t get up with the sun, and live off the land. We don’t sing the songs of our ancestors or live in a little village where we lived for a thousand years and told the same stories for a thousand years.
No, we live in Modern America. We watch hours upon hours of television, listen to hours and hours of radio. We go through reams of newspapers and magazines and journals. And on the block and at work and at home we discuss all the things that have filled our eyes and flooded our ears from the media. We think about everything they want us to think about. We see and hear and read nothing but that which someone out there wants us to see and hear and read. This is the culture–the environment in which we live and it is full of values that are not our values. But unless we become aware and start noticing things, those values will become our values. And we will start to think and act and live–no longer like good Catholics–but like modern Americans where our standard of what is right and wrong is determined by what is good for me–and what I want–not by what is good for our souls or our families.
The first day we find ourselves thinking that abortion is not so bad–because after all it is someone’s choice for what is good for them–no matter that it is not good for the baby, that is the day we have become good secular Americans. The first day we begin to think that maybe mercy-killing is not so bad and that it is more merciful to put grandma or grandpa to sleep is the day we have become moderns who think that what is most important is that I not be inconvenienced by someone else’ sickness.
How about gay marriage? It is coming and soon and will be a universal right before too long. And with the constant drumbeat in the newspapers and news shows and dramas and talk radio have we all started to accept that its just two guys in love who want to get married.
And as soon as we find ourselves asking “What’s the problem?” we need to realize that we have lost ground here too. For we will have lost our understanding that marriage is about family–children–parents–love and life and it was birth control that brought us to gay marriage.
There are a whole host of such issues where we as Catholics need to be aware of what is going on around us, and not just accept these things as part of the landscape. That is when the problem becomes a crisis.
And these issues are not just love and life issues–but economic as well. I just read the other day that our unemployment rate–if figured more traditionally–is about the same as it was at the height of the great depression. And how did that happen?
How many immoral financial laws and loopholes were passed all these years–laws that were good for banks and financiers and billion dollar investors–but bad for small business–bad for jobs and homes and therefore bad for families. And these laws were passed by people we elected as our legislators. And people and families–like the people and families of St. Odilo–just normal workaday folks–end up as victims.
But we don’t even think of ourselves as victims–this is just the way it is.
We are so accustomed to the media vocabulary and analysis–so used to their explanation of things–that even when we have been laid off or kicked out of our homes–all we can do is shrug our shoulders and say–“well, I don’t have a job, because we are in a difficult economy.”
And is no one to be held responsible for the “difficult economy”?
Every day people tell me they are looking for jobs. And I wish to God I could employ more people–but what a “difficult economy” means is that our families are suffering–there is less food for their children, less clothes on their backs and less heat in their homes. When 30% of a family’s salary goes to taxes and the poor mother is forced to go out to work– just to pay the taxes–tell me that there is not something wrong. Tell me that that is not terrible for our families. But who notices that?
When was the last time we heard the Bishops speak out against exorbitant taxes that force mothers out of the home and into some job somewhere–just to make ends meet. When was the last time we heard anyone say it might be good for mothers to stay home? No, we just accept it all as part of life in America.
When I was a kid–things were lean. I remember a period when we were eating chicken gizzards every night–and we had to split a pint of Walgreens ice cream 7 ways. But my policeman father somehow made enough so that we could live in a bungalow in Marquette park–drive a car and send five kids to Catholic schools for fifty dollars a year. When did they turn things around on us? When did they make it so we couldn’t live like that anymore? And when will we discover that we don’t have to accept this matrix in to which they have put us.
Sure it is the Second Sunday of Advent, and I should be talking about waiting for the Baby Jesus to be born in our hearts, and I will–next week–but I cannot help but think that the prime example of how we have been persuaded to another set of values is the way they make us behave every Christmas.
We spend all of December in an unbridled orgy of shopping and buying and consuming mountains of plastic crap from China. Did you see all the nonsense about Black Friday? And how people were getting up at 3 in the morning to be first in line to buy this or that gewgaw or gimcrack? What efforts they made–what suffering they endured to get the best deals and bargains–but to what end? What will it serve them? Will their children and spouses appreciate what they bought and how much they struggled to obtain those things?
Is this what Christmas has come to mean? An early morning at the end of December–where the whole family is gathered under the tree tossing one box after another onto a mountain of torn discarded wrapping paper? And why they have to wait until December 25th they’ll never know.
Will those gifts satisfy deeper longings for God and love? I doubt it. And the proof of that will be all the Christmas family fights that all those gifts did nothing to quell or mollify.
Will those families be at Mass on the Sunday after Black Friday? Or will they be there on Christmas? What does all this mean to them?
And I do not want to blame these families. They are the frog in the pot of water–boiling to death in a sea of “stuff”. And they don’t even know it.
They have been convinced by the mind-numbing drone on television and radio and in the newspapers that life is not about God or Jesus or the Blessed Virgin Mary or about quiet family moments eating together, talking together and singing together and maybe even praying together. Life is about accumulating junk. That’s what they–we–are learning. Today on this Second Sunday of Advent–maybe we could pray for them and for each other–that at some point soon– and maybe even because of the coming of Christ at Christmas–we will begin to understand that whatever they are telling us out there–about life–about sex about money–about politics-on television on the radio in the newspapers and magazines–is not true–is not holy and is not good for our families.
And then at that point we can shake off this culture, clear our eyes and ears and fill them with another context–the beautiful one given to us by our God and our Church. The one that makes for saintly lives and saints.
This will take an incredible amount of effort and grace–but it is more than worth it. It will mean the salvation of our very souls.
(Dec. 5, 2010)