3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Jan. 22, 2012
Fr. Anthony Brankin
Gospel: Mark 1:14-20 “Repent, and believe the Good News.”
Full sermon text: Today is the day that the Bishops of the US have asked all Catholics to make of it—a day of reparation for the sin of abortion—a sin—I might add—that has been committed about 50 million times in almost forty years.
But that number only applies in this country. I read just last night that the world-wide number of abortions approaches one billion! I saw that statistic in a letter to the editor of a Catholic journal; and the author of the letter said that all these abortions—these billion lives that were snuffed out—were lives taken in the so-called “Christian west”.
Christian west?
Now that made me pause and think a moment. The Christian west. Now what would the Christian West be?
I know what the Christian West used to be—Christian Civilization–Catholic countries the world over whose lives and culture were formed by the Catholic church or even the residue of Catholicism in Protestant countries like the United States. But what is it now? Who comprises the Christian West today? Is any of it Christian?
And if so by what measure?
Are the laws of the Christian West—particularly in America—Christian in any recognizable way? Do our laws foster the practice of Christianity–Protestant or Catholic?
In fact, is it not written into our constitution that the government has forgotten to establish a religion? And has that not been interpreted for a very long time now that the government is not allowed even to recognize any religion—particularly if it is Christian?
You and I know that the howls go up anytime it looks like the government has forgotten itself and permitted some innocuous Christian advantage—like putting up a manger scene or a cross on public property. Oh my goodness—next we will be forcing the aldermen to go to Mass!
Forced by the government
The Cardinal [Francis George] himself said that he never thought the day would come that Catholics in America would be forced by the government to provide immoral activities—like birth control and sterilization and abortion in our hospitals and healthcare facilities. Or that we would be forced to insure our employees for those immoral activities in our schools and universities. Well the Cardinal knows now if he didn’t know then, that the modern liberal secular government—is not our friend—and never has been and never will be.
The modern secular government—call it liberal democracy—call it the will of the people—call it anything you want—the modern secular government born in the atheism of the Eighteenth Century Salons, tells us that there is no power above the government or with whom it needs to contend. The state is all that counts— its laws—its power to enforce—its ideological trajectory—where it is going and where it wants to go—is supreme.
The modern liberal democracy says that you as a citizen of this country can believe in God if you want—you can go to church all day long if you want—you can light candles and make novenas and pray your little hearts out but do not expect that your God or the teachings of your religion will be acknowledged or encouraged or put into practice by the State—certainly if that God or His laws are at all at odds with the will of those who run this country.
Brainwash us
Now they brainwash us by telling us that we are self-governed—that all our laws come from us. But we really know that the ones who run this country are not the voters.
If it were our country—and if our simple Christian will was being enacted in the laws and policies of this country—would we have as much misery and poverty as we do?
How many of us actually enacted the laws that drove down the values of our houses by 50 to a 100 thousand dollars—if we didn’t lose them entirely. No. We were the pawns of the ones who really run this country—the politicians and the financiers—the corporatists and capitalists in league with the socialists. They are the ones who made the laws and made the money and we suffered the consequences.
They took our jobs
Did you ever see the acres upon acres of empty factories on 16th street—where they used to make Hotpoint appliances? Or the covered over and built over and abandoned Western Electric plant—that made all the phone equipment for the whole world? Were you consulted when they took it all away—along with your jobs and stores and families and neighborhoods and had their slaves in China do it for free? Did you vote for that?
If we Christians were the ones who were running this country We would not have had 100 years of families destroyed by the plague of divorce and the heartache of infidelity.
If we were the ones who were running this country we would not have the spectacle of men wanting to marry each other with the government providing monetary incentives for them to do so. And We as a Church would not be forced to provide immoral medical treatments or be forbidden to provide adoptions and foster care for children.
Slaughtered by abortion
If we were the ones who were really in charge—as they want us to think we are—then we would not be faced with the guilt and sin of forty years of abortions—fifty million babies slaughtered in our abortion mills.
Well how did it happen? The short answer is that we allowed the State to convince us that the state is supreme and that religion is a private matter. Only the government—and not the Church—can tell us what is right or wrong.
Only the state (and with no input from Christianity) legislates what is good for families—for husbands and wives—children and grandchildren. And we accept all that because we have been persuaded that the State carries out the so-called will of the people and the will of the people is supreme. But the will of the people is a myth. The will of the people is only code for the will of the elites who rule our land. (And we should never think that a majority vote equals God’s will. The majority only equals the number of those who believe what the bankers and atheists and rulers and governors of this world tell us—that what they want for us is what we must want for ourselves.)
False idea of freedom
How did they do that? Well, they appealed to our wounded human nature’s disordered love of freedom and they seduced us into believing that true freedom is doing what we want to do—and not what God wants us to do. Then, doing our will—we are happy. We are achieving life’s ultimate fulfillment and goal—which is fun and pleasure—no matter who gets hurt along the way. Abandoned wives? Abused children? Broken families?
Dead babies? That’s just collateral damage—bug splat—on the way to our individual personal happiness. Moreover, once we accept our masters’ understanding of life and love we put ourselves in their hands—in their control—because they will be our suppliers who will provide all this pleasure. (That is the Ancient temptation of Adam and Eve isn’t it?) That is when they can do with us as they please because then they are in control of us and our lives—and our souls.
You see, it is not so much about wealth and money—though that is no small part of the process. It is about power. That is the ultimate wealth. And if the truth be told, this is where Satan comes in because Satan will use all the things going on around us—the politics, the media, the culture at large—to seduce us to his will— at the very moment we think that we are achieving our will.
Culture of pleasure
Now they did not get us to this point by intellectual argument. No. They appealed to our lower instincts—our baser passions. They promoted unlimited and unfettered bodily pleasure as the sum and summit of life and gave us movies and music and newspapers and ipods and blackberrys and rock and roll and legalized divorce and contraception and sterilization and gay marriage to direct our pleasures to where they want us to go—so that we would do what they want us to do.
They have engineered a whole culture that fills their pockets with the money that should have gone to give bread to our children—but we have killed our children to feed the other appetites they have stoked.
We have created a whole structure of laws and enforcement to protect their power over us so that if by accident something like a little baby is actually conceived (despite all our herculean efforts to make our love-making sterile) then it is now legal to kill that baby. The baby is the inconvenient roadblock to more pleasure. So abortion serves to keep our physical appetites unencumbered by things like responsibility and duty and sacrifice and true love—and keep us in thrall to those who tell us it is all about freedom.
Moral sleep-walking
The sad thing is that we don’t even notice all this. To keep us in the coma—to keep us in the dream where we continue to think that the best thing we could ever hope for in this life is as much physical pleasure as we can handle, they spend countless billions on endless distractions and the subtlest seductions. What do you think is behind all the movies about Good Vampires or gay cowboys. They are trying to keep us in the sleep walk—in a moral daze that tells us that good is bad and bad is good—that God is evil and that the devil is good.
This is the trans-valuation of values that keeps us off balance and in their hands.
So—is the Christian West Christian? No. It isn’t. The West, the United States and Europe and anywhere we have spread Enlightenment values: in parts of Latin America, the Philippines and Japan—well that is the “west”. And it is not Christian. It is worldly, godless and grasping. It calls itself, “enlightened” because it is no longer in the shadow of the Church. But therefore it belongs to Satan.
Conscious defiance
Now personally, we as individuals may be Christian; but we need to remember that we are Christian only to the measure and to the extent that we practice our faith in conscious defiance of the reigning culture around us. If we go along with it all—perpetual war and cutthroat finance and intentional poverty and scheduled unemployment as well as accepting abortion and gay marriage and pornography as part of the price of living in America, well then we are actually part of the problem.
The Bishops can have all the days of reparation they want—but until we realize that the problem is deeper and older and more pervasive than deciding which Republican is more electable than Barack Obama or more difficult to solve than one more futile march in Washington, we will have to commemorate January 23rd forever!