Sixth Sunday of Easter, 2012
Fr. Anthony Brankin
Gospel: John 15:9-17 “As the Father has loved me, so I love you.”
(Full text of sermon) I guess I go through my days as a priest reading and observing and thinking about what I have read and observed. I don’t really watch TV, but I still follow the news and I do read commentaries and journals of fact and opinion. I really don’t like most daily columnists—but I force myself to see what they’re saying—because if nothing else they are the bell weather of this society in which we live.
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In other words if you want to know what people are thinking–or being led to think—or propagandized about—you have to read what the pundits and popularizers are saying. You have to because that is how you learn where the enemy is going to bring the fight.
The ancient fight of Satan
And what fight you ask? Well, there may be skirmishes here and there about this or that issue, but always the fight is the Ancient fight of Satan against God—Lucifer versus the Lord of Life and Love—and against His Presence in the world, the Catholic Church.
And the ambassadors of Satan—modern secular media and opinion and government will use every possible technique and strategy to wage this war against God.
Right now the battle is on as it has not been on for a while. They are pommeling us in the media. Every half-literate columnist or politician who can put a sentence together has joined the propaganda machine and day after day, they talk about how the Church is waging war against the nuns or against women or against children or against families or against progress or against Barack Obama or against the poor—or anything else they can dream up.
And you can tell that this is what is going on when they reference their inventions as something that “The Vatican” is doing. As if The Vatican is some evil mysterious personless force that oozes out of Rome to flood and darken the minds and lives of free-born Americans. The Vatican…. The other one is The Bishops.
The target is the Church
You will notice, they never give the reader an opportunity to think clearly about the issues. What they write is always a hysterical attempt to persuade everyone about how terrible the Church is.
Always the target is the Catholic Church. It is not that they do not also despise the little evangelicals and Baptists and Lutherans. They hate them as well—but they know that if they want to go after God most effectively and most directly, they have to go up against us.
Make no mistake about it— we as members of the Catholic Church are on the front lines in this fight. When the Sun-Times and New York Times and the Tribunes and all their minions talk about how terrible this or that Catholic policy or program is, or how unfair this or that teaching is, or how evil all their priests are, they are trying to get us to disbelieve in the Church—and therefore, eventually, disbelieve in God.
They want to get us to the point where—because of all that we have heard from them—we will ask ourselves: why should I remain a Catholic? Why should I still believe? If all that the modern media says about the Vatican and about the Bishops is true, then why should I stay? They know that once they get us to leave the Church, we will pretty much stop believing in anything supernatural and begin to believe everything they tell us.
Argument from beauty
So I spend my days trying to come up with some sort of personal defense of my own faith so that I might be strong, and then be able to share some insight or strength with you.
Now, what I sometimes think is the best possible defense against our godless and secular culture is what I call the Argument from Beauty. The Argument from Beauty asks us to look at all the genuine, sincere and deep beauty that Catholics have created in and for the world since her beginnings.
And again, I am not talking (this time) about music and painting and sculpture and architecture. I am talking about the beauty of people’s lives and how for two thousand years we as Catholic people do beautiful things—sometimes heroic— sometimes pretty humble—but what we do week after week is beautiful. Either we feed the poor or heal the sick or just simply raise our children to do good things.
Proving the truth and goodness of God
Look at what we are doing today. In this Crowning of the Blessed Virgin Mary as the Queen of hearts—by the very children who yesterday received the Son of Mary into their hearts. We are proving the Truth and Goodness of God by the Beauty of our celebration. This is the Argument from Beauty par excellence.
I think we could say that the beauty of our religion—in all its customs and traditions and ceremonies is—in a very real sense—a proof of the truth of our religion. And how is that? Because beauty—true beauty that pleases and delights—the beauty of a sunset or the beauty of a face that stops us in our tracks—the beauty of a sculpture or of an athlete or a mural — or the beauty of little children putting a beautiful crown on the Beautiful Virgin causes us wonder and joy and an exaltation of the heart that cannot explain itself.
We all sense beauty
You have to ask yourself: Why does beauty delight us so—what is there in the beautiful thing that makes us tingle with recognition? And you have to conclude—that somehow Beauty must come from God because Beauty cannot explain its existence or its effect on us apart from God. You see if there were no God, then there would be no explanation for the fact that all of us see and sense Beauty when it is there. Do not believe those who say that Beauty is in the eye of the beholder—as if to say that everyone creates his or her own beauty. As if to say that everyone creates his or her reality.
No—that is not what happens. Beauty actually resides—actually exists—in the beautiful object. Beauty is not just a matter of our personal taste—it is not just style or fashion. There is something in that which is Beautiful that every one on every continent in every age can recognize as Beautiful. But why is that? Because beauty is actually a reflection of God. In one way of understanding all this, we can say that the God who created that beauty resides in the beautiful thing. He dwells in it. God shines forth out of that which is beautiful and reveals Himself to us—by means of the beautiful thing.
There is a spark of God’s Infinite, All-powerful, All-Intelligent, All-loving Being that glistens in the beautiful thing. The Spark escapes, so to speak, from that which is beautiful, and stops us and surprises us not by being something purely material—but by being a reflection of God Himself! That is what is going on with Beauty. It is God showing Himself to us—and proving His existence to us so that we would know that nothing is by chance—nothing is by accident. Everything that happens and exists does so by His Loving Presence and Plan.
A beautiful God
That is why the beauty of our celebration today—the flowers, the music, the feelings the sentiments, the beauty of the children in their First Communion outfits—only one day after they have received Our Blessed Lord in Holy Communion, the innocence of it all, the loveliness of every element proves that it is all true—that this is not just over-pious sentiments of adults in the face of nostalgia and memory.
The beauty of this moment actually proves by being beautiful that there is a God, and a Beautiful God, and a loving God who shines forth out of each part of today’s celebration.
Yes this is true and God is true and the Virgin Mary is true and we truly crown her the Queen of our hearts and the children really did receive the Body of Christ and you don’t have to take my word for it—it is all proven true by the beauty that cannot explain itself—a beauty that needs a God to create it and show it to us.
They will lose this war
And those who write the lines of our culture and who fight the Church at every turn and who spare no expense to demean and denigrate the Church for everything the Church does and stands for and teaches will never understand that it is they who will lose this war. For they and their arguments and their conclusions are ugly. And they are up against Beauty, who of course, is no less than God.