Are We Living in Darkness?

In Sunday’s gospel Jesus proclaims that He is the light of the world, just before restoring sight to a man blind from birth.  This man had spent his entire life in darkness and after his miraculous cure, the Pharisees accused Jesus of sin for having healed on the Sabbath.  In response, Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see might see, and those who do see might become blind.”  (John 9:4)

Jesus is referring to the spiritual blindness caused by sin, and yet He died for our salvation, despite our sinfulness, so that we might be forgiven and receive spiritual sight.   As St. Paul says in Sunday’s epistle, “Brothers and sisters: You were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.  Live as children of light, for light produces every kind of goodness and righteousness and truth.” (Eph 5:8-9)  This infers that living in darkness makes us susceptible to lies and untruth.

In his first Encyclical, The Light of Faith, Pope Francis explains that:

 “Faith transforms the whole person precisely to the extent that he or she becomes open to love.  Through the blending of faith and love we come to see the kind of knowledge that illumines our steps… because love itself brings enlightenment.  The immense love of God transforms us inwardly and enables us to see reality with new eyes.”

Sadly, our world is growing darker as the light of faith slips away from so many people.  In their blindness, people have come to believe more and more lies while denying the truth as revealed by God in scripture, in the life of Christ, and in nature itself.  Natural law has been transmuted by the notion of “natural rights.”   In a terrible example of this blindness, Belgium recently expanded their euthanasia laws to include children.  Although children in Belgium cannot drive a car until the age of 18, they now have the right to request assisted suicide.   In Holland where euthanasia has been legal for more than 20 years, the law started with acceptance of suicide for the terminally ill, and over time was expanded to include euthanasia, then expanded again to include the chronically ill, then psychological illness was accepted as a reason to choose euthanasia, now it can even be performed without the patient’s consent.  It has become so common in Holland that a recent report estimated nearly half the assisted suicides are not even reported.  The so-called “right to die” has now been made legal in 5 U.S. states with several more preparing to vote on it.  It’s a slippery slope.

In another example of darkness, Planned Parenthood has bestowed Nancy Pelosi with their highest honor, the Margaret Sanger award “for her outstanding contributions to the reproductive health and women’s rights movement.”  The foremost of those rights is apparently the right to kill unborn babies.  Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was an avowed racist and anti-Semite who promoted birth control, abortion, and mandatory sterilization for people considered “undesirable.”  Pelosi continues to describe herself as a practicing Catholic, but in a recent speech staunchly supporting the HHS mandate she said, “I am a devout Catholic and I honor my faith and love it … but they have this conscience thing.”  Apparently, in her mind, human will trumps Catholic teaching on moral issues.   Could she be more mistaken, or more blind about what it means to be Catholic?  

When the Hobby Lobby case came before the Supreme Court last week, liberal pundits and protestors where howling about employers “denying women the right to contraceptives,” despite the fact the Hobby Lobby had agreed to pay for contraceptives, but not the abortion-inducing morning after pills.  Our government, in their blindness, is going to great length to force employers to pay for contraceptives and morning after drugs with no deductible and no copay, despite the fact that these medications are universally available at little or no cost.  Conversely, Obamacare requires people to incur huge out-of-pocket expenses if they need life-saving surgery.  Where is the outrage at the monumental increase in the cost of health insurance and health care which is affecting virtually everyone?  What sense does any of this make?  Our government filed suit against the Little Sisters of the Poor over this issue, but no one takes them to task over the fact that millions of people lost their health insurance because of Obamacare or because the cost of health insurance is going through the roof as a result of all the new requirements imposed by the new law and it’s 20,000 pages of new regulations.  Is everyone blind to the harm being caused by Obamacare?  Is the fuss over contraceptives just a ruse to take attention away from the very real problems caused by the new law?

As I write this blog, today is the last day to enroll in Obamacare this year without paying a tax penalty, if you remain uninsured.  At last count fewer than 6 million people have enrolled in Obamacare coverage, but it has been estimated that about half those people already had health insurance and simply changed over to take advantage of the government subsidies.  The original goal was to expand coverage by 23 million people.  The goal was dropped to 14 million early on, and today HHS Secretary Sibelius said that if 7 million enroll, they’ll consider it a success.  It seems everybody is anxious to describe Obamacare as a success, despite the myriad of problems is it creating for health care and for our economy.   I guess Democrats are counting on the fact that people will believe anything is it’s said with enough conviction.  The old adage “the blind leading the blind” comes to mind.

At mass Sunday, the first Prayer of the Faithful at our Church was for the overturn of the HHS mandate.  I wonder how many parishioners heard and understood what we were praying for?   It pains me to know that even regular attendees are still so blind as to not realize that voting for a pro-abortion politicians is to participate in grave evil, and thus sinful.   But then, you have to know you are committing sin, to be culpable, and sadly, darkness has pervaded so many hearts that a great many of us are blind to the truth of what’s going on around us.  As we approach Holy Week, let’s pray for an awakening of faith, and for the light of Christ to open the eyes of the faithful to the truth of what is going on in our country… before it’s too late.  And finally, let’s all strive to live as “children of light.”

 

 

Religious Freedom on Trial this Week

In Sunday’s gospel for the third Sunday of Lent, Jesus invites the Samaritan woman at the well to follow Him and receive the life-giving water He offers.  Scripture scholars associate this scene with Jesus’ proposal to be the bridegroom of humanity because the well was the place where a number of prophets met their eventual spouses.  The Samaritan woman, representing sinful humanity, was invited by Jesus to accept His gift of salvation.  This is a foreshadowing of Jesus’ relationship with all humanity which St. Paul describes as akin to a marriage covenant in which Jesus is the bridegroom and we (the Church) are His bride.

Of course, a marriage covenant implies the total giving of spouses to one another in a faithful relationship meant to last for all eternity.  For our part, faithfulness to Christ is a challenge to our sinful nature and requires us to beg forgiveness again and again.  The practice of our faith is a litany of missteps, apologies, and forgiveness.  Maybe that’s why they call it “practice.”   Recently, the practice of our faith has become even more of a challenge because of interference from our government.   This is not exactly a new phenomenon, but one that has gone from opinion to interference by force of law.  The administrative laws put in effect under Obamacare require all employers to pay for contraceptives, abortion-inducing drugs, and sterilization, even though it may violate their religious beliefs.  Even religious-owned and operated non-profits are required to comply with the new law.   About 20 for-profit companies have won exemptions from the HHS mandate in the lower courts, but the Obama Administration has appealed all the way to the Supreme Court who will hear arguments in the Hobby Lobby case this coming week.  The 100+ religious organizations who have filed lawsuits for relief will not come before the Supreme Court until much later this year, or next.

Hobby Lobby would be forced to pay fines in excess of $1 million a day, if they lose this case and continue to refuse to comply, effectively destroying their company.  Ironically, several thousand employers and unions have already been exempted from Obamacare when they appealed to the President or then-speaker of the house Pelosi in the first few months after the bill passed.

How did we get this this point where the religious freedom of people who own businesses can be trampled by our government?  The answer lies in recognizing that there has been a concerted effort underway for several hundred years, not only to remove the influence of Christianity from government, but to replace it with a set of beliefs that are based on materialism.  Materialism asserts that religious belief is irrational and divisive, because the universe and everything in it is simply matter and there is no spiritual realm, no soul, no afterlife.  For several hundred years, liberals have been spreading these ideas in colleges and more recently in public education where they promote the concept that everyone has the natural right to pursue whatever makes them happy.  They believe the greatest moral good is individual freedom including the “right” to choose abortion, homosexual marriage and euthanasia.   This liberal morality is now being imposed by force of law.  Liberals have gone from advocating tolerance, to imposing their moral views in what amounts to a form of religious belief in itself.

This effort to replace Christian values with liberal beliefs was in play at the time of our nation’s founding.  When they chose the Great Seal of the United States in 1782, our founders included the image of an all seeing eye above a pyramid.  This image is the same one used by the “illuminati” and Freemasons at about the same time our country won its independence.  In the 17^th century, political philosopher Baruch Spinoza described an ideal form of government in which humanity is described as a pyramid where an “enlightened few” were at the top and under them were the most intelligent people who would carry out the dictates they received from the intelligentsia.  This was to be accomplished by controlling education, the judicial system, the sciences, and the government, in such a way as to direct and control the more ignorant mass of humanity.   Spinoza wanted to limit or eliminate the influence of the Church, but acknowledged the importance of a role for the church as long as it took its direction from the head of government and was used to control the masses.  Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and FDR were all “progressives” who shared the idea that government should direct every aspect of society.  FDR, who was a Mason by the way, added the eye and pyramid to the one dollar bill in 1935.

When the people controlling government, the courts, and education, believe there are no absolute moral truths, we end up with moral relativism, in which everybody gets to make up their own truth.  Pope Benedict XVI warned about “the dictatorship of relativism,” not only because it would demolish long-standing religious and moral traditions, but because it imposes its own brand of morality on everyone.  That’s exactly what’s happening now.   Not only are we losing the freedom to live out our faith, Christians are being punished for failure to comply with the government’s immoral dictates.   Wedding photographers and others have been fined for refusal to participate in gay weddings, and religious orders are being fined for refusal to pay for abortion-inducing drugs, both on the charge that they are violating people’s “rights” by their refusal.  If this persists, and the Supreme Court allows the government to prevail, we will be entering an era where Christians are being prosecuted (persecuted) for their beliefs.

This Thursday (March 27^th) President Obama meets with Pope Francis in Rome.  I wonder if this will come up?

Superheroes

Sunday’s gospel story of the Transfiguration has always been a bit of an enigma to me.  I get that Moses and Elijah appearing with Jesus represented the law and the prophets, and that Jesus fulfills all the prophecy and embodies God’s law.  Jesus appears transfigured, as if arisen after His resurrection, and God’s voice identifies Him as His Son, but what other insights might we glean from this episode?  Then it struck me.  God said, “This is my beloved Son… listen to Him.”

Of course there are many things Jesus said, that we should listen to, but perhaps one of the most important is what He said to Pilot just before being condemned to death: “I have been born and come into this world for this reason - to testify to the truth.  Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”  (John 18: 37)  The truth Jesus testified to is embodied in His life and His words.  He certainly fulfilled scriptural prophecy, and He expanded on “the law,” as I mentioned in my blog 2 weeks ago.  Jesus explained that not only is adultery a sin, so is lust, and that rather than ‘an eye for an eye,’ we should turn the other cheek, and that we must love even our enemies.  This is the higher standard of Christianity.  This is the perfection Jesus calls us to, so that we may be more like our heavenly Father.

These are the truths of our Christian faith, but we live in a world where truth is considered to be subjective, to the point that each person can make up their own idea about what’s true and what’s not; what’s sinful and what isn’t; what’s good and what’s evil.  As I’ve been writing about this past month, the whole point of liberalism is to liberate people from the constraints of the objective moral truth.  Many people have come to believe that we’ve moved now from the Age of Pisces (the age of Christianity) to the Age of Aquarius, where the so-called new cosmology replaces religion.  This new form of liberal religion holds that rather than a single God who created the universe, the universe itself is God in which every bit of matter is part of God.  In this scheme of things, human beings are no different than any other life form, albeit more complicated.  According to the new cosmology, there are no moral absolutes, only the on-going evolution of all matter such that we have outgrown the old superstitions and morality of the past.  This new worldview holds that personal freedom is more important than personal responsibility.  The right to express ourselves sexually is considered more important than adhering to the antiquated ideas of marriage, monogamy, and sexual continence.  The most important value of this new cosmology seems to be tolerance of others, as long as no one gets hurt, and no ones’ freedoms are impinged.

In his Apostolic Letter, The Light of Faith, Pope Francis wrote, “Today more than ever we need to be reminded of this bond between faith and truth, given the crisis of truth in our age.”   As Christians we must first acknowledge and advocate the existence of truth itself.  Listening to Jesus, we know that truth exists, and can be known by reason and by faith.  For too many people, truth has simply become another word for opinion.   This is what is meant by “moral relativism,” your truth and mine can be quite different and each of us is entitled to make up our own truths.  But the thing is, following our own ideas about good and evil, thinking it is enough just to be a good person, falls short for one simple reason:  We are human.  We all want things that appeal to our senses, whether they are good for us or not.  We quickly rationalize that things are good if they feel good, and no one gets hurt.  But we are called to be better than this, we are called by God to be His sons and daughters and to become perfect as He is perfect.  We accomplish this through self-sacrifice, and most importantly by acknowledging the moral truths God has revealed to us through scripture and Jesus Himself.   Jesus exemplified this for us, perfect as He is, by sacrificing Himself for our salvation.

By acknowledging and adhering to the truth, the real truth, we transform or transfigure ourselves in the image of God.  Of course we will never be perfect, and we certainly cannot accomplish this on our own.  It is only by the grace of God that we can transform our lives and become more Christ like, and of course only by the saving grace of Jesus that we can become sharers in the divine life of God. 

On a lighter note, this talk about transfiguration and transformation reminds me of the stories and movies about superheroes.  In the old comic books, the slogan for the Justice League of America was, “Truth, Justice and the American Way.”  Many of the superheroes are ordinary people who are transformed in some way to become “super.”   Peter Parker, Bruce Wayne, Steve Rogers and Tony Stark where just normal people before they were transformed into Spiderman, Batman, Captain America and Iron Man.   These superheroes all struggle to do the right thing, and although Tony Stark is a bit of a playboy, they all fight for the higher truth of good in order to overcome evil. 

Watching the movies, we identify with the hero, face dilemmas with him, struggle to make the right choices, and in doing so, grow a little in virtue with him.  This is what I like about the superhero movies, they are adventures in life and they depict the struggle of good and evil, acknowledging that evil does indeed exist, and we are all called to resist and overcome it.  This is a basic truth about life.  The superheroes fight for truth and justice, just as Jesus did.  In every superhero movie, the hero has to make sacrifices, whether in his personal life, or in the process of fighting evil.  So too, each of us are called to make sacrifices in order to lead a heroic life, struggling to increase in virtue while pursuing objective moral truth in order to overcome evil. 

Modern society often mocks Christianity as naïve, boring, or superstitious, but it takes courage to stand up for the truth, and to call attention to the fallacies of the liberal secular agenda in which there is no objective morality.  As Christians, we know that our love is part of a greater love, a Love that created us and reveals Himself to us in salvation history and in the life of Jesus, who Himself suffered for our redemption.  The bible itself is not just a book of rules, or proofs of our doctrine, but rather the stories of heroes of faith who followed the call of God, endured great hardships, and made great sacrifices in their journey to the Promised Land.  Jesus of course is the foremost of these, the culmination and embodiment of God’s law and His Love.  He calls us to be transformed, just as He was transfigured by the power and grace of God.  This is the path to holiness, to fulfillment, and to perfection, that can only be traveled by leading a heroic life of faithfulness to God’s Truth.

Lenten Reflection on Religious Freedom

Lent begins again with ashes as a reminder that we have all been created from the dust of the earth, and everyone will face death in this life.  Sunday’s reading from Genesis describes how sin entered the world when Satan deceived Eve into believing that if she disobeyed God and ate from the tree of life, she and her husband would become like God, knowing themselves what is good and what is evil.  The great truth of this Genesis story is that sin entered the world when men and women disobeyed God and began to determine for themselves what was good and what was evil.  

In preparation for the commemoration of Jesus’ death and resurrection, we acknowledge that we are all sinners in need of forgiveness and salvation that only Jesus can offer.  This is our Christian belief: that temptation and sin exist and we are in need of salvation if we are to enter into eternal life in the presence of God.  For more than a millennium, this was the commonly held belief of the Western world, and the Church served as the defender of God’s truth, as revealed in scripture and in Jesus’ words and actions.  Although the leaders of the Church were, like all men, subject to temptation and sin, the Church has been guided by the Holy Spirit and provides spiritual guidance.  It was commonly understood that worldly kings governed civil affairs, and they were expected to follow the moral guidance of the Church whose authority was limited to the spiritual domain.  However, in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, all this changed when Kings began proclaiming themselves to be absolute rulers of both worldly and spiritual affairs.  Thomas Hobbes, considered to be the father of modern liberal political philosophy, argued that the church undermined the authority of the king.  Hobbes was a materialist who believed that all existence was corporeal and therefore there were no immaterial objects, no soul, and no spiritual realm.  He believed that all matter was neither good nor evil, and all actions were merely mechanical reactions to physical stimuli, and therefore there were no moral absolutes.  He denied the existence of sin and natural law, and in its place asserted “the right of nature,” in which every person is at liberty to do as he pleases.   Of course this would lead to chaos and confusion, and therefore civilization needed a sovereign government to establish rules and rights for everyone, so that civil society can flourish.  In The Leviathan, Hobbes posited that nothing was illegal unless outlawed by the government, and nothing was sinful, unless it violated the government’s laws.

Hobbes’ philosophy influenced Western civilization significantly and led to many kings taking control of churches as a means of holding sway over the populace, changing moral standards and religious practice to suit their political agenda.  A century later, Baruch Spinoza laid out a rationalist philosophy proclaiming that God never became flesh, but rather that all flesh and all matter was and is God.  His pantheism was the basis for encouraging humans to worship their own actions and efforts as divine.  Since the political state is the most powerful expression of human effort, Spinoza claimed that the state itself is a manifestation of the divine.  Spinoza’s Ethics influenced Descartes, Hegel and others who would usher in the so-called Age of Enlightenment in which rational thought was considered supreme, and those who continued to believe in the spiritual realm were regarded as ignorant, misguided and intolerant.  Never the less, Spinoza saw the value of using the church to manipulate and control the unenlightened people who clung to their superstitious beliefs.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because this is the origin of our liberal state.  Christianity has been under attack for 500 years as one government after another claimed control over its local church.  The United States has been a notable exception, until recently.   Over time we’ve gradually adopted the liberal view that evil doesn’t really exist and that relatively few things are truly sinful.  We’ve become conditioned to believing that the state knows what’s best for everyone.  Rather than recognize and observe God’s universal Truth, the state has gradually redefined moral and religious belief to suit its political agenda, and in the process convinced many that there is no such thing as sin, and no need for salvation.  In many instances, Christianity has been watered down to the point of believing that the most important thing we can do is respect everyone’s right to believe whatever they choose.  Why else would so many self-proclaimed Christians come to believe that abortion and gay marriage are both acceptable?  As recently as last month, the United Nations chastised the Catholic Church for its failure to modernize its teaching on birth control, abortion, and gay marriage, as if God’s truth is subject to human approval. 

Our president and his administration have changed their views on marriage, intentionally ignored, then repealed the Defense of Marriage Act, and despite settled law to the contrary, spent hundreds of millions on taxpayer-funded abortion services.   They have also sued religious organizations for adhering to their beliefs by refusing to fund birth control, abortion-inducing drugs and sterilization.  At the same time, the administration seems to have no compunction about using the IRS to harass their political adversaries, whether they be Tea Party or Pro-Life organizations, both of whom were repeatedly denied non-profit status, while liberal organizations’ applications sailed through.

It seems that our government has set itself up as its own god, accountable to no one but itself, even as they disregard the constitution and violate the separation of powers.  This Lent is an excellent time to pray for our country.  Let’s hope and pray that Christians will come to their senses and vote for candidates who will respect the Constitution and protect rather than violate religious freedom.  The State cannot and must not tell us what to believe and how to practice our faith on a daily basis.  As Jesus  said in Sunday’s gospel, “The Lord you God shall you worship, and Him alone shall you serve.”