Pro-Life Sermon 6

     "You shall not kill!" Reminds us Our Lord in the Gospel.

     For the past fifty years, a culture of death, violence, hatred and destruction has triumphed around us. Since the laws authorizing contraception and abortion. Since hedonism and utilitarianism replaced God and morality.

     In 1979 (40 years ago), when receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, Mother Teresa, Saint Teresa of Calcutta, declared: "The greatest destroyer of peace today is the crime against the innocent unborn child. If a mother can kill her own child, in her own womb, what keeps you and me from killing each other? (...) But today we are killing millions of unborn children. And we don't say anything."

     How our society, which proclaims with such insistence Human Rights (this new Decalogue of the modern world), how did men come to let flout the most fundamental right: the right of every human being to life? How is it that modern man, always talking about "progress", "respect" and "tolerance", acts more and more as a hateful and violent barbarian. The worst thing is that the more he becomes violent and hateful, the more he thinks he is a good man, enlightened, fighting for justice and progress.

     What are the causes of this blindness? It is very useful to think on these causes, in order to be able to find remedies. Of course, it is not good to look too much at evil, and to lose inner peace by gobbling up on what is going wrong. "Human anger does not bring about the righteousness of God," says St. James. But on the other hand, we have a duty to recognize things as they are; do not be an ostrich. We must fight, as much as we can, against evil. It is very important to not get used to moral evil. Our lukewarmness towards evil manifests the weakness of our love of good, of truth, of God. To react effectively against the culture of death, hatred and destruction that is invading our societies (with all its consequences: abortion, euthanasia, terrorism, violence, increasing numbers of murders and suicides...), to combat all these evils, the best way is to understand in depth the causes of this. There is no point in moaning and lamenting.

     This culture of death and hatred finds its origin in the revolution. Not the American Revolution, which we celebrated yesterday. It was not a revolution, it was a revolt, mixed with civil war, which aimed at independence. No, I am talking about the Revolution (the French one). A revolution wants to destroy everything, make a clean sweep of the past and build a new world, by violence. The Revolution is by nature extremist. It never achieves its idea of a perfect world. Revolutionaries fall into two categories:
- those who are ready for anything, and who will go further and further in violence and hatred.
- those who are stopped along the way, and who will be destroyed by the first one.

     So it was with the French Revolution; so it was with the different Marxist and Communist revolutions. (We must not forget that Lenin admired the French revolution, and set himself the task of completing and perfecting it.) The revolution causes and propagates the culture of death, violence and hatred.

     Some will say, "Father, it is still the fault of the French ... they invented it." You are wrong. The first revolution was not French, it was Luciferian. Non serviam; I will not serve. Lucifer was the first to overturn the established order, and he sowed chaos, hatred and death.

     The main cause of today's blindness is forgetting or rejecting God. Rejecting the Creator, Master of life and death. Atheism and secularism permeate the mindsets of our contemporaries. God is excluded from society. Man therefore believes he is free to choose for himself what he likes; to decide what is right and what is wrong, regardless of the of the objective nature if things created by God. Man becomes his own God and no longer recognizes any moral law that is superior to his own. It is man who sets human rights. It's the modern man who decides whether the little embryo is a man or not. It is the modern man who chooses whether the disabled person or the old man have a dignified life or not. It is the modern man who judges whether a certain historical figure corresponds to modern "morality" or not.

     Life is no longer received as a sacred gift from God; but like something that man is the master of. That he can arrange as he wishes. And man destroys himself. Berdiaef, a Russian philosopher of the 20th century, said: "Without God, there is no man, it is the experimental discovery of our time."

     Having rebelled against the supreme authority, against God, rejecting the authority of Christ the King; why should modern man respect a lower authority? Thus disappear all the human authorities: clergy, fathers, government, teachers and scientists...

     Forgetting God automatically leads to the loss of a sense of true human dignity. Man no longer known who he is, nor where he is going. He no longer knows that he is a creature made in the image of God, called to participate at the life of God by knowledge and love. He no longer know s that he has an immortal soul and that it is much more important to save his soul than to save his bodily, earthly life. Every human being, even the weakest, the poorest, the most "abnormal", therefore carries with him something infinite: he is loved by God for himself, called to eternal happiness. To kill him is in a way a sacrilege: it is to do to God a "great insult", says the Catechism of the Council of Trent, it is "to put on Him a criminal hand, by making disappear his image of the middle of the world."

     In contrast to the culture of death, which delights in ugliness, wickedness and falsehood, the Church continues to teach the importance of the beauty, the good and the true. Despair feeds the culture of death, while joy respects life.

     There are still many other causes of the culture of death in the world today. These are all our sins. Sins of pride, selfishness, lust anger greed, our lack of charity, our refusal to forgive ... St. Catherine of Siena said that her own sins were the cause of the evils of the whole world, and in a sense it is true: "every soul that rises raises the world"; conversely, every soul that indulges in sin opposes the sources of grace and increases disorder in the world.

     The remedy for all these evils is to rediscover the sense of God the Creator. To rediscover the sense of dignity of all human life, destined for an eternal life of Charity, with God. The remedy is also an example of our holiness, joyful virtue, gentle charity, selfless service of neighbor, good mood... Everything that can make men understand that they are loved by God and called to eternal happiness. Not the fleeting pleasures here below.

     "Let us smile! If from today, each of us (starting with the oldest as the Gospel says...) took the resolution to keep in his mouth his negative words and however, to marvel at these little things that give flavor to life, it would be a contribution, modest but effective, to the happiness of those around us and, why not, by chain reaction, to world peace." (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)

     Let us ask the Lord to give us a lively, enthusiastic, radiant, communicative faith, so that we may be ardent apostles, and that we may know how to make men understand that true happiness is to serve God, in Himself or in the smallest of our brothers. Let us pray, beg, repair. Amen.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

I Need a Million Dollars

Anybody Out There?