It is Holy Week, the most important time of year for Christians.
This week always leaves me with mixed emotions. In a short span of three days, my God gets nailed on a cross and suffers death under the weight of all my sins, your sins and the sins of the rest of mankind. A bit of a downer.
My memories of visiting you and grandma at Easter are warm and fuzzy. Church, hunting for eggs with the smell of ham and sweet potatoes engulfing the house, and those big chocolate eggs the lady down the street made each year (my kind of tradition).
I know if you were still on earth you would be surprised (appalled, perhaps) that during this Holy Week the US Supreme Court has been trying to figure out what constitutes a marriage. No, I’m not kidding, although both of us probably thought we had a pretty good handle on this: A man and women commit their lives to God and each other in a ceremony officiated by a minister or priest. They spend the rest of their lives building a home, having children (if blessed by God), suffering bad times and celebrating good times.
The court debate this week is whether a marriage must include a man and woman (one of each) or whether it could be two men or two women. And yes, it is pretty obvious that God’s plan called for one of each gender, not various permutations that the Catholic Church has rightly labeled intrinsically disordered. How strange it is to see the court trying to figure out something that God made abundantly clear to us a few millennia ago.
That’s how our world is these days.
A few weeks ago, I was having lunch with five consecrated women of Regnum Christi. The conversation inevitably wandered into cultural territory and our state of moral decadence. I mentioned the statement a couple years by Francis Cardinal George of Chicago that if we didn’t change the course of our moral collapse and government persecution of morality and the Church, the world would become a dangerous place for people of faith. In fact, he said he expected that he would die in his bed, his successor would die in jail and the bishop after him would die a martyr.
The five women I was dining with were all at least two decades younger than me. So, while I have a pretty good chance of dying in my bed, if I were a betting man I would bet at least one of them dies a martyr.
That’s where our society is going.
If we were better students of history, we would realize this always happens when people turn their backs on God and put their faith in government. Government lacks the moral compass to decide right from wrong – witness the marriage debate. God, acting through his Church, makes sorting right from wrong rather simple, though we all know that doing the right thing isn’t always easy.
Unless things change, I doubt we are many years from the day when someone who claims that marriage can only be one man united to one woman will be jailed for “hate speech.” I hope what I have written here will remove any doubt about my feelings and ensure that I’ll be incarcerated with the true believers.
Love…Jim
