HUMAN PRIDE

It is the mission of the Church to persuade human beings to renounce their addiction to social aggression and to lay down their virtual weapons—the morbid and dangerous saber-rattling of me, myself and I and the perilous hatreds unleashed when “or”, “against”, “contend”, “dispute”, “oppose”, “fight”, “separate”, and “divide” are hurled and exploded by militant egos locked in psycho-social combat.

YOU SAY "I'm a Christian, but I don't need the Church". I answer, "You boast in mid-ocean, 'I'm a sailor, but I don't need this ship'". Well then, sailor, walk to the rail and step off. You ignorant man. Do you despise St. Peter or are you his teacher? Apart from the apostles, Peter's faith falters. Jesus knows he will sink into the sea; he has something to teach him. He catches Peter by the hand, saying, "O man of little faith, why did you doubt?" Take this story to heart! Peters jump from the boat does nothing to erase his or the apostles fears. On the contrary, his impetuous paladinism leads him from fright to disaster. Jesus restores Peter back to the boatand to the company of the disciples. There the Lord calms the winds. Do you undermine what Jesus does with Peter? Or do you presume to teach the Teacher? May the Spirit open your eyes of faith!

IN THE context of personal integration and wholeness, therefore, contraception is anathema (Gk. denounced) precisely because it cleaves the foundation of matrimony by appealing to vulgar and gratuitous fragmentation under the banner of charitable union. Over the invocation of matrimonial vows--"For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder"--can be heard the subdued but not indistinguishable antithesis: I give you everything that I am and all that I have, but you cannot have my fertility. Hence, peevish self-love and sinful coveting--and their fragmented and disordered consequences--invite further insults to the marital union, all of which tend toward the catastrophic brokenness that occurs in the wake of countless divorced persons who admittedly loved their spouses, but cannot fathom why they failed to make satisfactory attachment to them.

SADLY MANY Catholics mimic the invective used by vociferous non-Catholics to attack the sacraments, particularly confession:  <em>I talk to God in my own way and God forgives me</em>. One has only to recall Our Lords parable of the sanctimonious Pharisee who, because of his self-serving, complacent, even unctuous prayer--"God, I thank thee that I am not like other men"--walked out of the temple unjustified. The Pharisee "stood and prayed thus with himself"--<em><span>I, I, and I</span></em><span>. He prayed with himself in his own way and presumed God was pleased with this and forgave him.  Anyone who teaches that Christians may decide for themselves whether they do or do not need the visible <em>ecclesia</em>  (Gk. assembly, church), or some portion of the visible Church, speaks wholly outside the bounds of divine truth. There is no such thing as <em>my own way</em> in the new covenant that Christ established in his name.

RATHER THAN honestly appraising the desolation that has occurred, lifestyle partisans celebrate an appalling and delusive euphoria: <em>It's all water stirred in the same glass</em>. For better or worse, social phenomena need not be subordinate to or reformed by norms arising from absolute truth. Social phenomena is truth itself. Pretending improvement makes improvement. Hence, the stomach-turning extreme of society's unexamined conscience: Broken families, violence, addiction and illusion are accepted as normal and therefore appear to be new norms....It seems to be a law that societies surfeited by affluence and sophistication tend to embrace deviancy by appealing to progressiveness, a fluid apprehension that one is moving forward or onward as if he knew where he had come from and where he was going.