This was one of the hardest sermons I can remember writing. The subject matter is obviously controversial, and there was a true need to "sweat the details", but the real challenge was that it's not easy to write sermons that are challenging. What is the right balance of encouragement and "in your face"? How do I challenge others publicly when I feel like I fail constantly? Is this what people need right now? And yet, you preach not because you want to but because the occasion demands it.
With no further ado then, here is the audio and the full script of the sermon is below that.
There’s a good chance that
everybody can be ticked off by something in this homily. I’ve got strong words
and challenges for everybody. Today I am an equal-opportunity offender.
As was referred to in the Bishop’s
pulpit announcement, on Friday the Supreme Court declared that all 50 states
must recognize same-sex marriage. Many people were overjoyed by this; many
people were crushed to hear it. Some people threw it in others’ faces; some
people raged back or got self-righteous.
Let’s start there. This
challenge is for everybody. We all have feelings. We all have our reactions. A
feeling deserves to be felt. Whether joyful or angry, ecstatic or frustrated,
feelings deserve to be felt. But we also have choices, and they can be right or
wrong. Some choices, some responses, are not acceptable. It’s not okay to mock,
or to respond with hate-filled words. It’s not okay to insult or give slurs. We
should feel authentically, but being Christian calls us to never cease loving
or respecting. Like I said, this one is for all of us.
To those who were
heart-broken by the Court’s decision, and I am among them, we need to look
within ourselves and ask some hard questions, questions of our attitudes
leading up to, and now, after this. How do we view and treat people with
same-sex attraction? What do they think we think of them?
Why? Because the Catholic
Church should be the most welcoming, loving, understanding place a person with
same-sex attraction ever encounters. We ought to be the light in the darkness
to those who are hurting. We are to be Jesus’ heart in this world.
I wonder how well we have
done on that. Have we been who we ought to be?
For 23 years now—since 1992,
when the Catechism of the Catholic Church was published—for 2+ decades, we’ve
have had clear, black and white directions on what the Christian response to gays
and lesbians is to be. Paragraph 2358 says, “[Men and women with deep-seated
homosexual tendencies] must be accepted with respect, compassion, and
sensitivity.” Have we always done this?
And if not—if our Church
hasn’t been accepting with compassion and respect—can we be surprised if
Catholics with these attractions look elsewhere to be accepted and loved? And
if we haven’t included them, if we haven’t shown them a way to fulfill their
Christian vocation within the Church, can we be surprised if they turn to a
movement or a lobby or a mindset that says, “We want you. We want you to belong
fully.”
We talk about the beauty of
marriage and family, and we are told to use that beauty to help us to make the
legal, cultural, spiritual case for the Church’s view, but if we preach about
that beauty but don’t offer real love, real acceptance, and a real home to
people with same-sex attractions, can we be surprised if they say, “Yes! And
that beautiful thing you’ve been talking about: I want that for me too.”? We
have to offer an alternative and we haven’t always done that well.
For those who were left
confused and frustrated on Friday, that part was for you.
This next part is for
everyone. Because the only path ahead for the Catholic is one of both radical
love, respect, and sensitivity, and at
the same time holding fast to the truth that marriage is a unique institution
of a man and a woman in a lifelong union with the possibility of new life.
To most people, that double
calling sounds impossible. To one half, claiming to love and accept while
continuing to believe that marriage is between only man and woman is just
patronizing lies and hypocrisy. To the other half the call to accept and
respect seems like a dangerous watering down of the commitment to stand for
true marriage. To all, holding both seems hard if not impossible. And yeah,
Jesus does that sometimes. Remember the “Love the sinner, hate the sin” idea?
Or telling us to correct others’ bad actions but not judge their motives? Yeah,
he does that.
It’s hard. Some want to dig
in and fight this to the last. Others want to just say, “It doesn’t affect me;
do what you makes you happy.” And a third group, and maybe the largest, just
wants to hide. They don’t know what to think or say. They are torn. And they
just wish the moment would pass.
I read an article on the Internet
yesterday and it talked about how many people talk big about how they’ll fight
for their beliefs, how they’re willing to face persecution, how they’d risk
losing a job for their faith. But the author made the good point that while
they say that, many roll over the instant you imply that they are a bigot. None
of us want to be called “haters”.
I get it. Trust me I get it.
I went in to Walmart on Friday in my Roman collar to get a prescription, and I
was convinced that everyone was looking at me and thinking, “A priest. Oh, I
bet he’s mad. What a bigot. He probably hates all gays.”
But why do we Catholics still
say that marriage is between a man and a woman? What’s our argument in the face
of such ridicule?
Preface: we all stink at this
debate. First, both sides are constantly mixing up three different things:
same-sex attraction, same-sex actions, and finally same-sex marriage. We swirl
them together and we often use imprecise language. For example, the Church
clearly states that there is no sin in the attraction of people to their own
gender; it’s about actions. Similarly, the question before the courts isn’t
about actions. Since 2003, any law against actions has been abolished, and most
hadn’t been enforced for decades. It’s about civil marriage. But people don’t
make distinctions.
Here more mistakes are made.
Conservatives tend to argue things like: “It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and
Steve!” or “Marriage is made by God” and then sprinkle in quotes from Genesis,
Leviticus, and Romans to show that gays are evil. On the other hand, Liberals
tend to say things like: “You can’t legislate morality.” Both are doing this
wrong.
Yes, God made marriage, but it’s
hard to use that as your main pitch when talking to a secular democratic-republic
with dozens of competing religious (and non-religious) ideas. On the other hand,
we’re constantly legislating morality. When we outlaw murder, rape, plagiarism,
skipping child-support, whatever, we are legislating morality. We do it
constantly. The question is, what moral judgments should we use? Even arguments
for gay marriage are moral
reasonings. That moral argument goes something like this: “Humans possess
personal love and freedom of will; if Bob and Sally can choose to enter a
permanent bond of love, why can’t Bob and Bill?”
So here’s the case for civil
marriage being only a man and a woman. And this then is the challenge to the
people who were jubilant on Friday at the Court’s decision.
The key question isn't “Why
not gay marriage?” but rather “Why is there civil marriage at all?” Why would
states and nations care? States don't bother to regulate, legislate, or
validate your friendships. You don't mention your siblings, boyfriend, or BFF
on your 1040 form. But the state does track marriages and it does ask for your
spouse on your tax form. Why? Because states want to protect, encourage, and
reward entities that are good for the commonwealth. We give tax breaks to clean
energy initiatives because we want more of that. We break up monopolies because
business competition is good. We regulate and underwrite public schools to
ensure an educated citizenry.
See, ancient humans figured
out that a child is brought up best when her parents stayed together and if her
siblings had the same parents too. Why best if they stayed together? Because
humans are notoriously slow-developing and need years of cooperative rearing.
Why is it best if siblings come from the same pair of parents when possible?
Because a family is a better bonder of persons than a boarding house.
So they developed some rules
to encourage and benefit these pairings, like recognizing the transfer of
property, and they made other rules to protect this institution, like
forbidding adultery and rape and giving legal recourse for injuries to one's
family members. Successive generations added greater formality, but all to the
same end. States granted privileges to this institution which they didn't grant
to other relationships, like friendship, because it benefited states in a
unique way as the institution that reared the nation’s children and provided
stability through this basic building block of society.
That’s the case. Marriage is
a contract that guards and benefits children and makes a stable, healthy
society. A common response to this is that same-sex couples could adopt or be
inseminated. But there are some flaws there. One, that union doesn’t naturally
beget those kids, so historically there wasn’t the same reason to
institutionalize and defend it. Two—no, that’s not an insult to adoptive
parents in traditional families. Adoption is a beautiful way of making the best
out of a bad situation. When parents die, or parents can’t raise a kid safely, or
a single mother would otherwise abandon or abort a child, and adoption makes
something beautiful out of it by inviting them into a steady family. What we
have seen in the last couple decades is a shift, in both gay and straight
couples, to seeing child as a commodity—“I have a right to be able to have a
family”—and we see this “right” being fulfilled by insemination, in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, or
adoption. This may be one of the scariest shifts in the modern world in terms
of human rights: that we are now more focused on the wants of adults than on the
needs of children. And notice, I said male-female couples, and singles, have
sometimes taken this mindset too. Which brings me to a final challenge:
We have to admit the part we
all have played in bringing about massive changes in the concept of marriage
and family. I have described an institution developed over millennia that
expected faithful, permanent unions that were open to children and reared them
in a healthy way. Once we privileged it and enshrined it, and yet part of the
reason people can very easily argue that marriage is just about love,
(#LoveWins) is that we let that institution fall apart. America is not
currently a country dedicated to preserving marriages or forming children
within those families.
How is that? In the last
fifty years, no-fault divorce and abortion have become enshrined rights.
Contraception and sterilization are seen as standards features of the
efficient, practical, modern family. This is our fault. Catholics started
practicing sterilized love. Christians bought into the idea that marriage is
just about feelings, feelings that come and go. Red-Staters accepted divorce as
standard practice in modern families. The Supreme Court might be wrong about
the ancient institution of marriage, but they might be dead-on about the thing
in modern America we call “marriage”. Gay-activist Andrew Sullivan famously
writes, “The heterosexuality of marriage is intrinsic only if [marriage] is
understood to be intrinsically procreative; but that definition has long been
abandoned in Western society.” And he’s got us dead-to-rights on that. I am
amazed at the colossal number of Christians, Catholic and Protestant, who
utterly reject same-sex marriage but defend to the last contraception and
no-fault divorce.
Mary Eberstadt explained the
connection perfectly in an article in 2008—she was talking about the Anglican
Church, but it applies to all Christians in the last fifty years, “By giving
benediction in 1930 to its married heterosexual members purposely seeking
sterile sex, the Anglican Church lost, bit by bit, any authority to tell her
other members—married or unmarried, homosexual or heterosexual—not to do the
same. To put the point another way, once heterosexuals start claiming the right
to act as homosexuals, it would not be long before homosexuals start claiming
the rights of heterosexuals.” In other words, gay marriage.
So what now?
On Friday the President said
this: “I know that Americans of good will continue to hold a wide range of
views on this issue. Opposition, in some cases, has been based on sincere and
deeply held beliefs. All of us who welcome today’s news should be mindful of
that fact and recognize different viewpoints, revere our deep commitment to
religious freedom.”
We’ve been told for years
now: “This isn’t going to affect you. If you don’t want a gay marriage then
don’t have one, but this isn’t yours to worry about.”
I hope this is true, but I
have my worries. No, tanks are not going to roll up and cart off priests who
won’t do same-sex weddings. Would that courage were so easy to come by! It’d be
easy to stand up then.
Last weekend there was an
article in The Weekly Standard called
“You Will Be Assimilated”. I invite all supporters and opponents of gay
marriage to read it. The first ¾ are about the bait-and-switch tactics used
over the last twenty years of this campaign. But the last part explains that
ultimately same-sex marriage and religious liberty will be incompatible. The
Left is not going to make the mistake it made after Roe vs. Wade of letting a fallen opponent get up off the mat to
fight on another 40 years like the pro-life cause has. Dissenters will be
demonized and silenced, called bigots and haters.
You think not? On Friday the
Harrisburg newspaper PennLive/The Patriot-News announced it “will no longer
accept, nor will it print, op-eds and letters to the editor in opposition to
same-sex marriage.” The popular website Buzzfeed also said Friday that “We
firmly believe that for a number of issues, including civil rights, women’s
rights, anti-racism, and LGBT equality there
are not two sides” to the argument. [emphasis mine]
Justice Samuel Alito asked
the solicitor general during the SCOTUS arguments if this will be an issue for
tax-exempt status. After hemming and hawing solicitor Verrilli said, “I don’t
deny that. I don’t deny that, Justice Alito, It is—it is going to be an issue.”
Most likely trouble will come
in the form of lawsuits. Already the bakery “Sweet Cakes by Melissa” has been
fined $135,000 by the state of Oregon. Maybe tiny parishes like St. Ann’s and
Sacred Heart will escape that, but St. Francis hospital and GICC, St. Michael’s
and St. Cecilia’s schools, dioceses and Catholic colleges will be targets.
Anything involving Catholic counseling, hospitals, insurance through Catholic
offices, and especially hiring and firing could be battlegrounds. If a same-sex
couple wanted to teach CCD here, would that end in a lawsuit? And you don’t
even have to win the case to crush someone with lawyer’s fees. This is real. So
what are we going to do?
One, pray. It doesn’t feel
like a lot, but if you’re not doing it, the rest is pretty useless.
Two, know why we teach what
we do. It’s no longer ok to just hide and say, “Well, my church teaches this,”
because now the Church is open to infinite criticism from the rest of the
country. You’re going to have to know and explain it, because people will ask,
“Why do you even stay in that church?”
Three, be heroic in your
families. As I said: this is partly our fault. We need the best marriages, the
strongest families. We need to show that, no, modern marriage is not destined
for divorce. No, marriage is not meant to be closed off and selfish and not be open
to new life.
Four, going back to my very
first point, we have to love and accept same-sex attracted people. We have to
show that we really mean it when we say, “You are loved and welcomed and
accepted, and we’ll treat you with respect and sensitivity.” We have to show
them that they have a place in Christ’s Church. Otherwise it just reinforces
what people accuse us of or have been assuming. Honestly, part of this is going
to be done by reaching out to all single people, gay or straight, to say, “You
fit in here too.” When you feel like the only way to be involved is by being
married or having kids that keeps on reinforcing the feeling that 1) “You don’t
get to be a part of this,” and 2) the goal is to get “this”. This double
impression may have partly driven what happened on Friday. So we have to
challenge ourselves on that. We must learn true love; that’s our job as
Christ’s Church.