Mammon from Hell

I wonder if we should change one of the traditional Sunday Advent readings to Matthew 6:19-21, 24.

Lay not up to yourselves treasures on earth: where the rust, and moth consume, and where thieves break through and steal. But lay up to yourselves treasures in heaven: where neither the rust nor moth doth consume, and where thieves do not break through, nor steal. For where thy treasure is, there is thy heart also. No man can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one, and love the other: or he will sustain the one, and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.

Traditionally in the western Church, the Christmas season was 12 days (hence the song) from Christmas Day (December 25) to the Epiphany of the Lord (January 6).  This is still more or less true on the Church calendar itself. In the U.S., however, and perhaps some other countries, the Epiphany is moved to the nearest Sunday, so Christmas lasts 9 to 14 days.

Even without this unfortunate change, there is no denying that the Church's Christmas season is radically different from the secular Christmas season, which begins in November ("officially" on Thanksgiving) and lasts until the evening of December 25 when the last Christmas special airs on TV.

This change came about primarily from the commercialization of Christmas.  As I child, I remember adults at church bemoaning how our society has forgotten the "true meaning of Christmas."  Now I hear people complain about store clerks wishing "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" as if they are committing an act of blasphemy.  Perhaps they are, but against God or mammon?

Mammon is a word representing our greed and material desires. There is nothing wrong with gift giving at Christmas and material possessions in general (provided they are at the service of the good), but we must ask ourselves: if at Thanksgiving we are more focused on the Black Friday sales than giving thanks to God; if our children feel entitled to a certain toy, regardless of whether it is appropriate and good for them or if you can afford it; and if a merry Christmas revolves around them getting that toy; and if you are willing to inconveniece yourself and wait in line at a store for hours for the best deal but can't find the time to attend Mass during Advent, Christmas, or New Years; ask yourself: whom do you truly serve, God or mammon?

Meaning of "Anti-Catholic"

Go to any given Catholic apologetics website and you'll find references to or dialogues with people or organizations labelled "anti-Catholic."

The term can mean two things: first, someone who is actively opposed to the teaching of the Church, and second, someone who knowingly or negligently distorts or misrepresents Church teaching or history.  I would include in the latter group people who openly mock the Church in mean spirited humor.

In the first case, an example is Penn Jillette, at least with respect to this video. Jillette is an outspoken atheist who disagrees with the Catholic Church's teachings on many things and is therefore actively opposed to them, but he also defends the Church when appropriate and does not misrepresent her views.  On the other hand, this article by Larry Doyle of the Huffington Post, as well as fundamentalists like Jack Chick and the group Mission to Catholics International, are definitely of the second type.

I prefer to use the term "anti-Catholic" only for the second group of people.  It is fair enough for someone to have different views and to promote their own.  The intellectual and moral problem arises when someone feels it is necessary to be dishonest about someone else's beliefs in order to promote their own.  (This standard applies to Catholics as well, of course.)

Interracial marriage, same-sex "marriage", and the Catholic Church

Many advocates of redefining marriage to include same-sex couples compare belief in natural (or traditional) marriage to anti-miscegenation laws (laws forbidding marriage between interracial couples).   Although I believe those making the argument believe the laws are on similar footing, the truth is, they are not.  In other words, the reasons for the anti-miscegenation laws are not at all the reasons for Proposition 8 and similar laws.  The underlying assumption against the argument is that there is a group of people who don't like some other group of people (e.g. gays or blacks), and want to deny those people the right to love whom they wish.  As I explain below, this is far from the truth.

Consider this: the Catholic Church opposes redefining marriage, and it also opposed anti-miscegenation laws, and essentially for the same reasons, but the opponents of interracial marriage are not necessarily the same supporters of natural marriage today.

In the 19th century and into the early 20th century, the philosophy of eugenics became very popular among many secularists (and, to be fair, many Christians as well).  It was the ideology that led to the holocaust, and was popular among everyone from the KKK to Margaret Sanger (foundress of Planned Parenthood).  In the United States, this took the form in the belief that if a white person has a single drop of non-white (especially black) blood, the white bloodline becomes impure.

Keep in mind, too, that there was a great stigma against having children outside of wedlock.  This stigma is virtually non-existent today.  Thus marriage was seen, properly I might add, as being the vehicle for which children are conceived and born.  If an interracial couple were to get married, especially a white person to a non-white person, this would threaten the bloodline of white people and ultimately the white race as a whole.

In laws forbidding interracial marriage ,the definition of marriage (a union between a man and a woman designed to produce children and raise a family) was never changed. Rather, certain men and women were forbidden from marrying each other, because of the philosophy of eugenics.

What about same-sex couples?  The effort to allow same-sex couples to marry necessarily involves a redefinition of marriage, so that children become impossible.  Adoption does not count into this formula, nor does barrenness.  Barrenness is a disorder that can often be remedied (and is often discovered after marriage) but there is no remedy that can naturally produce children in same-sex couples.

Rather, homosexuality is more comparable to impotency between opposite-sex couples.  In the Catholic Church, if either partner is unable to perform the sexual act in order to consummate the marriage, that marriage is not valid.  In other words, sexual impotency at the time of marriage is a barrier to a valid marriage, because the conception of children is impossible.  Likewise, a couple who enters into marriage intending not to have children, ever, do not enter into a valid marriage.  (Are you beginning to see the consistency in reasoning here?  The key is children: is it possible to naturally conceive children, or at least engage in the sexual act that would allow one to be open to children, without any unnatural barriers?)

In other words, the Catholic Church opposed anti-miscegenation laws because they prevented worthy men and women marrying each other on the basis of the wicked philosophy of eugenics, but it opposes same-sex "marriage" because it redefines marriage in a way that excludes children from the sexual union.  In both cases, the meaning of marriage is attacked by worldly philosophies that will pass from one age to the next.

Catholic Church and Interracial Marriage

What was the first court ruling that said laws banning interracial marriage (miscegenation) were unconstitutional?  If you said Loving v. Virginia, you're wrong.  It was Perez v. Sharp in 1948.  This case was not just a case of personal freedom, but religious freedom.  The case was heard by the Supreme Court of California, which held that the anti-miscegenation laws of the state violated the Federal Constitution.  

Andrea Perez, a Mexican-American legally classified as "white", wished to marry Sylvester Davis, a "negro," in the Catholic Church.  The Church held no objection to their marriage, as they were well within their canonical rights to marry one another. Justice Edmonds, in his concurring opinion, held that their religious rights were violated since the Church was willing to marry them.  In effect, the state was preventing them from receiving the sacrament they had every right to receive.

His comments (citations deleted):

I agree with the conclusion that marriage is "something more than a civil contract subject to regulation by the state; it is a fundamental right of free men." Moreover, it is grounded in the fundamental principles of Christianity.

 And later:

Reasonable classification, therefore, is not the test to be applied to a statute which interferes with one of the fundamental liberties which are protected by the First Amendment. The question is whether there is any "clear and present danger" justifying such legislation, and the burden of upholding the enactment is upon him who asserts that the acts which are denounced do not infringe the freedom of the individual. In the present case, the respondent does not claim that there is any clear and present danger justifying the restrictions imposed by sections 60 and 69 of the Civil Code. In 18 states, including New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania, where about 10 per cent of the Negroes of the United States reside, there are no such limitations. The population of California, to a large extent, is made up of people who have come to it from other sections of the country, and if there are undesirable consequences of interracial marriages, the challenged legislation is an ineffective means of meeting the problem

.

The basis for opposing interracial marriage was eugenics, not protection of natural marriage.  Theories of eugenics were condemned by Pope Pius XI in his encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge (written in German rather than Latin, directly in condemnation of what was happening in Germany under Hitler).

He says (emphasis added):

8. Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community - however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things - whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.

And continuing...

17. The peak of the revelation as reached in the Gospel of Christ is final and permanent. It knows no retouches by human hand; it admits no substitutes or arbitrary alternatives such as certain leaders pretend to draw from the so-called myth of race and blood. Since Christ, the Lord's Anointed, finished the task of Redemption, and by breaking up the reign of sin deserved for us the grace of being the children God, since that day no other name under heaven has been given to men, whereby we must be saved (Acts iv. 12). No man, were every science, power and worldly strength incarnated in him, can lay any other foundation but that which is laid: which is Christ Jesus (1 Cor. iii 11). Should any man dare, in sacrilegious disregard of the essential differences between God and His creature, between the God-man and the children of man, to place a mortal, were he the greatest of all times, by the side of, or over, or against, Christ, he would deserve to be called prophet of nothingness, to whom the terrifying words of Scripture would be applicable: "He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh at them" (Psalms ii. 3).

18. Faith in Christ cannot maintain itself pure and unalloyed without the support of faith in the Church, "the pillar and ground of the truth" (1 Tim. iii. 15); for Christ Himself, God eternally blessed, raised this pillar of the Faith. His command to hear the Church (Matt. xviii. 15), to welcome in the words and commands of the Church His own words and His own commands (Luke x. 16), is addressed to all men, of all times and of all countries. The Church founded by the Redeemer is one, the same for all races and all nations. Beneath her dome, as beneath the vault of heaven, there is but one country for all nations and tongues; there is room for the development of every quality, advantage, task and vocation which God the Creator and Savior has allotted to individuals as well as to ethnical communities. The Church's maternal heart is big enough to see in the God-appointed development of individual characteristics and gifts, more than a mere danger of divergency. She rejoices at the spiritual superiorities among individuals and nations. In their successes she sees with maternal joy and pride fruits of education and progress, which she can only bless and encourage, whenever she can conscientiously do so. But she also knows that to this freedom limits have been set by the majesty of the divine command, which founded that Church one and indivisible. Whoever tampers with that unity and that indivisibility wrenches from the Spouse of Christ one of the diadems with which God Himself crowned her; he subjects a divine structure, which stands on eternal foundations, to criticism and transformation by architects whom the Father of Heaven never authorized to interfere.

Pius XI says that all races are equal before God.  Christ, a Jew, came to save all, Jew and Gentile.  We must never raise our racial, cultural, or political identity above God, lest we commit a form of idolatry.  It was in this spirit that Miss Perez and Mr. Davis proceeded, knowing that laws banning their marriage are never just.  Later in 1967, eleven bishops in states that still had these laws joined together in an amicus curiae brief in the case that ultimately eliminated anti-miscegenation laws, Loving v. Virginia.

So if you're married to a person not of your race, thank the Catholic Church!

The slow fade.

One of the greatest errors non-believers (and many believers) have fallen into is the belief that sinful actions are those things that we naturally want, and are therefore good for us, but an oppressive church seeks to restrict solely for the sake of maintaining power and control.

So, the thinking goes...

• ...fathers and mothers do not deserve respect in themselves, because respect must be earned, not given freely.
• ...children are a choice, not a gift.
• ...opposition to contraception and abortion is an invitation to poverty.
• ...opposition to homosexuality is an opposition to love.
• ...opposition to adultery, pornography, and other forms of sexual perversion opposes our natural, animal desire for sex.
• ...opposition to stealing presupposes that we have a right to private property, which we don't.
• ...opposition to stealing is opposition to the first lesson we learned as a kid, to share what we have.
• ...opposition to stealing keeps hungry people in poverty under penalty of sin.
• ...opposition to lying is unreasonable.
• ...opposition to lying would have gotten Jews arrested during the Holocaust.
• etc. &c et cetera.

Holding to this belief is like standing on your head and insisting that gravity forces things upward.  The natural order of a righteous life is what leads to happiness.  Sin is the perversion of that order and deceives us into thinking that the fleeting biological moments of pleasure are equal to the spiritual and biological happiness that is the result of a virtuous life.

Consider sexual immorality.  I hold that this is truly the central sin of our age for other sins like lying, stealing, and murder break off of it like spokes on a wheel.  One need only watch an episode of the daytime soaps to see this.  Sin is the cause of much of our plagues that cause us tremendous suffering.  A couple that waits until marriage to engage in intercourse, are both virgins when married, and never commit adultery will not contract AIDS or any other STD unless some other sin, like rape, enters the picture.

The solutions we propose are mind-numbingly absurd.  Rather than manage our passions like rational creatures, we find work-arounds to hopefully not contract disease.  Billboards, doctors, and pundits tell us that we can't trust our lovers, and that we must use condoms lest they give us a disease.  It always amuses me to see people who panic if a piece of food falls on their dinner table, but have no qualms about swapping bodily fluid with someone who may have a deadly or painful illness that could be passed onto them.

Consider pornography.  The internet and cable TV have brought pornography into nearly every home.  It is being consumed on a nightly basis for often hours at a time.  There are often secret rituals that involve the use of pornography.  One spouse will find a way to keep the other from finding out about the pornography.  It is a standard feature in web browsers now to have private browsing that doesn't save the history or cookies, lest you forget to clear it all.  Lying.  Deception.  Barriers.  And we wonder why marriages fail.

Alcohol is the second most abused drug in America.  Pornography is the first.  How well would our society function if every household had a never ending supply of free alcohol in it?  Millions more would become alcoholics.  Hangovers would become our normal mode of operation, until we are perpetually curing ourselves with the hair-of-the-dog.  Yet this is exactly what we have done to ourselves with pornography.

Here's a comment on the above video: 

S. Craig

I am sitting here alone in an apartment, now separated from my wife and 3 children after 25 years of marriage. It began by walking away from the Lord....and the slow fade began. I am working on myself, my relationship with God and praying that his will would be done here. I am scared, but need to "trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make your path straight" Proverbs 3, 5-6 Please pray for us all. Thanks

There are millions more just like S. Craig.  But many tell us that the walk away from the Lord is the way of enlightenment.  If enlightenment means not being able to trust people, having relationships fall apart, contracting diseases, and being addicts, I will take the foolishness of happiness any day.

Why we need Sacred Art more than ever

Since the Second Vatican Council, much debate has centered around the liturgy, and much less on the loss of art in our churches.  Perhaps this is because the people who dismantled our liturgy are the same ones who stole our art and buried it underneath the new parking lot.  I wish to make the case for bringing this art back.  We need it now more than ever.

We live in an age that is increasingly visual.  The average American over the age of 2 watches about 37-40 hours of TV a week.  Over 5 hours a day.  We spend as much time at work as we do in front of the TV.  On our way to and from work, we are bombarded with visual ads on huge billboards, in subways, on sides of buses, on the backs of other cars, and just about everywhere else we can imagine.  At work and at home we spend even more hours at the computer, often while watching TV.

When we consider both the type of images -violent, sexual or pornographic images, and images designed explicitly for the purpose of manipulating our decisions, such as to buy something- and the sheer number of these images that we see, it is more important in this age than ever that we readjust our eyes to that which is holy.

Pornography is rampant in our society.  More and more people are accepting it as a normal form of entertainment.  In Houston (where I live), it is nearly impossible to drive around the city without seeing ads for sex shops, or the sex shops themselves.  Strip clubs abound, and visiting them is seen as a right-of-passage for young men and bachelors about to tie the knot (there are very few worse ways to set a marriage off on the wrong course from the get-go).

As more and more lay Catholics and clergy accept pornography as something normal, it is clear that pornography is a spiritual HIV, attacking those white blood cells, faithful Christians, in order to work its evil so that more women and children are abused, more marriages fall apart, and more men and women become addicted to sex and lose their jobs over pornography addictions.

Getting pornography out of our personal lives is often not an easy task.  Addicts will tell you that even after months or years of not viewing pornography, many images still live on in the mind.  I first became exposed to pornography in the 7th grade on the internet, and I can still recall very vivid details of some of the first pictures I saw.

I don't think we need to start taking Matthew 18:9 hyper-literally and gouge out our eyes.  The first step in removing pornography from your own home, besides throwing out any videos & magazines and deleting all your bookmarks, is to place at least one image of the Blessed Virgin in your home, preferably near wherever it is you normally look at pornography (computer, TV, etc.)  As a Church we cannot force people to such things, but we can return Sacred Art to our churches, thereby gradually cleaning the mind of filth and replacing it with the sublime.

Today's semi-iconoclasts tell us that we shouldn't have too much art in our churches. "Let us stick with a statue or two, maybe a modern painting, and some felt banners.  Oh, and if there must be a crucifix, let's at least make it a "resurecifix."  Too much art makes the church look rich and alienates the poor."  Beneath this assertion is a most pernicious presupposition, namely, that art is only for the rich.  It doesn't belong to the poor, the semi-iconoclasts assume, but to museums where you have to pay for admission and where there are exclusive parties for those wealthy aristocrats whose names are inscribed upon the walls of the museum and under the paintings prefixed by the words, "From the private collection of".

Art is not only for the wealthy.  It is for the poor and the middle class.  It is for all humanity, and the Church makes it accessible and free to all.  This is most especially true of Sacred Art.  It not only glorifies God (as is its primary purpose), but it raises the soul to God in a beautiful expression of worship and humility.  Sacred art instructs the ignorant, especially the illiterate, in the Bible, the life of Jesus, and the lives of the Saints.  We teach our children with pictures before we teach them with words.  The first books we give to a child are picture books, with little or no words.

Furthermore, Sacred Art affirms the worth of the human soul.  The souls of plants, animals, and other biological life forms are mortal.  When the body dies, the soul perishes with it.  Although animals vary greatly in intelligence, they do not make art.  Ants and termites make complex mounds, spiders weave beautiful webs.  But these are an extension of the brush of the Divine Artist, they are not works of art from the animals themselves.  Unlike humans, ants, termites, and spiders are not co-creators with God.  Only humans paint paintings, sculpt sculptures, and write books that express the joys and sufferings of an immortal soul.

Art is for everyone, rich or poor, man or woman, young or old, believer or unbeliever, sinner or saint.  It glorifies God, raises our souls to God, instructs our minds, and purifies our hearts.  Let us return Sacred Art to our churches, so as to begin a new Catholic renaissance, ecclesiae et orbi!

Mary the Morning Star

 Q: Why do Catholics call Mary the “Morning Star”? There are only two people in the Bible given this name: Jesus, the true Morning Star, and Satan, the false “morning star.”

A: Jesus and Mary are both correctly called the Morning Star, but in difference senses. Mary is called so only in relation to Christ, who is described in this theology as the dawn. The morning star precedes the dawn and is a harbinger of it. It is a symbol of hope that morning is coming. Thus Mary is the Morning Star in that by accepting, in faith, that these things “shall be accomplished that were spoken to thee by the Lord” (Luke 1:35), she came before Christ as a herald, being the first bearer of the Good News both to Elizabeth and to us. Christ, however, is the Morning Star in that He is His own prophet, telling us of His glorious second coming. He Himself is the sign that death was defeated by His death and resurrection, that sin will be wiped from the world, and that every tear shall be dried (cf. Rev. 22:16).