Deacon Keith Fournier Will we dedicate June to the Sacred Heart of Jesus or to rejecting God’s loving plan for marriage?

Jun 2, 2016

The month of June is traditionally dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the Catholic Church. On the Friday after the Feast of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ we even celebrate a Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The Church, as mother and teacher, invites the faithful to spend the whole month reflecting on what it means to live our lives in such a way that we reveal the Loving Heart of a Merciful God to the whole world. 

The Catholic Church marks time by the great events of the life of Jesus Christ and the Christian Faith. In so doing, she invites Christians to enter more fully into the mysteries of that faith and actually live differently. She also keeps the truths of the faith ever present before a world which needs to be set free from sin and death. The early Christians referred to the Church as the world reconciled. They believed that the Church is meant to become the home of the whole human race. She is a seed of the coming Kingdom, making it present even now. Do we believe this?

The Catholic Catechism affirms: "To reunite all his children, scattered and led astray by sin, the Father willed to call the whole of humanity together into his Son's Church. The Church is the place where humanity must rediscover its unity and salvation. The Church is "the world reconciled." She is that bark which "in the full sail of the Lord's cross, by the breath of the Holy Spirit, navigates safely in this world." According to another image dear to the Church Fathers, she is prefigured by Noah's ark, which alone saves from the flood."(CCC#845)

Nations also mark time. In their special days and months, they send important signals to their citizens and to the community of Nations. For example, we recently celebrated "Memorial Day" in the United States of America by honoring those who gave their lives to protect our freedoms. In so doing, we affirmed values which join us together. The various proclamations of our Presidents setting months apart speak to what we as a Nation believe and value. The question is what our commemoration says about who we are and who we are becoming.

By way of another Presidential Proclamation, President Barack Obama has once again declared the Month of June to be "Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual and Transgender Pride Month".  The proclamation makes a point of hailing theObergefell v Hodges decision of 2015 wherein 5 unelected Justices decided they could redefine marriage, with no basis in the Natural Law, common sense, human history or legal precedent. In his proclamation this year, the President refers to "Last year's landmark Supreme Court decision guaranteeing marriage equality in all 50 States" as an "historic victory."

No-one should ever deny that all human beings have fundamental human rights and human dignity because they are human beings. However, that is not what this proclamation or the proclamations of the last several years from this Administration dedicating June as "LGBT Month" are really about. There is an accelerating effort to make homosexual and lesbian relationships the moral and legal equivalent of true marriage by Governmental coercion and use the Police Power of the State to enforce such a restructuring on the rest of civil society.

When sexual behavior between two men or two women is viewed as the foundation of a newly minted "right" to marry - and those who oppose this counterfeit equivalency movement are characterized as being against the "freedom" to marry and "equal rights" -  the revolutionary plan is exposed. The goal is obvious and its implications are to promote and unleash nothing less than a cultural revolution.

To defend marriage is NOT to discriminate against any person, including those who define themselves as homosexual or lesbian or even "transgender". To limit marriage to heterosexual couples is not discriminatory now, nor has it ever been. Homosexual couples cannot bring into existence what marriage intends by its very definition. To "confer" the benefits that have been conferred in the past only to stable married couples and families to homosexual paramours is bad public policy and will seriously injure the common good.

Marriage between one man and one woman, intended for life and open to the bearing and rearing of children is the fundamental building block of society. The family is the first cell of society. It is a relationship defined by nature itself, revealed and affirmed by the natural law that binds all men and women. Civil institutions do not create marriage nor can they create a "right" to marry for those who are incapable of marriage.

The institutions of a truly just government should defend marriage against those who would undermine it - not redefine it out of existence. Civil Government has long regulated marriage for the common good. For example, the ban on polygamy and age requirements were enforced in order to ensure that there was a mature decision at the basis of the Marriage contract.

The truth about the nature and ends of marriage is not simply a "religious" construct.  The Natural Law reveals - and the cross cultural history of civilization affirms - marriage is solely between a man and a woman, open to children and intended for life. Marriage is the foundation for the family which is the privileged place for the formation of virtue and character in children, our future citizens. The family is the first society, first economy, first school, first civilizing and mediating institution and first government.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Catholic Church wrote these important words in 2003, "The Church's teaching on marriage and on the complementarity of the sexes reiterates a truth that is evident to right reason and recognized as such by all the major cultures of the world. Marriage is not just any relationship between human beings. It was established by the Creator with its own nature, essential properties and purpose.

"No ideology can erase from the human spirit the certainty that marriage exists solely between a man and a woman, who by mutual personal gift, proper and exclusive to themselves, tend toward the communion of their persons. In this way, they mutually perfect each other, in order to cooperate with God in the procreation and upbringing of new human lives."

On May 31, 1992 in Rome, Pope St. John Paul II canonized the Jesuit Priest Saint Claude de la Colombiere, the Spiritual Director of Saint Margaret Mary of Alocoque. She was the religious sister to whom the Lord gave a special revelation of His Sacred Heart, filled with redemptive and merciful love for the world. The priest shared Margaret Mary's devotion to the Heart of Jesus and helped to spread that devotion. This occurred at a critical time when the culture of Europe was steeped in darkness - and the Church staggered from corruption within - a time very much like our own.

At the Mass of canonization, the late Pope proclaimed: "For evangelization today, the Heart of Christ must be recognized as the heart of the Church: It is He who calls us to conversion, to reconciliation. It is He who leads pure hearts and those hungering for justice along the way of the Beatitudes. It is He who achieves the warm communion of the members of the one Body. It is He who enables us to adhere to the Good News and to accept the promise of eternal life. It is He who sends us out on mission. The heart-to-heart with Jesus broadens the human heart on a global scale."

The heart is the center of a person, the place from which he/she makes the choices which will affect the world within them and around them. The Catholic Catechism summarizes this truth in these words," The heart is the seat of moral personality." (CCC# 2517) Devotion to the Heart of Jesus reminds us that it is in the Sacred Humanity of Jesus that we find the pattern for becoming fully human ourselves. In His Incarnation, saving life, death and Resurrection, we receive both the pattern - and the means - to become more like Him. 

The leaders of the Second Vatican Council in their beautifully written Pastoral Constitution on the Mission of the Church in the Modern World wrote, "The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him Who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear."  (GS #22)

Two years before he became Pope, Karol Cardinal Wotyla (Pope St John Paul II) spoke to the Catholic Bishops of the United States. His frank observation was republished in the Wall Street Journal on November 9, 1978: 

"We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has gone through. I do not think that wide circles of the American society or wide circles of the Christian community realize this fully. We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, of the Gospel and the anti-Gospel. This confrontation lies within the plans of divine providence. It is a trial which the whole Church must take up."

We are living under what Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI called a "Dictatorship of Relativism" Relativism denies the existence of any objective truths which can be known through the exercise of reason and should govern our life together as a society. Divorced from norms to guide the exercise of human choice and govern our behavior, we are rapidly declining as a culture.

When there is nothing objectively true which can be known by all and form the basis of our common life then there is no basis for authentic freedom. Instead, we teeter on the brink of anarchy. Marriage is the newest target in the advance of the tyranny of the social and cultural engineers. 

In his apostolic exhortation on the Eucharist, the Sacrament of Charity, Pope Emeritus Benedict summarized the duty of Catholics when confronted with an assault on authentic marriage:  "Marriage and the family are institutions that must be promoted and defended from every possible misrepresentation of their true nature, since whatever is injurious to them is injurious to society itself."

We are living in a new missionary age. These very different visions of the human person, human love and the dignity of human sexuality, human flourishing, marriage and the family - and the society founded upon them - are contending for the heart, soul and future of the West. One will lead to true human progress, flourishing and freedom, the other to continuing  human degradation, moral and cultural collapse.

Let us choose to spend the month of June in Prayer to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, lifting up our Nation, indeed the whole world, to the One in whom we place all of our trust. He will not disappoint; His Heart still beats with Mercy and Love for the world.  "Sacred Heart of Jesus, We Place our Trust in Thee."

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Image: Lawrence OP via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

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