Thoughts on being Catholic

By Paul Rasavage

In reading this letter, it is becoming more apparent by the minute how much force — social, political, legal, economic and especially spiritual, is being levied by powers and principalities, seen and unseen, against the Catholic Church.

These forces reveal and describe themselves in this letter to Cardinal O'Malley of Boston — http://www.rcfm.org/LettertoRCBishops.htm.

Here we have a group of people who, on the one hand, claim to be faithful servants and children of God, while on the other, openly attack an institution for exercising its free rights to exist and to function within the boundaries of democratic society.

The last I knew, we still had the right to vote in this country.

The Catholic Church, by availing itself of the mechanisms of democracy inherent within our political system, is promulgating and championing initiatives to protect the sanctity of the institution of marriage as created by God — Nothing more, but certainly nothing less.

For us as Catholics, marriage is a supernatural relationship — a sacramental institution created and established by God to demonstrate His love for us, His children.

The marriage bond is a Covenant.

It is through the marriage covenant that love is manifested in the world, it is the environment in which the love between man and woman becomes incarnate — children born into the world are the fruit of this love.

Children are the God-given consequence of the covenant of marriage.

Scripture says, "You will know them by their fruits."

What fruit can come from any relationship between two men or between two women?

"Consequently, sexuality, by means of which man and woman give themselves to one another through the acts which are proper and exclusive to spouses, is by no means something purely biological, but concerns the innermost being of the human person as such. It is realized in a truly human way only if it is an integral part of the love by which a man and a woman commit themselves totally to one another until death. The total physical self-giving would be a lie if it were not the sign and fruit of a total personal self-giving, in which the whole person, including the temporal dimension, is present: if the person were to withhold something or reserve the possibility of deciding otherwise in the future, by this very fact he or she would not be giving totally.

This totality which is required by conjugal love also corresponds to the demands of responsible fertility. This fertility is directed to the generation of a human being, and so by its nature it surpasses the purely biological order and involves a whole series of personal values. For the harmonious growth of these values a persevering and unified contribution by both parents is necessary.

The only place in which this self-giving in its whole truth is made possible is marriage, the covenant of conjugal love freely and consciously chosen, whereby man and woman accept the intimate community of life and love willed by God Himself which only in this light manifests its true meaning. The institution of marriage is not an undue interference by society or authority, nor the extrinsic imposition of a form. Rather it is an interior requirement of the covenant of conjugal love which is publicly affirmed as unique and exclusive, in order to live in complete fidelity to the plan of God, the Creator. A person's freedom, far from being restricted by this fidelity, is secured against every form of subjectivism or relativism and is made a sharer in creative Wisdom."

— from Pope John Paul II's Apostolic Exhortation "Familiaris Consortio,"

On the Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World (1981)

Marriage, then, isn't merely about the trivial — about sexual preference, materiality, a forum for contention and struggle for power between the sexes, nor is it a worldly, legalistic platform to be exploited for rationalizing and legitimizing each and every form of social and moral dysfunction.

For those people who, for themselves, reduce the holy institution of marriage to these banal and shallow elements, then they have no doubt lost all sight of their own intrinsic supernatural value and, indeed, their own spirituality altogether as a consequence.

In other words, they have lost their relationship with God.

The sacred and supernatural entity created by God that we call Marriage and Family, is not the same as a law firm or business enterprise, so we would all do well not confuse the one with the other. These disparate entities are on two completely different and often conflicting, contradictory and mutually exclusive spiritual and temporal planes.

Because the Marriage bond is sacred, and the family itself — Father, Mother, Children — are a tacit reflection and manifest extension of the Holy Trinity in the world, man and woman, as Sacred Scripture attests, must truly and indeed be ready, willing and able to become one in all things.

God did not make us hermaphrodites.

Man and woman are incomplete in and of themselves by design — God's design.

Man and woman are different in and of themselves by design — God's design.

Man and woman — we would all do well not to confuse the one with the other.

Many seem to have lost sight of the very important fact that God made men and women to compliment and complete each other — to combine the two together to make a single whole that is greater than the sum of the two parts.

For the sake of mere culture, on the other hand, if we start presenting women as "husbands" to brides and men as "wives" to grooms, then where does that take us?

It takes us where the devil wants us to go — women marrying women, men marrying men — in this context marriage becoming a sick and twisted unholy caricature of its original self, meant solely to entice us to embrace acts, once considered decadent and perverse, that now find themselves being more and more socially acceptable, and even lawful, within the context of our hedonistic culture.

Sacred Scripture, along with the Catholic Church's doctrine and theology are all perfectly sound and harmonious — until one begins to substitute genders, one for the other, where they neither fit nor belong. Because in so doing, such "gender swapping" serves only to destroy God's intended complimentarity along with His divine concepts of unity and completeness, and most especially, His covenant.

In short, the singular objective of homosexuality is to destroy the marriage covenant that exists between husband and wife, parents and children, between family and society, and ultimately, between society and God.

By embracing homosexuality, regardless of contrived rationale, feigned excuse or alleged justification, those groups and organizations opposed to Catholic teaching have reached the point where the very fabric that binds them together begins to come apart.

Unfortunately, this is where our poor Anglican and Episcopal brethren now find themselves.

My heart and prayers go out to them, particularly to those who are working so hard to be faithful to Christ and His Word, watching helplessly as their Anglican Communion self-destructs before their very eyes.

"At a moment of history in which the family is the object of numerous forces that seek to destroy it or in some way to deform it, and aware that the well-being of society and her own good are intimately tied to the good of the family, the Church perceives in a more urgent and compelling way her mission of proclaiming to all people the plan of God for marriage and the family, ensuring their full vitality and human and Christian development, and thus contributing to the renewal of society and of the People of God. "
— "Familiaris Consortio"

For myself, I pray that by the grace of God, our One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church continues to work tirelessly to promote, champion and defend each and every means and opportunity for demonstrating holiness in our secular and barren world.

As Christians, we must, each and every one of us, strive to be the light of Christ and the salt of the earth — not only in our own lives, but within our families and within society as a whole.

With regard to the future for us as Catholics, the price to pay for witnessing to God will undoubtedly be very high, especially as the opposition continues to gain social, legal, economic and legislative momentum and prominence.

Their efforts to change the ways set before us by God, serve not to keep us on the path leading to all truth, oneness and completion in Christ, as He promised, but carry us headlong into the darkness of chaos, confusion, contention and contradiction.

This Catholic, for one, cannot and will not journey there.

© Paul Rasavage