In “the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” They are no longer two but one flesh. “Therefore,” Jesus says, “what God has joined together, no human being must separate.” Jesus teaches, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”
Now Christ’s Church does believe and teach that there can be situations where it is prudent and right for a person to physically or legally separate from their spouse. Perhaps there’s physical or emotional abuse in the marriage; destructive, unchecked addictions; or obstinate infidelity. And after the marriage falls apart the Church can investigate whether something essential to that marriage being a binding, sacramental bond before God was missing from the start.
It is possible for Catholic brides and grooms to fail to marry sacramentally in many ways. For instance, the couple might get invalidly married outside the Church; inside a courtroom, on a beach, or in a barn. The bride might feel forced to marry such that her consent is not free. The groom might lack the psychological or physical capacity for marriage. Or one of them might say the vows without not really meaning them. There are many ways a marriage can be sacramentally invalid and non-binding. And where the Church finds sufficient proof for this she will grant an annulment, permitting the man or woman to remarry. So as I said before, being divorced is not necessarily a sin; it does not automatically bar you from receiving Communion. However, to abandon one’s spouse without cause, or to remarry when you are not free to remarry, are sins that require repentance.
“What God has joined together, no human being must separate.” Jesus said this in response to a question about divorce, but what other things of human sexuality has God joined from the beginning which no human being should separate? God joined sexual relations to the covenant of marriage. He joined love-making to the possibility of life-making. And he joined one’s biological sex to one’s identity. God created them male and female, one man and one woman, not identical sexes—but physically and spiritually complimentary mates, and made God them man and wife in a covenant for life.
God’s first commandment in the Garden was “be fruitful and multiply,” and today we hear Jesus tell us “Let the children come to me.” His wish is to bring “many children to glory,” as our second reading says. God’s Word in the Bible celebrates having many children as a blessing, not a curse. Today’s psalm proclaims this blessing
“Your wife shall be like a fruitful vine
in the recesses of your home;
your children like olive plants around your table…
May you see your children’s children.”
Indeed, being surrounded by the love of many offspring is among the greatest blessings for the aged. But human beings separating sexuality from an openness to life distorts God’s plan and the society around us.
Contraception is not something new. It existed in ancient times. Genesis relates how a man named Onan repeatedly “wasted his seed on the ground” during intercourse to avoid conceiving children. “What he did greatly offended the Lord, and the Lord took his life…” Egyptian scrolls dating to 1850 B.C. describe other methods and the pagans practiced contraceptive techniques in the Roman Empire in the days of Christ and the Early Church. The Church Fathers, such as St. Clement of Alexandria, St. Augustine, and St. John Chrysostom condemned acts of contraception or sterilization. Even the first Protestants denounced contraception, too. Martin Luther the founder of Lutheranism, John Calvin the founder of Calvinism, and John Wesley the co-founder of Methodism all wrote against it.
All Christian groups were agreed on this less than a century ago. That is until the Anglicans in 1930 became the first Protestants to officially approve artificial contraception use for hard cases. (Thirteen years before, in 1917, the same group had declared contraception “demoralizing to character and hostile to national welfare.”) As is the way of such errors, the exception became the norm and the Protestant denominations changed their teachings. By 1961, the National Council of Churches could pronounce that “most of the Protestant churches hold contraception… to be morally right when the motives are right.” The Catholic Church, however, stood firm and stood alone against the spirit of the age.
At the end of 1930 and again in 1968, the popes wrote encyclical letters reaffirming the constant teaching of Christ’s Church about the nature, purpose, and goodness of marriage and the marital act; and repeating the consistent and ancient rejection of all directly-willed acts of contraception, sterilization, and abortion. In 1968, St. Pope Paul VI predicted in his encyclical Humanae Vitae that the widespread use of contraception would broadly lower morality, increase marital infidelity, lessen respect towards women, be coercively imposed by governments, and promote the self-harming belief that we have unlimited dominion over our bodies and human life in general.
According to its advocates, contraception was supposed to strengthen marriages, prevent unplanned pregnancies, improve women’s happiness, and reduce abortions. After decades of cheap and widespread contraceptive use, half of all pregnancies are unplanned, half of all marriages end in divorce, women report lower and lower levels of happiness throughout the decades since the 1970’s, and about one-in-five U.S. pregnancies end in abortion, with more than 60 million killed since Roe vs. Wade in 1973. When persons and societies decouple and oppose human sexuality to its life-creating purpose, many harmful errors follow. You can trace the path of one error leading to the next. We are now to the point that many people cannot even define what a woman or a man is.
I would be remiss here if I did not mention that the Church teaches that there can be holy reasons and virtuous means to avoid conceiving more children. Natural Family Planning (also known as NFP) uses signs from a woman’s body to identify the days in her cycle when she can conceive. Equipped with this knowledge, for serious reasons a couple may virtuously abstain from the marital embrace to avoid a pregnancy, while respecting God’s design and the dual meaning of the marital act.
Couples who practice NFP report growing in communication, self-control, and intimacy. They are more open to discerning and embracing God’s plan for their families and are statistically less likely to divorce. Not only is NFP completely natural, the information it tracks about a woman’s body commonly leads to the diagnosis, treatment, and cure of health disorders, from infertility to life-threatening illnesses. Unlike common chemical contraceptives, NFP does not cause increased risks for breast, liver, or cervical cancer; nausea, vomiting, stomach problems, or diarrhea; depression, mood swings, or lowered libido; and it does not cause spontaneous abortions (by preventing implantation of newly conceived children into the uterine wall).
Realize that NFP is not the Rhythm Method. The old Rhythm Method simply counted how many days had passed since the woman’s last cycle and was a moral but rather ineffective approach. Faithfully-followed NFP techniques have a 99% effectiveness rate, comparable to illicit methods of artificial contraception. If you would like to learn more about NFP, visit the Diocese of La Crosse’s website and search for “NFP”. There you can investigate NFP techniques, their science and their benefits, and register for on-line courses.
Whether or not you are married, whether or not you are past the age for children, I hope that you will recognize that in the chaotic, constantly-changing, errant stream of human history, is our stable rock for truth is Christ’s Church. The Bride of Christ, our mother the Church, calls us to follow her teachings from Christ as faithful, trusting, loyal sons and daughters. Jesus says, “Amen, I say to you, whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it.” Do not miss out on blessedness, in this life or the next.
The “ninth of Av,” also known as Tisha B’Av, is no ordinary day for observant Jews, but a day of fasting and abstaining, because ninth of Av has seen multiple calamities in Jewish history. First, during the Exodus, when the twelve spies sent by Moses returned from scouting the Land of Canaan, most of them voiced negative reports, saying there was no way The Promised Land could be conquered. The Hebrews despaired and cried and refused to proceed. As a consequence, God made his people spend 40 more years in the desert until almost all the adults of that generation had died without entering The Promised Land. The next calamity came in the days of the Prophet Jeremiah, after the founding of the Kingdom of Israel. In the sixth century B.C., the Jewish Temple built by King Solomon in Jerusalem was destroyed by the conquering Babylonians. With that disaster, the Jews were forced to leave their homeland and resettle in the East, and this Babylonian Exile lasted about seventy years until a significant number of Jews were able to return. A third catastrophe occurred in 70 A.D., when the Second Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in response to a Jewish revolt. Not one stone was left upon another, as Jesus had foretold about 40 years before it came to pass. All of these devastating catastrophes, all three of these traumatic, mournful events (the denial of The Promised Land and the destruction of the first and second Temples) are remembered as occurring over the ninth day of Av.
On my last homily I talked about the fact that faith can produce miracles. Today’s scripture readings helps us to understand how we acquire that gift of faith and participate in God’s divine partnership plan.
Nathan and Cassie’s wedding day lands upon this, the third Friday after the Feast of Pentecost, the eleventh day of June. God’s providence has arranged it that they be married on this special day – a feast day, the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, during a month especially dedicated to Jesus’ Sacred Heart. You can see depictions of the Sacred Heart inside this church. There is the statue of Jesus behind me, here in the sanctuary, and presently another statue in our devotional corner in the back. In artistic depictions, you may see Jesus’ Sacred Heart resting upon his chest, or maybe he holds it in his hand offering it to you, and sometimes his heart is depicted by all itself. In every depiction it is a human heart, crowned with thorns, pierced on the side, with flames and a cross emerging from the top. What is the meaning of these things? What do they reveal about Jesus? And what do they mean for Nathan and Cassie and us?
As much as a baby receives from his or her mother, the Son of God receives still more so from his Father. How does God the Father give life to his Son? The Son is eternally begotten of the Father; “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.” The Father gives his whole being to the Son, and his Son, so loved, receives everything with joy. In today’s Gospel, Jesus says, “As the Father loves me, so I also love you.” How does God love you and me like the Father loves the Son?
Our Gospel from John has Jesus telling his disciples, telling us, how we can survive and be happy not only in this life but gain for us everlasting life if we but realize our dependence for success and life depends on our acceptance of the fact that we cannot succeed without help from the “Vine,” without Jesus. In preparing for this homily, I went to Formed to get their take on today’s gospel. The minister who reflected upon the Gospel said that we need “HABITS” to allow us to produce fruits from the vine of God, who is Jesus, in order to deal with the challenges that we will face if we wish to be followers of Christ and find peace and experience a successful life as we journey to the Father’s house.
Parishable Items 