If same-sex marriage comes to America, it will not be because Americans asked for it.
in 2013 a federal judge struck down the law that Utahns had passed to keep marriage a man-woman institution.
Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road broad that leads to destruction, and those who enter through it are many. How narrow the gate and constricted the road that leads to life. And those who find it are few.
I am the way and the truth* and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.It is Christ who is the narrow gate. Let us enter through him into the hands of God, where no torment shall touch us.
The first was the emergence of Bruce Jenner as a "woman" named Caitlyn, and the second was a "shadow council" that took place in Rome and apparently called for the victory of a theology of love over John Paul II's theology of the body.
Let me begin with Irenaeus. Toward the end of the second century, Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons, wrote a text called Adversus Haereses, and the principle heresy that he identified therein was Gnosticism. Gnosticism was, and is, a multi-headed beast, but one of its major tenets is that matter is a fallen, inferior form of being, produced by a low-level deity. The soul is trapped in matter, and the whole point of the spiritual life is to acquire the gnosis(knowledge) requisite to facilitate an escape of the soul from the body. On the gnostic interpretation, the Yahweh of the Old Testament, who foolishly pronounced the material world good, is none other than the compromised god described in gnostic cosmology, and Jesus is the prophet who came with the saving knowledge of how to rise above the material realm.
What Irenaeus intuited -- and his intuition represented one of the decisive moments in the history of the Church -- is that this point of view is directly repugnant to Biblical Christianity, which insists emphatically upon the goodness of matter. Scan through Irenaeus's voluminous writings, and you will find the word "body" over and over again. Creation, Incarnation, Resurrection, the theology of the Church, Sacraments, redemption, and the Eucharist all involve, he argued, bodiliness and materiality. For Irenaeus, redemption is decidedly not tantamount to the escape of the soul from the body; rather, it is the salvation and perfection of the body.He closes his article with:
For Biblical people, human love is never a disembodied reality. Furthermore, love -- which is an act of the will -- does not hover above the body, but rather expresses itself through the body and according to the intelligibility of the body. To set the two in opposition or to maintain that an inner act is somehow more important or comprehensive than the body is to walk the gnostic road -- which is just as dangerous a path as it was in the time of St. Irenaeus.
For the mainstream of the Catholic intellectual tradition, love is not primarily an emotion, but an act of the will. To love, Thomas Aquinas says, is to want the good of the other. Consequently, hatred is not primarily a feeling, but desiring evil for another, positively wanting what is bad for someone else. Given this, when is hatred called for? When is hatred morally permissible? The simple answer: never.
God is nothing but love, and Jesus said that we are to be perfect, as our heavenly father is perfect. This is precisely why he told us to love even our enemies, to bless even those who curse us, to pray even for those who maltreat us. Does this mean that our forebears were obliged to love Hitler and that we are obliged to love ISIS murderers? Yes. Period. Does it mean that we are to will the good of those who, we are convinced, are walking a dangerous moral path? Yes. Period. Should everyone love Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner? Absolutely, completely, unconditionally.
But here is where a crucial distinction has to be made: to criticize someone for engaging in immoral activity is not to "hate" that person. In point of fact, it is an act of love, for it is tantamount to willing good for him or her.
When they see the people in the gondola, who are clean, and those among the people who have re-entered the oil coated water to tell those who remained of the dangers they live in, the people who love the smell and feel of the olive oil become enraged.
They speak of the virtue of unity, that everyone should find joy in being coated in the oil and that those who are in the gondola are divisive and haters.
But I ask you, since those covered in the oil are going to be burned, is dividing the people so that some of them can be saved, less than the unity where all will burn eternally?
All men are called to the salvation that is in Christ, and God provides sufficient Grace for every man to be saved from the eternal fire. Will you embrace that salvation or will you degrade those who call you out of the fire?
Verse 4 (Wisdom 3:4) says:
For if to others, indeed, they seem punished, yet is their hope full of immortality;
I remember thinking that when reading this passage, it is very important to clearly enunciate the first 't' in "immortality."
So, let us repent of our immorality, that we may come in the end to immortality.
The most prominent of these were a group of men and boys who served as pages to the court of King Mwanga II. This king had initially been supportive of the missionaries, but his attitude quickly changed when he discovered how seriously his Christian pages took the moral demands of their new faith. Accustomed to getting whatever he wanted, Mwanga solicited sexual favors from several of his courtiers. When they refused, he presented them with a terrible choice: either renounce their Christian faith or die. Though they were new converts and though they were very young, the pages, to a man, refused to deny their Christianity. Joseph Mukasa Balikudembe was killed outright by the king himself, and the rest were led off on a terrible death march to the place of execution, many miles outside the capital city.
When Pope Paul VI canonized these 22 martyrs on October 18, 1964, he referred to the Anglican pages martyred for the same reason.
