Homily for the 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time

For daily readings, see http://www.usccb.org/nab/100508.shtml

Our Archbishop, Archbishop Naumann, and the bishop of Kansas City/St. Joseph, MO, Bishop Robert Finn, have issued a joint pastoral letter that is available in your bulletin on this weekend when parishes across the country celebrate Respect Life weekend. The pastoral letter is entitled Our Moral Responsibility as Catholic Citizens http://www.archkck.org/images/pdf/election.pdf and concerns our responsibliity as Catholics to sensitize our consciences to all intrinsic moral evils when we deliberate how to vote. Most grave of these intrinsic moral evils that can never be justified is the evil of abortion. Since 1973 there have been 45 million abortions in our country, a number so large that frankly, it is nearly impossible to properly sensitize ourselves to this evil as our bishops ask us to. Pope Benedict in commenting upon both abortion and euthanasia said that a Catholic would be guilty of formal material cooperation in evil, and so unworthy to present himself for Holy Communion, if he were to deliberately vote for a candidate precisely because of the candidate's permissive stand on abortion and/or euthanasia. Most of us are familiar with the efforts of bishops to get politicians who profess to be Catholic to understand the grave responsibility we all have to avoid formal material cooperation in evil, and to perhaps exempt themselves from Holy Communion if they disagree with Catholic teaching. The Church from the beginning of the United States, long before there was an IRS code prohibiting tax-exempt Churches from endorsing political parties or candidates, has always embraced the proper separation of Church and state, so that She Herself could remain the sign and the safeguard of the transcendental dimension of the human person (Gaudium et Spes, 76). Our Church has never and will never tell anyone who to vote for or align Herself with any particular political party. Yet in order to safeguard the spiritual nature of the human person, it has always been necessary for the Church to form the consciences of her members and of society, so that the kingdom of God could be built and may flourish within the confines of natural and divine law. Some people say the Church is being political and is outstepping Her bounds. They are wrong. The Church must preserve Her right and joyful duty to speak out on moral issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, embryonic stem-cell research, the repression of religious liberty and racial discrimination. Otherwise She is forfeiting Her freedom to form consciences, something the Church cannot and will not afford to do.

Regarding the issues surrounding the sacredness of human life, it is clear to me at least that the Church's discernment of grave moral evil is grounded sufficiently within the natural law open to human reason. There has been reference by Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and others to a supposed theological inconsistency within the Church regarding when an embryo receives his soul, and thus when an embryo becomes a person worthy of rights. Based on old biological knowledge, there has been theological discussion regarding the time of ensoulment, which the Church now believes is concurrent with the time of conception. However, never in the Church's history has there been any moral confusion whatsoever about the morality of abortion. Never. Such rhetoric by Catholic politicians has tried once again to reduce the issue of abortion to a private religious issue when abortion is easily shown to be wrong by the light of human reason. There is no logical reason to treat fertility as a disease, as contraceptives do. There is no logical reason to justify performing invasive destructive surgery on a mother who is not made sick by any medical standard whatsoever by her pregnancy, or to call a human embryo in the exact same stage of development a 'baby' when it is desired by the parents and 'tissue' when it is not. All of these things are illogical in the light of reason. They go against the standard medical practice of trying to heal a person. All scientists can agree clearly that from the first moment of conception, a new baby needs only the things that you and I need to survive, a proper nourishing environment. The difference between me and an embryo then, is very, very small, as one would expect since I would not be here today if my right to life as an embryo had been discarded by my mother in 1974 as it was by Roe v. Wade in 1973. In gratitude for my life, conceived 5 months after the Roe v. Wade decision, I will make an effort to go to Washington D.C. for the March for Life every year until the decision is overturned, and every year afterward in thanksgiving for the restoration of the right to life of every child in our country.

What about the war in Iraq, you might say? Is that an intrinsic moral evil? Well, the Church has spoken consistently about the war, most often against it, and has advised throughout Her history that war is very difficult to justify, and oftentimes signals a loss of hope and a failure to use the best human resources available in service of peace. That being said, there are conditions within the just war doctrine of the Church that can make a war legitimate for the protection of the innocent, just as captial punishment can theoretically be justified if it is necessary for the protection of the innocent. Both war and capital punishment, however, should always be used as a last resort, as our Church has clearly stated, but neither of these issues mimics the deliberate taking of an innocent human life, which always makes abortion intrinsically evil and never justifiable. If you are a person who is strongly against the war in Iraq, I challenge you to become even more familiar with the just war doctrine of the Church, so that it can be applied more precisely and practically to actual war situations like Iraq. I really believe this is something that is needed by our Church and can be produced by young faithful philosophers and theologians.

Tonight's Scriptures show, if applied allegorically, what potentially happens to societies and individual persons who do not respect the natural moral law or the divine law given by God. The vineyard described in Isaiah and in the Gospel represent areas of God's kingdom, areas of human flourishing and happiness. There is to be a kind of intoxication of eudaimonia, or human happiness, produced when one lives according to the natural law. We see what happens, however, when this natural law is not respected. In Isaiah, the vineyard produces not good grapes, but ugly, distasteful, wild ones. Thus, the vineyard is torn down and given over to weeds and produces nothing. When Adam sinned in the Garden of Eden, by wanting his private right to determine good and evil for Himself to be respected by God, the natural happiness of the garden gave way to the long-enduring struggle against evil that you and I find ourselves in today. In tonight's parable, we see how invidious we can get when we determine that we are more necessary than God, that we are better off determining right and wrong for ourselves rather than following the natural law, and when we regard our lives and our bodies as our private possessions rather than as gifts to be cherished and to be made fruitful. When we do this, we destroy ourselves, not to mention our desire to destroy God and His representatives whenever they threaten our right to privacy. Isn't it more fun, my dear friends, not to jealousy guard our right to do what we want, but to welcome God into our lives that are filled with light, and to join Him in producing fruit that will last?

Thus, this homily can and should end on a happy note. The story of the vineyard is still being written, as we hear at the end of the parable, and wherever the vineyard of the Lord is being torn down it will be taken away and given to a people that will bear its fruit. Jesus Christ came to restore the vineyard of the Lord. He invites us to accept the challenge of caring for the most vulnerable in our society, and loving the people that no one wants to love. He invites us to build a vineyard with Him where those who have experienced the pain of abortion can receive His mercy and be healed and once again know themselves as beloved sons and daughters of God. He invites us to proclaim the Good News that the only thing that can meet the challenge of once again becoming and sustaining a culture of life that welcomes every child is the love that we now share around this Eucharistic table through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.