Father Eduard Perrone, "
A Pastor's Descant" (Assumption Grotto Catholic church, February 16, 2014):
Reluctant to state the obvious, preaching to the choir, as they say, I yet feel compelled to write something about the devastating moral plague of the time as manifest in the unremitting campaign against marriage. Truly I’m tired of reading and hearing about it–I, who have almost no media connections. How then must it be for those forcibly made prey to incessant media barrage of “gender issues?” Queerness is evidently advancing at a rapid pace and the opposition to it which represents the convictions and beliefs of the majority of people is rarely or meekly stated. But that’s not true everywhere.
This past December 29th, the feast of the Holy Family, the bishops of Poland issued a Pastoral Letter warning their flock of the danger of the ideological campaign on gender identity. It was a bold initiative, befitting the successors of the apostles who must “preach the word in season and out of season, convince, rebuke, and exhort, be unfailing in patience and in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears will gather to themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths” (2 Timothy 4:2-5). Have we in the USA perhaps already arrived at that unfortunate time of intolerance for truth, and our bishops, reckoning that teaching so forthrightly and courageously as their Polish brethren, have decided that it would be of no avail to us? In any case, many here have been heartened over the Pastoral Letter of the bishops of Poland. I’d like to share with you a few points they make.
They begin by quoting Blessed John Paul II who taught that marriage is beyond the will of individuals. God created a man for a woman and a woman for a man, unto the propagation and upbringing of human offspring. To reject this must inevitably lead to the defeat not only of family but of humanity itself. Those who want to redefine marriage through gender ideology unwittingly owe their position to Marxism, feminism and to the sexual revolution. They assert that who one is by given nature–male or female–can be reversed simply by a declaration of self-definition. Reality in this case would not be what is but what one would wish reality to be. In this case it would mean the creation of a new meaning for family, based on homosexual unions.
Most people are unaware of the danger posed by the legalization and attempted legitimization of gay marriage. They are told it is the coming of age of an enlightened society which abhors all forms of discrimination. The Church agrees that humiliating any people is evil, but it also at least must state that marriage is God-defined, and that homosexual acts and tendencies simply can’t be compatible with it. One will note here that the bishops have a narrow focus in their Letter. They say nothing about the disordered nature of homosexual acts–not that they would deny the fact. Their intended purpose is merely to clarify the incompatibility of marriage with same sex coupling.
And so, the bishops of Poland protest the suggestion that children be indoctrinated in a gender ideology that redefines words such as marriage, sex, love and–indeed–humanity itself. The bishops foresee the far reaching and baneful consequences this would have not only for families but for their entire “Homeland.” Their appeal is for people of faith to have courage to speak the truth about marriage and to invoke the Holy Family for its help.
... The greater issue in the gay marriage campaign has to do with establishing a total and complete dissociation of sexual acts with reproductive potency. One simply must get out of his head that sex has anything to do necessarily with children. And here one sees the logic of the contraception movement come to full term: its ultimate triumph would consist in a permanent divorce of sexual acts with human reproduction. The consequence of the success of this would be not only that homosexuals would be free to do whatever they would wish to do but that everybody would be free to do whatever his sexual urges would direct him to do. But there’s yet more to campaign for in the future, things not yet given much publicity, such as the full exploitation of children by adults, the legalization of child pornography, public nudity and open copulation....
A fundamental choice is what is really being proposed for us in the matter of gay marriage. Either there is a law of nature which determines certain things to be necessarily as they must be or reality itself, not being a pre-determined thing to which one must conform, can be created at will. Anything and everything is subject to this most basic matter: either truth is given and thus obliging, or it is a plaything fashioned by wish and whim.
Are those crickets I hear coming from the Chair of St. Peter?
ReplyDelete