"Keep the Commandments"

During my preparation for the Roman Catholic priesthood, I had the privilege of being privately tutored during a five-year period by a great teacher, a former Rector of the Pontifical North American College in Rome. He had known four popes personally and was chosen to serve on the dicasterial commission which compiled and composed the Catechism of the Catholic Church (promulgated in 1992 by Pope John Paul II).

It will surprise many that the idea of a catechism, of any catechism, caused controversy among the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Bishops, especially in the West, asked, "Aren't we beyond catechisms?! Haven't we gone to a higher place far above rules and commandments?" When it was revealed that the Ten Commandments would occupy a whole Section of the book, a firestorm of protest was ignited. For the view of these progressive bishops, proceeding out of Vatican II, was that a new age of love was struggling to be born but that rules and regulations would strangle this long-awaited birth.

In due time, a draft of the Catechism was sent out to every bishop in the Roman Communion for comment. Instantly, a flood of modi (requests for modification) inundated the commission charged with the work. The progressives spoke in one voice:

The poor commission members! What were they to do about this tsunami of modi?! After all, bishops are styled "authentic teachers" in the Roman Catholic Church. No one is senior to a bishop, whose title is "Most Reverend." Ignore them?! Unthinkable! So they went to the Roman Communion's senior officer in matters of faith and morals, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a Cardinal named Joseph Ratzinger. In reply to their request for guidance, the gentle Cardinal scheduled a meeting.

When the day arrived, the members were seated around a large conference table. Slowly and silently, Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, walked into the room carrying a large book. He set it down at the head of the table and in that soft voice began reading:

Two generations later the passing of time has granted the gift of perspective. We remember the era of "Love and Peace." We recall the high hopes and sincere hearts who honestly believed they were ushering in a new age. Roman Catholic clergy and religious in particular were swept up in the heady belief that the Kingdom of God with its credo of universal love was materializing right before their eyes! New hymnals were written. New liturgies were contrived. Relevance was the cry of the day, and the life the Church had known for nineteen centuries was nearly eclipsed.

May I indulge in personal recollection? I witnessed firsthand the solemn and sincere compassion for a little country in Southeast Asia invaded by the United States. Even the Secretary of Defense, the greatly respected (and I might add, conservative) Robert McNamara finally saw that the invasion was a catastrophic (and immoral) error. Many responsible Americans voiced their compassion. When four protesting students were shot and killed by their own National Guard, including a nineteen-year-old girl, Beth Krause, and a twenty-year-old girl, Sandy Scheuer, concern boiled over into general outrage. And many citizens answered the call for national protest in Washington. Bus loads came led by clergy. I was there too.

I was filled with anguish as I made this journey — anguish for my country, anguish for the young people who were killed, and I grieved for their disbelieving mothers and fathers. I expected to meet others who shared my solemn grief. But what I saw when I arrived turned my stomach: young people passing around free drugs, young people frolicking nude in the pools and fountains around the national monuments, rock and roll music playing loudly. A party was in full swing.

I hitchhiked home and was picked up by a man driving a van that stunk of pot. He told me that a gun was under my seat and that if the police pulled us over, we would just start firing. I felt sick. And this sickness would inaugurate the long process of my "sobering up," you might say. It would take awhile, but I matured and saw that human self-indulgence and mob hysteria can never usher in a new age. French or Bolshevik Revolutions? Yes. Utopias? Never.

A half-century later, we are able to see what the so-called Age of Love gave to the world. "Universal love" morphed into universal indiscriminate sex. The mighty and irresistible force called family, which is God's intention for love, proceeded anyway. And we began learning the hard lesson that is still being taught: we are out of our depth when we arrogate to write a new Rule of Life. Good and evil cannot be redefined. They are elements in our periodic table, encoded in our DNA, written, not in stone, but on the fleshly tablets of our hearts first (2 Cor 3:3), as St. Paul would say.

The elemental meaning of love is for two lives to become one, permanently, and for this life-giving unity to be the safe place for engendering our whole lifeworld. The fruits of this divine vision, not so long ago, was commonplace in America: a sanctified mother, a devoted husband and father, stable and self-assured children. This is the Age of Love, an age that God (Who is love, 1 Jn 4:8) inaugurated and which is still within our reach today.

Here is another element of our moral periodic table: when the sacred is desecrated, the grotesque appears. The greater the desecration, the more hideous the grotesquery. What is the grotesque face of indiscriminate sex where love is supplanted by unredeemed lust? Since 1970 (the same year the four students at Kent State were murdered) up until the year 2016, 50,000,000 unborn children have been slaughtered. How much is 50,000,000? If you took all the Americans killed during World War II and multiplied them by fifty, — that's fifty World War IIs — you would come to fifty million lives lost.

Recall that the Early Church for centuries held that three Commandments among the Ten stood out as particularly heinous crimes against God: murder, violations of sexual morality, and apostasy, which is the rejection of God. (Those were the first three we encountered today in our Gospel lesson.) It is striking that that so-called "new age of universal love" has revealed not love, but rather the menacing face of these three heinous crimes staring at us with a restless hunger. For they seek to devour all human life on the earth (1 Peter 5:8) .... at least life worth living.

How in the world did we get here? We followed a pied piper who promised a new and higher place beyond God's morality. We would write our own Rule of Life. We would, in the words of fallen angels, supplant God:

The first thing the Lord Jesus tells the young ruler is that

"What good thing shall I do that I might have eternal life?" — a simple sentence. The reply from the Lord Jesus is no less simple. But it may not be what we think we want for ourselves. The good and the true are always simple, for simplicity is one of the properties of God. It is Hellish life, by its nature an ever-divisive complex of deceit and delusion, which is complicated. We need not go far to see examples, for this is the stuff of our own culture: ever-changing narratives that go nowhere and have no end. Withal, God's good life abides, unchanged and unchanging. What is its message? Simply this: "Taste and see that the Lord is good!" (Ps 34:8).

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.