Sermon of the 26th Sunday after Pentecost, 2016
Fr. Richard G. Cipolla
Parish of St. Mary
Norwalk, Connecticut
From St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians: “For freedom Christ has set us free.” (5:1)
An earthquake hit this country with a magnitude at least as
strong as the one that destroyed the Basilica and Monastery of St. Benedict a
few weeks ago. It was not a natural earthquake.
It did not bring down buildings.
But it severely damaged the structure of what we can call post-modern
American civilization, a civilization based on the self and money and the
denial of objective morality. And the
irony of it all—natural earthquakes are never ironical, they just are—and the
irony of it all is that the prime mover of the earthquake is a product of that
selfish amoral society.
The supreme irony is that the one who is the prime mover of the
earthquake is the product of the society that was epitomized in Tom Wolfe’s
novel of the Bonfire of the Vanities and who could never be accused of
being a serious thinker. No serious
Catholic could ever hold Donald Trump up as the paragon of virtue nor as the
model of the intellectually serious man. And yet, and yet. Quite apart from
Donald Trump, we are indeed looking at the ruins, or at least the putting to
rest, of two political dynasties, who despite wearing different party labels,
were responsible for the flourishing of that culture that has ruled this
country for some fifty years, that culture that was founded on a high powered
group that thought of themselve as being liberal but in fact have been
relentless in tossing aside freedom in
its classical sense and replacing it with the idea of rights, rights that have
no other origin that the desires of the self to make oneself into whomever one
chooses and to define truth in a radically subjective way. And anyone in the way of this march of
history is branded as a bigot, someone who, as the phrase goes, is on the wrong
side of history. The arrogance of that
phrase is breath taking. Imagine the power to know the future and to be able to
know with certainty that one’s decisions at a particular point in history are
part of an inevitability that sweeps everything else along with it.
The
furor over Donald Trump’s election has many facets. One is the reaction of students in elite
colleges on the East and West coasts who are so emotionally distraught that
they cannot take exams or who need counseling.
This reaction, while not mitigating Trump’s foolish and vulgar comments,
bares the coddled and narcissistic essence of these students who live in the
bubble of fabulously wealthy academia, peopled with professors who look down on
those they profess to be in solidarity with and who despise the white, middle
class, non college educated, religious mass of people who make up much of this
country. They despise these people,
because these people have failed to be enlightened by these self appointed
gurus who feel appointed to show them the error of their ways. But these people have spoken. And most not
out of prejudice or bigotry or stupidity, but because they feel they have been
left out, they have no jobs, and they do not want, among other things, gender
neutral bathrooms. They think it is
silly to even talk about such things, that this is not in accord with reality,
a reality not grounded in the self but in reality outside of themselves.
The earthquake has happened, but one must not put one’s hope
in anyone in this singular situation. At
least none of the personages in the current scene of the drama. But we can be
grateful that we now have some time, and who knows how long, to consider where
we have been and where we are. And by we, I mean Catholics: bishops, priests,
deacons, religious, and above all lay Catholics. The Bush and Clinton dynasties are dead,
different parties but basically the same assumptions about reality. But this death in particular does not
guarantee the death of the post-World War II explicit distortion of the
understanding of freedom. This is the
crux of the matter. Freedom.
The Magna Carta of Christian freedom is St. Paul’s Letter to
the Galatians: For Freedom Christ has
set us free. Now it must be asked: how does this relate to the founders’
Declaration of Independence statement: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that
all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness. You notice that Liberty is enumerated among the rights of man.
Liberty, or freedom, is defined as a right endowed upon man by their Creator,
an ambiguous reference to God. From the
beginning freedom in this country was defined as a right. In Christian terms freedom is something that
has nothing to do with rights but rather is something that was bought by Christ
on his Cross: it is freedom from sin and through faith in Him as Lord and
Savior. The Christian understanding of
freedom is not so much freedom from but rather freedom for. One of the ancient collects speaks in this
way: whose service is perfect freedom. The Christian understanding of freedom is not
only freedom from the deadly effects of sin but also freedom to love, that is,
to love without those bonds of selfishness that prevent the act of love. The
source of Christian freedom is not something endowed by the Creator as a right
but rather from the Cross of Jesus Christ.
This does not deny the importance of freedom from, freedom from the
tyranny of a government, freedom from coercion in matters of practice of
religion, freedom from oppression of any sort.
But when freedom is defined as a right of man
apart from that perfect freedom that is the service of God, then freedom is
always in danger of becoming license, to do whatever I want as long as it is
not against the law, and even, if it is against the law right now, if the law
is in the way of my personal rights to do what I want, then the law has to be
changed. And that is the context not
only of Roe vs Wade that made abortion legal. It is the context of the
so-called sexual revolution of the past 50 years that denies the ontological
basis of human sexuality and has substituted the grammatical entity of gender
for sex.
I wrote a message to our bishop after the election and said
that whatever happens, this situation gives the Church a time, a pause, to
consider the path that she has taken in this country which has been one of too
late opposition to amorality and immorality and a failure to teach her people
about the true meaning of freedom. If
the Church does not take advantage of this pause, however dicey and cloudy the
situation is in this pause, then she is not being faithful to her duty of
evangelization in the name of Christ who is the Way, the Truth and the Life. So
much is unknown and we cannot depend on the president elect to do what ought to
be done. But the Church can and should
take advantage of the present situation, even if it turns out to be temporary,
where the false liberalism of the past fifty years is no longer in official
power. And we must also beware lest we
fall yet again into the trap of confusing traditional Catholicism with
political conservatism. They may overlap
at certain points. They are never the
same thing. Traditional Catholicism
demands not adherence to a certain political party nor to any ideology. It
demands adherence to the person of Jesus Christ as the Way, the Truth and the
Life and this not in some rigid way that excludes those who do not understand
this or even those who reject this.
I did not plan to stay up to watch the
election results on Tuesday night. I
sort of pride myself on being apolitical. But I became aware of something unexpected
happening and I had to stay up and try to find out what was really happening. Could
be. Who knows? Something’s coming, if I can wait. About two o’clock in the morning, when the
final results were still not certain but the trend was readily apparent, the
reporter went into Times Square to talk to people gathered there. Those who were there had been ready to
celebrate what they thought was inevitable.
They were subdued in disbelief that what they had expected was not going
to happen. One of the young women who
was interviewed and who was deeply disappointed in what was happening said
this: “Maybe living in New York is
living in a bubble.” You think? The bubbles of the Northeast and the West
Coast are bubbles of unreality. But what
about the bubble of a Catholicism that no longer understands what freedom
means? May God give us the courage to burst this bubble.
