By Judie Brown
Consider the crushing evil in our midst and you might become faint of heart. But if you agree with Saint Vincent de Paul that “the most powerful weapon to conquer the devil is humility,” you are aware that no matter how wicked the ideology, grace conquers all.
This is why we resist the devil’s advocacy of abortion, euthanasia, contraception, homosexual lifestyles, and all those evils that press heavily on the culture today. The body politic is weak, but we do not give up on any one of these people. Our mission does not permit us to avoid a single opportunity to use truth to slay deception.
Consider homosexual lifestyles for a moment. We hear some people challenge the truth of gender—male and female—as though it were fungible. But what is it really?
Professor John Grabowski says:
At root, gender ideology is a 21st-century version of ancient Gnosticism that sees the body and the material world as things to be overcome rather than gifts to be received from the God who created us.
Recent church teaching, especially St. John Paul II’s catecheses on the theology of the body, helps us to recover a better biblically grounded (and scientifically accurate) understanding of ourselves as male and female made in the image of God (Gn 1:27). Our task as Christians is to defeat this dangerous set of ideas in the public square and in the church, while responding in love to persons struggling with gender discordance.
To defeat this assault on God’s creation of the human person, we need faith, facts, and limitless love for our fellow human beings. Nothing less works. The great Jesuit Father John Hardon knew this, teaching:
One of the main contributors to the plague of sodomy which has infected the modern world is the claim that sexual union is allowed before marriage. This erroneous opinion is not only contrary to Christian morality, it opens the door to the claim that two people can have mutual sexual experience independent of the purpose for which God created the two genders of men and women. The desecration of the sexual powers outside of marriage opens the door to the degeneration of homosexuality.
This is not an oversimplification, but it is in fact the fundamental reason why so many people clamor for contraception, abortion, homosexual lifestyles, and euthanasia. As the value and dignity of the human person, especially her sexuality, is degraded, evil springs up like a weed to overwhelm and literally suffocate those who fall prey to it.
Ours is a culture that talks about Planned Parenthood’s rainbow crosswalks in homosexual communities while ignoring the health problems that can occur within same-sex relationships, not to mention the inevitable moral abyss when people ignore the fact that the natural ends of human sexuality, namely procreation, are impossible for people who engage in homosexual relationships. The loving thing is to help them see this rather than pander to the false gods of popular opinion.
Taking this seriously and pondering it helps us see the defect in the position of assuring the public that abortion is “safe” for the expectant mother, even though it is clear that abortion is deadly for the baby.
Ah, but as we see, the devil is in the details. By setting the table with the question of safety rather than outlawing abortion, people are tempted to consider something less than the fundamental evil of an act. The same can be said about addressing the needs of the homosexual community. Such rhetoric obfuscates the fact that living a homosexual lifestyle is itself a sin against God.
It may not be fashionable to point out that God is the Creator of each person, but it is the right way for us to strike a blow against the deadly clever posturing of our archenemy, the evil one. David placed smooth stones in his pocket before he confronted Goliath. A single stone was enough.
We place the truth in our pockets, our minds, our hearts, and our will to resist such aberrations as abortion and homosexual lifestyles.
One stone slew the giant; truth will slay the deadly clever falsehoods that we confront today.