The Gospel is always sacred and serious: today’s (July 17) Gospel, though, is especially somber. When St. Gregory the Great read today’s Gospel, this is what he taught: ”Christ continues to weep for sinners who, like Jerusalem, run after evil and refuse to make peace with God.
Their sins hide from their eyes the judgment that is coming; otherwise they would weep for themselves. When (the judgment) arrives, demons will besiege the soul and the Lord will visit them with His dreadful punishment” (Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, p. 145).
The ideas of sin, evil, the need for repentance, the fear of the Lord, divine justice, the last judgment – all of these traditional Catholic teachings are as utterly alien to modern ears as is this quotation from the Book of Revelation: “Cowards, traitors, perverts, murderers, the immoral, those who practice magic, those who worship idols, and all liars – the place for them is the lake burning with fire and sulfur, which is the second death” (GNB 21:8).
Why is it that, with the exception of today’s Gospel from St. Luke about the colossal fall of Jerusalem (which, as St. Gregory told us, may signify the equally colossal failure of all of us as individual sinners), we so rarely hear warnings about the ubiquitous dangers to our souls? We hear more about the “perils” of bad breath than we do about the loss of our souls. Here, I think, is the reason:
For 50 years now, we Catholics have been exposed to a liturgy which too often seems to be grounded in the idea that Mass should be fun and frivolous. Banners and balloons were and, I regret to say, still are prevalent in many churches. I will not give you here a laundry list of the liturgical abuses which have compromised or corroded the Gospel for half a century. One example may do: About three months ago, in Michigan, a bishop’s confirmation homily consisted of his strumming a ukulele while singing “This Little Light of Mine.” Convinced (and not without reason) that this was absurd at best and sacrilegious at worst, the church organist turned the volume of the organ to maximum and drowned out the bishop with a traditional hymn. What do you suppose the confirmandi will recall, many years from now, about this nightmare?
Beginning in the late 1960s and reaching a fever pitch in the 1970s, with many echoes still evident today, certain “reformers” sought to make the Mass into a musical extravaganza, into a carnival or sideshow, into a laugh-a-minute comedy routine in which there’s fun for the whole family. A priest in Alabama once told me, for instance, to be sure that any homily I preached would make people happy. Have you seen the priests whose chasubles feature big “happy face” buttons?
We had better purge today’s Gospel reading, hadn’t we? Is it, after all, a laughing matter that sin surrounds, serenades and seduces us? That abortion and euthanasia are the law of the land, with abortion killing more than 58 million people since 1973? That the great gift of marital intimacy has been debauched beyond anything someone from 50 years ago could begin to recognize? That bioethical experimentation is on the verge of three-parent embryos and of the creation of half-human and half-animal beings? That contemporary ethics understands nothing that isn’t relativism? That we celebrate evil as good and good as evil, and that the only tolerable Catholic – as far as society is concerned – is a vapid or fallen-away Catholic?
It is no wonder that in the last book of the Gospel (John 1:1-14), read at almost every traditional Latin Mass, we are told: “The Light (of Christ) shines in the darkness; and the darkness grasped it not.” As St. Paul tells us in today’s Epistle (1 Cor 10:6-13): “We should not lust after evil things,” and “do not become idolaters.”
Now consider what you see and hear on TV and radio, in the movies, in endless ads, in comments by Hollywood stars, in the press, and all around us – constantly! We and our children bathe in these morally polluted waters: ethical relativism, which tell us that nothing is ever objectively good, true, and beautiful; hedonism, which tells us to pursue pleasure; narcissism, which tells us to be concerned only with ourselves; psychologism, which tells us that we are no more than our urges and appetites; nihilism, which counsels us that nothing matters, that nothing is right, that nothing endures; scientism, which tells us that the divine can be found only at the bottom of a test tube; pervasive secular humanism, which exalts the creatures while vilifying the Creator; and, finally, syncretism, which tells us that all religions are equally valid or equally vain.
These are the bricks of the modern Tower of Babel. Much too rarely do we hear it said that these corruptions have two things in common: they rejoice in what is evil and they kill the soul, for they are the stuff of mortal sin. And they lead to the fall of Jerusalem, both personally and politically.
Where do we look for a remedy? The kernel of wise counsel is from the Old Testament prophet Habakkuk: “Look at the proud! Their spirit is not right in them, but the righteous shall live by their faith” (2:4 NRSV). Habakkuk was telling us that the Babylonians of his day were arrogant and self-centered and their conceit would lead to defeat; but the humble, whose faith was centered in God, could be saved.
We live in troubled times, and there is great confusion around us, even sometimes in the liturgy. We forget that the Church has always told us that our earthly pilgrimage is marked by “mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” We have, though, the precious words of Our Lord to sustain us in difficult and darkened times: “The world will make you suffer. But be brave! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). Be firm in your Catholic faith – now and always!
Deacon James H. Toner serves in the Diocese of Charlotte. Before retiring, his last regularly scheduled sermon at Our Lady of Grace Church in Greensboro was presented on the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost (EF), in which the Gospel is taken from St. Luke (19:41-47a), concerning Our Lord’s weeping over Jerusalem.