Father Dan Beeman Holy Trinity Catholic Church 13 th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

Transcription

1 Father Dan Beeman Holy Trinity Catholic Church 13 th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. 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. These words, which begin our nation s Declaration of Independence, whose anniversary we celebrate this week, were words of people who had been attacked and denied their religious liberty. Their declaration was a turning point where they were no longer to be on the defensive for what they believed. Now, they were on the offensive, actively claiming their right to life, to freedom, and to happiness. Last week I preached to you about the Church s beautiful and powerful teachings on our openness to the gift of human life within the marital embrace. We spoke of the fact that Church finds the use of artificial contraception to be incompatible with the covenant of marriage. Thus it seems to be the case that we cannot as Catholics in good conscience pay for such things for ourselves or others against our will. Keep in mind we aren t trying to make contraception illegal for women who want them, we are simply refusing to pay for them ourselves. Through the Health and Human Services mandate which was never considered by Congress nor voted on by them but rather by executive order, the Church was told that we would not only have to allow contraception, abortion inducing drugs and sterilization of women, but that we would have to pay for those services for our employees and those we serve. In an insane act of irony, if you worked for a Catholic hospital, your insurance would pay for you to have procedures or take medicines that we don t even provide in any Catholic hospital because we find them immoral! There is no exemption that will protect us, no other path to take. Essentially, the message to the Church from President Obama has been comply or close down all Church outreach including hospitals, social ministries,

2 schools and universities. Comply or quit he says, but our Catholic faith says we can do neither and remain Catholic! Many wonder how this could be the case. What President Obama and his administration have done is sought to limit what defines our religious practice. They have said that our religious practice is limited to what we do in the walls of our Churches on Sunday morning as Catholics. That fails to recognize that everything we do within these walls is so that we can live the same faith outside of them! In the history of the Catholic Church in the United States, ever since in the first Catholic Mass was celebrated in Pensacola, Florida in 1559, the Church has never kept the practice of our faith inside the walls of our Churches. Under President Obama s regulations, not a single amount of work done by Mother Teresa, not a scrap of food given in our Food Pantry at Holy Trinity, not a day spent in a Catholic school or a life saving surgery in a Catholic hospital would be considered religious practice and we have to respond. But the Bishops have not asked us to be on the defensive, but on the offensive, for our faith. We aren t being called into battle, but we are being called to be outward and proud in what we believe and in how we live. We have always lived our faith outwardly. In most neighborhoods, we have always built schools and hospitals before we have even built the Churches! When the government refused to educate our children or when we were denied funds to build schools, we built them anyway, on our own dime, and we educated our own children and others better than the government did! Our hospitals have brought healing and care to the weak and the vulnerable since before Medicaid and Medicare existed. We have run orphanages, counseled widows, provided for the homeless, and given food water and shelter to those in need. We educate more people in America than any other scholarly institution and always have, and we bring comfort and healing to our military and their families, moral teachings to our young people and uphold marriage and defend life. In this, our own parish, we spend four times more money each year serving the poor of Ocean View than we spend on worship expenses for Mass! The Catholic Church has always done those things for one reason: to be sure that everyone in our nation, Catholic or not, sees the face of Jesus Christ. In serving the poor, in healing the sick, in loving the sinner, in embracing those in difficulty, we show Jesus to our nation! Bishop DiLorenzo is not acting on a personal idea or agenda in speaking out against the government s intrusion into our rights and neither am I as your pastor. He stands with every single Bishop in the United States and I stand with him. For the first time in our nation s history, every single Bishop has spoken on this matter. Of all of the times the Bishops have offered counsel or asked for action, this is the first time in history that every single Bishop has been united, not a single has held back or gone another way. Which goes to point out that this issue goes beyond our opinions or how we normally vote. It goes

3 beyond Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, Catholic or Protestant, Fox News or CNN. This goes to the very core that we live in a nation where we were founded on the idea that our expression of religion should be neither coerced nor denied by the government. There is no doubt that the actions of the Obama Administration would deny our ability to live our Catholic faith as we always have. We must remember that we as Catholics belong to a Church that is ever ancient. We have not changed who we are or what we do in 2000 years. For those who feel the Church is becoming political this has nothing to do with politics. It is about freedom. We didn t pick this fight, we didn t go to them, they came to us! My brothers and sisters, you need to know this. Our freedom is really, truly under attack. Today in your bulletin you will see a list of all the ways that our religious liberty and our ability to live our Catholic faith is being challenged under President Obama and his administration. On this week that we celebrate our Independence, we must reclaim that this is a nation who at its core existed so that people could live our faith freely. But realize that the Lord too faced difficulty, darkness, and death. But when He did, he didn t sit back, He too went on the offensive, He too stepped up and acted. Today in the Gospel, when Jairus daughter faced death, when darkness had overcome them, Jesus Christ went and actively entered their lives, he raised up that little girl and gave life. And we must follow the image of Jesus in doing the same. We must go out of these walls and give life and realize we are created in the image of God to be the image of God for others as we heard in our first reading. But I don t believe we will lose this battle and here is why. Whenever the Church has been under attack, we have sought to bring light to darkness just as Jesus did. Whenever we have been invited to deny our faith, we have upheld it as the Saints have done. We re going to stay faithful and we re going to follow in a long line of men and women who were faithful too. If you want to know why we are going to make it, if we want to show President Obama and his administration why their mandate won t work, if you want to know why it is worth defending our Church right now in our history, the answer is in every Catholic Church in the world. Look past the walls that have held the prayers of thousands and walk directly into the sacristy where the priests dress themselves for Mass. There, among all of the vestments, reflect on one in particular the ones that are boldly red in color. Those vestments are worn by priests on the feast days of martyrs. They exist because Roman Catholics and Christians from the very moment of Jesus Christ have said, we will die before we will deny our faith; we will lay down our life in imitation of the One who did it for us. For freedom, Christ set us free, Saint Paul says, and in the striking red of the priestly vestments for martyrs, we too will live in freedom. The Church has always been full of bishops and priests, nuns and lay faithful who would willingly wear the red of the

4 martyrs than abandon or deny our faith and that is no different now. We will not relent, we will live our faith and we must begin that now by showing an image of the Lord to this great nation; and by giving everything to defend our freedom to do so.

5 1. For the Bishops of the United States. That as they act with one voice to defend our religious liberty, they might know the support of their faithful, we pray. 2. For President Obama and his administration, that they be inspired as we celebrate our nation s independence this week to honor the first freedom to practice our religion without government oppression, we pray. 3. For those who defend our freedom of religion and speech through their service in the military, that they be kept safe from all harm in their work for peace, we pray. 4. For those who are ill and in need of God s healing, especially: John Bailey, Donna Lucenious, John and Peggy Litz, David Phillips, Manoli Phillips that they know the healing of Jesus, we pray. 5. For the repose of the souls of those who have died, especially: Mary Paulino and Hailey Alcala that they know eternal life with Christ, and for 5:00pm 9:00am 11:00am the repose of the souls of Thiet and Nguyen Huong (Teat and Winn) the repose of the soul of Delfin Villanueva the repose of the soul of Mary Cummings which is the intention of this Mass, we pray.