By Judie Brown
The variety of disturbing subjects one could write about in these tumultuous days staggers the mind. But the one thing that puts the messy world’s concerns in focus is always the same, and that is authentic devotion to our Lord’s truth and the courage to speak it. This truth will overcome whatever evil we confront on our way to Christ.
As the Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us, “The Old Testament attests that God is the source of all truth. His Word is truth. His Law is truth. His ‘faithfulness endures to all generations.’ Since God is ‘true,’ the members of his people are called to live in the truth.”
Mother Teresa spoke that truth when she received the Nobel Peace Prize. She said:
I am grateful and I am very happy to receive it in the name of the hungry, of the naked, of the homeless, of the crippled, of the blind, of the leprous, of all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared, thrown away of the society, people who have become a burden to the society, and are ashamed by everybody. . . .
In the newspapers you read numbers of this one and that one being killed, this being destroyed, but nobody speaks of the millions of little ones who have been conceived to the same life as you and I, to the life of God, and we say nothing, we allow it. To me the nations who have legalized abortion, they are the poorest nations. They are afraid of the little one, they are afraid of the unborn child, and the child must die because they don’t want to feed one more child, to educate one more child, the child must die.
Today, more than ever before, we see escalating wars against the innocent with little regard to the truth that calls us to defend those who cannot defend themselves.
Examples of our national refusal to acknowledge that truth are copious. A couple recent stories confirm this.
One story comes from a Yale University professor, who has been talking about the word fertilization and challenging the science of what it means when a human sperm and a human egg unite. By relegating this provable fact of science to nothing more than a metaphorical concept, the strangest opinions regarding gender, sex, and human sexuality become mainstream, discarding the evidence and replacing it with ideological constructs.
The rejection of human embryology 101 is nonsensical, and yet it is a core belief for those who reject truth, thus making peace of mind and soul impossible. We see this exemplified in the posturing of political candidate Kari Lake, who has recently decided that her position on aborting the innocent needed to be tweaked.
Lake has moved from total opposition to surgical abortion to the position of assuring audiences that she would not support a national ban on abortion. Perhaps her political aspirations have clouded her awareness of accurate scientific data. Politics appears to have that effect on a great number of people these days.
This is why we need strong shepherds like San Francisco’s archbishop Salvatore Cordileone and Oakland’s bishop Michael Barber, SJ, who recently issued a joint statement teaching that “gender ideology denies certain fundamental aspects of human existence, such as male-female sexual difference, the reciprocal complementarity of man and woman, and the essential unity of body and soul in the human person.”
LifeSiteNews reports, “The archbishop and bishop noted that ‘[m]any faithful Catholics demonstrate solidarity with those suffering from gender dysphoria, unjust discrimination, or other questions related to gender identity and sincerely desire to respond in love to their sisters and brothers.’ This solidarity, they said, must be practiced ‘while affirming the beauty and truth of God’s creation.’”
Such clarity of thought commences from the way to peace—the truth as taught by Scripture, Jesus Christ, and faithful shepherds.
In his second letter to the Corinthians, Saint Paul affirms this path toward peace when he says: “We wish you joy; try to grow perfect; encourage one another; have a common mind and live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you.”
Let us remember that only in our Lord and His teachings will we find that everlasting peace we all desperately need.
