Ordinary Time 28 - The Gift of Human Life, Part 2 - Who Are the Vulnerable?

 

Homily for Ordinary Time 28

October 13, 2024

The Dignity of the Vulnerable

 

            A random fact about my life is that I was on Food Network for five seconds. Yes, it’s true. When I was a deacon, I was visiting a brother priest who asked me, “Can you assist me at Mass? By the way, a film crew will be here.” So we had Mass and a film crew from Food Network was there, because right after Mass, this priest – Fr. Leo Patalinghug – was going to be on “Throwdown with Bobby Flay”. Fr. Leo won the throwdown, by the way.

            But now Fr. Leo has a much more important ministry than just making good food – he’s making good lives. He runs a ministry called “Grace and Grub” which is a food truck…run by ex-convicts. While much of the world sees these men as wasted lives, Fr. Leo trains them in cooking and job skills, and gives them a chance to contribute to society. It’s a population that so often is seen as lacking human dignity – but Fr. Leo sees their dignity and loves them back into the men they were created to be.

            We continue our series on “human dignity” during this Respect Life month by looking at different facets of human dignity. For all of our technological progress and first-world comforts, the true mark of a civilized society is how it treats the most vulnerable – and we do not do a particularly good job on many fronts, in large part because we’ve lost the Christian understanding of the human person as made in the Image and Likeness of God, from conception until natural death.

            With this understanding of our inherent dignity, our Church teaches that we must have a Preferential Option for the Poor – in other words, in our laws and policies and even in our daily lives, our first thought and concern should be for the poor. But who are the poor? The poor are the unborn, the elderly and sick, immigrants, victims of war or abuse or racism, those who struggle with addictions, the disabled, and those who are materially poor. These particularly vulnerable populations deserve our concern, protection, and aid.

            In doing so, we recognize that dignity does not depend upon which side of the womb you’re on. Dignity doesn’t depend on the amount of money in one’s bank account. Dignity doesn’t depend upon one’s health or having only a short time remaining on earth. Dignity does not depend upon what language you speak or what country you come from. Dignity is not taken away based upon a person’s limitations, what they’ve done, or what they’ve been through.

            St. Vincent de Paul, who worked with the poor his entire life, admitted that to our eyes, human dignity could be hard to see. He once said, “The poor are our masters, but masters who are terribly insensitive and demanding, dirty and ugly, unjust and foul-mouthed. But the harder they are to serve, the more we have to love them.”

            After all, Christ was Himself “the poor”. He was an unborn baby in a crisis pregnancy. He was an immigrant when forced to move to Egypt. He lived in poverty and labored with His hands. He was so disfigured in His Passion that the Scriptures said that He hardly had the appearance of a man. He was injured and helpless upon the Cross. And so He said that those who feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, or shelter the homeless are doing those acts of kindness to Him.

            Some of the saints took this quite seriously. St. Camillus, who was dedicated to taking care of the sick, once came up to a sick person and asked him to forgive his sins – he truly believed that this sick person was Christ! The Hungarian Queen, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, once found a poor man suffering from illness, and not having the ability to take him to a hospital, brought him to her own bed in home. When her husband objected to having a sick stranger in his own bed, he angrily tore off the covers and was shocked to find, instead of a sick man, a vision of Christ stretched out on the Cross upon the bedsheets. Clearly, to respect human dignity and to love our neighbor is to love Christ Himself!

            I hope it is safe to say that we all agree thus far that human dignity is non-negotiable. However, with an election looming and so many issues of human dignity at the forefront, how is this truth to impact our choices? It is important to make a distinction among certain issues.

            Human beings have many rights: life, food and shelter, love, home, a right to an education and employment, a right to freedom of religion and freedom from fear. But of all the rights that a person has, the right to life is the most fundamental and under no circumstances can we allow a person to take the life of an innocent person. Therefore, all persons of good will must be committed to protecting the lives of the unborn and the elderly as a primary value as we look to build a Culture of Life.

            By contrast, there are many issues of human dignity where people of good will can disagree about how best to pursue the good. For example, we all must welcome immigrants, but people of good will can disagree about the best way to do that while protecting our own country. We all must be concerned about poverty, but there can be a wide range of solutions for ending poverty. These are not unimportant issues, but there can be legitimate disagreements about how we can respect human dignity.

            So what are our “action steps” in response to the great dignity of every human being? First – we have a duty to work toward a just society which respects all human dignity. We work toward it through the political process, through making our voices heard in the halls of power, through peaceful and prayerful protests and activism which seek to build a “Culture of Life” and by praying for the conversion of our leaders. Second – we have a duty to respect human dignity in our own spheres of influence – by being there for the friend in a crisis pregnancy, taking care of and not abandoning our elderly relatives, welcoming immigrants in our midst, finding ways to alleviate the sufferings of the poor, and supporting charities which do such things. We aim to build a Culture of Life in our homes, our neighborhoods, our town, state, and country.

            In a truly Christian society, no one is unwanted. No one is disposable. As Pope St. John Paul II said, “The only right response to another human being is love.”

            Let’s build that truly Christian society.

Ordinary Time 27 - The Gift of Human Life

 

Homily for Ordinary Time 27

October 6, 2024

The Gift of Human Life

 

            In 1995, Pope St. John Paul II released a document which became one of the cornerstones of his pontificate: Evangelium Vitae, which means “The Gospel of Life.” This encyclical letter (which is a letter from the Pope to the entire world, carrying magisterial weight) coined that phrase which would be so repeated by the saintly pontiff for the remainder of his tenure: We are facing an enormous and dramatic clash between good and evil, death and life, the “culture of death” and the “culture of life.”. He held up these two contrasting ideas - culture of life and culture of death – as the great battle of our time. And here we are, almost thirty years later, with the battle still raging around us. As our Church enters into October, which is designated as Respect Life month, and as our nation is roiled by continual disagreements about the gift and meaning of human life, today I begin a month-long homily series discussing the Culture of Life and how it is lived out joyfully, with love.

            But first, let us examine what makes human life unique – in a world that is sometimes lost to it! Haven’t we all seen the old Fancy Feast commercial where the cat is being given the choicest, most delectable tidbits to eat out of the crystal goblet – while at the same time there are starving people in Bridgeport? Human life is infinitely more valuable than a pet’s. Why? Let us look at five aspects of human life that makes it unique, valuable, and worthy of respect.

            First, human life is sacred. We are made in the Image and Likeness of God, with an intellect and freedom. The Church has always been on the forefront of human dignity – whether it was the Dominican priest Fr. Bartolome de las Casas objecting to the harsh mistreatment of Native Americans among the Conquistadores, the religious orders like the Camillians who founded the modern hospital system, the great works of charity of St. Vincent de Paul and Mother Teresa, or the bold stand against the Nazi juggernaut by Bl. Franz Jagerstatter. The Church, since it is made of individuals, is not perfect in its history of respecting human rights – but it was truly due to the influence of Christianity that the world shifted from being “nasty, brutish, and short” to being one that sees the sacredness of every human life.

            This was one of the main reasons why Christianity spread so rapidly in the Roman Empire – it was the first religion to actually respect human dignity for everyone, from the poorest to the rich. An anonymous early Church document called “The Letter to Diognetus”, from approximately 130AD, talks about this stark, countercultural juxtaposition of the Roman culture of power, domination and violence with the unique compassion and respect that Christians showed: Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. (Exposing children was the ancient tradition of taking a handicapped child and leaving them in a field or forest to die). (Christians) share their meals, but not their wives. They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law. Christians love all men, but all men persecute them. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory. They are defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, kindness their response to insult. It was this radical commitment to the sacredness of all human life that caused the Church to be looked at in wonder – and for Christ’s message to spread

            Second, human life is a right. Our Declaration of Independence was correct when it stated that “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.” This right to life comes from God and cannot be taken away by any government or individual.

            Third, human lives are equal. If you were in a psychology class in college, you may have had to do the classic “Lifeboat” thought experiment. We were taught something along the lines of, “There are ten people on a sinking ship, and the lifeboat only has five spots. Who do you let on? You have a college professor, a person with cancer, an elderly person, a child, a famous athlete, your mother, someone with Downs’ Syndrome…” and the list goes on. The whole idea of the exercise is to somehow judge which lives are worth saving and which lives are not worth anything. With the eyes of a Christian, though, every life has the same equal value since all are loved infinitely by God and are invited to the same eternal destiny. There is no human life that has greater or lesser value than any other, based on talent or looks or money or size. From the first moment of conception until natural death, every human life has equal value.

            Fourth, human life is a gift. The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. He does not owe us another day of life or another breath – but all is gift. It is a gift that we must treat well, lest we offend the Giver – hence, our obligation to take care of our health and the health of others.

            Because it’s a gift, it is not something we are owed. This is especially true for couples who are struggling to have a child, which is a tremendous cross for many families. Recently IVF has made the news, and I know it is very prevalent in this community. But IVF is always gravely immoral, since it makes a child, not a gift, but a commodity to be manufactured. A child has a right to be brought into existence through an act of love, not a scientific technique. In this way, we preserve the nature of the gift – the giver is God, and we receive the gift of human life with gratitude and openness.

            Finally, life, as good as it is, is not absolute and there are many reasons to give it up. Greater love has no man, says that Lord, than to lay down his life for his friend. The fifty million martyrs who shed their blood for Christ demonstrated this profoundly – there are reasons to give up our health, our energy, our very lives.

            As Pope John Paul II said, “The basis for every good thing in society is the dignity of the human person.” Life is always a good, as it participates in the very life of God. This earthly life is a hint and a foreshadowing of that life that never ends, which we all yearn for. As St. Irenaeus put it, “The glory of God is man fully alive” – and this is His destiny for us, not just an earthly existence, but a Heavenly one where this earthly life will reach its fulfillment.