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.
No comments:
Post a Comment