I'm excited for the Bishop's Synod on the Family that opens today and for Respect Life Month. Please don't let the media distort what is happening at the Synod. Stay close to Catholic news outlets, like the Vatican's news source, http://www.news.va There you can find Pope Francis' homily for the Mass that opened the Synod and see there that reports of him making radical changes to Church teaching are greatly exaggerated!
Have a blessed week!
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Homily:
27th Sunday of Ordinary Time – Cycle B
Has anybody out
there seen the “monkey selfie”? Most of
you have, I’m sure. You know, I have to
say that he took a pretty good picture. In
case you haven’t seen it then let me give you a quick rundown of what happened. A photographer had set up his camera to take
pictures of macaque monkeys in Indonesia and when he stepped away from his
camera for a few minutes, the monkeys approached it and picked it up. One of them figured out how to make the
clicking sound and started taking pictures.
The most famous one is what seems to be a perfectly executed selfie:
complete with cheesy grin and everything.
So why is this big news?
Well, because the animal rights group PETA has decided to sue the
photographer, claiming that the monkey holds the copyright to that image. Although copyright laws seem to state clearly
that copyrights can only be held by humans, this group is hoping to stretch
that definition to include this monkey.
Apparently, they think that he is people.
But there is something fundamentally different about
people, right? While it is true that all
people are animals, it is not true that all animals are people, am I
right? All we have to do is to look to
our scriptures today to see that. In the
book of Genesis, we read that God, after he had created Adam, recognized that
it was not good for him to be alone and so he desired to create “a suitable
partner” for him. And so God proceeded
to create all of the “various wild animals and various birds of the air” and he
brought them to Adam to see if any of these creatures would be “a suitable
partner”. Adam gave names to all of the
animals, but none of them proved to be “a suitable partner”.
It wasn’t until God took a part of the man and built it up
into a woman that the man found his “suitable partner”. “This one,” he said, “is bone of my bones and
flesh of my flesh”. In other words, the
woman was a person: his equal. None of
the animals proved to be a suitable partner because none of them was his equal:
none of them was another person. And so
we see in this account of creation that we, human persons, are fundamentally
different from all of the other animals, and that this is something that God
intended. Because of this, when we start
to think of rights, we recognize that persons have different rights than
non-persons.
One of our modern problems, however, is that we are losing
the notion of what it means to be a person.
“Animals are persons, too” is a rallying cry for animal rights activists
who claim that, because we are discovering that many animals demonstrate higher
levels of rationality than we ever thought that they had, they must be afforded
the same rights as human persons. What
this fails to recognize, however, is that they’re NOT ACTUALLY PERSONS! They are God’s creatures, true; and, because
of this, they are deserving of our care and respect; but they are not
persons. Meanwhile, actual persons
throughout the world are treated worse than most animals and these rights
activists don’t seem to notice. In many
ways, I think that we are “outsmarting” ourselves into eliminating the very
real differences between us and the rest of the animals, often to the detriment
of real persons all over the world.
(In fact, I remember that one of the ways that I tried to
draw attention to this fact was to create a window sticker for my car that read
“People are animals, too”. I figured
that if these activists thought of people as animals, they might actually see
them as persons and, thus, fight for their rights.)
The month of October is Respect Life Month and it is about
raising our awareness to the fundamental dignity of the human person as
something unique and that was intended by God.
This year’s theme, that “every life is worth living”, highlights that
even when a life doesn’t seem to have the same “quality” as others, perhaps
because of a disability, a terminal illness, or a loss of ability due to old
age, that it is nonetheless full of dignity and value and that it is, thus,
worth living. Because the human person
was created in the image and likeness of God—who, by the way, is three persons in himself—he bears a special
dignity that sets him apart from the animals.
This dignity is ours not because we are smarter than all the animals (I
mean, what if one day we find out that we aren’t smarter than they are?), but
rather because it has been given to us by God when he created us. Thus, our dignity transcends the
circumstances of our lives, including our ability or disability to live them
fully.
What better example do we have of this than in Jesus Christ
himself? The author of the letter to the
Hebrews reminds us that Jesus was made “perfect through suffering”. In other words, the very thing that many
people will say diminishes a person’s dignity—that is, suffering—is the same
thing that the scriptures tell us was part of Jesus’ perfection; and this
because his dignity transcends suffering, making his life worth living in spite
of it.
No, my brothers and sisters, taking a selfie does not prove
that you are a person (though it can make you famous). Being a human being, created in the image and
likeness of God, proves that you are a person.
And if you ever have a question about whether or not your life—or any
human life, for that matter—is worth living, just look to Jesus, who left the
perfect peace of heaven to become like us—not a monkey, or an elephant, or a
panda bear—so that we might become perfect, like him, through suffering and
know the inestimable worth of our lives; lives that were worth dying for and so
are definitely worth living.
Friends, as we offer back to God the perfect sacrifice of
his Son on this altar, let us give thanks to God for this great gift of life—of
personhood!—and let us pray for the grace to go forth from here to proclaim the
truth that every life is truly worth living.
Given at All Saints Parish:
Logansport, IN – October 4th, 2015
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