Mea Culpa

In the same Public Square last month I observed that few sermons get preached these days on sexual morality. Well, count me corrected. I was in Omaha only a few days after the last issue went to press, and at Mass what did I hear? Fr. Mark McKercher at St. Cecilia Cathedral preached a fine sermon that defended and commended Humane Vitae , the 1968 encyclical that clarified and reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s prohibition of artificial means of contraception.

The readings lent themselves to the topic. From the Old Testament we heard Jeremiah lamenting his fate. He has prophesied as the Lord directed him, but his fellow Israelites have responded with derision and reproach. That, Fr. McKercher observed, pretty much describes how many responded after Paul VI promulgated Humane Vitae .

Jeremiah is like most of us. He would prefer to be silent, for the contempt of the world can be difficult to bear. But the Word of God burns like a fire in his heart. Much as Jeremiah would like to be conformed to the world, he cannot. God has the last say. Jeremiah has to speak.

Just so the Church, Fr. McKercher continued. Paul VI did not “decide” that the pill constitutes a violation of the moral integrity of the union of male and female. The Church teaches what she must, what accords with the moral and spiritual truths entrusted to her, not what she wants. And for that we should be thankful, for if we allow ourselves to sail this way and that in accord with the ever changing winds of worldly opinion, we’d be shipwrecked. Which is what Paul VI predicted when he itemized the disarray and disorder that would follow from a wholesale embrace of modern contraceptive ¬technologies.

Of course, as Fr. McKercher pointed out, we let ourselves be blown around by winds of worldly opinion, some of us on questions of sexual morality but all of us in some area. The temptation”one he said he often falls victim to”is to focus on the Church: “How could the Church be so stupid, so retrograde, so out of touch?”

However, St. Paul would have us think differently. “Do not conform yourselves to this age, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” That shifts the question: “Why are we so wayward, so irreformable, so out of touch?” Doubtless there are specks in the Church’s eye, but item number one on our to-do lists should be removing the beam from our often worldly eyes.