The link below is from a discussion in the State of Indiana House Judiciary Committee on defense of marriage. It is an excellent scientific, psychological, and legal defense of traditional marriage. It is professional, it does not insult those of different opinions, and gives a clear explanation of what those in favor of keeping the traditional marriage definition see as the dangers of altering the definition. I encourage everyone to view this carefully, even if – perhaps especially if – you are not in agreement with the traditional definition of marriage or are not sure. The link is to the blog of the Catholic Apologist Matt Fradd.
Faith and Science: arch enemies or twin sisters?
I was requested by one person who posted a comment on my blog to please comment upon the relationship between faith and science. I’m happy to oblige!
Faith and Science: what does the juxtaposition of these terms signify to you? Are they an oxymoron (words that contradict each other, like a “married bachelor”)? Sadly many people view them this way, as if we either must believe the Bible or believe science, but not both. For example, it is in fact very true that there were and still are many fights in the Southern Bible Belt and elsewhere regarding the teaching of Creation vs. Evolution. The creationists believe that the world came to be precisely as the Book of Genesis tells us, while evolutionists will tell you that God had nothing to do with it, that it all started with the Big Bang. (Sounds like a TV show theme song!) We Catholics are often stuck right in the middle of this never-ending conflict. The biggest problem for Catholics about the whole debate is that this fight is not ours!
Faith and science do not preclude each other; in fact, they complement each other perfectly. The only people who have problems seeing this are the fundamentalists on both sides, Christians, for example, who believe the world was created in seven 24-hour periods, and that if the Bible doesn’t say it is true, it isn’t, and atheistically-based scientists who believe their job is to prove believers wrong about God and to use their scientific discoveries to prove that God doesn’t exist. Both sides are wrong. First, the Bible never claims and never did claim to be the absolute word on every bit of knowledge ever to be had. If that were the case, we could never cook our food, for we don’t find any recipes in the Bible to tell us what the proper temperature and time for cooking a 21 pound turkey is! By the same token, figuring out how things work in the world and how they came about by no means disproves the existence of God. If you imagine a very smart person who takes a piece of chocolate cake, analyzes it, figures out that all the ingredients (sugar, chocolate, eggs, etc.) got mixed together and heated at a certain temperature for a certain time and then got covered with icing, if he told you his (correct) conclusion thereby proves there’s no such thing as a baker, what would you say? That’s foolishness! Figuring out how something was made by no means proves that no one made it.
Pure creationism to the exclusion of any scientific knowledge is not a Catholic belief but one held by Fundamentalists. For us, science and theology go hand in hand. They are not bitter enemies but twin sisters. Catholics have always been at the forefront of learning and scientific knowledge. Observe just a few facts: the modern university system was in fact created by the Catholic Church. The oldest university in Western Civilization is the University of Bologna, founded in 1088. Some of the greatest teachers of higher learning throughout the Middle Ages, including the modern sciences, were priests and bishops: St. Bonaventure, St. Albert the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, just to mention a few. Pope Sylvester II (pope from 999-1003) was a prolific scholar and teacher. He endorsed and promoted study of Arab/Greco-Roman arithmetic, mathematics, and astronomy, reintroducing to Europe the abacus and armillary sphere, which had been lost to Europe since the end of the Greco-Roman era. He is said to be the first to introduce in Europe the decimal numeral system using the Arabic numerals. It was Pope Gregory XIII who introduced the modern calendar that corrected errors in the Julian calendar, and to this day the Pope’s summer residence at Castelgandolfo boasts the magnificent Vatican Observatory, with two state of the art telescopes that are run by the Vatican Observatory Research Group. These are hardly indicators of a Church that despises science, are they? No, theology and science go hand-in-hand, and the only people who have problems with it are those fundamentalists on either side who automatically think one precludes the other.
Okay, so how about Creation vs. Evolution? Let’s take a look: First, we have never claimed that the stories of creation in the Book of Genesis represent an eyewitness account of how God created. Those who believe every word is scientifically or historically accurate will have a hard time explaining why there are two stories of creation in the first two chapters of Genesis that contradict each other on the order of creation. In Chapter 1 we see the familiar seven-day creation account where God creates simply by willing something into existence: “Then God said, ‘let there be light’, and there was light”(Genesis 1:3). He starts small and builds up to man. “’Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’…and so it happened…male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:26-27). Once he has created man, he has created his masterpiece. It is finished, and he rests. We also see that everything is orderly, good, and all leads up to the creation of man. In other words, man is the ultimate end of all creation; all exists for him. Then, immediately after God has finished creating, he seems to be starting all over again with a barren land from which “the Lord God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7). Wait a minute! Didn’t we just see that in Genesis 1? What did God do, destroy what he had just done and start all over? No, of course not! Both of these stories are from ancient oral traditions that predate the writing of the biblical texts. When the biblical writers got around to writing down the Book of Genesis in an organized text, they had both of these ancient stories before them. The first one tells of God’s transcendent power, his sovereignty, his ability to create merely by his will, and that all led up to man, who had dominion over it all, and it was orderly and good. The second story shows God molding clay into man and breathing into him, working very immanently. He creates the man and cares for him. He creates the garden for him, and then declares it is not good for him to be alone, so he makes a suitable partner for him. First he creates the animals, but none of them is a suitable partner, so he forms the woman out of Adam’s rib (something near his heart) and brings her to him. The man accepts her at last as “flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones”, and the text then explains that “this is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one body” (Genesis 2:24). So they have these two stories which contradict each other in historical ‘fact” but which both tell important things about God and his love for us. Which one is right? Well, they both are! Both relate important points about our relationship with God. No one for a moment believed that either one was written by a stenographer taking notes as God created. Only the Fundamentalists believe that! We are not Fundamentalists.
Now let’s look at the scientific end. Some people try to disprove the existence of God by quoting the Big Bang Theory. First of all, we must remember that this is still a theory and not an established fact. I do think there’s a lot of merit to it, but even if someone someday proves the Big Bang so that it is no longer a theory but a scientific fact, does that prove God doesn’t exist? Of course not! All they did was discover how God created! You haven’t gotten rid of God! How does figuring out how something came about prove that no one created it? There is nothing in the Big Bang Theory that requires it to be a product of chance that was not guided by anyone.
I find religiously-minded people who are afraid that science is going to one day disprove the existence of God to be terribly naïve and weak in faith. How can exploring God’s creation possibly prove he doesn’t exist? Does that make any sense? At the same time, scientists who believe that science will one day prove God does not exist are being equally naïve and in fact unscientific. Just logically speaking, if you ask me to believe that the world in all its magnificent array was merely the perchance result of actions over time that were not guided by anyone but just happened that way or that a conscious mind guided it, which is easier? I am perplexed by scientists who reject the idea of intelligent design, that God guided the scientific actions that bring things about. What are they so afraid of?
Scientific people tell us constantly that the existence God cannot be proved, therefore, we have to trust only the solid proof of scientific experimentation. But the fact of the matter is, scientists place their faith in others’ writings all the time. Someone recently wrote on my blog that he knows science to be true because he can do the experiment himself and prove it. Fair enough. But until he does, he’s putting faith in another’s words. It’s not feasible as a scientist to say you’d only believe something once you’ve proven it for yourself. So scientists trust the evidence of others just as we trust the evidence of faith. Scientists have been wrong before, and people feel rather foolish who put their trust in their findings, only to discover they were in error. So there’s always going to be faith involved, and neither religion nor science will ever preclude the other.
We have no problem reconciling belief in God’s creation with scientific facts. Truth can’t contradict truth. If a religious truth and a scientific truth seem at first to contradict each other, all that means is that there is something about one or the other, or perhaps both, that we don’t fully understand. Once we understand them both completely, they fit hand and glove!
2013 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 3,700 times in 2013. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 3 trips to carry that many people.
Excellent column by Matt Fradd on the polygamy/homosexual marriage discussion
I have received numerous responses to my post a few days ago about the legalization of polygamy and of how it is a natural outgrowth from the homosexual marriage legalization. Matt Fradd, a famous Catholic apologist posted a discussion about it on his site that I found excellent. I recommend everyone check it out.
Fr. Carrozza
http://mattfradd.com/2013/12/20/homosexuality-and-the-duck-dynasty-debate/
Here is one time I hate being right – polygamy is now legal!
In a previous post I wrote that the legalization of gay marriage was just the tip of the iceberg, and I warned about what was waiting in the wings. Some people scoffed at my prediction. Well, my predictions are coming true!
An activist federal judge ruled on Friday that polygamy is now essentially legal in the United States. U.S. District Judge Clark Waddoups recklessly decided that reality TV stars Kody Brown and his four “wives” could not be prosecuted for polygamy, even though the Utah law against the practice is the strongest in the nation. So now, watch! State after state will start legalizing polygamy (including polyamory – three men and two women, for example – it’s the same thing!) and we will be branded as “polyamorophobes” because we oppose it.
I warned from the beginning that once the biblical standard of man-woman marriage was breached, there would be no logical place to stop. Though we as Catholics have been accused of exaggerating and scare-mongering, this ruling shows that we were right all along to sound the alarm. The next in line to be overturned will be bans against incest. After that, bestiality (zoophilia)! Just watch! Don’t believe me? No one believed me when I said polygamy would be accepted. Pandora’s Box is open! All the evils are now out and free! God save us! We obviously can’t leave it up to ourselves to know right from wrong! My biggest fear is that I’m being proven right far sooner than I ever imagined! Do you still think there was nothing wrong with legalizing gay marriage?????
The Catholic Faith in a Nutshell
I was having dinner with a friend the other night who is not Christian but who was asking me a lot of questions concerning what our Catholic faith is all about. When I explained it to him, he said I pretty much captured it in a nutshell. Since he found it helpful, I thought it might help someone else by posting it on my blog, so here goes!
With Original Sin, Heaven was lost to mankind. Satan had his entry into our world, and with him came his greatest weapon: death. No matter how good any one of us tries to be, because of Original sin, when we die, we would enter into Hell and condemnation for all eternity, and there was nothing we could do about it. A good image would be of us being thrown into a prison and shackled to the wall with the door slammed shut behind us. With Satan, all our pleading and begging for mercy to let us out falls on deaf ears. The only one who can help us is God. We need his help; without him we’re doomed. God did come to our help by becoming a man. He took on our human nature precisely so that now he could enter the realm of death, something he couldn’t do as God alone. He took on flesh in the person of Jesus, who is both truly God and truly man. When he died on the cross – which was his plan from the beginning – he was able to enter into Hell and free us. You can imagine it as Satan letting the one person in who had the key to our shackles and the gate to Hell. When he rose from the dead, he destroyed death’s hold over us. It’s as if Jesus paved a highway that goes right through Hell and up to Heaven. So Jesus totally reversed the power of death by taking Satan’s prime weapon and turning it against him. What Satan intended as the means to enslave us in his kingdom – death – is now the way we leave his power and enter into heaven. We will still die, but death now leads to our salvation and not our condemnation. But in order for us to follow the path, we have to be one with Jesus. God took on our nature, and now we must take on his. This is accomplished through the Sacraments. In Baptism, we die with Christ and are buried with him, but we also rise with him. We inherit heaven and become heirs with Christ to everything he won by his death. In the Eucharist, Jesus gives us his body and blood as our food so that our flesh is now made up of his flesh, and every time we celebrate the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and receive Jesus in Holy Communion, we are on the cross with him in an unbloody and painless manner, are buried with him and risen in him over and over again. It’s as if Jesus created a power line that transverses eternity for us to plug into his death and resurrection and receive the salvation he won for us once and for all. He made the sacrifice he offered on Calvary forever present to us in the Holy Mass. He also gave his teachings to the Apostles with the authority to continue these Sacraments for all of time, and told them to “teach them to carry out everything I have commanded you.” (Matt. 28:20) We still have to walk the path to heaven – there is no moving sidewalk that automatically takes us there – and sometimes, because while Baptism washes away Original Sin, concupiscence (the inclination to sin) still remains – we stray from the path. Christ calls us back to the right path constantly through the Sacrament of Reconciliation, and teaches us through the Church, especially the successor to St. Peter (the Pope) to whom Jesus gave the ultimate authority to speak in his name (cf. Matt. 16:13-20), to help us know when we’re not sure if certain activities or beliefs lead us to heaven or not. So, in order to reverse the effects of Original Sin, we must accept Jesus as God-made-man, be baptized, receive him in Holy Communion every Sunday for the forgiveness of our sins, and allow him to keep us on the path to heaven by following the way he shows us through the teachings of the Church. Do that and you’ll get to Heaven. It’s as simple as that!
P.S. Thanks, Joe, for the inspiration!!
Do You Want To Go To Heaven?
“Do you want to go to heaven?” Anyone who believes in God would almost certainly answer that question with a “yes!” No one who believes would desire anything else. So why, then, do we have to worry about going to heaven? Some people mistakenly hold that, “since God is all-loving, what loving God would want us to burn in hell for our sins rather than be with him in his kingdom? He wouldn’t deliberately condemn any of his children; therefore, everyone will go to heaven!” Unfortunately, that’s not a correct read on God, as they leave out one very important element: free will. Yes it is true: God desires the salvation of everyone. His death and resurrection made that possible for all of us. But in order to enter heaven, we must follow him. That is up to us.
Imagine if you will a ship that has come to rescue people who were tossed overboard in a shipwreck. The ship anchors and sends a ladder down into the water for everyone to climb up to safety. Many people do, but others, for whatever their reason, refuse to climb the ladder. Maybe they are enjoying the water and see no reason to get on the ship, or maybe they’re expecting the captain to jump into the water and drag them out personally. They argue, “The captain doesn’t want us to drown, so he’ll jump in and pull each of us out of the water.” And so they stay treading water waiting for the captain to save them. The ladder is still there and the captain is saying, “Come on! Grab onto the ladder and climb up onto the ship!” but the person says, “No, I don’t have to because I know you’ll come down and get me!” Well, what happens? Glug! Glug! Glug! The person drowns. Did the captain deliberately drown the person because he refused to climb the ladder? No, he is very upset by the fact that the person drowned, but it was the person’s own fault. So those who were saved were saved because the captain threw down a ladder to make their rescue possible. As for those who weren’t saved, it was their own fault!
It is the same way with God. By becoming man and suffering, dying, and rising for us, he made our salvation possible. But you and I have to freely avail ourselves of what he offered in order to enter heaven. Remember that, while we often think of heaven as this big banquet going on in heaven, theologically speaking, “to go to heaven” means to be perfected, to be perfectly formed in the image and likeness of Christ, to be totally present to him. What needs to be perfected? Our muscles? No. Our hairdo? No. Obviously, it is our will. Original Sin occurred when Adam and Eve said no to God and yes to sin. Our salvation is when we reverse that, when we say no to sin and give our full assent to God’s will. Now, if God were to force us to follow him, that would not be our free will, our own consent; it would be coercion. So God cannot drag us by the hair into heaven whether we want to enter or not – he can’t force us to be perfected. He will help us, but it has to be our own choice. Hence, anyone who is saved is saved by the grace of God; anyone who is not, it is his own fault! God saves those who are saved; the condemned man, by his own refusal to follow God, condemns himself!
So therefore, no one can sit back and rest on his laurels thinking his salvation is in the bag. We must work on it every day by following God’s law. Yes, he desires our salvation and he helps us in a thousand ways every day to walk the path, to climb the ladder out of the waters of death, but we have to walk, we have to climb. He cannot do it for us.
Respect Life – but don’t shoot the priest!
This Coming Sunday the Church celebrates Respect Life Sunday. It is the weekend every year when we are asked to reflect upon the sanctity of human life in all its stages, from conception to natural death. Of course, whenever we talk about the precious gift of life and the crimes against it in our society, we know we will meet opposition, sometimes even within our own household. This fact has often put the priest in a great dilemma at mass. Some people, aware that some Catholics in church on Sunday do not take defense of life seriously, expect the priest to give a fiery condemnation of abortion, euthanasia, and all other crimes against human life. For them only a frontal attack will do. I would be the last person in the world to deny the seriousness of these practices, and I too sometimes get angry when I see Catholics taking them lightly. But I also know that there are people in our congregation who have had abortions. Some regret them terribly, and a strong condemnation only digs the knife of their pain deeper in their heart. Others do not regret it, or at least not as severely, and can end up feeling that the priest is trying to make them feel guilty when in fact they don’t. So a strong attack will not benefit them. Then there are some who do not want to even talk about it because they don’t want their children to have to hear about it. But by never talking about it, we fail to instruct our children from an early age to respect life and deprive others of possible tools to help them make life-affirming choices should they or someone they love be in a crisis situation. So the priest is often stuck between the barrels of the shotguns of two groups: one demanding that he preach strongly and condemningly against abortion and the other demanding that he never mention it at all. So what should the priest do? Well, I always ask how Jesus would handle it. I believe first of all that Jesus would undeniably affirm the sanctity of every human life, and that it is never permissible for us to take or prevent any human life. I think he would be very strong when confronted with those who advocate doing so. At the same time, he would be most forgiving and comforting to those who have submitted to any life-denying actions and now regret it, and if he needed to bring the person to realize the error of their ways, he would do it with tremendous charity. That’s what I try to do, and I suggest we all do the same. So if at any time your priest does not speak about life matters in the manner you would wish, I plead with you not to shoot him and make him the source of all evil, whether it is the accusation of keeping silent and allowing evil to triumph or of talking about it and upsetting children and making others feel guilty. Remember that the priest is not the source of the problem of lack of respect for life. It is a sad reality in our world that we must discuss unpleasant matters at times, even if it makes some people who don’t want to hear it uncomfortable, but at the same time we cannot come out like gangbusters bashing everyone; we must be sensitive to the needs of all parishioners. Let us strive to advocate respect for all life in uncompromising fidelity to the truth but also with tremendous understanding and compassion. I think that’s what Jesus would do!
How does one become a saint?
I just got back from Rome last night, and while there, I could not cease to remember seeing Pope John Paul II several times on previous trips to Rome and reflecting on how I saw and met a future saint. With the recent news that Pope Francis will canonize Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II, a lot of attention will be focusing on the process of being declared a saint. The blog whose link I have attached below does an excellent job in relating the process.
One thing I always find necessary to point out is that the Church doesn’t make saints: we declare them. A saint is someone in heaven. When someone is canonized, it means that God has given us sufficient indication that the individual is with him in glory, and that their life was so exemplary of the life of discipleship in Christ that we should pause and reflect upon their life, as it will help us on our journey.
Undoubtedly, someone will point out a sin the person once committed and think this automatically rules the person out for sainthood. Not true. We don’t canonize people for being sinless; we canonize them for practicing heroic virtue, which clearly both John XXIII and John Paul II demonstrated amply in their lives.
The link below describes the canonization process:
http://www.focus.org/blog/posts/how-does-someone-become-a-saint.html
The Supreme Court and Pandora’s Box
Watching the news stories of people celebrating the Supreme Court’s decision to override certain elements of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which in effect legalizes gay marriage, I can’t escape the analogy of watching people celebrate as the Trojan horse is wheeled through the gates of Troy. While this ruling will be perceived as a great victory by some people because it validates their desires, there is a host of evils hiding within that, once they are out, I guarantee you people will regret tremendously, and will begin to rue the day the Supreme Court overstepped its bounds and had the audacity to redefine what constitutes a marriage. Same sex marriage is just the tip of the iceberg. What is waiting in the wings is terrifying. Observe the following:
- A lawsuit being referred to as the “Sister Wives” lawsuit because the persons involved with the lawsuit are the ones who are in the TLC reality show of the same name, is being filed in Utah. Kody Brown and his four wives believe the bigamy law in Utah – which does not allow a man to have more than one wife – is unconstitutional.
- A woman who calls herself “Ashara Love” defending polyamory and pushing for the right to marry, explains: “We are the next generation after the gay and transgender communities.” She belongs to a small group that believes people have the right to form their own complex relationships with multiple partners. The most vocal want the right to marry as a cluster. “We have rights to love any way we want unless we are harming other people,” said Love. “Like the air we breathe, we have a right to be and do and say whatever is our full expression, and this to me is a civil right.”
- On Nov. 16, 30-year-old office worker Chen Wei-yih married the love of her life — herself. The Taipei City-based woman, who is no longer single by her own admission, wanted to show other ladies who have hit their thirties without a manifested prince charming that they are not failures. “You must learn to love yourself before you can love others,” said Chen, who also embarked on a solo honeymoon to Australia. Chen explained that when a woman in Taiwan enters her thirties, getting married and having children becomes the main focal point among concerned family, relatives and friends, making a single, independent woman feel like a failure if she has none of those things. Chen explained that “although many people freely express their love for others through flowers, chocolates and expensive dinners, they are less inclined to pamper and shower the same love on themselves. By the same token, expressing your love for a man through marriage and a huge wedding banquet should be something you’re willing to do for yourself. Self-marriage seemed like the logical solution”, she concluded. Making it clear that she has had several boyfriends and relationships, some of which almost led to the altar, Chen described herself as neither unmarriageable nor against marriage to another person. She also considers this marriage non-binding, meaning she is free to marry someone else, but if that opportunity does not arise, at least she made the commitment to forever love herself.
- A blog entitled “Full Marriage Equality”, which defines itself as “Advocating for the right of consenting adults to share and enjoy love, sex, residence, and marriage without limits on the gender, number, or relation of participants” and states that “full marriage equality is a basic human right” makes a forceful argument to legalize consensual incest: “In the twenty first century family, we have made progress in leaps and bounds. Interracial couples are accepted, gay rights are improving and ‘acceptance’ is the catch-cry of our generation. But it seems strange that while we have come so far in breaking down these social barriers, we have built other walls. Incest, which was common amongst Ancient Egyptians and monarchs up until a few hundred years ago, is now a social taboo…the thing that really stands out though is that no matter the situation, two or more convictions for incest puts you on the Sex Offenders Register for the rest of your life. ‘Consent’ is not a valid defense. The love of your life can be standing in a witness box, telling the court he loves you, and that it was consensual, but it doesn’t matter…Incest is mainly illegal because there’s a law saying it is. It’s not exactly harmful to participants or their children. You just have to remember that incest and abuse are not synonyms.”
- Animal sex advocate Malcolm Brenner is republishing a memoir he wrote about a nine-month sexual relationship with a theme park dolphin. Brenner asks, “What is repulsive about a relationship where both partners feel and express love for each other? I know what I’m talking about here because after we made love, the dolphin put her snout on my shoulder, embraced me with her flippers and we stared into each others’ eyes for about a minute.” Activist Cody Beck compares talking about his attraction to dogs and horses to a gay teenager coming out. Harboring a crush on a Dachshund is “like being gay in the 1950s. You feel like you have to hide, that if you say it out loud, people will look at you like a freak.” Beck says that he and a network of zoophile or “zoos” are the logical extension of the sexual rights movement.
Of course, some people will scoff at the idea that any of these perverse acts will ever be legalized. But the reality is that, given the language used to argue same sex marriage rights – “my civil rights”, “the right to love whomever I choose”, “as long as it’s not harming anyone else” – what foundation is left to prohibit these actions? It is completely eroded away, and it is only a matter of time before the tide of public opinion becomes less hostile to people with these desires and more compassionate and understanding of their “needs” and fights for their rights to marry their sister or their dog. Pandora’s Box has been opened wide!
What I find most interesting (or appalling) in all of this is what has happened to the definition of marriage. If we put all this together, what is society proposing as the new definition of marriage? It would appear to be something like this: “Marriage is a bond of love between one, two or more persons of either sex or with a non-human that may or may not be expressed sexually, that can be permanent if you want it to be or temporary – whichever you prefer. It may be a pledge of fidelity to another person, unless you don’t want mutual exclusivity, in which case you are free to love as many people as you wish.” In other words, “create whatever relationship you’d like and call it a marriage.”
Contrast this with the Christian understanding of marriage that has been the foundation of Western society. That view is that God created Woman from the side of Man to show that the two come from one flesh: This one “at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh…that is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one body” (Gen. 2:23-24). Add to that the Catholic understanding that in marriage, a man and woman who give themselves to each other sexually are uniting their love with the very love of God, who through them may bring a new life into the world, thereby drawing them into union with the very essence and nature of God and by that act receiving tremendous grace and leading their souls to heaven.
If this new contemporary definition of marriage is allowed to grow and mature, what will we have achieved? There are many legitimate needs that some people face in a society where they cannot enter into marriage with a member of the opposite sex, but they can be met in various other ways without loosely defining any relationship we wish as a marriage. My question is this: is the contemporary ambiguous redefinition of marriage worth throwing away the Christian view of marriage that we have held until now? Where is the improvement? Perhaps we need to discuss the very real possibility that God knew what He was doing when He instituted marriage as a sacred covenant between one man and one woman, and that any attempt on our part to address the legitimate needs of anyone who doesn’t fit this model, no matter how compassionate and understanding we are, will not be solved by redefining marriage to meet their personal desires.
The only hope we have left is for enough people to open their eyes to the reality of the direction in which we are headed and start to acknowledge once again that marriage must only be between one man and one woman. It’s time we lose the egos that have dared to tell God he’s wrong and that we’re going to correct his error. Perhaps we can still round up the evils and put them back in Pandora’s Box before it’s too late. God help us if we don’t!
Either marriage is heterosexual and monogamous or it is totally meaningless. We cannot have it both ways. Which do you prefer?
Rev. Andrew P. Carrozza 