On June 26, the Supreme Court of the United States, which contains a Catholic (in name only) majority, joined forces with anti-Catholic Liberalism to proclaim a decision lacking any basis in reality.  The Court struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which merely stated a truism of nature: marriage is the union of a man and a woman, as any other type of union is by definition incapable of attaining the primary end of the marital act.  The majority of the Court stated this law to be unconstitutional.  

The opinion of the Court was delivered by Justice Kennedy (nominally Catholic) and joined by Justice Sotomayor (another purported Catholic).  And yet not a single bishop to my knowledge has thus far declared either Justice lacking in the ever elusive “full communion” status denied only to those who defend the Catholic Faith, rather than work to destroy it. 

The Kennedy opinion goes further than simply invalidating the federal law, but it does so by declaring the statute to violate the “dignity” and “personhood” of those engaging in acts contrary to nature—this from the same Justice, by the way, who refuses to protect the dignity and personhood of unborn babies slaughtered in their mother’s wombs.  Such hypocrisy merely demonstrates in Technicolor the utter emptiness of these vapid politically correct terms.

The saddest part about the decision, however, is the dissenting opinions of the Catholics on the Court, who although they would have upheld the Defense of Marriage Act do so using liberal principles.  They would uphold the law not because it is a restatement of the immutable Natural Law, but rather because it is the “will of the People”. 

Whether the government should bestow the rights and benefits of marriage on non-marriages is not for them an issue of truth and justice but merely a choice to be left up to the “political branches.”  Justice Scalia, for example, dissents out of his conviction that the people should decide whether or not to deny reality, violate the principle of non-contradiction and declare that which is not a marriage to be a marriage.  He writes: “We might have covered ourselves with honor today, by promising all sides of this debate that it was theirs to settle and that we would respect their resolution. We might have let the People decide.”  All hail the “divine” revelation of the god of the People.  The people had spoken in DOMA and therefore, according to Scalia, the cause is closed. 

A federal law declaring unnatural non-marriages to in fact be marriages would be perfectly legal with Justice Scalia as long as 51% of some unspecified majority voted for it.  Truth is relative, in other words, and can be changed according to the will of the majority.  Justice Alito lines up with Justice Scalia to defend the lunacy of the People declaring their own reality: “I hope that the Court will ultimately permit the people of each State to decide this question for themselves.”

How is it possible that this could happen?  The Church’s teaching has been betrayed by Catholic Justices in the majority and in the dissent but only because, in the words of St. John Fisher, “the fort has been betrayed even of those who should have defended it.”  The Second Vatican Council is the ultimate cause of this decision.  The Council adopted the false idea that reality can become whatever a majority declare it to be. 

As documented in scholarly detail by Robert de Mattei in The Second Vatican Council An Untold Story, the Council itself established the premise that a majority of bishops in Council could change the reality of Catholic teaching.  That which centuries of Tradition and consistent papal teaching had declared as wrong was all of a sudden was declared right.  The notion of the collective government of the Church rather than the monarchial government of the Church had been condemned in the Middle Ages.  The participation of Catholics in ecumenical hootenannies was condemned by pope after pope.  The propositions that the Church and State should be separated and that people had a right to publicly practice false religions had been solemnly declared anathema by the highest magisterial authority in the Church.

Yet, the French Revolution in the Church (as the Council was described by Cardinal Suenens) swept all this reality away and proclaimed a new reality of collegiality, ecumenism and religious liberty.  Now by a wave of the mihi placet (it pleases me), post-Conciliar popes declare this obvious contradiction to be in continuity with Tradition. 

Even more relevant to the recent Supreme Court decision striking down DOMA is the reversal of the Traditional definition of the ends of marriage.  As the Church’s philosophy of teleology holds that what things are is a function of their end, a change in the definition of the ends of something involves a change of the definition of what it is.  Here the “what” is the reality of marriage.  The Church had always and everywhere taught that the primary end of marriage is the procreation and rearing of children.  The secondary end is the mutual support of the spouses; and the third is the quieting of the desires of concupiscence. 

Not so, says the Spirit of Vatican II! The innovators sought to overturn this definition and topple the primary end from definitional primacy with the intention of either inverting the order or instituting an incommensurability of the ends of marriage, thus holding them all of equal value—a novel philosophy that would be developed by John Finnis and Germain Grisez to defend the novelty of the Council. 

As Dr. Mattei writes “Unfortunately the family morality formulated in the chapter ‘The dignity of matrimony and of the family’ in Gaudium et spes would incorporate the suggestions of the innovators, rather than those of the defenders of traditional morality.”_[1] 

Cardinal Ruffini’s prophetic criticism of the new ideas at the time has come to fulfillment in the Supreme Court of the United States.  The cardinal wrote: “It seems that the concept of matrimony as we have understood it until now, dogmatically and morally, has to change, at least in practice.  But is it possible that the Church was  mistaken until now, and that adaptation to today’s society forces us to declare that what was always held to be immoral is [now] in keeping with morality.”_[2]

Cardinal Ruffini was referring to another type of unnatural union— that of the contraception of marital acts, but his observation applies also to the issue homosexual ‘marriage’.  Once procreation is no longer the primary end of the marital act, and the love of the parties and the satisfying of the appetite of concupiscence are elevated to its equal or superior, then denying the fulfillment of these two ends for those who want to do so with someone of the same sex is indeed, in the words of Justice Kennedy, a denial of their dignity. Since they attempt to fulfill the newly defined ends of marriage they must be recognized as married.  The decision of the two Catholics in the majority in this case was made not in Washington, D.C., but in St. Peter’s and in this very chapter of Gaudium et Spes—a document which even Benedict XVI worried aloud had been imbued with the errors of Palegianism. 

Tragically, however, ineffective dissent of the Catholic Justices in this case was also decided in St. Peter’s, through the entire course of the Council, which proceeded as if mere majorities could vote change in reality and truth.  If a majority of votes at a Council declare right that which has always been wrong then the will of the People must be respected in that case too.  For Scalia and Alito and those joining parts of their dissents, the error of the majority of the Supreme Court Justices in this case is not their denial of the reality of marriage but rather their intervention to cut short the political debate over whether our nation should launch off into the deep of contradiction of nature. 

Sadly these Catholic jurists on the majority and the dissent who are clearly not in “full communion” with reality or Catholic doctrine should be pitied more than criticized.  They are sheep who were led to the guillotine  by their Revolutionary shepherds in an event which even a cardinal of the Catholic Church recognized as the “1789 of the Church”—the Second Vatican Council.  They are simply in “full communion” with the implications of Vatican II.  Truth is no longer the correspondence of our mind to reality but rather the bending of reality to what the will of the People decrees. 

If even the most holy sacrifice of the Mass—of supernatural origin—can be reshaped to the tastes of modern Man, why not the natural institution of marriage?  Kennedy and Sotomayor are simply more consistent in their use of the contradiction in Gaudium et spes than the dissenters in this case, who evidently can live with whatever the outcome of the votes in a Church Council or in the U.S. Congress.  It’s the “sacred will of the people” that matters most. 

This latest decision is merely another mile marker on the slippery slope whose descent started at Vatican II.  We can expect nothing less than a continuation of this downward spiral until a pope or Council returns the hierarchy of the Church to “full communion” with reality and truth.