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Thursday, October 16, 2014

Synod Nods to Sin of Sodom

By:   Brian Charles
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Synod Nods to Sin of Sodom

Does the Catholic Church Still Believe in Mortal Sin? Hell? Damnation? Sins that Cry to Heaven for Vengeance? The Ten Commandments?

The New York Times, Time and The New Yorker are exuberant about the contents of the mid-Synod document on homosexuality. The Huffington Post calls it a “dramatic shift.” Reuters says the document challenges the Church to “change its attitude” toward those who practice perversion, the sin of Sodom. These times are interesting indeed.

 

Despite the opposite impression now being conveyed by the worldwide media, this document has no theological weight whatsoever. Let’s compare its contents with the authoritative teaching of the Catholic Church, based on Sacred Scripture and Tradition.

The mid-Synod document asks a misleading and provocative question, perhaps designed to avoid directly affirming that sodomites, with their alleged “gifts and qualities,” are to be valued as if it is Church doctrine.

Let’s be clear: Anyone who calls himself a “homosexual” is either lying or deceived. No one can be identified solely by his inclination to sin. I am NOT a heterosexual male. I am a male with concupiscence and weakness to sin. But I do not proudly accept my proclivity to sin in an open light, glorify it as my self-identity, boldly proclaiming to others that they must accept my public and manifest sin as my identity.

Apparently, however, the Synod Fathers disagree:

Homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community: are we capable of welcoming these people, guaranteeing to them a fraternal space in our communities? Often they wish to encounter a Church that offers them a welcoming home. Are our communities capable of providing that,accepting and valuingtheir sexual orientation, without compromising Catholic doctrine on the family and matrimony?

Of course we are, through the sacrament of Penance available at most Catholic churches at least weekly.

So, moving right along, let’s now compare this positively affirming quote with the inspired, inerrant, infallible Word of God, along with its interpretation by several Fathers of the Church, by whom the Credo of the Council of Trent, bound the Church’s interpretation of Sacred Scripture.[i]

Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind, because it is an abomination…Keep ye my ordinances and my judgments, and do not do any of these abominations: neither any of your own nation, nor any stranger that sojourns among you.[27]For all these detestable things the inhabitants of the land have done, that were before you, and have defiled it.[28]Beware then, lest in like manner, it vomit you also out, if you do the like things, as it vomited out the nation that was before you.[29]Every soul that shall commit any of these abominations, shall perish from the midst of his people.[30]Keep my commandments. Do not the things which they have done, that have been before you, and be not defiled therein. I am the Lord your God. (Lev 18:22, 26-30)

Seems pretty clear to me! But I suppose I’m one of those “fundamentalists” that the Synod bishops, along with the Holy Father, keep railing against. It’s astonishing to see what 100 years of imitating Protestant “Scripture scholars” by deconstructing the Word of God has done to the insights of those men who have been given the sacred commission to hand on what they have been given!

Let’s explore one or two more passages for some even vague biblical foundation for the novel language mid-Synod document employs where practitioners of the sin of Sodom are concerned. Let us see if St. Paul might shed some light on this:

Because that, when they knew God, they have not glorified him as God, or given thanks; but became vain in their thoughts, and their foolish heart was darkened.[22]For professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.[23]And they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of a corruptible man, and of birds, and of four-footed beasts, and of creeping things.[24]Wherefore God gave them up to the desires of their heart, unto uncleanness, to dishonor their own bodies among themselves.[25]Who changed the truth of God into a lie; and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.

[26] For this cause God delivered them up to shameful affections. For their women have changed the natural use into that use which is against nature. [27] And, in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts one toward another, men with men working that which is filthy, and receiving in themselves the recompense which was due to their error.[28]And as they liked not to have God in their knowledge, God delivered them up to a reprobate sense, to do those things which are not convenient;[29]Being filled with all iniquity, malice, fornication, avarice, wickedness, full of envy, murder, contention, deceit, malignity, whisperers,[30]detractors, hateful to God, contumelious, proud, haughty, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents,[31] foolish, dissolute, without affection, without fidelity, without mercy.[32]Who, having known the justice of God, did not understand that they who do such things, are worthy of death; and not only they that do them, but they also that consent to them that do them. (Rom. 1:21-32)

So if words have any meaning, the inspired, inerrant, infallible Word of God cannot be easily harmonized with the text of the mid-Synod document. But perhaps the Fathers of the Church can help us find continuity: 

The fate of the Sodomites was judgment to those who had done wrong, instruction to those who hear. The Sodomites having, through much luxury, fallen into uncleanness, practicing adultery shamelessly, and burning with insane love for boys; the All-seeing Word, whose notice those who commit impieties cannot escape, cast his eye on them. Nor did the sleepless guard of humanity observe their licentiousness in silence; but dissuading us from the imitation of them, and training us up to his own temperance, and falling on some sinners, lest lust being unavenged, should break loose from all the restraints of fear, ordered Sodom to be burned, pouring forth a little of the sagacious fire on licentiousness; lest lust, through want of punishment, should throw wide the gates to those that were rushing into voluptuousness. Accordingly, the just punishment of the Sodomites became to men an image of the salvation which is well calculated for men. For those who have not committed like sins with those who are punished, will never receive a like punishment." (St. Clement of Alexandria) 

Uh-oh, that’s less than helpful to the Synod Fathers’ case.



Well, how about St. Augustine, that man of men who sinned boldly and much throughout his life prior to his conversion to the one true Faith? Surely he must have warm and welcoming words for men who practice the sin of Sodom, just like the Synod Fathers do. Right?

[T]hose shameful acts against nature, such as were committed in Sodom, ought everywhere and always to be detested and punished. If all nations were to do such things, they would be held guilty of the same crime by the law of God, which has not made men so that they should use one another in this way." (St. Augustine, Confessions 3:8:15 [A.D. 400]).

Wrong again! So St. Augustine isn’t siding with the Synod Fathers and the Pope either.

Let’s try one more time. Surely the greatest Scripture scholar in the history of the Church, St. Jerome, must have expounded upon the fact that the Church should be open to public sodomites who have no intention of repenting or changing their perverse lifestyles. Right?

 “And Sodom and Gomorrah might have appeased it [God’s wrath], had they been willing to repent, and through the aid of fasting gain for themselves tears of repentance.” (St. Jerome)

Nothing there, either! Is it possible, then, that on October 13, 2014, the 97th anniversary of the appearance of Our Lady to the children at Fatima, the Synod Fathers actually released a document that contradicts Sacred Scripture, the authentic interpreters of Sacred Scripture and the entire Tradition of natural law and moral doctrine? It would seem so.

Of course not all of the Synod Fathers are pleased by this abuse of Synodal authority. Cardinal Raymond Burke, a stalwart Catholic bishop and cardinal, continues to do public battle for the spread of authentic doctrine in those media outlets that will interview him. So what’s left of the Catholic world has a new hero.

But woe to those bishops, priests, and seemingly and sadly, the Pope, for allowing the little ones to be scandalized and for giving the world the impression that ongoing sodomitical behavior is normal and that adulterers are perhaps able to ignore the unanimous teaching of the Church handed down from Jesus Christ’s Own lips, and be able to worthily receive Holy Communion.

Maybe it’s time for us to ask the Synod Fathers and the Holy Father a question or two or our own:

§  Do you hold the authentic Catholic Faith passed on to you from the apostles?

§  Do you believe you have the authority to pass on ONLY what Christ and His Apostles handed down to you through their successors, or do you believe you can create new doctrine based upon your own sinful dispositions and proclivities?

§  Do you believe in mortal sin?

§  Do you believe the ongoing, persistent practice of adulterous and sodomite sexual relations is mortally sinful, objectively speaking?

§  Do you believe that a person in the state of such mortal sin should be allowed to receive our Lord’s body, blood, soul and divinity in the Holy Eucharist?

§  Do you still believe in the real, substantial, abiding presence of Jesus Christ in each and every particle of the Sacred species and Precious Blood? I guess with nearly 50 years now of the abuse of Holy Communion handed from laymen to other laymen with no altar boys present to catch the fragments scattered on the floors of churches worldwide, the answer to the final question, as sad and preposterous as it seems, is self-evident.

Let us reflect upon this passage by St. Cyprian of Carthage:

[T]urn your looks to the abominations, not less to be deplored, of another kind of spectacle. . . . Men are emasculated, and all the pride and vigor of their sex is effeminated in the disgrace of their enervated body; and he is more pleasing there who has most completely broken down the man into the woman. He grows into praise by virtue of his crime; and the more he is degraded, the more skillful he is considered to be. Such a one is looked upon—oh shame!—and looked upon with pleasure. . . . Nor is there wanting authority for the enticing abomination . . . that Jupiter of theirs [is] not more supreme in dominion than in vice, inflamed with earthly love in the midst of his own thunders . . . now breaking forth by the help of birds to violate the purity of boys. And now put the question: Can he who looks upon such things be healthy-minded or modest? Men imitate the gods whom they adore, and to such miserable beings their crimes become their religion" (Letters 1:8 [A.D. 253]). 

Oh, if placed on that lofty watchtower, you could gaze into the secret places—if you could open the closed doors of sleeping chambers and recall their dark recesses to the perception of sight—you would behold things done by immodest persons which no chaste eye could look upon; you would see what even to see is a crime; you would see what people embruted with the madness of vice deny that they have done, and yet hasten to do—men with frenzied lusts rushing upon men, doing things which afford no gratification even to those who do them." (ibid., 1:9). 

O Synod Fathers, including Pope Francis, please consider the following passage if you must continue your work on the Synod of the Family:

At that hour the disciples came to Jesus, saying: Who thinkest thou is the greater in the kingdom of heaven?[2]And Jesus calling unto him a little child, set him in the midst of them,[3]And said: Amen I say to you, unless you be converted, and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.[4]Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, he is the greater in the kingdom of heaven.[5]And he that shall receive one such little child in my name, receiveth me.

[6] But he that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea. [7]Woe to the world because of scandals. Forit must needs bethat scandals come: but nevertheless woe to that man by whom the scandal cometh…[10]See that you despise not one of these little ones: for I say to you, that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father who is in heaven. (Matt. 18:1-7, 10)

[i]Creed of the Council of Trent: “I also admit the Holy Scripture according to that sense which our holy mother the Church hath held, and doth hold, to whom it belongeth to judge of the true sense and interpretations of the Scriptures. Neither will I ever take and interpret them otherwise than according to the unanimous consent of the Fathers."

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last modified on Friday, October 17, 2014