The Scripture readings for today’s feast are about love, faith, children, and suffering, so in a word, these readings are about the beauty of the family. Until very recently in human history, children have rightly been considered a blessing in every culture and religion, but, sadly, in the wealthy West that is no longer so for many people. The Sexual Revolution selfishly insists that children are often a burden, in many ways a restriction of personal liberty, always just an option, and at best a lifestyle accessory to be chosen or not according to one’s own preferences.
And in the warped view of the radical Left which now dominates progressive politics, the human race is a pestilence from which the Earth or (if you will) the goddess Gaia must be protected, and so having few or no children is therefore understood as an act of charity for our planet or even as a moral obligation not to bring more people into the world. These are among the several reasons why most Western nations now have birth rates well below population replacement level and why the average age in those same countries continues to rise to the detriment of all.
At the core of the Sexual Revolution are false claims about the nature, identity and purpose of the human person. And the partisans of that Revolution perceive both the God of the Bible and the natural family of husband, wife, and children as hateful obstacles to their true freedom and flourishing. And, friends, that is the very definition of a culture of death.
This is why divorce for no reason, abortion for any reason, contraception always and everywhere, surrogate motherhood for hire, and gender fluidity by decree even during childhood are all signs of the new vision of human life offered by the Sexual Revolution, the central creed of which denies that there is an eternal moral law or even a permanent human nature.
That creed also asserts that all people have an absolute right to self-invention and re-invention in the elusive search for the fulfillment of our deepest desires. And this ludicrous fantasy of self-creation must, of course, be accepted by everyone else at our legal, political, and economic peril.
Into this cultural maelstrom came a document from the Holy See just before Christmas which was interpreted in both the secular media and much of Catholic media as an endorsement of the false claims of the Sexual Revolution and a radical innovation in Catholic doctrine and discipline.
The text in question is called Fiducia Supplicans, meaning Supplicating Trust, and it is an ambiguous document which can be read in an orthodox way from a certain point of view but which was also predictably read by many as an attempt to change the Church’s understanding of Holy Matrimony through subterfuge by allowing priests to offer blessings to Catholics whose public sexual friendships do not correspond to the Gospel.
Of course Fiducia Supplicans does not change the teaching of the Church because no document from any bishop, including the Bishop of Rome, can contradict the Word of God. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the supernatural gift of divine revelation, and therefore the Church’s teaching on the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony and the gift of sexuality can never be changed to contradict what that teaching has always been from the time of Christ and the Apostles. And any claim to the contrary is simply false.
The unfortunate ambiguity of this document is, I believe, a reflection of the desire of many theologians and even some bishops to change the Church’s teaching by surrendering to the anthropology of the Sexual Revolution. But that tendency must always be opposed, and this battle has been with us from the very beginning of Christianity. That is why the New Testament Letter of Jude teaches us that even in the midst of false doctrine and immoral behavior in the Church we must always “contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.” (Jude 1:3)
In many ways the Sexual Revolution advances nothing other than a new version of Gnosticism, an ancient stew of bizarre ideas and false doctrines based on the notion that enlightenment and happiness come from the liberation of the human spirit from what the Gnostics regarded as the prison of the body. Indeed, Gnosticism sought to free humanity from the constraints of all material reality by means of esoteric knowledge or, in Greek, gnosis - hence the name gnosticism.
From the beginning of Christianity, Gnosticism in some form has been a rival to the truth of the Gospel, and Gnosticism both ancient and new proposes alternate ways of understanding how and why the universe came to be, what a human person is, how we come to know our purpose, why we suffer, what we can do to end our suffering, and how we find enduring happiness.
Standing against the new Gnosticism, just as against the old one, is the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which reveals that our bodies are not prisons but essential parts of our human nature and the means by which our true identities are disclosed both to ourselves and to others. But even those who are intentional disciples of the Lord Jesus must take great care lest we substitute gnostic fantasies for the Word of God.
For example, the radical changes about marriage and sexuality introduced into mainline Protestantism in the past hundred years are illustrations of how a resurgent Gnosticism undermines authentic Christian doctrine and replaces it with a facsimile while rejecting the authority of divine revelation in favor of the supposed wisdom of human experience. And that experience, of course, must always be interpreted for us mere mortals by enlightened experts who have attained, to their own way of thinking, a higher and deeper understanding of reality.
It is just this temptation to imagine a wisdom higher than the Word of God that has misled so many Catholics in our time, including those responsible for the German Synodal Way and the recent unhappy document from Rome.
But against these trends of the new Gnosticism firmly stands the reality of the Incarnation and birth of God the Son. Christ’s human life among us points to the simple, beautiful, and compelling witness of love, faith, and children in the family, but Christ also reveals the meaning of suffering in our lives, including in the life of the Holy Family.
Today’s feast reminds us that there is a givenness in human nature which defies every effort to deny or reinvent it. So, contrary to the madness now among us, there are only two sexes, and they are revealed by our bodies. Only men can be fathers, only women can be mothers, and boys and girls are the human future. And children flourish most fully in families created by the loving bond of husband and wife who give themselves completely to each other and to their children. When that way of life struggles or fails, civilization itself totters or falls.
Friends, we find our freedom and fulfillment by living in keeping with these truths rather than by rebelling against them, and this is so even for those of us who never marry or have children. The full truth about God and man is revealed in the life, death, and Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, who after thirty years of life in the Holy Family was given to the world as a sign of contradiction in the world for the salvation of the world.
As we read today from Genesis and sang in the Psalm, the God of all creation called Abram out of Ur of the Chaldees and made with him an everlasting covenant, a covenant confirmed with Abraham and Sarah through their son Isaac. And then, through Isaac’s son Jacob and his twelve sons and their tribes, the Lord called together a single people who would bear witness to all the nations that by grace through faith the children of God would be, as the Letter to the Hebrews teaches today, as numerous as the stars of the sky or the sands of the seashore.
In the fullness of time a new covenant was sealed with another Son, God’s own Son who took flesh of the Virgin Mary and was made man, and then he was presented in the Temple by Joseph and Mary according to the Law of Moses. That day in the Temple, Mary learned that a sword of sorrow would one day pierce her own heart, and that sword came to her at the foot of the Cross.
But love is stronger than grief and death, and the living God is love. And when he became flesh and dwelt among us full of grace and truth, God the Son was then love Incarnate who came to suffer, and die, and rise from the dead to free us from the grave and call us to love him and to live with him forever in our glorified bodies.
The Lord Jesus was a man like us in all things but sin, and so like all families the Holy Family knew hardship and sacrifice of many kinds. In these days of Christmastide, the Church bids us ponder not only that suffering is an inescapable dimension of human life after the Fall, but also that faith, love, and children in a healthy family transcend human suffering and give meaning, purpose, and hope to our lives.
That is why the struggles of our lives are not a reason to forsake children and embrace sterility, because the answer to all suffering is the abundant life of grace which is meant to be shared with others, starting with our families and especially with the beautiful, magnificent, and literally life-giving gift of children.
We know, of course, that life can be hard and confounding, and we are all subject to suffering of many kinds, not only in our families but sometimes from our families. But through it all, the Word of God sustains us and directs us to understand our human dignity and eternal destiny according to divine wisdom and love. Moreover, we learn and live the liberating truth of the Gospel most fully in a loving family, just as did our Messiah, the Savior born at Bethlehem and reared in Nazareth under the authority of his adoptive father and virgin mother.
As we read today in the Gospel from Saint Luke, when the Christ child was presented to God in the Temple forty days after his birth, he was greeted there with joyful faith by Simeon and Anna who gave thanks to God that the Messiah had come and the redemption of Israel was at hand. Filled with the Holy Spirit, Simeon sang a hymn of praise which the Church lifts up to the Throne of Grace every night in the last hour of the Divine Office, Compline:
O Lord, now you let your servant go in peace; your word has been fulfilled: my own eyes have seen the salvation which you have prepared in the sight of every people: a light to reveal you to the nations, and the glory of your people Israel.
Friends, that light of revelation to the Gentiles and the glory of God’s people Israel is the Alpha and the Omega; the eternal Word made flesh; the Way, the Truth, and the Life; the Son of God who became the Son of Mary: the Lord, Jesus Christ. Come, let us adore him.
This is the text of my homily for the Feast of the Holy Family given on 31 December 2023 at Saint Mary’s Church, Greenville.
Fr Jay Scott Newman