Many Catholics are in shock at the landslide passing of gay marriage in Ireland. This country that sent missionaries throughout the world and is the home of Our Lady of Knock and St. Patrick has, according to some, rejected the Catholic Church and embraced a complete redefinition of marriage. The demoralized now lament that this demonstrates a failing for the Catholic Church and its mission of the saving of souls.

I am going to encourage you to study the situation soberly and then decide what is your own personal course of action.

First, you need to understand who you are. When you were baptized, you became part of Christ’s work as prophet. The Baptismal rite at the anointing with Chrism, gives you a share in Christ’s role as priest, prophet and king. This role is so important and powerful that St. John Chrysostom declared that our work is  more important than any of the prophets of the Old Testament. Their God given vocation was to preach to the Hebrew people, you and I, said the golden voiced preacher, have a mission to preach to the whole world. So, our role is greater than that of the prophets of the Old Testament.

That understood, we need to look at the events of the past several months in Ireland and ask ourselves if any of the prophets experienced anything similar. The answer:  Yes, of course, but, the issue was not gay marriage, it was idolatry which believe it or not was a bigger issue for them as it would be for us today. That is because, the issue did not just include one aspect of morality, but many other disturbing practices including  replacing God with Ba’al and secretly or openly worshiping and making sacrifices to these pagan entities. So not only would priests secretly worship other gods  as God reveals to Ezekiel and do prayers to them, they also may have approved all the practices within those religions which would have included forms of human sacrifice and liberal understanding of sexuality. In such cultures temple prostitution would have been common and many of the cultures surrounding Israel and later Judah too practiced forms of homosexuality. This is so prevalent that many academics extrapolating from the surrounding cultures claim today that David and Jonathan were homosexual lovers. (This is part of what is called “gay theology” of which I am not an adherent.)

God reveals to Ezekiel in that prophet’s book, chapters eight and nine, that  secretly the priests practiced idolatry and we know throughout the Old Testament at times it was practiced more openly among the peoples when they strayed from God. Most, if not all of the prophets railed against it. In many cases, the cause of this practice was prosperity. As I learned in seminary, if in the agrarian economy, your neighbor worshiped Ba’al-the god of fertility-and he had a better crop, therefore a more profitable  one, you might worship Ba’al too.

Meanwhile, just as in our times, the greatest false prophets proclaimed “Peace and security!” which means while the true prophets warned the people to repent that the Lord’s judgement would come in the form of great destruction by the enemies of their nation if they did not change their ways back to God, the false prophets proclaimed that God was not angry at their idolatry or their wayward ways and the future held nothing but “peace and security”.  (cf Ez 13, 1thess 5)

In  one and two Maccabees, which are not found in a “Protestant” bible, we see also a correlation to what is happening around us. Every time I see one of those COEXIST bumper stickers, I am reminded of the stories from those books.

Maccabees, especially in the first chapter of the first of book, tell the story of what is known as syncretism growing throughout the land in the second century BC in the name of peace. Basically, their Greek monarchs decided to create a religion that combined the practices of others so all the religions could live in peace. This meant that the Jews had to abandon their religion specific practices including making the temple for the exclusive use for worshiping the Jewish God. The most stark elements came to the fore with the prohibition against pork. Any Jews who refused to eat it were to be executed.

Just as we see in Ireland and other countries today, a joyful acceptance of practices previously forbidden by the Judeo-Christian tradition by fellow Catholics, so we see among the Jews the enthusiastic embrace of the new laws in the time that led up to the Maccabean Revolt.

Some Jews, however, preferred death to abandoning their faith and in one stark account a whole family is tortured to death one by one for refusing to eat pork. It is a scene which I describe to parishioners as equal to being given the choice of either eating an egg, bacon and english muffin sandwich, or being tortured to death. They chose death.

This situation eventually grows to a civil war, called the Maccabean Revolt in which, ironically, freedom of religion is the issue. Specifically, they fight for the right to worship and use of the temple for the exclusive worship of the One God. This leads to a point where the Jews worked to keep the sanctuary light there aflame but only had the one day’s supply of oil. The one day of oil miraculously lasted eight until more oil arrived.  That time is remembered today in Hanukkah. Eventually the Maccabean Revolt succeeded and Jewish practice triumphed.

In all cases, the response to what you saw in Ireland and in other places in the world remains the same, for the faithful to choose to be faithful, even when all others choose to embrace the secular ways.

The great destruction Ezekiel predicted came to pass when King Nebuchadnezzar  violently took Judah’s leaders captives in what today is called the Babylonian exile.

The Books of Maccabees remind us today of the call to remain faithful to God for the ways of the world do not ultimately succeed, no matter how well meaning they are, even when we compromise our faith to “Coexist”.

So before you turn in despair, and even surprise, at what happened in Ireland, remember the people of faith have been here before. As before, we have to make the choice to be part of the worldly movements that reject the practice of our faith, or stand our ground by living our faith in testimony to our baptismal promises and our commitment to our God who called us through the Catholic Church.

The choice does not lie in a ballot box, but in our faithfulness to living the Gospel as a Catholic, to choose individually, and within the community, to remain faithful to God, even when the world goes another direction. As the prophets would tell you, the people of God have been down these paths many times before, and God always wins.

Fr. Robert J Carr