One of the great problems of our understanding of Catholic morality, as I have taught before, is to understand it as a way to Heaven. Good people go to Heaven and bad people go to Hell. In many of the traditionalist communities of the Catholic Church it is still common to hear such teachings, however, they are not fully correct. Many may not understand that the current secularist world in which we live may be an outgrowth of this bad teaching. You see, if living a moral life is the key to getting to Heaven, and I have a hard time living that moral life, all I have to do is change my understanding of morality and then I am living a moral life, even though no change happened in my life.
When I define my faith by morality, I only have to focus on morality instead of making a deeper change to which faith invites us. So we see people practicing a Christianity that rejects much of Catholic morality. Hence, sex out of marriage is ok as long as it is consensual. Gay marriage is ok as long as partners are faithful to each other. Artificial contraception is ok because we need to save money. Drug abuse is ok as long as no one gets hurt and stealing is ok as long as you are poor and from the inner city. There has been a change in morality so now the moral person is someone who lives a new morality. That is the problem with a morality based understanding of faith. However, that is not Catholicism. Our morality is not a key to Heaven, it is an avenue of prophecy. This is the reason why the Church cannot change its teachings to conform with the modern world.
Often people tell me that the Church needs to update itself. She cannot, our living our Catholic faith is how we live as prophets. This is why our Catholic morality is so important. We can see in the second reading that Paul sets the precedent for this. Remember Paul is rarely talking to Jews who have embraced Christ, he is writing to former pagans who are learning of Christ and His Jewish roots for the first time. So for these people this is a whole new way of life. The letter to the Ephesians was actually written to all Christians, scripture scholars teach us, it is just that the first place he wrote this letter to was indeed to Ephesus. He was writing in Rome from prison at the time.
Notice in the letter that he is calling on the Christians to live a new way of life, that is different from accepted behavior among the pagans. The standard of morality among the non-Christians had its roots in their own respective cultures. However, Paul is teaching that our morality is based on love of the God who loves us so much He gave his life that we may be saved and love of neighbor that they too may be saved. He is explaining to the people of his day that the ways of life among the pagans are no longer going to be viable in the world and indeed their way of life did eventually fade away to be replaced by Christian living.
Today, we are dealing with a similar situation. We are surrounded by people who embrace the former morality, rejecting Christ for a wisdom that has no divine connection. The fruit of it will always be as it was in the time of St. Paul, a muddled morality that changes with the times and dehumanizes everyone in society starting with the most needy. There is no standard of morality and, therefore, anything can become moral. We see in the headlines this is coming true all over again. When we embrace the morality that comes to us from Christ, we testify to a truth that is unknown among the pagans and today among unbelievers. It is a radical way of living that leads us to see things from God’s perspective not the human perspective, to see the value of each person in God’s eyes not in the eyes of the economy or as cogs in a radical wheel of manipulation. We lead others to think similarly, but we cannot do this, if we do not understand our task in living as Christ calls us to do. This is how we become the salt of the earth and the light to the world. Without us living our Catholic life, the world falls into a darkness best exemplified by Pontius Pilate: “Truth what is truth?” We lose a sense of what is good and what is bad because we define both based on our own culture, just as the pagans prior to learning of Christ in the Roman Empire. Our culture sees people as objects of manipulation; cogs in a wheel to further the culture. Our value is based on what we bring to the culture, not on any divine value that even Thomas Jefferson taught.
The unborn, for example, are as one major Network TV news interviewer described: harvested. They are sold and become more valuable as a commodity sold on a market than they are in the womb. Workers and Owners root their decisions on what is best for themselves, rather than what is best for the people they serve.
Our living our Catholic morality testifies that something is greater than what the culture embraces. That something is not only that we are created by God and saved by His Son, our existence has a value that cannot be defined by a pagan culture. Each person has a profound value that only in the divine can we even partially understand. Every person has a unique dignity and we have a calling to testify to this in the way we live our lives. It is not just morality we live, but morality defined by charity and love rooted in Christ. This is the reason why Jesus defines our salvation by how we treat those most in need in our society, because, that reveals that we have embraced the divine vision for every human being from conception to natural death.
The current news stories of harvesting and marketing the organs of the unborn is the apogee of a culture that has rejected God and turned humans into commodities. It is no secret that the most atheist of societies imprison the most people, because they see no value to a human being beyond what benefits the culture. Our morality teaches us a way of life to preach to the world that each of us have an intrinsic value given to us by our creator. It is in Hell that people are valued by their utility, it is in Heaven that people are valued by their existence. This is the root of our morality.
So it is essential that we live our Catholic morality, not to earn our way to Heaven, but to prophetically proclaim by our lives a whole different standard of living, one rooted in God’s vision for each of us. This is the point of the passage that St. Paul wrote not only to Ephesians, but to all Christians, including those of the 21st Century.
God bless you, Fr. Robert J Carr
Fr. Carr is an alliance member of the New Song Community (Canção Nova). He is the pastor of Holy Trinity Quincy, MA and is the editor of this blog. He is the author of several books, blogs and hundreds of videos all of which you may find on Youtube. He also has a regular radio program on WebRadio Canção Nova. Which he podcasts on Mixcloud and here on Catholicismanew. You can follow him on twitter as @frbobcarr and on Google Plus as +Fr. Robert Thoughts, comments on the homily? Let us know at Facebook