A house cannot be built without opposites. You need a left and a right and front and a back. You need a left column and a right column, a floor and a ceiling. If you are lacking any of these opposites you cannot have a house.
Our faith is also built on opposites. Many get angry at the institutional nature of our faith others who embrace the institutional reject the charismatic. However both the institutional and the charismatic play an important part in our faith.
Two other opposites are faith and reason. Our faith is built on both.
When we look at today’s gospel, we can see Peter’s famous admission to Jesus that he knows that Jesus is the Messiah. It is then that Jesus says Peter is the one on which He will build His church. Yet, He also says that Peter learned this truth from the Father who revealed it to him.
This is an essential element of our faith. Some truths are learned from reason and others are revealed. If we build our faith on one or the other we will never fully understand it.
This is something that our world cannot understand at all for obvious reasons. It is also a truth that if we are ignorant of it our church will be damaged by it and our world will be destroyed by it. We need reason to understand our faith, but if we do not embrace the fact that some elements of our faith are revealed that we will never plumb the depths of our faith.
Right now many people are concerned for example that there is a radical socialism that is overcoming our nation and others are point out that socialism is collapsing in Europe. We know of people who are trying to build a world where the state is supreme and even that the will only be one state. Recently, I saw a video on YouTube where an Idaho State Senator recounted his experience at a meeting in 1993 where he learned of people trying to take down the US and using a series of tactics, all of which are happening now, the most important being working to decay the moral fiber of the country. Alexis de Toqueville said that it was the Churches and their strengthening the moral fiber of the country that were its tent poles keeping it up. This implied of course that take that down and the whole enterprise will fall. That was one of the goals at the meeting to begin that process. The Senator said that in 1993 he did not see that happening, in 2008 he discovered that in fact it is happening.
However, in 1917, Our Lady speaking to the shepherd children in Fatima said that this would happen worldwide but her Immaculate Heart would be the victor. This was the reason it was important to pray the rosary and to spread that devotion. Reason tells us that what the Idaho Senator relates is happening now, faith tells us that those who remain faithful to Our Lord will not be defeated. Both faith and reason tell us the importance of spreading the message of Christ.
That is why we need to listen to the Church and to its tradition which is filled with those who understood the revelations of God and helped us to understand them as well. If we dismiss them as anti-intellectual then we will be consumed by a false understanding of who we are, that is happening to people all around us. If we dismiss reason, then we will succumb to a fundamentalism that will steer us wrong. There is a reason why Catholics embrace science and even evolution while some other Christians do not. We embrace not only revealed truths but the reason that helps us to understand it.
When I was a a teen a friend of mine and I went to one of those trade shows at the Hynes Convention Center. There was a man outside who tricked some dollars out of our pockets by doing an old carnival trick. The trick was to take a ball suspended on a string in front of a pin. One had to swing the ball past the pin so that the ball would knock down the pin on the return swing. We failed at every attempt and the man kept our money. Later we learned that this was an old way to cheat people and he was successful because he was skilled at turning on a magnet. Without the magnet the feat is impossible. I am not only bad at math, I am bad a physics.
Living in a world without faith or reason is like trying to knock down that pin. If we deny that God exists then we will ultimately fail at every social enterprise in our world. Communism, which is built on Atheism is a failure because it is rooted in reason excluding faith. Religious theocracies in the middle East are failures because they are rooted in a faith without reason.
We need both the revelation from God and that reason the understands it to live in our world. If we use both, we will overcome those forces that will undermine every society from the inside out. If we use one or the other, we will either be defeated by those forces, or be a part of those forces.
Presently, the forces of Atheism are seeking to destroy our Church. Lawyers in this country seeking to take down the Vatican are using the law as their mode of operation for the destruction of the Church.
Several years ago, a man come to understand that God is always sovereign and even evil serves him unwittingly. We see that with the demonic in the bible, it has to obey Jesus at all times. Those who are seeking to destroy the Church are actually strenghtening it and purifying it because there are times coming not much different than what Jesus warns about in his parable of the houses built on sand and rock. If we build our lives on faith and reason rooted in Christ we will weather the storms. If embrace faith without reason or reason without faith will we will be washed away with everyone else.
Jesus promised that the gates of Hell will not prevail against the Church and of all the institutions that have tried to destroy her, she is the only one standing.
Peter in his letters many years after this incident in today’s gospel demonstrates the road we must follow and he warns about following a path that leads us astray. Those who heeded his warning are the victors, those who did not were defeated by the forces in which they put their faith. This is why listening to the Church is essential for it brings faith and reason to show us the path to life. That path is built on those two opposites: faith and reason.
God Bless You,
Fr. Robert J Carr
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