The love of free sex blinds the mainstream media to the evil of murdering our children in the womb
Fr. Steven Scherrer, MM, Th.D.
Homily of Friday, 30th Week of the Year, October 30, 2020
Philippians 1:1-11, Psalm 110, Luke 14:1-6

Biblical quotations are taken from the Revised Standard Version unless otherwise noted

“One sabbath when he [Jesus] went to dine at the house of a ruler who belong to the Pharisees, they were watching him. And behold, there was a man before him who had dropsy. And Jesus spoke to the lawyers and Pharisees, saying, ‘Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath, or not?’ But they were silent. Then he took him and healed him, and let him go. And he said to them, ‘Which of you, having an ass or an ox that has fallen into a well, will not immediately pull him out on the sabbath day?’ And they could not reply to this” (Luke 14:1-6).

Jesus is the great healer. He came to heal our souls of sin, which is the greatest ailment of all, for it alienates us from the only source of true happiness, which is God. During his earthly ministry as well as during that of his apostles, both before Jesus’ death and immediately after his resurrection, bodily healings and exorcisms were important visible verifications of who Jesus was and what he came into the world to do. They verified the truth of the claims he made about himself to be the Savior of the world and the Son of God.

Today’s gospel is an account of one of these miraculous cures. How should we read this gospel as people of Christian faith? We should see it as one of the many proofs that Jesus gave of the truth of his preaching that he truly is the Son of God, sent into the world to redeem the human race from their sins and thus reunite them to God, the only source of true happiness both here and hereafter.

But Jesus encountered considerable opposition in working these miracles, for he did many of them on the Sabbath, and the Pharisees, who were always looking for something to accuse him of, interpreted his Sabbath cures as working on the Sabbath, something forbidden by the law of God revealed to them by Moses. So, they would say, “How can this man be from God when he does not keep God’s law and works on the Sabbath.” But this opposition to Jesus simply is another indication of the perversity of the Pharisees in rejecting their own Messiah when he finally came and in rejecting the proofs he gave of the truth of what he claimed to be.

They could see with their own eyes that this man was cured instantly, something which none of them could do. Even their objection that if Jesus were a man of God he would not be doing works on the Sabbath that are forbidden by the law – even this objection was empty. Jesus could give two answers to it: 1) this is not a work of man on the Sabbath, but rather a work of God, as they could all see with their own eyes, for only God could do what he just did. And the law of Moses does not prohibit God from doing works on the Sabbath. 2) Furthermore, they themselves would readily do the equivalent of this if their ox or ass fell into a well on the Sabbath. None of them would let it drown, but would immediately get ropes and as many people as they could to pull it out and save its life.

They could not deny the truth of what he had just said to them, “‘Which of you, having an ass or an ox that has fallen into a well, will not immediately pull him out on the Sabbath day?’ And they could not reply to this” (Luke 14:5-6). Yet in spite leaving the Pharisees speechless, unable to answer his question, they still did not change their attitude towards him, but remained his opponents to the end. They could not overcome their hatred of him and put their faith in him. Their jealousy of him and his powers and influence over the people with his teaching and miracles blinded them so that they could not recognize him as their Messiah and Savior. That is what hatred does to people. It blinds them so that they cannot recognize what should be obvious to an open-minded person.

We are now on the eve of one of the most important elections in the history of our country, with significance for the whole world, and we see this same kind of hatred blinding people from recognizing the obvious truth that even their own consciences bear witness to.

What are the underlying issues in this election that cause such hatred in the mainstream media so that they distort the news and cannot see what a simple child without such hatred could easily see? There are many economic issues that involve prudential judgment that people of one school of economics would oppose, and those of another school would support. These are not fundamental moral issues, but rather issues of prudential judgment that good open-minded people could decide either one way or the other. But there are other moral issues that every Christian should immediately recognize, issues in which only one point of view is correct, that which is revealed in the Scriptures.

What are these issues? They are: abortion, same-sex marriage, and transgenderism. How is it that a Christian could support a candidate who condones murdering our own children in the womb or just as they are being born or even immediately after birth? This is intrinsically evil and tens of millions of children have been murdered in this country since abortion was legalized in 1973. It is astounding to hear supporters of the Democratic candidate shouting that if you elect the other candidate your right to murder your children will be violated. They don’t have the nerve to actually say it that clearly, because it sounds so obviously horrible, so they have a euphemistic way of saying it, namely that a certain candidate will violate women’s reproductive rights, as though a woman has the right to murder her child in her womb, which, of course, she does not.

Every true Christian believes that directly willing and executing a totally innocent person for no reason whatsoever other than that you don’t want him or her around is intrinsically evil and gravely sinful. This is not a matter of prudential judgment that you could take one side or the other. This is a simple matter of good versus evil, as God has revealed it in the Scriptures and as the Tradition and official teaching of the Church has always maintained. This is something that Christians have believed throughout the history of the Church.

One candidate has appointed nearly three hundred antiabortion judges to the courts throughout the land and three of them to the Supreme Court, which has the power to overturn the mistaken decision of Roe versus Wade that legalized abortion in 1973. This is a tremendous achievement, and yet he is mocked and derided for it for threatening to violate women’s reproductive rights. Women have no right whatsoever to murder their child in the womb. Murdering their child in the womb is not a woman’s right, but a moral evil and a mortal sin, and a moral evil can never become a woman’s right, or a civil right, or a human right.

Why do so many people want abortion to remain legal in this country? It is because of the new false belief that sex between consenting adults, whether of the same sex or the opposite sex, whether married to the person or not, is a good thing and provides you with the greatest human pleasure possible. But to carry out this free sex lifestyle one needs abortion to eliminate the pregnancies that will occur.

So, the mainstream media in this country, which has embraced this free sex lifestyle as something good has also embraced abortion as absolutely necessary. And since one candidate is trying very hard to abolish abortion in this country, the mainstream media is involved in a campaign of denigration against him so that they twist whatever he says or does to try to make it look bad. Sleepy, inattentive, uncritical people who watch the mainstream media and take it as gospel truth find themselves indoctrinated and brainwashed without even realizing it so that whatever the mainstream media says, they believe to be true, and so they believe that the candidate that the media is denigrating must be an evil person whom they should not vote for.

But all this is based on blindness caused by hatred of this candidate’s good policy concerning abortion. In other words, hatred has blinded the mainstream media so that they cannot recognize basic Christian moral values, and so they denigrate and condemn the candidate who is supporting these values concerning abortion.

Hatred blinds people from recognizing the truth. The terrible thing is that when it is the mainstream media itself that has become blinded by their hatred, it influences tens of millions of people to vote against the candidate that wants to make abortion illegal.

So, what is the religion of the mainstream media and of those that have been indoctrinated and brainwashed by it? It can be summarized very simply: tolerance of diversity. They believe that we must be tolerant of diverse lifestyles. We must be tolerant of people who want to live a free open sexual life and abort the pregnancies that result. We must be tolerant of people who want to have sex with someone of their own gender, and we must accept, approve of, and support them in their choice.

According to this tolerance of diversity religion, we must be tolerant of, support, accept, and approve of people that want to change their gender, and we should make them feel that they are doing something that is good. This is the new false religion of the mainstream media: tolerance of diversity.

Tolerance of diversity is good and necessary when it comes to neutral things like race. But we should not tolerate immorality that contradicts the word of God. We should not tolerate abortion. We should not tolerate homosexual sex, same-sex civil unions, or so-called same-sex “marriage,” which is no marriage at all, but rather an evil union entered into for the purpose of committing perverted homosexual acts that are gravely sinful and profoundly offensive to God. We should not tolerate such things in the sense that we approve of, accept, and support them.

We may not be able to do anything about them, so in that sense we have to tolerate them, but we are not to approve of them. And these are not things that should not be made legal and protected and given status by the law. We should be against these things.

So, the application that I am making of today’s Scripture text may seem to have gone rather far astray from the story of Jesus curing a man with dropsy, while the Pharisees are looking on with disapproval. But the connection is simply that hatred of the good blinds you to the truth. The Pharisees out of their jealousy towards Jesus hated him, and their hatred blinded them from seeing the truth of his teaching and the proofs he gave of it in his miracles.

In the same way, hatred of a moral life, where sexual relations are only permitted within the bond of a valid marriage, has blinded many people in this country from seeing the clear truth of God’s revelation that murdering your children in the womb or as they are being born or shortly after they are born is gravely sinful and profoundly offensive to God. So blinded are people by this hatred that they are trying to destroy the candidate who is standing for, upholding, and protecting fundamental Christian moral values concerning abortion.