Sermon Preached at 11.00 a.m. Mass on Sunday 9th July, being the 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time, by the Parish Priest, Rev. Fr. Brian O Mahony CsSP
Today, we celebrate a Day for Life.
Jesus told us to read the signs of the times. This entails being awake to the trends in our world, particularly in the battle between good an evil.
One of the prominent philosophers of our day, adept at reading the signs of the times, is Remi Brague, Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne, in Paris. Whilst agreeing that an attempt to identify what is the dominant movement of any particular century can only be a vast simplification, yet he believes that we must strive to observe what is happening. He suggests that the nineteenth century was concerned with Justice, the twentieth century with Truth, while the twenty first century will have to defend Life itself.
The leading issue of the nineteenth century was the question of social justice. In the West, virtue was exemplified by justice towards the underprivileged, and evil by exploitation and misery. In the twentieth century the question of truth came to the fore, along with its opposite of lies and deceit. The principal concern was with those regimes driven by ideology, whether Communist or Nazi, which claimed to be based on truths revealed by science: by biology or sociology. Formerly lies had masked the truth; now ideological falsehood claimed to reveal it. The struggle was no longer a clear one between good and evil, but between truth and deception.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a man who suffered dreadfully under Stalin, but he claims that the worst suffering under an ideological regime, worse than any misery or oppression, was to be obliged to lie, whilst the first condition for breaking free, was to refuse to lie.
Consider now the twenty first century, and the belief that the dominant issue will be Life itself. This does not mean that the search for Justice, and the duty to tell the Truth, have ceased; on the contrary, these imperatives will be with us as long as good and evil exist. But though the social question has not been resolved, it has become less pressing; and whilst the lure of ideology has not disappeared, it is no longer supported by powerful states. The problem for our time is nothing less than the existence of human life on earth.
The late Pope John Paul II wrote much on what he called “the culture of death” in which we live. Without going into all the forms threatening life, we know that mankind has weapons capable of destroying itself in a series of huge explosions; with contraceptives it has the means of eradicating itself discreetly and passively, perhaps without even being aware of what it is doing – the drop of the native populations of some European nations, and their replacement with immigrants is proof of this; and if contraception fails, the holocaust of abortion is used to kill human life.
Then, of course, mankind dreams of improving itself by eliminating ‘defective’ individuals, with biology attempting to give it the means to achieve this. The programmes of euthanasia will ensure that the unwanted will be destroyed. Then there are the thirty thousand people who die every day through starvation or malnutrition, whilst rich nations find endless funds to rain down death and destruction in war. A very gloomy picture, but a factual one! We should not bury our heads in the sand and pretend otherwise. Living in a fantasy world where all is good will not save us.
The basic issue facing us is that of ‘Being’ versus ‘Nothingness’. Nietzsche at the end of the nineteenth century predicted that the principal problem of future generations would be what he called ‘Nihilism’, the rejection of all moral and religious principles, with the belief that life is meaning less - so that non-being is superior to being.
However, the two sources of European civilisation, the Greek philosophers and the Bible, both hold that Life is good. The Greek philosophers proposed an equation: being is good. The corollary is that ‘being is worth more than nothingness’. In the Bible, the same affirmation is heard in the words of the Creator when he found creation ‘very good’.
Down the centuries, thinkers have asked, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ That question has now become ‘Is it really necessary that there should be something rather than nothing?’ So existence is no longer considered as ‘good’ in itself. The logic of this attitude leads to the destruction of what is considered unworthy of life.
The challenges that we face are complex, for multiple reasons of economics, politics, psychology etc. The faith of Christians does not, as such, give Christians special expertise to speak on such subjects. But Christians are perhaps the only people able in a responsible fashion to defend Life. We can only do this when we are totally convinced that all human life from the womb to the grave is sacred – truly sacred. This conviction can be defined by three elements:-
Therefore, I suggest that the Church is the only institution which can bestow, both theoretically and practically, that stable Philosophy of Being that we need in order to survive nihilism. There is a gigantic conflict between the forces of Life and the forces of Death, with nothing less than the survival of the human race at stake. The battle can be won by a total commitment to the sanctity of all human life, and with the help of God’s grace.