Cultural Healing

CULTURAL HEALING

by Fr. Jim Whalen

SOME SEED FELL INTO BAD GROUND, SOME SEED FELL INTO GOOD GROUND.

* Centesimus Annus, Pope John Paul II, May 1, 1991.

** Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II, March 25, 1995.

The Gospel today challenges us “TO BECOME GOOD GROUND, GOOD HEARTS” - to become saints. The fact is, God is always sowing the seeds of His grace in hearts that are ready to receive Him. St Augustine teaches that ‘God is a farmer and if he abandons man, man becomes a desert. Man is also a farmer and if he abandons God, he turns himself into a desert’. Man, in his quest for fulfillment, seeks for truth and from this search for truth, the culture of a nation derives its character. Pope John Paul II states: “For an adequate formation of a culture, the involvement of the whole man is required, whereby he exercises his creativity, intelligence, and knowledge of the world and of people. He displays his capacity for self-control, personal sacrifice, solidarity, and readiness to promote the common good. Thus the first and most important task is accomplished within man’s heart” (C.A. 51)*. Is your heart ready for the seeds of life? Is your heart ready for the seeds of divine promise that can heal our culture and build a civilization of love?

Much of our present civilization is like a desert, devoid of life, a Culture of Death. We are engaged in a war for souls, a war that attacks human life at all fronts: spiritual, moral, educational, social, and political. The main battle is spiritual. Our main weapon is sanctity. We will win because we wield the strongest force in the universe, the blood of Christ. Satan, with his minions, plants seeds of deception, destruction, and death, scheming to win souls for his kingdom of hell. His evil plots include a litany of atrocities: terrorism, drug traffic, gang warfare, contraception, abortion, sterilization, euthanasia, genocide, child molestation, and the abuse of women. His death dealing agenda includes deceptive reproductive technologies, cloning, aberrations of fetal experimentation, and embryonic stem cell experimentation. Marriage itself is under attack. Pope John Paul II recently warned Canadians about undermining our culture: “Same sex unions create a false understanding of the institution of marriage” (Speech, Sept. 4th).

The devil’s plan is to corrupt mankind and society “by reaching hearts through hormones” (Peter Kreeft). He begins by attacking the family, the heart of the culture of life. He seeks to destroy stable marriages, by attacking sexual fidelity through promoting a sexual revolution in the mass media. The unborn, the handicapped, the elderly, and the chronically ill are all under siege. His tactics are corruption of power, dividing to conquer, absolute relativism - denial of the devil, sin and the spiritual war.

Pope John Paul II has given us a prophetic pro-life vision. He restored to us responsibility before our neighbour, society, the world, and God. He took a firm stand on the centrality of man in history and in the world (E.V. 42f)**. He emphasized the sacred meaning of the human body and human sexuality; the great value attached to education and culture; the importance of the roles of the worker, the citizen, the nation, and the state (C.A. 50); the dignity of the woman (E.V. 99a); and the need to protect creation (C.A. 37).

Culture is the cultivation of the soil from which men grow. Christian culture is the cultivation of saints. The writing on the wall is clear - if we cease to cultivate saints, the Christian culture will rot and die. Pope John Paul II points out where our mission to transform our culture starts: “We need to begin with the renewal of a ‘Culture of Life’ within Christian communities themselves…to transform humanity from within and make it new” (E.V. 95).

The healing and restoration of Christian culture is the restoration of all things in Christ and especially the restoration of the Spirit of Christ: poverty of heart and fecundity. Being Christian costs everything, 100% (heart, time and life), totally committed to serve life in all its truth, giving God full permission to change what needs changing in our hearts, homes, lives and culture. We need to take advantage of this time of Divine Mercy as Sr. Faustina reminded us. We need true generosity, the mark of the Way of the Cross. We need social charity, solidarity to build a civilization of love. We need to have the heart of a martyr, like Maximilian Kolbe, to surrender all to Christ. We need to go the extra mile, love our enemy. We need to make a leap of faith and risk the death of loving, like Padre Pio, Patron of Perpetual Adoration. Newman put it this way: “If faith be the essence of Christian life, it follows that our duty lies in risking upon Christ’s word what we have, for what we have not”.

To be agents of cultural change, we should imitate our Lady’s Fiat, “Be it done to me according to your Word”, by consecration to Jesus through Mary. Pope John Paul II calls us to a New Commitment to a New Evangelization, under the mantle of our Lady of Guadalupe, Patroness of Life, the first evangelizer of the Americas, Mother and Queen of the Americas. What she did for the Aztecs she can do for the world: end this holocaust of human sacrifice and convert people to the truth. “Listen and be sure that I will protect you. Am I not here, I who am your Mother, and is not my help a refuge?” (to Juan Diego). Her intercession as Mediatrix of all graces, the action of her spouse, the Holy Spirit, the principal agent of evangelization and our communion with the angels and saints are crucial to Christian Cultural growth.

Evangelizing zeal springs from personal holiness of life, nourished by prayer and love of the Eucharist. Following the Year of the Rosary the Pope proclaimed Oct. 2004-Oct. 2005 as the ‘Year of the Holy Eucharist’. At every Mass we recall the death and Resurrection of Christ in such a way that through the Holy Eucharist, His sacrifice is a reality before us. His presence is real and total, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. When we hear the words: “This is My Body given up for you” and “This is the cup of My Blood…” we should, in our hearts, pray: “Take my body, take my blood, take my life, which I offer up out of love, with your Son, to you. Do with me what you will”. This is a personal powerful pledge to build a ‘Culture of Life’.

Certain cultural principles must be restored for our culture to survive. They include:

1) solidarity

2) subsidiarity

3) ultimate good

4) personhood

5) non-maleficent

6) inalienability of the right to life and liberty

7) priorization of individual rights

8) protection of the life and lib- erty of the preborn, the elderly, and terminally ill, from conception to natural death.

What is crucial is that by witnessing, promoting and defending these principles, we extend our beliefs about our personal lives into the domain of collective lives, and keep safe the future of our culture. The fact is that increasing material well-being and reliance on technology has caused us to overvalue the tangible and the material and undervalue the intangible and spiritual. The fact is that grounding a culture and policies in materialism presents an incomplete view of human dignity, destiny, and community.

Consider the concept of conjugal love. One issue of Time magazine presented it as a biological affair. Conjugal love, as in the sacrament of marriage, is a life-long commitment, which involves a covenant between a man and a woman and God. This means mutual love, openness to the transmission of life; procreation, and the promotion of the good of society. This commitment cannot be touched or viewed under a microscope. This lack of tangibility causes youth in many instances to view love in terms of emotion, self-pleasure or sexual appetite instead of in terms of commitment and community. The media’s exaltation of the individual as the unique source of one’s own rule of conduct, a relativistic morality, with no objective standards has led many away from the truth. Youth are bombarded with propaganda to utilize birth control pills and so called ‘safe sex’. The consequences of such a morality based on self-interest, utility, and pleasure is nothing less than self-destruction. John Paul II challenged youth at WYD to make a difference, choose life, to be the salt and light of the world, to live lives of chastity and abstinence, to become saints. In his message for WYD 2005, he calls youth to holiness: “Make courageous choices - come and Worship Christ. He is the rock on which to build your future and a world of greater justice and solidarity” (Aug. 26, 2004).

Consider the evils of contraception and abortion, resulting in the death of millions of unborn children, mutilated and sterilized women, and men, introducing moral wounds into the heart of the family and the heart of culture (250 million chemical deaths/yr, 55 million surgical deaths/yr).

The consequences of not heeding Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae surround us:

- disintegration of the family

- an increase in divorce

- epidemic in pornography

- rampant child abuse

- disrespect for women

- an AIDS pandemic (36 million plus suffering worldwide)

- moral bankruptcy in governments

- a deterioration of the Christian culture and way of life

Many do not listen and ignore the magisterial teaching. Over 80% of Catholics practice contraception. They listen to the word of man rather than the Word of God. They follow Planned Parenthood’s false propaganda, exploiting sex, rather than choosing chastity, sanctity and Natural Family Planning. The responsibilities of human sexuality must not be abandoned to techniques or delegated to technicians. We must respect and protect the greatest gifts of marriage: new lives (children).

Consider the opposition to Pope John Paul II’s stand on the Church and Christian culture, those who support the totalitarian trend of liberalism. In his encyclical, Centesimus Annus, our Holy Father points out that they seek to undermine apostolic and ecclesiastical traditions. They seek the removal, a transfer of the magisterium. They seek a restoration of the rationalism of the enlightenment. They seek principles of discernment that welcome the values of modernism, which in turn leads to Atheism (C.A. 13). They seek the new, not the real, not the true, for the sake of the new. Christianity must seek Jesus for the sake of Jesus, The Way, the Truth, and the Life. Our culture must not be swayed by artificiality or sensationalism or the deliberate assertion of what is not true. The strongest reactionary force impeding cultural growth and healing is the cult of progress itself, a cutting off from our roots, making growth impossible and choice unnecessary. “Life is viewed as meaningless and one is considered free from responsibility in the way a scavenger is free” (John Senior, The Death of a Culture).

Pope John Paul II emphasizes that only faith in Jesus Christ can in all truth liberate man from the prisons of liberalism and modernism, which alienates man’s dignity (C.A. 26). Faith is the most dynamic factor for transforming society and opens man to practice religious liberty. Pope John Paul II gives clear directions to the world. He indicates that the future of Europe depends on reactivation of its faith, its spiritual patrimony (C.A. 41). In the developed western world, the obstacles to religious liberty are practical materialism, the lure of gain, enrichment, egotism, desire for power, concentration of money, merciless selection from which the weak suffer, with usefulness, and efficiency as ultimate reference points (C.A. 41).

This materialism is seen in the flood of pornography inflicted without the least restraint on youth. (C.A. 36) and in the concrete expression of Atheism that confines human existence to the closed horizon of death (C.A. 55). In the third world, the obstacles of religious liberty include misery, deprivation of food, lodging, education, and culture. When man becomes preoccupied with physical survival, he risks closing the self to the other and to God.

Religion and faith have been major factors of resistance to totalitarianism on the international scale as well as on the level of persons. This was evident in the countries of eastern and central Europe in the 20th century. Christian believers were present and engaged in a civil war which they won by perseverance in faith (C.A. 17). Communists thought they had exterminated the faithful, but Christians went against the current by attacking the structures of sin, opening the way to evangelize the structures. (e.g., the workers movement confronted poverty and injustice calling for reordering of the economic system (C.A. 26). Pope John Paul II’s teaching on the relationship between freedom and truth encouraged Polish leaders to denounce and expose the lies and corruption of totalitarian ideology, and liberalism, hidden by the media. “Obedience to the truth about God and man is the first condition of freedom, making it possible for a person to order his needs and desires and to choose the means of satisfying them according to a correct scale of values” (C.A. 41). Western believers can do likewise and reject the yokes of relativism and modernism.

It is no secret that world markets are essentially organized in service of the wealthy, a supernatural bureaucracy which seeks to absorb the state, to alienate couples, to dispose the family, and control nations. The Church states that underdevelopment and poverty have their origins in the injustices, the immorality, incompetence, lethargy, corruption, the imbalance, and concentration of wealth as well as bad organization. Pope John Paul II advocates that the principle of subsidiarity needs to be applied to these problems and he names the solutions: respect, justice, solidarity, love, and peace.

Many have forgotten Blessed Mother Teresa’s counsel: “If a mother can kill the child in her womb what is to stop us from killing each other?” Any country or culture which allows abortion will never have peace. The road to authentic liberation and restoration of Christian culture comes about by enlightening and nourishing the faith of God’s people, personal conversion, as well as building up the common good. In living their faith, the poor find the strength to resist oppression and take their destiny in their own hands. Christian culture needs to be healed for the salvation of the whole human community not for the profit of a few. This means above all the decisive choice to choose life, the Lord of the living (Mt 22:32), Who wants none to perish (Mt 18:14). We do not reach healing except through the intervention of others. This is especially true in the domain of conjugal spirituality. Here we see the importance of reactivating the theology of the Mystical Body. In making man grow in humanity, the Gospel brings its specific and decisive contribution to the development of human society. “There can be no genuine solution of the ‘social question’ apart from the Gospel” (C.A. 5). To work at ‘new evangelization’ is to work with the supra motivation that faith alone can provide. Christians must take a stand and do their part in the healing of culture. It means reactivating Christian faith and relearning the meaning of responsible work. It means reconstructing ruined societies and revamping educational systems. It means correcting ineffective administration and changing government policies. It means becoming prayer warriors, attending daily Mass when possible. It means implementing Perpetual Adoration before the Blessed Sacrament. “Adoration is more powerful for construction than nuclear bombs are for destruction” (P. Kreeft).

It means Consecration - true devotion to Mary, and praying the Rosary. It means fasting, accepting, and embracing the cross we cannot change. It means following the magisterial teachings. It means fighting against alcoholism, AIDS, promoting chastity, and abstinence. It means awakening creativity and responsibility, becoming artisans of justice, truth, and peace. It means having an on-going active relationships with the angels and saints. It means striving to become saints.

In our time, in our culture we have seen the change from a ‘do no harm’ model established by Hippocrates toward a utilitarian system which in some cases includes the killing of the weakest and most defenceless among us. In our time, in our culture, we have seen objective truths often become passé and the concepts of right and wrong assaulted. We are like the proverbial frog slowly boiled to death in a pot. The frog does not perceive the water growing progressively hotter. The Steam of our Culture is rising. The temperature of the water is scalding. We thank God that unlike the frog, we can and must do more than simply cook and stew. We can feel the heat, sense the danger, and take the necessary steps for healing. We can do what has to be done, become good ground, become saints; make our hearts ready to receive the seeds of life and divine promise. We can by serving life, on the spiritual, moral, social, educational, and political levels heal our culture and build a civilization of love. We know the price paid for our lives - our souls. Mother Teresa’s words remind us of that fact: “Jesus showed His love for us by dying on the cross”. He continues to show His love for us in His Real Presence in the Sacred Host now. Peter Kreeft in his book, How to Win the Culture War, assures us of victory: “We will win because we are the body of Christ, and Christ is God, and God is love, and love never, never, never gives up”.

It remains for us to respond to the Mission entrusted to us by Pope John Paul II - to do our part with all our hearts, and build a Culture of Life and a Civilization of Love. +

Bibliography (Recommended reading)

1. Kreeft, Peter, How to Win the Culture War, Inter Varsity Press, 1989, pp. 120.

2. McCarthy, Donald, Edward Bayer, Handbook on Critical Life Issues, Pope John Paul Center, Braintree, Massachusetts, 1988, pp. 218.

3. Schooyans, Fr. Michael, The Totalitarian Trend of Liberalism, trans. by Fr. John Miller, C.S.C., revised edition, 1995, pp. 262.

4. Senior, John, The Death of Christian Culture, RC Books, Harrison, NY, 1994, pp. 207.

5. Spirtzer, Robert, S.J., et al, Healing the Culture, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2000, pp. 347.