You shall treat the alien who resides with you no differently than the natives born among you; have the same love for him as for yourself; for you too were once aliens in the land of Egypt.
Leviticus 19:33-34.
This comes out on a Sunday morning.
Faithful Catholics are going to Mass today, as required by the Church, or went last night. These are the readings for the day, which will also be read in some "main line" Protestant Churches that use the Catholic lectionary:
Reading 1
Nehemiah 8:2-4a, 5-6, 8-10
Ezra the priest brought the law before the assembly, which consisted of men, women, and those children old enough to understand.
Standing at one end of the open place that was before the Water Gate, he read out of the book from daybreak till midday, in the presence of the men, the women, and those children old enough to understand; and all the people listened attentively to the book of the law.
Ezra the scribe stood on a wooden platform that had been made for the occasion.
He opened the scroll so that all the people might see it— for he was standing higher up than any of the people —; and, as he opened it, all the people rose.
Ezra blessed the LORD, the great God, and all the people, their hands raised high, answered, "Amen, amen!" Then they bowed down and prostrated themselves before the LORD, their faces to the ground. Ezra read plainly from the book of the law of God, interpreting it so that all could understand what was read. Then Nehemiah, that is, His Excellency, and Ezra the priest-scribe and the Levites who were instructing the people said to all the people: "Today is holy to the LORD your God. Do not be sad, and do not weep"— for all the people were weeping as they heard the words of the law. He said further: "Go, eat rich foods and drink sweet drinks, and allot portions to those who had nothing prepared; for today is holy to our LORD. Do not be saddened this day, for rejoicing in the LORD must be your strength!"
Reading 2
1 Corinthians 12:12-30
Brothers and sisters: As a body is one though it has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body, so also Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, slaves or free persons, and we were all given to drink of one Spirit.
Now the body is not a single part, but many. If a foot should say, "Because I am not a hand I do not belong to the body, "it does not for this reason belong any less to the body. Or if an ear should say, "Because I am not an eye I do not belong to the body, " it does not for this reason belong any less to the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God placed the parts, each one of them, in the body as he intended. If they were all one part, where would the body be? But as it is, there are many parts, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, "I do not need you, " nor again the head to the feet, "I do not need you." Indeed, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are all the more necessary, and those parts of the body that we consider less honorable we surround with greater honor, and our less presentable parts are treated with greater propriety, whereas our more presentable parts do not need this.
But God has so constructed the body as to give greater honor to a part that is without it, so that there may be no division in the body, but that the parts may have the same concern for one another. If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it; if one part is honored, all the parts share its joy.
Now you are Christ's body, and individually parts of it. Some people God has designated in the church to be, first, apostles; second, prophets; third, teachers; then, mighty deeds; then gifts of healing, assistance, administration, and varieties of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work mighty deeds? Do all have gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret?
Gospel
Luke 1:1-4; 4:14-21
Since many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning and ministers of the word have handed them down to us, I too have decided, after investigating everything accurately anew, to write it down in an orderly sequence for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may realize the certainty of the teachings you have received.
Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news of him spread throughout the whole region. He taught in their synagogues and was praised by all.
He came to Nazareth, where he had grown up, and went according to his custom into the synagogue on the sabbath day. He stood up to read and was handed a scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He unrolled the scroll and found the passage where it was written: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord. Rolling up the scroll, he handed it back to the attendant and sat down, and the eyes of all in the synagogue looked intently at him.
He said to them, "Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing."
Faithful Orthodox using a different calendar will hear three readings as well, those being John 20:19-31, 1 Timothy 1:15-17 and Matthew 15:21-28.
Donald and Melania Trump, and their son Barron, aren't going to hear any readings today, as they're not going to Church. Melania is a non observant Catholic (her marriage to Donald Trump is invalid in the eyes of the Church) and Trump is from all observances non religious, in spite of Evangelicals having proclaimed him, with no evidence to support it, a man of God.
I find myself in a peculiar situation, in that as a Catholic who firmly believes that Episcopal holy orders are "completely null and utterly void", I'm rising to defend an Episcopal Bishop, and moreover one that I don't really know about in general.1
Moreover, as a Catholic who also believes that women may not be ordained to the priesthood, I'm rising to defend a female Episcopal cleric.
And in doing this, I'm recalling a homily delivered by a local young, highly orthodox, Catholic priest, that the being the "four things God hates homily".
Let's start off by recalling that, highlighting the part that applies here:
Because I've referenced it more than one time, but apparently never posted it (cowardice at work) I'm going to post here the topic of "the four sins God hates". I'm also doing this as I'm getting to a political thread about this years elections and the candidates, in the context of the argument of "Christians must. . . " or "Christians can. . . "
First I'll note using the word "hate", in the context of the Divine, is a truncation for a much larger concept. "Condemns" might have been a better choice of words, but then making an effective delivery in about ten minutes or less is tough, and truncations probably hit home more than other things.
Additionally, and very importantly, sins and sinners are different. In Christian theology, and certainly in Catholic theology, God loves everyone, including those who have committed any one of these sins, or all of them.
This topic references a remarkably short and effective sermon I heard some time ago. The way my 61 year old brain now works, that probably means it was a few years ago. At any rate, it was a homily based on all three of the day's readings, which is remarkable in and of itself, and probably left every member of the parish squirming a bit. It should have, as people entrenched in their views politically and/or economically would have had to found something to disagree with, or rather be hit by.
The first sin was an easy one that seemingly everyone agrees is horrific, but which in fact people excuse continually, murder.
Murder is of course the unjust taking of a life, and seemingly nobody could disagree with that being a horrific sin. But in fact, we hear people excuse the taking of innocent life all the time. Abortion is the taking of an innocent life. Even "conservatives", however, and liberals as a false flag, will being up "except in the case of rape and incest".
Rape and incest are horrific sins in and of itself, but compounding it with murder doesn't really make things go away, but rather makes one horror into two. Yes, bearing a child in these circumstances would be a horrific burden. Killing the child would be too.
The second sin the Priest noted was sodomy. He noted it in the readings and in spite of what people might like to say, neither the Old or New Testaments excuse unnatural sex. They just don't. St. Paul is particularly open about this, so much so that a local female lesbian minister stated that this was just "St. Paul's opinion", which pretty much undercuts the entire Canon of Scripture.
A person can get into Natural Law from here, which used to be widely accepted, and which has been cited by a United States Supreme Court justice as recently as fifty or so years ago, and the Wyoming Supreme Court more recently than that, and both in this context, but we'll forgo that in depth here. Suffice it to say that people burdened with such desires carry a heavy burden to say the least, but that doesn't make it a natural inclination. In the modern Western World we've come to excuse most such burdens, however, so that where we now draw lines is pretty arbitrary.
Okay, those are two "conservative" items.
The next wasn't.
That was mistreating immigrants.
This sort of speaks for itself, but there it is. Scripture condemns mistreating immigrants. You can't go around, as a Christian, hating immigrants or abusing them because of their plight.
Abusing immigrants, right now, seems to be part of the Conservative "must do" list.
And the final one was failing to pay workmen a just wage. Not exactly taking the natural economy/free market approach in the homily.
Two conservatives, and two liberal.
That's because Christianity is neither liberal or conservative, but Christianity. People claiming it for their political battles this year might well think out their overall positions.
As I noted, two conservative items, and two liberal.
No murdering, no sodomy, no abusing immigrants, and no cheating people on their pay.
A homily nearly guaranteed to make everyone uncomfortable or angry.
Seems like everyone claiming to carry some sort of Christian banner in the deep Trump camp is only comfortable with one of those, now days.2
Bishop Budde directly addressed Donald Trump, and for that matter J. D. Vance. You may have read what she said, but invoking the Jimmy Akin Citation Rule, you'll let you hear it for yourself.
This is homily is profoundly Christian. There's nothing in it that any Christian can condemn. So why are people condemning it.
Well, because it is profoundly Christian. She asks for mercy for the different, downtrodden, and immigrants.
Gasp!
Donald Trump, who is trying to yank citizenship from the "natural born", is taking exception to a Christian cleric's plea for mercy for everyone his policies impact.3 4 Of course, he also ignored her comments about calling people names, accusing her of not being "smart", a frequent accusation by Trump (who might not be comfortable with his own smarts).
Well, this gets directly at the hypocrisy of some supporters of Trump who continually evoke religion, and particularly those who are in a certain evangelical camp.
For years now, we've been told by these people, including a fair number of clerics, that Trump, who has no discernable connection to any religion as an adult, doesn't seem to practice any religion, who is a serial polygamist with a horrific history towards women, and who is a member of the class that Christ warned less of a chance of getting to Heaven than a camel through an "eye of a needle", was a "Godly man".
This has been a complete fraud. There's no evidence that Trump is religious. He attended Church only fourteen times during his first term of office. He was confirmed a Presbyterian when he was young, a denomination he says he's no longer part of, but John Calvin would give him a dope slap for his personal conduct if he came back from the grave.5
What they really mean is they see him as somebody who going to restore and invoke a certain John Brown view of muscular evangelical Christianity. Their religion is heavily mixed with right wing politics, and they see themselves as leading a march out of a metaphorical immoral Kansas.6 Trump is just, in their view, a God sent vehicle to get this done.
Put another way, as I've mentioned before, they see Trump as a sort of Cyrus the Great.7 They don't care that he isn't a Christian, as he's going to back their "Christian values".
And their values, frankly, express a deficit of Christianity.
This is something we've seen before in the United States and it dates back, really, to the country being a protestant nation founded by migrating, and often dissenting, protestant sects. If you looked at the "Pilgrims", for example, they really weren't all that nice. Oliver Cromwell's Calvinism formed a background to a lot of the early religious history of the US, and Cromwell definitely wasn't nice. Indeed, he ended up being so hated in his own country that the location of his head remains a secret, something imposed to prevent people from digging it up in anger.
In the past, Southern "evangelicals" were often backers of segregation. Carrying forward to the current times, they see many of the descents from Christian moral standards, such as the intrusion of homosexuality into society in general and the pulpit in particular, as abominations. At the same time, however, they continue to see things that they've widely accommodated as not much of a problem, at least not openly. You aren't going to hear, for example, any evangelicals condemn divorce. Locally I know at least two people who "lived in sin" and were really active members of a major evangelical church. I've sort of known one person carrying the banner of Christian morality who is married to a divorced woman who is herself extremely right wing, which while common in the US, is something Christ specifically prohibited.
You really don't get the pick and choose option here.
The New Apostolic Reformation has embraced Trump in spades. They feel that he'll, to put it in an old fashioned fashion, drive the Sodomites from the land and restore and impose a Evangelical Christian order. A lot of them seem perfectly comfortable with policies that will hurt, at a human level, a group of people who are largely darked skinned, even if they don't hold personally racist views.
To be perfectly fair, a lot of American Catholics, completely dim on the nature of the New Apostolic Reformation, are going right along with this and supporting it, so we are far, far from being free of accusation here ourselves.7b
That fact in and of itself will have some infesting implications. The Episcopal Church is a "main line" Protestant religion that was once a major force in the country, but which accommodated itself to an ever growing list of things Christians have always considered sinful. In the 1930s the Anglican Communion remained so close to Christian tradition, and close the Apostolic Christian tradition at that, that it caused a king to resign his thrown over divorce. Now it doesn't worry much about divorce and is okay, in many places with homosexual "marriage". Hence the accusation of "woke" aimed at the Bishop, even though she did not say a single thing that could be regarded as being woke in her homily.
I note this as Hispanics have come into the country they have been attracted to protestant and quasi Christian faiths in some numbers. This isn't hugely surprising, even though the majority of Hispanics are cultural, if not practicing, Catholics, as these faiths seem more "American". It's notable that in the novel, but not the movie adaptation of it, The Godfather Michael Corleone figure was disappointed when his protestant wife converted to Catholicism and started raising the children in that faith, as he hoped that they'd be members of the more "American", at that time, Episcopal Church. Indeed, Catholics aspiring to be in the upper middle class in fact often did that until the 1960s, when Kennedy made being American and Catholic seemingly okay.8
In reality, it never actually became okay, as the Church will not accommodate itself to the culture of anyone nation, something that became increasingly obvious after 1973's Roe v. Wade decision.
It's been noted that Hispanics voted for Trump in large numbers this last election, a shift in political alignments that we predicated here quite awhile back. That reflects their cultural conservatism, which is to say that it reflects their cultural Catholicism.9 What they probably were not ready for is the degree of outright hatred a significant number of the Maga crowed have to anyone who isn't a White nominal protestant. This started to become evident when Anne Coulter, a serious Presbyterian told Vivek Ramaswamy recently that she'd vote for him, but he isn't white. Indeed, he's an Indian American Hindu. Ramaswamy got the message and bailed out of the doggy agency, realizing that there was no future for him there. He's going to run for the Governorship of Rust Belt Ohio where voters will likely inform him that he's not white, as its okay apparently to say that once again.
Indeed, there are a lot of under the breath mutterings about Usha Vance who isn't white, and who is a Hindu. Oh my.
Chances are good that the Trump interregnum will have an impact on the Evangelicals in a major way, starting with this. There isn't really a home in a lot of those churches for Christians who hail from a culture that didn't arise in Great Britain during the English Civil War. When the disaster of Trump blows up, it's going to take the wind out of the sails of a lot of things associated with his movement, and most likely a lot of Hispanics out of the pews.
To be a real Christian, of course, has always meant that you didn't have a home in the world, and it still does. It has also always meant that you'd be hated. People want to hear that they can get rich on Earth and that its a sign of approval from Heaven. They want to hear that some people don't really count, up to the point of their deaths, whether that be through neglect or judicial execution. They want to be told that unnatural sexual unions are hated by God, but shacking up and affairs, as long as the plumbing is correct, aren't really a big deal. They want to be told they can pay as little to their employees as they can get away with, and that's just God's plan. And they want to be told they can hate the stranger, even the infant ones, if they weren't born in the right place.
They want "Christian values", as long a they weren't the ones Christians were martyerd for, and they're easy to do. They're okay with the Sermon on the Mount, as long as it doesn't mean they really have to go to Church to hear it, and can stay home and watch football.
Now, does this apply to all Evangelicals? Certainly not, and not by a long shot. About 80% of white Evangelicals voted for Trump, but not all of them hold such views by any means. 58% of Catholics voted for Trump, that being a majority. A lot of that may be explained in both instances by Democrats hugging the bloody body of abortion, which should be a lesson to them and one which we warned here was a mistake to do. And quite frankly much of what has come about was due to the developments brought about by Obergefell, which we warned would occur.10
So, horrified by a moral decay that became obvious with Obergefell, but having accommodated itself to a flood of moral decay that came before that, the American Civil Religion turned to an irreligious man who has no capacity for deep thought at all and who started whining, but only after some of his backers whined first, that a "woke" minister was interjecting religion into politics.
Politics and morality are inseparable. And as morality's foundation is religion, religion and politics are necessarily related. We need religion as a guide. We need it because we are imperfect, and our government needs the church, because only those humble enough to admit they're sinners can bring to democracy the tolerance it requires in order to survive.
Ronald Reagan.
Footnotes:
1. The phrase is from Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Apostolicae Curae holding Anglican ordinations to be invalid.
I'm not hostile to Episcopalians, I'd note, I just agree that Pope Leo XIII was correct. Apparently a lot of Episcopalians have over the years as there's been efforts to convey validity by cross ordinations from other churches that can demonstrate Apostolic succession, something the Methodist have done as well. Some Anglican male priests do have valid holy orders, however, particularly if they were formerly Catholics.
2. Trump reinstated the death penal for certain Federal offenses. The Catholic Church generally takes the view that its obsolete and while the state is allowed to impose it under certain conditions, those conditions no longer exist in the modern world.
3. This is clearly a legally deficient argument and has been stayed by a court.
4. Of interest, already there's been arguments that Trump's proclamation also deprives Native Americans of citizenship, a nasty shocking proposition. This because Trump's AG office holds the view that birthright means "subject to the jurisdiction" of the US.
Of interest, if that's correct, Ted Cruz is not a U.S. citizen. He was born in Canada.
5. Presbyterians do allow for divorce, as a last resort, in cases of adultery, which Trump has experience with, or abandonment.
6. Catholics that have been backing this best fear, as this camp is traditionally highly hostile to Catholicism, and many of its members wouldn't regard Catholics as Christians at all, even though Catholics are the original Christians.
7. This analogy really fails. Cyrus the Great wasn't a bad man, in the context of his times and station. He wasn't Jewish, and of course he lived well before the time of Christ, but he was charged with freeing the captive Jews under his dominion.
That's why some Evangelical Christians see Trump as a Cyrus. Cyrus enormously benefitted the Jew, but he wasn't Jewish. So, to those in the New Apostolic Reformation, Trump will be a Cyrus who lets them bring forth a new Evangelical Protestant nation.
Well, Cyrus would regard Trump as a pussy. Moreover, Trump is just making us look like clowns and stands a much better chance of tainting Evangelical Christianity irredeemably.
7b. Having said that,yanking the citizenship of the native born was the topic of an address by Catholic Cardinal Cupich.
He's not alone in this. Other US Catholic bishops have made statements on this issue, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops condemned Trump's actions on immigration as well.
The Church does not maintain there should be "open borders", as some on the far left do. Rather, it holds that immigration should be governed by four principles:
First Principle: People have the right to migrate to sustain their lives and the lives of their families.
Second Principle: A country has the right to regulate its borders and to control immigration.
Third Principle: A country must regulate its borders with justice and mercy.
8. There was also a trend like this that followed World War Two with some returning US servicemen joining the (ironically) Lutheran Church as well as the Episcopal Church which seemed more American and local.
While widely missed, there's a counter trend today with young conservatives and traditionalist joining the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and some very devout Evangelicals joining the Orthodox Church after being exposed to the early history of the Church.
9. I've already seen one video clip by a Hispanic Trump voter horrified over the deportations, claiming he promised to do no such thing.
No he didn't. But this is an interesting example of how people convince themselves a politician holds their own views because he holds some views that they like.
10. We specifically stated:These justices have perhaps assumed too much if they've assumed that they can now act so far that Marshall would be horrified, and I'd be surprised if, long term, this decision doesn't either mark the beginning of a Cesarian court and a retreat of American democracy, or the point at which the roles of the Court began to massively erode in favor of a more Athenian democracy.
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