St. Thomas More Chicago

Father Robert Behnke

The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
"Thou shalt love The Lord Thy God…Thou shalt love Thy neighbor as Thyself….”  Can there be a word in the English language that is so often misunderstood and thus so often misused as the word “love”?  I love…ice cream…my dog or my cat…my job…winter or summer…my mom and my dad…my friends…my wife or my husband…God.  The fact that Our Lord commands in another place that we must…love our enemies…bears great significance to understanding that word “love,” as well as the other word…neighbor.  The 613 commands of the Law of Moses are distilled in the Old Testament into these two commands found in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy; Our Lord repeats them, but as we know from His parable of The Good Samaritan, He gives the word neighbor an enlarged meaning.  For me, for many others, that is surely one of the great challenges of this commandment.
To understand the word love, as given in these two commands to love God and love our neighbor, perhaps it is better to figure out what that word love does not mean.  After all, we should not compare our love neither of God nor of our neighbor to our love of ice cream.
I am not a particularly rabid fan of prime time entertainment; were I given a test of naming current prime time entertainment TV shows, I would flunk.  More to my taste is I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners.  But after my father died, I would often stop in to see my mom around suppertime, and she would often enough be watching TV.  She introduced me to Everybody Loves Raymond.  For those unfamiliar, the Barone family – Raymond, wife Deborah, girl Allie and twin boys Michael and Geoffrey, live across the street from Raymond’s parents Frank and Marie and his older brother Robert.  The Barones are all Catholic, and many of the episodes portray especially Raymond and his wife as being certified cafeteria-type Catholics; this portrayal is often subtle, soft, and meant to be inoffensive, and so all the characters come across as good, morally speaking.  I am certain that many miss that Catholic Raymond and Deborah and their children demonstrate little apparent knowledge of the Faith; their behavior shows their lack of knowledge.  One episode that demonstrates all this quite clearly features Allie asking questions about life.  At first Raymond thinks Allie wants to know the facts of life, so he gears himself up for this.  But not so. Allie’s question is this: If we all go to heaven when we die, then why does God put us here?  Raymond first swallows his tongue and comes up with answers unbelievably goofy (“There is an overcrowding problem in heaven”).  But then the adults in the family attempt to figure out a serious answer.  They even call their parish priest, Father Hubley, for an answer (Father Hubley never calls back, at least not by the end of the show).  The question remains unanswered at the end (there is a kind of unspoken, fuzzy, feely, resolution, but no clear answer); no clear answer can be given, because there is no answer to that question, because the question itself is faulty, assuming facts not in evidence.  Allie’s question needs to be corrected by her parents, but it is not.  And sadly, this is a question stated in many ways today, all of which end up assuming the same false premise: God’s love is more powerful than anything, and so how can an all-loving God allow people to suffer eternally for their sins?  He cannot, and so consequently – as little eight-year-old Catholic Allie states – If we all go to heaven when we die, then why did God put us here?  If Allie were to think about her question long enough, and if she knows anything at all substantial about her Catholic Faith, she may be able to figure out that there is a problem with her premise – we all go to heaven when we die.  Only when she changes that premise can her question – why did God put us here – be satisfactorily answered.  Indeed, if we all go to heaven when we die because God’s love is so powerful that it supersedes His justice and His holiness, then will He not even draw the devil to Himself in the end?  If we all go to heaven when we die, if God’s love is unrestricted in the human sense, why did He ever allow hell and the devil and his fallen angels in the first place?  Why did He bother to banish Adam and Eve from paradise?  Why did He allow them to fall into sin?  Why did He banish Cain after Cain murdered Abel?  Why did He destroy the earth by flood?  Why did Israel end up in Egyptian slavery?  Why did He allow His Divine Son to become a man and die a horribly innocent death on the cross?  Why do some Christians bother to perform acts of penance or acts of charity?  Why did Our Lord bother commanding love if everyone in the end goes to heaven no matter what they do, even if they equate loving God and neighbor with loving Italian food?  Why bother with any of this if, in the end, nothing we do or don’t do on earth matters anyway, because, as Allie has obviously been taught, we all go to heaven when we die?
The Church, as we see today from the beatification of Blessed John Henry Newman, is quite cautious in declaring with absolute certainty that any particular individual is in heaven.  Compared to just the billions and billions of Catholics who have lived and died over the past 2000 years, only a tiny fraction has been declared to be in heaven.  St. Thomas More died a martyr in 1535, but his canonization only took place 400 years later, in 1935.  And the Church is infinitely more cautious in declaring that any one certain individual is in hell – that kind of declaration has never happened; the Church has never stated with certainty that any one particular individual is damned, simply because we cannot know a person’s final state of soul at the moment of death.  But that is a far cry from what can be called universal reconciliation – the popular belief today that there is no hell, because everybody goes to heaven when they die.  The Church has a word for that belief: presumption. One presumes on the mercy of God and so lives his life more or less as he pleases.  But even little Allie, were she to reflect on her young life, would see the foolishness of this lie.  As all children, Allie at some time misbehaves, and, her parents, being decent parents, punish her for that misbehavior.  She may not feel particularly loved as she is punished, but she still in her heart knows that her mom and dad love her.  The bromide used by parents punishing their children this hurts me more than it hurts you, spoken in genuine sincerity, is likewise spoken in genuine love.  If a parent would let a child do whatever he wants, is that a sign of love or a sign or possible weakness or neglect?  God is neither weak nor neglectful; God is no pushover.  Rather God – Father, Son, Holy Spirit – is perfect in justice, love, and mercy.  And genuine love can neither destroy justice, nor cancel it out.
It is no secret that the apostolic journey of Pope Benedict that took place these past few days stirred no little controversy in Great Britain.  The crowds of the faithful, however, seem unperturbed by whatever controversy there was.  Now as far as I could tell, the Holy Father did not use the word “hell” even once.  But he did not have to; he spoke of conversion, faithfulness to Christ, vocation, penance and shame for child abuse, the Church and all the world finding its own deepest meaning in the meaning of the Blessed Sacrament.  What was the point of anything the pope said, or even of his coming, from Rome to England and Scotland – no walk in the park even for an 83-year-old pope – if in the end our choices in life make no difference and so have no meaning?  Why bother to beatify Cardinal Newman, why bother to beatify or canonize anybody, if sainthood is assured us all, since going to heaven at the end of life is what it means to be a saint?  But Our Lord’s parable of Dives and Lazarus teaches the world that our choices on earth determine our eternal destiny.  The Holy Father undertook this “apostolic journey” – the Holy Father “bothered” to make the trip – to “…speak the truth in love…”; because love demands the truth be spoken; because love and truth are two sides of the same coin; because Our Lord Who is love incarnate, is “…the Way, the Truth, and the Life….”  The Holy Father continues to “bother,” because so much of the world knows not the Truth and so cannot know the meaning of the command to “…love God…and love Thy neighbor as thyself….”  Is it too dramatic, too exaggerated, to warn the world that it may be going to hell in a hand basket?
Believers are rightly shocked by the horrors of human suffering as a result of what the Church rightly calls sin.  It is unimaginable for one who believes in God Who is Love, at the same time to believe also that sinners unrepentant at the moment of death of grievous mortal sin can nonetheless reach heaven.  But the sufferings of Christ on the cross teach us that one who suffers on this earth does not sin in the suffering, nor endanger his immortal soul; earthly suffering and eternal suffering are not at all the same.  To this point, the words of Blessed John Henry Newman are instructive; these are his words from his Apologia pro Vita Sua – a history of his religious opinions – his contrasting the horror of suffering to the gravity of sin ought to lead us to both repentance and frequent, even devotional, confession:
The Catholic Church holds it is better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremist agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one willful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.
The most extreme human suffering on earth does not have eternal consequences.  The moral actions of man do.  Even an unrepented venial sin is shocking and awful in its effects.  When Our Lord taught us to pray, the final petition of His prayer was “…and deliver us from evil.”  Why bother to make this prayer for deliverance from evil of there is no evil from which we can be delivered?  To love God with all we are, and to love our neighbor as ourselves, means that the evil of sin can have no place, no home in our lives; it means that we know there is a place called hell and know there is nothing good about it; and so it means we know the meaning of life, the meaning of supernatural love we have known from childhood: God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in heaven.


By Father Behnke