St. Thomas More Chicago

Fr. Robert Behnke

This past week, I read an article from the Our Sunday Visitor on Catholics who home-school their children.  If you’re not aware of it, more and more Catholic parents are choosing to home-school their children for a variety of reasons, the chief of which is often dissatisfaction with the religious instruction their children have received in some Catholic schools.  The article quoted a number of individuals—parents, priests, bishops, Catholic school officials—and, as might be expected, some were vociferously opposed; many others were adamantly in favor.  Those in favor rightly pointed to the teaching of the Second Vatican Council: parents are the first teachers of their children.  The matter becomes even more complicated when considering preparation for the sacraments, as canon law gives the pastor the right both to give instruction to and to determine the readiness of candidates for the sacraments of initiation; with children, this would usually concern First Holy Communion and Confirmation.  The article did not break any new ground, nor did it reach any certain conclusion.  And so what I found most interesting was not the article itself but the readers’ comments following the article.  Most of those comments came from Catholics who have had experience with home-schooling.  And the shortest comment was the one I also found the most profound: a reader stated …the reason I home-school my children is that I want them to get to heaven….

I wonder how many Catholics ever give serious reflection to this as their life’s goal: to get to heaven; to get the members of my family to heaven; to get my dearest and nearest—family, friends, neighbors—to heaven.  I know that, by my listening to Catholics, in this one parish, whether within or outside of the confessional, there are many—perhaps very many—who are concerned, for themselves, and, even more concerned for those whom they love: children, spouses, even parents who seemingly have abandoned the Faith.  They pray for them, have Masses offered for them, remember them at the moment of Holy Communion.  But all those other Catholics—so many who seem to have lost sight of even the purpose of Our Lord’s incarnation, His coming to earth, His life, His teaching, especially His passion and His death—what do they think the ultimate purpose of all this is, if not for souls to be saved—for souls to get to heaven?  This past week, Caritas International, an international charitable agency of the Holy See, meeting the past few days in Rome, unveiled a new video on its website, repeatedly stating its new motto One Human Family, Zero Poverty.  The slogan was criticized by the President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Peter Cardinal Turkson of Ghana.  He reminded the Church of Our Lord’s words…the poor you shall always have with you.  Cardinal Turkson was not for a second criticizing or diminishing the Church’s consistent and important work of alleviating the suffering of the poor, but he was reminding the Church of its ultimate purpose, and so of the meaning of what Our Lord said…the poor you shall always have with you…; Our Lord did not come as a social reformer, to be an activist or a revolutionary; He came for a supernatural purpose: for redemption, for forgiveness of sins, that each of us might be watchful and ready and prepared for, not the end of the whole world, but for the end of our own world, for that most important moment of our whole life on earth—for the moment of our death and our own particular judgment.  If that is not the first purpose of Christ’s death and resurrection, if that is not the first purpose of His giving us the Church, then everything we do here—all the sacraments, all the Masses, all the hours of adoration before the Blessed Sacrament—all this loses its meaning and purpose, and all those—especially all those fallen-away Catholics—who so assuredly claim they can pray to God in their living room or their bedroom or on the front porch or in the woods just as well as they can pray in any Catholic church—if nothing absolutely unique takes place just here—if what happens here can happen everywhere else—well, then they are right.  They are then also right about not needing to remain faithful, not needing to keep the commandments and to live one’s life in harmony both with the natural law and with revealed truth.  If Our Lord did not come for a supernatural purpose, to achieve a goal that man on his own could never achieve: that we might be saved, to redeem us, and if He did not leave us the Church as His instrument of salvation—then: why did He come, why did He suffer and die, why are we here right now?

But Our Lord had no need to come to earth if His purpose was just to pay us a visit, or to let us know He “cares,” or to give us an example.  Because God is everywhere, none of those purposes would necessitate an incarnation—God taking on human flesh, our human nature—nor does any reason other than, as we say each Sunday in the Nicene Creed…for us men and for our salvation…explain and require His suffering and His death.  St. Peter states today for us the reason for the coming of Emmanuel—God with us—…Christ suffered for sins once…that He might lead you to God….  And Our Lord, on the very night before He dies—because that night is the moment at which, and the context in which, He speaks the words of today’s Gospel—is telling those first disciples—the apostles—those for whom He is about to suffer and die—what He requires, of them and of us—what He requires of all who want to claim a share in His acts of salvation—what He requires of those who want to go to heaven, to be led to God:…If you love Me, you will keep My commandments….Whoever has My commandments and observes them is the one Who loves Me. And whoever loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and reveal Myself to Him….

Twice in such a brief space—twice as He is about to be apprehended and brought before the Sanhedrin, before the chief priest, before Pilate—twice at this singular moment, Our Lord teaches…if you love Me, you will keep My commandments….  None of the apostles—cowards though most of them proved to be—none asked Which commandments?  All of them?  All the time?  Can we change some we don’t like?  If some prove to be inconvenient, or opposed to popular opinion, may we adapt, or change, or drop some?  That, simply put then, and simply put now—if someone wants to get to heaven—changing the intent of Our Lord’s words is simply out of the question.  And recall, too, in that group of apostles stood Simon, now Peter, meaning Rock—the rock on which Our Lord said He would build His Church.  Peter, for all his cowardice, understood what it would now mean for him to be that rock; at that moment. He might not have liked what it meant, but he understood—because he would soon betray Our Lord—it meant suffering, even eventual death—but Peter, who was so often used to questioning Our Lord, arguing with Him, sometimes even putting his foot right into his mouth—here Peter is silent, for he realizes that he must now be the rock on which the proclamation of the path to heaven—…keep My commandments…—now rests.

If Our Lord makes keeping His commandments the way to heaven, could He be so unloving as not to give us a sure and certain way of knowing precisely what is required of those who want to do as He prescribes?  We should be both happy and thankful to know that the successor of Peter, the Holy Father, has the authority to proclaim the truth, so that each individual has not to make up his own mind about what Our Lord means and wants.  The infallibility of the pope and of the Church’s magisterium is a gift revealing the great mercy of God, to preserve true faith in the world, and to restrain freedom of opinion from its own suicidal excesses.  And this is precisely why polls telling us what “most Catholics” think or believe about this or that issue are of use only in giving us a number, but not at all of any use in determining supernatural truth.  Likewise, this is precisely why the prominent issues of the day—same-sex unions, homosexual “marriage,” contraception, abortion, adoption of innocent little babies by two daddies and no mommy or vice versa—why all these must be seen and acted upon with the eyes of faith, and why the truth of these matters must be determined by what Our Lord has given us to be the certain guide to what He requires of His 21st-century disciples—the teaching authority of the Church.  Catholic Charities of Illinois has this past week laid off its adoption and foster-care workers because the state legislature refused to give agencies opposed to adoption by same-sex couples an exemption to the requirements of the state’s new civil union law that will take effect this Wednesday; no question: a loss here, in this life on earth, but on earth faithful to Christ, and to the meaning of His words…the poor you shall always have with you….  Loving Our Lord—keeping His commandments—getting to heaven—all three go indivisibly together.

Many—surely not all—but many who, in whole or, especially, in part, abandon the practice of the Catholic Faith do so because they say things such as …following Jesus has nothing to do with all those Catholic teachings and rules…; they want to move down the cafeteria line, choosing what appeals to their spiritual appetite.  On the other hand, every single person whom in my 38 years of the priesthood I have seen embrace the practice of the Catholic Faith has done so because they were convinced by the certainty of the Faith; they discovered that making up their own mind about each individual tenet they would believe was getting out of hand; often a convert would say something like I can’t really tell you what my previous church believed, because no one could say for sure.  Everyone I have ever known who chose to become Catholic did so because the Catholic Church was certain about what is true and what is required; only the Catholic Church claims for itself its identity as the one true Church of Jesus Christ.  No other Christian denomination has even dared apply for that position.  If loving Our Lord and getting to heaven means keeping His commandments, only one Church speaks with certainty about exactly what that means.  How God finally judges the heart and soul of each person is a mystery known only to Him.  But in terms of getting to heaven, I have never heard of an instance of a death-bed conversion to the Lutheran Church, or the Baptist, or Episcopal, or Methodist, or Presbyterian, or Orthodox, or to any other church.  I know only of death-bed conversions to the Catholic Church.  When it comes down to that final, ultimate, moment of my life, I want to be certain I have been, and am now, in the right pew.

The Sixth Sunday of Easter