TEXT: Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, October 6, 2024

October 6, 2024 Father De Celles Homily

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27th Sunday Ordinary Time

October 6, 2024

Homily by Fr. John De Celles

St. Raymond of Peñafort Catholic Church

Springfield, VA

Today’s Scripture readings are very rich in content.

But on this Respect Life Sunday,

I’d like to focus on just two particular aspects:

         the dignity of the lives of women and children.

One of the most influential movements of the last sixty years

         has been what we used to call the “Women’s Liberation Movement.”

Now, there have been a lot of wonderful and positive changes

made in these sixty years to improve the status of women in society,

         and the Women’s Movement has played an important role in this.

But there has also been a part of the movement

         that didn’t simply demand equal rights with men,

         but saw men as the enemy,

and saw things like sex, marriage, and children

as part of the enemy’s ancient plan of oppression.

And so, it sought to rid women of these chains,

or at least give them control over them.

Unfortunately, this latter “Radical Feminist” element came to dominate

the “Women’s Movement.”

As part of their effort to liberate women

from the supposed chains of marriage and children,

they began to push them to take greater control of their sex lives.

But instead of encouraging self-control,

         they encouraged promiscuity and contraception.

And rather than finding liberation, women just found more oppression.

As they searched for love, they found only sexual abuse and exploitation.

As they sought to liberate themselves from the oppression of men,

they found themselves liberating men from all responsibility

related to the consequences of sex and procreation.

They also pushed for changes in the divorce laws

         to make it easier for a woman to choose to do whatever she wanted

without being tied to “outdated” social institutions.

Rather than being an instrument of freedom for women, though,

the new “no fault” divorce laws have more often been used by men

to increase their freedom to abandon their wives and their children

         whenever they wished.

This leads us to the most important, or rather terrible, victory

for the radical feminist movement: abortion.

Abortion.

The right for a woman to control her own body,

even as she controls the life and body of another.

The right to live as she chooses,

even as she denies her baby the right to live or choose at all.

But no matter how hard they try,

they cannot change the fact that an aborting woman

         will always be the mommy of an aborted baby.

They have lied to her, they have stolen from her,

and they have killed not only her baby,

but part of her heart and soul as a woman as well.

This is the plan, and this is the rotten fruit, of radical feminism.

But God has a different plan.

In today’s Gospel, the Pharisees ask Jesus,

“Is it lawful for a husband to divorce his wife?”

Jesus responds by simply going back

to the very beginning of God’s plan

and quoting from the first chapter of the first book of the Bible:

         “From the beginning of creation, [He says]

         God made them male and female.”

In other words, He reminds them

that God created human beings as male and female,

         and He created them not to be independent, or selfish, or successful,

         but to share life and love with God and their spouses and children

                  in marriage and family.

Jesus goes on to quote from the 2^nd Chapter of Genesis, saying:

         “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother

                  and be joined to his wife.”

This is the same chapter from which we read in today’s first reading.

We read that while God created Adam first, He immediately said,

         “It is not good for the man to be alone.

I will make a suitable partner for him.”

Notice, when God created Eve, He created not a slave for Adam,

         but a “partner”!

And when Adam saw his new partner, he cried out,

         “This one, at last, is bone of my bones

and flesh of my flesh.”

In other words, this one is like me!

This one is not an animal given to me to use,

but another person to cherish and respect

as I cherish and respect my own flesh.

In God’s plan, male and female

         are both created in His image as human beings.

They are partners; they are of the same flesh, the same stuff.

They are equal in dignity before God and each other.

But they are also different:

         This is what Genesis, Chapter 1 means when it tells us:

                  “In His own image He created Him,

                  male and female He created them.”

And it’s what Genesis, Chapter 2 means when it says

         that God created Adam and Eve

         at different times, and yet from the same stuff.

Equal, but different, so that they could complete what the other needed.

This is God’s plan.

And as Genesis tells us, “It was very good.”

Some might say,

         “Father, that’s all fine and good,

                  but things don’t always work out as good as God planned.”

You’re right.

God’s plan for the good of man—male and female and their children—

         is described in Chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis.

But then comes Chapter 3: Adam and Eve reject God’s plan.

They try to become “like God” and make their own plan—they sinned.

This is what Jesus means in today’s Gospel when He says,

“Because of the hardness of your hearts,

                  Moses allowed you to divorce.”

The term “hard-hearted” is an ancient Jewish way of referring to SIN.

Jesus is saying because of sin, God’s plan is changed by man.

“But,” He adds, “that’s not the way it was in the beginning.”

In Chapter 3 of Genesis we go on to read that God tells Adam and Eve

         that because they have chosen their own plan,

         from now on, their lives together, and the lives of all spouses,

         will suffer the effects of sin.

In particular, He warns Eve,

“Your urge shall be for your husband,

and he shall have dominion over you.”

Now, this is not a blessing or a privilege for men;

         it’s a curse resulting from a sin!

He’s warning them both that from now on,

         men will try to sinfully dominate their women.

In short, according to Jesus and Genesis,

         it is sin, or following our plan for things instead of God’s plan,

         which is the root of all problems between men and women.

The solution to this is not blaming men or women for the problem.

The solution is one word: Jesus.

Jesus, God the Son, was there at the beginning.

And He came into the world

         and lived, suffered, and rose to restore God’s plan.

So He says…no more divorce.

In effect, He says, “No more treating each other as objects—no more sin!”

This is the right plan—the natural plan—for men and women.

This is the plan that leads to perfect happiness in heaven,

         but also happiness in this world as well,

         as God showers His grace and love on the lives of spouses.

He provides the grace to live as equals in the sight of God and each other,

         but also His grace to a husband to love with a masculine love,

         and His grace to a wife to love with feminine love.

_____

God’s plan contradicts the Radical Feminist plan

         in another essential area.

In Genesis, Chapter 1, again, right after it tells us that

         God created them male and female in God’s own image,

         it goes on to say that God commanded them: “Be fruitful and multiply.”

Part of the dignity of being created in God’s image

         includes the divine ability

         to give life and love to a new human being:

                  a baby created in the image of God,

                  and made of the exact same stuff as her mom and dad.

This, so that a mother can look at her child and say,

         “This one is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.”

Just as Adam recognizes and cherishes the dignity and the life of Eve,

         all women are created to recognize and cherish the dignity and life

         of their babies.

Abortion does nothing if not degrade the dignity of the life of a baby.

Men degrade themselves when they degrade the dignity of women:

         How can women enhance themselves

         when they degrade the dignity of their unborn children?

It is absolutely and always wrong for men

         to treat their wives like some-thing

         they can use or get rid of whenever they want.

And it is absolutely and always wrong for women 

         to treat their unborn children like some-thing,

         some lifeless tissue that they can get rid of whenever they want.

Children, no matter how small or large, born or unborn,

         share in the dignity of their parents and of all human beings.

This, too, is God’s plan.

So, it’s no surprise that at the end of today’s Gospel reading,

         after Jesus defends the dignity of marriage and of women,

         He then defends the dignity of children.

When the disciples tried to keep the children away from Him,

         the Gospel tells us:

                  “Jesus…became indignant and said to them,

                  ‘Let the children come to me; do not prevent them,

                  for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.’”

The solution to the sins that corrupt the relationship

between men and women is not to devise or embrace a plan

that sets them as enemies of each other,

 or that degrades the dignity of the life of their children.

That plan has failed.

Look around at our society steeped in those sins.

The only plan that can truly

         protect the dignity of all human beings,

                  women and men, children and adults, born and unborn,

         is the plan conceived by God Himself

         even before the beginning of the world.

It’s a plan He has written in the hearts and consciences of every human being,

         especially women.

It’s a plan that He can and will restore to its proper place

         by grace of the one who came to restore all things in Himself

         —Jesus Christ.