Friday of the Second Week of Lent

Lectionary: 234

The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone;
by the Lord has this been done,
and it is wonderful in our eyes?

Google AI tells me that the Lord's stumbling stone is cited 15 times in twelve verses of the New Testament, and the rejected stone of Psalm 118, five times. It was clearly a key for Christians to unlock the mystery of Jesus and discover their own place in the Roman-occupied world. Asked who they were, they could say they were neither Jew nor Gentile; they were a stumbling stone for both groups. 

Like the Lord with his authority to heal, guide, and demand respect in a world that "neither respects God nor fears any man," Christians are also a stumbling stone. We have much to say to those who would build a more technological, efficient, and powerful world which exploits the Earth and wastes human lives. 

Recently a friend explained to me how young people selectively breed more of their own kind and arrange a more stratified brave new world. Lawyers marry lawyers, doctors marry doctors; pro athletes marry pro athletes. They breed superior children who become lawyers, doctors, and athletes, whose children go on to  further refine their selections. 

It sounds like eugenics. Once again, with birth control, sperm banks, genetic testing, and abortion, we're designing a purer race of superior human beings who will govern the rest of humankind. The plan may not be as intentional, efficient, or brutal as the Nazi exterminations and American racist policies; but the direction is the same. 

Catholics object. Planners en route  to Huxley's Brave New World stumble over our Church and our faith in God. We object to manipulative, controlled breeding of human beings. Although humans have deliberately bred pets and livestock for many centuries, we have always objected to the practice among human beings. We might point out the Romeo and Julia principle; that is, that young people of differing social strata, races, and religions often fall in love and elope. Society's governors cannot control that impulse with chemistry and surgery. Attempts to do so, like Shakespeare's play, end in tragedy. Only the authority of God, which is both merciful and stern, can guide our impulsive sexuality. 

As this brave new world was dawning in 1968, the encyclical Humanae Vitae of Pope Paul VI raised objections to artificial means of birth control. The Holy Father taught that a man and woman who do not intend a lifelong, faithful, procreative, and unitive partnership of equals cannot contract a marriage, regardless of what they think or feel, or what the state says. An infant has a right to a mother and father who conceive and bear children, and live together in a covenant of mutual love and support. That child might ordinarily expect brothers and sisters of the same parents.  

The teaching in the halcyon days of American dominance seemed like a huge, unwarranted imposition by an outdated, patriarchal organization. It was assaulted five years later by the Supreme Court of the United States with their infamous Roe v Wade ruling. When they rejected nature's way of bearing children, they cleared the road for artificial insemination, surrogate motherhood, gay marriage, and transsexual surgery. The prehistoric discovery that sex leads to conception has been reversed as women alone must decide if, when, and how they create children, and what kind of children they want. 

The Roman Catholic Church, practically alone among Christian denominations, has become a stumbling stone to the emerging brave new world, and is widely rejected, even by the children who were granted life. We cannot know how this story will play out. We only know that we must speak the truth to an intransigent society. We must take up the cross of fidelity and follow in the footsteps of Our Savior.