The Paastor's Pen

 

October 23, 2022, Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Hurricane Disaster Relief: Baskets remain at the entrances of the church to receive your donations given to assist those turning to the Church for help in South West Florida and in Puerto Rico. Let us enable the Church to be a living sign of the compassion and charity of Christ to those in crisis as a result of the devastation to their homes and businesses recently caused by these powerful storms. Your generosity will be greatly appreciated.

Mission Sunday: Today we join with the Church throughout the world to offer our spiritual and material support to those who go out in our name, carrying the gospel to the far reaches of the world in spite of the sacrifices and hardships this work may entail. This annual observance must also serve to remind us of our own responsibility to bring the gospel to places where it is presently absent, sometimes in homes, workplaces and other locations not so far away and very familiar to us!

Thou Shall Not Kill: October is the pro-life month and so it calls us to wrestle once again with the prohibition against taking the life of another human being issued by God in the commandments entrusted to Moses on Mt. Sinai. While many might like to add some exception clauses to this commandment, in truth, none were included on the day God gave the command. So all of human life is to be respected and protected whether while still in the womb, whether young or old, healthy or infirm, innocent or guilty. It was the latter that caused a stir most recently as the jurors deliberated the just punishment to be given to the young man convicted of coldly gunning down his peers at a Florida High School. While putting the young man to death was an option looming large as the jurors deliberated his fate, in the end the jury could not unanimously agree on that course of action and so he was sentenced to life in prison without parole instead. The reaction was in the least disappointment and for many even outright anger. Some opined that justice had not been served by letting the man off easy by not also taking his life as he had taken those of others without mercy. Yet as Catholics called to be pro-life we are asked to struggle as we might in order to see the rightness of the Jury’s decision. What would the death of this guilty man accomplish? Would it bring back even one minute more of any one of the lives he so callously took? We know the answer to that is no. Yet justice is served by his losing his freedom which he so wrongly used to murder others and by the fact that he will never be able to commit such a crime again. Yet for some that is not enough, they call for his death, but is that true justice or is it actually vengeance? When do two wrongs ever make a right? Taking the life of another even legally as the State makes those responsible for deciding that and then carrying it out those who claim dominion over life and death which clearly no human being can actually possess. If we truly believe in life, then we have to respect, protect and preserve it even in difficult cases, remembering that God said “Thou shall not kill “– period!! We must let God be God and so leave the ultimate judgment to him who alone will determine the punishment this man truly deserves, and while we wait that day we must take extra care not to slide down a slippery moral slope by claiming any exceptions to the commandment not to kill, trusting as we do that we will be forgiven for breaking it if without explicitly intending to do so we end up violating it in self-defense.