I take it as given that God commands only what is good for us and forbids only what is bad, which means sometimes also not permitting others to do what’s bad. For we are social beings, and permission slides into participation, and participation slides into approval, and approval eventually demands celebration, and sometimes even compulsion.
Solomon’s idolatry thus began when he looked outside of Israel for his wives. By the time Ahab was on the throne of Israel with the malevolent Jezebel, loyalty to God might cost you your life. Obadiah, master of Ahab’s house, had to hide in a cave one hundred and fifty prophets of the Lord to keep them safe from Jezebel’s murderous hatred.
If that was not bad enough, Ahaz the king of Judah, turning toward the gods of Assyria, “cut in pieces the vessels of the house of God, and shut up the doors of the house of the Lord, and he built altars in every corner of Jerusalem.” (2 Chronicles 28:24) No doubt Ahaz considered himself a religious man.
When things have reached such a pass, in order to return to health, we may have to pull up the old evil by the roots. The saintly king Josiah did not simply encourage the worship of the true God, while permitting the well-established and well-heeled idolatry to go on in his midst. As soon as he was of age to command, “he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem from the high places, and the groves, and the carved images, and the molten images,” smashing the altars of Baal, reducing the images to dust, and strewing it over the graves of those who had sacrificed to them. (2 Chronicles 34:3-4)
Then the real renewal could begin. He repaired the Temple, and Hilkiah the high priest, searching in an old disused place, “found a book of the law of the Lord given by Moses.” (34:14) Perhaps the priest knew where it was all along. Josiah then read the book before all the people of Jerusalem, and vowed to keep the commandments of the Lord, and demanded that the people do the same.
Josiah’s reform had some staying power, continuing through his reign, and being of some force afterwards, though there was backsliding. Only the destruction of Jerusalem and captivity in Babylon sufficed to turn the hearts of the people back to the Lord.
Yet I am sure that before then, people had gotten used to the idolatry. Pluralist and tolerant all! What if small babies were sacrificed to Moloch? Babies don’t have a real life, not yet.
What if some people enjoyed the ritual prostitution and sodomy in worship of the Baalim? Hiel may have gone a little too far when he rebuilt Jericho during the reign of Ahab, laying its foundation in the body of his firstborn son Abiram, and planting the gates in the body of his youngest son Segub (1 Kings 16:34), but who could be incensed about it, other than somebody like that half-mad ruffian Elijah?
We are now in the midst of a great and widespread sickness. Children are snuffed out in the womb, between 2,500 and 3,000 every day in the United States. Many people who decry those murders are quite all right with something related to abortion, just as ghastly, and with greater power to destroy human civilization: the deliberate manufacture of children, and the freezing of embryos not wanted.
Marriage is in free-fall, and so are birth rates. Many neighborhoods are empty for most or all of the day, which means that they are neighborhoods no more, but only locations.
Pornography is everywhere. Libraries welcome drag queens to read to little children stories that inseminate their minds with perversion. The unnatural is celebrated, and in many a workplace is thrust upon you so constantly that it is hard to get through a day without paying it compliance at least.
Children are mutilated, and people cheer the mutilation, pretending that a boy can become a girl or a girl can become a boy. The confusion is so widespread and infectious that language itself is twisted into pretzels to comply with it. Imagine having to explain to anyone before yesterday that you could use the “wrong” pronoun to refer to somebody right in front of your eyes.
In this dreadful situation, the Church holds the last lifeline. Her teachings condemn this multivariate madness. She promotes and corroborates what is healthy and in accord with our human nature.
She upholds the inestimable value of human life in the womb. She condemns the severance of the marital act from the conception of children, whether by contraception or by manufacture. She permits separation but forbids divorce. Her doctrines – not always her ministers, alas – protect the innocence of children.
She is sure of the goodness of male and female, and she does not countenance the sterilization that must ensue when you mutilate healthy sexual organs to affirm a fantasy.
But perhaps the most visible sign of her sanity is what now embarrasses many of her leaders and her followers: the male priesthood.
I accept the argument that a woman cannot really offer the sacrifice of the Mass in persona Christi, since Jesus was a man and not a woman. But we cannot rest there. If it is good for us that there should be an all-male priesthood, we ought to know why.
That question involves not the single man before the altar, but the very meaning of manhood, and of the brotherhood of priests. Nor, since grace builds upon nature, should we consider such a brotherhood to be an oddball exception. It should stand as an exemplar of sanity. It’s not only priests who should unite in brotherhood.
We are in no position to wag our fingers at the Church for not getting with the times. The times are evil. Or worse: they are insane. The Church holds the lifeline. Let us thank God for it, then, and grab hold of it, without reservation.
