under the patronage of St Joseph and St Dominic

By the rivers of Babylon there we sat and wept, remembering Zion;
on the poplars that grew there we hung up our harps. . . Ps 136

WORLD YOUTH DAY AND MAN’S VOCATION

The Catholic Church exercises a critical function in society through its teaching and example.  If its directions are heeded only by the Catholic faithful, they have, nonetheless, an osmotic effect which redounds to the good of all.  Western society is sick with the effects of materialism whose pagan and atheistic influences work enormous harm on the moral sense.  Study the lack of attention to dress and appearance, the preoccupation with maceration, and the generally hopeless attitudes of schoolchildren in most Australian secondary schools and you will see what these influences are doing to our families and our society.  We have lost the sense of any personal worth because we have lost the sense of man’s vocation.

Almighty God created man in love, and for love.  He called man to love as an incarnate spirit, that is, soul and body, in the unity of the person.  Love is man’s vocation.  Hence human love is not something merely biological, merely animal: it is something transcendent: it concerns the intimate nucleus of the person.  The use of sexuality as physical giving has its own truth, and reaches it full meaning when it expresses the personal giving of man and woman for the whole of their lives together.[1]   At the heart of this personal exchange is the virtue the Devil loves to mock—with which mockery the modern world, under his influence, joins in—chastity.  Chastity is the very foundation of any society.  Destroy chastity in the individual and you begin to destroy it in society; destroy it in society, and you destroy society itself.  That is what the Devil wants.  Listen to three of the Church’s Doctors, and understand the nature of this personification of evil.

St Augustine: If the Devil could do everything he wanted, there would not remain a single living human being on the earth. (Patralogia Latina XXXVII, 1246)

St John Chrysostom: No one can feel such implacable hatred for his worst enemy as the evil one feels for the human race. (On the Priesthood, 6, 13)

St Bonaventure: The cruelty of the Devil is such that he would devour us at any moment if the divine power did not protect us. (Diaeta salutis, VII, c.1)

Secular humanism and feminism, evil successors of communism—the evil fruit of Marx’s dialectical materialism—part of those “errors of Russia” of which Our Blessed Lady spoke at Fatima in 1917, have blinded western society to man’s dignity.  They have immersed us in sexuality as the blind man, through his lack of sight, falls into an open sewer.  In our preoccupation with the matter, we have lost sight of the infinitely more important form.  Man is made for eternity, not for sexual gratification.

World Youth Day is to be celebrated in Sydney this week.  The Pope is due.  He comes, not as the secular media think, to apologise for the appalling conduct of perverted priests and religious, but to call the world’s youth to the sense of their vocation, love.  The celebration is not just for the Catholic young, but for all young people.  For Christ came not just to save Catholics, but all men.  He came not to call the virtuous, but sinners to repentence.

Michael Baker
13th July 2008—Fifteenth Sunday of the Year
91st anniversary of the Third Apparition of Our Blessed Lady at Fatima