The Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Supreme Court Opinion on Marriage

During June of 2015, we await the decision of the United States Supreme Court in a case styled Obergefell v Hodges. If the Justices take it upon themselves to reject the Natural Moral Law, step outside of their legitimate authority and include relationships which can never achieve the ends of marriage to be marriage, a new chapter of our experience as Christians in America will begin. The Police Power of the State will be used to enforce this action, over time. Classical, faithful, biblical, creedal Christians cannot ever accept any redefinition of marriage. No civil legislature, executive or Court has the authority to redefine the first institution. Marriage and the family founded upon it precede civil government.

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CHESAPEAKE, VA (Catholic Online) On May 29, 2015, President Barack Obama issued a presidential proclamation declaring the month of June as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month. You can read the proclamation here.

Catholic Christians follow a very different practice in the month of June. We dedicate the month of June to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Last weekend we celebrated the Feast of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. Today we celebrate the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

The Church today, and throughout this month of June, invites us to spend the month reflecting on what it really means to live our lives in such a way that we reveal the Loving Heart of a Merciful God to the whole world. 

On May 31, 1992 in Rome, Saint John Paul II canonized the Jesuit Priest Saint Claude de la Colombiere, the Spiritual Director of Saint Margaret Mary of Alocoque. She was the religious sister to whom the Lord gave a special revelation of His Sacred Heart, filled with redemptive and merciful love for the world.

The priest shared Margaret Mary's devotion to the Heart of Jesus and helped to spread that devotion. This occurred at a critical time when the culture of Europe was steeped in darkness - and the Church staggered from corruption within - a time very much like our own.

At the Mass of canonization the late Pope proclaimed: "For evangelization today, the Heart of Christ must be recognized as the heart of the Church: It is He who calls us to conversion, to reconciliation. It is He who leads pure hearts and those hungering for justice along the way of the Beatitudes.

"It is He who achieves the warm communion of the members of the one Body. It is He who enables us to adhere to the Good News and to accept the promise of eternal life. It is He who sends us out on mission. The heart-to-heart with Jesus broadens the human heart on a global scale."

The heart is the center of a person, the place from which he/she makes the choices which will affect the world within them and around them. Devotion to the Heart of Jesus reminds us that it is in His Sacred Humanity that we find the pattern for becoming fully human ourselves. In His Incarnation, saving life, death and Resurrection, we receive both the pattern - and the means - to become more like Him. 

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The leaders of the Second Vatican Council in the Pastoral Constitution on the Mission of the Church in the Modern World wrote, "The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him Who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear."  (GS #22)

Two years before he became Pope, Karol Cardinal Wotyla (Saint John Paul II) spoke to the Catholic Bishops of the United States. His frank observation was republished in the Wall Street Journal on November 9, 1978:

"We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has gone through. I do not think that wide circles of the American society or wide circles of the Christian community realize this fully. We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, of the Gospel and the anti-Gospel. This confrontation lies within the plans of divine providence. It is a trial which the whole Church must take up."

We are living under what Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI called a Dictatorship of Relativism. Relativism denies the existence of any objective truths which can be known through the exercise of reason and should govern our life together as a society. Divorced from norms to guide the exercise of human choice and govern our behavior, we are rapidly declining as a culture.

When there is nothing objectively true which can be known by all and form the basis of our common life then there is no basis for authentic freedom. Instead, we teeter on the brink of anarchy. Marriage is the next target in the advance of the tyranny of the social and cultural engineers. 

In his apostolic exhortation on the Eucharist, the Sacrament of Charity, Pope Emeritus Benedict summarized the duty of Catholics when confronted with an assault on authentic marriage:  "Marriage and the family are institutions that must be promoted and defended from every possible misrepresentation of their true nature, since whatever is injurious to them is injurious to society itself."

During June of 2015, we await the decision of the United States Supreme Court in a case styled Obergefell v Hodges. If the Justices take it upon themselves to reject the Natural Moral Law, step outside of their legitimate authority and include relationships which can never achieve the ends of marriage to be marriage, a new chapter of our experience as Christians in America will begin.

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The Police Power of the State will be used to enforce this action, over time. Classical, faithful, biblical, creedal Christians cannot ever accept any redefinition of marriage. No civil legislature, executive or Court has the authority to redefine the first institution. Marriage and the family founded upon it precede civil government. In fact, they are the first society. 

As the social, political and economic implications of such a move unfold, we will first be viewed as an annoyance or worse. Without some form of legal protection we will eventually be seen, as were our forebears in ancient Rome, as rejecting the new Caesar. God will give us the grace, as he gave the early Church the grace, to deal with the persecution which will ensue. 

This is a new missionary age. These two very different visions of the human person, human love and the dignity of human sexuality, human flourishing, marriage and the family - and the society founded upon them - are contending for the heart, soul and future of the West. One will lead to true human progress, flourishing and freedom, the other to human degradation and cultural collapse.

The Feast of the Sacred Heart reminds us of our mission in a Culture which has forgotten God. Let us spend the month of June in Prayer to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, lifting up our Nation, indeed the whole world, to the One in whom we place all of our trust. He will not disappoint; His Heart still beats with Mercy and Love for the world.  "Sacred Heart of Jesus, We Place our Trust in Thee."

The Church marks time by the great events of the life of Jesus Christ and the Christian Faith. In so doing she invites Christians to live differently - in every culture and in every age. She also keeps the truths of the faith before a world which needs to be set free from misguided choices.

The early Christians referred to the Church as the world reconciled. They believed, as should we, that the Church is the home of the whole human race. She is a seed of the coming Kingdom. The Catechism affirms:
 
"To reunite all his children, scattered and led astray by sin, the Father willed to call the whole of humanity together into his Son's Church. The Church is the place where humanity must rediscover its unity and salvation. The Church is "the world reconciled." She is that bark which "in the full sail of the Lord's cross, by the breath of the Holy Spirit, navigates safely in this world." According to another image dear to the Church Fathers, she is prefigured by Noah's ark, which alone saves from the flood."(CCC#845)

Nations also mark time. In their special days and months they send important signals. For example, we recently celebrated "Memorial Day" in the United States of America by honoring those who gave their lives to protect our freedoms. In so doing, we affirmed values which join us together. The various proclamations of our Presidents setting months apart speak to what we as a Nation believe and value.

The question arises, what does this Presidential proclamation reveal about the Nation we love and what is being promoted? It is affirming a very different world view. One which rejects what has been universally accepted.

No-one denies that all human beings have fundamental human rights and human dignity because they are human beings. That includes those with same sex attraction as well as those who self-identify as homosexual, lesbian or who buy the notion that one can somehow also reject sexual differentiation and define their own "gender".

However, that is not what this proclamation or the proclamations of the last several years dedicating June as LGBT Month are really all about. They are about nothing less than a cultural revolution.

The Catholic Catechism reminds us of the biblical truth that the heart is more than a fleshy organ in the middle of the chest, "the heart is the seat of moral personality." (CCC # 2517) The Heart of Jesus was pierced out of love for the whole world. His reaffirmation of marriage as between one man and one woman referred back to the first Book of the Bible for good reason. (See, Matt 19)

This truth about the nature of marriage has been the foundation of civil societies and does not depend upon specific revelation - though it is elevated, affirmed and confirmed by it. It has been universally accepted for good reason, not the least of which is the right of children to a mother and a father. 

Choosing as a Nation to reject this truth about the nature of marriage as between one man and one woman, intended for life, open to life and formative of family is a serious rejection of the Natural Moral Law. Restructuring the civil order and using the police power of the State to enforce this new order will have serious and destructive results.

When I was a child, the sisters taught us the prayer which, in many various forms, is associated with this Feast. "Sacred Heart of Jesus, I place my Trust in Thee." I suggest we pray it continually in the days ahead.

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Deacon Keith A. Fournier is Founder and Chairman of Common Good Foundation and Common Good Alliance. A married Roman Catholic Deacon of the Diocese of Richmond, Virginia, he and his wife Laurine have five grown children and seven grandchildren. He is a human rights lawyer and public policy advocate who served as the first and founding Executive Director of the American Center for Law and Justice in the nineteen nineties and has long been active at the intersection of faith and culture. He serves as Special Counsel to Liberty Counsel. He is a senior contributing writer to The Stream.

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