| Politics

just society. The real possibility looms that today's Catholic positions on these matters of importance for all men and women, including those of other faiths or no faith at all, will be censored from the public debate or, worse yet, made the subject of a new form of censorship. We need to remember history. The early Christians were not persecuted for "religion" but as "enemies of the State" and for "hatred of the human race". In 1999, Evangelical Protestant theologian, Harold O.J. Brown of the Howard Center for the Family, Religion and Society noted a "similarity between the way the Roman authorities charged Christians of that era with "odium humani generis" [hatred of the human race] and the way the political and media establishment charge contemporary Christians with creating a "climate of hate."

This charge, leveled against the early Christians, of "Hatred of the Human Race" was directed by those within an ancient Rome which had lost its respect for the dignity of all human life while claiming to be enlightened. They practiced primitive forms of abortion as well as "exposure", the killing of unwanted newborns. The Emperor Nero in the first-century A.D. was overt in his homosexual relationships. He even sought to make such relationships normative in the empire by giving an equal status between homosexual relationships and true marriage. First and Second century Rome was one of the first mission fields of the early Christian Church. It proclaimed itself the shining example to the world of its age while it embraced debauchery. In an eerie parallel, the history of ancient Rome reveals that the hostility toward the Christians grew as the citizens of this once great empire continued in their own spiraling moral decline. They simply did not want to hear these Christians and their opposition to abortion and the practice of "exposure" (the killing of newborns). Their infatuation with hedonism was threatened by those Christians’ insistence on monogamy and the family as the first society and foundation of civilization.

One of the ancient Christian manuscripts from that age, written to a pagan inquirer, spoke of the distinctly different practices of the Christians: "They reside in their respective countries, but only as aliens. They take part in everything as citizens and put up with everything as foreigners. Every foreign land is their home, and every home a foreign land. They marry like all others and beget children but they do not expose (kill or abandon) their offspring. Their board they spread for all, but not their bed." The commitment of these Christians to the dignity of every human person as well as the witness of their faithful monogamous marriages transformed ancient Rome. But it was not without hostility.

We are called to build a culture of life and a civilization of love in our own day. We cannot support the efforts to give promiscuous heterosexual or homosexual relationships the same status as monogamous marriage, period. When such practices become enforced by the civil law of the State, we must be ready to experience hostility in opposing such laws and proposing a better way. In so doing, we may also become more and more annoying to some as the West proceeds on a march toward a new paganism. The irony is that some call such a march “progressive” when, in fact, it is regressive. The first step of a new “two step” would be to diminish our truth claims by insisting that our positions are “religious” and must be confined within our Church Walls. So far the American regime has not charged those who insist that such positions are rooted in the Natural Law with "hatred of the human race’ but censoring our speech may be an ominous step in that direction.


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