Our People

Called to Witness to the Gospel of Life

Homily for Mass for University of Sydney Life Week Mass

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
29/5/2006

Life and love

“In the world you will have trouble, but be brave: for I have conquered the world!” What consoling words to those of us passionately committed to the Gospel of Life and Love in a university environment and a cultural which still have a long way to go in embracing that Gospel. If the victory of our Easter Lord is already certain, we have nothing to worry about!

But we have no cause to be smug or complacent. Today’s readings remind us that if we wish to be part of Christ’s victory we must become a new creation in Christ ourselves. It is not enough to wag our fingers at the culture, the institutions or the individuals around us. We must let the Holy Spirit make each of us living gospels of life and love if our the world is to be converted and we are to be co-conquerors with Christ. Papered around the campus today is a call to challenge the sexual revolution and the culture of death. With what wisdom does our Theology of the Body and our Gospel of Life arm us for this?

Well, first of all, we should have an abiding confidence that sex and life are good things given us by a good God. Christians esteem marriage, sexuality, procreation and child-rearing highly. You might say we love sex and we love babies! We recognize that sexuality is essential to our design make-up as bodily beings and “God don’t make junk”. Sex permeates and colours our personalities, relationships and activity. Male and female God made us, complements to each other, and this grounds reciprocity in marriage and dignifies both sexes equally. Sexual activity, properly understood, is a total gift of the self, an exchange of feelings, hopes and promises, and an experience of union and transcendence. But we know sex can also be trivialised and abused, becoming self-indulgent, deceptive, exploitative, even abusive; we can debase ‘the sexual language’.

That’s why we Christians recommend chastity to everybody: the virtue that integrates sexuality with the rest of our vocation, putting sex in its place within our life-story and at the service of those we touch. And sex, we recognize, has two intrinsic and inseparable dimensions: its ‘love-making’ dimension, which constitutes two people as lovers and commits them to this calling by a mutual and complementary self-giving by touch; and its ‘life-making’ dimension, constituting those same two people as potential parents and committing them to this calling by that same act of self-giving. Fully understood, sex expresses in bodily form what marriage vows express mentally. Sex says marriage and chastity enables us to say what we mean and mean what we say with sex.
As John Paul II demonstrated in his wonderful writing on the Theology of the Body, Catholics cannot be wowsers when it comes to sex. No other religion takes beauty and goodness of marital intercourse so seriously as to raise consummation to being an element of a sacrament. And that’s why we are so disappointed when individuals or whole cultures trivialize sex or demean the body. That’s why pornography and sex outside of marriage and unchaste, unloving or anti-life sexual activity within marriage, are such a let down.

If couples take sex seriously – if they take themselves and what they can do with their bodies seriously – then they will exercise their sexuality and fertility responsibly, as they will the other aspects of their life together. If we are not yet ready to say all that sex says, by way of love-making and life-making, by way of commitment and sacrifice, by way of the agony and the ecstasy of our life together, then we are not ready for sex. When people are lulled or bullied or self-driven into having sex before they are ready they commonly mess up themselves and each other, and possibly in the process another innocent life, that of the child they may have or perhaps have destroyed.

Which brings us to the link between the sexual revolution and the culture of death, the Theology of the Body and the Gospel of Life. Sound philosophy and genuine faith reveal to us that human life is always a good, a goal worth seeking for ourselves and others. Nothing can lessen the intrinsic goodness of a man’s life, its dignity and inviolability. No personal or social benefit can justify the intentional destruction of that life. God is the Lord of life and commands reverence and love for every person. Thus the direct killing of an innocent human being — whether as an end in itself or as a means to a good end — is always gravely immoral. No wonder that Catholics so abhor abortion, abortifacient drugs, embryo experimentation, genetic search and destroy for the handicapped unborn, infanticide of the handicapped newborn, suicide, euthanasia and (increasingly) warfare and public execution.

Responsibility in these areas is complex of course. The objective evil of unchastity and violence does not mean that all those involved have gravely sinned — though sometimes they clearly do. As Our Lord said, people often do not know what they are doing. Various pressures draw or drive some people to misuse their sexuality or harm another person. Particular burdens are suffered by the lonely, the inexperienced, the pregnant, the depressed, the sick and those around them. But the Church remains committed to preaching the Gospel of Life and to championing the cause of the victims of the sexual revolution and the culture of death.

Politics and culture

The revolution in values and practices in the last generation failed dismally to deliver on the promises of hippies, libertarians and me-generation yuppies that we would enter a utopia of more intimate and enduring relationships, every child being a wanted child, no child being born out of wedlock, lower rates of teen pregnancy and suicide, replacing war-making with love-making, and the rest. Anybody who imagines the sexual revolution and the culture of death have made people happier has blinkers on. The cost of sex-as-amusement-park-ride has been enormous in terms of emotional damage, teen pregnancy, spiralling abortion rates, women wounded by abortion and silenced thereafter, men unable to take responsibility, relationships under pressure, broken families, drugs, delinquency, adolescent suicide…

Can anybody seriously be proud of the fact that the most dangerous place for an Australian to live today is in the womb; that it is safer to stand in the middle of Broadway? Almost everybody thinks our 90,000 abortion deaths a year are too many. Almost everyone would prefer women were offered real alternatives and every effort made to lower the abortion toll. But still it rises, with some politicians recently clinking champagne glasses after removing a ministerial hurdle to the human pesticide RU486. Meanwhile Australia’s copulation explosion has been coupled with a population implosion. Like our water shortage, the demographic demise of the West — and the economic, political and cultural tensions it will increasingly occasion — have elicited scattered tut-tuts but little real action in response. We are in denial: but reality is fast forcing itself upon us.

If the sexual revolution and the culture of death have not made us individually happier or socially more secure, have they at least made us freer? Contemporary liberal culture is big on the rhetoric of autonomy. Yet free will — adults know — is not just freedom from things that constrain us; it is freedom for things that fulfil us. The Catholic moral vision is no enemy to freedom but rather proposes ways to best use that freedom for people’s happiness. Having conquered the communist separation of the common good from personal freedom, John Paul II’s second great project was to challenge the consumerist separation of freedom from truth. Benedict XVI is very much his heir in this, identifying for us the tyranny of relativism. No Catholic can be ‘pro-choice’ if by that we mean in favour of “the right to do as I please and hang the lot of you”.

Yet, ironically, for all the rhetoric of freedom, autonomy and consent, contemporary liberal cultures offer many people very few choices. I have already mentioned the ways in which people are socialised and pressured into sex. The same is true for abortion. The self-styled ‘pro-choice’ lobby seem quite content with women being railroaded into abortion with no real alternatives, no real assistance, no real time to think. It is the pro-lifers who are the ones presently arguing for women to be given real choices. And who can be against giving women choices? Surely not those who have built their power-bases on that very rhetoric!

Not only do women need real choices, they need real men to help them. We need to encourage men to take their part in supporting pregnant women. Many feel impotent to contribute either to social debate or individual decisions, even when they are the father. Many fear getting their heads bitten off, by daring to suggest an alternative. Some are simply afraid of commitment, responsibility, sacrifice — afraid of growing up. We must help men recover a sense of adulthood, manhood and fatherhood, in place of the recreationalisation of sex and so of women and ultimately of themselves. The emasculation of men which has gone on over the past few decades has left them in the rôle of the ‘enemy’, the carriers of that worst of sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy, the ones who ‘get women pregnant’. By recovering a love of their bodies and their fathering potential, and regaining a sense of the place of sex within committed marital love, both men and women grow up and leave behind the infantilizing fears and fetishes that have marked modern sex.

We must also question the ‘harm minimization’ talk of some well-meaning people, as well as more sinister ideologues and commercial interests, who keep telling us that the answer to teen pregnancy is more abortion, and the answer to abortion is more sex education and access to contraception. We have tried these very panaceas for three decades now and they have manifestly failed. More value-free sex education and easier access to contraception and abortion have meant higher and earlier rates of sexual activity, pregnancy and abortion. The 2003 Sex in Australia survey found there are already very high levels of contraceptive knowledge and use amongst those who have abortions; indeed we now know that most abortions occur amongst people who are already contracepting. No wonder the abortion industry is quite happy to promote the ‘contraceptive’ pill and the ‘morning-after’ pill: far from diminishing their market these simply add to the number and varieties of abortion year by year.

Of course we pro-lifers must accept some responsibility here. Sometimes I suspect we are our own worst enemies. We need to get much smarter about our messaging: what we say, where, how, in whose voice. We need to build on sound research into social attitudes and what works with people, and let go of well-worn strategies or long-habituated ways of pro-lifing if they do not match the reality of where people are today and what persuades them. This does not mean abandoning moral principles, going quiet on the truth about the humanity of the unborn child, selling out for quick popularity or to save a few. But it does mean bringing our ancient principles and contemporary prudence to bear upon the real challenges and opportunities of today. If we are to read the signs of the times and seek the voice with which we should speak, then we must ask ourselves Saint Paul’s question in our First Reading today: “Did you really receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?”

Mysticism and mission

When Jesus was telling his apostles to be brave it was within the context of repeatedly promising to send them the Holy Spirit so that they might share in his very life and power. We recall this especially in this post-Ascension week of waiting for the Holy Spirit to come at Pentecost. Jesus’ promises of the Holy Spirit came immediately after proclaiming this year’s Life Week theme: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (Jn 14:6). The relationship was further explained by the imagery of the vine and the branches with the startling conclusion: “I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit. But without me you can do nothing” (Jn 15:5).

It has been said that the Christian of the future will either be a mystic or nothing. This is not to say we must all be having regular mystical experiences. But it does mean that in a pluralist and increasingly secularized world being a tribal Catholic will not be enough: we will have to be Christians with the force of reason and the courage of faith, with that wisdom that only God can give and that surrender to God’s wisdom which only the human person can choose.

If we are to challenge the culture of death and bear much fruit in building a Civilization of Life and Love, then we must speak with the voice of Christ and so we must find his voice. It is not enough to recite condemnations of various behaviours. Finding Christ’s voice means loving with Christ’s own Sacred Heart, depending totally upon the Holy Spirit, adhering with all our will to the Gospel and living all the demands of discipleship. We will never defeat the culture of death by demos and lobbying, TV appearances and public relations alone. Even changes to the civil law do not radically alter the depths of a culture which can merrily kill 300 little ones each day. We must begin first and foremost by seeking holiness in our own lives so that we can be authentic witnesses of the One who is the Way, the Truth and the Life. If we are in Christ, then the Advocate he promised will give us his voice when it is time for witness: “When they lead you away and hand you over, do not worry beforehand about what you are to say. But say whatever will be given to you at that hour. For it will not be you who are speaking but the Holy Spirit” (Mark 13:11). It is the Saints who conquer the world — those who rely on Christ and not on their own power.

How do we confidently proclaim the life message today? Talk, like life and sex today, is cheap. Jesus didn’t blab as he was led as a lamb to slaughter. He was silent. He focussed on seeking first the will of the Father and abandoning himself totally to that will. For it is primarily through contemplation, prayer and sacrifice of ourselves to the Father that the world is changed. We have the most enriching texts to contemplate, the most powerful prayer to pray and the one all-satisfying sacrifice in the Sacred Liturgy of the Mass. It is our greatest pro-life work!

Anything we make more important than Christ in our lives – our drive for pleasure, our reputations and comfort, our studies and jobs, our relationships, even our pro-life strategies and credentials – are idols and will ultimately prove sterile. Cut off from the vine the branches wither; “apart from me you can do nothing.” But if we let the Holy Spirit guide and form us and lead us into all truth, as Jesus promised, then the days of the sexual revolution and the culture of death may be numbered. For God, as our Psalm today reminded us, is the Father of the little one – the orphan, the widow, the unloved and the trapped. “In the world you will have trouble,” says the Lord, “but be brave: I have conquered the world!”