A SERMON FOR THE 13th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Several decades of increasingly graphic horror movies from Hollywood have deadened our appreciation of what is truly shocking. And yet, I believe that if I were to show you photographs of the effects of leprosy on the human body, you would still find it in you to be appalled and horrified. It is a gruesome disease: the symptoms begin with the thinning of the eyebrows and eyelashes, and then a thickening of the facial skin, so much so that the person is no longer recognizable, his face contorted and disfigured by swellings and infection. First the nose starts to bleed so badly that you can’t breathe through it, you develop pain in the throat and are unable to speak properly. Eventually, this results in the complete destruction of the nasal septum and the collapse of the nose. In the advanced stages, arthritis develops, with swelling of the lymph nodes in the groin and armpits, fingers and toes become deformed and sometimes fall off altogether, and if that wasn’t enough, the leper would often go completely blind.
Today, the world is full of lepers. Many of them are very close to you: members of your family, friends, neighbors and acquaintances, people you work with and deal with every day. Because leprosy, no matter how bad it is when it ravages the body, is far worse when it attacks the soul. We must cast our thoughts and our compassion to the hundreds of thousands of poor souls whose faith has been genuinely damaged, in some cases destroyed altogether by the after-effects of the Protestant Reformation, of the French Revolution, and now, yes, of the Church’s apostasy since Vatican II. We must think of those Catholics who no longer have the stability of their two-thousand-year-old Catholic faith to sustain them through the temptations and trials of their life. What happens to them? Inevitably they fall into sin, and their soul takes on the characteristics of leprosy. Their minds become infected with ignorance, depression and despair. Their intellect and will are deformed by a complete surrender to sin. Their state of grace, their ability to act properly, their desire to please God—all drop away like diseased fingers and toes. And in the latter stages they are blinded to their own sad state, excusing themselves as no worse than anyone else, justifying their sins and sometimes even taking pride in them.
If you don’t believe me, think of “gay pride”. Look at the human deformities who walk in those parades, blind even to their own identity, and ready and willing to mutilate their bodies to turn themselves deliberately from the men and women God and Nature made them, into monsters, no longer creatures of God, but open advertisements for sin and debauchery. They are the deformities of Satan, and yet they take “pride” in this. It is as absurd as if the lepers in today’s Gospel, instead of humbly asking for God’s mercy, were to strut up and down the street, boasting about the stench of their rotting flesh, displaying the gaping holes in their faces, holding high the decaying fragments of their body that had fallen off, all for us to admire and applaud.
This defiant attitude to the laws of God and nature can have only one logical conclusion. As the faith of so many individuals crumbles like the flesh of a leper, it leads eventually and inexorably to the point where the very foundations of our society disintegrate and entire Catholic nations lose their bearings, voting for example en masse for legalized abortion and same-sex marriage. And as it spreads from one nation to another, we are forced to watch helplessly, as day by day the two thousand years of Christian civilization culminate in this terrible disease of spiritual leprosy.
Is there no cure for this disease? Back in our Lord’s day, once a person contracted leprosy, it was a death sentence. Not a quick death, but a long and lingering disintegration of the body. Today, in our spiritual parallel, the whole world is suffering from the torments of this slow death. The Gospel presents us with this picture of ten lepers for a reason. For they were indeed cured from their disease by our Lord, and it is in him today that we must place our hope for a cure for the epidemic of spiritual leprosy that has spread its tentacles through our society. As the words of today’s Gospel float by, let’s remind ourselves that they are the Word of God, Christ himself, who passes by today with this message. Now it’s up to us whether we are just going to let him pass by, or whether we are going to call out to him, insistently, like the lepers in the Gospel: “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”
We must ask for mercy just as the lepers did. Certainly not with complacency, feeling as though we are entitled to a cure for our civilization, which after all, has done so very much in these recent years to offend God. But neither with despair, devoid of hope that the faith can ever be restored to Christendom. We must ask with a firm hope in God’s mercy, knowing full well that if he so chooses, the present crisis will be made to vanish just as quickly as it first appeared. And if we see signs that God is indeed giving his graces to a corrupt Church and perverse people, then we must absolutely not greet such signs with cynicism and doubt. Rather, we must thank God for his graces. We must be like the one leper who turns to our Blessed Lord and gives thanks, not like the nine who show no gratitude for their cure, but simply return to their lives of complacent sinfulness. When we see small signs, such as the current rumblings of revolt in the Novus Ordo Church against Francis and his over-the-top hatred of all things traditional, by all means let’s hope. We should hope with caution and some measure of distrust in those “conservatives” who may be starting to rise up against their more modernist masters. But we should hope! Rome wasn’t built in a day, and if it is to be rebuilt, that probably won’t happen overnight either. It will take a lot of grace from God, and a lot of cooperation from those in high positions. But none of this will happen unless we, the chosen few who have kept the faith intact, pray very, very hard for it to happen.
So let us pray for the restoration of the Church. Let us repeat, over and over again the words of the lepers, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” Let’s look to the signs that give any indication of any turn by the Church back towards the light of her former truth and glory, and if we see any, let us be grateful and redouble our efforts. Maybe one day, if it be God’s will, we will be blessed to hear once again the words of our Lord: “Arise, go thy way, thy faith hath made my Church whole.”
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