BREAKING THE LAW

 A SERMON FOR THE 16TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

It comes up in the confessional time and again, so I thought I’d try and set the record straight once and for all so that we know when we’re committing a sin and when we’re not.

Let’s call to mind first of all what a sin is.  Something is sinful, not because it breaks a rule or a law, but because it offends God.  Keep that in mind and everything else falls into place.  This is the spirit of the law, and if your motivation is always to love God you will never commit a sin.  Christ knew this perfectly well, of course, and in today’s Gospel he reprimands the hypocritical Pharisees and lawyers of the Jewish faith for preaching that one must never break a law for any reason.  He points out that in certain cases you can, and sometimes even must break the law.

We, of all people, traditional Catholics who uphold the true faith, should know this.  After all, if we adhered to the letter of the law—the canon law of the Church—we couldn’t even attend this Mass here today!  Are we not “betraying” the Vicar of Christ himself by going to a Mass he has abolished?  Obviously we’ve all come to the very serious and well thought-out conclusion that we are doing the right thing, otherwise we’d all be at the Novus Ordo in our local parish church this morning.  So we all, in principle, and in practice too, agree that some laws just have to be broken.  In this, we follow the teaching of Christ himself when he tells the pharisees that they would be perfectly justified in pulling their ox or ass out of a ditch on the sabbath day.  We are equally justified in pulling ourselves out of the filthy ditch of the conciliar Church and coming here to Mass on the sabbath day.

So can we break any law we want if there’s a good reason for doing so?  I’ll give you the principle first, the theory behind what we can do and what we can’t do, which laws we can break and which we can’t.  It’s a simple distinction, so don’t think we’re going to get bogged down in a lot of highfalutin theology.  It’s a distinction between two types of law: disciplinary law and divine law.  Let’s start with divine law, most of which is simply the natural law.  The Ten Commandments are divine law, and cannot be broken for any reason.  We can never murder someone, for example, no matter how much we think they deserve to be knocked off.  We all probably have a little list in our head of people we’d secretly love to put an end to.  But it’s just a little fantasy when we get right down to it—if we had Nancy Pelosi chained up in a chair, we wouldn’t really be prepared to pull the trigger, would we?  If you would, go to confession!  Because no matter how much better off the world would be without her, we’d be breaking the Fifth Commandment of the Divine Law if we make it happen.  We can never do something which is intrinsically wrong no matter how much good may come of it.  The good end never justifies the evil means.

Now that we’ve established that we can’t break the Divine Law, let’s look at the other type of law, Disciplinary Law.  This is a law that is based on circumstances, and circumstances, as we well know, can change.  We are obliged, for example, by the disciplinary law of the Church to attend Mass on Sunday.  It is an obligation that binds us under the pain of mortal sin, so it’s not a law that can be treated lightly.  We must go to Mass at all cost every week, no matter where we are, what other things might be happening at Mass time, no matter how tired we are, or lacking in energy, enthusiasm, or whatever.  If we miss Mass even just once, we commit a very serious sin, one that, unless we repent and confess it, will prevent us from ever entering heaven.  And yet… it’s a disciplinary law.  There are circumstances that can allow us to deliberately miss Mass.

We’ve mentioned most of these circumstances before, so I don’t need to dwell on them.  Here’s a brief list:  we’re sick, there’s a snow storm and it would be dangerous to travel, we live too far away from a traditional Mass, we have a sick relative we need to look after, we have a job that requires us to work on Sundays (first responder, law enforcement, military, baker, hotel keeper and so on), or, for that matter, if your ox or ass has fallen in a ditch.  It’s nothing more than common sense, and if you have a good reason for not going to Mass, it’s not a sin and you don’t need to confess it.

But, you might object, going to Mass on Sunday is breaking the Divine Law, the Third Commandment, isn’t it?  Thou shalt keep holy the Sabbath.  No it is not.  It breaks the disciplinary law of the Church to keep holy the Sabbath by attending Mass, but not the actual commandment of God to keep holy the sabbath.  Moses and the Israelites were not committing a mortal sin by not going to Mass in the wilderness.  The Church created this law of going to Mass so that we could more easily know how to keep holy the sabbath.  But it’s not the only way, and if we really can’t attend Mass it’s important to keep in mind that we still need to obey the Divine Law and keep that Sabbath holy!  So no unnecessary servile work, no unnecessary shopping, and above all, extra prayers to make up for not being able to go to Mass.  If you fail to observe these rules of the sabbath, then you would be breaking the Divine Law—and that, you’d need to confess.

Just keep to common sense.  It’s the same in the natural world.  Traffic lights and speed limits are there to keep us safe.  They are disciplinary laws of the state or local authority.  They must be obeyed or you’ll get a ticket.  But the Law has flexibility and if you have a truly good reason for breaking the speed limit the police will be on your side.  Go racing through a school zone full of children at 75 mph and they’ll throw the book at you, and rightfully so.  But if you go through a red light at three in the morning when there’s no traffic around, as you rush to get to the hospital with your wife who’s in labor in the back seat—you might get pulled over but you’re more likely to get a police escort to the maternity hospital than a ticket.  God’s mercy acts in the same way as our natural compassion, and he’s not going to condemn us for breaking a disciplinary law for the right reason.  Rather, he will send his holy angels to escort us into Paradise because we were motivated by common sense and a true, not hypocritical love, a love of God that follows the spirit and not the letter of the law.

We’re all breaking the Church’s law just by being here this morning.  And yet it's that love of God that brings us here, that constant desire to seek out the Way, the Truth, and the Life that our beloved Church has temporarily abandoned.  Let’s look forward to the day when we can close this chapel and find God again in our local parish church—when we can return to our rightful place in a Church that once again imposes true laws that God wants us to follow.