PLAINLY SPEAKING

A SERMON FOR THE 11th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Every time we turn on the news these days, we're faced with a great deal of nonsense, some it just silly, but at other times a reflection of the pure hatred that exists in people at both extremes of the political spectrum.  The riots in Charlottesville last week gave us a good idea of what is going on in people's heads these days—the backlash by the left against the violence and hatred of the extreme right merely serves to demonstrate a similar level of violence and hatred amongst the extreme left.  Neither side listens to reason, and the mob mentality prevails, just as it did at other turning points in human history, from the French Revolution to the Russian Revolution to the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s.  This does not bode well for our nation, and I hope that today's Gospel will give us a better sense of how to handle the dangers in the political sphere, and understand how we may avoid becoming victims of its current extreme positions.

Today's Gospel describes the healing of the deaf-mute.  In truth, the man was not literally mute, as we learn that he had "an impediment in his speech."  It wasn't that he couldn't speak, but rather that his words didn't make sense to those who heard him.  Probably, this was due to his deafness.  If we have ever known a person who has been completely deaf since birth, we know that his speech does not sound like yours and mine.  That's not surprising, of course—unless you first hear what speech actually sounds like, you don't know how to shape your mouth and tongue to make the right noises.  Before modern advancements in speech therapy, the deaf often remained mute also.   They were referred to as deaf-mutes, or as "deaf and dumb".

The word "dumb," of course, has two meanings in English.  There are the dumb who can't speak—the mute—and then there are the dumb who can speak but shouldn't, because they say dumb things.  This last kind of dumbness is worse than the other. At least the mute keep their mouth shut and don’t lead us astray with their lies and nonsense.  Like the deaf and dumb man in the Gospel, whose words were unintelligible, the talking heads of television provide us with a new kind of dumbness, a daily deluge from the deaf and dumb.   Listening to their babble we should learn very quickly that speaking is not just about opening our mouths and letting whatever is in our head come spewing out.  Our Lord did not heal the deaf mute just so that he could join the rest of the mob, spouting lies and nonsense.  If we are to speak, we must do so with words that are true and that therefore make sense.

That is why our Lord didn't just cure the man's speech impediment.  First, he cured his deafness.  Because if we take the trouble to listen to reason, to hear the voices of those wiser than ourselves, we will not embarrass ourselves quite so often when we open our mouths to pontificate dogmatically about things we don't understand.

To know the truth and speak the truth intelligently, first we must we must hear the truth.  Before the dumb can speak, the deaf must first hear.  The apostles were given the task of teaching the faith to all nations.  The pagans throughout the world were the deaf, and now they would hear.  Millions of souls were converted to the truth, and the more who heard the truth, the more would go on to speak the truth.  It was like a hurricane gathering strength from the warm waters over which it passes, an unstoppable force sweeping the people into the truth of God and demolishing all the vain idols of the pagan world as it spread.  The deaf heard, and then they spoke.

At the Protestant Reformation, people began to reject the truths taught by the Church.  They stopped listening to the infallible voice of the Church, and inevitably started speaking nonsense.  They denied many of the truths God had revealed to his Church, and tossed them out the window.  No longer, for example, did men hear in their churches anything of the beauties of God's two greatest gifts to man, namely the Holy Eucharist and our Blessed Mother.  They ceased to hear the true teachings of the Church.  People became deaf again, and as a result they began to speak heresy.  As usual, when the deaf stop hearing, the dumb start speaking.

With Vatican II, the same thing happened again, this time much closer to home.  The very documents of the Council are filled with modernist babble that had been condemned time and again by preceding popes and councils, and if these documents were bad, what followed was far worse.  In the spirit of the Council, Rome very quickly became the seat of the Antichrist predicted by our Lady at La Salette.  Everything was dumbed down, from the Mass to the Catechism to the Ten Commandments, until we reached the point we're at today, when the supposed Vicar of Christ bombards us weekly with more and more examples of his nonsensical-slash-dangerous beliefs in global warming, ecumenism, and Marxism, all served up with a distorted tolerance of all things bad, and a fanatical intolerance of whatever is traditional.  One wonders when and why this man stopped listening to the voice of God, because his words betray the fact that he surely did.

Today, we who are still capable of speaking sense must do so in a way that will lead people to God, not away from him.  Speech, like all gifts from God, is a privilege, and like all privileges it comes with the responsibility to use it according to God’s holy will.  We need to pray that we might be cured of any deliberate deafness, such as refusing to accept the truth when we hear it, or pretending that a simple fraternal correction about our behavior is an attack on our dignity.  Our words should reflect the truth we have heard, and not pervert them into some other meaning more in tune with our own distorted thinking.  

One morning last week I received two emails that stood out from the others.  One was about a non-Catholic who desires to convert and become a member of the Church.  The other was from a traditional Catholic who, after many years of helping preserve the true faith and Mass, has decided to rejoin the Vatican II Church.  Here was an example of the same path being taken by two different people, the same path but in different directions.  Like ships that pass in the night, these two men walk past each other, one on the road to the Truth, and the other on the road away from it.  One hears the Truth and is drawn to it—a deaf man who has heard and will now speak with the words of truth he has heard.  The other heard well enough and spoke well enough for many years, but has now chosen to turn a deaf ear to the truth he once knew, deliberately choosing to be deaf and dumb.  It's a scary lesson to us all how fragile our faith can become if we stop listening, and how easily we can lose our firm devotion to the true Mass if we stop attending every week.

In these confusing times, our chapel is open to all Catholics, no matter what their “opinion” may be on the question of the pope, the validity of the new sacraments, the application of canon law and all those other vexing questions for which we can no longer turn to Rome to find the answer.  Our aim is not to provide those answers, as only the Magisterium of the Church can do so once it's restored.  Our aim is not to provide yet another forum for traditional Catholics to disagree with each other about things that can never be definitively settled under the present circumstances.  Our aim is to provide a refuge, a safe haven where we may attend a valid Mass and hear the true doctrines of the Church such as we have been taught by our Lord, his Apostles and their successors through the centuries.

Here is the true answer to the events in Charlottesville and the spread of hatred in the land.  If enough people would hear the word of God and then act according to its truths, very quickly the hatred would be replaced by the virtue of charity, and extremists on both sides would remain on the fringe of society, to be pitied and prayed for by the rest of us.  And if we would confine ourselves to speaking only what we know to be the moral and doctrinal truths we have been taught, it is far more likely that the deaf and dumb of this world will be healed by our words instead of scandalized and offended.  And at least we would understand that only by speaking in accordance with those true doctrines and the good sense of the catechism we learned as children, can we ever hope to convince the spewers of hatred in our nation that right is right only insofar as it complies with the commandments and the love of God.  Because when God heals our deafness to the truth, only then can we put a stop to the dumb things we say.