I WILL NOT SERVE?

A MESSAGE FOR ROSARY SUNDAY

In the depths of pre-history, a most dreadful event took place in the firmament of heaven.  God's most beautiful creation, one of the Cherubim most close to the divine Creator himself, the "Bearer of Light," Lucifer, rebelled against his Maker.  Refusing to serve the Most High God, his fate was inevitable and swift, as Holy Michael the Archangel led the loyal angels in a great battle, expelling Lucifer and his rebellious cohorts to the bottomless pit.

Since then, God created Man, who, like the angels, had the free will to choose whether to know, love, and serve God—or not.  Like the angels, man was given a test of his loyalty to God.  And like the angels, man failed the test.  When Adam and Eve bit into the fruit of the forbidden tree, it was with the same words, albeit unspoken, that Lucifer had pronounced in the heavenly Paradise:  "I will not serve."

Fortunately for man, we have a nature less perfect than the angels.  Unlike the angels, when we act badly, we are capable of repenting our disloyalty to God.  Thus, our lives are a series of sins and absolution, as we offend God, and then repent for having done so.  Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained.

But to restore us to grace, there had to be a sufficient sacrifice to propitiate for all these sins against an infinite God.  The sacrifice had to be infinite, which is why only the Blood of God's sole-begotten Son could ever adequately suffice.  For that Son to shed blood, he had to be born of man, and thus God needed the willing cooperation of one of his creatures before the Incarnation of his Son could take place.  Hence, the importance of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and of her agreement in the First Mystery of our Holy Rosary to be the Mother of God.  We owe her so very much, and can never sufficiently repay her for her courage and love.  Fortunately, God can, however, and indeed did so, as witnessed in the Last Mystery of the Rosary, when she was crowned as Queen of Heaven and Earth.

Nevertheless, we should always attempt, in our own inadequate ways, to show our Blessed Mother how thankful we are.  We do so chiefly through our loyal service to her divine Son.  We serve God firstly by obeying his commandments.  And secondly, by serving those whom God has placed over us in this life, starting as a child with our own mother and father, and continuing into adulthood by our service to our Church and Nation.  There is no need for civil laws to force us to be loyal to parents or country, and no policemen are needed to enforce this virtue of filial piety.

It should therefore be evident that the question of athletes refusing to acknowledge filial piety to their country by kneeling for the national anthem is not one for the courts to decide.  We cannot enforce virtue by civil law. However, we can and should expect people to behave virtuously nonetheless.  The virtue of filial piety falls under the cardinal virtue of justice—we owe to our nation the natural love and respect known as patriotism.  Any acknowledgment of our country's imperfections must never interfere with that patriotism, just as the deficiencies of our mother or father should never cause us to publicly disrespect them. To do so is a sign of our disloyalty to the God who placed us in submission to parents and nation, and to the Son of God who himself gave us the example in the Holy Family of Nazareth.  Our duty is to serve both God and country, Church and State.  Our response must never be, in either case, "I will not serve."