A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

Miami Archbishop Wenski: US on the way to totalitarianism May 1, 2013

He diagnoses the disease, but I’m not sure he gets the cause.  Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami, handed one of the most tragically morally corrupt dioceses in the nation, has something of a reputation for orthodoxy, at least as orthodoxy goes in the hierarchy. He spoke recently at a Red Mass for Miami’s lawyers, and had strong words for state recognition of homosexuals simulating marriage, and the creeping totalitarianism of American society (I add emphasis and comments):

Miami’s Catholic archbishop, Thomas Wenski,  said establishing “gay marriage” would corrupt the natural setting for  rearing children by a mother and a father, and further spread “moral  relativism,” one of the signs that democracy is “on its way to  totalitarianism.”

The state has always recognized and favored heterosexual marriages  “because such marriages best provide the optimal conditions for the  raising of future generations of its citizens,” said Archbishop Wenski  in an Apr. 24 homily at the Red Mass for the Miami Catholic Lawyers  Guild. “And all honest social research as well as anecdotal evidence  shows that children are ‘hard-wired’ to be best raised by a mother and  father who are married to each other in a low conflict relationship.” [Isn’t this just fact shown by elemental reason?  Why the burning desire among those who deliberately engage in sterile relationships to have children?  There is something fundamentally perverse about that]

In other words, he said, “it’s about what’s best for children. Only  in the marriage of a man and a woman can ‘two become one flesh’ (Genesis  2: 24) and thus create a conjugal society – or family – which provides  that the individuals who give life to children should be the ones to  raise them in a bonded and enduring relationship.”

[This is key…..]The push for “so-called same-sex marriage, if it prevails,” said the  archbishop, “will fundamentally change” the mother-father-children  family and “open a Pandora’s Box of unforeseen and, to be sure,  unintended consequences – as the more permissive no-fault divorce  legislation did some 40 years ago.” [I think this radical redefinition of marriage will make all the others – contraception, no fault divorce, even abortion – pale in comparison in what it does to a formerly Christian nation.  The US is not like Europe. We have only comparitively recently fallen into an increasingly socialistic, atheistic mentality.  Europe has been sliding into such for over a century. So when radical things like homosexual marriage happen there, the effect may be somewhat muted. I think in the US, it’s going to be a profound, and very disorienting, shock.  I don’t know what will come, but I suspect it won’t be good, because there is still a very significant part of the US populace that just won’t accept this travesty, unlike northern Europe or Canada]

“[T]he proponents of so-called same-sex marriage would now redefine marriage for all as existing solely for the gratification of two (and why just two?) consenting adults,” said Abp. Wenski. [This is the second bishop to use this argument of late, and I am glad they are. Marriage has, historically, been oriented towards the protection of women and children from the basest instincts of men. We see in our present culture what happens when that protection is removed, or subsumed by overweening societal concupiscence. It produces devastating effects.  But social disorder is what the left thrives on. It’s all good to them.]

The archbishop, who represents 1.3 million Catholics in 118 churches  in South Florida, said the push for same-sex marriage is just the  logical consequence of the moral relativism found in Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood,  which “virtually establishes a new secular religion based on the ‘right  to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe,  and the mystery of human life.’” [It’s about a post-Christian culture, a culture that rejects God, and hates His Presence. It’s a culture of profound narcissism, the same narcissism that always say “Non serviam.”]

That is “moral relativism,” he said.

“When a democracy bases itself on moral relativism and when it  considers every ethical principle or value to be negotiable (including  every human being’s fundamental right to life), it is already, and in  spite of its formal rules, on its way to totalitarianism,” said Abp.  Wenski. “The might of right quickly becomes might makes right.”  [Indeed. And that, I am afraid, is precisely the point.]

In ending his homily, the archbishop noted that America’s founding  fathers established a society upon a  “vision of freedom” in accordance  with “ordered liberties” that are evident in the natural order, such as  the complementarity of man and woman, and the right of children to a  mother and a father – in short, as he cited from the Declaration of  Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident ….”

It’s this last bit where I must disagree with Bishop Wenski a bit. Maybe. He doesn’t exactly endorse the vision of the founding fathers, but perhaps he’s just laying out what it was. For I would argue that it is the very disordered notion of liberty proffered by the founding fathers that is ultimately at the root of the societal collapse we see before us.  I don’t want to get into what is an enormous subject in this post, but the simple fact of the matter is, the protestants and deists (I know, John Carroll, but that’s just one Catholic) who founded this nation did not found it upon Christ the King and place Him as the cornerstone of the edifice of state.  I fear that without that very visible recognition of the Kingship of Jesus Christ as the foundation for all authority, any government is doomed to eventually fail.

I may get to see if I’m right about this in my lifetime.

Still, a sterling speech from Archbishop Wenski. Oh, to see such words from our own ordinary.