By Archbishop Thomas Wenski - The Archdiocese of Miami
Archbishop Thomas Wenski preached this homily at the Mass Sept. 6, 2024, at the Catholic Medical Association's 93rd Annual Educational Conference in Orlando, Florida.
I came up yesterday afternoon from Miami, on the new Brightline Train. It was too hot to come by motorcycle and yesterday morning I was celebration the feast day of Mother Teresa at the shelter run by her sisters, the Missionaries of Charity, in downtown Miami.
She certainly recognized the Imago Dei, in every man, woman and child she met, even when they appeared before her in some disagreeable disguises. She would say, “People are unreasonable, illogical and self-centered. Love them anyway.”
Today, we deal with people who are not only unreasonable, illogical and self-centered but also very confused. To quote Abe Lincoln briefly: “If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a cow have? Today when 2 + 2 doesn’t necessarily equal 4, many people cannot answer Abe Lincoln’s questions correctly. I hope you know the answer: If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a cow have? Four, because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it so.
We are the “imago Dei”: Made in the His Image, male and female he created us.
Today, as medical professionals and as men and women of faith, you face rejection, ostracism, exclusion from an ascendent secularism that has confused people about what is real, what is true. We witness deaths of despair – people dying from drug abuse or suicide – because they have been bewitched by a false sense of human autonomy that justifies even the killing of a baby in her mother’s womb.
In the first millennium of Christianity, the big questions revolve about “Who is God? The great councils of that time gave us the Creeds and helped the Church to understand God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The second millennium which began with the Great Schism between the East and West and suffered the breakup of Christendom into Catholic and Protestant, had as its big question: What is the Church? Today, in the second decade of the third millennium, we see that big question will be: What is man?
“We are servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God”, St. Paul tells us in the first reading. For the first two millennia, Catholics who sought to remain faithful to the truth about who God is or about what the Church is suffered persecutions. Our liturgical calendar is filled with the feast’s days of saints who, witness even by the shedding of their blood to the truth about God, or about the Church. In this third millennium, we can expect no less as we witness the truth about man who is made in the image and likeness of God. If once the battle lines were drawn around theology or ecclesiology, today the battle lines are drawn around anthropology. You know, rarely will you find the New York Times criticizing the Church for her God talk. They don’t care what we say about the Trinity, or transubstantiation. But they do object to our Man talk, to what we say about marriage, about homosexual activity, about the unborn – and about the dignity of every person, including the immigrant and those languishing on death row.
Our culture today is deeply wounded by individualism, by narcissism; it is wounded by materialism which denies the transcendence of the human person. It is confused by false ideologies about what it means to be male or female.
This explains a lot about why our politics are so polarized and why Catholics should feel “homeless” in either political party. We don’t get to choose to vote for the “best candidate” but rather to opt for the least “worse” candidate.
Andrew Breitbart’s has a famous quote, “Politics is downstream from culture”. As people change their beliefs about what is good and true (i.e., their culture), their politics change as well.
Pope St. John Paul II, who survived both Nazi and Communist tyrannies, understood this. In fact, when bishops would meet John Paul II for their ad limina visits, he wouldn’t ask them what they were doing to change the politics in their particular countries. Rather, he would ask them what they were doing to change the culture?
Politics — or politicians — follow the culture. Ted Kennedy, Al Gore, Jessie Jackson, Joe Biden, and many others all started their political careers as "pro-lifers." Don't think that when they became "pro-choice" their flip-flopping was in any way a “profile in courage.” They had their fingers in the air and sensed a change in the winds of our culture, at least among their constituencies. The same with President Obama and other politicians on so-called "gay marriage." They were against it before they were for it. No profile in courage here either.
The Catholic Church is not — nor does she want to be — a political agency or a special interest group. But she does have something to say, a word to share: that Word is Jesus Christ, true God and true man. So she does have a profound interest — and rightly so — in the good of the political community, the soul of which is justice. For this reason, the Church engages in a wide variety of public policy issues including the defense of the unborn life, religious liberty and marriage as the union of one man and one woman, as well as advocacy on issues concerning immigration, education, poverty, and racism, along with many other concerns. This stems from our anthropology, our understanding of Man as the Imago Dei. Pope St. Paul VI said that the Church is an expert in humanity – and as St. John Paul II said, Jesus Christ is the human face of God and the divine face of Man.
As I said, I came up yesterday afternoon on the train, so I haven’t attended any of the talks or conferences offered but they are impressive. And I thank you for engaging in great anthropologic questions of our day and for witnessing the faith not only in season but also out of season. You are called to heal bodies, but also to heal culture. Because of what you do, and who you are, I could not say no and not be here to break bread with you, the bread that gives us eternal life.
