Denver Catholic

22 OCTOBER 28-NOVEMBER 10, 2017 | DENVER CATHOLIC Perspectives 20 years ago, we were mar- ried with three children chasing the things of this world: Careers to be had, a house to attain and a net worth to begin build- ing. As cradle Catholics, sadly, we were only going through the motions with our faith. In the last of my single years and into our marriage, I went away from the sacrament of reconcil- iation, convincing myself, "Why do I have to go tell my junk to another man? I am not doing those things anymore. I mean, God will forgive me. Won't He? The Bible says He will. Won't He?" To me, at that time in my life, the sacraments that you receive growing up were more about the ritual and ceremony. Reluctantly deciding, maybe I should try that confession thing again. Before returning, I took a blank legal pad and began to examine my life over the past several years; and it all started to be illuminated, writing for several pages. It was my return to confession and now frequent visits to this illustrious sacrament that con- stantly transforms my life. Our beloved priests in the con- fessional are "In persona Christi," a Latin phrase meaning "in the person of Christ." I never understood the stupendously glorious value of Holy Mother Church that Jesus estab- lished and left so that we could receive His help, love, mercy and grace. After hearing my six pages of sin, the priest put His fi nger on a sin of lust that I hadn't planned on ever confessing: Self-gratifi cation. A spir- itual battle ensued in my head and heart, "Uh, I'm not confessing that, I thought. That is nobody's business. I am not saying that sin out loud; it doesn't hurt anyone, and it's private and why is He asking me that?" After what seemed like a lifetime but was only seconds, and only by the grace of God, I confessed, "Yes, that too." With that and the mighty words of absolution, I was fl ooded with Jesus' love and mercy and was released from that sin. As St. Paul says, "Wherever sin is, grace abounds the more." I truly believe that I met Jesus in that confessional that day and He read my soul. If you too are struggling with sins of lust or things you did that you are ashamed of, be not afraid of the sac- rament of reconciliation. The enemy wants us to keep these things in the dark, in the shadows. Keeping them quiet imprisons us and away from true freedom. Jesus longs to liberate us from ourselves and our sins to set us free to love others as He loves us. Making alibis, excuses or rational- izing our sinful behavior only repels God's grace. Jesus established His Church knowing we need His pardon and peace. Humbly we bring all our sins to the light, our hearts become malleable in the hands of our Creator and we become a new creation. As God's grace and love penetrate our hearts, our new behaviors allow us to live out the greatest two command- ments, loving God with our whole mind, body and soul and loving our neighbors as we love ourselves. Marriage Missionaries Matt and Mindy Dalton can be reached at matt@marriagemissionaries.org, 303-578- 8287 or at www.marriagemissionaries.org. MATT & MINDY DALTON True freedom Whose bourgeois morality? I n the latest round of debate over Amoris Laetitia, Pope Fran- cis's apostolic exhortation on marriage and the family, a fervent defender of the document sni" ed at some of its critics that "the Mag- isterium doesn't bow to mid- dle-class lobbies" and cited Humanae Vitae as an example of papal tough-mindedness in the face of bourgeois cultural pres- sures. It was a clever move, rhetori- cally, and we may hope that it's right about the magisterial kowtow. But I fear it also misses the point — or, better, several points. At the Synods of 2014 and 2015, to which Amoris Laetitia is a response, the most intense lobbying for a change in the Church's traditional practice in the matter of holy com- munion for the divorced and civilly remarried — a proposal the great majority of Synod fathers thought an unwarranted break with truths taught by divine revelation — came from the German-speaking bishops: Prelates who represent perhaps the most thoroughly bourgeois countries on the planet. Thus one does not strain against veracity or charity by describing the German-speaking bishops as something of a lobby for middle-class preoccupations. Pas- sionate defenders of Amoris Laetitia might thus be a bit more careful when dismissing as a middle-class lobby those who raise legitimate con- cerns about the ambiguities in the document; what goes around, comes around. There was, of course, far more going on in the 2014-2015 German campaign to permit holy commu- nion for the divorced and civilly remarried than lobbying on behalf of the bourgeois morality of secular, middle-class societies. There was, for example, the ongoing, two-front German war against Humanae Vitae (Blessed Paul VI's 1968 encyclical on the morally appropriate means of family planning) and Veritatis Splendor (St. John Paul II's 1993 encyclical on the reform of Catholic moral theology). We are told, now, that a commission is examining the full range of documentation involved in the preparation of Humanae Vitae. One hopes that that study will bring to the fore what Paul VI realized when he rejected the counsel of many and rea² rmed the Church's commit- ment to natural family planning as the humanly and morally appropriate means of regulating fertility. For what Pope Paul realized — and what he had the courage to stand against, despite fi erce pressures — was that a deeper game was going on beneath the agitations of various "middle-class lobbies" for a change in the Church's position on artifi cial means of contraception. What was afoot was an attempt, refl ecting cur- rents in the German-speaking world of Catholic theology, to enshrine the moral method known as "proportion- alism" as Catholicism's o² cial moral theology. And according to propor- tionalists, there is no such thing as an intrinsically evil act: every moral action must be judged, not only in itself, but by a person's intentions and the action's consequences. This, Paul VI realized, would be a disastrous concession to the spirit of the age. But the proportionalists didn't quit the fi eld after their defeat in Humanae Vitae, and that brings us to Veritatis Splendor. John Paul II had spent the greater part of his academic and intellectual life trying to reconstitute the foundations of the moral life in a confused age dominated by (if you'll pardon the phrase) a bourgeois culture and its laissez-faire concept of morality. He knew that the triumph of propor- tionalism and the vindication of its denial that some things are simply wrong, period, would gut the moral life of both its tether to reality and its human drama. And that, inevitably, would lead to unhappiness, misery, and social chaos. So in Veritatis Splendor, the most intellectually sophisticated and pastorally experi- enced pope in centuries rea² rmed, as the settled and unchangeable teaching of the Church, that there are intrinsically evil acts: That some things are just wrong, without excep- tion, no matter the calculus of inten- tions and consequences. And still the proportionalists wouldn't quit; one German com- mentary critical of Veritatis Splendor went so far as to claim that the Ger- man-speaking world had a special, privileged responsibility for Cath- olic theology. It was a statement of breathtaking arrogance, not least because it was made by theologians whose local churches were largely empty of congregants, thanks in no small part to the bourgeois lifestyle of post-war Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. There are, indeed, "middle-class lobbies" in the Church, but they're primarily the by-product of Catholic Lite and its destruction of Catholic life and practice. The sorry condition of German-speaking Catholicism is a case in point. The Catholic Di¥ erence George Weigel is a distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. GEORGE WEIGEL

• Cover