'Simply wrong' Archbishop Alexander Sample responds to decision by Supreme Court legalizing same-sex "marriage"

6/29/2015 10:00:00 AM Catholic Sentinel Catholic News Service The U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington D.C. Most Rev. Alexander Sample Archbishop of Portland I am deeply saddened by the narrow majority decision of the Supreme Court requiring all states to license and recognize same-sex “marriage.” It is indeed a tragic ruling that will negatively affect the common good of our society, especially the future generations of children. The Court is simply wrong, as the minority opinions state. Our Constitution does not require states to redefine marriage. A Court ruling cannot make what is intrinsically false to be somehow true. Marriage, by its very nature, can only be between one man and one woman. No human decision can trump the natural law which is inscribed in the very nature of man and woman as we come from the hand of the Creator. Just as the Roe vs. Wade decision did not end the debate over the right to life of the unborn, so this decision by the Supreme Court will not silence those of us who will continue to advocate for a just and proper understanding of the very nature of marriage itself based on the natural differentiation of the sexes. I am especially concerned with the impact that this decision will have on children. Marriage is the one institution that connects children to both their mothers and fathers. All children have the natural right to know their mothers and fathers wherever and whenever possible. This disturbing ruling will make that much more difficult for future generations of children. For them, it is an injustice. I am deeply concerned that this ruling will have a chilling effect on the protection of the religious rights and liberties enjoyed by citizens of this great land. It is not at all unreasonable to think that those who will uphold the true nature of marriage as between one man and one woman are going to be in for very difficult days ahead. As I stated when same-sex “marriage” became legal in the State of Oregon: “From the beginning, our efforts to prevent this from happening were never about demeaning or attacking the dignity of persons who happen to be homosexual. Their dignity as human persons must never be called into question or denied. This has always been about upholding and protecting the unique institution in our society that we call marriage.” We will move forward with hope and determination to protect and honor the sacred institution of marriage as given to us from our Creator. For us, marriage can and will always be what it is, i.e. the union of one man and one woman. We will pray for all those negatively impacted by this decision, especially children." May God help us, and may God bless America.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger: Prophesy on What the Church Will Look Like. From 2000

"From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge—a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning.

She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so will she lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, she will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision.

As a small society, she will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members. Undoubtedly she will discover new forms of ministry and will ordain to the priesthood approved Christians who pursue some profession. In many smaller congregations or in self-contained social groups, pastoral care will normally be provided in this fashion.

Alongside this, the full-time ministry of the priesthood will be indispensable as formerly.

But in all of the changes at which one might guess, the Church will find her essence afresh and with full conviction in that which was always at her center: faith in the triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world.

In faith and prayer she will again recognize her true center and experience the sacraments again as the worship of God and not as a subject for liturgical scholarship. 

The Church will be a more spiritual Church, not presuming upon a political mandate, flirting as little with the Left as with the Right.

It will be hard going for the Church, for the process of crystalization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek.

The process will be all the more arduous, for sectarian narrow-mindedness as well as pompous self-will will have to be shed.

One may predict that all of this will take time. The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism of the eve of the French Revolution—when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain—to the renewal of the nineteenth century.

But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church.

Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.

And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times.

The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already with Gobel, but the Church of faith.

She may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death."

From 2013: G. K. Chesterton: It’s Not Gay, and It’s Not Marriage

by Dale Alquist, The Amerian Chesterton Society

One of the pressing issues of Chesterton’s time was “birth control.” He not only objected to the idea, he objected to the very term because it meant the opposite of what it said. It meant no birth and no control. I can only imagine he would have the same objections about “gay marriage.” The idea is wrong, but so is the name. It is not gay and it is not marriage.

Chesterton was so consistently right in his pronouncements and prophecies because he understood that anything that attacked the family was bad for society. That is why he spoke out against eugenics and contraception, against divorce and “free love” (another term he disliked because of its dishonesty), but also against wage slavery and compulsory state-sponsored education and mothers hiring other people to do what mothers were designed to do themselves.

It is safe to say that Chesterton stood up against every trend and fad that plagues us today because every one of those trends and fads undermines the family. Big Government tries to replace the family’s authority, and Big Business tries to replace the family’s autonomy. There is a constant commercial and cultural pressure on father, mother, and child. They are minimized and marginalized and, yes, mocked. But as Chesterton says, “This triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.”

This latest attack on the family is neither the latest nor the worst. But it has a shock value to it, in spite of the process of de-sensitization that the information and entertainment industries have been putting us through the past several years. Those who have tried to speak out against the normalization of the abnormal have been met with “either slanging or silence,” as Chesterton was when he attempted to argue against the faddish philosophies that were promoted by the major newspapers in his day.

In 1926, he warned, “The next great heresy will be an attack on morality, especially sexual morality.” His warning has gone unheeded, and sexual morality has decayed progressively. But let us remember that it began with birth control, which is an attempt to create sex for sex’s sake, changing the act of love into an act of selfishness. The promotion and acceptance of lifeless, barren, selfish sex has logically progressed to homosexuality.

Chesterton shows that the problem of homosexuality as an enemy of civilization is quite old. In The Everlasting Man, he describes the nature-worship and “mere mythology” that produced a perversion among the Greeks. “Just as they became unnatural by worshiping nature, so they actually became unmanly by worshiping man.” Any young man, he says, “who has the luck to grow up sane and simple” is naturally repulsed by homosexuality because “it is not true to human nature or to common sense.” He argues that if we attempt to act indifferent about it, we are fooling ourselves. It is “the illusion of familiarity,” when “a perversion become[s] a convention.”

In Heretics, Chesterton almost makes a prophecy of the misuse of the word “gay.” He writes of “the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion.” Carpe diem means “seize the day,” do whatever you want and don’t think about the consequences, live only for the moment. “But the carpe diem religion is not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people.” There is a hopelessness as well as a haplessness to it.

When sex is only a momentary pleasure, when it offers nothing beyond itself, it brings no fulfillment. It is literally lifeless. And as Chesterton writes in his book St. Francis of Assisi, the minute sex ceases to be a servant, it becomes a tyrant. This is perhaps the most profound analysis of the problem of homosexuals: they are slaves to sex. They are trying to “pervert the future and unmake the past.” They need to be set free.

Sin has consequences. Yet Chesterton always maintains that we must condemn the sin and not the sinner. And no one shows more compassion for the fallen than G.K. Chesterton. Of Oscar Wilde, whom he calls “the Chief of the Decadents,” he says that Wilde committed “a monstrous wrong” but also suffered monstrously for it, going to an awful prison, where he was forgotten by all the people who had earlier toasted his cavalier rebelliousness. “His was a complete life, in that awful sense in which your life and mine are incomplete; since we have not yet paid for our sins. In that sense one might call it a perfect life, as one speaks of a perfect equation; it cancels out. On the one hand we have the healthy horror of the evil; on the other the healthy horror of the punishment.”

Chesterton referred to Wilde’s homosexual behavior as a “highly civilized” sin, something that was a worse affliction among the wealthy and cultured classes. It was a sin that was never a temptation for Chesterton, and he says that it is no great virtue for us never to commit a sin for which we are not tempted. That is another reason we must treat our homosexual brothers and sisters with compassion.

We know our own sins and weaknesses well enough. Philo of Alexandria said, “Be kind. Everyone you meet is fighting a terrible battle.” But compassion must never compromise with evil. Chesterton points out that balance that our truth must not be pitiless, but neither can our pity be untruthful.

Homosexuality is a disorder. It is contrary to order. Homosexual acts are sinful, that is, they are contrary to God’s order. They can never be normal. And worse yet, they can never even be even. As Chesterton’s great detective Father Brown says:  “Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down.”

Marriage is between a man and a woman. That is the order. And the Catholic Church teaches that it is a sacramental order, with divine implications. The world has made a mockery of marriage that has now culminated with homosexual unions.

But it was heterosexual men and women who paved the way to this decay. Divorce, which is an abnormal thing, is now treated as normal. Contraception, another abnormal thing, is now treated as normal. Abortion is still not normal, but it is legal. Making homosexual “marriage” legal will not make it normal, but it will add to the confusion of the times. And it will add to the downward spiral of our civilization.

But Chesterton’s prophecy remains: We will not be able to destroy the family. We will merely destroy ourselves by disregarding the family.

Worship Director named for Archdiocese of Portland

Jesson Mata The Archdiocese of Portland has a new director for the Office of Divine Worship. Jesson Mata, former director of liturgy and music at Blessed Sacrament Parish in Seattle, has accepted the position. “Divine worship is at the heart of everything we do as the People of God in western Oregon,” says Archbishop Alexander Sample. The archbishop calls Mata “an exceptional candidate” with the background, knowledge, talent and excellent communication skills needed to be successful. “His thorough knowledge of and passion for the sacred liturgy will be a tremendous support to me and our pastors and parishes,” the archbishop says, asking that people keep the office in their prayers. Mata will start work at the pastoral center on July 7.  A native of the Philippines, Mata was raised in a Catholic household and came to the United States with his family at age 9. He quickly learned English and became fascinated with American culture and politics. He studied political science and philosophy at Seattle University and later continued his studies in philosophy and theology at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Mata directed liturgy and music for 10 years at Blessed Sacrament, where he developed liturgical and musical programs aimed at centralizing the focus of worship on the Eucharist. He worked with hundreds of volunteers and taught and trained liturgical and music ministers. As a former seminarian with the Dominican Order, Mata developed a love for prayer and a devotion to the Eucharist. He focused study and prayer on the liturgy, particularly on the development of the celebration of the Mass as well as the Divine Office. He gives talks on the topics. Mata’s devotion to the Eucharist originated from his work with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, India, where he volunteered alongside the Sisters to attend to the poor, dying, and orphaned. He prayed the Mass with the sisters each morning and ended the day with adoration. He also spent many hours praying at Mother Teresa’s tomb. Mata says he is most excited to share his faith and pray with the people of the Archdiocese of Portland. He is looking forward to meeting clergy and the lay faithful and hopes to deepen their love of the sacred liturgy. Mata says he plans to hike and enjoy the beauty of the outdoors. He is an avid gardener, a health and fitness enthusiast, and a photographer.

"Just who do we think we are?" How the Supreme Court’s conservatives explained their votes against "gay marriage".

 From Quartz.com an interesting article on why these Supreme Court Justices voted against this decision.  Their decisions on maintaining the status quo for the common good is excellent reading.

The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling legalizing gay marriage throughout the US split along familiar lines, with the nine-member court’s four most conservative justices voting against a nationwide right to homosexual unions.

Chief justice John Roberts joined justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito in opposing the majority’s opinion on the case brought by Ohio resident James Obergefell, whose 2013 marriage to his now-deceased partner was not recognized by the state.

Here are excerpts from the four dissenting opinions (pdf) the naysaying justices filed.  From page 41 of this pdf you will find the complete arguments against this decision.

Go to page 41 of the pdf attachment for the whole text.  There's so much good reading.

Chief Justice John Roberts

Although the policy arguments for extending marriage to same-sex couples may be compelling, the legal arguments for requiring such an extension are not. The fundamental right to marry does not include a right to make a State change its definition of marriage. And a State’s decision to maintain the meaning of marriage that has persisted in every culture throughout human history can hardly be called irrational. In short, our Constitution does not enact any one theory of marriage. The people of a State are free to expand marriage to include same-sex couples, or to retain the historic definition.

Justice Antonin Scalia

It is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage. It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact— and the furthest extension one can even imagine—of the Court’s claimed power to create “liberties” that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention.

Justice Clarence Thomas

The majority invokes our Constitution in the name of a “liberty” that the Framers would not have recognized, to the detriment of the liberty they sought to protect. Along the way, it rejects the idea—captured in our Declaration of Independence—that human dignity is innate and suggests instead that it comes from the Government. This distortion of our Constitution not only ignores the text, it inverts the relationship between the individual and the state in our Republic. I cannot agree with it.

Justice Samuel Alito

The Constitution says nothing about a right to same-sex marriage, but the Court holds that the term “liberty” in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment encompasses this right. Our Nation was founded upon the principle that every person has the unalienable right to liberty, but liberty is a term of many meanings. For classical liberals, it may include economic rights now limited by government regulation. For social democrats, it may include the right to a variety of government benefits. For today’s majority, it has a distinctively postmodern meaning. To prevent five unelected Justices from imposing their personal vision of liberty upon the American people, the Court has held that “liberty” under the Due Process Clause should be understood to protect only those rights that are “‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.’” … And it is beyond dispute that the right to same-sex marriage is not among those rights.