Hi, everyone, I'm going to do a bit more from Cardinal Sarah for this Sunday's post, but then I am taking a 2 week hiatus from blogging so that my family and I can go on a trip. So you probably will not see another Crone blogpost until June 1st.
Continuing with Cardinal Sarah's chapter on "Hatred of Man" in his book The Day is Now Far Spent, he quotes former Pope Benedict XVI, who says:
"[I]f there is no pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creatio, then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation. Likewise, the child has lost the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him . . . The defense of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is dendied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man."
That's pretty profound--whoever defends God is defending man. Defending how precious humankind is, how respected human beings should be as children of God. Sarah then continues with his own thoughts on this as pertains the child:
"Whoever defends God defends the child and his right to be born of a father and a mother. Without that, there is no longer any clear filiation. . . . Born of the process of surrogate gestation, they will bear for their whole lives the burden of an anonymous birth. . . . How can anyone deny a child the right to know and to love his biological father and mother? . . . Laws that promote such practices are profoundly unjust. We will end up with incredible inequalities in which humanity will be divded into two: people who know their parents and those who are deprived of that joy, perpetual orphans.
"Over the course of the last decades, we have seen a visceral hatred of the family develop. . .. [But] the family is the great rampart of love! It is the ultimate recourse of all who know that they are in danger. . . . Indeed, I think that the family is an institution that is utterly unbearable to the devil. Because it is, par excellence, the place of love and gratuitous self-giving, it srouses his hatred and violence. Even more profoundly, the union of father, mother, and child is a trace of the fruitful unity of the Divine Trinity. , , , In destroying families, the one who is "a murderer from the beginning" does nothing but reenact the massacre of the Holy Innocents. Because God made himself an infant, the innocence of every child has become unbearable to him because it reflects the very innocence of God."
Sarah then discusses the vital need of men and women for each other. He has a very interesting discussion of what he considers to be the three great temptations facing men. He speaks of how the msculine soul is tempted by violence, disdain for those weaker than he, and moral laziness. A God-fearing man, on the other hand, realizes he has been given strength to be "the servant of the good of others." The God-fearing man realizes that he was given strength to protect and serve those who are weaker, and that generosity, not selfishness, must be the marker of masculinity. He also forthrightly condemns prostitution, calling it "a contemporary form of slavery," and he has equally strong words to say about pornography. As he says, "Who will tell [consumers of porn] that all these images do not depict the truth about sexuality? Who will tell them that sexuality is made up of self-gift and sensitivity, and not of violence and humiliation?"
Saah then turns to the modern sense of the body as object:
"The human body has become a mass of cells that the financial and politicql powers intend to control. Tremendous sums of money and liberal ideology are transforming this world into a genuine hell. Anything can be bought nowadays, from human organs to sperm, and even the wombs of surrogate mothers. Contrary to what it proclaims everywhere, the modern world has a profound contempt for the human body. It turns it into an object. . . . I think that Christians, disciples of a God who took flesh, will never be able to disdain the human body or to abandon it to the voraciousness of merchants or of unscrupulous researchers. . . [W]e share this privilege with mothers who have experienced the care that is given to fragile, precious newborns."
Embodiment is holy. It is how the Gods live, and how their children live. Toying with the means by which souls are embodied leads to misery and destruction. It is a betrayal of our divine heritage, a betrayal of all our Heavenly Parents have given us.
Betrayal is marked by the dismissal of all bounds and bonds of affection. Sarah quotes Dostoyevsky: "If God does not exist, then everything is permissible." The Nimrodian transhumanist agenda is the contemporary result:
"The purpose of [transhumanism] is to surpass the limits of humanity and to create a superman. . . .Man hates himself to the point where he wants to reinvent himself. But he runs the serious risk of disfiguring himself irremediably . . . They rejected the Creator. They disdained the very notion of huma nature. What is left? Here we are alone, disarmed, and helpless, at the mercy of an ultimately nightmarish movement. We have transgressed all the limits. But we did not see that the limits were protecting us. Beyond the limit, there is nothing but the infinity of the void . . . Whereever God is not, hell is there.
"The Cross is the final response to this ideology that, in order to escape weakness, dreams of doing away with all finitude: fatigue, pain, sickness, and even death. I think, on the contrary, that the heart of our civilization is accepting and loving finitude. The Promethean dream of an unbounded life, of an infinite power, is a lure, a diabolical temptation."
Wise words indeed: an acceptance, even an embrace of embodied finitude is the beginning of grace and wisdom. We must not betray our God, our sex, our bodies, our very creation. May we stand immovable in the face of the Nimrodian temptation, in all its major and minor forms.