A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. The Pharisees went off and began to plot how they might entrap Jesus in his speech. They sent their disciples to Jesus accompanied by Herodian sympathizers who said, teacher, we know that you are a truthful man and teach god way sincerely. You court nobody's favor and you don't act out of human respect. Now give us your opinion about this case.
Is it lawful to pay tax to the emperor, the Roman emperor, or not? Now our lord recognized at once their bad faith, of course, and replied, why are you trying to trip me up? You hypocrites. Show me the coin used for the tax. Now when they handed Jesus a small Roman coin, he asked them, show them the coin.
Whose head is this and whose inscription? Caesar's, they replied. At that, Jesus said said to them, then give to Caesar what is Caesar's, but give to God what is God's. The gospel of the Lord, the good news of the Lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen.
It wasn't easy to find text that might synthesize what I wanna lay before you this morning. But here's my attempt. First, I want to quote from the first chapter of Genesis and this is the statement of Genesis after the Lord had created the world and after he had created man, male and female, he made made them. And so god looked at everything that he had made and found it very good. Now that's from Genesis.
All I want there is to bring home to your mind that this universe, this world of which only part of the universe, that that is the world we live in, this little tiny orb, that that is the product of god's creation. I don't care whether it took a a minute or a billion years. I don't care about that in the least. All I care about is that Genesis says that the universe is god's creation. It did not come of itself out of chaos.
Now I wanna quote Saint Thomas Aquinas. I'm quoting this from the catechism of the Catholic church which we still don't have the English version. Thomas Aquinas says in his discourses on the 10 commandments in the very first chapter, he says, natural law is the light of human intelligence put in us by God. Human beings have intelligences given to them by god almighty. Now this intelligence enables us to know what ought to be done and what ought to be avoided.
This light or law, god gives to all creation, all creation, everything he made. That is I say is taken from his discourses on the 10 commandments. And I'm quoting it from the Catholic the catechism of the Catholic church. Incidentally, has a very good treatment of natural law. This catechism, the more I read it, the more I admire it.
I hope we'll see it in English one of these days. Now last Sunday, I introduced our holy father's tenth encyclical which has been acclaimed as his best. It's a document of 179 or a 180 pages. I still don't have a copy. I have read excerpts from it.
And last Sunday, I entered the it's called, of course, veritati splendor, the splendor, the magnificence of truth of truth. Not of opinion, not of what I think, not what you think, but objective truth, splendor, the magnificence of the truth of truth. That's its title, 179 pages. Now in conjunction with that, I read quoted from our cardinal Hickey's letter to the clergy asking us to bring it to the attention of our people, to use it in our preaching, to use it in our instruction. And I said last Sunday, this I do most gladly, most gladly.
And there's gonna be more of it. If you get tired of it, too bad. Just too bad. The holy father spent six years writing it, and we can afford to spend an hour of four sections of fifteen minutes or so paying some attention to it because a cardinal Hickey says says that this is the source of our decision making about our individual matters of conscience. And it isn't it isn't enough just to have a conscience.
Everybody has that of some sort, whatever you think of it. We are obligated to have a true conscience. Well, what do you mean by true? You mean that it's not my opinion, it's not my feeling, it's not how I think, it's not what I would like, it's not pleases me. It's not what makes me comfortable.
It can make me deadly uncomfortable. The truth can do it. Look what it did to the savior of the world, put him on the cross. That can be your reward for pursuing truth. Look what they did to Socrates.
Look what look what has happened down the ages. So when we say we we have a conscience, of course we have a conscience. But the point is that's not not enough at all. We are obligated to do our best to have a true, a right, a truthful, authentic conscience. And that means that we have some principles, principles.
And where do you get them? Where do you get those principles? Out of your own head, out of your own life, out of a democratic vote, out of a consensus? No. Most ultimately, they go back to god the creator.
God the creator. Now in this encyclical, veritati splendor, the splendor of truth, our holy father is talking about that. He's talking about the ultimate basis of morality. And what he is doing is trying to tell his bishops. This letter is addressed to bishops.
It's not addressed to the faithful. It's not addressed to the priests. It's not addressed to everybody in the world as many of the encyclicals are. He addresses this to the bishops. Why?
Because he says, you have a responsibility with me to ensure the authentic teaching of Christ's church. And therefore, I gather from what I've read about theology, there are many reference to the traditional doctrine of the church. Traditional doctrine of the church without, as far as I can see, making any very close, definitions of it. Now last week I referred you to the article in New York Times, the article in the Washington Post by Niebuhr. And then since then, I've been was given a copy of the very, very fine article in the, Wall Street Journal for October 8 by Neuhaus, Richard father, Richard Neuhaus.
And I have written to The Wall Street Journal to ask them to let me duplicate it. And if they do, I hope to give each of you a copy because I'm sure not all of you read The Wall Street Journal every day. And it is very good. And what I would like you to do if it comes off is to compare it with what our dear friend Colin McCarthy wrote yesterday in the Washington Post. The title of his article for this encyclical was bedroom theology.
And he says, I'm quoting, that it is a 279 pages of the hope of the of the pope ordering Catholics not to use condoms, period. That's his summary of this encyclical, Coleman McCarthy in yesterday's post. If that isn't demeaning, he either hasn't read it or he has read it and is a liar. Because even in every one of those articles in the in the in the in the public press, they all point out that this letter goes way beyond sexual morality, that it's only a very minor part. It's a 179 pages.
And so today I want to spend a little a few minutes on a very deep subject and that's natural law and more specifically natural moral law because the natural moral law is just a form of the natural law applying to human beings who have free will, who not only have intelligences but who have free will to exercise those intelligences. That's called the natural moral law. Now the first thing that we've got to get straight, and I wanna tell you, there is nothing in my life has been more persuasive in keeping me in touch with god almighty. Now notice I didn't say Christ. I said god almighty, the creator of the world then the time I spent years and years ago and have gone back over it time and time again that God created the world.
And that every single thing in the world, every single thing happens in some way in conjunction with his will. The world is not a chaos. The world is a cosmos and man is a microcosmos, a little little world. That every single thing that comes from the hand of god is contingent, depends upon its for its very being with god almighty with god almighty. There is no time.
There is no space. God is timeless. He's spaceless. We can't imagine this. But this is what we've got to try to think of when we think of god and the world.
He made it. And as a little kid, one add once asked me, why did he do it? And the only answer I can give is that because of love. He didn't have to do it, that's for sure. But he created it and what he saw that he had created, he liked, he praised it, he found it good.
Second step. How does the world run? Now I'm not at all giving you a history of philosophy on this. I'm really giving you the Catholic doctrine on this. Catholic doctrine.
How does he do it? It's not like an alarm clock that you wind up. That was Leibniz. Every single thing. Now this is important.
This word thing is terrifically important because we get the word reality from the word thing, res. And the only reality in this world that we know are things, not no things but things. And to every single thing, god gave it an inherent and intrinsic, a natural bent or tendency or as the scholastic said, an appetite, a tendency toward its goal. And what is the tendency? What is the appetite?
What is that intrinsic yearning? That intrinsic reaching out of everything in the universe and the only things you have are individuals? Keep this in mind. What is it? It's God.
It's God. God could have no other purpose than himself. So then what guides the world? What guides things? Basically, not exclusively, basically.
It's that inherent, that intrinsic Notice the word natural comes from the verb to be born, to be born. That and so that they what we call the natural law comes from the fact that God imprinted or any word you want to use, he made it part of every individual thing to be the kind of thing that it is and to act uniformly in that way. And notice that word uniformly I brought in. So that the universe, the everything under the intelligence of man is guided by its own inherent intrinsic drives. And in so doing so doing, it accomplishes god's purpose.
God's purpose, not my purpose. World doesn't exist for me in in in an ultimate sense. It exists for god. They're his creatures individually and individually they bow down and conform and act out. They behave, use any verb you want, because of what they are intrinsically.
Now we take another step. The step is this. First, we had god's law, eternal law, the law of creation. You have the participation in that of all creatures, all individuals individuals in in the the universe. Universe.
But now you have some special individuals. On the last day of creation, God created man, man, human beings. And he said, go out and multiply. He made them male and female. Notice two, male and female.
And he looked upon them and saw that his creation was good. And he says, multiply, fill the earth and master it. Master it. Master it. We are not the slaves of the world.
We are to be its masters. Christ said so. I mean, the Genesis says so. The very first chapter of the first chapter of Genesis says so. Now what about these these peculiar creature called human beings?
Well, here you're in a different ball field but you're not in a ball field separated from god. Now this is what we have to see, that we are in a in a sense repeat, in a sense, we are in a sense as determined as any cat or dog or rattlesnake or tree or bush or fish or whale. We are determined. God has made him form him himself and our hearts will not be at rest till they rest in him. Saint Augustine, very first chapter of his confessions.
We are not an exception to nature. God has given us what we call a human nature intrinsic to me in being a human being. But how do I differ from the cats and the dogs and whales and the sharks, the bees and the flowers of the field? Because first of all, I have an intelligence and secondly, I have a will. The will.
As old man Horace says, may I I think it was Horace. As he said, I see the good. I see what I ought to do, I approve it, and I do the opposite. That was written by a poet before Christ's time. Now so that a human being therefore is not an exception to the natural law which is a participation in the divine or eternal law.
The human being participates in a supreme way because unlike the sharks and the rattlesnakes and the cats and the dogs and the bears and all the rest of nature, we can see what we ought to do and say no, I want to do something else. God made me to his own image and likeness. So that now what happened? That man then participates in the natural law, the natural law participates in the divine and eternal law, but man participates in the way of his god given intelligence, a function of his soul, not of brain cells. And that's what we call then the natural moral law.
It's it's called moral because it involves man's knowledge and it involves his will. He can say yes, he can say no. I want no parts of it. I see the good, said the old Roman poet, and I approve it. And I do the opposite because it looks to me better.
It's more comfortable. It's more fulfilling. I like it better. It's not that I choose evil, but that is I choose an illegitimate, a law an unlawful good. Now that's putting this thing in the boldest summary I can give you.
Now when you come, you'll say, yeah. That's fine for him to stand up there and say, but all you have to look around, go to Somalia, go down to Haiti, come back to The United States and see what's going on here, and you'll say, where is that natural law? If it's as universal as you say it is, is it that it is abiding and immutable as you say it is. If it goes back to God, it's got to be permanent. It's got to be immutable.
It's got to be permanent. How do you find it in experience of human beings? And the answer is you find it in all kinds of shapes and forms and depravities. Depravities. Because it is not in this the exercise the exercise of this law, the in in the in the what we call the existential world, that is not something that is completely revealed to us, that is completely given to us on a silver platter.
We have the intelligence theoretically to know it, but when you look around the world, you'll say, all I can say is first of all, people differ enormously about and there are are all kinds of variations about it. And thirdly, there's nothing to be surprised or astonished at about it. Human beings, first of all, are human beings. They are individuals And their capacity to think is not the same. Their capacity to to con to get into some contact with truth, the splendor of truth, it varies enormously.
A blind person born blind never knows what color is. That's the reason ignorance is such an awful thing. It's the worst possible thing, ignorance. Absolutely the worst possible. Because it's like a blind man who is sightless trying to find his way and it's much worse than that.
So there's nothing to be astonished at, to see in the world in which we live that if there's such a thing as this traditional natural law that this guy up there in the book was talking about, where in the world do you find look look how people act. If it's so universal, why don't they act in a more universal and uniform way? Why aren't all the nation's democracies? And as I I repeat, it's because we are dealing with human beings of all kinds of size, shapes, and color, and everything else. We are individuals.
And if we're left to our individual searchings, you know what we come up with. The answer to is look around and see. Look around and see. If the best we can do is what we're doing in getting a hold of this natural law you're talking about, we are pretty hopeless, if not helpless. Concheto.
That's exactly the truth and that's why we needed a savior. That's why we needed someone who could come and stand up as one of us and say, I am the way, the truth, and the life. That is why that savior of the world said, thou art Peter and on this rock I'll build my church and I'll be with you until the end of time. Going therefore, teach you all nations, not what what you could pick up by yourself from the natural law, but what I have taught you and I am with you all days. Where is Christ if he's gonna be with us all days?
Where is that voice? Where is that help? Where is that absolutely necessary light that we need to light our way in this confusing world? Where is it? If it's if we can't discern it, if we can't get a hold of it, it's no good to us.
And the answer is Peter, the rock who speaks in the name of Christ. I wanna conclude with a very short paragraph from Vatican two because this summarizes everything I've tried to say. This is from Gaudium et Spes, that is the church in the modern world. I'm quoting directly now. It's this is Flannery's translation.
Christ the lord is the goal, the focal point of human history and civilization, the center of mankind, the joy of all hearts, and the fulfillment of all aspirations. That's Christ, the lord. Animated and drawn together in god's spirit, we press forward on our journey through life toward the culmination of history, history which goes back to the Garden of Eden or whatever it was, which now here's what I want to emphasize, which fully conforms to the plan of god's love to unite all things in himself. In the name of the father and of the son and the holy spirit. Amen.