January 22, 2006 (Audio) Homily by Fr. Robert Altier Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
Reading I (Jonah 3:1-5, 10) Reading II (1 Corinthians 7:29-31)
Gospel (St. Mark 1:14-20)
In the Gospel reading today, we hear about the beginning of Our Lord’s
public ministry. The very first thing He preached to the people was the
message: Repent, and believe in the Gospel because the kingdom of God
is at hand.
When we look at that point of repentance, we can see what follows from it. In
the first reading today, for instance, we hear about Jonah going into the city
of Nineveh and preaching to the people. When the people heard the message of
Jonah, they believed. They turned their lives around, they called a fast, they
put on sackcloth, and they repented of their sins. Because of their repentance,
God did not carry out the destruction of the city which He had threatened.
Saint Paul tells us in the second reading today that the world as we
know it is passing away; and thanks be to God, I might add. But regardless of
that, we need to be able to look at the necessity of repentance, because
repentance can mitigate the chastisement that is to come. And why do we need to
repent? All we need to do is think about the tragic anniversary that we observe
today, the most horrific decision the United States Supreme Court ever made, in
1973, to allow babies in the womb to be killed. Since then, 47 million American
citizens have been surgically aborted. Since 1980 (that is, in the last 25
years), throughout the world 1 billion children have been aborted. One
billion in the last 25 years. If we think the tsunami that hit over in the
Indian Ocean last Christmas was pretty bad, think of what the blood of a
billion babies is going to be. Think of the tidal wave of blood that has been
shed upon this earth, and think all the way back into the Book of Genesis when
Cain killed his brother Abel. God spoke to Cain and said, Your
brother’s blood cries out to Me from the earth. The unjust taking of innocent life is one of the
four sins that cries out to heaven for vengeance, and the blood of these babies
must be atoned.
Even though the vast majority of Americans are opposed to abortion,
that seems to mean nothing. Objective truth seems to mean nothing. One of the
hopeful things, at least, that we can look at is that the vast majority of
college-age students are pro-life. In a recent CBS poll, 55% of Americans said
they opposed abortion. Then beyond that, another 17% said they thought abortion
should only be allowed in very specific cases, which means that 70% or so of
American people are opposed to more than 98% of all the abortions that go on in
the United States right now.
But things are even worse. In America, even though we are still
surgically aborting 1.3 million babies a year (that, of course, does not
include the contraceptive abortions), we are not the worst. The average woman
in Russia right now has had 8 abortions – average. In the Low Countries,
they are aborting approximately 50% of all their babies. Throughout the world
right now, 1 out of every 3 pregnancies ends in abortion – 1 out of every 3
worldwide. In some countries, for instance, China and India, they have
decided that boys are far more important than girls. After all, the way they
would look at it, the boy maintains the family name; in those countries, when a
girl gets married, she is owned by her husband’s family or becomes part of his
family; the boy receives the inheritance; and, in China, they have determined
that the boys would be able to do more physical labor than the girls.
Therefore, they do not want girls and they kill them purposefully so that they
can have boys, because in China they have a one-child policy. You can only have
one baby, and if a woman is pregnant with her second baby, they will forcibly
abort the baby; they will force the mother to kill the child. Oftentimes in
China, if the first child born is a girl, they will kill her because they want
a boy. So right now in China there are 25 million males of marriageable age
with no girls to marry. And because of that situation, what is happening is the
girls have become an object. For the few girls there are, there are many young
men who want to marry them, and the jealousy factor that gets involved has
turned out in many cases to be a situation where “If I can’t marry this woman,
nobody will” and they kill the woman; they murder her so that nobody can marry
her. So even the few girls who have made it to marriageable age, a lot of them
are being exterminated because some jealous male was not able to marry her. In
India right now, we are having the exact same problem. They are aborting the
girls for the same reasons I mentioned earlier. Right now, for every 1,000 boys
there are approximately 800 girls being born. This has been going on now for
the last several years. Consequently, in India we are going to have the same
problem coming up in a few years as we are having in China: many boys, few
girls.
Just two weeks ago, the European Union decided that the right of a
woman to kill her baby in the womb is more important than the right of a doctor
to say that he will not do it. And so the the forty nations that comprise the
European Union have decreed that it is an international right – imagine that! –
for a woman to have an abortion, and a doctor has no right to make a
conscientious objection, even if the doctor is Catholic. The only exception to
that rule is if the doctor will take the woman to another doctor and guarantee
that the other doctor will abort the baby. Otherwise, the right to have an
abortion in the European Union overrides the doctor’s right to say that he has
a conscientious objection to killing babies. This is what is going on in our
world today.
All we have to do is look at the present Supreme Court hearings that
have been going on over the last few weeks. It does not have anything at all to
do with whether a judge knows much about the law; it does not matter what he
knows about the Constitution; it is a question of: “Where do you stand on
certain political agenda issues, primarily abortion?” And isn’t it interesting
that even though these politicians, who over the last number of years have
constantly beat the same drum saying, “My constituents are pro-abortion,
therefore I have to vote pro-abortion,” now we have 70% of the American
population saying they are pro-life, and the politicians continue to beat the
pro-abortion drum. They can no longer blame it upon their constituents because
their younger constituents realize that one-fifth of their classmates have been
killed.
So we do indeed have much to repent of. But at the same time, we have
to understand the mercy of God. We are not going to escape entirely what is
coming. Look back, again, into the ancient world and you will find that God
tells the Israelite people that the very reason He sent them into the Promised
Land to exterminate the peoples who were there was because they killed their
babies and because they worshipped idols. What do we have going on in the world
today? The people of Nineveh at least believed because they had some belief in
God. We live in a pagan society now. The worship of idols has become rampant
and the offering of babies is happening on a daily basis. These are sins God
cannot tolerate.
If we look into our own hearts, we realize that all of us, from one
degree to another, are also responsible for the mess in the world. We have all
sinned. But God’s mercy is far greater than our sinfulness; and if we are
willing to repent, God, Who is faithful and Who is merciful, will forgive our
sins. It does not matter what the sin happens to be. Perhaps there has been an
abortion. Perhaps you have been involved in contraception or sterilization or
any other mortal sin you can think of. God’s mercy is infinitely greater than
our sin. No matter how horrible the sin might be, if we are willing to get down
on our knees before the priest of Jesus Christ and humbly confess our sins,
they will be forgiven. God will remove those sins from our souls. And if we are
willing, then, to learn the lesson from the people of Nineveh, to truly repent
and be willing to do penance, we can mitigate whatever is going to befall this
world.
God will take the blood of all of those babies and He will make
something great, as only God can, because the old saying is The
blood of martyrs is the seedbed of faith. There is no blood more innocent than that of a
child in the womb; therefore, there is no blood that is going to be more
powerful than that of a child from the womb. And we have now spilled upon this
earth the blood of over 1 billion babies. That is a powerful force crying out
to heaven, and God will hear the cries of those babies. But God will also hear
the cries of the mothers. We recall when we think about the Holy Innocents, the
Gospel writer Matthew tells us that that was to fulfill what was said: Rachel
wailing for her children because they are no more. There is not a heart of a woman who has
aborted a baby that does not cry out in pain. As much as they might want to try
to hide it, they cannot. The reality is there. And if any woman will turn to
God and allow those cries to be cries of repentance directed to Almighty God,
those will be powerful prayers. So instead of turning upon ourselves, which is
what this world tells us to do, we need to turn to God and we need to hear the
words of Jesus Christ: Repent, and believe in the Gospel because the kingdom
of God is at hand.
* This text was
transcribed from the audio recording of a homily by Father Robert Altier with minimal editing.