Immaculate Conception, pray for us!

Details: 06 December 2013

Scripture (Luke 19:41-44) reveals Jesus weeping over Jerusalem. A daily commentary on each day’s Mass readings (“The Better Part”) says Jesus “looks down upon this city, chosen by God to be a lantern for the world, whose vocation is to be frustrated by the stubborn refusal of its leaders to admit God’s sovereignty.
“Jesus weeps… because he knows that those who reject God’s rule and the peace it brings simultaneously submit themselves to Satan’s view (we only have two options), and that means destruction.” One can only imagine how bitterly our Lord must weep over the complete degradation of human sexuality in our culture.
From music lyrics, to movies, to television programs, to advertisements, the objective seems to be to push the bounds of sexual degradation as far as possible. A recent example of such degradation, in the advertising realm, is a series of print ads promoting Obamacare in Colorado.
One ad shows a woman holding a package of birth control pills standing next to a man. Underneath their picture are the words, “Susie and Nate Hot to Trot.” Next to their picture it says, “Let’s Get Physical, OMG, he’s hot! Let’s hope he’s as easy to get as this birth control. My health insurance covers the pill, which means all I have to worry about is getting him between the covers.” The ad concludes with “thanks obamacare!”
There are lots of adjectives one could use to describe this ad and what it says about our culture. I’ll just go with “sad,” because it makes me want to weep for our culture and its objectification of human beings and their sacred gift of co-creating new human life.
I’m confident this makes our Lord weep, too. After all, He made human beings “capable of a higher kind of love than concupiscence, which only sees objects as a means to satisfy one’s appetites; the person is capable rather of friendship and self-giving, with the capacity to recognize and love persons for themselves.
“Like the love of God, this is a love capable of generosity. One desires the good of the other because he or she is recognized as worthy of being loved. This is a love which generates communion between persons, because each considers the good of the other as his or her own good.” [from the Vatican document Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality]
In “Married Love and the Gift of Life,” the U.S. Bishops say “married love is powerfully embodied in the spouses’ sexual relationship, when they most fully express what it means to become ‘one body’ (Gn 2:24) or ‘one flesh’ (Mk 10:8, Mt 19:6). The Church teaches that the sexual union of husband and wife is meant to express the full meaning of love, its power to bind a couple together and its openness to new life.
“When Scripture portrays God creating mankind “in his image” (Gn 1:27), it treats the union of man and woman as joining two persons equal in human dignity (“This one, at last, is bone of my bones / and flesh of my flesh,” Gn 2:23), and as being open to the blessing of children (“Be fertile and multiply,” Gn 1:28).
“Married love differs from any other love in the world. By its nature, the love of husband and wife is so complete, so ordered to a lifetime of communion with God and each other, that it is open to creating a new human being they will love and care for together. Part of God’s gift to husband and wife is this ability in and through their love to cooperate with God’s creative power.
“Therefore, the mutual gift of fertility is an integral part of the bonding power of marital intercourse. That power to create a new life with God is at the heart of what spouses share with each other.”
In 1959, the U.S. Bishops consecrated the United States to the Immaculate Conception. As we are about to celebrate the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, let us pray that our Blessed Mother will intercede for our nation that God would have mercy on our sins against purity and that our society will understand and live the true meaning and dignity of human sexuality.