You cannot have God for your Father
if you do not have the Church for your Mother.
if you do not have the Church for your Mother.
-- St. Cyprian, third century Christian martyr
To every lukewarm, confused or dissenting Catholic out there:
I get you, I really do. I was a lapsed and lukewarm Catholic once, too, with one foot out the door. You probably think the Church is wrong on contraception and you want your birth control for free. I understand. I am one of "the 98%" of Catholics who have used contraception at some point in their lives.
But even then, as a tepid, contracepting Catholic, I would have seen something like this HHS mandate as a defining moment.
As it stands, this is your defining moment.
Mother Church -- your mother -- is under attack. You may think she is old and out of touch, even a doddering old fool. You may feel she doesn't understand you. But she is still your mother.
As much as you may want her to change her mind on contraception, she won't. She will never change her moral teachings, no matter how unpopular they are, no matter how many of her own children reject them. She is stubborn that way, when it comes to objective truth. It's part of what makes her your mother, and frankly, it's something to be admired.
The federal government issued its mandate just a few short weeks ago, imposed by a man who apparently thinks he's a king. But your mother, the Church, has her own mandate to follow, one which was given some 2,000 years ago, by a true King. It was a mandate to hold fast to the truth and teach it faithfully, until the end of time. Christ's eternal mandate supersedes and annihilates all temporal ones.
Now, because Mother Church will never give in to the government's attempted violation, there will be painful fallout in the resistance. You are a child of the Church, even if a bit distant from her, and you have a duty to defend her in this battle. Rouse your irrevocably baptized soul and come to her aid. It's sadly true that we sometimes kick around our own family members, but we don't allow outsiders to come in and do the same!
The government has made a breathtaking power play, kicking around your mother in her own home. She has responded with a firm and resounding, Get out of our house!
Get up, and help her shut the door.
For [Catholic] is the peculiar name of this Holy Church, the mother of us all, which is the spouse of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Only-begotten Son of God (for it is written, "As Christ also loved the Church and gave Himself for it", and all the rest), and is a figure and copy of Jerusalem which is above, which is free, and the mother of us all; which before was barren, but now has many children.
-- St. Cyril of Jerusalem, circa 350
**Update: Obama "shifts" the mandate to insurance companies who are paid by Catholic institutions. Don't be fooled and don't let your guard down. Nothing has changed.
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