Letter Twenty-Three:
Messing with the Rules
My Dear Family,
None of us around our family table are without sin. We are not a sinless society in an ivory tower looking down our noses at all the riff-raff outside our door. The Church is a hospital for sinners. Not only this, but we know what sin is, especially the deadly sins of pride, anger, greed, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth.
It is foundational for society to know what sin is. A metaphor that works for us is games with rules. Every game, such as football, is essentially linked to its rules, and these rules are unique to that game. Without these rules, the game itself cannot exist. For instance, roughing the kicker is an infraction everyone knows, and the team is penalized when it happens. We all agree to the rule itself; it is an objective rule that is necessary to sustain the game with integrity.
Sin is like breaking the rules of a game. For instance, extramarital sex is a sin and must be called out. What is infinitely worse than sin, however, is disregarding the rules, or changing them so that it is no longer the same game. When this happens, chaos ensues, and the game cannot be played with integrity. We might call this pure evil, and as such, it is diabolical, the work of the devil. Ordinary sin contradicts truth; this diabolical falsehood denies the rules essential to the game.
What is happening in our society, especially with sexual morality, is changing the rules of the game. Homosexual acts are as old as humanity, and certainly a well-documented phenomenon in the Church itself. In the 11th century St. Peter Damian wrote a book against clerical homosexuality rife in the Church at that time. It was always there and continues to exist today at all levels of the church.
But the Church knows what sin is because she knows that God set the rules of the game. She knows that to mess with the rules to conform to our behavior is far worse than the sin itself. For then we become the arbitrators of the truth, which can only lead to nihilism, the philosophical belief that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value. This is why the call to embrace homosexuality as an accepted lifestyle in the church, both in practice and in marriage, is diabolical. The sin itself is forgivable, but messing with the rules is another matter.
When we play by the rules established by our Creator, the game of life makes sense and can be played out with joyful hope. Again, this comparison of life as a game with rules is just a metaphor. If we dig deeper, we find that the rules are, in fact, ingrained within each of us, and that we are all called to participate in God’s moral order rather than create our own. This is called “natural law”, and we explain this in our Hungry for More section.
Yours in Christ,
Father John Worgul
Takeaway
To sin is to be human, to change the rules to make sin normalized is diabolical.
Discussion Questions
Our culture is doing all it can to normalize sin by changing the moral law, such as permitting homosexual marriage. It is the fundamental responsibility of the hierarchy of the Church to protect the doctrine that has been handed down from the Apostles, thus putting the Church in direct conflict with our government.
- How do you respond to the takeaway statement above?
- How do you process the conflict in which we are involved?