That I May See

Thirtieth Sunday of the Year. Fr Leon Pereira calls upon Christians to see and proclaim the truth.

In Ireland recently a lady remarked, ‘Nowadays people don’t seem to respect the value of human life.’ Presumably she had in mind wars, civil strife and knife crime. Her companion offered, ‘Do you mean abortion being voted for by the public?’ The lady stopped, puzzled. And after a few seconds, she vigorously shook her head and said, ‘No I don’t mean that!’ Her puzzlement is a display of that cognitive dissonance we often see in the modern world. When the truth is presented, an inconvenient truth, many are unable to accept or process it. It does not fit the narrative they have constructed or accepted.

The restoration of the true Kingdom of the Messiah is the promise God makes in the first reading. To be in the Kingdom is to walk in the light, and not in darkness. It means to see, and to see aright. Jesus says to the Pharisees, ‘If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains’ (Jn 9:41). To pretend to see when you are blind is truly, at the very least, cognitive dissonance.

The Pharisees of our own time say ‘We see’ but they are blind guides leading the blind. Today language is often weaponised, and twisted to hide the actual meaning. The term ‘gender-affirming care’ means sex-denying mutilation and castration. ‘Women’s reproductive rights’ means the killing of babies. ‘Assisted dying’ is, properly-speaking, enabled murder. ‘Safe and effective’ has come to mean (as so many have realised through bitter experience) dangerous and mostly useless. The media has become used to creating and shaping the news rather than reporting it. ‘Danger to democracy’ is used precisely by those who are themselves that very danger. ‘Follow the science’ means mindlessly following the unverified and questionable. ‘Conspiracy theory’ often means the news that is inconvenient to acknowledge at present, but later will be quietly admitted and shelved.

A striking shibboleth of this confusion today is the secular liberal inability to define the word ‘woman’, and often a reluctance to define ‘synodality’.

The wilful blindness of the world is one thing; that in the Church is quite another! We see (that is, if we have the light of Christ) the hypocrisy of calls for transparency and a listening, inclusive community from those who are the most intolerant, inflexible and excluding of others. Jesus says, ‘What father among you, if his son asks for bread, would give him a stone?’ and yet those who ought to live up to their fatherhood are hurling heresies as stones to injure their children, because they themselves are stuck in their rigid, backwardist (sic), heterodox ideologies of the Seventies. If we in the Church should propagate untruths we would be serving the enemy, the father of lies. It would be to sow tares among the wheat, to choke Christ’s wheat with thorns, to let the wolves tear into the flock. It is to give children stones instead of bread.

Rabbouni, that I may see again! is the cry of the man who would see. And when Christ gives him sight, he uses his sight to see the end Christ our Lord is going to, that is, to Jerusalem and to the Cross. We need the Light of Christ, the Light that is Christ, to see aright. We need Jesus in order to abandon our human narratives and human solutions, to be cured of our blindness. And we must follow Him to Jerusalem, to the Cross.

Chesterton remarked, ‘The Catholic Church is the only thing that saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.’

Only through the Cross can we see aright and love properly. To see and love a child enough not to kill it for the sins of its father, as though rape could justify abortion. To see and love our brothers and sisters enough not to lie to them about their disordered or sinful unions, but to hold out Jesus to them, our only Saviour. To see and love human beings enough not to mutilate their sex or their bodies through experimental medicaments.

Let the whole Church cry, Rabbouni, that I may see again!

Readings: Jeremiah 31:7-9 | Hebrews 5:1-6 | Mark 10:46-52