My Dear People,

First, I would like to thank the ones who participated in the Choose Life State Conference. There were great motivational speakers, and it was very informative.  Being this is pro Life Sunday. I will mention briefly some small aspects where one speaker, presented the way that abortionist providers decided to move their agenda forward. It is an 8-point plan: 1) Framed the debate 2) Created cynical slogans 3) Fabricated Facts 4) Used False Polling 5) Manipulated the complicit media 6) Justified 7) Repeated the Lies 8) The Catholic Strategy (how to attack the Catholic Church on this issue).  For this reason, there is such an attack at Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The abortionist promoters see him as a threat because he is pro-life, and his vote could help overturn Roe-v-Wade.

In the reading of Genesis, the sacred writer conveys that the creation of the human being is not yet over: he needs to be able to live in a full and deep union with another of his kind.  The animals were also created by God, but they cannot provide complete companionship.  So, God creates woman, giving her the same body as man.  From now on it is possible for the human being to communicate.  The creation of woman, therefore, marks the climax of God’s love for the human being he created. 

This passage also shows us man’s inferiority:  he is aware of his own aloneness.  Although here loneliness is more a possibility and a fear rather than a real situation, we are being told that it is through awareness of being alone that man can appreciate the benefit of communion with others. 

Like man, animals are created out of matter, but they are not said to have received from God the breath of life.  Only man is given the breath of life, and this is what makes him essentially different from animals:  man has a form of life given him directly by God; that is to say, he is animated by a spiritual principle which enables him to converse with God and to have real communion with other human beings.  We call this “soul” or spirit.”  It makes man more akin to God than to animals, even though the human body is made from the earth and belongs to the earth just as an animal’s body does. 

The unity of the soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the “form” of the body: that is, it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in humans, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature. 

This sleep is a kind of death; it is as if God suspended the life he gave man, to re-shape him so that he can begin to live again in another way—by being two, man and woman, and no longer alone. 

When man—now in the sense of the male human being – now recognizes woman as a person who is his equal, someone who has the same nature as himself, he discovers in her the fit “helper” God wanted him to have.  Now indeed the creation of the human being is complete.  Man’s attitude to woman as it comes across here is that of husband to wife.  “In his wife he sees the fulfillment of God’s intention: “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him. Authentic conjugal love presupposes and requires that a man have a profound respect for the equal dignity of his wife: ‘You are not her master,’ writes St. Ambrose, ‘but her husband; she was not given to you to be your slave but your wife.  Reciprocate her attentiveness to you and be grateful to her for her love.”

This depicts that the institution of marriage as something established by God at the time when human life began. As John Paul II explains, “this conjugal communion sinks its roots in the natural complementarity that exists between man and woman, and it’s nurtured through the personal willingness of the spouses to share their entire life project, what they have and what they are: for this reason, such communion is the fruit and sign of a profoundly human need” (Familiaris Consortio, 19).

By joining in marriage, man and woman form a family. “The two will become one flesh,” thereby indicating that marriage as willed by God was monogamous.  Jesus also referred to this passage about the origin of man to teach the indissolubility of marriage, drawing the conclusion that “what God has joined together, let no man put asunder” (Mt 19:5).  The Church teaches the same:  “The intimate partnership of life and the love which constitutes the married state has been established by the Creator and endowed by him with its own proper laws:  it is rooted in the contract of its partners, that is, in their irrevocable personal consent.  It is an institution confirmed by the divine laws and receiving its stability, even in the eyes of society, from the human act by which the partners mutually surrender themselves to each other; for the good of the partners, of the children, and of society this sacred bond no longer depends on a human decision alone.  For God himself is the author of marriage and has endowed it with various benefits and with various ends in view.” (Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes, 48)

In the Gospel, Christ renews the first plan that the Creator inscribed in the hearts of man and woman, and in the celebration of the Sacrament of Matrimony offers ‘a new heart’: thus the couples are not only able to overcome ‘hardness of heart’ (Mat 19;8) but also and above all they are able to share the full and definitive love of Christ, the new and eternal Covenant made flesh.  Just as the Lord Jesus is the “faithful witness’ of the promises of God and thus the supreme realization of the unconditional faithfulness with which God loves his people, so Christian couples are called to participate truly in the irrevocable indissolubility that binds Christ to the Church, his bride, loving him to the end.

“To bear witness to the inestimable value of the indissolubility and fidelity of marriage is one of the most precious and urgent tasks of Christian couples in our time” (John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio, 20).

Yours in Christ,

Fr. Vincent Clemente