Reject false prophets and embrace enlivening moral theology

Editor’s note: This homily was preached for the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, (Extraordinary Form), on July 27, 2025, at the Church of the Holy Innocents, New York City.

Last Sunday’s readings gave us the opportunity to consider some sacramental theology; today’s readings suggest a consideration of moral theology, from two different angles.

First, who are the “false prophets” condemned by Our Lord in today’s Gospel (Mk 7:15-21), and where are they? Sad to say, they are found all over the cultural, societal, and ecclesial landscape.

False secular prophets

On the secular front, we have been exposed to their influence for over fifty years (although most of us didn’t perceive their activity until much more recently). Why were their schemes relatively imperceptible? Because they were shrewd. They understood the lesson of how to cook a lobster: If you plunge a lobster into a caldron of boiling water, he will leap out; if you place it in a lukewarm water and gradually increase the temperature, you will have lobster thermidor in short order! The purveyors of the brave new world knew that you could not take an essentially religious population and convince them that the ways of Pagan Rome were right.

And so, the clever Margaret Sanger began her program of eugenics, not with abortion (which she knew did not have a snowball’s chance in hell at that time) but with efforts at sterilization and birth control for Blacks and other “undesirables.” Her plan took off in a new direction when the Supreme Court of the United States in Griswold v. the State of Connecticut (1965) declared unconstitutional state laws limiting the sale of contraceptives to married couples. Needless to say, her ultimate triumph came in 1973 with Roe v. Wade, bringing her original goal to its final and logical conclusion with abortion-on-demand.

We can chart similar courses for programs toward secularization, as well as the desensitization of entire generations to issues of morality and modesty, aided and abetted by an unholy union among various levels of government, media, and Hollywood. All of these voices promised us greater happiness and fulfillment, to which we need to respond with the question that won Ronald Reagan the presidency in 1980: “Are you any better off today?”

The statistics offer a resounding “no” as we behold the effects of all this in the highest teenage suicide rate in history; single-parent homes now outnumbering two-parent families; sexually transmitted diseases as common as the common cold; economic disaster the result of greed on Wall Street and Main Street alike. The depressing litany could be recited ad infinitum, simply proving the accuracy of Christ’s estimation: “By their fruits you will know them!” Cardinal Newman sees this as so self-evident that he treats it as a rhetorical question: “How is a man to know that his motives and affections are right except by their fruits?”

False prophets in the Church

Nor has the Church been exempt from false prophecy, spanning the ideological spectrum, I might note. Some “prophets” have held that the Holy Spirit made His debut on the ecclesial scene with the Second Vatican Council, while others hold (publicly or privately) that the Holy Spirit has been on an extended vacation since 1962. A true and loyal Catholic says, “A plague on both your houses!”

The first assemblage of false prophets asserts that Vatican II created a “brave new Church,” just as their secular counterparts promoted a “brave new world.” They maintain that every aspect of Catholic life not only needed to come under a microscope but that radical surgery needed to be done in regard to moral theology, dogmatic theology, canon law, and liturgy. When they are confronted with the unfortunate truth (for their perspective) that there is no justification to be found in any conciliar document for such a program, we are told either that is what the Council Fathers really meant or what they wanted to say but couldn’t say or that we have grown beyond Vatican II’s “limited” view of reality. Where their programs have been followed, we find empty pews, empty schools, empty seminaries and novitiates, and, yes, empty lives. Often enough, one encounters a healthier Christianity among Evangelical Protestants than among liberal, dissenting Catholics. “By their fruits you will know them.”

The second assemblage of false prophets, interestingly and ironically, also holds for a Council that brought about a cleavage in Church history. They maintain that Vatican II was an unmitigated and unrelenting disaster, which never should have been convoked. However, they forget two facts inconvenient for their version of reality. First, most of Western Europe was essentially lost to the Church for nearly a hundred years before Vatican II, since the Church had never recovered from the body blows coming from the French Revolution, the Enlightenment in England, the Kulturkampf in Germany, the Risorgimento in Italy, and the Spanish Civil War.

Second, if everything was so marvelous in the pre-conciliar period, how did it all unravel almost overnight? Nuns going from ten yards of black serge swathing every part of their bodies to J. C. Penney pantsuits in a heartbeat; the surfacing of heretical theologians, all of whom had been trained in the seminaries and universities of the 1940s and 50s; more priests leaving the priesthood in ten years than had left during the entire Protestant Reformation; the nearly overnight universal practice of artificial contraception by married couples. Once again, “by their fruits you will know them.”

No, neither group understands the Church or Church history. A wise maxim informs us, “ecclesia semper reformanda” (the Church is always in need of reform). So, neither the discontinuous hermeneutic of the Left nor the return to the would-be halcyon era of the fifties of the Far Right is what the doctor ordered. And that doctor is none other than the Holy Spirit, who neither first arrived in nor left the Church in 1962. Pope Benedict exhibited a genuinely Catholic spirit in this regard—like Saint John Paul II before him–in seeing the Council as a great blessing, but one which yet remains to be fully implemented. It is worth mentioning that almost every council in history has needed at least fifty or more years to gain the ascendancy.

Now, why do false prophets obtain a hearing? Because Christians do not know how to live a Gospel life. It is not sufficient to cry out, “Lord, Lord,” as the Lord Himself warns in today’s Gospel St. James puts a yet finer and more chilling point on it as he declares, “Even the demons believe—and shudder” (2:19). No, knowing and even believing that Jesus is the Son of God is not enough; one must live according to the implications of that doctrine.

Problems within the pre-conciliar Church

Why was Our Lord so regularly disconcerted by the Pharisees? Doctrinally, He was one of them since He believed in and taught Pharisaic doctrines and practices: the existence of angels; the resurrection of the body; the importance of fasting and good works; the centrality of tradition as an interpretive key for Scripture. Why did He castigate them (but nary a word about the Sadducees, who didn’t hold any of those positions)? Because the Sadducees were manifestly wrong, while the Pharisees were theologically orthodox, but in need of having their practice of the faith brought into line with their doctrine.

Perhaps the biggest problem in the pre-conciliar Church was the way Catholic morality was taught and lived. In the United States, the difficulty was exacerbated by a strong strain of Irish Jansenism, with its overemphasis on sexual matters, rule-based observance of moral norms, and obedience primarily rendered out of fear of hellfire. Serious attempts were made to remedy such a defective and debilitating approach to Gospel living decades before Vatican II; one such attempt was Bernard Häring’s The Law of Christ, which I would highly recommend; sadly, he went off track years later.

St. Paul, however, provides us with a healthy understanding of moral theology, encapsulated in today’s Epistle (Rom 6:19-23), which combines good theology and good psychology. Paul begins by raising the moral question within the life-situation of his Roman converts by asking them to raise “the Reagan Question”: Were you better off in your pre-Christian mode of living? The answer is an obvious “no.” And that’s the same question we need to raise personally and culturally.

Psychologically speaking, we know that every human being must choose some person or thing outside himself to serve; few people seem to comprehend that. Indeed, modern men like to style themselves free agents; truth be told, however, moderns are enslaved in ways that even the ancient pagans were not: slavery to drugs, sex, alcohol, consumerism, pornography. Again, with what results? Massive amounts of unhappiness, depression, and lack of personal satisfaction.

Following Christ, and not simply following a set of rules, offers the human person the greatest measure of happiness, both now and later. Pope Benedict XI never tired of reminding us: “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”

The divine blueprint for happiness

That said, the Ten Commandments are not ten sand traps designed to snare us into the jaws of Hell. They are precisely what I called them in a pamphlet I wrote on this topic several years ago: the divine blueprint for human happiness–true, genuine happiness, not the ephemeral and unsatisfying type which life without God and Christ has to offer. Almighty God gave us the Ten Commandments, not to lord it over us, but because He is, as St. Augustine put it, “intimior intimo meo” (closer to me than I am to myself); that is, He knows us better than we know ourselves – and for that very reason, He gives us a plan of action and a way of life which enable us to respond to the better side of our human nature and thus experience deep personal fulfillment.

Jesus comes onto the scene proclaiming the fulfillment of the Law–in Himself and by His holy example. Men can no longer say that God doesn’t understand what it’s like to be human, to be vulnerable, to be subject to temptation. In and through Christ, God knows–from the inside–what it is like to be human. Is Gospel living easy? No, Our Lord not only did not say it would be easy; He said it would be difficult–a cross, a burden, a yoke. However, He invites us to take up that yoke, which union with Him makes easy. Do not forget that a yoke is intended for two, not for one. Who’s in the yoke with us? Christ Himself, which is what makes the burden both easy and light, as He taught us.

And so, in our earthly pilgrimage, we walk resolutely toward our final goal, experiencing right now the joy of discipleship because in choosing to serve Jesus, we know–both intellectually and experientially–that we have chosen the kindliest Master of all. And that is truly liberating, so that we are not slaves either to our own lower urges or to a lifeless set of rules.

If committed believers lived in that awareness and showed that by real Christian joy, no one in our society would ever dream of saying that Christianity is deadening, joyless, or burdensome.

Dynamic, enlivening moral theology is what today’s Scriptures propose for us, a moral theology firmly grounded in the sequela Christi (the following of Christ), a moral theology renewed and rediscovered at Vatican II and enshrined in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, a moral theology promoted by Saint John Paul II and brought forward by Benedict XVI.

Allow me to close with the final words of Pope Benedict from his inaugural homily as Sovereign Pontiff, wherein he cites his saintly predecessor:

At this point, my mind goes back to 22 October 1978, when Pope John Paul II began his ministry here in Saint Peter’s Square. His words on that occasion constantly echo in my ears: “Do not be afraid! Open wide the doors for Christ!” The Pope was addressing the mighty, the powerful of this world, who feared that Christ might take away something of their power if they were to let Him in, if they were to allow the faith to be free. Yes, He would certainly have taken something away from them: the dominion of corruption, the manipulation of law and the freedom to do as they pleased. But He would not have taken away anything that pertains to human freedom or dignity, or to the building of a just society. The Pope was also speaking to everyone, especially the young. Are we not perhaps all afraid in some way? If we let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we open ourselves totally to Him, are we not afraid that He might take something away from us? Are we not perhaps afraid to give up something significant, something unique, something that makes life so beautiful? Do we not then risk ending up diminished and deprived of our freedom? And once again the Pope said: No! If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation. And so, today, with great strength and great conviction, on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to you, dear young people: Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and He gives you everything. When we give ourselves to Him, we receive a hundredfold in return. Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ – and you will find true life.