As we have written about often, the daily Gospels of Matthew 13 these past two weeks have focused on the many parables Our Lord used in His discourses on separating the wicked from the just when D-Day finally arrives. Jesus uses the analogy of the fertile soil and rocky ground to distinguish between those open to Him and those whose hearts have hardened. He uses the imagery of wheat and weeds to indicate the great harvest when the good wheat will be separated from the chaff. In His parable of the net, he likens the kingdom of Heaven to a great net cast on the vast sea of life in which every kind of creature of the deep is found. Through God's Mercy and Love we grow solid roots in the soil of salvation by heeding His Words. It is through His Mercy and Love that we become the wheat of Life, One Body with Christ in the Mystical Body of Christ and one with Him in Holy Communion. It is through His Mercy and Love that we can swim against the current of depravity, temptation, licentiousness, greed, lust, anger, sloth and all of the other sins that pollute souls and find our safe haven in the calming waters of grace. He speaks to the people's occupations of those times - agriculture and fishing. Yet those parables ring truer today than they did during His time in Galilee. Why? Because the chasm between good and evil is growing wider and wider.

    You see, there is the other side of the coin as well; to use another analogy Jesus used when the Pharisees tried to trap Him. While God is infinitely Merciful, He is also equally Just. Justice calls for accountability. Those who have so misjudged God by their assumptions that He will overlook their transgressions, are in for a shock. Do they forget the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah? Evidently they do for they have fallen into the den of deceit by disregarding His teachings and promoting their own theology of egotism and depravity. They have embraced sin and extolled it, and then have the gall to try to rationalize it by saying "God wouldn't punish me." Are they daring the Almighty? From their actions they are! And there will be a price to pay, a steep price!

    Yet, we must also take care to steer clear of any semblance to Jansenism which preached that few would escape the flames of hell. Fear can cloud mens' minds just as much as doubts, heresy or rebellion. We must walk a fine line - the middle of the road, so to speak, in our approach to God's plan for us. We are not predestined to Heaven or hell. God won't send us there. We merit Heaven through the graces of the Divine Son's great sacrifice on Calvary, renewed daily in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass which allows us the great opportunity to replenish those graces and keep them through our good deeds; and we deserve hell if we turn our back on the life-saving measures He has provided His children to keep us out of the swirling typhoon of eternal damnation. Unlike our justice system today, where appeal after appeal sometimes end up being thrown out of court, overturned or held up on a technicality, God's Supreme Court is final. What we bring to the "court room" is the ultimate evidence whether we are innocent or guilty: Our actions and our deeds that cannot be hidden in the heart.

    No amount of platitudes will help if we have not been honest with ourselves. No amount of excuses will help if we have abused or misused our God-given gifts. No amount of rationalizing or second-thoughts will count when we stand before the great Judge. No amount of blame on others will give us points in the great book when that ultimate time arrives when sentence is to be passed. Just as man excommunicates himself from the Church by his disobedience to the teachings and doctrines of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, so also man separates himself from God through sin. God does not walk away from us, we walk away from Him. He is always there, we are the ones who wander. Some stray just a short distance and return truly contrite through the wonderful, most merciful Sacrament of Reconciliation. Others grow far apart by their insistence that they are right and God is wrong. As Bishop Fulton J. Sheen says, man deifies himself, and in so doing, condemns himself for he does not have the power to survive without God. That power only comes from one Being. But God in His Infinite Mercy, Love and Justice has given us all a free will. That is the final testimony in our judgment. How we use that free will ultimately determines our true freedom.

    Many rail at the Church because she has denied man freedom; where, in truth, she has expanded our freedoms by passing down the limits God has set. Those who clamor for freedom are prisoners of their own dark cells. Bitterness crops up in some feminists who regard the Church as a bastion of male superiority that has greatly degraded the female gender by denying them the "right" of ordination, or telling them that they do not have the right to their own bodies when another life is involved. How dare the Church say such things! How dare they not! How dare these "liberated" women question Christ and His teachings! They cry out "who is the Church to tell us what to do?" We say, who are they to tell the Church, founded on the Rock of Peter on solid soil with roots that stem 2000 years deep, what this hallowed institution should and shouldn't do. Contrary to many feminist and liberal opinions, the Church was not founded in 1965. People like Frances Kissling of "catholics" for a free choice haven't a clue. They are bitter and lash out at anyone but themselves. They are the unrepentant sinner who strives to involve others in their sins, falsely assuming it will ease their own pain and justify their continued malaise and heresy. It doesn't work that way.

    Many blame the Church for "disorienting" them or putting them on a "guilt" trip. Again, convenient excuses to shirk responsibilities. It is inevitable, that in an institution of one billion, there will be problems and indeed there are concerns that some of the flock have strayed, that there have been cover-ups of pedophile and homosexual priests by some bishops, that the poorly supervised seminaries and nunneries after Vatican II provided a larvae for the gay agenda to infest others. If indeed this is true and these people have not repented and persist in their sin, then the "Angels will go out and separate the wicked from among the just, and will cast them into the furnace of fire, where there will be the weeping, and gnashing of teeth" (Matthew 13: 49-50). Their judgment will be all the more severe because of the responsibilities and trust placed upon them. In the meantime the great majority of priests and bishops are good men, striving to fulfill God's Holy Will amidst the maze of politics inherent in any organization. They, like us are human. They, like us are tempted, even more so. They, like us have to follow the same set of rules, even more stringent if you will. They, like us, can be intimidated. That is why it is imperative that we pray they will not shrink from the task and have the strength to speak out even more forcibly for the Gospel of Life over the next several critical months.

    We bring this all up because this week the presidential campaign begins in earnest with the Republican Convention in Philadelphia. Throughout the next ninety-six days we are going to hear all kinds of rhetoric and rationalization that sin is okay and we should be allowed to do anything we want no matter the consequences and anyone opposing those freedoms is a right-wing radical who is not fit to live. No, it won't be couched that way, but look at the agenda. The Homosexual contingent has long tried to justify sodomy. Look how they have got their clutches in the United Kingdom and how they tried to besmirch the good name of Cardinal Thomas Winning for standing up to them and speaking the truth. Now the multi-headed poisonous basilisk has reached our shores in hyping the "correctness" of sodomy. They want us to believe it as an acceptable, normal behavior. Beware, all who oppose their "rights" they will demean as abnormal and liken to Hitler. Oh, they can be clever those snakes! And they are trying to slither into the schools where family values will be further undermined. Just last week Catholic World News reported that the California State Board of Education voted in favor of requiring homosexual-friendly education for children and teachers. You know what that means: indoctrination in the belief that sodomy is normal and acceptable. Not only that, but this powerful and misguided board wants to enforce these new "educational equity" regulations in both public and private schools! That includes Catholic schools who are under their influence because of government grants and programs. "These regulations," according to the head of the Director of the Campaign for California Families Randy Thomasson, "are so bad that they will actually allow a student at a Christian school to be punished, or a teacher to be disciplined, or even a volunteer parent to be persecuted with some type of state pressures if they even said that homosexuality was unhealthy or immoral." Do you see how the gay agenda is manipulating America? They are seeking to intimidate in any way they can, disguising it all under "hate crimes." That's the gate they're using to serpentine their way into legislature. They tried "equal rights" in their attempt to liken their plight to the African-Americans of the sixties, but it won't wash because the latter truly do have God-given rights as do all God's creatures in the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Sin is not a right!

    Because sin is not a right, these arguments disintegrate when one equates God's Laws and the natural law to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. For truly, they are not happy people. Did you ever wonder why so many homosexuals and lesbians have gravitated to the entertainment business in Los Angeles, New York, London and Paris today? Because there they can hide in their own depravity and don a mask. They gain comfort from those who justify their sinful ways. From Washington D.C. to Hollywood, from Madison Avenue to the Castro in San Francisco they put on the facade of being happy about having "come out of the closet" and can be themselves, but deep down, their conscience is gnawing away at them. Statistics don't lie. So many despair in the long run because misery does indeed love company and they are wallowing in self-pity, demanding we accept the responsibility for their sins.

    The same holds true for those who advance abortion, arguing that a woman has a right to her body. They conveniently forget the inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for the human being within their womb. They demand we accept the responsibility for their sins by legitimizing murder. Again, sin is not a right. Unfortunately they have succeeded in their venue, evidence Roe vs. Wade and the martyrdom of nearly 50 million innocent unborns since 1973. Yet they continue to parade their cause, demanding we take responsibility for their sin. Only One Man can take the sins of the world on His shoulders and did. Jesus Christ died for them as well as all of us. He didn't die on the cross in vain, He didn't die on the cross so they could advance their agenda of anything goes. Long before the Son died on the tree and rose from the tomb to assure every generation and degenerate that they could be saved, God the Father gave Moses the Decalogue - better known as the Ten Commandments. In this mandate He set in stone what we can and can't do. We cannot kill! Look it up, it's a commandment not a suggestion. We cannot lust after another, we cannot steal, we cannot lie, we cannot blaspheme, we cannot disobey God or the rightful authority placed before us by God. Read into this parents and His Holy Church. Nowhere do we see where God has allowed an exception to murder by saying the slaughter of a fetus is fine because it's not born yet. Nowhere do we find the wording that thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's friend or mate. The wording is wife, as in two genders - male and female - as in Genesis 2: 24, "For this reason a man leaves his father and mother, and clings to his wife, and the two become one flesh." He didn't say "a man clings to his male friend."

    So many forget the wiles of the evil one first advanced in Genesis 3: 1-13. Yet, after all these countless millenniums, we still haven't learned. We still allow satan to tempt and deceive us through our sin of pride. We still seek to blame others for our own actions and behavior through our sin of pride. Are we happy when we sin? Show me just one sinner who deep down in his or her heart is truly happy! This creature does not exist because of the mark of Original Sin. We have a conscience, and no matter how much it is dulled, we know in our hearts God is right and we are wrong. But we won't admit it. Again, the sin of pride. Rather than being as little children, rather than humbly submitting to God, rather than returning as the prodigal son, we dig in stubbornly - too proud to admit we are wrong. Those who advance sodomy and abortion are wrong. God said it! We believe it! That settles it! By denying they are wrong and continuing to promote and justify their wrongs, the difference is that they have dug a deeper hole, closer to hell. They falsely believe that the deeper they are, the steeper the climb back. They forget Christ's soothing, but firm words in John 8: 11, "Neither will I condemn thee. Go thy way, and from now on sin no more." He didn't say, "that's okay, Who Am I to judge?" He didn't say, "Hey, we're all human, don't worry about it." He didn't say, "Just be careful." He said "SIN NO MORE!!! That's all there is to it in order to fly back into His loving and merciful arms immediately and forever no matter how badly we have sinned. All we need to do - the "we" comprising all sinners including all abortionists and murderers, all adulterers and sodomites, all pornographers and purjurers, all theives and heretics - is to repent with a clean heart and resolve to sin no more!

    However, if someone persists in the sin with no sign of remorse, we must then follow His charge in Matthew 18: 15-20 in which Jesus admonishes us to strive to correct our brother's sin through the proper channels. When those are exhausted, as is the case of stubborn sodomists and abortionists, then they are an anathema. And He gave His Church and her appointed authorities from the Pope to the Apostolic successors - the bishops the power to enforce this, "Amen I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound also in Heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed also in Heaven" (Matthew 18: 18).

    Since the Church, for nearly 2000 years, has held true to this and not loosened the laws of God or the moral laws, then it stands that what the Church says today about sodomy and abortion is echoed in Heaven above. While the Church, because of its human composure, has had its problems over the centuries, she has never waivered in her adherence to Divine Revelation and the truths passed down. No matter what issues are brought up, the moral issue is the only one that truly counts in this upcoming presidential election; the only issue we will have to answer to God for! Christ always counsels us to love the sinner with unconditional love, but strongly, staunchly and vigorously oppose the sin. Yea, hate the sin! Abortion and Sodomy are sins. Sin is not a right! Therefore no one has a right to Abortion and Sodomy! Those who disagree can use all the rationalization they want, all the half-truths they can conjure up, all the intimidation and guilt-trips they can muster, even all the legislation they can forge. But in the end, they know in their hearts their cause is fruitless, and like the weak, withered vine, will fall off and be blown by the winds of pride into eternal oblivion. Plain and simple, before God and man, it's wrong! The proof is in Matthew 7: 18-20, "A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Therefore, by their fruits you will know them." Those who advance the justification of abortion and sodomy will forever be fruitless!

For past editorials for the last two years, click on CATHOLIC PewPOINT Archives