Bishop Ronald M. Gilmore’s homily

On the occasion of the Aug. 1 Mass preceding the Natural Family Planning information/appreciation gathering at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe

Stop lying to one another, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed, for knowledge, in the image of its Creator. Could I have you turn those lines over in your minds this morning, and in a quite specific way?

An Oregon bishop recently restated the creed in its ethical implications, and he asked all who served around the altar to embrace it with their signatures. One lady, a lector, objected publicly to the Church' s teaching on human sexuality, and promptly quit. That strikes me as being a profoundly misguided action. Without knowing it possibly, she was lying to herself and to others.

Think this through now. What are we talking about when we refer to the teaching on sexuality? We are talking about the meeting between the Word of God and the human experience of marriage. We are talking about 2,000 years of continuous reflection in all parts of the Church. We are taking about a priceless thing that we have inherited from our ancestors.

The women and men of the Old Testament prized sexuality as one of the greatest gifts of God. It had the wondrous ability to bring persons together, to unite them, and it permitted them to cooperate with the Creator in the making of new life.

The women and men of the New Testament prized sexuality as a great gift. And what Jesus did was to rejuvenate it from the inside out: what I say to you is ...a man and a woman shall cling to one another and become one flesh. The crucifix that hangs above the marriage bed of so many Catholic households takes on new meaning in light of what happened to him. On the cross he emptied himself in an offering that literally produced children for God. The marriage bed effects a sharing in this once-for-all sacrifice to produce children for God.

Like the people of the Old Testament and the people of the New Testament, the people of the Church have always prized sexuality as a great gift. They have always thought, and the Church has always taught, that sexual activity is good and proper only within marriage itself. Further, they have always thought, and the Church has always taught, that even within marriage, sexual activity must respect the biological and the psychological structure of the act itself. They have always thought, and the Church has always taught, that we must respect the truth of the conjugal act itself.

That truth is rich, complex, baffling, mysterious. Its meaning is more than meaning, is beyond meaning. We shall never exhaust the meaning of this created mystery. But our tradition does tell us that our sexual powers are used properly only when they are a sign and cause of love, and only when they are open to the possibility of new life. There is a unitive and a procreative meaning to sexual activity.

Intercourse is a kind of language, the Holy Father is fond of saying: it is a wordless way of saying something. It is an especially powerful language of love. Intercourse before marriage is a language of love that fails. It tries to say I give myself to you totally and forever. But it has not yet done that, formally, publicly, properly. It is a language that lies, then.

Intercourse that is contraceptive, before marriage or after marriage, is a language of love that fails. It tries to say I give myself to you totally and forever, in the way designed by God. But it does not really do that. The sticky fingers of conniving reason are all over it. It controls something. It holds something back. It pretends only. It is a language of love that lies.

Neither of these practices respect the full truth of the human person, or the full truth of -t1ie conjugal act. Neither of these keep faith with our ancestors. No Christian church ever approved of contraception until the 1930s. Though many of her children began to stray there in the late 1960s, the Catholic Church has never gone down that path. And for one simple reason: her devotion to the Word of God, her experience of the human person, her experience of marriage -all these things make her cling to the truth of human sexuality.

The fullness of that truth is lived in a striking way by men and women quite like yourselves. They are here today, those who live and practice natural family planning. They can introduce you to the story I have been telling, the story that reaches back, back to the dawn of creation, and deep, deep into the heart of the Creator himself. They can open for you the richness of that truth about sexuality so that for you too it can be both language of love and language of life.