TMM: This Will Ultimately Be Good for the Church

"Mark my word, in the long run, this will be good for the Church." So said one of my colleagues from work concerning the Supreme Court's Wednesday ruling on DOMA (by extension, on California Proposition 8). This, in response to my quoting from Scalia's dissenting opinion:

"But to defend traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would prefer other arrangements, any more than to defend the Constitution of the United States is to con- demn, demean, or humiliate other constitutions. To hurl such accusations so casually demeans this institution. In the majority's judgment, any resistance to its holding is beyond the pale of reasoned disagreement. To question its high-handed invalidation of a presumptively valid statute is to act (the majority is sure) with the purpose to "dis- parage," "injure," "degrade," "demean," and "humiliate" our fellow human beings, our fellow citizens, who are homo- sexual. All that, simply for supporting an Act that did no more than codify an aspect of marriage that had been unquestioned in our society for most of its existence -- indeed, had been unquestioned in virtually all societies for virtually all of human history. It is one thing for a society to elect change; it is another for a court of law to impose change by adjudging those who oppose it hostes humani generis, enemies of the human race."

My own reaction to this passage had been that I am not particularly optimistic about what the final solution to this particular issue will involve. I continue to be very pessimistic, but I am a hopeful pessimist. God can write straight with crooked lines, as the addage goes. The source of my pessimism is how the secular world will react to Catholics and other people of Christian faith when we continue to call a spade a spade by noting that legal fictions do not change ontological realities. The source of my hope is knowing that final victory doesn't lie within history--which is full of re-writes anyway--but rather is in eternity.

In other words, I pessimistically think that the soft-persecution faced by people of faith today will only intensify into hard persecution, meaning that we will go from the occasional human rights kangaroo court over denials of service to actual jailings and perhaps worse. On the other hand, I suspect that once we go from facing having our livelihoods threatened and the occasional trumped up lawsuit to seeing churches burned and Christians arrested, beaten, exiled, tortured, and ultimately martyred, that the result will be a strengthening of the Church's remaining membership. The blood of the martyrs may be the seed of the Church, but in this day and age the Church in the West has largely grown complacent. It's not just a matter of the formal apostasies--it's the lack of heroic witness by many of us who are nonetheless trying to remain faithful. Heroism is always difficult, but it's even more difficult to distinguish from simple piety when the worst most of us will likely face is a few slurred insults and idle death threats.

In the meantime, we ought to pray that we will be granted the fortitude and fear of the Lord to be heroic witnesses to the faith if and when those hard persecutions do come. We will also be needing the wisdom and counsel to prepare for that day, and the knowledge, understanding, and piety to remain faithful through the challenges which we will continue to face until then. In the meantime, we should continue to face whatever soft persecutions come our way by acknowledging that they exist, and by fighting them where we are able, but also with the understanding that they can and probably will get much worse.