July 23, 2023
Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 23, 2023 – Wisdom 12:13, 16-19; Romans 8:26-27; Matthew 13:24-30
In the first version of the movie Footloose, John Lithgow plays a Protestant minister who lost a child in her teenage years to an auto accident caused by drunk teenagers. And, in his bitterness and sorrow, he has forced the village council to issue a law forbidding dancing as well as drinking and drug use within the village limits. Into this small town comes a city teenager who can’t imagine a world in which people are not allowed to dance. And he starts a movement to try to get the law overturned. In the meanwhile, he has both the good fortune and bad fortune to fall in love with the minister’s daughter, which sets up a terrible conflict that’s both political and very, very personal. At the end of the story, the minister loses, and dancing is allowed again. But just before the big reveal, he shows up one night in front of his church and his own parishioners are burning books in the parking lot that they don’t want in the library. And the minister is horrified at the lack of democratic ideals, not seeing the contradiction in his own mind. And he demands that they stop, and he runs to the fire and starts trying to pull the books out of the fire. On the night of the senior prom, all the kids are inside the local hall, dancing, and he’s outside with his wife, pouting at his loss. And suddenly something overcomes both of them. They begin to dance together in the parking lot, realizing that, perhaps there is more to life than they thought.
Error, error has no rights. That was the teaching of the Catholic Church from the early middle ages until the middle of the twentieth century. Error has no rights. From that simple declaration grew one of the worst travesties of Catholic history, The Inquisition. The Inquisition started very simply. It was a committee of people that would review the works of theologians to see if they were going off the rails. If they were, to give them a warning to change their teaching. But slowly, over the years, they became connected with the civil authority. Because this was the reasoning - the state has the obligation, the obligation, to seek the common good. In a Christian Europe, the common good seemed to include the truth held by the Catholic church. Therefore, if there’re people deliberately trying to corrupt the truth by heresy, after their works were judged heretical, the civil authority had both the obligation and the responsibility to deal with them in the criminal court system. And terrible things happened for centuries. Several thousand people were executed by Inquisitions throughout Europe.
Nothing changed until the Second Vatican Council. In the 1950s, an American Jesuit named John Courtney Murray began to work on that statement, error has no rights, in the light of democratic ideals in the American Constitution. And he tried to find common ground between Catholic church teaching on the common good and truth, and America’s view of human rights. And he was silenced by the Inquisition all during the 1950s. But Francis Cardinal Spellman took him to the Second Vatican Council with him, as his spokesman, and they drafted together the “Decree on Religious Freedom.” When it was brought to the Council floor, in addition to Cardinal Spellman, its other champion was a guy named Cardinal Karol Wojtyla. Most people had never heard of him outside of Poland. He became Pope John Paul II and then St. Pope John Paul II. And, between the three of them, they changed the entire view of the church on human freedom and the right to express oneself, even if one’s point of view was against church teaching.
During the Protestant Reformation, the various break-off groups abandoned bits and pieces of Catholic teaching but held onto the theory that error had no rights. And one of the worst expressions of that here on America’s shores was the Salem Witch Trials. A bunch of giddy teenage girls started a rumor about some lady they didn't like. And the whole thing mushroomed out of control until children were accusing their parents and their neighbors of being witches. And this terrible evil descended upon Salem, in which scores of women were burnt at the stake on the word of trivial teenagers. About forty years later, the Senate and the Representatives of Massachusetts publicly apologized to each family and gave them financial reparations. But the harm was already done. It lives as an ugly episode in American history.
“Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” That was the demand of Joseph McCarthy, who led the House Committee on Un-American Activities, looking for communists under every rock and bush. It started out innocently enough. Most Americans were anti-Communist in 1950. But it became an obsession that overtook the public life of America, causing the Hollywood blacklist, which kept famous actors, great directors, and great writers from getting any work for almost a dozen years. Until finally, at the Army-McCarthy Hearings, the whole thing was put to rest. And, after all that damage was done, Joe McCarthy’s career as a politician and his family life were ruined by that one overzealous campaign.
Right now, we live in the midst of what people are calling a cancel-culture. In some states, they’re talking about book burnings and library closures. And ghosting people and gaslighting them. And internet bullying. And stunning misinformation on websites and on the internet. And radical appeals - radical appeals - to First Amendment freedoms. You get to say anything you want because you have the right to say what you want to say no matter what it costs anybody else. And the equally daunting puzzle of where to draw the line on what people are allowed to say. Each of our scripture readings this morning has something to say about all of this. Not a solution, just a series of insights to put out there.
In the first reading, it says that those who hold leadership positions must be kind as well as just. Not a bad idea for any of us. If we think we’re right - whether we’re right or not - if we think we’re right, we also must be kind to other people in expressing what we believe to be right.
In Jesus’ parable this morning, He says, “Let everybody grow together. It will get itself sorted out at the end. There is no need to pull up stuff. You might destroy something good while you are trying to destroy something you think is bad.”
And St. Paul, talking about the presence of the Spirit in the life of the Body of the Church and within each of our individual hearts says, “Because we don’t know how to pray as we ought, the Holy Spirit expresses our deepest desires in unutterable, indescribable groanings.” Suppose that all this stuff around us, all this contradictory chatter, suppose that were all the inexpressible groanings of the Holy Spirit among us.