A weekly column by Father George Rutler.
Connecting with people you'd like to have known is a nice hobby, and I
can claim to be just three handshakes from Abraham Lincoln and only
five from George Washington. Recently at the opera, I put several people
three handshakes from Puccini. Alas, an employee in a sporting goods
store near Grand Central was unmoved when I put him four handshakes from
Mendelssohn. Just two handshakes from the Alice of Wonderland, I
spent many hours in the rooms she knew when her father was dean of the
college where I studied and where Lewis Carroll wrote the stories for
her. Alice Liddell, later Mrs. Reginald Hargreaves, died in 1934 at the
age of 82, shortly after she visited New York to be honored by Columbia
University.
In Through the Looking Glass, Humpty Dumpty boasts: “When I
use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor
less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words means
so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which
is to be master — that's all.”
When the State tries to be master over nature, behavior becomes
disordered. The results of the disastrous legalization of the
destruction of unborn children prove that, and now it is happening again
in attempts to “redefine” marriage. So far, eleven countries have done
it, as well as nine of our own states, along with the nation’s capital.
Hundreds of thousands have publicly protested the attempt of France’s
Socialist president to play “master.” It should be obvious to all
except the dense and the willfully ignorant, that the next step will be
to attack the Church through civil penalties for refusing to accept the
authority of the State to invert the natural order, of which the State
is only a steward.
Pope Benedict XVI has said: “. . . if there is no pre-ordained
duality of man and woman in creation, then neither is the family any
longer a reality established by creation. Likewise, the child has lost
the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him.
[Rabbi] Bernheim [the Chief Rabbi of France] shows that now, perforce,
from being a subject of right, the child has become an object to which
people have a right and which they have a right to obtain. When the
freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then
necessarily the Maker himself is denied, and ultimately man, too, is
stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the
core of his being.”
At the wedding in Cana, Christ's mother said, “Whatever my son
says to do, do it.” We are free not to do what he says, and to play
Humpty Dumpty with nature, but when the social order has a great fall,
all the politicians will not be able to put it back together again.
