December 8, 2009
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,
The great feasts in honor of our Blessed Mother, the Immaculate Conception on December 8, and Our Lady of Guadalupe on December 12 signal that we are already nearly halfway through Advent, and December. May these weeks of preparing to celebrate the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ open our hearts to welcome our Savior once again.
As part of my own preparations, I am reflecting on this year of grace 2009. This has been for me a year of subtle joy, and I am filled with awe at the unexpected workings of the Holy Spirit. I am especially grateful for the strong and growing devotion of so many faithful in this Diocese, which, I hope, my Pastoral Letter can encourage. Also, in this Year for Priests, I am particularly moved by the dedication of my brother priests, and by their growing commitment to unity with me and with each other. My own love for you, my brother priests of this Diocese, continues to grow. At this busy time of year, please take care of yourselves and find time to experience the love you have for the priesthood in a new way. I ask all of us to please keep all our priests in prayer daily; we need and depend on your spiritual support.
This year has also had its share of grief and disappointment. One disappointment was that I did not have occasion to celebrate the Sacrament of Holy Orders this year. We can all do more to encourage vocations to the priesthood. And priestly vocations flourish most when all vocations can be discerned, supported, and chosen clearly and freely. The vocation to the Sacrament of Marriage is especially important to the Church and to the world, which is why a particular cause of sadness for me was the decision of the Iowa Supreme Court, on April 3, to strike down our State’s legal definition of marriage as between one man and one woman.
If we have good and holy marriages and families, we will have more vocations to the priesthood and the consecrated life. Let me once again share some thoughts on marriage. As you know my fellow bishops and I recently prepared a document on marriage. As soon as it is published, I hope you will read it and appreciate the teachings we seek to share on this beautiful sacrament of love. Marriage, as we know and as the Church rightly teaches, is a divine gift (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1603). Even before the Fall, our first parents received this gift, and were “of one single flesh” together (Gen 2:23). The sin of our first parents did not change the nature or purpose of this divine gift, and it continued throughout all of human history “to overcome self-absorption, egoism, pursuit of one’s own pleasure, and to open oneself to the other, to mutual aid and to self-giving” (CCC, 1609). At the level of natural virtue, prior to the grace of the sacrament, the life-long, complete, mutual, and complementary gift of husband and wife to each other and to God teaches profound charity and humility.
Like all of God’s natural gifts, this gift of the natural law of marriage prepared the world for its fulfillment in our Lord Jesus Christ. “This covenant between baptized persons has been raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a sacrament” (CCC, 1601). As a sacrament, marriage between two baptized members of the Church becomes a special means of sanctifying grace, teaching not only natural love, but also supernatural love, imitating Christ’s transforming love for us from the Cross (CCC, 1615).
Our salvation is love. For those called to the married state, the divine commandment to love is made concrete and urgent in the persons of spouse and children. By learning to love each other and their children both naturally and supernaturally, in spite of every obstacle life may raise, Christian spouses learn to love precisely as Christ (CCC, 1641). They can then choose to love any person they meet as Christ.
Moreover, Christian marriage is a symbol of Christ’s “wedding” to His spotless Bride, the Church (CCC, 1612; Eph 5:32). Christ’s love for His spotless Bride is eternal (or life-long), complete (holding nothing back from the gift of self), mutual (or exclusive), and complementary (forming a single whole of the two partners). The same is true in Christian marriage. To compromise any of these four marks would deny the sacramental nature of marriage, and deny even the saving truth of Christ’s love for the Church.
Finally, “The well-being of the individual person and of both human and Christian society is closely bound up with the healthy state of conjugal and family life” (Gaudium et Spes, 47; CCC, 1603). The Church’s defense of the dignity of marriage contributes to the good of all people. A society in which marriage is weak, is a weak society.
The Iowa court’s imposition of the false equality of homosexual “marriage” weakens marriage in Iowa. I say “false equality,” because one cannot simply declare two things of quite different natures to be the same. So-called marriage between two people of the same gender is not the same as marriage. It cannot in its nature fulfill all the divinely given marks of marriage – neither completeness, since procreation, at least, must by definition be withheld; nor complementarity, since such a relationship cannot form the one single whole modeled by Christ’s love for the Church. It is not, therefore, and can never be, a marriage.
In saying this, I assert the Church’s compassion for all those struggling with same-sex attraction. This desire does not come from God, but is a consequence of the Fall. Christ calls all His children to the same virtue of chastity, to be lived either in marriage or in celibacy. Same-sex desire, if acted upon, leads to an end for which the gift of sexuality is not intended by God. But a person is more than a desire. The dignity of the person remains prior to the order or disorder of a given desire. A person can choose how to respond to desires. To act on this desire is, in general, sinful; while to refuse to be mastered by this desire is as heroic as to refuse to yield to any temptation.
Advent calls all of us to change, in preparation for the celebration of the arrival of our Lord and King. Changing our hearts to be more Christ-like implies doing what we can to change public behavior and culture in the same way. In upholding the truth of marriage publicly, we must be more committed ourselves to uphold it in our own homes. We must also be more direct in evangelizing our culture on the unique value that marriage has for the common good. Let us, moreover, pray faithfully for those who experience same-sex attraction, just as for all of us, who wrestle daily, each with our own temptations to sin. May the special graces of this Advent season strengthen us to live and teach His saving truth, in love and joy. May our special patron, Our Lady of Guadalupe, help us to be humble before God’s great love for all of us. May Saint Juan Deigo be an example to all of us in our selfless gift of our lives to love each other from the hearts.
I think the Bronco’s are on their way back! Only a few more games to enjoy!
Your brother in Christ,
Most Reverend R. Walker Nickless
Bishop of Sioux City