• God is in the business of showing His creatures unconditional love, and this will never change. It is part of His very being. God can only be good to us, because He is goodness itself. God can only love us, because He is love itself.
• We learn from the first chapter of Genesis that God created us in His own image. “Let us make man to our image and likeness”, God says to Himself.
• This not only indicates what God made us to be; it also indicates what we must strive to be. We are made in the likeness of God, but we must also strive to hard to be like God.
• What I am going to claim in this sermon is that we especially do that through the pursuit of our vocation, whether that be the priesthood, the religious life, or the married life.

Unconditional love in a vocation

• There is a special quality in a vocation, in that it demands of us unconditional love. We are required to commit ourselves up front to pursue a certain path for the rest of our lives, to stay on that path and never deviate from it.
• This is what married couples do when they exchange vows before the altar; this is what religious do when they make their perpetual vows; this is what a priest does when he is ordained.
• These vocations require unconditional love because of the fact that they do not know up front all that their vocation is going to require of them. They make a commitment up front to be faithful to a path but they do not know all that is on that path.
• Spouses, for instance, tell one another that they are going to stay by one another for life, no matter what happens in the future. If one of them gets cancer, if their house burns down and they lose their life savings, if they have quadruplets, no matter what, they will stick together.
• Spouses offer this unconditional love to one another when they marry. Priests and religious offer it to God. When a priest is ordained, he dedicates his life for the salvation of souls. He says, “I give myself unconditionally for the salvation of souls, for life, no matter what that may demand of me.
• We know that, for priests, sometimes the demands are costly. A priest does not know how the years of his priesthood are going to play out when he is ordained, and yet he commits himself.
• He may be asked to leave his home country and live overseas. He may have a superior who does not understand him. He may have faithful who do not listen to him and make bad decisions for themselves and their children. He may at times feel as if he is a failure. He may suffer an apparent excommunication just a week after he is ordained.
• It is beautiful to think that God created us human beings in His image and likeness and then also created ways to live our live that help us resemble Him, and that those paths of life require unconditional love of us.
• He created marriage at the same time that He created the human race. Then, when He became incarnate, He instituted two vocations that are intrinsically supernatural: the priesthood and the religious life.
• But Our Lord did not only institute the life of the Catholic priesthood and the life of the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. He also lived them. He showed us how to resemble God in these paths of life.

• In response to the consecrations of four SSPX bishops last Wednesday, Pope Leo XIV has taken exceedingly strong measures. He has declared that bishops, priests, and all formal adherents of the SSPX are excommunicated. That means those who “participate habitually in the celebrations of the Society of St. Pius X and formally share formally their doctrinal positions.”
• These measures are extremely harsh because the Vatican has refused to use the penalty of excommunication for many very serious situations in the Church in the past 60 years. You can deny the Catholic faith publicly, you can offer very scandalous Masses, you can show approval for same sex couples, for divorce and other forms of immorality.
• But these actions have not resulted in excommunication by those who have done them, in the Church, since the Second Vatican Council. And, certainly, it is extreme and novel for the Vatican to not only excommunicate the bishops of the SSPX, but to excommunicate hundreds of thousands of Catholic faithful!
• How is it possible for Pope Leo to take such extreme measures? Even the secular media outlets have been astonished by what they call the “exceptional harshness” of the decree. The contrast between how outright heretics in the Church are treated in comparison with traditional Catholic would seem to indicate that Rome is seized by a certain Tradition Derangement Syndrome.
• The one thing that Rome does not want to see in the Church is for the New Mass and the Second Vatican Council to be challenged. It does not want the traditional movement to have the means to continue. It does not want lay faithful to be traditional Catholics.
• This situation is very sad because it is a situation of a father treating his own children with great injustice. And the father is the representative of Christ on this earth.
• There is one section of the Church that is booming today, that is full of good, devout Catholics and large Catholic families, while the rest of the Church is dying. And this is the one section of the Church that the Pope harshly punishes.
• Rome is putting immense pressure on you faithful to stop attending with the SSPX and be assimilated into the Conciliar Church. Instead of promising to start fighting heresy and guaranteeing the practice of the traditional Catholic faith to you, they are offering full communion in exchange for you becoming a Vatican II Catholic.

• I was listening to a debate recently between an atheist and a theist. The theist was arguing that, if there is no God, then there is no objective good. It is impossible to say what is good and what is evil.
• The atheist replied by asking whether God was a person? And the answer was that, yes, God is a person. But then, said the atheist, if God is a person, then He is a subject. And so God definition of good and evil is merely subjective.
• This answer by the atheist completely fails to understand what it means for there to be a God Who creates us. It is true that God is a subject, but as Creator of our world, He makes an objective order for His creation.
• By His act of creation, God establishes for us what we are and what we are made for. This determines what is good and evil for us.
• For example, God created us to have physical bodies that need air, food, drink, and sleep. This makes it good for us to provide ourselves those things for the health of our bodies and evil for us to use them in an unhealthy way.
• Another example would be the institution of marriage. God created humans as male and female and gave them the capacity to bring forth children through their union and only in that way. This is what makes marriage to be a good thing. By that, I mean the union of a man and a woman that is for life, that is exclusive, and that has for its purposes the procreation of children and the mutual support of the spouses.
• The fact that God created us in a certain way has determined for us what is good and what is evil for us. We call this reality “natural law”. It is the law that goes with having the nature that God has given us.
• This law is objective, in the sense that it is the same for every human being. It does not change based on where you are from, how you feel, how you identify, what you like to do and what you don’t like to do. Every single human person is created by God and has a human nature. The fact that we all share the same human nature means that good and evil is the same for all of us, and also that we have no power to change what is good and what is evil.
• Recently, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia made headlines by stating that, during his time as head of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Rome, he tried to make changes to move away from what he called “armchair theology” that is grounded in natural law theory and move toward a new paradigm that focuses on the lived experiences of real people in their concrete circumstances.
• What this means is that he was trying to move towards a moral theology where good and evil are different for different human beings. Homosexuality is good for some people, bad for others. Divorce and remarriage is sometimes good, sometimes bad. The use of artificial birth control is sometimes good, sometimes bad.
• Anyone who adopts such a mentality effectively overthrows the entire moral order. If good and evil are different for each person, then there is no good and evil, because each person is able to justify anything he does by just saying that, while it may not be good for others, it is good for him.