25th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First Reading: Wis 2:12, 17-20 
Second Reading: Jas 3:16-4:3
Gospel Reading: Mk 9:30-37

“Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me,” Jesus says in this Sunday’s Gospel Reading. We may infer, then, that whoever abuses a child rejects Christ.

The recent news has scandalized everyone, but especially the immediate victims. “Scandal is an act, omission of an act, attitude, or behaviour that leads someone else to do evil,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church. “Scandal” comes from the Latin scandalum, which means “stumbling block.”

“The person who gives scandal becomes his neighbour’s tempter,” the Catechism says. “He damages virtue and integrity; he may even draw his brother into spiritual death.”

Scandal is particularly grave when the one causing it has authority and the one scandalized is weak, the Catechism says. “It prompted Jesus to utter this curse: ‘Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.’“

We are right, then, to hate the sin. We should not even mention it among ourselves, St. Paul says, and Alexander Pope explains why in his Essay on Man: “Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, as to be hated, needs but to be seen. Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, we first endure, then pity, then embrace.”

The gravest consequence of sin is separation from God, the Catechism says. (That must have been the principal source of Christ’s agony in the garden.) However, sin also damages our relation with the Church and our “fraternal” relations with others. There are no private sins; every sin involves everyone.

But all this applies to any sin! We see the horror of sins to which we are not tempted. Like St. Catherine of Siena, we are overcome by their “stench.” With respect to them, we agree with St. Dominic Savio: “Death rather than sin!” However, we see the sins to which we are tempted as natural, normal, excusable.

The law forbids child abuse, but many other horrible sins it accepts: lustful thoughts, immodest dress, masturbation, fornication, adultery, abortion, contraception, euthanasia, abandonment of a spouse, sterilization, drunkenness, superstition, blasphemy. Accordingly, no one who has knowledge of these sins is ever accused of “cover-up.”

Let us direct toward our own sins the hatred we feel for child abuse and its concealment. Like our own, these sins are inexcusable. Like our own, they are forgivable.

That is why God the Son became Man: to forgive sins. “People who are in good health do not need a doctor; sick people do,” Jesus said. “I have come to call not the self-righteous, but sinners.”

That is why, on the very evening of his Resurrection, Jesus shared “with his first priests the power to pardon sins,” says Cardinal Dolan in his book Priests for the Third Millennium. Apparently, “what he most wanted to give his Church was mercy for sins.”

In fact, the Catholic Church is the place for sinners. “It is probably less safe to leave your umbrella at the door of a Catholic church than at the door of a Methodist chapel,” observed Monsignor Knox in his book In Soft Garments in a chapter entitled “The Unholiness of the Church.”

Jesus warned that the world would hate us. In the words of the First Reading, Satan will continue to “lie in wait for us” to test us with “insult and torture” so as to “make trial” of our “forbearance.”

However, Jesus followed up his warning by saying, “Take courage! I have overcome the world.” His last words to us were, “Know that I am with you always, until the end of the world!”

Let us, then, learn “the wisdom from above,” which, St. Paul says, “is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.”

Father Hawkswell will be teaching a free course on the Catholic faith starting Sept. 24.  It will run on Mondays from then until Pentecost: from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at St. Anthony’s Parish,  2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver, and again from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, :00-9:00 pm at the archdiocesan centre, 4885 Saint John Paul II Way (just off 33rd Avenue between Oak Street and Cambie Street). Everyone is welcome, Catholic or non-Catholic.