Wednesday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time
Hypocrisy is defined as a pretense of having a virtuous character, religious belief and/or principles that one does not really possess. One can look at our current state of politics to point out easy examples of hypocrisy. Catholic’s are not immune from hypocritical stances. The pro-life belief of the Church is complicated and this often allows for hypocrisy to enter the stance. The issue that complicates the matter is capital punishment. One of our major political party’s holds a stance is both anti-abortion and pro-death penalty at the same time. This confuses many Catholics, who are members of this party. Most transfer the party’s belief onto the church’s pro-life teaching.
Although not surprised, I was extremely disappointed to find flyers that said as much at the Catholic Church at which I found myself this past Sunday morning. The flyer suggested that as Catholics we need to vote for pro-life candidates that stood against abortion, euthanasia, and birth-control. The flyer continued that if the candidate held beliefs that were pro-death penalty and pro-war, that those stances were negotiable. Pope John Paul the Second requested a second edition of the Catechism in order to add strong language (over one-hundred paragraphs), that named both torture and the death-penalty as sinful. Truly pro-life, for Blessed John Paul, meant natural conception to natural death, for him there was nothing negotiable about it.
In the early church there was a struggle between the Jewish and Gentile Disciples of Christ. The Jewish Christians expected everyone who wanted to follow Christ to become Jewish and follow the Jewish code. Peter, who was part of that Jewish Christian community believed in that Jewish approach. However, he did not follow what he believed consistently. In today’s story, Peter only followed the Jewish teaching after the Jewish community showed up at their gathering. Paul, who was the prophet of the Gentile community, called “Cephas” out publicly on this hypocrisy. Notice that Paul used Peter’s pre-conversion name to call him out. What name would the Lord use to call us out?
Lord watch over this day. Send us modern day St. Paul’s to call us to accountability, so that we can no longer say we believe one thing, and do another. Help us especially to be people of forgiveness, so that we too will be forgiven by God and delivered from evil. Amen!
- Michael Montgomery