Wednesday of the
Thirty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time
(Daniel 5:1-6.13-14.16-17.23-28; Luke 21:12-19)
The writing on the wall has been decipherable for some time
now. Yet many still refuse to pay
attention. The sexual revolution begun
in the 1960s has caused more misery than could have been imagined. Children born without fathers to protect
them, women and men contracting diseases, and the felt need to destroy emerging
life are all pathologies attributable to the frivolization of sex. Sexuality is God’s gift to humans for both
personal and social development. Humans
have turned it into an entitlement for egotistic pleasure.
In being both blind to the writing on the wall and abusive
of their bodies as sacred vessels, humans today duplicate the story of the
Babylonians in the first reading. The
latter should have been conscious of what they were doing when they robbed the
Jerusalem temple of its sacred objects.
But they were greedily oblivious.
They might realize that the peculiar writing on the wall can be nothing but
a message of doom for their rapaciousness.
We should want our young to shun present ideology that seeks
to control the consequences of sex rather than to respect its creative power. In teaching how to discipline their sexual drives
we are providing them a road map of both moral integrity and human happiness.
