Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division.
Christ warned us that families would bust apart because of Him. Father against son and mother against daughter. Throw a person’s in-laws into the mix, and Christ comes off as some sort of divine homewrecker.
We see how our world is wrought with division. Do we attribute this to Christ? Of course not. The point is that Christ has to come first. We have to love God and then love neighbor—in that order. Our neighbors cannot save us; as our prayers state, it is not “through neighbor” that we get to heaven, it is through Christ. We must also notice that in Sunday’s passage from Luke Christ did not pit husband against wife. No, the division of man and woman in marriage would come from some not-so-divine homewreckers.
Origin of the Family, published by Friedrich Engels, using the notes of his long-time collaborator, Karl Marx, theorized that humans descended from apes, and that they lived not in families but in herds, where there was no private property and no monogamous marriage—a naturally “communistic species.” The theory proposed that their society was matriarchal, since nobody knew who their father was. It was only after farming started that the “human herd became the patriarchal tribe,” for men needed to know their sons in order to pass on their property.
This was, according to Engels, the revolution that started the oppression of women. Since men worked outside the home and women inside, that gave husbands the position, in Engel’s words, of “supremacy” and “privilege.” Isn’t that interesting? We hear those words used all the time today in academia, the media, and government. The stoking of division between not only classes, but races and the sexes has long been an activity of Marxists, who see history as nothing more than a battle between an oppressor class and an oppressed class.
In 1937, Pope Pius XI taught, “The preachers of Communism are also proficient in exploiting racial antagonisms and political divisions and oppositions.” The pope added how “modern agnostic science . . . burrow[s] into the universities, where they bolster up the principles of their doctrine with pseudo-scientific arguments.”
Marx and Engels used pseudo-scientific arguments to create marital antagonism. In the Origin of the Family, Engels wrote that “within the family, [the husband] is the bourgeoisie and the wife represents the proletariat.” Engels added, “Real social equality” could only be found when the female sex went “back into public industry” working outside the home. Engels also called for women to have marital relations with anyone they wanted as long as they “loved” them. This would liberate women, and when this was realized, “the monogamous family as the economic unit of society [would] be abolished.” And so, as one scholar put it: “You may not learn a lot about the origin of the family in Engel’s book, but anyone can learn about the origin of the women’s liberation movement.”
What has that liberation movement brought on? Well, we’ve witnessed the abolishment of monogamous marriage as the unit of society, a society where fewer and fewer know who their father is. The movement also has championed contraception, which Pope Paul VI, in Jeremiah-like fashion, warned against in 1968. For doing so, he was, so to speak, thrown down a well, like Jeremiah.
In a National Review article, George Weigel wrote:
Derided for alleged misogyny (hatred of women), Paul VI in fact foresaw that the contraceptive society . . . would lead to disrespect for women, reduced as they would be to instruments for the pleasuring of men. Look at the plague of sexual abuse throughout society, the chronic inability of [people] to make lifetime commitments, and the multibillion-dollar exploitation of women in “adult” films—and then ask yourself, Who are the misogynists here?
In the prophet Jeremiah’s time, the Hebrews had gone pagan, even to the point of sacrificing their children to demon gods. The prophet Jeremiah warned that punishment was in order, and that punishment was coming in the form of the Babylonians, who had no interest in assimilating into Hebrew culture.
Rejecting his message of doom, the Hebrews threw Jeremiah down a well and turned to nice, non-offensive, sunshine prophets to tell them what they wanted to hear. The Babylonians then came and conquered Israel and did so most likely due to the loss of the Hebrew population. The Babylonians bound King Zedekiah and made him watch as they killed his sons before plucking his eyes out. The last thing the King of Judah saw was the end of the royal line of King David. Then Zedekiah was hauled off to Babylon where he died.
Let us all, the people of God, hear this: Go to confession and confess all you’ve done that has distanced you from Him. Come to Mass in your best clothes, showing God and neighbor that you fear Him and put Him first. Then get on your knees and beg for mercy. Yes, beg for mercy, my friends, because the Babylonians are coming.
The Babylonians are coming, but take heart. Jeremiah promised the Lord would make a new covenant, a new marriage with His people that would last forever. About 600 years after Jeremiah’s time, the new King, the Son of David arrived, and the royal line of David was remade. And the new King did not bring peace, He brought a sword, which He drove into the ground on which to hang; the sword that set the world on fire.
He also brought His Mother, whose foot crushes the head of the serpent. The new King, with His Mother cooperating, started a war against sin and death in order to deliver you from this earthly Babylonian exile.
So, with your heart on fire, start processing with your sword, your cross, and follow your King; it is only through Him that you will make your way home to the Promised Land.
Photo by Omar Prestwich on Unsplash
