Blessed Are You When People Hate You…

About three years ago, a Catholic high school in San Francisco invited a former college champion gymnast, a young mother of two, to come and speak about life issues. Five minutes into her talk, almost all of the 800 students walked out in protest.  Just a few dozen students remained to hear the woman speak.  

Afterwards, the Archbishop of San Francisco wrote the students a letter in which he warned them not to be “victims of the culture.”  He wrote: “There are powerful forces in our country that use slogans to co-opt you into being agents of their own self-serving agendas.  You must see through their lies.”  The archbishop continued, “Abortion is the killing of a human life.  This is a scientific fact.”  He explained that it is a “horrendously violent act” no matter the method.  “This is not hyperbole,” he wrote.  All emotion, heartbreak, and feelings aside, “It is scientific fact.” 

Speaking of science, listen to some details on what a Harvard professor calls the most efficient machine in the universe:  It is composed of 30-40 working parts of “remarkable complexity in structure and assembly control.”  The most remarkable thing about it is that the motor assembles and repairs itself.  It operates with two gears, is fueled by proton motive force, and its rotor speeds are estimated at 17,000 rpm but have been clocked upward of 100,000 rpm.  (A car traveling at 60 mph runs around 3,000 revolutions per minute.)

This most efficient machine is found in the human body.  It is the flagella motor found in bacteria.  And these motors, similar to an outboard motor on the back of a boat, are so small that eight million of them can fit in the circumference of one strand of human hair.

The study of this machine is shaking the faith of those who deem themselves Darwinists. Charles Darwin, a 19th century atheist, popularized the theory that all life is an evolutionary process, a long journey from the simple to the complex. Darwin theorized that cells in the human body were just globs of goo, simple building blocks of matter which developed into more complex body parts over millions of years. 

But science tells a different story. The electron microscope shows that the bacterial flagella motor could not have evolved from simple parts bit by bit over millions of years.  No, all the parts have to be in place in the beginning for the motor to work.  If one part is missing, it does not function.  It’s useless.  The microscope also shows us that there are at least a billion little complex machines in each of the 120 trillion cells that are inside the body.  This is not a theory.  It is a scientific fact.  It is the truth.

Last fall, a successful Catholic businessman (John de Bruyn) gave a commencement speech at a Catholic university in Australia.  He mentioned some statistics on abortion and the fact that God instituted marriage as the union of a man and a woman.  At this, 95% of the people in attendance got up and left.  Supposedly, the remaining 5% stayed behind just to film the man’s outlandish statements as evidence to punish him.

A Catholic philosophy professor (DeMarco) wrote that the man’s concluding comment may not have been heard by the fugitives, but was most appropriate.  Bruyn had said:

As happened to me, you will be faced with issues in your professional and personal lives where the general opinion of the majority of the population is at odds with the teaching of the Church.

My friends, especially you younger ones, understand:  This is going to happen to you because the general opinion has evolved.  It has evolved from so-called “backward,” simple truths into “modern-day,” complex and sophisticated ones.  And what is the result of this evolution? We are now told a person’s biological sex is just a social construct, a choice one makes.  We are told two persons of the same sex can be married and have children. And we are told the child in a mother’s womb is just a clump of cells, a glob of goo. 

We have parish children being confirmed this week.  In our modern day, most children stop practicing their faith after being confirmed.  That is not my opinion, that is a statistically proven fact.  Surely, most all of those Catholic students who protested hearing the truth had gone through some sort of confirmation program. 

Through the years, I’ve hammered home to confirmation seekers the fact that human beings did not evolve from slime and progress towards some sort of divine consciousness.  No, I’ve reminded them that human beings fell.  We are down here, living in exile in a fallen world, and we are doomed to die.  

Then I remind them that Christ, God Himself, came to save us from death by dying, by offering Himself to His Father.  And so, through the years, I’ve asked students, “Are you ready to die for Christ?”  I’ve received mostly blank stares for asking such an outlandish question. 

Here’s another question modern man has failed to ponder: Who made you? Someone did. You certainly didn’t assemble yourself.  No, Someone made you, and He knows every strand of hair on your head and every little motor inside all your trillions of cells.  He made you, and He came to save you.  He came to save you from a fallen world blinded by so much sin that it no longer knows it needs to be saved.  It’s a world of survival of the fittest, where the weak, the small, the old, and crippled get weeded out in the name of natural selection.  But understand: While this is the general opinion of the majority of the population, it is not the truth. And you we were called to follow the truth, not to be victims of a culture headed for hell.

Friends, Christ is the missing link to all of life’s questions.  And He put something inside of you that the most powerful microscope and the most committed Darwinist will never see—He put hope inside of you.  And at your baptism and confirmation, He gives you the supernatural gift of fortitude.  And so, when 95% of the world turns its back on Christ, will you turn away too, or as Jeremiah put it, will you fear not when the heat comes? That is the question. 

Meditate on that and then understand: Cursed is the one who trusts in human beings, who seeks his strength in flesh, and not in Christ.  Woe to him.  But blessed are you . . .

Blessed are you when people hate you,
and when they exclude and insult you,
and denounce your name as evil
on account of the Son of Man.
Rejoice and leap for joy on that day!
Behold, your reward will be great in heaven

Photo by Alex McCarthy on Unsplash