Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Homily)
June 19, 2016 5:00 pm · Father Jim Blantz
This past week we had this tragedy in Orlando, and the government seems to think the solution to the problem is to fine tune our gun laws. There may be some truth to that. But I have another approach to that. I think we should put up more signs. When I was growing up we had signs in our libraries, in our schools, on our buses, even billboards. Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal. Have you ever seen a sign like that in your life? We used to have them all over the place. Now certain segments of our community say you can't do that anymore, we don't want our children to know that. There are certain things we hide from our children. When I was growing up it was the birds and the bees, now we teach them the birds and the bees at the age of 7, and we don't let them see the Commandments until they're 21.
If you think about the tragedy in Ferguson Missouri a few years ago. If that gentleman had been told, thou shalt not steal, the riots in that town would not have happened, the murders would not have happened, the deaths would not have happened. But nobody thought to teach him thou shalt not steal. So I think the answer to our problem is, get our people to stop killing, and stop stealing, we wouldn't really need guns at all would we? We use them for our protection, but if nobody killed and nobody stole we wouldn't need them for our protection.
But anyhow, we are swimming away from the life preserver. Each year we are getting farther and farther away from morality, from God's law, and we're going down hill. We've got to get back to morality, but nobody seems thinks about that but the Catholic Church. Everybody else is trying little by little to erode from morality and God's law, so we should stop and think about it. See in our own lives, what's happening in our schools, what's is being taught to our children, what laws are being made in our city government, state or nation. Is there anything we can do to offset some of this erosion from the Catholic morality.
