Passion of St. John the Baptist
August
29, 2018
CollectDon Bosco Cristo Rey, Takoma Park, Md.
The Collect
for this memorial of the Passion of St. John the Baptist, i.e., his martyrdom,
recalls that he was “a martyr for truth and justice” and then asks for us the
grace to “fight hard for the confession” of divine teachings.
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The Beheading of St. John the Baptist
(Pierre Puvis de Chavannes)
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In our time
there’s certainly a mass of divine teaching under assault, maybe none more than
the teaching that figured in John’s martyrdom.
That’s the divine teaching about chastity. Recent events bring home to us that church
people must model that virtue. But it’s
not only a matter of protecting God’s children, as important as that is. It’s that we have to show them the beauty,
the wholesomeness of chastity in itself, and its place in the divine plan for
our happiness. Chastity isn’t only
priestly celibacy but also marital chastity and the chastity of teenagers and
single young adults. Chastity is
safeguarded by such old-fashioned practices as modesty in dress and manner and
custody of the eyes and ears and thoughts.
In our age, these are hard teachings—not as hard as John’s preaching to
King Herod, to be sure. But it seems
like an uphill battle to teach them, preach them, and practice them in our
culture.
Our teaching
begins with our own manner of life, our own example, in our interactions with
our students, with each other, in our families:
the language we use, what we watch on TV, the movies we see, how we use
social media, the respect we give to one another. Against the prevailing culture, it’s a kind
of martyrdom. But as you know, martyr
means “witness.” Like John the Baptist,
we bear witness to the truth: the truth
of who we are as God’s children, to how Jesus teaches us to live.
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