Pride goes before a fall

In the Gospel account of the temptations of Christ, one is struck by the devil’s offer of reward to the Lord provided the latter knelt down and adored him. Since the beginning of time, pride, which, as shown here Satan is the prime advocate, has always hounded man. This primordial vice can have many and diverse aspects. During the last century, the two great (and infamous) ideologies, Communism and Nazism, had a trait that was common to both. They conferred quasi-divine status on their main exponents – Stalin and Hitler. These two men in their pride and thirst for power wielded absolute supremacy over the fate of millions. Those who resisted were, almost always, swiftly done away with.

During the last few decades, especially in Western societies, which have largely renounced their Christian faith, laws have been passed which uphold man’s need to be in complete control (another facet of pride) of his own life and that of others. Taking the life of an unborn child is not only a matter of control over one’s own body but also that of others, even though science teaches us that human life starts at fertilization. To many this, sadly, means nothing at all, since pride and other matters dictate that nothing can stand in the way of their decision to choose who should live or die. Those countries which boast about their success in the mass killing of unborn babies with Down’s Syndrome recall fathers in pagan times who often decreed whether their new-born babies should be allowed to live or be exposed to the elements and left to die.

However, nothing that has been done over the last years can compare to the stand taken by governments regarding same-sex relations. Genesis is very clear that God made them ‘male and female’. Jesus echoes this in Mark 10:6-8. He says, “From the beginning of creation God has made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one.” With the passing of legislation enabling same-sex marriage with the possibility of adoption and putting it on a par with heterosexual marriage, we have embarked on a path of irrationality and open defiance of God as Creator. As Pope Francis says in Amoris Laetitia, “There are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in anyway similar or even analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family” (251). Later, he continues that “Every child has a right to receive love from a mother and father; both are necessary for a child’s integral and harmonious development. Respecting a child’s dignity means affirming his or her need and natural right to have a mother and father” (172).

Man’s need to be in absolute control of his destiny and that of others often comes to a woeful (and mysterious) end. The demise of the all-powerful Soviet Union is a case in point. No political analyst, however clever, ever predicted that the communist regime in Russia and all over Eastern Europe would come to such an early and abrupt end. Yet, an invisible hand in the latter part of 1989 seemed to have decreed that ‘Enough is enough’. Like a deck of cards, the Soviet Union and its satellites which in the fifties and sixties seemed destined to engulf the whole world, dissolved like snow in the sun. Can our pride allow us to learn from all this that we are not so much in control after all, that there are limitations beyond which we cannot venture and that an all-loving God and Father is the final arbiter of our destiny?