Heal me Lord with your Word

If you were to ask me a year and a half ago, while having a good time with my buddies on a weekend, about my opinion on Catholicism, this is what my response would have been:

What's wrong with these catholics? Not all of them, I mean. Most of the catholics are good people - they come to church once a week on Sundays and leave their faith at the door as they exit the church. They, then, go on with their normal life. Such catholics are easy to be around - at times they might even share a joke about the priest or about confession. They don't mind bending the rules from time to time; they lie and gossip; they drink to get drunk; they have no problem with other peoples' sexual orientation; they could care less about abortion and contraception. Unless you see them on any given Sunday at the church, you could never even tell that they are catholics. They are the good catholics.


Then there is a small percentage of catholics who are just the opposite. They make a big deal about everything. They don't like people having fun - bingo nights and fish fry Fridays amount to all the fun they care about. And they are horrible people as they judge others all the time. They have this agenda against homosexuals, but they close their eyes when it comes to abusive priests. They blabber and equate abortion to murder, but they have no problem with people seeing doctor to remove ovarian cysts. They talk all the time about loving others, but they have a problem with people using contraception while making love. All the bad reputation associated with Catholic church is because of this small percentage of so-called catholics. The Church has failed to adjust to the modern society and thought process because of these bad catholics.

Looking back at it now, obviously I am not proud at all of the opinion I held about my own faith. But don't we all feel at times that the Catholic Church is too old, hypocritical and self-contradictory? Doesn't it seem like the Church stand in way of everything that is modern? Take the issue of abortion for example. In today's society, abortion is linked directly to women's health - it is one of those things you have to have to ensure the safety of an expectant mother. So it is only a natural reaction for anybody to think that those who are objecting abortion is also against the well being of women. But is that truly the intention of the Church, don't they care about women's health at all?

To answer Catholic Church's position on abortion, we will have to go back in time a little bit, a couple of thousand years to be exact. We will need to start at the very foundation of the Church, with a man named Jesus. According to the Gospels, one of the things that Jesus did at all times was healing the sick - He cured withered hands, paralysis, blind eyes, severed ear, leprosy, and hemorrhages. What is even more important is that He found these sick people mostly outside of their homes- on the roadside and also in the outskirts of towns. Human history up to that point was consistent in its treatment of sick people by simply abandoning them. Without proper knowledge of the cause of illness, the loved ones distanced themselves from the sick ones with the fear of getting sick themselves. Jesus never turned anyone away; He healed everybody regardless of their gender, race, faith, and state of mind. With every healing, Jesus did not only restored the body back to its original state, but the whole human person was healed by making way for them to go back home to their families, thus being happy both in body and soul.

In following Christ, the very essence of caring for the sick emerged through the Church in response to the value placed on human lives by Jesus. From Fr. Damien who lived in island full of cast away lepers to Mother Teresa who used bare hands to pick off maggots from humans who were barely alive, it was the Catholics who taught the world everything they know today about healthcare. Today in United States alone, one in five patients get treated in a not-for-pofit Catholic hospital. 

The simple process of breathing in and out is one of life's greatest mysteries. Life - beginning, during and end - has not revealed its secrets to humanity yet; nobody knows when life enters into the human body, how it stays there and why it leaves. Judging whether a fetus is human or not based on its ability to survive outside a mother's womb is absolutely wrong. If somebody chop off my hand, then it wouldn't survive either. Does that mean it is okay for anybody to chop off my hands? Everything has an assigned place in a human body - my hand is alive only if it is attached to me; an unborn's survival is meant to be in a mother's womb, not outside of it. 

Catholic Church and its followers don't just care about the well being of a person's body, rather they care about the well being of the whole person - both mind and body. They want people to go home with a body that no longer hurt and a soul that no longer ache. Abortion returns the body back to its original state, but the soul is forever scarred. Though 2000 years old, the Catholic Church has the sense to know that it is not good enough, and that it is not how the healing power of Jesus work. The Church's stand against abortion has nothing to do with intolerance or lack of concern for women's health, but it has everything to do with the One who walked the dirt roads of Jerusalem's outskirts to heal the afflicted with the Word. It is all about a God who loved us so much so that He gave his only Son as a sacrifice to redeem it and to restore life. (On Friday January 25th, March for Life will be held all across the United Sates to support the rights of the unborn)

"Heal me, LORD, that I may be healed; save me, that I may be saved, for you are my praise." (Jeremiah 17:14)