Curing Our Hypocrisy

If a person has not found absolute love in Christ, anything that impedes his search for other values is regarded negatively.  He may frame this search in terms of a moral necessity of being true to himself.  Naturally, in a society riddled with hypocrisy, decadence and mediocrity (which, too often, is also the outer face of the Church), his own inner voice seems to him to be the purest guide.

It is only when he hears the voice of God himself as love, whispering to his soul out of the depths of the Church, that he may find that fidelity to the Church will bring about the greatest fulfillment of all that his deepest self has always sought.  Given a profound conversion to Christ in the Church, his attitude toward Church law will correspondingly change.  Once he achieves a genuine love of the Eucharist, his greatest desire will be to avoid all temptations and sins which would obstruct his approach to this mystery.  He will look to the laws of the Church as rules of love teaching him in the concrete what those things are which would destroy the bond of love.  He sees the laws of Christ as a necessary means of rooting out the weeds of his self-love; and he is grateful for the knowledge that a certain sin will estrange him from Christ, because this will act as a deterrent to those destructive forces within himself which he wants to conquer.

This desire to approach the Eucharist in a spirit of love rather than one of guilty betrayal makes him understand the law of the Church which excludes the unrepentant from Communion.  Now he sees it, not as an arbitrary pharisaical restriction but as the embodiment of a basic law of love: Repentance and forgiveness must precede union.  He understands from the Gospels and from the institution of penance as a sacrament that Christ's moral laws are not designed to exclude him as wicked, but rather to lead him to turn away from his sins and to accept the forgiving arms of Christ.