On June 26 Justin Trudeau attended celebrations of Eid, marking the end of Islam’s holy month of Ramadan, and Tor-onto’s gay pride, which this year fell on the same day. Mr Trudeau wore an eye-catching pair of rainbow socks, a closer inspection of which revealed that they were made by the Toronto-based Halal Socks.
Perhaps the Canadian Prime Minister’s savvy publicity stunt is like trying to get the Nazis and the Jews in a group hug in front of Auschwitz’s dreaded gate singing Barney’s ‘I love you, you love me’ and having Arbeit macht frei replaced by ‘Love makes you free’.
Back in the office, Trudeau probably discussed with his pollsters if his political bilocation – no offence meant to Padre Pio’s devotees – would do the trick to raise his approval ratings.
This reminds me of a scene from the Quo Vadis movie when Emperor Nero, brilliantly acted by Peter Ustinov, asks a general if the people love him during another march celebrating pride.
But there is something sinister lurking in the hearts of emperors of all epochs. They veer eerily to Vladimir Solovyev’s Antichrist, who believed he was the great pacifier of otherwise unbridgeable antagonists and commanded his subjects to celebrate diversity and inclusivity and trounce discrimination. Under his magnificence, all you need is love!
This is, however, a gross misunderstanding of love.
True love discriminates, and there is in the scripture very clearly a concept called the wrath of God driven by his jealous love. This is unambiguous in the Old Testament, with numerous instances where Yahweh authorises the destruction of Canaanite nations to discourage Israel from flirting with their gods.
God hates all enemies of his chosen people as a doctor who hates the disorder killing his beloved patients.
In the New Testament Jesus uncompromisingly expresses wrath – I did not come to bring peace but the sword (Matthew 10, 34) – but redirects this wrath towards sin.
He tells the adulterous woman: “Neither do I condemn you. Go and from now on do not sin anymore” (John 8, 11). Love and hate go together.
They will never accept that love of all humans and hate of all sinful behaviour go together because for them homosexual inclination is not an objective disorder
This merciful love means that if you really love a human being, you will hate all the dehumanising forces that are harmful to that human being. But this kind of love reveals that if you don’t really love a human being but just tolerate a human being, then you’ll be hating nothing.
This merciful Jesus is precisely what certain Catholic LGBT ministries fail to understand. They will never accept that love of all humans and hate of all sinful behaviour go together, simply because for them homosexual inclination is not an objective disorder. Worse, it seems that they refuse to admit that love of a human being no matter who he is and hate of a human being no matter who he is are exact opposites, like black and white.
This is why many Catholic LGBT ministries try to redefine chastity and send the message that same-sex attraction is some kind of genetic gift God gives you at birth.
Then chaps, like Fr James Martin SJ, plagiarise theology designed for the complementarity of male and female – a concept so dear in the theology of the body of Saint John Paul II – and transpose it to the homosexual realm.
Paradoxically this teaching is Pharisaism in disguise, for the bigoted Pharisees believed that the source of their well-being was to be found in themselves.
They felt perfect and self-sufficient. They are like Frank Sinatra’s song My Way with a religious, do-it-yourself grace twist.
This the quintessence of pride.
Jesus consequently said the most terrifying things in the gospel to the Pharisees, who thought they needed no doctor, for they had nothing to confess and no wounds to be made clean.
Joseph Sciambra, an ex-gay porn actor from California, brilliantly narrates with real life imagery the thinly veiled Phar-isaism of the well-meaning, gay-friendly priests who used to tell him: “God made you gay... accept yourself... just live a chaste life.”
They reject sections 2357-9 of the Catechism, which define same-sex inclinations as disordered, because they can’t fathom a God creating souls with an intrinsic orientation to sinful behaviour and would prefer to see the Church teaching as wrong rather than believe that God is sadistic.
In the eighth century another emperor prided himself on what he should have been ashamed of, this time in Byzantium when trying to save his realm.
At the height of his pride Emperor Constantine V destroyed the image of Christ in Hagia Sophia and replaced it with his self-portrait, declaring himself the defender of the faith, just like Beppe Fenech-Adami, who thinks that by downgrading civil marriage to junk status, he is more Christian than Saint Thomas More.
Not to mention the public flogging and blinding of Patriarch Anastasius, who was then driven shamefully through the city streets as if in a scene from Game of Thrones!
Indeed some things never change.