The Son of God labored on earth as a physician. He applied His deft hands to the work of healing the infirm. In the beginning He made us out of moistened earth with the power of His Word. In the fullness of time, He healed blindness and deafness with the same clay and moisture and divine speech.
Why? Why has He opened the ears of the deaf and the eyes of the blind? So that we could believe in Him and live.
Perhaps you have heard something about the controversy between the Dept. of Health and Human Services and the Catholic health-care system. Many people see the business as a matter of religious freedom.
Don’t we also have to see it as a controversy over what health care is? What health is?
Doesn’t ‘health’ = thriving in the truth of who we are made to be? Isn’t health care a matter of imitating and co-operating with the Great Physician Who made us in the first place?
Is it healthy for a woman to poison her body with pills that maker her infertile and inhospitable to new life? What kind of health care is that?
The proponents of universal access to contraception try to characterize it as a “woman’s issue.” But if “pro-woman” health care involves poisoning the womb with chemicals, then I would hate to see what misogynistic health care would involve.
The divine Physician came to help us have a better life. Much better than a dead-end routine of work, eat, sleep, and work again, with occasional recreational sex. Artificial contraception fits into an Orwellian nightmare of dehumanized modernity, not into the beautiful truth of who we are in Christ. The children of God have inherited a better life than what the Department of Health and Human Services wants to envision.
The divine Physician came to us so that we could enjoy eternal health in the Kingdom of purity and light. May He help us all to open our eyes, ears, and lips to behold, hear, and sing His liberating truth.
Father Mark White Blog 