Father Scalia on The Danger Of Being Pontius Pilate

Hadley Arkes has a nice piece up at the Catholic Thing. See Lessons of the Season, Seen and Unseen . He makes a perhaps valid observation about Sean Hannity. But the real meat is what is thought provoking is what he says about a recent Homily Father Scalia gave. Yes Father Scalia is the son of the bog cheese on the Court.

Hadley links it to a couple of issues but what Scalia is talking about affects so many others. I am hoping an audio might be available soon here.

But then let us connect to another scene: It is McLean, Virginia, just a couple of weeks ago, and I had gone to St. John’s to see the service directed by the son of good friends who had taken now the firmest, and most artful, hold on his vocation as a priest. The Rev. Paul Scalia focused, in his homily, on the moment when Pontius Pilate confronted Jesus: Did he affect really to be the King of the Jews? Jesus would not affirm that account rendered by another. He answered obliquely, that his kingdom was not “of this world,” that he had come to “bear witness to the truth.” To which Pilate responded, of course, “What is truth?”

Fr. Scalia took Pilate to reflect the current of relativism in our own day: the eroding conviction that reason could grasp moral truths, because we increasingly doubted our faculty for knowing truths of any kind. But in the moral domain, the erosion was devastating: Held back in doubt, people would recede from judgment – and from facing their responsibility to judge. And doubt soon would beget cowardice, as it begot, in Pilate, the willingness to wash his hands and let the responsibility for judging fall to someone else.

But then, as Fr. Scalia completed the story: It fell now to the “body of the Church,” for those assembled here, and in the vast reach of this communion, to stand in place of Jesus in taking on the mission. The body of the Church would bear “witness to the truth.” What truth? In our own day, most pressingly, the truth about marriage, set against the wave moving toward same-sex marriage, and the truth of “the human person,” set against the culture of death and the denigration of life, nascent and aged. There will be, in this season, many splendid homilies, but I know my friends among the priests will not be offended if I say that I’m not likely to hear a lesson more telling than this one, now or in the seasons to come.