Have you ever wondered why everyone is looking for love? Almost every popular song in human history, and almost every movie ever made and every story ever told, describes someone's search for love. We all thirst for love because we are made in God’s image, who is Himself an eternal exchange of love between three persons. Mother Teresa was fond of saying that “you were created for greater things: to love and to be loved.”
But what is “love,” and where do we find it?
The month of June is set apart for “love.” Do you know what special celebration of love happens every June? That’s right: the Feast of the Sacred Heart. We sing sacred songs to the Heart of Jesus, proclaiming that God has a heart, and that heart thirsts for you and for me. But, in fact, images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus are not what you will see in every downtown in America this month. There is another image on every city lamppost, in advertisements, on sports teams jerseys, on TV ads, and on internet pages this month: the rainbow flag. People say June is “Pride Month.”
For starters, “pride” is a sin, in fact a “capital sin,” and the first of the capital sins. We do use the word “pride” in some virtuous ways, such as “I’m proud of my children” or “we are proud of our school,” meaning “we appreciate these good things.” But what is being promoted is not a good thing. Rainbow activists are “proud” of their rebellion against “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” to borrow a phrase from our nation’s Declaration of Independence. Rebellion against nature always ends badly, for "Mother Nature is not mocked."
How about if we replaced “pride month” with “humility month?” Shouldn’t Christians seek virtues like humility and purity rather than pride and impurity? We all want love. Democrats and Republicans, communists and monarchists, progressives and traditionalists: every last one of us wants “love.” And so I return to my original question: where do we find love? We find it in the family, which John Paul II described as “the school of love.” If we don’t learn how to love from our mothers and fathers —how to share, how to be patient, how to sacrifice ourselves for others—we will never learn how to love. And it is precisely the family which the various atheistic movements—of which the rainbow coalition is the most well-funded at the moment—are trying to eliminate.
They’ve made impressive progress. Less than half of the children in America’s cities grow up in a broken family. To rebuild a healthy society built of healthy families, we look to the Holy Trinity, the “family of God,” the model that powers every human family and every community. To restore real love, we cannot do better than imitate the humility, the purity, and the charity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.