Mark S. Latkovic, S.T.D. | Special to The Michigan Catholic

Upon hearing the news that the U.S. Supreme Court had made same-sex marriage a constitutional right in Obergefell v. Hodges, my first thought was that the devil himself had induced a mass psychosis — just eight days before we celebrated our nation’s birthday, July 4. It was the devil, after all, who’s had it out for God’s design for marriage from the very beginning (cf. Gn 3).

My second thought? It will no longer be good enough (was it ever?) for Catholics to be merely good. We will have to be holy, just like the saints and martyrs. Overdramatic? I don’t think so. The crackdown on those who dissent from the new dogmas about marriage, sex and family will follow as surely as night follows day.

My third thought — I had more than three, but I’ll stop here — was anger at how a Catholic judge, Anthony Kennedy, had penned the majority opinion in prose better suited to philosophy or a love letter.  Many Supreme Court judges earn prestigious law degrees, but give little evidence of it in their reading of the Constitution. Even a brilliant Catholic conservative justice such as Antonin Scalia, in a scathing dissent, demonstrated the thorough “positivism” — no “higher law” or “natural law” for these justices! — at the heart of the Supremes’ jurisprudential “reasoning.”

But this column isn’t really about the legal decision and what to do about it, but on our moral strategy, that is, on what we Catholics need to do in our own lives post-Obergefell to turn the culture around. I’ll keep it brief and simple. I could write all day about the kind of Catholic witness that is needed.

First, we as a Catholic community need to repent of our own sins. We must admit that many of us played a role in giving birth to the Sexual Revolution — the Pill, the porn, the permissiveness.

In our battle for the hearts and minds of Americans, we’ll need the virtues, especially courage and temperance: courage to face strong opposition, even violence, directed at us and temperance/chastity to master our own unruly sexual passions. If we don’t live the full truth of natural, conjugal marriage better than we have, why should our secular culture see in us a better way to follow?

We’ll need to pray more — a lot more; the kind of prayer in which we beseech God to have mercy on us for our role in the deterioration of marriage and family in our country.

Of course, we’ll need to articulate far and wide the truth about why gender — male and female complementarity — matters; why mothers and fathers matter; and why marriage is inherently a lifelong procreative kind of friendship. Today, these truths are labeled hate speech. But then, that’s why we need the courage of our convictions to teach and preach them.

We must show why, as our Church clearly teaches, making babies in a laboratory does not respect the dignity of those children. This isn’t the way God ordained children and families to come into being: It’s the mastery over human procreation by impersonal technique, rather than the fruit of a person-to-person act of the spouses.

We’ll also need to do a full-court press on educating our fellow citizens, including Catholics, about the nature and meaning of democracy, religious freedom, conscience and rights. We, including Catholics, have largely forgotten the true meaning of these ideas. We’ve gotten sloppy in our thinking about politics in the wider sense of that term.

We’ll need to be willing to go places where traditionally we have not gone before — and I don’t just mean social media. We have to take our faith out to where the people — believers and non-believers alike who may have rejected or merely abandoned historic Christian doctrine on marriage — are. This is what an evangelical Catholic faith will look like in the coming years.

I think we’ll need to expect more from our Church leaders, too. We have the Synod on the Family in October; a papal encyclical on the falsehood of same-sex marriage and how to pastorally meet its challenge would be welcomed as well.

Finally, let’s take St. Paul’s advice in Ephesians 6: “Put on the armor of God so that you may be able to stand firm against the tactics of the devil. For our struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens … So stand fast with your loins girded in truth, clothed with righteousness as a breastplate, and your feet shod in readiness for the gospel of peace. In all circumstances, hold faith as a shield, to quench all [the] flaming arrows of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.” You and I are going to need it.

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Mark S. Latkovic, S.T.D., is professor of moral and systematic theology at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit.