“Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me…”

In today’s Gospel, Jesus takes a little child and, counterposing him to his childish disciples, tells them: “Whoever receives a little child like this receives me and receives not me but Him who sent me…” (i.e., God).

Most homilists likely talk about “childlike faith” and “simplicity” and the “non-ambition of a child,” which is both good and understandable.

But let me suggest a topic desperately worthy of discussion: what that teaching says about openness to parenthood (acknowledgement to Fr. Paul Scalia for the idea).

Note the verb “receives.” To “receive” is to welcome something or someone who already exists, that is, and has a right to be. To “receive” is to welcome something or someone that does not now belong to me—a gift. To “receive” is a sign of gratitude for the gift received and the trust shown.

A child is a gift. Among the pious or anachronistic, it’s even sometimes heard that a child is a “gift from God.” Honest people have to ask, however, whether the mainstream attitudes of our culture really believe that.

If we read the Gospel rather than focus on maudlin images, we might also discover that Jesus raises the stakes. Receiving a child is equivalent to receiving Jesus. Not content to leave it at that, Jesus ramps the stakes higher: it’s not just receiving Jesus but receiving “Him who sent me…”

Of course, implicit here is the converse argument: not receiving—rejecting a child—is to reject Jesus. Not only is it to reject Jesus, but it is to reject Him who sent Jesus and told us “this is my beloved Son, listen to Him!”

Yet we live in a culture that says roughly a million times per year that we need not receive a child. We live in a culture that says a child is not a “gift” but a “choice.” And even when we pretend a child is a “gift” (e.g., with artificial reproductive technologies), there’s something of the ingrate in the discussion, because we reserve the right to return or exchange the gift if it doesn’t meet our expectations. Indeed, there’s evidence to suggest that the turn away from motherhood after the Dobbs decision is precisely because contemporary women of childbearing age want the nine-month-return-no-questions-asked guarantee of Roe v. Wade.

Well, you say, ours is a pluralistic culture, and so you cannot expect the vast majority of Americans to be guided by your theological argument.

While U.S. religious diversity is greater than it’s ever been, about 63% (i.e., nearly two-thirds) of Americans still identify as Christians. That their denominations may be fudging (or even openly ignoring) Jesus’s teaching shows that the Old Testament distinction between genuine and false prophets remains alive and well today.

From the perspective of Catholic sexual ethics, a child is always a gift—never a “right,” a “choice,” or an “expectation.” That perspective is rooted in that fact that every child is always first God’s creation, not his parents.

How so? Two reasons. First, every person always belongs to God, but never to any other human person. God is our Maker, and therefore has a claim over us. We are all brothers and sisters. Second, no mother or father can create a soul. Their sexual intercourse contributes the physical matter necessary for physical development, but human life is more than just a physical process. For human life to begin and develop requires a soul—and only God can make a soul. So, even before parents can thank each other for the gift of life, they first have to thank God. That is, they first have to “receive a child” given to them.

And it is precisely that receptivity that is awry in our society.

Consider the brouhaha generated over J.D. Vance’s comments about childlessness. Yes, his formulation may have had a polemical edge, but it’s the core of his argument–that our culture is fleeing parenthood–is the real issue. And it’s precisely that contention–that having kids is and should be seen as normal and desirable–that is what his opponents call “weird.”

Think about that: thinking that having babies is natural and normal is now “weird”!

What’s really “weird” is the culture that thinks that way, because it has lost the insight into the child as gift. Nor should we lose sight of the fact that this loss also stems from a loss of faith, which no longer sees “receiving a child” as a gift of God to be welcomed in love.

Karol Wojtyła spoke of parenthood as a communion of persons (communio personarum). In the conjugal embrace by which children enter the world, the Trinity is in fact imaged twice. It is first imaged in the “threesome” necessary to give life, because every child comes from three persons: the mother and father that contribute the gametes for physical development and God who creates the soul that makes these two gametes passing in the night into a new human being.

The Trinity is then imaged a second time in the human community the enlivened child now creates: a mother and a father with a child through whom the love of the mother and father “proceeds.”

So, yes, if you receive these two miracles in your child, you receive Jesus and, ultimately, God who, after all, defined Himself as “Love” (1 Jn 4:8). And, no, if you don’t receive these two miracles, it’s not just an indifferent and autonomous “choice.” In rejecting the child, one rejects Christ and, ultimately, Him who sent Jesus.

The stakes behind whether we see a child as a gift to be received or a product to be made cannot be higher.

I’ll conclude with an observation made by the French theologian, Laetitia Calmeyn.

After the fall, Genesis speaks of Adam and Eve as giving birth to Cain and Abel. What’s telling is and, as Calmeyn notes, often overlooked is how that childbearing is spoken of. When Eve gives birth to Cain, she says, “I have produced a male child with the help of the Lord” (Gen 4:1).

In some ways, it’s true. It might even seem to some to tally with the vision of receptivity to parenthood sketched above. But Calmeyn (and I) would disagree.

Note where the focus of gravity is: “I have produced a child with the help of the Lord.” “I.” God “helped.” God—without whom no child, no human being, has life—is reduced to a supporting actor.

After Cain kills Abel and then goes into exile, Adam and Eve have another child, Seth. Listen now how Eve speaks of Seth: “God has granted me another offspring in place of Abel” (Gen 4:25). Gone is the “I.” In the words of Professor Henry Higgins, “by George, she’s got it!” The subject of the sentence is “God” who “granted,” that is, gifted, Eve is with a child whom she now receives.

Catholic sexual ethics and parenthood have never been just about “methods”—“natural” versus “artificial” or “doing what comes naturally” versus artificial means of reproduction. Catholic sexual ethics is also about right attitudes, including attitudes of piety (and concomitant humility) that recognize whom God is, whom we are, and how these three are properly related. It is about recognizing that, in Mary’s words also connected with her parenthood, “I am the handmaid of the Lord.”

Mary received her Child as a gift. Let her, the new Eve, be our model of the Catholic attitude towards parenthood, towards “receiving a child.” Because that is how she received her God … and how we do or don’t.