“Painting the Catholic Church as “out of touch” is like shooting fish in a barrel, what with the funny hats and gilded churches. And nothing makes it easier than the Church’s stance against contraception.
Many people, (including our editor) are wondering why the Catholic Church doesn’t just ditch this requirement. They note that most Catholics ignore it, and that most everyone else finds it divisive, or “out-dated.” C’mon! It’s the 21st century, they say! Don’t they SEE that it’s STUPID, they scream.
Here’s the thing, though: the Catholic Church is the world’s biggest and oldest organization. It has buried all of the greatest empires known to man, from the Romans to the Soviets. It has establishments literally all over the world, touching every area of human endeavor. It’s given us some of the world’s greatest thinkers, from Saint Augustine on down to René Girard. When it does things, it usually has a good reason. Everyone has a right to disagree, but it’s not that they’re a bunch of crazy old white dudes who are stuck in the Middle Ages.
So, what’s going on?
The Church teaches that love, marriage, sex, and procreation are all things that belong together. That’s it. But it’s pretty important. And though the Church has been teaching this for 2,000 years, it’s probably never been as salient as today.
Today’s injunctions against birth control were re-affirmed in a 1968 document by Pope Paul VI called Humanae Vitae. He warned of four results if the widespread use of contraceptives was accepted:
- General lowering of moral standards
- A rise in infidelity, and illegitimacy
- The reduction of women to objects used to satisfy men.
- Government coercion in reproductive matters.
Does that sound familiar?
Because it sure sounds like what’s been happening for the past 40 years.
As George Akerloff wrote in Slate over a decade ago,
By making the birth of the child the physical choice of the mother, the sexual revolution has made marriage and child support a social choice of the father.
Instead of two parents being responsible for the children they conceive, an expectation that was held up by social norms and by the law, we now take it for granted that neither parent is necessarily responsible for their children. Men are now considered to be fulfilling their duties merely by paying court-ordered child-support. That’s a pretty dramatic lowering of standards for “fatherhood.”
How else are we doing since this great sexual revolution? Kim Kardashian’s marriage lasted 72 days. Illegitimacy: way up. In 1960, 5.3% of all births in America were to unmarried women. By 2010, it was 40.8% [PDF]. In 1960 married families made up almost three-quarters of all households; but by the census of 2010 they accounted for just 48 percent of them. Cohabitation has increased tenfold since 1960.
And if you don’t think women are being reduced to objects to satisfy men, welcome to the internet, how long have you been here? Government coercion: just look to China (or America, where a government rule on contraception coverage is the reason why we’re talking about this right now).
Is this all due to the Pill? Of course not. But the idea that widely-available contraception hasn’t led to dramatic societal change, or that this change has been exclusively to the good, is a much sillier notion than anything the Catholic Church teaches.
So is the notion that it’s just OBVIOUSLY SILLY to get your moral cues from a venerable faith (as opposed to what? Britney Spears?).
But let’s turn to another aspect of this. The reason our editor thinks Catholics shouldn’t be fruitful and multiply doesn’t hold up, either. The world’s population, he writes, is on an “unsustainable” growth path.
The Population Bureau of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations sees (PDF, h/t Pax Dickinson) the rate of population growth slowing over the next decades and stabilizing around 9 billion in 2050…and holding there until 2300. (And note that the UN, which promotes birth control and abortions around the world, isn’t exactly in the be-fruitful-and-multiply camp.)
More broadly, the Malthusian view of population growth has been resilient despite having been proven wrong time and time again and causing lots of unnecessary human suffering. For example, China is headed for a demographic crunch and social dislocation due to its misguided one-child policy.
Human progress is people. Everything that makes life better, from democracy to the economy to the internet to penicillin was either discovered and built by people. More people means more progress. The inventor of the cure for cancer might be someone’s fourth child that they decided not to have.
So, just to sum up:
- It’s a good idea for people to be fruitful and multiply; and
- Regardless of how you feel about the Church’s stance on birth control, it’s proven pretty prophetic.
Oliver Twist: Once Anti-Semitic, Now Universal?
“A new study by an Australian academic, John Waller, argues that Dickens took his story from the memoirs of a poorhouse boy, Robert Blincoe, published in 1832, five years before Oliver. The Real Oliver Twist (Icon Books, £16.99) may have uncovered a source of Dickensian detail, but no affinity of character.
As for Fagin, there is no telling where he came from. Dickens admitted that he knew no Jews at the time. Yet, like Shakespeare before him, he allowed the villain a certain endearing avuncularity. One feels Fagin’s sorrow as gives up Oliver to the custody of Sikes. Rachel Portman’s attractive score studiously underplays the accompaniment of Jewish music to Jewish misery.
Ben Kingsley endows the villain with tragic inevitability: a lonely old man, scrabbling for trinkets of security and a little human warmth. The story ends in his prison cell, gallows rising in the square outside. Instead of Dickens’ happy ending, showing Oliver’s acceptance into polite society, the apotheosis is cruel and appropriately sanctimonious. In this, and most other ways, the film is true to the spirit of the story and of the author’s ambiguities: for the blurring of anti-semitism is something in which Dickens himself ultimately conspired.
In 1860, Dickens sold his London home to a Jewish banker, James Davis. ‘The purchaser of Tavistock House will be a Jew Money-Lender,’ he told a friend. Some time later he added: ‘I must say that in all things the purchaser has behaved thoroughly well, and that I cannot call to mind any occasion when I have had money-dealings with anyone that have been so satisfactory, considerate and trusting.’
He took quite a shine to the banker’s wife, Eliza Davis, who reproached him in a letter of 1863 for the ‘great wrong’ he had committed in Oliver Twist. Two years later, Dickens created in Our Mutual Friend the noble character of Riah, an elderly Jew who finds jobs for downcast young women in Jewish-owned factories. ‘I think there cannot be kinder people in the world,’ exclaims one of the girls. ‘There is nothing but good will left between me and a People for whom I have a real regard and to whom I would not willfully have given an offense,’ wrote Dickens to Mrs Davis.
He set about revising Oliver Twist in light of her criticisms, removing almost all mention of ‘the Jew’ from the last 15 chapters. In one of his last public readings in 1869, a year before his death, Dickens cleansed Fagin of stereotypical caricature. ‘There is no nasal intonation; a bent back but no shoulder-shrug: the conventional attributes are omitted,’ or so the reports have it.
This attempt to make amends redeems Oliver Twist, for me, from the index of anti-Semitic English literature, a list that stretches from Chaucer through Marlow to Trollope and Belloc, Agatha Christie and T S Eliot. It was certainly Dickens’ final intention that ‘the Jew’ should be incidental in Oliver Twist and in his film Polanski has given the story a personal dimension that renders it irreproachably universal.“
US-backed mobs burn 30 alive in Odessa
Daniel McAdams on US-backed mass-murder in Odessa:
“Friday in Odessa, Ukraine, more than 30 anti-Kiev protesters were burned alive, as a US-backed pro-Kiev mob set fire to the trade union building into which they ran to escape the pro-Kiev crowd. It was the largest loss of life in Ukraine since the US-backed coup in February, and it may well be a turning point in the east versus west struggle that ensued.
The pictures from the scene were ghastly (warning: graphic), as desperate protesters tried to claw their way out of the building as they were burned alive. Also ghastly were the photos of the young girls happily making the molotov cocktails that were thrown into the building. These smiling girls are accomplices to mass murder.
More ghastly still, was the US media coverage of the savage event. Even when a 25 minute video available clearly demonstrated what happened in Odessa, clearly demonstrated who was responsible for the incineration of unarmed protesters, the US media all hewed to the State Department line that pointedly refused to pin any blame on the pro-Kiev mob supported by Washington. Said the State Department release:
The events in Odesa that led to the deadly fire in the Trade Union Building dramatically underscore the need for an immediate de-escalation of tensions in Ukraine. The violence and efforts to destabilize the country must end.
Contrast this to US government’s very different position when violence broke out in Kiev in February: even as evidence pointed to much violence committed by the protesters, the US nevertheless blamed the then-Yanukovich government exclusively.
Double standards.
And the US media was not far behind the State Department in its Odessa spin.
According to the Los Angeles Times:
Thirty of the victims died of smoke inhalation after a fire was set in the central trade union building, where pro-Russia separatists reportedly had taken up sniper positions to fire on pro-unity demonstrators.
LA Times spins it like burning more than 30 protesters alive was a purely defensive measure. But if they were all snipers, why did they not shoot their way out?
In lock-step with the State Department, the NY Daily News reported that:
…for reasons still unclear, a fire broke out in a trade union building and the death toll started to climb.
This even though their own article features a photo of a pro-Kiev protester tossing a firebomb into the building!
As to be expected, the New York Times followed the State Department line of avoiding any real reporting that might damage the US-backed regime in Kiev, preferring to present the act of mass murder as some sort of tragic accident:
Violence also erupted Friday in the previously calmer port city of Odessa, on the Black Sea, where dozens of people died in a fire related to clashes that broke out between protesters holding a march for Ukrainian unity and pro-Russian activists
There are too many more examples of the US media’s lock-step reporting on this event to cover here.
But even the virulently anti-Russian and pro-Kiev Kyiv Post could get the basic reporting correct:
A mob shouted “Glory to Ukraine” and “Death to enemies” as the building burned with people inside.
That makes it pretty clear who did the torching and who did the dying.
Continued the Kyiv Post:
Photographs circulating on Twitter and Facebook show people – some presumably in their teens – mixing explosive concoctions in discarded beer bottles before lobbing them into the building.
Why did the US media not report any of this? Because they did not want the American public to see any possibility other than the US government official line, which is that the post-coup government in Kiev and its supporters represent the legitimate and democratic will of the people and anyone who protests against that government or its supporters is a Russian agent and a terrorist.
The US mainstream media marches lock-step with the US government, even to the point of covering up a most vile mass murder. It is only alternative sources and networks like RT (and RPI) that dare to cross the State Department line.
No wonder the US State Department has declared war on RT.”
(No: RT is also not to be trusted fully. It’s to be balanced against the US media and both to be weighed against what independent analysts – such few as there are – say).
Belize Church rejects contraceptive imperialism
“Belize’s Roman Catholic Bishop Dorick Wright issued a directive to the country’s Catholic schools stating that “organizations whose activities and positions are actively opposed to the moral teachings of the Catholic Church, and which endanger the souls of the People of God, cannot be welcomed under any circumstances in our schools.”
The bishop’s letter specifically named the Belize Family Life Association (BFLA), the United Belize Advocacy Movement (UNIBAM), the National AIDS Commission and the Red Cross program called “Together We Can,” according to Amandala News.
Bishop Wright charged these groups with promoting “the First World’s errors and problems” among “unsuspecting people,” such as the notion of “sexual rights” among children, as well as abortion and homosexuality, and warned that they “foster programs that ultimately undermine our Catholic values.”
“These organizations often present themselves as champions of some apparent good, whether it be to educate on sexuality and reproductive rights, AIDS, or to administer certain medical treatments or shots to our children, but despite some apparent good, you must, nevertheless, respectfully decline any and all invitation or association with any such organizations. I make this directive to all local managers of Catholic Schools, assistant local managers, all administrators, principals and teachers,” Bishop Wright said.
Stressing that Planned Parenthood is an international billion-dollar business that profits from the killing of babies through abortion, Bishop Wright said, “BFLA, the operational arm in Belize of International Planned Parenthood, is an instrument of the most serious crimes against life and our Christian morality.”
Anti-NWO blogger Vadakayil arrested for defamation
I’ve linked Ajit Vadakayil’s often colorful blog here a couple of times. He’s more than somewhat controversial and his language can be over the top but his blogging is in good faith (so far as I can see) so I’ve linked him.
Now comes news that one of the targets of his blog, Bollywood actor Aamir Khan, has had him arrested for defamation.
“A retired Merchant Navy officer has been arrested for allegedly defaming Bollywood actor Aamir Khan and his television show Satyamev Jayate on social media. The retired officer – Ajit Vadakayil, 58 – was arrested from Manipal in Karnataka on Thursday, the Mumbai police said.
Vadakayil’s arrest came after a complaint was lodged by the actor. In his complaint, Khan said that “false messages which claimed that donations sought in his TV show were going to a trust working for a particular religion” were being circulated through electronic media.
“Vadakayil was arrested and was immediately granted bail. Today, we filed a chargesheet against him in the court,” a crime branch officer said.
Vadakayil has been booked under relevant sections of the Information Technology Act and for defamation under the Indian Penal Code.
Last month, Aamir Khan had met Joint Police Commissioner (Crime) Sadanand Date at Mumbai Police headquarters and briefed him about the “false and malicious messages” being circulated on social networking sites Facebook, Twitter and messaging app WhatsApp were damaging his image and the reputation of his issue-based reality show.
The Cyber Crime Investigation cell had later blocked the content on the website.
Khan, through a social networking site, had said false and malicious messages were circulating through various electronic media, including Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter and other social media networks alleging donations are being sought in his television programme Satyamev Jayate, in relation to an entity by the name of Humanity Trust working for a particular religion.
Khan had said West Bengal’s Humanity Trust had nothing to do with Humanity Trust referred to in the messages.
The actor had also clarified “all donations sought in the show are used and channelised for entirely deserving and secular causes, contrary to the content of the highly mischievous/malicious insinuations in the messages, being circulated by vested and unscrupulous interest.”
Truth is understood from experience, not evidence
And experience can be grasped both directly and from the retelling of artists. More here, from one of my latest discoveries, the talented and insightful writer Anthony Esolen:
“The young person who is steeped in history will be armed against the latest fashions in What Everybody Knows. He’ll understand, if but intuitively, that a study conducted by an eel, in the pot of eels, on the habits of the other eels, is going to be of limited applicability to raccoons foraging freely over the woods.
The young person trained by good books to look at the reality of things will be armed against the sophomoric skeptic. If you say to him, “Where is your proof that children are better off growing up with a married father and mother?” he will look at you, and rightly, as if you were a color blind person demanding proof of the existence of green. He might reply, “Do I need to wait for a sociologist to do a study to prove to me that children should play outside?” Of course they should grow up with a married mother and father. He sees in his mind’s eye Oliver Twist and the Dodger and the rest of the rabble of boys, huddling in the condemned building with Fagin, who teaches them to steal, and who secretly turns them over to hanging when he’s through with them. He sees Jane Eyre, and Esther Summerson, and Tom Jones.
You read good books to join in conversation with people who see farther or more deeply than most of us. You enter the quiet room with Jane Austen, who says, with a sly smile, “Is it really true that we understand our own desires? How often rather do we conceal them from ourselves by clever names? Didn’t young Emma do that, when she nearly spoiled the life of her young friend Harriet?” Robert Browning laughs from the corner, beckoning you to come near. “Miss Austen is surely right about that! But have you ever stopped to think that some people do evil by owning up to their desires and revealing them, at the right moment and to the right person? Allow me to introduce you to my Duke, and the painting of his last Duchess.”
“Yes,” says a slender, sober man in a tunic, who looks as if he’s spent most of his life listening and not speaking. “The Queen of Carthage was once a noble and pious woman, until she was seized by her dreadful desire. It spares no one.” He seems as if he were about to add something, but falls silent again.
“But there are two loves, and not just one,” says a man with a bishop’s miter, “and two cities, each built upon the foundation of one of those loves. The one city is called Babylon, and the other is called the New Jerusalem.”
“That first city’s name is Florence,” says a sardonic poet with a set jaw and an eagle’s beak for a nose. “I should know, because I lived there.”
“And they threw you out of the city,” says Browning, coming over to Dante to throw an arm around his neck. “By the way, that painting you said you were making of Beatrice, what happened to it? I would give more for that painting, just because you were not a painter, than I would for another fifty of your love poems, as highly as I esteem them!”
“But doesn’t my thought shine more brightly in the poetry, in which I’m skilled, than in a painting?”
“I don’t want your thought. I have that already. I want the human being in all his ordinary glory and weakness. I wrote a poem about that painting, you know. It was a love poem for my wife Elizabeth. Have you met her?”
You do not read good books so that you can scramble up some tricks, so that you can write clever things about them, so that you can do well on a test and secure a prestigious job and then die. You learn about the language and about what writers do, so that you can read good books and learn to love them, because they are companions who will tell you what they have seen of the truth, and they tell you it in a way you will not soon forget.”
Brunei adopts Sharia Law
“Beginning on April 1, the tiny but oil and petroleum-rich nation of Brunei, will be the first eastern Asian country to implement nation-wide the strict penal code of Shariah. This law strictly regulates punishments such as the amputation of limbs for theft, stoning for adultery, and flogging for alcohol consumption, abortion and homosexuality.
Those punishments are referred to as “hudud,” or punishments that are fixed for certain kinds of crimes, ones which are referred to as “claims of Allah.” Under strict Islamic law, the sovereign is required to apply those punishments for the stated crimes whether or not the victim complains…..”
AND
“The nation’s top Islamic scholar scolded critics for focusing solely on the amputations, stonings and canings.
Mufti Awang Abdul Aziz explained that there will not be “indiscriminate cutting or stoning or caning.”
In other words, only if one is found guilty of one of the crimes for which those punishments is required, will one be subjected to it. And there were at least initial guarantees that only Muslims will be subject to the Hudud.
Following several months of critical responses from some Bruneians, the Sultan issued a harsh warning to his people last month, through an official statement marking Brunei’s National Day.
Brunei citizens were warned that online criticism of the future imposition of the Shariah penal code and even about the Sultan would get them in a great deal of trouble. The threat was sufficiently broad that it suggested there might be a move to interfere with Internet access unless the criticism stopped.
The threat was posed as a rebuke to “outsiders” who are using the Internet to influence people within Brunei, who in turn criticize and even dare to mock the decisions of the Sultan.”
Priapus: The God of Modernity
Update: Again, the needful clarification:
I don’t support Esolen’s position on gay marriage, just because I agree with the accuracy of his exposition of Christian doctrine.
In contrast to Esolen, I fully support the right of homosexuals to marry and adopt children and raise their own children in any way they want.
I go even farther.
I think polygamists, poly-amorists, and every other bi- or trans group should be free to form their own types of marriages/group couplings…or unions… and create churches that agree with them, if they want to.
But I do object to attempts to rewrite traditional Christian teaching to make it approve these practices and I affirm my right to state that those unions are not consonant with the traditional teaching of Christianity or the major religious traditions.
Apparently, in some circles, that still makes me a “bigot” and “hater.”
One thing is true. I am bigoted in favor of truthful statements and I hate falsification of history and mendacious media campaigns.
ORIGINAL POST
I just discovered an interesting conservative Christian magazine – Touchstone, which claims to be a defense of “mere Christianity” – C. S. Lewis’ term for unadorned traditional Christian teaching. An article there argues that the real god behind the “environmental feminism or eco-feminism” of the New World Order is not the goddess Gaia, as its naive proponents believe, but the God Priapus.
Anthony Esolen on the real god behind Gaia – Priapus:
“We may never budge one inch on what is essential. We will not tell a lie, even to please the world and win us the accolades of faculty bishops and historians everywhere. We will not move.
In our day, the issue is not Christology. We’re not so sophisticated in our heresies. The issue is sex. We’re encouraged to pretend that the child-making act is not essentially ordered to child-making. We must pretend that it’s only the friction of erogenous flesh. We must pretend that a man can be made into a woman by a saw and a trowel, and a woman into a man by pinning the tail on the donkey, or by just thinking it is so. We must pretend that a child in the womb is just some stuff or other. We must pretend that boys and girls do not deserve a married father and mother, promised to one another for life. If we are Christian, we must say to Christ, “Thus far and no farther! You can have all the world, but these few inches are mine.”
Demands of the New Religion
Now let us be quite clear. We have not chosen this fight. The new religion has come to us, and it demands total submission. It demands that we cease to worship God, and that we cease to tell the truth. We have come to the cleft in the road, what Lewis called the great divorce. God will, if we allow him, heal our evil ways; Jesus came to call sinners. But God can no more accept evil in his household than he can cease to be God. He is holy. He will wash our grubby robes white in his blood, but Truth cannot lie. He cannot declare the unclean to be clean. He can only make it clean by his grace.
The new religion of sex requires us to take down the Cross and erect something else. We must not do so. It requires us to abandon our fellow men to lusts that destroy the common good, as even sociologists, often the slow kids on the block, have begun to see. We must not do so. It requires us to subject our bodies to the phantasms of homeless postmodern man. We must not do so. It requires us to avert our eyes as our little brothers and sisters are dismembered. We must not do so. It requires us to wink as the minds of children are subjected to confusion in order to ratify the choices of adults. We must not do so. It requires us to subordinate political liberty to sexual license. We must not do so.
It requires us to spit upon the Cross, to sink our fingers in the blood of innocent children, to harden our hearts against the crushed lives of brothers and sisters who learn to their dismay that Priapus is a stupid and stupefying idol. It requires us to like ourselves rather than love our neighbors. It requires us to tell a deadly lie.
Raise One Sword
We must not do so. We shall not do so. Truth is truth to the end of time. Even if the battle appears lost, let each Christian raise one sword at least against the lie. Even if the fight is fierce, the warfare long, let each Christian remember that our Captain triumphed in and through the hour of his utter defeat upon Calvary. We set our faces like flint. While there is breath in our lungs and blood in our hearts, we will not cease to tell the truth, and we will not bend one inch in homage to the idol.
The Lord does not require that we win. He requires that we be steadfast. The battle is not ours but his. Yet let us not suppose that we are doomed to lose this fight. The gates of hell are not iron; the gates of hell are straw. For a vanguard has gone before us that our opponents cannot see, whose very existence they do not suspect. It is that great cloud of witnesses—and they are armed in the full array of God.”
Use filters on your search engines
I just realized that you can block untoward search results from your searches with a simple trick that doesn’t involve buying any software or signing up for anything.
If you’re searching on Google, which isn’t a great idea in the first place, you just need to click on the word Settings on the Google page.
It’s to the right of the search box.
Once in Settings, click on Safe-search and then on Lock Safe-search. The terms might be slightly different on some computers. Then save your settings.
That should filter out spammy webs-sites or porn imagery even on regular sites.
I figured this out recently because I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of the whole Belle Knox story, which strikes me as extremely suspicious and most likely a concocted propaganda story of some kind.
Anyway, it’s hard to research the topic without running into her raunchy pictures. They pop up even on the first page of her Google search. Apart from being annoying, there’s always the danger of malicious software being hidden in such things and of accidentally clicking on one of those pop-ups while trying to read an article.
Once your settings are saved, you will no longer have to have the rude, crude, and vulgar stuff shoved into your face, just because you decide to take a second look at an obviously rotten story.
Why obviously?
Because college-age prostitution has been around for decades and it was never shoved into mainstream news before.
Because how many strippers do you know who can in the space of weeks get columns and write-ups on Huffington Post, Time Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Playboy. with leading magazine writers vying to defend them and excoriate their critics?
And how many do you know who are offered their own TV shows, writing gigs, and college lecture circuit? Especially, when said porn “stars” have barely begun working in the porn industry?
And how many keep getting called “The Duke Porn Star,” when they just joined Duke?
The “Duke porn star” label was branding at its finest and the whole story seems to be an advertising campaign by the porn industry, which has taken a big hit in recent years from the rise of amateur (do-it-yourself) free porn.
So now the industry is reinventing itself to compete…
Some savvy porn entrepreneur ran into the Weeks family and saw in their self-harming, unstable, emotionally needy adolescent (with her body-image and boundary-setting problems and a history of rape and drug use) the perfect vehicle to take violent porn, degradation, and sado- masochism mainstream….with the added twist of a “star” who is “barely legal” but looks about 12.
In America, it’s always “follow the money….”
“Tolerant” liberals threaten violence against orthodox nun
Crisis magazine reports that a leftist group’s outrage over a nun’s orthodox criticism of homosexuality was really a tantrum over the resurgence of orthodoxy in a hitherto liberal enclave of Catholicism:
“All of this
(Lila: “This” refers to the outrage of some students, parents, and faculty, at Sister Jane Dominic Laurel’s traditionalist lecture about homosexuality at a Catholic high school in Charlotte, North Carolina.)
led to perhaps the most acrimonious part of this story, the intense and vexatious school assembly where Father Matthew Kauth, school chaplain and the one who is blamed for all of this was—in the words of several witnesses—crucified. And this is where the real story of the nun’s lecture comes to light.
The story was never really about the nun. She was collateral damage for those who wanted the scalp of Father Kauth and even more want to stem encroaching orthodoxy from this otherwise Catholic-light enclave. The larger story is about how the dissenting Church is dying in Charlotte, North Carolina and this is perhaps its dying gasps.
So quickly did the poison build up in the school—what with teachers fanning the flames, parents in irregular relationships stoking the fire, dissenting nuns and perhaps a few grey-haired priests lending a hand, and all the largely unformed students wanting to be “fair” and “loving” and “non-judgmental”—the diocese decided to have an all-parents meeting to let off some steam.
The meeting started with general statements by the diocesan representatives and then a prepared apology from Father Kauth. When I first read his statement, it seemed to me he was throwing Sister to the wolves. He said she did not give the talk he asked for. But here’s the problem. According to sources close to the situation, when Kauth asked for the talk he heard previously that talk did not have the homosexual part in it.
Sister had been to the school last fall and spoken to smaller groups segregated by sex and in the company of parents. That talk had the gay stuff in it and it was received positively. When Father asked for a talk, Sister thought he meant that talk. She went to him twice to ask, “Are you sure you want that talk?” Father twice said yes, but they were talking about two different lectures. Sister knew in her bones the talk with the gay stuff would not fly in an all-school assembly.
Kauth apologized for that and that makes sense. He did not back away from the material, only from the venue and he blamed himself.
Did that stop the wolf-pack come to pick at his innards and suck on his bones?
The angry parents yelled and screamed and demanded for what was supposed to be an hour and a half but stretched into two and a half hours. Their cries were like cries of pain from deep within their souls. They were smart not to challenge Church teaching. Very few are willing to come right out and say they disagree with Church teaching, to announce they contracept, or believe in a woman’s right to abort, or that men who have sex with men can marry each other.
One mother shared with me a text message she received from a dissenting mother. I quote it in full so as not to be charged with cherry picking:
Parents’ objections were never about the churches official teaching on adultery as it pertains to homosexuals having sex. Or about the church’s teaching about any kind of sex for that matter. Contraception never came up? The objection was to the statement of non doctrine “scientific facts” made, the manner in which the facts were presented, the age range and co-gender audience it was presented to, the fact that parents were not notified of the program like EVERY OTHER program at the school, etc. No one is afraid to talk. We just want to stick to the facts of what happened and not defend ourselves against baseless claims that we are “dissenting” simply because protocol in partnering with parents was violated on purpose and non scientific, non doctrine facts were dumped on kids as young as 13. In a co-gendered audience. [Austin Ruse’s] message back to you indicates he may just be part of that crowd insinuating heterodoxy where it simply doesn’t apply just to cause more division. The division in the school is because of the way it was handled. And in so doing children were marginalized and the saddest point of all of it, not once was God’s love for all his children ever, ever mentioned. And that last part? Came straight from my daughter’s mouth. They accomplished nothing if that is what my amazing, wholesome, smart and faithful girl walked away with.
Note this mother thinks that men who have sex with men is simply a matter of adultery as if they could have sex if they were married, yet she is at pains to say she does not disagree with Church teaching.
She is upset that “non-doctrinal” facts were presented though if you go to the catechism you find the only reason for homosexual attraction is “psychological.” The church is silent on genetic factors. Note also her insistence in using the word “gender” even in the clumsy formulation “co-gendered” rather than something simple as “co-ed” or even “boys and girls.”
Their insistence on process masks their deep problem with Church teaching and a lack of courage to express it.
So, at the meeting they did not yell and scream about Church teaching but about process, and yell and scream they did. “Why weren’t we told?” “Why didn’t you stop her?” After each emotional outburst, a crowd of parents, at least one gay couple included, would stand and cheer and it all came out like the stomping of little feet among those who have not gotten their way.
Any parent who rose to defend the Priest and the school, were shouted down. Parents who tried to defend the priest and the school are now frightened, frightened physically and frightened for their children. That is why none of them wanted to go on the record.
As the meeting progressed, Father Kauth tried to answer their questions but the questions became all the same and the angry mob was not listening. Someone told me it reminded them of why Christ did not answer some of his questioners; the questioners simply were not interested in listening, only venting and getting a pound of flesh. Sympathetic parents said they had never seen such a display of anger and hatred directed at a priest.
And this gets to the slightly larger question. Prior to Father Kauth’s arrival two years ago, the school only had visiting priests, no regular confession, never regularly daily Mass. Kauth arrived and insisted on a daily presence, an open door, regularly scheduled confession, daily Mass. Mass attendance began to spike. Now half the chapel may be filled for the twenty minute Mass he gives each morning before lunch. If he runs late, there is a stack of “Mass Passes” that get them back into class without problems.
He outraged the lefty faculty not long ago when on a weekend day, not during school hours, he blessed the school, the whole school, all the classrooms, and then presided over the Traditional Latin Mass in the chapel. At least one teacher was outraged. “He blessed my room? He did this without MY permission?”
The left is dying in Charlotte and this is at least one of their last gasps. The small seminary has twenty-two young men, all orthodox. As they are graduated and ordained they come to run parishes that hitherto had been run by the pungency of dissent. One source told me, “When a new orthodox priest takes over a parish, the dissenters up and leave and have to go somewhere else and they are running out of places to go.”
Lila: Sister Laurel, meanwhile, was forced out of her public commitments:
“And what of the nun? Sadly, she immediately cancelled all of her upcoming speaking engagements. Reliable sources tell me she received too many threats of violence to proceed. Such is the tolerance of the sexual left.”
Also at Crisis Magazine, Rev. James V. Schall describes how the liberal intolerance of orthodox belief has led to the existence of two churches. He identifies a “church of the media,” whose doctrine is expected to follow state legislation, and the real church, where a “remnant” of believers cling to the traditional doctrine of the Christianity, in defiance of modern mores:
“By identifying religious and philosophical ideas as the cause of civil discontent, Hobbes was able to justify giving the state absolute power over public expression. This prevention was accomplished by the presumed fear of violent death if the law was violated. In a way, modern public opinion produces the same effect, a kind of civil death in which a reasonable position is simply said not to exist. If we do not allow anything but what the state or the culture permits, no matter what it is, we will end up with a “peaceful” society that has been intimidated and ridiculed into silence.
As a result, the arguments against these disorders are never heard. Society becomes locked into itself. No one is able to diagnose its ills. But this new form of suppression of dissent works also in the churches. Since their members also display widespread instances of divorce, homosexuality, in vitro births, abortions, and various other ways of life considered to be unnatural or harmful, it makes opposing these things in church also problematic.
Many basic teachings are simply seldom heard from the pulpit out of fear of dissent in the congregation or the loss of state funds. Politicians and other public figures who advocate positions against basic Church teachings are not expelled. They remain members in good standing. In this context, an ordinary person will conclude that the Church is silent about these teachings because they are indefensible. Protests are immediately heard whenever a strong and informed case is made against these deviations from Catholic teaching; as a result, the Church is often found speechless.
And if the arguments are seldom heard, it will not be surprising if the majority of people assume that the Christian churches have in fact abandoned their teachings as they have been urged to do. There will be in effect two churches. The first is the old-fashioned one, the minority, that still advocates the orthodox positions that are now largely against the civil law and public opinion. The second is the church of the media in which everything is understood as evolving and developing in the direction of what the civil law establishes. This will be presented as what is best for man and what the churches ought to teach. The orthodox Christian view will appear to undermine civil peace. A remnant will be left that will not go along with what modern society permits.”
Professor Anthony Esolen, in another Crisis article, argues that this “not getting along” with the world is the church’s very heart and soul because the teachings of Jesus Christ always scandalize society, even though they are objectively true in the moral realm.
Today, it is Christ’s stringent teachings about sexuality that create scandal:
“The Church’s teachings liberate. I’ve experienced it. The habits of the Sexual Revolution enslave, and bring in their wake a great deal of human misery, and even blood. That may make people unhappy to hear, but it is a fact.”