Marriages Are Made In Heaven

(My lovely bride and I celebrated our 29th Wedding Anniversary this past weekend; given that, as well as the Synod on the Family currently unfolding in Rome, it seems Worth Revisiting this post about marriage from January 14th, 2015. To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.)

    Marriage is our oldest human institution, and the indispensible foundation for any successful society, and hence is a perennial topic of discussion.  Just this past week I’ve run across two different articles, one from a positive perspective, the other from the negative; together, they say a lot about marriage today, which is to say that they say a lot about the challenges facing our world.

     First, the good news.  This is a feature article from Foxnews.com called “Seven ways to stay married” [full article here].  The author starts out by explaining that he wanted to know, “What can people do to have a happy, fulfilling, lifelong marriage?”  Rather than ask the so-called experts (“psychologist or self-help gurus”), he went to the real experts: “older Americans who have been married 50, 60, 70 years and more.”  What he found turns out to be not that surprising, at least the first six points (not all are really presented as “ways”): “ 1. Marriage is hard . . .  2. But marriage for a lifetime is worth it . . . 3. Marry someone a lot like you . . . 4. Think small . . . 5. Talk, talk, talk  . . . 6. Stop trying to change your partner.”  Number 7 looks like a new one at first: “Are we hungry?”  “The elders”, our author tells us, recommend stopping to eat when a big fight is in the offing.  As it turns out, the food is just a way of buying some “cooling off” time, which is another tried and true technique.

     The good news about the good news is that all of these things are commonsensical and accessible to anyone, once you know them.  My lovely bride and I have benefited from them (sometimes, it is true, after learning them the hard way) in our own experience over twenty-eight years of marriage.  The bad news is that such obvious things, most of which would have been conventional wisdom passed on from mothers and fathers to their children a couple generations ago, are now presented as revelations.  But it makes sense: how many newlyweds today can turn for advice to parents who are still married to each other?  The number is shrinking all the time.

     Which brings us to Exhibit B: a lifesitenews.com article called “Young men giving up on marriage: ‘Women aren’t women anymore’” [hat tip to Fr. Z; full article here].  The article draws on a survey from the Pew Research Center detailing attitudes about marriage among various people from various age groups.  One section focuses on data showing that young men are growing less interested in marriage: only 29% say that having a successful marriage is one of the most important things, a six-point drop since 1997, while the number of women saying the same thing rose nine points to 37% over the same period (perhaps a reflection of the fact that women and their children suffer the brunt of family erosion more directly).  There are plenty of other frightening statistics in the article; I found this one particularly alarming:: “Just 20 percent of those aged 18 to 29 are married, compared with 59 percent in 1960.”  In other words, four out of five people in their prime child-bearing years are unmarried, which means they are either denying their children the enormous advantages of married parents who are committed to each other and to the family, or they are having no children at all.  Those who do get married after thirty will have much less time for building a family (fertility starts declining sharply after 35, here), but a surprisingly large number of them will never marry at all, according to Pew’s own updated summary [full summary here] of their survey:

                In 1960, some 12% of adults ages 25-34 had never been married.  After 10 years, when that group was between the ages of 35 and 44, 7% of them still hadn’t wed.  By 1980, when they were in their mid-40s to -50s, only 5% had still never married.  The next cohort starting in 1970 followed a similar trajectory.  However, each new cohort of young adults since then has had a higher share of never-married members than the cohort that came before it.  If current trends continue, 25% of young adults in the most recent cohort (ages 25-24 in 2010) will have never married by 2030.  That would be the highest share in modern history. (Pew Research: “Record Share of Americans Have Never Married” – bold mine)

     We are headed into uncharted waters.  In most western countries we are not producing enough babies to replace our current population as it dies, and an increasing proportion of those children who are being born are being raised outside of the framework of the traditional family, with all the well-documented implications for their own well-being and the health and stability of society as a whole.  And, it doesn’t look like it’s going to get better soon: the Pew report also tells us that 67% of those aged 18-29, the prime family-building years, are off the opinion that “society is just as well off if people have other priorities than marriage and children”. This is a recipe for societal suicide.

     And yet . . . I’m not ready to throw in the towel just yet.  Let’s return to the first article for a moment, on the Seven Ways to Stay Married.  We are told that marriage is hard, “both because of the range of stresses and problems that confront all couples, but also because of the fundamental difficulty of merging two separate and different people into one single life.”  Nonetheless, for those who persevere, “It is a sublime experience, a connection to another person unlike any other relationship.  The elders describe it as the experience of a lifetime.” 

     Now, I’m not privy to the author’s private notes, but I can’t help but suspect he’s left something out.  Where do people find the strength and perseverance to stay at it long enough to merge themselves ”into one single life” with another person?  In effect, to sacrifice themselves? One might almost say, to become one flesh? I find it very surprising that none of these long-married couples seem to make any mention of Faith, or relying on the help of God.  Most of the long-married couples I know (not all, it is true, but most) would put those things at the very top of their list.  Surely many of those who spoke to this author did the same. In any case, we know, as Psalm 127 puts it, “If the Lord does not build the house, in vain do its builders labor”, and also “Truly sons are a gift from the Lord, a blessing, the fruit of the womb”.  Not only that, Jesus Christ provides us with both a model of self-sacrifice, and help in bearing our own burdens. 

     Just as God is the only sure foundation for individual marriages, so he is for society as a whole.   Scripture tells us to be ready with reasons for the Hope that is within us (1 Peter 3:15), which means we need to be prepared to speak out on the importance of marriage and family; we also know that those who are not amenable to reason can often be swayed by the power of example, and so we need to show by our actions we honor and support marriage and family life, and that we find it a joyous, "sublime" experience.  Above all, we need to pray for marriage, families, and for our society, and ask the Lord to yet again “turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers” (Malachi 4:6) and heal our wounded culture.

Who Dares To Tell The Emperor He's Naked?

The Emperor’s New Body

    I’m sure we’re all becoming a little tired of hearing about Bruce Jenner and Caitlyn, his new female identity, but I can’t simply ignore a cultural (well, maybe “pop-cultural”) event that is both so large and so perfectly captures the spirit of the age.  I’m not speaking so much of Jenner himself, however (except to offer the suggestion, as others have done, that he is very much in need of our prayers), I’m more interested in the reaction from the elite opinion makers, the media, and society at large.  They remind me of the well-known story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, but with an important difference.  Most of us are familiar with the old fable of the foppish monarch deceived by con-men who exploit his vanity to convince him that he is wearing a splendid new set of clothes, when in fact he is strutting about stark naked.  None of his subjects dare to say anything other than agree that his new “clothes” are indeed magnificent, except for one innocent little boy who blurts out the truth that the emperor is wearing nothing at all.  That breaks the spell, and the emperor and his subjects, realizing how foolish they have been, come to new wisdom.

Bruce Jenner in simpler times

    The first part rings true.  The news media and the arbiters of the conventional wisdom are falling over themselves to call Bruce Jenner “she” and tout his purported bravery, even though he is not really a woman at all, but a man whose outward appearance has been altered by plastic surgery and breast implants. So far, life imitates art. But back to the story: imagine that, instead of sheepishly admitting their foolishness, the emperor’s subjects instead grab the little boy by the scruff of the neck, throw him over the town wall into the moat, and then go back to congratulating the deluded emperor.  That’s how it works in our world. Anyone who does not publicly affirm that Jenner has indeed become a woman, and that this is a marvelous thing, risks being castigated as a “hater” by the cultural elites, and suffering the same treatment as, for instance, the various business executives, bakers, photographers, etc., who have had the temerity to support marriage as it has been traditionally understood. Such are the times in which we live.

Meet The New Boss, Worse Than The Old Boss

    And those are curious times indeed, an era that only someone with a keen sense of irony can truly appreciate.  The two chief ironies that dominate our age both spring from the widespread rejection of God.  The first is that, taking our Lord to be a tyrant, we sought freedom from His laws, and as result find ourselves instead enmeshed in an endlessly growing tangle of man-made rules that are no less oppressive than the old laws, and in fact much more so, because they lack the clarity and consistency of the old ways. More importantly, they are not founded, as are God’s laws, on a perfect understanding of what our human nature requires. On our college campuses, for instance, the simple and straightforward (not to mention commonsensical) mandate that young men and women are not to fornicate has been abolished; in its place has sprung up an excruciatingly byzantine welter of regulations governing what constitutes consent for said fornication, when and how often such consent must be given, and so on.  It is near impossible to keep up with each new embellishment, but woe to the unhappy individual (invariably a young man) who runs afoul of the newest dictate.  By the same logic, our freedom to express our opinions on the matter of human sexuality must defer to the freedom of Bruce Jenner (or whoever) to declare themselves whatever gender they claim to be, even if it’s a “gender” we’ve never heard of before.

“What About Women Who Are Male?”

    The second irony, closely connected to the first, is best summed up in the remark often attributed to G.K. Chesterton (although the actual source is unknown) that when people cease to believe in God they don’t believe in nothing . . . they believe in anything.  And so we see that the secular world, having dismissed God as an “unscientific” fantasy, has itself lost any grounding in reality.  For example, we somehow don't see the immense damage to both individuals and society as a whole that continues to be wrought by the so-called "sexual revolution", and pretend that the manifest differences between men and women are really just a "social construct", in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary.  Many of us are familiar with the quote from Fr. Henri de Lubac, that "It is not true, as it is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God.  What is true is that, without God, he can only organize it against man."  Now we can see that the Godless organize the world not only against man, but against plain common sense, and against reality itself.  In a recent piece columnist Jonah Goldberg explores the sort of mental ju-jitsu that necessarily results from trying to process something like the Jenner phenomenon through the current cultural assumptions:

But the most fascinating argument comes from those who have no problem with Jenner changing genders, but have serious misgivings about the word “woman.”

On a recent MSNBC panel celebrating the “Jenner Effect,” The Nation’s Michelle Goldberg (no relation), noted that many young feminists “no longer want to use the word ‘woman’ in relation to abortion because it excludes trans men.” There’s a lot of “conceptual murk to clear away,” she added with admirable understatement, “but among younger people that I’ve talked to, it almost seems amazing to them that anybody would question the need to have gender-neutral language.”

In a fascinating piece for The New Yorker, Goldberg wrote about this growing schism. Rachel Ivey, a young feminist told Goldberg, “If I were to say in a typical women’s-studies class today, ‘Female people are oppressed on the basis of reproduction,’ I would get called out.”

Some students, she explained, would ask, “What about women who are male?”

Limits? What Limits?

    Such extravagant absurdity seems like the stuff of parody, but the stakes are too high to laugh.  They are certainly high for individual transsexuals themselves, whose lives are no happier after their bodies have been mutilated.  A long-term study in Sweden of all the individuals who underwent sex reassignment surgery in that country from 1973 to 2003 concluded:

Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behavior, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population.

A recent study in the United States found that 41% of transsexuals reported attempting suicide, many time the rate of the rest of the population. In spite of that, it is now illegal in some states (California, Massachusetts, New Jersey) for therapists to try to help transgendered young people to resolve their feelings in favor of their actual sex . . . you can lose your license to practice if you criticize the emperor’s new clothes..

     There are broader implications for society beyond the issues of transgenderism and transsexualism. Their public celebration is a sign of a culture that has already lost a sense of the sacredness of the human person.  In his 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, Bl. Paul VI said

. . . we must accept that there are certain limits, beyond which it is wrong to go, to the power of man over his own body and its natural functions—limits, let it be said, which no one, whether as a private individual or as a public authority, can lawfully exceed. These limits are expressly imposed because of the reverence due to the whole human organism and its natural functions . . . (Humanae Vitae 17)

    But why accept limits, when we think that there is no God above us to whom we are answerable?  And so we have abortion, lab experiments on human embryos and even the creation of human/animal chimeras at the beginning of life, Euthanasia and socially sanctioned suicide at the end, and in between more and more ways in which human beings and their bodies are reduced to playthings. And now, apparently, there are advocates for the “trans-abled” who say that we should applaud and assist those who feel a desperate need to sever perfectly good limbs, and that to do otherwise would be judgmental and discriminatory.

The Truth In Love

    The prognosis is not good for a society that so eagerly embraces such self-destructive insanity, and is at the same time so desperately determined to shut down anyone who dares to point out the obvious truth.  The logical end of it all is total disintegration unless there is a collective return to reason, of which there seems to be little chance any time soon unless people start turning back to God. We who profess to be Christians must continue to pray for the conversion of society (as well as for unhappy victims of its craziness, such as Bruce Jenner), and we should take very seriously our need to model a different, more Godly way.  But we should also not be afraid to speak the truth about the human person, lovingly but forthrightly, remembering that true compassion means trying to prevent people from harming themselves and others, not in encouraging them to do so or congratulating them after the fact.  After all, if those of us who claim to be disciples of Jesus Christ can’t or won’t be witnesses to His Gospel, who will?

The Catholic Teaching on Marriage is Rooted in Love

    Katherine Jean Lopez has a good piece in National Review Online (read article here) about the March for Marriage in Washington, D.C., with a focus on San Francisco Archbishop Cordileone.  The good Archbishop was scolded by various left-leaning types, including “Catholic” politician Nancy Pelosi, for encouraging “hate” by attending the pro-traditional marriage event.  Lopez quotes extensively from Cordileone’s speech at the March to show that the Church is motivated not by hate but by love when it upholds traditional marriage.

     The false charge that any opposition to the deconstruction of the institution of marriage is motivated solely by hatred has been repeated so often by those on the left that not only have they convinced themselves, they have persuaded half the country as well.  Even Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy could find no reason other than “animus” against homosexuals to oppose the imposition of gay marriage.  Archbishop Cordileone knows better; after recounting various problems (economy, immigration, schools) he says:

But none of these solutions will have a lasting effect if we do not rebuild a marriage culture, a culture which recognizes and supports the good of intact families, built on the marriage between a man and a woman committed to loving faithfulness to each other and to their children . . . No justice, no peace, no end to poverty, without a strong culture of marriage and the family.

It’s amazing how hard it is for many people to understand this seemingly obvious truth: there’s no social problem that isn’t made worse by the dissolution of traditional families, and none that wouldn’t be significantly alleviated by more intact families.  It’s an argument I’ve made numerous times (here, here, and here, among others).  The problem is that we’ve convinced ourselves that we can live our lives with self-satisfaction our highest goal, which includes, thanks to contraception, enjoying the pleasures of marital intimacy without the responsibility of children.              

     It’s not as simple as it seems, of course, so while a declining birthrate means that there are fewer and fewer children to support us in our dotage, there are still very many born to parents who aren’t committed enough to each other to stay married or, increasingly, even to get married in the first place.  The result is bad for everyone: a growing number of men who are essentially irrelevant to the families they have fathered, denied the full experience of the paternal role that is their calling; women who are crushed under the burden of being both mother and father, in a culture that is increasingly indifferent to or even disdainful of motherhood; children who grow up without the attention of two full-time parents, and without models of self-sacrificing complementary love – which is not to say they don’t see self-sacrificing love, often heroic self-sacrifice, on the part of the single parent (usually the mother) who is raising them, but the dynamic between parent and dependent child is very different than that between husband and wife. Children don’t learn how to be successful husbands and wives, and increasingly don’t see a lasting marriage as a real possibility.

     Notice that none of the above has anything to do with homosexuality.  Gay activists are quite correct when they point out that heterosexuals had already made a thorough mess of the institution of marriage before "gay marriage" came on the scene.  The question is, do we complete the demolition of the one natural institution most essential to human flourishing and a stable society, or do we work to protect and, ultimately, to restore it? Which, really, is the loving thing?

Related link: I just read about this on Fr. Z's blog: Children's Divorce Stories (here), hosted by Jennifer Roeback Morse at the Ruth Institute; there's some sobering reading here

(Throwback from June 2014)

A Couple Paving Stones On The Road to Hell

      There’s an old saying: “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”  It’s a little odd, when you think about it: shouldn’t our intentions be good?  The road to Heaven certainly isn’t paved with bad intentions, is it?  The answer, I think, is that the second half of the proposition is left out.  It's about good intentions that are not grounded in reality, or in wisdom, or in God’s law: they create more problems than they solve (if, indeed, they solve anything at all).  

     A classic example of the Road to Hell Principle is the thoroughly modern practice known as “Sex Education” (Sex Ed informally).  A concern, and I believe a sincere one in most cases, for the well-being of young people in an increasingly sexualized world has led to instructional programs in schools (and not just public schools) that, because they are disconnected from God’s law, and Natural Law, and plain common sense, promote the very harm they are intended to ameliorate.

     One such program has been in the news recently: a class run by a Planned Parenthood chapter in California that was invited to teach a class on sexuality to 9th graders in the local public high school.  According to the Fox News story [full story here]: 

. . . some parents are irate that their children’s sex ed class at Acalanes High School in Lafayette is being taught by employees of Planned Parenthood without their prior knowledge. They are also fuming over the methods and materials being used, including a checklist that asks students if they are “ready for sex” and another worksheet that describes how to give and obtain consent, as well as a diagram that uses a "genderbread" person for lessons in gender identity. 

The Gingerbread Person is a cute little fellow who clearly was designed to appeal to children, much like the old Camel Cigarettes mascot “Joe Camel”; and like the much maligned cartoon camel, who was criticized for promoting an unhealthy product to children, Gingerbread Person offers reassurance to the very young that whatever they want to express or do sexually is not just all right, but good and desirable.  Things, perhaps, that had not even occurred to them before.  As for the class itself, many of the children “felt the sessions were pressuring them to have sex” or, as one parent put it, “Some of the kids were distracted because it was divergent from what they were taught at home.”  Indeed. For example: 

Included in the materials provided to students were documents and worksheets that included a checklist entitled, “Sex Check! Are You Ready For Sex?” in which the 13 and 14-year-old students are asked questions such as if they have water–based lubricants and condoms and if they could handle a possible infection or pregnancy. Another worksheet reads like a how-to on obtaining consent from a possible sexual partner and offers possible statements like “Do you want to go back to my place?” and “Is it OK if I take my pants off?” 

There are more problems with school-based sex ed classes that I can get into here.  I will point out that the foregoing tends to support what many of us have been saying for a long time: that such classes not only debase sexuality and separate it from it’s appropriate place in a loving marital relationship, but actually encourage (or even “pressure”, as the students say above) early and promiscuous sexual activity.

     Here’s another case, this time from the UK [full story here].  After a sex ed class, a thirteen year-old boy and girl  

. . . went to a secluded area where they discussed what they had just been taught about sexual intercourse.

The boy said that he asked the girl if she wanted to "try sex." Although the young girl repeatedly said "No," the schoolboy proceeded to pin the girl down and rape her. Afterward he allegedly told the girl, "You can go now." 

This is only one case to be sure, but we can see a clear connection between the instruction and the act.  And, as it turns out, many British students have misgivings similar to those expressed by their American counterparts above.  From the Life Site story: 

Earlier this year a poll of UK teenagers by the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) [here]found that a large majority of both boys and girls complained that sex education often presents promiscuity as normal, putting additional pressure on them to become sexually active before they might otherwise do so.

Many of the teens criticized the sex education lessons they had received at school for not doing enough to discourage them from becoming sexually active.

One 18-year-old girl responded to the poll question about her sex-ed experience: "I always felt pressured by teachers, like, 'sex is normal, just be safe OK' when actually I wasn't interested in having sex at the time and was happy to wait for the right person.”

"I don't think sex should be taught as 'the norm'. I think people should be made to feel comfortable and teachers should say, 'you should wait, the law states 16, don't be pressured'."

 

According to Dr. Philip Ney, a retired professor of psychiatry, there is plenty of research to show that the negative effects of sex ed programs are very real.  In an essay he wrote for Life Site News [full article here] he says:

It is quite conclusive now, that the more sex education, the more sexual activity and all the problems that go with that.  The introduction of sex education is well correlated with the increase in abortion, STDs and boy-girl interpersonal problems. Good education gives people the desire to try it out or learn more experientially.  Paradoxically, in that respect, current forms of sex education are good education but have the wrong results . . . The earlier the sex education, the younger children explore sex and try various sexual techniques. Present evidence makes it possible to also conclude that the earlier the sex education, the earlier the sexual behavior. Thus sexual education is sexual titillation. 

Despite all the evidence that these programs do the opposite of what they intend, the “experts” have nothing to offer but more of the same.  In response to the British case above, one such expert said that “in her opinion the solution to this type of misbehavior is more sex education, ‘and much earlier than 13, I would say.’”  

     This whole situation brings to mind an old saying: “Insanity is to keep doing the same thing, while expecting a different result”.  But what else can they do in the public schools, or in the secular world in general?  They have rejected a worldview in which healthy sexuality is nourished and supported.  They have torn down the social attitudes and institutions that protected people from the consequences of lust run amok. In a world where the most important thing is feelings (and isn’t that what the Genderbread Person is all about?), right and wrong are random abstractions.  That’s why even abstinence classes, while better than the Planned Parenthood inspired alternative, are still not enough.  Young people need to be taught not simply the (negative) practice of abstinence but the (positive) virtue of Chastity, and not just in a classroom: they need to see it as part of a coherent worldview, as something that not only works but can be lived out joyfully, especially by the example of the adults in their lives. 

     There are many reasons why Christianity spread as quickly as it did throughout the Roman Empire in the first few centuries after Christ.  I have heard that one of them was that pagan Romans saw the joy in the lives of their Christian neighbors, not the least part of which was the love and respect Christian men had for their wives.  In a culture that more and more encourages people to use each other for pleasure rather than embrace each other in love, we are again called to show a more excellent way.  We need to understand, and help our fellow Catholics see, that Church teachings on sexuality and marriage are not so much a series of prohibitions as they are a road map to happier, more productive, and holier lives. We need to rebuild, one person, one family, at a time a culture where Christ is King. 

St.Catherine of Alexandria, Patroness of Modern Women

  

St. Catherine of Alexandria

      Today is the Optional Memorial for a very intriguing Saint, Saint Catherine of Alexandria.  There was a time when she was considered one of the Great Saints, but we hear of her much less today . . .  about which, more below, but first let’s take a look at her story.

     For a full account, see here.  I’ll provide a brief sketch. Saint Catherine, we are told, was a beautiful princess born of pagan parents.  She was possessed of a superior intellect, and applied her talents in the study of the sciences and philosophy.  When she became a Christian, she betrothed herself to Christ in a Mystical Marriage, and used her formidable intellectual prowess in defense of His Church.  In this way she came to the attention of the Emperor Maxentius, who enlisted a small army of philosophers to refute Catherine’s arguments.  Not only did they fail, but some of them were converted by her.  The enraged emperor ordered the young woman to be imprisoned and tortured, in the midst of which she gained even more converts, including the emperor’s own wife.  After executing his wife (along with all the other converts) Maxentius tried to win over Catherine with an offer of marriage.  After she refused (already being married to the King of Kings), she was condemned to be tortured to death on a spiked wheel.  When this implement of torment was destroyed by the mere touch of the Saint, the emperor finally ordered Catherine beheaded.  He body was brought by angels to the monastery on Mt. Sinai that now bears her name.

     For a long time St. Catherine was one of the most well-known and honored Saints.  The story of her martyrdom was widely told, and she was popular as the patroness of single women; she was also one of the Saints who spoke to St. Joan of Arc.  Today, however, many Catholics have never heard of her.  Her feast day was removed from the Liturgical Calendar in 1969, although it has returned more recently as an Optional Memorial.

     There are no doubt a number of reasons for St. Catherine of Alexandria’s loss of prominence, but one of the more important (possibly the most important) is the fact that there is no historical record of her life until several centuries after the fact.  While we can’t deny, of course,  that some pious traditions and stories are clearly fantastic, to conclude that we must therefore reject anything handed down by our predecessors in the Faith that falls short of the sort of documentary evidence required by modern historiography is to concede too much to a materialistic worldview.  There is certainly no evidence that that St. Catherine is a fabrication, and in doubtful matters I’ll throw my support to Christian tradition.

     St. Catherine’s lower profile is also unfortunate because she has so much to say to women in our world today.  She is the embodiment of the sort of “Christian Feminism” that St. John Paul II described in his Apostolic letter Mulieris Dignatem [here] and in other places: while she is able to equal accomplished men, she does not seek to supplant them, and she does not lose sight of her essential femininity.  Notice that she finds her fulfillment in her spousal relationship with Christ, and her miraculous deeds are a result of her absolute trust in Him.  Her later namesake Catherine of Siena [here], who was a diplomat and advisor to Popes, was also known for her Mystical Marriage to Christ, and was like her in that even when she went toe-to-toe with men on their turf, she didn’t try to be one of them.   

St. Joan of Arc

     I find the connection to St. Joan of Arc [here] instructive here as well.  I don’t see St. Joan as a precursor of modern feminism, as she is sometimes depicted.  She is really much more like the Old Testament Judge Deborah.  In Chapter 4 of the Book of Judges Deborah takes the reins of the army unwillingly, only after her general Barak tells her that he won’t lead their troops against their enemy Sisera without her.  “I will surely go with you”, she replies, “nevertheless, the road on which you are going will not lead to your glory, for the Lord will sell Sisera into the hand of a woman” (Judges 4:9).  As a result, not only does Deborah receive credit for the victory that should have been Barak’s, but Sisera himself dies at the hand of another woman, Jael, who drives a tent peg through his head as he sleeps.  Likewise, when Joan of Arc takes up the sword, it is not to assert that women should behave just like men; it is a rebuke to the men who have been failing to do that which they have been called to do.

     There’s a lesson here.  Today’s radical feminism is to a large degree an overreaction to a genuine failure to show due respect women and their appropriate role, but feminism has taken a cure that is worse than the original ailment: it denies the essential nature of women by attacking their maternal and nurturing mission.  At the same time, a major result of so-called sexual revolution has been to reduce woman to a mere object of desire.   As a consequence, women are, in important ways, less respected than ever.  St. Catherine of Alexandria has a lot to say to such a world.  She puts her trust completely in Jesus Christ, and so she trusts in the gifts he has given her, including her femininity. Therefore, she can be as strong as any man, without surrendering her womanhood.  She is not deterred by threats, seduced by bribes, and can’t be broken by the worst this world has to offer, because the Lord is her spouse.  She commands the respect of men, and invites the emulation of women.  What more could we ask of a Great Saint?

    

   

Our Pre-Cana Adventure

(An earlier version of this throwback was published on February 9th of this year; it is co-written by my Lovely Bride, Linda)

A True Story

The Miracle at Cana

     A few years ago my wife, Linda, and I were invited to talk to a group of engaged Pre-Cana couples at a local parish.  The woman responsible for lining up speakers had done charitable work with my wife and thought that we would be well suited to talking to the soon-to-be married couples about the Church’s teaching on marriage and sexuality, and the place of natural family planning (NFP) within it. You should be aware that our instructions stressed that this wasn't to be a class on the exact details of how to practice NFP;  There were several couples in the diocese qualified to teach such a class, but we were not among them, and the woman who invited us knew this.

     Needless to say, we were pleased to be asked.  We leapt into preparations: we read Pius XI’s Casti Connubii, Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae, articles by people like Janet Smith from the website One More Soul, Kimberly Hahn’s Life-Giving Love, information on John Paul II’s Theology of the Body and I can’t remember what else (I may track down our bibliography and post it). We did include NFP, but in the context of the Church’s teaching on marriage and sexuality, which, you’ll remember, is what we were actually asked to do.  It was, if I may say so, a dynamite presentation.

Not Everyone Was Pleased

      Strange to say, the reaction was not as positive as we had hoped.  Monsignor seemed satisfied with our presentation, but our target audience seemed a little, well, stunned.  While we certainly didn’t accuse anyone of anything, we did share the fact that cohabitation, consummating relationships outside of marriage, contraception, etc. were gravely wrong (i.e., sins). It’s a fair bet that a number of the couples, most likely the majority (and quite possibly all of them), were doing at least some of those things, so it wasn’t welcome news, however gently  and non-confrontationally we put it (which I assure you we did).We did get one mildly positive comment from one of the women; the only other question was “How many children did you say you have?”  To our answer, “five”, the response was “and how reliable is NFP supposed to be?”  They seemed unconvinced that none of our children were due to a “failure” of NFP, that all were expected and welcomed.  They had never been taught, or at least never absorbed, that having children is the norm (we used to call them “a Blessing”!), avoiding them the exception.  In their written feedback afterwards, they related that they liked us personally, but found our presentation too “judgmental”, too "black and white".

     The gentle and kindly woman who had asked us seemed as stunned as the couples.  Apparently, she thought we had gone too far by actually saying that contraception was a sin; her vision of the presentation was that we would talk in glowing terms about how natural NFP is, how free from chemical side-effects, etc. and we would somehow win them over to NFP by sheer green-appeal.  Then, having been won over to NFP by its greenness, they might someday be inclined to learn more about the theology behind it and the fullness of the church's teaching on the blessing of children.  My lovely bride answered that we could not, in good conscience, go in to talk about the Church’s teaching on marriage and sexuality without, you know, talking about the Church’s teaching on marriage and sexuality.  Linda recalls saying with incredulity, "But they're all getting married in a few weeks, and this is supposed to be the official instruction they are receiving from their church about contraception.  If we don't tell them now, when are we going to tell them?  Are we going to wait and let St. Peter do it at the gate?"  Really, if they never knew any better, they wouldn’t be the ones breaking out into a cold sweat when giving an account of themselves someday.  As we were "hired" for this job, and knew better, if we didn’t share the fullness of the Church's teaching with them, we were the ones who'd have some explaining to do (see Ezekiel 3:18-20).

A Failure To Communicate?

     This all happened seven or eight years ago. Would you be surprised if I told you that, despite the fact that they claimed to be desperate to find speakers willing to help out with this topic, we haven’t been asked back?

     So, as they say, what have we learned here?  If you’ve read many of the posts on this site, you know that we take the importance of the family very seriously.  On the level of Natural Law, it is the essential building block of a healthy society; as Catholics, we know that it is an image, an icon, however imperfect (even in the best families), of the perfect love of the Trinity.  Let me amend that: as Catholics, we should know.  I am truly sorry to say that in my experience, most Catholics really don’t.  My wife at one point gave a copy of Kimberly Hahn’s Life-Giving Love to a young mother, a faithful Mass attendee, after she heard her talking to another regular Mass goer, also a young mother, and it was clear that neither knew anything about the Catholic teaching on contraception, sterilization, and our proper disposition toward child-bearing.  I’m sure both young women were trying to be a faithful Catholics, but having absorbed the secular “conventional wisdom” about having babies, they were unaware of a serious alternative.      

     Some will criticize priests for not preaching on this topic, and there’s some justice to the complaint: I can’t recall a single homily so much as mentioning contraception in my adult life (although there are some bishops who have spoken out boldly, particularly the incomparable Archbishop Charles Chaput, link here).  Many priests will respond that, in this skeptical age, they simply lack the credibility to say anything too demanding about marriage; and they also have a valid point.  I can hear it now: “Who is he to tell me about sex?  He’s a celibate male!”  What’s the solution?

Learn It, Live It, Etc.

     It seems to me that, given the age in which we live, a large part of the initiative in this area has to come from the laity.  We do need the explicit support of the clergy, yes, but right now they’re talking to a blank wall (when they’re talking at all).  We lay Catholics, especially those called to marriage, need to learn about the true nature of marriage and the true place of sexuality (St. John Paul II's Theology of the Body is a great place to start).  We need to live according to that knowledge, joyfully receiving the children the Lord sends our way (using NFP, if we discern that it’s appropriate, according to the principles laid out by the Church), publicly demonstrating the importance we place on our families, and always remembering that we are to be an Icon of Love; never underestimate the Power of Example.  The power of example, however, is not enough: after all, to many people our traditional family, however loving, will appear to be simply another “lifestyle choice” among the many on offer (“That’s fine for them, of course, but not for us”).  We need to be willing to share the content of Catholic teaching, in a loving way that respects people where they are, with the goal of lifting them up.  If more priests feel that they have the support of a large part of the laity, they will be able to speak out with more confidence.

     The state of the family is not a tangential matter, it is a key component of every major problem facing both the Church and society at large.  We have the truth:  we need to live it.

Resources:  this is not a full bibliography from the talk I describe above, but these are links to sources I mention in my post:

Pope Pius XI’s Casti Connubii – amazingly relevant eighty-three years later:

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_31121930_casti-connubii_en.html

The “notorious” Humanae Vitae” – the encyclical that launched a thousand dissents - read it and see how accurately Pope Paul predicted the baleful results of wide-spread contraception:

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae_en.html

Janet Smith’s One More Soul – well worth the time you spend there:

http://onemoresoul.com/

Kimberly Hahn’s Life-Giving Love – an excellent popular resource on the Catholic vision of marriage:

http://www.amazon.com/Life-Giving-Love-Embracing-Beautiful-Marriage/dp/1569552924

There is no one resource to go to for the Theology of the Body, but the USCCB site is a good place to start – closely follows John Paul the Great’s series of talks on TOB from 1979-1984:

http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/marriage-and-family/natural-family-planning/catholic-teaching/theology-of-the-body.cfm

Text of Pastoral Letter published in 1998 by Charles Chaput, then Archbishop of Denver (Currently heading the See of Philadelphia) – absolutely the best explanation of Humanae Vitae I’ve come across by anyone, cleric or layperson:

http://guweb2.gonzaga.edu/~dewolf/chaput.htm