Why We Fight: Powers, Principalities & The Culture Wars

An earlier version of this Worth Revisiting post was published October 9th, 2014 under the title "Why We Fight". 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.

The latest bizarro piece of news from the Culture Wars: a school district in Nebraska has decreed that its teachers and its students may no longer use gender-specific terms  - like "boys" and "girls".  Instead, teachers must use alternative terms like "Purple Penguins" (I'm not making this up!) so that "all genders" will feel "welcome". [link] As absurd as it seems, this story shows just how far the assault on the Family, traditional morality, and plain common sense has come. It brings to mind the following scripture passage:

Put on the whole armor of God,that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.  For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the  powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in heavenly places. Therefore take the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the equipment of the gospel of peace; besides all these, taking the shield of faith, with which you can quench all the flaming darts of the evil one.  And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. Pray at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints, and also for me, that utterance may be given me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains; that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak. -Ephesians 6:11-20

   Every time I look at the news I am reminded that we are engaged in a Spiritual Battle, we collectively, and each one of us personally.  It has always been this way, and will be until Christ comes again in glory. The nature of the battle is constantly changing: for individual believers there is always a personal, internal struggle, but there is also a more external, public conflict which changes and ebbs and flows over time and in different places.  We can see this external spiritual battle raging all around, and picking up intensity, in the so-called “Culture Wars”.  A major theme of George Weigel’s authorized biography of Pope John Paul II is that the Pope understood that culture trumps politics and economics, and that culture grows out of religion, a given people’s understanding of God.  And acting on that understanding, St. John Paul the Great helped bring down the walls of that latter-day Jericho, Soviet communism.     

     If the cultural war is really spiritual warfare, then, who is the real antagonist?   This becomes tricky, not because we don’t know, but because saying so in our current climate is difficult.  Those of us of a certain age will remember the Flip Wilson Show.  One of the comedian’s most successful gags was a character called “Geraldine”, actually Wilson himself in none-too-convincing drag, whose most memorable laugh-line was “The devil made me do it!”  More recently, Dana Carvey’s “Church Lady” on Saturday Night Live always provoked uproarious laughter from the audience when she said “Could it be . . .(pregnant pause) . . . SATAN?!?”  For a long time now, the message in the popular culture has been that anyone who actually attributes anything to the Evil One is, well, ridiculous (interesting, by the way, that both of the examples above involve men dressed as women).  We are set up to be dismissed as unserious cranks if we see the hand of the Devil anywhere.     

     There are some who are still willing to speak out, however.  Just a few years ago, one South American cleric described a law legalizing same sex marriage as “a move by the devil, looking to confuse and deceive all children of God” [link] (interesting that this same cleric, who now has a rather prominent position in Rome, was recently named "Person of the Year" by the gay magazine The Advocate).  Closer to home, I was listening to a radio interview the other day with Joseph Bottum, who was arguing that one reason why it’s so difficult to make any headway with those who have left the faith and are now clinging to new enthusiasms like gay marriage, global warming, Marxism, etc. is that those beliefs have taken on a religious significance for them, and are occupying the place reserved in our hearts for God. Those other things, of course, are poor substitutes indeed for the Real Thing, the One who made us for himself, as St. Augustine tells us, and to Whom we can say “our hearts are restless until they rest in You” (inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in Te). For which reason they cling to their false spiritual consolations all the harder, in the unconscious hope that if they just try a little harder, they'll feel fulfilled; but such things do not ultimately satisfy.   We can see here where we get the word “Devil”, from the Greek Diabolos, the Divider, because he divides us from God.       

     None of us is immune to the temptations of Division. St. Ignatius of Loyola represented this internal battle as a conflict between the Spirit of Jesus and the Spirit of Satan, and pictured it as Two Standards, as in Roman battle standards, around which the armies of each Spirit gather.  When we follow the Standard of Jesus internally, we serve in his army out in the world as well, and so it is in the case of the other side. As St. Paul tells us, our battle is with "spiritual hosts of wickedness in heavenly places".  Those whom we take to be their foot soldiers here on Earth most certainly do not think of themselves in those terms.  Having spent many years as secular leftist, I know that the vast majority of those who serve in that camp are well-meaning, and honestly believe they are on the side of good and righteousness, not realizing that the breastplate of righteousness is part of the full armor of God. That’s the other message of Paul’s letter: we can’t withstand in the evil day without "the armor of God", without the "Gospel of Peace", without "all prayer and supplication". When we separate ourselves from God, or don’t avail ourselves of all the spiritual arms with which he provides us, we are helpless against the wiles of the Divider.  We need to remember this in our interactions with those who are on the other side.  We need to speak the truth in love (Eph 4:15), and aim for the conversion of their hearts, and, ultimately, their redemption, not their destruction.     

     Finally, this is the reason why St. Paul asks that "utterance may be given me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains; that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak". Jesus rallies an Army of Love around His Standard. That’s why we engage in the culture wars: not because we like brawling (see Eph. 4:15 above), and not to inflate our egos (Scripture is chock full of warnings about getting “puffed up”), but to win hearts and souls for Christ. 

A Couple Paving Stones On The Road To Hell

This Throwback Thursday Post was first published on December 12th, 2014. Warning: contains content of a sexual nature.  

      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). 

“Is it OK if I take my pants off?”

     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?”  

"You can go now."

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 its 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'." 

The Definition Of Insanity

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. 

         It has happened before. 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 in which Christ is King.

On Being A Child Of This Age

G. K. Chesterton

The great G.K. Chesterton said of the Catholic Church: “ It is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.” If you doubt that the slavery of our particular age is getting more degrading by the day, consider the following random samples from the unraveling of our once-Christian culture:

- The big news from last week, of course, was the U.S. Supreme Court’s “finding” that the Constitution of the United States mandates that states may not exclude same-sex couples from their definition of marriage.  In his dissent from the majority opinion, Chief Justice Roberts  wrote “The right it announces has no basis in the Constitution or this Court’s precedent.” No, but it is perfectly attuned to the Spirit of this Age.

- A major newspaper in Pennsylvania announces that it “will no longer accept, nor will it print, op-Eds and letters to the editor in opposition to same-sex marriage”, with the grudging exception that it would “for a limited time, accept letters and op-Eds on the high court's decision and its legal merits.”  Journalists in the United States may claim to have an unshakable commitment to free speech, but the Spirit of our Age does not tolerate opposition.

- It is equally intolerant of any disagreement on the new conventional wisdom that sex, or “gender”, is not something inborn, but a thing we can create for ourselves and change at will. Actress Alice Eve learned this the hard way after she pointed out via social media the seemingly obvious fact that cosmetic surgery can’t turn male Olympic gold medalist Bruce Jenner into an actual woman.  After a torrent of abuse from the forces of tolerance, she was soon sounding uncannily like the victim of one of Stalin’s show trials: “Maybe this needs a little thought. I felt confused and now I feel enlightened and like I know what education I need to move forward.” 

-Since “gender reassignment” surgery is such a good thing, how can we withhold it from anyone? The New York Times, in an article celebrating surgical intervention of this sort for teens, reports that in Oregon 15 year-olds can undergo this mutilating, life-changing procedure at state expense . . . and without parental consent. The Times reports that “advocates say that extending treatment to teenagers will alleviate depression and suicide”, although it concedes that “The evidence is mixed. A large-scale Swedish study at the Karolinska Institute found that starting about a decade after gender reassignment surgery, transgender people were still more than 19 times as likely to die by suicide as the general population [link here, which the NYT somehow forgot to include].”  Other researchers have published similarly grim results, such as this U.S. study that found more than four out of ten transsexuals have attempted suicide. Perhaps it would more “mixed” if they could point to other studies  demonstrating an upside?

     - This article at Life Site News reports on Laura, a healthy, 24 year-old woman in Belgium who will be killed by lethal injection this summer, simply because she doesn’t want to live.  She says, “Life, that’s not for me.”  Well, to each his or her own, I suppose.  After all, she has received official approval. Interestingly, one of the psychiatrists who signed off on her case is currently hawking a book touting “euthanasia for psychological reasons”, so Laura can get what she wants and give the doc a little publicity as well.  The Spirit of the Age calls that a win-win!

I could go on, but you get the idea.  The proverbial Visitor From Another World could only conclude that we are in the midst of some sort of suicidal societal dementia, or possessed by a malevolent demon that renders us incapable of distinguishing reality from fantasy, and that is intent on destroying not only us as individuals but also the institutions that sustain us.  Or perhaps, if he’s familiar with Earth literature, he might see us as an entire world full of Victor Frankensteins who, like the eponymous protagonist of Mary Shelley’s novel, seek to usurp God’s power of creation, only to spawn a destructive force beyond our control.  It would be easy to look at the Signs of the Times and despair.

    Despair, however, is not an option for us, because despair means giving up hope. Christian hope is the confidence that God will fulfill his promises of mercy and salvation, and if we surrender that trust, we are giving up on God; we are in fact, committing a grave sin. Instead, St. Paul instructs us to “Rejoice in your hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer” (Romans 12:12).  In other words, if we stay connected to our Lord, and endure our present hardships with His help, we will be with Him in His final victory. That’s not a bad deal.

    Clinging to the Lord, of course, is not simply a personal matter; we are called to be witnesses to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Who knows? Our wayward countrymen may yet amaze us like the Ninevites surprised Jonah when they repented in sackcloth and ashes (see Jonah 3).  Short of that happy but unlikely outcome, we might at least rescue some fortunate individuals; as scripture tells us,“whoever brings back a sinner from the error of his way will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins” (James 5:20).  Finally, by remaining faithful to Christ we can serve as one of his instruments in preserving his Church, which will be a source of healing after today’s craziness has run its course.  As the future Pope Benedict XVI said in a famous radio address almost half a century ago, “when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church.”

    Which brings us back to where we started. Chesterton tells us that the Catholic Church is the only thing that frees us from enslavement to whatever the current foolishness happens to be.  But it is not a freedom for our own sake alone, it is freedom for service: service to our Lord and our fellow men and women, and service to the Truth . . . and the truth about humanity is and always has been that we were made to love and serve the Lord in this world, and to be eternally happy with him in the next.  Isn’t that infinitely better than anything the Spirit of This Age has to offer?

    

"Real Funny Jokes About Abortion"? Dispatches From The Culture Of Death Part Two

“Be Sober, be watchful.  Your adversary the Devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.  Resist him, firm in your faith.”  (1 Peter 8-9)

     Last week, in my discussion of an essay by Ezekiel Emmanuel supporting the idea that we should not try to keep people alive beyond 75 years old, I said:

The more often such opinions come from such sources, the less unthinkable such opinionThes become in the wider world until they eventually become commonplace.  We have seen this strategy employed to perfection in recent years in regard to the redefinition of marriage. 

The Successful Game Plan

The picture-perfect example of how to bring about a massive change in public perceptions and sentiment, in fact, has been the Gay Rights movement, which eventually built the stunningly successful Gay Marriage campaign.  The strategy was explicitly laid out almost three decades ago in 1987, in an article by Marshall Kirk and Erastes Pill (later expanded into a book) called “The Overhauling Of Straight America” (entire article here). Kirk and Pill call for a graduated media campaign to change public opinion, starting with making homosexuality seem commonplace by talking about it constantly, particularly in the entertainment media; then by portraying homosexuals as victims, at which point they can enlist supporters outside their own circles by appealing to a sense of justice, and only then seeking to destroy the credibility of any critics by using their media reach to portray opponents  as ignorant haters, bigots, etc.  Anyone who has been paying attention for the last three decades has seen this strategy play out precisely as scripted (we are now in the final “destroy the opposition” phase).

     This idea didn’t start with Kirk and Pill, of course, nor with the Gay Rights movement.  Some might recognize the ideas of master “community organizer” Saul Alinsky, who in turn was simply putting a groovy spin on long-standing communist agitprop doctrine - the need to use the entertainment media to shape public opinion explains why the communists were so interested in Hollywood in the thirties and the forties.  Kirk and Pill also saw the potential of the entertainment industry, but they had a resource that was not available to Stalin-era agitators: television.  Therefore:

Where we talk is important. The visual media, film and television, are plainly the most powerful image-makers in Western civilization. The average American household watches over seven hours of TV daily. Those hours open up a gateway into the private world of straights, through which a Trojan horse might be passed. As far as desensitization is concerned, the medium is the message--of normalcy.

“Desensitization” was necessary before the public would accept the rest of the gay rights program, and television did in fact prove to be the perfect medium (feel free explore the links here if you don’t believe that this strategy was employed to the fullest).

If it worked for Gay Marriage, why not abortion?

Mindy Kaling

     This brings us to today, and the curious case of Mindy Kaling, as recounted by Brent Bozell [article here]. Mindy, Bozell tells us, “not only stars in her own sitcom on Fox called 'The Mindy Project,' she’s in charge of it.”  Her character on the show is an OB/GYN.  Professional feminist and pro-abortion activist Amanda Marcotte sees Kaling’s show as a ready-made vehicle for the same sort of desensitization that the Gay Rights people carried out so successfully:

Abortion is actually a perfect topic for a half-hour comedy because it touches on so many themes that comedy writers love to mine for the laughs . . . How easy it is, if you let go of the fear of getting letters from anti-choice nuts, to make some really funny jokes about abortion.

     The problem for Marcotte is that most people, even those who are generally in favor of legal abortion, don’t see the humorous potential in the intentional slaughter of innocent life in the womb.  Kaling herself, who doesn’t appear to be pro-life but does seem to know her craft, at first politely rejected the idea of using her show “to make some really funny jokes about abortion”, telling an interviewer: “It would be demeaning to the topic to talk about it in a half-hour sitcom”.  Unfortunately for Mindy, nobody is allowed to sit on the sidelines for this battle, and the abortion industry and its cheerleaders turned up the heat.  Soon she was apologizing for her failure to humorously promote abortion on her program, and has now reached the point where she says she “has faith” that she will find a “hilarious take on abortion that’s saying something new.”  Don’t worry, folks, “The Mindy Project” will be rolling out its abortion laugh-riot any day now.

     This is not the first recent attempt by the abortionists to follow the gay marriage media  playbook: there was the Abortion Comedy “Obvious Child”, and creepy “comedienne” Sarah Silverman has been trying to mine the laugh-potential of abortion for some time.  “Obvious Child”, however, was much more popular with pro-abortion movie critics than it was with the public, so maybe Anthony Esolen is right [see here] that the average person’s innate common sense won’t allow too many of them to be taken in too deeply by the Culture of Death for too long.  Maybe . . . but I’m not sure that he isn’t underestimating the power of people in our fallen state to convince themselves of just about anything, especially if it means the orgy can continue.  Be that as it may, brace yourself: I suspect we’ll be seeing more and more of the “lighter side” of abortion from the entertainment media in the future. Be sober and be watchful . . .

    
(This throwback was first published in September of 2014)

"If they do not rise to meet that challenge, they will lose their civilization”

It's never really safe to be a Christian

It’s never completely safe to be a Christian in this world.  In my recent Sunday Snippets post [here] I briefly discussed the plight of Christians in Iraq, who are facing brutal persecution at the hands of ISIS, an armed movement embracing a particularly virulent strain of radical Islam. I illustrated the post with the Arabic “N”, with which ISIS terrorists target Christian homes, and which has since become an emblem of solidarity and a badge of honor for Christians around the world.

The Fall of Rome

     That explicit identification as Christians, and with other Christians, is vitally important. I made the point the week before [here] that radical Islam would pose little threat to “a Christendom united in Faith and fortified with Prayer”. Unfortunately, what had been Christendom is rapidly de-Christianizing, which creates a twofold threat, both from within and from without.  The external threat, a radicalized and aggressive Islam, still looks fairly distant to those of us in the United States; it looks a lot more formidable in Europe.  There, a growing, poorly assimilated, and increasingly alienated and hostile  Muslim population is combining with the forces of societal destruction under the guise of “multiculturism” to attack the very basis of historic (which means, essentially, Christian) European culture, as described by Joseph Pearce in a piece that is appearing on Life Site News [here].  The article is well worth reading in its entirety; the best summation of Pearce’s point comes in a quote from actor John Rhys-Davies, who played the dwarf Gimli in the screen adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.  Rhys-Davies says: “I think that Tolkien says that some generations will be challenged, and if they do not rise to meet that challenge, they will lose their civilization”.  Since the actor first spoke these words several years ago, the concrete evidence of their truth has been rapidly multiplying, and so although the multi-culti wrecking ball pounds on, an increasing number of Europeans are starting to see multiculturalism for the civilizational suicide that it is.

"If we falter and lose our freedoms, 

it will be because we destroyed ourselves" -Abraham Lincoln

     To those of us in the United States, events in Iraq can seem very far away, especially now that there are no longer many of our countrymen serving there under arms.  The incidence of jihadism here can be seen as sporadic, with only a few serious incidents (9/11, the Fort Hood Massacre), and the local Muslim population is still quite small and has shown only scattered signs of radicalization – so far.  The heedless dismantling of our culture from within, however, proceeds apace.  I’ll provide just two recent examples.  First, the College Board, which through the content of its Advanced Placement (AP) exams determines the curriculum of thousands of high school classes around the country, has come with a new AP American History [article here] course that omits great Americans such as Benjamin Franklin and Martin Luther King, jr.  Instead it emphasizes impersonal “historical forces” - and not so much those familiar to earlier generations of students like the development of democratic institutions and religious tolerance.  From the Fox News article: 

“ . . . you’re not going to find Thomas Jefferson and the House of Burgesses and the cradle of democracy either,” said Larry Krieger, who retired in 2005 after more than three decades in the classroom.  And finally, you’re not going to find Benjamin Franklin and the birth of American entrepreneurialism . . . what you’re going to find is our nation’s founders portrayed as bigots who developed a belief in white superiority . . .”

The article adds that students will find, overall, “a narrative laden with tyranny and subjugation.”  As if it’s not enough that individual classes are convincing young people that their country is and always has been irredeemably corrupt, we now have entire schools dedicated to the purpose – at your expense.  We now have “social justice” charter schools [here], government schools funded with taxpayer money.  And while the term social justice has an honorable origin in Catholic social teaching, it has long since been hijacked by the left.  No, the students at these schools won’t be studying Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, they’ll be training in “social activism”, a.k.a. leftist political agitation.  All of which means that in certain localities in the United States we’ll have the curious phenomenon of the government expending public funds to set up public schools dedicated to training young people to tear it all down. 

"The Church of the Living God, the pillar 

and the foundation of the Truth." -1 Timothy 3:15

     Tearing it all down is the program of the cultural and political left, whether we’re talking about multi-culturalism, the redefinition of marriage, revisionist history, or Robin Hood economic activism.  They don’t even pretend anymore to have a coherent positive vision of what might replace all the institutions they seek to eradicate.  Not that it would help much if they did: every attempt to destroy a society that had developed over time in response to the real needs and experiences of human beings and construct on its ruins a society hatched in the brains of men (e.g., the French Revolution, Soviet Communism) has been a disaster; bloody, inhuman disaster, such as is still playing out in North Korea.  In similar fashion, the man-made religion of Islam has had a track record over the past millennium and a half of spawning anti-human horrors such the one currently on display in Iraq.
     The most profound and radical revolution in human history, on the other hand, was the transformation of the Greco-Roman civilization by the unlikely spread of Christianity.  It was no mere human idea, but the revelation of God himself in the person of Jesus Christ that subdued “the glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome” (props to Edgar Allan Poe).  And notice that the Church didn’t destroy and replace the institutions of the Roman Empire, but rather “baptized” them and made them the bulwarks of a more humane culture [for more on that, see here and here].  When Rome did fall to invaders from the North, the Church worked the same transformation on the newcomers.

     And now here we are in a society that wants to do away with both the Church of Jesus Christ and the institutions passed on by our ancestors.  Do we really think that the empty shell that will be left can stand against the legions of the New Caliphate, or any other motivated and determined conqueror from without or within?

(This Throwback was first published on 12 August 2014)

    

Blessed Margaret Pole: Martyred For The Church And Marriage

Blessed Margaret Pole

Martyr of England. She was born Margaret Plantagenet, the niece of Edward IV and Richard III. She married Sir Reginald Pole about 1491 and bore five sons, including Reginald Cardinal Pole. Margaret was widowed, named countess of Salisbury, and appointed governess to Princess Mary, daughter of Henry VIII and Queen Catherine of Aragon, Spain. She opposed Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, and the king exiled her from court, although he called her “the holiest woman in England.” When her son, Cardinal Pole, denied Henry’s Act of Supremacy, the king imprisoned Margaret in the Tower of London for two years and then beheaded her on May 28. In 1538, her other two sons were executed. She was never given a legal trial. She was seventy when she was martyred. Margaret was beatified in 1886. (from Butler's Lives of the Saints)

     I called my piece last week on St. Julia of Corsica [here] “A Saint For Our Times”; when I think about it, I have yet to find a Saint who isn’t for our times. But today’s Saint, Blessed Margaret Pole, who gave her life in defense of the sanctity of marriage, seems especially suited to the situation of our increasingly post-Christian culture. The niece of kings, Blessed Margaret was martyred because she refused to applaud publicly the sacrifice of Holy Matrimony to a third king’s lust.

Henry VIII

     Blessed Margaret’s antagonist, Henry VIII, could serve as a sort of patron “anti-saint” for our times. He was a man possessed of great gifts: he was given a strong, handsome, athletic body, a quick mind that he applied to writing and musical composition as well as to governing, and the rule of a rich and powerful kingdom. Henry never mastered himself, however, and so his prodigious talents were put at the service, not of his people, but of his equally prodigious cravings for women, wealth, and power. In the end he tried to swallow even the Church. In his later years his grossly obese body became a living image of his insatiable appetites.
     People come and go, but human nature doesn’t change. King Henry is long gone, but his imitators are still with us. Like Henry, they are not satisfied with mere tolerance or tacit assent: they require full-throated public approval, and so the Margaret Poles must be silenced. Nobody is literally being led to the block, thankfully, and pray God it never comes to that. Nevertheless, as we have seen over and over again,  those who stand up for Church, family, and traditional moral norms today, even if they do so privately, can expect to have their character blackened and their livelihoods threatened.
     I have often heard Blessed Margaret’s younger and much better known contemporary, St. Thomas More, proposed as a Patron Saint for our times because of his martyrdom in defense of the Church and Marriage. Like him, Blessed Margaret's firm reliance on Christ's loving care gave her the strength to stand fast in face of mortal threats, and the serenity not to be swallowed up in bitterness against her persecutors.  We would do well to invoke Blessed Margaret Pole along with St. Thomas More, and to pray for her intercession against the ravenous spirit of Henry VIII that yet again threatens both Faith and Family.

The Pope Is Catholic, Yet Again

Who would have guessed that the Pope is Catholic?

     It’s funny that Pope Francis is the most quotable of Popes . . . except when he’s not.  A few weeks ago, when he appeared to criticize couples who were ‘irresponsible” in having children “in a series”, dismissing the idea that, “in order to be good Catholics, we have to be like rabbits,” it was big news.  More recently, when he said that “Not to have children is a selfish choice,” and suggested that a culture that “views children above all as a worry, a burden, a risk, is a depressed society,” well, where was the news media?  Where are the “Spirit of Vatican II” Catholics who trumpet every reference to rabbits and every off-the-cuff  “who am I to judge” remark?  Yes, it was reported (mostly in non-U.S. outlets), but given very little play and quickly forgotten, especially compared to the hullaballoo surrounding some other comments from this Pope.

     Not that any of this is a surprise, of course.  Since the revolt against the Church’s teaching on contraception that erupted into public view at the issuance of Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968, reproduction and sexuality have been Ground Zero in the culture of dissidence that exists within the Church.  Not coincidentally, those are also the issues that animate the drivers of cultural trends in the secular world as well.  The “news” media is a major component in the Spirit of this Age, and so it is happy to run with anything the Pope says that could further its agenda, especially if it can be spun to undercut Catholic moral teaching on their favored issues.

     It may be hard for some of us to believe just how important this last point is to the promoters of the new sexual ethic.  They quite correctly see the Church as the main obstacle in their way.  The Popes agree.  In his encyclical letter Casti Connubii (“Of Chaste Marriage”), published in response to the abandonment by the Anglican Church of the age-old Christian ban on contraception, Pope Pius XI describes:

. . . the Catholic Church, to whom God has entrusted the defense of the integrity and purity of morals, standing erect in the midst of the moral ruin which surrounds her . . . (Casti Connubii, 56)

     If this description was true in 1930, when Casti Connubii was published, how much more so today?  Not only are the moral ruins around us more widespread than ever, but there is a visible group of people who identify as Catholic actively working to pull down the Church into that debris.  Pope Francis’ remarks on the selfishness of sterility are most unwelcome both to this set of Catholics, and to the media, not only because he is contradicting their agenda, but specifically because he is re-stating long-standing Catholic teaching.  These comments give the lie to the mythical Pope Francis who is freeing the Catholic Church from its judgmental and puritanical past.  And we can’t have people think the Pope really is Catholic, can we?

The Past Week at Principium et Finis:

Monday – “Benigno Zerafa – Dixit Dominus,Mov. II” It’s a shame to let anything beautiful go to waste, esprcially something created to glorify God.  So, here’s a little musical treasure brought down from the attic . . . 

Tuesday –“ J. Puccini the Elder: DixitDominus” When I was researching Zerafa’s “Dominus Dixit” I came across another under as familiar name . . . but not quite as familiar as it looked.  Anyway, here’s another treasure

Wednesday – “Ash Wednesday: A Symbol Of Repentance, A Sign Of Hope”   I was sitting in the DMV Tuesday morning, waiting for my son to finish his driver’s test, and musing about how curious it is that people who don’t normally attend Sunday Mass show up on Ash Wednesday and, well . . . the result was this post 

Thursday – “Richard Dawkins Is Full Of Surprises”  Who knew that the celebrated atheist apologist entertained fond memories of the Anglican Church?  But then, the whole atheist enterprise is nort as reasonidriven as they’d like us to believe . . .  

Friday – “What Adam ate Brought Death, What Christ Gives Us to Eat Brings Eternal Life”  Some thoughts on Lent, Sin, and Salvation, inspired by an Ash-Wednesday homily 

Sunday -  "Sunday Snippets", in which an intrepid group of Catholic bloggers boldly convene to swap posts AND the Lent/Purgatory connection 

Sunday Snippets - A Catholic Carnival (25 January 2015)

     Happy Sunday! Welcome to Sunday Snippets, A Catholic Carnival.  Sunday Snippets® is a weekly convocation of Catholic bloggers sharing links to their posts from the past week.  The main gathering is here at This That and the Other Thing, home of out gracious hostess RAnn.

The Communion of Saints

Yesterday was the feast day of St. Francis De Sales, Bishop and Doctor of the Church.  St. Francis, who died almost four centuries ago, was ahead of his time in his concern for the devotional life of laypeople. I'll have more to say about this wonderful Saint in the future.
      Yesterday was also the feast day of number of less well-known saints , including Saints Thyrsus and Projectus.  Their biography at Catholic Online [here] is rather brief; it reads, in full:

Martyrs of an unknown year and location. Their Acts [i.e., histories] are no longer extant.

That’s it.  We don’t know when they lived, where they lived, or what they did. All we know is that they are Saints . . . which is really all that matters in the end.  St. Paul says:

. . . Run so as to win.  Every athlete exercises discipline in every way.  They do it to win a perishable crown, but we an imperishable one. (1 Corinthians 9:24-25)

     That crown is the crown of sanctity, if we persevere to the end. We are all called to be Saints with God in Heaven, but we can’t all be a St. Francis De Sales.  Most of us, just like the vast majority of saintly Christians through the centuries, will be forgotten a few generations after our passing from this world.  All the things that seem so important to us today will likewise have disappeared.  And that’s fine, because there’s only one thing that ultimately matters, that eternally matters: that, by the Grace of God, we be Saints.

    

This week also saw the annual March for Life in Washington on the anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s baleful Roe vs. Wade decision, so naturally there was emphasis on the law and human life in most of the week’s posts; below are the snippets from Principium et Finis:

Monday – A little-known composer, but a beautiful setting for a beloved traditional prayer: “Schola Regina Pacis – Stabat Mater (J. Rheinberger) [here]  

Tuesday – A few facts to consider the next time someone tells you that it’s a waste of time to vote pro-life: “Abortion Myth #17” [here] 

Thursday – A Throwback from last May in which I argue, contra some libertarians, that redefining marriage is an assault on liberty:  “If You Want To Defend Freedom, Protect Traditional Marriage” [here]

Friday – I know that the argumentum ad Satanam isn’t very fashionable these days, but Planned Parenthood’s new pro-abortion “prayers” are truly Diabolical: “‘Choice’And The Father Of Lies” [here] 

If You Want To Defend Liberty, Protect Traditional Marriage

Today is the 42^nd anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade and Doe vs. Bolton decisions, which at a stroke nullified abortion laws in all fifty states. In his dissent from Roe, Justice Byron White said, “I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the court’s judgment,” and goes on to characterize the decision as nothing more than “an exercise of raw judicial power”.

     Sadly, federal courts have not given up on exercises of “raw judicial power” over the past four decades: in 22 states federal judges have voided state constitutional amendments or statutes put in place by voters that defined marriage as the union of a man and a women (a definition that, throughout all of human history up until twenty years ago, would have seemed remarkable only for the fact that something so obvious needed to be said at all).  To date the redefinition of marriage has been put to voters in the United States several dozen times, and has passed only once (here in my home state, I’m sorry to say, and that after losing in earlier bids). Clearly, the way this novel definition of the primary human institution is being imposed is undemocratic; in the post below, an earlier version of which I published in May of last year, I argue that beyond that, by its very nature it is opposed to human freedom, both political and religious.

A Hot Topic

The legal definition of marriage has been a hot topic in recent years. Faithful Catholics know that while traditional marriage was created by God and raised to a Sacrament by Jesus Christ, there are very good reasons in the natural order to preserve it as an institution, such as that it provides the best environment by far for raising and forming children, and it is an essential building block in any stable and prosperous society. Unfortunately, a “hot topic” is not the same thing as a reasoned debate, and advocates of marriage redefinition very often do not respond to arguments with counter-arguments, but rather with attempts to silence and even destroy those who disagree with them. Just one example among many: at Notre Dame (a Catholic University) campus police expelled a pro-marriage group at the prompting of violent gay marriage activists who disliked their message (here). 

     Such activists, however, are a minority, and there is still a mass of people in the middle whose minds are open if they can be given solid reasons for supporting traditional marriage, and given a sense that they are not facing the brown-shirt tactics of the left all alone if they profess the traditional view.  Given that many, perhaps most, of the people in the middle are more secular than religious (even if they identify as Christians) we need to be prepared with arguments rooted in the natural order.  Moreover, there are certain constituencies that at least ought to be natural allies for those of us fighting to preserve marriage.

Which Side Is Lady Liberty On?

     I am thinking in particular of libertarians and others for whom personal freedom is a primary concern.  Many such liberty-minded people have been drawn into the anti-marriage camp because those who would redefine marriage often rely on an appeal to freedom: one hears arguments such as "nobody has ever shown me how two men or two women marrying each other is going to harm their own marriage.”  Another argument we all have heard is something like:   “You anti-gay marriage people are anti-freedom: you want to keep gay people from marrying the partner of their choice”, or "you're trying to impose your religious beliefs on everyone else."   I’ve even seen protesters standing outside my church holding a sign that says “When did I get to vote on your marriage?”  So perhaps it’s no surprise that many people, particularly those of a libertarian bent, have been convinced that the pro-gay marriage advocates are on the side of liberty, and that supporters of traditional marriage are the would-be tyrants; how can they be wrong?

     To begin with, all the arguments above proceed from false premises.  Virtually nobody today is arguing for the return of anti-sodomy laws, or advocating the forcible separation of co-habiting same-sex couples.  Nor have I heard of anyone promoting laws that would somehow prevent homosexuals from calling their relationships “marriages”.  Traditional marriage supporters are simply working to preserve the long-standing legal definition of our most important social institution (older than any government and older even than institutional religion) against those who want to use the force of law to compel the rest of us to agree to a new definition, a definition that nobody anywhere has ever held (up until the last few years), and one which will change our understanding of that most important institution in fundamental ways.  By any objective measure, the gay marriage advocates are trying to deprive the rest of us of our liberty to hold and to express our beliefs.  The incident from Notre Dame (a supposedly Catholic institution) cited above is, again, just the most recent example. I don’t have the space here to run through the list of businesses and individuals attacked, smeared, harassed, sued, etc. by the redefinition advocates, but one only needs to pay attention to the news for a couple of days to know that such tactics are the rule, not the exception; and they all come from the side that accuses us of opposing freedom.

Are wedding bells liberty bells?

Did The State Invent Marriage?    

 Beyond the tactics used by the opponents of traditional marriage, there is a much more profound issue, one concerning the proper role of government. Laws concerning marriage have always been descriptive, describing and recognizing an institution that was not created by the state, and in fact existed long before the state came into being. Even laws regulating certain aspects of marriage (the ban on polygamy, for instance) never seek to change it; they are intended to protect marriage, and preserve it more faithfully within its traditional contours.  A law that re-defines it to mean something completely different, something it has never been, is a prescriptive law, one that prescribes or creates a new reality.  This is a power that few governments, and certainly not our constitutional republic, have ever claimed in regard to marriage. It is the annexation of something that has never belonged to the state; it is to treat  something that the state has always recognized as pre-existent, above and beyond itself,  as if it were a creation of the state, to be manipulated,  redefined, and at some point (why not, after all?) even abolished at the whim of the ruling power. This is truly totalitarian.  I don’t believe that lovers of liberty really wish to give the state such powers.

You Can't Fight City Hall - At Least On Your Own

     Giving the state total control over the institution of marriage would have profound ramifications for freedom in general. Families are, along with organized religion, the most important “mediating institutions” between the individual and the state.  Mediating institutions are groups of people large and small that help serve as a check on government power and provide individuals with a way of influencing the state much more effectively than they could on their own.  These independent sources of authority are essential to the preservation of liberty:  without them the behemoth of the state would easily crush the lone citizen.  That’s why totalitarians of every stripe make the subjugation, or even destruction, of these institutions (especially the Family and the Church) a top priority.  Giving the state the power to manipulate, redefine and hence to unmake such essential protectors of freedom must necessarily lead to an ever more powerful state, and an ever smaller place for individual liberty.

     The desire of libertarians to work to preserve personal freedom is quite understandable, but the legal redefinition of marriage will do just the opposite: it will necessarily mean the loss of freedom to express and to act according to our most sacred beliefs, and it will grant to the state an enormous and unprecedented power for remaking society according to its own designs.  If you want to defend liberty, therefore, protect the traditional family.

(See also, "Marriage, Family, & Liberty" here)