"Progressive" Catholicism, Humanae Vitae and the Spirit of Vatican II

This Worth Revisiting post dates from September 26th, 2015, shortly before Pope Francis visited the United States. We'll be hearing more on this topic throughout this year as we commemorate the 50th anniversary of Pope Paul VI''s encyclical Humanae Vitae.

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.

A Blast From The Past

   Some years ago, as part of a staff spiritual development project at a Catholic high school, I was asked to read and comment upon a number of excerpts from a book called A People Adrift: The Crisis Of The Roman Catholic Church In America, by a fellow named Peter Steinfels.  

I didn’t know much about the author at the time except that he and his wife had some connection with the leftish quasi-Catholic publication Commonweal.  I soon ascertained that he was very much of the “Spirit of Vatican II” school of Catholicism, in which the teaching and tradition of the Church often appears to serve as little more than window dressing for whatever enthusiasms are fashionable among the cultural elite.  It seems that it’s hard to maintain this stance if one is too particular about that doctrine and tradition, as I pointed out in one of my responses to the assigned reading:

Steinfels typically uses vague generalities when proposing his heterodox positions, as when he fails to cite any of the documents of Vatican II in his discussion of the council and the reform of the liturgy [literally not one citation in an entire chapter on the topic!]. Other times he simply ignores factual evidence that doesn’t fit his theses, as when he omits the scriptural background and the teaching of the Fathers in his discussion of contraception, and in his discussions of the current state of the Church he never mentions the ecclesial movements or some of the vibrant new publications spearheaded by lay Catholics.

I couldn’t possibly respond to every omission, distortion, and non-argument in his book, but still my comments grew longer and more elaborate with every chapter assigned. Finally, after reading his chapter on Humanae Vitae and contraception, I submitted a thirteen-page critique of Steinfels' argument and a defense of the Church’s centuries-old ban on contraception, with attached documentation of at least equal length.  It was an exhausting (and tiresome) exercise.

    The Catholic Left, however, never seems to tire of discussing Humanae Vitae and contraception.  Mr. Steinfels continues to opine on the topic in public, most recently just a couple weeks ago in the Washington Post [here], where he takes advantage of the publicity surrounding the Pope’s visit to the United States and next month’s Synod on the Family in Rome to renew his campaign to persuade the Catholic Church to abandon its condemnation of contraception.  

The More Things Change . . .

    As for Steinfels’ arguments, well, not much has changed over the past ten years.  To begin with, he tries to minimize the Catholic teaching on contraception with the usual red herrings and non-sequiturs:

The church’s sexual norms were woven out of the Old Testament, apostolic injunctions and classical doctrines such as Stoicism, which held passion suspect and condemned sexual acts not directed toward procreation as “against nature.”

But unlike, say, adultery or fornication or defining the conditions of a valid marriage, contraception was a relatively marginal issue until the 20th century, when reliable methods replaced a brew of folk remedies. Before that, birth control was associated with prostitution or illicit sex and decried by virtually all Christian denominations . When Anglican churches broke that pattern in 1930, followed by many Protestant denominations, Pope Pius XI reacted with a stern encyclical reasserting the condemnation. Opposition to birth control soon became a kind of identifying mark of Catholicism.

So, the implication is that a centuries-old doctrine can be done away with because 1) it’s based on the Bible, the teaching of the Early Church, and Classical moral philosophy, 2) we can accomplish the proscribed activity much more effectively now than we could in the past, 3) said activity was formerly associated with prostitutes, but now, apparently, behaving like a prostitute is no longer a big deal, and 4) the Anglicans and other Protestant bodies changed the teaching, and they’re doing just fine, aren’t they? . . .  At least the ones who are left. This last point is especially funny, given the massive decline of those ecclesial bodies after their acceptance of contraception, when the the main point of Steinfels’ essay is that banning contraception is driving decline in the Catholic Church.  As a matter of fact, along with points 1 through 3, this actually sounds more like an argument for maintaining the prohibition on contraception, doesn’t it?

Lies, Damned Lies, And Statistics

    There is also the usual unspoken assumption among the “progressive” set that Catholics can somehow vote to repeal unwelcome moral teachings.  He trots out the the notorious “600 theologians” who, in the best traditions of theological discourse, published a full-page ad in the New York Times the day after Humanae Vitae was promulgated in order to proclaim their opposition (one wonders when they found the time to study its arguments, or whether, in fact, they read it at all).  We are asked to accept uncritically the thoroughly unbiblical, uncatholic, and ahistorical notion that, on matters of faith and morals, academics in university theology departments can overrule the Successors of the Apostles.

    We also hear from the voice of the supposedly faithful laity:

Approximately 80 percent of U.S. Catholics, including the thoroughly devout, disagree with that stance [i.e. the prohibition of contraception] (support for changing the ruling is nearly as high around the world). And the vast majority ignore the teaching altogether — one study suggests that 68 percent of sexually active American Catholic women have used birth control, sterilization or IUDs.    

Blessed Paul VI, author of Humanae Vitae

This last quote is a good example of just how slippery these statistics can be: what precisely does “thoroughly devout" mean? Who gets to decide who falls into this category? How can one be “thoroughly" devout if one rejects the teaching of the Church to which one is supposedly devoted? Notice also the careful parsing of “68 percent of sexually active American Catholic women have used birth control.” First of all, I’m surprised the percentage isn’t higher, because we live in a culture where contraception is the norm, where doctors routinely prescribe birth control pills to teenaged girls without a second thought.  That makes it easy to distort the real situation: by including all women who have used birth control, Steinfels is putting in the anti-Humanae Vitae camp the growing number of women who, on the contrary, have embraced the encyclical's teaching after trying the current conventional wisdom and finding it sadly wanting.  Quite a few of the public promoters of Humanae Vitae's teachings today, in fact, are lay people who have gone this route.  More importantly, it doesn't matter how unpopular it might be, Doctrine isn't made, or unmade, by popular opinion: it's Doctrine because the Magisterial Church to which Christ gave the power of binding and loosing (Matthew 18:18) has determined that it's the truth.

The Truth

    That, finally, is the fundamental problem with the Steinfelsian approach, not only in regard to Blessed Paul VI’s encyclical, but to everything.  There is no sense of coming to terms with The Truth: everything is put in terms of a battle of opinions, as if this were a wrangling over a political platform, where whoever can concoct the more persuasive argument "wins". For instance, Steinfels writes:

At last October's Synod on the Family . . . the discussion of contraception was perfunctory.  The bishops simply called on the church [sic -lower case in original] to do a better job of propagating "the message of the encyclical Humanae Vitae." In other words, the rejection of the birth- control ban is simply a messaging problem.

Well, no, it doesn't necessarily follow that the bishops consider it a "messaging problem", which is political jargon for not “selling” your position in a way that appeals to voters. I suspect the bishops were more concerned about the fact that the Church, in the person of its bishops and priests, virtually never mentions the topic at all (for more on that point, see here).  For Steinfels, however, and for "progressive" (another political term) Catholics in general, politics seems to be the prism through which they view everything, including their faith.  Instead of the traditional definition of theology, "Faith seeking Understanding", we have merely "policy preferences seeking justification". That’s not the sort of thing that inspires ordinary people to become saints.

   And yet, sainthood is what we are all striving for, isn't it?  St. John Paul the Great used to exhort us to embrace the “Adventure of Orthodoxy”, and “Set Out Into the Deep”; Mr. Steinfels is willing to settle for “give the people what they want”.  Which one sounds like he’s talking about the Church of Jesus Christ?   

Is The Catholic Church A Political Animal?

   Right now we are in the midst of an unusually rambunctious presidential election here in the United States. It seems a good time to revisit this Throwback to April 15th 2015 (first published on the blog Nisi Dominus), which looks at the difference between secular politics and "politics" within the Church.

   You’re going to find politics wherever people gather, or so someone once told me when I had objected to using the secular political terms “liberal” and “conservative” to describe different factions within the Catholic Church.  And he was right, if by “politics” we mean the small-p wrangling that unavoidably accompanies any human enterprise requiring two or more people.  But that is a very different thing from Politics, of the partisan variety.  The Church is not a political party, and does not work like a political party.  Nor should it.

Synod on the Family October 2015 (photo: Vatican Radio News)

     That may seem an obvious point to you and to me, but it’s not at all obvious to everybody.  It’s a distinction lost on a large number of people outside of the Church for instance, for many of whom politics has taken the place of religion, and so has become the lens through which they interpret everything. Many such people have come to dominate the secular media in the developed world, with the result that the mass media projects the secular political model onto the Church, with bad guys called conservatives working to thwart the good guys, the liberals (sometimes referred to as progressives), who are fighting to bring about a kinder, better Catholic Church more in step with The Times.  This is the only model of the inner-workings of the Church most people see, including most ordinary Catholics, unless they intentionally seek out Catholic publications which reject this distorted view (sadly, many self-identified Catholic outlets do not).

     That is not to say that there isn’t a wide range of legitimate differences of opinion within the Church; there most certainly is.  Unlike a political party, however, where major policy planks can change overnight with a vote of the membership (and why not? They’re only opinions), there are many things in the Church which are grounded in Divine Revelation, and are therefore not up for negotiation.  This vital distinction was expressed very clearly by then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI) in 2004.  Senator John Kerry, the nominee of the Democratic Party for President of the United States, was widely criticized for receiving communion and touting his Catholic bona fides despite his open advocacy for legal abortion and other positions contrary to Catholic moral teaching.  Accordingly, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote a letter (later published by the Holy See under the title “Worthiness to Receive Holy Communion: General Principles”) to Kerry’s ordinary, then Archbishop of Washington, D.C. Theodore McCarrick,  which gives an excellent example of how the Church is different from a political party.  For instance, Cardinal Ratzinger writes:

Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia.  For example, if a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment or on the decision to wage war, he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion.  While the Church exhorts civil authorities to seek peace, not war, and to exercise discretion and mercy in imposing punishment on criminals, it may still be permissible to take up arms to repel an aggressor or to have recourse to capital punishment.  There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI)

     This crucial difference can be obscured by applying secular political terms to church “politics”.  Political parties often change even basic positions, and this is sometimes a good thing: consider that, when I was a child, many prominent leaders in the Democratic Party in the United States were unapologetic White Supremacists and segregationists. Such a position would be unthinkable today, and yet nobody doubts that the Democratic Party is still the Democratic Party.  Using the political analogy can create the impression that proposed changes in the Church are benign or even desirable changes of the same sort.The difference between abortion and euthanasia on the one hand and war and capital punishment on the other is that the Church has always taught that the first two are intrinsically evil, and so never permissible; this teaching is part of the deposit of faith and cannot change, and to publicly oppose it is to separate oneself from the Church (hence the unworthiness to receive communion).  In the case of war and capital punishment, the Church has taught that, in some instances, they may be morally licit, a teaching that likewise cannot change.  While there are certain moral principles that bind a Catholic here (e.g., the Just War Doctrine), the actual application of these principles belongs to the prudential judgment of individual Catholic decision makers.  It is in matters of prudential judgment that legitimate differences of opinion may arise.

     Many so-called liberals in the Church today, however, are not advocating simply the more “liberal” application of unchanging principles in prudential situations, but are pushing for changing more foundational things like the teaching on marriage, the meaning of priesthood, sexual morality, etc.  The Catholic Church, however, can’t change its teachings and still remain the Catholic Church. One can usually make a case for being either a conservative or a liberal in political matters, but when it comes to Church Doctrine, we can only be Catholic . . . or Not. 

Archangels, St. Jerome, Morality, And God's Law

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,

nor stands in the way of sinners,

nor sits in the seat of scoffers;

but his delight is in the law of the LORD,

and on his law he meditates day and night.

He is like a tree planted by streams of water,

that yields its fruit in its season,

and its leaf does not wither.

In all that he does, he prospers.

The wicked are not so,

but are like chaff which the wind drives away.

Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,

nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;

 for the LORD knows the way of the righteous,

but the way of the wicked will perish. (Psalm 1)

  

   The first Psalm gives us an interesting account of God’s law.  It is explained primarily in descriptive terms: if you follow God’s Law, and take it to heart, you will be happy, but if you choose wickedness, well, then your wages will be death.  Here is one of many indications in Scripture that while God allows us to conduct our own affairs, both on an individual and societal level, he wants to be involved, and he has created us in such a way that we in turn desire his presence in our lives (yet another occasion to quote St. Augustine: “Our heart is restless until it rests in you”).  And so he has created a variety of means for communicating with us without controlling us.

     We see God’s desire to communicate reflected in different ways in our obsevances over the next two days.  Today is the feast of the Archangels: our word “angel” comes from the Greek ἄγγελος, which simply means “messenger”.  The function of angels, at least as far as they concern us, is as carriers of God’s messages to us.  In addition to that, tomorrow is the feast of St. Jerome, who is known primarily for creating the first complete and reliable Latin translation of the Holy Scriptures, making the Bible available to all those inhabitants of the Roman Empire who did not know Greek. We honor St. Jerome because he made the word of God available to so many people.

      I couldn’t help thinking about the Archangels and St. Jerome the other day when I was reading this column [here] by Star Parker.  Parker is reporting on a recent survey by the Pew Center showing that: 

Over the last 12 years, the percentage of Americans that think religion is losing influence in American life has increased dramatically.  In 2002, 52 percent of those surveyed said religion is losing influence.  In 2014, 72 percent of Americans said religion is losing influence. 

Star Parker

     At the same time, Parker says, “fifty-six percent say that the waning of religion is a bad thing compared to 12 percent that say it is a good thing”, and she points to a Pew poll from 2012 that found that 58 percent thought religion was “very important” against only 12 percent who believed the opposite.

     What are we to make of these figures?  One would think that the large majority decrying the decline of religion must nonetheless play some part in that decline.  I suspect that we are seeing, at least in part, the struggle between our willing spirits and weak flesh within our restless hearts: “Lord give me chastity . . . but not yet” (St. Augustine has all the bases covered).  There are also more concrete considerations.  Parker, who was at one time a single mother on welfare, and who credits the welfare reforms of the 1990’s with rescuing her from a life of dependency on government largesse, sees the baleful moral consequences of such dependence as an important proximate cause.  Most Americans, largely out of a sense of Christian Charity, supported the enormous expansion of government assistance programs starting in the 1960’s.  

Who appreciated that the program would undermine the very religious, traditional values that keep families intact, essential for the work ethic that leads people out of poverty?  Massive increases of government in the lives of low-income black families were accompanied by a tripling of single parent households and out-of-wedlock births, laying the groundwork for intergenerational poverty. 

Now it’s happening in the whole country.  As we’ve gotten more government telling Americans how to save for retirement, how to deal with their health care, how to educate their children – American families have been damaged and out-of-wedlock births have increased six-fold from 1960 to 42 percent today.  Government has displaced family.

But it’s not simply about government.  In fact, Parker finds fault with both the Statists on the left and the Libertarians on the right who see the government per se as the issue, as if adding more government or radically cutting it will alone solve our social problems.  No, “you can’t have a free society that is not also a virtuous society”, and “we can’t separate our fiscal and economic problems from our moral problems.”  And where does morality come from?  Of course . . . God’s Law.

     I want to be clear that I’m not pushing some kind of “Gospel of Prosperity”, but the discussion above does offer an example of how God knows the truth about us, and that living by that truth leads to happiness, while denying it brings on ruin.  We know it from the messages carried by his Angels, the Scriptures he inspired, and the Church he established.  As the Lord Himself tells Moses:   

For this commandment which I command you this day is not too hard for you, neither is it far off.  It is not in heaven, that you should say, 'Who will go up for us to heaven, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?' Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, 'Who will go over the sea for us, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?' But the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.  "See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil.  If you obey the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you this day, by loving the LORD your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his ordinances, then you shall live and multiply, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land which you are entering to take possession of it.   (Deuteronomy 30:11-16)

  

When "Progress" Isn't Progress

The beginning of another school year seems a good time to republish this Worth Revisiting post, an earlier version of which was first posted June 22nd, 2014. 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.


 A thoughtful friend recently lent us a book called DisOrientation: The 13 “isms” That Will Send You To Intellectual  “La-La Land”.  It is a collection of essays edited by John Zmirak with contributions by such luminaries as Jimmy Akin, Robert Spencer, and Fr. John Zuhlsdorf (a.k.a. “Fr. Z”), among others.  Its purpose is to prepare prospective college students for the various intellectual traps that await them, such as Relativism, Hedonism, Utilitarianism, etc.  One of my favorite essays in the collection is Peter Kreeft’s contribution on Progressivism.  He starts out by clearly delineating what it is to be a “progressive”:

The opposite of Progressivism is conservatism or traditionalism. A conservative, by definition, is a happy person, one who is happy with what is.  It is only for that reason he wants to conserve it.  A progressivist, on the other hand, is by definition an unhappy person, one who is unhappy with what is.  It is only for that reason he wants to change it . . . Adam and Eve were conservatives until the Devil made them into progressives.  For the Devil himself was the first progressivist.  The other angels were happy with God and His will, but the Devil wanted to progress to something better.

Now, Kreeft may be having a bit of mischievious fun with his argumentum ad Satanam, but his point is nonetheless valid.  Satan’s chief sin was Pride, a belief that he knew better, and isn’t the belief that one’s self knows better than the unenlightened rubes of the past and the ignorant and/or evil-minded boobs of the present the driving force of progressivism?

Progress? I think not . . .

     Kreeft notes various “justifications” for the assumptions of Progressivism: evolution, technological progress, etc., and he uses the term “chronological snobbery” to sum up the attitude that something is undesirable simply because it is not new.  The progressive’s dislike of “what is” is not the result of any actual qualities of what is, but is based solely on when what happens to be ising. That’s why the progressives rely on “justifications”: they need to persuade others who are  interested in the actual situation on the ground. While Kreeft doesn’t put it quite this way, a consequence of all this is that the positions and policy prescriptions of progressives very often are not rooted in reality but in feelings, the felt need to be “progressing” to . . . well . . . who knows? 

     The progressive tendency is not simply a political view, it is really a mindset, and one that finds expression not just in politics, but also in culture, and in the Church. It is particularly problematical in the Church, because the Church is founded on the unchanging revelation of an eternal God. While there is a place for “progress” of a sort,  here progress consists in faithfully applying the eternal principles to new situations (development), in making the Church more fully what it has always been, rather than “progressing” to something new. We should keep this combination of principle and practice in mind.  Despite its Divine source, there’s something very down-to-earth and human about Catholic Doctrine: Christians have found it not only possible to live by that teaching, but have flourished through it: “I came that they might have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).

     That’s why I find it odd that those who advocate “progressing” beyond the magisterial teaching of the Church claim that they are drawing on the “lived experience” of Christians.  That’s nonsense, of course, because as we saw above Church teaching has always been the lived experience of Christians. In its place they would put things that have never been, such as homosexual marriage, or things that have been tried and failed, such as the panoply of ecclesial innovations that can be found in the rapidly declining “mainstream” Protestant denominations.

     In the end, “Christian Progressivism” is an oxymoron, and a double-irony.  First, progressives advocate moving away from any signs of the Transcendent (Eucharistic Adoration, Ad Orientem worship, incense and bells, etc), and from Biblical and magisterial moral teaching; for a Christian, however, progress means precisely moving closer to the transcendent God.  Not only that, they fail even on their own terms: they reject the 2,000 years of human experience embodied in Sacred Tradition, all the while claiming to align themselves more closely with experience.  Progressivism for its own sake is problematic in any context, but in the Church it is impossible.  Instead, we should follow St. Paul’s advice: “So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us” (2 Thessalonians 2:15).

Abortion Myth # 17

MYTH: "Voting pro-life doesn't do any good; once they're elected, pro-life candidates don't do anything about abortion."

TRUTH: Although the U.S. Supreme Court decisions Roe vs. Wade, Doe vs. Bolton, and Casey vs. Planned Parenthood prevent the passage of laws directly outlawing most abortions in the United States, pro-life legislators and governors have put in place numerous pro-life laws that, while not outlawing abortion, have significantly reduced its incidence (while simultaneously improving maternal health):

Pro-life laws lead to real reductions in abortion

-          Dr. Michael New reviewed 16 peer-reviewed studies, and reports that all of them show significant decreases in teen abortions after the enactment of parental involvement laws (reductions from 13-42%). [here]

-          Informed consent laws, Medicaid restrictions, and partial-birth abortion bans have all been shown to lead to significant measurable decreases in the abortion rate. [here]

Pro-life laws lead to real improvements in Women’s health

-          Informed consent laws, Medicaid restrictions, and partial-birth abortion bans have also been shown to lead to significant measurable decreases in various health problems such as gonorrhea (12%-20% reduction for women under 20 yrs old) and suicide (11%-21% reduction in women 15-17 yrs old)[here]

-          Maternal mortality is consistently, and significantly, lower in countries where abortion is illegal than it is in countires where it is legal. [here]

-          In Ireland and Northern Ireland, where abortion is heavily restricted, rates of low birth weight and still births are consistently and significantly lower than in England Scotland, and Wales, where abortion has been legal since 1968 (in 1971 the rates were much higher in Ireland and Northern Ireland). The Irish countries also have lower maternal mortality rates and lower breast cancer rates. [here] 

There are also ways that government officials can promote life other than by the passage of laws:

Federal judges are nominated by the President and approved by the Senate; pro-life Presidents and senators are more likely to put in place justices willing to reverse those decisions (pro-abortion politicians regularly go before groups such as Planned Parenthood and explicitly promise to nominate only judges who will uphold pro-abortion decisions).

There are other things Presidents, governors, and other officials do that encourage or discourage abortion. For instance, President Reagan and both Bushes had policies in place forbidding use of U.S. funds for abortion overseas (the “Mexico City Policy”); Presidents Clinton and Obama both reversed those policies on their first day in office. State governors also make decisions that either encourage or discourage abortion (see here, for instance).

DON’T BUY THE LIE!

Essential Pro-Life Resources:

Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments (link)  

The Elliot Institute (link)  

National Right To Life Committee (link)  

Care-Net (link)

The Nurturing Network (link)


To See The Entire Abortion Myths Series Click HERE 

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.

Benedetto Marcello's Requiem & Weekly Roundup of Posts

Benedetto Marcello

     Today at Mass our music director brought along a trumpet player, who played an interesting piece by a composer named Benedetto Marcello, with whom I was unfamiliar.  After I returned home I was looking at a clip from Johann Christian Bach's Requiem (the opening of which I posted last week), when I noticed a recommended link to a Requiem by this same Benedetto Marcello. I decided it was time to learn something about this composer.
     Marcello was a Venetian who lived from 1686-1739.  A trained composer, his first love was music, but he was also a nobleman whose family expected him to take on a life of public service. Throughout his life he had to find time for composition while serving various positions in the Venetian government.  He also faced frustration in his personal life: he fell in love and married one of his students, Rosanna Scalfi but, because she was a commoner and legally ineligible to marry the noble Marcello, they wed secretly, and after the composer's death the marriage was voided by the authorities.  Their relationship did, however, provide material for an opera called (naturally) Benedetto Marcello by the composer Joachim Raff.
     The clip below is the haunting opening to Benedetto Marcello's Requiem,  one of the nine Masses he composed.  While you listen, feel free to peruse the links below to past week's posts at Principium et Finis; who knows? you might find something worth reading . . .

Weekly Roundup, July 5th 2015

It was a busy week, for the summertime at least, at Principium et Finis: there was something old, something new, nothing borrowed (except a few pithy quotes from minds greater than mine, all properly attributed), and I must confess that I was a little blue about the state of the culture.  A theme common to a number of the posts below is the sad course a society will follow when it turns its back on God.  The Good News, of course, is that Jesus Christ will triumph in the end, and would be happy to have us along . . . if we’re willing to follow, that is.

Tuesday - “On Being A Child Of This Age” We start with Chesterton’s famous observation that the Catholic Church “is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age”, and man, what an age . . . [here] 

Wednesday - “Feed My Sheep (Worth Revisiting)” In which we see, first, that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing (when I attempt to apply my modest Greek skills a passage from John’s Gospel), but more importantly just how far Jesus is willing to go in order to give us a chance to repent [here] 

Thursday - “Archangels, Morality, St. Jerome, & God’s Law” This post combines the themes of the first two: God is speaking to us in a variety of ways, but we desperately want to believe that we can ignore him and still have everything turn out all right.  Guess who’s right? [here] 

and -  “St. Monegundis Is An Example Of God’s Loving Providence” None of Monegundis’ plans worked out; fortunately, she listened to the plan God had for her.  That’s why we call her “Saint.”  [here] 

Saturday - “July 4^th: An Experiment In Freedom Under God” The First of two Independence Day posts.  In this one we look at what George Washington had to say about the importance of religion and morality in a free society, and see why we are unwise to ignore his advice. [here] 

and - “‘Appealing To The Supreme Judge Of The World’ – July 4^th” A revision of a post from last year about the Declaration of Independence.  The Declaration asserts that “the protection of Divine Providence” is extended to citizens, not governments.  Without that protection, however, free citizens can’t hope to remain free from the power of the state. [here] 

         

"Appealing To The Supreme Judge Of The World" - July 4th

      A defiant group of Englishmen and Scots-Irish who were tired of getting pushed around made a formal announcement 239 years ago today that they had had enough, that they were declaring independence from Great Britain and her grasping monarch, George III (to my British friends out there, by the way, no hard feelings – I think we’ve smoothed things over since, especially in the war begun a hundred and one years ago this summer, and even more so the in one that followed a few decades after). Here’s how that document, the Declaration of Independence, begins:

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

     “The laws of nature and nature’s God”.  Here’s an extraordinary thing: they were going above the head of the king, as it were, and appealing to God for justice.  Likewise in the next paragraph:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

     So, governments exist only by God’s leave, and their purpose is to protect the people’s God-given rights.  The end result of this idea can only be a republic, and a republic was formally codified eleven years later in the U.S. Constitution, but this was to be a republic different from those that had gone before: while technically the sovereignty belonged to the people, the true Sovereign was God himself. And yet it was not a theocracy: the protection of individual freedoms demanded that the citizens individually be governed by God’s law in pursuit of their individual interest.  That is what John Adams meant when he said (I won’t quote directly this time; if you’re familiar with this blog you’ve seen the quote) that the U.S. Constitution was fit only for a moral and religious people.  In the absence of religious faith (particularly Christian faith), citizens without a sure moral compass make a people incapable of self-government.

     We can see how true this is simply by looking around us.  There have been several periods in American history referred to as the Great Awakenings, dramatic revivals of religious faith.  In the past half century we seem (both in the U.S. and other Western nations) to be going through a Big Sleep, a dramatic decline in religious belief.  At the same time we see an equally precipitous decline in morals, a rapid disintegration of the family, and a growing and ever more coercive state eager to step in and make more of our decisions for us.  It’s worth pointing out that our growing weakness as a culture is also a major factor in the growing boldness of jihadists and others eager to complete our downfall.  People unwilling or unable to govern themselves are incapable of directing the government of the state; the end result can only be tyranny.

     The Declaration ends with a final invocation to the sovereignty of God.  The document concludes:

           

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states . . . And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

I submit that unless we are equally willing to submit to the “Supreme Judge of the world”, and ready to pledge our “lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor”, we will find ourselves under the weight of a despotism heavier than anything George III could have imagined. 

July 4th: An Experiment In Freedom Under God

It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.  –Alexander Hamilton, Federalist #1

     The Publication of the American Declaration of Independence on July 4^th, 1776, marks the formal beginning of a great experiment.  As Alexander Hamilton put it a decade later during the debate over adopting the new constitution, the question was whether free men, exercising “reflection and choice,” were up to the job.  The founders of the new republic, as Hamilton’s quote above suggests, also saw the new republic that they inaugurating as not simply a matter of local interest, but as an example to the rest of the world that such an arrangement could succeed.  The conventional wisdom at the time was that republics and democracies were doomed to fail, devoured by the unchecked passions and appetites of the populace.  That, it was said, was the verdict of history.

     We might reasonably ask what it was that led Hamilton and the other founders to believe that this republic would not similarly fall victim to the baser motives of its citizens.  It wasn’t education, as important as that might be, because the founders understood the difference between knowledge and wisdom, as so many of us today do not.  George Washington put it very directly in his Farewell Address:

…Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and citizens . . .  Let it simply be asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

     Washington was most emphatically not referring to a national religion or state church, something that was explicitly ruled out in the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution.  He and the other founders were mostly Protestants of various stripes; some, such as Jefferson, were Christians of rather more idiosyncratic views, and a very few were Catholic (including only one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll).  They were united, however, by a strong Christian worldview and a firm conviction that human dignity demanded that men should be accorded the freedom under God to conduct their own lives.  Religious toleration was therefore an essential part of the polity they devised, an arrangement amenable to the flourishing not only of Protest Christians, but of a growing Catholic population as well (in whose case often in spite of very real prejudice on the part of their non-Catholic fellow citizens).  The result was an inversion of the usual political order, in which ordinary citizens occupied the lowest position, with a governing elite above, and God over all; the American model still had God at the apex, but directly below him not the rulers but the citizens themselves, and they, each one shaped and informed by his faith, were empowered to direct the government.

     For its first two centuries the American experiment seemed to be proving the doubters wrong, although not without a few rough spots along the way (the stretch from 1861-1865, for instance).  The United States has grown and prospered, and has often been the example its founders hoped it would be.  Material success, however, often leads both individuals and nations to lose sight of their radical dependence on the Grace of God.  That would seem to be the case in the United States today.  It appears that a new and very different experiment is under way, in which religion and morality are no longer guiding principles; the indulgence of appetites and passions is held to be a virtue, such that those who object must be harassed and silenced, and oaths of the Courts of Justice, as Washington called them, are no more than empty words, if recent judicial decisions are any indication.  History and reason suggest that experiments of this sort do not end well.  I am reminded of the words of Thomas Jefferson who, deist though he might have been, had the wisdom to say: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”

     God is indeed just, but he is also merciful, and this country has seen several “Great Awakenings” of religious faith in the past.   I believe with Alexander Hamilton that the “conduct and example” of the American people are being watched with interest around the world; the failure of the experiment in Liberty under God would be a loss not just for Americans but for people everywhere.  Please join me in praying that we rediscover the reliance on our Creator that animated the signers of the Declaration of Independence whose proclamation we celebrate today; please join me in echoing one of our great presidents, Abraham Lincoln, who at perhaps the darkest juncture of our national history prayed “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

N.B. Lincoln’s quote comes from his “Gettysburg Address”, which he delivered at the dedication of a cemetery to inter the dead from the Battle of Gettysburg, the largest and most destructive battle in the history of North America.  It was fought on July 1-3 1863, 152 years ago this week.