Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Alice von Hildebrand recently published a lengthy essay in critique of Christopher West’s manner of presenting the theology of the body. In the essay, she contrasts what she considers to be West’s rather vulgar and democratic presentation of John Paul II’s theology of the body to her own husband’s approach to similar themes.

I have only one point that I wish to draw from her presentation: and, above, I’ve only linked to a news account of it, as I did not have time to see if it was published on line. Her own husband’s theology was, presumably in contrast to West’s, thoroughly aristocratic in spirit, in the ancient tradition of orthodox monastic theology, seeing the Christian life, whether in the married state or celibate, as ascensional in Christ. He was horrified and repulsed by pornography and sodomy. These were, for him, unlike for many contemporary Catholics, even orthodox Catholics, vile and violent misuses of human freedom and of the body, as gravely serious in their nature and consequences as any sin. He was incapable of even joking about these acts, contrary to the blithe attitude of so many Catholics today.  

Hildebrand was a man of genuine Catholic tradition and greatness of spirit. He was not a fashionable pre-vericator in expounding the nature of the Catholic tradition. He is a genuine role model of the faith for our times, especially, I would suggest, for lay Catholic men. Would that all Catholics today could see their lives as truly in Christ as Hildebrand did and allow their sensibilities to be shaped accordingly.

He is the antidote to those many theologians in the Anglosphere today who would claim to recover the great tradition of Catholic theology all the while thinking that it is morally right that, for instance, ”civil unions” for SSA couples should be established.

[And, I would add, the very idea of "women's ordination" would likewise be horrifying to Hildebrand, and he would see it as connected to the same gross and diabolical misunderstandings of Catholic tradition and of the nature of the body that lead one to blithely ignore the grave consequences of sodomy or pornography.  But I'd have to do a very long essay on that to make the point clear -- I only offer it here as an aside. And, besides, this is David's area of expertise, not mine.]

Well, I have just completed my first full week of unemployment.  I think that I had more leisure time while employed.  Unemployment began by waking up to 8 inches of water in the basement Saturday morning before last.  The sumps had stopped running for some reason.  I was able to get them started before heading off to Mass. The water was pumped out by the time we returned.  Tricia spent the morning trying to dry out our files that had been inundated with water while also holding a garage sale.  I spent the morning cleaning up the basement.  We headed out to Chicago to visit some friends in the afternoon and made it back home by 11pm.  That has been one of our more leisurely days.

We are in Dayton for our goddaughter’s graduation, so that is the only reason I have a breather right now.  I thought I would take the time to comment on a topic I have seen in my inbox this  month.  Several articles by several different persons have been forwarded to me about Christopher West and the fallout from his Nightline interview.  He has been taking quite a bit of heat for it.  According to some (Alice von Hildebrand and David Schindler), it is not simply the case that West was taken out of context and misconstrued,  but rather that he has some underlying problems in his anthropology.

First for some caveats and disclosures: I cannot speak as an expert on Christopher West’s interpretation of John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, as I have read and/or heard relatvely little of his thought.  However, I have read and heard some and have found that I share some of the concerns being presented.  I know David Schindler.  I took a course from him at the John Paul II Institute which, by the way, served as the inspiration for the title of this blog.  He was also a reader for my dissertation.  I do not always agree with Schindler’s take on John Paul II. I think it is often too heavily read through his “Balthasarian lens.”  However, I do think that some of Schindler’s criticisms are well-founded, and these criticisms will be the focus of this post.  I don’t claim to be the world’s foremost expert on John Paul II or his theology of the body, but I do consider myself to have an above-average expertise, as this was the foundation of my dissertation, and I have taught undergraduate courses on the theology of the body for several years.

Schindler begins with some apparently rather questionable statements that Christopher West has made.  Oftentimes, these questionable statements can seem to be reconciled with orthodoxy when contextualized, but even in doing so, Schindler says that there is a residual problem.  Schindler lists four issues he sees with West’s approach, and also with the substance of his theology.  These Schindler sees as giving rise to what many find vulgar and prurient in West’s approach.

Schindler first lists West’s underestimation of the damage done to humanity by concupiscence.  Schindler refers to his having brought this up to West a number of years ago.  I recall Schindler’s having mentioned this discussion (back in 2003, I think it was).  He mentioned West’s problematic dismissal of the perduring effects of concupiscence and West’s response.  However, I also recall that I did not agree with the way the Schindler seemed to frame the meaning of concupiscence.  He seemed to reify it as some positive reality then, as something that resides in the body.  His statement in the above linked article also intimates this understanding.  Nevertheless, what I have heard from West seems to suggest to me that he does in fact underestimate the impact of concupiscence on the human person.  Redemptive grace in this dispensation does not remove concupiscence, and concupiscence in sexual attraction cannot be ignored.  West seems to forget this, though “Christopher” of this blog, who has recently taken a class from West, indicated that West is reconsidering his take on concupiscence.

I have the impression of West that he seems to consider puritanism as a greater threat than the sexual libertinism of the sexual revolution.  I seem to recall seeing this written by him, but if I am wrong about this, I apologize.  However, if it is true, it would explain many things about his overemphasis on sex which Schindler thinks arises from his lack of a proper sense of the analogia entis (the analogy of being), which takes its archetype in God but never forgets that the difference between God and His creation is greater than the similarity.  Puritanism is a distortion of chastity.  Libertinism is a rebellion against not only puritanism but also against chaste virtue.

West seems to think that concupiscence can and must be defeated.  This is impossible.  Temptation must be overcome and defeated but concupiscence remains for the entirety of this lifetime.  Concupiscence is not an object to be defeated.  Concupiscence is a privation of integrity between the affects (i.e. emotions and appetites) on the one hand and the intellect and will on the other.  The original state was one of integration among these faculties, which we had only because of original grace–but this is how we were created–we were created for grace.  This integrity can be provisionally restored to a greater or lesser extent by cooperating with sanctifying grace, but the proclivity to sin always remains, and so it must not be tempted.  West can seem to dismiss this.  In doing so, it seems that he is falling into the error of presuming upon God’s grace in order to reject the admonition to avoid the near temptation of sin.  God’s grace can transform us if we cooperate it, but in our fallen state this is not a straight path that one can achieve simply through the force of will or by a quietist presumption on grace.

Schindler criticizes West for a lack of Marian sensitivities in his theology of the body. The way Schindler describes this is pure Balthasar and so it is not fair, I think, to consider this a failure. John Paul’s theology is certainly sympathetic with Balthasar’s Mariology, and good arguments cans be made that he incorporated this to some degree in his own thinking.  At most this should be proposed as a corrective to West’s prurience but not a fault in West’s theology.  Hildebrand argued that West loses the mystery of the person by his lack of sensitivity to the dangers of concupiscence.  This I think I have seen.  It is, I think, the reason behind his inability to discern what is inappropriate or vulgar and what is not.

Puritanism and sexual libertinism are both threats.  The former because it set the stage for justification of the latter.  However, both reject the authentic meaning of the human person and the sacredness of the body.  The danger is (and I think that this is the trap that West falls into) that the response of one who suffers from puritanical thinking can look very much like the response of one who has an authentic anthropology and responds out of a desire for purity.  That is, when subjected to sights that might be a temptation both will turn away.  The puritan because he thinks that the naked body is dirty or evil and the wannabe saint because he realizes that the goodness of the naked body is sacred, and in his fallen state he can be tempted to reduce the other to his sexual value.  Furthermore, there is a stewardship for the weaknesses of others that must be observed in order to protect them from temptations.

When inadvertantly subjected to experiences that can lead to lust, one does indeed have the obligation through self-mastery to overcome the temptation.  However, one also has the obligation to avoid the near temptation of sin.  It is ill advised, indeed it can be sinful, to  subject oneself purposefully to anything with which Satan or our simple fallenness can use to draw us more easily into sin.  Everyone is different.  Men and women are tempted differently.  Men tend to reduce women to their sexual value for the sake of pleasure.  Women tend to reduce men to the latter’s ability to meet their need for complementary bonding and personal fulfillment.  Among men, however, temperament, experience, history of subjection to pornography, etc. all factor into what can lead to temptations and how difficult it is to master oneself in this regard.  One may not sin in a misguided attempt to attain self-mastery. Neither may I assume that what I can safely be subjected to is the standard for everyone.

West’s use of images that offend the sensibilities of many good Catholics seems to be motivated by the fact that he thinks that puritanism is the root cause for their offense.  He needs to be reminded that puritanism is a relatively recent phenomenon and that chastity and purity are age old virtues.  While it is true that some cultures are not offended by things sexual that do offend others (a point I recall West often making), one must not draw conclusions based upon superficial assessments.  Lack of offense does not imply purity in reception.  Cultures in which men and women are both publicly naked must not be assumed to show that public nakedness is a possibility for a society that wants to achieve purity.  In fact, these cultures rarely show a high regard for women and their sexuality.

Ok, enough blathering and back to the question: is Christopher West’s interpretation of theology of the body dangerous?  First, I will say that I wish that this discussion could go on in private because it serves to give comfort and aid to dissenters and can undermine a good apostolate that West has developed, albeit, one that is in need of some course corrections. However, with respect to the question,  I suspect that for some people it can be.   I do think that in many ways he has done very much good, and I have no way of knowing how much that his disregard for concupiscience may have caused damage to those misled by it.  I do hope that he will take the public criticism to heart and find someone who can help him to correct his misinterpretations.  Our culture needs it and so does the Church.

In reading Archbishop Robert Herman’s, the Administrator of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, recent column published in the St. Louis Review, I was reminded of G. K. Chesterton’s famous poem written in 1907, “The Secret People.”

In his article, Bishop Herman put things in the right perspective, showing that anger at BO and his administration is misplaced (do read the entire column linked to above).  Rather, our anger, or rather our focus, ought to be on the enabling of Catholics (or half of us) and of Catholic politicians who have allowed us to arrive at where we now stand.  BO did not hide what he had planned even if the MSM did its best to keep it out of public view.

It is a failure of Catholics to understand and live their faith that has allowed the country to drift into a post-Christian, post-God malaise.  Chesterton’s poem is written about events in English history that he sees as significant. Chesterton asserts that the average Englishman was/is more endowed with common sense than those leaders whose goal it was to labor for freedom from the Crown.  However, in each of these events he writes of he admonishes, it seems to me, the average Englishman for his silence being more interested in mundane niceties than fighting for what justice:

Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget;
For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet.
There is many a fat farmer that drinks less cheerfully,
There is many a free French peasant who is richer and sadder than we.
There are no folk in the whole world so helpless or so wise.
There is hunger in our bellies, there is laughter in our eyes;
You laugh at us and love us, both mugs and eyes are wet:
Only you do not know us. For we have not spoken yet.

Chesterton writes of the suppression of Catholic monasteries in England while the common Englishman says nothing:

They burnt the homes of the shaven men, that had been quaint and kind,
Till there was no bed in a monk’s house, nor food that man could find.
The inns of God where no man paid, that were the wall of the weak.
The King’s Servants ate them all. And still we did not speak.

He writes about reign of Charles I in an indictment of the blindness, in fact, the tyranny of the democratic forces that opposed Charles.  Recall that Charles I was the last King of England who professed the divine right of kings and who was eventually executed for his various attempts to secure this right:

And the face of the King’s Servants grew greater than the King:
He tricked them, and they trapped him, and stood round him in a ring.
The new grave lords closed round him, that had eaten the abbey’s fruits,
And the men of the new religion, with their bibles in their boots,
We saw their shoulders moving, to menace or discuss,
And some were pure and some were vile; but none took heed of us.
We saw the King as they killed him, and his face was proud and pale;
And a few men talked of freedom, while England talked of ale.

He goes on to speak of Napoleon and others but ends with what he seems to find to be the sad state of political affairs of his time and the fact that the common Englishman has not spoken yet:

They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords,
Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords.
They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;
They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,
Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs.

We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet,
Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street.
It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first,
Our wrath come after Russia’s wrath and our wrath be the worst.
It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest
God’s scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best.
But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.
Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.

What is common to both Bishop Herman’s column and Chesterton’s poem is that we all know, or should know, what is right and what is wrong.  We have the responsibility for standing up for what is right.

In our present circumstances, we must stand for the right of the unborn to be born and for the right of society to be free from the tyranny of disordered social structures mascarading as protected alternative lifestyles.  We have to put truth and justice ahead of convenience and social acceptance.  We have to put down our ale and stand to protest against erroneous claims of promoting freedom that in fact, deprive us of authentic freedom.

Both, perhaps could  be summarized by the dictum attributed to that 18th century Irishman, Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.”  Let us not talk of ale while our blind politicians talk of freedom.

In his encyclical Quadragesimo anno, Pius XI considers the question as to whether the more benign forms of socialism, which had come about since Marxist socialism had been condemned by Leo XIII in Rerum novarum 40 years earlier, could be reconciled with Christianity.  After considering the question from many sides, recognizing that many of the fearful totalitarian aspects had been expunged, and that in many ways it had become more amenable to Catholic social principles, the Pope still had this to say:

Whether considered as a doctrine, or an historical fact, or a movement, Socialism, if it remains truly Socialism, even after it has yielded to truth and justice on the points which we have mentioned, cannot be reconciled with the teachings of the Catholic Church because its concept of society itself is utterly foreign to Christian truth (paragraph 117).

What was its societal concept?  It was one in which the goal of society is considered solely from the perspective of material wealth and one in which the state was ultimately responsible for creating and distributing such wealth.  This contradicts Christian truth because it gravely distorts the meaning of the human person and so damages human dignity.  Pius XI warns that even if more benign forms of socialism do not deny completely the ability for private ownership of property, they still so mistake the nature of the human person and the purpose of society in aiding in the perfection of the human person, that they can never be reconciled with Church teaching.

In fact, he warns about the socialist mentality’s inevitable recourse to “excessive force” and also to the attempt by socialists to use public education to indoctrinate the young to their way of thinking.  To counter this, he emphasizes the importance of Christian based education.

It is amazing how these prognostications of the popes bear themselves out in lived history, sometimes sooner, and sometimes later…but inevitably.  The reason for this, of course, is that the Church is an expert on the human person.

We have all heard about Germany’s assault and persecution of home schoolers.  Here is a story about a German family that is seeking asylum in the U.S. from their government’s persecution.  Socialists in Germany do not recognize the priority of pre-political institutions, especially the family, in the education and formation of children.  In fact, they seem to fear the consequences of allowing families to assume their rightful responsibilities in this matter.  In fact, the German government is employing the tried and true totalitarian approach of condemning such persons as mentally unstable and removing the children from their parents’ care.

Unfortunately, this family has come to the US at a time in which the incoming administration is likely to be more sympathetic to the German government’s ideology than to the rights of this family.  We will see what happens, but I will not be surprised if this family is quickly deported.  Such an action would indicate that those in control of the U.S. government have slid into this same socialist mindset and would imply that such persecution may not be too far off for US home schoolers (for example in Florida). If this happens, one might consider whether US parents who home school ought to start looking for sympathetic governments elsewhere.

     For all of us called to the Vocation of Marriage (or Vacation of Marriage as I heard mispronounced in a wedding one time) there is a great book I have just discovered.  The title is “For Better…Forever” by Gregory K. Popcak. Dr. Popcak is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker who has his ideas well grounded in the Catholic Faith. You can find more information on Dr. Popcak at the Pastoral Solutions Institute webpage http://www.exceptionalmarriages.com/

     As a budding young Marriage and Family Therapist is it great, for me, to find a text that not only up holds the Catholic Churches idea about Marriage but also challenges each couple (husband & wife) to buck up and work on their marriage. I have personally be even more convicted to work on my marriage as well as to implement these principles into my therapeutic approach with couples. This work does not challenge you to work on your marriage so much as to work on yourself and your part of the marriage. My mom used to tell me growing up that marriage is never 50/50. Sometimes it is 90/10 or 110/-10. Dr. Popcak addresses this and many other great aspects of marriage in this short 235 pages.

     Dr. Popcak also outlines the different types of marriages (Impoverished, Conventional & Exceptional) and describes what the strengths and weaknesses of each marriage are. He provides suggestions in which we as married couples can seek to have “Exceptional Marriages” and not settle for the marriage that we have. This book is a wonderful breath of fresh air (if you have not read it already. Published, 1999) and insight into what our marriages are really about and what we are doing wrong even in the most well intentioned and well oiled relationships.

     Dr. Popcak has many good books that he has written over the years on Relationships (For Better…Forever), Sex (Holy Sex!) and Parenting (Parenting by Grace: Raising Practically Perfect Kids). I will have to provide one disclaimer for his works; don’t read them unless you are ready to do some hard work on your relationships. You cannot read these works without being convicted to put more work and effort in to your family. As with our Catholic faith life our marriages must be in constant conversion closer to what our Lord examples to us in His relationship with the Church (Ephesians 5:23-28). Don’t waste one more minute in raising your spouse closer to Christ as a spotless and unblemished lamb.

     Peace & Prayers,

     CLS

John Paul the Great’s Theology of the Body is very popular today with many young, faithful Catholics. That is a very good thing. However, there are at least two groups of folks who are not all that pleased with it. One of these groups is not surprising.

It is generally eschewed by those who promote sexual license, if not wanton promiscuity, at least in ways that reject the meaning of the human person and sexuality as authoritatively taught by the Church (read here same sex attraction disorder, sex outside of the marital union, etc.). Because it clearly shows how the human person is made to be complementary in terms of sexual difference and the real meaning of the sex can only be authentically understood in terms of a marital act, it negates the legitimacy of these folks’ attempts to insert pagan sexual “enlightenment” into Catholic theological discourse.

Another group that is unsure about it are those of a more traditionalist bent. This group is generally familiar with it through its popularizers. A good summary of what this group finds problematic with it, or more precisely they way it is interpreted by some of its popularizers, can be found here. Disregarding the dangers of oversimplifying, which I am wont to do at times, I would say that the way it is presented to them they believe that it goes against Church tradition in terms of modesty and purity.

The concerns that Michael J. Matt (see the previous link) summarizes were evident in the comments on an article that Hierothee pointed me to on Inside Catholic. Kate Wicker, the author of the article, writes about her overcoming her “shame” about breast feeding during Mass. As justification, she cites Christopher West as an authority on JPTG’s Theology of the Body:

Christopher West, the Catholic author best known for his insightful commentary on John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, describes a nursing mother as “one of the most precious, most beautiful, and most holy of all possible images of woman.” So why should I feel ashamed nursing in church — in the presence of the Most Holy Eucharist — but not at the mall? Do I believe breasts are made to feed babies or are they just meant to be squeezed into rhinestone-clad bras for surfers to ogle on the Internet?

Kate gets what seems to me (I did not read all of the comments, much less tally them) an evenly mixed response between those who support her and those taking issue with her. In a relatively early reply (in the combox section, #27) she again goes back to Christopher West in support of her position:

An article by Christopher West is what inspired me to write this article. I’m going to take the easy way out rather than addressing everyone’s comments indvidually and share some of the article here. I also want to mention that I’m not saying we should be giving kids of all ages snacks at Mass. My preschooler is not allowed any food or drinks in Mass. We are supposed to be fasting before receiving the Eucharist and children (even those who have not made their First Communion yet) can wait to nosh until after Mass.

However, babies’ wants and needs are the same thing. A hungry baby needs to be fed and cannot be spoiled by responding to his/her needs. (This may spur another debate). Also, as some of you have pointed out, nursing DISCREETLY is key. Even when I’m at the beach where women are walking around in string bikinis, I nurse so discreetly most people wouldn’t have any idea I was feeding my baby.

Still, I’m always amazed by how the idea of nursing still makes so many people uncomfortable. So without further ado, here’s an excerpt from Christopher West’s article entitled “Nursing a Sexually Wounded Culture.”

“I remember attending the Second World Meeting of John Paul II with Families in Brazil in 1997. Nursing mothers were a common sight at this international gathering. What I found intriguing, however, was that women from “first-world” nations tended to drape themselves and sit off in a corner, while women from other nations seemed to have no qualms whatsoever about feeding their babies in full view of others. I remember one woman unabashedly roaming the crowd passing all manner of bishops and cardinals with her breast fully exposed while her child held on to it with both hands happily feeding. The only people flinching seemed to be those from the northern hemisphere.

Isn’t it interesting that the part of the world producing the most pornography and exporting it to the rest of the globe has seemed to lose all sense of the true meaning of the human breast? What a commentary on the sad state of our sexually wounded culture! Breasts have been so “pornified” that we can fall into thinking that even their proper use is shameful. In other words, we have been so conditioned to see a woman’s body through the prism of lust that we find it very difficult to recognize the purity and innocence of breast-feeding.

St. Paul hit the nail on the head when he said, “To the pure all things are pure, but to the impure nothing is pure” (Ti 1:15). It is a tragically impure world that labels the purity of a baby at the breast as “gross.””

God bless!

Written by Kate Wicker

I have not followed Christopher West much at all so I do not wish to take these few decontextualized comments to characterize what very well could be a more nuanced position. So let me comment on what Kate and others seem to be getting from him.

It is interesting that Kate uses the term “shame” to characterize her initial feelings about breastfeeding in Church. Shame is in fact a central theme in JPTG’s Theology of the Body. Interestingly enough, it is not a purely negative concept for him. John Paul finds that shame serves an essential function in our fallen state.

He makes it clear that concupiscence is an ill fruit of the Fall and that this proclivity to sin will always be with us until we die. In fact, John Paul is adamant that we cannot authentically interpret our current experiences without understanding the “man of concupiscence” (the earlier translation used the “man of lust” which I find more appealing for its dramatic tone but as the translator of the updated edition points out, concupiscence is a more accurate rendering of what JPTG intends). The man of concupiscence is in a continual struggle against temptations to sin, especially sexual sins.

John Paul makes distinctions among many types of shame. He terms sexual shame the fear of being reduced by another to one’s sexual value. This is a great temptation in the fallen state. Concupiscence leads one who is exposed to those aspects of another’s body (the opposite sex for the vast majority who do not suffer from SSAD) which reveal his sexual value, to see only the sexual value and not the entire person. In seeing only the sexual value, one then reduces the other to this value. This reduction is the sin of lust when it is consented to.

John Paul says that the body’s sex reveals its spousal meaning but this meaning is nearly (but not completely) annihilated by concupiscence. Thus, sexual shame serves the purpose of trying to restore the body’s nuptial meaning. It promotes modesty. The modest person covers those aspects of his body which lead him to be reduced to his sexual value. These of course include the genitals for both sexes as well as the breasts for women which uniquely point to their sexual value as mothers, though some other secondary sexual characteristics can also be problematic. Christopher West, by the way, is correct that the sexual value of the female breast has been gravely distorted by our “pornified” culture making it not a sign of motherhood but of sexual use for pleasure (however, even if he correctly interprets his observations in terms of a trend I do not think that it is legitimate to intuit that the first world women were uniformly motivated by Manicheaism and the third world women were motivated by a healthy understanding of their bodies).

Sexual shame serves an important function with a two fold purpose. Thus, John Paul does not dismiss it as something to be overcome as some seem to infer. First, it motivates one to protect his personhood from being reduced. However, a second motivation is to protect the other person from the loss he will suffer through succumbing to temptation if he were exposed. So one is not only concerned with himself but he also has a grave responsibility for the other as well.

In his Theology of the Body, John Paul takes pains to make the distinction between the Church’s teaching on the body and Manichaeism which is a hatred for the body. He does this because he recognizes that superficially, one can interpret actions motivated by modesty for the sake of purity to be those motived by a Manichean outlook. The latter is termed prudishness or puritanism. This distinction is of fundamental importance. Without understanding it, one can fall into a category error and so misread much of John Paul’s writings.

Here is where I think the problem lies in the way many understand the Theology of the Body. They recognize that the body is good and has a good meaning but they miss the fact that concupiscence demands modesty for one’s own sake and especially for the sake of others.

Women especially have little idea, at least relying only on their own experiences, the effect that their bodies can have on men. Women in general reduce the man in his body to a use in terms of satisfying relational needs. They do not tend to experience the “testosterone rush” men must cope with when exposed to sometimes even seemingly innocuous feminine movements and gestures, much less more direct evidence of feminine value.

Men, on the other hand, tend to reduce women to their sexual value in terms of use for the sake of pleasure. Some men can experience this temptation so compellingly, that it takes what seems to be superhuman effort to resist. Our oversexed culture reinforces this temptation so greatly that, except for various disorders, this is fairly universal among men (of course it comes in varying degrees based upon temperament, environmental factors, the degree to which he has subjected himself to pornography, etc).

So what is the response to solve this problem. In the traditionalist post above, Michael Matt references a comment by Christopher West that seems to suggest that one should by some means (we can safely assume that if he is suggesting this that it be through self control aided by sacramental grace) overcome these temptations and no longer be subject to them. West references Karol Wojtyla’s Love and Responsibility:

John Paul II warned that if chastity is lived in a repressive way, it’s only a matter of time before sexual desires explode (see Love and Responsibility, pp. 170-171). I think we find here a key for understanding the sexual revolution of the 20th century. It was a ticking time bomb waiting to detonate in response to the prudery and repressiveness of the previous era.

Unfortunately, this is also what Kate seems to take from Christopher West’s statements. However, If one reads the passage cited above completely, one will see that Wojtyla makes it clear that repressiveness has the same superficial response as modesty. One still says “no”, but for a different reason. One says no to exposure to the body in its nakedness for the sake of seeing the whole person, not because the body is evil. Wojtyla understands that mistaking the body for an evil gives more “ammunition” if you will, for temptations. Thus, it is important to understand the Wojtyla/JPTG is not suggesting that we can set aside modesty.

Now we could make precisions in what John Paul the Great says about the naked body. He does find that it is possible to present it in art. He generally finds that the naked body should not be the subject of photography because there is not the ability to control the presentation of the whole person as there is in mediums like paintings, sculpture, and drawings. Nevertheless, not everyone can expose themselves to even authentically portrayed nudity in art, even if the majority can safely do so. For all of whom this might be problematic he has the obligation to avoid the near temptation to sin.

So what is the end result. I will say first, that one cannot legitimately point to John Paul II’s Theology of the Body as a defense for the decision to breastfeed during Mass. There are other issues to consider here as well to consider, not the least of which is the restraint demanded against even pure and noble, but still mundane activities, because of the solemnity of the Sacrifice of the Mass (can a bottle of breast milk substitute in this one limited case?).

Nevertheless, if someone’s prudential judgment dictates it is legitimate, after very serious consideration of the issue, one must not blithely dismiss covering oneself under the misguided notion that it necessarily implies Manichaeism or that one has no duty to safeguard the purity of others for whom such potential exposure might be a temptation to sin.

The feminine breast is a beautiful sign of motherhood, especially when a baby is being suckled. It is a shame that not everyone can enjoy such a sight without temptation. But that is the state in which we live. The man of concupiscence must be ever vigilant. He must not try to pretend he can bring back original innocence. John Paul the Great is adamant that the threshold was crossed and can never again be restored. Grace and cooperation with it through practice of the cardinal virtues is essential to self-possession, the precursor to holiness. However, this grace is given now to the man of concupiscence in a way not given to man in original innocence. We cannot forget that until we reach heaven, we are living East of Eden and shame will always be an ally.

Tom Wolfe, in his 2004 novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, explores the connection between the mind-brain reductionism of contemporary neuroscience and sociobiology and the moral depravity rampant on contemporary college and university campuses. Philosophical materialists who reviewed the book were, by and large, unimpressed by the idea that mind-brain reductionism should lead to the libertinism endemic to contemporary campus life.

But Wolfe, who is generally more prescient regarding the culture than those purely literary types who review his books, was simply expressing a sense of a connection that honest philosophers since the time of Socrates have recognized as their vocation to articulate. Namely, it is impossible that there should be such a thing as objective moral goodness if reality is nothing more than matter in motion.

Philosophical materialism is the underlying metaphysical presupposition of the contemporary academy. It is a metaphysical position that is thought, by many, to have been put on an unshakable foundation by the findings of modern neuroscience. All experiences and thoughts are capable of being measured in the brain, so it is said by materialists, and we have proven this by our successes in mapping experiences and thoughts to their neural correlates. Certain neural regions, when stimulated, give rise to experiences and thoughts. Many take this to mean that the brain must be wholly causal of psychological phenomena, and this is taken to mean, at least implicitly, that the human person is reducible to his brain. We truly are (on this view), to borrow an image from Descartes, brains in a vat, though the vat in question is simply the rest of the human body. Much of the effort in neuroscience is directed to finding the neural correlates of psychic experience.

Perhaps the best book written on the subject of the relationship of the mind and the brain remains Stanley Jaki’s Brain, Mind and Computers. The book was originally published in 1969, with a second and expanded edition in 1989. Jaki, as many may know, is a Catholic priest, theologian, and perhaps the most important historian and philosopher of science in the past 40 years. In this book, he defends the existence of the soul, whose existence alone, he argues, makes human understanding possible. He makes this defense, in a masterful blend of historical scholarship and philosophical argumentation, against the reigning philosophies that underlie modern neuroscience and especially against those who think that mental processes are reducible to computer models. Jaki considers the relationship of the brain to experience and thought, and he levels a devastating critique of those who champion the existence of “artificial intelligence,” those, that is, who equate understanding with the physical manipulation by pre-established rules of purely formal systems. Especially valuable is chapter V of the book, which Jaki added to the second edition and which gives a very suggestive phenomenology of language.

The book is worth considering in detail, but there is one point that Jaki makes near the end of it that I wish to bring out here, and that gets me to the point of this post. Jaki gives several suggestions, toward the end of chapter 5, for defenders of the existence of the soul to consider in regard to the contemporary debate on the mind and the brain, inasmuch as there is such a debate. One of his suggestions is that defenders of the soul should have the courage to call a spade a spade. By this he means that philosophers who recognize fully the dignity of the human person must be brave enough to stand athwart efforts by neuroscientists, sociobiologists, proponents of artificial intelligence, and the like, to reshape human society according to their valueless science. Jaki explains:

… [society] merrily marches down the road to anarchy. The march is to the brass bands composed of academics who have been busy trumpeting that exclusive attention to quanitatively specificable patterns is the only posture with intellectual respectability. Such a pattern is on hand whenever a behavior, no matter how queer, is acted upon in a statistically significant number. From there it is but a short step to claims to legal recognition and protection, as on the basis of mere patterns, so many pure formalizations, everything becomes a mere machinery, with no allowance for distinctions between the morally good and the morally evil. Hence the steady erosion of sensitivity for hallowed principles, as if they were so many words, and the growing readiness to grant social respectability to any behavior, provided it establishes itself as a pattern. (Brain, Mind and Computers p. 295)

Jaki wrote these words in 1989, and there is little doubt that he did not have the concept of “gay marriage” on his mind at that time. But the basic principle that he brings out here is at play in the ever-greater social acceptance of “gay marriage.”

What he means in this passage is that there are those who hold that behavior is entirely determined by biology. The biological dimension of beings is, in turn, thought to be capable of being mathematically measured. Indeed, the establishment of a mathematical measure to things is the ultimate goal of science. The ultimate reality of things is, on the view of many, that which is quantifiable. Given the advances of twentieth century physics, mathematical science has tended to rest in statistical analysis, especially so in regard to “biological systems.” The statistical is therefore thought to be the real. Statistical significance is the only significance. There is no good or bad, in the traditional moral sense. There are only, for these reductionists, statistically significant occurrences of behavior.

Jaki confines his attention to unmasking the pretensions of proponents of artificial intelligence. They think only in terms of statistical significance. They have no other basis then statistical analysis to uphold or deny moral norms. But, going beyond Jaki’s analysis, it must be recognized that the philosophical position of these reductionists goes hand-in-glove with utilitarianism, which reduces the rational assessment of human action to a calculus of pleasure.

The upshot of this type of moral reasoning is that there can be no standard of moral goodness that transcends comfort and demographic consensus. If a person’s behavior is thought to contribute to his comfort and pleasure then his behavior is acceptable, on the condition that the statistically-verified, consensus opinion of his society is amenable to his behavior.

Of course, this type of reasoning goes against the virtue ethic of the Catholic tradition, for which actions or behaviors are good or bad by their very nature. In regard to the discussion of “gay marriage,” the gap between the Church’s virtue ethic and the materialistic ethos of the wider culture makes it very difficult at present for genuinely Catholic opinion to penetrate public opinion. On the analysis of the Church, it is in the nature of things that male and female are sexually oriented to one another, as is evidenced by their bodily complementarity. It is for the ultimate good of a society that it should encourage a stable ordering of this orientation of one to the other in the socially privileged institution of monogamous marriage.

Scriptural revelation unveils the profoundest depths of the ordering of male and female to one another. Marriage is revealed in scripture in its sacramental profundity. The union of man and woman in the Church, as Saint Paul realized, gives to marriage its full significance as both sign and instantiation of the entire Church’s nuptial relationship to Christ the Bridegroom. Naturally, the Church cannot force civil society to accept the sacramental meaning of marriage. But the revealed meaning of marriage is a perfection of its natural meaning, and it is the Church’s duty to defend this natural meaning even in the civil order.

Ultimately, mind-brain reductionism devalues the body as much as it denies the existence of the mind. The form of the body is of little consequence to an analysis of human action for reductionists. For the virtue ethic of the Church, the sexual act is good inasmuch as it is ordered to the union of husband and wife and the openness to procreation that seals their love most fully. The form of the body and the experience of married love reveal to natural experience the soundness of this teaching. But reductionists cannot see in the form of the body anything that is of its essence, just as they cannot see in concrete experience anything that connects to reality. Male, female, or some combination of the two: it makes no difference. Matter and its statistically analyzed motion is the only reality for reductionists, not the “shape” of the body, not its concrete existence as we experience it. Reality, for reductionists, is ultimately a homogeneous mass of matter/energy in space-time. The things we experience in our everyday life, the basis for the Church’s virtue ethic, are denied reality.

So, the upshot of the cultural dominance of mind-brain reductionism, as Tom Wolfe realized, is the situation of poor Charlotte Simmons, an innocent college co-ed at a prestigious university, who is left to figure out her life in an environment where anything goes. What difference does it make, as long as almost everyone is comfortable and having a good time? In the end, you are only your brain. When it dies, there is nothing left. Why, then, should we not have a culture formed by the ethos of “Girls Gone Wild,” or “Boys Gone Wild,” or “The Jerry Springer Show?”

How do we, as faithful and hopeful Catholics, transform this cultural situation? It can only come through the Church. As the Holy Father himself realizes, it starts with the reform of the Church’s liturgy, where bodily form and symbol have to be valued once again after several decades of anti-religious leveling of the symbols in the Church. And Catholic institutions of higher education have to have the boldness, as Fr. Jaki says, to call a spade a spade. Moral reasoning is impotent if it is based upon the idea that the mind is reducible to the brain. The Church’s intellectual class needs to state it plainly: there can be no such a thing as objective goodness or of “values” that transcend cultural norms if the mind is reducible to the brain. Luckily, we are seeing more and more bishops who are stating the matter plainly, and we must all support them.

A careful reading of Catholic philosophers and theologians in the Thomist tradition, such as Stanly Jaki, has much to teach us as well, and Catholic universities should get back to this tradition of thought. A first pedagogical step would be to teach a sound epistemology to students: one that recognizes that each and every act of understanding transcends the material domain. The brain cannot understand. Computers cannot understand. These cannot understand because material systems cannot, as Thomists have always understood, abstract universals from concrete particulars. And it is only by abstracting the universal meaning of things that any particular thing – whether it be a word, or a symbol, or an animal, or a tree, or a molecule – is understood. Brains and computers are only concrete particulars, or collects of concrete particulars, and only act within the concrete moment. They cannot transcend the concrete moment of space-time because they exist entirely within it. It takes spirit, which is not confined to space-time, in order to abstract the universal from the concrete. It takes spirit in order to understand, for instance, what it means to be a person, or to be this particular person, or to understand any particular thing or general concept that persons communicate. Of course, I mean by spirit, at least for humans as opposed to angels and God, that which is, in the soul, truly united to the body (as the soul was not for Descartes), even though the soul is not reducible to the body. This sound epistemology, which is also the only basis for a sound ontology, is the starting point for a genuinely Catholic and Christian educational perspective. It should be expanded and brought out on many different levels. It is the basis of true philosophy and theology. It is only in recognizing the existence of the soul and the body (both of which are done away with by mind-body reductionism), and their unity, that a truly humanistic form of moral reasoning can be articulated.

I came across a story at the Catholic Education Resource Center of which a Canadian psychologist and author argued that biology, and not a patriarchal conspiracy, was reason for a significant disparity between men and women among the high ranking positions of fortune 500 companies. She attributed the “glass ceiling” as being one of choice, based partially on the effects of a hormone called oxytocin. In other words, they had other priorities in their lives other than climbing the corporate ladder. Oxytocin is not only essential for facilitating child birth and breastfeeding, but has also been found to enhance social recognition, bonding, the formation of trust between people and generosity.

A Rutgers University study indicates that the feelings of romantic love are among the strongest drives on Earth –– even more powerful than hunger. Other researchers indicate that oxytocin has other long-range implications –– that individuals develop a “template” for a partner based on their previous pair-bonding.

A study from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), found that the production of oxytocin varied among women according to the level of distress and anxiety or the degree of security in their relationships. The women who had fewer negative emotional relationships in their lifetime experienced greater oxytocin production. Likewise, they were better able to set appropriate boundaries for their subsequent relationships.

Numerous studies indicate that stress and fright inhibit oxytocin release. In other words, if relationships are not grounded in the kind of explicit commitment evidenced by loving, trustworthy, considerate, selfless behavior, the amount of oxytocin produced by intimacy decreases, and it becomes increasingly difficult for bonding to take place. On the other hand, the researchers at UCSF said bluntly: “[A] close, regular relationship may influence the responsiveness of the hormone.”

In the pursuit of equality and sexual freedom, the liberated women have set themselves up for exploitation by men within their relationships and in many cases, the best they can hope for is the mutated misnomer of love called eroticism. Eroticism is based on the fulfilment of infantile needs which include the need of being received, accepted, and satisfied. Relationships are sustained with acts of “love” (bribes) with the hope of one buying the other’s allegiance and favor. Consequently, those who have the most to lose also have the greatest need to deceive. The more failed sexual relationships one goes through, unless they dramatically change their behaviors, the less likely they will ever have a fulfilling and meaningful relationship in the future. Since the reality of true love is to will the good of the other, it’s not something we can possibly “fall into”, as opposed to falling into desperation, loneliness and selfish needs and desires.

I think the lack of bonding and commitment among couples illustrate why even among those who make it to marriage, a majority of them never make it a life long committment- and those who don’t divorce there seems to be an epidemic of infidelity, competition and hostile relationships. There is little doubt that sex before marriage damages the bond between husband and wife required to sustain a healthy, life long relationship.

“man can build a world without God, but this world will end by turning against him.“- Pope John Paul II

California Catholic Daily had an article yesterday explaining what the San Francisco-based “Gay-Straight Alliance Network” is up to in their latest attempt to promote “marriage” for those who suffer from same sex attraction disorder and number of related affective pathologies. For the upcoming “Freedom to Marry Week” they want clubs in high schools and middle schools to go all out to promote this “fundamental human right — the right to marry those whom we love.”

In order to promote it they are suggesting decorating classrooms and hallways, holding mock weddings complete with wedding receptions with cake and toasts to the “freedom to marry.” One venue aimed at children as young as 14 years old is offering free drag shows and workshops on “safe sex” and “how to do drag.”

Of course, this is the long term strategy. One can see that these activists are hoping to influence enough young minds to become, if not activists themselves, at least favorable to their agenda. The strategy is an appeal to love, human rights, and equality. This seems quite difficult to argue against for many who do not have a solid moral grounding and/or insight into what this lifestyle really entails.

The real difficulty with arguing against this “rights language” is that society has come to distort the meaning of sexuality and marriage so badly that in its present deficient state, there seems little grounds for demonstrating the disordered nature of same sex attraction. This began when we swallowed the error that contraceptive sex within marriage is legitimate. In doing so we separated the inseparable aspects of the marital act–the procreative and the unitive. These two meanings form an inseparable unity just as the body and soul comprise two aspects of one unified human nature. In fact, there is a direct correlation between the marital act and this hylomorphic structure of the human person.

One can see that the procreative aspect of sexual intercourse, the primary end in the biological domain, corresponds to the material/bodily aspect of the human person. Likewise, the unitive aspect of marital intercourse, which weds two souls together, corresponds to the formal/soul aspect of the human person. Just as when one separates soul from body the person dies, when one attempts to separate the unitive from the procreative in marital intercourse, one destroys the marital act. It becomes, what we must admit is the ultimate end of artificial contraception any way, simply an act of hedonism in which pleasure–a fruit of the marital act–becomes the purpose of the act. Making this pleasurable secondary effect an end/purpose results in libidinism. In his work, Love and Responsibility, Karol Wojtyla shows that this libidinism necessarily results in the use (read exploitation) of each person by the other. This is the case even when both consent.

Once we destroyed the meaning of the marital act and treated in such a way that it is now clearly viewed primarily in terms of pleasure, we lost the ability to claim that the act must be reserved to marriage. Thirty years ago living with someone of the opposite sex prior to marriage was still a no no, for the most part, culturally. Today, the average person is often authentically surprised when they hear it suggested that there is actually something morally wrong with premarital intercourse or cohabitation. I see it every year with students and with RCIA.

Now since the marital act has been torn from its unified meaning as procreative and unitive in our culture, it now is free to be redefined however we choose. Add to this the fact that the no fault divorce debacle has led to the annihilation of the meaning of marriage itself, as a life long commitment of two people to one another and to their children. I would argue that the close correlation of the wide availability and “effective” artificial contraception beginning in the 1960s and the radical increase in the divorce rate and the free fall of the nuclear family all represent causally connected phenomena. Because of this destruction of the meaning of marriage and the marital act, some, of course, are choosing to make the case that anyone you can have sex with, you should be able to marry. Now is the opportune time as too many of us have lost the sense of nature and what is natural. All is now all open to redefinition based upon our whims…even the whims of disorder. At least in the sexual sphere, Nietzsche’s nihilistic, deconstructionist dream in his Gay Science is now upon us.

It is not the case that there is a large interest in marriage among those who suffer from these disorders. Rather, what we see in this movement is the manifestation of a phenomenon common to many who find themselves in a perpetual state of moral disorder. These suffering souls need continual reaffirmation that what they are doing is “really ok.” Any sense that there exists anyone, any place who would warn that they are not ok cannot be tolerated. All messages that something is not right with them must be removed.

This is what underlies the movement for “equality” in marriage. SSAD sufferers need continually reaffirmation from all quarters that same sex attraction is not a disorder. They need to hear from everyone that they are normal. This much can be seen from the totalitarian methods taken by many of those suffering from these disorders when they have the power, against anyone who would utter a word suggesting that there might be something wrong with SSAD. And this need for repeated reaffirmation will continue to be the case even when they do not hear anyone telling them they are not.

It is the fault of our society–read those of us in it– that we have promoted the conditions in which the arguments for “equality in marriage” are now compelling to so many. In truth, these disordered efforts to finally destroy the meaning of marriage are not the first volleys in the battle against marriage. Rather, they represent the final assault in a war whose first shot was heard in 1930 in the U.K. when the Anglican bishops meeting in Lambeth agreed that it was permissible to allow artificial contraception in marriage in some restricted cases. That was the initial crack in the windshield; today the windshield is nearing total structural failure.  Don’t be surprised if in the near future, your children or grandchildren will be taking as one of their required courses, How to do Drag…

The problem with most androgynous pushing activists and man-hating wives is that they understandably hate and fear what has hurt them in the past. Many of them were betrayed by an abusive “father” and/or husband who destroyed the innocence they were supposed to protect, and exploited their role as a means of self- validation and fulfillment. As if like a cancer that is carried on from generation to generation, some of it’s victims feel justified in destroying the lives of others who had become fallen prey under the premise of marriage; while others heroically dedicate their lives to never allowing it to take another victim.

Food for thought with Zenit’s article on How Dads Can Help Raise Strong Daughters:

Research shows that a father’s influence builds up self-esteem, helps his daughter to avoid sex, drugs, alcohol, and stay in college. What it is that a father offers is that he carries an authority in his daughter’s eyes. This authority is not ascribed to the mother, not that she is not important, but a father’s influence is different.

When a girl is little, her dad is her primary male love relationship. When he gives her something as a man, she learns lessons about men, setting a template in those early years on her heart about what to expect, to think, to feel, and know about men from there on out, affecting even her relationship to God, because Christ is a man.

Some of us have lived charmed lives, having no excuses for so often falling short in so many of the responsibilities in our called vocations. As this is one, among many reasons, to why we are in no position to judge anyone for any reason – but we are bound to take action against such a former victims to prevent acts which may systemically jeopardize the well being of their family members.  Although culpability may vary – the damage does not. For some, a membership into the victim hood survivor club is the best ticket in town which comes with a life time worth of benefits to include.

•  Freedom from responsibility.
• Perpetual moral correctness.
• Freedom from accountability.
• Sympathy without limits
• Justified in feeling moral indignation for being wronged.

It’s too bad we live in an imperfect world, with imperfect mental health professionals who do more to screw up imperfect patients than help them. It’s also too bad when some of us can’t seem to move beyond the self destructive nature of self pity and anger. We ALL live in a fallen world that quite often seems unfair – more for some than others – and it’s up to all us to make the best out of it by helping each other. It’s a pity when we get stuck in our own petty little world.

A request for prayers…

It had been twelve and a half years. At the time the decision had seemed a temporary concession for a greater good. If he had known at the time that it would not have been so temporary, he wondered if he would have made the same decision. That is immaterial now. He now recognized that God could not have been calling him to a marriage that would separate him from the Sacraments, even for a short period of time.

She was a single mother who had been severely sexually abused by her father and, or so she claimed, had been physically abused her first husband. This was the first woman that he had felt such a closeness to and she really needed him. He hadn’t understood then what this type of need really meant. He thought that he was being called to help her. Little did he realize that she suffered from disorders for which he could never have been prepared.

While he was, like the rest of his generation, very poorly catechized; unlike the average Catholic, he had a great sense of closeness and relationship with God while growing up. However, this sense had waned over the last decade. However, he had always recognized God’s presence in the Eucharist and this was something that he sorely missed.

In hindsight, he could now see that her denial that she had agreed to seek an annulment and have the Church bless the marriage after the baby was born, was likely a symptom of her personality disorder. He found that this was something common among those who were so severely abused as children. He was now just beginning to realize that the nightmare she was putting them through was probably lurking at the margins of their relationship from the very beginning. He also admitted to himself that he was not wholly innocent. The sins which had led to the marriage and marrying outside of the Church aside, he had adopted her button pushing acumen; something that she used for her confused sense of controlling the situation he would often employ in his weaker moments, for retaliatory measures. He realized now that this probably had the effect of reinforcing her errant belief that relationships were about controlling the other.

She had always seemed to want to be the best mom to her children. This probably was still the case but clearly this maternal instinct could no longer overcome her almost primal need for control and her very distorted need for self affirmation. When her out of control spending had required his getting a second job, the reduction in attention may have been what finally drove her to these apparently new extremes. On the other hand, perhaps this also had occurred, though less obviously, throughout the marriage. Nevertheless, the disordered relationships she now sought out and the ridicule she subjected him to with her new consort made her very public infidelity all the more demeaning. And when he had finally discovered her betrayal, her demand for a divorce now drew his children into his nightmare.

This was probably the hardest part. After she had told them that she was divorcing him, whenever he looked into their eyes they seemed to be pleading with him to make all of this insanity go away. This tore his heart out; he was their father and there was nothing he could do to protect them. He didn’t know then how much worse things could get. When she found her spending made a divorce impossible until the house was sold and she was unwilling to give up the house, he found out how insane this would be. This occurred that day after Christmas when the police showed up late that night giving him five minutes to get what he needed and get out of the house because she had filed for a restraining order with the false claim of domestic battery. While the casual observer could see that she really should be the one committed to psychiatric care, it was obvious that without the enormous amount of money that he did not have, the legal system had little ability to recognize and appropriately deal with such a situation. Instead of getting her the help she needs, she will rather be enabled by the system to continue her downward spiral until something even more tragic happens.

Given this turmoil, his preparation for returning to the Sacraments was all the more poignant. Attending Mass, he could not withhold the tears realizing that very soon he would again receive Christ: Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. He finally was led to recognize that he needed this Communion as much as he wanted it. His mother was there for Christmas and so she was there when he finally received Holy Communion again after more than a decade. Neither of them could withhold the tears of joy, if the experience of it somewhat mitigated by the situation.

It is not at all clear how all of this will end; especially how his sons will fare in the short and long term. However, he does know that with God’s grace now giving him solace and strength, whatever comes he will be given the strength to handle it. He is also beginning to understand in his experience of God’s closeness throughout this terrible pain, what is meant by the truth that God permits evil in the world only that greater good may come from it.

Please keep this suffering family in your prayers.

Earlier this year I posted on the problem of divorce and the lack of marital commitment from the perspective of relationship and how what all of this means for children and society. While there are plenty of problems assaulting marriage and family life today, the destruction of the meaning of marriage and commitment through our no-fault divorce statutes has to be recognized.

Divorce laws began to be changed in the early 1970s in the US in a way that did away with the need to find fault in order to terminate a marriage. The rationale was manifold, but in general, it was intended to prevent the wide spread abuses that had come about in order to get around fault laws, including the generally prevalent perjury. What has happened is that we now have a system which some argue results in an unconstitutional deprivation of due process because they put the one who initiates the proceedings at a considerable advantage and denies the other party any meaningful recourse to the commitment made by the other spouse. Instead of being a defender of the bond, the state has become an enabler of socially destructive behavior.

In an article about no-fault divorce law about 10 years ago in First Things, Maggie Gallagher identifies copious problems associated with them, including the affect of divorce on children. In effect, she says, the no fault divorce laws effectively deliver divorce on demand. The state no longer seems to have a sense that it is in society’s interest to enforce the commitment couples make and in keeping marriages together. The presupposition now seems to be that the individual has a “right” not to be married any longer and this right trumps the rights of children, the rights of the spouse that does not want the divorce and would seek redress from the state in order to compel their spouse to live up to his original commitment, and the rights of society to expect people to honor their commitments and to raise healthy, emotionally mature children (which requires healthy marriages).

In the same article, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead argues against changing no fault laws, which I find, by the way, uncompelling, but she is right that this alone will not solve all of the problems we have with marriage and family. In fact, some of the more fundamental problems such as the widespread use of artificial contraception, will be very difficult nuts to crack. Nevertheless, there needs to be a fundamental shift in thinking before we can embark upon repairing the damage we have done to society with this tyranny of individualism that now threatens its very stability.

• First, we need to recover the meaning of the human person and marriage, and the central place of importance that marriage and family take in securing the health of society.

• Second, we have to recognize the authentic meaning of love and abandon the romanticist notion that love comes and goes without someone’s consent; i.e. there is the possibility of healing most marriages because love comes through personal consent.

• Third, we need to recognize that the rights and interests of society and children must be given compelling consideration in deciding not only whether a marriage out to be dissolved, but I would argue, that this same interest would demand a rigorous and mandatory preparation regimen before allowing couples to enter into marriage.

• Fourth, because the state has an interest in the success of marriage, there should be mandatory, longterm reconciliation programs required of those who would petition to have their marriages dissolved.

• Finally, we will have to get over the fiction that we do not legislate morality. Right and wrong underlies everything that we now legislate. Thus, we have to recognize what we used to recognize as crimes because of their deleterious effects on society are, in fact, crimes. Those anti-social acts that I would argue ought to once again be socially stigmatized and come with legal penalties include adultery, fornication, sodomy, sado-masochism and other sexual deviances, and family abandonment.

Our marriage and divorce laws now support the defective individualist thinking the permeates our culture. They subsidize the romanticist view that “love dies” without any personal culpability and they annihilate any meaningful sense of commitment to one’s oaths. In the process children, families, and society suffers for it.

As we continue to accede to seemingly restraint free demands for our personal (often fabricated) rights without any attendant societal responsibilities our prospects for social health decline in corresponding fashion. While programs of education and legislative initiatives to support marriage and family are important, ultimately it will take the success of the new evangelization among Catholics and a corresponding evangelization of the culture before we can expect to see much acceptance of the above proposals or the societal healing that will come from them.

LifeSiteNews reports on a Norwegian pre-school operator, backed by child psychologists, who are pressing to encourage kindergarten children to dance naked and masturbate. The psychologist fears that unless these children learn to their sexuality, “thing can go very wrong.” He doesn’t seem to have a clue though, that their is a wrong way and a wrong time to try to learn it. However, I must admit that these would be child abusers are not without any restraint. They say:

“… their sexuality must also be socialized, so they are not, for example, allowed to masturbate while sitting and eating. Nor can they be allowed to pressure other children into doing things they don’t want to,

Sure, I can see that. Eating and masturbating would just be plain impolite. The article reminds of a German government education pamphlet from earlier this summer in which the German Ministry for Family Affairs encouraged parents to sexually massage their children, for fathers to pay attention to their young daughters’ genitals, and for parents to teach their children the movements done in copulation.

Recently the APA released a report on the dangers of early sexualization of children. At least some professionals are still able to see clearly enough in this country to realize that children need to be protected from sexualization. However, given the way that we follow Europe in the slippery slope to social mayhem, I would not be surprised if the APA doesn’t reverse themselves on this in the not too distant future. Remember, this is the group that allowed activist pressure to force them remove from their list of sexual disorders same sex attraction disorder such that now any doctor who tries to treat it as a disorder is in danger of being punished or expelled for “unethical” practices.

When man forgets God, he becomes an enigma to himself and eventually turn on himself. This is what we are seeing today. Science has no resources for ascertaining morality, nor do they have the resources to understand the complete human person. Empirical data can and is interpreted in ways that support ideologies and so I would argue that because Europe has removed God from public life they have no defense against the implosion of their culture. Unfortunately, because our cultural “elite” in the entertainment and news media, and among social “progressives” are intent on following Europe in this secularization of public life, our hopes don’t look very promising either.

Twice divorced politician Gabriele Pauli proposed that marriages be allowed to expire after seven years if the couple choose to call it quits. She told reporters that setting an expiration date of seven years would lend to a more realistic ideal of marriage and prevent couples from staying together soley for the purpose of feeling safe. She has already caused some ripples in a male-dominated, mainly Catholic party which has dominated Bavarian politics since World War II.

I kept trying to figure out why Gabriele would possibly submit such an asinine proposal which has no possible chance of passing. I thought the possibilities could include that she has some sort of delusional disorder, or maybe she is just a publicity hound, or that she just loves the reactions she gets from her male conservative peers; so I deducted that it’s most likely a combination of the three.

In Canada, polygamy is oozing onto the public square as a result of same-sex marriage lending legitimacy to some of it’s argument. What’s different in this case is that a majority of the anti-polygamy lobby is being fueled by opressive feminists who, because of their ideology, find polygamy repugnant. Now that Pandora’s box has been opened, on what grounds can the Canadian government “fairly” prevent voluntary plural marriage?

Western Catholic Reporter

12 years ago yesterday, Amber and I originally exchanged marriage vows outside of the Catholic Church on June 10th 1995 by a Methodist minister, and subsequently had our union officially recognized through a Convalidation of Marriage by the Church on August 29, 1999. Looking back, I think I may understand how tough it must be for some parents whose adult children have abandoned the faith and painfully want to do what is best to ensure the salvation of their children’s soul. For many years in my early adulthood years, my father and I – who were so very much alike – had a somewhat of a contentious relationship which placed a burden on him to maintain a relationship with his son who was not typically open to inconvenient truths and, at the same time, protect him from his own ignorance. He did the best he could. Despite the fact that I had not darkened a Catholic Church in 10 years at the time, because of my father – I actually went to confession and spoke to a priest prior to the wedding. Not that it would have made a difference, but the priest told me since it was only weeks away from our wedding, that we could just to go ahead with the wedding and return to the Church in 6 months (which I never did) to have it recognized – just what I wanted to hear but not correct (correct response here).

My favorite wedding picture of Amber who told me once, in no uncertain terms, she would never be a Catholic!

The exchange of our wedding vows which were not recognized by the Church, not because the Catholic Church sees Herself as the only Church capable of performing a valid marriage but because as a Catholic I should and must follow Church law.

We had our union officially recognized by the Church through a convalidation of marriage at Our Lady of the Atonement by Father Phillips. My father died prior to this and Amber’s conversion to the Catholic faith, but grace through his patience and words that he spoke to me shortly before he died, along with David and Tricia brought me and Amber home.

Not too long ago, I heard someone talk about a family in which the father, after almost 25 years of marriage, decided to leave his wife and move out…because he “felt” that she just did not understand him (or some such thing). They had children in their teenage years to early twenties. The children of course, were quite distressed about what their father did but with time the distress has somewhat abated.

It turns out that the father goes out of his way to try to stay involved in the lives of his children, and I think that this has gone quite a way toward the attenuation of the children’s perception of their distress. So much so, that one of the boys told his mother, regarding his father, that while he abandoned you, he did not abandon us (meaning the children). There is much that ought to be said about this situation; however, I would like to focus just on this phrase.

From the appearance of things, an unreflective response from most would find little difficulty with this statement. The father does want to maintain a relationship with his children. Experientially, I would guess that this is the way, for manifold reasons, that at least some of the children perceive it. However, I am quite certain the wife would sense the lack of veracity in this assertion, even if should could not articulate why.  And of course, I would also argue that this is not the case.

What I mean is this. A family relationship has an existence, an ontology, that is more than simply the sum of its parts. It is not simply an aggregate of the multifaceted relationships among the various members of the family. The family relationship has its own existence. Its foundation begins with the marital union between wife and husband. Its ontology arises from the fact that marital union is the most unique and perfect interpersonal bodily participation in Trinitarian Communion.  The marital relationship gives rise to the potency for integrating other persons (children) into it, but this marital relationship is the foundation for the entity known as the family. Thus, while the rupture of other relationships within a family can damage its over all health, the rupture of its ground–the marriage– destroys the whole. What is left is only the possibility for individual relationships. There is no whole left by which all of the multipersonal relationships can be integrated.

This analysis means then, that to reflect reality the phrase in this post’s title must be changed. The father did abandon “us.” Rather, the son must say that he did not abandon “me or the others.” There is no longer the possibility of a familial relationship. That is gone. All that is left is, at best, an disunified aggregate of independent, bi-personal relationships with no cohering entity to elevate them into a synergistic whole.

One might ask, then, what about when one of the spouses dies? Does this then destroy the family relationship? It does not. One can explain why this is so by making distinctions between the reality of relations and that of relationships.  Relationships differ from relations in that the former are volitional and the later exist by nature.  My relation to my parents always exists but it is the relationship, which exists by choice, that can be broken.  In the case of death, there is no volitional act by which the relationship is destroyed. Therefore, it transcends death and will be taken up into the perfect, universally intersubjective communion (God please) in the beatific vision of the eschaton.

Our fragmented, Ockhamist culture has reduced relationships from ontological realities (ends in themselves) to disposable means of extracting personal fulfillment (understood as pleasure). This combined with our radically selfish individualism has made the likelihood that marriages will be able to survive the storms of this valley of tears, quite unlikely. Even though the relational philosophy described above, that explains what is happening is not readily made accessible to the average person (primarily because so much mistaken thought must first be corrected) there is still an easily understood and experientially verifiable truth that can be clearly proclaimed.

We need to continue to proclaim the message that John Paul the Great constantly emphasized. Man can only fulfill himself by giving himself away. In other words, we fulfill ourselves in relationships (with God and others) not by seeing what we can get out of them (pleasure, persona affirmation, novel affective experience, etc.) but by giving ourselves completely to others, for their own sakes. Personal fulfillment does not come by what you take but by how much of yourself you give. If this were better lived (beginning with me), then these errors (regardless of the cause) would be less likely, perhaps nearly even impossible, to make.

Please pray for this family as a final decision about its fate will be made by the husband in the next couple of weeks.

Here is a cute video that shows quadruplets responding to their father’s funny faces . . . four “choices” giving such great joy to their parents:

We were watching TV yesterday morning, trying to learn more about the snow storm making its way across the east central states, and I came to recall why I avoid, as much as possible, watching the popular media. The program was NBC’s Today Show and the issue was the “tragic” situation of couples continuing to live together after the “love” has “disappeared” from the marriage. This is the plug line from their website:

NBC’s Janet Shamlian takes a look at married couples who choose to live separate lives under the same roof instead of getting a legal divorce. Then, TODAY’s Al Roker talks with Dr. Gail Saltz about the new trend.

Shamlain’s portion (which is not on-line) provided the “sage” advice, that one’s concern for the children ought not be an inhibitor to going through with a divorce. The parents just need to explain to their children that their “journey together has now come to an end.” Roker’s interview with Dr. Saltz, a psychiatrist, was just as illuminating.

Saltz says that the reason for people living in this situation is fear. The fear arises from economics including the cost of divorce and the loss of income, the fear of being alone, and the fear about the impacts on children (Saltz admits that we now know about the long term negative effects on children of divorce but that short remark exhausts their treatment this concern). Roker offered that these fears did not legitimize living with someone whom you no longer loved. Saltz agreed. She warns that the problem is that people need intimacy, love, and sex (emphasis her’s).

Saltz says that what couples need to do is to seek counseling. Why, pray tell? Of course, counseling is needed in order to prepare the couples for a “healthy” divorce (whatever that may be). As an after thought, it seems, she offered that perhaps there might even be something left in the marriage that could allow it to be salvaged. But the over riding emphasis of Saltz’s discussion is on getting on with a “healthy” divorce.

Now here we have a “professional” psychiatrist who seems to suffer from emotivism. Emotivism is the defective view that moral judgments simply express our feelings. With emotivism, emotions like love are reduced to feelings and so if this “feeling” has “mysteriously” disappeared then it would seem that there is nothing one can do to restore it. There is no right or wrong about divorce, simply the need to ensure that the couples have the “intimacy, love, and sex” that they need; the welfare of the children be damned.

Classical philosophy shows us that love is an act of the will; it is not an emotion. Emotions ought to correspond to the rational faculties (which include the intellect and will) but they do not always do so immediately. However, emotions can and must be trained to submit themselves to reason, as they are created to do. Bad philosophy has negative consequences for society at large. Psychiatry has swallowed the philosophical errors of modernism and post-modernism and have called them science and medicine. It is time that they recognize that there is such a thing as human nature and that human nature entails more than simply biology. Modern medicine is in sore need of an adequate philosophical system in order to recover an authentic anthropology. Without this, they do not have a snow ball’s chance of actually helping their patients.

When the focus of marriage counseling is providing “healthy divorces” and saving a marriage is an afterthought that is viewed in terms of assessing whether there is anything there worth salvaging, we seem to have little chance of turning around the “free fall” of the family ( the state it has been in since the 1960s). I am not defending the non-divorce, divorce. Rather, I am saying that we need to recognize the truth about the human person if we are going to provide helpful advice and treatment to troubled marriages. Promoting the modern reductive understanding of the human person and erroneous ideas about personal needs will continue to damage marriages, families, children, and society.  Heaven help us.

A same-sex marriage activist group called the Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance has proposed a ballot measure which would require all marriages to produce children within three years, or have their marriage annulled, and consequently be ineligible for any marriage benefits. They’re hoping that this idea will open up discussions that will address the, “misguided assumptions” underlying the state Supreme Court ruling that upheld a ban on same-sex marriage. If nothing else, they hope to experience “the good fun to see the social conservatives who have long screamed that marriage exists for the sole purpose of procreation be forced to choke on their own rhetoric.”

If passed by Washington voters, the Defense of Marriage Initiative would:

• add the phrase, “who are capable of having children with one another” to the legal definition of marriage;
• require that couples married in Washington file proof of procreation within three years of the date of marriage or have their marriage automatically annulled;
• require that couples married out of state file proof of procreation within three years of the date of marriage or have their marriage classed as “unrecognized;”
• establish a process for filing proof of procreation; and
• make it a criminal act for people in an unrecognized marriage to receive marriage benefits.

The one glaring weaknesses of their argument that really stuck out to me was the false assumption that a marriage’s sole purpose is procreative in nature, when in all actuality, it’s an inclusive component. As Catholics, we believe, “The permanent and exclusive commitment of marriage is the necessary context for the expression of sexual love intended by God both to serve the transmission of human life and (not or) to build up the bond between husband and wife (see CCC, nos. 1639-1640).” Marriage is the fundamental pattern for the complimentary male-female relationship. It also contributes to society because it models the way in which women and men live interdependently and commit, for the whole of life, to seek the good of each other, which also INCLUDES remaining open to procreation.