The risk of being heroes

I’ve made two additions to my blogroll that you should read: Steve Gershom’s Catholic, Gay and Feeling Fine, Thanks and Richard Evans’ Catholic Boy Richard. Although both describe themselves as “gay”, they also practice continence: Steve made his decision almost as soon as he became aware of his same-sex attraction (SSA), while Richard turned to continence after many years as a gay-rights activist.

This leads to two points. First, I’m not sending you over there to clog their comboxes with arguments as to whether they should call themselves “gay” or not. Steve only uses the term sporadically, generally preferring the shorthand “SSA”; I don’t know what Richard’s rationale is, and I don’t intend to beard him on it either. And while I generally reserve “gay” for people who are practicing homosexuals, I don’t insist on it … it’s just not that important.

Second point: I’m not asking you to go over to “get a load of the freak shows” or to make poster boys of them. They’re both truly intelligent, well-spoken people who write things about life in the Catholic faith worth reading. Say to them, “Hi, Tony sent me;” read what they have to say, then comment on what they’ve said. It’s that simple.

The injunction against making tokens or freak shows of these men is especially important. On one of Steve’s posts, which addressed another person’s statement “The best a gay Catholic can get is not-masturbating” (please read the post for the context), one reader, Ron, snorted: “Oh, please ... That shows the bias that all people with SSA are a bunch of sex-always-on-the-brain, ready-to-jump-in-the-sack people. We are capable of so much more than that, capable even of heroism.”

Teaching sexual stupidity (Part II)

So in a rich, private Quaker school in Philadelphia, an English teacher named Al Vernacchio is also instructing a course in “Sexuality and Society”. While there’s no “show and tell”, and the course material doesn’t go so far as to demonstrate positions from the Kama Sutra, the discussion is frank and often graphic.

Furthermore, Vernacchio abandons abstinence education in favor of promoting “safe sex” in an “LGBT-friendly” manner. And author Laurie Abraham is so taken with his approach that she has written an eight-page encomium in the New York Times Magazine.

In Part I, I conceded that kids do need authoritative education in sex and sexuality. However, using “they’re gonna do it anyway” as a justification for abandoning abstinence-centered sex education is poor pedagogy and dumb policy. The saturation of our media with messages encouraging poor sexual judgment is simply further reason why we need abstinence education, and can provide a myriad of examples of how the media sells an unrealistic expectation of sex without consequences.

Nevertheless, this is the strategy many educators want to pursue: to teach kids to rely on prophylactics and chemicals to minimize the risks of pre- and non-marital sex. In fact, Abraham titled her piece “Teaching Good Sex”, as if copulation within the bonds of a monogamous, permanent marriage open to procreation is by definition unsatisfying or substandard. (I’ve seen this dirty-only-if-it’s-done-right implication before, in a Young Catholics For Choice advertisement, and I remember that our culture’s sexual values are still largely informed by the mindless psychobabble, quasi-scientific research and half-digested Marxism of the 1960s.)

Teaching sexual stupidity (Part I)

We all know that having a lot of money doesn’t mean you can’t in some way be a ninny. (Cue photo of Paris Hilton.) Nor is a post-graduate education a bar to silliness; while I know and admire plenty of people with magisterial and doctoral degrees, some others peddle and gulp theories or policies worthy of Dr. Peter Kreeft’s pungent phrase, “so stupid only a Ph.D. could believe it!”

If you want to go to the land of rich, well-educated idiots, you have to go either west to California, especially the San Francisco Bay area, or east to anywhere within 150 miles of Manhattan. Philadelphia’s Main Line — full of some of the oldest money and bluest blood in the country, and source of many of our nation’s greatest unsung heroes — now seems to be descending into the kind of senescence produced by inbreeding even an uncrowned, unofficial nobility.

Case in point: Friends’ Central School. A private school in Wynnewood run by the Society of Friends (“Quakers”), tuition starts at $13,200/year for nursery and tops out at $27,400/year for the secondary grades. Needless to say, it’s the kind of school ambitious yuppie parents want their kids to go to and the Philadelphia elite stuff full every year. And one of the electives a senior student can select from the curriculum is a year-long course called “Sexuality and Society”.

This course, taught by English teacher Al Vernacchio, who developed the course and sold it to the school’s leadership, is the subject of a rather fulsome, admiring 8-page article in the New York Times Magazine written by Laurie Abraham [H/T to Mark Shea]. Despite Abraham’s effusive praise, the article unconsciously conveys exactly what can go wrong with sex education in schools.

Humans matter; or, Why holiday specials suck

The other day, I had an almost crystal-clear story idea. And since I’m publishing it here, you can tell me if it’s already been done … but you can’t use it yourself. Heh-heh-heh.

Here it is: A man living in a seemingly Utopian materialist future becomes frustrated by the annual commercial madness of the “Winter Holiday”, a holiday whose purpose and origin he doesn’t know or understand. After giving voice to his confusion and irritation publicly, he receives a cryptic message which pushes him into researching this annual headache. The first major plot point, which springboards the rest of his story, is when he finally comes across a clip of A Charlie Brown Christmas — fifty-one seconds that puts his job, his marriage, his reputation and his life in peril.

You know the fifty-one seconds I’m talking about: Linus reciting Luke 2:8-14 KJV.[*]

Let’s face it: Most “Holiday” specials, shows and movies are crapburgers. They’re either too treacly or hooky to be truly heartwarming, or they’re too uneven or crude to be truly funny, or they take a big, grinchy, Scrooge-like dump on Christmas altogether in an obscenity- and blasphemy-laden fillip on “Bah, humbug!” (like A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas). And would somebody please tell me what’s so flipping magical about A Christmas Story that it needs to be shown all bloody day on Christmas Day!?

Above all, only a thimbleful of these shows have the stones to refer to the Nativity … for which A Charlie Brown Christmas is still remarkable.

Religious authority vs. primacy of conscience (Part IV)

Part I covered the problem of having an authoritative doctrinal body in the devastating wake of the primacy of individual conscience. Part II concerned itself with building up the need for religious authority. Part III discussed the proper understanding of the primacy of conscience, put in the light of our common-sense perception of personal responsibility: Religious Authority doesn’t and can’t pull the trigger.

In a sense, the last two posts were meant in part to dispel the myth of the Mind-Controlling Church, that rhetorical bogeyman invoked by critics of the Catholic Church to push the “you’re not the boss of me” button on their audiences. True mind control, or “brainwashing”, is nowhere close to mainline acceptance as a valid psychological phenomenon, which of course hasn’t stopped it from being used as a meme elsewhere. As long as people need to assert and validate their intellectual independence against some Authority, they’ll continue to believe in mind control; here, however, we need not let this pseudo-scientific fallacy detain us further.

So let’s return to where we left off in the first part: Granting that some kind of central authority is needed to distinguish between authentic Christian doctrine and inauthentic or non-Christian doctrine, why must that authority lie with a monarchical Pope? Why can’t it be more like a democracy, with the Pope as kind of a president?

Religious authority vs. primacy of conscience (Part III)

Part I covered the problem of having an authoritative doctrinal body in the devastating wake of the primacy of individual conscience. Part II concerned itself with building up the need for religious authority.

When we left off, we were at a fork in the road: We are either following Christ or we’re simply co-opting some of his teachings for our own. If novelty is all you crave in a philosophy or religion, you should perhaps be a follower of Nietzsche or Rand, or a New Age devoté … not a Christian. By its very nature, Christianity can’t be “new”; people can only say new things about it, or find new applications for 2,000-year-old tenets. By the same rule, you can’t simultaneously hold that Christianity is true and that anything older than 1980 is defective or false; if you’re going to be a chronological snob, your snootiness should at least be consistent.

So I’ve spent the last two posts building up the position of religious authority. However, outside of the occasional sniping comment, I haven’t really said what’s so bloody wrong with the primacy of the individual conscience. After all, isn’t your conscience your best guide? Isn’t handing over your conscience to an Outside Authority immoral … the root of such horrific acts as were seen in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union?

Religious authority vs. primacy of conscience (Part II)

In Part I, I started discussing the problem of having an authoritative doctrinal body in the devastating wake of the primacy of individual conscience. Simply put, the two are irreconcilable unless the latter means no more than that we bear chief responsibility for our acts. For the decisions of such a body — we postulated a standing ecumenical council or “central committee” — to have any traction, each person must concede three points:

1. The individual conscience is not infallible;
2. Human authority is both a practical necessity and an indispensible feature of education; and
3. Some people are better equipped to decide on matters of faith and morals than others; mere possession of a Bible and ninth-grade reading skills doesn’t make a person an authority on Scripture.

But before we go further, I should probably shore up my position. Granting that we learn indirectly from others far more than we learn directly from our own experiences, does it still follow that we need a central authority to decide what is true Christian doctrine and what is false? Even if I grant I’m not the sharpest knife in the block, and that I don’t know nearly as much as some others about Scripture, history, patristics, theology and all that rot, since it’s my soul on the line for my actions, shouldn’t I be the one to decide what Christ and the apostles taught?

Religious authority vs. primacy of conscience (Part I)

Thus Kate Childs Graham, writing in the National Catholic Fishwrap almost three years ago:

... I am a prochoice Catholic because my Catholic faith tells me I can be. The Catechism [§1776] reads, “[Conscience] is man’s most secret core and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths.” Even St. Thomas Aquinas said it would be better to be excommunicated than to neglect your individual conscience. So really, I am just following his lead. … Being a prochoice Catholic does not contradict my faith; rather, in following my well-informed [?] conscience, I am adhering to the central tenet of Catholic teaching — the primacy of conscience [??].

I’ve brought up this piece of rampant intellectual dishonesty before, on at least two or three occasions on this blog alone, because it summarizes so neatly the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too approach of dissident Catholics that makes them objectionable in a way Protestants — even rabidly anti-Catholic Protestants — could never be. In fact, not only is the primacy of conscience not “the central tenet of Catholic teaching”, it could be called with some justification the single most misunderstood, misapplied and counterproductive concept ever botched up by Western man.

However, Joe Heschmeyer has a post up on Shameless Popery where he discusses the problem of the visible division in Christ’s body as represented by denominationalism, which as I’ve said before overwhelms any notional “invisible union of believers” to Christianity’s great detriment and the scandal of unbelievers. While C. S. Lewis made an admirable attempt at a definition of a rock-bottom “mere Christianity”, all such attempts inevitably founder on the reef of religious authority. Who owns the trademark? Who has the right to say, “You, sir/madam/small child, are (not) a Christian”?

Roland S. Martin still doesn’t get it

First, to give you some context, read this example of poor scriptural exegesis by ex-Catholic journalist Roland S. Martin in CNN Opinion. Then read Fr. John Zuhlsdorf’s thorough fisking of Martin’s arguments; if anything, Martin’s column, with its rampant misquotations and misinterpretations, is simply one more example of why sola scriptura is bad doctrine.

Chris Paulitz, one of Fr. Z’s many followers, tweeted Fr. Z’s post, with the comment: “What am I not thankful for? @rolandsmartin & his ignorance of #Catholicism.” The following (very slightly edited) exchange then took place:

Martin: I’m not ignorant of Catholicism. Spent 26 years as one. You have ignorance of the Bible. Jesus supersedes the Pope!

Paulitz: As a Catholic you surely know the Pope is the Vicar of Christ on earth. You may want to pick up a Baltimore Catechism.

Martin: Jesus tore the curtain so people would have direct access to Christ without a middle person to get to him. Read your Bible!

Paulitz: So I take it you’ve left the Church? Probably something you should have pointed out in the piece, no?

Martin: I take it you don’t know jack about Scripture? Go read your Bible and learn the Word!

Paulitz: I do, yet I’m humble enough to know it’s not every man & his Bible, it’s the Church Christ built on Peter.

Martin: Nonsense. The Bible says Christ lives in all of us.[*]

Paulitz: Of course. That doesn’t mean you can properly interpret the Bible on your own, or it’s all moral relativism.

Martin: Well, clearly you understand there is NOTHING wrong with altar girls. Stop promoting nonsense.

Unreason, demagogues and the end of the West

The Blogger Who Must Not Be Named posted A Question from a Reader, who asked why same-sex marriage is such a cause célèbre. MS’ reply touches three basic answers, which I will simply describe here:

1.      Consent is the sole criterion of the good. The premisses are that the State has no valid interest in what happens inside the social black box labeled “private” so long as no one inside the box is harmed, and that harm is a purely personal judgment. Thus, sodomy and other risky sexual practices can’t be bad so long as either party thinks they’re not.

2.    Homosexuality is narcissistic. Narcissism isn’t unique to same-sex attraction. However, in the gay-rights movement, it lends itself to a demand for social acceptance such that mere tolerance isn’t sufficient: You. MUST. Approve. Marriage, with its evocation of the spouse, the kids, and the little white house with the picket fence, is symbolic of the goodness of natural affections. Ergo, homosexuals must not be denied this “seal of approval” for the natural goodness of their love.

3.    The mystery of sin at work in the world. God’s gift of free will implies Man’s ability to pit his will against God’s, the ability to say Non serviam (“You’re not the boss of me!”) and act on it. This necessarily leads to distortion in one’s values, to redefine good and evil according to one’s desires or to enjoy evil in full knowledge and acceptance of its wickedness. It also corrupts virtues, so that the value of one virtue can be inflated beyond proper bounds to the cost of other virtues.

As thoughtful as these answers are — and, to think about it, the third comprehends the other two — I don’t think they suffice. So let me add to the analysis: