Veggio...nel Vicario suo Cristo esser catto
Veggiolo un' altra volta esser deriso;
Veggio rinovellar l'aceto e' l fiele.
(I see...Christ in his own Vicar captive made;
I see him yet another time derided;
I see renewed the vinegar and gall.
- Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio XX 86-88
How sickening, and yet how appropriate, that the enemies of the Church, internal and external, should have launched their most ferocious attack on Pope Benedict just as Holy Week was approaching. It just goes to show that Satan has a very real sense of liturgy.
Back in the 1980s, one of the most common charges against the Church was her "unforgiving" attitude to those who persisted in sexual sins. This "rigidity" was contrasted unfavourably with the merciful, forgiving characteristics of Our Lord Himself. It was denounced as "not very Christian" by those who had long since severed all links they may once have had with any kind of Christianity.
Most of our readers will be old enough to recall, too, the prevailing attitude of those seeking to destroy the basis of Catholic teaching on sexual matters. Progressive organisations defended the right of paedophile groups to campaign for the legalisation of consensual sexual activity between adults and children. "Trans-generational sex" they called it. There were the Paedophile Information Exchange in Britain, (affiliated to the National Council for Civil Liberties) and the North American Man-Boy Love Association in the United States, which used to take part in "gay pride" marches. One of the great pioneers of this perversion was the sexologist Alfred Kinsey, still applauded in the media and the entertainment industry. As Professor Patricia Casey has recalled, he argued that sexual relations between adults and children were not necessarily harmful, and it was society's attitude that was at fault.
In our day sodomy and abortion - quite recently crimes punishable by stiff terms of imprisonment - have become secular sanctities against which it is increasingly dangerous to blaspheme. Yet paedophilia is inveighed against, with considerable ferocity. Quite right too, we all agree.
But from a secularist perspective that really doesn't make any sense. As the Anglican Fr John Hunwicke has trenchantly pointed out, he would have no difficulty explaining to a paedophile why this predilection contravened Christian dogma, and why its expression was therefore an absolute evil which no little game of situation ethics could for the tiniest moment justify. But Fr Hunwicke didn't know how he would even begin to persuade a paedophile of the rationality of current public morality. With truly righteous anger, he comments:
We all know that those who are gunning for the Pope are hypocrites. We know that they are in many cases dirty hypocrites whose own lifestyle is unmarked by any evidence of sexual continence. We know that they are bigoted hypocrites who are only marginally, if at all, interested if a rabbi or a humanist gets "done" for paedophilia or if an Anglican diocese is bankrupted by the compensation it has paid out to abused Inuit children. There is one organisation that they detest with a loathing curiously like Hitler's dislike of the Jews. There is one man for whose downfall they have an insatiable bloodlust.
Earlier this year Fr Hunwicke speculated, prophetically as it turned out, that as the papal visit to Britain grew ever closer, the media might try to smear Pope Benedict by suggesting that he was involved in paedophile cover-ups. "They might use their familiar weapons of suggestio falsi and suppressio veri by examining all the cases that might have passed over his desk, and then testing whether any of the characters involved might have crossed the pontiff's path in other contexts: so as to suggest that he protected a vast network of iffy cronies."
Cardinal Newman is to be beatified during the papal visit. Just wait for the posh British dailies and weeklies to attempt to befoul his reputation once again by repeating their baseless allegation that he, too, had sodomistic leanings. They may get some Tabletista Catholics to write features to that effect. Irish papers would no doubt copy. You may be sure, anyway, that the Devil will not spend his entire summer sunbathing on some beach in Florida. The Father of Lies must be well aware of the old saying: "A lie can get half way round the world before the truth can get its boots on." That is even more apt in this age of the internet.
(In writing this editorial I have drawn heavily on Fr Hunwicke's "Liturgical Blog". It is one of the best combative pieces of Christian apologetics on the internet.)
Nick Lowry
March 19 is the Solemnity of St Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church - usually forgotten as it comes two days after the national feast day. On both occasions, and more so on the feast of the Annunciation, Lent is suspended.
Benedict XVI sent his pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland on his baptismal patron's feast. The letter was characteristically brief, concise - and unsatisfactory to the usual suspects. Commentators suggest the Pope blames secularism for the Irish Church's woes. Do they expect Benedict's ringing endorsement? My reading suggests he pinpoints the twin issues of the Church's poor reaction to secularism and misinterpretation of the Second Vatican Council. The Pope specifically mentions an avoidance of applying Canon Law (parallel to the Murphy Report), problems in determining the suitability of candidates for seminary and cloister, and inadequate priestly and religious formation. This is not exhaustive. He also lists problems arising from the relationship between Church and society in Ireland, such as the position of the priest and other authority figures in Irish life and excessive concern for the Church's reputation.
The Pope addresses every conceivable stakeholder in the issue. Victims come first, then perpetrators, then parents, young people, priests, religious and bishops and finally all the faithful. His words, particularly to the abused, abusers and ordinaries are unequivocal. He proposes remedies involving reflection, prayer and penance. Not secular made-to-order solutions. He insists canon law be followed.
Notwithstanding propaganda to the contrary, canon law is compatible with civil law (it may be injudicious to apply canonical sanctions during criminal trials as the defence may seize on this as prejudicial). Those expecting episcopal resignations or compensation funds or transfer of Church institutions to the state were in for a disappointment. The document, however, is not final. It is open-ended and offers more dialogue to the aggrieved.
The media wanted a red rag, but the Pope did not deliver. Discussion died quickly. One may reflect on a carefully orchestrated campaign against Pope and Church in recent years, noted by former Mayor of New York, Ed Koch, in the Jerusalem Post and Lutheran theologian Professor John Stephenson. The reportage of some obscure cases in the United States and Germany to tarnish the Pope's reputation is symptomatic. These are probably not the fruits of industrious investigative journalism. They are dropped without explanation when they prove useless, leaving their imprint in readers' memories. The hostility manifest in comments to online articles illustrates the breadth of the new anti-Catholicism, but the New York Times' facilitation of Hans Küng's open letter is an egregious case in point.
The Pope in his letter has shown an awareness of the problem and the current state of the Irish Church which reveals his engagement with both. His solution is principally spiritual, carrying a challenge to all the faithful to participate - in prayer and in penance. One would hope the Apostolic visitations and the Mission to priests and religious will yield fruit and bring about a longed-for renewal in the Irish Church, but the laity need to be disposed toward supporting this in whatever manner they can.
Peadar Laighléis
Never one to miss an opportunity to promote his views, Hans Küng used the current agitprop against the Church to attack Pope Benedict. Küng's pretentious and absurd "open letter" to the bishops of the world was received with eager hands by the likes of the Irish Times and the New York Times in the vain hope that his manifesto of complaint and resentment would be the occasion of a spontaneous rebellion of Catholics across the globe.
At the start of the letter - may we name it the Küng encyclical? - he presents himself as a oncefellow theologian of Joseph Ratzinger, and a theologian still at work in "the service of the Church". He proclaims his continuing "critical loyalty" to the Church, although how denying almost every article of the Apostles' Creed is either service or loyalty is a bit of a mystery.
In truth, Küng is a theological modernist as defined by St Pius X in the Lamentabili document in 1907. Truth - religious or other - is provisional and relative to the individual and the culture. There is no absolute religious truth, no divine revelation and infallibility is a human invention. Like the snake shedding its skin, Christians need to abandon "medieval religion", and join other believers as equal partners in an ecumenical search for shared values and ethical guidelines. It is no wonder that his Global Ethic Foundation attracts people like Tony Blair, Mary Robinson, Robinson, Kofi Annan and Desmond Tutu. Enough said.
Küng is now deeply disappointed and pained because Benedict is not constructing the Hans Küng church. Worse still, despite his enormous written output, he is no longer the centre of attention in the Church's theological world, even among dissenters.
The laundry list of complaints in his letter reads as if it had been garnered from the tabloids. It expresses no understanding of the papal decisions and policies, and is grossly untruthful and unjust. Similar to Pope John Paul II, Benedict's refusal to embrace secular fashions - unlike Professor Küng - is branded as a failure to "promote renewal and ecumenical rapprochement in the spirit of the Vatican Council".
There are some risible elements in the Küng encyclical. Castigating Benedict for promoting the "medieval Tridentine Mass", he notes with barely concealed horror that the Pope "occasionally celebrates the Eucharist in Latin with his back to the congregation". Is this plain ignorance or malice?
The "Big One" is the sex scandals and the alleged Vatican cover-up. If, like Küng, you accept the account of the New York Times, then it is an open and shut case. Ratzinger was the villain - unscrupulous, manipulative and thoroughly backward.
Maybe some good will come from the Küng encyclical. Orthodox Catholics will recognise just how far he has departed from the Church in his quest to create a religion that the New York Times and Irish Times can love.
David Manly
THE sexual and physical abuse of children and young people is a global plague; its manifestations run the gamut from fondling by teachers to rape by uncles to kidnapping-and-sex-trafficking.
In the United States alone, there are reportedly some 39 million victims of childhood sexual abuse. Forty to 60 percent were abused by family members, including stepfathers and live-in boyfriends of a child's mother - thus suggesting that abused children are the principal victims of the sexual revolution, the breakdown of marriage, and the hook-up culture. Hofstra University professor Charol Shakeshaft reports that 6-10 percent of public school students have been molested in recent years - some 290,000 between 1991 and 2000. According to other recent studies, two percent of sex abuse offenders were Catholic priests - a phenomenon that spiked between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s but seems to have virtually disappeared (sixcredible cases of clerical sexual abuse in 2009 were reported in the US bishops' annual audit, in a Church of some 65,000,000 members).
Clericalism, cowardice, fideism
Yet in a pattern exemplifying the dog's behaviour in Proverbs 26:11, the sexual abuse story in the global media is almost entirely a Catholic story, in which the Catholic Church is portrayed as the epicentre of the sexual abuse of the young, with hints of an ecclesiastical criminal conspiracy involving sexual predators whose predations continue today.
That the vast majority of the abuse cases in the United States took place decades ago is of no consequence to this story line. For the narrative that has been constructed is often less about the protection of the young (for whom the Catholic Church is, by empirical measure, the safest environment for young people in America today) than it is about taking the Church down - and, eventually, out, both financially and as a credible voice in the public debate over public policy. For if the Church is a global criminal conspiracy of sexual abusers and their protectors, then the Catholic Church has no claim to a place at the table of public moral argument.
The Church itself is in some measure responsible for this. Reprehensible patterns of clerical sexual abuse and misgovernance by the Church's bishops came to glaring light in the US in 2002; worse patterns of corruption have been recently revealed in Ireland. Clericalism, cowardice, fideism about psychotherapy's ability to "fix" sexual predators - all played their roles in the recycling of abusers into ministry and in the failure of bishops to come to grips with a massive breakdown of conviction and discipline in the post-Vatican II years.
For the Church's sexual abuse crisis has always been that: a crisis of fidelity. Priests who live the noble promises of their ordination are not sexual abusers; bishops who take their custody of the Lord's flock seriously, protect the young and recognise that a man's acts can so disfigure his priesthood that he must be removed from public ministry or from the clerical state.
That the Catholic Church was slow to recognise the scandal of sexual abuse within the household of faith, and the failures of governance that led to the scandal being horribly mishandled, has been frankly admitted - by the bishops of the United States in 2002, and by Pope Benedict XVI in his recent letter to the Catholic Church in Ireland. In recent years, though, no other similarly situated institution has been so transparent about its failures, and none has done as much to clean house. It took too long to get there, to be sure; but we are there.
These facts have not sunk in, however, for either the attentive public or the mass public. They do not fit the conventional story line. Moreover, they impede the advance of the larger agenda that some are clearly pursuing in these controversies. For the crisis of sexual abuse and episcopal malfeasance has been seized upon by the Church's enemies to cripple it, morally and financially, and to cripple its leaders.
That was the subtext in Boston in 2002 (where the effort was aided by Catholics who want to turn Catholicism into high-church Congregationalism, preferably with themselves in charge). And that is what has happened in recent weeks, as a global media attack has swirled around Pope Benedict XVI, following the revelation of odious abuse cases throughout Europe. In his native Germany, Der Spiegel has called for the pope's resignation; similar cries for papal blood have been raised in Ireland, a once Catholic country now home to the most aggressively secularist press in Europe.
How low can you get?
But it was the New York Times' front page of March 25 that demonstrated just how low those determined to bring the Church down were prepared to go.
Rembert Weakland is the emeritus archbishop of Milwaukee, notorious for having paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to satisfy the demands of his former male lover. Jeff Anderson is a Minnesota-based attorney who has made a substantial amount of money out of sex abuse "settlements," and who is party to ongoing litigation intended to bring the resources of the Vatican within the reach of contingency-fee lawyers in the United States. Yet these two utterly implausible - and, in any serious journalistic sense, disqualified - sources were those the Times cited in a story claiming that, as cardinal prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith [CDF], Joseph Ratzinger, later Benedict XVI, had prevented sanctions against Father Lawrence Murphy, a diabolical Milwaukee priest who, decades before, had abused some 200 deaf children in his pastoral care. This was simply not true, as the legal papers from the Murphy case the Times provided on its Web site demonstrated. The facts, alas, seem to be of little interest to those whose primary concern is to nail down the narrative of global Catholic criminality, centred in the Vatican.
The Times' descent into tabloid sourcing and innuendo was even more offensive because of recent hard news developments that underscore Pope Benedict's determination to root out what he once described as the "filth" in the Church. There was, for example, the pope's March 20 letter to the Catholic Church in Ireland, which was unsparing in its condemnation of clerical sexual offenders (". . . you betrayed the trust that was placed in you by innocent young people and their parents and you must answer for it before Almighty God and before properly constituted tribunals") and unprecedented in its critique of malfeasant bishops ("grave errors of judgement were made and failures of leadership occurred . . . [which have] undermined your credibility and effectiveness").
Dramatic change coming?
Moreover, the pope mandated an Apostolic Visitation of Irish dioceses, seminaries, and religious congregations - a clear indication that dramatic leadership change in Ireland is coming. In framing his letter to Ireland so vigorously, Benedict XVI succeeded in overcoming the institutional Vatican preference for the subjunctive in dealing with situations like this, and the pleas of Irish bishops that he cut them some slack, given the intense pressures they were under at home. That the pope rejected both curial and Irish opposition to his lowering the boom ought to have made clear that Benedict XVI is determined to deal with the problem of sexual abuse and episcopal misgovernance in the strongest terms. But for those obsessing over whether a pope had finally "apologised" for something (as if John Paul II had not spent a decade and a half "cleansing the Church's historical conscience," as he put it), these unmistakable signals were lost.
Then there was the March 25 letter from the leadership of the Legionaries of Christ to Legionary priests and seminarians and the Legion-affiliated movement, Regnum Christi. The letter disavowed the Legion's founder, Father Marcial Maciel, as a model for the future, in light of revelations that Maciel had deceived popes, bishops, laity, and his brother Legionaries by living a duplicitous double life that included fathering several children, sexually abusing seminarians, violating the sacrament of penance, and misappropriating funds.
It was Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger who, as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was determined to discover the truth about Maciel; it was Pope Benedict XVI who put Maciel under virtual ecclesiastical house arrest during his last years, and who then ordered an Apostolic Visitation of the Legion of Christ that is currently being concluded: hardly the acts of a man at the centre of a conspiracy of silence and cover-up.
THE Pope's Letter offers an explanation of the cause of the evils which have come upon us, and the cure.
I suspect that many or most in Ireland now are beyond being able to understand the Pope in this. Because - and this is the causethat the Pope sees - secularisation has made such headway. Only 18% of Catholics are at Sunday Mass in Dublin - the others are never resourced by hearing the Word of God nor fed by the Sacramental Life. For 40 years at least there has been a progressive banishing of God from Western Society, Ireland included, though here a façade remained longer in place. But behind the façade the Faith was dying. Among the people, among the priests. No small part of this sickness advanced under cover of what was supposed to be the Second Vatican Council.
At the same time - the early 1970s onwards - began the corruption in the seminaries: often the wrong people were admitted; more seriously, excellent candidates were often excluded for ideological reasons. My own good fortune was always to be in parishes with good priests - but eventually I could see that things were not well. In those years sin changed from being a bad thing to being a dirty word - seldom preached about in the bright new world where all was love - and of course there could be no disciplining of priests whose lifestyle was in flagrant contradiction with their calling.
Canon Law gave the bishops the tools they needed to address these problems - but the Bishops knew better! And all the time God was being phased out from Irish society. To the point that now He has little real place in the lives of a very great number. And let us not imagine that we ourselves are totally immune. Our minds too have to some degree been colonised by godlessness.
Thus far Pope Benedict on the cause. Now for - dare we hope - the solution. Well, at any rate, the way forward. And the whole Letter of the Pope breathes the Spirit of Faith. There is an invitation to everyone to renewal of Faith. Everyone. No category is exempt. The abused are in need of renewal or, in some cases, the return of Faith as much as the abusers. What seemed to slip largely out of the discourse of the Bishops was that Christ died for abusers also. The Bishops need to be renewed in Faith - all of them - and in courage - fortitude. Speak to them everything that I command you. Do not be afraid to face them (Jeremias 1:7-8). The priests too, all of us. The Faithful without exception. Parce, Domine - Spare, O Lord, Thy people.
But all of that recipe is not what the media want. We have surely no illusions - in many cases media people are souls who have lost the Faith - sometimes with the hate of an apostate. Benedict, of course, expresses his sorrow for the suffering of those abused and betrayed. But he makes it clear that for them too the only way forward is the Person of Jesus Christ.
Cans of worms
In the immediate aftermath what strikes the Pope is the secularisation of the episcopal mind. They have failed "grievously" (Benedict's word). Their appalling neglect is to be tackled immediately by Apostolic Visitation of Dioceses and Seminaries - talk of cans of worms!
It is the Pope's regret that the great spiritual capital amassed by Irish Catholics, our forefathers, over generations of repression, persecution and heroic effort has been squandered in large part through the neglect of these inflated mediocrities the Bishops. But none of us can say "O God I give Thee thanks that I am not like the rest of men, paedophiles, bishops, apostates..." You and I are in absolute need of God's mercy too. To drive out the devils that possess this land we must resort to more intensive prayer and more serious fasting.
We might begin with the prayer composed by the Pope.
God of our fathers, renew us in the Faith which is our life and salvation, the Hope which promises forgiveness and interior renewal, the Charity which purifies and opens our hearts to love You, and in You each of our brothers and sisters.
Lord Jesus Christ, may the Church in Ireland renew her age-old commitment to the education of our young people in the way of truth and goodness, holiness and generous service to society.
Holy Spirit, Comforter, Advocate and Guide, inspire a new springtime of holiness and apostolic zeal for the Church in Ireland.
May our sorrows and our tears, our sincere effort to redress past wrongs, and our firm purpose of amendment bear an abundant harvest of grace for the deepening of the Faith in our families, parishes, schools and communities, for the spiritual progress of Irish society, and the growth of charity, justice, joy and peace within the whole human family.
To You, Triune God, confident in the loving protection of Mary, Queen of Ireland, our Mother, and of Saint Patrick, Saint Brigid and all the Saints, do we entrust ourselves, our children, and the needs of the Church in Ireland.
Amen.
The Holy Father makes the following recommendations:
THERE is a time when it is necessary for one person to accuse another of wrongdoing. It may well be even one's duty to do so. But before one becomes an accuser one needs to discern the spirit prompting one to do that deed.
At least that is how it should be for a Catholic, for whom the discernment of spirits is the highest of the Gifts of the Spirit. The good Catholic asks: "Is it the Holy Spirit inspiring me to accuse this person, or am I being tempted by the devil?"
In the Book of the Apocalypse, or Revelation, in the Bible, we find that Satan is called "the accuser". We read:
And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world - he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brethren has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God (12: 9-10).
So we have to be careful before deciding to accuse someone of wrongdoing. Our motive must be enlightened by the Holy Spirit, who would want us to follow Christ's example, as given to us in his Word: "For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him."(John 3: 17).
In his life on earth Jesus accused people of wrongdoing, notably the Pharisees, but with the hope that they would sin no more. His accusation was intended to bring the blessing of repentance, and the renewal of the faith and charity of the accused person or per sons.
Bitterness and hatred
How different that approach is to the situation in Ireland today. There is an orgy of accusation for accusation's sake going on. In newspapers, on radio and television, there is a constant stream of people accusing someone of wrongdoing with the sole object of exhibiting the accuser as being a good person. When listening, for instance, to a phone-in show on radio, and hearing one person after another accuse some politician, bishop, priest, teacher, banker, or whoever, of some wrongdoing, in a self-righteous tone of voice, I am reminded of René Descartes' declaration, Cogito, ergo sum(I think, therefore I am). For I often get the message from the accuser on the programme: "I accuse, therefore I am good." Yet quite often the accuser does not bring good to the situation, but only makes the matter worse by injecting bitterness and hatred to the discussion.
I wonder then who it was that inspired the accuser to take up the phone and ask to speak on the radio programme. Was it the Holy Spirit or Satan? One can tell when the Holy Spirit is inspiring the caller. It is revealed by the fairness and accuracy of the charges made, and the humility and compassion of the accuser, ready to admit that they were wrong if proved to be so.
It is time for us to pray, in this day of darkness for the Church and for the country, for a great outpouring of God's Holy Spirit, whom Jesus promised to us as our "Counsellor" (John 14 and 15), and "Spirit of Truth"(ditto), that the Day of Our Lord, Light of the World, may soon come to Ireland.
THERE was a "gay" bookstore called Lobo's in Austin, Texas, when I was living there as a grad student. The layout was interesting. Looking inside from the street all you saw were books. It looked like any other bookstore. There was a section devoted to classic "gay" fiction by writers such as Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, and W.H. Auden. There were biographies of prominent "gay" icons, some of whom, like Walt Whitman, would probably have accepted the homosexual label, but many of whom, like Whitman's idol President Lincoln, had been commandeered for the cause on the basis of evidence no stronger than a bad marriage or an intense same-sex friendship. There were impassioned modern "gay" memoirs, and historical accounts of the origins and development of the "gay rights" movement.
It all looked so innocuous and disarmingly bourgeois. But if you went inside to browse, before long you noticed another section, behind the books, a section not visible from the street. The pornography section. Hundreds and hundreds of pornographic videos, all involving men, but otherwise catering to every conceivable sexual taste or fantasy. And you would notice something else too. There were no customers in the front. All the customers were in the back, rooting through the videos. As far as I know, I am the only person who ever actually purchased a book at Lobo's. The books were, in every sense of the word, a front for the porn.
Buying respectability
So why waste thousands of dollars on books that no one was going to buy? It was clear from the large "on sale" section that only a pitifully small number of books were ever purchased at their original price. The owners of Lobo's were apparently wasting a lot of money on gay novels and works of gay history, when all the real money was in pornography.
But the money spent on books wasn't wasted. It was used to purchase a commodity that is more precious than gold to the gay rights establishment. Respectability. Respectability and the appearance of normalcy. Without that investment, we would not now be engaged in a serious debate about the legalisation of same-sex "marriage".
By the time I lived in Austin, I had been thinking of myself as a gay man for almost 20 years. Based on the experience acquired during those years, I recognised in Lobo's a metaphor for the strategy used to sell gay rights to the American people, and for the sordid reality that strategy concealed.
This is how I "deconstruct" Lobo's. There are two kinds of people who are going to be looking in through the window: those who are tempted to engage in homosexual acts, and those who aren't. To those who aren't, the shelves of books transmit the message that gay people are no different from anyone else, that homosexuality is not wrong, just different. Since most of them will never know more about homosexuality than what they learned looking in the window, that impression is of the greatest political and cultural importance, because on that basis they will react without alarm, or even with active support, to the progress of gay rights.
There are millions of well-meaning Americans who support gay rights because they believe that what they see looking in at Lobo's is what is really there. It does not occur to them that they are seeing a carefully stage-managed effort to manipulate them, to distract them from a truth they would never condone.
For those who are tempted to engage in homosexual acts, the view from the street is also consoling. It makes life as a homosexual look safe and unthreatening. Normal, in other words. Sooner or later, many of these people will stop looking in through the window and go inside. Unlike the first sort of window-shopper, they won't be distracted by the books for long. They will soon discover the existence of the porn section. And no matter how distasteful they might find the idea at first (if indeed they do find it distasteful), they will also notice that the porn section is where all the customers are. And they will feel sort of silly standing alone among the books. Eventually, they will find their way back to the porn, with the rest of the customers. And like them, they will start rooting through the videos. And, gentle reader, that is where most of them will spend the rest of their lives, until God or AIDS, drugs or alcohol, suicide or a lonely old age, intervenes.
Ralph McInerny once offered a brilliant definition of the gay rights movement: self-deception as a group effort. Nevertheless, deception of the general public is also vital to the success of the cause. And nowhere are the forms of deception more egregious, or more startlingly successful, than in the campaign to persuade Christians that, to paraphrase the title of a recent book, Jesus Was Queer, and churches should open their doors to same-sex lovers.
The gay Christian movement relies on a stratagem that is as daring as it is dishonest. I know, because I was taken in by it for a long time. Like the owners of Lobo's, success depends on camouflaging the truth, which is hidden in plain view the whole time. It is no wonder The Wizard of Oz is so resonant among homosexuals. "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain" could be the motto and the mantra of the whole movement.
No single book was as influential in my own coming out as the now ex-Father John McNeill's 1976 "classic" The Church and the Homosexual.That book is to Dignity what the Communist Manifesto was to Soviet Russia. Most of the book is devoted to offering alternative interpretations of the biblical passages condemning homosexuality, and to putting the antihomosexual writings of the Church Fathers and scholastics into historical context in a way that renders them irrelevant and even offensive to modern readers.
The first impression of a naïve and sexually conflicted young reader such as myself was that McNeill had offered a plausible alternative to traditional teaching. It made me feel justified in deciding to come out of the closet. Were his arguments persuasive? Frankly, I didn't care, and I don't believe most of McNeill's readers do either. They were couched in the language of scholarship, and they sounded plausi ble. That was all that mattered.
Winning legitimacy
McNeill, like most of the members of his camp, treated the debate over homosexuality as first and foremost a debate about the proper interpretation of texts, texts such as the Sodom story in the Bible and the relevant articles of the Summa. The implication was that once those were reinterpreted, or rendered irrelevant, the gay rights apologists had prevailed, and the door was open for practising homosexuals to hold their heads up high in church. And there is a certain sense in which that has proved to be true. To the extent that the debate has focused on interpreting texts, the gay apologists have won for themselves a remarkable degree of legitimacy. But that is because, as anyone familiar with the history of Protestantism should be aware, the interpretation of texts is an interminable process. The efforts of people such as McNeill don't need to be persuasive. They only need to be useful.
This is how it works. McNeill reinterprets the story of Sodom, claiming that it does not condemn homo sexuality, but gang rape. Orthodox theologians respond, in a commendable but naïve attempt to rebut him, naïve because these theologians presume that McNeill believes his own arguments, and is writing as a scholar, not as a propagandist. McNeill ignores the arguments of his critics, dismissing their objections as based on homophobia, and repeats his original position. The orthodox respond again as if they were really dealing with a theologian. And back and forth for a few more rounds. Until finally McNeill or someone like him stands up and announces, "You know, this is getting us nowhere. We have our exegesis and our theology. You have yours. Why can't we just agree to disagree?"
That sounds so reasonable, so ecumenical. And if the orthodox buy into it, they have lost, because the gay rights apologists have earned a place at the table from which they will never be dislodged. Getting at the truth about Sodom and Gomorrah, or correctly parsing the sexual ethics of St Thomas, was never really the issue. Winning admittance to Holy Communion was the issue.
Intellectual abstraction
Even as a naïve young man, one aspect of The Church and the Homosexual struck me as odd. Given that McNeill was suggesting a radical revision of the traditional Catholic sexual ethic, there was almost nothing in it about sexual ethics. The Catholic sexual ethic is quite specific about the ends of human sexuality, and about the forms of behaviour that are consistent with those ends. McNeill's criticism of the traditional ethic occupied most of his book, but he left the reader with only the vaguest idea about what he proposed to put in its place. For that matter, there was almost nothing in it about the real lives of real homosexuals. Homosexuality was treated throughout the book as a kind of intellectual abstraction.
But I was desperate to get some idea of what was waiting for me on the other side of the closet door. And with no one but Fr McNeill for a guide, I was reduced to reading between the lines. There was a single passage that I interpreted as a clue. It was almost an aside, really. At one point, he commented that monogamous same-sex unions were consistent with the Church's teaching, or at least consistent with the spirit of the renewed and renovated post-Vatican II Church. With nothing else to go on, I interpreted this in a prescriptive sense. I interpreted McNeill to be arguing that homogenital acts were only moral when performed in the context of a monogamous relationship. And furthermore, I leapt to what seemed like the reasonable conclusion that the author was aware of such relationships, and that I had a reasonable expectation of finding such a relationship myself. Otherwise, for whose benefit was he writing?
I was not so naïve (although I was pretty naïve) as not to be aware of the existence of promiscuous homosexual men. But McNeill's aside, which, I repeat, contained virtually his only stab at offering a gay sexual ethic, led me to believe that in addition to the promiscuous, there existed a contingent of gay men who were committed to living in monogamy. Otherwise, Fr McNeill was implicitly defending promiscuity. And the very idea of a priest defending promiscuity was inconceivable to me. (Yes, that naïve.)
Promiscuous priest
Several years ago, McNeill published an autobiography. In it, he makes no bones about his experiences as a sexually active Catholic priest - a promiscuous, sexually active, homosexual Catholic priest. He writes in an almost nostalgic fashion about his time spent hunting for sex in bars. Although he eventually did find a stable partner (while he was still a priest), he never apologises for his years of promiscuity, or even so much as alludes to the disparity between his own life and the passage in The Church and the Homosexual that meant so much to me.
It is possible that he doesn't even remember suggesting that homosexuals were supposed to remain celibate until finding monogamous relationships. It is obvious that he never meant that passage to be taken seriously, except by those who would never do more than look in the window - in others words, gullible, well-meaning, non-homosexual Catholics, preferably those in positions of authority. Or, equally naïve and gullible young men such as me who were looking for a reason to act on their sexual desires, preferably one that did not do too much violence to their consciences, at least not at first.
The latter, the writer presumed, would eventually find their way back to the porn section, where their complicity in the scam would render them indistinguishable from the rest of the regular customers. Clearly, there was a reason that in the earlier book he wrote so little about the real lives of real homosexuals, such as himself.
Bad priest and con man
I don't see how the contradiction between The Church and the Homosexual and the autobiography could be accidental. Why would McNeill pretend to believe that homosexuals should restrict themselves to sex within the context of monogamous relationships when his life demonstrates that he did not? I can think of only one reason. Because he knew that if he told the truth, his cause would be dead in the water. Although to this day McNeill, like all gay Christian propagandists, avoids the subject of sexual ethics as if it were some sort of plague, his life makes his real beliefs clear.
He believes in unrestricted sexual freedom. He believes that men and women should have the right to couple, with whomever they want, whenever they want, however they want, and as often as they want. He would probably add some sort of meaningless bromide about no one getting hurt and both parties being treated with respect, but anyone familiar with the snake pit of modern sexual culture (both heterosexual and homosexual) will know how seriously to take that.
And he knew perfectly well that if he were honest about his real aims, there would be no Dignity, there would be no gay Christian movement, at least not one with a snowball's chance in Hell of succeeding. That would be like getting rid of the books and letting the casual window-shoppers see the porn. And we can't have that now, can we? In other words, the ex-Fr. McNeill is a bad priest and a con man. And given the often lethal consequences of engaging in homosexual sex, a con man with blood on his hands.
Free sexual market
Let me be clear. I believe that McNeill's real beliefs, as deduced from his actual behaviour, and distinguished from the arguments he puts forward for the benefit of the naïve and gullible, represent the real aims and objectives of the homosexual rights movement. They are the porn that the books are meant to conceal. In other words, if you support what is now described in euphemistic terms as "the blessing of same-sex unions", in practice you are supporting the abolition of the entire Christian sexual ethic, and its substitution with an unrestricted, laissez faire, free sexual market.
The reason that the homosexual rights movement has managed to pick up such a large contingent of heterosexual fellow-travellers is simple: because once that taboo is abrogated, no taboos are left. I once heard a heterosexual Episcopalian put it this way: if I don't want the church poking its nose into my bedroom, how can I condone it when it limits the sexual freedom of homosexuals? That might sound outrageous, but if you still believe that the debate is over the religious status of monogamous same-sex relationships, please be prepared to point out one church somewhere in the US that has opened its doors to active homosexuals without also opening them to every other form of sexual coupling imaginable. I am too old to be taken in by "Father" McNeill and his abstractions anymore. Show me.
A few years ago, I subscribed to the Dignity Yahoo group on the Internet. There were at that time several hundred subscribers. At one point, a confused and troubled young man posted a question to the group: did any of the subscribers attach any value to monogamy? I immediately wrote back that I did. A couple of days later the young man wrote back to me. He had received dozens of responses, some of them quite hostile and demeaning, and all but one - mine - telling him to go out and get laid because that was what being gay was all about. (This was a gay "Catholic" group.)
He did not know what to make of it because none of the propaganda to which he was exposed before coming out prepared him for what was really on the other side of the closet door. I had no idea what to tell him, because at the time I was still caught up in the lie myself. Now, the solution seems obvious. What I should have written back to him was, "You have been lied to. Ask God for forgiveness and get back to Kansas as fast as you can. Auntie Em is waiting."
Different world out there?
In light of all the legitimate concern about Internet pornography, it might seem ironic to assert that the Internet helped rescue me from homosexuality. For 20 years, I thought there was something wrong with me. Dozens of well-meaning people assured me that there was a whole, different world of homosexual men out there, a world that for some reason I could never find, a world of God-fearing, straight-acting, monogamy-believing, and fidelity-practising homosexuals. They assured me that they themselves knew personally (for a fact and for real) that such men existed. They themselves knew such men (or at least had heard tell of them from those who did). And I believed it, although as the years passed it got harder and harder.
Then I got a personal computer and a subscription to AOL. "OK", I reasoned, "morally conservative homosexuals are obviously shy and skittish and fearful of sudden movements. They don't like bars and bathhouses. Neither do I. They don't attend Dignity meetings or Metropolitan Community Church services because the gay 'churches' are really bathhouses masquerading as houses of worship. But there is no reason a morally conservative homosexual cannot subscribe to AOL and submit a profile. If I can do it, anyone can do it."
So I did it. I wrote a profile describing myself as a conservative Catholic (comme ci, comme ça) who loved classical music and theatre and good books and scintillating conversation about all of the above. I said I wanted very much to meet other like-minded homosexuals for the purposes of friendship and romance. I tried to be as clear as I knew how. I was not interested in one-night stands. And within minutes of placing the profile, I got my first response. It consisted of three words: "How many inches?" My experience of looking for love on AOL went downhill rapidly from there.
When I first came out in the 1980s, it was common for gay rights apologists to blame the promiscuity among gay men on "internalised homophobia". Gay men, like African Americans, internalised and acted out the lies about themselves learned from mainstream American culture. Furthermore, homosexuals were forced to look for love in dimly lit bars, bathhouses, and public parks for fear of harassment at the hands of a homophobic mainstream. The solution to this problem, we were told, was permitting homosexuals to come out into the open, without fear of retribution.
A variant of this argument is still put forward by activists such as Andrew Sullivan, in order to legitimate same-sex marriage. And it seemed reasonable enough 20 years ago. But 35 years have passed since the infamous Stonewall riots of 1969 in New York, the Lexington and Concord of the gay liberation movement. During that time, homosexuals have carved out for themselves public spaces in every major American city, and many of the minor ones as well. They have had the chance to create whatever they wanted in those spaces, and what have they created? New spaces for locating sexual partners.
The real thing
There is another reason, apart from the propaganda value, that bookstores like Lobo's peddle porn as well as poetry. Because without the porn, they would soon go out of business. And, in fact, most gay bookstores have gone out of business, despite the porn. Following an initial burst of enthusiasm in the 1970s and 80s, gay publishing went into steep decline, and shows no signs of coming out of it. Once the novelty wore off, gay men soon bored of reading about men having sex with one another, preferring to devote their time and disposable income to pursuing the real thing. Gay and lesbian community centres struggle to keep their doors open. Gay churches survive as places where worshippers can go to sleep it off and cleanse their soiled consciences after a Saturday night spent cruising for sex at the bars. And there is no danger of ever hearing a word from the pulpit suggesting that bar-hopping is inconsistent with believing in the Bible.
When I lived in the United Kingdom, I was struck by the extent to which gay culture in London replicated gay culture in the US. The same was true in Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin. Homosexuality is one of America's most successful cultural exports. And the focus on gay social spaces in Europe is identical to their focus in America: sex. Cyberspace is now the latest conquest of that amazing modern Magellan: the male homosexual in pursuit of new sexual conquests.
But at this point, how is it possible to blame the promiscuity among homosexual men on homophobia, internalised or otherwise? On the basis of evidence no stronger than wishful thinking, Andrew Sullivan wants us to believe that legalising same-sex "marriage" will domesticate gay men, that all that energy now devoted to building bars and bathhouses will be dedicated to erecting picket fences and twocar garages. What Sullivan refuses to face is that male homosexuals are not promiscuous because of "internalised homophobia", or laws banning same-sex "marriage". Homosexuals are promiscuous because when given the choice, homosexuals overwhelmingly choose to be promiscuous. And wrecking the fun damental social building block of our civilisation, the family, is not going to change that.
I once read a disarmingly honest essay in which Sullivan as much as admitted his real reason for promoting the cause of same-sex "marriage". He faced up to the sometimes sordid nature of his sexual life, which is more than most gay activists are prepared to do, and he regretted it. He wished he had led a different sort of life, and he apparently believes that if marriage were a legal option, he might have been able to do so.
Unsubstantiated hope
I have a lot more respect for Andrew Sullivan than I do for most gay activists. I believe that he would seriously like to reconcile his sexual desires with the demands of his conscience. But with all due respect, are the rest of us prepared to sacrifice the institution of the family in the unsubstantiated hope that doing so will make it easier for Sullivan to keep his trousers zipped?
But isn't it theoretically possible that homosexuals could restrict themselves to something resembling the traditional Catholic sexual ethic, except for the part about procreation - in other words, monogamous lifelong relationships?
Of course it is theoretically possible. It was also theoretically possible in 1968 that the use of contraceptives could be restricted to married couples, that the revolting downward slide into moral anarchy we have lived through could have been avoided. It is theoretically possible, but it is practically impossible. It is impossible because the whole notion of stable sexual orientation on which the gay rights movement is founded has no basis in fact.
René Girard, the French literary critic and sociologist of religion, argues that all human civilisation is founded on desire. All civilisations have surrounded the objects of desire (including sexual desire) with an elaborate and unbreachable wall of taboos and restrictions. Until now. What we are seeing in the modern West is not the long overdue legitimisation of hitherto despised but honourable forms of human love. What we are witnessing is the reduction of civilisation to its lowest common denominator: unbridled and unrestricted desire. To assert that we have opened a Pandora's Box would be a stunning understatement. Fasten your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen, it looks to be a bumpy millennium.
When I was growing up, we were all presumed to be heterosexual. Then homosexuality was introduced as an alternative. That did not at first seem like a major revision because, apart from procreation, homosexuality, at least in theory, left the rest of the traditional sexual ethic intact. Two people of the same gender could (in theory) fall in love and live a life of monogamous commitment. Then bisexuality was introduced, and the real implications of the sexual revolution became clear. Monogamy was out the window. Moral norms were out the window. Do-it-yourself sexuality became the norm.
'Sexual orientation'
Anyone who wants to know what that looks like can do no better than go online. The Internet offers front row seats to the circus of a disintegrating civilisation.
Take Yahoo, for example. Yahoo makes it possible for people sharing a common interest to create groups for the purpose of making contacts and sharing information. If that conjures up images of genealogists and stamp collectors, think again. There are now thousands of Yahoo groups catering to every kind of sexual perversion imaginable. Many of them would defy the imagination of the Marquis de Sade himself.
People who until a few years ago could do nothing but fantasise now entertain serious hopes of acting out their fantasies. I met a man online whose fondest wish was to be spanked with a leather wallet. It had to be leather. And it had to be a wallet. And he needed to be spanked with it. Old-fashioned genital friction was optional. This man wanted a Gucci label tattooed across his backside. He could imagine no loftier pinnacle of passion. And he insisted that this desire was as fundamental to his sexual nature as the desire to go to bed with a man was for me. Furthermore, he had formed a Yahoo group that had more than three hundred members, all of whom shared the same passion. There is no object in the universe, no human or animal body part, that cannot be eroticised.
So, is the desire to be spanked with a leather wallet a "sexual orientation"? If not, how is it different?
There was a time when I would have snorted, "Of course it is different. You can't share a life with a leather wallet. You can't love a leather wallet. What you are talking about is a fetish, not a sexual orientation. The two are completely different." But the truth is that all the gay men I encountered had a fetish for naked male skin, with all the objectification and depersonalisation that implies; that I now consider the distinction sophistical. Leather is skin too, after all. The only real difference between the fellow on the Internet and the average gay man is that he preferred his skin Italian, bovine, and tanned.
Over the years, I have attended various gay and gay-friendly church services. All of them shared one characteristic in common: a tacit agreement never to say a word from the pulpit - or from any other location for that matter - suggesting that there ought to be any restrictions on human sexual behaviour. If anyone reading this is familiar with Dignity or Integrity or the Metropolitan Community churches or, for that matter, mainline Protestantism and most of postVatican II Catholicism, let me ask you one question: when was the last time you heard a sermon on sexual ethics? Have you ever heard a sermon on sexual ethics? I take it for granted that the answer is negative. Do our priests and pastors honestly believe that Christians in America are not in need of sermons on sexual ethics?
Here is the terrifying fact: if we as a nation and as a Church allow ourselves to be taken in by the scam of monogamous same-sex couples, we will be welcoming to our Communion rails (presuming that we still have Communion rails) not just the statistically insignificant number of same-sex couples who have lived together for more than a few years (most of whom purchased stability by jettisoning monogamy); we will also be legitimising every kind of sexual taste, from old-fashioned masturbation and adultery to the most outlandish forms of sexual fetishism. We will, in other words, be giving our blessing to the suicide of Western civilisation.
But what about all those images of loving same-sex couples dying to get hitched with which the media are awash these days? That used to confuse me too. It seems that The New York Timeshas no trouble finding successful same-sex partners to photograph and interview. But despite my best efforts, I was never able to meet the sorts of couples who show up regularly on Oprah. The media are biased and have no interest in telling the truth about homosexuality.
Journalistic deception
I met Wyatt (not his real name) online. For five years he was in a disastrous same-sex relationship. His partner was unfaithful, and an alcoholic with drug problems. The relationship was something that would give Strindberg nightmares. When Vermont legalised same-sex "marriage", Wyatt saw it as one last chance to make their relationship work. He and his partner would fly to Vermont to get "married". This came to the attention of the local newspaper in his area, which did a story with photos of the wedding reception. In it, Wyatt and his partner were depicted as a loving couple who finally had a chance to celebrate their commitment publicly. Nothing was said about the drugs or the alcoholism or the infidelity. But the marriage was a failure and ended in flames a few months later. And the newspaper did not do a follow-up. In other words, the leading daily of one of America's largest cities printed a misleading story about a bad relationship, a story that probably persuaded more than one young man that someday he could be just as happy as Wyatt and his "partner". And that is the sad part.
But one very seldom reads about people like my friend Harry. Harry (not his real name) was a balding, middle-aged man with a pot belly. He was married, and had a couple of grown daughters. And he was unhappy. Harry persuaded himself that he was unhappy because he was gay. He divorced his wife, who is now married to someone else, his daughters are not speaking to him, and he is discovering that pudgy, bald, middle-aged men are not all that popular in gay bars. Somehow, Oprah forgot to mention that. Now Harry is taking anti-depressants in order to keep from killing himself.
Darwinian gay bars
Then there was another acquaintance, who also happened to have the same name as the previous guy. Harry (not his real name) was about 30 (but could easily pass for 20), and from a Mormon background, with all the naïveté that suggests. Unlike the first Harry, he had no difficulty getting dates. Or relationships for that matter. The problem was that the relationships never lasted more than a couple of weeks. Harry was also rapidly developing a serious drinking problem. (So much for the Mormon words of wisdom.) If you happened to be at the bar around two in the morning, you could probably have Harry for the night if you were interested. He was so drunk he wouldn't remember you the next day, and all he really wanted at that point was for someone to hold him.
Gay culture is a paradox. Most homosexuals tend to be liberal Democrats, or in the UK, supporters of the Labour Party. They gravitate toward those Parties on the grounds that their policies are more compassionate and sensitive to the needs of the downtrodden and oppressed. But there is nothing compassionate about a gay bar. It represents a laissez fairefree sexual market of the most Darwinian sort. There is no place in it for those who are not prepared to compete, and the rules of the game are ruthless and unforgiving. I remember once being in a gay pub in central London. Most of the men there were buff and toned and in their 20s or early 30s. An older gentleman walked in, who looked to be in his 70s. It was as if the Angel of Death himself had made an entrance. In that crowded bar, a space opened up around him that no one wanted to enter. His shadow transmitted contagion. It was obvious that his presence made the other customers nervous. He stood quietly at the bar and ordered a drink. He spoke to no one and no one spoke to him. When he eventually finished his drink and left, the sigh of relief from all those buff, toned pub-crawlers was almost audible. Now all of them could go back to pretending that gay men were all young and beautiful forever.
Gentle reader, do you know what a "bug chaser" is? A bug chaser is a young gay man who wants to contract HIV so that he will never grow old. And that is the world that Harry left his wife, and the other Harry his Church, to find happiness in.
Swept under carpet
I have known a lot of people like the two Harrys. But I have met precious few who bore more than a superficial resemblance to the idealised images we see in Oscar-winning movies such as Philadelphia, or in the magazine section of The New York Times. What I find suspicious is that the media ignore the existence of people like the two Harrys. The unhappiness so common among homosexuals is swept under the carpet, while fanciful and unrealistic "role models" are offered up for public consumption. There is at the very least grounds for a serious debate about the proposition that "gay is good", but no such debate is taking place, because most of the mainstream media have already made up their (and our) minds.
But it is hard to hide the porn for ever. When I was living in London, I had a wonderful friend named Maggie. Maggie (not her real name) was a liberal. Her big heart bled for the oppressed. Like most liberals, she was proud of her open-mindedness and wore it like a badge of honour. Maggie lived in a house as big as her heart and all of her children were grown up and had moved out. She had a couple of rooms to rent. It just so happened that both the young men who became her tenants were gay. Maggie's first reaction was enthusiastic. She had never known many gay people, and thought the experience of renting to two homosexuals would confirm her in her open-mindedness. She believed it would be a learning experience.
It was, but not the sort she had in mind. One day Maggie told me her troubles and confessed her doubts. She talked about what it was like to stumble each morning down to the breakfast table, finding two strangers seated there, the two strangers her tenants brought home the night before. It was seldom the same two strangers two mornings running. One of her tenants was in a long-distance relationship but, in the absence of his partner, felt at liberty to seek consolation elsewhere. She talked about what it was like to have to deal on a daily basis with the emotional turmoil of her tenants' tumultuous lives. She told me what it was like to open the door one afternoon and find a policeman standing there, a policeman who was looking for one of her tenants, who was accused of trying to sell drugs to school children. That same tenant was also involved in prostitution.
Maggie didn't know what to make of it all. She desperately wanted to remain open-minded, to keep believing that gay men were no worse than anyone else, just different. But she couldn't reconcile her experience with that "tolerant" assumption. The truth was that when the two finally moved out, an event to which she was looking forward with some enthusiasm, and it was time to place a new ad for rooms to let, she wanted to include the following proviso: Fags need not apply. I didn't know what to tell Maggie because I was just as confused as she was. I wanted to hold on to my illusions too, in spite of all the evidence.
Decisive moment
I am convinced that many, if not most, people who are familiar with the lives of homosexuals know the truth, but refuse to face it. My best friend got involved in the gay rights movement as a graduate student. He and a lesbian colleague sometimes counselled young men who were struggling with their sexuality. Once, the two of them met a young man who was seriously overweight and suffered from terrible acne. The young man waxed eloquent about the happiness he expected to find when he came out of the closet. He was going to find a partner, and the two of them would live happily ever after. The whole time my friend was thinking that if someone looking like this fat, pustulent young man ever walked into a bar, he would be folded, spindled, and mutilated before even taking a seat.
Afterwards, the lesbian turned to him and said, "You know, sometimes it is better to stay in the closet." My friend told me that for him this represented a decisive moment. This lesbian claimed to love and admire gay men. She never stopped praising their kindness and compassion and creativity. But with that one comment she in effect told my friend that she really knew what gay life was all about. It was about meat, and unless you were a good cut, don't bother coming to the supermarket.
On another occasion, I was complaining to a lesbian about my disillusionment. She made a remarkable admission to me. She had a teenage son, who so far had not displayed signs of sexual interest in either gender. She knew as a lesbian she should not care which road he took. But she confessed to me that she did care. Based on the lives of the gay men she knew, she found herself secretly praying that her son would turn out to be straight. As a mother, she did not want to see her son living that life.
'Internalised homophobia'
A popular definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing, while expecting a different result. That was me, the whole time I was labouring to become a happy homosexual. I was a lunatic. Several times I turned for advice to gay men who seemed better adjusted to their lot in life than I was. First, I wanted confirmation that my perceptions were accurate, that life as a male homosexual really was as awful as it seemed to be. And then I wanted to know what I was supposed to do about it. When was it going to get better? What could I do to make it better? I got two sorts of reactions to these questions, both of which left me feeling hurt and confused. The first sort of reaction was denial, often bitter denial, of what I was suggesting. I was told that there was something wrong with me, that most gay men were having a wonderful time, that I was generalising on the basis of my own experience (whose experience was I supposed to generalise from?), and that I should shut up and stop bothering others with my "internalised homophobia".
I began seeing a counsellor when I was a graduate student. Matt (not his real name) was a happily married man with college-age children. All he knew about homosexuality he learned from the other members of his profession, who assured him that homosexuality was not a mental illness and that there were no good reasons that homosexuals could not lead happy, productive lives.
Still in the closet?
When I first unloaded my tale of woe, Matt told me I had never really come out of the closet. (I still have no idea what he meant, but suspect it is like the "once saved, always saved" Baptist who responds to the lapsed by telling him that he was never really saved in the first place.) I needed to go back, he told me, try again, and continue to look for the positive experiences he was sure were available for me, on the basis of no other evidence than the rulings of the American Psychiatric Association. He had almost no personal experience of homosexuals, but his peers assured him that the book section at Lobo's offered a true picture of homosexual life. I knew Matt was clueless, but I still wanted to believe he was right.
Matt and I developed a therapeutic relationship. During the year we spent together, he learned far more from me than I did from him. I tried to take his advice. I was sharing a house that year with another grad student who was in the process of coming out and experiencing his own disillusionment. Because I had been his only gay friend, and had encouraged him to come out, his bitterness came to be directed at me, and our relationship suffered for it. Meanwhile, I developed a close friendship with a member of the faculty who was openly gay. When I first informed Matt, he was ecstatic. He thought I was finally come out properly. The faculty member was just the sort of friend I needed. But the faculty member, as it turned out, despite his immaculate professional facade, was a deeply disturbed man who put all of his friends through emotional hell, which I of course shared with a shocked and silenced Matt. (I tried to date but, as usual, experienced the same pattern that characterised all my homosexual relationships. The friendship lasted as long as the sexual heat. Once that cooled, my partner's interest in me as a person dissipated with it.) It was not a good year. At the end of it, I remember Matt staring at me, with glazed eyes and a shell-shocked look on his face, and admitting, "You know, being gay is a lot harder than I realised."
Last nails in coffin
Not everyone I spoke to over the years rejected what I had to say out of hand. I once corresponded with an English ex-Dominican. I was ecstatic to learn that he was gay, and was eventually kicked out of his order for refusing to remain in the closet. He included an e-mail address in one of his books, and I wrote him, wanting to know if his experience of life as a homosexual was significantly different from mine. I presumed it must be, since he had written a couple of books, passionately defending the right of homosexuals to a place in the Church.
His response to me was one of the last nails in the coffin of my life as a gay man. To my astonishment, he admitted that his experiences were not unlike mine. All he could suggest was that I keep trying, and eventually everything would work out. In other words, this brilliant man, whose books had meant so much to me, had nothing to suggest except that I keep doing the same thing, while expecting a different result. There was only one reasonable conclusion. I would be nuts if I took his advice. It took me 20 years, but I finally reached the conclusion that I did not want to be insane.
So where am I now? I am attending a militantly orthodox parish in Houston that is one of God's most spectacular gifts to me. My best friend Mark (not his real name) is, like me, a refugee from the homosexual insane asylum. He is also a devout believer, though a Presbyterian (no one is perfect). From Mark I have learned that two men can love each other profoundly while remaining clothed the entire time.
We are told that the Church opposes same-sex love. Not true. The Church opposes homogenital sex, which in my experience is not about love, but about obsession, addiction, and compensation for a compromised masculinity.
Tear down the façade
I am not proud of the life I have lived. In fact, I am profoundly ashamed of it. But if reading this prevents one naïve, gullible man from making the same mistakes, then perhaps with the assistance of Our Lady of Guadalupe; of St Joseph, her chaste spouse; of my patron saint, Edmund Campion; of St Josemaría Escrivá; of the blessed Carmelite martyrs of Compiégne; and, last but not least, of my special supernatural guide and mentor, the Venerable John Henry Newman, I can at least hope for a reprieve from some of the many centuries in Purgatory I have coming to me.
So, what do we as a Church and a culture need to do? Tear down the respectable façade and expose the pornography beneath. Start pressuring homosexuals to tell the truth about their lives. Stop debating the correct interpretation of Genesis 19. Leave the men of Sodom and Gomorrah buried in the brimstone where they belong. Sodom is hidden in plain view from us, here and now, today. Once, when preparing a lecture on Cardinal Newman, I summarised his classic Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine in this fashion: Truth ripens, error rots.
The homosexual rights movement is rotten to the core. It has no future. There is no life in it. Sooner or later, those who are caught up in it are going to wake up from the dream of unbridled desire or else die. Itis just a matter of time. The question is: how long? How many children are going to be sacrificed to this Moloch?
Until several months ago, there was a Lobo's in Houston too. Not accidentally, I'm sure, its layout was identical to the one in Austin. It was just a few blocks from the gas station where I take my car for service. Recently, I was taking a walk through the neighbourhood while my tyres were being rotated. And I noticed something. There was a padlock on the door at Lobo's. A sign on the door read, "The previous tenant was evicted for non-payment of rent." The books and the porn, the façade and what it conceals, are gone now. Praise God.
Ronald G. Lee is a librarian in Houston, Texas.
© 2006 New Oxford Review. All Rights Reserved.
February 2006, Volume LXXIII, Number 2.
BEYOND CONSOLATION: How We Became Too "Clever" for God - and for Our Own Good. By John Waters. Continuum, London and New York. Price: £12.99 in the UK.
READERS of this magazine will, I hope, have followed John Waters' career with interest. Like many Irish cultural commentators he can be very strong when talking about his own experiences or dissecting other people's assumptions, but is inclined to blather when he engages in cultural theorising. It is clear, however, that he sees his writings on popular music, and his efforts to come to terms with being a father and providing for his own child, as part of a spiritual quest. In recent years he has been trying to reconcile himself with the Catholicism he abandoned in adolescence.
This book is quite searingly honest because Waters is talking about his own growing sense of mortality as he ages. I have noticed some of the phenomena he describes as I advance into middle age: the surprise at the thought that you are the same person as the child who played on the beach or the boy in the classroom, so many years ago; the realisation that one day you will be like those old people you remember from your childhood; the realisation that things you did or left undone can never be changed now and that your defaults or neglect must be forever unremedied unless Another takes them up.
Waters takes as a starting point the famous last radio interview with Nuala Ó Faolain in which she talked about her approaching death, how she felt that nothing awaited her but extinction and how with that knowledge all the pleasure went out of life. He notes how this interview was praised as "honest" and "profound" without ever addressing the questions it raised, and how the interviewer seemed to shy away from addressing some of the points where Ó Faolain seemed unsure.
What is being 'honest'?
In a later chapter, Waters discusses a radio interview in which Seámus Heaney declared that he did not believe in God or an afterlife and suggested that no-one who thought about the subject could really do so, before going on to express regret at the decline of traditional Irish Christian values during the boom and the hope that some of them might soon revive. Waters suggests that the interviewer's failure to press Heaney on the questions of how you can regret the decline of such values, or hope for their maintenance, while at the same time believing they were founded on a lie, and how Christianity can be so self-evidently false while at the same time still being believed by a majority of the people in the country (many/most of whom are not self-evidently devoid of intelligence) springs from the same source as the unanalysed praise for Ó Faolain.
Our official culture, and an increasingly large section of the Irish population, tacitly assumes Christianity/Catholicism can be tolerated as a sort of eccentricity, but is merely a "belief" subjectively held by a dwindling minority of eccentrics, whereas unbelief is how things really are even if we are reluctant to express it in so many words - hence to do so is to be "honest".
Waters notes how the dominant Irish media present Catholicism as a mere relic of a dying past, an externally-imposed tyranny whose grip has weakened until its dwindling presence lingers only among the old and uneducated. He notes how a certain newspaper, which he does not name but whose title we can guess, published on its front page when reporting on an Assumption pilgrimage to Knock, a photo of two elderly ushers kneeling to pray with their faces sunk in their hands, although inside there was a photo of two young pilgrims laughing; and a few days after the Ryan report the same paper published in the same front-page position a photo of the Pope kissing a child at a public event.
In both cases, Waters suggests, the innuendo (Catholicism as a thing of the past found only among the old and abject; the hint that the Pope's love of children is unhealthy) did not need to be articulated; it was tolerated and promoted by a sort of groupthink. It is important that this should be told to a mainstream Irish audience by commentators like Waters and David Quinn, because it is true, and Waters deserves our thanks for saying it even if we may not agree with everything else he says.
Adolescent cult of youth
Waters suggests that in this reaction against our past, this redefinition of religion as simply an external controlling force1cuts its adherents off from a source of hope and a means of coming to terms with our own mortality; they cling to a perpetually adolescent cult of youth and a refusal to recognise that we are now, or are rapidly becoming old people - whom in our youth we saw as almost a different species, assuming we ourselves would never be old.2 Even when we see ourselves face to face with death, Waters suggests, so many refuse to reconsider the existence of God, because they see this as submission to an external tyrant rather than the source of the hope deeply implanted in our nature for which we yearn as for water in the desert.3
Waters is quite honest about the extent to which he is still a seeker; he says he is searching for a personal relationship with Jesus. He speaks of how impressed he is by His Personality, but he says also that he has not yet met Him, though he yearns to, and knows trustworthy people who say they have. He is deeply ambivalent about what he calls the institutio al church; on the one hand he accuses it of reducing Christ's message to a moralism which shades into tyranny, and his attachment to Catholicism often seems to be as much because it is Ireland's traditional religion and a link with our ancestors as because of its claims to truth. On the other hand, he had a nice description of a debate at a Cork literary festival with a priest who was trying to distance himself from the Church while proclaiming his attachment to "spirituality" (very vaguely defined) and who, Waters felt, was trying to ingratiate himself with the audience. Waters had not come across the type before, but readers of this Review will certainly recognise it.
Waters responded by very specifically asking the audience whether they were Catholics or if they wanted their children to be Catholics, and reading out some of Rodney Stark's suggestions about how much different (and worse) Western civilisation would have been if the followers of Jesus had remained an obscure sect; he then got accused of offering an apologia for the institutional church, with which he said he had no concern.
Communion and Liberation
Waters says he dislikes the tendency of the pious subculture to see itself as a sort of club and to talk about religion only in terms of piety and doctrine4 rather than talking about all subjects through religion.5 There is a great deal of truth in this indictment, past and present. It is a pity Waters does not seem to have access to some Irish Catholic spiritual writers who expressed similar concerns in the past and sought to redress them6, but they are neglected nowadays, and I suppose their idiom is not immediately accessible to him. All the more credit to Communion and Liberation for addressing his concerns in a manner that has intrigued and aroused him so much.
Traditionalists who are excessively critical of the turn from Thomism towards personalism might note that Waters operates from his personal experience, his sense of loss and neediness, and he finds that Pope Benedict's writings speak to these with remarkable strength (he quotes extensively from Spes Salvi: I doubt if he could have been reached by the Thomist manual approach). Let us hope that he finds his way to a fuller grasp of the truth, and let us remind ourselves that our own grasp of it may not be so secure as we like to think; we too need to draw on the springs of living water, and to realise how radical is the challenge we must face to obtain the pearl of great price, in whose vision the boy playing on the beach and the lonely man at the keyboard will find fulfilment.
FOOTNOTES
PRESIDENT OBAMA got his way. The healthcare bill that he had been pushing - the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" is its formal title - got rammed through the US Congress. America as a result is going farther down the road to nationalised healthcare.
Will the country be better off? Will patients get the greater protection and more affordable care that this disingenuously named bill touts? Not at all. The cost of medical care will increase, the quality will decrease and bureaucrats will end up controlling a sizeable portion of the American economy.
Obama and the Congressional Democrats claim the opposite, but their arguments do not hold up under any sort of scrutiny.
Healthcare in the United States is more expensive than it might otherwise be. Most observers - not just the Democrats - agree on that. The situation, however, could be remedied rather easily. No massive bill was needed.
There are Americans without health insurance. That too is clear. The figures that have been bandied about - 44 to 48 million people - are, however, highly misleading on several counts and, in any event, being without insurance is not synonymous with being without medical care in the United States. Hospitals can turn no one away.
The opposite effect
Commenting on the bill in a recent interview in the Wall Street Journal, Nobel economist Gary Becker stated "It's a bad bill. Health care in the United States is pretty good, but it does have a number of weaknesses. This bill doesn't address them. It adds taxation and regulation. It's going to increase health costs - not contain them."
The principal reason that the cost of medical care is artificially high is that close to 90 per cent of payments for medical care are made by third parties - insurance companies or the US government. In such an environment, individuals have much less reason to economise on their medical expenditures and refrain from seeking medical care for minor health problems. As Becker again put it: "Once people begin spending substantial sums from their own pockets, they become willing to shop around. Ordinary market incentives begin to operate. A good bill would have encouraged that."
On the insurance side, the current arrangements are vestiges of World War II price and wage controls. Employers trying to attract workers and legally constrained from offering higher wages during the war, offered health insurance in lieu of wage increases. When these payments in kind attracted the attention of the tax authorities, Congress made employer-provided insurance tax free. These insurance policies, moreover, typically have very low excess, or in American parlance, deductible amounts.
What needed to be done here was simple - level the playing field. Either eliminate the favourable tax treatment for employer-provided plans, and reduce tax rates accordingly, or extend the tax-free status to insurance purchased by individuals and to medical savings accounts. A further step in the right direction would have been to remove the myriad restrictions on what type of plan insurance companies could offer. Currently these include prohibition of insurance companies operating across state lines, a host of individual state mandates affecting what insurance companies must cover and the inability of employees to maintain existing coverage when they switch jobs.
Miserable failure
Left to their own devices and with a greater range of products available, many individuals would opt for policies with higher excess amounts. No one buys homeowner insurance with a low excess to cover themselves in case a door knob falls off. They buy it to cover catastrophes like fires. If people were paying out of pocket for medical insurance - the way they did for home owners' insurance they would very likely not pay for a policy that covered visits to doctors for minor problems.
In both of these respects - moving away from thirdparty payment and fostering competition - the bill that was passed fails miserably. It keeps the current payment system intact, and through time will result in a nationalised health insurance system that will inevitably be more rigid than the current one. What about the people without insurance? In 2007, according to US census data, there were somewhat over 45 million. That's a big number in absolute terms but still only about 15 per cent of the population. Of that amount roughly 40 per cent, or 18 million are individuals between the ages of 18 and 34. Very many of these, given the much lower probability of serious medical problems, most likely opted out. Another 27 per cent or 12 million are individuals who are eligible for government assistance but never sign up. Finally there are an estimated 7.5 million plus who are in the country illegally. Total that up, and you are left with 7.5 million people or less - roughly two and one half per cent of the population, rather than the 15 per cent or more that has attracted so much attention.
Obama and the Congressional Democrats have never explained why taking care of that small group necessitated a thorough redoing of the US healthcare system. And in fact they cannot.
Instead they mouth the usual platitudes of nannystaters the world over, who seem to believe - or at least want other people to believe - that they have cornered the market on compassion.
Rhetoric, however, is no substitute for reality. The US healthcare system, even given its problems has been the envy of the world. Need an operation of some sort done quickly, either to alleviate pain or a more serious condition? Tough luck under a nationalised system. Get in the queue, mate. Canadians realise this and hop south across the border if the need truly arises. I have heard of no movement whatsoever in the opposite direction.
Personal experience
Let me put this into perspective with a personal anecdote. One spring on holiday in Ireland I slipped and twisted my knee. Since the knee was not at all right when I returned to New York shortly thereafter, I rang an orthopaedic surgeon who diagnosed the condition as torn ligaments. Five days or so later, after an MRI scan to confirm the initial diagnosis and a general physical exam, I had arthroscopic surgery to repair the damage.
Delays in receiving care are, however, the relatively benign part. As more and more medical decisions get made by bureaucrats rather than by physicians and their patients and costs get even more out of hand as they inevitably do in any government-run enterprise, rationing will take on a more chilling face. Issues having to do with what in Britain is euphemistically known as the "quality of life" will take on greater and greater importance. Neonatal intensive care for babies with Downs syndrome, if indeed they are even allowed to come into the world, and heart surgery for octogenarians will be rarities.
That gets us to the issue of abortion more generally. Representative Bart Stupak made much of his opposition to the bill right up until the very end because it would provide abortion funding. But then he got a promise from President Obama that he would issue an executive order banning the use of US Government monies for abortion. And Obama did in fact sign such an order. The problem is that it will not stand up in a court of law if challenged. If Obama had been serious about eliminating abortion funding, he would simply have had the bill changed. What actually went on in Stupak's mind that made him vote for the bill is anyone's guess.
Unhappy public
How has all of this set with the American public? Not very well at all. A sizeable majority opposed the legislation. They evidently sifted through the bill and realised what it would mean for them going forward and are unhappy about it. They appear even more upset about runaway government spending and the rise in taxes it will engender.
The latest opinion polls show Obama and the Democrats in a free fall. Hope and change are no longer the happy bed fellows they seemed to be in November 2008.
The elections this autumn will tell the tale. All of the members of the House of Representatives are up for re-election, so too one-third of Senators. As Karl Rove, former chief advisor and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush recently put it: "[I]f Republicans connect the dots among record spending, skyrocketing deficits, rising taxes and a weak recovery, Democrats will suffer a midterm loss from which the Obama presidency may never fully recover."
Deo volente.
The Children's Bill
Dear Editor,
I am very concerned about the lack of response of
the Catholic Media to the Government's proposed
Children, Schools and Families Bill. There is a clear
anti-God and anti-Christian bias to this bill. Instead of
screaming a warning from the rooftops, however, the
mainstream Catholic Press is low-key and altogether
supine in its non-opposition to this - what can only
be described as - satanic legislation.
Indeed, should sex education have ever been introduced into Catholic schools in the first place?
Those who teach in the dumbed-down charade which is "modern education" know full well that sex education is taught devoid of morality. Even in supposedly Catholic schools the sum total of the "morality" taught to students is a limp-wristed "don't do anything you're not ready for".
No wonder we have an epidemic of single mothers and young boys who are addicted to pornography and promiscuity. They have not been taught traditional Catholic morality. The liberal mentality which has corroded Catholicism in the post Vatican II era sees any attempt at teaching a robust morality to students as "dictating to youngsters". We have a lost generation because our political overlords and the highlyvocal progressive, post-conciliar catechists have turned Christian education into a simplistic philoso- phy of secular do-goodism. In the politically-correct arena of the modern secondary school, tolerance and diversity are everything; standing up for Catholic principles is anathema. Anyone who dared to stand up for Catholic principles in modern schools would subsequently prosecuted for hate-crimes.
I suggest parents begin a vigorous campaign for the reintroduction of traditional Catholic morality into all aspects of education. Until then, teenage suicides, pregnancies and the other moral disasters which plague our spiritually-bereft youth, will continue unabated.
Brendan Kavanagh
Kerry
----------------------------------------------
Voices of Encouragement
A chara,
Best €20.00 I spend in the year. I look forward to
each issue and read it again and again. Keep up the
good work.
Sincerely
Mgr P.J. Gallagher
Ballina, Co Mayo.
Dear Nick,
It's the best magazine ever. Keep it up and don't
quit.
Paul Hellyer
Leeds, England
Dear Nick,
Enclosed my subscription. The best journal I have
had the good fortune to find.
Regards,
John Smyth
Malahide, Co Dublin
Sigrid and Sanctity
It is always a thrill when you come across something really fascinating about which you previously knew absolutely nothing. This happened to me recently when I discovered the works of the Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1928 for her masterpiece Kristin Lavransdatter.
After her father's death, Sigrid had to cut short her education and became a secretary in Oslo to make ends meet. She hated her job, but it gave her an excellent work-discipline, and she used to study late at night, immersing herself in the medieval history of her country. Partly as a result of her studies, she was converted to Catholicism - an unusual and unpopular thing to do in 1920s Norway. This, in her own words, is how it happened:
By degrees my knowledge of history convinced me that the only thoroughly sane people, of our civilisation at least, seemed to be those queer men and women the Catholic Church calls Saints. They seemed to know the true explanation of man's undying hunger for happiness - his tragically insufficient love of peace, justice, and goodwill to his fellow men, his everlasting fall from grace. Now it occurred to me that there might possibly be some truth in the original Christianity. But if you desire to know the truth about anything, you always run the risk of finding it. And in a way we do not want to find the Truth - we prefer to seek and keep our illusions. But I had ventured too near the abode of truth in my researches about "God's friends", as the Saints are called in the Old Norse texts of Catholic times. So I had to submit. And on the first of November, 1924, 1 was received into the Catholic Church.
Sigrid Undset has the rare gift of making holiness sound very attractive, particularly in some of her minor clerical characters.
**************************
Power of Repentance
Kristin Lavransdatter is divided into three parts, making a total of nearly 1,000 pages. I have only read the first 300 or so pages and I am hooked. The plot races along like a middle-to-highbrow Mills and Boon (if you can imagine such a thing) only packed with beautiful descriptions of scenery, seasonal changes, fascinating historical information and profound portrayals of character. I hope some time in the next few issues to do a proper review of Kristinin the hope that some readers will come to share my enthusiasm for Sigrid Undset, who I believe should be much better known, particularly among orthodox Catholics.
The story so far (although it is impossible to summarise it properly in a few sentences): Kristin is a young girl who has the misfortune to fall for Erlend, a rather weak character who, unknown to her, has a mistress and two young children. She persuades her father Lavrans, a most pleasant and devout individual, to let her marry Erlend even though she is betrothed to someone else. (Lavrans doesn't know that Kristin is already pregnant by Erlend.) Before the ceremony, the mistress turns up and tries to poison Kristin. Frustrated in this attempt, she turns a knife on Erlend; but in a confused struggle, ends up stabbing herself to death. Kristin briefly approves of her death.
In an agony of remorse, after her marriage Kristin makes a solo penitential barefoot pilgrimage across mountainous country to Trondheim cathedral, carrying her baby son Naakkve to the shrine of St Olav, the martyred warrior-king and patron of Norway. Sigrid Undset powerfully describes Kristin's repentance:
High above the triumphal arch, uplifted over the people, hung Christ the Crucified. The stainless Virgin that was His mother stood gazing in deathly anguish at her innocent Son, suffering a death of torment like an evil-doer. And here knelt she [Kristin], with the fruit of sin in her arms. She pressed the child to her - he was fresh as an apple, red and white as a rose - he was awake now, and lay looking up at her with his clear sweet eyes.... Conceived in sin. Borne under her hard evil heart. Drawn from her sin-polluted body, so fair, so whole, so unspeakably lovely and fresh and pure. The undeserved mercy broke her heart asunder; she knelt, crushed with penitence, and the weeping welled up out of her soul as blood flows from a death wound...Cor mundum crea in me, Deus, et spiritum rectum innova in visceribus meis.
I can hardly wait to know what happens next. If I had to guess, I would say that Kristin's marriage will turn out badly (like Sigrid's own) but that as she grows older she will become a very great saint.
*************************
Of Rockets and Brain Surgeons
In British soap operas, when someone is being more than usually slow to grasp some fairly simple point, another character will often say: something like: "Well, it's not rocket science. You don't have to be a brain surgeon." So I rather chuckled over this, which I found on the "Hermeneutic of Continuity" a sardonic orthodox Catholic blog.
UNIVERSITY OF THE FLIPPIN' OBVIOUS
Bachelor of Commonsense Honours Degree
Examination
Rocket Science Level I (Faculty of drawing conclusions from empirical observation) Answer question 1. (Three hours allowed)
Which of the following will be more effective in reviving Catholic faith and devotion in Britain today?
a. Arranging meetings to discuss the environment, climate change, the credit crunch, inclusion, exclusion, holism, and equality, discerning how best to downsize the Church's activity by closing parishes, and identifying the possibilities for lay ministry in priestless Churches, with people breaking into small groups to discuss their feelings about these important issues.
Vigorously promoting the traditional devotional life and magisterial teaching of the Church, and giving high-profile support to all events that encourage and nurture faith in the Blessed Sacrament, and devotion to Our Lady and the Saints - not excluding devotion to relics of the same. (Without actually needing to break up into small groups.)
Hint: it is not actually rocket science.
*************************
Catholic Celebration of Gaia
A friend of mine has written to Archbishop Joseph Di Noia, OP, Secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, about an "eco-concert" including Eric Sweeney's "Hymn to Gaia" which uses a variety of religious texts - Christian, Moslem, Buddhist and Native American. It has been performed in several Catholic churches around the country, after its premiere in Christ Church cathedral, Waterford. It has received rave reviews.
The Director of the Lassus Scholars Ite O'Donovan described the piece thus:
In Hymn to Gaia, Eric Sweeney is trying to look at the importance of looking after the environment. That's his big thing, and his piece is almost a wake-up call for us to look after the beauties of the created world. He uses texts from all world religions, and from poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins and Walt Whitman. "It's probably unique in that it uses the framework of a Christian Mass yet with all these extraordinary texts put in."
A review in the Munster Express described how mezzo soprano Bridget Knowles sang from the Koran about creation and the alternation of the night and the day. It went on:
The choirs of Christ Church Cathedral, Tribal Chamber Choir (Galway) and Lassus Scholars and Piccolo Lasso (Dublin) created a deep resonant tone that was memorable. The Agnus Dei took away the sins of the world as the soloists rejoiced in the nature of Bodhisattva and Buddha with a Puja as an act of respect and reverence before the work gathered into a Requiem Aeternum (sic) inspired by Walt Whitman - nothing is ever really lost.
Now, the music may well be brilliant - but I agree with my friend. This kind of pagan syncretism has no place in a Catholic Church. I am sure Pope Benedict would agree with us - and it goes without saying that Guttur Profundum certainly would.
***************************
Atheist's Feast Day
We hear that in Florida, an atheist brought a frivolous case alleging that he and his co-non-religionists suffered from discrimination because they, unlike Jews and Christians, had no special recognised days of celebration. The judge dismissed the case.
Immediately, the atheist's counsel rose to protest, pointing out that Christians had Easter and Christmas, Jews had Passover and Yom Kippur, while atheists had nothing.
The judge leaned forward in his chair and said this was simply untrue. "The calendar says April 1st is April Fools' Day. Psalm 14: 1 says: 'The fool says in his heart, there is no God.' Thus, it is the opinion of this court that if your client says there is no God, then he is a fool. Therefore, April 1st is his day. Court is adjourned."
***************************
Something Good out of Glenstal
In our last issue we were taken to task by Glenstal monk Dom Anselm Hurt OSB, a very faithful reader of this Review, for "stereotyping" Glenstal. It is quite true that from time to time we have a go at the place, but then we do consider it to be a caricature of a progressive religious community, and therefore fair game. It was nice of Dom Anselm to share his thoughts with us; and he willingly gave permission for us to publish them, which we did without any accompanying snide comments.
Actually, Dom Anselm is not quite right to assume we believe nothing good can come out of Glenstal. I hadn't realised it until recently, but in 2008 there died Dom Dominic Johnston, who for many years had thundered in the letters columns of the national papers against the offences against faith and morals perpetrated almost daily by clerics and progressive pundits who considered they were implementing the spirit of Vatican II. One can only imagine what he must have thought about the opinions of some of his brother monks, who can't have liked his letters one bit.
How Dom Dominic would have hated the panegyric delivered by Abbot Hederman, which included this gem: "Therapy of a psychological as well as spiritual kind introduced Dominic to his other life, the undercarriage of his personhood." Work out what that means if you can. Obviously the monks had considered Dom Dominic was in need of treatment. Poor old fellow!
Fr Dominic was no dyed-in-the-wool Trad, at least in liturgical matters. I once wrote to him inviting him to celebrate the old Latin Mass in Limerick. The letter was returned, with the word "NO!" scrawled across it.
***************************
Wanted: An Eminent Badger
A friend and I were discussing Pope Benedict's letter to Irish Catholics, about which there is rather a lot in this issue. Our admiration for the document was virtually unbounded, and my friend opined that the most important part of all was the announcement of an Apostolic Visitation of Irish dioceses, seminaries and religious congregations. (As Pastor Ignotus said in his sermon: talk of cans of worms!)
We agreed that a most tough-minded and ruthless individual would be needed to head up the visitation - one who would stand for no slipperiness or obfuscation whatever, be it from bishops, seminary professors of heads of congregations.
A Doberman Pinscher, I suggested. Maybe a rottweiler, or better still, a pit bull terrier. "No," said my friend, "I know; he must be a badger. When a badger gets hold of something he hangs on and bites harder and harder, deeper and deeper, until he feels the bone crack."
***************************
No Sheilas
I cannot vouch for this story 100 per cent, but it has a ring of possible authenticity.
An Irishman goes into a bar in Western Australia, and quickly notices a sign saying MEN ONLY. Ordering his "tube" of Foster's beer, he asks the barman by way of friendly conversation whether there is any bar in the town where women are allowed.
"What do you want to drink with sheilas for?" asks the barman. "Are you a poofter, or something?"
When ordering, please do not include any money: we will send you an invoice with the package. You may contact us by post, by telephone, by fax, or by e-mail (brandsmabooks@eircom.net). Please note that the cost of postage and packaging is extra and will be included on the invoice. Unfortunately we can no longer accept payment by credit card.
Edited by Nick Lowry, and James. R. Lothian, and published by Brandsma Books Ltd., 14, Villarea Park, Dun Laoghaire, Co. Dublin. (Tel: 01 280 3540). Cost of yearly subscription in Ireland (six issues), EUR19.80.