David French: on consentual sex

The carrier pigeon didn't even land. It just dropped its little wad of a message like pigeon poop. But there it was at my feet. Guy Noir - Private Eye, again. My underground correspondent from God knows where: somewhere 'stealthy.'

"For some reason, David French — like Peggy Noonan and Elizabeth Scalia — often annoys. But here he is right on," he wrote, in what looked like quill point squiggly ink lines.

The link he included led to this: David French, "A morality based only on consent results in sexual oppression" (National Review, October 15, 2017). Amen to that.

"Sex-drenched"

Thus reads another missive from our underground correspondent, Guy Noir - Private Eye, sent yet again by carrier pigeon from God-knows-where. Unfolded and spread on the table, it read:

Ding ding ding! Read this (but kids, please be safe…)

Rod Dreher, "Cheap Sex = Dying Christianity" (American Conservative, September 5, 2017), who quotes Mark Regnerus, "Christians are part of the same dating pool as everyone else. That's bad for the church." (Washington Post, September 5, 2017):

Cheap sex, it seems, has a way of deadening religious impulses. It’s able to poke holes in the “sacred canopy” over the erotic instinct, to borrow the late Peter Berger’s term. Perhaps the increasing lack of religious affiliation among young adults is partly a consequence of widening trends in nonmarital sexual behavior among young Americans, in the wake of the expansion of pornography and other tech-enhanced sexual behaviors.

Cohabitation has prompted plenty of soul searching over the purpose, definition and hallmarks of marriage. But we haven’t reflected enough on how cohabitation erodes religious belief.

We overestimate how effectively scientific arguments secularize people. It’s not science that’s secularizing Americans — it’s sex.

About which, Noir noted that decades ago Frank Sheed also wrote on sex, as one finds here in this beautifully arranged post entitled "Let's Talk about Sex" (September 9, 2017).

In answer to which, sent back to Noir via carrier pigeon the following reply, folded up in a paper:

This is good stuff from Sheed. As always. I've run into several things on the topic lately, and one thing I'm gathering is that (ironically) the actual practice of sexual intercourse has dropped off precipitously since the advent of pornography. In Japan they're apparently no longer interested in getting married. It seems that actual relationships with real human beings are too much trouble. People are too busy having sex with themselves to trouble themselves with having it with others.

Sad.

Contra Ivereigh: not just 'converts' are worried about the Church

Dan Hitchens, "It’s not just converts who are worried about the Church" (Catholic Herald, August 10, 2017):

In the last few years, many Catholics have become uneasy about statements coming out of Rome, and about the general direction of the Church. But which Catholics? According to a recent article in the Vatican newspaper, the “main obstacle” is “a good part of the clergy”. Then again, an article in Crux last year identified those “going against the Pope” as “almost always lay”.

Some believe that the issue is geographical: Massimo Faggioli describes an unease about the Church changing its style “from a Western one to a global religion”. Conversely, Cardinal Walter Kasper has said that the recalcitrant tend to be African or from “Asian or Muslim countries”....

This brings me to Austen Ivereigh’s latest piece suggesting that the epicentre of current anxiety is neither priests nor the laity, neither Westerners nor Africans, but converts. Ivereigh diagnoses “convert neurosis” in a range of writers, from “elegant commentators such as Ross Douthat” all the way down to “ex-Anglicans in my own patch such as Daniel Hitchens of the Catholic Herald.” Our neurosis reveals itself in disproportionate anxiety at the state of the Church; a horror of doctrinal development beyond our favourite period of Catholic history; and a failure to trust that “the Holy Spirit guides” Pope Francis. In sum, “their baggage has distorted their hermeneutic”.

I’m wary of this kind of psychologising: it is hard, even with those we know best, to say how their psychological issues affect their opinions. And in this instance the psychoanalysis seems needless, since there are at least as many cradle Catholics who have the same worries as us converts....

... I’m sorry to go over this again, but it seems worthwhile, since there is a determined effort in some quarters to change the subject. The concerns are about the sacraments and about doctrine. Nothing on this earth is more beautiful and precious than the sacraments, and it is natural for Catholics to be alarmed about the abuse of them. Scarcely anything is as necessary for our happiness as sound doctrine, and it is normal for Catholics to worry that doctrine is being contradicted or confused. There have been as many saints who were relaxed about heresy as there have been saints who despised the poor.

So of course converts and cradle Catholics will be dismayed by sacramental abuses and doctrinal confusion. And it is hard not to use such terms when we read Malta’s bishops claiming that avoiding adultery may be impossible; when we hear of priests, bishops and even cardinals abandoning the Church’s practice on Communion; when papal teachings are used – without contradiction from Rome – to justify novel approaches to divorce, euthanasia and extramarital relationships....

[Hat tip to JM]

When an Oxford Don goes rogue and comes out in support of traditional marriage and family values

I understand Oxford Don Richard Swinburne created quite a stir when he addressed the Midwest meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers last fall. "The difficulty," according to The Editors of First Things, was that in the course of exploring these topics, Swinburne characterized homosexuality as a “disability” and a condition that, while sometimes “to a considerable extent reversible,” in many instances is “incurable,” given the present state of medical research.

The Editors continue:

Given the current state of public life and the stringency of academic moral codes in favor of diversity and tolerance, it will be no surprise to our readers that the president of the Society of Christian Philosophers, Michael Rea, subsequently expressed his “regret regarding the hurt caused by” Swinburne’s paper, suggesting that Swinburne’s ideas were inconsistent with the Society’s “values of diversity and inclusion.”

Rea’s message has triggered a reaction on the other side. So far the situation has been commented on by Joseph Shaw, Edward Feser, and Rod Dreher, along with eighty-seven philosophers who signed a letter of protest against the principles implied in Rea’s apology. We at First Things were curious about the paper that prompted all the to-do, and so we asked Professor Swinburne whether he would be willing to let us make his paper available. He has generously agreed.

You can read it here [PDF download].

Here is a video of Swinburne's live presentation:

Shapiro: some excellent debate points on transgenderism and abortion

Note: I didn't say every one of his points was good. He doesn't understand the arguments against contraception. But he's got some terrific points on transgenderism, in particular.

Amy Welborn on Nashville sex ed skirmish

Amy Welborn, "4th Period is SexyTime Today" (Charlotte was Both, September 22, 2016)

[Parental advisory: the article contains explicit language]

Really? Is this what children need to be hearing in school?

As Guy Noir says: "Eye-opening and surprising, even as it is completely unsurprising ... And one more time I'll opine that Theology of the Body is as much a bloated and dubious project as any sort of gift, much like Vatican II."

Britney Spears "finds grace in the hook-up" while Jamie Lynn Spears thinks "love should take it slow"

Commenting on Spencer Kornhaber's article, "Britney Spears Finds Grace in the Hook-Up" (Atlantic, August 26, 2016), our underground correspondent, Guy Noir - Private Eye writes, in a cracker-jack display of journalistic finesse:

The Atlantic, the magazine for the 'good writing' crowd, yes, *The Atlantic* is publishing music reviews giving props to mall teen baby making pop. So goes the culture when two parent families are seen as a quaint commodity. I guess it's now 'all good' now matter how hormonally hyped if the message is 'chill' bohemian (Chris Brown, please leave the room), the producers trendy, and the production ingredients urban shiny. But the sophisticate's confession of faith in sex = salvation, tongue-in-cheekiness as it may be, paints poor Britney as a soon-to-be pop version of Snooki-crossed-with-Miranda Priestly. Oh wait, Madonna already has that part. Anyway...

And in a strangely-timed instance of You'd Never Know It's The Same Family, the Other Spears comes off [HERE] like an artful True Love Waits songstress. This is actually nice. Go figure.

Bravo.

On the idea that celibate clergy with no experience of marriage or sex are incompetent to advise laity on sexual morals

Joseph Selling of the Catholic University of Louvain composed and edited a document, entitled "Catholic Scholars' Statement on Marriage and the Family," in preparation for the Synods of 2014 and 2015. It offers a premier example of the now regnant conceits of self-styled 'progressive' dissenters in the Catholic Church.

Several ideas Prof. Selling is trying his hand at selling his audience are extracted for examination and analysed by David Mills in "While We're At It - Pt. XVIII" (First Things, February 2014): 

• “The vast majority of official teaching of the church on marriage and the family has been prepared and promulgated by men who have no direct, personal experience of married life in the contemporary world. They have made promises of celibacy which exclude any form of sexual relationship. As a result, relatively little of the teaching in this area clearly speaks to persons who are attempting to come to terms with their sexuality, to find and enter into meaningful relationships, and to prepare for a life of committed, mutual love that may involve the challenges of parenthood.”
So claims the Catholic Scholars’ Statement on Marriage and the Family issued by a professor at the Catholic University of Louvain and signed by a variety of dissenting Catholic theologians, though apparently none of the writer’s colleagues at Louvain, and good for them. About a third were listed as emeritus or retired. Sr. Jeannine Grammick and Georgetown’s Peter Phan appear.

Some priests and bishops may not convey the teaching very well, but the Church has the laity for that. If all old Fr. Tortellini can do is recite the rules, Mr. and Mrs. Antonelli can explain how those rules work out for good in practice.

Of all people capable of rational analysis of sex and human sexuality, celibates are the most likely to examine the matter dispassionately and disinterestedly. The fact that they don’t have a dog in the fight (other than their concern for the lives and eternal destinies of their people) helps them see more clearly what’s what. But of course what the statement means by “clearly speaks” is not “explains the teaching in a way people can understand and live” but “says what we think it should say.”

• It’s a contentious claim, that celibates are the most likely to examine the matter dispassionately and disinterestedly, writes Anna Sutherland, until last May one of our junior fellows. “The fact that it’s so contentious exposes what seems to be a common but false assumption: that you can’t really understand a sin if you haven’t committed it yourself, when in fact sin has a blinding, not an enlightening, effect.”

We may be better able to relate to someone like St. Augustine who sinned and repented, she continues, “but Jesus and the saints were more insightful, not less so, because of their holiness.” This we find hard to believe, so deeply have most of us ­absorbed the idea that experience brings ­knowledge.

 This recalls, as one reader writes, some Frank Sheed:

"Serving God does not give us the same kind of here-and-now pleasure that sin gives.  To eyes as little trained to reality as ours, there is a color and energy in sin, by comparison with which virtues look pallid and half-alive."

 Caveat emptor!

[Hat tip to JM]

The Natural Laws of Sex

Shock and awe! "Why a Chaste Engagement Matters"

Emily Stimpson, "Why a Chaste Engagement Matters" (National Catholic Register, April 10, 2016).

[Hat tip to JM]

The satanic underworld of the entertainment industry and politics

Someone was talking about how diabolical influences have infiltrated the music industry, mentioning a few singers' names. I checked out some of their music videos and, whether the symbolism was subtle or overt, I would have to concur. The same is apparently true of large swaths of the movie and entertainment industry. This 'Black Child Production' video [see blow] starts off with some creative use of film clips to enact some of the points made by the narrator. The narrator switches from male to female about a quarter of the way through. But the real kicker comes when she begins referring to specific individuals, groups, and events in the last half of the video [advisory: some explicit sexual language]:


On the one hand, I'm not inclined to believe that the influence of the diabolical is so overt or prevalent as to involve satanic blood sacrifice rituals throughout the mainstream of the entertainment industry. On the other hand, I rather suspect that there are some quarters where well-known individuals are involved in some pretty nasty and evil business.

Just as a test, I picked one of the news articles referenced (at 12:38 on the video), namely "George Clooney’s ‘Astonishing’ Evening in Berlusconi’s Bedroom" (ABC News, October 10, 2011), which begins with this juicy paragraph:

Actor George Clooney is talking about the night he went to Prime Minister of Italy Silvio Berlusconi’s home - infamous for lavish sex parties – and was invited to the leader’s bedroom. Berlusconi’s bashes have come to be known as “bunga bunga” parties, and Clooney says he got an invite.

I don't make a practice of spending much time in this iniquitous netherworld and its steaming cauldrons of infernal vices and luciferian plots. But I have read enough to know that it has probably infiltrated the circles in which many of our political leaders move. You have surely read about the first President Bush's induction into the Skull and Bones secret society at Yale University. Perhaps you have also read about the Clintons and their trail of dead bodies and unaccountable disappearances in the course of their political rise to power from dubious beginnings in Arkansas.

You may or may not have heard Larry Sinclair's statement before the National Press Club about his cocaine and sex trysts with Barack Obama when he was senator in Chicago, Rev. James Manning's testimony to the same, or the Washington, DC-based investigative journalist Wayne Madsen's report on Obama's involvement in a Chicago gay club called "Man's World," and the convenient deaths of three Chicago gay friends of Obama, one of whom (Donald Young, who was the openly gay choir director at Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ) is claimed by his mother, Norma Jean Young (who worked for Chicago's Police Dept.), to have been murdered to protect secrets of his bisexual lover who became president.

How anyone could be puzzled over Obama's policies while in office is beyond me -- his 'Iran deal', which opens the door to nuclear weapons in the hands of the most notorious promotors of anti-western terrorism in the mideast; his 'evolution' on the issue of gay rights and abandonment of DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act) in favor of same-sex 'marriage'; his plunging our nation into debt to the point of nearly doubling the debt on the national credit card, now rocketing upwards of $20 trillion; his refusal to acknowledge Islamic terrorism while easily referring to the threat of Christian funamentalist 'terrorism'; ... the list goes on. Whatever one thinks of Dinesh D'Souza, I, for one, consider some of his claims in this short video about Obama pretty compelling, even if he doesn't plumb the spiritual dimension adequately. Americans who re-elected this man to yet a second term are fools, or ignorant, or evil.

So when I listen to NPR and hear polished pundits playing sound bites from Obama and solemnly treating them as 'politics as usual', I get the surreal feeling that I have just stepped into a scene from Last Year at Marienbad. From my point of view, what NPR considers serious reality, I consider facile fiction; and what NPR considers the fetid fever swamps of medieval fantasies about an unseen world of angels and demons, I consider seriously to be the underlying reality of our world. Even on a bad day, J.R.R. Tolkien could tell us more about what's happening in our world than NPR ever could on its best day. He, at least, understood that there are such things as the preternatural diabolical forces represented by Mordor, the corruption of Sarumen, the temptations and delusions of Boromir, and the possibility that rides on them of winning or losing everything.

"Hypocrites!" says Jesus: "You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky. How is it that you don't know how to interpret this present time?" (Luke 12:56)

In case you ever thought Planned Parenthood was innocent

The first video ["Planned Parenthood and Race"] shows Planned Parenthood representatives accepting donations from a man who says he wants his donations earmarked for the African American abortions because there are too many blacks in the country. The Planned Parenthood reps willingly go along with the caller, insisting that they'll comply with the caller's request, because they'll happily take the money regardless of why anyone donates.

The second video (below) is a montage of outright lies, fabrications, abuse on the part of Planned Parenthood in some case assisting clients involved in sex trafficking, sometimes involving minors. Sickening.

Fr. Perrone on the commodification of human beings in porn and abortion, as reflected in the McDonaldization of death

Fr. Eduard Perrone, "A Pastor's Descant" [temporary link] (Assumption Grotto News, January 31, 2016):

Funeral customs are fast a-changing in our time. Speaking recently with a local funeral director, I was shocked to learn about the new thinking of how we bid adieux to the dead, viz. with increased indifference and quick dismissal. It’s so very inconvenient to have someone’s death interfere with whatever one happens to be busy about. The old obsequies of making visits to the funeral home to “pay one’s respects,” of comforting the mourners, of praying for the happy repose of the departed, of taking time off from other demanding necessities in order to perform these corporal works of mercy–all that is fast vanishing from American life. In its place, according to my funeral director friend, is something like this. No funeral home visitation; no flowers or Mass offerings; the quickview scan of the online bio of the deceased with its ready-at-hand link to register a brief word of sympathy; cremation for the corpse; and, often, no funeral service or requiem Mass. Moreover, the strictly forbidden retention of the deceased’s cremains or, worse, their scattering to the four winds, is becoming more prevalent. In short, we’re making rapid disposal of the dead, just as we had avoided contact with them as living persons in their last years of life, allowing them to rot in a nursing home or hospice facility. (Even that fate is now become accounted as fortunate since the administration of painkilling drugs in high doses can speed along the death processes so as to avoid all the inconveniences of what we had been accustomed to call one’s “final illness.”)  

What’s caused these new customs, these new ways of thinking about the dead and the process of dying? For one thing, we’re all on life’s fast track. We have now no time to be bothered by the death (or even the life) of anybody else when we’re so busy getting done whatever we must do–or even–whatever we think advantageous to ourselves–even our own pleasures and idle leisure. And what’s behind that selfish preoccupation? A number of things. The indoctrination of Selfism has long been forming our attitudes, succeeded to convince us that only the Great I am worthy of myself, my time, my deeds; only my goals are important; only what I want–morally good or bad–is what I must have; and whatever may interfere with these ‘goals’–God and religion included–must be set aside. And how did we arrive at this?  

Among the contributing causes to this attitude and way of living is the ever increasing use of porn which reduces the human person to so many body parts for exploitation and titillation of the senses. The fact that the “models” who so shamelessly expose themselves for public viewing are real people with minds and consciences, with souls that have human feelings–these facts have been put out of mind with porn use. Other people are toys. They can be bought, used, abused and are disposable. This contributes to estimate that the bodies of the deceased are as so much useless trash. 

Another thing that has shaped our thinking about the body is our relative unconcern over the hideousness of crushing and dismembering babies in the womb. Killing babies or–worse yet–selling its surviving parts as ‘spares’ for the living or as ingredients for cosmetics–is regarded as a social good. But it’s an old heresy which regards the human body this way where it was said that only a person’s spirit, (soul) counts. The body is unimportant. This specious premise, which at first glance may seem an ascetical, spiritual perspective, is in fact a way of so denigrating the body as to make utilitarian use of it without a care to any moral considerations of it or even to consider the meaning of the human person as a unity, a totality, of spirit and body.  

Our world is changing fast, and with it our thinking about who (or what) we are. Necessarily we will think about God and the Catholic faith differently (and not for the better). We are transhumanizing, becoming something else. Monsters, I would say, caricatures of what we were made to be–the image of God–and of what we were privileged to become as Christians–children of God and Christs-in-miniature.  While we may not be able at large to stop these horrible denigrating ways of inhumanity, we can retain the consciousness of our human dignity and our Christian vocation to holiness and refuse to go with the flow. Keeping ourselves unsullied by all the filth this fallen world offers and by the devout practice of the Catholic life is a goal within the reach of all of us. 

Fr. Perrone

How porn hurts

A class of seminarians and I were discussing the effects of pornography in an ethics class before Christmas, and a couple of my seminarians called my attention to a terrific website called "Fight the New Drug." Among other things, it discusses three ways in which porn can harm the addict: (1) physiological effects in the brain; (2) detrimental effects on personal relationships; and (3) negatives effects in communities and society generally. There's a lot more on the website. Check it out.

Incarnation: why matter matters in theology

S.M. Hutchens, "Jesus Christ Come in the Flesh" (Touchstone, November 30, 2015):

If the old stories are true, what offends and angers Satan more than anything else is the act of God wherein spirit becomes incarnated.  He hated the creation of man not as a mere animal, but in no less than the image and likeness of God, who treacherously breathed the nephesh chayyah into this thing of dust.  The Serpent had his way with the first Adam in Eden, thinking to destroy him.  Most of all he hates the second Adam, that vessel of clay that has the spirit without measure, with whom he had his way at Calvary, once again thinking to destroy him, and through him all mankind.  The spirit clothed in flesh must be execrable filth to the rebellious who are in substance fastidiously pure spirit, and the Incarnation of God so inexplicable, so hateful, and so enraging, that they cannot bring themselves to confront it as reality, thus providing a way that their loyalties, and those of their followers, can be tested right through the veil of their deceit and self-representation as angels of light.  (Do not look for mere hatred of the West at the deepest spiritual stratum of Islam, but of what the West stands for in the offended mind of its Principalities.)

We can easily understand the old and rather simple heresies–Gnosticism, Docetism, and the like–where a denial was clear, but have difficulty seeing those of our own day because they are more subtle and indirect.  Classical liberal theology, for example, does not deny outright the Incarnation or the Passion or the bodily resurrection of the flesh of Jesus, but treats these as stories for those with a pre-scientific view of reality (that is, who believe they really happened), and regards these beliefs about the flesh of Christ not as referring to actual events with cosmic and eternal significance, but mere symbols of abstract virtues like hope, courage, patience and renewal.  To identify the articles of the Creed, however, as “pre-scientific” is another way of calling them false when presented as statements of historical truth. 

Likewise the egalitarians, in their preoccupation with the equality of the sexes, eliminate the cosmic and eternal significance of the sex of Christ by consistently emphasizing that it was his generic humanness and not his male humanness–that is, the actual flesh of his incarnation–that signifies, thus identifying their ideology as another Satanic attack on Jesus Christ come in the flesh.  Both egalitarianism and theological liberalism refuse to make the required positive confession of the whole truth of the reality.  The First Epistle of John tells us an actual denial is not necessary for identification of the spirit of Antichrist, only an inability or refusal to confess.  The most effective ways to do this require the assistance of religion.

If the old stories are true, what offends and angers Satan more than anything else is the act of God wherein spirit becomes incarnated.  He hated the creation of man not as a mere animal, but in no less than the image and likeness of God, who treacherously breathed the nephesh chayyah into this thing of dust.  The Serpent had his way with the first Adam in Eden, thinking to destroy him.  Most of all he hates the second Adam, that vessel of clay that has the spirit without measure, with whom he had his way at Calvary, once again thinking to destroy him, and through him all mankind.  The spirit clothed in flesh must be execrable filth to the rebellious who are in substance fastidiously pure spirit, and the Incarnation of God so inexplicable, so hateful, and so enraging, that they cannot bring themselves to confront it as reality, thus providing a way that their loyalties, and those of their followers, can be tested right through the veil of their deceit and self-representation as angels of light.  (Do not look for mere hatred of the West at the deepest spiritual stratum of Islam, but of what the West stands for in the offended mind of its Principalities.)

We can easily understand the old and rather simple heresies–Gnosticism, Docetism, and the like–where a denial was clear, but have difficulty seeing those of our own day because they are more subtle and indirect.  Classical liberal theology, for example, does not deny outright the Incarnation or the Passion or the bodily resurrection of the flesh of Jesus, but treats these as stories for those with a pre-scientific view of reality (that is, who believe they really happened), and regards these beliefs about the flesh of Christ not as referring to actual events with cosmic and eternal significance, but mere symbols of abstract virtues like hope, courage, patience and renewal.  To identify the articles of the Creed, however, as “pre-scientific” is another way of calling them false when presented as statements of historical truth.

Likewise the egalitarians, in their preoccupation with the equality of the sexes, eliminate the cosmic and eternal significance of the sex of Christ by consistently emphasizing that it was his generic humanness and not his male humanness–that is, the actual flesh of his incarnation–that signifies, thus identifying their ideology as another Satanic attack on Jesus Christ come in the flesh.  Both egalitarianism and theological liberalism refuse to make the required positive confession of the whole truth of the reality.  The First Epistle of John tells us an actual denial is not necessary for identification of the spirit of Antichrist, only an inability or refusal to confess.  The most effective ways to do this require the assistance of religion.

- See more at: http://touchstonemag.com/merecomments/2015/11/jesus-christ-flesh-2/#sthash.7OouvMvS.dpuf

If the old stories are true, what offends and angers Satan more than anything else is the act of God wherein spirit becomes incarnated.  He hated the creation of man not as a mere animal, but in no less than the image and likeness of God, who treacherously breathed the nephesh chayyah into this thing of dust.  The Serpent had his way with the first Adam in Eden, thinking to destroy him.  Most of all he hates the second Adam, that vessel of clay that has the spirit without measure, with whom he had his way at Calvary, once again thinking to destroy him, and through him all mankind.  The spirit clothed in flesh must be execrable filth to the rebellious who are in substance fastidiously pure spirit, and the Incarnation of God so inexplicable, so hateful, and so enraging, that they cannot bring themselves to confront it as reality, thus providing a way that their loyalties, and those of their followers, can be tested right through the veil of their deceit and self-representation as angels of light.  (Do not look for mere hatred of the West at the deepest spiritual stratum of Islam, but of what the West stands for in the offended mind of its Principalities.)

We can easily understand the old and rather simple heresies–Gnosticism, Docetism, and the like–where a denial was clear, but have difficulty seeing those of our own day because they are more subtle and indirect.  Classical liberal theology, for example, does not deny outright the Incarnation or the Passion or the bodily resurrection of the flesh of Jesus, but treats these as stories for those with a pre-scientific view of reality (that is, who believe they really happened), and regards these beliefs about the flesh of Christ not as referring to actual events with cosmic and eternal significance, but mere symbols of abstract virtues like hope, courage, patience and renewal.  To identify the articles of the Creed, however, as “pre-scientific” is another way of calling them false when presented as statements of historical truth.

Likewise the egalitarians, in their preoccupation with the equality of the sexes, eliminate the cosmic and eternal significance of the sex of Christ by consistently emphasizing that it was his generic humanness and not his male humanness–that is, the actual flesh of his incarnation–that signifies, thus identifying their ideology as another Satanic attack on Jesus Christ come in the flesh.  Both egalitarianism and theological liberalism refuse to make the required positive confession of the whole truth of the reality.  The First Epistle of John tells us an actual denial is not necessary for identification of the spirit of Antichrist, only an inability or refusal to confess.  The most effective ways to do this require the assistance of religion.

- See more at: http://touchstonemag.com/merecomments/2015/11/jesus-christ-flesh-2/#sthash.7OouvMvS.dpufIf the old stories are true, what offends and angers Satan more than anything else is the act of God wherein spirit becomes incarnated.  He hated the creation of man not as a mere animal, but in no less than the image and likeness of God, who treacherously breathed the nephesh chayyah into this thing of dust.  The Serpent had his way with the first Adam in Eden, thinking to destroy him.  Most of all he hates the second Adam, that vessel of clay that has the spirit without measure, with whom he had his way at Calvary, once again thinking to destroy him, and through him all mankind.  The spirit clothed in flesh must be execrable filth to the rebellious who are in substance fastidiously pure spirit, and the Incarnation of God so inexplicable, so hateful, and so enraging, that they cannot bring themselves to confront it as reality, thus providing a way that their loyalties, and those of their followers, can be tested right through the veil of their deceit and self-representation as angels of light.  (Do not look for mere hatred of the West at the deepest spiritual stratum of Islam, but of what the West stands for in the offended mind of its Principalities.)

We can easily understand the old and rather simple heresies–Gnosticism, Docetism, and the like–where a denial was clear, but have difficulty seeing those of our own day because they are more subtle and indirect.  Classical liberal theology, for example, does not deny outright the Incarnation or the Passion or the bodily resurrection of the flesh of Jesus, but treats these as stories for those with a pre-scientific view of reality (that is, who believe they really happened), and regards these beliefs about the flesh of Christ not as referring to actual events with cosmic and eternal significance, but mere symbols of abstract virtues like hope, courage, patience and renewal.  To identify the articles of the Creed, however, as “pre-scientific” is another way of calling them false when presented as statements of historical truth.

Likewise the egalitarians, in their preoccupation with the equality of the sexes, eliminate the cosmic and eternal significance of the sex of Christ by consistently emphasizing that it was his generic humanness and not his male humanness–that is, the actual flesh of his incarnation–that signifies, thus identifying their ideology as another Satanic attack on Jesus Christ come in the flesh.  Both egalitarianism and theological liberalism refuse to make the required positive confession of the whole truth of the reality.  The First Epistle of John tells us an actual denial is not necessary for identification of the spirit of Antichrist, only an inability or refusal to confess.  The most effective ways to do this require the assistance of religion.

[Hat tip to JM]

"94% of Synod Fathers voted to undermine parental rights at Synod"

Alright, that's a pretty grim spin over at LifeSiteNews. If you look at the actual wording of the paragraph in the Relazione Finale that was voted and approved by 94% of the Synod Fathers, here's how it (paragraph 58 of the document) reads:

The family, while maintaining its primary space in education (cf. Gravissimum Educationis, 3), cannot be the only place for teaching sexuality.

Now when the LifeSite article says that the Synod Fathers voted "to undermine parental rights," this may not at all have been what the Synod Fathers thought they were doing. After all, the passage still states that the family maintains "its primary space in education." The only qualification is the harmless-looking additional proviso that the family nevertheless "cannot be the only place" for teaching about sexuality.

The implications of these sorts of documents are always hard to immediately discern. What possible can of worms does this harmless looking little additional proviso open up for Catholic families? The answer lies entirely in what our contemporary Catholic culture will make of it. See for yourself, and then you decide: Read more >>

Safe masturbation and other Salesian myths for corrupting the young and the restless

Poor St. Francis de Sales! The order that takes its name from him has now been exposed for promoting abortifacient contraceptions, masturbation, and condoms in mirror image of all that the heathen New Dark Ages have embraced with delight since the collapse of Church influence in the West. Chalk up another one for the Lepanto Institute.

Related (a comprehensive discussion of the topic): Boniface, "Why is Masturbation a Sin?" (Unam Sanctam Catholicam).

Porn / Theology of the Body

Guy Noir again: "And while the synod worries about communion access, the larger first world families deal with stuff like this. I get why porn may be a lesser problem in third world countries, where poverty reduces cell phone access, but certainly this could use more airing..."

"Bad News, Indeed — Playboy Opened the Floodgates and Now the Culture is Drowning" (AlbertMohler.com, October 14, 2015).

"Of course, there is not too much hope for clarity in the Franciscan era, when a most celebrated [theology-of-the-body] apologist we remember feels no compunction offering such lines as 'I love Hugh Hefner.' A pope could not have said it better, right?

Matt C. Abbott, "Christopher West, Hugh Hefner, and the 'Theology of the Body' controversy" (Renew America, May 9, 2009).

Obergefell as "Übercollapse" -- The failure of fornication as a path to happiness, two generations and counting ...

Guy Noir - Private Eye shot me an email 9 hours ago with the subject line: "Post-Obergefell Remedial Reading." Indeed. He writes: James Morgan at CRISIS has one of the better answers to the consternation surrounding the Gay Marriage decision. He offers a needed corrective to extended commentaries that engage the Constitution and Religious Liberty but the hardly touch on topic of sex. The greatest compliment I can pay his words is that they made me want to go find my old copy of Christopher Derrick's Sex and Sacredness: A Catholic Homage to Venus. And Peter Kreeft's Making Choices: Practical Wisdom for Everyday Moral Decisions. Both books seemed close to containing words on fire when I first read them. Yet I also recall Kreeft's pointing to Derrick, when he initially wrote 20 some years ago, and remarking even then that even as he himself assigned S & S as required book, his students would routinely register blank uncomprehension at its central theses. So the seeds of our present destruction had been strewn that long ago... But here is Morgan. I don't agree with every word, but there is this incisive commentary [Noir's emphases]:

...the true losers in Obergefell are the same as in Windsor: those experiencing same-sex attraction. The blessing is that, post Obergefell, there is no more political frenzy to cover over sadness of soul. Those in homosexual relationships will have to face the hard facts of their lifestyle. Many have already suffered under the normative lie that homosexuality can bring happiness, and many more will suffer now that this lie has been quite literally wedded to state power. Those now given the imprimatur of the federal government on the dead-end slavery of sin—and the children who are condemned to witness this slow-motion destruction of human dignity firsthand—are the true sacrificial victims in this war. If we were not praying for them before, let us start doing so today....

Hence, the fourth blessing: not only are we called to love, but we are now given the chance to demonstrate it in a very real way. The homosexual activists consistently ground their concept of love in two places: the body itself, and the way the body feels. The glittery bacchanalia that started in the Age of Aquarius and has now culminated in Obergefell thus has a very narrow conception of love. For the sensualists, love is an adjunct to the personality. Love gives our sexual identities purchase and heft. It dispels loneliness, assuages fear, and makes us feel better about ourselves. But does love do anything besides fill the vessel of the ego? One need but look at the Cross to know. Love is kenotic. It dies to itself. It lays down its life for the sake of the wayward other. It counts no cost, reckons no reward, holds no grudge. It pours itself out in unmerited bounty for all alike. Love dwindles to nothingness so that others might have eternal life. It is not the self, but the very negation of the self.

Seen this way, the Obergefell conception of love can never rise into the upper reaches of our beings. Obergefell love sinks like carbon dioxide in a room, huddling around the homely flesh and fleeting emotions that are the twenty-first century’s poor substitutes for the full promise of the human person. The homosexual activists find this sort of love so unfulfilling that they are forcing three hundred million people to pay homage to it in order to distract from its failure to bring enduring happiness. But regardless of how many hundreds of millions applaud the abstract idea, homosexuality is doomed to be love’s opposite: the tragic amputation of sexual desire from the deep wells of the soul—the mere mutual slaking of animal lust. This love will never satisfy, and we must not abandon our brothers and sisters to the hell they now festoon with the rainbow of God’s covenant. In their orgiastic celebrations, the homosexual activists are crying out for real, transformative love.

Fifth, Obergefell is a chance for repenting of the greatest sexual failure of our generation: not homosexuality, but fornication. For every lost soul searching fruitlessly for love in a gay bar, how many hundreds more are de facto polygamists or polyandrists, shuttling from one wrecked relationship to the next, and increasingly numb to the lies that he or she is telling with body, words, and heart? If there is any moral high ground in the debate over sexual ethics, I for one am utterly unworthy of approaching it. I will stand, instead, beside the gutter from which God’s Grace rescued me, the better to remember, at the very least, who is holy in all of this, and who is made holy thereby. In a very real way, those with same-sex attraction have been fighting, at least in part, for the right to be as flamboyantly promiscuous as all the rest of us. Let us see who among us will dare to cast the first stone.

New Life from Dead Liberalism

Sixth, the majority opinion in Obergefell was a stunning admission of the intellectual poverty of late-stage liberalism. Proceeding by breezy judicial fiat was the only recourse open to the United States Supreme Court, for in seeking to legitimate the paradox of homosexual marriage they could make no honest appeal to reason, truth, Scripture, tradition, common sense, biology, or the natural law. They simply had to harden their hearts and wave their magic wands. Obergefell makes shockingly apparent the impossibility of forming any sort of community based on what is, at the very best, finely-tuned mutual antagonism. Justice Anthony Kennedy therefore has the distinction of having written, not the most insidious or disingenuous opinion in the history of the court (Roger Taney, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harry Blackmun, and Henry Billings Brown must all outdo Kennedy in this regard), but the silliest. The linty non-sense of the Obergefell decision is a tremendous boon for a United States now coming to the extremities of an unsustainable philosophy. By dint of sheer hokeyness, the Obergefell majority opinion should be enough to wake whole battalions from their intellectual torpor.

Fr. Perrone: this is no time for oblivion or indolence

Father Perrone, "A Pastor's Descant" (Assumption Grotto News, June 28, 2015): 

I wonder how cognizant people are about the true state of things at this time. My guess is that they are not much aware, or at least not all that much troubled by them. I’ve avoided apocalyptic warnings to you for the good reason that they would be false. Only God knows for sure when the travail of the final days will be upon us. This does not mean, however, that there cannot be a time great turmoil in the world–a time of disturbances which afflict the entire societal body in the political, moral, and religious areas of life–which is to say, in every aspect. 

The near collapse of order in beneficent government, national and worldwide, in societal structures, in education, the military, in law and judiciary, in education and arts, in economy and–hard to admit it–even in the Church, does not seem overmuch to worry many people, because they’ve been lulled into reverie by an enveloping, all-pervading sensuality. The palliative effect of pleasures which distract our minds and cloud our judgment tends to make us oblivious to the disorder all around us: the effect being much like an anaesthetic on a body suffering some pathological condition. Pain is a warning that something’s amiss that needs remedying. Covering over problems with blithe distractions from sensual comforts allows decay unattended to advance, to worsen. 

Men’s ambition and pride lead to resentment of authority; their inclination towards evil, and especially towards sexual indulgence, leads them to want to give way to outpourings of their lawless passions (anger, lust and disregard for law and discipline); and these in turn make men turn away from God and prepare them to become practical atheists, which is to say, agnostics. It is only at this last phase that we begin to see clearly that there’s more than human ambition and weakness behind the ensuing general disorder–that it is demonically inspired. In any case, whether we are willing to believe in the Enemy’s hand in this or not, we are all feeling the effects of the advancing chaos in the disharmony in our marriages and families, in our ineffective educational attempts in our schools, in the squeeze that holds our money and property, in the ever-wider encroachment of big government over more and more aspects of our lives, in the disturbances and discomfort we are feeling by being in a Godless public, in the uncertainty and fears we experience as ominous, impending calamity, in the division in the Church, etc.

Much more needs to be said about these things that can’t be aired here. But my reasons for bringing them up are 1) to assure that all this is not right, is not normal, and is decidedly deadly for continuance in an ordered world; 2) to speculate about what the right response should be in the face of this distorted scene. Responses are basically of two kinds: a) offensive action which seeks to rectify the troubles by opposing the many seducing errors and the moral decay; b) prayer and sacrifice, both for restoration of order and for making reparation for damages already done. These two forms are often posed as being in tension with each other: the ‘direct confrontation approach’ or the more ‘indirect’ and (seemingly) ‘passive.’ In truth, I can’t say that there is an alternative: both are needed. We need front-line fighters and we need prayer-warriors (pardon that gooey expression). What we cannot do is to become idle and numb, indifferent and unconcerned, allowing evil to go unopposed, and thus to advance.

If I am undecided about which of these to recommend to you the more, I would, as your pastor, say at least this much with utter confidence: you must stop your own slinking into the myriad forms of evil that are rotting souls. You simply cannot give way to your passions–which are the internal originators of all the disorder and chaos in society and in the Church. You, in simple terms, have got to oppose the sinful inclinations that induce you to commit your sins. Never mind the terrible things other people are doing, how bad the world is getting, how dizzying the turmoil in the Church. Be saintly, and do not budge from the way of righteousness. Be tough on yourselves and be holy people. The reform of the world begins with you, in your own soul. Then, and only then, should you proceed with your plan of righting the wrongs of others. This program is a version of what our Lord Himself said: remove the plank in your own eye before removing the splinter in the eyes of others.

Don’t mistake my meaning. I am not suggesting that we should not oppose the tremendous evils that are upsetting the God-willed harmony and order of the world and the Church. We must oppose these. Nor am I saying that we should not be making the much-needed Eucharistic holy hours to appease divine justice and petition divine intervention. We, however, must not be hypocrites, outwardly valiant and righteous but inwardly unconverted. What is inexcusable is indolence and apathy and, of course, complicity in the great movement to overthrow the God-given order of truth, goodness, beauty, and holiness, a movement which is not fundamentally a thing but a destructive and malevolent person who rails against God and seeks to frustrate His plans for the salvation of the human race.

Fr. Perrone

P.S. This will be my last Descant for a while as I take my summertime lease for mental and physical refreshment. Fr. John, to whom I confidently entrust your pastoral care, will no doubt graciously supply in my absence.