Woody Allen and the Buffered Self - Fr. Robert Barron

It was Samuel Johnson, in his poem "The Vanity of Human Wishes," who used the phrase, "To point a moral or adorn a tale." D.H. Lawrence quoted the line and pointed out that often the (author's) moral pointed one way and the tale another (think of the famous example of Milton's Paradise Lost). "Never trust the author, trust the tale!" says Lawrence. Fr. Barron makes a similar point about Allen, his bleak vision, and his art: Don't trust the auteur, trust the film!

Prejudice as strong as ever? by Sheila Liaugminas

   

 | 28 Jan 2014 |

It takes many forms, and it snakes its way through cultural relativism. But it’s alive and very active.

The topic is probably worth a book, certainly a long article or series. For purposes of a manageable blog post for now, let’s look at some recent events in light of other related events and see how the pieces fit together to form a picture.

Fr. Robert Barron is the force and the voice behind the Catholicism Series. So he’s an important voice to listen to when he speaks out about some recent anti-Catholic outbursts, and why they should bother everyone.

Last week two outrageously anti-Catholic outbursts took place in the public forum. The first was an article in U.S. News and World Report by syndicated columnist Jamie Stiehm. Ms. Stiehm argued that the Supreme Court was dangerously packed with Catholics, who have, she averred, a terribly difficult time separating church from state and who just can’t refrain from imposing their views on others. Her meditations were prompted by Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s granting some legal breathing space to the Little Sisters of the Poor, who were objecting to the provisions of the HHS mandate. As even a moment’s thoughtful consideration would reveal, this decision hadn’t a thing to do with the intrusion of the “church” into the state, in fact just the contrary. Moreover, the appeal of American citizens (who happen to be Catholic nuns) and the decision of a justice of the Supreme Court in no way constitute an “imposition” on anyone. The very irrationality of Stiehm’s argument is precisely what has led many to conclude that her column was prompted by a visceral anti-Catholicism which stubbornly persists in our society.

Clearly and correctly stated. This is true.

The second eruption of anti-Catholicism was even more startling. In the course of a radio interview, Governor Andrew Cuomo blithely declared that anyone who is pro-life on the issue of abortion or who is opposed to gay marriage is “not welcome” in his state of New York. Mind you, the governor did not simply say that such people are wrong-headed or misguided; he didn’t say that they should be opposed politically or that good arguments against their position should be mounted; he said they should be actively excluded from civil society! As many commentators have already pointed out, Governor Cuomo was thereby excluding roughly half of the citizens of the United States and, presumably, his own father, Mario Cuomo, who once famously declared that he was personally opposed to abortion. Again, the very hysterical quality of this statement suggests that an irrational prejudice gave rise to it.

This needs to be addressed and confronted. Fr. Barron takes us back through historical anti-Catholicism and it’s good to remind Americans of what it was.
But…

What is particularly troubling today is the manner in which this deep-seated anti-Catholicism is finding expression precisely through that most enduring and powerful of American institutions, namely the law. We are a famously litigious society: The law shapes our identity, protects our rights, and functions as a sanction against those things we find dangerous. Increasingly, Catholics are finding themselves on the wrong side of the law, especially in regard to issues of sexual freedom. The HHS mandate is predicated upon the assumption that access to contraception, sterilization, and abortifacient drugs is a fundamental right, and therefore to stand against facilitating this access, as the Church must, puts Catholics athwart the law. The same is true in regard to gay marriage. To oppose this practice is not only unpopular or impolitic, but, increasingly, contrary to legal statute. Already, in the context of the military, chaplains are encouraged and in some cases explicitly forbidden to condemn gay marriage, as this would constitute a violation of human rights.

And this is why the remarks by Andrew Cuomo are especially chilling. That a governor of a major state — one of the chief executives in our country — could call for the exclusion of pro-lifers and those opposed to gay marriage suggests that the law could be used to harass, restrict, and, at the limit, attack Catholics. Further, the attitude demonstrated by the son of Mario Cuomo suggests that there is a short path indeed from the privatization of Catholic moral convictions to the active attempt to eliminate those convictions from the public arena. I would hope, of course, that it is obvious how this aggression against Catholics in the political sphere ought deeply to concern everyone in a supposedly open society. If the legal establishment can use the law to aggress Catholics, it can use it, another day, to aggress anyone else.

Which recalls Martin Niemoller’s ‘First They Came…”
Which precisely gets to the point of the Nazi Holocaust and the belief in ‘lebensunwertens lebens’, or ‘life unworthy of life’, when an entire class of human beings can be denied any human rights when another class has power over them.

And that gets to this past week’s anniversary of Roe v. Wade in America, 41 years of abortion on demand. And President Obama’s remarks to observe that anniversary. And Fr. Barron’s assistant Brandon Vogt taking those remarks to task, challenging the message.

Here’s the message:

Statement by the President on Roe v. Wade Anniversary

Today, as we reflect on the 41st anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, we recommit ourselves to the decision’s guiding principle: that every woman should be able to make her own choices about her body and her health. We reaffirm our steadfast commitment to protecting a woman’s access to safe, affordable health care and her constitutional right to privacy, including the right to reproductive freedom. And we resolve to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies, support maternal and child health, and continue to build safe and healthy communities for all our children. Because this is a country where everyone deserves the same freedom and opportunities to fulfill their dreams.

Here’s Brandon Vogt’s challenge:

Though relatively short, the President’s statement is packed with several confusing assertions. I’d like to respond to some of them:

“[W]e recommit ourselves to the decision’s guiding principle: that every woman should be able to make her own choices about her body and her health.”

It’s true that every woman should have liberty to make decisions regarding her own body, but not the body of another. Modern embryology affirms that a new human life is created at fertilization (i.e., conception.) Therefore abortion intentionally destroys the life, and thus the body, of an innocent human being. We all should have choices, but nobody should have the freedom to murder anyone else.

“We reaffirm our steadfast commitment to protecting a woman’s access to safe, affordable health care.”

Everyone agrees that women (and men) deserve safe, affordable healthcare. That’s not the question. The question is whether the restrictions put in place by Roe v. Wade constitute healthcare. Unfortunately, they primarily concern the right of mothers to uninhibitedly take the life of their children. It’s not healthcare to disrupt a healthy and normally functioning process (e.g., pregnancy) nor is it healthcare to destroy the health of unborn babies.

“[We reaffirm a woman’s] constitutional right to privacy”

Like many Constitutional rights, the right to privacy is not absolute. In the eyes of the law, what a woman does with her own body in her own environment is her own concern. Yet when her choices threaten the lives of innocent others, the common good trumps her right to privacy. We all intuitively understand this. It’s why we agree that invading drug labs trumps a drug dealer’s right to privacy. The same principle applies here: women have a right to privacy, but not at the expense of innocent lives.

“[We reaffirm a woman’s] right to reproductive freedom.”

I agree! Women should be completely free to reproduce however and, with certain qualifications, wherever and with whomever they will. But Roe v. Wade doesn’t concern reproduction at all. It regards what happens *after* reproduction occurs, after a new, unique, individual human has already been produced by his or her parents. I agree we should promote reproductive freedom but not the freedom to terminate any resulting children.

This is intellectual honesty we seldom see, directed at each line of the president’s remarks. This is engagement we need.

“[We resolve to] support maternal and child health”

I struggle to see how the Roe v. Wade decision supports child health when it seems that 100% of the children it directly affects are no longer alive.

Yet it doesn’t support maternal health either. By violently disrupting a healthy bodily function, abortion leads to increased depression, cancer, mental illness, future pregnancy complications, and more.

Also, note the President’s chilling word choice here. He didn’t resolve to supportwomen’s health, but specifically “maternal” health. The word maternal connotes motherhood, and you can only be a mother if you have a child. This subtle choice insinuates that the President knows well that pregnant mothers carry children, not some abstract clump of cells, and therefore abortion is not a neutral surgical procedure. It involves a mother intending the death of her child.

“[We resolve to] build safe and healthy communities for all our children.

Again, I struggle to see how the Roe v. Wade decision supports children. Abortion doesn’t result in safe and healthy communities for children. It results in less children.

“Because this is a country where everyone deserves the same freedom and opportunities to fulfill their dreams.”

I wholeheartedly agree! And that’s why Roe v. Wade should be overturned. The misguided court decision crushes the rights of unborn citizens for the sake of born citizens. It smashes their freedom and opportunity on the altar of false liberty. Everyone in this country deserves the same rights—men, women, and children—especially the smallest and most vulnerable among us.

Argue with that, and you are defending age discrimination, among other class distinctions.

This article was first published by Sheila Liaugminas and MercatorNet.com under a Creative Commons license. You may republish it or translate it free of charge with attribution for non-commercial purposes following these guidelines. If you teach at a university we ask that your department make a donation.

- See more at: http://www.mercatornet.com/sheila_liaugminas/view/13460#sthash.DPVyoj2E.dpuf

Fr. Barron on Anti-Catholic Prejudice Then and Now

See also Fr. Barron's article, "Why Anti-Catholic Prejudice Ought to Bother Everyone."

More on the Economics of Pope Francis: Two Videos

Two videos on Evangelii Gaudium, with very different perspectives.  Fr. Barron emphasizes the urgency and the central point of the pope's Apostolic Exhortation, not to be too caught up with internecine quarrels when we should be on fire with the joy of the Gospel, as the early Christians were.  Fr. Barron says nothing at all about the most controversial parts of the letter, those about economics.



Samuel Gregg, research director of the Acton Institute, on the other hand, focuses his attention on precisely what Fr. Barron ignores in his commentary, namely Francis's comments about the market.  It is here that the pope seems most naive and uncomprehending.  Not that a pope needs to be an economist, but if he chooses to comment on the nature of markets, the sources of wealth, and how poverty can be overcome, it is good that he know what he is talking about.

If the point is to set aside bickering and join in the urgent task of communicating the joy and the good news of the Gospel, why permit yourself to be diverted into attacks on the one institution that has done vastly more than any other to lift billions of people out of poverty?

Fr. Robert Barron comments on David Bentley Hart's The Experience of God

Fr. Barron comments on who God is and who God is not.  He discusses key points in David Bentley Hart's great new book.

Fr. Robert Barron on 'Gravity'

Christology in Cinema: Fr. Robert Barron on The Shawshank Redemption

Intolerant Tolerance - Is Rational Public Discussion Still Possible?

Paul Adams

It was not some goofball but obscure pastor somewhere, but the presiding bishop of the Episcopalian Church USA (ECUSA), Jefferts Schori, who recently gave a sermon in Venezuela that has provoked questions such as, Is this the worst sermon ever preached? and (on my part, I admit) Have the Episcopalians in the US gone completely mad? Here are Fr. Barron's comments, delivered not with a rending of garments but with his characteristic chuckle.



Additional commentary by Fr. Barron, who addresses among other questions that of whether such a patently ridiculous and silly sermon is even worth paying attention to:



Other writers have commented on the increasingly bizarre nature of this abandonment in our times of critical thinking or any resort to reason or evidence - and the substitution of intolerant bullying - in the name of tolerance and diversity.  See for example the article by Australian sociologist Michael Casey on "The Puzzle of Intolerant Tolerance" and the interview with him here.

Now D.A. Carson, "a well-known Reformed theologian and exegete," has, in the words of James Kalb's review, "written a clear and well-reasoned analysis of today’s imperialistic tolerance from an Evangelical and classically liberal standpoint.

Kalb explainss,

He tells us that the new understanding of tolerance has meant a shift from accepting the right of others to hold dissenting views to demanding acceptance of such views as equally valid. It thus implies a shift from free discussion of conflicting truth claims to suppressing conflicts by silencing truth claims. This shift, he says, makes the new tolerance intellectually debilitating as well as blind, intolerant, and socially dangerous.

The shift is from a concern with truth and the common good to a radical individualism and subjectivism that conflates diversity as situation with diversity as a principle, that celebrates lifestyle diversity as such.  In this view diversity of family structures is to be welcomed.  We are supposed to talk of "families" rather than "the family," as if the natural family in which the children who result from the bodily union of their married parents are raised by those parents were just one kind of family among many alternatives and preferring it or wishing to promote and protect it were a form of intolerance or bigotry.   Not without reason Carolyn Moynihan calls this celebration of 'family diversity' "the world's most dangerous idea." Gone is the right of the child declared by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as spelled out in the Convention on the Rights of the Child adopted by the U.N. as recently as 1987 according to which every child has "as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents" (Article 7).

As Kalb notes in summarizing Carson's argument,

The result was a tolerance that looks only to itself, or perhaps individual freedom, as the highest standard. As the author puts it, the current form of tolerance is “largely cut free from both a well-articulated vision of truth and from binding culture-wide moral standards.”

The result has not been a state of ultimate freedom but a tolerance that makes rejection of absolutes an absolute. That, of course, is self-contradiction. As the author notes, the “truth question catches up with all of us,” and secularism has turned out as absolutist and dogmatic in its commitments as any other system. It is more so than most since it denies that it has dogmatic certainties and so feels no obligation to articulate and defend itself against objection. Instead, it relies on the “manipulative bludgeoning” of accusations of intolerance.

The new tolerance thus puts irrationality and bullying at the heart of public discussion. The results are as bad as might be expected. The new tolerance can’t deal with evil, for example, so serious discussion of human life and the public good becomes impossible. That leads to practical problems. The author notes, for example, that the idea of truth is necessary to resist tyranny, giving twentieth-century tyrannies and unpleasant features of Japanese life as examples. Nor can democratic procedures solve the problem. If rational discussion is impossible democracy becomes unworkable, and power inevitably flows upward to manipulative and irresponsible elites.

The author notes that the Christian emphasis on truth makes Christianity intolerant and therefore illegitimate by the new definition of tolerance.

Carson is right about the irrationality of this new notion of tolerance, one which rejects the notion of truth (except in asserting the truth of its own view about truth) and so makes itself impervious to reason and evidence and excludes them from public discussion.  But as Kalb says, there is a need to go further, to a sociological, theological, and philosophical understanding of how it can be that such an irrational, indeed bizarre form of tolerance

 has become so immensely powerful among intelligent, thoughtful, responsible, and well-educated people. More needs to be said of the logic of a modern outlook that views human relations technologically, and identifies what is good with what is desired. For those who hold such an outlook it is  natural to divinize individual subjectivity, which leads to an extreme concern for feelings, and to reject as irrational traditional forms of social organization, which involve sexual and cultural distinctions as well as conceptions of ultimate truth. Put those two tendencies together and the result is today’s politically correct version of tolerance. The author rightly points out many ironies of the present situation. Its ultimate irony, however, is that the current craziness springs from the utilitarian and technological outlook that is now considered so purely rational.

This combination of voluntarism and determinism, of subjectivism and mechanics, was a key theme of John Paul II (e.g., Fides et Ratio; Theology of the Body) and of Benedict XVI (Regensburg Address in 2006; Address intended for La Sapienza University in Rome in 2008).  See also Michael Waldstein's not-to-be-missed lecture on "Faith, Science and Pope Benedict XVI's Regensburg Address" and his marvelous introduction to his English translation of JP II's Theology of the Body.  No-one has better pursued these themes, utterly central to understanding modernity and our current cultural catastrophe, in an accessible or popular (but not dumbed down) way, than Fr. Robert Barron.

Fr. Robert Barron on Modernity & Morality

From Joke to Dogma in Ten Years: Gay Marriage, Conformism, and the Breakdown of Moral Argument

Paul Adams

One of the extraordinary features of the SSM 'debate' is the absence of serious moral argument, or indeed any coherent argument in which the two sides connect, consider, and dispute.  Proponents of SSM resort mainly to name-calling and vilification, as if everyone before them for millennia were, in their view of marriage, motivated only by bigotry and hatred.  The absurdity of the position is matched by the intensity and vitriol with which it is promoted.

In place of argument, we have opinion polls.  It is true that in 32 states where the issue has been put to the people in a referendum - including liberal states like California and Wisconsin - the conjugal view of marriage as between one man and one woman has prevailed.  In some cases, constitutions have been amended by popular vote, in others representatives have enacted statutes to the same effect.  As Anderson, Girgis, & George say, "All told, the people of forty-four states have affirmed the conjugal view of marriage by direct voting or through their representatives."

But polls show opinion shifting rapidly in favor of SSM, especially among younger voters. One can explain this in terms of the pill, the sexual revolution it enabled, the separation of sex from marriage and both from children, the consequent rapid decline of marriage, family, and faith, especially among those in the lower socioeconomic strata--see Mary Eberstadt's outstanding work on this in Adam & Eve After the Pill and her new book, How the West Really Lost God.  The result has been the erosion, not only of marriage itself,  but of the conjugal understanding of marriage as a comprehensive union, permanent, exclusive, and monogamous, of man and woman, in body and mind, rooted in and consummated by the one and only sexual act that can produce new life, and ordered to the procreation and education of children (if any) who result from that union.  With that erosion has come the revisionist view of marriage as rooted in emotions, in the feelings of adults without reference to children or even to sex, and lasting as long as the feelings last.

That revisionist view may be incoherent--unable to explain how that relationship they want to call marriage is different from friendship (which the state does not certify or enforce, or generally involve itself in); from the committed, longterm, financially interdependent relationship of two sisters or two brothers who share a residence; or why such a relationship should be limited to only two adults.  But it "finds overwhelming support among intellectuals, journalists, and entertainers, indeed nearly all our cultural elite" (Girgis, Anderson, & George, 2012).  Especially lawyers.

Here Fr. Robert Barron draws attention to the lack of any serious moral argument on the issue.  Citing Alasdair MacIntyre, he wonders about the possibility of moral argument in our society.  A fundamental. civilizational shift is under way without any serious public consideration of the issues and arguments.  As if poll trends were arguments, as if public support for something--say dropping the bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 or slavery in 1825--made it right and were sufficient argument in itself.

One of the few voices decrying the elite's rush to conformism and its imposition on the rest of society through legal coercion and single-minded propagandizing by the mainstream media, is Brendan O'Neill.  A former Marxist, O'Neill describes himself as an "atheistic libertarian," now edits Spiked Online, and writes for many other publications.   He co-founded the Manifesto Club, an organization "with the aim of challenging cultural trends that restrain and stifle people's aspirations and initiative."In his latest essay, O'Neill takes up the question of how this conformism came about and swept so much of elite, and then public, opinion before it, without either a mass movement or a serious public debate or even a coherent argument.  He says: 

I have been doing or writing about political stuff for 20 years, since I was 18 years old, during which time I have got behind some pretty unpopular campaigns and kicked against some stifling consensuses. But I have never encountered an issue like gay marriage, an issue in which the space for dissent has shrunk so rapidly, and in which the consensus is not only stifling but choking. This is the only issue on which, for criticizing it from a liberal, secular perspective, I’ve been booed during an after-dinner speech and received death threats....

Is this sudden shift in opinion, accompanied by intolerance of any discussion or questioning and by vitriolic denunciation of any dissent,  threats to jobs and businesses (not to mention the death threats) of those who don't quickly fall into line, healthy?

How do we account for this extraordinary consensus, for what is tellingly referred to as the ‘surrender’ to gay marriage by just about everyone in public life? And is it a good thing, evidence that we had a heated debate on a new civil right and the civil rightsy side won? I don’t think so. I don’t think we can even call this a ‘consensus’, since that would imply the voluntaristic coming together of different elements in concord. It’s better described as conformism, the slow but sure sacrifice of critical thinking and dissenting opinion under pressure to accept that which has been defined as a good by the upper echelons of society: gay marriage. Indeed, the gay-marriage campaign provides a case study in conformism, a searing insight into how soft authoritarianism and peer pressure are applied in the modern age to sideline and eventually do away with any view considered overly judgmental, outdated, discriminatory, ‘phobic’, or otherwise beyond the pale.

This is not a mass movement like the civil rights movement or the pro-life movement, but an elite-driven campaign led by lawyers and the elite media, one that brooks no dissent or even discussion.  O'Neill again:

In truth, the extraordinary rise of gay marriage speaks, not to a new spirit of liberty or equality on a par with the civil-rights movements of the 1960s, but rather to the political and moral conformism of our age; to the weirdly judgmental non-judgmentalism of our PC times; to the way in which, in an uncritical era such as ours, ideas can become dogma with alarming ease and speed; to the difficulty of speaking one’s mind or sticking with one’s beliefs at a time when doubt and disagreement are pathologized. Gay marriage brilliantly shows how political narratives are forged these days, and how people are made to accept them. This is a campaign that is elitist in nature, in the sense that, in direct contrast to those civil-rights agitators of old, it came from the top of society down; and it is a campaign which is extremely unforgiving of dissent or disagreement, implicitly, softly demanding acquiescence to its agenda. 

READ O'NEILL'S WHOLE ESSAY HERE. 

And in an additional brief comment on his video, Father Barron answers a further question on the subject: "What is the framework for having a good moral conversation?"

"Francis, Rebuild my Church!" - God

Fr. Robert Barron's first thoughts on our new pope.

Evangelizing through Beauty - Fr. Robert Barron

The Legacy of Pope Benedict XVI: Commentary by Fr. Robert Barron

Hugh Hefner's Theology of the Body - and John Paul II's

Paul Adams

Playboy founder Hugh Hefner is once again scheduled to be married to his fiancee Crystal Harris, this time on New Year's Eve, 2012.  Prompting some thoughts about puritanism and sexual expressionism...and John Paul II's answer to both.

I recently had the privilege of sitting in on a seminar taught by Professor Michael Waldstein, the distinguished theologian who not only translated John Paul II’s Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body but also provided the book with a brilliant 128-page introduction.  One of the most memorable sessions involved an unscheduled discussion about Hefner's theology in relation to JP II's.  The occasion was the interview with Hef conducted in 2004 by religion reporter Cathleen Falsani.  According to Waldstein, Falsani is a very bright graduate of Wheaton, the Evangelical college).  The interview - under the improbable title “Hugh Hefner: Man of God?” - appeared in the SoMA Review.  I would link to it except that the site carries a computer safety warning.  Still, her account of the meeting is included in a collection of Falsani’s interviews with famous public figures about their spiritual lives.

The conversation with Hef is revealing and seemed to surprise both participants.  It seems Hef had a Puritan upbringing.  He's descended from the original Mayflower Puritans but was raised sorta Methodist as he explains (loose in dogma, strict in morality).  

To set the stage for looking at Hef and his spiritual evolution, first a word about concupiscence and adultery in the heart - the topic for the day from TOB.  Bear with me here and I think you'll find it interesting from a cultural perspective, if nothing else.  I think it brings out how very differently a Catholic thinks about things than a Protestant or secularist. The two - Protestantism and secularism - are closely linked, I think, historically and spiritually - some say Protestantism is a stepping stone to atheism.  Even some Protestant theologians like Alister McGrath, whose book, The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World, I reviewed here, thinks there is truth in the observation.  (See also Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society.)  Of course, in countries like the U.S. where Protestant/secularist culture predominates, even Catholics start to think like Protestants, a great loss to the larger culture as well as themselves.

In the Catholic view as explained by John Paul II, concupiscence is defective love, in as well as outside marriage, which it corrupts, so that even a marriage between Christians falls short of a Christian marriage when the spousal love is corrupted by it.  Thus adultery in the heart can happen even within a marriage while adultery in the flesh cannot.  But adultery in the flesh (i.e., involving someone outside the marriage) doesn't happen unless adultery in the heart has already happened.  A full and integral love (of flesh, blood, spirit) derives from the mystery of Creation (God who is love creates us out of love for love, so man cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of self [cf. Lk 17:33]).  

Our main difficulty with sexuality is that we don't see it in its full value, its real beauty, which is tied up with the spousal meaning of the body.  We are created male and female for a one-flesh union that is a full communion of persons, the archetype of which (without the sex) is the Trinity, a communion of Persons in the complete giving and receiving of love.  Jesus warns, not against normal sexual desires when he says the man who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery in his heart (Mt. 5:27-28), but against the dehumanizing reduction of another person to an object for one’s own use, like a bar of chocolate.  His strictures, more harshly stated than the OT Law in some areas, can be a danger for persons of a scrupulous disposition.  But Jesus' point is not puritanical or sex-negative.  It is to reduce everything to the commandment of love, which Augustine summed up perfectly in the very non-Puritan injunction to "Love and do what you will."

So the answer to our tendency to objectify the person we are attracted to, to see her in a utilitarian way, in terms of her usefulness for our pleasure, is not to turn away in revulsion at our drives, our bodies, and sex, to take a cold shower (the Protestant-Kantian approach) but to love more.  Not to look away but to look more closely, to see the woman as a full person on her own journey through life and toward God, with her own goods (love is willing the good of the other as other, a matter of will and not just feeling or drives).  This corresponds more or less to the way Aristotle talks about friendship.  It's about living for someone and sharing life with them (the gift of self).  For the utilitarian alternative, think of the way I go to the store and buy a bar of fine dark chocolate.  I don't ask it if it wants to be bought and used by me for my pleasure.  I just pay for it, unwrap it, and eat it, an object of use for my pleasure, and then throw away the wrapper.  Treating a person that way is a real problem, combining slavery and rape.  Prostitution, even where it does not involve trafficking and coercion, is like that except it involves two people using each other in a commercial exchange in which each gets what they want, sex or money.  But there is no pretense of loving or even seeing the other as a full person with his or her own life journey, any more than there is in my relation with the cashier when I pay her for a bar of chocolate.

So what is the character of sexual desire in a right relationship?  It's part of an exchange of gifts--joy through giving and receiving joy.

From this perspective, utilitarianism is the other side of the coin of Puritanism.  Puritans, as did Luther, worried about selfishness.  You have to avoid pleasure in sex, or at most give it without receiving it.  This is manifestly absurd.  I kiss my wife to give her pleasure, but I make it clear that I am doing it for her, I get no pleasure from it myself as that would be selfish.  She'd slap my face.  Reminds me of the advice to English wives who were supposed to do their marital duty but not to enjoy it - just "lie back and think of England" - England being presumably so unerotic a thing to think about as to fill you with a sense of duty but without any pleasure attached.  Kant is like this, isn't he? - One should act out of duty only, not pleasure.

So in puritanism and porn (or hooking up), you have two sides of the same coin.  In both, sexuality is separated from the person, in one case to be repelled, in the other embraced as 'recreation.'  The actual teaching of Jesus is beautiful and liberating.  The real challenge is to love wholeheartedly, not defectively.

Hefner was consumed by the sense that an injustice was done to sex.  He was not hugged, he was left with a longing for love, which his mother could not express because hugging your kids is too pleasurable and like a good Lutheran she wanted to avoid pleasure.  So poor (though rich) Hef never broke out of his puritanism.  He just switched sides.  From born again to porn again. He is right to say (para. 4 of the interview) that organized religion (to the extent it embraced this puritan revulsion from sex) played havoc with people's lives and was very unChristian.  But he's wrong to tell his mother that because of what she was unable to give as love, "it set me on a course that changed my life and the world."  No it didn't.  He just changed sides, but remained as far away as ever from a full integration of sexuality with love and the full human integrity of the person.  He, no more than his mother, was able to love fully and integrally.  Both meant well, but neither was able to break out of their puritan chains.

Of course, Catholicism has been deeply influenced, more in some countries than others, by this puritan strain.  Nostra culpa.  But the challenge is to recover - in the midst of a deep dehumanization as well as desacralization of sex, the body, love, and marriage - a fully human and so fully Christian understanding, which seems more and more to be the task of countercultural 'creative minorities' rather than a socially available option on a large scale.

But young people who encounter JP II's TOB find it life-changing.  I wish more Catholics understood it and were capable of teaching it.  It's JP II's greatest gift to humanity, which is saying a lot given his many and profound contributions - to ending Soviet-style Communism/totalitarianism, stopping the rot in the Church, and his connection to millions of spiritually deprived young people.  (I like that poster of JP II, in the style of motivational management posters about teamwork.  It says, Generation JP II: Raising Our Parents Catholic.) 

Source: Uploaded by user via Being Catholic on Pinterest

Fr. Robert Barron has some excellent discussion of these themes in his essay, Sex, Love, and God: The Catholic Answer to Puritanism and Nietzcheanism.  See also such video clips of his as this:

and this, discussing Hanna Rosin and her defense of the hook-up culture as good for women -

Fr. Barron comments on the Tragedy at Newtown

Fr. Barron comments on Skyfall

Fr. Robert Barron: Resisting Aggressive Secularism

Fr. Barron on Sex, Love, and God

Sex, Love, and God: The Catholic Answer to Puritanism and Nietzcheanism

By Father Robert Barron *

Many of the Catholic Church’s teachings are vilified in both the high and popular cultures, but none more than its doctrines concerning marriage and sexuality. Time and again, the Church’s views on sex are characterized as puritanical, life denying and hopelessly outdated — holdovers from the Bronze Age. Above all, critics pillory the Church for setting unreasonable limits to the sexual freedom of contemporary people. Church leaders, who defend traditional sexual morality, are parodied as versions of Dana Carvey’s “church lady” — fussy, accusatory, secretly perverse and sex-obsessed.

Let me respond first to the charge of puritanism. Throughout the history of religion and philosophy, a puritanical strain is indeed apparent. Whether it manifests itself as Manichaeism, Gnosticism or Platonic dualism, the puritanical philosophy teaches that spirit is good and matter is evil or fallen. In most such schemas, the whole purpose of life is to escape from matter, especially from sexuality, which so ties us to the material realm. But authentic Biblical Christianity is not puritanical. The Creator God described in the book of Genesis made the entire panoply of things physical — planets, stars, the moon and sun, animals, fish and even things that creep and crawl upon the earth — and found all of it good, even very good. Accordingly, there is nothing perverse or morally questionable about bodies, sex, sexual longing or the sexual act. In fact,  it’s just the contrary. When, in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus himself is asked about marriage and sexuality, he hearkens back to the book of Genesis and the story of creation: “At the beginning of creation God made them male and female; for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and the two shall become as one. They are no longer two but one flesh” (Mk. 10:6-8). That last sentence is, dare I say it, inescapably “sexy.” Plato might have been a puritan, and perhaps John Calvin too, but Jesus most certainly was not.

So given this stress on the goodness of sex and sexual pleasure, what separates the Christian view from, say, the “Playboy” philosophy? The simple answer is that, for Biblical people, sexuality must be placed in the wider context of love, which is to say willing the good of the other. It is fundamental to Catholic spirituality and morality that everything in life must be drawn magnetically toward love, must be conditioned and transfigured by love. Thus, one’s business concerns must be marked by love, lest they devolve into crass materialism; and one’s relationships must be leavened by love, lest they devolve into occasions for self-interested manipulation; even one’s play must be directed toward love, lest it devolve into mere self-indulgence. Sex is no exception to this rule. The goodness of sexual desire is designed, by its very nature, to become ingredient in a program of self-forgetting love and hence to become something rare and life enhancing. If you want to see what happens when this principle is ignored, take a long hard look at the hookup culture prevalent among many young  — and not so young — people today. Sex as mere recreation, as contact sport, as a source only of superficial pleasure has produced armies of the desperately sad and anxious, many who have no idea that it is precisely their errant sexuality that has produced such deleterious effects in them. When sexual pleasure is drawn out of itself by the magnetic attraction of love, it is rescued from self-preoccupation.

Now there is a third step as well, for human love must be situated in the context of divine purpose. Once Jesus clarified that male and female are destined to become one flesh, he further specified that “What God has joined together,” no human being should put asunder. When I was working full time as a parish priest, I had the privilege of preparing many young couples for marriage. I would always ask them, “Why do you want to be married in church?” After some hesitation, the young people would invariably respond with some version of “Well, we're in love,” to which I would respond, “I'm delighted that you're in love, but that’s no reason to be married in church!” My point was that entering into a properly sacramental marriage implied that the bride and groom realized that they had been brought together by God and precisely for God’s reasons, that their sexuality and their mutual love were in service of an even higher purpose. To make their vows before a priest and a Catholic community, I would tell them, was tantamount to saying that they knew their relationship was sacramental — a vehicle of God’s grace to the wider world. This final contextualization guaranteed that sexuality — already good in itself and already elevated by love — had now something truly sacred.

Our culture has become increasingly Nietzchean, by which I mean obsessed with the power of self-creation. This is why toleration is the only objective value that many people recognize, and why freedom, especially in the arena of sexuality, is so highly prized. It is furthermore why attempts to contextualize sex within higher frameworks of meaning are so often mocked as puritanism or fussy antiquarianism. Thank God that, amidst the million voices advocating self-indulgent sexuality, there is at least the one voice of the Catholic Church shouting “No,” a no in service of a higher Yes!

Father Robert Barron is the founder of the global ministry, Word on Fire, and is the Rector/President of Mundelein Seminary near Chicago. He is the creator of the documentary series, "Catholicism," airing on PBS stations and EWTN. The documentary has been awarded an esteemed Christopher for excellence. Learn more about the series at www.CatholicismSeries.com

From Catholic News Agency, October 23, 2012

Jesus Had a Wife? More Gnostic Nonsense

Cornelius Sullivan 

Gnosticism, from “gnosis” in Greek, says that the salvation of the soul comes from the possession of a somewhat intuitive knowledge of the mysteries of the universe and of magic formulas about that knowledge. Gnostics were "people who knew", a superior class of beings, basically different from those who did not know.

There is a proportion of people today who also want to believe the most bizarre things about the preacher who claimed to be the son of God. If we follow the idea derived from Gnosticism that he had children then logically it follows that they, as direct line descendants, children of God made man, would be able to make the blind see, the lame walk, drive out demons, cure the sick, and speak with words that would change hearts and change the whole course of history. Tell me where they are. I want to see them. 

Jesus was married? Where was his wife? Where is she now? There were hundreds of witnesses to the Resurrection. Through the centuries there have been hundreds of visions from all parts of the world but not one of Jesus and his wife. Believe what you want, I’m going with the first thirty three or so popes who were martyred for their faith. Think of what that means. It is a violent death to affirm that Jesus is the only Lord, just that, not anything about his family, nothing about his progeny. 

Find an account that says that when Saint Stephen was being stoned to death, and forgave his murderers, that he had a vision of Jesus and his wife sitting around the kitchen table, or that Jesus and his wife said, “Saul, why are you persecuting us?, or Saint Peter said, “Quo Vadis Lord, where are you and Mrs. Jesus going?”  

If you like free flowing ideas that are all over the place without regard for the truth, and that tell you at the same time that you are getting special secrets that only some can know, you probably would have been a Gnostic back then, and today you probably get thrills from the most bizarre blogs.

My ridicule of domestic ideas is to point out the singularity of the story of salvation as revealed in history by so many witnesses who died for the truth.The idea of Jesus having a wife is not to die for.

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Here is Thomas L. McDonald on the latest from the Gnostic Noise Machine: 

I was going to let the whole “Jesus had a wife” thing pass by in silence, since the discovery of a minor fragmentary unprovenanced 4th century papyrus of a probable Gnostic text is about as relevant to actual Christianity as an episode of Scooby Doo.

If it turns out to be authentic (big if) it may very, very slightly and incompletely expand our knowledge of some of the fringe backwaters that burbled up and rapidly drained away in the early centuries of Christianity. Honestly, though, it doesn’t even really add much to our store of knowledge about Gnosticism (one of the earlier Christian heresies) that we didn’t already know. READ THE FULL POST HERE.

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And here is Fr. Robert Barron in conversation with Dr. Scott Hahn about Gnosticism and modern spirituality.  Why Gnosticism, like Dan Brown and other conspiracy theories of our times, appeals to the perpetual adolescent in us.

Fr. Barron on Ross Douthat's "Bad Religion"

Paul Adams

A good discussion of a mostly good book.  But the criticism of George W. Bush and the conflation of his foreign policy with Providence needs to be balanced with a critique of the ludicrous messianism associated with the cult of Obama in 2008, which is still not entirely dead - see the embarrassing quotes from normally sane people assembled by the site that asks, Is Barack Obama the Messiah?  Bush's military adventures need to be balanced with Obama's.

Bush made possible withdrawal from Iraq by means of a successful "surge" that was much criticized at the time, by Obama among others.  Obama copied this surge strategy in Afghanistan despite warnings, from his vice-president among others, that the cases were not equivalent and it would not work.  He makes extensive, legally and morally dubious use of predator drones to assassinate people in other countries.  He led the U.S. into playing a major military role in the attack on Libya.  (For a consistent anti-interventionism, opposed as much to Republican hawks as to liberal imperialism, think of Ron Paul or The American Conservative.  We forget that throughout the last century it was liberal Democrats who led the U.S. into every war, just and unjust.  The neoconservative approach to foreign policy is a continuation of the liberal Democrat internationalist hawkishness associated with Scoop Jackson.)

Nationalism has been a deadly heresy when entangled with religion, as in the Reformation and Thirty Years War.  The American form includes the admixture of utopianism that Fr. Barron describes, a tendency to impose our will on others for their good rather than just ours in the belief that doing so will make the world a better place.  This is the Wilsonianism that led not to a program of acquiring colonies in the old imperialist vein from Greece and Rome to the British, French, and Dutch empires of the nineteenth century. but to the League of Nations.  It is a pious do-gooding form of liberal-Christian imperialism captured wonderfully in the character of the American business leader Charles Gould in Joseph Conrad's great novel, Nostromo.  

But in addition to the important distinction made by internationalist marxists between the nationalism of the oppressor and the nationalism of the oppressed - subject for another post - there is also the need to distinguish a proper patriotism from its near and far enemies, to use Buddhist terms.  That is, patriotism, rightly understood, is as Alasdair MacIntyre argues, a central moral virtue.  It involves special affection for one's own country, a sense of personal identification with the country, special concern for the well-being of the country and a willingness to sacrifice to promote the country's good the love of one's own country.  (For more on this question, see MacIntyre's (1984) Lindley Lecture, "Is Patriotism a Virtue?" and the entry, with references and links, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Patriotism.

Like other virtues, patriotism is a golden mean between two extremes.  One is the heresy to which Douthat and Barron point, conflating the good of one's country with Divine Will or Destiny.  The other, much more common among liberal elites and in the academy, is a kind of cultural self-abasement or self-loathing.  In the name of some utopian cosmopolitan moral high ground, it rejects love of country altogether and tends to support or identify with or at least excuse those who, for whatever reasons, hate the U.S.  This kind of anti-patriotism is also common in Europe, though less directed at one's own country than taking the form of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism.


Recognition of the importance of the transcendent to the American Founders, of acknowledgment of the Creator in the declaration - "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" - does not entail a belief in Manifest Destiny or an immanentizing of the Eschaton in the form the United States as shining city on a hill.  It is not nationalism as heresy though the heretical tendency was present from early on and persists today.

It does, however, imply recognition of John Adams's point about the limits of even the best constitution:

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Douthat's book is a sweeping argument full of insights and a brilliant diagnosis of the heresies in American religion (and "not-religion-but-spirituality").  I think it is largely right but it has some serious blind spots that are revealed when journalistic put-downs substitute for serious and fair-minded analysis.

The problems with Douthat's book are most evident in his grossly unfair treatment of Michael Novak, whom he includes  in a chapter on praying and growing rich and who also has written much on the importance of the American Founding and its principles.  Novak offers no nostrums for getting rich.  He is concerned with economic development and acknowledges that capitalism has lifted more of humanity out of poverty and done more to enlarge human freedom than all previous systems put together.  Novak's concern is with reconciling a Catholicism that was historically anti-capitalist and anti-liberal (for good historical reasons) with a liberal capitalist order that offered the best prospect in a fallen world for human creativity, freedom, and innovation.  He stands in the tradition of Tocqueville, Acton, and JP II, none of whom is concerned with making money, though all recognized the potential of liberal, democratic capitalism, rightly understood, to require and develop the virtues required for a vibrant, free society.

Douthat pretends to be anti-capitalist, quoting some prelate to the effect that capitalism is flawed or sinful in its DNA.  What does that even mean?  Economic systems don't have DNA, so it can't be taken literally.  And what other economic system is not the flawed expression of a fallen humanity or is less so than capitalism?  Slavery, feudalism, socialism?  Douthat ducks a serious argument with a quote from a cardinal.

In the same way he quotes Novak quoting Ken Lay and then reveals, in a gotcha line (p. 207), that Novak was quoting the founder of Enron.  So what?  It was early in the Lay/Enron story, but what in any case is wrong with what Lay says in Novak's quote from him?  It is not about getting rich but creating "an ethical environment in which every individual is allowed and encouraged to realize their God-given potential" (Douthat, p.207, quoting Novak quoting Lay).  Isn't that a worthy goal, inconceivable under slavery, serfdom, or 'actually existing socialism'?  So what's the point?  That Lay didn't live up to his own ideals?  Novak is as aware as Karl Barth that we are fallen creatures, and the fact that Lay had feet of clay hardly invalidates what he says here.  (Nor does Douthat even bother to argue otherwise.)  It reminds me of what a Buddhist teacher said to me about a world-famous meditation teacher from Tibet who engaged in all kinds of womanizing and corrupt behavior:  "The Dharma [teachings] come through him as clear as a bell.   But he cannot hear them."

In my view, the Catholic tendency to condemn liberal capitalism - a product of the bitter and lethal hostility of European liberals in the 19th century to the Church - was a serious problem that made it very hard over decades for the Church to respond adequately to the new developments of urban, capitalist modernity and the collectivist alternative.  The ambivalences in Catholic social teaching reflect this need for theoretical development. Novak rose to the challenge and did some very important work to resolve the inadequacy.  His classic, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, was read clandestinely all over Eastern Europe and guided key figures there in forging a path from communist totalitarianism to democratic capitalism.  His work was what enabled JP II to make the distinction in his great social encyclical, Centesimus Annus (1991).  Asking whether capitalism was the model which shd be proposed, as the alternative to statist totalitarianism, to Third World countries searching "for the path to true economic and political progress," JP II responds that the answer is obviously complex:

"If by capitalism is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative....  But if by capitalism is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative."

It seems to me absurd and grossly unfair to reduce Novak's great work in this area to a variant of the gospel of wealth, to a Mammon over God heresy, etc.  (By the way, Douthat was attacked by a liberal Catholic reviewer, Michael Sean Winters in the Atlantic, for being an uncritical "comrade" and fellow neocon of Novak.  Douthat defends himself by distancing himself further from Novak and pointing to the Lay quote.  One can only tremble at the thought of what degeneration is in store for Douthat as he continues to work with the denizens of the NYT.

But I do think that, Douthat's mistreatment of Novak notwithstanding, the book is pretty good.