“Does anyone in America doubt that Kerry has a higher IQ than Bush? I’m sure the candidates’ SATs and college transcripts would put Kerry far ahead.” – Howell Raines, former executive editor of the New York Times, last August. Heh.
QUOTE OF THE DAY II: “Texans have made a decision about marriage and if there is some other state that has a more lenient view than Texas then maybe that’s a better place for them (gay and lesbian families) to live.” – Texas governor, Rick Perry, last Sunday.
IRAN AND THE WORLD CUP: The Iranian team is very close to qualifying for the 2006 soccer World Cup. The outburst of popular enthusiasm could be very unsettling for the mullahs. Like these constant demonstrations.
EVEN FAILED ORGASMS …: … turn out to be genetically determined.
A VERY CATHOLIC JOKE: Leonardo Boff, Hans Kung and Benedict XVI all die on the same day. They arrive at the Pearly Gates and St Peter welcomes them and says that Jesus wants to see each of them individually. Boff is first to go in to see Jesus. After half an hour, Boff comes out, shaking his head, and muttering, “How could I have been so wrong?” Kung is next. Same deal. After a while, Kung too emerges, head in hands: “How could I have been so wrong?” Benedict is next. After half an hour, Jesus himself comes out and groans: “How can I have been so wrong?”
AN OBVIOUS POINT: My point? Well, I have two. In his most recent speech, Benedict spoke out against alleged threats to the family. He is adamant on forbidding birth control, gay unions, in vitro fertilization, masturbation, oral sex, and so on. Much of what he says, especially about the unique beauty and wonder of heterosexual marital union, is eloquent, even moving, as Amy Welborn points out. Money quote from B16:
“Even in generating children marriage reflects its divine model, the love of God for man. In man and woman, paternity and maternity, as the body and as love, do not let themselves be limited to the biological: life is given entirely only when, with birth, love and the sense that make it possible to say yes to this life are also given. Precisely in this way does it become clear how contrary to human love, to the profound vocation of a man and a women, it is when the union is closed to the gift of life, or worse yet, suppresses or manipulates unborn life … For this reason the building of every single Christian family is placed within the larger context of the great family of the Church, which sustains it and bears it within itself.”
Amy makes a good point that this is completely consistent with Church doctrine and I agree with her that I see no way that such doctrine could find a place for gay marriage within the Church. (If the Church ever does come around to seeing the God-given beauty of homosexual love, it will have to come up with some other kind of union.) I should add that I find his description of what marital sex can be in its deepest and fullest sense to be profound and exhilarating. But it doesn’t follow that every other form of sexual expression is therefore sinful or evil. And the Pope, of course, is not restricting himself to what the Church understands as marriage. He is insisting that the Church’s view of sacramental matrimony be replicated entirely in the civil and secular order, and that anything else is moral “anarchy.” That’s a big leap – especially since the Pope’s own definition of heterosexual marriage is ignored by the vast majority of even Catholics, let alone everyone else in a secular society.
PRIORITIES, PRIORITIES: My second point is simply one of priorities. Perhaps the most insistent teaching of the Catholic church today is a conception of family life. Apart from priests, nuns and homosexuals, the call to procreative marriage has been put at the very center of what it means to be a faithful Catholic. As you see in that passage above, the very Incarnation is deployed to defend marriage and procreation as a central human goal. And yet, when you read the Gospels, you find something very strange. Jesus barely mentions marriage. He never married. He demanded of all his disciples that they abandon their own families and wives, without even saying goodbye. He was openly contemptuous toward his own mother and father in adolescence and early adulthood. His fundamental response to adultery was forgiveness of the adulterer and suspicion of the morally superior. His contemporaries must have regarded him as illegitimate, since he was conceived out of wedlock. So this illegitimate, single man who broke up family after family, whose closest female friend was a childless former prostitute, who scandalously stayed alone in the home of two unmarried women, who offended every family value of the time … has been turned into the chief architect of “family values!” I’m not saying that building families is something alien to Christianity. We are not all called to wander through the fields preaching salvation and telling people to abandon their spouses and children. I’m not saying that procreative marriage isn’t a glorious thing. What I am saying is that the over-powering fixation on marriage, family life and procreation has overwhelmed the deeper and more unsettling priorities that Jesus obviously stood for and proclaimed. The gulf between the priorities of the Gospels and those of the hierarchy of the Church on this score is both wide and deep. To coin a phrase: How can they have gone so wrong?
The Dish 