Catholic, Gay, and Feeling Fine, Thanks

BY STEVE GERSHOM

A little explanation of that last part: It would be more accurate to say that I have same-sex attraction than that I’m gay. My attraction to men is deep and, as far as I can tell, permanent, but I’m celibate. I sometimes use the word “gay” as a convenient shorthand, but it carries a lot of political and even theological baggage, and doesn’t really apply to me, because of my celibacy and for other reasons that I’ll try to make clear below.
The upshot is that I’m unmarried and likely to remain that way. I’m not discerning a vocation to the priesthood or the religious life, either. I’ve been there, done that, and I’ve let the Lord know he can do whatever he wants with me – up to and including sending me to Calcutta or the Bronx – but that if he wants me to be a priest or a monk, he’ll have to do something drastic. I’ve spent a long time checking my internal compasses, and none of them point in that direction.

So what then? I know what not to do: Don’t believe the gay activists, don’t water down the faith, don’t pretend homosexual actions aren’t sinful. Don’t have a boyfriend; don’t get married. Don’t, don’t, don’t. But nobody ever had a vocation that consisted in not doing something. Marriage, the priesthood, the religious life – these involve definite actions, definite commitments.

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Bring Them Home

BY REV. JOHN HORGAN

Some are estranged from the Church, angry at her teachings, hurt by her representatives; a larger number simply live their lives as if the Church had no place in their world, no bearing on their lifestyles, careers, and choices. . . except at Christmas.

Many are our loved ones, members of our families, young and old. Parents and grandparents often have a lump in their throats as they sing the Christmas carols, happy to have their adult children and grandchildren with them for Christmas Mass � but knowing that it is probably the only Mass they will attend during the year. There are probably more prayers offered for the success of the sermon than at any other time during the year; as people pray that Father will say exactly the right things to get loved ones back to church and not say anything that will push people’s buttons.

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A Generation Detached

BY NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY

A few years ago, an intern came to me with what he no doubt thought was an exciting new idea for a piece about “the youth vote.” After having read a few too many press releases from MTV, he wanted to “get out the message” that young people should go to the polls “so their voices can be heard.” As editors go, I don’t think I have a reputation for being curmudgeonly, but on this particular occasion I could hardly contain myself.

“Frankly, I don’t want the youth to vote,” I told him. “They don’t own property, they don’t pay taxes, they don’t have kids to send to school. They have no financial stake and little moral stake in society and, until they do, I’d prefer they stay the heck away from the polls.” OK, maybe I was a little harsh. But this demographic—the unmarried, childless, economically dependent types—is a growing segment of society.

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Disturbing New Evidence on Contraception and AIDS in Africa

BY JOE HESCHMEYER

A few weeks ago, I wrote on the impact of Catholic social teaching on AIDS rates in Africa. I showed there that the most Catholic parts of sub-Saharan Africa tend to have lower (sometimes, dramatically lower) rates of HIV infection than their non-Catholic counterparts. This proved true both by region, and by country. There are plenty of reasons that this might be so:

that the acceptability of contraception encourages people to have risky sex;
that Catholics are less likely to have sex outside of marriage, or use intravenous drugs;
that Catholic countries have better HIV treatment programs, since the Catholic Church is the largest institution in the world providing direct AIDS care;
or that Catholic countries are unique in some unrelated way, such that the correlation is unrelated to causation.

Whatever the case, it certainly seems that when folks like Polly Toynbee claim that the Catholic Church’s “ban on condoms the church has caused the death of millions of Catholics and others in areas dominated by Catholic missionaries, in Africa and right across the world,” she has absolutely no idea what she’s talking about. We just don’t see millions more dying in Catholic countries than non-Catholic ones. If anything, the evidence seems to suggest that the Catholic Church’s social teaching is saving countless lives.

Since publishing that post, my conclusions received support from an unexpected place: the New York Times. A Times news article provided one more reason that contraception-happy regions are facing a higher AIDS rate: namely, that one of the most popular forms of hormonal contraception (known in the US under the brand name Depo-Provera) is actually increasing the spread the AIDS:

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180° the Movie

What could you say in less than a minute to make a typical “pro-choice” American do a “180” on abortion?

Watch this award-winning documentary to find out! Well-worth the 33 minutes!

The Acts We Perform; the People We Become

BY FATHER ROBERT BARRON

Karol Wojtyla taught that in making an ethical decision, a moral agent does not only give rise to a particular act, but he also contributes to the person he is becoming. Every time I perform a moral act, I am building up my character, and every time I perform an unethical act, I am compromising my character. A sufficient number of virtuous acts, in time, shapes me in such a way that I can predictably and reliably perform virtuously in the future, and a sufficient number of vicious acts can misshape me in such a way that I am typically incapable of choosing rightly in the future. This is not judgmentalism; it is a kind of spiritual/moral physics, an articulation of a basic law. We see the same principle at work in sports. If you swing the golf club the wrong way enough times, you become a bad golfer, that is to say, someone habitually incapable of hitting the ball straight and far. And if you swing the club correctly enough times, you become a good golfer, someone habitually given to hitting the ball straight and far.

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Let There Be Light, Sickly Blue Light

BY JOSEPH BOTTUM

“In the beginning, there was a glade. A green and foresty place, a meadowy clearing in the great big woods. The robins called from branch to branch. A laughing stream wove gently through the dell. A rabbit hopped through the long grass, bright with morning dew. All was well, and all manner of things were well – until, one day, the evil came.

The evil, of course, is you. And me. People, in other words: human beings in general, but Europeans in particular – those pale pioneers who invaded the forest with their unnatural Western science and their denatured Western religion. Iron sick, they were, and gold mad. Acquisitive and unsettled. Uncomfortable in their own skins. They tormented the land with their steel axes and their guns, their machines and their desires. They poisoned Mother Earth with runoff and waste, overheated houses, and cars like angry monsters prowling through the night. What now can come to good, with people here? All is changed, and nothing for the better.”

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The Right Double Negative

BY JOHN M. GRONDELSKI

Margaret Simon, my sixth grade English teacher and grammar martinet, would have been shocked by this book’s title: What We Can’t Not Know: A Guide. Back in 1970 I learned, under pain of death, never to use a double negative. But that was thirty-some years ago. Today, Miss Simon might be shocked by an even greater claim: that such basic moral principles as the Decalogue itself are believed, by many of the West’s most vocal elites, to be unknowable.

The unknowability of the Commandments lies in the epistemological terra incognita of modern and postmodern thought, which denies a human capacity to know anything with certainty in ethics or morality. What is called moral knowledge may be a reflection of the interests of the dominant class, race, gender, etc. It may express subjective feelings or sentiments. There’s but one thing moral knowledge is not, at least according to reigning opinion: it is not real knowledge, knowable with certainty, which imposes a claim precisely because it is knowable.

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Should Marriage Be Easy?

BY REGIS NICOLL

The state of our unions has prompted comments from a number of sources. One is business titan and television celebrity, Donald Trump. Several years after his second divorce, Mr. Trump had this to say: “If you have to work at a marriage, it’s not going to work. It has to be sort of a natural thing. But my ex-wife would say, ‘You have to work at this, you have to do this, you have to do that’. And I’m saying to myself, ‘Man, I work all day long, well into the evening. I don’t want to come home and work at a marriage. A marriage has to be very easy.” Marriage has to be very easy? Anyone want to tell The Apprentice boss, “You’re fired!”?

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Man or Rabbit?

BY C.S. LEWIS

“‘Can’t you lead a good life without believing in Christianity? This is the question on which I have been asked to write, and straight away, before I begin trying to answer it, I have a comment to make. The question sounds as if it were asked by a person who said to himself, “I don’t care whether Christianity is in fact true or not. I’m not interested in finding out whether the real universe is more what like the Christians say than what the Materialists say. All I’m interested in is leading a good life. I’m going to choose beliefs not because I think them true but because I find them helpful.” Now frankly, I find it hard to sympathise with this state of mind. One of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals is that he wants to know things, wants to find out what reality is like, simply for the sake of knowing. When that desire is completely quenched in anyone, I think he has become something less than human.

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