Many people in our day are deeply affected by this question, both directly and indirectly. Many readers know someone who has committed suicide, and all of us are living in a country that continues to consider allowing physician-assisted suicide as part of “health care”. Catholics must take an absolute stand against every form of suicide. Suicide is “contrary to the love of God”. It is truly evil. Now, please understand me here. In saying that suicide is evil, I am not saying that a person is evil. Catholics believe that each human person is intrinsically good. But we can choose to do evil actions. There are some actions which are evil in and of themselves, regardless of motivation or circumstance. Of these, suicide is one.

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Every once in a while, a video unexpectedly becomes an Internet sensation, garnering attention all over the place and spreading like wildfire through the virtual world.

Just this past week, a phenomenon of this type has emerged in the form of a slickly produced video of a 20-something-year-old man in a leather jacket half rapping, half speaking a poem about Jesus and religion — more specifically how the former came to abolish the latter.

Incredibly, this five-minute video (without much musical or visual enhancement) featuring a single person offering a not very sophisticated argument, as of today [Jan. 20] has garnered upward of 12 million views! A student of mine at the seminary first clued me in to the video, but then, through the Word on Fire website and Facebook page, I was flooded with requests to comment on it.

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Rush-hour traffic emerged from the Battery Tunnel and roared up West Street on that gray, overcast afternoon as I made my way through the narrow, temporary passageways that snake around partially constructed buildings and deep foundation pits. My ticket for the National September 11 Memorial at the World Trade Center site gets checked one last time at the temporary entrance on the southwest corner, and then I feel my heart rate climb and my throat constrict.

Designed by Michael Arad, the central foci of the memorial are two deep, square pools that mark the footprints of the two destroyed buildings. A delicate screen of water cascades down the sides, evoking the thin vertical strands that were the main architectural feature of the two towers that once dominated the skyline of lower Manhattan. The pools of water drain into still deeper shafts at their centers. Bronze railings surround the two pools of falling water, and into them are inscribed the names of those who died on September 11, 2001, not just at the World Trade Center, but also at the Pentagon and on the airplane that crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside.

I am looking for the names of the three men who were my college classmates.

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

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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“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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