Where Have All My Deep Male Friendships Gone? I have many guy friends. Why don’t we hang out more?

 

Where Have All My Deep Male Friendships Gone?

I have many guy friends. Why don’t we hang out more?

What Western European cultures are fascinated by, and what the rest of the world is not.

Terry Mattingly's Get Religion blog, which have linked in here on the side, states something that we've already stated, but in a more in-depth article.

Or maybe it's something we've posed as a question.

Christianity is not a European religion.  Indeed, Europeans, in the form of Romans and Greeks, at first opposed it.

Christianity, and certainly the original form of Christianity, Apostolic Christianity, of which all the Orthodox and Catholics are part, came out of the Middle East and in fact it never left it.  The first Catholics, which is to say the first Christians, were at the very first all in the Roman province of Palestine.  Pretty soon they were in Syria, where they were first called Christians, and Egypt.  In the Apostolic Age Christianity, which again is to say Catholicism, made it all the way to India, and of course it also made it to Rome.  Rome was the early site of the head of the Church, because it was the center of the most powerful secular entity in the world, the Roman Empire, but other localities were major diocesan seats as well.  The last Apostolic Christian church in North Africa prevailed until the 1400s, the same century that the Moors were expelled from Spain, and the same century that the Church was established in Sub Sarah Africa.  Catholicism was so strong in Angola that pre Revolution slave rebellion in the Southern English Colonies of North America saw a Catholic Angolan band rise up and bolt for Catholic Florida.

So why, some of us have asked, is there so much attention on homosexuality in today's Church?

Seem unconnected?  It isn't.

Homosexuality is relatively rare in the world, but it is most common in European cultures.  There are a number of reasons for this.  For one thing, the Western world is rich, and it's used its wealth in pecular ways impacting living arrangements.  Basic aspects of adult life common throughout human history and in every culture have been badly warped in post World War Two, or maybe post World War One, or maybe as part of the Enlightenment, European cultured world.  While consumption of food, working, and the basic reproductive nature of humans is the same at an elemental level for people everywhere, and at all times, in the rich society of post 1945 Western Culture, there's an entertainment element to all of it.  People do these things to be "fulfilled", which in the end often tends to mean that their reproductive organs pretty much play the same role as a Nintendo joystick.  People have completely lost the connective and reproductive aspect to sex itself, which naturally leads to all sorts of bored playing with it.  We have, in this context, all become characters on MXC.

Additionally, as the West developed it got into warehousing of men, and sometimes women, for various reasons.  In the movie version of Pasternak's classic, Dr. Zhivago, the Orthodox Priest, in taking Lara's confession, warned her that sex was strong and that "only marriage can contain it".  As we've built societies that postpone marriage by operation of social pressure and economics, we can't be surprised that premarital sex became common.  Likewise, as we warehoused young men in various fashion. . .all male schools, all male institutions, etc., a certain percentage seek relief where they can find it.  Like most disordered behavior, the initial inclination probably isn't really very strong, but once people find relief in it, that takes over.  People don't take up drinking a quart of Jim Beam all in one setting.

So at this point the rich West has a pretty messed up relationship with sex in general, and for that matter, with nature and life in general.

And it's in a rocketing decline.

So why so much attention to the Fr. James Martin's of the world?  Why does the Papacy address this small demographic rather than, so far, addressing the effective schism of the German church, which has gone even further?

Mattingly notes:

"The Church of Africa is the voice of the poor, the simple and the small," wrote Cardinal Robert Sarah of Guinea, the former head of the Vatican's Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. "It has the task of announcing the Word of God in front of Western Christians who, because they are rich, equipped with multiple skills in philosophy, theological, biblical and canonical sciences, believe they are evolved, modern and wise in the wisdom of the world."

Mattingly also notes:

Catholic debates over LGBTQ+ issues are crucial, he [ Rev. Chris Ritter] said, "because if you want to spot low-fertility, low-faith cultures in Europe and elsewhere, you look at how and when they legalized and legitimized same-sex marriage. That will give you a good idea of what is happening. … Just look for large numbers of secular old people."

And that gets back to what I noted the other day. The West, in every fashion, is in decline.  By mid-century that will be more obvious than it is now, and that's not long.  In our feebleness, we've become self obsessed and lost a grasp of the existential.

This won't last forever.  Our self extermination by confusing entertainment with living is assuring it will not.  And, by extension, the unique tragedy of homosexuality, and the related plagues that endorsing rather than sympathizing with that tragedy has brought on, won't last long as major issues much longer either.  Society really doesn't need to be wringing its hands so much over this.

For that matter, we can suppose it won't be long until the occupant of St. Peter's Chair was born in Africa once again. . .and that will not be a bad thing.

In reality, the Trojan War was probably just about this stupid. . .

 involved people about the same age, and over pretty much the same issue.

Responsum: "Negativamente".

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith responded to a dubium concerning whether or not the church could do what individuals like Father James Martin, SJ, and the leaders of the German bishops, would appear set to have the Church do, that being bless and indeed regularize in some fashion homosexual unions.  The response probably came as a surprise to those who seem to think that they know what Pope Francis thinks, but its solidly in line with Church teaching.

First, here's the text, in its English translation.

Responsum of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to a dubium regarding the blessing of the unions of persons of the same sex

TO THE QUESTION PROPOSED:

Does the Church have the power to give the blessing to unions of persons of the same sex?

RESPONSE:

Negative.

Explanatory Note

In some ecclesial contexts, plans and proposals for blessings of unions of persons of the same sex are being advanced. Such projects are not infrequently motivated by a sincere desire to welcome and accompany homosexual persons, to whom are proposed paths of growth in faith, “so that those who manifest a homosexual orientation can receive the assistance they need to understand and fully carry out God’s will in their lives”^[1].

On such paths, listening to the word of God, prayer, participation in ecclesial liturgical actions and the exercise of charity can play an important role in sustaining the commitment to read one's own history and to adhere with freedom and responsibility to one's baptismal call, because “God loves every person and the Church does the same”^[2], rejecting all unjust discrimination.

Among the liturgical actions of the Church, the sacramentals have a singular importance: “These are sacred signs that resemble the sacraments: they signify effects, particularly of a spiritual kind, which are obtained through the Church’s intercession. By them men are disposed to receive the chief effect of the sacraments, and various occasions of life are sanctified”^[3]. The Catechism of the Catholic Church specifies, then, that “sacramentals do not confer the grace of the Holy Spirit in the way that the sacraments do, but by the Church’s prayer, they prepare us to receive grace and dispose us to cooperate with it” (#1670).

Blessings belong to the category of the sacramentals, whereby the Church “calls us to praise God, encourages us to implore his protection, and exhorts us to seek his mercy by our holiness of life”^[4]. In addition, they “have been established as a kind of imitation of the sacraments, blessings are signs above all of spiritual effects that are achieved through the Church’s intercession”^[5].

Consequently, in order to conform with the nature of sacramentals, when a blessing is invoked on particular human relationships, in addition to the right intention of those who participate, it is necessary that what is blessed be objectively and positively ordered to receive and express grace, according to the designs of God inscribed in creation, and fully revealed by Christ the Lord. Therefore, only those realities which are in themselves ordered to serve those ends are congruent with the essence of the blessing imparted by the Church.

For this reason, it is not licit to impart a blessing on relationships, or partnerships, even stable, that involve sexual activity outside of marriage (i.e., outside the indissoluble union of a man and a woman open in itself to the transmission of life), as is the case of the unions between persons of the same sex^[6]. The presence in such relationships of positive elements, which are in themselves to be valued and appreciated, cannot justify these relationships and render them legitimate objects of an ecclesial blessing, since the positive elements exist within the context of a union not ordered to the Creator’s plan.

Furthermore, since blessings on persons are in relationship with the sacraments, the blessing of homosexual unions cannot be considered licit. This is because they would constitute a certain imitation or analogue of the nuptial blessing^[7] invoked on the man and woman united in the sacrament of Matrimony, while in fact “there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family”^[8].

The declaration of the unlawfulness of blessings of unions between persons of the same sex is not therefore, and is not intended to be, a form of unjust discrimination, but rather a reminder of the truth of the liturgical rite and of the very nature of the sacramentals, as the Church understands them.

The Christian community and its Pastors are called to welcome with respect and sensitivity persons with homosexual inclinations, and will know how to find the most appropriate ways, consistent with Church teaching, to proclaim to them the Gospel in its fullness. At the same time, they should recognize the genuine nearness of the Church – which prays for them, accompanies them and shares their journey of Christian faith^[9] – and receive the teachings with sincere openness.

The answer to the proposed dubium does not preclude the blessings given to individual persons with homosexual inclinations^[10], who manifest the will to live in fidelity to the revealed plans of God as proposed by Church teaching. Rather, it declares illicit any form of blessing that tends to acknowledge their unions as such. In this case, in fact, the blessing would manifest not the intention to entrust such individual persons to the protection and help of God, in the sense mentioned above, but to approve and encourage a choice and a way of life that cannot be recognized as objectively ordered to the revealed plans of God^[11].

At the same time, the Church recalls that God Himself never ceases to bless each of His pilgrim children in this world, because for Him “we are more important to God than all of the sins that we can commit”^[12]. But he does not and cannot bless sin: he blesses sinful man, so that he may recognize that he is part of his plan of love and allow himself to be changed by him. He in fact “takes us as we are, but never leaves us as we are”^[13].

For the above mentioned reasons, the Church does not have, and cannot have, the power to bless unions of persons of the same sex in the sense intended above.

The Sovereign Pontiff Francis, at the Audience granted to the undersigned Secretary of this Congregation, was informed and gave his assent to the publication of the above-mentioned Responsum ad dubium, with the annexed Explanatory Note.

Rome, from the Offices of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the 22^nd of February 2021, Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter, Apostle.

 

Luis F. Card. Ladaria, S.I.

Prefect

Giacomo Morandi

Archbishop tit. of Cerveteri

Secretary

_______________________

^[1] FRANCIS, Apostolic Exhortation Amoris laetitia, 250.

^[2] SYNOD OF BISHOPS, Final Document of the XV Ordinary General Assembly, 150.

^[3] SECOND VATICAN ECUMENICAL COUNCIL, Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum Concilium, 60.

^[4] RITUALE ROMANUM ex Decreto Sacrosancti Oecumenici Concilii Vaticani II instauratum auctoritate Ioannis Pauli PP. Il promulgatum, De bendictionibus, Praenotanda Generalia, n.9.

^[5] Ibidem, n. 10.

^[6] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2357.

^[7] In fact, the nuptial blessing refers back to the creation account, in which God's blessing on man and woman is related to their fruitful union (cf. Gen 1:28) and their complementarity (cf. Gen 2:18-24).

^[8] FRANCIS, Apostolic Exhortation Amoris laetitia, 251.

^[9] Cf. CONGREGATION FOR THE DOCTRINE OF THE FAITH, Letter Homosexualitatis problema On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, 15.

^[10] De benedictionibus in fact presents an extended list of situations for which to invoke the blessing of the Lord.

^[11] CONGREGATION FOR THE DOCTRINE OF THE FAITH, Letter Homosexualitatis problema On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, 7.

^[12] FRANCIS, General Audience of December 2, 2020, Catechesis on Prayer, the blessing.

^[13] Ibidem.

Now let the woke Internet reaction begin.

And it certainly will.  

The adherent and faithful in the Church should be buoyed by the restatement of the long held Catholic understanding of sexual relations outside of marriage, of all types, being illicit, which is the basic holding of this document, based on the Catholic understanding of marriage which is that it can only occur between complimentary genders and be oriented, by that nature, to the possibility of life.  Indeed, this is a step toward  the reaffirmation of orthodoxy that many have been hoping for.  Therefore, Rad Trads and the like should be very much buoyed by it, but we'll see if they are.

Catholic liberals, and western secularists, will have a fit.  They've been hoping for the Pope to follow the path that the German Bishops seem intent in blazing which would basically shelve St. Paul forever and follow the paths of Protestant churches that have simply abandoned almost all long held Christian tenants regarding sex.  Of note, German Bishops have dropping out of the "Synodal Path" over time and therefore its claim to be able to proclaim on such issues within Germany is weakening.  The Vatican has already indicated that it cannot take actions that are contrary to doctrine as it is, although its leadership has seemed intent on doing just that.  This action effectively informs the German Bishops, in advance of their taking any action, that they cannot in this area.  The German Bishops in the Synodal Path have in the past simply ignored the Vatican and now there's a clear line in the sand.

One thing the very wealthy but increasingly ignored German Catholic Church doesn't quite seem to want to acknowledge is that Christianity has never been a religion that simply ratified people's needs and wants^[1].  Indeed, whether there is such a religion that's survived long term is questionable.  Certainly in the English speaking world large sections of the Protestant denominations have done just that, turning a blind eye to pretty much all of the sins that St. Paul said barred the gates of Heaven to their participants^[2].  The Catholic Church, moreover, has always been clear on sin and its effect, while not holding that the individual person is an anathema, something that ironically some hard line Protestant churches that now ignore this conduct once did^[3].

This has caused particular confusion in the United States which is a Protestant nation in numbers and cultures.  Because of the long influence of certain Protestant denominations in the US, there's a general retained cultural belief that all Christians are opposed to science, for example, which is far from true in the case of knowledgeable Catholics^[4].  There's also a retained belief and a mocking belief in the secular left that Christian morality is defined by Mike Meyers' "Church Lady" from Saturday Night Live.

Meyers grew up in Toronto and was born of English parents, which is interesting in that Toronto, now one of the most liberal cities in Canada, was once one of the most conservative and most English.  Meyers sort of personally reflects Toronto in that fashion.  Toronto, for example, was once the bastion of English conservative beliefs, but its hip Canadian progressive culture defines the opposite now.  While Meyers "Church Lady" was presented on American television, it fits that view of Christianity that baffles Catholics as it doesn't represent Catholic Christianity or any of the Apostolic faiths in their world outlook, which holds that God's nature is unchanging, universally good, but that all humans are burdened with a cross to bear they can accept or reject, with some crosses heavier than others.  People with homosexual inclinations, Apostolic Christians hold, cannot act upon those licitly, any more than people with "polyamorous" ones can, but that doesn't make the people themselves objects of contempt.

All of this has presented any number of societal challenges in the modern world, particularly the post Second World War world. We've often noted before that something seems to have dramatically changed following World War Two, and perhaps because of it.  We've posted on that many times in the past, and in fact just recently.   What exactly it is, isn't clear, but what is clear is that something has changed in how people view their fealty to things outside of themselves, particularly when they're against deep seated desires.

Some of this changed prior to the war, to be sure, but following the war society became wealthier and wealthier.  European nations that had been regarded as "advanced" and "industrialized" none the less contained vast number of working poor and rural poor.  This was true of the US as well, but mech less so.  It would be totally false to argue that the working poor were all religious or even traditional.  Indeed, to a large extent the opposite was true, which is what gave rise to so many Socialist and Communist parties before the Second World War.  Nonetheless, large numbers of people did focus in the immediate and the metaphysical in ways that people do not now.  Somehow, since that time,  as wealth increased, "self realization" did as well, not all of which was a bad thing by any means.  But at the point we are now at, this has advanced to the point where people actually define themselves in some instances by their sexual urges, and that's a bizarre thing.

Agree with the Responsum or not, (and Catholics must agree with it), it serves to focus on something which people need reminded of.  For those with faith, God does not exist to validate our self realization or to give the stamp of approval to all of our desires, no matter how strongly felt.  It's a fallen world. And for those without faith, its not a perfect world and we cannot make it so.  The basic order of it is plain to see, but reengineering it on a person by person basis cannot be done and in fact is dangerous to try. 

Footnotes:

1.  German churches and synagogues benefit from the Kirchensteuer which taxes the income of registered members from their paychecks. As there's a real "out of sight, out of mind" element to payroll taxation, its something that people really don't pay that much attention to even though the approximately 8% taxation rate is not unsubstantial.  By analogy, very few Americans pay any attention to their FICA tax rate which is 6.2% for the employee and 6.2% for the employer.

About 70% of German church and synagogue revenue comes in this fashion, and as a result the German churches are very wealthy.  For reasons that are unclear, however, the problems that we've noted here in regard to post World War Two morality and whatnot have hit Germany fairly hard in recent years.  It's worth noting, therefore, in this context that people who are convinced that state support of religion keeps it strong do not have very good evidence to support that.  Indeed, some evidence of the opposite can fairly easily be found.

For what its worth, this system is not unique to Germany and is in fact common in Scandinavia.  

2.  Some of done this in a fairly remarkable fashion with the larger Anglican Communion providing one such example.

To be completely fair, the Church of England never had that good of grasp on the English in the first place.  England was as devoutly religious nation throughout its long Christian era, a period which is considerably longer than its Protestant era, but is forced conversion to Protestantism was rocky and violent, and never really worked out that well.  Unlike the Scandinavian regions were distance and confusion operated to allow a complete co-opting of Catholicism in the region, the United Kingdom rocked back and forth between doctrinal positions before finally landing on the Anglican one.  By that time large groups of English had only loose affiliation with the new religion.  In the colonies, however, the Church of England did fairly well, although the oddity of the American Revolution created a particularly odd severance, and retained loyalty, in the Episcopal community.

None the less,  particularly in the U.S., but also in Canada, the Episcopal Church benefitted from being wealthy and was associated with economic success. That fact made it a magnet to Christians of other denominations.  Protestants who wanted to associate with the more affluent could switch denominations and be comfortable that they were entering what seemed to be a Protestant church, even if the Anglican Communion itself was murky on whether it believed itself to be Protestant.  Catholics who were willing to commit what the Church holds is a mortal sin by leaving it could convince themselves that they really were not, if they were attracted to the Episcopal Church for economic reasons, as the Episcopal Church retained many Catholic features.  Indeed, this was so much the case that at one time the question of the validity of its Holy Orders was submitted to the Vatican which returned the opinion that they were "completely null and utterly void".

At any rate, the Anglican Communion was highly conservative up into the 1960s.  It didn't, and still doesn't officially, recognize divorce.  But starting in the 1930s it began to move toward more liberal positions subtly, and then a wing of it, like a wing of every Christian faith in North America, became politically liberal in the 1960s.  It's never stopped evolving in that position and whereas as late as the 1960s there was some thought that it might reunite with the Catholic Church, it's put itself far to the left on many social issues since that time. At the same time, its pews began clearing out and some conservative parishes joined the Catholic Church.  A recent report in Canada suggests that the once powerful Anglican Church in Canada may well go extinct in the foreseeable future, oddly leaving disappearing parishes that are well endowed with funds from prior loyal members.

3. This is true of the modern Orthodox churches as well.  While Orthodoxy made some concessions in the area of marriage and remarriage long ago, in terms of modern social trends its turned its back on them.  This was perhaps particularly well summed up, in terms of their views, in the statement issued by the Russian Orthodox Bishop in Alaska who politely and firmly noted that Supreme Court decisions had no impact of the moral teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church.

4.  Indeed, this is confusing enough that many rank and file American Catholics, including occasionally American Catholic religious, have picked up Protestant beliefs in this fashion.  It's not uncommon to hear some Catholics express the view held by some Evangelical Christians on evolution, for example, even though the greater Church has no position at all on that topic, and most Catholics world wide accept it.  This is, interestingly, a very recent development.

Misunderstanding demographics

The professor returns for a discussion on demographics.

One of the most common features of social science is completely misunderstanding the topic of demographics. Indeed, we ought to note that nearly all demographic predictions are wrong in retrospect.

One thing we might start off with is something we noted long ago in our first law of history, which holds:

Everything first happened longer ago than you suspect.
It doesn't matter what the topic is, but the first occurrence of anything is always further back in time than originally thought.  This is why certain distant dates are continually pushed back, and will continue to be. So, take whatever you like, say the first use of the horse, or the first appearance of humans in North America, and you'll find the "first" date gets more and more distant in time.  Things that were thought to happen, say, 5,000 years ago, turn out to have happened 50,000 years ago, or 500,000 years ago, as we gain better data.

This was presented, of course, in terms of the historical past, but it's also true of the present.  We might, in fact, need to present another rule, which would be:

By the time media picks up on a story, it's already well advanced.

Such is certainly the case here.

Pop social scientists have been worried about the "population bomb" since at least the 1960s, or even much earlier if you go back to Malthusian angst. But the truth of the matter is that professional demographers have known for decades that the predicted population curve will start to decline this century.  Usually they run populations through the end of the century and no further, for good reason. Demographic predictions, as noted, are notoriously inaccurate. But the ultimate decline in the human population is an established scientific probability that's so well established its not worth debating.

Indeed, from a scientific perspective, the predictions that the population is going to keep growing and growing all over the globe which has been popular in apocalyptic books has been known to be flat out wrong for at least two decades if not longer.  Demographers began to revise their downward population trend predictions well over a decade ago to take into account the much more rapid decline, that's right decline, in population that was already beginning to become a feature across the globe. Apparently nobody really took note, however, until sometime a couple of weeks ago when they did it again as the well established trend is accelerating and therefore global population decline will set in much more quickly than we had originally thought.

Indeed, in spite of the "what we're doing now to ourselves" concerns, some of which are indeed very valid, this is something that's been occurring since the turn of the prior century and was a matter of angst then.  Observers in the United States, for example, worried as far ago as the early 20th Century that the white, or rather the White Anglo Saxon Protestant, demographic birth rate was dropping off so fast that it meant demographic death, while they also worried about the black birth rate (and the Catholic one) which was not, at that time.  Such concerns ultimately gave rise to the likes of people like Margaret Sanger who called blacks "weeds" and promoted abortion as as a well of arresting their population increase.  Only this past week did Planned Parenthood, the organization that she founded, change the name of one of their installations once it became too politically imprudent to continue an honor a woman who was a racist promoting abortion to keep black numbers down.

In Germany there was such a concern about the drop off in the birth rate that the Nazi Party went to extreme rates, icky propaganda, and icky programs to try to reverse the decline.  Ultimately, they even took to kidnapping children who they felt could pass for German, handing them out to German families.  Most never made it back to their original parents.  More than one country in that time frame boosted programs to try to increase the number of children that women were having, all to no effect.

The reason that we note all of this is that the decline is a demographic fact that pre dates pharmaceuticals to prevent or abort birth.

It's closely tied to economics, something that's well known in one way, and the source of misplaced concern in another.  Simply put, and dating back prior to the real incorporation of women into the workplace, as advanced economies managed to raise the bulk of their populations into the middle class, birth rates fell.  As this is happening all over the world, and quickly, birth rates are accordingly falling quickly.

Indeed, poor societies tend to have high birth rates, although this isn't always true. The classic reason for this is that the poor have tended to depend on their children for support in old age, although in the United States, where most of the poor actually are at an economic level that would have been regarded as lower middle class a century ago, this isn't the reason.  In that case the law of unintended consequences has operated to incentive child birth economically while simultaneously operating to destroy marital bonds in the same demographic.

Which takes us to our next point, which perhaps should be a law as well, that being

Old understandings of conditions continue to be believed well after they are no longer correct.

Here that old understanding is the same one that operates classically to produce high birth rates in poor demographics, but with a societal application.

That is, it's widely believed that a declining birth rate is a societal disaster as large numbers, indeed an ever increasing number, of new workers is necessary to support an old retiring populations.

That's complete nonsense.

It's nonsense as it doesn't contemplate the fact of ever increasing societal wealth, which has been a decade by decade feature of economies ever since the beginning of the Renaissance.  It also doesn't take into account the advance of technology.

In fact, it's interesting to note that the very same societies and journals that are now worried about the human population now decreasing are also proposing a Universal Basic Income because technology is, they assert (probably correctly) going to put so many people out of work.  So we're simultaneously worrying that a decrease in the population means that there are fewer workers to support an aging population while we are also worrying that entering generations of workers are going to be put out of work by technology.

If you consider that both things may be operating at one time, what it should lead you to believe is that; 1) a declining population of workers is a good thing as work is also declining; and 2) advances in technology are making society wealthier and that's a good thing as it supports everyone, including the old.

Of course, that ought to also lead you to question the American policy of massive immigration rates, which are designed to offset our population decline, which otherwise set in during the 1970s.  We frankly aren't going to have a place for the workers we're bringing in, if technologist are correct, so what we're doing is importing future unemployment.  Indeed, as those same entrants come from less technologically advanced nations, the argument can be made that their future labor, which they depend on for a livelihood, will shortly be needed more where they are, than where they are going to.

All of which means:

1.  This isn't a future economic problem of any sort.

2.  It doesn't mean that future generations of elderly will be without economic support.

3.  It's actually good for the environment and the standard of living in every sense.

That doesn't mean, however that there aren't some things worth considering and perhaps being a bit worried about.

In that context, while take a look at bits of an essay by Fr. David Longnecker.  Fr. Longnecker is more classically concerned about this, and I've discounted those concerns above, but that doesn't mean that there aren't societal things that shouldn't be considered, with some rejected, nonetheless.

Well start with his essay, which was titled:

THE ABOLITION OF MAN…LITERALLY

First of all, that's dramatic, but that' isn't occurring.  People aren't going away.  There are a lot of us, and a long term decline in population will have to go on for at least two centuries before there's a real problem.  The BBC article that Fr. Longnecker linked in noted that Japan and Spain could see a 50% reduction in their populations by 2100, but if we consider that Japan's population is 126,500,000, nearly as high as Russia's, that would hardly amount to a disaster.  That would place Japan's population at around 60,000,000 which is still far too high to make Japan a really nice place to live.  Added to that, on the human understanding of population, Japan's pre World War Two population was 90,000,000 which the Japanese regarded as so dense that it required, in their view, starting colonies in Asia in order to export its population.

Spain's population is about 47,000,000, about the same as pre World War Two Germany's.  Spain isn't big.  If it had 23,000,000 it's still be pretty darned crowded.

You get the point.

The US, I'd note, hasn't. Our population is predicted to be higher than it current is in 2100, although not enormously so, as we keep importing a population.  The US is already so densely populated in some areas that regions that were once regarded as really idyllic are horrifying crapholes, Los Angeles being a prime example, followed by the rest of California.  We keep doing that for the reasons noted above, and also because we find it convenient to engage in a version of slavery light, in which we import the poor so that we don't have to pay our own poor a living wage.

Okay, so that only reinforces what I've already said.  So nothing to worry about, right?

Well, societally there is, which is mostly not what we're doing.  And here's where Longnecker, first among the really erudite critics, points out, succinctly, things that are problematic.

We first note:

What else is driving the lower birth rate? Young people are not choosing to marry and have children. Not only that, an increasing number are choosing not to make love. They can’t be bothered.

Is that really correct?

Well, part of it is, and part of it isn't. 

We've noted already that the widely held perception that people are marrying later and later isn't really true.  The young marriage ages that people generally are considering are actually usually demographic flukes that apply to unique economic conditions. 

Indeed, we've analyzed that all here in depth, and shown that marriage ages have remained remarkably stable since the Middle Ages:

Shockingly young! Surprisingly old! Too young, too old! Well, nothing much actually changing at all. . . Marriage ages then. . . and now. . and what does it all mean?

Added to this is the statistical problem of how couples that "cohabitate" or "live together" are regarded and counted.  Throughout the Christian era, until very recently, this was strongly frowned upon culturally, but at the same time occured much more often than might be supposed.  If examples given, for instance, in such well researched works as Kristin Lavransdatter are considered, they were fairly common among the gentry, if again strongly disapproved of, although they usually didn't have an illegitimate status endlessly. They broke up or resulted in marriage.  They were extremely common among British minor nobility in the 18th Century and early 19th.  They'd become so common among the British industrial working class that the concept of Common Law Marriage was introduced in order to deal with the situation in a formal way.

When no fault divorce spread through the English world and then around the world, the common law marriage died off. But the behavior remains.  This causes a statistical problem here as if these same couples were regarded as they once were, marriage in fact would be much more common.  The interesting thing is that with the death of the common law marriage a certain elevation in concept of formal marriages occurred, although divorce, which was once fairly uncommon, remains very very common.

Fr. Longnecker wouldn't want to be seen to be endorsing common law marriage and is really dealing with a social issue in advance of dealing with it from the Catholic and Christian prospective, but its important to note there that our concept of what's occurring may be inaccurate.  Having said that, the second part and third parts of his observation is correct.

Young people are not choosing to marry and have children. Not only that, an increasing number are choosing not to make love. They can’t be bothered.

People remaining childless has become quite common, although in recent years, at least by informal observation, that trend is reversing. Even where it is reversing, however, it isn't as if couples are normally choosing to have large numbers of children.  And while Catholics would generally regard it as a good development, the epidemic of sex outside of marriage that dropped down into the teens and twenties in the 70s, 80s, and 90s has really reversed.  Not only are married couples not having as many children, unmarried people aren't engaging in sex as often as they were in spite of the constant entertainment industry and societal pressure that urges them too.

Indeed, on the last item things are really thick with irony.

There's been a lot of questions about all of this in recent years, with theories ranging from the sociological to the biological.  

Sociologically, the impact of work seems to be a definite factor in some societies, particularly the United States and Japan.  The US has become as obsessed with careerism as Japan has and the emphasis in the US has really shifted since World War Two from finding a good job or career, to support a family, to a career being the end all and be all of everything.  This has been something that's impacted both men and women.  

Fr. Longnecker notes:

The reasons are complicated but among them are the aggressiveness of the modern feminist. High powered career focussed women are not interested in marriage and babies and many young men are not interested in this type of woman so the guys just opt out.

And he may in fact be right, but only in part.  Its not only because the feminist ethos has become hostile to men, which in some instances it is, and always has been, but the emphasis on careers and work in Western society have spread to women when originally it only pertained to men, and not in the same way.

This can sound like we're saying something we're not.  We're not saying women shouldn't work.  Rather, what we're saying is that there came a shift over time in which both men and women were sold a line of propaganda that held real worldly fulfillment came through careers.  That was always baloney.  

Indeed, people have always normally taken up whatever work they take up in order to get by in life, which for most people meant providing for their family  The thought of a spouse interfering with a career was really foreign to most people. Rather, the opposite, often applying only to men in earlier times, was that a career became a necessary burden and even a sacrifice to support a family The family came first in the equation.  Now a lot of people simply forgo families as its hindrance to a career, the irony being that careers are just jobs and it turns out that the majority of people don't like their jobs.

Indeed, before we move on, one thing that all of this raises is the topic of "temporary marriages", something that now exist throughout Western society but which is basically only acknowledged, oddly enough, in Iran.

Islam has a religious institution of temporary marriages, although it's really rare in almost every Islamic society save for Iran.  In Iran, which retains a fairly advanced Western economy, it's not and its even somewhat encouraged.

The Islamic institution of the temporary marriage acknowledged that humans have a sex drive while, at the same time, young people often have goals which are contrary to contracting a marriage.  In Christian cultures divorce was traditionally disallowed, which obviously isn't the case in Western cultures now, but in both Islamic and Judaic societies it isn't.  Sex outside of marriage is frowned upon in nearly every culture and religion and very much so in the Abrahamic religions.  Temporary marriages made temporary couples' actions licit.  They can have sex and not stray from morality, even though they're likely to split up later.

Following the sexual revolution the cultural leaders in the Western world encouraged and nearly demanded that everyone engage in premarital sex and only those with strong religious feelings will openly regard it as wrong now in spite of the social devastation that the change has brought about.  What's been missed is that as this has occurred, a lot of Westerners basically engage in something equivalent to temporary marriages.  No formal marriage is (usually) contracted, but people cohabitate in conditions in which its nearly acknowledged that it's all just temporary and has at least a partial goal of satisfying urges.  Obviously, a child is permanent, and therefore they're creation is diligently avoided in those arrangements.  

But is is more than that.  The heavy emphasis on work has been shown, in Japan, to cause such a level of fatigue that people are just not interested.

The example of Japan gives us another factor as well, although our own culture also does.

Pornography is a huge Japanese industry. There's something really odd here in that Japan produces a massive amount of pornography of all types, right down to the cartoon level.  That stuff is being used for something.

When the word was first coined over a hundred years ago the world "homosexual" pertained to men whose sexual impulses were self directed.  The word's meaning has changed, rather obviously, over the years, but at that time it was believed that the other meaning, the one it now has, flowed naturally from the first meaning to the practice of the second. That may sound odd, but it's not completely illogical as it is in fact the case that some people become so focused on the first that all conventional impulses are overridden, and for others it leads them into really odd acts.  There would be few (although there are some) who would maintain that this is the case today, but the mental pathway for those assumptions weren't completely illogical.

Part of the reason that they weren't completely illogical is that by and large people's impulses had to be conventionally directed by nature.  Pornography was in printed form up until introduced into film, and in both instances obtaining it had to be done at least somewhat publicly, and often illegally in earlier eras.  We've already dealt with how that changed after the introduction of Playboy magazine, which introduced a really skewed version of femininity,and we've traced that history and its interactions with pharmaceuticals and the sexual revolution already.  Indeed, we have multiple posts on it.  What the Internet has done is to make pornography free. 

And what that has done has turned a lot of men, more or less, into the original definition of homosexuals. Rather than have to deal with woman who is a person, will have moods, problems, get sick, get mad, have expectations, and the like, they just opt for a photographed (or cartoon) harem that doesn't do any of those things and is only interested in sex whenever men are.

And men will be more interested as a rule than women.  And like the old knowledge that we're no longer supposed to acknowledge holds, women are much more moodier, and perhaps simply have much keener and sharper feelings, than men do.  Nearly any married man has had to learn, or at least to learn, how to deal with feelings and reactions that he can't really fathom.  Simply electing to turn on the desktop and opt for photos of a series of massive boobed prostitutes (as that's really what they are) is easier.  At some point, it becomes not only easier, but a habit, and then some cross over into what the original definition of homosexuality was.  Most will not, but all will suffer some decay because of it and indeed nearly our entire society has.  Frustrated men who would have made decent husbands and fathers in earlier eras become loners who really have only the companionship of their workmates in fairly large numbers.  Fr. Longnekcer briefly addresses this in his comment here:

Another contributing factor to the falling birth rate is the twisted approach to sex caused by pornography. An article in London’s Daily Mail explains the research done on the effect porn and masturbation have on male libido. The short version is, guys find porn more stimulating than the real thing and self abuse easier than building a real relationship.

Finally, it can't help be noted that part of the explanation, but not all of it, for the decline in population is pharmacological and that the law of unintended consequences applies to that.  We've addressed that before a couple of times here:

The Chemical News: "New Study Links Birth Control Pill to Brain Differences, but Don't Panic", "Breast Cancer Warning Tied To Hair Dye", "Hair Dyes and Straighteners May Raise Breast Cancer Risk for Black Women". Go ahead and panic.

And here:

We like everything to be all natural. . . . except for us.

Truth be known, if the "pill" were introduced today, it's unlikely that it would be around long.  Lawyers would drive it out of existence through lawsuits if government regulators didn't.  But now we're fully used to it and it's not going away.  But its impacts aren't.

It's been repeatedly more or less maintained that this set of drugs is "safe" and that there's no overall impact on the human biome in any significant way. But we know that some of this isn't true, as the first item noted above notes.  Birth control pills are known to cause disruption in female thinking, alter brains, and cause cancer.  What the do to men isn't known, but the routine assertion that they do nothing is at least questionable.

Something is causing an increase in male sterility.  We don't know what it is. And while it may simply be a reflection of the Strauss-Howe generational theory at work (men become what women want them to be), it might not be.  Scientifically its been shown that younger generations of men are weaker than currently older ones.  And a lot, but certainly not all, of younger men now are much more lighter and, dare we say it, effeminate than their predecessors.  It's currently popular to speak of "Toxic Masculinity", but much of that was simply masculinity and, in an era not all that long ago, what women sought out.

That latter fact may be, as noted, an example of the Strauss Howe factors at work.  But it might also be the influences of chemicals in our environment as well.  And those chemicals may be having long term effects on both men and women in unnatural ways.

Well, does it matter?

It does, therefore, but not for the reasons that people are worried about.  It matters because families are the root of any decent society where as the individual and the individuals whims aren't.  People aren't made to live the lives of rootless economic samurai and they aren't happy doing so.  If we're altering ourselves chemically that's definitely a bad thing.

So once again, we should at least pause and think.

The Wreck of the Birkenhead

On this day in 1852 the HMS Birkenhead struck rocks off the coast of South Africa and sunk in stormy seas. The ship had 634 passengers, most of whom were soldiers in the British Army from various units. As some of those units were cavalry, it also had a cargo of horses.

One hundred soldiers drowned in the initial collision, but the remainder made it to the deck. The ship, as was common for military transports of the time, also had a small number of women and children. When it was realized the vessel was lost, the order was given to place the women and children (seven women, thirteen children) in the lifeboats. The horses were then set loose into the sea in hopes they'd swim the two miles to shore. The soldiers were ordered to stand fast as the ship sank out of fear that if they swam for life boats, which was first proposed than countermanded, they would swamp the life boats. They remained nearly silent the entire time.

The women and children survived. 113 soldiers also did, some swimming two miles over 12 hours, some clinging to wreckage, and some to the floating hull where they were picked up the next day. Many of those who went into the sea were killed by sharks. Six Royal Marines and 54 sailors also survived. Eight horses successfully swam to shore.

I note this for no particular reason other than that this tragedy occurred on this day so long ago. The soldiers were on their way to a colonial war against the Xhosa, a British effort which wouldn't draw any admiration today. Be that as it may, the sacrifice they did make in their final hours is one that a person might wonder if men today would make, and it was really heroic.

Soldier an' Sailor Too, by Kipling. 

To take your chance in the thick of a rush, with firing all about,Is nothing so bad when you've cover to 'and, an' leave an' likin' to shout;But to stand an' be still to the Birken'ead drill is a damn tough bullet to chew,An' they done it, the Jollies -- 'Er Majesty's Jollies -- soldier an' sailor too!Their work was done when it 'adn't begun; they was younger nor me an' you;Their choice it was plain between drownin' in 'eaps an' bein' mopped by the screw,So they stood an' was still to the Birken'ead drill, soldier an' sailor too

The Overly Long Thread. Gender Trends of the Past Century, Definitions, Society, Law, Culture and Their Odd Trends and Impacts.

The conversion of St. Paul by Caravaggio.  St. Paul, it might be noted, was executed for his message.  Bringing up this topic has a tinge of that, as the messenger pretty much can be guaranteed to draw flak.

I started a long post once on the crisis in the Catholic Church, but which wasn't actually on the crisis in the Catholic Church. Rather it was on societal developments.

I'll self edit on this blog, I'll note, which means I'll be cowardly.  Occasionally I'll write something and then not post it as I don't want to offer offense.  This is an example of hubris, of course, in that it presumes the existence of a readership to offend, for which there is scant evidence.  Indeed, I've really only put up a couple of post that have offended certain readers that I'm aware of, one being an early post criticizing Colorado's ill thought out legalization of marijuana, which ironically came up in the context of  the centennial of its being made illegal, and secondly a post which noted that the Civil War really was about slavery, which offends some folks who insist that it was not.*  Nonetheless, I still self edit on some controversial topics or where I stray off into what could be controversial.

Rockwell's "Fact and Fiction".  This blog normally gets between 200 to 300 hits per day, which doesn't exactly put it in the New York Times category.

This is one of those topics for a variety of reasons.  The most recent occasion I started this thread I noted:

I've started and stopped this thread probably a half a dozen times.  Most due to self editing.  I.e., given as I think there's a low chance of this being 1) read, and 2) understood if it is read, I thought about just putting it aside. 

But then I read a stupid op ed by a relative of my relatives, which makes us a non relative but sort of related, so I decided to recommence it.

And then I dropped it.**

Puck from May, 1914.  Probably reflective of the level of attention some of my more serious posts here get.  Having said that, when a lot of serious posts are posted here, the readership hits tend to go up noticeably.

The most significant reason I dropped it is that the John Jay Report on sexual abuse of third parties in the Catholic Church makes it extremely obvious that the overwhelming (up over 80%) majority of such abuse or inappropriate behavior was done by homosexual men on post pubescent males. That is, it was men on young men.  Even the ranking clergy, for various reasons, doesn't say that very often, but it's the case. The relationship when you connect all the dots is in the 90 percentile range, far too high to even be worried about statistical error of any kind.  That's what it is.

This provokes an immediate reply that homosexual men (and we're really talking only about men here) are no more likely to commit acts of rape upon children than "straight" men, and I have no reason whatsoever to believe that this isn't in fact the case.  Most abuse on children is by straight men.

Indeed not only are most cases of abuse by straight men, but the number one predictor of abuse is, FWIW, straight men living in the household of young or underage females who are not their children.  I.e., "stepfathers" or something that's sort of like that (or let's be honest, live in men who are really the temporary, quite often, "significant others" of the woman they're living with).  The number two indicator is simply fathers of female children.

This would tell us that its certainly not the case that if all clerics were "straight" that there'd be no abuse, and it also doesn't suggest that if they were allowed to be married  (which was sort of the topic of one of my earlier discarded drafts) that there's be no abuse.***  So we don't mean to suggest that: 1) all homosexual men and only homosexual men are abusers and 2) if there were not homosexual clerics there's be no abuse.  No, we didn't say that.

Going on, FWIW, the number one occupation of abusers is school teacher.  School teachers far and away are the most likely to be acting inappropriately sexually towards children. . . and teenagers.

We note teenagers here as that's about to get relevant. As when we look at the priest abuse case, they really have not been principally on children.  Most of them are acts by men upon young men or male teenagers.

The acts aren't at the same rate as those by school teachers.  This fact is relevant, but we'll deal with it below.

It's also become hugely plain that its principally something that occurred in a certain time frame, and that time frame starts to some degree in the 1950s and ends in the 1980s.  Before that, there was very, very little abuse of any kind. After that, it's dropped so low that its clearly disappearing.  It's also plain that in the same time frame we know that the percentage of homosexuals who made up the priesthood increased a great deal, i.e., the 1950s through the early 1980s, but it's dropped so low since that statistically it can actually be said it's reached the 0 point.

Now, this is controversial for a variety of reasons, the primary one being that homosexuality went from something that was universally abhorred at the start of the time we're speaking of, to tolerated but thought of as very odd by the 1970s, to where presently it is officially regarded as normal conduct and a person isn't really supposed to say anything negative at all.  My earlier draft post took the position that the increase in homosexuals reflected post World War Two economic changes that manifested themselves starting in the 1950s and it didn't address the conduct of the larger class of homosexuals in any fashion whatsoever.  None the less, I never posted it.

Maybe it's best that I didn't, as since then I think that what I was pondering in that post wasn't wholly accurate as there's something much larger at work here, although I think my more detailed points were correct.  Those basic points were that prior to 1945 it was pretty uniformly the case that men entering the priesthood were opting for a fairly difficult life but that, at the same time, the economic realities of the world were such that it wasn't that much more difficult than life in general was.  Indeed, the burdens of a family were sufficiently high that either not being able to afford to get married at all, or simply opting not to, weren't as uncommon as we might suppose. So men entering the priesthood weren't giving up as much, particularly depending upon where they lived, as it might at first seem.  Indeed, they were often gaining.

Following 1945 the wealth in American society increased dramatically but so did the wealth in European society, as it was reconstructed following the war.  It took a long time, and it varied in when it had really ramped up beyond 1932 levels, but it did ultimately occur everywhere.  By 1968, the year of the great world wide social upheavals, it was well in in swing everywhere. At any rate, in my view, that changed things in one way in that men with conventional orientations who previously had perhaps found it easier to hear their calling to the priesthood now were in a different situation as they could afford to have a family.  Indeed, it occurs to me that I know more than one fairly devout Catholic married man who was in the seminary in that period and then left it in order to get married.

Things were different from homosexuals however as the priesthood offered them a way out of social scrutiny and therefore they began to take that route in increasing numbers.  That doesn't explain all of what occurred and we'll drop off to Pope Benedict's comments next, but I'm pretty sure it explains part of it.  I'll comment as we go along.  But to conclude my comments before we launch off in reading the text below, I also think that partially explains the drop off.  Being a homosexual without a calling, which is distinctly different from being a homosexual with a calling, would be an entirely different matter for a Priest for the same reason being a straight man without a calling would be. Without the calling, restraint would be hard.  Now that things have developed to where a person can't even really discuss this topic without drawing criticism, things are in a different state entirely in which there's really no reason for homosexuals without a calling to enter the Priesthood at all.**** There's no advantage for them whatsoever as they have no reason to find a place to really hide the inclinations, irrespective of whether they yield to it or not.  This same factor, however, is not true for those who have been closeted for decades, as they either must keep their deception going, or run the risk of clearly sounding like an apostate.

So we turn to Pope Benedict and see what he has to say.  and we comment on his comments as we move along, with more commentary to follow.

Pope Benedict with George Bush and members of his family.  I like to put in photos, but had a fairly difficult time finding a public domain example for Pope Benedict.  This one is.  Pope Benedict served in that role from 2005 to 2013, at which point he retired from the office, being one of the very few Popes to have ever resigned.  The move was controversial and regretted by many orthodox Catholics, who have not been as happy with his successor.  In retrospect, however, even many orthodox Catholics are somewhat critical of his period in office in that he leaned more on his academic nature rather than be the heavily active Pope they had hoped for.  Benedict, Francis and even St. Pope John Paul the Great have received criticism for their handling of the sexual abuse issue, although it seems largely unfair in the case of Pope Benedict.

And so we start.

On February 21 to 24, at the invitation of Pope Francis, the presidents of the world's bishops' conferences gathered at the Vatican to discuss the current crisis of the faith and of the Church; a crisis experienced throughout the world after shocking revelations of clerical abuse perpetrated against minors.

I'd first note here that this comment continues the myth about the abuse being against "minors". That's true to a degree, but it suggests that it was against young children, which in fact was largely not the case in the way its commonly understood.

Now, we need to understand that by the American definition a person younger than 18 years of age is a minor.  Other nations have other definitions of this, but they're all close to his age, so generally we can find some extremes in the western world in which a minor might be 16 years of age, but that isn't that common.  Indeed, up until fairly recently quite a few nations had stepped in definitions of when a person reached the age of majority, and the United States actually still somewhat does.  In my state, up until very recently, we had a sliding scale in which age 18 was generally the age of majority for some things, but not for others, with that going up to age 21.  Recently there's been a bit of a push back on ages of majority and there's been some who have suggested recreating the 21 age for some things once again. 

At the same time, the age of consent, which is not the same as the age of majority, has pretty uniformly been 18 years of age in the US and much of Western world, unless the acts are between minors and then you once again have a bit of a sliding scale.  Oddly, even though it's widely the case that 18 is the age that generally applies here for some things, it isn't for abortion where it falls below that age on supposed but weak Constitutional grounds that protect only 1/2 of the parties whose conduct has caused a child to come into being.

None of this excuses abuse, but it's important to note.  If a person wished to discuss abuse against blacks and referred to them as Asians, it'd still be abuse, but the story wouldn't be accurate.  Almost all, but not all, of the abuse that occurred that gave rise to this crisis was male on male and male on post pubescent male.   There were some exceptions to be sure, and Pope Benedict mentions one such exception in his text.

The extent and gravity of the reported incidents has deeply distressed priests as well as laity, and has caused more than a few to call into question the very Faith of the Church. It was necessary to send out a strong message, and seek out a new beginning, so to make the Church again truly credible as a light among peoples and as a force in service against the powers of destruction. 

Since I myself had served in a position of responsibility as shepherd of the Church at the time of the public outbreak of the crisis, and during the run-up to it, I had to ask myself - even though, as emeritus, I am no longer directly responsible - what I could contribute to a new beginning. 

Thus, after the meeting of the presidents of the bishops' conferences was announced, I compiled some notes by which I might contribute one or two remarks to assist in this difficult hour. 

Having contacted the Secretary of State, Cardinal and the Holy Father himself, it seemed appropriate to publish this text in the Klerusblatt [ a monthly periodical for clergy in mostly Bavarian dioceses]. 

And in fact that is where this was published.  So the version we are looking at is a translation of that German language text into English.

My work is divided into three parts. 

In the first part, I aim to present briefly the wider social context of the question, without which the problem cannot be understood. I try to show that in the 1960s an egregious event occurred, on a scale unprecedented in history. It could be said that in the 20 years from 1960 to 1980, the previously normative standards regarding sexuality collapsed entirely, and a new normalcy arose that has by now been the subject of laborious attempts at disruption. 

It's mostly that part that I'm interested in here, but I'll take up the whole thing.  Indeed, my earlier abandoned texts did as well.

In the second part, I aim to point out the effects of this situation on the formation of priests and on the lives of priests. 

Finally, in the third part, I would like to develop some perspectives for a proper response on the part of the Church. 

I. 

(1) The matter begins with the state-prescribed and supported introduction of children and youths into the nature of sexuality. In Germany, the then-Minister of Health, Ms. Strobel, had a film made in which everything that had previously not been allowed to be shown publicly, including sexual intercourse, was now shown for the purpose of education. What at first was only intended for the sexual education of young people consequently was widely accepted as a feasible option.

I think this last sentence suffers from an awkward translation form the German.  What seems to be meant is that the film, as it depicted sexual acts, came rapidly be seen as a declaration that the acts depicted were normal, endorsed, and what a person ought to be doing.

I've posted on it elsewhere here, but I'd draw the same analogy to Playboy magazine in the United States, except that it flat out declared that it represented the best standard.  Playboy came out at the same time as the Kinsey reports.  It's now known that what Kinsey depicted in his reports relied hugely on data from imprisoned deviants, as the pool of American men were largely in the service, and that Kinsey himself participated in observing sex crimes against minors.  Playboy actually had a period of time itself during which it increasingly sexualized underage girls in cartoon form until it was called on it and stopped.  Hardly noticed, however, several Playboy models in the early years were only 17 years old, and therefore their nude depictions could have been criminal acts.

The point is that what was depicted in Playboy when it was first introduced did not in fact reflect the views of a majority of Americans, let alone American males, but by the early 1960s the concept that the girl next door was supposed to be dumb, sterile, and available was widely accepted.  Girls not only were subjected to this, but following a decade of increasing acceptance of this juvenile view by males, they accepted it, particularly after pharmaceutical birth control made it possible for them to in fact make themselves sterile.

Similar effects were achieved by the "Sexkoffer" published by the Austrian government [A controversial 'suitcase' of sex education materials used in Austrian schools in the late 1980s]. Sexual and pornographic movies then became a common occurrence, to the point that they were screened at newsreel theaters. I still remember seeing, as I was walking through the city of Regensburg one day, crowds of people lining up in front of a large cinema, something we had previously only seen in times of war, when some special allocation was to be hoped for. I also remember arriving in the city on Good Friday in the year 1970 and seeing all the billboards plastered up with a large poster of two completely naked people in a close embrace.

An interesting observation, much mirroring the American experience although for different reasons, in my view.

Still, consider that 1953 was the year that Playboy magazine came out.  Starting that decade and running through the "innocent" 1950 and up to the mid 1960s (which is really the decade of the 60s in common popular recollection) movies portrays of women went from characters like the smart female heroines of the 1940s to dimwitted large chested twits such as portrayed by Marilyn Monroe.*****  The pre silicon era of American (and Italian) movie actresses focused even then on a collection of enormously endowed women to such an extent that it became the butt of a joke, from the lips of a British character, in 1963s Its A Mad Mad Mad World.

Among the freedoms that the Revolution of 1968 sought to fight for was this all-out sexual freedom, one which no longer conceded any norms. 

1968 really was a watershed year, but I still have no good reason why.   There's something truly odd about 1968.

The mental collapse was also linked to a propensity for violence. That is why sex films were no longer allowed on airplanes because violence would break out among the small community of passengers. And since the clothing of that time equally provoked aggression, school principals also made attempts at introducing school uniforms with a view to facilitating a climate of learning.

All this also occurred in the United States, but not in the same form.  I'm sure that films of the type described  were not ever allowed on American airliners, but television has descended into the depths over time.  The same struggles on clothing were common topics when I was growing up in the 1970s and early 1980s.

While hardly remembered now, school clothing was in fact an issue everywhere.  Where I live, there had been a dress code for high school students that lasted at least into the 1950s.  As mandatory ROTC was a feature of academic high school life for men, that dress code required the wearing of an Army Service Uniform a couple of days a week all the way through the 1960s and into the 1970s, but other standards applied on other days.  Female students had a standard that applied at least into the 1960s but I don't really know much about it.  By the mid 1970s, following the Vietnam War, mandatory high school ROTC was dropped and by the time I was in high school in the 1970s things  had much changed.

There was a dress code, but it was little applied, perhaps because the ability to apply it was thin.  T-shirts were the seeming male norm at the time and we were prohibited from wearing t-shirts that featured beer advertisements, not that many of us would have worn them anyhow.  Having said that, I can recall a student being sent to the office when I was in junior high for wearing just such a shirt.  "Halter tops", i.e., female "tank tops", were banned as well.  Male students would never have worn a "wife beater" t-shirt at the time, so I don't know if they were.  I can recall that nearly every year as we approached warm weather the schools reminding female students that they were not to wear halter tops or very short skirts.  Usually one or two female students would violate the halter top rule and be reminded, but that was about all that occurred as generally girls in this region didn't wear short skirts, nobody wore shorts to school, boys didn't wear shorts at all, and the halter top ban was enforced.

At the same time, however, in national news this frequently came up, and there were one or two cases of judges in the country ruling that the attire of a young woman was a factor in her being assaulted.  This is shocking to consider now, and indeed its reprehensible judicial conduct, but the interesting thing in connection with it is that it always provoked a feminist reaction that held that the view was completely divorced from even a scintilla of reality and that women could and should wear whatever they wanted at any time.

Even by the late 1970s, however, the curve was swinging the other way on female dress and generally the really provocative dress of the 1960s had departed.  This continued on into the 80s and its never returned.  In spite of what people may think, outside of the Hollywood set, female dress has become much more decent than it was in the early 1970s and it already was by the late 1970s, and it's continued to go in that direction.  This has created the odd situation in which, thankfully, average women are now pretty decently dressed as a rule, while those in the influential set depicted on television are often dressed like tramps.  Put another way, an average collection of young women are decently dressed while the cast of Vanderpump Rules looks like a pack of prostitutes at a Los Vegas convention.

Male dress is another matter.  General male dress of the 60s and 70s were fairly masculine, even if sloppy, by default.  Feminized male dress started to come in by the late 1980s and is very much around at present, showing some other sort of evolution.

Part of the physiognomy of the Revolution of ‘68 was that pedophilia was then also diagnosed as allowed and appropriate.

I think this statement would have benefited from clarification.  I can't say that this was the case, completely, in the United States, but then there was an expression of it.  As noted above, Playboy, after getting launched, not only depicted nude women barely of age, but actually some who were minors, and got away with it.  In cartoons they sexualized girls in the same period until they were called on it and stopped.  But by the 1970s movies and advertising pushed these limits until a public outcry in the more conservative United States erupted. The final straws came with advertisements that sexualized pre teen girls and the movies Pretty Baby and Taxi Driver, the latter of which is remembered and the former which is not.  The former, dealing with and glamorizing mother and daughter prostitutes, was real trash and provoked a strong negative public reaction.

For the young people in the Church, but not only for them, this was in many ways a very difficult time. I have always wondered how young people in this situation could approach the priesthood and accept it, with all its ramifications. The extensive collapse of the next generation of priests in those years and the very high number of laicizations were a consequence of all these developments. 

Because of the way I originally came at this question, I hadn't considered this angle, but it's clearly part of it.

(2) At the same time, independently of this development, Catholic moral theology suffered a collapse that rendered the Church defenseless against these changes in society. I will try to outline briefly the trajectory of this development. 

Until the Second Vatican Council, Catholic moral theology was largely founded on natural law, while Sacred Scripture was only cited for background or substantiation. In the Council's struggle for a new understanding of Revelation, the natural law option was largely abandoned, and a moral theology based entirely on the Bible was demanded.

There also existed a collapse in the Natural Law in the law, to tragic results in my view.  Natural Law in law and philosophy was about the only sound principal that existed in either of those bodies, and now it's been largely replaced with whim and personal opinion.  This is perhaps best exemplified by the really anemic of reasoning in the recent Obergefell opinion.  No matter what a person thinks of the results, the legal reasoning is poor.

I still remember how the Jesuit faculty in Frankfurt trained a highly gifted young Father with the purpose of developing a morality based entirely on Scripture. Father Schüller's beautiful dissertation shows a first step towards building a morality based on Scripture. Father Schüller was then sent to America for further studies and came back with the realization that from the Bible alone morality could not be expressed systematically. He then attempted a more pragmatic moral theology, without being able to provide an answer to the crisis of morality.

The same negative evolution has occurred in the law.  If the law has no basis in nature, it's just a bunch of game rules.

This is also true of philosophy and those fields of science that are only barely scientific.  If not grounded in nature, they're just opinion.

Beyond that, why Schuller was sent to the US is baffling.  The United States has a principally Protestant background, not a Catholic one, and has a strong streak of native Christian thought which had long rejected reason and emphasized faith alone as the basis for belief.  This had lead to extreme rejections of scientific principals which the Catholic Church had never held and still doesn't.

In the end, it was chiefly the hypothesis that morality was to be exclusively determined by the purposes of human action that prevailed. While the old phrase "the end justifies the means" was not confirmed in this crude form, its way of thinking had become definitive. Consequently, there could no longer be anything that constituted an absolute good, any more than anything fundamentally evil; (there could be) only relative value judgments. There no longer was the (absolute) good, but only the relatively better, contingent on the moment and on circumstances.

The crisis of the justification and presentation of Catholic morality reached dramatic proportions in the late ‘80s and ‘90s. On January 5, 1989, the "Cologne Declaration", signed by 15 Catholic professors of theology, was published. It focused on various crisis points in the relationship between the episcopal magisterium and the task of theology. (Reactions to) this text, which at first did not extend beyond the usual level of protests, very rapidly grew into an outcry against the Magisterium of the Church and mustered, audibly and visibly, the global protest potential against the expected doctrinal texts of John Paul II (cf. D. Mieth, Kölner Erklärung, LThK, VI3, p. 196) [LTHK is the Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, a German-language "Lexicon of Theology and the Church", whose editors included Karl Rahner and Cardinal Walter Kasper.] 

Pope John Paul II, who knew very well the situation of moral theology and followed it closely, commissioned work on an encyclical that would set these things right again. It was published under the title Veritatis splendor on August 6, 1993, and it triggered vehement backlashes on the part of moral theologians. Before it, the "Catechism of the Catholic Church" already had persuasively presented, in a systematic fashion, morality as proclaimed by the Church. 

I shall never forget how then-leading German moral theologian Franz Böckle, who, having returned to his native Switzerland after his retirement, announced in view of the possible decisions of the encyclical Veritatis splendor that if the encyclical should determine that there were actions which were always and under all circumstances to be classified as evil, he would challenge it with all the resources at his disposal. 

It was God, the Merciful, that spared him from having to put his resolution into practice; Böckle died on July 8, 1991. The encyclical was published on August 6, 1993 and did indeed include the determination that there were actions that can never become good.

Telling and interesting comment here by Pope Benedict.   Böckle was saved from further sin and perhaps apostasy by his death being timely, and thereby preventing that from occurring.

The pope was fully aware of the importance of this decision at that moment and for this part of his text, he had once again consulted leading specialists who did not take part in the editing of the encyclical. He knew that he must leave no doubt about the fact that the moral calculus involved in balancing goods must respect a final limit. There are goods that are never subject to trade-offs. 

There are values which must never be abandoned for a greater value and even surpass the preservation of physical life. There is martyrdom. God is (about) more than mere physical survival. A life that would be bought by the denial of God, a life that is based on a final lie, is a non-life. 

Martyrdom is a basic category of Christian existence. The fact that martyrdom is no longer morally necessary in the theory advocated by Böckle and many others shows that the very essence of Christianity is at stake here. 

In moral theology, however, another question had meanwhile become pressing: The hypothesis that the Magisterium of the Church should have final competence [infallibility] only in matters concerning the faith itself gained widespread acceptance; (in this view) questions concerning morality should not fall within the scope of infallible decisions of the Magisterium of the Church. There is probably something right about this hypothesis that warrants further discussion. But there is a minimum set of morals which is indissolubly linked to the foundational principle of faith and which must be defended if faith is not to be reduced to a theory but rather to be recognized in its claim to concrete life. 

All this makes apparent just how fundamentally the authority of the Church in matters of morality is called into question. Those who deny the Church a final teaching competence in this area force her to remain silent precisely where the boundary between truth and lies is at stake. 

Independently of this question, in many circles of moral theology the hypothesis was expounded that the Church does not and cannot have her own morality. The argument being that all moral hypotheses would also know parallels in other religions and therefore a Christian property of morality could not exist. But the question of the unique nature of a biblical morality is not answered by the fact that for every single sentence somewhere, a parallel can also be found in other religions. Rather, it is about the whole of biblical morality, which as such is new and different from its individual parts. 

The moral doctrine of Holy Scripture has its uniqueness ultimately predicated in its cleaving to the image of God, in faith in the one God who showed himself in Jesus Christ and who lived as a human being. The Decalogue is an application of the biblical faith in God to human life. The image of God and morality belong together and thus result in the particular change of the Christian attitude towards the world and human life. Moreover, Christianity has been described from the beginning with the word hodós [Greek for a road, in the New Testament often used in the sense of a path of progress]. 

Faith is a journey and a way of life. In the old Church, the catechumenate was created as a habitat against an increasingly demoralized culture, in which the distinctive and fresh aspects of the Christian way of life were practiced and at the same time protected from the common way of life. I think that even today something like catechumenal communities are necessary so that Christian life can assert itself in its own way. 

Okay, this sets Pope Benedict's views as to the history of the situation.  I think he's right, and wrong.  Perhaps what he really is, however, is simply incomplete.

The Pope Emeritus essentially starts this story with the introduction of certain things, and then goes from there.  I'm not saying that he's wrong on this, but I am saying that this recitation is incomplete.  It's focused on Germany, of course, which is too narrow of focus in the overall story.  And even while focusing just on Germany, it starts too late in my view

I don't know that anyone has really figured out what occurred in terms of a societal shift, but it seems to me that the evidence is pretty strong that things were heavily at work in personal income, poverty and wealth, almost everywhere, but in varying degrees in the late 19th Century.  Going along with that, the most desperate elements of society fostered radical elements in many places, indeed in every location, that rejected everything associated with tradition of every type.  At the same time, in those places with the most reactionary conservative politics, hard repression set in just as hard hypocrisy became more and more evident.  The degree to which upper aristocratic classes routinely ignored the conservative values they stood for became harder to ignore.  World War One broke the fragile glass and the old order collapsed, and its wake radicalism arose.  World War Two exposed the world to titanic global violence for the second time in less than three decades and one of the radicalisms, fascism, died while another, Communism, rose.  In the west, the post war era brought new material wealth in unheard of amounts and new drugs meant that conduct generally frowned upon could be medically licensed and therefore not harmful, on a temporary basis. By the late 1960s the strain on everything was immense and everything was in a state of flux.  The Church in the west, and by that we can hear mean all the churches, did a poor job of reacting to it, seeking, except perhaps in the Orthodox world, to accommodate the direction things seemed to be moving in various degrees, with the Protestant churches gong much further than any others.  \

Likewise, society in large did a pretty bad job of reacting to the new forces, largely accommodating them.  If it seems like the churches are uniquely suffering, that's only because we're now so acclimated to a titanic mess.  A day in a court anywhere will reveal the degree to which sexual license has been a destroyer.

II.  Initial Ecclesial Reactions 

(1) The long-prepared and ongoing process of dissolution of the Christian concept of morality was, as I have tried to show, marked by an unprecedented radicalism in the 1960s. This dissolution of the moral teaching authority of the Church necessarily had to have an effect on the diverse areas of the Church. In the context of the meeting of the presidents of the episcopal conferences from all over the world with Pope Francis, the question of priestly life, as well as that of seminaries, is of particular interest. As regards the problem of preparation for priestly ministry in seminaries, there is in fact a far-reaching breakdown of the previous form of this preparation. 

In various seminaries homosexual cliques were established, which acted more or less openly and significantly changed the climate in the seminaries. In one seminary in southern Germany, candidates for the priesthood and candidates for the lay ministry of the pastoral specialist lived together. At the common meals, seminarians and pastoral specialists ate together, the married among the laymen sometimes accompanied by their wives and children, and on occasion by their girlfriends. The climate in this seminary could not provide support for preparation to the priestly vocation. The Holy See knew of such problems, without being informed precisely. As a first step, an Apostolic Visitation was arranged of seminaries in the United States. 

One of the really shocking aspects of this has been the revelations about "homosexual cliques".  Pope Benedict only briefly touches on this, but this has received a lot of discussion elsewhere.

It seems like such an oddity, but if we keep in mind what we've already explored, i.e., that economic forces earlier on meant that whatever the attractions of the priestly life may have been to homosexual men before 1945, they would have made up a small percentage of Priests and wouldn't have had the opportunity to form cliques had they so desired.

But it's also fairly well demonstrated that people of all types and inclinations will form groups within groups.  This is enormously well demonstrated even though its regarded as impolite to really reference it to some degree.

At one time, for example, big city police forces and fire departments really were heavily packed with Irish immigrants and Irish Americans.  Sicilian immigrants really did make up the almost all of the Mafia and the distance between any Sicilian neighborhood and the Mafia was short.  Certain professions contained more members of certain ethnic groups, for historical reasons, than others.  And so on.

In this context, homosexuals, being a class that was fairly despised, would naturally have formed associations with each other where they were strongly represented.  This is undoubtedly the case, for example, in the theater community which had a high percentage of homosexual men at one time.  San Francisco, as a town, provides another odd example.  The officer corps of the Imperial German Army does as well, in an example which would surprise many today, and famously had a high percentage of closeted homosexual men in it in spite of its exaggerated masculinity.

Indeed, this last example might be more analogous than we might otherwise suppose as the class the officer corps drew from, the aristocratic class, was expected to provide some service in some occupation that was regarded as acceptable to the class.  In most European armies, moreover, marriage among officers was informally discouraged, with all the attendant vices that creates in an average population present.  At any rate, entering the military, as opposed to entering the clergy, that being another acceptable occupation, gave people with that inclination a chance to be around others who held the same inclination in private, while giving a cover as to why the individual was not married.

This matters in terms of what is being discussed as it created an atmosphere for excusing the violation of a chaste life and at some point it provided a means of oppressing those who were of conventional inclinations.  It was immoral in both of those aspects, albeit a temporary situation.

As the criteria for the selection and appointment of bishops had also been changed after the Second Vatican Council, the relationship of bishops to their seminaries was very different, too. Above all, a criterion for the appointment of new bishops was now their "conciliarity," which of course could be understood to mean rather different things. 

Indeed, in many parts of the Church, conciliar attitudes were understood to mean having a critical or negative attitude towards the hitherto existing tradition, which was now to be replaced by a new, radically open relationship with the world. One bishop, who had previously been seminary rector, had arranged for the seminarians to be shown pornographic films, allegedly with the intention of thus making them resistant to behavior contrary to the faith.

The Bishop isn't named, but such an approach would have shown a complete lack of understanding of highly ingrained human nature.

There were — not only in the United States of America — individual bishops who rejected the Catholic tradition as a whole and sought to bring about a kind of new, modern "Catholicity" in their dioceses. Perhaps it is worth mentioning that in not a few seminaries, students caught reading my books were considered unsuitable for the priesthood. My books were hidden away, like bad literature, and only read under the desk. 

Moreover, there was a weird element of faddishness about everything in the 60s, 70s, and into the 80s that impacted the Church along with everything else.  It's now reversed, and in interesting ways.  Today, the younger post Baby Boomer Catholics are much more orthodox than their Baby Boomer predecessors.  They're a lot better educated than the Boomers were by a long shot as well. The difference is stunning, and encouraging.

The Visitation that now took place brought no new insights, apparently because various powers had joined forces to conceal the true situation. A second Visitation was ordered and brought considerably more insights, but on the whole failed to achieve any outcomes. Nonetheless, since the 1970s the situation in seminaries has generally improved. And yet, only isolated cases of a new strengthening of priestly vocations came about as the overall situation had taken a different turn

In actuality, at least in the United States, the situation in seminaries has vastly improved and the era Pope Benedict is speaking of here has largely and perhaps completely been overcome.  The difference between younger priests, accordingly, and older ones in these regards can be vast, with younger priests returning strongly to orthodoxy.  As the older generation ages out, this should have a huge impact on the Church.

(2) The question of pedophilia, as I recall, did not become acute until the second half of the 1980s. In the meantime, it had already become a public issue in the U.S., such that the bishops in Rome sought help, since canon law, as it is written in the new (1983) Code, did not seem sufficient for taking the necessary measures. 

Here Pope Benedict's words are translated from the German (which I don't have in front of me) to mean pedophilia. But in actuality the problem has been demonstrated not to really feature very much pedophilic misconduct but in reality conduct aimed at young men, including teenagers. This is a different type of conduct entirely in every sense.  There has been very little abuse that is actually in the nature of pedophilia.

Not that there hasn't been a society wide rise in it, there is. But not in the Church.  Most of it occurs in the home with the overwhelming majority of such acts committed by male members of households upon the daughters of their "significant others" who are not their own.  This isn't surprising, but it's also a topic that nobody is supposed to really speak about as it would suggest, correctly, that men living with women often have no paternal feelings towards the children of their female interests prior relationships and in fact may have a predatory one.  That is a huge problem, but it isn't a problem in the Priesthood.

Rome and the Roman canonists at first had difficulty with these concerns; in their opinion the temporary suspension from priestly office had to be sufficient to bring about purification and clarification. This could not be accepted by the American bishops, because the priests thus remained in the service of the bishop, and thereby could be taken to be [still] directly associated with him. Only slowly, a renewal and deepening of the deliberately loosely constructed criminal law of the new Code began to take shape. 

It ought to be noted that this view was a universal one.  I've noted schools before, but in the time frame discussed here the norm was to let a school teacher simply go rather than to turn them over for prosecution.  The same is true with about every other institution.  Army officers caught engaging in illicit underage affairs were simply allowed to resign and asked to move on, if even asked to do that. 

It was also widely believed at the time that falling into this conduct could be easily reversed, perhaps by psychological analysis.  This seems shocking now, but it was the common view at the time.  Prosecution was really rare in any venue.

In addition, however, there was a fundamental problem in the perception of criminal law. Only so-called guarantorism,  [a kind of procedural protectionism], was still regarded as "conciliar." This means that above all the rights of the accused had to be guaranteed, to an extent that factually excluded any conviction at all. As a counterweight against the often-inadequate defense options available to accused theologians, their right to defense by way of guarantorism was extended to such an extent that convictions were hardly possible. 

Allow me a brief excursus at this point. In light of the scale of pedophilic misconduct, a word of Jesus has again come to attention which says: "Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung round his neck and he were thrown into the sea" (Mark 9:42).

While the crisis dose not, as we note, involve true children, this statement would nonetheless be every bit as applicable and is one that has occurred to me often during this discussion on this topic.

The phrase "the little ones" in the language of Jesus means the common believers who can be confounded in their faith by the intellectual arrogance of those who think they are clever. So here Jesus protects the deposit of the faith with an emphatic threat of punishment to those who do it harm. 

The modern use of the sentence is not in itself wrong, but it must not obscure the original meaning. In that meaning, it becomes clear, contrary to any guarantorism, that it is not only the right of the accused that is important and requires a guarantee. Great goods such as the Faith are equally important. 

A balanced canon law that corresponds to the whole of Jesus' message must therefore not only provide a guarantee for the accused, the respect for whom is a legal good. It must also protect the Faith, which is also an important legal asset. A properly formed canon law must therefore contain a double guarantee — legal protection of the accused, legal protection of the good at stake. If today one puts forward this inherently clear conception, one generally falls on deaf ears when it comes to the question of the protection of the Faith as a legal good. In the general awareness of the law, the Faith no longer appears to have the rank of a good requiring protection. This is an alarming situation which must be considered and taken seriously by the pastors of the Church. 

What Pope Benedict is getting at here is the damage of perception.  Perception is often wholly wrong one way or another, but once its damages, it's damaged.  Repairing that damage is difficult, and ignoring the damage will not address it.

This may mean that really repairing it will fall to the new generation of Priests just coming in now, and over the past decade or so.

I would now like to add, to the brief notes on the situation of priestly formation at the time of the public outbreak of the crisis, a few remarks regarding the development of canon law in this matter. 

In principle, the Congregation of the Clergy is responsible for dealing with crimes committed by priests. But since guarantorism dominated the situation to a large extent at the time, I agreed with Pope John Paul II that it was appropriate to assign the competence for these offences to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under the title Delicta maiora contra fidem.This arrangement also made it possible to impose the maximum penalty, i.e., expulsion from the clergy, which could not have been imposed under other legal provisions. This was not a trick to be able to impose the maximum penalty, but is a consequence of the importance of the Faith for the Church. In fact, it is important to see that such misconduct by clerics ultimately damages the Faith. 

Only where faith no longer determines the actions of man are such offenses possible. 

This last comment is supremely interesting, and has wide application outside of the clergy.  I'm sure Pope Francis knew that, but I wonder how many people will pick that up?

Since the 1960s we've seen an explosion of all sorts of offenses 1) against children and 2) of a sexual nature in general.  Now we're surprised by that.  But should we be?  The ripping down of the old order and standards in these areas, which held that many social structures were absolute, also operated to protect against such offenses at the same time.  Once the walls were taken down, the crimes came on in, everywhere.

Now efforts are made to put new walls up. But the effort is reactionary in nature.  I.e., we know that such offenses in society are bad, and therefore we must built a wall against it.  But that misses the foundation that the original walls were built on.  And without a foundation, those walls will not last.

The severity of the punishment, however, also presupposes a clear proof of the offense — this aspect of guarantorism remains in force. 

In other words, in order to impose the maximum penalty lawfully, a genuine criminal process is required. But both the dioceses and the Holy See were overwhelmed by such a requirement. We therefore formulated a minimum level of criminal proceedings and left open the possibility that the Holy See itself would take over the trial where the diocese or the metropolitan administration is unable to do so. In each case, the trial would have to be reviewed by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in order to guarantee the rights of the accused. Finally, in the Feria IV (i.e., the assembly of the members of the Congregation), we established an appeal instance in order to provide for the possibility of an appeal. 

Because all of this actually went beyond the capacities of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and because delays arose which had to be prevented owing to the nature of the matter, Pope Francis has undertaken further reforms. 

III. 

(1) What must be done? Perhaps we should create another Church for things to work out? Well, that experiment has already been undertaken and has already failed. Only obedience and love for our Lord Jesus Christ can point the way. So let us first try to understand anew and from within [ourselves] what the Lord wants, and has wanted with us. 

The "another Church" that Benedict refers to is obscure, but it would likely be a references to the churches of the Reformation.

In fact, there is every reason to believe that the level of abuse in other churches is just as high as it is in the Catholic church, where it has received a lot of attention.  Having said that, I would be very curious if the same level, of the same type, is present in the Orthodox churches.^

Looking at this in Protestant churches is difficult as there are so many.  What we might wonder about here is whether in those churches its less gender specific and might actually be more pedophilic.  That's only speculation however. 

The Orthodox churches and the Eastern Rites of the Catholic church allow for married priest.  Indeed, its the norm for married men to be diocesan priest, with unmarried priests normally being monks.  I'd be curious as to how this reflects itself in those areas, and I suspect that what has been seen in the Latin Rite, an era of homosexual predation, is likely absent as the societal forces we've discussed above would have been absent in regard to them.  I'll note more on that below.

First, I would suggest the following: If we really wanted to summarize very briefly the content of the Faith as laid down in the Bible, we might do so by saying that the Lord has initiated a narrative of love with us and wants to subsume all creation in it. The counterforce against evil, which threatens us and the whole world, can ultimately only consist in our entering into this love. It is the real counterforce against evil. The power of evil arises from our refusal to love God. He who entrusts himself to the love of God is redeemed. Our being not redeemed is a consequence of our inability to love God. Learning to love God is therefore the path of human redemption. 

Let us now try to unpack this essential content of God's revelation a little more. We might then say that the first fundamental gift that Faith offers us is the certainty that God exists. 

A world without God can only be a world without meaning. For where, then, does everything that is come from? In any case, it has no spiritual purpose. It is somehow simply there and has neither any goal nor any sense. Then there are no standards of good or evil. Then only what is stronger than the other can assert itself. Power is then the only principle. Truth does not count, it actually does not exist. Only if things have a spiritual reason, are intended and conceived — only if there is a Creator God who is good and wants the good — can the life of man also have meaning. 

That there is God as creator and as the measure of all things is first and foremost a primordial need. 

But a God who would not express Himself at all, who would not make Himself known, would remain a presumption and could thus not determine the form [Gestalt] of our life. For God to be really God in this deliberate creation, we must look to Him to express Himself in some way. He has done so in many ways, but decisively in the call that went to Abraham and gave people in search of God the orientation that leads beyond all expectation: God Himself becomes creature, speaks as man with us human beings. 

In this way the sentence "God is" ultimately turns into a truly joyous message, precisely because He is more than understanding, because He creates - and is - love. To once more make people aware of this is the first and fundamental task entrusted to us by the Lord. 

A society without God — a society that does not know Him and treats Him as non-existent — is a society that loses its measure. In our day, the catchphrase of God's death was coined. When God does die in a society, it becomes free, we were assured. In reality, the death of God in a society also means the end of freedom, because what dies is the purpose that provides orientation. And because the compass disappears that points us in the right direction by teaching us to distinguish good from evil. Western society is a society in which God is absent in the public sphere and has nothing left to offer it. And that is why it is a society in which the measure of humanity is increasingly lost. At individual points it becomes suddenly apparent that what is evil and destroys man has become a matter of course.

The use of the word orientation here is very telling. Western society has indeed become extraordinarily disordered to everything.   It's disintegrating in disorder.

That is the case with pedophilia. It was theorized only a short time ago as quite legitimate, but it has spread further and further. And now we realize with shock that things are happening to our children and young people that threaten to destroy them. The fact that this could also spread in the Church and among priests ought to disturb us in particular. 

Why did pedophilia reach such proportions? Ultimately, the reason is the absence of God. We Christians and priests also prefer not to talk about God, because this speech does not seem to be practical. After the upheaval of the Second World War, we in Germany had still expressly placed our Constitution under the responsibility to God as a guiding principle. Half a century later, it was no longer possible to include responsibility to God as a guiding principle in the European constitution. God is regarded as the party concern of a small group and can no longer stand as the guiding principle for the community as a whole. This decision reflects the situation in the West, where God has become the private affair of a minority.

Perhaps not as much as Pope Benedict thinks. Rather, what seems to be the case that observance had greatly declined in much of Europe and outwards expressions of religious belief have declined in certain occupations.  Among lawyers, for example, an outward expression of religious belief is almost never expressed.  Statistically, however, people tend to retain large elements of religious belief even if, for reasons that Pope Benedict discussed above, its often self styled and self comforting as its divorced from any concept of personal responsibility.  This gives us the odd examples of people declaring themselves to be in spiritual good shape when the same person never would have been in any prior era.

Indeed, even among the groups who ostensibly are purely secular odd things will break out.  I've been present, for example, when people who have a publicly stated agnostic or even atheistic belief will say something that only comports with a religious belief or even lapse back into long held religious practices in particular moments.  Whole cultures in fact do that.  Public suppression of outward religious faith has a lot to do with why its not more evident in certain settings.  France provides an interesting example as the recent fire at Notre Dame de Paris brought out some immediate religious activity and awhile back, when the French state forced recognition of same gender marriages upon the French, the French, a supposedly secular people, turned out in enormous numbers in protest, showing a retained natural law view of the world that is Catholic in origin in their case.

A paramount task, which must result from the moral upheavals of our time, is that we ourselves once again begin to live by God and unto Him. Above all, we ourselves must learn again to recognize God as the foundation of our life instead of leaving Him aside as a somehow ineffective phrase. I will never forget the warning that the great theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar once wrote to me on one of his letter cards. "Do not presuppose the triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but present them!” 

The citation to Hans Urs von Balthasar is interesting.  He's a widely quoted theologian.  I've not read him, but he's the author of a text entitled Dare We Hope That All Men Might Be Saved in which he ponders that question.

That sort of thinking, we're all saved, is extremely questionable in my view and I doubt it. For that reason alone, I'm not a von Balthaser fan and indeed regard that sort of thinking as emblematic of the modern problem.

Indeed, in theology God is often taken for granted as a matter of course, but concretely one does not deal with Him. The theme of God seems so unreal, so far removed from the things that concern us. And yet everything becomes different if one does not presuppose but present God. Not somehow leaving Him in the background, but recognizing Him as the center of our thoughts, words and actions. 

I'd add to this that a sound grasp in concepts of nature and natural law is also now completely lacking.  Law has been reduced to mere human rules divorced of nature, and with that we've gone to the concept that human nature is individually defined, a dangerously anti scientific view of the world.

(2) God became man for us. Man as His creature is so close to His heart that He has united himself with him and has thus entered human history in a very practical way. He speaks with us, He lives with us, He suffers with us and He took death upon Himself for us. We talk about this in detail in theology, with learned words and thoughts. But it is precisely in this way that we run the risk of becoming masters of faith instead of being renewed and mastered by the Faith. 

Let us consider this with regard to a central issue, the celebration of the Holy Eucharist. Our handling of the Eucharist can only arouse concern. The Second Vatican Council was rightly focused on returning this sacrament of the Presence of the Body and Blood of Christ, of the Presence of His Person, of His Passion, Death and Resurrection, to the center of Christian life and the very existence of the Church. In part, this really has come about, and we should be most grateful to the Lord for it. 

And yet a rather different attitude is prevalent. What predominates is not a new reverence for the presence of Christ's death and resurrection, but a way of dealing with Him that destroys the greatness of the Mystery. The declining participation in the Sunday Eucharistic celebration shows how little we Christians of today still know about appreciating the greatness of the gift that consists in His Real Presence. The Eucharist is devalued into a mere ceremonial gesture when it is taken for granted that courtesy requires Him to be offered at family celebrations or on occasions such as weddings and funerals to all those invited for family reasons. 

The way people often simply receive the Holy Sacrament in communion as a matter of course shows that many see communion as a purely ceremonial gesture. Therefore, when thinking about what action is required first and foremost, it is rather obvious that we do not need another Church of our own design. Rather, what is required first and foremost is the renewal of the Faith in the Reality of Jesus Christ given to us in the Blessed Sacrament. 

The discussion on the Eucharist here is interesting in that it seems to cut counter to what Pope Francis has been doing and for which he's been widely criticized.

Indeed, what Pope Benedict notes here has a lot more to do with Germany than it does the contemporary United States, although the U.S. is not without criticism here as well.

In the case of the Catholic Church in the United States where fault can really be found is in the incredibly bad catechesis of the 1970s.  Catholics who came up in their Faith in that era learned almost nothing about it and really received only rudimentary exposure to general Christian principals.  A lot of what later occurred in the Faith in later years can be tied to that.  I can honestly say, having come up in that era, that a Catholic youth of that era would have learned nearly nothing if anything at all on foundational Catholic beliefs and really only have the vaguest concepts of what Communion and Reconciliation are about and how the Church views them.  Listeners of such broadcasts as Catholic Answers should therefore not be surprised when listeners call in, identify themselves as Catholic, and reveal that they were married twenty years ago and just learned that the church required them to be married in the Faith, for example.

The good news is that a lot of this has really changed and the Internet has made it possible for young people to self educate, which they are used to doing. That era has largely passed.

In Germany it went further as there was a very strong ecumenical movement.  Such a movement also existed in the United States but it never went as far as it the United States is a Protestant country and there are a lot of Protestant faiths that are extremely far removed from Catholicism in fundamental ways.  In Germany, however, Christianity is really limited to the Lutheran and Catholic faiths and a real effort to jointly participate in a lot of things was common.  Beyond that, a high intermarriage rate between Catholics and Lutherans, and the nature of the theology in regard to conservative Lutherans, apparently created a situation in which a lot of Lutherans routinely attended or attend Catholic services and acknowledge nearly all the aspects of the Catholic faith (which in fact conservative Lutherans in general do everywhere) to the point where there has been a theological question presented in regard to their ability to receive Communion.  I'll abstain from commenting on that as its not the topic here and I don't really grasp it, but Pope Francis seemed to issue an opinion on it earlier with which Pope Benedict seems to be disagreeing with here, maybe.

In conversations with victims of pedophilia, I have been made acutely aware of this first and foremost requirement. A young woman who was a [former] altar server told me that the chaplain, her superior as an altar server, always introduced the sexual abuse he was committing against her with the words: "This is my body which will be given up for you." 

It is obvious that this woman can no longer hear the very words of consecration without experiencing again all the horrific distress of her abuse. Yes, we must urgently implore the Lord for forgiveness, and first and foremost we must swear by Him and ask Him to teach us all anew to understand the greatness of His suffering, His sacrifice. And we must do all we can to protect the gift of the Holy Eucharist from abuse. 

(3) And finally, there is the Mystery of the Church. The sentence with which Romano Guardini, almost 100 years ago, expressed the joyful hope that was instilled in him and many others, remains unforgotten: "An event of incalculable importance has begun; the Church is awakening in souls." 

He meant to say that no longer was the Church experienced and perceived as merely an external system entering our lives, as a kind of authority, but rather it began to be perceived as being present within people's hearts — as something not merely external, but internally moving us. About half a century later, in reconsidering this process and looking at what had been happening, I felt tempted to reverse the sentence: "The Church is dying in souls." 

Indeed, the Church today is widely regarded as just some kind of political apparatus. One speaks of it almost exclusively in political categories, and this applies even to bishops, who formulate their conception of the church of tomorrow almost exclusively in political terms. The crisis, caused by the many cases of clerical abuse, urges us to regard the Church as something almost unacceptable, which we must now take into our own hands and redesign. But a self-made Church cannot constitute hope. 

Jesus Himself compared the Church to a fishing net in which good and bad fish are ultimately separated by God Himself. There is also the parable of the Church as a field on which the good grain that God Himself has sown grows, but also the weeds that "an enemy" secretly sown onto it. Indeed, the weeds in God's field, the Church, are excessively visible, and the evil fish in the net also show their strength. Nevertheless, the field is still God's field and the net is God's fishing net. And at all times, there are not only the weeds and the evil fish, but also the crops of God and the good fish. To proclaim both with emphasis is not a false form of apologetics, but a necessary service to the Truth. 

In this context it is necessary to refer to an important text in the Revelation of St. John. The devil is identified as the accuser who accuses our brothers before God day and night (Revelation 12:10). St. John’s Apocalypse thus takes up a thought from the center of the framing narrative in the Book of Job (Job 1 and 2, 10; 42:7-16). In that book, the devil sought to talk down the righteousness of Job before God as being merely external. And exactly this is what the Apocalypse has to say: The devil wants to prove that there are no righteous people; that all righteousness of people is only displayed on the outside. If one could hew closer to a person, then the appearance of his justice would quickly fall away.
The narrative in Job begins with a dispute between God and the devil, in which God had referred to Job as a truly righteous man. He is now to be used as an example to test who is right. Take away his possessions and you will see that nothing remains of his piety, the devil argues. God allows him this attempt, from which Job emerges positively. Now the devil pushes on and he says: "Skin for skin! All that a man has he will give for his life. But put forth thy hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse thee to thy face." (Job 2:4f) 

God grants the devil a second turn. He may also touch the skin of Job. Only killing Job is denied to him. For Christians it is clear that this Job, who stands before God as an example for all mankind, is Jesus Christ. In St. John’s Apocalypse the drama of humanity is presented to us in all its breadth. 

The Creator God is confronted with the devil who speaks ill of all mankind and all creation. He says, not only to God but above all to people: Look at what this God has done. Supposedly a good creation, but in reality full of misery and disgust. That disparagement of creation is really a disparagement of God. It wants to prove that God Himself is not good, and thus to turn us away from Him. 

The timeliness of what the Apocalypse is telling us here is obvious. Today, the accusation against God is, above all, about characterizing His Church as entirely bad, and thus dissuading us from it. The idea of a better Church, created by ourselves, is in fact a proposal of the devil, with which he wants to lead us away from the living God, through a deceitful logic by which we are too easily duped. No, even today the Church is not just made up of bad fish and weeds. The Church of God also exists today, and today it is the very instrument through which God saves us. 

It is very important to oppose the lies and half-truths of the devil with the whole truth: Yes, there is sin in the Church and evil. But even today there is the Holy Church, which is indestructible. Today there are many people who humbly believe, suffer and love, in whom the real God, the loving God, shows Himself to us. Today God also has His witnesses (martyres) in the world. We just have to be vigilant in order to see and hear them. 

The word martyr is taken from procedural law. In the trial against the devil, Jesus Christ is the first and actual witness for God, the first martyr, who has since been followed by countless others. 

Today's Church is more than ever a "Church of the Martyrs" and thus a witness to the living God. If we look around and listen with an attentive heart, we can find witnesses everywhere today, especially among ordinary people, but also in the high ranks of the Church, who stand up for God with their life and suffering. It is an inertia of the heart that leads us to not wish to recognize them. One of the great and essential tasks of our evangelization is, as far as we can, to establish habitats of Faith and, above all, to find and recognize them. 

I live in a house, in a small community of people who discover such witnesses of the living God again and again in everyday life and who joyfully point this out to me as well. To see and find the living Church is a wonderful task which strengthens us and makes us joyful in our Faith time and again. 

At the end of my reflections I would like to thank Pope Francis for everything he does to show us, again and again, the light of God, which has not disappeared, even today. 

Thank you, Holy Father!
--Benedict XVI

Okay, that's a lot to take in, and we've commented about it as we've moved along.

I'm glad that Pope Benedict weighted in.  Many Catholics who have been disappointed with Pope Francis have lamented Pope Benedict's retirement and, indeed, have grown increasingly disenchanted with Pope Francis as time has moved on.^*  George Weigel, the conservative Catholic commentator has opined that the result of the recent meetings in Rome has sent things in a proper direction, but the problem remains that a lot of root causes of the disaster haven't really been addressed and its nature doesn't seem to be understood.  Indeed, the focus on child abuse is really misplaced as the abuse was largely not of children at all.  Only some Bishops have been willing to address the situation as one that was largely abuse by men upon younger men and hardly anyone has been willing to note that the situation is addressed among younger clerics, but that there remains a reservoir of those who came up in the 50s, 60s and 70s who perhaps entered the Church for the wrong reason and remain there.  Indeed, some of those men now are likely bishops.

Pope Francis, who has found it his role to deal with the crisis.  To orthodox Catholics in at least North America, Pope Francis has been a Pope that frequently has troubled them.  His handling of this issue has brought little praise, although George Weigel at least gave him some.

All of this actually came up in the recent conference which lead to a bit of open debate.  Indeed, at the start of the conference, Pope Francis stated:

In the face of this scourge of sexual abuse perpetrated by men of the church to the determent of minors, I thought I would summon you sot aht all together we may lend an ear and listed to the Holy Spirit. . .and to the cry of the small ones who are asking for justice.

Those noting the demographic nature of the data posed a challenge to the conferees and to the legacy of the conference.

Open Letter to the Presidents of the Conferences of Bishops

Dear Brothers, Presidents of the Conferences of Bishops,

We turn to you with deep distress!

The Catholic world is adrift, and, with anguish, the question is asked: Where is the Church going?

Before the drift in process, it seems that the difficulty is reduced to that of the abuse of minors, a horrible crime, especially when it is perpetrated by a priest, which is, however, only part of a much greater crisis. The plague of the homosexual agenda has been spread within the Church, promoted by organized networks and protected by a climate of complicity and a conspiracy of silence.  The roots of this phenomenon are clearly found in that atmosphere of materialism, of relativism and of hedonism, in which the existence of an absolute moral law, that is without exceptions, is openly called into question.

Sexual abuse is blamed on clericalism. But the first and primary fault of the clergy does not rest in the abuse of power but in having gone away from the truth of the Gospel. The even public denial, by words and by acts, of the divine and natural law, is at the root of the evil that corrupts certain circles in the Church.

In the face of this situation, Cardinals and Bishops are silent. Will you also be silent on the occasion of the meeting called in the Vatican for this coming February 21st?

We are among those who in 2016 presented to the Holy Father certain questions, dubia, which were dividing the Church in the wake of the conclusions of the Synod on the Family.

Today, those dubia have not only not had any response but are part of a more general crisis of the Faith. Therefore, we encourage you to raise your voice to safeguard and proclaim the integrity of the doctrine of the Church.

We pray to the Holy Spirit, that He may assist the Church and bring light to the Pastors who guide her. A decisive act now is urgent and necessary. We trust in the Lord Who has promised: “Behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world” (Mt 28,20).

Walter Cardinal Brandmüller

Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke

Cardinal  Burke is correct as to the demographic character of the crisis, although he hasn't expanded on it.  A person can acknowledge that, and if they are honest they should, without necessarily taking the same political point of view that he has, but he was acknowledgely bold to address it.

Those who do address this topic are often shouted down in the media, as their point isn't understood, and then there are those on the mix who come dangerously close to being apologist for the abusers even though they don't see themselves that way at all.  Father James Martin, S.J., is for example such a cleric as he would have the attention on the homosexual nature of the abuse excused away in an effort to radically reform the Church's view on homosexual sex, which is distinctly different from the Church's view of homosexuality.

As an example of both, or indeed all of the later, the New York Times, in an example of really bad timing, ran an article recently lamenting the fate of (universally older) homosexual priest that totally missed the point that all Latin Rite Catholic priests, almost, are supposed to be celibate.  The NYT depicted them as oppressed, basically, because they can't have sex, missing the point entirely that no Roman Catholic priest is supposed to be having sex save for the very few who are married.  If the Times piece had contained intellectual merit, its argument would have been for sexual license in the clergy without restraint, which it wasn't.  It was only for sexual license, oddly enough, for homosexual priests lamenting that some of them had come into the violation of their vows late in life (and fairly rarely) and in once occasion through answering some sort of classified advertisement, which normally would be regarded as icky if it entailed a person of more conventional orientation.

This provoked a blistering response from Roman Catholic Priest and blogger Father Zuhlsdorf ("Father Z") who railed:

The title of the NY Times piece was seriously irritating.

‘It Is Not a Closet. It Is a Cage.’

Gay Catholic Priests Speak Out

The crisis over sexuality in the Catholic Church goes beyond abuse. It goes to the heart of the priesthood, into a closet that is trapping thousands of men.

No. NO. NO!

The priesthood is not a cage.  It is not a trap.   The door is over there and it is open.   If it is so horrible, GET OUT.

But you can already hear the wails…

“Oooooo but I wanna staaaaay.  It’s so rewarding making people feel good and being touched by their lives!  (Because it’s all about me in the end, and how good I feel.)  I don’t want to leave the priesthood.  I want to stay and have everyone know that I’m ‘gay’!  (Because it’s all about me.)  Saying that I should leave makes me feel bad, and no one is supposed to feel bad.  We should all be affirmed just as we are! (Because … you know.)“

Do I, Fr. Z, want you guys to get out?

Frankly, yes, if you are having sex with men, yes.  GET OUT.   If you are striving to live a holy life, and you are ordained, then get on with your priesthood and stop whining about it and stop rubbing it in people’s faces.

The same goes for a “gay” (how I hate that word) priest who bares his soul in public about his attraction to men.  Talk about selfish!   Why dump that on people and make them bear it?  I don’t want to hear about the inner struggles of an oppressed gay guy “trapped” in the priesthood.  Shut up and be a priest!  You’re a man, right?  Even if you have a disorder, be a man.  If you have be on the Cross 24/7, shut up and stay on the Cross.  That’s where priests are supposed to be.   When Christ spoke to the Father about allowing Him not to drink of the chalice, the Synoptics say He was sequestered in the Garden.  During His Passion, Our Lord didn’t whine in public about what His tormentors were doing to Him.   “I’m soooo conflicted!  I’m soooo misunderstood!”

You must not commit scandal by blurting all this out in public and confusing the faithful about your ministry and about the Church’s God-affirmed teachings and authority!

The Cross is your path to salvation and a place in heaven, because of faithful suffering.

I sincerely believe that people with same-sex attraction, if they strive to be chaste and bear their subsequent suffering, will have a very high place in heaven.  The greater the burden and suffering, the greater the graces and reward.

Father Z obviously doesn't have a problem with being really blunt and highly sarcastic, but he does have a point that is seemingly missed, although the way we are viewing it here, we think perhaps the overall historical nature of this is missed in general.  Being a cleric is about being a cleric, not about your personal inclinations.  As we're speaking of Catholic clerics, that means a celibate life.  It doesn't really make very much sense, in that context, for this to be a discussion about an older generation of clerics that had homosexual desires they acted on.

Father Z takes a blunt view of life. He's highly orthodox with a focus on orthodox theology and the sacrament of Confession.  But his basic view here, that a Priestly vocation must be lived no  matter what your inclinations are, is difficult at best to refute.

Indeed, while he did't put it the same way, Father Z's entire point might take us back to Paul, where we started. St. Paul specifically listed homosexual acts, of more than one type, as grave sins that would specifically bar entry into Heaven.  Modern homosexual apologist have repeatedly tried to discount that, but they're clearly trying to entirely remove what basically amounts to several books of the New Testament when they do that.  However, those who focus only on that really miss the point. St. Paul listed all types of sexual conduct outside of marriage as being in the exact same category and also included other vices, such as drunkenness.

Indeed, St. Paul's list would include nearly every Western Christian alive today in the category of those who need to get to Confession immediately.  Couples that that live together without being married, or together before being married, are in it.  Sexual activity before marriage and outside of marriage is in it.  Sexual activity of the homosexual type is in it, but then so is sexual activity fitting the original definition of "heterosexual", when the term meant abnormal non conventional sexual activity, is also in it (that term is discussed below).  Contemporary Christians who would excuse homosexual sex as something that is simply an antiquated view fail to realize that St. Paul took the fully Catholic retained view, which of course isn't surprising.  Paul held it as gravely sinful to engage in any sexual activity that wasn't within the confines of marriage and he was definite about that.  Moreover, he was living in a society in which all of that activity was hugely common, as it is now.  When Paul wrote, his writings reached even a Christian audience that wasn't fully observing them and a non Christian audience that fully rejected them.  He was, therefore, an incredibly contemporary Saint.

That gets back to the topic Father Z was addressing above.  The point of those like the New York Times authors who take the view that, gosh isn't it sad that these Priests are being called out for engaging in homosexual sex are completely missing the point.  Priests are avowed celibates and Catholics which means: 1) no sex outside of marriage and 2) they can't get married as they're celibates. What's sad, therefore, is that they apparently took up a calling that they can't reconcile with their desires and therefore should never have taken up.  There's no way whatsoever to actually excuse their conduct in a Catholic context, other than to urge them to repent and endure, any more than there would be if a Priest came out and indicated he was strongly attracted to women and therefore felt that he should be excused for having mistresses.  Can't be done.  Those who would ask for their personal desires, even if they're simply to be married in a conventional sense, to dictate over the top of their vows, let alone over what are clearly stated Christian positions, really ought to step down from their office.  There's really no other logical choice.

But there is more to look at here.

Another extremely orthodox cleric but one of an extremely intellectual bent, and who is therefore sometimes not very predictable, is Father Hugh Barbour, O. Pream.  I note that as his comment on same gender attraction in women was mentioned earlier here and came out in a direction that most would not suspect in the context of a "Boston Marriage".  Father Barbour did not license illicit sexual contact, i.e., sex outside of marriage, in any context either, but he did have a very nuanced view of attraction between women that's almost wholly unique in some ways.  Like the discussion above, but in a more nuanced form, it gets into the idea that modern society is so bizarrely sexually focused that its converted the concept of attraction to absolute need, failing to grasp the nature of nearly everything, and sexualized conduct that need not be.  Barbour issued an interesting opinion related to this back in 2013, at which time there had just been a huge demonstration in France regarding the redefinition of the nature of marriage. 

Katherine Coman and Katherine Lee Bates who lived together as female housemates for over twenty years in a "Wellesley Marriage", something basically akin to what's called a Boston Marriage today.  Named for Wellesley College, due to its association with it, Wellesley Marriages were arrangements of such type between academic women, where as Boston Marriages more commonly features such arrangements between women of means.  Barbour noted these types of arrangements in a basically approving fashion, noting that its only in modern society when these arrangements are seemingly nearly required to take on a sexual aspect, which of course he did not approve of.

Barbour's article is copyright protected (but can be found on the net)  with a reinforced copyright notice.  I'd quote from it at length here, and in fact started to, but his article includes an express copyright reservation, so I'll abstain. Anyhow, his short article asks the provocative question "Do homosexuals exist?" and goes on at length challenge the categorization.  He strongly argues, in a way that makes a great deal of sense, that to define an identify by the act does not make a good deal of sense and he makes the often missed argument that defining the very essence of a person by their same gender attractions implicitly licenses those of us with conventional attractions to be unruly with them. I.e., categorizing some people as homosexuals leads, fairly naturally, to the argument that regular attractions are wholly incapable of being restrained.

Barbour's work is pretty dense in its citations and discussions, but it brings up a lot of necessarily subtleties that blunt replies like Father Z's lack.  Barbour takes a much more classical view of the striation that would not force people into simple definitions and which took a less restrained view of very close relationships between members of the same sex that were not sexual in nature and did not need to be sexualized.  Indeed, the answer of Barbour to the question posed on the Catholic Answers podcast discussed above makes even more sense in that context.

Irish American bar in the 1940s.  I couldn't find a photographic example of what I was trying to link in here, but Fr. Barbour also noted, in his discussion, the very long existing demographic feature of old Irish bachelors who were part of the Irish pub culture.  It was very common in Ireland, at one time, for single men who did not wish to engage in the pressures of married life, and who felt no calling to the Priesthood or the English military, to take up working class jobs. After work they hung out as fixtures at local pubs. That may seem odd, but Irish beer is actually extremely low in alcohol content and while it is no doubt the case that sitting every night in a bar and drinking is in fact bad for your health, the gist of it was that this was their society.  As it was fully allowed as part of the culture, there was no taint with them being bar flies as there might have been in other places, nor was there anything regarded as abnormal about their not being married.  I.e., they weren't pressured to marry, weren't regarded as good, and weren't expected to be having sex with anyone.  The culture extended into the US in areas with large Irish populations.  A similar culture is discussed frequently in Garrison Keilor's radio show The Prairie Home Companion in the form of "Norwegian Bachelor Farmers".  Now, anyone in the single aging male category is automatically suspected of being a homosexual, and even pressured to be in a sexual relationship with somebody, which is totally unfair and frankly odd.

It might therefore not be too surprising that another unique view was taken on by a columnist seminarian in First Things as he's a student seeking to become a member of Father Barbour's order.  Michael Hannon took Barbour's points, and ran with them even further in that article.  He went so far as to state:

Over the course of several centuries, the West had progressively abandoned Christianity’s marital architecture for human sexuality. Then, about one hundred and fifty years ago, it began to replace that longstanding teleological tradition with a brand new creation: the absolutist but absurd taxonomy of sexual orientations. Heterosexuality was made to serve as this fanciful framework’s regulating ideal, preserving the social prohibitions against sodomy and other sexual debaucheries without requiring recourse to the procreative nature of human sexuality.

He then goes on, interestingly enough, to equate that development not only with the rise of homosexual advocacy, such as we've seen in recent years, but also to its prior legal suppression. That is, the redefinition of marriage away from its natural procreative ends caused both what we are currently seeing legally and societaly, and well as what we saw before, and they really aren't that different.  He also noted, from the Christian position, that "Self-describing as a “homosexual” tends to multiply occasions of sin for those who adopt the label—provoking, in Prior’s words, an unnecessary “dramatization of the temptation.”"

Hannon notes that the development of the term homosexual, and for that matter heterosexual, dates to the 1890s and further notes that Freud, whose theories are largely discounted on most things now, was one of the strongest early advocates of defining homosexuals by their conduct.  The term heterosexual wasn't used in English until 1892. All of this is significant in regards to the story we're recounting here, or at least what we think the science and history of it supports. Also noted is the early use of the term in English wasn't meant to really be an all accomplishing definition of the person who engaged in the conduct, but rather one among many things that were defined as deviant.

Sigmund Freud, the famous but  now largely discredited psychologist, who thought everything was somehow related to sex and who was an early proponent of the term "homosexual".  Freud died in 1939, many years before his theories hit the dustbin and during which time they were at the height of their influence.  In retrospect, more than a little of Freud's thoughts were more than a little odd in their own right, and only his development of the practice of psychoanalysis really survives to the current day.

Heterosexual also defined deviance that was meant to describe a person who engaged in deviant behavior as they engaged in perverted sexual disorder that was focused on sterile acts, a definition that, by Catholic definitions, would define most people with conventional sexual orientation today.  Generally, from a Catholic prospective, sexual acts that are not oriented to the possibility of life or which in fertile people are so oriented are disordered.  That view remains the view of all of the Apostolic Churches today and was in fact also the view of almost all Christian denominations until very recently.  Only when the Episcopal Church began to change its view, slightly in 1958 at the Lambeth Conference, which was before the introduction of pharmaceutical birth control, did that begin to change, but when it did, it changed very rapidly in most of the Protestant denominations.^^

Prior to that time, there was a widely shared concept that there were a lot of acts between men and women, including married couples that were wholly immoral.  The term heterosexual applied to those who engaged in those activities, in the original use of the term.  Indeed, the term itself, if understood in its its etymological fashion, makes that plain.  "Hetro" is the Greek word for "different".  So, in the fashion in which these terms were originally used, homosexual meant "man sexual", or a person whose orientation was oriented towards men, while heterosexual meant "different sexual", or a person whose orientation was directed towards different, or rather different, deviant acts.

Hannon argues that the terms aren't really real,, but his he correct?  Frankly, while I think there's something to his argument, I don't think it stands up from a biological prospective, or rather the evolutionary biology level.  Looked at it that way, and across populations, which is quite clear is that male orientation towards females and vice versa is extremely strongly expressed in our species.  Indeed, as evolutionary biologist have noted (crude warning coming up) our species, homo sapien sapien, is in the simian group of primates, and the simians are notable for having the highest level of sexual dimorphism of any mammal. If this is followed down, moreover, this trait expresses itself in our genus in the fashion of having the highest sex drive of any simian, so not only does our species have an extremely high level of sexual dimorphism, it also has the highest sex drive of any of the members of our biological family.  We're really unique this way.

Evolutionary biologist theorize that this reflects and explains an enormous amount about the behavior of our species. Early on, it seems, this trait developed and coincidentally, or perhaps because of it, or both, this suited a species that was developing an enormous intellect.  Humans take nearly two decades to really fully mature and our species cannot successfully raise a member of the species from infancy to adulthood without at least two, if not more, members of the species cooperating.  Sexual complintarianism (a Catholic term again), served this and it still does.  It's established now by modern science that what St. Thomas Aquinas noted about us, that human males and females bond strongly due to sex at the first instance and basically remain that way if they don't destroy their orientation by acts designed to depart from it.  This in turn means that the couple, in a state of nature, remains together through the childhood of their offspring, and after they're all raised, beyond until their old ages and deaths.  This also makes us extremely unique.

Painting of St. Thomas Aquinas receiving a belt of purity after deriving his proof of chastity.

It also serves to demonstrate how messed up the modern world has become, as what Aquinas worried about we have well achieved.  Through intentional frustration of the normal order in regards to sexual conduct, we've made for a pretty messed up modern world in a lot of ways.  That's an other topic entirely, but what's significant in the context of this discussion is that this means that Hannon's supposition about the terms not reflecting anything real, in their modern usages, is off the mark.

Medieval allegorical painting on chastity.  Almost completely missed by moderns, and particularly missed by modern Christians, is the absolute fact that chastity has been a primary Christian virtue from the onset.  Also notable is that chastity is a central tenant of Islam, which holds out the Virgin Mary as the best example, something that Islam shares with Christianity.  Chase conduct is also very strongly emphasized in the Sikh and Baha'i faiths and strongly emphasized in the Hindu and Buddhist religions, something that the supposed followers of Buddhism in the Western World are seemingly largely unaware of.

But not entirely.  What is clear is that the human norm is extremely strongly expressed and no doubt our universal natures right down to our DNA. But beyond that, there's a lot of departures from the natural pattern in regards to sex, as with everything else, which means that we are likely misconstruing same gender attraction to some degree and also misconstruing a lot of other activity that we've come to accept as normal when it departs as well.  So his overall point that categorizing people as "homosexuals", or any of the other terms that describe that orientation, is based on faulty science and likely really incorrect.

Hannon notes that making the characterization is likely harmful to people with same gender attraction, while also arguing that it's also harmful to everyone else.  This same point, but on another topic that we'll add in here (as if this post wasn't already long enough) was made by the Priests who blog on Catholic Stuff You Should Know.  It was just in passing, but it as it raises another interesting topic here and passed by this topic in reference, we'll mention it here as well. The link to the podcast is as follows:

• 02 May 2019 · #388 Can Men Be Friends?

  Fr. John Nepil & Fr. Austin Litke
  
  Why watching sports, drinking beer, and playing golf just isn't enough

Three male friends photographed by Frances Benjamin Johnston.  This photograph is misidentified, fwiw, by the Library of Congress as being of Frances. The middle name must have confused them, as Johnston was a she, not a he.

What Can Men Be Friends is really about is whether, in the Western world, men can be friends in a close fashion.^^^  Its' a really legitimate topic and it expresses a major area of concern, or one that should be a major area of concern.  What they noted in passing was what we just noted, but in another context, that being that the use of the term "homosexual" has come to be so defining for people with same gender attractions it actually limits them categorically to the conduct.  Even a passing examination of well known individuals (take Freddy Mercury for example) before the term became all defining, as it has in the last decade, demonstrates this.  So, if the attraction is regarded as something on the scale of human conduct, irrespective of its cause, and assuming the cause isn't genetic, society really ought to be approaching the entire topic differently.  I.e., by regarding it as so rigid, current society is actually making it rigid.

Male friends during World War Two, solider on right on leave.  At this period in American history most men were not yet high school graduates, although nearly half were. Few attended college.  So the men that men knew and were friendly with as boys went on into adulthood.  This was the case with my own father, who was a high school graduate and who held a graduate degree for that matter.  He returned to his home town and so did most of his close high school colleagues, whom remained his close friends for his whole life.  He was the first of them to pass away.  All of the men in this photograph are likely younger than they appear.

This relates back to the topic at hand as this view came in at some point prior to the 20th Century.  Prior to that the conduct existed (more on that in a moment) but it wasn't understood to be something defining a person to their core.  It was regarded as immoral, but as an immorality it was regarded as a species of corruption, as were other sexual vices.  But as a vice, it wasn't conceived of as something much more abnormal than other sexual vices, and persons engaging in it were assumed to be capable of correcting their conduct.

When the change in the psychological views came in, however, it was viewed as a psychological abnormality the same way that other psychological abnormalities were (as were, FWIW, some other sexual vices).  That changed the common view of people who exhibited the conduct enormously and basically forced them underground.  And this became all the more the case as the trait went from what was basically an odd vice to one that was a person's defining characteristic, with that characteristic being regarded as a severe psychological abnormality.

Indeed, the recharacterizaiton operated that for the first time the behavior went from one which was regarded as a matter of moral conduct to one that had strong legal implications.  Homosexual conduct was made illegal, along with some other sexual conduct.  There was a long precedence for this in that illegitimate sexual conduct had been a misdemeanor in many places,  but not in others, for a very long time.  But at this point certain conduct rose to the felony level in some places, most notably in the United Kingdom and those places with a strong English influenced legal system.  Most places in the western world there was also legal implications outside of the criminal law, most notably in the ability of a person to hold certain occupations, such as being a soldier.

Coming back to the topic at hand, this is significant as the characterization of the conduct as a psychological malady combined with its criminalization drove it deeper underground and moreover drove it underground in a defining way.  And things that go underground in that fashion develop their own cultures.

Indeed, all underground activities have their own cultures, including things that are only marginally underground. This has long caused their to be a debate on the criminalization of certain things in general, as the argument is that by making them illegal, you don't wipe them out, but instead cause them to occur outside the light of day.  Drinking during Prohibition is the classic example, and its hard not to argue that a real culture of drinking sprung up during Prohibition which didn't exist before it, and which didn't exist after it.  That can be argued, and the better statistical data is that Prohibition did in fact reduce drinking from the level which it had existed prior to 1919, but that doesn't counter that a culture of drinking involving risky criminal behavior and association with extremely illegal elements developed as well. Any number of similar analogies and counters could be developed.

The point here is, however, that in addition to those factors we've already noted the early 20th Century definition of the homosexuality may have had the added impact of reinforcing the conduct among those who had the inclination and it drove them underground, perfect conditions for the development of a certain culture among some, but not all, of those who engaged in it. And if a certain percentage of them entered the Priesthood, they'd enter in some cases with that culture's attitudes to some degree.  That may in part explain the "culture" aspect that came to be expressed in some seminaries in the 50s through the 80s, as once the lid started to come off towards how various conduct was viewed, the lid was loosened on the culture which remained a counterculture, so to speak, but one that had a toehold into regarding its conduct as normalized.

Whether that culture survives recent developments is a really open question.  It may not, given that its defining direction may have the ironic effect of slowly breaking the cultural foundation that exists on it, particularly with there now being some open questioning on whether the definitions are themselves even valid. That is, irrespective of the morality of the conduct, if a social structure opposing it no longer really exists, the one that has risen supporting it might at some point fail to exist as well. A culture formed in opposition doesn't have a foundational base, at some point, if the opposition has changed its nature.

The Catholic Stuff You Should Know item was interestingly a reaction of that sort, but in the other direction.  One thing that has occurred in the homosexual movement was a tendency to claim numerous people over time as members of the group, irrespective of the evidence.  This was ironically the flip side of the use of the same definition as a slur to taint a person early on.  Again, it seems to be both side of the same coin.  The British, for example, released diaries of Roger Casement that showed him to be an unrestrained homosexual, but the strong suspicion is that English agents simply made the diary up, or at least the scandalous entries in it.  Released before his trial, the diaries diminished support for Casement, but since his 1916 execution doubt has been substantial about their authenticity.  Secrets elements of the British campaign against Ireland, and even open elements, weren't above using some pretty fowl tactics in their effort to suppress Irish independents movements, so who knows.

Sir Roger Casement

In contrast, the homosexual movement today feels free to claim a lot of former historical figures, out of context, as homosexuals based on conduct that is actually pretty normal in most societies, most places, but which hasn't been among English speakers in particular since the psycholization of the topic about a century ago.  It's easy to find letters written between men in the 19th Century that were gushing in their profusion of love for the same gender recipient.^^^^

Frequently misidentified Korean War era photograph of one soldier comforting another.  This photograph was taken in the context of a member of this unit, a close friend of the crying soldier, having just been killed.  Another fried is comforting him in his despair.  This sort of male bonding is really only acknowledged in English speaking societies in this context where conditions are so horrific that the social structures of outward bonding as a taboo have been destroyed.  This is often portrayed as unique to this condition, but it may in fact not be, but for the taboos.  For those who are students of material history, these very early Korean War American soldiers are equipped with the recently introduced field pants patterned on the World War Two airborne pattern, the new cotton fatigue shirt, and World War Two vintage M1943 combat boots, which were already in the process of being replaced by a post war model of combat boot.*^

Women, of course, still do this, but men in English speaking societies do not.  Given as they did at one time, and as European males generally have over a long time, its made all such past close relationships claim for political staking by homosexual advocates.  Indeed, the Catholic Stuff You Should Know podcast episode came about for that reason, as apparently a recent article by Andrew Sullivan, as well known columnist who is both Catholic and avowedly homosexual, made such a claim about some notable past figures.  Sullivan is a good writer and was formally one of the real standouts in The New Republic but he is all wet here.  He has a stake in the issue, as even though he is an acknowledged Catholic, he dissents from the Church's teaching on homosexual acts and does so openly, although some what quixotically (he lives in the UK and is subject to a marriage with another man apparently recognized under English law, but opposed the Obergefell decision on the basis that it was inherently antidemocratic, which his in fact quite correct about).  Sullivan's argument is that this stuff has been around all the time and therefore it's just the case to acknowledge it.

But the better examples is that while the acts have been around in the human population forever, the cause is poorly understood, and it doesn't fit well with the biological evidence.  Moreover, it may very well be the case that the pre psychologicalization definitions of the conduct as being something that was simply on a scale that departed from the norm, and that it didn't otherwise define the actors, has a fair amount of merit.

What also has merit is the point raised by the Catholic Stuff podcasters, which plays back into the isolation nature of what's been noted above.  Given the development of the categories in the English speaking world in particular, it became almost impossible for men to maintain close male relationships if, as most do, they occupied conventional jobs.  That's a really complicated subject and we're straying pretty far off course, but this gets back to the point first raised.  What we have seen, more likely than not, is a statistical bubble.  

That bubble was caused, more likely than not, by the vast increase in wealth in Western society following World War Two which decreased the number of men with conventional orientation entering the Priesthood, combined with social developments that were at work for most of the 20th Century, combined with the psychological and criminological classifications that came in during the late 19th Century.  If that's correct, what that means is that for a time, the Priesthood was a place for  some homosexual men to hide (which isn't to suggest they were ever the majority by any means) and later, because of the cultural aspects noted above, and the confusing liberalization of things in the 50s through 80s, one where a certain culture developed and was tolerated on localized basis.

If that's also correct, those days are now over, and frankly they likely would have ended on their own.  That doesn't mean that there aren't ongoing problems to be addressed, and most particularly with those who became depraved, no matter what their orientation is, and remain in place.  And of course there's the fallout to deal with, even if the problem has largely cured itself.

Which assumes that the problem has cured itself.  It seems to have largely done so, but like most problems there's a certain ongoing Jump The Shark aspect to it.  That is, once people really begin to try to address a social problem of any kind, you can pretty much be assured that the problem has passed its peak.  Because, in that situation, some are still trying to address a past problem they create the risk of making its remnants actually worse, and there's good reason to believe that some are hard at work doing just that.  Father James Martin, S. J., provides once such example.

But that also should note mean that lessons shouldn't be learned and the realization of new times not acknowledged.  That doesn't seem to be happening accurately in my view.  The continued ongoing focus on the "abuse of children" is largely misplaced for the reasons noted, which doesn't mean that it doesn't deserve attention.  The fact that those who participated in the behavior and its cover up and that there are those who are in open dissent with the Church's long held moral doctrines can't be ignored either.  But in addition to that, this this is a new era with a newer, young, much more orthodox Priesthood, but one that is covering more ground that ever in their daily tasks, can't be ignored as well.

Those who have looked at all of those things have suggested various approaches, some of which seem sound and others which are likely not.  One suggestion is to increase the number of bishops to more of the Medieval level, which would mean that they would be much more local than presently.  Also, generally, to be appointed a Bishop in that context is basically a career ender, as appointed Bishops of that type remain in place.  Making the appointment a career ender is part of the point, as that would end careerism.

Encouraging the collegiality of Priests is another suggestion, and that's now occurring.  The Catholic Stuff Priests are a good example, as rather than live in a rectory by themselves, as had become the norm for many decades, indeed centuries, they've returned to a communal living pattern in which their mutual faiths are reinforced and the chances for the vices of isolation are decreased.   This too seems a good idea, but it requires there to be adequate Priests in order for it to occur, which in many locals there are not.

Pope Adrian II, Pope from 867 to 872.  He was a married clergyman who was still married at the time that he became Pope.  His wife and daughter lived with him in the Lateran Palace until they were both murdered.  He was the second Pope to have perhaps had a living spouse at the time he became Pope, as it is widely believed that St. Peter's wife and daughter were still living up until his martyrdom, although this is uncertain.  He was the fourth Pope to have become Pope who had been married in any event, although it is certain that two prior to him were widowers at the time of their ascension to the position of Bishop of Rome.  There would be three more Popes after him who had been married. Notably, the children of those who rose to the Papacy and who had been married very commonly became Priests or Nuns, and one prior to Adrian II was the son of a Priests.  For that mater, St. Patrick of Ireland was descended from clerics.

Which brings me to a suggestion that conservative Catholics just hate, which is to resume the practice of the early Church and the ongoing practice of the Eastern Rite and Orthodox Churches and allow married men to be ordained.  At least some of the reasons that are cited against this practice no longer are valid, which is not to say that they were not at one time. Granted, St. Paul, whom we started off this very long post with, was never married and suggested it best for servants of God not to be, but it wasn't until some point in the early Medieval period when the ban on marriage and the Priesthood came in. That was in order to prevent the development of a hereditary Priesthood, which was strongly associated with nobility, and it was indeed a good and valid reform.  It was also one that churchmen had a hard time adjusting to in the wilder regions of Christendom and it was basically ignored for some time in some regions even after it became a law of the Church.

Indeed, while the concern at the time was really legitimate, the records shows that married Priests very commonly had children who did in fact enter religious life often with great success.  St. Patrick, for example, provides a spectacular example, but his is not unique.  It isn't for this reason, however, that I'm suggesting a change here.  Rather, it's because in an era with spectacularly messed up marital examples, devout married Priests provide a potential good example for the Worlds and, moreover, it provides a chance to bring guy's guys into the Priesthood.

On that, right now I know, very vaguely, a single married Priest.  He's a Anthiochiean Orthodox Priest serving a Greek Orthodox parish with Greek and Russian Orthodox parishioners.  I'm noting him, not because I'm a parishioner of his, I'm not.  I'm not Orthodox (obviously, I'm Catholic) but I've met him, and he's a former Chicago cop and a former Marine. Pretty  manly guy.

Now, in fairness, I've certainly met pretty manly guys who are Catholic Priests as well, but I think in the era we're in, we need guys' guys in the Priesthood, and frankly a lot of those guys find the struggle between opting for the married life and the Priestly one pretty hard to overcome. And, in addition, being married, even for a highly introverted person such as myself, keeps you in touch with the publicans in a way that not having children doesn't.

Bar tender in a Catholic Czech/Polish social club, 1941.

We've posted an earlier item on priestly isolation, and while that podcast didn't touch on what I've noted here, I think that having married Priests in the mix would very much work against that.  This is somewhat counter-intuitive based on what I've stated earlier, as modern American men are fairly self isolated to start with.  But Priests are even more so.  Married men would have to deal with outsiders as Priests as they do as in all occupation.  If you want to find a man isolated in his occupation, no matter what it is, find a bachelor or a widower. They often have nothing left but their work.  A guy is much more likely to go hunting, fishing, or to a baseball game as a married man.

And that's an important aspect of this.  At one time, Catholic Priests, from an earlier generation, and living in a different time, were pretty well known for not being isolated in their rectories.  They could be found at the Knights of Columbus bar (when such things existed), or at the ball game, or playing cards with fellow servicemen when they were chaplains.  My father was friends with a Catholic Priest when he was in the Air Force who was part of a circle of men who played cards regularly.  Marine Corps Catholic Chaplains were so adept at card playing that a Protestant Chaplain asked Marine Corps general Chesty Puller to order them not to play cards as they were getting so many converts by doing that (Puller declined to issue the order).  Yet more recently, I've heard one who was interviewed actually trying to argue against doing any outside activities.  That view is, in my view, wrong.  The New Testament references the apostles fishing more than once, which of course was no doubt by necessity, but none the less . . . 

So we'll conclude this really long entry here (probably the longest we've ever posted).  What's it about?

Well, a variety of things. One is that it tracks a social trend and the conditions associated with it, and how that trend expressed itself in a variety of ways, with one of those ways developing in a malignant fashion, but which, it appears, is partially addressed in the lower ranks if not in the higher.

It also questions or tracks, or perhaps more accurately questions and tracks, the development of a supposed demographic category which might not really be wholly accurate, and which in part may be partially manufactured as the result of the definition itself. If that's the case, serious thought ought to be given to whether the demographic categorization is even real.

Finally, it addresses a whole bunch of other topics mostly pertaining to men and their role in society.  It's popular to complain about "patrimony" and the patriarchy and the like, but arguably both men and women have been badly served by the developments of technology and economics of the past century or more, and the societal impact on men may be just as bad as its been for women.  In which case they've achieved equality, albeit in a negative sense. at last.  Things are equally societaly crappy for both genders.

______________________________________________________________________

*If anything, those who objected to the marijuana protests have had their comments shown to be even more ill thought out than they were at the time that they were posted. One person wanted a cite to the comment that there was open begging for cash for marijuana downtown.  If you go to downtown Denver, you can cite that to yourself as you can't help but encounter that.  Colorado, quite frankly, is becoming a real mess.

**And even writing it this time has taken an epic length of time, although it's been fortuitous.  As I've started to write it, I ran into one or two things, at least one of which was posted after I started writing this, that is incorporated into this post.

As for that op ed, by my observation, it was very little read and noticed.  It probably therefore had no more of an impact than this long, long post will.

***We'll go on record here, however, that we're of the view that the rule of celibacy in the Latin Rite of the Church should indeed be changed and married men allowed into the priesthood on the same basis that they are in the Eastern Rite and the Orthodox Churches.  That's not the same level of freedom to marry that the faithful in any of those churches has, but it would be a major shift in the Latin Rite. The Latin Rite does have some married clerics, it should note, those being as a rule married clerics who came in from another faith that was closely related to the Latin Rite and Permanent Deacons, who are in fact a type of cleric.  In all of these instances, should their wives die before they do, they may not remarry.

****The extent to which things have changed is perhaps best exemplified by a recent event associated with the schools that I attended in which a speaker was brought in as an example of a local graduate who went on to great success and was apparently so honored a couple of years ago.

Frankly, he wasn't a great speaker in my view, delivering a speech that was about 3/4s on himself in a setting that should have focused on others, but what I'll note here is that he immediately introduced his "husband" and mentioned his marriage to another male at least twice more in the same speech when it wasn't really germane to anything.  At one point the reference drew applause, but in the sort of mandatory way that any time a pause mentioning somebody else does.  I note this, however, as people just slipped into the routine of applause whereas nearly anywhere this same reference would have received quite a bit less just a decade or more ago.  Whatever their personal beliefs are or may have been, people have fairly obviously acclimated to the new legal and social reality and now basically ignore it.

*****This statement is really unfair to Marilyn Monroe who in reality was no doubt not a twit.  On that score, here's an interesting photograph of Monroe taken by Look magazine during the height of her career:

On this photo, one of the really notable things about it is that she was just as attractive decently dressed as when she was dressed, probably by others, in an intentionally alluring fashion.  this makes the tragedy of her life all the more tragic somehow, and perhaps is a fairly significant lesson.

^The Orthodox and Eastern Rite churches fairly clearly have a different culture in regard to their Priests.  Priests at the parish level are usually married and have families, and the atmosphere of the clergy is pretty manly as a rule.

Ironically, perhaps, their lives are also subject to a greater set of rules, in spite of the allowance for marriage, than generally exist for diocesan Priest in the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church. This should allow a greater degree of parishioner interaction in the Latin Rite, and perhaps it does, but if so that's not obviously so.

^*This entry has taken me so long to write that during the period in which I was drafting it a letter by a set of Catholic individuals that includes some Priests has accused the Pope of heresy.  This is shocking but I'm not going to comment on it here, other than to caution that those who would rush to that conclusion, from a Catholic prospective really risk what Catholics call "grave", i.e., mortal, sin.  Perhaps for that reason, Father Zuhlsdorf, a well known Catholic Priest and blogger who is very conservative and very orthodox has refused to comment on the letter on his blog and instructed his readers not to bother him with informing him of the news regarding this.  His one post noted that this was an invitation to sin and urged his readers, as he often does, to go to confession.

Catholic blogger and polymath Jimmy Akin, at the request of the Catholic Register, for which he writes, took the letter apart in a scholarly fashion and was more vocal in his negative reaction on the Catholic Answers radio show.  Akin is extremely levelheaded, clear thinking, orthodox and not reactionary in the original meaning of the word.  Very disgruntled Catholics on the far right have been taking potshots at his position and perhaps should take the counsel of Father Zuhlsdorf.  At any rate, this is a horrific development for Catholics and while this storm is likely to blow over the writing of a letter making such a charge seemingly could have had its questions addressed in some other fashion that was much less likely to be a schismatic invitation.

^^As late as 1920 the Anglican Communion in the Lambeth Conference of that year categorically rejected all artificial birth control as immoral.  It's 1958 was basically a reservation asking members of the Anglican Communion to "respect the conscience" of those using artificial birth control, but the resulting rapid evolution of thought that followed basically simply opened the door in the Protestant denominations.

Indeed, the evolution of things in the Anglican Communion is particularly notable.  The Church of England was opposed to the marriage of King Edward VIII, or rather recently abdicated King Edward VIII, to Wallis Simpson on  the basis that the Church of England did not recognize divorce.  It remained very Catholic in its views on the topic at the time, although the couple did find an Anglican Priest in France to perform the ceremony.  From 1920 to 1958 it changed its views on artificial birth control a bit, which lead to it having no real view later on.  In our current era, it for the most part pays no attention to divorce, outside of its conservative wings, and has departed from the Apostolic Faiths in regard to ordination of women and in some branches same gender marriage.  At the same time its conservative branches teeter on the brink of going into schism, as the retain the original more Catholic views.  As the various branches of the Anglican Communion have evolved new views, those views have basically tracked in varying degrees, since the 1960s, with "progressive" social views. At the same time, it's membership has basically collapsed.

^^^This followed a much earlier episode on the topic of whether women and men can be friends.

In the modern world, its touchy to debate that topic, but frankly that relationship is problematic by nature.  My answer would be yes, but it's heavily qualified by my Catholic world view.  I think women and men can be friends, but in the context of having a world view that's defined by moral boundaries so that certain fences are not only not crossed, they're not approached.  Without that, I think they still can if at least one of the friends has such views.  If no such mental concepts are acting as governors, I think it's difficult and at least by way of observation, I think the test set of workplaces pretty convincingly demonstrates that.

^^^^There are an endless number of such relationships that are routinely so characterized, and often very questionably.

In the Sullivan article, apparently, Sullivan cites examples of writings going back as far as Augustine, apparently, not really grasping what they were writing about.  Citations going back that far are particularly ironic in that moderns really misconstrue them and Augustine is a good example.  He clearly and acknowledgedly had strongly struggled with sexual attraction to women in a fashion that should make him the most modern of saints, for that among other reasons.

St. Augustine of Hippo, a polymath who had a Berber/Roman father (Patricius) of fairly high birth and a Berber mother (Monica) of fairly low birth.

Sullivan also argued, again apparently, that Cardinal John Henry Newman must have been a homosexual due to his relationship with Ambrose St. John.  The two men were extremely close to be sure and wrote to each other in such a context. They were buried at their request in a common grave. But again, Sullivan totally misconstrues the nature of their friendship.  Both men were English clerics who had converted to Catholicism, an act which in Newman's case in particularly nearly put him into a type of war with his culture.  They both endured what was regarded as a nearly treasonous act by doing that, and therefore were basically combatants in the faith.  

T. E. Lawrence.

Another common example of this recharacterization concerns T. E. Lawrence, "Lawrence of Arabia".  Lawrence never married and was intensely devoted to a young Bedouin assistant who worked for him in his pre World War One career as an archaeologist to whom he dedicated Seven Pillars of Wisdom.  But again, Lawrence was a Victorian man who had lived a closely limited personal life up until that point and who was to known to have what appear to be fumbling romantic leanings to women he knew in his circles prior to World War One.  He left World War One so messed up that its no wonder that he never married.  His official biographer found there to be no evidence that he in fact had homosexual leanings.

Lawrence, moreover, was the victim of a homosexual rape while a prisoner of the Turks. This act went beyond what might be regarded as weird, but simply cruel, behavior by Turkish guards as it wasn't committed by his Turkish guards, but by a Turkish officer.  This is interesting in this context as its another example of the overall topic here.  As already noted, homosexuality was fairly common in the German officer corps of this period.  The Ottoman Turks, going into World War One, were ruled by a monarch who claim the title of caliph and therefore the society was officially a theocracy, although very obviously an imperfect one.  While I haven't seen any studies on it, I suspect that the autocratic Ottoman officer corps was subject to the same peculiar pressures that existed in the Imperial German, Imperial Russian, and British Armies' officers corps which strongly discouraged marriage.  At least in the case of the German officer corp, that instead created a place for aristocratic men with same gender attractions to be self closeted, and it'd be surprising if this wasn't also the case for the other armies, although perhaps this was not the case for various reasons unique to each of the other ones.

*^This provides another example, FWIW, of why putting women into combat roles in the military is problematic.

Most military people, even in peacetime, are young in context.  And putting young male and female folks together is going to cause certain things to occur. To believe that this will not occur in the context the military is naive, and I personally know four couples that met in that fashion.  That may be all well and good in a normal situation, but a combat situation is not normal.

Every branch of the service has had really pronounced trouble with this. Rape, both of the conventional kind and of the high pressure submit kind, has been a problem in all of the services and there's no really good reason to believe that the service has any of this really in hand.  And while its impolitic to say it, young female service members, and we need to keep in mind Kipling's admonition that "single men in barracks don't grow into plaster saints" is equally true of single women in barracks.  Instances of female service people photographing themselves in a fashion that's attended to draw male attention has been very problematic and while it may now be in hand, as regulations belatedly came about to address it, it speaks to a conduct that's really libertine and likely still exists. Where it's really been hugely problematic so far is in the old Department of the Navy as female sailors become pregnant on sea duty at a prodigious rate and in the Marine Corps behavior by male servicemen has been abominable, in no small part as they don't want women in combat ranks.

The United States, it will likely be noted, has been at war since 2001, but being impolitic again, the casualties sustained in our current wars are tiny in comparison to prior ones and that means, whether we wish to admit it or not, that we really haven't fought the kind of intense ground war that used to define significant wars since 1973.  Nothing like the Vietnam War has come about since Vietnam.  We might be so lucky that we now live in the age where we won't ever be in another war like the Vietnam War again or we might just be in a long interval between such wars, but if we do resume fighting that type of war again, let alone something like World War Two, human nature in this area will make the insertion of women into combat roles extraordinarily problematic as instinct, but of a normally good nature, and of a really bad nature, will cause a lot of things to occur which will prove to be hugely problematic in regards to sex.  Put another way, the intense bond shown in this photograph changes into something else if feelings beyond brother love are interjected into it.