A post that has been months in the making….

It has been a significantly long time since I last blogged anything. Over this long hiatus, I never felt I should blog on particular topics because of how busy I have been with teaching and writing for my dissertation and spending time with my wife and family (4 children ages 6 and under) and then just getting some quiet time for myself. I think I am at the point of being able to provide some thoughts on things that have been coming to me in the films I have been watching and the books I have been reading (or listening to via audiobooks).

It all started when I listened to Paul Johnson’s A History of the Jews; it is a decent work, a bit dated now, but overall a good introduction to a lot of history concerning the Jews and the events that have shaped humanity. Because I became fascinated with wanting to read more and learn more about the Holocaust and Post-Holocaust events, I went to Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. I did not know what to expect when I listened to a recording of Eichmann in Jerusalem. I knew very little about Eichmann prior to the book; but something struck me about how Arendt characterized Eichmann (as the banality of evil) and this converged with something that Fr. Ford (CUA Professor) had said about his experiences in post-WWII Germany, that the evil confronted in the Holocaust (and one can extend to evil anywhere in the world) for the most part did not come at the hands of maniacal human beings who were thirsting for blood. Sure these kinds of people existed before, during, and after the Holocaust; but for the most part, the evil manifested in our day and age is not often something spectacular but ordinary in a way; as Fr. Ford put it, it was ordinary Germans who kept quiet about the disappearance of neighbors and friends.

This “ordinariness” of evil surprisingly showed up in two very different films I watched with my wife. First, my wife and I saw Apocalypse Now (1979). In short, it is about a soldier (Capt. Willard played by Martin Sheen) who is being sent on a secret mission by his superiors to kill a rogue Colonel Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando) who has taken the war into his own hands during the Vietnam War. Kurtz is spoken of as a highly decorated office who has gone crazy and has caused the slaughter of innocent people. (SPOILER ALERT: Skip to the next paragraph if you haven’t seen the film.) Toward the end of the film, Kurtz details how he has gotten into the position he has – being considered rogue, etc. He recounts a story of how he lead some soldiers to help inoculate children from a  village with the Polio vaccine. Upon leaving the village, he saw that the elders of the village had cut off the inoculated arms of the children without any hesitation. For Kurtz, this was the type of human nature he wanted to embody and in some sense the kind of human nature he needed to win the war. What is the kind of human nature though? It seems to be an instinctual human being who is capable of living and fighting for his own survival without the need to get emotional or upset or disturbed by doing what had to be done to fight and win. In the end, Kurtz comes off as a very rational person who wants to embody a certain ideal of human nature. He is not some monster; but in some sense very ordinary.

The “ordinariness” of evil re-appeared in the second film my wife and I watched last night, After the Truth (Nichts als die Wahrheit, its German title). This film relates a fictional account of what might have happened if Josef Mengele, a Nazi doctor known for his activities at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, had been arrested and put on trial in Germany in the 1980s. The story mainly follows Peter Rohm, a young lawyer and Mengele scholar, who decides to defend Mengele in court. (SPOILER ALERT: Skip to the next paragraph to avoid key details of the film.) Part of Rohm’s defense is to show how ordinary some of the activities of Mengele had been in the 1930s and 1940s as part of the medical establishment of the times. The fictitious Mengele defends his activities as a compassionate doctor of his time. A second part of the defense is due to Rohm’s own mother testifying at how she unknowingly participated in the killing of two patients (via injections) at a psychiatric clinic she worked at when she was 17 (1939/1940); after learning about what had happened, she refused to participate in any more such injections; yet she knew that patients regularly died during the night over the period of time she continued working there as a nurse in training and yet she did nothing and hid her past after WWII ended.  The evil that is recounted in this film while at times is extraordinary but oftentimes appears as ordinary. Mengele and Rohm’s mother do not come off as monsters in the film; rather if anything the filmmakers aimed to drive home the point that evil lives very close to us and sometimes is in our own homes without us knowing what lurks in the human heart.

Where I am going with this reflection on human nature? I have used two very different reflections to get at the point I want to make; human nature is inclined to perpetrate evil if given the opportunity. Let me get at this one final way. Below, I am including a post by Peter Berger that deals with the exact topic I have been treating from a slightly different perspective:

…How is it possible that human beings could commit such horrible atrocities?  Again and again this question is asked—with regard to the Holocaust, and to such more recent events as the mass atrocities in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda. Commonly the question is given weight by the recollection that previous to the outbreak of genocidal violence the affected two groups lived with each other peacefully for long periods of time, even intermarried—Armenians and Turks, German Jews and their Gentile neighbors, Bosnian Muslims and Serbs, Tutsis and Hutus. (In that respect, the Cambodian case is distinctive, describable as auto-genocide, with no or religious or ethnic differences between victims and murderers.) Of course each case is unique. Thus there has been a strong animus in the Jewish community to subsume the Holocaust under some general category that would depreciate its uniqueness (as when, as is sometimes done, the mass murders of Hitler and Stalin are described as similar). I think that this desire to insist on the uniqueness of each particular horror is understandable as well as intellectually valid. Nevertheless, there remains the lamentable fact that mass murders of one kind of another have been perpetrated since the dawn of time. Once one faces this reality, all of history appears as a long string of atrocities. If I recall correctly, it is a character in Joyce’s Ulysses who exclaims “History is a nightmare from which I hope to awake.”   I suppose that we are all children of the Enlightenment and its optimistic view of human nature as essentially benign and of history as the march of progress. These assumptions may lie dormant in our consciousness, well short of the expression of a coherent worldview. But absent such assumptions we could still be horrified by the murderous actions, but we would not be surprised by them.   The Biblical tradition evokes a much darker view of man and of history. Christianity has asserted that human beings are under the sway of original sin. Gilbert Keith Chesterton observed that this is the only Christian doctrine which does not require faith—it is empirically verifiable. Judaism may be less pessimistic in that it has no such doctrine, but arguably it is more pessimistic for a different reason: as Abraham Heschel has pointed out, Judaism takes the unredeemed character of the world more seriously. In that perspective, Christians are overly optimistic by asserting that redemption is already underway since the coming of Christ. Be this as it may, I am not about to enter into this theological thicket. Let me propose a darker view in purely secular terms.   The rejection of the so-called “Enlightenment project” by some postmodernists and others is inappropriate. We owe much to that particular turn in history—for its devotion to reason and to the universality of human rights. All the same, its optimism cannot be empirically sustained. History undergoes certain progresses (in the plural), such as advances in the protection of human rights. But each progress is reversible. And Rousseau and others like him were wrong in thinking that man is by nature benevolent, and only turns to evil if led there by oppressive institutions. Actually, pretty much the opposite is the case: man is by nature homicidal, unless restrained from acting out of his natural impulses by institutions that foster benevolence. It is this perspective, I think, that is empirically sustainable. If one wants to put this into an evolutionary frame, one might say that homo sapiens is a pathological mutation of the anthropoid ape—so to speak a chimpanzee gone wrong. I don’t really want to go down that road.   How is it possible that human beings could commit such horrible atrocities? Let me suggest that this question should be reversed: How is it possible that human beings can live together peacefully for long periods of time without committing horrible atrocities? The general answer to that question is quite simple: it is possible if institutions are in place to socialize individuals to behave peacefully and to punish those who act otherwise. It seems to me that the identification and construction of such institutions is the true “Enlightenment project”.

But how do we go about having those kinds of institutions that socialize individuals? For Catholics, there are two such institutions: the Church and the family. Isn’t it interesting that these two institutions are the ones that have been threatened more so than any others in the past number of years? I’m not saying all the threats are external; some are very internal to the Church and family life. But these assaults upon the roles of the Church and the family have diminished the capacities of these institutions to humanize the human person.

Darkness and Light

I discovered a piece from Anne Rice on angels in this past weekend’s Parade magazine in the Washington Post, and this passage struck me  so I had to share:

But vampires are sad creatures. They speak to us of confusion and the longing to be human. They struggle in the darkness, lamenting the loss of light.  Perhaps the whole vampire craze can be related to the age-old yearning for a loving, eloquent supernatural presence that will save us from the perils and disasters of ordinary life (Anne Rice “The Angels Among Us” in Parade 12/20/09).

What’s ironic in a way is that a lot of human people are not much different than the way Anne Rice describes vampires.  The sadness that many people experience, the unhappiness of life, is sin, as Barron would put it.

Isn’t sin our attempt to be human in the way we think will make us happy and fulfilled?

And yet our happiness and our humanity is ever so close before our eyes this time of year.

As the days of Advent draw to an end, may the light of Christ shine ever more deeply in our lives to dispel the darkness of sin so that we may see what it means to be human and the true happiness that we seek.

On the Role of a Theologian

I came across quite a beautiful excerpt from a homily Pope Benedict XVI gave to the International Theological Commission in 2006.  The excerpt appeared as an explanation in the Mass guide for the episcopal motto of the newly ordained archbishop, the Most Reverend J. Augustine DiNoia, O.P., now secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discpline of the Sacraments.  Archbishop Dinoia chose the motto “in oboedientia veritatis.”  Here is the relevant snippet from Pope Benedict’s homily back on October 6, 2006:

… a beautiful phrase from the First Letter of St Peter springs to my mind. It is from verse 22 of the first chapter. The Latin goes like this: “Castificantes animas nostras in oboedentia veritatis“. Obedience to the truth must “purify” our souls and thus guide us to upright speech and upright action.

In other words, speaking in the hope of being applauded, governed by what people want to hear out of obedience to the dictatorship of current opinion, is considered to be a sort of prostitution: of words and of the soul.

The “purity” to which the Apostle Peter is referring means not submitting to these standards, not seeking applause, but rather, seeking obedience to the truth.

And I think that this is the fundamental virtue for the theologian, this discipline of obedience to the truth, which makes us, although it may be hard, collaborators of the truth, mouthpieces of truth, for it is not we who speak in today’s river of words, but it is the truth which speaks in us, who are really purified and made chaste by obedience to the truth. So it is that we can truly be harbingers of the truth.

The role of a theologian is not to seek applause and accolades but to serve with and speak the truth, no matter how difficult it is; this not only applies to how theologians should teach in their writings and lectures but also in their lives.  Without a faithful witness who continually seeks  to purify himself in obedience to the truth, how can we ever achieve upright speech and action regarding the truth for others to follow?

Obama is more Catholic than Pope Benedict?

In her piece “Without a Doubt: Why Barack Obama represents American Catholics better than the pope does” Kathleen Kennedy Townsend presents a case for how Pres. Obama can teach Pope Benedict about politics and what a Catholic politics could look like as well as how Pres. Obama fits better with American Catholics than Pope Benedict.  Reading such a piece fraught with so many mistakes, I don’t quite know where to begin. And please note, I am not going to tackle every problem in this article.  I leave that for those who have the stomach to comment on every mistake.

The first obvious place to start is with her selective use of Pope Benedict’s recent encyclical Caritas in Veritate.  She argues that:

In truth, though, Obama’s pragmatic approach to divisive policy (his notion that we should acknowledge the good faith underlying opposing viewpoints) and his social-justice agenda reflect the views of American Catholic laity much more closely than those vocal bishops and pro-life activists. When Obama meets the pope tomorrow, they’ll politely disagree about reproductive freedoms and homosexuality, but Catholics back home won’t care, because they know Obama’s on their side. In fact, Obama’s agenda is closer to their views than even the pope’s.

It’s fitting that Obama’s visit comes just days after the publication of “Charity in Truth,” a Vatican encyclical that declares unions, regulation of capitalism’s excesses, and environmentalism to be ethical imperatives. The document gives moral credence to Obama’s message and to progressive politics writ large.

Never mind the obvious points within the encyclical that clearly call out for the respect for human life:

Openness to life is at the centre of true development. When a society moves towards the denial or suppression of life, it ends up no longer finding the necessary motivation and energy to strive for man’s true good. If personal and social sensitivity towards the acceptance of a new life is lost, then other forms of acceptance that are valuable for society also wither away.⁶⁷ The acceptance of life strengthens moral fibre and makes people capable of mutual help. By cultivating openness to life, wealthy peoples can better understand the needs of poor ones, they can avoid employing huge economic and intellectual resources to satisfy the selfish desires of their own citizens, and instead, they can promote virtuous action within the perspective of production that is morally sound and marked by solidarity, respecting the fundamental right to life of every people and every individual. (paragraph 28- Emphasis in the original)

For a president who does not respect the fundamental right to life of every people, how can Pres. Obama teach Pope Benedict anything about politics and Catholic political life?  Indeed, I think it is the Pope who is teaching the world about what a true politics looks like – esp. one that respects human life and protects the weakeast amongst us.

Then Townsend proceeds to tell us more of what a politics should look like, esp. for Catholics:

Politics requires the ability to listen to different points of view, to step into others’ shoes. Obama might call it empathy. While the pope preaches love, listening to the other has been a particular stumbling block for the Catholic hierarchy (as it is for many in power). The hierarchy ignores women’s equality and gays’ cry for justice because to heed them would require that it admit error and acknowledge that the self-satisfied edifice constructed around sex and gender has been grievously wrong. Before he became John Paul II, Karol Wojtyla had a telling all-or-nothing formulation: “If it should be decided that contraception is not an evil in itself then we should have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit is on the side of the Protestant Churches.”

Is anybody struck by how she enumerates a modern liberal politics that seems to be grounded in the notions of equality and justice which are what we make them out to be?  Shouldn’t we be more concerned with loving our neighbors and helping them see the TRUTH of things?  Heaven forbid the Catholic Church try to teach anything that it regards as true about the human person.  Instead we should listen to our feelings and bodies and allow ourselves to construct our own view of the world and ourselves – atleast that is what Townsend believes that Obama can teach us about, esp. the oppressive Catholic Church which has constructed this power struggle over sex and gender.

Then comes another great section from Townsend about Humanae vitae:

That attitude has resulted in some heinous decisions. Most famously, in the lead up to the encyclical “Humanae Vitae” in 1968, an advisory body of theologians and laity empaneled by the pope advised that the church should reverse its position on birth control and concede that the issue should be a question for morality and for science. But authority—not truth, not love—prevailed: Pope Paul VI, listening to the advice of Wojtyla, disagreed with the majority of these advisers, who had voted 69 to 10 for change, fretting that to change this position would weaken his authority.

Authority won the day with Humanae vitae.  Get that?  Has Townsend even picked up a copy of HV and read it?  If anything, it is an effort to speak the truth about love and the human family.  As far as I am concerned, love and truth won out in the encyclical; I wish I could say the same for the world we live in.  Furthermore, I don’t remember anything in HV telling me, “Pope Paul VI declares such and such to be the case and it is on my authority that I tell it to be so,” or “let it be written, let it be done.”  If anything was lost, it was authority because HV represented a moment in which the dissent of theologians and bishops became more apparent and outspoken; it is the moment in which those who were to teach the truth began to turn against the truth in a way that has not been seen in modern history.

Now we get right down to it from Townsend and her message about American Catholics:

Yet polls bear out that American Catholics do not want to be told by the Vatican how to think. Despite the rhetoric of love and truth, the Vatican shows disdain (if not disgust) toward gays. But 54 percent of American Catholics find gay relationships to be morally acceptable, according to a 2009 Gallup poll. Meanwhile, against all scientific evidence and protestations from clergy on the ground, the pope claims that condoms aggravate the spread of AIDS. Seventy-nine percent of American Catholics disagree, according to a 2007 poll by Catholics for Choice.

Yes. Polls tell us exactly what we should believe and indeed we should put the Catechism and the teaching of the Church up for a democratic vote; anything that does not receive a majority vote should be removed from the Catechism.  Okay.  That was a bit harsh.  Indeed, this is a typical maneuever of more left-leaning Catholic theologians – the voice of the people speak the truth of things.  I remember Robert Blair Kaiser saying such a thing.  The people have decided he said when it came to the issue of contraception.  As far as Mrs. Townsend is concerned, the people have spoken on gays and condoms.  Who cares what the church thinks? I must say, in all my reading of  church documents and theologians writings on same-sex attraction, I cannot recall one disdainful or disgustful writing about those who struggle with same-sex attraction and behavior.  Indeed, it is very difficult to admonish our brothers and sisters who struggle with a condition that leads toward sinful acts.  Indeed, it is difficult to admonish our brothers and sisters who struggle with every other sin.  Does that mean we should give up?  No.  Indeed, it is out of the concern for truth and love that the Church teaches what it does.  It does not get some high or kick out of making people suffer.  Indeed, it wants people to reach heaven.  The Church wants the salvation of souls; and in order for that to happen, the Church has to teach the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

For the issue of AIDS and condoms, I refer my few readers to the fine article of Fr. Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco, O.P., “Can the Distribution of Condoms Stop the Spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa?“   Fr. Austriaco is a Dominican Friar who teaches at Providence College.  Here is a snippet:

as Dr. Edward C. Green, director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies explained in a recent interview, the best scientific evidence supports the Holy Father’s comments.   Author of Rethinking AIDS Prevention: Learning from Successes in Developing Countries, Dr. Green concluded: “”There is a consistent association shown by our best studies, including the U.S.-funded ‘Demographic Health Surveys,’ between greater availability and use of condoms and higher (not lower) HIV-infection rates. This may be due in part to a phenomenon known as risk compensation, meaning that when one uses a risk-reduction ‘technology’ such as condoms, one often loses the benefit (reduction in risk) by ‘compensating’ or taking greater chances than one would take without the risk-reduction technology” [6].  In other words, according to Dr. Green, condom users engage in riskier sexual behavior because they believe that using the condom would decrease the risk of becoming infected with HIV.  To put it another way, the reduction of the spread of HIV that may have resulted from increased condom use is offset by the increase in risky sexual behavior that promotes the spread of the virus.

Research has shown that the Church is quite right when it comes to the use of condoms to reduce HIV.  Promoting condom usage increases risky behavior that helps spread the virus.

Mrs. Townsend’s article came out before the visit between Pres. Obama and the Pope.  Not surprising, Pope Benedict gave Pres. Obama gifts of the recent encyclical as well as a a copy of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s instruction on bioethical issues, Dignitatis personae. No doubt the Pope is hoping to teach Obama. Not the other way around.

Finally, on a note concerning Pres. Obama and his way of doing politics, we have heard about how Obama plans to reduce abortions.  If you should ever get bored one day, feel free to visit the Campaign Spot at National Review Online or google for a few of his posts.  The writer, Jim Geraghty, has noted many times over the past 5 months in which Obama has done things he said he wouldn’t do.   As Geraghty writes, “All Barack Obama statements come with an expiration date. All of them.” Here’s waiting for this reduction of abortions to happen.  Oh wait. This promise already has expired.

The Addictive/Compulsive Nature of Same-Sex Behavior

Upfront it is important to note that not all people who struggle with same-sex attraction struggle to the same degree.  This highlights a difference between how Alcoholics Anonymous approaches the Twelve Steps and how Courage approaches the Twelve Steps. As Fr. Harvey puts it:

every alcoholic is compulsive, but not every homosexual is compulsive.  A.A. steps apply strictly to the compulsive homosexual, but they apply only analogously to the non-compulsive homosexual person.

Indeed, Courage’s use of the Twelve Steps aims more directly to those who struggle with compulsive/addictive forms of same-sex attraction/behavior.  This does not mean that those who experience same-sex attraction to a lesser degree can’t benefit from the Twelve Steps.  Such benefit for these individuals will be of a different kind in the end since these individuals experience less forms of compulsion towards same-sex behavior. The overall benefit these individuals would receive consists in living out the Christian life and working towards ending other areas that are deficient.

What does it mean for a person to struggle with a compulsive form of same-sex behavior?  These same-sex inclinations are attachments that focus the sexual appetite with certain same-sex sexual behaviors and other same-sex persons in a disordered fashion. “Disordered” here should be understand as the sexual appetite deviating away from the true purpose of the sexual faculties which are to be used in the state of marriage between a man and a woman.  In other words, the person becomes “addicted” to same-sex behavior.  And such addictions can have greater or lesser forms of intensity.  Addiction here is described as that which “attaches desires, bonds and enslaves the energy of desire to certain specific behaviors, things, or people” [Gerald G. May, M.D., Addiction & Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions (New York: Harper San Francisco, 1991), 3. Emphasis in the original text].  So in a compulsive form of same-sex attraction, a person’s sexual desires attaches to a specific type of behavior, thing, or person(s).

Through repeated same-sex behavior, a person becomes attached to these objects of desire through the misuse of the sexual faculties; thus same-sex persons are caught in a struggle to either live freely according to God’s plan  or to live according to their disordered desires and plans which leads to attachments. In a sense, same-sex inclinations and homosexual acts “make(s) idolaters of us all, because it forces us to worship these objects of attachment, thereby preventing us from truly, freely loving God and one another,” and they breed “willfulness within us, yet again, paradoxically, it erodes our free will and eats away at our dignity”(May, 4).

So same-sex attraction in more aggressive forms erodes at a person’s ability to turn away from such behavior.  It is very hard to break the attachment to same-sex sexual activity once an individual becomes habituated to it. This is so for two reasons.  First, psychologically speaking, it is because an individual has learned to associate a certain behavior with a certain response.  In the case of same-sex activity, a person comes to associate homosexual behavior with intense, physical pleasure.  The brain of that person “automatically associates these effects with the behavior” (May, 58).  And every subsequent time that behavior is repeated, the association is “reinforced, making me more likely to repeat it” (May, 58).  Repetition of the behavior paves the way toward the development of a habit.  After some time, this habit becomes “an integral part of my life” in which “any upset or distress” or “absence of stress” may trigger a desire to repeat the behavior that has been associated with the pleasure sought; in other words, a dependency has been formed (May, 59). Second, even more distressing than how this dependency is formed is that the fact that the brain cannot unlearn what it has associated with certain behaviors and pleasures.  As Gerald May puts it,

The brain learns how to ‘do’ its attachments far better than it learns to ride a bicycle or drive a
car, and it remembers them more powerfully. (90)

It truly seems as if the person who is struggling with same-sex behavior (or for anyone struggling with an addiction really) cannot break away from these attachments formed.  As May poignantly states:

The only effective way of ending an addictive behavior is to stop it.  Anything less will almost aggravate the situation.  But of course I will neither be able to accept nor to accomplish this simple reality.  All the pieces of the circle of attachment have reinforced my addictive behavior, making me repeat it.  And with each repetition, my learning has become more deeply ingrained.  With the circle complete, addiction is born.  Even when I consciously try to stop the behavior, my brain is unconsciously learning it better and seeking it more.  My motivations are mixed, and I am fully at war with myself.  My attachment has become like quicksand; the more I struggle and flail about with my willpower, the more mired down I become. … My self-esteem crumbled as I sense how truly out of control I am.  I am in the clutches of the enemy, and the enemy is myself. (60, emphasis in the original text)

Such cases seem hopeless.  But in reality, it is these very addictions that bring a person to the realization that things have to change. As Gerald May says, “We will never really turn to God in loving openness as long as we are handling things well enough by ourselves.  And it is precisely our most powerful addictions that cause us to defeat ourselves, that bring us to the rock bottom realization that we cannot finally master everything…. Thus, although in one sense addiction is the enemy of grace, it can also be a powerful channel for the flow of grace.” (May, 19-20). When things seem most hopeless, it is in fact when a person is most open to God and God’s grace to change one’s life for the better.  For any one who has struggled with bad behaviors or with a friend or relative who has struggled with an addiction, it is very hard to convince yourself or another person to see things for how they really are.  That an attachment has been formed that is causing one to become self-centered to the detriment of everything and everyone else.  And when a person finally reaches rock bottom, God is there.

Before a person can truly begin to start on the path towards a better and more fulfilling Christian life, one must come to the realization that things aren’t working anymore.  The pleasures aren’t quite the same anymore.  Once a person reaches rock bottom, hopefully he will come to the realization that things have to change.  As Alcoholics Anonymous puts it:

We had to quit playing God.  It didn’t work.  Next, we decided that hereafter in this drama of life, God was going to be our Director.  He is the Principle; we are His agents.  His is the Father and we are His children.  Most good ideas are simple, and this concept was the keystone of the new and triumphant arch through which we passed to freedom.

It seems like such an easy beginning doesn’t it? But to renounce one’s very own attachment(s) becomes a very tall order and even more difficult becomes the path towards sanctity.  Yet we should be reminded with the words from the Gospel:

Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for your selves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light. (Matthew 11:28-30)

In my next installment, I will begin going through the Twelve Steps of Courage.

Spiritual Solution to Same-sex attraction?

Fr. John Harvey of Courage speaks of a spiritual solution found in the Twelve Steps as a way to deal with same-sex attraction and behavior as opposed to reparative therapy [For more on reparative therapy and what it is, see Joseph Nicolosi, Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexuality: A New Clinical Approach (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc, 1997).  Nicolosi’s work describes the psychological genesis of same-sex attraction and approaches towards the recovery of the normal heterosexual orientation; you can also visit http://www.narth.org which is an organization dedicated to reparative therapy for those who do not want to live with same-sex attraction/behavior].  Fr. Harvey certainly has nothing against reparative therapy but he simply states that such therapy is not something for every person who struggles with same-sex attraction and behavior to pursue.  Instead, the spiritual solution that Fr. Harvey proposes is nothing other than learning to live the Christian life to its fullest and which is something everyone should be pursuing in some sense. And this spiritual solution undergirds the Twelve Steps first articulated by Alcoholics Anonymous.  As Fr. Harvey has stated:

From careful reflection upon the Twelve Steps I believe that any Christian can benefit from their practice.  One must get beyond the particular problem to which the Twelve Steps are applied and discern the universal principles upon which they are based. (John F. Harvey, O.S.F.S., The Homosexual Person: New Thinking in Pastoral Care, 157.)

Such universal principles are none other than ways to learn how to live as a Christian.  Such a spiritual solution can be applied to any person seeking to live a more full Christian life.  No doubt everybody struggles with particular sins or emotions, and it takes God’s grace to move us to be better and to work in us so that we can more fully fulfill the very dignity we have been given as sons and daughters in Christ.  As the Catechism of the Catholic Church eloquently puts it:

God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek him, to know him, to love him with all his strength. He calls
together all men, scattered and divided by sin, into the unity of his family, the Church. To accomplish this, when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son as Redeemer and Savior. In his Son and through him, he invites men to become, in the Holy Spirit, his adopted children and thus heirs of his blessed life. (CCC ¶ 1)

This is something fundamental that we must realize about all of us; we are called to perfection in Christ and God has given us the resources, his very life of grace, to sustain us and make us anew, to truly be the image and likeness of God.  Thus the spiritual solution underlying the Twelve Steps provides a substantive basis for anyone seeking to live the Christian life.

In my next post, I will begin discussing the nature of addictive behavior and how a person can come to the spiritual solution of the Twelve Steps as a means to live a full Christian life while still struggling with same-sex attraction.

Same-sex attraction, Courage, and the Twelve Steps Part I

I focused in my licentiate thesis on the Catholic group Courage and its use of the Twelve Steps in habituating the virtue of chastity in the form of continence. I want to encapsulate some highlights from my thesis in a series of posts.  I am not copying directly from my thesis but rather trying to condense and at times make more understandable the theological arguments I attempted to make to show how Courage builds a spiritual program for those who seek to live a life of chastity.  Part I will consider some of the basic rationale for the Church’s teaching on same-sex attraction and same-sex sexual acts and how I approached it.

The Catholic Church teaches that all those, who are not in a marriage between a man and a woman, should live a life of chastity in the form of continence.  What does that mean? Chastity is a sub-virtue of temperance.  Temperance, a cardinal virtue, is a habit of having well-ordered desires regarding food, drink, sex, and recreation.  Continence refers to the refraining of activities.  In the case of sex, continence refers to refraining from all forms of sexual activity.  Note that the church calls all those who are not married to live such a life of chastity in the form of continence.  It is not reserved just for those with same-sex attraction.  

What is wrong with same-sex sexual acts?  

Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.” They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved. (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2357)

It would go beyond the scope of this post to delve into the complete background of these statements so I will keep my comments to a minimum.  Sexual activity finds its only true expression within the bonds of marriage between a man and a woman.  This is one of the fundamental governing norms of the Church’s teaching on sex and marriage.  Man and woman are made for each other (affective and sexual complementarity).  Such a union is open to life, and marriage provides the stable institution to help sustain new life in the family (gift of life).  Thus the Church can teach that same-sex acts are objectively disordered.  Same-sex genital activity, by its very nature, is contrary to God’s plan for sex.  No subjective aspect (one’s intentions or emotions) could ever make same-sex genital activity to be good.  That goes to explaining some of paragraph 2357.  

In the very next paragraph 2358, the Catechism also refers to the condition of same-sex attraction as “objectively disordered.”  What does this mean?  The Church teaches that same-sex attraction, by its very nature, is contrary to God’s plan for sex.  As Fr. John Harvey puts it: 

the person with homosexual orientation lives in the occasion of sin in a special sense; that is to say, the occasion of sin is within his own heart and mind.  He may find himself immersed in homosexual ways of thinking and acting. (The Truth about Homosexuality: The Cry of the Faithful, 118).

A person who deals with feelings of same-sex attraction has unchaste inclinations to sin.  One must be clear that such an attraction is not sinful in itself; it just has the potential to lead to sin. The same-sex attracted person deals with challenges from within himself towards sin.  Yet, in some sense, this state is not much different from most people.  Who doesn’t deal with inclinations towards sin?  Who doesn’t struggle with particular sins?  And it goes without saying, same-sex genital activity is not some unforgivable sin or the worst sin.  

So how does one go about dealing with same-sex attraction?  Fr. Harvey and Courage propose the Twelve Steps as a spiritual plan to help deal with same-sex attraction.  This spiritual plan aims to develop the virtue of chastity in those who suffer with same-sex attraction. Chastity here is not about stopping one’s sexual desires or suppressing them.  Rather it is about trying to re-focus and re-orient one’s desires towards living a life of holiness with God. We are sexual beings and that is undeniable.  How we live as sexual beings, we have much control over, especially with the help of God’s grace.  

In my next post, I am going to take up the question of why a spiritual solution to this problem of same-sex attraction and how does one begin the path of the Twelve Steps, or rather, how does one begin to desire to live a life of chastity in the form of continence.

A Quiet Holy Endeavor…..

I do apologize for those few who do follow my blog.  I truly have been quiet over the past 3 months. I actually thought that once I finished my S.T.L., I would have more time to write on my blog.  That did not some to pass.  Trying to juggle my own school work, teach two classes, spend time with my family – all of these proved to keep me busy.

I spent most of October working on a German translation project, which thankfully got approved this month. That cleared the way for me to apply for my candidacy to the S.T.D. program, which should officially begin in January.  I also have been working this month on sending out my c.v. since I am looking for a full-time position, and I have been trying to get my S.T.D. dissertation topic approved by my area faculty before it gets sent to the Ecclesiastical Degrees Committee in January. Last, but not least, I have preparations underway for the four undergraduate courses I am teaching in the spring. 

I hope and pray that with the new year coming I may have more time to write at least one post a week and catch up on all the good material that I have been waiting to write about for the past 6 months. 

May all of you have a blessed Christmas and a joyous New Year!

The Responsibility of the Catholic Citizen

Nothing else could sum up my own thoughts on this upcoming presidential election than the joint pastoral letter OUR MORAL RESPONSIBILITY AS CATHOLIC CITIZENS from Most Reverend Robert W. Finn, Bishop of Kansas City-St. Joseph, and Most Reverend Joseph F. Naumann, Archbishop of Kansas City in Kansas.  An important section below:

In 2004 a group of United States Bishops, acting on behalf of the USCCB and requesting counsel about the responsibilities of Catholic politicians and voters, received a memo from the office of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, which stated:  

“A Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil, and so unworthy to present himself for Holy Communion, if he were to deliberately vote for a candidate precisely because of the candidate’s permissive stand on abortion and/or euthanasia.  When a Catholic does not share a candidate’s stand in favor of abortion and/or euthanasia, but votes for that candidate for other reasons, it is considered remote material cooperation, which can be permitted in the presence of proportionate reasons.” 

Could a Catholic in good conscience vote for a candidate who supports legalized abortion when there is a choice of another candidate who does not support abortion or any other intrinsically evil policy? Could a voter’s preference for the candidate’s positions on the pursuit of peace, economic policies benefiting the poor, support for universal health care, a more just immigration policy, etc. overcome a candidate’s support for legalized abortion? In such a case, the Catholic voter must ask and answer the question: What could possibly be a proportionate reason for the more than 45 million children killed by abortion in the past 35 years?  Personally, we cannot conceive of such a proportionate reason.

I have a hard time understanding the struggle of Catholics on who to vote for this November in the presidential race.  I think the choice is very obvious and clear.  How could anyone ever hope for a more just society that benefits the poor and the immigrant and establishes peace when innocent new human life continues to be slaughtered everyday?  Without a protection of life itself, how can the world ever hope to improve?

Bear with me a little bit longer…

I am in the midst of a very busy time.  I just took my STL Comprehensive exams on Friday, August 22, and have my first fall semester class to teach on Monday, August 25.  Not to mention, I probably will have my STL Oral Examination on Friday, August 29 and then the second course I teach begins on September 2. So please bear with me a little bit longer, and I will update this site with a few new posts.  Certainly I will continue with a discussion of my STL Thesis on the Catholic group Courage as well as a post on “responsible parenthood” and Humanae vitae.  These goodies may not arrive until September, but be assured that I am thinking of new material to write about and will continue what I have started.