What the "Nice Fornicators" Lose

From The Catholic Thing:

The Allegory of Chastity by Hans Memling (1430-1494)

Cutting Yourself With Your Own Knife

by Anthony Esolen

How does the practice we have been calling in recent columns Nice Fornication hurt those who practice it? How do they, as Chaucer put it, cut themselves with their own knives?

A good book could be written on this matter. They commit, objectively, a mortal sin. If they engage in this with full knowledge, they sever themselves from friendship with God. If they practice contraception, they separate sexual intercourse from the possibility of giving life, severing the act from its biological and theological meaning.

Whether they do or not, they behave with blithe irresponsibility toward the child they may conceive. They mimic marriage, and accustom themselves to some measure of deceit. They allow hedonistic experimentation to take root in the heart of the marital act, so that even after they are married they continue in the habits once established. For one of the curses upon those who pretend to be married when they are not is that they may feel no different after the ceremony.

Since all along they have justified themselves by a feeling of “being committed,” rather than by a public vow or a conferred sacrament, they will be helpless to understand why that vow should remain in force when the feeling disappears. You cannot treat the vow as a mere formality while you are fornicating, and then as solemn and eternally binding afterwards. It cannot be both. If it is a mere formality, the marriage itself is but a pleasant fiction. If it is solemn and eternally binding, then it demands that we behave accordingly, and not pretend with our bodies that we are married before we have made that vow.

But instead I should like to discuss one great blessing that the Nice Fornicators lose. I’ll illustrate it by a story.

When my father was engaged to my mother, he had to spend two years in the army first, and then when he returned he had to wait a little longer for my mother’s youngest sister to graduate from high school. That was because my mother was working to support the family, and would naturally quit that job once she was married. He loved her dearly, and he was a quiet young man, a tad on the lonely side, and deeply devout. Maybe he felt unsure of himself and wanted a guarantee of her love.

He asked her for the honeymoon before the marriage. I’m pretty sure he did so half wanting her to turn him down. These were two good-looking young Italians, healthy and strong. My mother was in a quandary. She spoke privately to the parish priest about it, and in a firm and kindly way he reminded her of the beauty of chastity, and of the solemnity of the act of marriage, which God had blessed in the beginning. So my mother in turn reminded my father of these things, and they preserved their innocence for the wedding. I was born eleven months later.


My father wasn’t one given to flights of poetry, but he thanked my mother ever afterwards for being strong when he was weak. I imagine them, in my mind’s eye, approaching the altar of the church where I and my brother and sisters were baptized, where we received Holy Communion, and were confirmed. They would there take one another fresh, as if made by the hand of God in the beginning. They would place God, in the order of time and the order of devotion, first in their marriage.

All the time before this moment, meeting one another and courting, going to dances, writing letters, would fade into relative insignificance. They would now know one another, as Adam and Eve, for the first time. Every chaste marriage is thus like a new creation, as if we were granted a vision of what it is like to be, as Charles Péguy describes Mary, “younger than sin.” They would be bound to one another in the holy vow, with God saying, “Be fruitful and multiply!”

And they left the church not as people old with the pseudo-knowledge of sin, but as youths, in mind and heart and soul a boy and a girl, ready to begin the world. My father and mother could say to one another something incomparably precious. It was not simply, “I will keep myself only for you,” but “I have kept myself pure in the sight of God, and now before God and man I give myself entirely to you forever.” Their lovemaking was born from the seed of the sacrament. And it flourished.

On the day my father was to die, we were gathered around him at home. He was sitting in his favorite chair in the parlor. He could no longer eat or drink.  Sometimes he fell into a light sleep, but mostly he was awake. My cousins had stopped by to make their farewells. The priest had been by to give him the sacrament.

Early in the evening his breathing grew heavy and erratic. We surrounded him, touching him, calling his name. My mother placed her head next to his. She was the only woman he had ever known, and he had known her only as coming from the hand of God. And now he was going back to God. He whispered his last words into her ear. “I love you,” he said.

Anthony Esolen is a lecturer, translator, and writer. His latest book is Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. He teaches at Providence College.  

Abp. Dolan Addresses Youth in Madrid

This morning Archbishop Dolan offered a 30 minute catechesis to young, English-speaking pilgrims in Madrid.  It is worth listening in full but fast forward to 24 minutes in to hear him at his best.  Our faith is in a Person...in fact three Persons and everything else is oriented toward that Truth.


Archbishop Dolan's Catechesis talks at World Youth Day by palmermj

William Oddie from UK Catholic Herald Responds to Weigel

Here's a thoughtful response to George Weigel's article (posted below) in which he calls for a wholesale replacement of Irish bishops and charges Ireland with being the epicenter of European anti-Catholicism:

Sorry, Mr Weigel: the Irish Church has problems, but to call Ireland the ‘epicentre of European anti-Catholicism’ is simply wrong

There’s an obvious distinction between the governance of the Church and the essence of the faith

By William Oddie on Thursday, 4 August 2011

Abuse survivors confront Archbishop Diarmuid Martin outside St Mary's Pro-Cathedral in Dublin

(Niall Carson/PA Wire)

I had not meant to return so soon to the subject of the crisis in the Irish Church, for though this is something I care about very much for personal reasons, I’m still an Englishman and this isn’t my business. But the American George Weigel has now written with ponderous weight on the subject, and I cannot simply ignore his piece, since people are influenced by what he says and somebody has to say something about it. After his epic and authoritative biography of the late pope, Weigel now speaks plausibly about a wide variety of subjects. And he’s a great one for the well-turned phrase which arrests attention.

He has now outdone himself with an opening sentence to an article in the respected National Review (which in Buckley’s time I wrote for myself sometimes), a sentence which, though certainly striking, is quite simply wildly untrue. The article, disrespectfully entitled “Erin go bonkers” (“Erin go brach”, of course, means “Ireland forever”) opens thus:

While America’s attention has been absorbed in recent weeks by domestic affairs, something quite remarkable has become unmistakably clear across the Atlantic: Ireland – where the constitution begins, “In the name of the Most Holy Trinity” – has become the most stridently anti-Catholic country in the Western world.

Well, now. The point is, of course, that the current crisis in Irish Church affairs, involving certainly an unprecedented fury against Ireland’s bishops and also against Vatican bureaucratic procedures – of which Enda Kenny’s late performance was the most striking example – is not about Catholicism at all. Incidentally, though the invocation of the Holy Trinity at the beginning of the Irish constitution certainly implies that Ireland is Christian, those behind the constitution (who also devised a national flag implying peace between Ireland’s Catholics and Protestants) were well aware that the Island of Ireland is home to more than the Catholic majority, and as Mary Kenny pointed out recently in an article I quoted on Monday, the constitution nowhere says that the Irish state is officially Catholic.

Pope Benedict's August Prayer Intentions

 
VATICAN CITY, 29 JUL 2011 (VIS)

Pope Benedict's general prayer intention for August is: "That World Youth Day in Madrid may encourage young people throughout the world to have their lives rooted and built up in Christ".

His mission intention is: "That Western Christians may be open to the action of the Holy Spirit and rediscover the freshness and enthusiasm of their faith".

George Weigel - "Wholesale replacement of the Irish hierarchy"

Shortly after the Murphy Report was issued in November 2009 regarding the egregious Irish abuse scandal, I attended a lecture at Providence College by George Weigel.  When asked by an audience member to comment on the scandal, Weigel didn't hold back in asserting (in the presence of a bishop) that the Holy Father needs to completely wipe the slate clean by removing every bishop in Ireland and replacing them with American bishops who have experience in the matter.  He remarked that is was Ireland that evangelized the world and now it was time to return the favor.

In the following article posted in NRO, Weigel again calls for the same:

Erin Go Bonkers

While America’s attention has been absorbed in recent weeks by domestic affairs, something quite remarkable has become unmistakably clear across the Atlantic: Ireland — where the constitution begins, “In the name of the Most Holy Trinity” —  has become the most stridently anti-Catholic country in the Western world.

Its Taoiseach (prime minister), Enda Kenny, recently took to the floor of the Dáil to denounce the Vatican as a house of “dysfunction, disconnection, elitism . . . [and] narcissism” and to commit an act of calumny against Pope Benedict XVI, accusing him of being a party to the coverup of the “rape and torture of children.” Ireland’s attorney general plans to introduce a new law that threatens priests with five-year jail sentences if they do not violate the seal of confession when pedophilia is confessed. Polls indicate considerable support among Irish voters for such an unprecedented violation of religious freedom, and the Irish press has indulged its anti-Church phobias with virtually no restraint.

There can be no doubt that the crisis of clerical sexual abuse — and the parallel crisis of local Catholic leadership that failed to address the problem — has been especially acute in Ireland. Benedict XVI condemned both the abuse and the coverup of abuse in a stinging letter to the entire Church in Ireland 16 months ago, a letter that condemned abusers and their enablers while offering a heartfelt apology to victims. Apostolic visitations of the principal Irish dioceses and seminaries have been undertaken, on Vatican orders, by bishops from the United Stats, Canada, and Great Britain; their reports, one understands, have been blunt and unsparing.

What has not happened, and what ought to happen sooner rather than later, is a wholesale replacement of the Irish hierarchy, coupled with a dramatic reduction in the number of Irish dioceses. Ireland is in desperate need of new and credible Catholic leadership, and some of it may have to be imported: If a native of Ireland could be archbishop of New York in 1850, why couldn’t a native of, say, California be archbishop of Dublin in 2012? The United States and Canada, in particular, have Anglophone bishops who have demonstrated their capacity to clean house and reenergize dioceses evangelically. Thus the Vatican, not ordinarily given to dramatic change, might well consider clearing the Irish bench comprehensively and bringing in bishops, of whatever national origin, who can rebuild the Irish Church by preaching the Gospel without compromise — and who know how to fight the soft totalitarianism of European secularists.

In the wake of Taoiseach Kenny’s hysterical rant in the Dáil, the Vatican recalled its nuncio to Ireland for consultations, a clear sign of displeasure with Irish politicians who, for whatever reasons, deliberately foment anti-Catholic hysteria. Yet as distasteful and irresponsible as Kenny’s attacks were, they underscore the fact that radical changes are needed in the Catholic Church’s leadership in Ireland — now, not at some indeterminate point in the future.

The deeper question that the past several weeks of Catholic-bashing in Ireland has raised — How on earth did this most Catholic of countries become violently anti-Catholic? — touches on the modern history of independent Ireland; serious answers to that question are likely to offer little comfort to either Irish romantics or defenders of the old alliances between Church and state.

Sixty years into the 20th century, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and Quebec were among the most intensely Catholic nations on the planet. Fifty years later, Quebec is the most religiously arid space between Point Barrow and Tierra del Fuego; Portuguese Catholicism, outside the pilgrimage shrine of Fatima, is hardly robust; Spain has the most self-consciously secularist government in Europe; and Ireland has now become the epicenter of European anti-Catholicism. What happened?

Perhaps some comparative history and sociology suggest an answer. In each of these cases, the state, through the agency of an authoritarian government, deliberately delayed the nation’s confrontation with modernity. In each of these cases, the Catholic Church was closely allied to state power (or, in the case of Quebec, to the power of the dominant Liberal party). In each of these cases, Catholic intellectual life withered, largely untouched by the mid-20th-century Catholic renaissance in biblical, historical, philosophical, and theological studies that paved the way toward the Second Vatican Council. And in each of these cases, the local Catholicism was highly clerical, with ordination to the priesthood and the episcopate being understood by everyone, clergy and laity alike, as conferring membership in a higher caste.

Then came le déluge: the deluge of Vatican II, the deluge that Europeans refer to as “1968,” and the deluge of the “Quiet Revolution” in la Belle Province. Once breached, the fortifications of Counter-Reformation Catholicism in Spain, Portugal, Quebec, and Ireland quickly crumbled. And absent the intellectual resources to resist the flood-tides of secularism, these four once-hyper-Catholic nations flipped, undergoing an accelerated course of radical secularization that has now, in each case, given birth to a serious problem of Christophobia: not mere indifference to the Church, but active hostility to it, not infrequently manifested through coercive state power.

This, then, is the blunt fact that must be faced by bishops, priests, and lay Catholics who want to build the Church of Vatican II, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI — the Church of a New Evangelization — out of the wreckage of the recent Irish past: In Ireland, as in the other three cases, the Church’s close relationship with secular power reinforced internal patterns of clericalism and irresponsibility that put young people at risk, that impeded the proclamation of the Gospel, and that made the Church in these places easy prey for the secularist cultural (and political) wolves, once they emerged on the scene.

And that is why the leadership that Catholic Ireland needs may have to be imported, at least in part. Men of indisputable integrity and evangelical passion who have no linkage to this sad, and in some instances tawdry, history are needed to lead the Irish Catholic reform for which Benedict XVI has called. I know no serious observer of the Irish Catholic scene, anywhere, who disputes the necessity of clearing the current bench of bishops; I also know no one who thinks that a reconfigured Irish episcopate, even one leading fewer dioceses, can be drawn entirely from the resident clergy of Ireland today. This may be one factor leading to the current languid pace in reforming the Irish hierarchy; and that lassitude is what gave Taoiseach Kenny the opening for his latest rabid attack on the Church, the Holy See, and the Pope. All the more reason, then, to make the reform of the Church in Ireland truly radical by looking outside Ireland for men capable of helping lead this once-great Church back to evangelical health.

— George Weigel is distinguished senior fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.