Posted on 07/24/2006 12:43:15 AM PDT by catholicfreeper
Edited and reprinted from a long time ago, because the subject came up again - via email - and so I thought I’d post it.
I recall reading a column by John Leo - way back in 1989 - wherein he recounted the invasion of St. Patrick’s Cathedral by members of ACT-UP. I can’t find the piece online but I do recall most of the details. ACT UP people participated in the Mass until Communion at which time they lay across the aisle to try to prevent worshippers from receiving. Some chained themselves to pews.
Others received the Eucharist in their hand and then brought it outside to the assembled activists, tearing the Host to piece and stomping on it, (and in another case spitting out the Host) to wild cheers.
Outside was the usual political theater, gays dressed as priests simulating sodomy against gays dressed as nuns, signs saying, “Get over it, Mary!” And “Cardinal O’ Connor is a fat cannible in a dress.”
Cardinal O’ Connor simply asked the worshippers to pray for these people and that no one would get hurt.
ACT UP found they’d gone too far with this particular demonstration and they lost a little of their media-lustre, for a while.
Since then, ACT UP - France has acted out.
A priest was slightly hurt Sunday at Paris’s famed Notre-Dame cathedral when clashes broke out between church security personnel and gay rights activists who performed a mock marriage of two lesbians.
About 20 members of the group Act Up entered the cathedral and proceeded to perform the mock marriage, before baffled tourists and worshippers, according to an AFP correspondent at the scene.
One militant - dressed as a priest - pronounced the two women married, while other Act UP members chanted: “Pope Benedict XVI, homophobe, AIDS accomplice.”
The president of Act Up Paris, Jerome Martin - who participated in Sunday’s demonstration - told AFP by telephone… “We did not want to be aggressive with respect to the worshippers… the aggressive security detail wanted to rip up our banner,” he said.
So, ACT-UP did not feel that coming into a church with a banner and performing a mock wedding was “aggressive.”
And Benedict XVI is a homophobe and an AIDS accomplice, why? Partly because he won’t embrace the idea that condoms will solve the AIDS problem.
I’ve always found it interesting that people who have no intention of following church teaching on chastity will DEMAND that the church change its teaching on condoms. It’s not like they’re actually paying attention to anything the church is saying, and clearly it is a ruse. Gay men are not carousing in bath houses or at the meat racks of Fire Island while thinking…”wait…the Catholic church says Condoms are Bad, and I don’t want to be separate from the church, so I guess I’ll just have to chance it and go bareback, because there is no way I’m not partying tonight!!”
For that matter, promiscuous heterosexuals, uninterested in monogamy and unconcerned about their souls, are also quite unlikely to worry about what the church thinks about condoms as they pursue their pleasure.
For too many people, the Orgasm is the new Idol. It is the Alpha and Omega of their human experience.
This is not simply the reactionary rant of a conservative. Way back when I was a liberal, I thought way too much emphasis was being placed on sex, sexuality and the almighty O. I remember nursing my elder son and flipping on the tv to find a women’s talk show carrying on about how orgasms brought meaning to their lives, raised their consciousness, made them the equal of men, yadda yaddda…
Even then, I thought this over-emphasis on the O was ludicrous. Actually the whole societal emphasis on sex as the be-all-and-end-all of life is ludicrous. Sex is great. It is also sacred. And holy. We’re not taught that, anymore. Humanae Vitae and John Paul II’s writings on the Theology of the Body try to teach it, but it’s not information being promoted by the mainstream - if anything it is information being mocked and quickly put away.
I think one of evil’s greatest triumph’s has been to take people’s understanding of sex outside of the realm of the spirit and keep it solidly in the camp of the physical. to reduce it to a few soundbites of personal empowerment, some adolescent giggles and a few sharp grunts. To mischaracterise sex as “dirty” was a failing of the Christian church. In doing so it opened itself up for the sort of mindless, reactionary silliness we have witnessed since the “sexual revolution” decided that sex was not “dirty” but “good clean fun.”
Sex outside of marriage is not sinful because it is “dirty.” It is sinful because the act by which we more closely work with God in creation, the act which takes us into the deepest recesses of our physicality, to our very essences, becomes reduced to nothing more than an end to itself, separated from the energetic and spiritual realm in which it is most fully and functionally realized. It removes emphasis on the spirit and chains you to the Corporeal, assists in the exploitation of other bodies, and keeps your mind, heart and eyes off of God. That is where the sin comes in.
We are not meant to use our bodies and each other like so much disposable tissue. If a beautiful park is not maintained, if its users are permitted to run amok within it, with no accountability to authority, the park is quickly a shambles of litter, weeds, broken equipment and squalor. It is the same with our sexuality. It is no playground meant to be exploited and run through by bands of marauding, mindless hoardes, which is pretty much what the sexual revolution promoted and encouraged.
The whole world has paid a price for it, this rampant, thoughtless, ravenous pursuit of the Almighty Orgasm - deemed more delightful, more worthy, more necessary than God or Family or even Self.
I have lost a beloved brother because of it. He thought he was having a good time, some harmless fun. He instead was killing himself, devaluing and ultimately destroying himself and his essence as a created Creature who had been loved into being. And yes, I’m angry about it. I miss him every day. He bought into the program, and pursued the empty, meaningless and fleeting pleasures that are dangled before the eyes of young gay men as something fine and ecstatic to chase and gain. And it killed him.
It killed his body…thankfully, his spirit did manage to find grace and peace before the end. But before that, while he was in mid-party and mid-pursuit, there was no grace, there was no peace, there was only the World, and the Things, and the Party…all of which brought laughter, it is true (as well as many tears) but none of which brought joy, or true love, or peace.
But condoms would solve everything, wouldn’t they? Except they break. Except they run out. Except people use poor judgement because they are human, faulty creatures.
Would condoms help contain the heterosexual AIDS crisis in Africa? Everyone acts like there are no condoms in Africa. There are, of course. They made no difference in the spread of AIDS. ABSINTENCE education, though, HAS made a difference. Absintence works - for obvious reasons.
But the world, and the Prince of the world, don’t want abstinence promoted. Abstinence leads to thought…and thought, too, too often, leads to things of the Spirit. And even more often, that leads to God. It makes a Houndog into a Hound of Heaven. And we can’t have that.
Evil wants to keep us mindless and distracted. Our society has been distracted for 40 years by the non-stop promotion of sex, and by the over-emphasis on the big O. And many smart, beautiful-but-immature-and-reckless people have died for that O. In fact, in the past 40 years, many more have died for the Orgasm than have died for the faith.
Too many have died for the false god of the Orgasm. They are not martyrs. They are not saints. But they are victims of a tinsel mentality that urged them on, every step of the way. And they leave behind countless, countless lives full of pain and sorrow.
I miss my brother. God, I miss him.
I did not intend to write all of this. But, I miss my brother, S. He is gone 18 months and the pain does not go away. We are not a “noble” family because we lost our beloved S to AIDS. And he was not noble because he died of AIDS. He was noble because he was as generous and forgiving and loving and sincerely warm a human being as I’ve ever known. The KINDEST guy I have ever known. And he is gone to us, now.
And all the “friends” who disappeared when he became sick and lost his pretty looks, they’re all continuing on. Some have HIV, some do not. They’re still renting the summer houses and living the reckless, eternally adolescent lifestyle of material things and sexual pre-occupations that are so outsized they cannot be counterbalanced by the love of family or faith, lives that are so raucous they cannot hear the quiet, simple pleading of God to “draw near…”
Now, my brother’s house is empty and his things - all those THINGS he loved and had to have, all the THINGS he acquired to try to fill the void in his life, the one he wouldn’t let God fill, because to do so would have ended the party…they have been disbursed - much of it to strangers.
S was so conflicted. On one hand he wanted God, he wanted faith - he HAD faith, but faith on his own terms, and his own terms simply brought in more conflict. He could never get settled. I asked him once, if the concept of chastity, of living his life in chastity as all non-married people are called to do, meant anything to him. It was a long and serious conversation, but he got distracted. He got distracted by the next phone call and the next party, before he could remember to ask for grace.
Grace did come, finally, stunningly, very late in the ballgame. It was a sort of 9th inning grace. But I am so grateful that it finally came.
But I miss him, and it hurts. The grief is slightly - so very slightly - healed over but it doesn’t take much to rip the scab and begin to bleed afresh. I would rather spend the rest of my life tending to his bedside than going to his grave.
But to his grave, I must go.
Jesus came that we might have life, and have it to the full. These ACT UP people call Benedict XVI (and by extension all of Catholism) an accomplice to death, they have it exactly backwards. Like his predecessor, John Paul II, this pope is trying to save their lives. So that they might have it to the full. And while some would say that a celibate person has nothing to say to the rest of human sexuality, it seems pretty clear to me, from the example of countless saints…from the example of celibates like Mother Theresa and JPII, and yes, the Dalai Lama, that once can live life to the full - very grandly, very completely - without worshipping at the altar of the Almighty O.
UPDATE: The pope - simply doing his job - has declared that gay marriage is anarchy. For some reason the press is acting like this is something no one has ever said before. Meanwhile, Bob Geldof is getting heat for inviting the Pope to Live 8, because even though Abstinence education works and condoms don’t…blah, blah, blah, the pope is a bad guy, etc, etc.
UPDATE II: Reader Mark Olsen provides us with another interesting link to an article about condoms and AIDS in Africa.
The countries with the worst HIV infection rates in the world turn out to be Swaziland and Botswana, where more than a third of adults have the virus — but only 5 per cent are Catholic. Botswana, incidentally, is pro-condoms, not that it seems to have helped much. In contrast, Uganda, where half the people are Catholic, is the one African country that has slashed its rate of infection — from a devastating 15 per cent of all adults to “just” 5 per cent. And, heavens, it worked this miracle by doing much as the Pope had preached.
You’ll want to read it all. Thank you, Mark - the article is a keeper
Much to ponder, and I thank you for posting it.
In 2004, she organized a nationwide, 24-hour prayer chain for the elections. (She's a former L-Dotter, too)
For too many people, the Orgasm is the new Idol. It is the Alpha and Omega of their human experience.
would seem to be true.......
"Sex outside of marriage is not sinful because it is “dirty.” It is sinful because the act by which we more closely work with God in creation, the act which takes us into the deepest recesses of our physicality, to our very essences, becomes reduced to nothing more than an end to itself, separated from the energetic and spiritual realm in which it is most fully and functionally realized. It removes emphasis on the spirit and chains you to the Corporeal, assists in the exploitation of other bodies, and keeps your mind, heart and eyes off of God. That is where the sin comes in."
Actually, the sin boils down to the fact that you may be creating a life which could be stuck in an inideal situation. That is why sex outside marriage is bad. You are playing with someone's life, literally.
She has a great blog. I read it daily...
Further, even in situations where one wouldn't be 'playing with someone's life' in that way (e.g. having relations with someone who is sterile) one would develop habits that would need to be unlearned to be able to effectively raise children in future. While it is not necessary for everyone in society to raise children, it is bad to have such a large portion of the productive class avoiding that duty.
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