Emotivism

I was very troubled today by my freshman religion class on the Eucharist. I raised the question: Who can receive? I planned to cover the normal material: a baptized Catholic, who has been catechetically prepared, who understands and believes the Catholic teaching, who is in union with the Church, in the state of grace, and has fasted the hour. I was flabbergasted when several students insisted that everyone had a right to receive: unbelievers, those ignorant, drunkards, and even animals. Not only did they insist that all God’s creatures are entitled to the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist, but they did so in a contemptuous manner, disgusted that the Church (and I) would discriminate against other species. They saw nothing wrong with sending the sacred host through the mail to a family member. These were good students from good families who spoke in a tone of righteous contempt for the sacramental practice of the Church.

These students live in an entirely different ontological and moral universe. They fail to see any essential structure to existence: the sacraments are for everyone and everything without discrimination and there is no hierarchy to being so that animals receive respect equal to humans.

Meanwhile, in my senior marriage course on marriage and the theology of the body, the most vocal students see cohabitation and gay coupling as morally equivalent to marriage.

Meanwhile, in the news we learn that President Obama is being honored by our premier Catholic university and the intellectually precocious President Clinton declares that embryos can be destroyed as long as they are not fertilized!

This is deeply troubling. Our youth inhabit a universe devoid of intelligent order, moral purpose or structure. They know only feelings and emotions: they are emotivists. They feel pleasure and pain, they emote good and bad, but they do not know reality as intelligible, as purposeful, as orderly.

This is all very discouraging. But then I think of Pope Benedict and his mission to restore a sense of Creation as infused with Logos, intelligent love and loving intelligence. His gentle, sweet, brilliant, and hopeful lucidity restores me to courage and confidence.