“St. Thomas relates the totality of sins against chastity to the common weal…and to justice as well.” (Josef Pieper, The Cardinal Virtues, p. 158.)
Particular Judgment: the confrontation of the soul with Christ the Judge immediately after death… distinguished from the General Judgment of all souls (re-embodied) at the end of time.
Young man: “What is it to be a good man, a real man?”
Wise man: “A real man is one that takes good care of women and children.”
Doctor King, upon departing his body, immediately approaches the pearly gates, with some trepidation, and is escorted by St. Peter to the Great Judge. St. Peter sadly reports mortal sins against the 6th commandment. The Lord seems untroubled but gazes with immense joy and love into the eyes of the pastor and says: “You are the one who so generously served my children who are poor, victimized, mistreated. Did I not say that what you do to the least of my brethren you do to me? Enter in, my dearest son, to the Kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of time.” The reverend’s heart swells with joy! “Even beyond that, my beloved disciple, you taught my little ones to forgive and love their enemies, racists in the South and the North both, you truly practiced my way. Enter into the highest realms of my Kingdom.” The minister’s heart is now bursting with happiness and praise. “And even beyond that,” continues our Lord, “you made the ultimate gift, you gave your life. You are a martyr. As a martyr, you are welcomed immediately into all realms of our Kingdom.” Bursting with joy, the great activist looks deeply into the piercing, pure eyes of our Savior. Something starts to trouble his spirit. He just doesn’t feel right. He feels unable to move into heaven. Glancing beyond Christ, he sees our Lady and, contemplating her immaculate virginity, he becomes more at ill-at-ease. Seeing the legion of martyrs to her right, he is relieved at the thought that he will be joining that heroic contingent; but then, looking to the left, the sight of the lovely virgins in their interior splendor awakes a deep sadness and regret. He closes his eyes and thinks of his beautiful, good wife and recalls how he had betrayed her. His eyes are now tearing. He then recalls the women who had looked to him, in trust, eager to be loved and cherished. He knows that he had abused and violated them. Then he is granted a vision of his country in the coming years, the last decades of the 20th century. He sees the abuse of women; the millions of abortions, so many of them by young women of color; the broken families; the sea of pornography in which the young men are emasculated. He owns his own part in this sad legacy. By now he has torn his clothes and is on the ground, hysterical with contrition. Pulling himself together, he turns to Peter: “I must go back. Let me make it up to my wife. Let me repair the harm I have done. Give me another chance to cherish these women and teach my followers to be pure of heart.” But Peter is shaking his head: “We do not do re-incarnation. You only get one shot at this.” Just, truthful, persistent man that he is, King will not budge: “I cannot enter heaven as I am. I am unjust! I am unclean!” Peter, still shaking his head: “We can’t force you into heaven. It is all about freedom. There is purgatory of course, but as a martyr you are spared purgatory.” “Do I look like a Catholic? We Baptists don’t do purgatory! Why would I do that?” “Well,” Peter patiently explains, “purgatory is a fierce, suffering, cleansing place where you endure great pain to repair the harm done on earth and become worthy of heaven.” A courageous, virile man…never one to back down in fear…he exclaims: “I want it! I demand it! I welcome it! Give to me this fierce, cleansing fire! I cannot…I will not advance into Glory until I repair my harm!” Charging into the deepest, fiercest depths of purgatory, the good Doctor finds himself exultant with joy and hope and pain as he declares the Miserere (Psalm 51) of the greatest penitent, King David himself: “Create a clean heart in me O Lord, and renew in me a steadfast spirit; cast me not out from your presence and take from me not your holy spirit; my sin is always before me, against you, you alone have I sinned, what is evil in your sight I have done; wash me and I shall be clean, cleanse me and I shall be whiter than snow; and I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will return to you.”
The foundation of social justice is virile chastity. Reverence and care for women and children is the basis for justice: in the family and at every level of society.
The Liberal Fallacy: Sexuality is Private
At the time of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, a fine Catholic remarked to me: “It is like a shoemaker. If he is a good shoemaker, you bring him your shoes. It doesn’t matter what he does in his privacy. It is the same way with the President.” This comment is classic contemporary liberalism: sexuality is strictly private; it doesn’t hurt anyone else; it is no one’s business; it has nothing to do with social justice or the public order. This “privacy” concept is a very bad idea! By contrast, St. Thomas taught that every sin against chastity is an offense against justice.
King David: Adultery as Injustice, Violence, Chaos
King-Saint David was, with Abraham and Moses, one of the “big three” covenant partners or “best friends” of God in the Old Testament. But the Bible does not sugarcoat his sin, his sin which is clearly an offense against justice. The adultery with Bathsheba leads quickly to the murder of her husband Uriah. Violation of the sixth always leads to a breaking of the fifth commandment. Uriah was himself a foreigner, which is to say a minority. In sharpest contrast to the lecherous monarch, this brave warrior maintains his holy, warrior abstinence from intercourse even when intoxicated by the scheming adulterer. The piercing scrutiny of prophet Nathan takes the form of a parable of a wealthy man who, unwilling to sacrifice a lamb from his own large flock, steals the only and beloved lamb of his poor neighbor. David is rightly enraged by this injustice which pales in comparison with his own sin.
David’s promiscuous, adulterous compulsion proves to be far more than a private flaw. Jealousy, lust and rebellion are rife among the sons of his many wives. Amnon lusts after his half-sister Tamar and rapes her. After the act, she pleads for him to protect her honor but he despises her and casts her to the gutter. Her full brother Absalom eventually kills Amnon. Later, the wise Solomon defiles the Davidic dynasty by marrying pagan women and falling into idolatry. From there, the Davidic line goes from bad to worse to horrendous.
Adultery, lust and unchastity corrupt and destroy the Davidic legacy. It will be finally and decisively restored only with the coming of the chaste Bridegroom. David remains for us, however, arguably the most important and fascinating and emulation-worthy character in the pre-Christ drama of salvation not because of the covenant or because of his heroism or his exuberant praise of God, but because of his profound repentance, his heartfelt contrition: “My sin is always before me; against you, you alone have I sinned; what is evil in your sight I have done!”
What is Chastity?
Chastity is far more than abstinence from adultery, promiscuity, pornography and the like.
Chastity is the power and energy of the gendered-sexual person to give love and life. Assisting charity and infused by charity (like all the virtues), chastity is:
- Interior serenity, composure, focus, sincerity.
- Sobriety, prudence, and the ability to see reality in all its splendor.
- Reasonable, intelligent, and logical in the logic of the Logos himself.
- Reverence, tenderness, and care for the feminine in its nobility and delicacy.
- Virile confidence, honor, courage and magnanimity.
- Fruitfulness, hope, promise and exuberance.
- Freedom from fear, shame, guilt, jealousy and inferiority.
Chastity is:
- St. Joseph protecting the virgin with child, mentoring the God-man, cherishing the most beautiful woman that ever lived.
- Patriarch Joseph of Egypt rejecting the sexual advances of his mistress out of loyalty to his master and then being unjustly imprisoned for many years. Note: unchastity leads to injustice. Note also: his purity of heart gives him clarity and sobriety of vision so that he is able to anticipate the famine,efficiently administer an empire, and feed the entire Mideast.
- The young prophet Daniel discerning and protecting the innocent and beautiful Suzanna from the lust-based accusations of the lecherous elders. (Again: lust =injustice!)
- Quintessentially, Christ with the woman caught in adultery. Effortlessly he disarms the lynch mob, eliciting humility and contrition in place rage and judgment. He then receives her tenderly, rescuing her from death, freeing her from guilt, and sending her forth to live freely in joy and love.
- Roman Holiday: The princess (Audrey Hepburn) is given a thrilling, delightful holiday by the older, experienced and virile journalist (Gregory Peck) who cherishes and protects her in her precious, lovely, delicate innocence.
- Aragon (Return of the King), strong now in his regal identity, at the final battle when his men are frozen in panic before an enemy that vastly outnumbers them, announces: “There may come a day when the courage of men fails; when we forsake our friends and break all fellowships. But this is not that day!”
Chastity is gentle, controlled, intelligent, virile, reverent strength. In his bargaining for the city of Sodom, Abraham got God to spare it if he could find 10 just men. “Just” here clearly means “chaste” as the obvious sin of the city was against chastity. So, in our age, if we have just, chaste men, we will have justice.
Mixed Legacy of the Sixties
As sure as David killed Goliath, Doctor King and his movement destroyed racism as a root cause of injustice. Well before the Obama presidency, this was obvious in the logic of the market. In the 80s, as a supervisor in UPS I was put through a series of workshops on inclusion and diversity. UPS had been traditionally a white, (largely Irish) male company. But the message was emphatic: without inclusion and diversity, we could not compete and flourish in the global economy. Unambiguously: the logic of the market and global capitalism has zero tolerance for racial discrimination. I realized then that racism as a pervasive system of injustice was extinct in the globalized market economy. This was the bright side of the impersonal market logic which also tends to deconstruct positive ties of ethnicity, family and religion as it redefines every individual as a unit of production and of consumption. In all the influential arenas of Western culture (faith, academia, entertainment, commerce) racism became the single most politically incorrect attitude. The only competitor for this title would be advocacy of sexual chastity as a public, justice issue.
In a recent book, Disintegration: the Splintering of Black America, the perceptive, liberal, black, Pulitzer-winning journalist Eugene Robinson argues that we no longer have a monolithic Afro-American community, but at least four distinct groupings: a majority have merged into the working-middle class, a small elite of the influential and wealthy (Oprah, Tiger, Barak), a newer group of immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, and the “abandoned” poor who are stuck in poverty. His reading is persuasive and implies that race itself is no longer a primary cause of poverty. What then keeps the “abandoned” poor? Daniel Patrick Moynihan (surely the brightest mind in American politics over the last 50 years…but so sadly mistaken on the protection of innocent life!) answered this question years ago: the family structure. And the family structure means masculine loyalty, which is to say chastity. Most of our poor are single mothers with children. Marrying and staying married is the single smartest financial decision one can make; what we are seeing now is that the affluent know this and do it but the underclass (of whatever race) is suffering most from the deconstruction of marriage and family in cohabitation, divorce, and adultery.
It is now common knowledge that during the summer projects of the Civil Rights Movement in the South of the early 60s, it was commonplace for young, white women to sleep with the dynamic, charismatic black male leaders. Black women were enraged. It was here that sexual liberalism became “one flesh” with the political liberalism which until then had been closely bonded with Catholicism and its cult of family, life and chastity. The “wheat” of social integration of this period is hard to separate from the “weeds” of sexual liberation. To this day, the strongest argument for legitimizing homosexual actions is the comparison with racial discrimination. Imagine if Doctor King had insisted on sexual chastity as rigorously as he did on active non-violence: there may have been no Roe, no sexual revolution, no gay militancy, no flood of pornography, no destruction of the family, and no corruption of the Democratic Party.
Where to From Here?
It was just reported that 41% of pregnancies in New York City end in abortion. The average age at which boys start using pornography is now 11. Social workers report a pandemic of the practice of oral sex among adolescents. Abuse of women and girls is rampant and getting worse. This must be the way things were in Sodom when Abraham could not find 10 chaste men.
Most of today’s argument about social justice pivots around the impersonal mechanics of the economy: we need to expand government to ensure health care for all; or, we need to shrink taxes, the deficit and debt and let the impersonal market lift everyone’s boat. The Tea Party is the mimetic opposite of Obama-philia: both seek justice in impersonal economic mega-systems rather than in pure hearts.
Neither is a genuine path to justice. Justice is always first a cardinal virtue, an attribute of a person, not a system. And even more, it is a characteristic of relationship, especially that between men and women and most essentially in marriage and family.
Let us withdraw our energies and loyalties, our hopes and resentments from ideologies of the right and left! Let us attend to the little, the immediate, the concrete: purity of heart, happy families, faithfulness, care of the poor around us, immersion in prayer, and continual conversion of heart. Let us pray the Miserere with the penitent David and the contrite Reverend:
Create a clean heart in me O Lord; and renew in me a steadfast spirit.
Cast me not out from your presence; and take from me not your holy spirit.
My sin is always before me; against you, you alone have I sinned; what is evil in your sight I have done.
Wash me and I shall be clean; cleanse me and I shall be whiter than snow.
And I will teach transgressors your ways. And sinners will return to you.
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