A Confident Catholicism

"I cherish and live my Catholic values within my family and in my own life but I cannot go out and tell two men who love each other that they cannot get married." These are the words of a woman very close to me, an intelligent, devout and serious-minded Catholic who is quite extraordinary in her generosity towards those in need and who recently voted for President Obama. She has an intense, quite feminine, aversion to anything oppressive, dominating, judgmental or arrogant. She has contempt for Republicans. She sees politics primarily as the arena in which to defend the rights and needs of the poor and needy against the greed of the rich and powerful. And she relegates values regarding innocent life at its beginning and end as well as marriage and sexuality to the realm of the private and the familial. She has almost exactly the same beliefs and values as mine; the crucial difference is that she reserves the life and sexuality concerns to the domain of privacy. The weakness of this approach has two sides: it fails to recognize and engage the aggressive, militant, evil forces that have now become dominant in the public realm of our culture; and it is reluctant to vigorously share the life-giving values of our faith which are necessary for the common good and especially the well-being of the weak, poor, and powerless. In 1970, about 70% of Afro-American births were to intact marriages; abortion was statistically insignificant as it was illegal in most of the USA. Today, in NYC, 60% of such conceptions are aborted and the majority of those delivered are to single mothers. Possibly one out of ten are born to intact marriages. This is a calamitous, tragic, devastating development of the last 40 years. It is not due to the slave trade of centuries ago, it is due to the sexual revolution of recent decades. Indeed, it is precisely the poor who are suffering most from the pandemic of contraception, abortion, divorce, cohabitation, pornography and male infidelity. The answer to this culture of death is the Catholic understanding of integrity, chastity, fidelity, and fertility. Our Catholic faith is inextricably mixed with our ethos of marriage and sexuality. The Catholic impulse is to share this pearl of great price, this wealth, this most gracious gift: not oppressively, arrogantly, and judgmentally; but gratefully, zealously, vigorously, and sensitively. The Catholic impulse is as militant and apostolic as that of violent Jihadism or revolutionary Marxism. The liberal, especially the Democrat, Catholic, however is excessively shy and insecure about her values in the public realm. Consider: who more truthfully loves the 60% of black pre-borns who are destroyed in the womb: the pro-life demonstrator or the liberal who doesn't want to think about it? Who loves the homosexual more: the one who condones sodomy as morally equivalent to the conjugal act or the one who cautions against something that is toxic, physically and spiritually, for all of us: men and women, homosexuals and heterosexuals, those who are married and those who are single? The Catholic impulse, inexorably, is to assist the poor and weak: materially and spiritually. The two are inseparable. I cannot hand a hungry person a piece of bread without some sense of gratitude to God, without a deep spiritual regard, without a remembrance of Eucharist. The current administration is dominating us and directing us that we cannot do public works of mercy unless we violate our consciences and implement the agenda of sexual liberation: the bishops closed down the outstanding program of service for women who are sexually trafficed because they would not provide "reproductive services;" adoptions services are closing because we are required to place children with homosexual couples; and we now face the human services mandate that threatens to close down our entire network of services unless we provide the technology of sterilization and death. We are in desperate need of a virile, assertive, confident Catholicism that is not shy and reticent but celebrative and exhuberant, precisely in the public square, about the BEAUTY and SPLENDOR of faithful and fecund sexual love...that is honorably, nobly, and unabashedly protective of every single female and her newborn.