The Resilient Heroines and Deplorable Men of the Misogynist Dystopia of Netflix 2021

Weekends, as we wound down 2021, we binge-watched Netflix. Four of the last things we watched ("The Maid," "Alias Grace," "Unforgiven," and "Unbelievable") had the same underlying narrative: a vulnerable woman is viciously abused by a systemic social misogyny but eventually prevails and triumphs, against impossible odds, due to qualities of courage, persistence, intelligence, long-suffering and impressive resiliency.

These are not the invincible, georgeous, hyper-intelligent superwomen of "Hunger Games," "Alias" or "Covert Affairs." These women are fallible, vulnerable, and devastated by abuse, rape, betrayal, disbelief. Two involve imprisonment for murder. One serious mental illness. The actresses are lovely but their raw physical beauty is camouflouged by the horror of their suffering as well as the focus on the intelligence and moral character that shines through the darkness and allows the final victories, however imperfect. u

I found them to be realistic: misogyny is the most systemic, persistent, profound, and finally catastrophic evil across our globe. In our world, the renunciation of the chauvinist dimensions of traditional patriarchy has resulted in a more subtle, sophisticated and disguised attack against the very form of femininity by the Cultural Liberalism of "reproductive rights," careerism, individualism, pornography, contraception, and a faux femininism that mimics the worst of toxic masculinity. The broad brush rejection of authority-paternity-tradition eviserated both masculinity and femininity of inner form: leaving us fatherless as motherhood is mercilessly abused. It is of interest that the most impressive, admirable character in these movies, Detective Karen Duvall in "Unbelievable" is portrayed powerfully by a radiant Merritt Wever who was herself fathered (so says google) by a sperm donation to a femininist activist mother. Art copies life: giving us a fatherless world.

The male characters fall easily into three types. The worst are the vicious, sadistic psychopaths who rape, abuse, despise the woman in her vulnerability. Secondly, most are not so despicable, but simply clueless and insensitive. They exercise their under-developed male intellect and psyche with decent intentions but are so oblivious to the feminine reality that they indeliberately inflict grave, on-going harm. The best example would be the male detectives in "Unbelievable" who find no objective evidence of the rape and conclude, after learning that the victim had recently been attention-seeking, that it was a false accusation. This is not an unreasonable conclusion; but they proceed to pressure and manipulate her, in their righteous self-confidence, in a manner that is indeliberate but horrific. These may be taken as protypical of the universe portrayed in all four movies: the violence against innocent, vulnerable, powerless women is unbearable even as it is systemic, pervasive, and in part not consciously intentional. The third and best type of male in these movies is the supportive, decent, kind-hearted guy (typically, the two husbands of the marvelous protagonist female detectives in "Unbelievable") who are however entirely marginal and removed from the dramatic action. They have no influence or effect. They are on the sidelines. They are nice but, regarding the conflict, impotent. Each woman is largely on her own with some support from other women, but the men are at best useless. This is a world without real men, without fathers.

Its not easy to be a man, these days...to be a real man...strong but gentle...a gracious, protective, life-giving presence. As a Catholic man how do I respond to this fatherless, misogynist, realistic universe.

First, it is salutary for us men to contemplate a woman's agony. Women suffer more than men: they are more sensitive, less crude; they are empathetic and open to the pain of another; they are instinctively generous and make themselves vulnerable. By nature the man is more isolated, thick-skinned, selfish, indifferent to the other. The male has greater physical and social power. The undeveloped male psyche is clueless and insensitive about the female heart, intellect and soul. The mission of the man is to cherish, protect, revere, and provide for the woman (with child, elderly, sick, etc.) but the disordered orientation of the sinful male soul is to lust, power, and contempt for feminine "weakness." In this Christmas season, as Catholics we ponder the words of Simeon to Mary, that "a sword would pierce her heart." They are not spoken to Joseph nor to Jesus. So as we consider Our Lady of Sorrows and our Lady of Mercy, we men need to dilate and soften our closed, hardened hearts.

Secondly, it is humbling to see how marginal and weak we men can be, but that can also lead to humility. Humility is the primary masculine virtue (in my view, even prior to chastity and courage) as it allows us to represent Another, our heavenly Father. Dependence upon our own agency, virtue and autonomy is catastrophic. Here our model is, of course, St. Joseph. He himself is marginal to the Christmas story. He never says a word. He doesn't initiate but he obeys. His silence, his responsivness allow the working of God's providence. This should encourage us men, not to be assertive or aggressive, but to be docile, responsive, trusting, and allow the Holy Spirit to work through us in all gentleness and strength.

Third, it is good for us to consider women in their interiority of truth, goodness, beauty. We men are easily distracted, even mesmerized by physical feminine beauty. But contemplation of radiant inner femininity does not come without a long internship of restrain, prayer, listening and glancing more deeply at her. It is an inspiring, even sanctifying exercise to consider the generosity, courage, resilience and intelligence of women around us, even on Netflix.

Moving through the Christmas season and into the New Year...may we draw closer to the Holy Family, to the fatherly Joseph and the motherly Mary...bring some light to this dark misogynist dystopia...as we allow ourselves to be renewed in our own femininity and masculinity!

The Pivot from Homosexual to "Gay"

They are not synonyms: they have different meanings.

A recent survey of research has 3.5% of our population identifying as LGBTQ; but 11% experience same-sex attraction while 8% have practiced such intercourse. So, for every self-identified "gay" there are 2-to-3 times more who experience the attraction and practice it who do not self-identify as gay.

(BTW a majority of the 3.5% who do identify as LGBTQ are bi-sexual by attraction; this is even more prounounced among women. This suggests that the hard, dogmatic "born-that-way" straight-gay binary is untenable and that there is a high fluidity, plasticity and vulnerability to our sexuality.)

Homosexual (same sex) simply describes a type of sexual-romantic attraction as well as a kind of sexual activity. So the word itself has a certain neutrality, a clinical objectivity to it. However it does have powerful historical associations.

Within Judaism and Christianity its active practice has always been seen as sinful since it violates (along with a litany including adultery, fornication, masturbation, etc.) the spousal (fruitful, unitive) purpose of sexuality.

Quite distinct from this is the genuinely homophobic use of disparaging expressions to shame and emasculate men perceived as effeminate. Such is a grave sin against charity.

Psychologically, a body of research associates the attraction with dysfunctions such as weak masculine identity, poor connection with father and peers, fear of women, negative body image, and incapacity to surrender to or yield authority. This discussion is entirely canceled by gay militance. My own observation is that the research deserves attention: there is strong association here but not direct causation or neccessary/essential connection. There are those who combine same-sex attraction with wholesome personalities, sterling character and even holy lives. The research should not be repressed: let the Truth manifest itself freely.

If the word "homosexual" is straightforward, true, corresponding to a reality; the word "gay" is not: it is ironic, transgressive, defiant, performative. The word deliberately misconstures, as happy, light, fresh and hopeful an attraction-action-lifestyle that(if not sublimated by chastity/charity) is intrinsically fraught with frustration, futility, sadness and despair. It is a falsehood, a manipulation, a false witness, a gesture of psychic-moral-spiritual violence.

Moral Orientations

Same-sex attraction is NOT an orientation. Orientation means direction, especially the moral trajectory of ones life. If I am driving from NJ to Canada my geographic orientation is northward. Attractions...feelings, emotions, passions...do not determine one's orientation. If I am attracted to petite Japanese women but I marry a big-boned Eskimo... what is my orientation? Hopefully, I am oriented monogamously, faithfully to my spouse, whatever my emotions and attractions.

For one with same-sex attractions, there are at least four orientations, moral paths, that present themselves. The first two are the traditional "don't ask, don't tell" programs of discretion; the second two are more recent, and contradictory of each other.

First is the decision to quietly endure the frustration of the condition and strive to live chastely, celibately, always ready to return to this path in case of failure.

Second is the choice to actively practice it, with a single person or many partners, with or without guilt, but abstaining from any moral crusade. This practice, by concealing itself, implicitly affirms the moral standard, by its discretion.

Third is a very small contingent which is dissatisfied with the attraction and hopeful for a traditional marriage. Such identify a sexual compulsivity rooted in wounds and so they seek reparative therapy as a healing of misconnections with father, mother, peers as well as sexual abuse. The intention here is not "conversion of orientation" but reparation of damage suffered, a release from compulsivity, and possibly a new gestalt in sexual/romantic tendencies. Reparative therapy is very marginal; popular in strong Catholic circles; and available only to those seeking it and not imposed coercively on anyone, certainly not youth. Unfortunately, it is confused with "conversion therapy," popular among more fundametalist evangelical groups, which can be coercive, oppressive, moralistic. It is not surprising that, in light of its toxicity and coerciveness, it has been largely banned. But the more gentle, consensual, psychologically sophisticated reparative therapy has enjoyed success. Its suppression by a woke resentment is not just or true.

Lastly, the gay position or decision, inflates the attraction into an orientation, an identity, a moral crusade, a way of life. The "coming out as gay" is a performative act, a vow of sorts, an acclamation of identity, values, belief. It proclaims: 1. My attraction is strong and significant and, at least in part, constitutes my identity. 2. I want to be known as such. 3. I renounce the shame inflicted by social homophobia. 4. I reject the traditional religious reservation of sexuality to spousality as restrictive, oppressive, and actually if not deliberately harmful and unjust.

The Gay Proclamation

"Coming out" to a Catholic family is a drama, a very real event. It requires a response. This can be implicitly framed as: "Accept me as gay; or reject me as gay." This translates as: "retain your Catholic belief and reject me; or reject your faith to love me as I am." This binary is invalid as is disallows a third response that is loving, truthful and Catholic: "I love you as you are, but I just don't buy the gay thing."

"Gay" is best understood as a mistake in self-identification. Mistakes in self-identification are common: if a friend tells me he is a member of the master race, or the revolutionary vanguard of the arc of history, or victim of "whiteness," or Napoleon, or a Winner (because he has so much money) or a Loser (because he has so little money), or being monitored by the FBI from the fire alarm system...I quietly register it as a mistake in self-identity.

In my world, "gayness" is not real; it lacks ontological substance; it is a fabrication, a myth, a misinterpretation. Earlier societies created such fictions: ghosts, lebrechauns, limbo, dragons. Modernity is replete with them: reproductive rights, whiteness, the arc of history, dialectic of the oppressor/oppressed, enviornmental psychology, critical race theory and LGBTQ identity.

I respect the subjectivity of the self-identifier in its sincerity, intensity, and integrity. The experience is itself real and powerful, but is informed by an intellectual error. The oppression of "whiteness" or the hope of "the arc of history" are both real experiences, but erroroneous. My love for you as a person is not contradicted, but rather enhanced by my renunciation of your misjudgement. To renounce a friend's moral-intellectual judgment is not to renounce the friend. Honest intellectual disagreement is part of any real relationship. Genuine love requires intellectual honesty and truth, however uncomfortable.

Why the Pivot to Gay?

Why the decision to self-identify as Gay? Sexual attractions are not chosen but received, passively. We are "afflicted" with our sexual/romantic longings. But self-identity is chosen. I have been pondering: Why do some with same-sex attraction (maybe about 1/3?) take that moral, intellectual, volutional position? I have not heard or read any discusion of this. I am eager for such. But it seems to me some of the following is at work. First, the attraction must be intense, persistent, deep-seated and inexorable. Second, there is an urge to be known as such; a impulse to transparency; a desire for the identity. Third, a moral outrage at the shame experienced. Fourth, a rejection of the classic restriction of sex to marriage as heterosexual, fruitful, exclusive, faithful.

Coming out as gay is in part a moral crusade against shaming, bullying, and disrespect. In that it is in part a good thing. It is a blessing of the Gay Movement that the stigma and shame associated have been diminished.

It is at the same time a contradiction of the Catholic view of sexuality, pure and simple. If the traditional teaching on sex is true, than a degree of disapproval and associated stigma is unavoidable and proper.

Additionally, there is a histrionic flavor to it which undermines the classic reverent reticence surrounding sexuality. Sharing intimate knowledge about ones sexuality is traditionally reserved for the spouse alone. A natural, salutary shyness surrounds the Mystery of sexuality. The Sexual Revolution tore away this veil of privacy and made sex something public, cheapened and vulgar. The gay movement has been expecially violent towards this childlike innocence as it parades its "pride" aggressively and has now overwhelmed all our major institutions, including the Church in the current papacy and much of the episcopacy.

It is worth noting the contrast between the gay movement in its histrionics and the spread of co-habitation among heterosexuals. The later is equivalent to the former as a clear violation of our time-honored code: but it has been widely implemented in a quiet, anonymous almost covert manner. No crusade, no parades, no "coming out." All of a sudden, everyone of the milenial generation is co-habitating: no argument, no culture war, no fuss. Something that was shameful a few generations ago has all of a sudden become commonplace. Our children, cousins, grandchildren...are all living together outside of marriage...apparently unembarassed and feeling no conflict with their proclaimed Catholicism. It is a close cousin of the gay movement, but so distinct in style. The widespread acceptance of non-spousal, contracepted sexuality and cohabitation by heterosexuals underlies, obviously, the widespread approval of the gay movement. The failure of the Church to confront cohabitation underlies its impotence before the demonstrative, aggressive gay movement.

Don't Ever Say "He is gay."

1. Because gayness is not effeminate behavior, nor sexual attraction, nor a kind of sexual activity, it is moral posture, a statement of belief and value, a social crusade. The four things are quite distinct: to call someone gay because of mannerism or sexual attraction or even sexual activity is a slander, a false judgment a violation of "thou shall not bear false witness."

2. One's sexuality is private and precious, something sacred and not to be casually discussed.

3. If someone self-identifies as gay, that is his privilege. He is free to do so. But we are also free to disagree; to refuse to endorse that judgment; to see him through a lens that is different from the one he has chosen. To confirm or encourage one we love in a gay identity is neither true nor just.

It is simple enough: I love you, cherish you, revere you, delight in you, care for you...but I do not see you as gay. Homosexual attraction is not an issue: we all suffer concupiscence in some form. Homosexual acts are sinful and serious. We can disagree.

Dear Bishops...

You did not ask me. But here is my advice:

It is time for you to man up: find your courage and virility, exercise your charism and authority, become a true father...clear, strong, gentle, confident, protective of the Truth and of your flock!

1. Be Father to your brother priests. Reverse the Dallas Chapter which is so unfair. Be just! Be defensive of the victims! But also protective of your own priests who have been made so vulnerable to false accusation. Read the scathing criticism of Monsignor Tom Guarino! Draw your brother-son priests to yourself...always in Truth!

2. Be Father to the traditionalists. Quietly ignore the vicious crackdown on that solemn, ancient rite by our pontiff. Do not collaborate in an evil act. Sure there are extremists and eccentrics among them; but for the most part they are desperately hungry for the holy. They are isolated and hurt; they need a Father to draw close, comfort and guide, strengthen and encourage them.

3.Be Father to your pro-abortion politicians. Quietly meet with them to correct and instruct, with a gentle and loving heart. Direct them to refrain from communion as long as they persist in this atrocity. Publically announce that those actively, publically advocating abortion are not welcome to receive.

4.Be a Father as protector of the Truth, Tradition, Authority. Abandon the facade of unity our national body of bishops recently presented with a statement on the Eucharist. We are NOT a united Church. We are a dysfunctional family; bitterly polarized about what is true and good. Speak the Truth clearly, boldly, confidently...challenge even the Bishop of Rome when he is wrong. Be Paul confronting Peter in Jerusalem!

5. Be Father, protector and teacher and guide, to the sexually afflicted and confused. Renounce the legacy of McCarrick! Acclaim the heritage of John Paul and Benedict, of Chaput-George-O'Connor! Challenge Pope Francis on his destruction of the John Paul Instituer for the Family in Rome and consider such a fine organization, more modest, in your own diocese. Lead a crusade against pornography. Encourage the homosexual in his identity as man and father; guide him in chastity, fidelity, paternity. Detach from the "gay" agenda!

6. Be a Father, not a CEO! Consider ways to disestablish the Church; to hand over the bureaucracies and institutions into lay hands; to encourage a lightened, powerless, liberated (institutional) Church.

7. Be a Father: give us strong meat, a wholesome diet, not junk food. Ignore "synodality." It is a confusion, a distraction, a waste of time, a "misdirection" that conceals an underlying bad agenda. Instead throw your energy and influence behind the good stuff: whatever is true, honorable, holy, pure.

I write as your brother-in-Christ, drawing upon my own baptism-confirmation-endowed-authority. I write as your spiritual son who has been deeply saddened by the state of the episcopcy, the failure in paternity, in this time. But you have my sympathy. Yours is the hardest job in the world. You are as a group exceptional men...capable, intelligent, kind, educated, holy. But the "holy" part is inhibited because your are buried under an avalance of responsibility for this huge bureacracy.

You are yourselves an elite and you stand next to "The Elite" of our society and you are understandably, unavoidably vulnerable to influence from hegemonic Cultural Liberalism. We need you to be the "Counter Elite."

Your instincts are strongly towards unity, accomadation, cooperation...to a fault! My suggestions will be viscerally repugnant to you. But you need to mortify your Chamberlain-esque compulsions and become a Churchill for the Church as we endure this demonic Blitz on our Church. It is time now for a virile, strong, clear, fatherly and TRUTHFUL love!

I exhort you: Courage! Surrender to the Holy Spirit given to you with the laying on of hands! Be bold, fearless, calm, clear, confident, and loving in announcing the Truth!

An Introvert at Mass

I go to mass as an introvert: craving silence, solitude, peace.

This is a problem, I know, since the Eucharist is a communal event, a banquet, a celebration. It is not an exercise in personal, but in corporate prayer. At the same time it is sacred, solemn, sacrificial. It warrents silence, contemplation, worship, kneeling...an atmosphere of awe and reverence.

The liturgical wars of the last 75 years can be understood, in part, as the tension between the introvert and the extrovert, the banquet and the sacrifice, the intimate and the holy. The personal and the communal intermingle...with more or less emphasis on each.

My mother said that when she was raising the nine of us the single hour she had to herself all week was her Sunday morning 10 minute walk to Church, the silence of the mass, and the 10 minute walk home. She was the most extroverted, sociable and gregarious of creatures; but the number of personal interactions she had in a week (crying babies, dirty diapers, lunchs made...) numbered in the thousands. But Sunday mass was for her to enjoy a moment of quiet, solitude, alone-with-God. I identify.

I a myself an introvert, but not a pronounced one. I value my alone time: reading, walking, praying. The world I inhabit in this, my 75th year is one I have chosen and largely shaped...my work, family, friends...and within it I am active, outgoing, gregarious. But I am still an introvert. On a given day, my personal interactions...conversations, phone calls, emails, texts...may number 60 to 70 or even more. Far more than I need as an introvert.

We live in a world of relentless, totalitarian noise...loud, constant, dissonant. In the gym, doctor's office, elevator...every where we are subjected to the idiocy, the oppression of senseless, superficial noice!There is a lack of peace, quiet, serentity, solitude, contemplation. If we find ourselves suddenly free of external noise, the inner cacophony of compulsive-obessive thought patterns kicks in and genuine peace eludes us. Desperately we need training in quiet, in tranquity, in rest.

So, please:

No cheery "Good Morning" from the priest! We get those all morning. Go quietly into the sign of the cross!

No chatter in Church...allow the silence. We are in the Holy Presence!

Don't sit next to me unless you are my immediate family. Give me about 10 yards if possible. At least six feet. This is not about germs or viruses. I just need my space.

No hugs at the sign of peace! No wandering around the Church!So glad the Covid put an end to that.

No applause...Please...no matter how good the choir, the sermon, the ushers or the altar servers! Please!

After communion let's sit quietly for 5 minutes...yes 5 full minutes. Cut back on the sermon if you are rushed.

Do not...I repeat...Do not...insist tyranically that the people in the back seats move up to the front for that warm-and-fuzy, comfy feeling. For God's sake, leave them alone in their solitude. God is with them. They need God...not the warm, fuzzy feeling!

You can understand that my sympathies are with the Latin Mass communities. They are often eccentrics and introverts, desperate for a taste of the sacred, the silent, the solemn. Let them be! Pope Francis' attack on them is a violence of the extrovert, the congenial, the gregarious against the introvert, the solemn, the solitary.

A weakness of the new (50 years old), ordinary rite is: too many words! Too much articulation! Too little silence, repose, contemplation. The older traditions...silence, icons and images,kneeling, incense, a strange language...facilitated a relaxation of the cognitive, verbal brain and a gentle move into the receptive, contemplative,and the mystical. Standard liturgical practice apes our crude, noisy culture as it attempts to satisfy the craving for sensory stimulation but it fails miserably since it cannot compete with Netflix.

Please...give us a little peace, a little silence, a little solemnity at mass!

Catholic Theology: Weak in Faith, Weak in Reason

"Fides et Ratio" ("Faith and Reason")is John Paul's brilliant, inspiring, monumental exclamation of the happy marriage in Catholic thought and life between faith and reason, Jerusalem and Athens, heart and intellect, revelation and intellectual reflection. The pontificate of his collaborator and successor was even more focused upon this symphonic synthesis. It is a retrieval of what is great in the Catholic Tradition over two millenia. Unhappily, mainstream Catholic theology since the Council, with exceptions, has not emulated this example, but is feeble in both faith and reason.

By faith I here mean surrender of will, intellect, heart, soul and entire personality in the encounter with the person of Jesus Christ. At the core of our faith is this personal event; everything else (dogma, ethics, liturgy) flows from it. Lacking clarity, depth and intensity in this core lends us to confusion, weakness, error, misdirection. The evangelical encounter becomes communal, ethical, liturgical, intellectual.

It is not that our theologians completely lack faith, but that their faith is not solidly Christ-centered, not evangelical, not Trinitarian, not personal, concrete, scriptural, communal, traditional. It is a faith that grasps and appreciates aspects of the Gospel, but not the heart and soul of that Gospel...the very person of Jesus, Son of God. And so we we do not find (what Balthasar called) a "kneeling theology"...reflection flowing out of the encounter with God in personal prayer and corporate liturgy. There is shift of focus: away from loving God with all your thought and all your mind and all your strength; toward subordinate themes such as psychological healing, justice for the poor and oppressed, and others.

By reason I here mean rigorous philosophical reflection grounded in a clear metaphysics of reality, of Being, of the good-true-beautiful. Theology is based in metaphysics. To not do metaphysics is impossible (as it is impossible not to do ethics, politics, religion); to "not do metaphysics" is to do bad metaphysics. So, what occurred immediately after the Council was the widespread turn from philosophy, as the handmaid of theology, to the social sciences, especially psychology and politial science, to Freud and Marx. And so we saw a drift downward into ecclectic, vague, incoherent philosophical ideas drawn from Jung, Whitehead, Chardin, Cambell, and various schools of psychology and politics. We witnessed on a large scale abandonment of the Tradition of "faith and reason."

A case in point: Pope Francis. He certainly has a lively, passionate faith. He loves Christ; he prays; he is fierce and fearless in his devotion to the poor and marginalized. But regarding reason he is severely challenged. He is incapable of deep, coherent, grounded theology. He is a man of emotion, not of thought. He is not merely non-intellectual; he is an anti-intellectual in that he resents dogma, sustained reflection, and the authority of Tradition and Magisterium. He may or may not be a saint; but he is a catastrophe of a theologian, and a weak, weak pope.

Question: were things better in the pre-Council Church. Well...sort of!

We shared a widespread culture of faith, but it was neither evangelical nor deeply intellectual. It was the ethnic, immigrant faith of the unschooled, purified by suffering: immigration-prejudice-poverty, the Depression, and World War II. It was not strongly Christological. But there was reverence, trust, gratitude and obedience toward God; a rich banquet of devotions to Mary, the saints, the sacraments and hierarchy; an acceptance, at least in thought, of the moral law; an openess to the supernatural; a culture that encouraged virtue and family life. Intellectually there was a failure to engage with the broader culture and a formal, manualist theology lacking in depth. But there was a simplicity and coherence to the theology and its relation to the ethnic culture. It was an ethnic religion, solid and coherent, but lacking a firm evangelical core and intellectual depth. This is why after the Council the culture crashed so catastrophically.

In that post-War period, however, there was a Catholic renaissance of true depth. The flourishing of religious orders, parishes and Catholic institutions of all sorts was not only a superficial flourishing of newfound Catholic bourgeois affluence; although it was that. Alongside of such materialism, there were deeper currents flourishing: resourcement theology as return to the sources (scripture and the fathers), engagment with the best in contemporary thought, renewal movements including the liturgical, Cursillo and similar retreat movements, and a wearied post-war enchantment with the supernatural. These currents were not spectacular statistically; but influential and significant.

The Good News: those often small, humble currents of genuine renewal did not disappear. They inspired the Council itself and continued in the renewal movements, in Communio theology, the Great-Dual-Pontificate and in a million quiet currents of prayer and goodness.

Notwithstanding the travails of the current Church, the Great Catholic Tradition experienced a renaissance in the run up to the Council, in that Event itself, and the dual papacy of Faith-and-Reason. We are blessed to live out of that majestic current of grace!

Let's Revive the Parishes! Let's Renew the Church!....Actually, Let's Not!

We need to reform the Church!..........BAD IDEA!

My buddies are older than me: pushing 80. They are arch-conservative, uber-Catholic Culture Warriors, like me, maybe worse! Their idea: "Let's get together, us Knights of Columbus, and pray to the Holy Spirit and work to revive our parishes!" I laughed spontaneously at the youthful idealism and enthusiasm. I responded positively and I meant it: "Any time anyone gets together and prays to the Holy Spirit it is a win-win-win!" But I also thought: "Really? At this stage, we old white guys are going to renew the Church?" I wondered: "What are you taking? I could use some!" More cynically, I considered: "Can this be early-onset, hypo-manic, grandiose senility?"

The reformer impulse, of Luther and Calvin and others, to reform the Church is always a bad idea. It is very Protestant, extremely anti-Catholic! It is not for us to reform the Church: not by our enlightened theology, not by synodality, not by institutional reform, not even by our favorite renewal movements!

The Church Herself, in her interiority, nothwithstanding the glaring corruption of her members, is never in need of reform. In her soul, her interior form. she is perfect! She is the Bride of Christ, cleansed, immaculate, purified. She is the Body of Christ, whatever infrections and wounds present. She is our Mother, however flawed.

It is you and I who have to be reformed, not the Church. We need ourselves to be reformed, renewed, converted by the Church because She is the visible, incarnate presence of Christ on earth. Christ is present:

Physicaly, ontologically in the Euharist

Efficaciously in all the sacraments.

Infallible in the Magisterium. Wherever the Word is proclaimed.

Radiantly, extravagantly, anonymously, eventfull in the lives of the holy ones...not only the great ones, but the little, humble, grateful ones.

The Catholic respose to the Church is always gratitude, obedience, surrender, participation, consent.

My uncle Billy (whom we all adored as a decorated WWII hero, lifelong convert operative for military intelligence, brilliant and charming eccentric, voracious reader, golfer, fisherman, dysfunctional businessman, Graham-Greene-type-Catholic) once told me: "I hate do-gooders!" I laughed because I was by most standards a "do-gooder" but I also knew he told my mother, his sister, that I was his best friend. But I know what he meant. Reformers, social activists, do-gooders...it is the self-righteousness, the moralism, the indignation! Sorry, a Catholic is NOT a reformer, an activist, or a do-gooder.

What a relief it was, in mid-life, to discover the 12-step approach: work my own inventory, tend my own garden, sweep my own side of the street.

More recently, in old age, I happily recall what we learned in parochial school: my first concern is the salvation of my own soul. And it is not my doing, but God's. And as I allow the Holy Spirit to sanctify me, this mysterious influence spreads to those around me, and even beyond to the entire Creation.

Now THAT is a Good Idea!

Jesus, the Devil and the Passion

A first: I today surrender this blog to a guest essay. Dan Pellegrin is a dear friend for over 50 years, since our college days. He is a lawyer who defends the rights of the mentally ill; an ordained, now retired, always maverick deacon in the Catholic Church. He has a ton of kids and grandchildren. He was, in my opinion the smartest guy in our class; he vigorously disagrees. He is oftentimes my theological adversary; but even when he is dizzyingly, brilliantly convoluted in his logic, he is unfailingly gracious, congenial, endearing and charming. This piece is a gem!

Jesus, the Devil and The Passion

“Scourge him” -- these are the words we know Pilate used.

The Roman soldiers seized the rope binding His wrists and led him out to the scourging pillar. As the burly soldier laid on the lash, Lucifer the Evil One whispered on Jesus’ ear: “Your people led you to this. How could they?! This is so unfair! You did nothing to deserve this!” Whip. “This is their fault. They don’t love you. They must hate you! Save yourself! We know you can. Summon that sniveling Michael, your angel” Whip … “He’ll make short work of these beasts.” “End this pain. Abandon this plan. People will never understand you or your Father.” Whip. “I’ve been right all along. You know I have been. Stop this!”

Jesus said nothing.

And wearing a crown of piercing torns, He was half-led, half dragged back to Pilate. Pilate was afraid now, and asked Jesus in a half-choked, hoarse whisper: “Where are you from?” Jesus made no reply.

Pilate: “You refuse to speak to me? Do you not know that I have the power to release you, and power to crucify you?”

Jesus: “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above.”

Lucifer screamed for only Jesus to hear: “Your cursed Father is doing this to you! He’s letting this happen! Damn him!”

The Chief Priests: “If you relerase this man, you are no friend of Caesar.”

With a hand gesture, made in frustration, disgust, fear, ambition, and denial, Pilate gave the order to the soldiers -- take him away. Crucify him.

The cross’ crosspiece was heaved on Jesus’ shoulder, with splinters and edge that cut into him. As he struggled to begin the way of the cross, Lucifer was at his ear: “How that hurts I know. It’s so wrong! You did nothing to deserve this. Your message was peace” (and with a sneer) “and love. Love! These swine know nothing. They can’t. Stop this madness! Rise up! Çurse them all as only you can! Love? Love yourself! Take the power! Crucify them! Them! Crucify all these gaping apes!”

Jesus grimaced with pain and said nothing.

Lucifer was there when Jesus fell the first time. “”Don’t get up.” And the second. “Stay down!!” And the third, each time screaming his hate and vengeance in Jesus’ ears.

Lucifer: “You know what’s ahead? They’re going to drive nails into your hands and feet. You’re going to have to stand on those piercing nails! The pain!”

Jesus looked at Lucifer then. What was in His eyes? Lucifer saw no hate there. Was it pity?

They reached Golgatha.

Lucifer: “Jesus, listen to me. Do you know what’s going to happen? You’re going to be nailed to that cross. Breathing will get harder and harder. Pain will rack you. You won’t be able to breathe. You know what then? You’ll DIE!! DIE!!! For what?” With scorn: “For them?!” Jesus didn’t look at him as the cross was shoved into place.

Lucifer was next seen on a grey-black shaggy rock outcrop, disconsolate, gazing at The Scene. Demons danced around him in a frenzy of ectasy as they lookd on the Son of God, bloody, humiliated, exposed, dying. A few pathetic, powerless humans weeping at the bottom of the cross.

Gleeful howls from the demons.

Lucifer shifted his gaze from the God-man to the demons. He fixed them with a hateful gaze, and said,

“You stupid, stupid deluded wastes. What do you see here? A crucified God? No, no -- you see our defeat. Our utter, forever, unchangeable defeat.

“Is any one of you willing to be beaten, whipped, scorned, sentenced with no iota of justice? CRUCIFIED? To win our war for the humans? I am NOT. And neither is one of you.

“No, Jesus has won. He has forever won. He has defeaetd us, utterly. Completely. Forever. This is his testament. His love for these sacks of sticking flesh has no measure. Surely no answer from us.’

“I have lost. Forever.”

The Agony of It All: Sexual Suffering and Romantic Misery

Why did no one tell us about it? It would be nice to know!

Sexual satisfaction and romantic happiness...insanely overrated! Sexual suffering and romantic misery...vastly underrated!

Let's face it: sexual desire is frustrated about 99.9999% of the time! Same for romantic longing! Even in the best case scenario, where "they live happily ever after", there is an endless parade of frustration, hurt, disappointment, annoyance, anger...endless! In the best case scenario, these afflictions are suffered, in God's grace, with some degree of forgiveness/contrition and patience, and slowly give birth to a love that is deeper, stronger, truer and purer than the volatility of sex and romance.

Disclosure: I speak, as always, as a man, and (I presume) for men as I am (as best I can tell) typical, not exceptional. I cannot speak for women who are strange, mysterious, fascinating and inscrutable for me.

Mother Church in her wisdom has taught us mostly what is important to know, but not everything. She has been mute about the agony of it all. We learn: of the sacredness of sexuality, gender, spousality, paternity and maternity; of the beauty of chastity and fidelity; of the grave destructiveness of it outside of very clear boundaries; of our constitutional weakness in this area and drastic need for prayer, support, conversion, sacramental grace, accountability and brutal honesty. But She is strangely silent about the suffering underlying it all! And so: She can sound moralistic and negative.

The credo of Cultural Liberalism is that sex/romance is simple, fun, recreational, satisfying, and trouble-free once the negativities of religion are discarded. A pure lie from the Father of Lies! This falsehood pervades our culture and influences all of us as we long delusionally for Mr. or Miss Wonderful! It is good to know!

Well, actually, as I think about it, someone did tell us about it!

A priest in confession once told me that I would be afflicted like this, I would be fighting this battle until my body is cold in its grave four days! It is good to know!

Perhaps 20 years ago, already in my 50s, I was enjoying a whiskey in a cosy tavern on the lower east side of Manhatten with John Rapinich, my best friend, my little-big brother, brilliant autodidact, poet, artist, friend of Jack Kerouac and the Beats, hard-core Catholic convert, charismatic, Neo-Cat, delightful eccentric. I was aware of the generations of workers, ethnic immigrants, gangsters, activists, artists, politicians, alcoholics, and others who had enjoyed such a whiskey in such a warm ambience with such congenial company. Mystically, I felt united with the Communion of Saints-and-Sinners. The gentle, warm euphoria that comes around the third or forth sip of whiskey was descending upon me. It occurred to me to share with this wise, loving friend about my struggles with unchastity. I did so. I don't know what I expected but my trust in him was strong so I knew he would only be helpful. He seemed to sigh quietly and then... calmly, solemnly voiced two words: "The suffering!" I was stunned! This made no sense at all: a complete non-sequitur ("does not follow")! I was not talking about suffering! I was talking about a psychological weakness, a defect in character, a moral failure, an insobriety and a sin! Not suffering! I was quiet. He was quiet. For quite a time. It was as if I had traveled into the Egyptian desert in the third century to receive a Word...a single Word...a Word from the Lord...from St. Anthony of the Desert. This Word was not something to be questioned, analyzed, discussed. It was Holy! It was from Above! It was to be gratefully, reverently, humbly received...and cherished. And I have so cherished it ever since! It is good to know!

Not too long after that I was in a holy place, a friary, with a wise young friar and I similarly shared a tormenting obsession. He gently responded: "Some things just must be suffered." Again...that word...suffer! It is good to know!

It is good to know we are suffering. It is a first step on the road to beatitude. It is a curse to suffer and not even be aware of it. Recently I interviewed a woman who was looking to move out of a good apartment which she was convinced was being broken into. Her anxiety was palpable. Her psychosis obvious. When I mentioned the anxiety she responded: "What anxiety? I am not anxious!" For me one of the great tragedies is the failure of middle aged men to recognize and articulate their depression and so commit suicide. It is good to know you are suffering. And it is good when another, a friend or counselor or confessor, acknowledges your suffering.

It is even better when you find a purpose for your suffering. When it has meaning. Like the mother giving birth. Like the long distance runner breathing heavy in the later stage of the marathon. The suffering is lessened, is backgrounded and marginalized but not eliminated, when some purpose is in the foreground. For example, I have found consistent relief when I simply pray for the woman who arouses sexual or romantic passion: you would not believe how many prayers I have offered for Ingrid Bergman, Sophia Loren, Halle Berry, Penelope Cruz and a litany of other beauties. I hope the prayers help them but they certainly do help me!

It is good to know that we are suffering! It is good to do some little positive thing with our suffering!

You are formally notified, dear Reader! You are suffering...You have suffered...and You will suffer...the Agony of sexual and romantic yearnings! Until Jesus comes!

Come Lord Jesus!

Pro-Motherhood

Words matter! In the enflamed abortion wars this week as the Court considered Dobbs we hear as always: pro-choice, pro-life, anti-abortion, anti-choice, women's rights, etc. I suggest an improvement: Pro-Motherhood.

Here we privilege neither the life of the fetus nor a woman's privacy/autonomy against each other: rather, the larger reality of mother-and-child. Mother-and-Child is the most precious, sacred, vulnerable, beautiful reality in Creation. It is the honor and joy of the Man to protect and provide, to cherish, enjoy and even adore the Mother-and-Child.

They belong together and define each other, similar to the Trinity in which the Father and Son in the Spirit constitute each other as three-in-one. What would a mother be without a child? Not a mother! What a child without a mother? An impoverishment!

The father-husband is an outsider to this privileged intimacy. At childbirth he in a sense loses his closeness to the wife and defers to the needs of the vulnerable mother and infant. He protects and provides. He stands alone, in God's grace, in the joy of caring for these two precious creatures, in a sense a singular reality, entrusted to his care.

The State is an extension of the paternal mission in its task of protecting the vulnerable from violation and ensuring peace and justice. Therefore, foremost in the agenda of any government is protection of the mother and child.

With such clarity of purpose very concrete consequences follow:

1. The life of the fetus is sacrosanct.

2. The safety, peace, protection of the mother is equally sacrosanct. Her rights, needs, vulnerability become a primary concern of the social order. This means economic security, health care, emotional-social-spiritual support.

3. The mother could never be criminalized in the event of an abortion since she is herself the victim in her motherhood. Rather, the abortionist is liable; additionally any men (boyfriend, husband, father) who coerce the woman into abortion will see prison.

4. Men who father children are held accountable for support of the child as well as the mother in her dependent condition.

Such an approach deepens and broadens the pro-life perspective beyond a narrow focus on the fetus to include the mother; even as it expands into a genuine feminism which reverences motherhood as the pinacle of femininity. It also gives focus and purpose to the energies of virility which tend to violence/chaos or atrophy if not directed to the protection and care of the vulnerable.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph ... pray for us!

New Catholic Politics

Surprisingly, happily...there is recently a flurry of innovative Catholic political thinking...small but significant. In a helpful article in First Things this past August (https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/08/catholic-ideas-and-catholic-realities), Ross Douthat identified four movements of thought. I will adjust his categories into three, with three distinct movements in the last.

The Context.

- There is a widespread sense that we have moved into a new post-liberal society. The two classic post-War expressions of liberalism, the Democratic Party of FDR/JFK and the Republican Party of Ronald Regan, have both expired: the first in a steady decline over the last 50 years into a nihilist Cultural Liberalism and the second unseated by the Trump movement. Liberalism, of the right and of the left, in priviliging the individual...isolated, competent, agential...is corrosive of the bonds (of faith, family, community) that define us and so victimizes all of us but especially the weak and incompetent, quintessentially the most helpless, the unborn. Furthermore, Adrian Vermulle has shown that the liberalism we face today, unbalanced by a wholesome conservatism, pushes relentlessly towards a better future by renouncing the past, by destroying custom, tradition, ancient habits of family and faith. In this it is self-destructive, annihilating the very basis for a good society and eventually provoking the kind of populist revolts we are witnessing across the globe. Clearly we are moving into a post-liberal world.

- The globe has moved from the bipolar Cold War through a temporary Liberal Euphoria after the fall of Soviet Communism into a dystopic apocalypse of the four monstrous kingdoms (see prior blog essay.)

- Catholic social teaching, after being deepened, strengthened and clarified by the dual pontificate of John Paul and Benedict has been confounded and polarized by Francis. He presents as a populist, defensive of the maginalized; but he has become a shameless partisan of the causes dearest to affluent, western liberals: global warming, open borders, death penalty. He has been entirely congenial to the three worst totalitarianisms (Chinese Communism, Cultural Liberalism, and aggressive Islam) while he vehemently opposes the actual populist movements that are surging across the globe. He is undisguished in his contempt for the American Catholic-Evangelical alliance that resists Cultural Liberalism. In a recent speech, Cardinal Joseph Tobin, one of his lieutenants, cast him as a kind of a messianic protagonist against the rising dictatorships. His self-identification as a moralizing global ideologue is deeply discouraging and polarizing even as it delights the liberals who side with him on these issues. Even those of us who might agree with his policies must bemoan the clericalism that elevates him into an diplomatic-political expert and the loss of moral stature due to his partisanship.

- The American Catholic with conservative tendencies finds himself homeless in his nation and his Church.

- The (hopefully permanent) marginalization of The Donald allows us some fresh air and a chance to collect our thoughts.

- Meanwhile the downward spiral of Democratic liberalism has hit a new bottom with the Biden Administration. Beneath his congenial, working man, pious Catholic, glad-handing demeanour lies a sickening moral decay and a breathtaking intellectual vacuity. He simply does not see or reverence the Real, the Good, the True and the Beautiful. He does not see the Form of things: regarding the precious, helpless fetus he sees waste matter and is rallying the full force of the federal government to destroy her; regarding our friends in Afghanastan who risked life to fight for us, he cavalierly abandons them in the most shameful foreign affair decision of my lifetime; regarding the border integrity of our nation he is careless and reckless in luring hopeful immigrants into the perilous journey and further arousing the anxiety of our own under class; regarding spending he is like a drunken sailor, indifferent to what this debt will do to following generations. As a Catholic Biden is a scandal and a sacrilige; and his moral rot contaminates the bishops, our pontiff and all who indulge him. If nothing else, the moral-intellectual abomination that he represents is enough to drive us Catholics to rethink our politics.

NEW CATHOLIC POLITICS

Returning to the renaissance in Catholic politics, we might identify three promising developments: the Benedict Option, Populism, and several marginal aspirations to a thorough, comprehesive political philosophy rooted in Catholic belief (Tradanistas, Integralists, and the New Polity community.)

1. The Benedict Option of Rod Dreher remains for me the defining Catholic politics in the USA 2021: protective, defensive retreat from the overwhelmingly hostile elite institutions to smaller arenas of family, faith and community to strengthen our common life of faith in all its elements. This is not, of course, an absolute, monopolistic approach but demands to be complemented by other approaches including the following.

2. Populism might be understood as "Trumpism without Trump": purged of its toxicities and idiocy, the Trump agenda suggested an outline of a promising Catholic-friendly polity: conservative culturally but economically protective of the working class. He delivered beautifully on the first platform, not at all on the second as his tax plan favored the rich. He shows little concern for the poor and remains shamelessly a rich, powerful guy challenged in his conscience. But moral conservatives like Douthat, Reno, Ahmari, Vance and others advocate for a new post-Trump Republican Party defensive of Catholic concerns for the unborn and the family as well as the working and poor classes. The success of this would need a charismatic figure capable of rallying the Trump base, maintaining some support from traditional Republicans while displacing their economic agenda, and appealing to swing voters as well as minorities and workers. This would be a miracle! Lets pray for it!

3. Deeper Catholic philosophizing has taken three directions of late: Tradanistas, Integralists, and the New Polity school. Each is very small, apparently insignificant, unknown except to Catholic nerds like myself. They look deeply into Catholic philosophy to create an ideal vision: intellectual, abstract, erudite. Most would dismiss them as impractical and utopian. Yet I value their efforts for two reasons: First, we always need an image of the good, even the ideal, as we struggle towards it accepting imperfection. Secondly, in our troubled times with the breakdown of traditional liberalisms we need new options to consider.

The Tradanista group is the most marginal and probably least promising. It seems to be a group of young Catholic intellectuals, without any prominent publication or heavy weight thinker (although it was befriended by Larry Chapp whom I like). Its name is explanatory: traditional (in morals) but Sandanista-like in concern for the poor. Theoretically it combines both poles of Catholic social teaching not entirely unlike a Catholic-friendly configuration of populism. They like Dorothy Day, Chesterton, the distributists, McIntyre as well as John Paul's catechesis on the human body. All that is to the good. But they also seem to favor the economics of Bernie Sanders. Here we find a double incoherence: first, Sanders probably would not know what "distributionism" is; secondly, the expansive state favored by Sanders is also biggest enemy of traditional morality. It remains to be seen if this good attempt develops into something significant.

Integralism is a retrieval of the classic Catholic conception that human life involves the temporal and the eternal and therefore is ruled by the state and church. It argues that every government in fact embodies religion as a set of values: liberalism obviously idolizes the surpremacy of the imperial, isolated individual. Any state that is not countervailed by a true, good spiritual principle degenerates into tyranny and idolatry. The best path is a revived Catholic community which opens itself to God in the Church and in secular affairs and grants final authority to the Church over the state. This proposal seems at first to be entirely implausible give the diminished status of the Church and the diversity of our society. But it has in its favor the advocacy of two first rate thinkers: Hardvard Law's Adrian Vermulle and the monk Edmund Waldstein. I must say that their writings are sophisticated, nuanced and persuavive. Nevertheless this approach is widely criticized in regard to coercion by the Church in a retrograde clericalism.

Even more sophisticated and profound is a new development: New Polity journal. Like integralism, this is a retrieval of deep Catholic, largely Thomistic thought. It is close to integralism but addresses the concerns around coercion and dualism. It has greal intellectual gravitas behind it: metaphysician D.C. Schindler of the John Paul Institute in D.C.; historian Andrew Williard Jones; and precocious teen philosopher genius Marc Barnes (who blogs as "badcatholic" with delightful lightness and humour). This school sees that human society is always oriented to or away from God; that there is no neutral, liberal zone. They advocate a theocracy even as they are sensitive to human freedom. They speak a metaphysical language that is entirely foreign to most of us. But they are developing a promising, profound new Catholic politics of the "real" (title of Schindler's recent book.)

These new forms of conservatism are deep-Catholic, unlike what we are used to in the USA. They clearly renounce the "mysticism of markets" and the elevation of individual choice. Noticeably they neglect the foundation of much American conservatism: reverence for the Constitution and the "founding" as sacrosanct. They see enlightenment liberalism as a defect in our founders, notwithstanding a countervailing Christian (although pronouncedly anti-Catholic) piety. For example, Vermule has recently argued for the need to go beyond "originalism" into a "common good constitutionalism" which implies a philosophy of natural law, a deeply Catholic thought, entirely unintelligible to our contemporary legal community.

Perhaps a decade ago David L. Schindler (D.C. Schindler's father) delibered a lecture in NYC in which he presented what Pope Benedict suggested as the three founding principles of a just social order: reverence for EVERY human life; respect for the family and all that supports it; and openness to the Transcendent and the free practice of religion. In this, I suggest, we have the beginning of a "new constitution." I suggest two additions. First, a preferential concern for the poor, suffering, powerless and marginalized. Secondly, a valuing of personal freedom and a reluctance for coercion as a tension-keeping balance to the strong sense of Truth.

There is no single "Catholic Politics" in the partisan, party or ideological sense. This is the realm of prudential judgment involving a universe of values, beliefs, facts, interpretations, contingencies, uncertainties, hopes and risks. Catholic do and should disagree...often passionately...about political options. (Unlike the moral and theologial in which we enjoy a substantial unity and peace.) Our faith and our societal reality is so dense, complex, and uncertain that no specific polity can be definitive as "Catholic."

It is thrilling that we can enjoy the conversation between these five movements, as well as what remains of value from the legacies of FDR and Ronald Regan. It is an interesting time to be Catholic...in a world falling into chaos...as we "stand erect and lift our heads and wait for the coming of the Lord."

Come Lord Jesus!

Our Apocalyptic Times: The Four Monstrous Kingdoms

The mass readings this past week, the last of our liturgical year, involved Daniel's visions of the four horrific kingdoms: one is more grotesque, destructive and fearsome than the next. It occurs to me that our current world can be understood, by analogy, as a competiton between four such competing kingdoms: fascist dictatorships, Sharia Law, Cultural Liberalism and Communism. They are not equally evil.

The least evil of the four is the surge of righwing dictatorships across the globe. In the West we see a nationalist populism fueled by rage at the totalitarianism of Cultural Liberalism. Putin is a prime example. The hysterical-derangement-syndrom Left configures Trump as such but he is a "dictator-wanna-be." Ross Douthat is accurate in saying that he lacks the political will and talent to become a true strongman. In his middle-of-the-night delusional tweets he is another Putin but in the real world his narcicissm, lack of focus and incompetence shortcircuit his ambitions. Early on Douthat correctly suggested that his campaign lacked the intelligence and sophistication for a genuine collaboration with the Russians but the prolonged, expensive Mueller Commission, like the current hearings on January 6, was a necessary OCD ritual that helped the Left process their obsession, anxiety and rage.

The good news about dictatorships: recalling Hannah Arendt's famous distinction between the authoritarian and the totalitarian, we see that right wing dictatorships claim monopoly over political power but if that is not threatened they tolerate a wide range of religious, cultural, and business freedoms. There was more liberty under Saddam than in Iraq today; under the Shaw than the Mullahs; under Diem than Ho Chi Min, even under Hitler than Stalin. These dictatorships are often mixed bags with some wholesome elements supportive of religion, family life, patriotism and the weak and vulnerable. In contrast to the three totalitarianisms, authoritarian regimes can be open to the "Christian Strategy" advocated by Adrian Vermulle whereby we might emulate Old Testament figures (Daniel, Joseph, Esther) who worked with such rulers to protect their people, advance the good and minimize the bad.

Sharia law tends to be more totalitarian than fascism, particularly in its denial of religious freedom. But as it is itself based upon religious principles it also has redeeming qualities: respect for the unborn, openness to the Transcendent, and respect for most of the Moral Law.

Cultural Liberalism is in many ways, like Islam, a Christian heresy that inflates and distorts certain elements of the gospel as it denies others and creates a new monstrosity. Its repression is more sophisticated and subtle and camouflaged in the righteousness of a more enlightened Christianity. Yet, the Christian elements are alive and dynamic and so here again there is an opportunity for the "Christian Strategy" whereby we work with this realm toward the good even as we oppose the impulses to evil.

Worse by far is the communism, especially of China and North Korea, but also of Cuba and Venezuela. This is hard, absolute evil. The accomadationist policies of Pope Francis and Bide are misguided: this is an arena for martyrdom and warfare (hopefully cold not hot), not dialogue and cooperation.

What is a Catholic to do in this dystopian, dismal universe? That is a topic for another essay!

Greatest Cinematic Icons of Virility

We men are constitutionally desperate for role models: good men we can imitate. The movies have for many decades been a rich, entertaining provider of such.

To be an "icon of virility" a movie character must be masculine, heroic in the sense of brave to the point of death, strong and fierce and forbidable in the fight against evil, intelligent in outwitting the foe, virtuous in protecting the vulnerable and defending the good, and pure of heart especially in treatment of women and children. Here is my list:

Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday, To Kill A Mockingbird, Keys of the Kingdom,, Russel Crowe in Gladiator, Cinderella Man, Sidney Poitier and John Wayne in almost anything, Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig and in High Noon, Alan Ladd as Shane, Charlton Heston as El Cid and Ben Hur, Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa, Alec Guiness as Obi Wuan Kenobi, Liam Neeson as Schindler, Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront,James Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life, Frodo and Aragon in Lord of the Rings, Peter O 'Toole as Lawrence of Arabia, Zorro and Robin Hood and Batman, Denzel Washington in Equalizer,Spencer Tracey as Father Flannagan, Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men, Ox Bow Incident, My Darling Clementine and others, Paul Newman in The Sting Nobody's Fool and Cool Hand Luke, Montgomery Cliff in I Confess, Jeremy Irons in The Mission, Robert Deniro in Bronx Tale, Roberto Benigni in Life is Beautiful.

Who is my favorite? Tough decision! But for his unique combination of gentleness, strength, intelligence, calmness and lightheartness I have to go with Gregory Peck in Roman, Mockingbird and Keys.

Who did I miss, dear Reader? Who is your favorite?

The Smartest Man I Ever Knew

My field of interest is theology, philosophy, culture, history, and the social sciences; so I am not talking about so many other intelligences such as musical, engineering, emotional, mathmatical, athletic, political, artistic, business and other. I will include among those I have known some famous figures who I have heard speak but I did not know personally and who did not know me; these I will italicize. By "smart" I mean here a combination of natural intelligence, erudition, virtuous character, and holiness which together bear fruit as wisdom and depth of insight.

Genius level, first team. John Paul II, Kiko Arguello, Pope Benedict Emeritus.,

Brilliant level, second team. Ivan Illich, Fulton Sheen, Adrian Walker, Scott Hahn, Paolo Prosperi and D.L. Schindler and D.C. Schindler, Avery Dulles.

Outstanding level, third team. Paul Vitz, Tom Guarino, Benedict Groeschel, Joe Whelan S.J., Bill Toth, (from the same JP II Institute) Antonio Lopez and Michael Hanby and Nicholas Healy, Ralph Martin, Rabbi Asher Finkel and Lawrence Frizzell.

Special mention: Two non-academics who were autodidacts (self-taught) but widely read, sterling in character, deep in insight and who deeply, personally influenced me: John Rapinich (my best friend, artist, beatnik friend of Kerouac, eccentric, saint) and Pat Williams, ex-marine, ex-pugilist, librarian, college mentor.

A tougher question: Who are the greatest women I have met in this regard? As I pondered this, I realized that the outstanding women I have known are weaker in erudition but deeper in emotional, intuitive, psychological, and spiritual wisdom. Less abstract and academic, they are more engaged concretely and incarnately in a life of prayer and service. At the top of this list: two women I personally met, Mother Theresa of Calcutta and Dorothy Day. Also: Seton Hall's Doctor Diane Traflett, my friend Felician Sister Marilyn Minter, Union Seminary's psychologist-theologian Ann Ulanov, and my charismatic mentor, Sister of Charity Pat Brennan.

I stand on the shoulders of giants.

Virtue and Femininity

In the pursuit of virtue, the woman has a huge advantage over the man as she is endowed by a powerful natural, instinctive urge to the good: morphologically, hormonally, neurologically and every which way...the woman is open to the other in sensitivity, compassion, emotional intelligence, kindness and generosity of spirit. It is her nature. In contrast to the brittle, sharp boundaries of the masculine soul and the inflated propensities of the male ego, the womanly psyche is pourous, engaged in the other, outgoing, inclusive, and gracious.

This instinctive, intuitional openess disposes her, at the same time, to specific weaknesses which require a formation of the intellect and will in virtue. Edith Stein (St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross) was especially prescient on this: she recognized the endowed richness of womanly instinctivity as well its need for a deepening and sharpening in the goodness of the will and intellect which can be overwhelmed by emotion and passion.

The masculine soul is more fragmented: even neurologically, parts of the brain that process emotion, thought, articulation, and decision do not communicate with each other as well as the more unitary, synthetic feminine brain. The danger for the woman is that she can be overwhelmed by emotion in a way that clouds the intellect and disables the will. So, education of the young woman needs a special kind of attention here.

The intense, profound bond between mother and daughter, of course, stengthens the feminine/maternal instincts. As does the spontaneous, intimate friendships formed so easily with other girls. So in a way quite different from the boy, the girl needs the influence of the loving, gentle, strong, protective father. Inbibing the love of the father, she takes in the best masculine qualities which she by nature lacks: a sense of being safe and cherished, emotional sobriety, inner serenity, respect for realistic boundaries and rules, reverence for authority/tradition/law, courage and self-confidence, a quiet assertiveness in the broader world, self-esteem in her own exquisite femininity as well as appreciation for the distinctive goodness of the masculine.

Mainstream feminism of the cultural liberalism of the past half century has tended to be a deconstruction of genuine femininity, actually a camouflaged and sophisticated misogyny, in its rush to androgyny which is actually a mimesis of toxic masculinity as sexual promiscuity (renouncing of paternity-maternity), bourgeois careerism in its pursuit of success-ambition-power, and the destruction of the powerless unborn.

A contrasting, more positive itinerary for the feminine in the face of an impoverished masculinity, can be seen in the black, ex-slave community. Here we see a fierce, resilient femininity, deeply rooted in Christian faith, that has compensated for masculine abandonment with a virile fortitude that yet preserves a maternal and feminine generosity.

In the broader culture, however, the decline of masculinity as a form structured by virtue has led to a decadent culture institutionalized in a emasculated liberalism bereft of the virile virtues and expressive of a weakened, reasentful and even hysterical effeminacy. This in turn has provoked a reaction in the form of a crude Trumpian machismo of xenophobia, bravado, anxiety and resentment.

Just this week, my niece mentioned to me her visceral aversion to some of the readings at daily mass: the mother of seven sons in Maccabees who exhorted her sons to suffer torture in fidelity to their God and the saints Perpetua and Felicity who themselves left their infants to accept excruciating martyrdom. My niece is by her nature exquisitely motherly; I was disinclined to disparage her feelings. But then she herself mentioned her devotion to our Blessed Mother. That of course opened a most hopeful direction: growth in closeness to Mary can only intensify all that is best in natural maternity even as engagement with the Passion of her Son can bring it a new spiritual depth.

Mary, our Mother, pray for us.

Virtue and Virility

The root for both virtue and virility is the Latin "Vir" meaning man, implying heroism and character. Virtue is constitutive of virility in a way different from the way in which it informs femininity. It is a different mix, a distinct gestalt.

Double standard here? Absolutely! Femininity and Virility are distinct forms; they contrast and complement each other; they are equal in dignity and significance. Vive la difference!

Femininity is more richly endowed...naturally, hormonally, intutitively, biologically...with compassion, resiliency, generosity, fidelity, sensitivity and emotional intelligence. The full flowering of femininity in spousality and maternity builds upon a wholesome filialtiy as with virility. But the blooming of the girl's character and personality is more fluid, spontaneous, and organic in comparison to the maturing of the boy which is tortured, labored, deliberate, prolonged, complicated.

Femininity is like a sturdy plant that can thrive in different circumstances: resilient and fierce, it can survive in dry or wet, cold or hot, with little or much sun and rain, with or without rich nutrients in the soil. with very little cultivation. To be sure, if it has good conditions it flowers into a magnificence of beauty and fruitfulness. To attain its fullest expression it requires, of course, formation in virtue. But even in the worst conditions it has a mysterious interior dynamism of resiliency and gratuity.

By contrast, manliness has a fragility, brittleness and vulnerabity about it. Without the right cultivation, the boy becomes either a weakling or a thug. It is like a plant that if not cultivated over many years with the right recipe of sun, rain, temperature and nutrients either shrivels and dies or becomes a monstrosity. Fruitful, fragarent femininity (I speak as proud father of five daughters) is relatively low maintenance; a little love and care and it yields wonderful fruit. Masculinity is super-high maintenance: takes many years of mentoring, correcting, encouraging.

The purpose or end of virility is paternity: the giving of life, protection, education, and guidance. As such, there are three primary virtues (humility, chastity, courage) and two secondary (prudence, justice) which constitute virility as paternity.

Humility. Humility is first of all for two reasons. Most important: human paternity is representative of the Fatherhood of God. Of its very nature it points away from itself to God. The success of a father is not that his children love and respect him; it is that they have moved, with his help, beyond him into a filial relationship of trust and love for our heavenly father. By contrast, maternity is not represenational, it is its own distinct creaturely form which complements but does not represent the Fatherhood of God. Secondly, the masculine psyche or ego is (since the Fall) brittle, crude, self-centered, insensitive, defensive-aggressive, and isolated. It is exactly what it should not be to point beyond to our heavenly Father. Deflation of the masculine ego is the lifetime task of every man. Paradoxically, however, genuine humility is not self-deprecating or weak. Rather, it is a realistic acknowledgment of ones weaknesses but even moreso a grateful, trusting reception of all God's gifts including intelligence, fortitude, wholesome self esteem, and magnanimity of spirit.

Chastity. A father's love is wholesome and pure in that it seeks (indeed fights for and dies for) the well being of his child. The polar opposite of such love is predatory abuse of the vulnerable. Lust and covetousness, in all their ugly configuations, is sariligeous in that it defiles true paternity. Here again we see that "normal" or post-original-sin masculinity is violent, toxic, narcissistic and predatory. The fight for purity of heart is also a lifelong struggle for the man.

Courage.Virility is essentially strength or fortitude. Such is essential to paternity. Paradoxically, such is the inverse side of, not the contrary of humility. The child, the wife, the family, the community depend upon the stability, reliability, safety provided by the strong father. Cowardice or weakness are the contraries of virility. Growth in fortitude is the third of the great masculine life projects.

PrudenceA man who is growing in humility, chastity and courage is also advancing in prudence. This is practical wisdom or intelligence which issues from serenity of spirit, sobriety in the emotions, rational self-restrain, and an receptivity to the Real. The good man provides a stability, a steadiness, a sense of peace and safety which is desperately needed by the young, the vulnerable and by women with their heightened sensitivity.

JusticeThe prudent man (who is humble, chaste and strong) will see and do, spontaneously, the just thing. He has the interior peace to evaluate all the elements in a given situation and will intutively move to the right decision. His presence insures a sense of justice which brings safety and peace.

The attainment of virility is lifetime project which requires personal dedication and exertion, relationships of accountability-support-mentoring, and a life of prayer and trust in God's Holy Spirit.

St. Joseph, Pray for us!

1968 Turn to the Dark Side: Catholic Liberalism Dies; Cultural Liberalism Prevails

Like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"...the entire liberal establishment, especially the Democratic National Party, until then a bastion of Catholic Liberalism, became transfigured and possessed by two conspiring ghost-demons: those of Marx and Freud.

The political-economic liberalism of my father's generation(1945-65) was solidly Catholic. It's primary concerns (the rights of workers against capitalists; the care of the poor and disadvantaged, including in other countries; the emergent civil rights movement) firmly aligned with Catholic social teaching. The entire culture passionately endorsed the traditional family, with as many kids as possible, in a rich ethnic Catholicism. It embraced a vigorous patriotism, having just sacrificed to defeat German and Japanese expansion, which entailed a fierce religiosity in defiance of atheistic, imperialistic Communism. This was not the liberalism of individualism, of resentment of authority and tradition, of personal license; it was solidarity in family, faith, trade union, and country. This powerful edifice (Catholic faith, patriotism, labor movement, Democratic Party) collapsed, spectacularly, like the walls of Jerico, in 1968.

This Fall was triggered by the acceptance of two coniving lies: that of Marx that all of social life is violence, the dominance of the weak by the strong, war always and everywhere; and that of Freud (or his followers) that the repressive superego is dominant over the innocent erotic yearnings of the childlike Id. The synthesis of the two is the work of the Frankfurt School: both build upon an atheistic nihilism and assume a chaotic universe of unending violence: interiorly within the psyche itself and externally between the master and the slave. This was the work of Marcuse, Reich, Fromn, the New Left and the hippies and the yuppies, Black Liberation, feminism, gay rights, and the decade of the 1970 and afterwards.

These two falsehoods are appealing as there is some truth in them. Power dynamics are in play in all areas of human interaction; it is part of original sin. Dominance and submission happens between classes, genders, races, ethnic groups, nations, empires, families, siblings and friends. But this is not the total and final picture. Likewise, wholesome sexuality has certainly in the past been suppressed by fear, shame and guilt aligned with unhealthy religiosityAgain: that is not the entire story. It is ironic that just as an emergent post-modernity was about to declare the end of all mega-narratives, the Cultural Left became intoxicated with this dual narrative of dominance and oppression as explanatory of everything.

It bears mentioning also, here, that John Paul II emerged as pope, at the very end of the catastrophic 1970s, with the definitive response to both narratives with his catechesis of the human body and his social teaching.

If Cultural Liberalism is a contradition of the communal, populist, pious liberalism of my youth, it was an intensification of the trajectory of classical enlightenment liberalism: liberation of the autonomous, uprooted individual from the shackles of the repressive, reactionary, superstitious, legalistic, religious past. The core of this liberalism: hatred of the Father. Patriarchy is the constitutive negative image of this religion: oppression of women by men, children by elders, eros by law, reason by superstition, freedom by authority, poor by rich, and black by white. The original Fall, when Eve inbibed the Satanic lie "that the Father is not to be trusted" is reenacted with catastrophic global consequences. For underlying it is, of course, a rejection of the loving Creator by resentful, jealous creatures. That classical liberalism took several forms: the economic liberalism (RNC) of the successful and affluent that idolized entrepreneurship, free markets and trade, expansive corporate captialism; and the contrary political liberalism (DNC) which mobilized an expansive government in defense of the powerless; and cultural liberalism which favored sexual liberation. By the late 1960s, a strange and unexpected political regestaulting occurred: economic liberalism alligned itself to cultural conservatism in reaction to the marriage of political and cultural liberalism. The working class, ethnic Catholic found himself without a home: entirely excommunicated from the anti-family party of abortion and sexual license, he could not entirely embrace the party of big money and libertarianism either. The party of Ronald Regan, while pro-life, pro-family, anti-communist, and pro-religion, remained alligned with corporate affluence and implicitly hostile to the subsidiarity of smaller communities that support the family.

With that background, we might now take a new look at Donald Trump from the point of view of Catholic politics. A year into the Biden regime and a year away from Trump's nauseating Twitter obsession, we have some distance and can evaluate what he offered. For our purposes here, I will not regard his vile personal behavior which firmly disqualified him from my vote in both elections. But focusing strictly on policy, he presents a promising new Catholic paradign for politics. He failed to deliver on all he promised; and he was toxic in so many ways (xenophobia, misogynistic, polarizing, unpredictable and incompetent by virtue of narcissism). But in his fundamental policy positions, he proposed a new conservative (culturally), populist (economically) Republican Party that aligns closely with (not all, to be sure) Catholic concerns.

He combined Republican conservativsm's defense of life, family and religious freedom (what is best about that party) while rejecting economic liberalism (free markets, trade) with its implicit individualism. In theory (though not in practice) he absorbed into his party the traditional Democrat concern for the working and poor classes. His consistent and firm defense of life and religious freedom, in his court selections and other decisions, was marvelous from a Catholic perspective. Not so much was his economic populism: his tax plan benefited the rich. Indeed, there is a litany of criticism that can be leveled against him. But in broad outline, he offered a populist, conservative alternative to the decadent indulgence of the Left and the affluent indifference of the Right. What I am advocating is a Never-Trump, (Trumpian?) Catholic-friendly Conservative Populism.

Personal Postscript: I am eternally grateful for my 1968: happily ensconced in college seminary with good friends and plenty of books I ventured to Cuernavaca, Mexico, that summer to study conversational Spanish at CIDOC, the think-tank of then-Monsignor Ivan Illich. I fell under the spell of this brilliant, eccentric, iconoclastic, Catholic mystic. He was far more radical than anything in the Catholic Left or the movements of the 1960s: a medievalist, he rejected modernity in toto...technology, bureaucracy, the clericalism of the Catholic Church. But underlying this was a deep, Catholic love for Christ and the Church. This appealed to my young, idealistic heart. I imbibed his suspicion of modernity and I think this helped to protect my heart and mind and keep me "in the world but not of the world." More deeply, I emulated his striking love for the Gospel and the Church. That very summer he was disciplined by the Vatican and later left the priesthood to pursue his vocation, keeping always his celibacy and prayer of the Liturgy of the Hours. God bless Ivan Illich!

Eulogy for Judy Laracy Carpron November 13, 2021

What a delight and honor: to be here with my cousins to remember Judy, our first cousin. I am myself an expert on "cousins"...really! Recently I wrote an essay on "Cousins...Underrated!" My expertise comes from experience: I have great cousins. It is particularly good today to see the different generations of cousins gathered here today!

She was very close to my mother, her Aunt Jeanne, who passed earlier this year at the age of 101. Just before she died, sound of mind and strong in spirit, she was calling people to say goodbye. She called her dentist, whom she loved, to say she wouldn't be in for her cleaning and exam. Judy was at the top of here list. They had a great chat. There was no fear of death there.

A Catholic does not fear death. I often remember my Aunt Marian, Judy’s Mom, just weeks before she died there was a big party, for Frank’s 75 birthday party, but it was really a going away party for her and she was radiant, smiling and laughing and as always full of affection and joy.

My Mom fondly remembered Judy a a teenager surprising her with a visit with her friends and a box of candy or goodies. That was Judy: always fun and laughter and joy. For us younger cousins she was the quintessential cool 1950s rock-and-roll teen: popular, gregarious, fun-loving. She was in the league of Ricky Nelson, Fonserelli, and John Travolta! She had a wild side, mischevious and even naughty: she would sneak out of her house in the morning to go to the infamous candy store for her breadfast of coke-and-donut.

We had a rough start though:: she liked me but I wasn’t crazy about her. I was maybe 4 years old and she was about 14. She like me but I wasn’t too crazy about me. So she would look at me and say “Hey cutie, I’m going to kiss you.” I would scream: “No. No kisses” and run away in terror. She would chase me, laughing. And I remember wondering “What is funny about this?” And she would catch me and kiss me. So annoying. SO ANNOYING! She was such a tease. She got that from her father, Frank.

This is what I want to say: she was, straight out, the most fun and funny person I ever met. When you were with her you were always laughing. The only ones in her league are her sisters Eileen and Pat. First of all: they tell everything. There are no secrets. No skeletins. No facade or pretensions. You are sitting there and you think: “Wow! She just said that!” And then you are laughing. If they are together it is even worse. You have to take a breath between the laughter. All the foibles and failings and sufferings...they all become light and humorous and affectionate when you are with the Frank-and-Marian cousins.

Judy, like her sisters, is a sublime sythesis of their mother and father, Frank and Marian. What a couple! So different. Frank tall and large in stature, in personality and character. Loud, clear voice; intelligent; gregarious; expansive and generous; funny. A leader of men! Marian, by contrast: petite, vivacious and bubbly, overflowing with affection and warmth; rich in faith. When you put that intelligence and humor together with that warmth and affection you have magic, that was Judy.

She was a product of, even the epitome, of the world in which we grew up. Working class, Irish Catholic; lots of kids; women pregnant or nursing; drinking and laughter and happily loudness. The men, all active in the labor movement, talking sports or union or politics. It was lively, light-hearted, energetic, and loud in a happy way. The Laracys, the Lenons, the Corrigans, the Hegers and others. Frank and Marian seemed to serenely preside, like king and queen, over this rich community of laughter, energy, faith, hope and love. And Judy was like a Princess.

Underneath it all: a deep, quiet Catholic faith. Our gatherings were often around the sacraments: somebody’s first communion, confirmation, wedding, baptism or funeral (like today). Judy, Rich,Eileen, and Pat lived literally in the shadow of Our Lady of Lourdes Church in West Orange. The Church was like the West Orange mountain, solid, palpable, reliable, invulnerable. ..like the earth beneath your feet. From the Church you could almost throw a snowball and hit their house. The Eucharist was there and the sacraments and I believe Judy inhaled, with the oxygen, the Holy Spirit radiating from that Church. She always kept the faith...in her quiet, humble way. Nothing pretentious, preachy or moralistic about her. All fun, affection, kindness. Never a hint of resentment or self-pity. Judy loved her novenas. And her rosary. I am told that when she was sick Linda asked if she wanted her rosaries she took them and immediately started praying her hail marys. It is like riding a bike...it comes right back. With her sisters she was expert about dispensations: she knew the travel dispensation, sick and all the others like a trained canon lawyer. She lived in the state of grace: quiet, humble. Trusting in God’s presence, power, providence.

As the oldest of us, Judy always seemed to me to have a foot in both generations: ours, and our parents. Born in 1937, she was a young girl during the war, well before the rest of us were conceived. You can imagine what a joy she was in those difficult years to her grandparents and all the women praying for safe return of the troops. She was Aunt Grace’s best friend. She was like a little sister to my father and the Laracy brothers. Uncle Jack was very fond of her. He was a funny guy: a loner, quiet, we didn’t see much of him. He fought with Patton. Aunt Grace remembers that Judy would get these beautiful letters from overseas from him. In beautiful penmanship, well expressed, they read like poetry. But the letters to Grandma and Aunt Grace were three sentence scribbles, not real intelligible. Some years later Aunt Grace asked him about the letters. “Oh that: I wrote the ones to you but the ones to Judy were done by a guy in our regiment who could really write well and he did the important letters to girlfriends and wives and stuff." I doubt Judy every knew that. I wasn’t going to tell her.

I felt a sweet Joy when I learned she had passed. A relief that her suffering was over. A sense of awe at a live well lived. But most of all a surge of joy pondering the joy in heaven as she is received by Pop Lenon, Grandma and Aunt Grace, her Laracy uncles and all the rest. Yes there is great joy in heaven as she is welcomed by so many who love her: Frank and Marian, Pop Lenon, Grandma and Aunt Grace and the Laracy borthers and others.

We are here today to pray for her soul, of course, because like all of us she is in need of God’s mercy. Her purgatory, I suspect, was largely served over these last difficult months of sickness. So I feel drawn to already share that Joy in heaven. With that happy thought, Let me end with a prayer of gratitude.

Dear God. Thank you for this beautiful life! Thank you for this marvelous cousin, wife, mother, grandmother, sister, friend. Thank you for all the joy and love and laughter she gave us. May she and all those she has loved in heaven send blessings of joy and love to us on earth, especially Bill, Kathy and Billy and Linda and their families, Rich and Eileen and Pat and their families, her cousins and friends. and all of us who enjoyed her so. Amen.

Incest in Camelot

Jacqueline Kennedy herself, in a 1963 interview, embraced the Camelot myth: "There will be other great presidents, but never a period like this." She is correct: It was a Camelot time...in more ways than one.

Clearly there are such times in our personal and communal lives...sublime, extravagant, joyous times...when everything is right...when life is enchanted: a summer romance, a family holiday, the courtship-honeymoon stage of a romance, the illuminative stage of prayer life, an athletic championship. For Israel, the kingship of David was Camelot; it fell apart, due to the diabolic dynamisms of incest, biological and moral-spiritual.

The heroic warrior-king-father David (a prototype for Arthur, JFK, MLK) created the quintessential Camelot, but the seeds of its destruction were in his adultery and a pattern of incest. His adultery with Bethseba was despicable mostly in his betrayal of Uriah, her husband and his loyal soldier and therefore, symbolically, his son. Morally, David slew his (moral) "son" to have his (moral) "daughter-in-law." Fast forward and we have his family in a sexual chaos: his one son rapes his own half-sister and then is slaughtered by her full-brothers. We have: adultery brings filiocide, brings incest, brings fratricide. This is the prototype for the incest-driven fall of Camelot.

The John F. Kennedy Presidency was a Camelot for us liberal, Catholic, especially Irish Americans. It was...the intelligence of the brain trust, the movie-star-glamour, the virile energy, the international altruism, the confidence, the expansive economy, the Pax Americana, the Vatican Council, the large families, the religious vocation surplus, and so much more.

The pressing historical question that haunts our boomer generation: Why did this splendid, enchanted Kingdom collapse so catastrophically shortly after the death of JFK around 1965? The answer may be in the Camelot tradition itself!

In the earliest legends, King Arthur dominates as a heroic warrior...much like the young King David, not unlike JFK and MLK. Later, he is sidelined as elderly and relatively weak in comparison with the appealing Lancelot who steals his bride Guenevere. We see here that the king, a paternal image, becomes weak while the queen's affection goes to the younger knight in a quasi-oedipal adultery. One of the earliest Arthurian legends has his nephew achieving this oedipal victory. In both cases, the king is diminished and sidelined as mother and surrogate son surrender to sexual chaos. This simple story line unveils the inner form of the Cultural Revolution that exploded in the late sixties: the diminshment of the Father (and authority, tradition, law, the sacred, the masculine), the explosion of a resentful femininism, and the license for contracepted, sterile, largely oedipal sex.

JFK was himself, of course, the opposite of the cuckolded, failing patriarch: he was robust, vigorous, confident and shamelessly promiscuous in imitation of father Joseph Kennedy. The Patriarch established the adulterous legacy and explicitly initiated his sons into it. John's alleged bedding of his father's ex-lover Gloria Swanson is an oedipal soap opera on a colassal scale. The Kennedy men continued this abuse of women out of unrestrained, power-fueled, toxic masculine lust. The legacy continued: Martin Luther King, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein, Andrew Cuomo, Jeffrey Epstein and a legion of often-Democratic, always contracepting, pro-choicing abusers of women. Clinton' daliance with Monica, same age as his daughter, was the most overtly incestuous drama; as such fatal for the life of the family and community; but casually dismissed as a recreational indiscretion. Epstein's abuse of underage women is nauseatingly oedipal in the moral and psychological sense. MLK continues as a cultural idol, curiously immune to "me-too" critique and its implicit acceptance of sexual license.

It is a mystery, a paradox, an irony: as the Great Generation (of men who defeated two totalitarianisms, contained a third, built a superb economym, society and church) reached the pinacle of power in the late 1960s that there was this luciferian pivot against the paternal into oedipal, incestuous spiritual chaos. How could this happen? How did they lose their grip on the Good and the True? Why did their women collapse into envy, resentment and disgust for the paternal/maternal? Why did their children despise them and their legacy with such arrogance and narcissism? it is a Mystery from hell! At the heart if it is the dark underside of Camelot: patriarchy turned adulterous/incestuos; womanly rage and envy; filial disloyalty, narcisissm and arrogance; the desecration of the iconography of the paternal, maternal, spousal and filial.

I recall a conversation many years ago with a young Italian security guard at Newark Airport: speaking of his love for his children, he recalled running into an ex-girlfriend who offered an adulterous daliance. He declined. Thoughtfully he reflected: "In regard to my wife, I could have gone with her. But not in regard to my children. I could never look them in the face." It struck me at the time as a profound moral intuition: the worst thing about adultery is the damage to the children. We know marriages that survive and even flourish post-adultery, where the offender is contrite and the offended forgiving. But the wound to the children, it seems to me, is indelible. The child's very being is conceived in the union of groom-and-bride; the child's very identity flows from the conjugal union, however imperfect, of the two. The violation of the sacred father-son/daugher relation in (implicitly incestous) adultery is the deepest of sins; it is not so much about sex as about the holiness and desecration of fatherly love.

The fall of Camelot, of the kingdom and the family and a legacy...of David, Arthur, JFK and MLK, Clinton and Weinstein...lies in the betrayal of paternal love in adultery; oedipal resentment and distrust of the father; feminine envy and rage at the paternal as disloyal and tyranical; the degeneration of the paternal as heroic, noble, generous; and the surrender into the chaos of sterile, recreational-romantic, non-spousal, anti-paternal, non-maternal sex.

The building of a new, genuine Camelot must be on the foundation of the holiness of the family; the primacy of state-of-life (vows of marriage or consecration); chastity; filiality; fraternity; fruitful, spousal love; paternity and maternity. This is why the destruction by Pope Francis of the John Paul Institute for the Family in Rome is the most disloyal, decadent of his decisions. The trivialization of sexuality and the pervasive acceptance of the adulteries of JFK, MLK, Clinton, Trump in the desecration of paternity is the deepest evidence of the decadence of our society and Church. It is that the health of the Church and society flows from the deep, good roots of wholesome, holy families...the prayerful, faithful, humble life of Nazareth.