On the reaction to H.H. The Pope’s end-of-year address to the S.R. Curia

http://aebrain.blogspot.com/2008/12/todays-battles_27.html
http://aebrain.blogspot.com/2008/12/translations-from-vatican.html
http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/letters/index.php/theaustralian/comments/the_pope_v_homosexuality/
http://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2008/12/dear-pope-ratz.html
http://cumecclesia.blogspot.com/2008/12/is-pope-christian.html
http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/adele-horin/its-time-to-sing-out-if-youre-gay-catholic-133-and-angry/2008/12/27/1229998727650.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/letters/government-has-picked-a-loser-with-car-industry/2008/12/27/1229998729454.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24840277-2703,00.html

Firstly, let me say that I hope that you had a merry Christmas and are looking forward to the new year.

Now I know I’m getting round to this topic a bit late, but my tardiness has given me the advantage of letting me absorb the way that this latest episode of secularist hysteria has played out. Let’s start by looking at what H.H. The Pope actually said (in contrast to what his enemies fancy he might have said). The following extract comes from the Vatican Information Service (V.I.S.) e-mail bulletin of December 22, 2008:

While highlighting that the Church "cannot and should not limit herself to transmitting just the message of salvation to her faithful", the Holy Father said that it must also "protect the human being against self-destruction. It is necessary to have something like an ecology of the human being, understood in the proper manner. It is not a surpassed metaphysics when Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman, and demands that this order of creation be respected. ... That which is often expressed and understood by the term 'gender', is definitively resolved in the self-emancipation of the human being from creation and the Creator".

So what the Holy Father has done is to question the positivism and constructivism of the ‘Gender Studies’ intelligentsia and its fellow-travellers. But the remarks are brief enough and vague enough to open them to all sorts of wild misinterpretations, and as such they constitute a sort of Rorschach (ink blot) test, revealing a lot more about their self-appointed interpreters than they do about the thoughts of His Holiness. Hence the Sodomites’ League takes the remarks as an attack on ‘gay rights’, the ‘gender identity’ theorists takes them as an attack on transsexuals/intersex, feminists take them as an attack on women, and somewhere out there there’s probably an anti-sodomite Catholic environmental group lamenting the diversion from green issues!

The reaction from the Sodomites’ League was swift and predictable. Hysteria reigned:

“It's the latest homophobic attack by this Pope,” said Gustav Hofer, co-director of a documentary on the life of a gay couple in Italy called Suddenly Last Winter.

[…] Reverend Sharon Ferguson, chief executive of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, called the comments “totally irresponsible and unacceptable”.

[…] Reverend Doctor Giles Fraser, president of the pro-gay Anglican movement the Inclusive Church and vicar of a London parish, said: “The Pope is spreading fear that gay people somehow threaten the planet, and that's just absurd.
(http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/letters/index.php/theaustralian/comments/the_pope_v_homosexuality/)

Some of the straw men and non sequiturs in the reactions of sodomite activists were simply preposterous. Had any of them actually read what the Holy Father said? This Mr. Hofer went on to assert that

“The Vatican talks about homosexuality or transsexuality as if it were a whim, never as suffering,”

But this is quite false. The S.R. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith spoke explicitly of the suffering of those with homosexual tendencies in its Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons:

12. What, then, are homosexual persons to do who seek to follow the Lord? Fundamentally, they are called to enact the will of God in their life by joining whatever sufferings and difficulties they experience in virtue of their condition to the sacrifice of the Lord's Cross. That Cross, for the believer, is a fruitful sacrifice since from that death come life and redemption. While any call to carry the cross or to understand a Christian's suffering in this way will predictably be met with bitter ridicule by some, it should be remembered that this is the way to eternal life for all who follow Christ.
(http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19861001_homosexual-persons_en.html)

And unsurprisingly, Mr. Hofer invokes the old identity vs. behaviour stratagem when he says that the Church

“reduces sexual orientation to the sexual act as if it had nothing to do with a person's identity.”

First things first: sexual orientation means the sexual orientation of a man towards a woman and vice versa; anything else is properly called a sexual disorientation, since reproductive faculties are ordered towards procreation. Secondly, has it occurred to this man that a “[pseudo-]sexual act” that tends to anal fissures and penile infections might indicate an inherently unhealthy identity?

And the priestess Sharon Ferguson asserts that

“When you have religious leaders like that making that sort of statement, then followers feel they are justified in behaving in an aggressive and violent way because they feel that they are doing God's work in ridding the world of these people,” she said.

What nonsense. By the same logic, does Ms Ferguson fear that her own remarks might incite sodomite extremists to acts of violence against Catholics?

As for the pseudo-priest Dr. Fraser, for him to assert that “The Pope is spreading fear that gay people somehow threaten the planet” is the true absurdity here, not anything that His Holiness said. An assertion like this indicates just how naturalistic this Anglican pseudo-priest’s thinking is—did it not occur to Dr. Fraser that the Holy Father might have been speaking of moral and spiritual self-destruction rather than biological and material self-destruction? The ravings of the gender theorists won’t do much to advance the cause of the lunatics in the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, but they certainly serve to corrode society’s moral fibre. (I might add that Mr. Schütz had a blog post quoting Dr. Fraser as inferring that The Pope had said that

"gay people threaten the existence of the planet in a way that is comparable to the destruction of the rainforest."

(http://cumecclesia.blogspot.com/2008/12/is-pope-christian.html)

How preposterous. The detonation of a hand grenade causes destruction ‘in a way that is comparable to’ the destruction wrought by a nuclear bomb, but there’s a pretty considerable difference in scale. And again, it’s a question of spiritual destruction, not necessarily material destruction.)

In good time the G.L.B.T. bloggers got in on the act. Rather than making any attempt seriously to engage with what the Holy Father actually said, the Canadian blogger MgS simply found the piece of yellow journalism that best suited her own prejudices and ran with it. In doing so she brought out another of the reliable assertions of Sodomites’ League, the idea that somehow speaking out against private violence (sodomy, for instance) is somehow exclusive of speaking out against public violence:

He would do far better for the world to focus his attentions on the horrors in Africa
(http://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2008/12/dear-pope-ratz.html)

Given that the Holy Father speaks out against violence in war-torn countries EVERY YEAR IN THE URBI ET ORBI ADDRESS she really should have known better. Ms Zoe Brain, meanwhile, appeared to make a serious attempt to determine what His Holiness had actually said, but ended up with pretty much the same inferences anyway; if anything they exceeded MgS in their lack of charity. For instance, Ms Brain speaks, in all seriousness, of the Sovereign Pontiff implying that transsexual/intersex individuals

can only be described in a purely ecological sense as human-created vermin, though that word in merely implied, not stated. Something undesirable and dangerous to the Ecology, the product of Humanity's prideful nature in wishing to be in sole and exclusive control of his own destiny. He does not go so far as to say that such (purely ecologically speaking, no pejorative meaning is implied) "vermin" should be exterminated, he leaves the question of what to do with them open. He merely states that they are a danger to all Humanity, and against the Natural order as ordained by God.
(http://aebrain.blogspot.com/2008/12/todays-battles_27.html)

Come on, Zoe, vermin? The only things pestiferous around here are the ravings of the Pope’s enemies.

And eventually the mainstream media commentators and letter-writers got round to venting their spleen at what the Holy Pontiff never even said. Ms Adele Horin had her say in an opinion piece in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herod, headlined “It's time to sing out if you're gay, Catholic … and angry”. Now presumably Ms Horin did not write the headline, but already readers ought to be suspicious, given that ‘gayness’ implies freely immersing oneself in the so-called gay culture, and hence is a freely-chosen identity, distinct from mere homosexual inclinations. It is an identity whose tenets are totally incompatible with Catholic teachings and hence gayness and Catholicism are two mutually-exclusive and competing identities.

I can agree with Ms Horin on at least one point though:

Why gays want to belong to a club that despises their way of living and loving is beyond me
(http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/adele-horin/its-time-to-sing-out-if-youre-gay-catholic-133-and-angry/2008/12/27/1229998727650.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1)

I would modify this slightly though, preferring to describe it, if ACON’s figures are anything to go by, as a way of dying rather than of living, and therefore a sickening parody of loving rather than a legitimate expression of it.

Curiously, Ms Horin asserts that

What the Pope said about homosexuals is rather opaque, but the subtext was the usual denunciation.

She must have superhuman powers of inference, because the Sovereign Pontiff made no reference to homosexuality. Surprisingly though, she goes on to offer a pretty accurate summary of what The Pope had to say:

He attacked what he called "gender" theories and said humanity needed to listen to "the language of creation" to understand the intended roles of man and woman, and that behaviour beyond traditional heterosexual relations was a "destruction of God's work".

That small portion of a single paragraph was, unfortunately, about the extent of Ms Horin’s powers of logical argumentation. She goes on to say that

The church teaches that homosexual people are not sinful, but that homosexual acts are. The spurious distinction condemns a significant minority to a loveless, lonely life. The Pope may see no problems in choosing life-long celibacy, but many of his priests failed the test.

A spurious distinction? Only if one is a determinist and thinks that material circumstances dictate behaviour. And what does the failure of some priests to abide by their vows of continence have to do with the matter at hand?

Then she invokes the ‘speaking out against something gives justification to acts of violence’ non sequitur:

As well as its lack of humanity, the church's view provides bigots with the moral justification for their homophobia.

What nonsense. More nonsense follows though:

They have instead maintained a hardline interpretation of a few scattered references in the Bible.

Well, a single reference would suffice, and I’m not sure which part of ‘sodomites shall not inherit the Kingdom of Heaven’ Ms Horin finds ambiguous. These objections notwithstanding, Ms Horin humbly tells the Hierarchy how to do its job:

Church leaders should be spreading a message of love and acceptance of gays. Instead, they are part of the problem.

Indulging people in whatever self-destructive behaviour they fancy might be Ms Horin’s idea of small-l love but it’s a pretty pathetic substitute for capital-C Charity.

And that brings us to what the letter-writers had to say. A Mr. David Sayers of Gwandalan offered his variant of the ‘speaking out against sodomy means not speaking out on other issues’:

We would have been better served if he had told us he was dedicating his energy to investigating and getting rid of all the child molesters in his own organisation.

Then a Mr. Des Mulcahy offered a textbook case of how not to write a well-argued letter:

The pontiff's decision to attack homosexuals and transsexuals this Christmas was a triumph of dogma over pastoral care.

He has vilified men and women who are at times marginalised and ostracised, while grappling with a lifestyle which has chosen them; people often battling with disease and other disadvantage, yet who immeasurably enrich society.

He, however, represents a group of men who have chosen an unnatural lifestyle, whose ranks are contaminated with pedophiles, who in turn have been protected by his organisation. He and his close associates in religion live in wealth and splendour.

Were Christ alive and living among us today, with which group would his sympathies lie?

Des Mulcahy Orange
(http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/letters/government-has-picked-a-loser-with-car-industry/2008/12/27/1229998729454.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1)

So firstly Mr. Mulcahy asserts some sort of conflict between dogma and pastoral care, without bothering to demonstrate this, of course. Then he makes the baffling assertion that the so-called gay lifestyle has chosen the sodomites. But if it’s a lifestyle then it was their own free choice, I would have thought. And he notes that many sodomites are battling disease, but these diseases are the direct result of the so-called gay lifestyle that they have chosen! As for the assertion that sodomites “enrich society”, the recent decision of the N.S.W. Government to fund the annual Sodomites’ Parade and the millions of dollars poured into the pro-sodomite lobby group that laughingly calls itself the A.I.D.S. Council of N.S.W. suggest that the ‘enrichment’ is flowing in the opposite direction. And his assertions in the second-last paragraph could just as easily be applied to the Sodomites’ League (not to mention the ‘do as I say, not as I do’ logical fallacy). Then he finishes of with the oldest one of them all, the idea that Our Lord would be siding with the poor, downtrodden sodomites rather than the teaching, ruling and sanctifying authority that He founded and continues to protect.

Then another letter-writer made what was presumably some kind of attempt at cleverness rather than the usually ferocious messenger-shooting:

I wonder if the Government, the Opposition and community leaders will publicly condemn the Pope's Christmas comments that homosexuality is a threat to the survival of human race as they did Sheik Hilaly's comparison of unveiled women to uncovered meat?

Paul Sadler Newtown

Perhaps someone could arrange to send Mr. Sadler some apples and oranges.

There was more at The Australian’s letters section over the weekend, with another writer wheeling out the old ‘homosexuality is a part of nature’ fallacy:

IF Benedict XVI really took his teaching on “human nature” from the natural world he would have noticed, along with the biologists, that so-called “homosexual” acts have been observed among literally thousands of species, from insects to mammals. In fact, such acts are normal variations of sexual behaviour.

What kind of nature is he referring to, then? A construction that manipulates nature in the service of church ideology. Religion is part of the problem, not a solution. This pope is fuelling a discourse of divisiveness where he ought to be a healer.

Victor Marsh
Ocean Shores, NSW
(http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/letters/index.php/theaustralian/comments/the_pope_v_homosexuality)

So ‘homosexual acts’ have been observed among the lower orders of creation. Some creatures eat their respective mates after copulation. Some creatures consume their young. All manner of internecine behaviour is observable in the animal kingdom. That doesn’t make it any healthier. Sodomy is not a normal variation of sexual behaviour; it is an abnormal variation of pseudo-sexual misbehaviour. Information on its deleterious consequences is available from any G.L.B.T. so-called health advisory body.

And Mr. Marsh asks “What kind of nature is [His Holiness] referring to, then?” Obviously this is where the Holy Father departs most markedly from the positivists, constructivists and nihilists. For the gender theorists and sodomite activists, humanity creates morality, and there is no such thing as natural law. For Catholics, morality is that which corresponds to right reason; to behave immorally—to sin—is, by definition, to offend reason. Hence when we say that God cannot sin this is not a mere tautology; to say that God cannot sin is to say that God cannot offend reason, that it is God’s nature to be reasonable. That is the kind of “nature” to which His Holiness was referring, and which was, of course, the theme of another of His Holiness’s monstrously misrepresented addresses, namely, the Regensburg address of 2006. What a delicious irony then, to see sundry secularist degenerates behaving like the intellectual equivalent of their enemies the Muslims. As I have noted on other occasions, secularists and Muslims have a lot more in common with each other than they might like to imagine.

But if I could offer just one little suggestion, if I may be so bold, for how the Holy Father might have improved the Curia address, I would suggest that it might have packed a bit more punch if His Holiness had ramped up the rhetoric and asked:

How is it that some people can be so vocal about the figurative sodomising and castration of the environment when they remain silent about the literal sodomising and castration of their fellow man?

Finally, just in case any sodomites, positivists, constructivists or nihilists should (as has happened on other occasions) happen across this blog and wish to engage me in debate (which I welcome, preferably after you’ve taken a cold shower though), please READ WHAT THE POPE ACTUALLY SAID and avoid the following non sequiturs, straw men, logical fallacies and preposterous falsehoods in your argumentation:

1. The Pope has implied that sodomites threaten the extinction of the human race.
2. The Pope has implied that gender theorists threaten the extinction of the human race.
3. There are neither teleological nor physiological reasons for criticising sodomy.
4. Criticising homosexual behaviour means vilifying homosexuals as persons.
5. The Pope would have been better off criticising war/disease/starvation/paedophilia, as if criticising these things and criticising the so-called gay culture and gender theory were mutually exclusive.
6. By criticising gays/gender theory The Pope has provided moral justification for vigilantes.
7. The Pope is a sinner therefore he cannot criticise other sinners.
8. The Pope has opposed dogma to pastoral care.
9. Our Lord would side with the sodomites and gender theorists against the very Hierarchy to which He communicated His authority.

Reginaldvs Cantvar
Feast of St. Thomas of Canterbury, A.D. 2008

On an A.C.B.C. initiative to improve doctrinal literacy

http://www.acbc.catholic.org.au/bishops/pm/200812091370.htm

I read an interesting little item in yesterday’s Sydney Catholic Weekly which is also available in much the same form at the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference (A.C.B.C.) website. Here it is:

Accessible new pamphlets on Catholic doctrine to be issued next year

The Bishops Commission for Doctrine and Morals is preparing to publish a series of easy-to-read pamphlets on key areas of doctrine.

It is proposed that six pamphlets will be prepared by the members of the Commission, Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop Mark Coleridge, Bishop Christopher Prowse, Bishop Anthony Fisher. Bishop Peter Elliott will also prepare one of the pamphlets.

They will be released to coincide with the feasts of Easter, Pentecost, the Assumption, Exaltation of the Cross, Christ the King and Christmas.

The pamphlets will examine the subjects of Christology, Truth in the Church, Christian understanding of the Body, Moral Truths, Eschatology and Salvation.

The Bishops Commission for Doctrine and Morals has also commissioned Dr Anne Hunt to develop a booklet on the Trinity. The booklet is directed to a general audience, including secondary students. It is expected that the booklet will be ready for publication during 2009.

Now this is a welcome initiative, and clearly a timely one given the recent ravings of a certain Australian priest (not to mention the nonsense that one can find any day of the week at websites like Mr. Coyne’s little project). And it is good to see that the prelates leading this initiative are ones who are regarded as orthodox. The thing is, they are orthodox, but none of them is Traditional, and so while I’m confident that most of the pamphlets will be doctrinally sound, I worry about what to expect from the pamphlet for the Feast of Christ the King. I blogged recently on His Eminence Cardinal Pell’s recent inadequate attempt to explain Christ’s Kingship, and unfortunately it appears that Msgr. Elliott conforms to the truncated ‘in men’s hearts’ (and therefore not truly and properly social) view of the Social Reign of Christ:

But, if I emphasise the social reign of the Lord Jesus, I need to place this in the spiritual or, let us say, the supernatural perspective. It is a simple call to faith: 'Let Jesus reign!'

Let him reign in our hearts, families, houses and apartments, schools and universities, workplaces, farms, factories, shops and offices. Let him reign among our circle of friends and family as we witness and strive to establish on earth the Kingdom of truth, life, holiness, grace, justice, love and peace.
(http://www.ad2000.com.au/articles/2008/feb2008p12_2723.html)

Let Him Reign “in our hearts, families, houses and apartments, schools and universities, workplaces, farms, factories, shops and offices” by all means, but what of His Reign over the State, which is society taken at its highest natural level? Nowhere in His Lordship’s article does he affirm that Christ’s Reign must be acknowledged by the State and that it must, in justice, do Him homage. This is particularly odd given that His Lordship began this article lamenting the ‘spiritualisation’ of Christ’s Reign.

So what can we do to avert any diminution of Christ’s Social Kingship and take advantage of this opportunity to promote His Reign? I am considering writing (under my real name, of course) an e-mail to the Commission’s Executive Secretary, Sr. Elizabeth M. Delany S.G.S., with the following sentiments:

J.M.J.
[Date]
Sr. Elizabeth M. Delaney, S.G.S.
Executive Secretary,
Bishops Commission for Doctrine and Morals
church.life@catholic.org.au

My Venerable and Dear Sister in Christ,

I was pleased to read in the Sydney Catholic Weekly of December 21, 2008 that the Bishops Commission for Doctrine and Morals, of which you are Executive Secretary, is going to issue several pamphlets dealing with some fundamental Catholic teachings. I write to you regarding the pamphlet to be issued for the Feast of Christ the King. I am concerned that the pamphlet might fail to uphold explicitly the dogma of the Social Kingship of Christ, and that Christ’s Social Reign might be reduced to a mere reign ‘in men’s hearts’ taken individually, which would, therefore, not be truly and properly social. I would like to express my hope that in any pamphlet treating Christ’s Kingship there will be an affirmation that Christ’s Social Reign is not just a matter of people in a society acknowledging Christ’s Kingship, but that it demands that people as a society acknowledge Christ’s Kingship, with the implication necessarily being that the State, which is society taken at its highest natural level, must acknowledge Christ as its King and as the Source of the blessings that it enjoys, of its authority and of its very existence. His late Holiness Pius XI wrote about this in his Encyclical Quas Primas:

18. Thus the empire of our Redeemer embraces all men. To use the words of Our immortal predecessor, Pope Leo XIII: "His empire includes not only Catholic nations, not only baptized persons who, though of right belonging to the Church, have been led astray by error, or have been cut off from her by schism, but also all those who are outside the Christian faith; so that truly the whole of mankind is subject to the power of Jesus Christ."[28] Nor is there any difference in this matter between the individual and the family or the State; for all men, whether collectively or individually, are under the dominion of Christ. In him is the salvation of the individual, in him is the salvation of society. "Neither is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given to men whereby we must be saved."[29] He is the author of happiness and true prosperity for every man and for every nation. "For a nation is happy when its citizens are happy. What else is a nation but a number of men living in concord?"[30] If, therefore, the rulers of nations wish to preserve their authority, to promote and increase the prosperity of their countries, they will not neglect the public duty of reverence and obedience to the rule of Christ. …
[http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_11121925_quas-primas_en.html]

I look forward to hearing more about this welcome initiative to improve doctrinal literacy and, in particular, I hope to see a strong affirmation of the dogma of the Social Kingship of Christ. I would be interested to hear back from you with any information regarding the Commission’s intentions in this connection.

Yours faithfully in Christ,
[Name]
[Address]

So what do you think? Do you think that I have expressed myself diplomatically enough here (I want to maximise the likelihood of an endorsement of the Traditional teaching on Christ’s Kingship, so I want to avoid anything harsh or polemical)? Would you be interested in supporting my little initiative by sending an e-mail of your own to Sr. Elizabeth, using the words provided here, or a composition of your own? Would a written letter enjoy a better reception than an e-mail, do you think? Let me know in the combox if you have any suggestions for making my attempt to promote Christ’s Social Reign succeed.

Reginaldvs Cantvar
22.XII.2008 A.D.