Priest says Virginity is finished!!
The following was written at Christmas in New York in 2016 (when I was 95).
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He was holding forth at the breakfast table with great vigor and confidence about almost everything. He was “lecturing” a group of ancient withered-up priests who were awed by his intelligence, his easy flow of language in their captive audience status. They, with the old man mouth agape and the involuntary drool of oldsters, wriggled with their wheel chairs, walkers or canes and wondered “what the h—- is he saying?”
Though the priest “lecturer” was in his early seventies, he apparently was suffering from some kind of late life awareness of a severely repressed childhood which, in his late blooming, he found to be hidebound by stodgy old rules and requirements. Perhaps, a bit angry at what he thinks he missed out on— viz: girls, dances, and parties, he is determined to compensate for this terrible lack by showing how dumb people are who are unaware that Purity-chastity and virginity are passé.
He argues that economics strongly influence what is called “morality.” Modern economic structures, he says, tend to discourage the Judae-Christian belief that people should abstain from things sexual until they are married. In the older system under which many of the older types were raised, people married shortly after graduating from college and began their families immediately. Their sexual drives were usually and automatically channelled into the husband/wife dyad.
Today, our flame-throwing priest says that people cannot afford to get married until much later when they are financially secure. Hence, the pressures to engage in sexual behavior are so strong and widespread that abstinence is virtually impossible and morally unjustified. Such repression carries, he argues, an unnecessary burden of guilt and distress for young people who are seeking happiness like every one else. The Bishops have to get going and do someting to resolve this impossible state of things….and on and on. Every one is doing “it” so the Bishops better get off their easy chairs (?) and do something or else we will have empty churches….
So, I, with some anxiety even terror at 95, dare to challenge the man who knows it all !! I tentatively suggest that what he proposes sounds (to me) suspiciously like ”situational” ethics. It sounds that such a position holds that there is really nothing, principle or behavior, intrinsically good or bad. And that All things ultimately are relative. It all depends how life is hitting you! What the human race has learned over the millenia, what common sense tells us, what is the explicit revealed will of a loving God is all thereby and hereafter in the trash bin! The tinge of denial, the kidding oneself, the rationalizations all seem fairly near to fancy “apologias”.
The rationalizations are strikingly similar to those we hear from the denying alcoholic.
Consistent with this self-centered if understandable view is the slippery slope dynamic. Where does one stop? Where does one draw the line? Where does the flawed human being say: I will not go beyond this point. How often crisis has been resolved and jettisoned by simply giving it all away in the name of “Good sense”? Or “human nature”? Consensus decides? Who or what sets the moral norm? Or does morality matter? It is said that when one is sexually aroused, conscience does not exist.
Dawn Eden Goldstein, the Catholic theologian, has written a superlative book, The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On, in which she explores the affective effect of the behavior advocated by the priest genius earlier cited. From her own youthful innocent but destructive behavior, she describes the ruthless harmful impact on one’s basic self esteem and how she was rescued from a self loathing life. We see this far too much in those seduced by the false promises of confused teachers or leaders. Dawn’s successful maturation centered, she believes, in what many call the Grace of God. The rewards of chastity are enormous.
The lily is traditionally a symbol of purity and chastity.
Image by bess.hamiti@gmail.com from Pixabay
In the weekly group I run of same-sex attracted males, I ask them often to compare their affective states in both their previous active gay lifestyle and their present chaste life - it is invariably the chastity style which wins for peace of soul and inner feelings of cleanliness. And these are dedicated to lifelong chastity. My friend the priest who dominates old guys isn’t williing to challenge young people simply to wait until their marriage when sex becomes the covenant with God. Are the modern “give-in” people” saying that it is impossible to do what God asks? Cardinal George of Chicago told a group of same-sex attracted people that any one who says that chastity is impossible is saying, in fact, that he doesn’t believe in the Resurrection of Jesus. Grace is there. There are countless examples of people whose despair was so intense that they felt they were captives with no way out. But there was. God knows best how to make people happy. His help is there. It is possible to be happy in this life with restraint.
However, no way can one deny the secular facts. To be chaste in this present culture is difficult. We are surrounded by a three-ringed circus shrieking the delights of the flesh wherever one turns. Difficult especially for the young people with strong gonadal tendencies and urges. Most people have a nervous system screaming for sexual discharge. Economy is tight and it is hard to make it in the high tax, government-controlled world we live in. All factual but the consequences are rarely evaluated. Think of consequences. What follows the illicit sexual experience? Can we get honest data from people?
Being the simple and sensitive chap that I am, I hesitate to make the flame-thower priest look silly, but has he looked at the empty pews in those churches where his philosophy is followed? Catholics aren’t perfect with their loopy infighting and envies, but by comparison, they are doing very well with a more healthy response to challenges which a well meaning cleric thinks is so terrible.