"If The Eucharist Is Just a Symbol, Then to Hell with It"

Some might be scandalized by these words spoken by the sui generis Flannery O'Connor.

That's too bad, because they're absolutely true.

Two days hence is Corpus Christi Sunday, when we remind ourselves that when we attend Mass and receive Holy Communion, each of us had better make sure our own spiritual house is in order, because despite the fact that it looks like bread, tastes like bread, smells like bread, and is, therefore, by all appearances, bread, it is most certainly not bread.

If it were, in and of itself, it would be exactly worthless.

And yet it isn't. On the contrary, the Eucharist is the very Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and as such, it is literally of infinite value. We can never tire of reminding ourselves of that.

Just yesterday I came across the text of a smashingly good address given by Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput to the Catholic Social Workers Association in which he shared O'Connor's aforementioned quip and offered her as an example of someone who was to be commended for her "confidence in the Church or her impatience with the empty conceit of people who want the comfort of faith but not the cost of actually believing and living it."

As is his wont, Chaput pulled no punches and spoke clearly. Here's how his talk begins:

We’re here today — or anyway, we should be here today — because we believe in Jesus Christ. Everything in Catholic social ministry begins and ends with Jesus Christ. If it doesn’t, it isn’t Catholic. And if our social work isn’t deeply, confidently and explicitly Catholic in its identity, then we should stop using the word “Catholic.” It’s that simple.

Faith in Jesus Christ — not as the world likes to imagine him, but the true Son of God as the Catholic Church knows and preaches him — is the only enduring basis for human hope. Real hope has nothing to do with empty political slogans. It has nothing to do with our American addictions to progress or optimism or positive thinking.

This is what we call Getting Back to Basics: the Catholic Church is about nothing if it is not about Jesus Christ. Boom.

Needless to say, the whole address is well worth a read.

This "Getting Back to Basics" idea struck me a few weeks ago when I came across this story about Francesca Sinicrope, a student at a Catholic high school in Canada. This 17-year old girl found herself in the unlikely position of having to defend Church teaching to one of her teachers who apparently told her class that Jesus never rose from the dead, and that the real moral of the story of Jesus' life is that we should all be nice to each other or something.

Reading this, I was reminded me of what Rudolf Bultmann once said: "If the bones of the dead Jesus were discovered tomorrow in a Palestinian tomb, all the essentials of Christianity would remain unchanged" -- words that convey an idea so stupid that they could have only been uttered by a theologian.

Here's the deal: at its heart, the Catholic faith (and Christianity in general) isn't about being nice to people. It's not about helping the poor, or taking of the widow and orphan, or fighting abortion.

It isn't about believing things like masturbation, pornography, contraception, non-marital sex, usury, defrauding laborers of their wages, etc., are sinful.

True, these things are part of the whole Christian scene, but they're not The Thing. At its heart, what the Catholic faith (and Christianity in general) is about is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

Either Jesus rose from the dead, or he didn't.

If he did, then Christianity is true. If he didn't...well, then, boy, aren't we a bunch of idiots.

How much more clearly could St. Paul have made it?

If there is no resurrection of the dead, then neither has Christ been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then empty (too) is our preaching; empty, too, your faith. Then we are also false witnesses to God, because we testified against God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if in fact the dead are not raised.

For if the dead are not raised, neither has Christ been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain; you are still in your sins.

Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all. But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. (1 Cor. 15: 13-20)

That's why, as for me, if Jesus didn't rise from the dead, I'd renounce my faith yesterday, and I'd tell every other Christian to do the same.

If the Resurrection is just a myth, then to hell with it.

What Have I Done Lately?

Today, the Church celebrates the feast of St. Lucy, patron saint of — among others — the blind.

While looking at the calendar a few days ago and taking note of this feast day, I was prompted to recall an encounter I had ten years ago.

After graduating college, I got a job teaching Religion at Good Counsel High School, a girls’ school on the Northwest Side of Chicago run by the Felicians Sisters.

After one of the teacher in-services at the beginning of the school year, Sister Mary Justilla Podgorski, who ran the attendance office, invited me to visit the Felicians’ Chicago Province Motherhouse (where she lived) next door to the school, where she introduced me to many of the other sisters in her community.

One of the sisters I met that day — whose name, I regret, escapes me — had been blind for ten years. After Sister Justilla and I talked to her for a few minutes (and listened to her play a song on her electric piano), we moved on. Sister Justilla then whispered to me that this sister offers up all of her suffering related to her blindness for those addicted to pornography.

I remember thinking at that moment that I felt like The Great Slacker of the World.

I’ve just met a saintly woman who hasn’t been able to see for ten years, and all this time she’s been offering up to God all of the pain, frustration, and suffering her blindness has caused her on behalf of porn addicts. And what have I done lately?

Penance and mortification are key aspects to a healthy spiritual life. And so it’s important for us to consider from time to time, especially during this penitential season of Advent: What have I offered up lately for my family? My friends? My co-workers? The guy down the street who’s out of work? The woman on the Hooters billboard I saw on the way to work this morning?

Etc.

What have I done lately?

[Cross-posted at Catholic Dads]

Do Your Part to Help Stop Pornography

I just got an e-mail from a friend of mine who works for Christian Brothers Investment Services about the firm's latest initiative to try to stop the distribution of pornography.

It's summarized in the essay "Pornography and Socially Responsible Investing", which appeared yesterday on Public Discourse:

Recently, Dan Nielsen, the Director of Socially Responsible Investing at Christian Brothers Investment Services (CBIS) released an “Action Alert” encouraging people to sign a letter to media companies asking these companies to stop distributing pornography. CBIS is an investment management firm with approximately $3.6 billion in assets under management for more than 1,000 Catholic institutions worldwide. In the letter, Mr. Nielsen cites the Witherspoon Institute’s study on “The Social Costs of Pornography.” Nielsen asks companies such as Comcast, Time Warner Cable, DIRECTV, Dish Network, and Cablevision to “1) Stop distributing pornographic programs, and 2) Improve public disclosure of potential business risks and revenues earned from distributing pornography.” This letter serves as a warning to these media companies about the growing legal and reputational risk that pornography production and distribution will face as the information in the Witherspoon report becomes more widely known. Not everyone may have the money or time to have an impact through socially responsible investing, but signing onto the letter represents an excellent opportunity to bolster CBIS’s efforts to encourage publicly-traded media companies to stop distributing pornography.

I just signed on to the letter, and you should too. But don't wait — the deadline to sign on is today, Friday, October 29.

What "Comprehensive" Sex Ed Is Really All About

The Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health is at it again.

In 2006, ICAH held its annual fundraiser at Playboy's executive offices.

That event—view the invitation here [PDF]—included a VIP reception with Playboy CEO Christie Hefner, the daughter of Hugh Hefner, who founded the magazine in 1953. Several years ago, Christie decided that the company could make more money by producing increasingly harder-core pornography—something that even her father was reluctant to do for a long time.

The next year, their annual fundraiser featured a stripper.

At this year's event on June 15, ICAH will be honoring sex advice columnist Dan Savage with the group's "Sexuality Activist Award."

The fact that Savage is being honored tells us everything we need to know about ICAH's values and the advice they believe should be given to kids.

On his website, Savage recommends things like group sex and encourages his readers to enter amateur porn contests. For the sake of propriety, most of the advice he gives I won't even mention obliquely.

He also ridicules a support group for pornography addicts by claiming "porn addiction is bulls***."

This despite reams of evidence showing how devastatingly harmful and addictive porn really is. (For but one example, witness pop singer John Mayer's candid admission that he would rather watch porn than form a new relationship with a real woman.)

In its press statement [PDF] announcing this year's event, ICAH blames "harmful abstinence-only-until-marriage messages that have proven inaccurate and ineffective" for the alarmingly high rates of pregnancy and STDs among teens.

Yet the evidence for successful abstinence education programs continues to mount, and meanwhile, it's increasingly clearer that the message of Condoms, Condoms, More Condoms, And Even More Condoms doesn't, you know, work.

So let's review:

For 3 of the last 5 years, the honored guests at ICAH functions have included the CEO of Playboy, a stripper, and a lurid sex columnist.

And they expect the people of Illinois to believe they have our children's best interests at heart when they push for so-called "comprehensive" sex education.

How stupid do they think we are?

Related Coverage on the Generations for Life Blog

• What Really Goes On In "Comprehensive" Sex Ed Class


• When did Playboy Become Respectable?

[Cross-posted at Pro-Life Action League and Generations for Life]

Show Me a Culture That Despises Virginity and I'll Show You a Culture That Despises Children*

Example #698412306221612765891:

Amazon pulls 'rape' computer game

A computer game in which players compete to rape women and get them to abort their babies has been pulled from sale on Amazon.com.

Rapelay, a Japanese "rape simulation" game which revolves around the premise of "hunting" down and raping a single mother and her two daughters, had been available via the online retailer's US site until an investigation by the Belfast Telegraph drew attention to it yesterday.

One website review of the PC game describes "tears glistening in the young girl's eyes" as she is attacked in graphic detail.

In the game, players begin stalking a mother on a subway station before violently raping her. They then move on to attack her two daughters, described as virgin schoolgirls.

Perhaps the saddest part: Getting rid of this *one* game is like killing one cockroach. Yeah, you've gotten rid of one, but you know there's a lot more where that came from.

* HT for the meme: Mark Shea

Pornography Awareness Week

Today marks the start of Pornography Awareness Week.

Therefore, men, beware! And resolve to use every means at your disposal (chief among them frequent Confession and Holy Communion) to resist its gravitational-like pull.

Along these lines, I'd encourage any and all of this here weblog's readers to sign this pledge to live chastely (which I found out about via the Catholic Dads blog).

I signed it. Will you?

I'm also reposting herein some self-explanatory test I originally borrowed stole from The Dutchman last year:

Nine Myths about Pornography

(by one angry girl designs)

Myth 1: Women who become strippers and hookers choose these careers, so who are we to judge them?

Myth 2: Strippers and porn stars lead glamorous lives, and men have nothing but respect for them.

Myth 3: Porn is an outlet or safety valve for men who might otherwise do Bad Things.

Myth 4: Men like variety in women so porn use helps a man stay faithful to his woman.

Myth 5: Porn is harmless and has no effect on the person using it.

Myth 6: Women who work in porn are empowered, because they get to call the shots.

Myth 7: Porn is for men who sincerely appreciate the beauty of the female body.

Myth 8: Everyone knows porn is just a fantasy, so no one would try to apply it to real life.

Myth 9: Porn enhances relationships.

Lust and Boredom

One of the consequences of The Fall is that man's ability to devise new and different ways to sin is essentially limitless.

As such, when a well-informed, spiritually mature Catholic hears about a particularly outrageous, supposedly "new" trend in sinful behavior, his reaction should, on the one hand, be one of disdain, as it should be for any other sins (including his own). On the other hand, though, he oughtn't be surprised.

This is especially true regarding sexual sins.

Lust, we observe, leads inexorably to boredom. And while other sins do, too, of course, I would contend it happens more so — or at least more quickly — in the case of lust.

Much like a drug addict, the man enslaved to lust is Absolutely. Never. Satisfied. by just one thought, or image, or video, or act (with whatever other person(s) or, well...).

Boredom soon sets in, as he realizes the fleeting satisfaction is gone. After a while on the pleasure/boredom roller coaster, he begins to wonder if dabbling in increasingly edgier porn and/or real acts themselves might finally forestall his heretofore inevitable loathsome boredom.

They won't, of course, but his conscience is too beaten down for him to know any better. For when a man is spiritually blind, all he can do is stumble around, and unless he asks for help, he ends up progressing further into the morass.

I say all this by way of introduction to this story:



Guys with a pregnant hooker fetish haven't always had a pregnant hooker fetish. No doubt, it's the result of having tried lots of progressively worse things before; perhaps this is just the flavor of the month.

But when the novelty of the pregnant hooker fetish wears off, where does their boredom take them?

And what about the women who allow themselves to be used (and then discarded) to satisfy some pathetic loser's messed up fantasy? How kinky do they have to become once a particular fetish becomes passé?

The possibilities are endless—thereby illustrating with shocking clarity why lust can only be justly regarded as a deadly sin.

"Not Your Father's Pornography"

A few months ago on the Catholic Dads Blog a post appeared (which, in turn, referred to this post by Father Valcheck on the blog Adam's Ale) about the unspeakable dangers inflicted on a father's children if they come into contact with his pornography (or any pornography, for that matter).

The latter elicited some insightful comments that are well worth checking out.

I came across these posts just a day or two after reading an article in the January 2008 issue of First Things titled "Not Your Father's Pornography".

My contribution to the comments section noted that Byassee's article is an excellent primer on just how bad the let's-see-how-far-we-can-push-the-limits porn of today is compared to that of, say, a generation ago. (It also has some beautiful reflections on the theological meaning of what sex really is.)

At the time, however, the full article was not available.

It is now.

If you read nothing else today, read that.

[Cross-posted at Catholic Dads]

Myths about Porn

One morning a few months ago, I opened the living room shades, and on the sidewalk directly in front of Haus Jansen, I saw this:



That's unusual, I thought, but kinda cool. What a way to remind people of the reality of sin in the world!

Later, after a walk around the neighborhood, I saw similar "N" and "S" markings on other portions of sidewalks, curbs, and streets, and realized that what was written on the sidewalk in front of Haus Jansen was not actually the word "sin"—well, it was, of course, but it wasn't intended as such—rather, it was intended as some sort of "north/south" marking (apparently these were made by the gas company, as they've been doing a lot of work in the area lately):





Anywho, I wanted a picture to accompany this post, and I figured this one...



...would do nicely.

I borrowed stole the self-explanatory text that follows from the Dutchman at FestungArnulfinger, so one great big tip o' the hat to him:

Nine Myths about Pornography

(by one angry girl designs)

Myth 1: Women who become strippers and hookers choose these careers, so who are we to judge them?

Myth 2: Strippers and porn stars lead glamorous lives, and men have nothing but respect for them.

Myth 3: Porn is an outlet or safety valve for men who might otherwise do Bad Things.

Myth 4: Men like variety in women so porn use helps a man stay faithful to his woman.

Myth 5: Porn is harmless and has no effect on the person using it.

Myth 6: Women who work in porn are empowered, because they get to call the shots.

Myth 7: Porn is for men who sincerely appreciate the beauty of the female body.

Myth 8: Everyone knows porn is just a fantasy, so no one would try to apply it to real life.

Myth 9: Porn enhances relationships.