Federali Aundy
LVC Member
What follows below is an interesting analysis of American culture from a good friend of mine in Minnesota. His words and argumentation have a certain shock-value to them, and while I don't necessarily agree with each and every point he makes, he certainly does approach the issue of political, cultural, and religious impact on abortion in an interesting new way that seems to transcend the typical dichotomy that the left and the right tend to use today.
So before you read this, I want to be pretty up front and say that I am mostly interested in reading your opinions on Pence's essay (e.g. it's strengths and weaknesses). I should also note that his views are informed by a deep monotheistic belief and he may use some categories unfamiliar to some. If this comes up and is confusing, I would love to know so that he can perhaps better articulate and explain these views.
So read on and post away! You guys are really smart and your thoughts are much appreciated!
Piety and Protection: A New Strategy for an American Culture of Life (Dr. David Pence)
It is important to get Love right. Trinitarian Love is the first reality—it is the driving force of Salvation History and it is the final end we seek. You get love wrong - especially if you are the Church - you have problems. It turns out if a nation gets love wrong, she too will have serious problems. The bonds of civic affection forged by performing shared duties shape national fraternity just as acts of love and gift ultimately shape the “ordering of the household” which is the meaning of “economy”. Pope Benedict grounded his social encyclical (Caritas in Veritate) in the reality of Trinitarian love. We do well to follow him in recasting the locus of debate and strategy of the national prolife movement.
First giving credit where credit is due, let us declare victory in winning the intellectual argument that the embryo, fetus and aborted baby are each a human being. At the same time we must acknowledge that winning that argument has not stopped abortion anymore than demonstrating that slaves were human beings ended the institution of slavery. There was always the “Slave Power” to contend with and with them it was never a matter of who had the better argument. The philosophical arguments and billboard teachings have been important and fruitful intellectual work. They give us good currency in public discourse.
The gravitational center of historical and national morality in the 1960’s was the interracial civil rights movement. It sprang from returning black veterans from WWII and the Korean War as well as religious leaders. The courageous sense of civic authority of these returning veterans was a well spring of civic equality. Their demand to be treated as men according to a traditional male honor code has been better told in the lore of small towns and cities rather than the narrative of the national movement. The language and songs of the renewed civil rights movement struck a biblical cadence deeply consonant with our nation’s religious founding.
When the struggle for an interracial “Beloved Community” and civic brotherhood under God our Father gave way to the black power movement, the language of common duties and dignity gave way to lists of grievances, excuses for violence, and demand for rights. God, national community and shared duties were derided as the language of Uncle Tom. And that great hero in American Christian literature - Uncle Tom - became a figure of ridicule and emasculated shame. The cries of Black Power, non-negotiable demands, and the welfare rights movement needed no God and no community. Black manhood was no longer about the assumption of duties but rather a posture of screaming obscenities at cringing guilt-ridden white college students and professors. Black humor became a celebration of filth and black manhood became a celebration of the gangster. When the interracial brotherhood movement lost the command center of religious obligation and the social capital bank of military service, a plethora of other rights movements blossomed. First the feminist movement, then the gay rights crowd, next the “ultimate civil rights movement” - the right to life of the little ones, and finally the trailer that everyone agreed upon - the rights of the disabled. From the imperious feminist to the helium inflated zygote to the student in the wheelchair everybody waved their signs: we want our rights and we want them now.
All these rights bearers clashed and clamored sometimes in alliance, often in competition. The zygote and the pregnant woman especially clashed. And even as the zygote grew older and his mother could feel his motion, his advocate was still a distant movement while his natural protector right up close was his enemy. The Bible asks, “Would a mother desert her child?” It turns out that in America the answer for a significant number of women is “Yes, indeed she will.” When everyone is a rights bearer some strange alliances and conflicts ensue. As long as one third of America’s pregnant women were willing to evict their own young there was little hope that the little ones and their allies could enlist federal and state legislators to override their natural protectors. Cultures that cannot produce the feminine character who will care for her own young will never produce police forces or legislatures to do the maternal job for them. If there are forty errant women in a large city, laws can make abortion so prohibitive that the natural maternal protector will be instructed by the state protector to do her duty. But if a third of the moms are willing to abort, then imagine one thousand Iwo Jimas with well entrenched Japanese soldiers - what cost in Marines to fight upon such unfavorable terrain?
We are fighting on the wrong ground. In rhetoric there is a notion of “stasis”. It is a tactical decision advancing an argument by choosing where one draws the most fruitful line of argument. Just because our philosophers can win the “definition of a person and the inalienable rights” arguments does not mean “life as the ultimate civil right” is the proper stasis where we best fight the culture of death. As long as we are assembled as rights bearers doing a bad replay of history’s legitimate interracial civil rights movement then we are assembled for indignant protest and not authoritative protection.
The rights bearer movements supported their main postulate (a demand for rights) with two corollaries: a) question and struggle against authority, and b) never blame the victim.
The war against authority and the representational male
The autonomous bearer of rights struck her most defiant pose against the evil authority figure. The juxtaposition of authority versus freedom and the injunction to speak truth to power became both a slogan and a personality type. Community cannot exist without authority, but the call for community became muted as the clamor for rights drowned out other voices. What could unite the different voices and unite all these disparate movements? After a few affairs during a brief summer of love, the college feminist had no real time for the angry black power advocate. She thought he was a chauvinist pig and he thought she was a spoiled daughter of privilege. So neither looked into the other’s eyes but both focused their rage on the white male patriarch. This occurred on hundreds of campuses, in city streets, at consciousness raising meetings and election rallies. The Man was the enemy—the husband was an abuser, the father a potential rapist. Other male protectors were derided. The policeman was called a pig and the soldier, “a baby killer”. Rights movements build their widest base as coalitions of complaints.
The emotional grist of the complainers was the passion Lincoln said most threatened the rule of law - hatred. Once hatred becomes the motif then the rights bearers looking for “Justice” are joined by criminals within, enemies abroad and the always useful Christian pacifists who join forces in a common goal - to discredit legitimate armed protective authority. A culture of life must deeply understand the necessity for authority and respect for authority if there will ever truly be a lived out culture of protection which guards the little ones.
The insidious undermining of representational male leadership by the rights bearers has had a theological twin in the war against the fatherhood of God, religious patriarchy and the male priesthood. The lavenderization of Catholic clergy has deformed the principal representative actors of the liturgy as icons of the protective sexual order. It is that sexual order of the Word proclaimed and sacrifice rendered (now deeply disfigured in our local face to face worship experiences) which represents and shapes the ultimate culture of life. The battle against communal authority and the representational male had a grammatical front in the forty year battle against the inclusive “he” as a representational pronoun referring to both males and females as antecedents. It is unclear why Christians did not appreciate the gravity of this linguistic attack on a male pronoun which could represent all - in whom there was neither Greek nor Jew, male nor female. Humanity is what we received from Adam and Eve. Mankind is what we can become in Christ. Catholics in our liturgy conform ourselves to the representative male who represents the community as well as Christ in offering our Eucharistic prayer to the Father. This fundamental form of communal organization is not a peripheral concern in living out the culture of life, first in our liturgy and consequentially in our civic life.
When victims are perpetrators-the incoherence of female victimology
The second corollary of the rights bearers is to ‘never blame the victim.” This has led to a moral incoherence which aids the Deceiver. It started with the reluctance of black leaders to criticize the daily reality of black crime and sexual immorality which followed in the wake of the de-Christianization of black males. This pathology was internationalized as US aid and foreign junkets by black Congressmen buttressed a host of thug governments posing as statesmen. The notion that black people could not be racist and that a white person no longer had the moral authority to judge the behavior of black people as immoral or criminal ushered in a great couple of decades for black criminals. The loss of nerve by white officials was paid for with the blood and tears of overwhelmingly black on black crime victims. The moral disaster of this racial calamity has played out in the streets of urban American as well as the savannahs of continental Africa.
Nothing compares though to the feminist victimology smokescreen. Feminism is a tyrannical imperium pitting female will against the feminine womb. The nurturing domicile becomes the killing field. And yet a legion of government funded feminists, awash in state and federal funds, depict domestic violence as a one way street inherent in the nature of masculinity, male authority and “power relationships”. There are lots of names and euphemisms for abortion. Certainly it is neither misleading nor too graphic to call it domestic violence. The domestic violence industry, like its homosexual cousin the AIDS education industry, keeps winning ground (no matter who is President) by adding government or university funded jobs to subsidize another full time paid personality in the war against traditional religious and protective culture.
The prolife movement in public rhetoric (sidewalk counseling is a laudable exception) has studiously avoided the dominant horror of abortion – a host of women willing to abort their own children. The spirit of the age prefers to wave placards against the President than criticize the no longer pregnant mother. What must be presented to this woman is not a philosophical question (e.g. is this child a person?) but rather a maternal one (e.g. is this not your child?). This is not the Holocaust where a group murders the Other in mass slaughter, but rather a kind of suicide in which the self murders flesh of my flesh knitted in the womb. There is a natural tendency for men to protect women and a proper legal tradition treating women as a protected class, but for religious authorities and the prolife movement in general to treat the principal immoral actor in the unnatural crime of abortion as a victim of circumstance is an act of stunning moral obtuseness. A person who cannot sin is not a moral agent. To treat women as incapable of serious sin is to treat women without seriousness. Let us be less philosophical about the rights of a new person and more personal about the failure to mother.
Medicine: The sacred trust and Loss of Authority
The two principal actors in every abortion are a mother and a doctor. One betrays her fundamental nature and the other his sacred profession. A culture of life will become much more grounded in reality when we return to the scene of the crime and battle the fundamental betrayals against motherhood and medicine which every abortion entails. But that will entail defending a Marian notion of femininity against both the radical feminist in the university and the feminist for life lectoring and distributing communion at the altar. It will also entail defending a more exalted vision of the medical profession, the authority of the physician and the sacred content of the physician-patient relationship.
The loss of physician authority and morality in the face of the imperial female as autonomous decision maker is stunning. Luckily our incomes have stayed high so we have at least retained our social status while losing our professional honor. Chief Justice Harry Blackmun had been General Counsel at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota before he wrote the Roe v. Wade decision. He stated: “Up to the point where State interests justify intervention the abortion decision in all its aspects is inherently and primarily a medical decision, and basic responsibility for it must rest with the physician. If an individual practitioner abuses the privileges of exercising proper medical judgment, the usual remedies judicial and intra professional are available.” Blackmun did not think his initial decision would lead to carte blanche abortion. He had experienced a confident and robust medical profession which guarded its prerogatives. Mayo doctors and the nurse-nuns of St Mary’s Hospital in Rochester Minnesota were a universe away from today’s “fee for service drive in” obstetrical model. There doctors gave orders but here doctors comply with commands barked by the autonomous pregnant patient. A Cancer doctor must treat his cancer patient who denies her cancer with the sobering balm of truth telling. In Modern Obstetrics however, deciding how many patients in the room will be protected by the doctor is left to the empress alone. What is called denial of objective reality in cancer patients is called a woman’s choice in Obstetrics. This betrayal of medical ethics and physician authority as old as Hippocrates is another prolife front largely unexplored in lieu of organizing election and fundraising campaigns for and against national leaders. This front would again strike much more at the core act of abortion, and the principal agents of evil rather than assembling to denigrate our principal national symbol of authority.
The Language of Life and Love: Put God back at the center and unite the social justice and prolife agencies
The “dignity of the human person” and the “right to life” of early human life still at a cellular stage of organization are the passwords of the current prolife movement. The woman cast as a victim of various male pathologies is the corollary backdrop of the story. Above all else the prolife movement strives to be seen as “pro-woman” while conscripting the language of civil rights for the human fetus as its ultimate moral guarantee. Some strategists say “If we talk about the baby, we win; if we talk about the woman, they win.” Legal/political strategies of defining and guaranteeing the basic rights of the embryo and fetus ultimately by a constitutional amendment become the overriding focus of the movement.
Human life before it is a rights bearer is a gift from God. It is He Who gives human life a sacred character. Before the human person has rights, he is a gift, not his own and not another’s. Every human being is an intentional specific act of Love by God. A movement which in a single-minded manner upholds the dignity of the human person without situating the person as a creature of a divine Father has shrunken the playing field and forfeited the language of the sacred so necessary to inspire a culture of duty, protection, sacrifice and life. This strategy is remarkably similar to the Catholic social justice movements who make “human dignity” not the sovereignty of God as the organizing motif of social justice. As Pope Benedict asserted in Caritas in Veritate, the Church promotes integral human development not only in her acts of charity but in proclaiming the gospel and celebrating the liturgy.
One cannot understand the claims of the human person without orienting him to the reality of God. The atheist cataract must be removed to see clearly the human situation. A prolife movement which inflates the human zygote and stem cell with rights and is mute about God in the name of reasoned secular debate has forfeited the battle by shrinking the battlefield. Secularists in both parties as well as certain “Catholic public intellectuals” however all insist on the atheist cataract and no reference to Divine commands or sacred goods is allowed in civic discourse. Human reasoning from Christian values is fine but obeying and showing reverence to the Living God who authored natural law is considered beyond the pale. A new prolife strategy will repudiate this self-defeating concession. The public recognition of God and man’s duty in justice to obey and worship God is not a sectarian argument. It is the structure of human reality. It has been forsaken by both the prolife movement and the social justice movement. Can this be one reason that these two movements seem to inhabit separate moral ghettos in so many Catholic dioceses?
The Feminist Implant
The feminist implant is the feminist thought pattern wired in every public brain (male or female) that apologizes for sexual distinctions of duty and considers the overwhelming preponderance of public male leadership in politics, policing and military matters not as the natural order of duty determined justice but as an act of bigotry and exclusion. The wiring of the implant especially hampers the auditory capacity to hear with an open heart and abide the voice of male authority. That widespread implant has not just impaired the receptive hearing necessary for the Gospel, tradition and community. Its presence has altered the pitch and tone of men in speaking imperative and declarative sentences. It forces men especially from the South, from Texas and from ethnic northern neighborhoods to adopt a second language from their native tongue to engage in national political discourse. That implant induces Republicans to try to beat the feminist Democrats at their own game. It was Republican implant recipient President Jerry Ford (1975), advised by Chief of Staff soon to be Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield, who allowed women in the service academies. It was Republican President Ronald Reagan who triumphantly appointed Sandra Day O’Connor as the first woman justice (and deciding vote on a host of abortion and affirmative action cases to the Supreme Court.) Reagan was articulate in his defense of unborn life but when the chance came to enter feminist history as a champion, the little ones lost their knight. He too had the implant and an ambitious socially aware wife who whispered in his ear to keep it tuned. It was George W. Bush who tried to appoint Harriet Meyers to the same court. Only the feminist implant can explain that kind of intellectual lapse.
The volunteer army (1974-75) and the abortion license (1973) both culminated in the Nixon-Ford era and these transformations of masculine and feminine protective obligations into individual choices were generally seen as furthering the cause of freedom. Middle and upper class men could plan their careers without the democratizing dangers of military duty while middle and upper class women were freed from the leveling tendency of biology so they might stay on track with their career and school plans.
John McCain with his homosexual chief of staff and gay marriage advocate campaign manager [1] embraced the twisted fantasy that has debilitated Republicans for forty years - “we will answer Democratic feminists not with a strong cohort of the best men working together for the nation but with our own female role models as leaders. We too will embrace sexual role confusion but we will do it ‘moderately’”. Seven years after Bill Clinton defeated Bob Dole for President (both of their wives were Senators,), the “liberal” in the North and the “conservative” in the South, both careerists perched for their run at the presidency. The feminist implant is not bound by party.
Just as Donald Rumsfield and his openly homosexual chief Pentagon personnel advisor [2] made no effort to shield women from the record number of combat deaths in Iraq, so Senator McCain and his campaign team exposed an accomplished but overreaching new mom/governor to the furor and frenzy of feminist hate. McCain’s campaign correctly assumed she would lead to a more “energized base”. That it might expose her family to the curdling hatred of the feminist Moloch or risk the command of the US military to a lady unsuited for command were apparently secondary concerns. That McCain campaign workers turned on Governor Palin and his campaign manager has advocated gay marriage just confirms that modern Republicans are not always chivalrous male alternatives to the sexual confusion of the left but are often secretive imitators of the same sickness.
The Atheist Cataract
Atheism has made its most dramatic advances by expelling prayer and piety toward God in public life and instituting a materialist hegemony in the teaching of science. The atheist cataract has fogged out the immaterial beings who populate the human drama. The angels, good and bad, are gone from our story. Satan the great deceiver has accomplished his greatest trick: a vanishing act from both the public stage and in human consciousness. God is no longer the living personal touchstone of public reality. He becomes a thousand different psychological constructs. Everybody gets to make his own higher power. This shrunken stage sometimes exaggerates man as the highest form of life and at other times shrinks him to a speck in the expanding universe. What is not allowed on the materialist stage are the sacred categories of gift and duty or the immaterial beings, God and the angels. So we live as if God does not exist. St Paul warned his contemporaries about trying to live as if there is no God. In his first letter to the Romans he wrote that substituting the wisdom of man for the sovereignty of God leads to unnatural love between men and men and women and women (How did he ever make that connection? Forty years ago I remember reading that in high school with some incredulity. I thought he was referring to some long lost weird Semitic cult but apparently he was pointing at us).
Our Catholic bishops could make no greater contribution to our civic conversation than by reintroducing the reality of immaterial beings, the living God and the Prince of Darkness, as principal players in the dramatis personae of the national narrative. Better a short letter on the reality of Satan than another long tract on the six principles of Catholic social thought. Our current Pope, African bishops and even Islamic scholars all attest that this public recognition of God and our duty to Him should be the starting point of mutual dialogue. Prolife strategists should recognize that this God-centered drama will lead us much more fruitfully into the language of sacred gift and protective duties. This is a very different approach than UN conferences on rights. The language of God, gift and duties binds Christians of the global south and religious patriots of America, Poland, and South America.
In a world still dominated by the Prince of Darkness, there can be no sacred without protective cover. Adam was given the Garden of Eden and ordered “to till and guard it.” The Levitical priesthood was the inner guard of the Ark of the Covenant as the circumcised Israeli males were the warrior outer guard of the nation. Both soldier bond and priestly bond were meant to fight. Every declaration of the sacred leads to some kind of masculine bond to separate and sustain the sacred in the midst of the profane. A declaration of the sacred leads to a need for protection and a need for protection leads to the social basis of sex roles.
The New Stasis: The Gift of the Sacred and Protective Sex Roles
Here then is drawn a new line in the sand, a better stasis to build the culture of life and protection. A culture of life is not a declaration of rights. A culture of life is a recognition that God’s love creates the human soul as a sacred gift and the response of adults to this gift is thanksgiving and an assumption of protective duties to safeguard the sacred. A culture of life is a culture of protection. Break down protection and life ebbs away. No protection, no retention of the sacred. All of us received our own lives as a loving gift from God and we were protected by our mothers, our fathers, our families and the civic communities we live in. As adults our response to this gift is to participate in the protective duties which once sheltered us as dependents. The language of gift is the precursor of the language of duties.
Once we realize this deep connection, we begin to understand better the papal synthesis in Benedict’s Caritas in Veritate. His synthesis is not in any way a new statement of the so-called seamless garment linking all “Life issues”. The Pope’s work found a common font for human development, ordering our Love’s starting with the gift engendering love of the Trinity.
Why a Culture of Life is a Culture of Protective Love - remembering the Christian narrative
Christian forms are basically forms of love. This brings us back to the nature of Trinitarian Love and our new Catholic strategy to build a culture of life in America.
The unspeakably treacherous offense against the Father–Son Trinitarian love came when an angelic creature rebelled against the gift he was given. This angelic spitting upon the sacred, this unspeakable treachery against the interior life of God must be rectified. And in the wisdom of God this dishonorable disobedience of a creature is going to be most fittingly answered and rebuked by creatures. Satan could have been vaporized, but first he was expelled from the heavenly relationship of the Trinity by the obedient angels.
When physical matter was first made manifest some 13.7 billion years ago it was in the form of a great breaking apart of fundamental laws and forces. The physical creation is good but in some way the satanic Angel was the prince of this expanding world of increasing disorder and cold. The Evil One has been countered sometime in the last hundred thousand to million years with a new creature who was brought into harmony with God and given a small stake in the physical world to till and guard.
Hierarchical masculine brotherhood—the communion ordered to contest
Adam and his sons were meant to participate in the final expulsion of the Evil One and the restoration of public uncontested honor to God’s Name. But Adam was lured over to the other side. God then prepared men in the form of an elect nation to battle their way “as one man” and fight to establish and conquer the Promised Land. He bound them by a male blood oath of circumcision, instructed them with commandments and promised a specific land where they might build Him a temple and He would dwell with them. They would win this land by holy war. This priestly people matured until there came from them a human temple—a perfect feminine form who bore the Word made flesh. The Evil One marked the sacred virgin birth with a great killing of the males of his cohort. His earthly father saved the boy child and His mother by re-entering the land of the Pharaohs to hide him from the wrath of Herod.
God had come to live among his people. The new Adam formed an inner core of men who would be his friends and sons of the Father. He invited them in ordination and both males and females in Baptism into Divine filiation. In Christ all the elect could become sons of God. He gave his apostles power over evil spirits. This body of men would drink his blood as a sign of the new covenant. They would keep His Name and presence alive in the world even if they had to die themselves in witness. They were allowed swords but did not conquer by the sword. When Christ was betrayed by one of the Twelve and crucified, the men scattered. He had obeyed his Father. He had slain death and mortally wounded the Evil One. The crucifixion and descent into Hell were hardly acts renouncing violence. The lethal force was applied but it was directed to the immaterial realities. Death itself was slain that day and the Devil received a mortal blow. After Christ rose from the dead and ascended into heaven the men were sealed by the Holy Spirit and formed the apostolic priesthood who would continue the Eucharistic tradition in memory of our Lord. Mary, who had first received the Spirit, remained hidden under their protection. Just as the interior unspoken life of the Trinity was insulted but always kept out of reach of the Satanic disruption, so Mary was kept from the ill will of the post-crucifixion Jewish priests and Roman soldiers. The apostles “beheld their mother” and did not turn the new Eve over to the Enemy as Adam had done.
Two thousand years later Catholic priests and bishops have not done as well in guarding the sacred feminine left under their protection. The liturgical Marian sanctuary is under attack. The masculine hierarchical brotherhood of acolyte, lector and deacon under the priestly father is meant to protect an interior reality. The hiddenness of the feminine, the tabernacle as feminine, the interiority as feminine - all of these icons need the public male protective group. These feminine realities do not speak for themselves but manifest themselves in relation to the masculine corporate hierarchical public presence. These deep sexually iconic realities which hint of God’s Trinitarian Life have been obscured with the swarming of the sanctuaries: the mixing of laity and priests and the role confusion of males and females.
In some ways the confusion can serve as a wakeup call which deepens our appreciation of the sacred liturgy and the nature of sacred space and sanctuary. The disintegration of liturgical form and the confusion of the male and female might be that felix peccatum (the happy fault) which better clarifies the sacred reality. Bishops and priests can reclaim sacred space, reintroduce the interiority of the tabernacle, reestablish clear cut roles of priest and laity and re-masculinize the sanctuary so the Marian Ark of the tabernacle becomes more fully reverenced.
The priestly formation of love is the most perfect manifestation of the Trinitarian love. Christ loved his apostles as the Father loved him. He loved them perfectly but always disciplined by his willingness “to do as my Father commanded me.” This new kind of love which supersedes kinship (“who is my mother and brother and sister?”) comes from the fraternity of shared duty. Adelphos - brotherly love is neither eros nor agape but closer in Greek terms to the philia of friendship. Brothers who turn their intellects and wills to serve the Father will find in this mutual acceptance of the same authority the basis of a deeper love than if they had simply turned to one another seeking each other’s good. We all fit together most perfectly when we are first turned to our first love: He who loved us into existence. This is the brotherly love which Christ forged among his apostles and disciples during his public life. Because this new priesthood of brotherly love is based on being elected to love and obey the same Father, it is the most fitting icon of Christ. It is the bond which he purified at the Last Supper by the washing of the feet to expel Judas from the priesthood. It is a brotherly bond which most perfectly mirrors the love of the Trinity because it is a public bond capable of drawing the generations into a communion ordered to contest. And we are in a contest, as was the first Adam, as is any man who recognizes the struggle of immaterial beings which fills the Catholic universe.
The brotherly bond, unlike the conjugal bond, is powerful enough to protect a sacred center and engage a deadly enemy to expel him from that portion of the physical universe which is still to be incorporated into heaven. A powerful public Father-centered love is a love which can make war against the Evil One. It is a love which can protect the widows and the orphans , the sacred presence of the Eucharist, the Holy Name of Jesus, the flock of parishioners, the adolescent boy, the integrity of the Gospel, the lonely woman, and the articles of the Creed. It is a powerful public Father- centered masculine love. It is a bond which incorporates women as electrons are drawn into orbit around a proton dense nucleus. There is a deep fundamental unity but spaces are created where different entities participate more fully.
The bond which the apostles had with one another in relationship to the Father was different than their tie to Mary who also did the will of the Father. It is a bond and love which PROTECTS. It is the bond of the priesthood. It is the bond of the 144,000 men who “know not woman” and who are “marked with the sign of the Father”. It is the bond which complements Michael and the angels and will do what the first Adam and his sons failed to do: expel the dragon who threatens the Queen mother at the birth of her divine Son. It is a bond with a cosmic mission. It is the archetype of the Church. It is a bond which gives life forever. It is the model of the great male orders. It is a model for the nations, cities, corporations, universities, and other ways men have made public bonds to protect, work, and learn. It is the vigilant posture necessary for the second Coming. It is the bond which best mirrors the most fundamental bond of the Father and the Son. It is Christian Brotherhood. It is why the priest addresses the people in the liturgy “Oratre Fratres” (Pray Brothers).
Marian Femininity vs. the “feminist implant”
Feminism has made its deepest penetration by assaulting theological patriarchy and a male clergy in religion while undermining masculine fraternity in the military, police forces, and civic associations. The rejection of motherly duty by elective abortion has been a direct consequence of the breakdown of a God-centered, sexually ordered protective culture. The deeper we understand the protective function of the male bond of love the better in juxtaposition we can ponder the person of Mary and the nature of the feminine. By encountering Mary as person and our feminine model we rediscover what the culture of death has destroyed: the natural protective role of mother and the protective veil of virginity which are the particular and fundamental characteristics of femininity. Mary hid and stayed in the background as the apostolic bond was forged. Later it was this bond which concealed her from the Church’s earliest enemies. She fed this bond, encouraged it and was protected by it. She did not seek to be in the male group anymore than a male would try to enter the marital bond of another man and his woman. She beheld the Johannine church as he beheld his mother.
Mary exercises a kind of maternal authority over the Apostles as the Queen of Heaven and Earth. She is also the archetype of the Ark—the tabernacle of the personal God who became man. She is the archetype of interiority—“for she pondered these things in her heart”. Mary is the feminine: in her hiddeness, in her devotion to Christ unto the cross, in her acceptance of her pregnancy and in her role as mother protector. To understand and relate to the person of Mary is to approach the mystery of the feminine.
As the most sacred of all creatures Mary was protected from Original Sin (the Immaculate Conception) and from the decay of death (the Assumption into Heaven). The feminine is both protected and a ferocious protector. The cultivation of feminine purity forms a protective barrier around the sacred. This female practice in dress and speech corresponds to the Virgin dimension of Marian femininity. The feminine as mother is the lioness in battle who would route the pantsuited feminist in any honest street fight. The interior woman and the mother protector woman are models being lived by thousands of women all about us. We will see them more clearly when we see Mary again by focusing our devotional lives especially in May and October to the true feminine genius: our Lady.
Any generation which gives up devotion to the real person of Mary for an abstraction will end up with something much worse than an abstraction. In fact if the reality of Christ is the essence of personhood and if the person of Mary is the highest material form of the feminine then the Antichrist may never appear as a person but as an abstract idea, an ideology, a mistaken “ism” - maybe even the feminist implant with a thousand personal slaves of its own.
How Joshua prepared the Israelites for the Promised land: a return to communal masculinity
After forty years wandering in the desert the Israelites crossed the Jordan. Joshua had all the men circumcised to rededicate themselves to fight for the nation as they approached Jericho. This is precisely what must happen to Catholic men, both priests and laymen. We must be re-circumcised for communal battle. The priests will be dedicated as the Levites were to the protection of the Sacred Presence. The laymen will bind the men of the nation and renew America under God. This renewal of a God-centered masculinity and Christian fraternity by Catholic men will allow us to present to the President and our civic brothers a compelling argument to separate the traditional quest for interracial community from the hijacking of that religious movement by the sexual revolutionaries. The fundamental categorical differences of gender, race and sexual disorientation are as confused by the libertarians of the Republicans as the sexual left of the Democrats. This blurring of categories has betrayed the religious and military roots of the authentic interracial civil rights movement.
A prolife movement built on the proper ordering of our loves will ground the prolife movement not in a call for rights but in a renewed culture of protective sex roles, adulthood and authority. That is what broke down and that is what must be fixed. That breakdown in the natural order under God is what turned our female ideal from Mary to the church feminist and our masculine model from Paul of Taursus to Rembert of Milwaukee. Let us try to understand the anti-patriarchal disaster of the last forty years.
The Clergy: The breakdown of priestly fraternity
Protective order is sacral, hierarchical, martial and sexual. This order, this posture of protective vigilance, has been denigrated in the liturgical life of our church and the public civic life of our country. It is no accident that the pacifist emasculated theory of the seamless garment rose amidst a set of bishops who had lost any ability or interest in defending the masculine character of apostolic priestly love [5]. They did not understand or seek paternal discipline or fraternal correction in the priesthood and they sought to weaken the protective sword of war and capital punishment in civil life.
The Catholic Church is a love relationship and “when you get love wrong it has serious consequences”. The priesthood is a communion of persons - it is an all male love relationship. Just as incest destroys brotherhood more deeply than fratricide, so the incestuous character of the homosexual clerical subculture in the American church deeply corrupted the clergy of this whole era. It is precisely brotherly love under the Father which the secret and not so secret world of “gay” priests in the last forty years have failed to live. Bad money drives out good is the economic truism. The good love of brotherhood was driven underground by the counterfeit sentiments touted in nauseating spiritual texts advocating the baring of the soul and sharing of faults to others as a path to male intimacy. But intimacy, particular friendship, is not the goal of fraternal love or male groups. Some new Joshua in the American clergy will see what Joshua saw of the corrupted Israelites in the desert years. He will need to initiate a serious foreskin cutting behind closed doors if a renewal is to ensue. Reform by retirement is not an option and priestly reform really is more important than another statement on health care reform, whether it be a defense of the subsidiary principle or a call to subsidize the poor.
The priests and bishops of the desert wandering years failed to protect the innocent and to this day seem incapable of the protective disciplining needed to purify the American priesthood. They have substituted the psychology of “falling in love” with male individuals for the fraternal group brotherhood fostered by shouldering priestly duty under the will of the Father. It does not matter if the homosexuals are “celibate”. It is the objects of their affections and loves which is disordered, corrupt and perverted. Their spousal pretensions destroy the dynamic of brotherly mission-oriented love. Like incest in the family the eroticization of brotherly love destroys not only the two but the group - and we need the power of a large group. That is why Christ shaped the form of masculine brotherly love in an apostolic college with a leader.
The insights of Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue especially apply to the destructive nature of the homosexual psychology in deforming priestly culture. All the personalities shaped in such a corrupted cauldron bear defects. The bad guys are narcissistic liars but the good guys are incapable of the deep masculine community and courageous character needed to expel the crooks. The real life application of McIntyre to seminary and diocesan life and the Catholic priesthood is most vividly understood and described in the incisive writings of Leon Podles [3].
The loyalties and loves of the lavender priests are very particular and very effective. They are directed mostly at fellow males. The great preponderance of their relationships are not at all sexual but organized to maintain the relationships of corruption which keep hundreds of men in an easy employ and out of jail, disgrace or real jobs. That this masquerade party is being done in the name of Jesus Christ should anger any man who has ever taken the pledge of the Holy Name Society. Their loves are not masculine nor priestly nor a reflection of “how the Father has loved me and I have loved you.” And getting love right is especially important for a Church based on a Trinity. This perversion of ordered masculine fraternity is not an argument against a male celibate priesthood as a priestly “club.” But it is definitely a call to break up the “club” which is fostering deceit, corruption, and inaction. That will not destroy the male priesthood but renew the deep bonds of fraternity which most perfectly mirror the love of the Father for the Son and the Son for his Apostles.
If the Church cannot get the fatherly love of the apostolic brotherhood in order than there is precious little chance Catholic laymen will be able to reorder the protective brotherhood of American men and the maternal duty of American women to securely guard the little ones. This obligation of Catholic bishops to clean their house - to wash the feet not of the laypeople but of the apostles because “one among you is unclean” is the action which will most renew the protective patriarchal culture of life. Dragged out retirements with sweet words and new jobs at secularized high schools and universities are no response to the crimes committed. Knowing glances that the church moves slowly and we will solve all our problems with retirements of the lax and the incoming of the new young orthodox priests is a cynical betrayal of pastoral authority. Being pastoral does not mean being out to pasture on a leisurely walk. A pastor has a staff, and it is not the walking stick of a tired over-fed status seeker. It is the weapon of the shepherd with which he might smite the bear or lion who threatens his sheep. This is not a flowery metaphor. This is biblical realism, true then and true now.
The Laity: When Catholic workingmen lost their party to the Episcopalian Democrats
Protective adults know that without authorized physical acts of force, we cannot protect the sacred gift of life from evil men. Men form nations and governments precisely to ensure in a legal form that force can be applied to men who will not submit to reason alone. The holding and prudential use of this sword is securely in the hands of those entrusted with the physical protection of nations and the enforcement of law and order among populations beset with corruption and criminality. The Church no longer holds the sword of Constantine but the civic sword remains. Who blunts that legitimate sword of authority and punishment leaves the sacred to be profaned and life to be desecrated. “He who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed and those who resist shall incur judgment…for he does not bear the sword in vain: he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the evildoer” (Romans 13).
It is the breakdown of protective order which has allowed the culture of death. It was not just the Catholic clergymen who have been corrupted. Was it not a Satanic perfect storm which transformed both the old urban masculine fighting liberals of the Democratic party and the masculine priests and feminine nuns of Catholic parish culture. As the priesthood became more corrupt and effeminate, the lay bureaucracy became more feminist, self-centered and surly. Social Justice as government lobbying for the poor and job security for church workers dovetailed with the new Democratic party of homosexuals and feminists expanding their job opportunities, pretending to be the heirs of the legitimate interracial civil rights movement. The Catholic working men, urban bosses and military preference were replaced by Unitarian university professors, social service employees, and affirmative action for middle class females. The sexual revolutionaries built their movements by lobbying for jobs in government and non profits, while building whole new university departments and disciplines. When they set out to attack the all powerful giant corporations, they found out what a humbug that wizard really was and perfected the new art of corporate blackmail with the ever compliant hostages in human resources.
Meanwhile, the Church which has never confused the categories of gender, skin color and disordered sexual libido was suddenly being directed by a clergy and staff which had lost their way precisely in terms of these categories. The era of masculine lay Catholics in national and local politics as well as the arts and sports gave way to a very different kind of personality. The Catholic warrior President John Kennedy, who rescued men from the Pacific Ocean, was confused with a cowardly brother who deserted a young woman at the bottom of a Massachusetts creek. The first Mayor Richard Daly was a daily communicant and kept order in the windy city in a turbulent time. His son pays homage not to the solidarity of workingmen and cops but salutes a kind of male coupling despicable to both the newest immigrants and oldest residents of his father’s beloved city. Hollywood Director John Huston and Pro Football icon Vince Lombardi were formed in the masculine patriotic fighting Catholic culture which shaped urban politics, Hollywood movies and professional sportsmanship.
The betrayal of Catholic laymen by the lavenderized clergy has produced a very different prototype of Catholic man. After all the success of Catholic laymen in Massachusetts political life, the Catholic House seat in Boston was snatched by the status seeking Jesuit Fr. Robert Drinan during the post Vatican II years of wandering. When Drinan finally voluntarily ended his act of usurpation, his natural cultural spawn was no vigorous Catholic layman - but Rep. Barney Frank. Cultures build certain kind of representative characters and the secularized demise of the Catholic priesthood and the sexually confused non protective culture of modern Democrats is nicely captured in the handoff from Fr. Bob to Brother Barney.
The deep interconnections of the Catholic Church’s homosexual clergy and feminist employees with their funding counterparts in the Democratic Party has never peaked the interest of journalistic sleuths. They prefer to uncover the more open link of Protestant evangelicals and Republicans.
For traditional fighting liberals of the Jackson-Kennedy stripe, this has left Catholic working men without a real intellectual base in a major party. Catholic free marketers and neoconservatives have a place in the Republican party. They should know though as Senator Brownback found out that neither Catholics nor Mormons will be the natural leaders of the Protestant/secular anti-Catholic coalition first assembled to oppose John Kennedy in 1964. There will be no serious contribution of Catholic laymen to an American prolife movement until we have strong voices in both parties. It is not really a paradox that while the Republican prolife Catholic will continue discussing the movement in terms of rights it will be a masculine Catholic resurgence among Democrats that will more eloquently speak the Catholic language of life as a sacred gift evoking a natural response of maternal and military obligations. The Catholic language of duties, communal solidarity and representational male authority will resonate deeply with black Democrats who passed Proposition Eight in California and feel the deep antipathy of black America (and black Africa) toward the white feminist and homosexual revolutionaries dominating the Episcopalian Democrats.
To rebuild the fighting liberal tradition of the Catholic post-WWII era it will be necessary to refute the neoconservative confusion about John Kennedy as the instigator of the naked public square. The first Catholic President very much understood the major conflict of his generation as a battle between a nation under God and another system meant to replace God with the designs of men. That Kennedy was assassinated by an articulate Communist gunman shows his assassin understood the centrality of JFK’s leadership in the fight against communism better than the Catholic intellectuals of his grandchildren’s generation. Anyone who reads the subsequent American bishops’ authoritative statements on war and the economy would understand quite well why Kennedy was prescient not atheist in saying that in matters of national policy the churchmen do not speak for him and he does not speak for them. Equating John Kennedy with Mario Cuomo, John Kerry and Ted Kennedy is of course just what all three of them would want. A new breed of masculine fighting democrats will also instruct the sexual left that the proper historical analogy for the youngest Kennedy brother to his slain elders is that of Absalom to King David: a blood relative but not a man of their mighty hearts. Catholic laymen have a great intellectual and fighting tradition mostly in the Democratic Party. That may surprisingly be where we will best make our deepest Catholic arguments for a return to God and manly protective roles in public life. It may be more difficult there to argue the complementary truth that a renewal of motherhood as the cultural ideal of the feminine is the best protection against abortion.
The Bishop’s Staff: Protecting the Eucharist by Purifying the Priesthood
The standard depiction of the shepherd in religious images is a softened male looking like he is ready to suckle some newly found lamb. This is not quite the image of a real Biblical shepherd, David, who tells Saul how he usually found his lost lambs. In arguing to King Saul why he (“but a youth”) should be allowed to represent Israel and fight Goliath, the Philistine “man of war,” David reminded the king that he had been a Shepherd.
“But David said to Saul, ‘Your servant used to keep the sheep for his father
and when there came a lion or a bear and took a lamb from the flock I went after him and smote him and delivered it out of his mouth; and if he arose against me I caught him by his beard and smote him and killed him. Your servant has killed both lions and bears and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be like one of them seeing he has defied the armies of the living God.”
The shepherd is not a nursemaid—he is ready to lay down his life for the flock. He is ready to slay the predator so at a later time he can feed the lambs the bread of life, not feed the wolves the blood of the lambs. While the bishop does not hold the sword of the, state he still retains the first protective power given him by Christ: the ability to cast out evil spirits. He still yields the protective staff of a shepherd if not the sword of execution. The bishop can safeguard his Eucharist and purify his priesthood.
A Bishop should tell no legislator how to legislate nor any voter how to vote. However if he believes that a pattern of legislation or even a single vote for a candidate is a grave public moral evil then he has a duty to state this and protect the Eucharist from defilement. The bishop may be wrong in defining a political judgment as a grave moral evil. He may be wrong but he is well within the authority of his office. If a man is denied communion unjustly he should consider this being struck by friendly fire which at least is aimed at restoring some public integrity in our Eucharistic life as Catholics. The Catholic Communion will always be a more restricted table than the bond of citizenship and the bishop serves the civic community best by sharply and authoritatively defining the Eucharistic bond. How can anyone expect that civil authorities will outlaw abortion with the threat of civic penalties when the deeper and more profound Eucharistic community of Catholics is so porously guarded? But let us keep in good order. It makes no sense that bishops threaten laymen about actions in civic life when the bishops take no action of sacramental protection from unfaithful and dissident priests and neighboring scandal-ridden bishops. The first protection of the Eucharist is the bond of the priesthood and the first area of Episcopal protection for the Eucharist must be in purifying the priesthood and the episcopacy. The cops are crooked and to reestablish the authority of the good cops, the bishops must devise an effective process of inquisition and punishment of the treacherous.
There is a fitting liturgical moment to culminate this priestly exercise. It is not always obvious the first steps to take but the fact is there is a standing order given on the day of the priests: Holy Thursday. If necessary, the morning of the Last Supper (the traditional time of the diocesan Chrism mass) should be for the bishop and his priests alone. No press, no laity, and no oversight committees until the apostolic order is renewed. The washing of the feet is an exorcism of Judas and it was not meant for the Master alone to carry out this duty. The Chrism Mass is to renew the public fraternal bonds of fidelity under the father-bishop. If the bishop is corrupt then the Lenten season is when neighboring bishops should do their duty of fraternal correction. If the bishop is faithful then Holy Thursday is the day for him to clearly separate the priests of God in his diocese from those who worship some golden calf. The horrific sins of the abuse scandal demand priestly penance and punishment. The flock needs to see their shepherds take out some wolves, especially those disguised as our pastors. Authoritative fraternal correction will include the banishment of MANY priests and bishops to some real place of punishment and penance. As Christ told his apostles after he cleansed the apostolic priesthood on that first Maundy Thursday, “No servant is greater than His master. What I have done you must do also.”
The Civic Sword: the competency of the layman
There is a particular unease that comes over any Catholic man and father when he hears Vatican international statements against the once universal practice of outlawing homosexuality or the new consensus against the use of lethal punishment for capital crimes. The policy of Pope John Paul II to limit the ability of civic authority to execute was born of an experience with foreign totalitarians. Likewise, his blindness to the homosexual threat in the priesthood was born of the practice of Communist overlords to use false accusations of sexual perversion to discredit strong priests who threatened Soviet hegemony. The American bishops who “prophesy” against the death penalty are in a very different position. In America, most of Europe and Canada, governments have been slow to prosecute priests for very real crimes indeed, some of them traditionally considered capital offenses.
Possibly the “prophetic Cardinal” and the “seamless garment” attack on civic authority should be seen as a special pleading by potential convicts for leniency in sentencing. Chicago gangsters were vocally opposed to federalizing police powers for crimes against banks or involving interstate flight. The bishops “moral concern” to eliminate the State’s ability to punish child rape with the death penalty is as convincing as mobsters Frank Nitti and Al Capone being considered moral advocates of states’ rights.
The very bishops in America who neglected their protective duties as Shepherds are the most vocal in denying the protective brotherhood of the State its legitimate sword. No father as Bishop… no father as Caesar. Who benefits but the wolves who feed on the innocent and can only be stopped by armed authority? What has stopped us from seeing this clearly is the same tendency which mutes black leaders in criticizing black criminals or police officers in turning in the bad cops or doctors from purging our own profession? Catholics love the Church and we confuse protecting corrupt clergymen with protecting the spotless Bride of Christ.
God has ordered, “Whoever strikes man so that he dies shall be put to death.” The Christian tradition has safeguarded the gift of life with a culture producing multiple protective layers of law and specific protective personalities: motherhood, fatherhood, the armed peace officer of the state and the rule of personal self defense. There is a long standing Christian tradition of granting the civic sword authority to punish capital crimes (those offenses for which you might lose your head). As a supplement to the protective roles of mothers and fathers in the family, the Church from Christ to St. Paul through the Councils has recognized the duty of civic authority to defend the communal life of the nation with police power internally and just wars externally. The American Declaration of Independence proclaimed not only God given inalienable rights but an authority to insure those rights (“to secure such rights, men form governments”). Rights do not come from government but governments are formed to protect rights. This is the Christian realism of our founding fathers and is consonant with an ancient and developed Catholic tradition justifying the necessary use of force by legitimate state authority. The prolife rule again applies. No protective authority, no sacred rights.
The Culture of Life: Collective Attention and the Sacramental Template of Sexual Order
Every Sunday Catholics gather in an act of sustained collective attention toward a singular event. We go back in time together to the central event in human history. We gather in protective vigilance awaiting another coming of the Savior. We gather in a service represented by a hierarchical priesthood focused on the death and return of a sacrificial warrior. In the midst of this masculine sacrificial action at the altar in the sanctuary is a deepening of the interior life. This is always somewhat hidden and inaccessible like the interior life of the Trinity, the tabernacle we genuflect towards, and the Marian presence we acknowledge with our bow to her statue.
As Catholics, we are used to acting and thinking as a group because we are part of a group story. We are used to the distinctive masculine apostolic and feminine Marian dimensions of life. Whatever we do in parish or civic life, to gather as men and women in distinctive roles and protective duties will bring a protective civic culture of life closer to fruition. These ideas cannot be just written about on the internet. They must be lived in real communal settings. The hierarchical formation of worship, thanksgiving and remembrance which shapes our liturgical life is meant as a template for our civic formation. If this means that on civic holy days men should gather again in public formations of armed agreement with our local officials and police or if it means our women should lead the way in the modest scarfing of American women to recover the sanctity of the feminine tabernacle, then let us act with a Catholic imagination.
Inorganic matter and the rot of death are asexual. The highest physical forms of life are unambiguously sexual. While the sexual complement of conjugal love is meant for the intimacy of marriage, the sexually complementary roles of male and female protective duties form the lattice of public and domestic life. The greatest enemies of this culture are atheism and feminism. Catholics especially should understand the deep analogical relations of atheism and feminism. The cataract and the implant must be countered not just in principle but with postures of public ceremony and unapologetic fully gendered personalities. Properly ordered sex roles are the orthopraxy of orthodoxy.
Let us put away the things of a child. Let us abandon “the cult of protest,” clamoring for rights and disrespecting authority. When we do petition, let us demonstrate the joy and hope of a hierarchical community of reverence and sexual vibrancy. This will sharply contrast with the depressing confusion he has learned from the Catholic leaders of his hometown and party.
The Beloved Community of America is a communal quest to obey the two great commandments: that we love God and love our neighbor [5]. The mission of America is to form a protective interracial brotherhood from sea to shining sea under God. The nation is not the church. The Church is protected by the nation and serves as a sacramental template for ordered love. The nation is built on a duty-bound brotherhood of watchmen guarding the city walls which protect the sanctuary of the church and the sanctum of the home. This communal brotherhood is lived out in every city and State. Let us build a culture of piety and protection. Let us order and deepen the natural loves emanating from our love of God: the masculine group, the male-female couple and the mother-child. Let us build a culture of life.
Dr David Pence is a Radiation Oncologist with a teaching license in both Earth and Life Sciences. He is a full time science teacher at a Catholic high school and a part time science tutor in a minor seminary.
1) John McCain’s Chief of Staff Mark Buse was well known in homosexual circles in Washington DC. He was “outed” by the gay press early in the McCain campaign. McCain’s campaign manager, Steve Schmidt , announced shortly after the election to the gay Log Cabin Republicans that he favored gay marriage and was advising Republican candidates accordingly. The timing of his talk was hardly an accident. The Log Cabin Republicans donated more money to McCain than any other candidate knowing that he and his closest advisors were friendly insiders despite campaign rhetoric.
2) Stephen E. Herbits, Seagram liquor executive, former secretary general of the World Jewish Congress and a former assistant to both Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld was hired in April 2001 as a key advisor to Rumsfield in filling Pentagon personnel. In a speech to advocates of gays in the military he asserted that opening as many positions as possible to women would undercut any future arguments against gay participation. He made the same sexual inversion argument in supporting the candidacy of Hillary Clinton for president saying that such a radical opening of the office to a female would do more for gay rights than all the activity of every gay activist. After his work with Rumsfield he became a liaison to the gay community for Hillary Clinton and secretary general of the WJC. He was influential in early strategy meetings outlining the attack of Iraq as the first step in a multi-generational war against terrorism. He is now estranged from Rumsfield because of his leaks to journalist Bob Woodward.
3) Sacrilege and The Church Impotent: The Feminization of ChristianityBy Leon Podles
4) In the Allan Gutmacher Institute (an ally of Planned Parenthood) survey of over 1000 women who had abortions, 80% were unmarried and 80% said the primary reason for terminating pregnancy was that bearing a child would interrupt plans for school or career.
5) Bonds of Affection by Professor Matt Holland, president of Utah Valley University is the clearest narrative of American history as a national attempt to fulfill the two great commandments.
So before you read this, I want to be pretty up front and say that I am mostly interested in reading your opinions on Pence's essay (e.g. it's strengths and weaknesses). I should also note that his views are informed by a deep monotheistic belief and he may use some categories unfamiliar to some. If this comes up and is confusing, I would love to know so that he can perhaps better articulate and explain these views.
So read on and post away! You guys are really smart and your thoughts are much appreciated!
Piety and Protection: A New Strategy for an American Culture of Life (Dr. David Pence)
It is important to get Love right. Trinitarian Love is the first reality—it is the driving force of Salvation History and it is the final end we seek. You get love wrong - especially if you are the Church - you have problems. It turns out if a nation gets love wrong, she too will have serious problems. The bonds of civic affection forged by performing shared duties shape national fraternity just as acts of love and gift ultimately shape the “ordering of the household” which is the meaning of “economy”. Pope Benedict grounded his social encyclical (Caritas in Veritate) in the reality of Trinitarian love. We do well to follow him in recasting the locus of debate and strategy of the national prolife movement.
First giving credit where credit is due, let us declare victory in winning the intellectual argument that the embryo, fetus and aborted baby are each a human being. At the same time we must acknowledge that winning that argument has not stopped abortion anymore than demonstrating that slaves were human beings ended the institution of slavery. There was always the “Slave Power” to contend with and with them it was never a matter of who had the better argument. The philosophical arguments and billboard teachings have been important and fruitful intellectual work. They give us good currency in public discourse.
The gravitational center of historical and national morality in the 1960’s was the interracial civil rights movement. It sprang from returning black veterans from WWII and the Korean War as well as religious leaders. The courageous sense of civic authority of these returning veterans was a well spring of civic equality. Their demand to be treated as men according to a traditional male honor code has been better told in the lore of small towns and cities rather than the narrative of the national movement. The language and songs of the renewed civil rights movement struck a biblical cadence deeply consonant with our nation’s religious founding.
When the struggle for an interracial “Beloved Community” and civic brotherhood under God our Father gave way to the black power movement, the language of common duties and dignity gave way to lists of grievances, excuses for violence, and demand for rights. God, national community and shared duties were derided as the language of Uncle Tom. And that great hero in American Christian literature - Uncle Tom - became a figure of ridicule and emasculated shame. The cries of Black Power, non-negotiable demands, and the welfare rights movement needed no God and no community. Black manhood was no longer about the assumption of duties but rather a posture of screaming obscenities at cringing guilt-ridden white college students and professors. Black humor became a celebration of filth and black manhood became a celebration of the gangster. When the interracial brotherhood movement lost the command center of religious obligation and the social capital bank of military service, a plethora of other rights movements blossomed. First the feminist movement, then the gay rights crowd, next the “ultimate civil rights movement” - the right to life of the little ones, and finally the trailer that everyone agreed upon - the rights of the disabled. From the imperious feminist to the helium inflated zygote to the student in the wheelchair everybody waved their signs: we want our rights and we want them now.
All these rights bearers clashed and clamored sometimes in alliance, often in competition. The zygote and the pregnant woman especially clashed. And even as the zygote grew older and his mother could feel his motion, his advocate was still a distant movement while his natural protector right up close was his enemy. The Bible asks, “Would a mother desert her child?” It turns out that in America the answer for a significant number of women is “Yes, indeed she will.” When everyone is a rights bearer some strange alliances and conflicts ensue. As long as one third of America’s pregnant women were willing to evict their own young there was little hope that the little ones and their allies could enlist federal and state legislators to override their natural protectors. Cultures that cannot produce the feminine character who will care for her own young will never produce police forces or legislatures to do the maternal job for them. If there are forty errant women in a large city, laws can make abortion so prohibitive that the natural maternal protector will be instructed by the state protector to do her duty. But if a third of the moms are willing to abort, then imagine one thousand Iwo Jimas with well entrenched Japanese soldiers - what cost in Marines to fight upon such unfavorable terrain?
We are fighting on the wrong ground. In rhetoric there is a notion of “stasis”. It is a tactical decision advancing an argument by choosing where one draws the most fruitful line of argument. Just because our philosophers can win the “definition of a person and the inalienable rights” arguments does not mean “life as the ultimate civil right” is the proper stasis where we best fight the culture of death. As long as we are assembled as rights bearers doing a bad replay of history’s legitimate interracial civil rights movement then we are assembled for indignant protest and not authoritative protection.
The rights bearer movements supported their main postulate (a demand for rights) with two corollaries: a) question and struggle against authority, and b) never blame the victim.
The war against authority and the representational male
The autonomous bearer of rights struck her most defiant pose against the evil authority figure. The juxtaposition of authority versus freedom and the injunction to speak truth to power became both a slogan and a personality type. Community cannot exist without authority, but the call for community became muted as the clamor for rights drowned out other voices. What could unite the different voices and unite all these disparate movements? After a few affairs during a brief summer of love, the college feminist had no real time for the angry black power advocate. She thought he was a chauvinist pig and he thought she was a spoiled daughter of privilege. So neither looked into the other’s eyes but both focused their rage on the white male patriarch. This occurred on hundreds of campuses, in city streets, at consciousness raising meetings and election rallies. The Man was the enemy—the husband was an abuser, the father a potential rapist. Other male protectors were derided. The policeman was called a pig and the soldier, “a baby killer”. Rights movements build their widest base as coalitions of complaints.
The emotional grist of the complainers was the passion Lincoln said most threatened the rule of law - hatred. Once hatred becomes the motif then the rights bearers looking for “Justice” are joined by criminals within, enemies abroad and the always useful Christian pacifists who join forces in a common goal - to discredit legitimate armed protective authority. A culture of life must deeply understand the necessity for authority and respect for authority if there will ever truly be a lived out culture of protection which guards the little ones.
The insidious undermining of representational male leadership by the rights bearers has had a theological twin in the war against the fatherhood of God, religious patriarchy and the male priesthood. The lavenderization of Catholic clergy has deformed the principal representative actors of the liturgy as icons of the protective sexual order. It is that sexual order of the Word proclaimed and sacrifice rendered (now deeply disfigured in our local face to face worship experiences) which represents and shapes the ultimate culture of life. The battle against communal authority and the representational male had a grammatical front in the forty year battle against the inclusive “he” as a representational pronoun referring to both males and females as antecedents. It is unclear why Christians did not appreciate the gravity of this linguistic attack on a male pronoun which could represent all - in whom there was neither Greek nor Jew, male nor female. Humanity is what we received from Adam and Eve. Mankind is what we can become in Christ. Catholics in our liturgy conform ourselves to the representative male who represents the community as well as Christ in offering our Eucharistic prayer to the Father. This fundamental form of communal organization is not a peripheral concern in living out the culture of life, first in our liturgy and consequentially in our civic life.
When victims are perpetrators-the incoherence of female victimology
The second corollary of the rights bearers is to ‘never blame the victim.” This has led to a moral incoherence which aids the Deceiver. It started with the reluctance of black leaders to criticize the daily reality of black crime and sexual immorality which followed in the wake of the de-Christianization of black males. This pathology was internationalized as US aid and foreign junkets by black Congressmen buttressed a host of thug governments posing as statesmen. The notion that black people could not be racist and that a white person no longer had the moral authority to judge the behavior of black people as immoral or criminal ushered in a great couple of decades for black criminals. The loss of nerve by white officials was paid for with the blood and tears of overwhelmingly black on black crime victims. The moral disaster of this racial calamity has played out in the streets of urban American as well as the savannahs of continental Africa.
Nothing compares though to the feminist victimology smokescreen. Feminism is a tyrannical imperium pitting female will against the feminine womb. The nurturing domicile becomes the killing field. And yet a legion of government funded feminists, awash in state and federal funds, depict domestic violence as a one way street inherent in the nature of masculinity, male authority and “power relationships”. There are lots of names and euphemisms for abortion. Certainly it is neither misleading nor too graphic to call it domestic violence. The domestic violence industry, like its homosexual cousin the AIDS education industry, keeps winning ground (no matter who is President) by adding government or university funded jobs to subsidize another full time paid personality in the war against traditional religious and protective culture.
The prolife movement in public rhetoric (sidewalk counseling is a laudable exception) has studiously avoided the dominant horror of abortion – a host of women willing to abort their own children. The spirit of the age prefers to wave placards against the President than criticize the no longer pregnant mother. What must be presented to this woman is not a philosophical question (e.g. is this child a person?) but rather a maternal one (e.g. is this not your child?). This is not the Holocaust where a group murders the Other in mass slaughter, but rather a kind of suicide in which the self murders flesh of my flesh knitted in the womb. There is a natural tendency for men to protect women and a proper legal tradition treating women as a protected class, but for religious authorities and the prolife movement in general to treat the principal immoral actor in the unnatural crime of abortion as a victim of circumstance is an act of stunning moral obtuseness. A person who cannot sin is not a moral agent. To treat women as incapable of serious sin is to treat women without seriousness. Let us be less philosophical about the rights of a new person and more personal about the failure to mother.
Medicine: The sacred trust and Loss of Authority
The two principal actors in every abortion are a mother and a doctor. One betrays her fundamental nature and the other his sacred profession. A culture of life will become much more grounded in reality when we return to the scene of the crime and battle the fundamental betrayals against motherhood and medicine which every abortion entails. But that will entail defending a Marian notion of femininity against both the radical feminist in the university and the feminist for life lectoring and distributing communion at the altar. It will also entail defending a more exalted vision of the medical profession, the authority of the physician and the sacred content of the physician-patient relationship.
The loss of physician authority and morality in the face of the imperial female as autonomous decision maker is stunning. Luckily our incomes have stayed high so we have at least retained our social status while losing our professional honor. Chief Justice Harry Blackmun had been General Counsel at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota before he wrote the Roe v. Wade decision. He stated: “Up to the point where State interests justify intervention the abortion decision in all its aspects is inherently and primarily a medical decision, and basic responsibility for it must rest with the physician. If an individual practitioner abuses the privileges of exercising proper medical judgment, the usual remedies judicial and intra professional are available.” Blackmun did not think his initial decision would lead to carte blanche abortion. He had experienced a confident and robust medical profession which guarded its prerogatives. Mayo doctors and the nurse-nuns of St Mary’s Hospital in Rochester Minnesota were a universe away from today’s “fee for service drive in” obstetrical model. There doctors gave orders but here doctors comply with commands barked by the autonomous pregnant patient. A Cancer doctor must treat his cancer patient who denies her cancer with the sobering balm of truth telling. In Modern Obstetrics however, deciding how many patients in the room will be protected by the doctor is left to the empress alone. What is called denial of objective reality in cancer patients is called a woman’s choice in Obstetrics. This betrayal of medical ethics and physician authority as old as Hippocrates is another prolife front largely unexplored in lieu of organizing election and fundraising campaigns for and against national leaders. This front would again strike much more at the core act of abortion, and the principal agents of evil rather than assembling to denigrate our principal national symbol of authority.
The Language of Life and Love: Put God back at the center and unite the social justice and prolife agencies
The “dignity of the human person” and the “right to life” of early human life still at a cellular stage of organization are the passwords of the current prolife movement. The woman cast as a victim of various male pathologies is the corollary backdrop of the story. Above all else the prolife movement strives to be seen as “pro-woman” while conscripting the language of civil rights for the human fetus as its ultimate moral guarantee. Some strategists say “If we talk about the baby, we win; if we talk about the woman, they win.” Legal/political strategies of defining and guaranteeing the basic rights of the embryo and fetus ultimately by a constitutional amendment become the overriding focus of the movement.
Human life before it is a rights bearer is a gift from God. It is He Who gives human life a sacred character. Before the human person has rights, he is a gift, not his own and not another’s. Every human being is an intentional specific act of Love by God. A movement which in a single-minded manner upholds the dignity of the human person without situating the person as a creature of a divine Father has shrunken the playing field and forfeited the language of the sacred so necessary to inspire a culture of duty, protection, sacrifice and life. This strategy is remarkably similar to the Catholic social justice movements who make “human dignity” not the sovereignty of God as the organizing motif of social justice. As Pope Benedict asserted in Caritas in Veritate, the Church promotes integral human development not only in her acts of charity but in proclaiming the gospel and celebrating the liturgy.
One cannot understand the claims of the human person without orienting him to the reality of God. The atheist cataract must be removed to see clearly the human situation. A prolife movement which inflates the human zygote and stem cell with rights and is mute about God in the name of reasoned secular debate has forfeited the battle by shrinking the battlefield. Secularists in both parties as well as certain “Catholic public intellectuals” however all insist on the atheist cataract and no reference to Divine commands or sacred goods is allowed in civic discourse. Human reasoning from Christian values is fine but obeying and showing reverence to the Living God who authored natural law is considered beyond the pale. A new prolife strategy will repudiate this self-defeating concession. The public recognition of God and man’s duty in justice to obey and worship God is not a sectarian argument. It is the structure of human reality. It has been forsaken by both the prolife movement and the social justice movement. Can this be one reason that these two movements seem to inhabit separate moral ghettos in so many Catholic dioceses?
The Feminist Implant
The feminist implant is the feminist thought pattern wired in every public brain (male or female) that apologizes for sexual distinctions of duty and considers the overwhelming preponderance of public male leadership in politics, policing and military matters not as the natural order of duty determined justice but as an act of bigotry and exclusion. The wiring of the implant especially hampers the auditory capacity to hear with an open heart and abide the voice of male authority. That widespread implant has not just impaired the receptive hearing necessary for the Gospel, tradition and community. Its presence has altered the pitch and tone of men in speaking imperative and declarative sentences. It forces men especially from the South, from Texas and from ethnic northern neighborhoods to adopt a second language from their native tongue to engage in national political discourse. That implant induces Republicans to try to beat the feminist Democrats at their own game. It was Republican implant recipient President Jerry Ford (1975), advised by Chief of Staff soon to be Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield, who allowed women in the service academies. It was Republican President Ronald Reagan who triumphantly appointed Sandra Day O’Connor as the first woman justice (and deciding vote on a host of abortion and affirmative action cases to the Supreme Court.) Reagan was articulate in his defense of unborn life but when the chance came to enter feminist history as a champion, the little ones lost their knight. He too had the implant and an ambitious socially aware wife who whispered in his ear to keep it tuned. It was George W. Bush who tried to appoint Harriet Meyers to the same court. Only the feminist implant can explain that kind of intellectual lapse.
The volunteer army (1974-75) and the abortion license (1973) both culminated in the Nixon-Ford era and these transformations of masculine and feminine protective obligations into individual choices were generally seen as furthering the cause of freedom. Middle and upper class men could plan their careers without the democratizing dangers of military duty while middle and upper class women were freed from the leveling tendency of biology so they might stay on track with their career and school plans.
John McCain with his homosexual chief of staff and gay marriage advocate campaign manager [1] embraced the twisted fantasy that has debilitated Republicans for forty years - “we will answer Democratic feminists not with a strong cohort of the best men working together for the nation but with our own female role models as leaders. We too will embrace sexual role confusion but we will do it ‘moderately’”. Seven years after Bill Clinton defeated Bob Dole for President (both of their wives were Senators,), the “liberal” in the North and the “conservative” in the South, both careerists perched for their run at the presidency. The feminist implant is not bound by party.
Just as Donald Rumsfield and his openly homosexual chief Pentagon personnel advisor [2] made no effort to shield women from the record number of combat deaths in Iraq, so Senator McCain and his campaign team exposed an accomplished but overreaching new mom/governor to the furor and frenzy of feminist hate. McCain’s campaign correctly assumed she would lead to a more “energized base”. That it might expose her family to the curdling hatred of the feminist Moloch or risk the command of the US military to a lady unsuited for command were apparently secondary concerns. That McCain campaign workers turned on Governor Palin and his campaign manager has advocated gay marriage just confirms that modern Republicans are not always chivalrous male alternatives to the sexual confusion of the left but are often secretive imitators of the same sickness.
The Atheist Cataract
Atheism has made its most dramatic advances by expelling prayer and piety toward God in public life and instituting a materialist hegemony in the teaching of science. The atheist cataract has fogged out the immaterial beings who populate the human drama. The angels, good and bad, are gone from our story. Satan the great deceiver has accomplished his greatest trick: a vanishing act from both the public stage and in human consciousness. God is no longer the living personal touchstone of public reality. He becomes a thousand different psychological constructs. Everybody gets to make his own higher power. This shrunken stage sometimes exaggerates man as the highest form of life and at other times shrinks him to a speck in the expanding universe. What is not allowed on the materialist stage are the sacred categories of gift and duty or the immaterial beings, God and the angels. So we live as if God does not exist. St Paul warned his contemporaries about trying to live as if there is no God. In his first letter to the Romans he wrote that substituting the wisdom of man for the sovereignty of God leads to unnatural love between men and men and women and women (How did he ever make that connection? Forty years ago I remember reading that in high school with some incredulity. I thought he was referring to some long lost weird Semitic cult but apparently he was pointing at us).
Our Catholic bishops could make no greater contribution to our civic conversation than by reintroducing the reality of immaterial beings, the living God and the Prince of Darkness, as principal players in the dramatis personae of the national narrative. Better a short letter on the reality of Satan than another long tract on the six principles of Catholic social thought. Our current Pope, African bishops and even Islamic scholars all attest that this public recognition of God and our duty to Him should be the starting point of mutual dialogue. Prolife strategists should recognize that this God-centered drama will lead us much more fruitfully into the language of sacred gift and protective duties. This is a very different approach than UN conferences on rights. The language of God, gift and duties binds Christians of the global south and religious patriots of America, Poland, and South America.
In a world still dominated by the Prince of Darkness, there can be no sacred without protective cover. Adam was given the Garden of Eden and ordered “to till and guard it.” The Levitical priesthood was the inner guard of the Ark of the Covenant as the circumcised Israeli males were the warrior outer guard of the nation. Both soldier bond and priestly bond were meant to fight. Every declaration of the sacred leads to some kind of masculine bond to separate and sustain the sacred in the midst of the profane. A declaration of the sacred leads to a need for protection and a need for protection leads to the social basis of sex roles.
The New Stasis: The Gift of the Sacred and Protective Sex Roles
Here then is drawn a new line in the sand, a better stasis to build the culture of life and protection. A culture of life is not a declaration of rights. A culture of life is a recognition that God’s love creates the human soul as a sacred gift and the response of adults to this gift is thanksgiving and an assumption of protective duties to safeguard the sacred. A culture of life is a culture of protection. Break down protection and life ebbs away. No protection, no retention of the sacred. All of us received our own lives as a loving gift from God and we were protected by our mothers, our fathers, our families and the civic communities we live in. As adults our response to this gift is to participate in the protective duties which once sheltered us as dependents. The language of gift is the precursor of the language of duties.
Once we realize this deep connection, we begin to understand better the papal synthesis in Benedict’s Caritas in Veritate. His synthesis is not in any way a new statement of the so-called seamless garment linking all “Life issues”. The Pope’s work found a common font for human development, ordering our Love’s starting with the gift engendering love of the Trinity.
Why a Culture of Life is a Culture of Protective Love - remembering the Christian narrative
Christian forms are basically forms of love. This brings us back to the nature of Trinitarian Love and our new Catholic strategy to build a culture of life in America.
The unspeakably treacherous offense against the Father–Son Trinitarian love came when an angelic creature rebelled against the gift he was given. This angelic spitting upon the sacred, this unspeakable treachery against the interior life of God must be rectified. And in the wisdom of God this dishonorable disobedience of a creature is going to be most fittingly answered and rebuked by creatures. Satan could have been vaporized, but first he was expelled from the heavenly relationship of the Trinity by the obedient angels.
When physical matter was first made manifest some 13.7 billion years ago it was in the form of a great breaking apart of fundamental laws and forces. The physical creation is good but in some way the satanic Angel was the prince of this expanding world of increasing disorder and cold. The Evil One has been countered sometime in the last hundred thousand to million years with a new creature who was brought into harmony with God and given a small stake in the physical world to till and guard.
Hierarchical masculine brotherhood—the communion ordered to contest
Adam and his sons were meant to participate in the final expulsion of the Evil One and the restoration of public uncontested honor to God’s Name. But Adam was lured over to the other side. God then prepared men in the form of an elect nation to battle their way “as one man” and fight to establish and conquer the Promised Land. He bound them by a male blood oath of circumcision, instructed them with commandments and promised a specific land where they might build Him a temple and He would dwell with them. They would win this land by holy war. This priestly people matured until there came from them a human temple—a perfect feminine form who bore the Word made flesh. The Evil One marked the sacred virgin birth with a great killing of the males of his cohort. His earthly father saved the boy child and His mother by re-entering the land of the Pharaohs to hide him from the wrath of Herod.
God had come to live among his people. The new Adam formed an inner core of men who would be his friends and sons of the Father. He invited them in ordination and both males and females in Baptism into Divine filiation. In Christ all the elect could become sons of God. He gave his apostles power over evil spirits. This body of men would drink his blood as a sign of the new covenant. They would keep His Name and presence alive in the world even if they had to die themselves in witness. They were allowed swords but did not conquer by the sword. When Christ was betrayed by one of the Twelve and crucified, the men scattered. He had obeyed his Father. He had slain death and mortally wounded the Evil One. The crucifixion and descent into Hell were hardly acts renouncing violence. The lethal force was applied but it was directed to the immaterial realities. Death itself was slain that day and the Devil received a mortal blow. After Christ rose from the dead and ascended into heaven the men were sealed by the Holy Spirit and formed the apostolic priesthood who would continue the Eucharistic tradition in memory of our Lord. Mary, who had first received the Spirit, remained hidden under their protection. Just as the interior unspoken life of the Trinity was insulted but always kept out of reach of the Satanic disruption, so Mary was kept from the ill will of the post-crucifixion Jewish priests and Roman soldiers. The apostles “beheld their mother” and did not turn the new Eve over to the Enemy as Adam had done.
Two thousand years later Catholic priests and bishops have not done as well in guarding the sacred feminine left under their protection. The liturgical Marian sanctuary is under attack. The masculine hierarchical brotherhood of acolyte, lector and deacon under the priestly father is meant to protect an interior reality. The hiddenness of the feminine, the tabernacle as feminine, the interiority as feminine - all of these icons need the public male protective group. These feminine realities do not speak for themselves but manifest themselves in relation to the masculine corporate hierarchical public presence. These deep sexually iconic realities which hint of God’s Trinitarian Life have been obscured with the swarming of the sanctuaries: the mixing of laity and priests and the role confusion of males and females.
In some ways the confusion can serve as a wakeup call which deepens our appreciation of the sacred liturgy and the nature of sacred space and sanctuary. The disintegration of liturgical form and the confusion of the male and female might be that felix peccatum (the happy fault) which better clarifies the sacred reality. Bishops and priests can reclaim sacred space, reintroduce the interiority of the tabernacle, reestablish clear cut roles of priest and laity and re-masculinize the sanctuary so the Marian Ark of the tabernacle becomes more fully reverenced.
The priestly formation of love is the most perfect manifestation of the Trinitarian love. Christ loved his apostles as the Father loved him. He loved them perfectly but always disciplined by his willingness “to do as my Father commanded me.” This new kind of love which supersedes kinship (“who is my mother and brother and sister?”) comes from the fraternity of shared duty. Adelphos - brotherly love is neither eros nor agape but closer in Greek terms to the philia of friendship. Brothers who turn their intellects and wills to serve the Father will find in this mutual acceptance of the same authority the basis of a deeper love than if they had simply turned to one another seeking each other’s good. We all fit together most perfectly when we are first turned to our first love: He who loved us into existence. This is the brotherly love which Christ forged among his apostles and disciples during his public life. Because this new priesthood of brotherly love is based on being elected to love and obey the same Father, it is the most fitting icon of Christ. It is the bond which he purified at the Last Supper by the washing of the feet to expel Judas from the priesthood. It is a brotherly bond which most perfectly mirrors the love of the Trinity because it is a public bond capable of drawing the generations into a communion ordered to contest. And we are in a contest, as was the first Adam, as is any man who recognizes the struggle of immaterial beings which fills the Catholic universe.
The brotherly bond, unlike the conjugal bond, is powerful enough to protect a sacred center and engage a deadly enemy to expel him from that portion of the physical universe which is still to be incorporated into heaven. A powerful public Father-centered love is a love which can make war against the Evil One. It is a love which can protect the widows and the orphans , the sacred presence of the Eucharist, the Holy Name of Jesus, the flock of parishioners, the adolescent boy, the integrity of the Gospel, the lonely woman, and the articles of the Creed. It is a powerful public Father- centered masculine love. It is a bond which incorporates women as electrons are drawn into orbit around a proton dense nucleus. There is a deep fundamental unity but spaces are created where different entities participate more fully.
The bond which the apostles had with one another in relationship to the Father was different than their tie to Mary who also did the will of the Father. It is a bond and love which PROTECTS. It is the bond of the priesthood. It is the bond of the 144,000 men who “know not woman” and who are “marked with the sign of the Father”. It is the bond which complements Michael and the angels and will do what the first Adam and his sons failed to do: expel the dragon who threatens the Queen mother at the birth of her divine Son. It is a bond with a cosmic mission. It is the archetype of the Church. It is a bond which gives life forever. It is the model of the great male orders. It is a model for the nations, cities, corporations, universities, and other ways men have made public bonds to protect, work, and learn. It is the vigilant posture necessary for the second Coming. It is the bond which best mirrors the most fundamental bond of the Father and the Son. It is Christian Brotherhood. It is why the priest addresses the people in the liturgy “Oratre Fratres” (Pray Brothers).
Marian Femininity vs. the “feminist implant”
Feminism has made its deepest penetration by assaulting theological patriarchy and a male clergy in religion while undermining masculine fraternity in the military, police forces, and civic associations. The rejection of motherly duty by elective abortion has been a direct consequence of the breakdown of a God-centered, sexually ordered protective culture. The deeper we understand the protective function of the male bond of love the better in juxtaposition we can ponder the person of Mary and the nature of the feminine. By encountering Mary as person and our feminine model we rediscover what the culture of death has destroyed: the natural protective role of mother and the protective veil of virginity which are the particular and fundamental characteristics of femininity. Mary hid and stayed in the background as the apostolic bond was forged. Later it was this bond which concealed her from the Church’s earliest enemies. She fed this bond, encouraged it and was protected by it. She did not seek to be in the male group anymore than a male would try to enter the marital bond of another man and his woman. She beheld the Johannine church as he beheld his mother.
Mary exercises a kind of maternal authority over the Apostles as the Queen of Heaven and Earth. She is also the archetype of the Ark—the tabernacle of the personal God who became man. She is the archetype of interiority—“for she pondered these things in her heart”. Mary is the feminine: in her hiddeness, in her devotion to Christ unto the cross, in her acceptance of her pregnancy and in her role as mother protector. To understand and relate to the person of Mary is to approach the mystery of the feminine.
As the most sacred of all creatures Mary was protected from Original Sin (the Immaculate Conception) and from the decay of death (the Assumption into Heaven). The feminine is both protected and a ferocious protector. The cultivation of feminine purity forms a protective barrier around the sacred. This female practice in dress and speech corresponds to the Virgin dimension of Marian femininity. The feminine as mother is the lioness in battle who would route the pantsuited feminist in any honest street fight. The interior woman and the mother protector woman are models being lived by thousands of women all about us. We will see them more clearly when we see Mary again by focusing our devotional lives especially in May and October to the true feminine genius: our Lady.
Any generation which gives up devotion to the real person of Mary for an abstraction will end up with something much worse than an abstraction. In fact if the reality of Christ is the essence of personhood and if the person of Mary is the highest material form of the feminine then the Antichrist may never appear as a person but as an abstract idea, an ideology, a mistaken “ism” - maybe even the feminist implant with a thousand personal slaves of its own.
How Joshua prepared the Israelites for the Promised land: a return to communal masculinity
After forty years wandering in the desert the Israelites crossed the Jordan. Joshua had all the men circumcised to rededicate themselves to fight for the nation as they approached Jericho. This is precisely what must happen to Catholic men, both priests and laymen. We must be re-circumcised for communal battle. The priests will be dedicated as the Levites were to the protection of the Sacred Presence. The laymen will bind the men of the nation and renew America under God. This renewal of a God-centered masculinity and Christian fraternity by Catholic men will allow us to present to the President and our civic brothers a compelling argument to separate the traditional quest for interracial community from the hijacking of that religious movement by the sexual revolutionaries. The fundamental categorical differences of gender, race and sexual disorientation are as confused by the libertarians of the Republicans as the sexual left of the Democrats. This blurring of categories has betrayed the religious and military roots of the authentic interracial civil rights movement.
A prolife movement built on the proper ordering of our loves will ground the prolife movement not in a call for rights but in a renewed culture of protective sex roles, adulthood and authority. That is what broke down and that is what must be fixed. That breakdown in the natural order under God is what turned our female ideal from Mary to the church feminist and our masculine model from Paul of Taursus to Rembert of Milwaukee. Let us try to understand the anti-patriarchal disaster of the last forty years.
The Clergy: The breakdown of priestly fraternity
Protective order is sacral, hierarchical, martial and sexual. This order, this posture of protective vigilance, has been denigrated in the liturgical life of our church and the public civic life of our country. It is no accident that the pacifist emasculated theory of the seamless garment rose amidst a set of bishops who had lost any ability or interest in defending the masculine character of apostolic priestly love [5]. They did not understand or seek paternal discipline or fraternal correction in the priesthood and they sought to weaken the protective sword of war and capital punishment in civil life.
The Catholic Church is a love relationship and “when you get love wrong it has serious consequences”. The priesthood is a communion of persons - it is an all male love relationship. Just as incest destroys brotherhood more deeply than fratricide, so the incestuous character of the homosexual clerical subculture in the American church deeply corrupted the clergy of this whole era. It is precisely brotherly love under the Father which the secret and not so secret world of “gay” priests in the last forty years have failed to live. Bad money drives out good is the economic truism. The good love of brotherhood was driven underground by the counterfeit sentiments touted in nauseating spiritual texts advocating the baring of the soul and sharing of faults to others as a path to male intimacy. But intimacy, particular friendship, is not the goal of fraternal love or male groups. Some new Joshua in the American clergy will see what Joshua saw of the corrupted Israelites in the desert years. He will need to initiate a serious foreskin cutting behind closed doors if a renewal is to ensue. Reform by retirement is not an option and priestly reform really is more important than another statement on health care reform, whether it be a defense of the subsidiary principle or a call to subsidize the poor.
The priests and bishops of the desert wandering years failed to protect the innocent and to this day seem incapable of the protective disciplining needed to purify the American priesthood. They have substituted the psychology of “falling in love” with male individuals for the fraternal group brotherhood fostered by shouldering priestly duty under the will of the Father. It does not matter if the homosexuals are “celibate”. It is the objects of their affections and loves which is disordered, corrupt and perverted. Their spousal pretensions destroy the dynamic of brotherly mission-oriented love. Like incest in the family the eroticization of brotherly love destroys not only the two but the group - and we need the power of a large group. That is why Christ shaped the form of masculine brotherly love in an apostolic college with a leader.
The insights of Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue especially apply to the destructive nature of the homosexual psychology in deforming priestly culture. All the personalities shaped in such a corrupted cauldron bear defects. The bad guys are narcissistic liars but the good guys are incapable of the deep masculine community and courageous character needed to expel the crooks. The real life application of McIntyre to seminary and diocesan life and the Catholic priesthood is most vividly understood and described in the incisive writings of Leon Podles [3].
The loyalties and loves of the lavender priests are very particular and very effective. They are directed mostly at fellow males. The great preponderance of their relationships are not at all sexual but organized to maintain the relationships of corruption which keep hundreds of men in an easy employ and out of jail, disgrace or real jobs. That this masquerade party is being done in the name of Jesus Christ should anger any man who has ever taken the pledge of the Holy Name Society. Their loves are not masculine nor priestly nor a reflection of “how the Father has loved me and I have loved you.” And getting love right is especially important for a Church based on a Trinity. This perversion of ordered masculine fraternity is not an argument against a male celibate priesthood as a priestly “club.” But it is definitely a call to break up the “club” which is fostering deceit, corruption, and inaction. That will not destroy the male priesthood but renew the deep bonds of fraternity which most perfectly mirror the love of the Father for the Son and the Son for his Apostles.
If the Church cannot get the fatherly love of the apostolic brotherhood in order than there is precious little chance Catholic laymen will be able to reorder the protective brotherhood of American men and the maternal duty of American women to securely guard the little ones. This obligation of Catholic bishops to clean their house - to wash the feet not of the laypeople but of the apostles because “one among you is unclean” is the action which will most renew the protective patriarchal culture of life. Dragged out retirements with sweet words and new jobs at secularized high schools and universities are no response to the crimes committed. Knowing glances that the church moves slowly and we will solve all our problems with retirements of the lax and the incoming of the new young orthodox priests is a cynical betrayal of pastoral authority. Being pastoral does not mean being out to pasture on a leisurely walk. A pastor has a staff, and it is not the walking stick of a tired over-fed status seeker. It is the weapon of the shepherd with which he might smite the bear or lion who threatens his sheep. This is not a flowery metaphor. This is biblical realism, true then and true now.
The Laity: When Catholic workingmen lost their party to the Episcopalian Democrats
Protective adults know that without authorized physical acts of force, we cannot protect the sacred gift of life from evil men. Men form nations and governments precisely to ensure in a legal form that force can be applied to men who will not submit to reason alone. The holding and prudential use of this sword is securely in the hands of those entrusted with the physical protection of nations and the enforcement of law and order among populations beset with corruption and criminality. The Church no longer holds the sword of Constantine but the civic sword remains. Who blunts that legitimate sword of authority and punishment leaves the sacred to be profaned and life to be desecrated. “He who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed and those who resist shall incur judgment…for he does not bear the sword in vain: he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the evildoer” (Romans 13).
It is the breakdown of protective order which has allowed the culture of death. It was not just the Catholic clergymen who have been corrupted. Was it not a Satanic perfect storm which transformed both the old urban masculine fighting liberals of the Democratic party and the masculine priests and feminine nuns of Catholic parish culture. As the priesthood became more corrupt and effeminate, the lay bureaucracy became more feminist, self-centered and surly. Social Justice as government lobbying for the poor and job security for church workers dovetailed with the new Democratic party of homosexuals and feminists expanding their job opportunities, pretending to be the heirs of the legitimate interracial civil rights movement. The Catholic working men, urban bosses and military preference were replaced by Unitarian university professors, social service employees, and affirmative action for middle class females. The sexual revolutionaries built their movements by lobbying for jobs in government and non profits, while building whole new university departments and disciplines. When they set out to attack the all powerful giant corporations, they found out what a humbug that wizard really was and perfected the new art of corporate blackmail with the ever compliant hostages in human resources.
Meanwhile, the Church which has never confused the categories of gender, skin color and disordered sexual libido was suddenly being directed by a clergy and staff which had lost their way precisely in terms of these categories. The era of masculine lay Catholics in national and local politics as well as the arts and sports gave way to a very different kind of personality. The Catholic warrior President John Kennedy, who rescued men from the Pacific Ocean, was confused with a cowardly brother who deserted a young woman at the bottom of a Massachusetts creek. The first Mayor Richard Daly was a daily communicant and kept order in the windy city in a turbulent time. His son pays homage not to the solidarity of workingmen and cops but salutes a kind of male coupling despicable to both the newest immigrants and oldest residents of his father’s beloved city. Hollywood Director John Huston and Pro Football icon Vince Lombardi were formed in the masculine patriotic fighting Catholic culture which shaped urban politics, Hollywood movies and professional sportsmanship.
The betrayal of Catholic laymen by the lavenderized clergy has produced a very different prototype of Catholic man. After all the success of Catholic laymen in Massachusetts political life, the Catholic House seat in Boston was snatched by the status seeking Jesuit Fr. Robert Drinan during the post Vatican II years of wandering. When Drinan finally voluntarily ended his act of usurpation, his natural cultural spawn was no vigorous Catholic layman - but Rep. Barney Frank. Cultures build certain kind of representative characters and the secularized demise of the Catholic priesthood and the sexually confused non protective culture of modern Democrats is nicely captured in the handoff from Fr. Bob to Brother Barney.
The deep interconnections of the Catholic Church’s homosexual clergy and feminist employees with their funding counterparts in the Democratic Party has never peaked the interest of journalistic sleuths. They prefer to uncover the more open link of Protestant evangelicals and Republicans.
For traditional fighting liberals of the Jackson-Kennedy stripe, this has left Catholic working men without a real intellectual base in a major party. Catholic free marketers and neoconservatives have a place in the Republican party. They should know though as Senator Brownback found out that neither Catholics nor Mormons will be the natural leaders of the Protestant/secular anti-Catholic coalition first assembled to oppose John Kennedy in 1964. There will be no serious contribution of Catholic laymen to an American prolife movement until we have strong voices in both parties. It is not really a paradox that while the Republican prolife Catholic will continue discussing the movement in terms of rights it will be a masculine Catholic resurgence among Democrats that will more eloquently speak the Catholic language of life as a sacred gift evoking a natural response of maternal and military obligations. The Catholic language of duties, communal solidarity and representational male authority will resonate deeply with black Democrats who passed Proposition Eight in California and feel the deep antipathy of black America (and black Africa) toward the white feminist and homosexual revolutionaries dominating the Episcopalian Democrats.
To rebuild the fighting liberal tradition of the Catholic post-WWII era it will be necessary to refute the neoconservative confusion about John Kennedy as the instigator of the naked public square. The first Catholic President very much understood the major conflict of his generation as a battle between a nation under God and another system meant to replace God with the designs of men. That Kennedy was assassinated by an articulate Communist gunman shows his assassin understood the centrality of JFK’s leadership in the fight against communism better than the Catholic intellectuals of his grandchildren’s generation. Anyone who reads the subsequent American bishops’ authoritative statements on war and the economy would understand quite well why Kennedy was prescient not atheist in saying that in matters of national policy the churchmen do not speak for him and he does not speak for them. Equating John Kennedy with Mario Cuomo, John Kerry and Ted Kennedy is of course just what all three of them would want. A new breed of masculine fighting democrats will also instruct the sexual left that the proper historical analogy for the youngest Kennedy brother to his slain elders is that of Absalom to King David: a blood relative but not a man of their mighty hearts. Catholic laymen have a great intellectual and fighting tradition mostly in the Democratic Party. That may surprisingly be where we will best make our deepest Catholic arguments for a return to God and manly protective roles in public life. It may be more difficult there to argue the complementary truth that a renewal of motherhood as the cultural ideal of the feminine is the best protection against abortion.
The Bishop’s Staff: Protecting the Eucharist by Purifying the Priesthood
The standard depiction of the shepherd in religious images is a softened male looking like he is ready to suckle some newly found lamb. This is not quite the image of a real Biblical shepherd, David, who tells Saul how he usually found his lost lambs. In arguing to King Saul why he (“but a youth”) should be allowed to represent Israel and fight Goliath, the Philistine “man of war,” David reminded the king that he had been a Shepherd.
“But David said to Saul, ‘Your servant used to keep the sheep for his father
and when there came a lion or a bear and took a lamb from the flock I went after him and smote him and delivered it out of his mouth; and if he arose against me I caught him by his beard and smote him and killed him. Your servant has killed both lions and bears and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be like one of them seeing he has defied the armies of the living God.”
The shepherd is not a nursemaid—he is ready to lay down his life for the flock. He is ready to slay the predator so at a later time he can feed the lambs the bread of life, not feed the wolves the blood of the lambs. While the bishop does not hold the sword of the, state he still retains the first protective power given him by Christ: the ability to cast out evil spirits. He still yields the protective staff of a shepherd if not the sword of execution. The bishop can safeguard his Eucharist and purify his priesthood.
A Bishop should tell no legislator how to legislate nor any voter how to vote. However if he believes that a pattern of legislation or even a single vote for a candidate is a grave public moral evil then he has a duty to state this and protect the Eucharist from defilement. The bishop may be wrong in defining a political judgment as a grave moral evil. He may be wrong but he is well within the authority of his office. If a man is denied communion unjustly he should consider this being struck by friendly fire which at least is aimed at restoring some public integrity in our Eucharistic life as Catholics. The Catholic Communion will always be a more restricted table than the bond of citizenship and the bishop serves the civic community best by sharply and authoritatively defining the Eucharistic bond. How can anyone expect that civil authorities will outlaw abortion with the threat of civic penalties when the deeper and more profound Eucharistic community of Catholics is so porously guarded? But let us keep in good order. It makes no sense that bishops threaten laymen about actions in civic life when the bishops take no action of sacramental protection from unfaithful and dissident priests and neighboring scandal-ridden bishops. The first protection of the Eucharist is the bond of the priesthood and the first area of Episcopal protection for the Eucharist must be in purifying the priesthood and the episcopacy. The cops are crooked and to reestablish the authority of the good cops, the bishops must devise an effective process of inquisition and punishment of the treacherous.
There is a fitting liturgical moment to culminate this priestly exercise. It is not always obvious the first steps to take but the fact is there is a standing order given on the day of the priests: Holy Thursday. If necessary, the morning of the Last Supper (the traditional time of the diocesan Chrism mass) should be for the bishop and his priests alone. No press, no laity, and no oversight committees until the apostolic order is renewed. The washing of the feet is an exorcism of Judas and it was not meant for the Master alone to carry out this duty. The Chrism Mass is to renew the public fraternal bonds of fidelity under the father-bishop. If the bishop is corrupt then the Lenten season is when neighboring bishops should do their duty of fraternal correction. If the bishop is faithful then Holy Thursday is the day for him to clearly separate the priests of God in his diocese from those who worship some golden calf. The horrific sins of the abuse scandal demand priestly penance and punishment. The flock needs to see their shepherds take out some wolves, especially those disguised as our pastors. Authoritative fraternal correction will include the banishment of MANY priests and bishops to some real place of punishment and penance. As Christ told his apostles after he cleansed the apostolic priesthood on that first Maundy Thursday, “No servant is greater than His master. What I have done you must do also.”
The Civic Sword: the competency of the layman
There is a particular unease that comes over any Catholic man and father when he hears Vatican international statements against the once universal practice of outlawing homosexuality or the new consensus against the use of lethal punishment for capital crimes. The policy of Pope John Paul II to limit the ability of civic authority to execute was born of an experience with foreign totalitarians. Likewise, his blindness to the homosexual threat in the priesthood was born of the practice of Communist overlords to use false accusations of sexual perversion to discredit strong priests who threatened Soviet hegemony. The American bishops who “prophesy” against the death penalty are in a very different position. In America, most of Europe and Canada, governments have been slow to prosecute priests for very real crimes indeed, some of them traditionally considered capital offenses.
Possibly the “prophetic Cardinal” and the “seamless garment” attack on civic authority should be seen as a special pleading by potential convicts for leniency in sentencing. Chicago gangsters were vocally opposed to federalizing police powers for crimes against banks or involving interstate flight. The bishops “moral concern” to eliminate the State’s ability to punish child rape with the death penalty is as convincing as mobsters Frank Nitti and Al Capone being considered moral advocates of states’ rights.
The very bishops in America who neglected their protective duties as Shepherds are the most vocal in denying the protective brotherhood of the State its legitimate sword. No father as Bishop… no father as Caesar. Who benefits but the wolves who feed on the innocent and can only be stopped by armed authority? What has stopped us from seeing this clearly is the same tendency which mutes black leaders in criticizing black criminals or police officers in turning in the bad cops or doctors from purging our own profession? Catholics love the Church and we confuse protecting corrupt clergymen with protecting the spotless Bride of Christ.
God has ordered, “Whoever strikes man so that he dies shall be put to death.” The Christian tradition has safeguarded the gift of life with a culture producing multiple protective layers of law and specific protective personalities: motherhood, fatherhood, the armed peace officer of the state and the rule of personal self defense. There is a long standing Christian tradition of granting the civic sword authority to punish capital crimes (those offenses for which you might lose your head). As a supplement to the protective roles of mothers and fathers in the family, the Church from Christ to St. Paul through the Councils has recognized the duty of civic authority to defend the communal life of the nation with police power internally and just wars externally. The American Declaration of Independence proclaimed not only God given inalienable rights but an authority to insure those rights (“to secure such rights, men form governments”). Rights do not come from government but governments are formed to protect rights. This is the Christian realism of our founding fathers and is consonant with an ancient and developed Catholic tradition justifying the necessary use of force by legitimate state authority. The prolife rule again applies. No protective authority, no sacred rights.
The Culture of Life: Collective Attention and the Sacramental Template of Sexual Order
Every Sunday Catholics gather in an act of sustained collective attention toward a singular event. We go back in time together to the central event in human history. We gather in protective vigilance awaiting another coming of the Savior. We gather in a service represented by a hierarchical priesthood focused on the death and return of a sacrificial warrior. In the midst of this masculine sacrificial action at the altar in the sanctuary is a deepening of the interior life. This is always somewhat hidden and inaccessible like the interior life of the Trinity, the tabernacle we genuflect towards, and the Marian presence we acknowledge with our bow to her statue.
As Catholics, we are used to acting and thinking as a group because we are part of a group story. We are used to the distinctive masculine apostolic and feminine Marian dimensions of life. Whatever we do in parish or civic life, to gather as men and women in distinctive roles and protective duties will bring a protective civic culture of life closer to fruition. These ideas cannot be just written about on the internet. They must be lived in real communal settings. The hierarchical formation of worship, thanksgiving and remembrance which shapes our liturgical life is meant as a template for our civic formation. If this means that on civic holy days men should gather again in public formations of armed agreement with our local officials and police or if it means our women should lead the way in the modest scarfing of American women to recover the sanctity of the feminine tabernacle, then let us act with a Catholic imagination.
Inorganic matter and the rot of death are asexual. The highest physical forms of life are unambiguously sexual. While the sexual complement of conjugal love is meant for the intimacy of marriage, the sexually complementary roles of male and female protective duties form the lattice of public and domestic life. The greatest enemies of this culture are atheism and feminism. Catholics especially should understand the deep analogical relations of atheism and feminism. The cataract and the implant must be countered not just in principle but with postures of public ceremony and unapologetic fully gendered personalities. Properly ordered sex roles are the orthopraxy of orthodoxy.
Let us put away the things of a child. Let us abandon “the cult of protest,” clamoring for rights and disrespecting authority. When we do petition, let us demonstrate the joy and hope of a hierarchical community of reverence and sexual vibrancy. This will sharply contrast with the depressing confusion he has learned from the Catholic leaders of his hometown and party.
The Beloved Community of America is a communal quest to obey the two great commandments: that we love God and love our neighbor [5]. The mission of America is to form a protective interracial brotherhood from sea to shining sea under God. The nation is not the church. The Church is protected by the nation and serves as a sacramental template for ordered love. The nation is built on a duty-bound brotherhood of watchmen guarding the city walls which protect the sanctuary of the church and the sanctum of the home. This communal brotherhood is lived out in every city and State. Let us build a culture of piety and protection. Let us order and deepen the natural loves emanating from our love of God: the masculine group, the male-female couple and the mother-child. Let us build a culture of life.
Dr David Pence is a Radiation Oncologist with a teaching license in both Earth and Life Sciences. He is a full time science teacher at a Catholic high school and a part time science tutor in a minor seminary.
1) John McCain’s Chief of Staff Mark Buse was well known in homosexual circles in Washington DC. He was “outed” by the gay press early in the McCain campaign. McCain’s campaign manager, Steve Schmidt , announced shortly after the election to the gay Log Cabin Republicans that he favored gay marriage and was advising Republican candidates accordingly. The timing of his talk was hardly an accident. The Log Cabin Republicans donated more money to McCain than any other candidate knowing that he and his closest advisors were friendly insiders despite campaign rhetoric.
2) Stephen E. Herbits, Seagram liquor executive, former secretary general of the World Jewish Congress and a former assistant to both Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld was hired in April 2001 as a key advisor to Rumsfield in filling Pentagon personnel. In a speech to advocates of gays in the military he asserted that opening as many positions as possible to women would undercut any future arguments against gay participation. He made the same sexual inversion argument in supporting the candidacy of Hillary Clinton for president saying that such a radical opening of the office to a female would do more for gay rights than all the activity of every gay activist. After his work with Rumsfield he became a liaison to the gay community for Hillary Clinton and secretary general of the WJC. He was influential in early strategy meetings outlining the attack of Iraq as the first step in a multi-generational war against terrorism. He is now estranged from Rumsfield because of his leaks to journalist Bob Woodward.
3) Sacrilege and The Church Impotent: The Feminization of ChristianityBy Leon Podles
4) In the Allan Gutmacher Institute (an ally of Planned Parenthood) survey of over 1000 women who had abortions, 80% were unmarried and 80% said the primary reason for terminating pregnancy was that bearing a child would interrupt plans for school or career.
5) Bonds of Affection by Professor Matt Holland, president of Utah Valley University is the clearest narrative of American history as a national attempt to fulfill the two great commandments.