I Stand With The Archbishop

If you ever want to be thoroughly depressed at the state of our society, simply read the comboxes in a public newspaper anytime anybody from the Church says anything about anything. Immediately employed is the Catholic version of the argument ad Hitlerum, wherein the reaction of the public defaults to a sticking of the fingers in the ears and a chanting of something to the effect of "LA LA LA SEX ABUSE SCANDAL LA LA LA!" As Chesterton so aptly put it, "it is generally the man who is not ready to argue, who is ready to sneer."

Such has become the case with Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk of Cincinnati's recent expression of disgust at "Sexploration Week," currently being offered on University of Cincinnati campus, notoriously sponsored by the intrepid sexplorers at Pure Romance. One caption from a photo of the "Pizza and Porn" session reads as follows:

some Students who attended “Pizza and Porn” were asked under what circumstances they would ‘do porn.’ Some would ... with provisions.

Curious for more information about "Pizza and Porn?" Here ya go:

At the event "Pizza and Porn," sexuality educator Kathleen Baldwin will discuss how "porn is not necessarily a bad thing," Johnson said. "We're not showing porn, we're just discussing porn."

Because porn is not necessarily bad, but too bad to show over pizza, apparently.

Other session titles include "Sexcapades" and "Got the Hook Up?" And if these talks whet your sexual appetites, free condoms and "safer sex kits" (I don't even want to know) abound, along with a free demonstration of products from Pure Romance to help accessorize the experience.

A word coined on Mark Shea's blog the other day aptly sums up the whole fiasco: "sluttony."

Archbishop Pilarczyk, an alumnus of the University of Cincinnati, rightly expressed his disgust at the week's events. Not surprisingly, he was greeted with a chorus of detractors, the content of most of whose comments could be summed up by "stuff it, you molestor!" and "sexual promiscuity is right because it's recent!" Here's a sampling of a few of the comments on the article from the Enquirer, which at last count filled 50+ pages:

"keep sex in the rectory where it belongs!!!"

"Mind your O.D.B. Catholic Church and Pilarczyk. Take your pageantry and pedophilia to a cave somewhere. We can all be good people and citizens without that garbage."

"Does the Archbishop realize that his parents had sex too! If not how in the world did he get here? His parents must have had impure thoughts and actions! Just once. Oh MY that may make a mortal rather that the high and mighty one he thinks he is."

"To the archbishop. GO CRALL BACK UNDER THE ROCK YOU CAME from! The only disturbing thing is how you handled the priests you shuffeled from church to church at the expense of the children that they molested. You Danile Pilarczyk are very disturbing to all of us in the city."

And so forth. Perhaps UC should consider spending their money on a campus-wide grammar and spelling convention instead.

The sex abuse scandal happened. There's no denying it; there's no excusing it. But to forget that the scandal happened inside the Church at the same time that the sexual revolution was happening outside is to live in unreality. I hate that the abuse happened in my Catholic Church, just as I hated when it happened in my Nazarene Church, or in my United Methodist Church, or in the schools I attended.

But perhaps what I hate the most about the fact that it happened in my Church is that when someone like Archbishop Pilarczyk rightly expresses disgust at a tasteless display such as "Sexploration," that the arguments he makes are automatically dismissed with the man.