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.

Bratz? Ratz!

In one of the most devastating blows to the pedophilia industry since people started paying attention to Thailand, a federal judge has ordered that the makers of "Bratz" dolls must cease production of their promiscuity-promoting dolls aimed at elementary school girls:

El Segundo-based Mattel (MAT) has seen sales of Barbie — once a rite of passage for American girls — slide since the doe-eyed Bratz dolls first came on the scene. Domestic sales of Barbie were down 15% in 2007.

The decision was a stunning defeat for MGA, which exploded onto the tween scene in 2001 with the edgy, urban-influenced dolls and made hundreds of millions in profits, giving Mattel's doll diva Barbie a run for her money.

The ruling, filed Wednesday in federal court in Riverside, followed a jury's finding that Bratz doll designer Carter Bryant developed the concept for the Bratz dolls while working for Mattel.

The same jury later awarded Mattel $10 million for copyright infringement and $90 million for breach of contract after a lengthy trial stemming from Mattel's 2004 lawsuit ended in August.

Granted, it was for a different kind of immorality that the "Bratz" brains got busted, but we'll take it where we can get it. And while Barbie is herself a fairly disgusting blot on the morality of American toymaking, at least she's over 18, and so is Ken. Skipper is another matter.

Here's to the possibility of a culture that doesn't force 13-year olds to look seductive while demonizing the 21 year olds who fall for it!

Toss of the tiara to Marybeth Hicks.

A Pre-Constantinian Obsession With A Lowercase Letter?

The ever insightful and consistently clever Mike Aquilina zings the post-enlightenment tendency to accuse Christianity of being something invented by the emperor Constantine, especially in light of the findings of some recent archaeological digs:

All this, of course, runs counter to what I learned in school, and probably to what most people learn in school today. It has, for generations, been commonplace to say that there were no crosses before Constantine. The standard current textbook in Christian archeology states flatly that there was “no place in the third century for a crucified Christ, or a symbol of divine death.”

If cruciform figures appeared in digs, they were dismissed as random scratches, mere geometric ornamentation, or later “contaminations” in early strata. The argument followed a circular logic:

1. We know there were no crosses before 300 because we’ve never found any.

2. When we seem to find crosses, we know they’re late or not really crosses, because of course there WERE no crosses before 300.

3. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I've encountered similar opposition among the goose-stepping legions of the historical-critical regime in regards to prophecy and dating biblical texts. Their logic might run:

1. Everybody knows that nobody but Orwell and Huxley can foretell events.

2. Anyone who pre-dates the Age of Reason who appears to have foretold an event (particularly in a religious text) had to have recorded that foretelling after the fact of its occurence in a retroactive futuregazing poetic style.

3. If we do find a text that could be construed as predating an event that it foretells, we have to assume that it was not talking about the event that came after it that fits that description, but an event that came before it that might share a characteristic or two with the event that happened after the writing was written, because history repeats itself in very specific ways.

Ah, the wisdom of the age.