The Freedom of the Gift
For love to be true, it must first be free. For no one can force love or make one love another against one's own will. Love must always be free. But, freedom exists for the sake of love and not the other way around. Love does not exist for the sake of freedom. It is always a tragedy when a person breaks his relationship because, he feels, it limits his freedom. "I'm too young to settle down. I have so much I want to do."
Love does limit your freedom in very real ways. Saying "I do!" to one woman implies alongside it a million little "I don'ts" to every other woman in the world. As a man marrying one woman, if he knows what is best for him, he has effectively unmarried every other woman in the world, he has cut them off forever as being an option for his heart. Nope buddy, that is it.
However, in another sense it is precisely this love that busts open the very nature of freedom and takes it to a whole new level. The dynamism of Christian love, which is always utterly human and also completely divine, widens the individual human heart when it is given away to one's beloved in such a total fashion. Freedom serves love, but love broadens freedom. By loving this one woman "until death do you part," you have opened up a new world of giving and receiving that was not possible a few months before.
Another problem that often afflicts human relationships is that people are not really free. Sure, they might not be slaves forced into a marriage, but they may be moral slaves to some dark sin, habit or behavior that prevents them from truly giving themselves over to their beloved. Moral freedom is more important then physical freedom. It is why the Scriptures tell us over and again that it is better to be wise and poor than a fool who is king. The king is a slave to his foolishness. But moral slavery to sin is even worse than ignorance because it corrupts what it encounters, like Midas' touch in reverse. In order to freely give yourself, you must fully possess yourself. In order to possess yourself, you must have self-control. It is this idea of self-control and moral discipline that has fallen completely out of fashion in today's culture. But if you want to give yourself away in love, you cannot give what you do not have. Fasting, abstinence, disciplining your will, your flesh, your passions, all of this serves the cause of true, internal, moral freedom. And love, for it to be real love, must be always free.
The Two Disguises: Lust & Infatuation
The problem with our fallen human nature, especially in us young people, is that love is often manifested in two really big ways. One way is the counterfeit, lust. The other way is the halfway house: infatuation. These can become two painful distractions that cause more pain and heartache than anything else in a relationship because these two problems tend to disguise themselves as love. Lust and infatuation have always been with us, damaging relationships and breaking hearts, but today we have experienced the widespread cultural acceptance of lust and infatuation. In fact, especially in youth culture, these are the only two forms that seem to matter any more, which is horrid because they are passing, illusory, and emptying.
Lust and Infatuation due the same thing but from two different angles. They each commit the grave sin of reduction. Lust reduces the beloved to their sexual value. Infatuation reduces the person to their sentimental/emotional value. To reduce someone from their intrinsic value and high dignity (dare we say "sanctity") of being a person to just this or that specific characteristic is to loose sight of loves wholeness. In a sense, love is wholeness. As the good Pope John Paul II once quipped, "Pornography is wrong not because it shows too much, but because it shows too little. It reduces the person to just his/her sexual value."
Archbishop Fulton Sheen once said that there are three sins that humanity struggles with in three different phases of life. The young (teens and adults) struggle with lust. The middle-aged struggle with greed. And it is the old who struggle with the desire for power. The more ministry I do with parents, young adults, and teens, the more I realize this to be true.
Lust is so easy to fall into for young adults and teens because it taps into their energy, their zeal, their refusal to compromise or to water down life. But it also taps into the fact that, when it comes to life, love and relationships, the young are still just rookies. The lack of moral experiences, of years of developing endurance, long suffering, and dedication to principles just is not there and cannot be there due to a lack of the quantity of years. So this is where moral training needs to take place, especially in the areas of discipline, commitment, and abstinence.
But for teens in a unique way that I don't think the young adults deal with as much is the tendency to reduce love to its sentimental or emotional value. I cannot begin to list the tales of high school and junior high girls that have come up to me extolling the virtues of their "true love" and their "fairly tale" romance, only to have it end a week or two later. Many teens cycle quickly through boyfriends and girlfriends because they are hungering for emotional attachments and satisfaction. Their relationships are like the grain of seed that falls upon the shallow soil. It sprouts quickly, but fails dramatically, because its roots are not deep enough to sustain growth and weather bad times. It is the emotional high of being in love that keeps them coming back for more.
I once knew a girl whose boyfriend committed suicide after she broke up with him. She mourned, as did we all, for this horrific loss. After two or so weeks go by, she had another boyfriend! While this relationships was a massive attempt to rebound and to heal, this was her typical behavior. At the conclusion of each relationship, a new one was started two weeks later.
I described infatuation as "a halfway house" to love because true love can start there. Love most certainly involves the emotions! Love is not a rational head game between two persons who reasoned their lives into one synthesis, but is a total giving and receiving. As long as these young lovers persist in loving through the emotional onto the higher planes, then infatuation is just fine. But if it stops there, if it remains this weak, sentimental thing, then it is ultimately destructive, fading away like plants with shallow roots. Emotions are too fickle to be the basis of the bond between two persons.
So in conclusion, for love to be true it must be both free and total. Love cannot settle for a halfway house to compromise with counterfeits. It cannot be taken, but freely given by persons truly at liberty with themselves. "For freedom Christ set you free!"
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
The Pain of Pornography
The Problem of Porn, as seen in Junior High
Two years ago I decided to take an informal poll among our jr. high boys during an EDGE Night on chastity. I asked four questions: Who has ever seen porn, who has seen porn in the last two months, who has seen it in the last two weeks, who has seen it in the last two days? Pretty much everyone raised their hands on the first one. The second question had about 90% of the room with their hands up. By the time I got to the last question, at least 80% of those junior high boys still kept their hands up!
There are 420 million pornographic pages on the internet with 12% of all websites on the Internet being pornographic sites. 42.7% of all internet users view porn online, bringing in a total of $4.9 billion dollars in porn sales in 2006. The American porn industry gets more revenue than NBA, NFL, and all baseball franchises put together. It generates twice as much revenue as NBC, ABC, and CBS combined. Worldwide, porn generates an astounding $97.06 billion! In the United States a new porn video is being created every 39 minutes.
To say that our world today has a pornography problem is an understatement. But it is more. It is a tragedy. And it is a problem for every junior high boy in school today in our community because it is rapidly becoming a daily part of the youth culture, whether or not an individual is actually looking at it him/her self.
What does this mean? It means that at lunch time porn is a typical topic of conversation. It means that when teens are sleeping over someone else’s house, they often look at porn. What this means for us is that parents need to take another look at their child’s online life, to get involved, to have uncomfortable conversations and to protect your children from the distortion and exploitation of the Adult Industry today. And its time to bring Christ into the picture.
Understanding the Wrong of Pornography
Pornography is a powerful medium of distortion and fantasy that devalues women, distorts sex and sexuality, and reduces the dignity of the person to become just a collection of body parts.
Pornography robs men of the capacity to give of themselves in a self-sacrificial way. Men are outward oriented and when it comes to sexual arousal, men are visually stimulated. Porn is thus far more appealing to men than it is to women and in that it is far more destructive. Engaging in pornographic behaviors is attractive to men because it makes them feel like a man without asking anything of them in return. It essentially cripples a man’s heart because it does not challenge them, asks nothing in return. It is all just taking, taking, taking.
If love is about self-gift, then pornography trains a man in lust where instead of giving one’s self to one’s beloved, one takes. Lust is found in many places today, but for teens who are going through puberty and trying to discover who they are in life, it represents a powerful twisting of the good and natural sexual desires into perversion. The great mystery and dignity of the human person is lost to the viewer of porn, and instead the person is reduced to simply their body parts. The great value of the whole person is nothing more than the other’s ability to gratify my needs. You do not have worth because of who you are, but only in what you can do for me.
I think every parent agrees that today it is hard to be a woman. Women are constantly thrown images of what beauty should look like from billboards, movies, and magazines, that they are consistently feeling like they cannot measure up. Depression and anxiety about their bodies is common place in elementary age girls now. In a culture that looks approvingly upon pornography, as youth culture undeniably does, there is now an added pressure on women to not just be “hot” or “sexy”, but to be sexually available. Sadly, we are seeing this effect the even the junior high party scene where sex acts, especially oral sex and group viewing of porn, is increasing in our community.
Pornography turns sexual intimacy into a commodity for profit. It turns women into objects. It turns men’s hearts to selfishness and lust. It breeds further sexual perversions, earlier ages of incidents of sexual contact in teens, and it looses sight of the meaning and dignity of sexual love between spouses. As Pope John Paul II so famously put it: "The problem with pornography is not that it shows too much, but that it shows too little. It reduces the person to only his or her sexual value."
Habits in the Dark: A Sad Look into the Addictive Nature of Pornography
This article seeks to draw attention to the reality of a silent epidemic that is alive and well in America: Teenage pornography addiction.
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. To many that struggle daily with an addiction to pornography, those images, videos, and sounds are worth a thousand agonies as well. Many parents today are surprised at the addictive nature of pornography and are often tempted to treat the problem as simply a matter of will power.
When a teenager first encounters pornography and becomes sexually aroused, his body reacts to the stimulus in a very specific way. The image causes the adrenal glands to produce epinephrine, which enters the bloodstream. When this reaches the brain, it causes that image to be locked into the memory of the teenager. Often the adults who have struggled with an addiction to pornography over the course of years or even decades can still recall the first images that they saw as a child or teenager. The imprint of the image on the brain of the adolescent is significant. The mere remembrance of that image can cause arousal in the individual.
The rush of epinephrine and the surge of other pleasure inducing chemicals, such as dopamine and adrenaline, cause the porn user to experience a sexual high. The user seeks to return to this high, but finds that more images and a longer exposure to them is needed in order to experience that rush again. This leads to the formation of the habitual abuse of pornography and is often accompanied by masturbation.
As the habit becomes more ingrained and the seeking of this rush more difficult to achieve, the teen has probably viewed hundreds, if not thousands, of images and seen dozens of videos. At this stage it becomes compulsive.
The teen may also be experiencing intense feelings of shame and isolation, especially if the family and religious upbringing views porn negatively. These feelings tend to only drive the teen into further use, as the biochemical rush is also a means of temporary relief from stress or anxiety. The feeling of powerlessness over one’s life is increased, even more so when repeated attempts to stop viewing porn or to overcome past memories fails. The turning to pornography becomes a cycle as the teenager feels worthless after viewing it, but the worthless is what causes the teen to return to it again and again.
The most important message that a teen can hear at this point is one of healing and support. The addiction can be broken, but only by stronger means, such as counseling and yes, even medicine. The goal is moral freedom from lust, or in the language of Sexaholics Anonymous, "sexual sobriety." The longer the addictions are allowed to endure, the deeper the addiction takes hold of the person's psyche. It needs to be brought out into the light in order to find the revolutionary freedom that only purity, chastity and holiness can bring.
Better Parents. Active Parents.
Addictions, 100 billion dollar industries, and youth culture sustaining hedonism can seem like an impossible foe, but with our God “nothing is impossible.”
Parents, the worst thing you can do is not take action. First, have a conservation with your child about their online habits. Talk to them about sex, pornography, lust, love and real relationships. If you don’t, realize that the media already is speaking loudly, and chances are your values are being lost. Secondly, take practical steps to destroy the influence of porn. Remove all computers from bedrooms and have them in open, high traffic areas. Turn all screens towards the room and not the walls. Cancel certain cable channels, too. On your family computer, put software that monitors and/or filters internet content. Check your History folder often. If it has been recently cleared, that is usually a sign of someone hiding inappropriate online viewing.
I can wholeheartedly recommend the software available from www.xxxchurch.com called X3 Watch. This is an accountability program, not a filter, so it sends out a bi-weekly or monthly email to specific accountability partners (such as parents) containing flagged websites. Best of all, the scaled down version, which may be all you need, is free to download!
Finally, pray as a family. God is bigger than addiction, than lust, than sin. Through the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ we have the strength to fight lust in our lives and bring all these things done in the dark into His merciful light. For it is only in the Light that we see the light, that we can see the wrongness of our actions and the experience the boundlessness of His merciful grace. Prayer every day, especially to Saint Joseph, the foster father of Jesus, and to Saint Michael the Archangel, will lead to victory. But no one can overcome alone. Get a group together who can support you and your teen. They need someone that can hold them accountable, that can pray for them and lift them up with strong words.
Praise Him in the dust of our humanity,
Mike Gormley
AMDG
Two years ago I decided to take an informal poll among our jr. high boys during an EDGE Night on chastity. I asked four questions: Who has ever seen porn, who has seen porn in the last two months, who has seen it in the last two weeks, who has seen it in the last two days? Pretty much everyone raised their hands on the first one. The second question had about 90% of the room with their hands up. By the time I got to the last question, at least 80% of those junior high boys still kept their hands up!
There are 420 million pornographic pages on the internet with 12% of all websites on the Internet being pornographic sites. 42.7% of all internet users view porn online, bringing in a total of $4.9 billion dollars in porn sales in 2006. The American porn industry gets more revenue than NBA, NFL, and all baseball franchises put together. It generates twice as much revenue as NBC, ABC, and CBS combined. Worldwide, porn generates an astounding $97.06 billion! In the United States a new porn video is being created every 39 minutes.
To say that our world today has a pornography problem is an understatement. But it is more. It is a tragedy. And it is a problem for every junior high boy in school today in our community because it is rapidly becoming a daily part of the youth culture, whether or not an individual is actually looking at it him/her self.
What does this mean? It means that at lunch time porn is a typical topic of conversation. It means that when teens are sleeping over someone else’s house, they often look at porn. What this means for us is that parents need to take another look at their child’s online life, to get involved, to have uncomfortable conversations and to protect your children from the distortion and exploitation of the Adult Industry today. And its time to bring Christ into the picture.
Understanding the Wrong of Pornography
Pornography is a powerful medium of distortion and fantasy that devalues women, distorts sex and sexuality, and reduces the dignity of the person to become just a collection of body parts.
“Pornography consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners, in order to display them deliberately to third parties. It offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other. It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others. It immerses all who are involved in the illusion of a fantasy world. It is a grave offense.”
-Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2354
Pornography robs men of the capacity to give of themselves in a self-sacrificial way. Men are outward oriented and when it comes to sexual arousal, men are visually stimulated. Porn is thus far more appealing to men than it is to women and in that it is far more destructive. Engaging in pornographic behaviors is attractive to men because it makes them feel like a man without asking anything of them in return. It essentially cripples a man’s heart because it does not challenge them, asks nothing in return. It is all just taking, taking, taking.
If love is about self-gift, then pornography trains a man in lust where instead of giving one’s self to one’s beloved, one takes. Lust is found in many places today, but for teens who are going through puberty and trying to discover who they are in life, it represents a powerful twisting of the good and natural sexual desires into perversion. The great mystery and dignity of the human person is lost to the viewer of porn, and instead the person is reduced to simply their body parts. The great value of the whole person is nothing more than the other’s ability to gratify my needs. You do not have worth because of who you are, but only in what you can do for me.
I think every parent agrees that today it is hard to be a woman. Women are constantly thrown images of what beauty should look like from billboards, movies, and magazines, that they are consistently feeling like they cannot measure up. Depression and anxiety about their bodies is common place in elementary age girls now. In a culture that looks approvingly upon pornography, as youth culture undeniably does, there is now an added pressure on women to not just be “hot” or “sexy”, but to be sexually available. Sadly, we are seeing this effect the even the junior high party scene where sex acts, especially oral sex and group viewing of porn, is increasing in our community.
Pornography turns sexual intimacy into a commodity for profit. It turns women into objects. It turns men’s hearts to selfishness and lust. It breeds further sexual perversions, earlier ages of incidents of sexual contact in teens, and it looses sight of the meaning and dignity of sexual love between spouses. As Pope John Paul II so famously put it: "The problem with pornography is not that it shows too much, but that it shows too little. It reduces the person to only his or her sexual value."
Habits in the Dark: A Sad Look into the Addictive Nature of Pornography
“When pornography becomes a filter through which the rest of life is understood, serious damage occurs. A 2001 report found that more than half of all sex offenders in Utah were adolescents — and children as young as 8 years old were committing felony sexual assault.”
-Daniel Weiss, Senior Analyst for Media and Sexuality at Focus on the Family
This article seeks to draw attention to the reality of a silent epidemic that is alive and well in America: Teenage pornography addiction.
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. To many that struggle daily with an addiction to pornography, those images, videos, and sounds are worth a thousand agonies as well. Many parents today are surprised at the addictive nature of pornography and are often tempted to treat the problem as simply a matter of will power.
When a teenager first encounters pornography and becomes sexually aroused, his body reacts to the stimulus in a very specific way. The image causes the adrenal glands to produce epinephrine, which enters the bloodstream. When this reaches the brain, it causes that image to be locked into the memory of the teenager. Often the adults who have struggled with an addiction to pornography over the course of years or even decades can still recall the first images that they saw as a child or teenager. The imprint of the image on the brain of the adolescent is significant. The mere remembrance of that image can cause arousal in the individual.
The rush of epinephrine and the surge of other pleasure inducing chemicals, such as dopamine and adrenaline, cause the porn user to experience a sexual high. The user seeks to return to this high, but finds that more images and a longer exposure to them is needed in order to experience that rush again. This leads to the formation of the habitual abuse of pornography and is often accompanied by masturbation.
As the habit becomes more ingrained and the seeking of this rush more difficult to achieve, the teen has probably viewed hundreds, if not thousands, of images and seen dozens of videos. At this stage it becomes compulsive.
The teen may also be experiencing intense feelings of shame and isolation, especially if the family and religious upbringing views porn negatively. These feelings tend to only drive the teen into further use, as the biochemical rush is also a means of temporary relief from stress or anxiety. The feeling of powerlessness over one’s life is increased, even more so when repeated attempts to stop viewing porn or to overcome past memories fails. The turning to pornography becomes a cycle as the teenager feels worthless after viewing it, but the worthless is what causes the teen to return to it again and again.
The most important message that a teen can hear at this point is one of healing and support. The addiction can be broken, but only by stronger means, such as counseling and yes, even medicine. The goal is moral freedom from lust, or in the language of Sexaholics Anonymous, "sexual sobriety." The longer the addictions are allowed to endure, the deeper the addiction takes hold of the person's psyche. It needs to be brought out into the light in order to find the revolutionary freedom that only purity, chastity and holiness can bring.
Better Parents. Active Parents.
Addictions, 100 billion dollar industries, and youth culture sustaining hedonism can seem like an impossible foe, but with our God “nothing is impossible.”
Parents, the worst thing you can do is not take action. First, have a conservation with your child about their online habits. Talk to them about sex, pornography, lust, love and real relationships. If you don’t, realize that the media already is speaking loudly, and chances are your values are being lost. Secondly, take practical steps to destroy the influence of porn. Remove all computers from bedrooms and have them in open, high traffic areas. Turn all screens towards the room and not the walls. Cancel certain cable channels, too. On your family computer, put software that monitors and/or filters internet content. Check your History folder often. If it has been recently cleared, that is usually a sign of someone hiding inappropriate online viewing.
I can wholeheartedly recommend the software available from www.xxxchurch.com called X3 Watch. This is an accountability program, not a filter, so it sends out a bi-weekly or monthly email to specific accountability partners (such as parents) containing flagged websites. Best of all, the scaled down version, which may be all you need, is free to download!
Finally, pray as a family. God is bigger than addiction, than lust, than sin. Through the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ we have the strength to fight lust in our lives and bring all these things done in the dark into His merciful light. For it is only in the Light that we see the light, that we can see the wrongness of our actions and the experience the boundlessness of His merciful grace. Prayer every day, especially to Saint Joseph, the foster father of Jesus, and to Saint Michael the Archangel, will lead to victory. But no one can overcome alone. Get a group together who can support you and your teen. They need someone that can hold them accountable, that can pray for them and lift them up with strong words.
Praise Him in the dust of our humanity,
Mike Gormley
AMDG
Monday, December 1, 2008
The Hope of Glory
"It is Christ in you, the hope of glory!"
We need a resurgence in American Catholicism. We need Scripture to be consumed by the laity and the clergy. We need to embrace the transformative power of the Holy Spirit and let Him radically re-orient the way we experience our Catholic Faith, setting the whole congregation on fire with divine charity. We need a spiritual revolution, overthrowing the current weak-sauce status quo institutionalism that offers little more than watered down Christianity, or as Archbishop Fulton Sheen put it, "A Christ without a cross" and we need to serve up real deal Christianity.
We don't need to wonder what such a fiery Catholicism would look like. We need simply to look into the past and reclaim our spiritual heritage. This return to the sources alone can equip the saints for these dark times like it did our elder brothers and sisters 2,000 years ago.
The World as it Was
Catholicism swept through the whole ancient world like a flood, growing around 40% every decade without the aid of the internet and mass marketing campaigns, and by being counter-cultural. Imagine a world like the Roman Empire; filled with institutionalized lust, gluttony, villianous politicians, unprecended greed and power grabs at every turn. Then take a message about total self-denial, chastity, holiness, poverty, and unconditional love and try to sell it in a such a hostile climate and you will find yourself with your head cut off (if you were lucky).
These people were not extraordinary individuals, unique in their courage or intellect among the previous or post generations of man. We often give ourselves over to calling someone "extraordinary" in order to exempt ourselves from responsibility. It was the times that were extraordinarily evil, violent, perverted and hostile. They were pagan to a fault.
In the midst of this world filled lust, greed and power was the impoverished preachers, the little priests of the poor, the monks of desert sands and nuns of caves, the popes of the prisons, the chains and martyrdom. Entering straight into the violence, their voices yelled "Blessed are the meek!" Entering into promiscuity, their lives shouted, "Blessed are the pure of heart!" Entering into the Senate, the Palace, the Praetorium, their very souls screamed, "Blessed are the poor!"
And so that world sought to silence their message. They shut their mouths, but it was their hearts that were on fire. So they marched all those who would not pinch incense to Caesar from the Praetorium into the Coliseum, into the Circus Maximus, and when they draw out the Christians last drop of blood, they heard the full force of a lion whispering with its final breath, "Blessed are the persecuted."
They were ordinary people who believed an extraordinary Faith, a Faith that converted the very murderers who took their lives. They believed and they lived as if what they believed was true. And in the end the Roman Empire fell, but the Catholic Church remained, and has remained.
The Dog Returns to His Vomit
This age has returned. Western Civilization is returning to the gutter of the vomitorium that spawned it 2,200 years ago. We have moved into a new age of violence, mass marketed with all the appeal that Madison Ave can contribute. We entered into a new age of sexual perversion, Photoshop'd and enhanced into illusion and fantasy prisons where pornography is substituting itself for intimacy. The average age of hardcore porn contact is 11, for both boys and girls. Think about how that effects people when they get into real relationships with real people!
The new Roman Empire is still obsessed with the same thing: sex, money, and power. As the ever-pessimistic author of Ecclesiastes said, "There is nothing new under the sun." We just do it with more efficiency and greater frequency. We just have more addicts with more access.
So what do we do?
How shall we now live?
Do we make our mega-church compromises with the world, removing crosses, hushing political speech when it has its moral implications because it may offend, and reducing the gospel to a series of cliches that form quaint soundbites, easily memorized but quickly forgotten?
Do we print t-shirts and bumper stickers like we are at a rally for some pathetic cause that no one really cares about? Do we scream and yell on street corners, turning our voices into the shrill cries of the American protester, playing some absurd role in this absurd game we call "the Process?"
Have we stripped our altars enough, thrown away enough rosaries, habits and clerics in order to blend in with the world around us yet? How long will we pretend to be a church without a past in order to wed the Spirit of the Age, only to be widowed again and again and again?
The reality is, my brothers and sisters, that the night is only just now upon us as the golden sun is beginning to set upon the Western World yet again, casting deep shadows over new and dying empires. We Christians have seen this all before. We have watched the pyramids wither, the Imperial Senate be conquered, and kingdoms become States. We have seen with our ancient eyes worlds build up and worlds collapse. We are going nowhere.
So what do we do now as the new Dark Ages of immorality + technology snuff out life and limb? We do what we have always done. We carry about in our very bodies the death of our Lord and in our hearts His resurrection. Christendom is dead. Long live Christianity!
Praise Him, even in the dust, even in the dusk.
Mike
AMDG
We need a resurgence in American Catholicism. We need Scripture to be consumed by the laity and the clergy. We need to embrace the transformative power of the Holy Spirit and let Him radically re-orient the way we experience our Catholic Faith, setting the whole congregation on fire with divine charity. We need a spiritual revolution, overthrowing the current weak-sauce status quo institutionalism that offers little more than watered down Christianity, or as Archbishop Fulton Sheen put it, "A Christ without a cross" and we need to serve up real deal Christianity.
We don't need to wonder what such a fiery Catholicism would look like. We need simply to look into the past and reclaim our spiritual heritage. This return to the sources alone can equip the saints for these dark times like it did our elder brothers and sisters 2,000 years ago.
The World as it Was
Catholicism swept through the whole ancient world like a flood, growing around 40% every decade without the aid of the internet and mass marketing campaigns, and by being counter-cultural. Imagine a world like the Roman Empire; filled with institutionalized lust, gluttony, villianous politicians, unprecended greed and power grabs at every turn. Then take a message about total self-denial, chastity, holiness, poverty, and unconditional love and try to sell it in a such a hostile climate and you will find yourself with your head cut off (if you were lucky).
These people were not extraordinary individuals, unique in their courage or intellect among the previous or post generations of man. We often give ourselves over to calling someone "extraordinary" in order to exempt ourselves from responsibility. It was the times that were extraordinarily evil, violent, perverted and hostile. They were pagan to a fault.
In the midst of this world filled lust, greed and power was the impoverished preachers, the little priests of the poor, the monks of desert sands and nuns of caves, the popes of the prisons, the chains and martyrdom. Entering straight into the violence, their voices yelled "Blessed are the meek!" Entering into promiscuity, their lives shouted, "Blessed are the pure of heart!" Entering into the Senate, the Palace, the Praetorium, their very souls screamed, "Blessed are the poor!"
And so that world sought to silence their message. They shut their mouths, but it was their hearts that were on fire. So they marched all those who would not pinch incense to Caesar from the Praetorium into the Coliseum, into the Circus Maximus, and when they draw out the Christians last drop of blood, they heard the full force of a lion whispering with its final breath, "Blessed are the persecuted."
They were ordinary people who believed an extraordinary Faith, a Faith that converted the very murderers who took their lives. They believed and they lived as if what they believed was true. And in the end the Roman Empire fell, but the Catholic Church remained, and has remained.
The Dog Returns to His Vomit
This age has returned. Western Civilization is returning to the gutter of the vomitorium that spawned it 2,200 years ago. We have moved into a new age of violence, mass marketed with all the appeal that Madison Ave can contribute. We entered into a new age of sexual perversion, Photoshop'd and enhanced into illusion and fantasy prisons where pornography is substituting itself for intimacy. The average age of hardcore porn contact is 11, for both boys and girls. Think about how that effects people when they get into real relationships with real people!
The new Roman Empire is still obsessed with the same thing: sex, money, and power. As the ever-pessimistic author of Ecclesiastes said, "There is nothing new under the sun." We just do it with more efficiency and greater frequency. We just have more addicts with more access.
So what do we do?
How shall we now live?
Do we make our mega-church compromises with the world, removing crosses, hushing political speech when it has its moral implications because it may offend, and reducing the gospel to a series of cliches that form quaint soundbites, easily memorized but quickly forgotten?
Do we print t-shirts and bumper stickers like we are at a rally for some pathetic cause that no one really cares about? Do we scream and yell on street corners, turning our voices into the shrill cries of the American protester, playing some absurd role in this absurd game we call "the Process?"
Have we stripped our altars enough, thrown away enough rosaries, habits and clerics in order to blend in with the world around us yet? How long will we pretend to be a church without a past in order to wed the Spirit of the Age, only to be widowed again and again and again?
The reality is, my brothers and sisters, that the night is only just now upon us as the golden sun is beginning to set upon the Western World yet again, casting deep shadows over new and dying empires. We Christians have seen this all before. We have watched the pyramids wither, the Imperial Senate be conquered, and kingdoms become States. We have seen with our ancient eyes worlds build up and worlds collapse. We are going nowhere.
So what do we do now as the new Dark Ages of immorality + technology snuff out life and limb? We do what we have always done. We carry about in our very bodies the death of our Lord and in our hearts His resurrection. Christendom is dead. Long live Christianity!
Praise Him, even in the dust, even in the dusk.
Mike
AMDG
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