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Mark Shea is Senior Content Editor for Catholic Exchange. You may visit his new website at www.mark-shea.com.
I have a deep appreciation for Sullivan's lithe and muscular prose in many spheres, particularly when it has comes to exposing and ridiculing the sometimes profoundly inhuman lies of the Left. His “Sontag” and “Begala” (and I might add, “Derbyshire”) awards, given in honor of particularly preposterous bloviating by the chattering classes, are much needed remedies for an intellectual elite in the US and Europe that sometimes seems to be wedded to folly, particularly in its failure to face down the planetary scourge that is Radical Islam. But I am not the only one to remark that all this fabulous common sense seems to go out the window when Sullivan turns his attention to Catholic teaching on sexuality.
For example, in recent discussions of the Troubles which presently afflict the American Catholic Church, Sullivan — on his eminently readable blog — speaks like somebody who has apparently been living on another planet in the last three decades. He is incredulous at the thought that a significant culture of contempt for chastity and orthodoxy already holds a powerful grip on much of the educational and bureaucratic machinery of the American Catholic Church. As Rod Dreher of National Review notes, “[Sullivan] resents my comments about the 'lavender mafia' running much of the institutional Church (the phrase is Fr. Andrew Greeley's, and he's hardly a Catholic conservative). He disdains my remarks about how some gay priests in control of seminaries and chanceries use their power to persecute orthodox, heterosexual priests and seminarians, and he resents my remarks about some seminaries being not much better than ‘gay brothels.’”
Dreher goes on to note that his beliefs here are founded on hard evidence from his own journalistic research (not to mention the research in Michael Rose's upcoming book Goodbye! Good Men), but what I find fascinating is that Sullivan's beliefs appear to contradict what even he himself has said in the past. After all, Sullivan, in his intelligent criticisms of the doctrinaire Left, has (like maverick lesbian Camille Paglia) not been slow to point out the tactics of what Paglia describes as “fascist gays” and the ham-fisted brownshirt tactics they routinely use to beat down opposition in the academy and crush any threats to their hegemony in school after school after school. He, like Paglia, has been vocal in protesting the commandeering of the machinery of the liberal academy by tenured radicals, whether straight or gay, in order to stamp out dissent.
And yet somehow, Sullivan is astounded at the suggestion that precisely these same tactics have been used in the Long March through the Catholic seminaries and chanceries by dissenting Catholics who hold the Church's teaching on chastity in contempt, just as they were used in the Long March through the secular academies in the 60s and 70s by the (now tenured) radicals who dominate secular universities.
I have news for Sullivan:
What do these four Catholic educational outrages have in common?
(1) Inviting an unrelenting supporter of the slaughter of the unborn to speak, and giving her an award;
(2) Dismantling traditional Catholic education, replacing it with a faculty and curriculum which advocates abortion, contraception, sympathy for cloning, and the normal menu of leftist dissent;
(3) Sponsoring the grotesque “Vagina Monologues”, featuring a warm and affirming portrayal of a lesbian pedophile rape;
(4) Welcoming members of the Jesus Seminar on campus to peddle their assaults on the integrity of Scripture and Catholic faith over the express protest of the local bishop.
The common thread? All involved universities run by the Society of Jesus. That's the Jesuits, Mr. Sullivan. And this is but a tiny tip of the iceberg in Catholic academe.
Sullivan has been wickedly funny and trenchant in his skewering of the idiots and liars who have tried to claim there is no anti-war Left in the US and abroad. But what are we to make of his sudden blindness when he tries to have us believe that there is no culture of contempt for chastity and orthodoxy in many American Catholic educational and bureaucratic circles? How do we account for his incredibly incoherent arguments to the effect that because some American priests have committed numerous crimes of homosexual rape and some African priests have committed crimes of heterosexual rape, therefore “the strained sexual doctrines of the current church — with regard to both priests and laity — are beginning to destroy the Church from within.”
Translation: the solution to sexual lawlessness is to abolish the Church's law of chastity. That way, there won't be any more lawlessness. Brilliant.
With the restless fertility of bewilderment, Sullivan throws out the red herring of abolishing celibacy as a panacea for abuse of boys, boys, boys, boys and boys. (Hmmmm… what other common thread might unite the character of these crimes besides celibacy?) Then he trots out the completely irrelevant (and false) claim that the ordination of women would somehow cure everything (“None of this hideous abuse of children would have occurred in the same way if women were fully a part of the institution.”) Apart from the entirely theological (not political) issue upon which that question really turns (sacraments being, after all, a gift of Christ and not a civil right), one has to ask what special gene on the X chromosome renders women incapable of participating in abuse? Has Sullivan learned nothing from the way in which NOW prostituted itself to apologize for the abusive behavior of Bill Clinton? Has he never heard of Mary Kay LeTourneau?
And when Dreher again points out that Sullivan is all over the map in his attempts to avoid the obvious Sullivan goes all Walt Whitman on us and says, in effect, “Do I contradict myself? Very well I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes! etc.” But the solution is for the Church to stop teaching what it has taught for 20 centuries and just give in to a gush of irrational feelings. That, at least, appears to be the upshot of this:
Thinking about this again today, and reading many of your perceptive emails, it became even clearer to me that sex is the problem – sex with minors, sex with members of the same gender, sex with members of the opposite gender, relations with the opposite gender. And the striking thing is how, when you read the Gospels, you hear so little about this subject. Jesus seems utterly uninterested in it. So why is the Church so obsessed with it? …Why cannot the Church be as neutral as Jesus was about this issue? Why can we not leave the dark and difficult realm of eros out of fundamental moral teaching? …More specifically: Why can we not hold up marriage and committed loving relationships as the goal but not punish and stigmatize the non-conformists or those whose erotic needs and desires are more complex than the crude opposition to all non-marital and non-procreative sex allows. …Let it go. And let's focus on what really matters: love of neighbor, prayer, compassion, service, honesty, justice.”
This recourse to “the heart has reasons that reason knows nothing of” business is all lovely and poetic of course, but as a coherent argument for demanding that the Church abandon the teaching of 20 centuries, it is somewhat wanting in actuality.
But, of course, all of Sullivan's rhetoric about priest abuse — like that of so much of the incoherent Catholic Left — is not intended to educate, but to distract. For the bottom line is this: Sullivan, as a practicing homosexual, wants to square the Catholic/active homosexual circle and therefore says what he must to maintain that commitment, no matter how little sense it makes.
Does this mean that no person with a homosexual orientation should be ordained? Not necessarily. I, at any rate, would prefer a chaste and orthodox priest who is homosexually oriented to a heterosexual priest who holds the Church's teaching in contempt. But the reality is that the gay subculture which has developed in the Church is one of the principal engines of contempt for both chastity and orthodoxy and is largely responsible (along with incredibly neglectful–possibly criminally neglectful–bishops who allowed and even participated in that subculture and are now reaping the whirlwind).
The one hopeful sign out of all this is that the Church is now revisiting the wisdom of unthinkingly ordaining homosexuals. Sullivan is, of course, angry about this, but the common sense of it is hard to deny. Not all or even most homosexuals are abusers, of course, but the undeniable fact is, virtually all of the victims were abused by homosexuals. Facts are not homophobic.
Sullivan's incoherence on this topic should be of interest to faithful Catholics because it demonstrates several old adages, as that “Most modern heresy begins in the groin” and “Sin darkens the intellect.” It also provides a sort of preview of what to expect in the coming months as a fanatically pro-homosexual media tries to keep us from making the stunningly obvious connection between the many pathologies of the homosexual subculture and the abuse of children by priests. As Harry Crocker has observed, it will be some time before we see a headline like “Priest Scandal Confirms Boy Scout Policy” but it's true nonetheless.
Remember that as the deluge of clamors for abandoning the Church's fundamental moral teachings reaches a crescendo. We got here by clergy ignoring the demand for chastity and orthodoxy. Getting rid of the Church's teaching altogether is like trying to put out a fire by smothering it in high octane fuel.
