What Threatens Catholic Christian Anthropology More--Serial Monogamy or "Gay Marriage"?
Most of the folks at the Roman Catholic website Vox Nova like to opine that the Catholic Churches talk too much about sex, I know, and I sometimes think the same, but, for the sake of the evangelization of an increasingly disillusioned youth, you better consider what Rod Dreher is suggesting HERE:
…Is sex the linchpin of Christian cultural order? Is it really the case that to cast off Christian teaching on sex and sexuality is to remove the factor that gives-or gave-Christianity its power as a social force?... the essence of any and every culture can be identified by what it forbids. Each imposes a series of moral demands on its members, for the sake of serving communal purposes, and helps them cope with these demands. A culture requires a cultus-a sense of sacred order, a cosmology that roots these moral demands within a metaphysical framework.
You don’t behave this way and not that way because it’s good for you; you do so because this moral vision is encoded in the nature of reality. This is the basis of natural-law theory, which has been at the heart of contemporary secular arguments against same-sex marriage (and which have persuaded no one).
Catholic Christianity might still succeed in “re-directing the erotic instinct,” but to survive in the coming generations, that “re-direction” MUST focus entirely upon love and acceptance of EVERYONE’S physical needs, as a matter of the re-imaging of Jesus Christ’s mercy-the mercy he showed to the Magdalen. Of course homosexuality is USUALLY “selfish,” and is USUALLY about “self-gratification” ; so is most heterosexual "love," too, until it is re-constituted as self-sacrificial commitment. The orthodox Christian communities had better start helping the "queer" communities to begin to re-constitute homosexual love as “self-sacrificial commitment,” before it’s too late.
People who claim that Christian bodies can “love the sinner, but hate the sin,” are forgetting one of the most significant things about historic Christian culture, as Dreher eloquently reminds us:
…Within a Christian anthropology sex takes on a new and different meaning, one that mandated a radical change of behavior and cultural norms. In Christianity, what people do with their sexuality cannot be separated from what the human person is.
And HERE is the enormous tragedy of the “modern”-which it is the Catholic Church’s absolute DUTY to rescue her children from:
To be modern is to believe in one’s individual desires as the locus of authority and self-definition.
Just as one of the article's commentators puts it, this is the way to insanity, but reformulate that as belief in one’s sacred, God-given AFFECTIONS and EMPATHIC IMAGININGS, and we may yet save Western civilization from sterility and self-destruction. THAT should be the all-dominating purpose of the “New Evangelization.”
To do this-to refashion the icon of marriage into a broader and more realistic image of Christ’s relationship to the cosmology He created-we will have to use the ancient Catholic Church’s wisdom regarding CHASTITY that Dreher, as a Protestant Fundamentalist, is so wrong about here:
Gay marriage signifies the final triumph of the Sexual Revolution and the dethroning of Christianity because it denies the core concept of Christian anthropology. In classical Christian teaching, the divinely sanctioned union of male and female is an icon of the relationship of Christ to His church and ultimately of God to His creation. This is why gay marriage negates Christian cosmology, from which we derive our modern concept of human rights and other fundamental goods of modernity. [And I absolutely DO believe that the "goods" of modernity derive from that source, and, as a result--I'll brag--of my rather considerable historical and cultural and aesthetic scholarship, I know it to be in fact true. Chateaubriand's great tract on Christianity taught me long ago that Jesus Christ was the instigator of all of the West's "progressivism," and even of its Revolutions.] Whether we can keep them in the post-Christian epoch remains to be seen.
It also remains to be seen whether we can keep Christianity without accepting Christian chastity.
Dreher confuses “chastity” with restrictions against active sexuality, turning it into something negative, when, actually what it IS, as a Christian virtue, is the self-sacrificial SPIRIT in which one does or does not use one’s sexuality.
Another thing that Dreher fails to understand is that the factor of marriage in revising the ancient Christian understanding of human anthropology was actually initiated by the Protestant reformers’ desecration of sacramental marriage-specifically by Luther’s refusal to understand that Christ Himself introduced a radical “reform” of “traditional marriage,” when He raised it to become a supernatural relationship which was as much about Him as about one's spouse and when he forbade what Moses had permitted. What Christ did then was NOT in conformity with “natural law,” as it had been understood from ancient times, either by pagans or by Jews.
It is PROTESTANT religious culture that births “modernism” in the field of religious anthropology, and opens the door to the American marriage culture of “serial monogamy”-not “gay marriage,” which is only comprehensible as a coda to the promiscuous divorcing practiced by the Protestant heretics.
And here is a very good example of why nobody should ever give up on authentic Christianity:
http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/04/being-gay-at-jerry-falwells-university/274578/