Good Things Priests Do, Episode #328,345,798 . . .

Last updated on: December 14, 2015 at 4:19 pm By Jennifer Fitz

I could spend a very long time listing all the good things I’ve seen priests doing — Father E.* stories are practically a genre for me. But my husband asked me to tell one that happened to him recently, and I wasn’t there which is why it all happened in the first place, so forgive the lapses that come from second-hand reporting.

***

The background is this: My family is divided 50/50 between choir members and pewsitters. Thus, normally at Mass the little ones and I sit down with the plebeians. Recently, however, my youngest had to be dragged up to the choir loft and stuffed in a corner, because 2/3rds of the pewfolk were going to absent that particular Mass.

Something else to know is that for various reasons, at any given Mass a significant fraction of the choir never leaves the loft. Those who are receiving Communion slip down quietly at the appointed time, but there’s no break in the music or other signal. The people who know to go just go. Like magic.

So my nine-year-old sits up in her spot out of the way, essentially forgotten because no one’s used to having to remember she’s there, and choirfolk have a lot on their mind mid-Mass. She completely misses the cue that she should descend to receive, and next thing you know the elder members of the family are already coming back up contentedly Jesus-filled, and Communion is over and she’s missed her chance.

When this comes to her attention, she does the same thing any other sensible person who’d just missed an appointment with God would do: She wept.

My husband figures out what happened, and so right after Mass he takes the little one downstairs, tracks down an extraordinary minister, and asks if it would be possible for our girl to receive Communion a few minutes late.

The man says yes, and they go forward towards the tabernacle.

While they are in the midst of this, Father S.**, who may have another initial on this blog but I can’t think of it right now, crosses their path. He’s apprised of the situation. So he does the thing that you knew was going to happen, because this is one of the bazillion times priests do exactly what their parishioners need, he gives her communion himself.

***

Were I keen on spinning this I could add all sorts of dramatic conjecture and turn this into a homily-worthy tearjerker. But all that I know for certain is that there’s this priest who did something very good for my daughter.

We’re grateful.

Artwork: “Charles Borromeo gives the holy communion to Aloysius Gonzaga.” Red velvet tapestry, embroidered in gold (19th century), in Saint Charles’ chapel in the church of San Carlo al Corso church in Milan. Picture by Giovanni Dall’Orto, June 22 2007. (Self-published work by G.dallorto), via Wikimedia Commons

*E is for Excellent.

**S. is for Straightforward.

What My Dog Knows About the Immaculate Conception

Last updated on: December 8, 2015 at 2:23 pm By Jennifer Fitz

Every evening at nine, Fitz kids and parents gather in the living room and talk to each other for an hour, and then we go to bed. It’s not a rule, it’s a thing that happens. There are usually two or three cats present, and always one dog.

The dog is not my dog, and I almost never provide any particular dog care.

So I was puzzled one evening a few years ago when I realized the dog was standing in front of me, paws firmly planted in a ready-for-action stance, gaze even, silent, still, waiting for my attention. I noticed her. She looked up at me, waiting.

Why is this dog coming to me for some thing? I am not the person who gives the dog bits of string cheese every evening. I am not the person who does food or water or walks or much of anything for this dog. She has a perfectly good boy for all those services and more.

But it was that time of night, so I asked her, “You need to go potty?”

She prances. Yep. That’s the thing she wants.

Then she glances over towards her boy, who is sitting right there with us in that room.

I tell him to let the dog out, and he does.

***

It was the first time I became aware of this habit of our dog’s and I’m not sure when it began. Of all the six people present in the room, I am the very least likely to get up and let the dog out. Our dog is extremely pack-aware, so she absolutely regards my husband as the Alpha of Alphas. Any human in the room, trying to advise the dog on whom she should see concerning the question of being let into the backyard, would have picked me last of all. Try one of the kids, or try the guy in charge.

But the dog knows that if she comes to me, I will make the thing happen. All she has to do is get my attention (politely), and I’ll figure out what she wants and tell the boy to take care of it.

My dog understands the way the world works better than the humans do. She understands the order of things.

***

Sometimes people describe Marian intercession as if God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were too stern or preoccupied to bother with your little problems, Mommy loves you and will help you when they won’t, or when you’re scared to go them, or something. I dunno. I always think that’s pretty stupid theology. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but Jesus didn’t die on the cross out of cranky slothful indifference for my good.

My dog and I, therefore, are no typological figures of Marian intercession, get that idea out of your head right now. Yes, Jesus would let the dog out if Mary told Him to. But no, Jesus isn’t too busy showing St. Joseph the Russian Priests with Cats Calendar that he fails to notice the dog needs to pee, that’s not what it’s about. There are other reasons asking Mary to intercede for you is a good, noble, worthwhile part of a healthy Christian lifestyle, and we’ll leave it at that for now.

The Immaculate Conception, which we commemorate today, is about this:

“We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful.”

Ineffabilis Deus, Apostolic Constitution issued by Pope Pius IX on December 8, 1854

The Immaculate Conceptions is about the order of things. It is about the re-ordering of broken humanity. For the new Adam we have a new Eve. Curiously, the new Eve isn’t the wife of the man about to fall, but the mother of God-made-man who’s going to save you from your fall.

Humans, fallen as we are, tend to overlook the order of things. We have a picture in our heads of how things stand, and when reality doesn’t match that picture, we tend to elbow aside reality and stick with our imaginary world, the one we made, not the one God made. The one we prefer, because we’re at the center of it, little gods with our little fake worlds.

The dog, in contrast, lives in no such imaginary world. She needs to be let out at night, so she has a pressing interest in understanding the real order of things.

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Gun Culture, Public Safety, and the Politics of Offendedness

Last updated on: December 7, 2015 at 3:37 pm By Jennifer Fitz

I live in Gunlandia. My new neighbor phoned the police to inquire about my longtime neighbors, who apparently shoot at the squirrels in their yard with a .22. Law enforcement gently explained that since we live in the county, as long as no one gets hurt and no one else’s property is damaged, it’s perfectly legal. Though weapon of choice varies a bit (we just send out the dog to chase them off), I’d say the neighborhood’s split three ways between those who shoot squirrels, those who feed squirrels, and those who shoot the squirrels they feed.

Hunting is normal here. I want venison sausage restocked this winter, therefore I instruct the spouse to either shoot me a sausage deer or bring home someone else’s. (It’s illegal to sell venison, which an elderly neighbor explained has caused a remarkable rebound in the deer population over the past sixty years — he grew up rabbit hunting for food because there just weren’t deer. If you live in Gunlandia, however, you know people who are perfectly happy to shoot you an animal just because you asked. It’s the neighborly thing to do.)

When Sister John Paul Bauer explains the relaxing, prayerful nature of deer hunting, we know exactly what she means. The other week, we sent our 11-year-old to sit in the stand with her father, for just that reason: Kid needed some quiet time to decompress. Since we aim to be as Laudato Si’ compliant as we possibly can, naturally spouse and child truck-pooled with a (different) neighbor out to the hunting lease. Or else maybe it was just to be convivial.

My kids think the semi-controversial* Palmetto State Armory Christmas ads are hilarious. The one about the silencer, in our mind, has nothing to do with vicious crime and everything to do with yet another neighbor who runs an outdoor shooting range and uses silencers to avoid creating a disturbance. There’s nothing sacriligious, to the Gunlandian, about suggesting gun-gifts for Christmas; if anything, at least a nice rifle is a useful tool for environmental stewardship, and if you buy it American-made, it doesn’t even implicate overseas slave-labor like those trendy, foot-killing, virtually-disposable party shoes do.

It is from this cultural context that we read the news. Is there gun crime in Gunlandia? Why yes, there is. But then again, places with much stricter gun laws also get their share of terrorists and criminals. To the Gunlandian, there doesn’t seem to be much correleation, let alone causation; the problem must lie elsewhere.

When non-gun people propose banning a thing they don’t even use, at best it rings hollow: Sure, go ahead, solve the world’s problems by picking something that imposes on other people. At worst, and when it comes from the mouth of someone with a 24/7 armed security detail it sure sounds this way, it’s a hypocritical policy that will hurt most those you never were going to care about anyway.

***

Catholics have wide latitude in making prudential judgments about public policy and firearms. It is to be absolutely acknowledged that because Gunlandians view firearms as ordinary household items, no more problematic than a truck or a dog** or a water heater, we tend to dismiss out of hand concerns about gun ownership as so much noise. Planning to ban pipes and nails, too? Huh? Huh?

It’s a bias to be conceded.

But at the same time, Gunlandians have difficulty not scorning people who get shocked, just shocked, to discover that meat comes from animals, and that furthermore you must kill the animal to get at the meat part. It is challenging to take seriously policy proposals from people who are living a life so utterly divorced from reality as we know it.

I’m not persuaded there are many politicians who are interested in reasoned debate and well-crafted legislation, but there are voters who care about such things, so it’s not a complete loss. I would propose that in order to have any meaningful discussion about weapons laws, one must first come to understand that for many Americans, the perfect, non-ironic, entirely-sincere way to celebrate the birth of our Savior is to fast and pray a bit, go to church, sing carols, give gifts, host a feast, and then take the girls out to the range on sunny winter afternoon and let them practice with the .22.

Photo: Portrait of a Girl with a Gun and a Hound [Public Domain], via Wikimedia

*We don’t know any real live people who mind the ads — which are run in Gunlandia, not some other place where they might take on a different meaning. For some previous years’ editions, see here, p. 9.

**We know a lot of real live people who mind irresponsible dog owners. Also, we mind that animal control’s idea of picking up a nuisance stray is to drive around the block once, declare the animal “impossible to find” and go back to the office to wait for you to bring it in yourself. But they’re real nice when you do.

Refugees vs. Enemies – We’ve Done this Before

Last updated on: November 17, 2015 at 12:29 pm By Jennifer Fitz

There is no getting around the fact that the terrorists in Paris took advantage of an assortment of accommodations for refugees and immigrants in order to murder their hosts. Abuse does not disprove right use, but right use doesn’t excuse abuse, either. What’s a civilized nation to do? This is not a new question for the United States.

***

My grandmother’s grandmother, sixteen at the time, got on a boat in the late 1800’s and traveled from Germany to visit a friend who’d moved to the United States. Germany and the US were getting along fine then. The vacation turned into a permanent stay: My teenaged ancestor liked what she found, met a nice German-American boy, got married, and settled down. Her children, including a handful of sons, all spoke German fluently.

When World War I broke out, there was no hand-wringing. The German-American sons enlisted and went to war against Germany. They did so with the full knowledge that they’d be fighting their own uncles, their mother’s brothers, who had likewise done the patriotic thing.

There was no second-guessing and no hard feelings. You fight for your country, period.

Later the story gets more interesting: In the years between the wars, one of the uncles, a German veteran of WWI, came to the US to visit the family. He started spouting Nazi propaganda, and was told by his sister and family to stuff it. (Typical Thanksgiving family moment, everyone’s got the Nazi uncle, right?)

This straight-shooting American patriotism had help, no doubt, by the reality that in both World Wars, German-Americans were targets of suspicion. And why shouldn’t they be? Espionage is a thing. Patriotism is a thing. If you want to spy on your enemy, pick someone who knows both cultures fluently.

Still, German-Americans had it easy compared to Japanese-Americans, for the simple reason that Germans blended better. Although it’s true that when I’m in Europe people assume I’m a native of the nearest blonde nation, you can’t just walk into a crowd of Americans of European heritage and pick out the German among the Swedes and the Swiss and the Irish and the English. Japanese people, in contrast, are pretty easy to pinpoint in a room full of Norwegians.

But if it was hard to cull the second- and third-generation Germans, and easy to sort out the Japanese (or slightly-Japanese) no matter how long they’d been in the US, naturally the people who most resembled the enemy were Germans seeking asylum, and those in neighboring, German-speaking countries. Think of people like the Von Trapps.

***

The challenge to refugee-resettlement is that on the one hand we know that not everyone who vaguely resembles the enemy is the enemy, but on the other hand, we don’t want to stupidly invite the wolf to walk right in. Add onto that challenge the reality that there are plenty of people willing to turn coat on their own country for the right incentive, plus plenty of homegrown criminals who don’t require any kind of war at all in order to justify their murderous rampages.

Strict nativism is one possible solution. It’s neither Christian nor particularly American, but it’s certainly popular among American Christians who feel themselves firmly enough established as the right sort of natives. A clamping down on civil liberties is another way to do it. If you can search and seize at will, arrest and detain freely and indefinitely, perhaps among all the innocent citizens you sweep into your net, you can catch a few more of the guilty as well. Police states are the government of choice among those whose highest priority is policing.

Is this what we want?

Or is there some way to have our Bill of Rights and a clean conscience towards those legitimately seeking our aid, without in the process inviting our enemies to overrun us?

I propose that there is, and I propose that it is difficult.

I suggest that rather than relying on the false security of racist tropes, we use instead the same detective work necessary when dealing with people who have all the right accents and documents, but are just as potentially deadly. We who choose not to shirk our Christian obligation towards refugees are nonetheless free to vary in our opinions on how best to carry out that duty. The evidence, however, is that it is in fact possible to put in place mechanisms that allow both prudence and charity to prevail.

I likewise suggest that the dangers we must necessarily risk in order to protect and preserve our freedoms are not dangers only for other people’s sons to experience on foreign shores, but part of the inherent tension of living in a free county — but that living in an unfree country is far more dangerous. Each of the freedoms enumerated in the Bill of Rights bears risk of abuse by the citizens who practice those freedoms. Denying any of these rights is an invitation to abuse by the power-hungry.

Were it self-evident that our governments could be trusted to behave honorably without the counter-pressure of free citizens armed-and-potentially-dangerous, the Founding Fathers would have felt no reason to revolt and no reason to write a constitution. The study of history would consist primarily in reading about improvements in agriculture and road-paving.

I’m no anarchist. I’m a proponent of the rule of law, uncorrupt, just, humane. But it seems to me that there might be some way, some mysterious path well worth exploring, that could allow us to have our Germans and defeat them too.

Artwork by UBC Library Digitization Centre [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons

Paris and the Battle for the World

Last updated on: November 15, 2015 at 10:11 pm By Jennifer Fitz

In the wake of the attacks on the city of Paris, I was glued to the news. As I followed commentators at France 24,where they were running live coverage all night in the immediate aftermath of the events, several comments in succession caught my attention.

The first was the observation that the style of the attacks — noted in the hours before any of the perpetrators had been identified — was typical of something out of Pakistan or Afghanistan. This could, the analyst explained, be just as easily an attack at any of dozens of cities across the war-torn Islamosphere. What is happening in Paris, I reflected, is only breaking news because it’s Paris. We expect it in Iraq or Nigeria. Where does the refugee run, if even Paris isn’t safe?

Later in the night there was a montage of video from previous times when the French government had declared a state of emergency. The point was to give the viewer historical context on how rare it is that the government invokes its temporary emergency powers. What became apparent to my eye, seeing clips from Algeria and from the more recent riots in the immigrant ghettos (“suburbs” – but they aren’t what Americans think of when we say that word) is that this is no new conflict. It is only the latest in a long string of violent encounters between France and the Muslim world reaching back generations.

And of course, it was sadly ironic to hear the odd remark about how Paris had never seen such a thing before. You could write an outline of world history just by listing all the deadly mass violence that’s gripped Paris over the millennia.

What happened in Paris Friday night is not so much news as it is the human condition; I will explain in a moment why this is the good-bad news.

***

We humans are made for peace. We grab at it like the famished reach for food. When we have it, we say to ourselves, this is normal. This is how things should be. And we are right about that.

We are destined, created, for eternal happiness.

But our happiness isn’t the careless, conscienceless happiness of the dog stretched out by the fire on a crisp autumn night — however pure and beautiful such pleasures are. Ours has always, from the beginning of time, been a happiness won by sacrifice.

The Bible refers to Christ as the Lamb slain since the foundation of the world. Not from the time of the fall. Not from the time of His sacrifice on Calvary. From the very beginning of creation. We, made in the image and likeness of God, bear that sacrificial nature. And hence, in the garden of perfect happiness, Satan shows up and challenges man to the sacrifice.

It is your dog’s nature, though he be stretched out lounging by the fire on a crisp night, if danger threatens to get up and defend to the death his pack. To do so is just part of being a dog. He lives out his complete dogginess when he does it.

It is your nature, free man that you are, to choose whether to enter that fight. Instinct will, as it helps your dog, help you to choose the right way to proceed. But it will be a choice. A free choice, a choice you can choose to reject in a way that your dog your cannot. Later, whether your dog stood his ground or fled, we will rightly decline to assign blame to his actions. We will recognize them as something that does not carry the moral weight of human action.

You, on the other hand, are held responsible. You will look back at what happened, what you did, how you reacted, and you will assess yourself: Under the circumstances, did I in fact do the best that I could?

This is what it means to be a man.

***

This moral battle that we fight with ourselves is integral to our humanity because it is integral to our free will. We cannot freely choose to know, love, and serve God unless we have the option to do otherwise.

***

Because we have the freedom to choose good, we therefore have the freedom to choose evil. We do it ourselves, daily, and our fellow men do, too. Hence, Paris.

***

Friday night as the tricolor was being raised over Facebook, several friends expressed their sense of helplessness: In face of what we think of as an attack on our territory, for many of us Americans have a certain patriotism towards France that has been long-earned, there was a profoundly felt desire to step in and join the fight.

And this is the very good news, because each of us is in this fight. It’s not a new fight, and it’s not the battle of the West, either. It is the battle of humanity. We don’t get out of it until the end of the world, and I’m not strictly sure we get out of it then. I think, rather, it will have gotten fully into us.

Because we are body and soul, smacked together so integrally that the temporary separation of the two causes death, it is both a physical and a spiritual fight. Because humanity is not a collection of individual everything-men, but rather an interconnected community of persons each bringing their distinctive gifts to the world, the part we each play is not identical.

There are some of us in the fight who have the job of actually going round doing physical battle. But there’s a twist to the sacrifice by the men and women who serve in the military, law enforcement, and other dangerous jobs that need to be done in order to keep the rest of us safe: Their job isn’t to protect us for a life of carefree coziness. Their role is to protect their fellow countrymen so that we fellows can in turn ensure that this generation and the next are able to carry out both the spiritual and the physical battle.

***

Friday night just after the terrorist attacks had occurred Paris-time, I took my daughter to volleyball practice. The rec center sits in the middle of what might have once been called the “wrong side of the tracks,” though it would be more accurate these days to say the wrong side of the highway. When no one has reserved the gym, the local boys jump ditches and climb over fences and walk along dark, narrow roads with no shoulder and no inkling of a thought about a sidewalk, to come play basketball with their friends.

So we show up at six, half an hour early, and the gym director comes out and says how he’s not sure whether there’s volleyball practice tonight. If he’d known we were coming, he’d have cleared the court, sent the kids home. Well, I tell him, no sense kicking the boys out until the coach shows up.

They’re fun to watch. Nice kids. If you’ve never seen teenage boys playing pick-up basketball, you have missed out on something beautiful and noble.

Eventually the coach shows, and the gym director goes to tell the boys it’s time to go home. Hold on, I say. We’ve only got one team practicing tonight. It’s an enormous gym. We’re only using half the court. Boys can keep playing on the other side.

The divide between the two types of teens who want use of that rec center isn’t particularly racial or religious or cultural. But it’s socio-economic for sure. It is easier to simply tell the local boys that they have to go now.

But in the battle we’re in, it is much more important that they know they belong, not just to their mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles, but to their city. That what they bring to this world is valuable and good. That they are worth making room for. They are needed and wanted both.

That’s the battle.

Fluctuat nec mergitur, motto of the city of Paris. By Britchi Mirela (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons. As seen on the 5th Arrondissement’s Mayorial Offices, by which I walked or rode my bike five or six days a week for a year. Not the Sorbonne, thanks for asking; Sciences Po.

Why God Made the University

Last updated on: November 13, 2015 at 5:08 pm By Jennifer Fitz

I didn’t fully understand Catholic education until this semester. Those who follow the blog know I’m one of the instructors for a weekly high school economics and debate class. It’s a small class, eight students: One Orthodox, two Anglicans, the remainder Catholic.

The program hosting us is unapologetically Catholic, but it’s not a program “about” the Catholic faith. Sometimes there are classes specifically featuring religious content, sometimes there aren’t. Usually the instructors are Catholic, sometimes they aren’t. The rule that holds everything together is that nothing will be taught that is contrary to the Catholic faith, and by the way here are three different people you can talk to other than your child’s instructor if any questions of that nature should arise. I’ll speak more on this rule below.

***

What we’re teaching this year is logic and debate, personal finance, and basic economic theory. Typical high school fare. It was thrown onto the course offerings because our state generally requires a half-credit in economics; for transcript purposes, parents can choose whether to consider the debate portion a class or a club. None of the course materials happen to be “Catholic,” save a few key encyclicals tacked onto the last weeks of the syllabus, fault of what was available in a package that met the constraints we faced. At I start of the year, what I thought to myself is, “This is probably the most secular class I’ve ever taught.”

I was so, so wrong.

Because my job is to teach logic and the art of argument, my job is to teach my students how to arrive at the truth. Our goal isn’t to score points or impress people with our rhetorical skills. Our goal is to find out what is true. Period.

This is what universities were made for, literally.

People talk talk talk about universities as a place where one encounters controversial or challenging ideas, and it is true that a working university will indeed contain just that. The way that a carpenter will purchase plywood or a chef will order bushels of produce, professors haul around ideas. Raw ones. Unfinished. Some of them sporting rotten parts that need to be identified and removed.

But the purpose of the university is not to show off all those raw, uncut ideas as if they were the goal of the education; what a university does, when it does its job, is churn through ideas, sort them and test them and form them, until what is left is the truth.

It is impressive to see a tree turned into a finished piece of furniture, or the fruits of the farm turned into a meal. Surely there are moments when a carpenter poses with a half-finished project, or the chef grins while chopping the garlic; but when the carpenter says, “I play with wood,” or the chef says, “I play with food,” we only take them seriously if, in the end, there is a finished work to be savored. If a carpenter thinks his end product is sawdust, you need a new carpenter.

The idea of “truth” has gone out of fashion, particularly at the institutions so-called “universities.” This is why, and precisely why, college sucks. Every article, every protest, every controversy these days is nothing more than people discovering that modern education consists of rolling in intellectual splinters and compost.

To be Catholic is to seek the truth, and to seek the truth is to be, however imperfectly, Catholic.

***

Because we are enamored with the idea of “controversy” as if that were what education were about, some people recoil in horror at the idea that an educational institution, such as the one I teach at, would insist that all instruction be consistent with the Catholic faith. How can you test new ideas, if you have such stifling rules?

The answer is that the Catholic faith is nothing more than a collection of things we know to be true. If it is false, it is contrary to the Catholic faith. If it might be true, it is consistent with that faith.

The carpenter doesn’t find it stifling to have a rule that all finished works must be structurally sound. The chef does not find it stifling to have a rule that all meals must be edible. The “rule” is not a constraint, it is the very goal.

The same people who are so very proud of their “originality” and “daring” when it comes to ideas tend to be persistently cautious about which mushrooms belong on their salad. They care about the mushrooms because they know the wrong ones are deadly; they don’t care about the ideas, because they think that ideas have no consequence.

To be Catholic is to want to test all the mushrooms, but only consume the good ones.

Photo: The main reading room of Graz University Library (19th century) on 2 Sep 2003. Picture taken and uploaded by Dr. Marcus Gossler, (Own work) [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Do Girls’ Sports Even Matter? What to do with the Transgender Athlete

Last updated on: November 5, 2015 at 3:27 pm By Jennifer Fitz

Rebecca Hamilton reports on the recent ruling by the Department of Education that girls’ sports teams must now admit certain boys — both to playing on the team and to the girls’ locker room. It’s a problematic ruling on many levels, but to get our minds around the issues, we need to pull apart the different questions involved.

1. Girls like to play sports.

I know that girls like sports because I can’t think of a single female in my family that I ever met who didn’t take an interest in sports in one way or another. My daughters and nieces all played sports. So did my sisters and I. My mom was a PE teacher. My grandmothers both played sports, not just in high school but throughout their lives. The only lady I ever chatted about sports with in my great-grandparents’ generation was my Aunt Helen, but yes: Sports. Lots of sports stories.

Girls like to play.

It is therefore important that we create opportunities for girls and women to play sports, just as it’s important that we create opportunities for boys and men to play sports.

2. Girls are different from boys.

I’ve played and watched single-gender and co-ed sports, and the two are different. A group of women interact together differently than a group of men, and a mixed group takes on another feel altogether. This isn’t good or bad, it just is. There’s a time and a place for all three options. Men and boys need time doing stuff with only other men and boys. Women and girls need time spent doing stuff, including sports, just among themselves.

Co-ed teams are, in a completely different way, also important — precisely because when you put boys and girls or men and women together the dynamic changes. It’s good to have co-ed teams not because they are just like single-gender teams, but because they are not the same. It’s good to have that alternate experience of men and women working together.

It is therefore important that we create opportunities for girls, boys, women, and men to play on both single-gender and co-ed teams.

3. Good competition makes for good play.

We say a game is sporting when all the players get a fair chance to test themselves. The goal of sports isn’t to confine competition to only the very best players in the entire world; otherwise, we’d only ever need one stadium and a good TV camera, done. Rather, in setting up play, we put a lot of effort into creating fair teams — which is to say, teams where players are matched for ability as best we can manage, so that the game is interesting and challenging.

There are a variety of ways we do this — by age, by size, by skill, by years of experience, by the level of the team, and sometimes by regulating the gender-composition of the team. My daughter’s volleyball league, for example, uses a combination of birthdates and gender when composing teams — there can be boys on a girls’ team, but the boys play two years above their birthdate if they are playing co-ed. It’s a rough corrective for the average differences in muscle mass and height among teenage boys and girls; and while a sixteen-year-old boy will be, on average, taller and stronger than an eighteen-year-old girl, the girl will presumably have an advantage in skill and experience that keeps it fair.

Sometimes the rules themselves take into account variations in skill. My youngest daughter’s FCA volleyball team (co-ed) gives new players the chance to try again if they miss a serve, and to stand as far forward as necessary in order to get the ball over the net. If you are more skilled than the average eight-year-old and get your ball over the net on the first try, you’re still limited in your total number of serves, so that no one player serves the whole game.

When we consider the question of gender-switching players, we need to consider how, if at all, this affects the fairness of play.

4. Sex and the Sex Drive are Linked

Your sex is whether you are male or female. Your interest in sexual intercourse is intimately tied to your attraction to men or to women or to let’s-not-go-there. If you are female, it is the ordinary, species-preserving instinct that you will find men sexually attractive. If you are male, it is the ordinary, species-preserving instinct that you will find women sexually attractive. The sex drive is necessarily strong; if you’ve ever give birth, or spent long hours with one of the young products of childbirth, you understand why it is that the desire for sexual intercourse need be so overwhelmingly strong.

–> If intercourse were as interesting as knitting and no more, we’d have lots of hats, and not so many babies to wear them. Hats don’t stay up all night crying. Hats don’t argue with you about what’s fair. Hats never, ever, vomit in your lap.

Chastity is that whole collection of things we do which help us respond to our sexual urges properly. We acknowledge the intensity of our sexual drive and make behavioral changes to prevent us from acting on impulses that may be natural but are not always appropriate. Recognizing that sexual intercourse is the act that creates a new living person who will need to be cared for and educated and raised by a mother and father, we do not wantonly and recklessly seek to satisfy our impulse to procreate with the same abandon we might unleash in the yarn store when the urge comes over us to create a new hat.

Because sports are physically and emotionally intense, and because sports can bring us into physical and emotional intimacy with other players, we need to take into account what effect, if any, our relationship with our fellow players might have on our ability to appropriately direct our sexual desires.

To this end, one of the traditional benefits of single-gender sports is precisely that they remove the question of sexual tension. One of the traditional benefits of co-ed sports is that they cement the bonds of marriage, family, and friendship, and provide a chaste venue for courtship.

What to do with a Gender-Switching Player?

Because same-sex attraction is nothing new under the sun, there has always been a challenge to chastity in single-gender sports. Because promiscuity is nothing new under the sun, there has always been a challenge to chastity in co-ed sports, and in all the things that happen before and after the game, regardless of who was or was not on the field.

Depending on the social environment, and regardless of the composition of the team, this difficulty could be virtually nil, or it could be notoriously overpowering. Abuse doesn’t disprove right use: We can’t say that because in _____ situation sexual harassment or unchastity were par for the course, therefore we need not concern ourselves with a higher ideal. On the contrary, we should always strive to create teams on which all players feel free to play their sport without fear of harassment.

Taking a purely secular perspective on the question (we’ll add in some Catholic in a moment) we can say that an appropriate sporting environment:

Does not subject the players to unwanted sexual intimidation or advances.
Allows players to choose between single-gender and co-ed sports, per their interest.
Creates a fair game, suitably challenging to all players.
Offers opportunities for men and women, boys and girls, to find a sport that suits their ability and level of play.

From a secular standpoint, the matter of transgender players potentially affects each of these concerns:

Unwanted sexual intimacy: It is not unreasonable for athletes to wish to avoid being viewed or touched in a sexual manner. The traditional divisions between single-gender and co-ed sports take into account the varying demands of modesty. It is reasonable for players to question the motives of a person of the opposite sex who is requesting a level of physical and emotional intimacy typically reserved for single-gender teams. When a team switches from being single-gender to being co-ed, this fact should be acknowledged openly and the switch be made fully. To pretend that a team is single-gender when in fact it is not is a fiction that serves no good purpose.

The option for a single-gender playing experience: The person who authentically experiences a sense of “not belonging” to his or her own gender may understandably feel out place and in search of a sense of fitting-in. This does not change the fact that whether one is male or female is biological fact. A co-ed team is a place where it doesn’t matter much whether you’re a man or a woman; in a single-gender team, it often matters very much. Fairness to the players wishing to play on a single-gender teams means respecting the boundaries of biology.

Fair play: The nature of competition dictates that teams will always seek the winning advantage. No matter was provisions are made to match up equally-skilled players, it is understood that everyone will endeavor to build up their team in a way that meets the letter of those provisions while at the same time conferring the greatest chance of winning. Competition is like that. When a team switches from being single-gender to co-ed, it behooves the rule makers to honestly assess what impact, if any, the change makes on the overall playing field.

There is no single answer here. If only a very few players wish to integrate a previously single-gender team, one might choose to evaluate players on a case-by-case basis and simply assign the player to the level of play best suited to his personal talent and ability. When there is a large scale transition from single-gender to co-ed play, the rules reasonably look at overall averages in the physical differences between men and women. In some sports, or for some age groups, there may be no gender advantage at all.

In all cases, however, one should avoid any decision which is utterly and undeniably asinine.

Opportunity to play: While single-gender sporting opportunities are worthwhile and important, one needs to also consider the overall good of all members of the community. Thus in situations where there are simply not enough players to field single-gender teams, one looks for ways to create co-ed teams that are fair and enjoyable for all players. There is a balance to be sought between the self-centered individual who feels that the world owes him a chance to do whatever his little heart pleases, and the indifferent community who finds those pesky trouble-makers need to just suck-it-up and eat dirt. A person undergoing a gender-identity crisis does not therefore become the other gender. The community can reasonably accommodate that player by either offering a co-ed team or by reminding players to please try out for the team with the matching biology.

Adding the Catholic to the Equation

Catholics are a famously both-and people. Our ultimate goal is the good of the person. In a contentious case such as this one, we can say without hesitation that the Department of Education has ruled in a way that disregards the good of all involved. The decision to require certain boys be admitted to the girls’ locker room is a violation of the girls’ natural right to modesty and privacy. There is another, deeper concern though.

As Catholics, we don’t require impeccability for participation in community life. We can observe that someone is deeply confused about his sexuality, but still find a way for that person to connect with the wider community and to grow as a person, as much as reasonably possible. This doesn’t include the right to shower with whom he will, but it does include finding a way for the athlete to play sports. People like to play sports. Male or female, people like to play sports, and healthy communities find ways to make that happen.

Because we care about the whole person, though, we cannot assist in the perpetuating of a lie. It is an honest thing to say, “I see that you are deeply uncomfortable with who you are as a young man, and that this is a source of torment for you.” It is not an honest thing to say, “Therefore, let’s all pretend you are a young woman.”

To be honest doesn’t require the athlete to instantly fix himself. It doesn’t require that he pretend to feelings he doesn’t have. It doesn’t require that he pretend to enjoy and identify with the entirely superficial, stereotypical gender norms that have no bearing on one’s actual masculinity or femininity.

We only need to be honest: You are a young man, and you are asking us to make this girls’ team co-ed for you. Okay, let’s talk about the implications, and find a way for you to play your sport in a way that respects everyone involved.

Photo: Members of U.S. Armed Forces Women’s Volleyball team blocks an Italian player from scoring during the 3rd Military World Games held in Catania, Sicily, 2003. U.S Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Terry Spain [Public Domain] via Wikimedia.