He goes on:
Then I think of a clever and energetic little boy whose family I love dearly, and who is lucky enough to live with grandmother and grandfather, and with plenty of other family around him, but whose father is a dreadful man, having sired children upon three different women. What are the chances that that boy will not learn the lessons of fornication all around him?
Still nothing to do with Father Martin, Tony. Can I call you Tony? And that sounds like a single story of fornication from which the energetic boy was kept far away.
I know of a parish whose priest was a homosexual abuser… It was clear that those boys were not coerced, but enticed, seduced. After all, they outnumbered the priest, and they were big. The abuser had won their consent.
No, he didn’t, Tony. He couldn’t have. Underage boys cannot consent to sexual intercourse; this is rape. It doesn’t matter if the underage boys were large in size. You’re describing sexual predation, not membership in the LGBTQ community to whom Father Martin wants to minister. I’m sure Father Martin would be the first to condemn this, but fortunately he had nothing to do with it.
Shall we say more? I know a lovely woman whose husband left her and her children for another woman; that story is now as common as dirt… one of her children took his own life.
Someone needs to sit Anthony Esolen down and teach him the facts of life. This is also not a story about LGBTQ people. Also, say it with me now, NONE OF THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH FATHER JAMES MARTIN.
The next few paragraphs are about pornography and group sodomy, and I won’t re-post them here.
Name for me one impoverished or oppressed people in the history of the world who rose to prosperity or who threw off the yoke of their oppressors while living in sexual license and remaining content with the ensuing family chaos. Name one. The Irish were brutalized by the English for three centuries, yet they did not lose the family, and they prevailed. Had my Italian grandfathers been indifferent to the morals of their children, I would not now be writing these words, because only a strong family headed by a good father can channel the energies of a young man with a rebellious streak who is stronger than his mother and smarter than his teachers.
You’re certainly not smarter than your English teacher, Tony. If you’d listened to her you wouldn’t be writing stringy paragraphs like that.
The western world is dying, literally dying. No one is getting married. Hedonism has led to its own demise; Eros has slain himself on his own altar. Do you wonder, Father Martin, why you do not see boys and girls holding hands? Because the world you bless has raised the stakes too high. They dare not do so; it will be a sign that they are in bed with one another, and embarrassment, if not moral qualms, will keep them from making that sign in public.
I see boys and girls holding hands all the time. Once, when I was over on the Franciscan University campus, I saw a young college couple holding hands on the way to the chapel. A pious gentleman who was there for the Charismatic Conference screamed “YOU CRAZY KIDS LEAVE ROOM FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT!” Once, when I was helping to direct a school play for some devout and very conservative Catholic families, I told one little boy to link arms with the girl next to him for a musical number. He refused, with real fear in his eyes, because his father had threatened to punish him “if he ever touched a girl.” In my experience, public displays of affection among children are discouraged more often by the prudes and Esolens of this world than by sexual libertines. And Father Martin has nothing to do with that.
And now we get to the racist part:
Shall we turn to the poorest among us? What two centuries of slavery and another century of relentless indignities failed to do, the Sexual Revolution accomplished in one generation, the destruction of the black family in the United States. Nor has it reserved its foul work to blacks. It has ruined such families as my grandparents could depend on, when they were mining coal for a pittance in Pennsylvania.
Well, I’m glad your grandparents could depend on black families toiling in the mines for a pittance for them in Pennsylvania. Or were you saying your grandparents were toiling for a pittance? I’ve lost track.
And it’s more than a little sickening that you’re spouting overly flowery versions of the same nonsense my neo-Nazi bus driver growls when he listens to prurient talk radio. The reason so many black families lack fathers couldn’t possibly be because of a history of systematically denying enslaved persons the ability to marry and deliberately breaking up their families for profit; nor could it be because of police brutality and a culture of incarceration leaving so many black men dead or in prison. It’s because of the sexual revolution. They’re all gay now. What an idea.
Who could have predicted that license would enslave? Everyone: all the pagan philosophers, even Epicurus; all the prophets, lawgivers, and evangelists in the testaments old and new; all the Fathers of the Church; all the schoolmen, all their enemies among the Renaissance humanists, all the Protestant reformers, all the American founders, even Jefferson, all the Victorian moralists, even the feminist George Eliot, all the popes, especially those who like Leo XIII wrote extensively on the social troubles of the modern world—anyone with eyes and a beating heart.
Her name was Mary Anne Evans, you silly man. And again, none of this has anything to do with Father James Martin.
The single pragmatic question that should guide our course of action is simply this. What customs, and the laws that promote and protect them, give boys and girls the best chance to grow up with a married mother and father committed to one another for life, and to learn the feelings and ways that are natural and normal for their sex, so that they will be attracted and attractive each to the other, and determined to have lifelong marriages of their own in turn?
I’m not overly concerned with making boys and girls attractive to one another. They usually are without our encouragement. You yourself told the story of the young man and woman and the trick from Sodom. And as for teaching them to feel, I don’t think it’s really possible to teach feelings. We’re supposed to teach our children to behave ethically regardless of what they feel like doing, whether that feeling is a desire to rob a bank, eat an economy-sized jar of Nutella with their bare hands, or engage in a trick of Sodom. No one is required to teach them to feel the correct emotion. Also, it’s exceptionally bad form to demand a course of action at the tail end of a long essay with no thesis where you’ve told several unrelated nasty stories and failed to relate what the problem is.
Answer that question first, and then we can figure out what to do for those who fall afoul of nature or the moral law or both. That would be mercy indeed, and not indifference (or complicity) with a grin.
Oh, I see. This entire article was the equivalent of one of those memes saying we can’t fight the death penalty when there are unborn babies in danger. Father Martin isn’t allowed to be nice to gay people when there are young men and women to be catechized with Catholic values. At least, that’s the closest I can come to the gist of it. It’s difficult for me to write an article refuting something like this, because he’s not really making a point.
Let me take a crack at the ending question there. If we take out the histrionics, it amounts to “how are we going to have strong Catholic marriages and instill our Catholic values into our children, when the world we live in has so many different values and can often seem openly hostile?”
Well, I’d certainly hesitate to hold up my own family as a paragon. Like most families, most of the time we’re just getting by and sometimes we can’t even manage to do that. However, in my own experience, I have found that if you strive to do what is yours to do without bothering to fear the world, the world won’t intimidate you as much. I try not to take an interest in other people’s sex lives. I make a special effort to ignore gossip about sex and mind my own business– for example, if this is typical of his writing, I’m not going to read an article by Anthony Esolen ever again. My husband and I obey the Church’s teaching in our own marriage, and the Church’s teaching is what we teach our daughter. But we make a point to do so without fear or hyperbole. I answer her questions honestly but with a level of detail I think is appropriate to her age. I teach her that her body is a good, powerful, holy thing that belongs to her and to God, not to anyone else, and if someone tries to touch her in a way she doesn’t like she should run and tell me right away. I don’t stop her from holding hands with her friends.
When my daughter runs into people who believe or act differently than we do, I listen to her questions and I say something along the lines of “We disagree with them and we do things differently because of our faith. But our faith also says that we have to love and respect everyone, and I expect you to do that.” And I use that same line for disagreements about gender or sexuality as well as any other issue of faith and morals. I am not perfect at this or any other task, but it’s the way I try to behave.
That answer has nothing to do with Father James Martin, of course, but then again the original article didn’t either.
(image via Pixabay)
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In