Homosexuality as a fad; the sex-drenched society

The Netflix film Cuties - sexualised depiction of women starts young

Nothing is more passé than being straight these days: Michaela Kennedy-Cuomo, the 23-year-old daughter of the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, said as much in an Instagram interview in which she spoke about what it meant to her to announce that she is queer.

In the interview she said her main concern when coming out was not with negativity from the wider society but that her own circle might think she was just trying to be trendy.

She said this fear arose because it’s “hip or cool to be not hetero in my liberal bubble”.

What! That young people make decisions on their sexual orientation for life on the basis of what is the latest fad! How sick is that? But it fits the pattern of the "transgender craze" that has erupted and the cluster phenomenon of a group of girls suddenly declaring they want to be male, going on to explain themselves with an outpouring of the "internet-speak" they have absorbed.

New York-based Guardian columnist and lesbian Arwa Mahdawi, whose partner recently gave birth to a daughter they will raise together, reacted with amazement at the nature of Kennedy-Cuomo's fear for her reputation.

Mahdawi said that when she came out 20 years ago she was afraid of being assaulted for being gay. Now, instead of inciting "widespread slurs", being gay is "something that the privileged offspring of politicians reckon is a badge of honour".

Homosexuality as purely a status symbol!

Not taking away respect for homosexuals, if this is how young people make their decisions under the macabre influence of social media and the mainstream media's delight in highlighting weird self-invention,  then they are bound to suffer the death of their psyche, given how they have adopted the lie fed them by the elite who often create, certainly cultivate, the latest fashions in lifestyle as much as in entertainment or clothing. There's no fun in such fashions, however, as by their warped nature they eventually kill their followers' spirit - we all pity the ill-fated follower of fashion!

Kennedy-Cuomo also revealed that she had experimented with several flavours of sexuality (such as bi- and pan-) before deciding that hers is of the demi- variety.

That was another element that jarred with Mahdawi:

Last time I checked, demisexuals weren’t exactly an oppressed minority fighting for equal rights. They are just people who aren’t sexually attracted to others unless they form a strong emotional bond with them first.

Furthermore:

Acting as if needing to get to know someone before jumping into bed with them constitutes a marginalised sexual orientation that needs a flag seems to play into the hands of rightwingers who are desperate to argue that liberals are narcissists with a victimhood complex.

That said, I don’t think demisexuality should be written off as attention-seeking. Indeed, I think it’s instructive to look at what the rise of demisexuality says about sexuality more generally; Kennedy-Cuomo, after all, is just one of a growing number of (mostly) young people [my emphasis - BS] who have latched on to the label in recent years.

Note "latched on to"! Hardly, language to confirm that the state discussed relates to a innate personal attribute.

Then Mahdawi gets to a second point of importance when discussing sexuality today:

The fact that there was a need to come up with a term like “demisexual” (which was coined in 2006) shows how sex-drenched society has become. The portrayal of women in the popular media has become increasingly sexualised. Porn has never been so accessible. Dating apps such as Tinder mean it has never been so easy to hook up.

It all starts young, especially for girls, as was highlighted earlier this year when Facebook announced Instagram for Kids. In a letter to the company, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, an advocacy group that often leads campaigns against big tech and its targeting of children, wrote of Instagram: 

The platform’s relentless focus on appearance, self-presentation, and branding presents challenges to adolescents’ privacy and wellbeing. Younger children are even less developmentally equipped to deal with these challenges, as they are learning to navigate social interactions, friendships, and their inner sense of strengths and challenges during this crucial window of development.

A coalition of 35 consumer advocacy groups along with 64 experts in child development co-signed the letter, which also stated: "Adolescent girls report feeling pressured to post sexualized selfies for attention from their peers". As well:

Citing public health research and other studies, the letter notes that excessive screen time and social media use can contribute to a variety of risks for kids including obesity, lower psychological well-being, decreased quality of sleep, increased risk of depression and suicide ideation, and other issues.

By their fruit you will know them! Another impact on young people's lives from corporate profit-seeking and the slavery of consumerism is stressed by Mahdawi:

Here’s the funny thing, though: while pop culture has become more and more sexualised, statistics show that young people are actually having far less sex than previous generations. There has been a lot of hand-wringing about hook-up culture, but it may be more of a media invention than a reality.

Indeed kids these days seem to spend more time describing the exact specifications of their sexuality and where it sits on various spectrums than they do actually having sex. Sex is supposed to sell, and it’s being sold to us willy-nilly – but as the rise of demisexuality shows, fewer people seem desperate to buy into what we’ve been told sexuality is supposed to look like.

The harm here comes in the form of young people turning to temporary sexual relationships - plural - and putting off a healthy search for one partner in life, in marriage, with a willingness to commit to the fruitful outcome that is children.

Especially, Mahdawi, as a new mother and obviously endowed with moral seriousness, is disturbed by the mental and emotional massaging of a sexual nature that goes on in the West, and increasingly in other societies, through all media and their accomplice, the entertainment world. Her terms, "sex-drenched society" and "increasingly sexualised" and "[sex is] sold to us willy-nilly" convey to me that this New York resident is very worried at the direction of society.

Rightly so! How can young people see the video of Cardi B's WAP, and note the awards given the song, and not have a shamed (girls) and scornful (boys) view of women? No wonder girls want to shed that female persona!

A second case of a woman letting down the side comes with the predicament that Billie Eilish found herself in after posing in a set of corsets. She had to withstand some disappointment from fans, even ridicule, but retorted with cussing repeating, "It's all about what makes you feel good".

Eilish is only 19 and so we can give her some leeway in sorting out what's important. Reportedly she told British Vogue:

My thing is that I can do whatever I want. It’s all about what makes you feel good. If you want to get surgery, go get surgery. If you want to wear a dress that somebody thinks that you look too big wearing, f**k it – if you feel like you look good, you look good.

New York Post also quotes a sympathetic fan:

“Guys, can we please realize that Billie is finding herself and that she is happy with the way she is and that is all that should matter. Billie is only 19 years old. She’s been [in] the public eye since she was 15 and she is finding herself. She don’t [owe] us anything.”

But the ET outlet identifies the contradiction of a young woman showing off her assets in a sexualised manner while campaigning for a positive view of women in society:

Eilish's new music also tackles the idea of men taking advantage of underage girls. She knows that this message combined with her more mature look will raise eyebrows.

Obviously, Eilish did not learn from the earlier instance of misuse of a photo - she has reported how her "boobs were trending on Twitter!" - or from the mockery that Emma Watson encountered after baring her breasts in - again - a women's fashion magazine in 2017. The mockery arose because Watson's interview had dwelt on serious topics like women's empowerment whereas she was seen to have let herself be milked by the magazine for greater sales.

A wag put these words into Watson's mouth: "Women's rights! Feminism! Social justice! Hey, look at my tits!" For both Watson and Eilish, certainly be proud of one's body, but don't let yourself be part of the abuse of women by the corporate elite in their profiteering by broadcasting sexualised images of girls and women. Learn the difference between liberation and objectification. It can come down to the question: "Who makes the money?"

This post has given attention to the diverse sources of concern about how the soft oppression of young people bolsters the malaise that is building in Western society, and rapidly elsewhere. The manipulation of the young and innocent by promoters of a set of false principles relating to sexual orientation, and feminism, is causing harm on a personal level and it is destroying the health of society as a whole.

The solution is to take stock, to start from the fact that young people are trapped in a toxic culture that prevents them from knowing the joy that flows when a person has learnt to be self-disciplined enough to be in control of their own intellectual and emotional life.

For that, they need goals and the support along the way that Western society no longer provides. Western society needs to return to the basics of our civilisation and learn again that God made us, and in opening up a relationship with us, makes it possible for us to know ourselves, how to be the best person we can be. That's the kind of self-invention we need.

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In the prison of my subjective feelings

A prison of our own making - photo by Enrico Hänel from Pexels

One time when the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was at a magnificent waterfall that many people were admiring he overheard one visitor describe the scene as "sublime" whereas another called it "pretty". Coleridge decried the expression of "pretty" as failing to match the reality of the sight.  

The academic and writer C S Lewis explains Coleridge's disgust:

The man who called the cataract sublime was not intending simply to describe his own emotions about it: he was also claiming that the object was one which merited those emotions. ...  'Can you be righteous', asks Traherne, 'unless you be just in rendering to things their due esteem? All things were made to be yours and you were made to prize them according to their value.'"

When people are in a group where there is an argument going on, each of those arguing looks for support on the basis of what everyone should agree to, what is logical, what is true to that which exists in the real world, and akin to that, what is the God-given reality. In other words, each party in practice points to some objective moral or intellectual value that the other side has violated. Each side ought to know, but often doesn't, that it is pointless to say "I don't care what you say, I have my own opinion - [or worse] - I have my own facts".

To speak about the objectivity of moral and intellectual values means there's something outside of what I think or I feel - my subjectivity - and things are right and wrong or good and bad in reality, for reasons that everyone must agree to because, on consideration, those reasons can be arrived at logically or because they can be observed and their meaning agreed to.

We have our own feelings and emotions but we have to live in the real world. Therefore, we have to train ourselves to react in an appropriate manner to what we encounter. The child has to learn "to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful", as Plato wrote. Teachers help the young learn of the richness that lies in Shakespeare's lines, or in the works of other writers or artists that have lasted the test of time - esteemed because they are seen as being true to life and therefore valuable in understanding the human experience.

Some in education, especially, come up with methodologies or concepts they want introduced into the curriculum. They often shy from expressing an objective value for their innovations but say they are important because they are "necessary" or "progressive", or "effective". However, Lewis states:

They could be forced by argument to answer the questions 'necessary for what?', 'progressing towards what?', 'effecting what?'; in the last resort they would have to admit that some state of affairs was in their opinion good for its own sake.

Objectivity relating to intellectual and moral values is not just a Western concept. Lewis refers to the principle being the basis of the Tao, the ultimate reality,  and acknowledges Hinduism's focus on what is known as Rta:

In early Hinduism conduct in men which can be called good consists in conformity to, or almost participation in, the Rta — that great ritual or pattern of nature and supernature which is revealed alike in the cosmic order, the moral virtues, and the ceremonial of the temple. Righteousness, correctness, order, the Rta, is constantly identified with satya or truth, correspondence to reality. 

Unfortunately, what worried Lewis, Coleridge, and Plato, is now widely accepted, namely that values such as what is good, what is beautiful and what is true "are just expressions of my subjective point of view, my subjective feelings". This means there are no principles outside ourselves that determine how we should behave or what degree of respect we should give to others. Here is where we pick up the content of a talk given by Catholic Bishop Robert Barron of Los Angeles.

He expresses what is the common sentiment of younger age groups: 

"Don't tell me what to think; don't tell me how to behave; don't tell me what's beautiful. My subjective feelings determine value and what's the matter with that?"

That attitude of a young person going into life draws a heartfelt response:

Do you see everybody how it locks us into these little prisons - the little prison of my subjective consciousness of my immediate feelings, and how the realm of objective value breaks us out of these pathetic little prisons and allow us now to explore worlds beyond my little arena of feeling and subjective apprehension?

To be drawn by a great master [artist] into the realm of objective value - it opens my life in such a wonderful way.

Another problem with this hyper-subjectivism is we're locked in our little prisons affirming our own feelings all the time - it sets us necessarily against one another if my feelings are incommensurate with yours. My feelings have no real reference to an objective value. All I can do is fight with you. We can't appeal together to some transcendent "third" by which our feelings are measured. No, we're just now in a war of feeling against feeling, this little prison that leads to warfare. I'm afraid that's where a lot of people find themselves today. That's the default position of a lot of people.

Break out of the prison! What gets you out is objective moral, intellectual, and aesthetic value. What opens the door toward real communion [is that] together we fall in love with Shakespeare, together we fall in love with Dante.... Good, now we've transcended this little petty world.

I know you hear this all the time, but don't let them seduce you with this suffocating subjectivism. Rather be open to the realm of the objective.

Michael Sandel, a political philosophy professor at Harvard, says in his book What Money Can't Buy, "We need to reason about how to value our bodies, human dignity, teaching and learning." He means we ought to use our intellectual powers to arrive at principles that allow us to agree on the reality of all that is important. The purpose of that is to create a harmonious society. For example, we need to go beyond scientific findings and find the deeper values of matters like patriotism, family, solidarity and justice. 

In an interview on that book, he is asked if there is "any downside to engaging with the world through the eyes of moral philosophy, rather than simple market logic?"

His answer is: "None but the burden of reflection and moral seriousness."

Rather than charging into debates on important issues flailing about with hot emotions or pure assumption, we need to identify values that are relevant to the context, that provide essential meaning. Sandel gives a topic related to his book's subject matter to illustrate his approach and he points to the goal of social discourse:

"Consider the language employed by the critics of commercialisation," he writes. "'Debasement', 'defilement', 'coarsening', 'pollution', the loss of the 'sacred'. This is a spiritually charged language that gestures toward higher ways of living and being." 

Those "higher ways" point to the importance of understanding the distinction between subjective and objective values. Lewis and his short work The Abolition of Man (see here) states that emotions "can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it". Further: 

Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao, or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own natural impulses. Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can over-arch rulers and ruled alike. A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery. 

All the more reason to escape from the horror house of subjectivity, that small prison of self-invention and emotional self-absorption. 

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Christian meditation app fills the gap

Jump into this video here for insight into a richer experience

Sam Harris is a writer and podcaster with a background in neuroscience. His is the youngest face of the "New Atheism"  brigade, which we don't hear about so much now because it has become clear that it is a touched-up version of traditional atheism.

However, Harris has gone on to promote Mindfulness, a well-meaning fad that has a business side attracting products such as Jimmy Kimmel's Mindfulness Coloring Book or the emag, 108 Mindfulness Lessons, which offers advice on surviving test stress and other student difficulties.

Harris' interest in mediation dates from his college days and his Waking Up app has been well-received. However, he has given his attention mostly to the Hindu and Buddhist strain of meditation, ignoring the riches of the Christian experience.

This is where those who want a more complete form of meditation, one that aligns with the hunger for a relationship with the deepest element of reality, that is, God, need to turn to groups such as the long-established World Community for Christian Mediation. This is "a global spiritual community united in the practice of meditation in the Christian tradition. It shares the fruits of this practice widely and inclusively, serving the unity of all and building understanding between faiths and cultures."

The community serves people in all kinds of situations, including business people and physicians."Members of WCCM span more than a hundred countries. There are about sixty-seven national coordinators. Its international centre is Bonnevaux – an ancient monastic site now dedicated to global peace and dialogue around the daily practice of meditation – near Poitiers in France."

For the latest community news on its website have a look here, and jump into the mediation page here. 

Watch the video titled The Pilgrimage - The Way of Christian Meditation here. Access the WCCM app here 

Sam Harris is right that we must do something to rid ourselves of the "habitual distraction" that contends with us for control over our time and mind space -  "your thoughts are incessantly appearing and capturing your attention and deluding you", he says.

But you can see how more profound  the Christian experience is when meditation is regarded as the pathway to deep attention to God, leading us to "feel the feelings of God". That is the path to follow!

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All belief points to a spiritual capacity

Detail from art by Lia Halloran A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.

New Scientist magazine has a series of articles on the topic of "Effortless thinking". One is titled "The god-shaped hole in your brain". 

The profound implications on the issue of the mind having a spiritual capability beyond what the brain produces are clear when the author writes:

If God designed the human brain, he (or she) did a lousy job. Dogged by glitches and biases, requiring routine shutdown for maintenance for 8 hours a day, and highly susceptible to serious malfunction, a product recall would seem to be in order. But in one respect at least, God played a blinder: our brains are almost perfectly designed to believe in him/her.

This is akin to the point of the famous passage from man-of-the-world Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions in which he states:

Great are you, O Lord, and exceedingly worthy of praise; your power is immense, and your wisdom beyond reckoning. And so we men, who are a due part of your creation, long to praise you – we also carry our mortality about with us, carry the evidence of our sin and with it the proof that you thwart the proud. You arouse us so that praising you may bring us joy, because you have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. 

The New Scientist writer also goes into the kindred matter of " the powerful and very human attribute we call belief":

Beliefs define how we see the world and act within it; without them, there would be no plots to behead soldiers, no war, no economic crises and no racism. There would also be no cathedrals, no nature reserves, no science and no art. Whatever beliefs you hold, it’s hard to imagine life without them. Beliefs, more than anything else, are what make us human. They also come so naturally that we rarely stop to think how bizarre belief is.

In 1921, philosopher Bertrand Russell put it succinctly when he described belief as “the central problem in the analysis of mind”. Believing, he said, is “the most ‘mental’ thing we do” – by which he meant the most removed from the “mere matter” that our brains are made of. How can a physical object like a human brain believe things? Philosophy has made little progress on Russell’s central problem.

The writer of this series reveals in one article that he is an atheist, but he does his readers a service by stating clearly key elements of what humans have experienced of the spiritual world.  

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When the front door of the mind is locked

What's allowed in? Kevin Bidwell photo - Pexels

J R R Tolkien wrote, “Myths, fantasies, and stories can open the heart’s back door when the front door of the mind is locked”. Already around the middle of last century he had recognised that the common mindset had become "If I can't see it, it doesn't exist". That "front door" is often the "plausibility structure" that individuals unconsciously construct in their way of thinking, and these days many commentators have expressed dismay at the shallowness of thought generally - typical examples here and here. 

A second element that impacts our pattern of thinking - what we accept as plausible - is the lack of ongoing contact with a rich variety of people outside the "we" group determining our reactions. Therefore, there is a lot of "emotional" responses to stimuli as against calmer reasoning as to best behaviour or where the truth lies.

In this connection, longtime readers of this blog will know that one area of interest of mine is how the supernatural realm is sometimes unveiled, but the wonder can be glossed over because of predetermined habits of mind, or simply by the distractions of this digital age. 

In my previous post, the experience of one survivor of the Florida apartment collapse is highlighted because the chain of events that led to her survival readily prompts recognition as a reality that prayers are effective. As she told reporters who took her account, she felt it necessary to thank God for keeping her safe, given she had lit a prayer candle before an icon of Our Lady of Guadelupe, signifying her belief that God answers prayers made through the intercession of other Christians, on earth or in heaven.  

Further, in a post here I report an account of a father who was part of a series of miracles in bringing an adopted son from China and seeing the boy's medical problems overcome. 

Now, I want to offer two more cases of people whose experiences are inexplicable other than that they arose from an encounter with the spiritual realm. The source of this information, the same as above, is a trustworthy author and journalist. He writes:

 A] I know that the divine is truly present in some things and places, and not in others. I also believe that the demonic is likewise present in some things and places. I once interviewed a woman who could not get books to stop flying off her shelves in her house until she burned and buried the ashes of two little humanoid wooden figures she and her late husband had bought at a bazaar in rural Indonesia on a vacation. She had not imagined it, but those objects had been used in some kind of wicked ritual. When she placed them on her bookshelf, she would wake up the next morning to find all the books splayed on the floor. 

B] If you have ever been part of an exorcism or a deliverance rite, you know that holy water is not the same thing as water that comes out of the tap. People who are demon possessed, it burns them. A couple of years ago, I was in Manhattan visiting friends. The wife of the family is possessed, and under the care of an exorcist. When her husband brought out a blessed object he had concealed, she reacted badly, her face changing, and a voice not her own coming out of her, cursing the presence of this object. I saw this with my own eyes. The poor wife apologized, and said, “I’m sorry, that’s not me.”

Store these accounts in your heart. They are not "stories" in Tolkien's sense of being fictional but they can contribute to a deeper mindset, one that accepts that there is a greater richness to life than meets the uncurious eye or the distracted consumerist world view. Each of us has a responsibility to form our "plausibility structure" in an independent fashion in order to better know the truth when we meet it, the truth that will set us free.

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A natural witness to the supernatural dimension

From the horror collapse of  Florida's Champlain Towers South comes an extraordinary account of survival. Just before it all fell, something jolted condo owner Iliana Monteagudo awake - she calls it a "rare force" - and thinking an open door at her balcony might be letting gusts of wind into her apartment, she got out of bed to close it. Then, behind her she saw a widening crack moving down her wall. She realised she had to get out of the building immediately. 

What followed is a startling series of events that lend weight to the notion of protection for those who pray for God's help.  Monteagudo, 64 and a Miami resident for 40 years, said she believes that if any of those moments had gone differently she would not be alive today. Let me use a report from CNN to describe what happened.

Before she went to bed she had lit a prayer candle before an icon of Our Lady of Guadelupe, and so by that action asking Mary, Jesus' mother, to intercede before God on her behalf.

But after she saw the huge crack Monteagudo went into overdrive. "Something inside me said run", she said." You have to run to save your life." The first help toward her quick escape was that the night before she had put her pills and credit cards into her purse because she knew she had to get up early in the morning. Quickly she put on clothes, grabbed her phone and purse, blew out the candle and left her condo.

She knew not to take the elevator but didn't know that the emergency stairs were just beside her unit, so she went to the farthest set of stairs instead.

"If I knew that, maybe I would have taken that one," Monteagudo said.

But as she was flying down the six floors of stairs, pleading with God to let her see her sons and grandsons again, she heard the sound of the tower she lived in collapsing. If she had been in the stairs closest to her home, she likely would have been crushed, her son, Andres Alvarez, said.

"She had to wake up early the next day, the next morning," Alvarez said. "She didn't take her sleeping pill because she was afraid she was going to oversleep. If it wasn't for that open door... if it wasn't for that wind... if she hadn't seen that crack... she wouldn't be here telling the story."

If a person is open to the wider principle of letting the eyes see and the ears hear, the "what ifs" do pose the question: Did God answer Iliana Monteagudo's prayers? Only God knows the answer.

In one way it is strange that Jesus, though understanding that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, directed everyone to pray for what they need - "And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith” (Matthew 21:22). He used the parable of the persistent widow and the evil judge to urge not to give up when prayers are not answered in the way and time we expect.

A couple of preachers this Sunday had insights into how a person's faith, or that of someone close to them, was very much involved in Jesus' miracles, and how this is so in our lives, too. The gospel reading was about Jesus going to Nazareth, and his former neighbours did not accept him as an authoritative teacher and healer, though they knew of his miracles elsewhere - he did cure a few sick people there, though. 

What's involved is a "faith dialogue" with God. God offers, but we have to accept the offer. With an openness of heart and mind, miracles can happen. The message on Sunday was: "Let go of a scepticism that is born of limited expectations."

With Jesus' miracles he repeatedly told the cured person: "Go, your faith has healed-saved you." We can go to Jesus in hope and fearlessness.

The twin ideas of hearing and seeing are closely linked to the concepts of learning and understanding, both hallmarks of life and intelligence. However, all of us have that inclination to block out what we might see, to talk over what we might hear, and so shut our heart to what we need to understand. This is where repentance and metanoia (Greek for turning around) come in. The prophets knew their message was usually not accepted because their people were rebellious (Ezekiel 2:2-5). Isaiah (6:9-10) and Jesus (Matthew 13:13) were saddened... "because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand".

"We must not delimit the power of God to act and save...Everything is pure grace and God has the power to do everything... [so] 'if our faith is weak, all we need to do is to imitate the father whose child was suffering from epilepsy. He said to Jesus, 'I believe; help my unbelief'" (Mark 9:24).

To "delimit" means to "determine the limits or boundaries" of something. To avoid blocking our hearts and minds to the spiritual is a real challenge when the main players in society have been captured by the secular mindset and, in turn, they turn their firepower on us and want us in the same chains of conformity as themselves.  "Secular" means being being directed away from the spiritual order of life to have a focus only on the material and what is of this earth. This is very damaging to human wholeness. Conversely,  a "spiritual" mindset is all enveloping and open to all possibilities. 

To a Washington Post reporter, Monteagudo described her abrupt awakening this way: “It’s like something supernatural woke me up. I felt something strange..." Before leaving the apartment, "I blew out the candle that I light every night for Our Lady of Guadalupe”.

“I was afraid I was going to be crushed,” she said, adding: “I kept going, screaming, ‘God, help me, please help me. I want to see my sons, I want to see my grandsons, I want to live, please help me, God.'"

Monteagudo thought about all the things she lost: wedding photos, first Communion photos, kids’ birthday photos. "I lost everything, I don’t have a past,” she said. “But I say thank God, I’m still alive.”

Clearly, there has been a dialogue of faith in this woman's life, and it continued during her short but horrifying ordeal. 

A final point is that God can perform whatever wonders he wishes, at any time he desires, but he usually only performs a miracle when faith is present in a person's heart and mind. As in Nazareth, it's hard to envisage Jesus, the Creator God, healing someone who outright rejects him. The way to bridge the gap in our dialogue with God is to cultivate whatever tender shoots of faith that we have still alive from our religious upbringing, or that we find springing up as we experience the mysteries of the human journey.  

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Germans in tussle with teaching authority

The Church in Germany is offering the rest of the world a view of the clash between what many Germans believe should be a democratic institution but which, in fact, is a body whose role is the preservation and dissemination of what God has revealed by word and deed, through Scripture and Tradition. 

In the months ahead, representatives of German lay groups, parishes, and religious orders, will meet with bishops in a form of an ongoing synod - what they refer to as a "synodal path" - on how to reform the Church, especially its structures, to prevent a recurrence of the scandalous tide of sex abuse. 

Though that is the stated goal, and it is a noble objective, there is a fear the journey will be a wasted one as participants rehearse the hoary topics of  greater share of power for the Church members, the ordination of women, and a change in its stance toward the sinfulness of homosexual acts (N.B. the Church makes no moral judgment concerning the person who is, among other things, a homosexual). The hope is that the path will come to an end next February.

Debate on the ordination of women to be a priest, in particular, will display in stark terms the conflict between the "enlightened" ones and those charged with upholding the living teaching office of the Church. This office is its "magisterium" involving the "clarification and manifestation of the truth contained in the deposit of faith or truths connected to the deposit and the mission of the Church" (Feingold 2016)* 

Note that "this teaching office is not above the word of God in scripture, but serves it". The commission can be fulfilled only through God's anointing of those who fill the office as successors of Peter and his fellow apostles, and through the help of the Holy Spirit.

Pope John Paul II declared in 1994 that priestly ordination must be reserved to men only.  He did it in such a way that made plain he was making a definitive and infallible statement that confirmed the Tradition of the Church:

Although the teaching that priestly ordination is to be reserved to men alone has been preserved by the constant and universal Tradition of the Church and firmly taught by the Magisterium in its more recent documents, at the present time in some places it is nonetheless considered still open to debate, or the Church’s judgment that women are not to be admitted to ordination is considered to have a merely disciplinary force. Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Luke 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful. 

Read the short document here. It displays the elements of an exercise of the teaching authority of the pope in a case of infallibility, which is immunity from error in the teaching of the magisterium through the assistance of the Holy Spirit.

Feingold comments:

In this paragraph, the Pope has expressed himself very precisely so as to make clear that this pronouncement is definitive and therefore infallible, and thus can never be changed by any future pope or council. All of the requirements given in [the Vatican Council's] Lumen gentium §25 (summarized in the Catechism of the Catholic Church §891) are clearly realized. First, the Pope confirms that he is acting as supreme pastor when he speaks “in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren.” Second, he explicitly intends to make a definitive act (“this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful”). Finally, he is teaching on a question pertaining to faith and morals, for he says that it is “a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself.”*

Here is an instance of God acting in the Church for the guidance of His people. For those who have lost the sense of the spiritual as an integral part of our world along with the material, this is a hard saying.  

Therefore, that the ordination of women as priests is still on the agenda in the German discussions has caused the fear of another German schism to grip many in the Church outside secularised Europe. 

*Feingold, Lawrence, 2016, Faith Comes From What Is Heard: An Introduction to Fundamental Theology, Emmaus Academic, Steubenville, Ohio.

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