I see the recent
Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon much as when I wrote about the fact that of
late, on several Catholic College campuses it has been possible to attend a
performance of Eve Ensler’s Vagina
Monologues, a play which, among “celebrations” of the female experience of
the vagina, contains a “romantic” scene, where a 24-year-old woman seduces a
13-year-old girl. The woman invites the girl into her car, takes her to her
house, supplies her with vodka, and seduces her, calling the experience “a kind
of heaven.” (One wonders what outcry would occur if priests with same-sex
attractions were to come to the defense of the play).
It is surely
reasonable to argue that these phenomena are the result of a turning away from
traditional Catholic sexual moral teaching, revealed by God for our health and
well-being. This rebellion has as its fruit not “liberation” but widespread
suffering: the spiraling number of
STDs, the millions of abortions, unintended sterility, global pornography, the
sex trade, the vast increase in rape and child abuse, promiscuity’s threats to
marriage and family, and the hundreds of thousands of victims of AIDS. A
sagacious observation on the infamous 1960s sums it up nicely: “I think it
would be difficult to find a single decade in the history of Western culture
when so much barbarism — so much calculated onslaught against culture and
convention in any form, and so much sheer degradation of both culture and the
individual — passed into print, into music, into art and onto the American
stage as the decade of the Nineteen Sixties.”
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