In 2012 I wrote:
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.”
In the United
States, the 1960s marked the beginning of a breakdown in sexual mores and a
rise in family disruption, joined with a culture of dissent as many tried to
rationalize deviations from traditional morality. We witnessed a massive social
experiment linked to genuine progress for which the Church was not prepared — discrimination
against African-Americans and women was coming to an end, and Catholics were
ever-increasingly undergoing assimilation into contemporary culture. As a
result, Catholics began placing their spiritual lives in one compartment and
their daily activities in the secular arena in another, commencing to treat
their Catholic faith as an entirely private matter, open to a “pick-and-choose”
approach to doctrine. Many theologians, religious educators and clergy
succumbed to the same inducement. So it was hard for the doctrinal teaching of
Vatican II to be heard; what did get through was often not the true council,
but a “spirit” of Vatican II.
And now we read that soon Catholic
colleges and universities will be hosting productions of The
Vagina Monologues or have officially recognized student groups
that are performing the play in 2014. Are these truly Catholic institutions of higher learning? I, for one, think not.
