All You Need is Love (da da da da da) Love is all you need

Of late Papa Bergoglio has uttered ambiguous sayings on the Church’s need to apologize to homosexuals for the manner in which she has treated them. Judging from the popular brouhaha in the social media, perhaps there is confusion in people’s thinking between homo-philia, chaste friendship, and homo-eros, people who desire sex with people of the same sex

We all know of the etymology from which these phrases derive. In the Greek there are four words for “love:” agape, pure unselfish love, philia, the love of friendship, especially between brothers, storge, affection love, a deep bond usually borne of spending a long time with another and, of course, the one most familiar, eros, which is passionate, sexual love, seeking pleasure from the other.

In the Catholic view, as Pope Emeritus Benedict wrote in Deus Caritas Est, all loves must be included under agape, which is the term Christ uses, and the Church has adopted, to mean “charity--” pure, unselfish love which wills the good of the other, without necessarily seeking our own good.

Our over-eroticized culture, however, often considers “love” as erotic love. This usually applies to persons of the complementary sex, a man and a woman. But what of “love” between persons of the same sex? There is nothing wrong, and indeed much that is good, in men loving men and women loving women. True friendship between “brothers” and “sisters”is only possible, however, if the love remains chaste.

What the Church warns against in same-sex friendship, following natural law, is eroticizing this natural and healthy bond, turning homo-philia, into homo-eros, with its accompanying unnatural vices. Our culture’s fascination with homoerotic tendencies has obfuscated the natural homophilic friendships of men and women.

Pope Benedict XVI also stated in Deus Caritas Est that modernity has warped eros, not the Church and Christianity, which very early on in the Roman Empire purified eros from its pagan inclinations, so toxic for women and children, subjugated as they were and used as sexual slaves and prostitutes (a plight that threatens them today as well).

In a genuinely Christian culture, men attempt to be chaste in relating to women, or at least held to account if they are not. Women thus hold all the cards in the sexual relationship. It is the opposite in a pagan culture, cut off from Judeo-Christian revelation, Here women are objectified and sexualized, taken by force if need be. So anyone who says the Church is anti-woman knows not history, nor that Her teaching is her best defense.

So eros must be controlled and channeled, incorporated under the higher love of agape, willing the good of the other. As John Paul II and Benedict both taught clearly, this is possible only within monogamous and faithful marriage, wherein the true “gift of self” can occur, with eros ordered to the mutual complementarity and union between husband and wife and the procreation of children.

All of our other friendships should be non-sexual and non-erotic.

Yet modernity thinks that all this matters not, though there remains a seeming aversion to adultery, pedophilia and rape. Be forewarned: even these are becoming increasingly difficult to explain as we cut ourselves off from the vine of Christian revelation and reason. Just recall the idolizing of Alfred Kinsey, an entomologist who malformed himself into a “sexologist,” carrying out sexual experiments on children, depicted fawningly by Liam Neeson in the film linked above.

So we now think that any sexual activity between “consenting adults” is OK. But how to define “consensus,” with all of the obvious and implicit disetortions of power and authority, and the problem of saying who really is an “adult.” Does one measure with the yardstick of biology? Psychology? Spirituality? Who determines? Furthermore, something harmful does not cease to be harmful just because one consents to it.

As Paul VI once wrote, we must not underestimate the power of libido, and how it affects us and those around us. In a homily in 1972, which served as the basis for my book, he opined that unleashed and ungoverned eros, whose origins lie in the deeply wounded libido of Man, is at the basis of many contemporary societal ills:

· the breakdown of the family and redefinition of traditional marriage

· the epidemic of sexual diseases

· abortion,with the unborn killed daily in far greater numbers than any other modern massacre.

So we do people with a homosexual orientation, and anyone else with an inclination to sexual deviancy, no favors by supporting their disordered inclinations and actions. Rather let us render them a service in love by revealing to them the full truth of who they are, and who they are called to be, in God’s image and so loved.

Comments

This video of a young boy twerking at Pride has homophobes outraged | Gay Star News

DANCING WITH MR. D: This video of a young boy twerking at Pride has homophobes outraged | Gay Star News : 'via Blog this'

A Child's Right

O ver the years since the accession of Jose Bergoglio to the Chair of Peter, in perusing the Huffington Post blog, the National Catholic Reporter website and other “progressive” social media, one gets the impression that these folks believe Francis (“Who Am I to Judge?”) will revolutionize Catholic teaching on marriage. On these pages I have frequently noted many of Francis’ statements affirming traditional-Biblical-natural marriage, as well as his extremely strong remarks back in Argentina, where he declared same-sex “marriage” a diabolical effort of “the Father of Lies” to “destroy God’s plan … and deceive the children of God.” He said then—only four years ago—that gay “marriage” discriminates against children “in advance,” depriving them of “their human development given by a father and a mother and willed by God.” At stake, said Cardinal Bergoglio, was “the total rejection of God’s law engraved in our hearts” and the very survival of the human family, with Satan at work. I co...

Read My First Chapter for Free!

St. Michael the Archangel Kindle allows one to share quotes from books on Facebook. Here is an entire chapter...

Novus Motus Liturgicus

From The Smoke of Satan in the Temple of God: In 1959, Pope John XXIII saw a true need for liturgical renewal within the Roman Rite in accordance with the metaphorical principle of organic development, the aim of the Liturgical Movement endorsed by Pope St. Pius X. In authentic organic development, the Church listens to what liturgical scholars deem necessary for the gradual improvement of liturgical tradition, and evaluate the need for such development, always with a careful eye on the preservation of the received liturgical tradition handed down from century to century. In this way, continuity of belief and liturgical practice is ensured. As Cardinal Ratzinger wrote at the time, the principle of organic development ensures that in the Mass, “only respect for the Liturgy’s fundamental unspontaneity and pre-existing identity can give us what we hope for: the feast in which the great reality comes to us that we ourselves do not manufacture , but receive as a gift. Organic de...

Ode to Freddi: Be Careful When You Write Papa

Last fall, militant Italaian atheist Piergeorgio Oddifreddi wrote Dear Pope, I'm Writing to You. O difreddi later said he was particularly surprised that Benedict read his book from cover to cover and wanted to discuss it, as it had been billed as a “luciferian introduction to atheism.” He should not have been so surprised, had he known his man. Odifreddi's book was a critique of certain arguments and lines of thought found in Benedict’s theological writings, beginning with his 1967 volume Introduction to Christianity , and including his book Jesus of Nazareth , which he wrote as pope, both of which I have profited from enormously. “My opinion about your book is, as a whole, rather mixed,” B16 said. “I profited from some parts, which I read with enjoyment, but in other parts I was astonished at a certain aggressiveness and thoughtless argumentation.” He noted that, several times, Odifreddi refers to theology as science fiction, and he...

Libido Redux: Gabriele Kuby

Gabriele Kuby’s The Global Sexual Revolution has been translated into English and published by Angelico Press. In it, Kuby persuasively argues that the freedom offered by the sexual revolutionaries is another and highly effective means of enslavement. Here are some highlights: · The Marquis de Sade, who lived and wrote violent pornography from his cell in the Bastille as the Ancien Régime fell and the French Revolution began. · Thomas Malthus, Margaret Sanger, Marx & Engels, Wilhelm Reich , Freud & Jung, behaviorist John Watson, Edward Bernays, Bernard Berelson, child abuser Alfred Kinsey, sex-change giant John Money ,--a gallery of evil men whose own immorality drove them to emasculate man’s morality. · The Yogyakarta Principles, a manifesto produced by a cabal of leftist homosexuals and “human rights” activists that purp...

The 21st Century Must Come Into the Church

Continued from September 14.... T hrough the Church’s teachings, God has also revealed his truth on how humanity can live happily. What is so little understood by Catholics and Christians is that doctrinal revelations that come through the Church come out of God’s very Self. They are not tied to culturally constructed norms! Read Vatican II’s Dei Verbum : “by divine revelation God wished to manifest and communicate both himself and the eternal decrees of his will concerning the salvation of humankind.” Our Lord’s Church derives its basic vision not from mere human speculation, which would be tentative and uncertain, but from God’s own testimony—from a historically given divine revelation. Thus Catholics believe that just as God himself is immutable, so, too, are His teachings as revealed through the Church because they come from him. As I discuss in my book, although the Church does not change its central teachings, we do see the theological principle of “devel...

Dancin' With Mr. D: Non-Binary?

A n LGBT activist has admitted that the battle over men accessing women’s bathrooms and vice versa has little do with transgenderism, and everything to do with re-working society and getting rid of the heterobinary structure—eliminating distinctions between “male” and “female” altogether. Male and female He made them. Riki Wilchins, who has undergone “sex change” surgery and is a far-left social change activist, has written that p eople should be able to enter whatever bathroom “fits their gender identity,” but the fact that we even have “male” and “female” bathrooms reflects something about society that needs to change. He added that there are many “genderqueer” or “non-binary” people, pointing to a student who recently “came out” to President Obama as “non-binary” at a London townhall as an example. “Non-binary” people don’t identify as male or female and they often want to be referred to as “they” or “hir” or “zer.” So the fact that there...

On the Feast of Corpus Christi

It is appropriate on this day that one reflect on why one should never miss Mass. The first end for which the Mass is offered is to give God honor and glory. This is the one great end of our existence to give God honor and glory, and thereby to save our souls. "Man was created," says St. Ignatius Loyola, at the beginning of his Spiritual Exercises, "to praise, reverence, and serve God, and thereby save his soul." For this we were sent by God into the world. Now, in the Mass we fulfill ,in a supreme degree, our function on the earth, as rational beings, of praising and reverencing God. The second end for which the Mass is offered is to give thanks to God for His benefits. "Put in one heap," says St. Leonard of Port Maurice, "all the gifts, all the graces, you have received from God-so many gifts of nature and of grace; yes, the very life, too, of His Son Jesus, and His death suffered for us, which in themselves immeasurably swell the ...

Why did God Make You?

Often we get caught up in the things of this world to the extent that, as Catholics, we forget why God made us, and what our existence means, really. So, find 45 minutes, and enjoy!

Search This Blog