W hat Christianity shares with Judaism (and Islam,  for  that matter) is a belief that God created all things (though all three religions understand God differently). We are creatures. We owe our being, our existence, to Him. We are stewards of His creation, stewards, even, of our own bodies. Acknowledgement of God’s creative power leads to religious awe, a sense of the sacred. This means that each creature/creation has a nature, a manufacturer’s (God’s) instruction manual. Masculinity and femininity are aspects of that nature for human beings. When belief in God becomes irrelevant, we can throw away this instruction manual and refuse to see ourselves as a creature who has responsibilities to God and to society. To understand ourselves, we need to start at the beginning. What kind of being are we? The traditional answer–originating with the Greeks, continuing in the Middle Ages, and persisting into our own time -- and the answer given by common sense intuition -- is this : we

  A s Jonathan Coe has recently observed, When we look at the contemporary ecclesial landscape, we should never limit what the Holy Spirit can do, but any optimism needs to be tempered by certain realities. For example, in looking at the Catholic Church in America, (1) our de facto leader is the heterodox, zeitgeist puppet Cardinal Blaise Cupich; (2) homosexualist priest Fr. James Martin has been given almost carte blanche in peddling his lavender gospel; and (3) the USCCB voted 137-83, with three abstaining, to not encourage the Holy See to release all documents concerning allegations of sexual misconduct by the recently defrocked ex-Cardinal McCarrick. The list goes on and on . In the face of these disheartening developments, Coe highlights the shepherding of 3 prominent churchmen; Archbishop Charles Chaput, Cardinal Robert Sarah, and Bishop Athanasius Schneider. Let’s sample the thinking of the first shepherd. In his talk at the Pontifical College Josephinum in Ohio ,