Our Totalitarian Sexual Culture
JESUS CHRIST – THE ANSWER TO OUR TOTALITARIAN SEXUAL CULTURE
We are immersed in a totalitarian state, a totalitarian sexual culture. To live in such a totalitarian culture is to walk in an environment of fear, disorientation and oppression. It is an environment within which the announcement of truth is met with a response of hostility and those who speak the truth are declared enemies of the totalitarian regime. Such is the case in today’s sexual culture. For someone, indeed especially a Catholic, to announce the truth that marriage is exclusively the joining of a man and woman in a sacred willingness to give their lives to each other through the action of God is to be identified as one who is defying the totalitarian sexual culture. Indeed, it is even a denial of the fundamental right granted to same sex couples by our national law. As such, the “cultural warriors” are called forth to identify and “dispatch” this enemy.
What is the Totaliarian Sexual Culture?
In the totalitarian sexual culture, fornication, co-habitation, adultery, birth control and abortions are all increasingly seen as entirely acceptable, linked inexorably to individual rights and maturity of personality and assuaging of wounds suffered through individual histories and relationships. The totalitarian regime will then quickly identify as the enemy, the Catholic individual or communities or the entire Church that attempts to proclaim the fundamental truth that sexual intimacy is reserved for those who are married and that life is to be protected from conception until natural death. To be identified as an enemy of a totalitarian culture or regime is to be declared a traitor, a non-respecter of human rights and one who is required to be cleansed of this traitorous position. This “cleansing” is accomplished by activist outcry, cultural incarceration and isolation, a kind of cultural “death”.
Fornication-Acceptable in Totalitarian Stat
In a totalitarian state, the strategy is gradually to convince the people of the reasonableness and sensibility of its program. A people are then developed in such a manner as to be totally convinced of its rightness and thereby becomes increasingly comfortable and at home with the emerging totalitarian culture. Under the current totalitarian sexual culture, Pew Research reports that more than 80% of people asked have been convinced that cohabitation is acceptable. Such an acceptability reflects the emergent belief that cohabitation is simply an expression of the rights of the individuals to follow their own fulfillment. This is us, who only a short generation ago, embraced a Christian culture that announced the exact opposite of fornication and cohabitation through a clear and unambiguous teaching of the beauty of sex within the sacred place of marriage.
The Real Enemy in the Battle
Two issues however mark the sexual culture of our time as distinguished from historical situations. Unlike other totalitarian states, the “dictator” and the geographical extent of this totalitarian sexual culture are not easily identified or recognizable. In the midst of WW II, the faces of Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito were on constant display as the enemy to be conquered. Who does not recognize Josef Stalin’s face? But to whom do we point in this totalitarian sexual culture? It is not simply a confrontation with the LGBTQ+ culture. It is not simply a ‘battle” between right and left, liberals and conservatives. No, there is a much deeper struggle underway and the face that must be seen and identified is the face of Satan, the face of the Devil, the face of the Evil One, the face of the Anti-Christ. The immediate difficulty is that the sexual culture scoffs at this identification and denies the very existence of such a Dictator. The failure to recognize the existence of Satan is exactly the strategy of a modern totalitarian regime because then the enemy is obscured, even denied.
The Universal Scope of the Totalitarian State
Other totalitarian states dominate specific geographical areas or countries. However, the domain of the totalitarian sexual culture is not national or regional but is universal in its scope. So one cannot simply “escape” or emigrate or walk away from this totalitarian culture. Such a universality of totalitarianism reveals the seriousness of the battle for the human consciousness. In front of a hidden Dictator and the boundarylessness of this regime, we immediately face the question: How do we respond to this state? How do we even begin to speak with the totalitarian seual culture? /
Who Do We Announce? Jesus Christ
The question is not “What do we do?” but “Who do we announce?”. The answer to the whole current confusion, confrontation and loss of human sexual dignity and values is Jesus Christ, who is made visible in the Catholic Church. The battle lines are then clearly drawn: an epic totalitarian sexual culture aligned with Satan at its head against the culture of love aligned within the nature of Jesus Christ in the Church. In this confrontation, the announcement of the piercing and penetrating Christian sexual truth is to be expected to be met by howls of outrage and denial of rights. This battle is not about liturgical reforms, altar rails, proper reception of the Eucharist, sensitivity to those who believe and live differently. It is a battle raging in the deepest regions of the human consciousness. The most profound error of response is to “accommodate” to this sexual culture. Recall the tragic accommodation of the 1933 Reichskonkordat between the Church and the German Reich, subsequently wept over by Pius XI in “Mit brennender Sorge” only four short years later. The current commitment of the German bishops to “newly assessing” the sexual teaching of the Church is a clear accommodation to the totalitarian sexual culture and is disastrously in error.
To enter into a confrontation with this culture behind Jesus Christ in the Church is to enter only with Benedict’s “true love…ready to understand but not to approve.” This contemporary battle with “adjustment” to totalitarianism is fought at the dinner table, in the family, in the Diocesan agencies, in public places, schools, theater and art, all reflecting the incredible depth of infiltration of the totalitarian culture. But to enter and confront with love is to speak clearly without obfuscation, without individual judgment. Benedict again: “In a totalitarian system one may have saved one’s own skin and perhaps also one’s position, but only at the price of …having betrayed one’s conscience and soul.” To align with Christ, to declare allegiance to the teaching of the Church is to be ready to suffer, to give one’s life for the truth of the true beauty of the sexuality of man and woman. In the final analysis, to be a Catholic, individually or collectively is to bear the cloak of Jesus’ nature and stand ready to be nailed to the Cross of blasphemy for declaring the truth of what has been revealed and announced through multiple ages. Anything less than this is to fail to live the ultimate Truth, the living of the Word of God and is then to live a duplicitous life which will only lead to destruction of body and soul.
