Can you recommend a good Catholic University?

Dear Rev. Know-it-all,

Can you recommend a good Catholic University?  Little Leroy has finally decided to leave home. He is only 53 and has never been away from home, and so of course we want send him to a good Catholic College where he will be safe and his brain will not be fried by strange new ideas. 

Yours,

Louie and Alma M. Whiffenpoof

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Whiffenpoof,

My sainted mother always said if you haven’t anything good to say then say nothing at all.   (Imagine the sound of crickets chirping)……………………As for new ideas? Very few Catholic institutions of higher learning, so called, have had a new idea since 1965.

I remember my college days at Crayola University here in Frostbite Falls.  I took a philosophy course offered by Dr. Siegfried Hansen. He said, “Zuh great Kvestion of 20th zenchury philosophy…” In English that is “The great question of 20th century philosophy is….. ‘Why is there something instead of nothing?’” 

I raised my hand and said “Because there is no nothing! Nothing cannot 'be' by definition.”  To which he responded, “Wrong!”  and continued his lecture pacing back and forth expounding in a soothing monotone. I dropped that class like a bad habit. 

In our times education has gone from bad to worse in most places, especially in the liberal arts. I know. I am an aging hippie who taught at a university for 25 years. Don’t ask questions. We young radicals asked the questions and figured out the right answers that our parents and teachers were hiding from us. You young folks don’t have to ask any questions. We tenured revolutionaries will tell you what to believe.

I have just heard a wonderful example of this enlightened attitude that I and my Aquarian generation have tried to instill in younger minds, now middle-aged, who are teaching minds yet younger than they how to petrify their own brains.

It seems that a male studentgot into it with his ethics instructor, Cheryl Abbate,   when she made a list of ethical questions on the blackboard regarding philosophy and modern political questions such as gay rights, gun rights, and the death penalty.

 “We had a discussion on all of them – except gay rights,” reported the student.  “She erased that line from the board and said, ‘We all agree on this.’” 

End of discussion. 

After class he told the teacher that he thought they should have included the issue of gay rights. Long story short, she told him that, “You can have whatever opinions you want but I will tell you right now – in this class homophobic comments, racist comments, sexist comments will not be tolerated,” she said. ‘If you don’t like it, you are more than free to drop this class.” The student dropped the class.

“I understand that other people have very different views than I do and that’s understandable, but when a student is not allowed to have an open discussion in a discussion-type class on a specific issue because it’s regarded as homophobic – that really irks me,” said the student. 

The teacher defined ethical behavior in such a way as to restrict speech in a university classroom, a Catholic University classroom. Years ago I wrote an article about the transvestite beauty contest at DePeter University, a local Frostbite Falls Catholic University. The event was featured on the front page of the student newspaper. The gala event ended with a drag ball in one of the university dormitories on campus. The president of the school called me upset, not that I had questioned the wisdom of having such an event at a Catholic University, but that I had made the event public and upset one of his donors. It was not important to the reverend father that he was raising funds under false pretenses nor that he was allowing behavior inappropriate to life at a Catholic institution. He was simply upset by the bad publicity. The most astonishing part of my conversation was that he insisted that he could do nothing about it, neither the full-color full cover picture of a very scrawny boy in a wig, makeup and a rather skimpy women’s bikini bathing suit, nor the transvestite dance in a university-owned dorm, because of (get this) academic freedom. 

I don’t know if DePeter University still has the transvestite beauty contest and drag ball, but they do now offer a minor in queer studies. I wonder if the reasons for Catholic teaching about same-sex teaching are highlighted and clearly explained in this bold, new academic department. (By the way I am not making any of this up, except for the name of the school, whose real name I bet you could never guess.)  

This, I believe, is the heart of the matter. Academic freedom in some places means the freedom to discuss only what the new pseudo-orthodoxy demands. The same academic freedom that allows behavior which for two thousand years has been thought contrary to the Gospel prohibits discussion of what has been perceived for the same twenty centuries as the obvious meaning of the Gospel.  

This is crazy. To say that the academic freedom permits boys to think they are girls but forbids other boys to say they think that is bizarre. It is just as bizarre as saying that sex has nothing to do with the birth of children; just as bizarre as saying hormone shots and mutilation will turn a man into a woman or vice versa; just as bizarre as pretending that ejecting a student with a varying opinion from class is a form of tolerance.

If you look at human physiology, the nature of gender is quite clear. If you look at the political correctness of our time and the convoluted definition of academic freedom that forbids students to express the teachings of the Church in a Catholic university philosophy course in this age of new-speak tolerance, it is clear that we are a religious culture that has lost its mind and lost its way. We no longer have the right to call ourselves Catholic — that is universal — because we have cut ourselves off from those who have gone before. We live only in the present age, not the past and the future. Unlike our Lord, we are no longer the same “yesterday, today and tomorrow.” We are just a fad. We may be modern, but we can no longer claim to embrace the fullness of humanity.  We cease to be Catholic in the most basic sense.

Human beings have experienced sexual dysfunction since Adam and Eve left the garden, but as far as I know this is the first generation to define dysfunction as normal. The only people not welcome in church are those who have not sinned and thus have no need of a savior. People with their moral shortcoming and their disordered appetites are welcome in the church; the embrace of Christ extends to all, except to those who say I have not sinned. For a Catholic sin is not the greatest problem. The greatest problem is a refusal to recognize sin in oneself. This kind of pride is called hubris and it invites disaster.  

This aging hippie recalls an old Bob Dylan song from 50 years ago “A hard rain’s a gonna’ fall.”

Rev. Know-it-all

P.S. To my fellow ageing hippies, “Power, brother” (I mean I hope your electric scooter has enough battery power. Keep on truckin’)

What's your take on the Duck People?

Dear Rev. Know-it-all

What do you think of all this Duck Dynasty business?

Yours,

Drake Mallard

Dear Drake,

I guess I don’t think about it.  I have never watched the show, but I have always been a little amazed that people who look like they need regular flea baths could parlay a business that made duck calls into a lucrative enterprise. Beyond this I cannot understand why a show about the travails of a family full of these people could command one of the largest viewing audiences in American history.  The phenomenon could provide doctorates and government research grants for years to come.

I assume however that you are referring to the comments one of them made about same-sex attraction and same-sex marriage that caused a ruckus. I didn’t see that either. My complete ignorance about the show and the interview that let the network to placing the family patriarch on “hiatus” will however not stop me from commenting on the whole business.

My suspicion is that the Arts and Entertainment Network of Cable TV started the show so that they could cash in on the enjoyment of mocking a bunch of fundamentalist rubes. I imagine that they were both pleased and chagrined that the audience loved it all and took it seriously. The audience, I suspect, sees the Duck People as quintessential Americans. They have managed to make a small fortune by thumbing their noses at the world. What could be more American? The clan patriarch, Mr. Robertson does not own a computer or cell phone and is publicly a fundamentalist Christian who belongs to White's Ferry Road Church of Christ. It is a Congregationalist church that believes in “word only”. They believe that the action of the Holy Spirit is limited to the Bible. That means every man is his own pope, able to read the Bible without any clerical help. Could anything be more American?

Here we have the crux of the problem. Mr. Robertson believes in his own infallibility. So do his critics. Which one is right? Well, the one who is right is the one who agrees with your particular opinion — or, perhaps, my particular opinion. I’m not sure which. I suspect that if I can drown out your voice by yelling louder than you clearly my opinion is the correct one.  This is a Congregationalist country founded by the followers of John Calvin. The founders of the republic rejected the idea that there should be an established religion precisely because the Congregationalist faith of the new nation could not agree within itself on the nature of truth. They founded a republic on the principle that we have the right to disagree with each other.

A woman waited outside the locked doors of the constitutional convention in 1787, wondering whether the framers had chosen a monarchy or a democracy. When she asked Benjamin Franklin, “Well, what have you given us?” He responded, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

The Congregationalist political experiment has been in doubt for the past two centuries, and I think it is more in peril now than it has ever been. The invasion of media into the private thought of citizens could never have been imagined by the founders of this country. The desire to belong is an overwhelming human need. “It is not good for man to be alone.” (Gen 2:18) We are terrified by loneliness, and so we fill the holes in our life with anything that will drown out the silence. Cell phones, I-pads, Twitter, Facebook, Wi-Fi, on and on and on.

Do you know how carbon monoxide works? Our blood has receptors for oxygen. Carbon monoxide will fit these receptors just as well, but it is poisonous. We can’t take in oxygen if we have filled the receptors with poison and so we suffocate. One can put the wrong plug into the wrong outlet. Just because one can do it, doesn’t mean one should. There will be a fire or some other disaster.

We have plugged chatter into the holes where dialogue is meant to go. The Duck People are untroubled by cell phones and email and computers. That, I suspect, is why they are so fascinating to the American public. They have a confidence in their own self-worth that left our republic years ago. They don’t care what people think of them, or at least they seem not to. They have formed their consciences, right or wrong, they have formed them. They need no external approbation and this both maddens and fascinates us. It’s who we imagine ourselves to be, but we haven’t been that independent since the ink finally dried on the Declaration.

The whole snafu takes me back to a parish I pastored many years ago. The Inflexibly Tolerant Committee forbad me to offer the 9AM Mass. It was clear that I was Intolerant because I called God “Father” and used the word “Lord”. They firmly supported a woman’s right to kill her unborn child and always used the feminine pronoun in the readings at Mass. They would often say things like “Jesus and Her disciples...”, though it was always “the devil and his angels...” (I’m not making this up).

It was clear that I was intolerant because I did not do this. And they simply would not tolerate such behavior. After three years I decided to dialogue with them. At one point I said to them, “Whatever you do, don’t change the words of Baptism. I have to sign a statement that says, “This child was baptized in name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”  Not “this child was baptized in the name of the 9 o’clock Liturgy committee.” They had been in the habit of having the special priests they brought in for “their” Mass baptize children in the name of the creator, savior, sanctifier, the father-mother, the earth mother, the four winds, and anyone else who happened to come along. I told them that I had a conscience too, and they had no right to make me sign on to their decisions of conscience.

The next week, they had a child a baptized in heaven knows whose name. I called the chancery and all whatever broke out. There were pickets in front of the rectory, nasty letters to the bishop, calls from the dean and unpleasant faxes from the chancery. They boycotted the collection, which started, strangely, to go up. They left the parish which then doubled in size. They sure showed me!

Like the 9 o’clock liturgy committee, the Current Moral Movement, that will tolerate everything except intolerance claims to be a movement of conscience and that those who don’t agree are immoral. I was rather impressed by one the critics of the Duck People who said the Duck People weren’t true Christians and no true Christian would agree with them. The True Christian commentator knocked 95% of Christians out of the Church, including its founder, Jesus, and the apostles Peter and Paul.

When people in the Current Moral Movement say they are merely following their consciences, I wonder. My conscience usually disagrees with me about what is good and right. I keep trying to tell my conscience that if it feels good, it must be good. My conscience just rolls its eyes when I say that and then starts making me feel bad. My conscience is constantly telling me I should be good to the poor, share my money, not eat that second piece of cake and not insult people who really seem to need a good insulting.

I don’t know. I wish I was as good a person as the Current Moral Movement people. Their consciences always seem to agree with what they want. Even more, they are not content simply to follow their own consciences. They are so concerned for me that they want me to follow their consciences too. It’s as if they aren’t quite sure that they are right, and by forcing me to participate, not just allow, but to approve and participate in their decisions of conscience, and occasionally to pay for them, they will finally be sure that they were right all along. They do not concede me the right or the freedom to be immoral, at least as they define it. Heaven forefend that I should call them immoral. That is hate speech, which, of course is immoral and increasingly criminal. They can’t yet stop me from thinking it, but at least they can stop my church and my children from thinking it.

Our republic is founded on the right of people to disagree. Our Church is founded on the Way the Truth and the Life, securely set on the Rock of Peter. The state is a compulsory society. I must respect and agree with the right of others to disagree. The Church is a voluntary society. If I don’t hold what it teaches, I am free to obey my conscience and leave it or not to join it in the first place. It seems that we have turned things upside down. If I don’t agree with you, but can outshout you, you must go along with the crowd in order to be part of the general society. To disagree is criminal hate speech. However, in the Church if you have the bad taste to point out that my theology or morality runs counter to the whole history and teaching of the Church, you must be a mean spirited un-Christian, inflexible, narrow-minded, bigot who isn’t a true Christian.

I can’t figure any of it out frankly. Maybe that’s why the Duck People are so fascinating. They have the freedom of Citizens and the hearts of believers, and besides, they have really cool beards.

Yours,

The Rev. Know-it-all