Shepherds at Work

By Anthony Esolen. But first a note from Robert Royal: As Professor Esolen explains today, there's a vast difference between our compassion towards sinners - which means, towards all of us since all of us need God's mercy and salvation - and the indulgence of self-destructive attitudes and acts, among bishops and the Vatican itself. A lot of confusion has arisen lately about the two sides of this consummately Christian truth, which is why we must be a steady voice for both mercy - and justice. Please, all of you reading, this: be generous in support of that fully Catholic vision. You know how. Why not do it? Now. Now for today's column... The latest news from the American episcopacy comes from a bishop who has welcomed, as a hermit, a woman who fourteen years ago underwent surgery and pumped her body with chemicals to simulate the appearance of a male. She says she did so out of a respect for the created order, which is like saying that you filled the lake with sand because you found it so lovely. I grant also that the feelings of such a person must be powerful and extremely delicate. Some motive must be driving you to ruin your sex, as other motives drive people into other self-destructive or delusive actions. How much the persons are to blame, if at all, we must let God judge. I'll grant that it is a touchy thing to minister to someone so confused about both male and female that she thinks a little lopping and pasting, some hair on the face, and some extra muscle can obliterate her womanhood and make a man of her. The bishop, though, is another matter. I beg him to think about the whole situation, and if he cannot help rebuild the moral basis of a wholesome society that promotes marriage and family life and protects the innocence of children, shepherding them into healthy understandings of their own sex and its being made for the other, he should at least not go out of his way to make it harder than it already is. Here is the situation. It has been a long time since we abrogated the Christian understanding of sex. The promise, when I was a boy, was of openness, liberty, the delights of love, and better understanding and appreciation of each sex for the other. By the time I was in college, nobody believed that anymore. The revolution had soured. Loneliness set in, because the stakes for even a modest approach of a man to a woman or a woman to a man were too high. It was not that everyone was in bed. It was that there was hardly any territory left between nothing and the bed; and then did people suffer the inevitable disappointments, betrayals, confusion, resentment, and self-accusation that come in the wake of such a life. When we say that something is morally wrong, we do not simply blame those who engage in it. Often, they do not know any better. We affirm that it is bad for people, for the individual and for the society that accept it and its principle. Not all the sophistry in the world, or wishful hoping, or averting the eyes, can alter the fact. To accept fornication as what everybody does and therefore as what everybody must do to begin a relationship or to continue it once it has tentatively begun, is to inject the social body with a virulent and debilitating disease. Nor did the disease stay put. It spread, and it bred new forms, or rather its root principle, namely that what consenting adults do in bed is all right so long as they are nice to each other, already implied those new forms. If man and woman, and with no children in mind, why not man and man? If two, why not three? If doing, why not watching? Meanwhile, rather than reject the principle, actions to control some of the unwanted results had to be justified too: hence was abortion sewn seamlessly into the Western way of life, or way of death. It is no comfort to say that young people are less likely now to be engaging in fornication than they were twenty or thirty years ago, since their shying away from it has nothing to do with believing that it is wrong...