Notre Dame and V-Monologues:
A Golden Dome opportunity missed

		The Catholic  Difference  George Weigel

A pall will hang over commencement at the University of Notre Dame this year - the pall of a great opportunity missed. Temporarily, one must hope.

Notre Dame's new president, Holy Cross Father John Jenkins, got off to a brilliant start this past fall, with an inaugural address that located Notre Dame solidly within the ancient tradition of Catholic higher learning.

Father Jenkins then led a pilgrimage to Rome, an act that embodied a key plank in the reformist platform announced in his inaugural address: to "think with the church" means both to think and to think "with the church."

Capitulation?

Then, in April, things changed, dramatically and for the worse. After a campus wide debate, Father Jenkins announced that "the creative contextualization of a play like The Vagina Monologues can bring certain perspectives on important issues into a constructive and fruitful dialogue with the Catholic tradition."

Therefore, Father Jenkins decreed, the V-Monologues could continue to be produced on campus.

It was difficult, bordering on impossible, not to read Father Jenkins' decision as a surrender to the most corrosive forces eating away at the vitals of Catholic higher education.

Public letter

That view is shared by numerous Notre Dame faculty, among whom Holy Cross Father Wilson Miscamble, stands tall, literally, intellectually, and spiritually. In a public letter to his brother Holy Cross priest, Father Miscamble told Father Jenkins that "your decision is being portrayed as involving your 'backing down,'" in part because of an untoward deference to "the convictions of certain senior arts and letters faculty that any restriction on this play would damage our academic 'reputation' - and especially among those 'preferred peer schools' whose regard we crave.

"Indeed," Father Miscamble continued, "it is hard to understand [your decision] in any other terms."

Then Father Miscamble got down to cases: "In your recent . . . statement you reveal a level of naivete about the process of a Catholic university engaging the broad culture that is striking and deeply harmful to our purpose as a Catholic university. We live at a time, as Yale Law School professor Stephen Carter pointed out some years ago, when the elite culture is programmed to trivialize religion.

"Further more, much of popular culture is deeply antithetical to religious conviction and practice. It offers a worldview completely at odds with any Catholic vision. It is a worldview from which none of us can be sequestered and, indeed, many of our students arrive here far more influenced by the reigning culture than by faith convictions.

Reducing women

"Amidst this larger context you are to permit the continued production and promotion of a play which, as our colleague Paolo Carozza rightly puts it, 'seems to reduce the meaning and value of women's lives to their sexual experiences and organs, reinforcing a perspective on the human person that is itself fundamentally a form of violence.'

"Dialogue with this point of view is ridiculous. It should be contested and resisted at Notre Dame but never promoted. Notre Dame must hold to a higher view of the dignity of women and men. Might I ask that if this play does not meet your criteria of an 'expression that is overt and insistent in its contempt for the values and sensibilities of the University,' then what would?"

Father Miscamble ends by asking his brother priest to "go back to your best self and to your original instincts and position on this matter. Don't embarrass those of us who want to work with you to build a great Catholic university. Lead us."

Universities must teach

Anyone who cares about the flagship university of Catholic higher education in America must pray that Father Miscamble's plea is heard by Father Jenkins, a man who has shown courage in the past. The V-Monologues is trashy, pornographic nonsense, like a lot of other stuff available in the movies and on cable-TV.

A great university can't monitor what its students watch on TV or in theaters. But it can teach them about stupidity. The V-Monologues are stupid, and one of the things a great Catholic university ought to teach its students is to avoid the stupid. It can't do that by the "creative contextualization" of stupidity.

George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Sex and marriage:
Church teaching is good news

		A Culture  of Life  Christopher West

The Church's teaching on sex and marriage is good news. This truth must be emphasized from the start. It's good news because it's the truth about love, and true love is the fulfillment of the human person.

But the Church's teaching on sex and marriage is also challenging news. This is so because the truth about love is always challenging.

Truth about love

When we search out the true meaning of sexuality, we touch on the core of our being as men and women. We encounter our deepest longings and aspirations and, at the same time, our deepest fears, wounds, selfishness, and sins. Here lies the challenge: we must face the reality of our humanity - the good and the bad - if we are to discover the truth about our sexuality. Inevitably this leads us to the cross. For it is Christ who, by showing us the truth about love, shows us the meaning of life.

"Love one another as I have loved you" (Jn 15:12). These words of Christ sum up the meaning of life and the meaning of human sexuality. At its core, sexual morality is about expressing God's love through our bodies. This is why Pope John Paul II can say that if we live according to the truth of our sexuality, we fulfill the very meaning of our being and existence.

The opposite, however, is also true. If we don't live according to the truth of our sexuality, we miss the meaning of our existence altogether. We forfeit true joy, true happiness.

Disputes on life

Disputes about sexual morality, then, are not merely about differing ethical perspectives, different interpretations of Scripture, or Church authority versus personal conscience. No, they go much deeper than that. At their root, disputes about sexual morality are disputes about the very meaning of life.

The Church never fails to proclaim that Christ came into the world not only to show us the meaning of life but also to give us the grace to overcome our fears, wounds, selfishness, and sins in order to live life according to that meaning. True love is possible. That's the promise the Church holds out to us in her teachings on sex and marriage. This is good news. This is GREAT news!

Clear understanding

But if this is such "great news," you might ask, why do so many people dispute the Church's teaching? Let's be honest here. People find many points about Catholic teaching to dispute, but if someone has a bone to pick with the Catholic Church, it's almost always related to sex. Whether it's Church teaching about contraception ("C'mon, get with the modern world!"), divorce and remarriage ("How insensitive can you get?"), or the ordination of men alone to the priesthood ("Proof positive that the Church is an oppressor of women"), such contentions depend finally on disagreements over our ideas about sex.

That's why it's so important that we come to a clear understanding of what God has revealed to us about the nature of human sexuality. While popular opinion holds that a Christian perspective on sex is downright negative, what we actually discover by reflecting on the Scriptures is that sex in God's plan is more awesome than any human being could possibly dream. It's quite literally in-credible - that is, unbelievable. Only faith is able to believe the "great mystery."

Christopher West is a research fellow and faculty member of the Theology of the Body Institute in West Chester, Pa. His column is syndicated by www.OneMoreSoul.com and reprinted from his book Good News About Sex and Marriage: Honest Questions and Answers About Catholic Teaching (St. Anthony Messenger Press).