Waiting for Godot to Leave

CONCUPISCENCE - Fallen man's proclivity to sin, especially in matters of sex. How Christopher West and his followers say we should handle concupiscence. Engage it, especially by confronting and indulging near occasions of sin (or what weaker minds would call near occasions of sin).  If you see a naked person who is not your spouse, stare at him or her.  (In Fr. Loya's memorable admonition, "Look at her butt!  Look at her breasts!")  If you're afraid that in doing so, your lust will be stirred, that's only because you're a coward.  The only way through the purgative way to the illuminative way - the only way from beginner's spirituality to advanced spirituality - is to see naked bodies, to stare at them, and to transform your lust into love.  This sounds sordid, but it's highly advanced and spiritual.   How St. John Paul II says we should handle concupiscence.   If we indulge concupiscence, we end up sinning, turning the prophetic lan...

The old man he plays let's pretend When e'er his friends come by And all his friends, not to offend Pretend, affirm, and cry, "Oh, yes, old man, oh what a friend Both you and trophy wife are! "How smart is she!  How capably She does the things we all do! She's keen and cute and shape-ily She has the latest hair-do. Her IQ must be 101, or maybe-ly It's more!  She surely will go far." The wife she laughs and says a word She loudly mispronounces. The old man, though it seems absurd To keep her safe he pounces: Pretends we all misheard His 20-year old bird Both you and me We all, you see, Must keep alive his fantasy. *** Another type of make-believe I'm sure you've been a part of Young Amber gets engaged to Steve, She says it's love, well sort of. We hope and pray that Steve will leave. Engaged they may have got; Engaging he is not. But no one dares to say a peep or Make an accusation. We all pretend that he...

Four years ago I was very naive. In 2010 when I began blogging seriously and using Facebook regularly I actually thought that reasoned arguments could happen on the internet.  Now, of course, I know better. The Torture Debate was the first issue I engaged at the time.  The Torture Enthusiasts, who since they Dissent from Church Teaching I will henceforth call Dissenters (though clear terminology makes them furious - see below), were using this approach ... They denied that the Church forbid Torture, or else they claimed that Church teaching forbidding Torture in any and all circumstances was not Magisterial or was still in flux. They claimed that the act they were defending (in this case waterboarding) was not in fact Torture. I later discovered that this handy template is the only one that's used by right wing Dissenters on all their precious issues.  Just fill in the blank and you're good to go.  And go and go and go.  If you're a Dissent...

Cupid in a Cage Father Brian von Hove writes ... The danger in West’s approach, as it could be misunderstood at least, is in its domestication, intended or not, of the mysterious. He and Hefner want to get it all out there, so to speak, as if to overcome the mystique of the forbidden.  He is not so much forgetful of concupiscence as he is of that which is awesome, the tremendum ...  Our sexuality is anything but “harmless.”  As Donald Keefe has said, there is no common ground between yes and no. Sexual love in marriage, he would note, is the occasion for blissful joy, not simply the elements of fun.  Any attempts by West or Hefner to domesticate the beautiful, to make the holy into something manipulable, even manageable, will be about as successful as rap music has been in lowering the crime rate. Nudists make a similar mistake.  The naked body is shrouded with clothing because it is shrouded in mystery.  To walk around naked has no power to ...

This was published four years ago in Gilbert Magazine.   I had linked to it then , but the link is now broken.  However I discovered that the editorial had been mirrored by Andrew Cusack , and so I am copying and pasting it below.  It is well written and covers all the bases. It's literally a damned shame that this issue is even coming up again, but the points Dailey made four years ago are just as valid today. T hose who see abortion as an evil are often frustrated by those who attempt to justify abortion by vague arguments about “choice” or even more practical arguments about exceptions for rape or incest, or the health of the mother. But many of these same people lose their moral clarity when the subject is torture. Suddenly they are the ones bringing up exceptions and parsing definitions. There is so much confusion over this issue that in a recent TV interview, a prominent Catholic journalist let a former Bush Administration speechwriter, also a Catholic, gros...

Let's torture the torturers and eat the cannibals. 99 years ago, G. K. Chesterton wrote an article in the Illustrated London News that answers the question we keep hearing today. "Why can't we torture terrorist prisoners?!" confused Catholics are asking .  "We'll be at a disadvantage if we don't!  God knows they'd do it to us!  We need to fight fire with fire!" Chesterton, of course, on June 5, 1915, was writing about World War I (which was then in full swing) and not the War on Terror, but he's writing as much for America today as he was for England a century ago.  Some excerpts (my emphases) ... If we were at war with the King of the Cannibal Islands, these people would say that our Admirals ought to eat their prisoners.  At least, they show no perception of any intellectual principle that could save them from such a conclusion.   It does not seem to dawn on them that we do not eat savages ... because we are not savage.  We do n...

Here's the big game advocates of torture play: If torture is wrong, you mean I can't spank my son when he misbehaves?  If torture is wrong, you mean nuns should not have been rapping the knuckles of their students with rulers?  If torture is wrong, then why can't we even define what it consists of?  Goodness gracious, drowning or producing a fear of drowning in a Muslim.  How could that be torture??? Cowardly as this line of reasoning is, it at least points toward a truth.  The Church says that torture is intrinsically evil, evil by its very nature.  If torture is merely severe corporal punishment (and nothing else), then how can that be?  Does the nature of something change when its degree changes?  Corporal punishment is not intrinsically evil, so why should severe corporal punishment be?  Severe corporal punishment may be wrong (as too much eating or too much drinking is wrong), but the thing in and of itself is not wrong, no more...

Lately I've been posting a lot about Christopher West.   Let me try to explain why. Before coming to the Faith in the middle of my life, I had been blessed (or cursed) with having tasted from a kind of smorgasbord of false philosophy, the Gnosticism of the Jungians being my dish of choice, though even then I could sense something sour and spoiled in the ingredients. Discovering the Bread of Life was therefore a great blessing.  I could see, looking back, that the times I was most satisfied by the false faiths I had sampled were the times when those faiths were passing along ingredients culled from Catholic Truth.  In other words, what I liked most about Jung, for instance, was that he had actual Christian content mixed in with all the weirdness - and it turns out the Christian stuff was the most nourishing.  It has seemed to me ever since a remarkable act of foolishness to turn from that which really satisfies to that which offers a kind of empty flavor, to sell...

In one of his newsletters , Christopher West said ... St. Augustine wrote, "Like a bridegroom Christ went forth from his chamber.... He came to the marriage-bed of the cross, and there in mounting it, he consummated his marriage. And when he perceived the sighs of the creature, he lovingly gave himself up to the torment in place of his bride, and joined himself to [her] forever" Now Augustine was hardly a Westian.  But that's not my point. My point is that West did not get this quotation from St. Augustine.  He got it from Carl Jung , who got it from his student Marie-Louise von Franz . [NOTE: He may have gotten it from Fulton Sheen, who got it from Carl Jung.  See ADDENDUM below - Kevin.] How do I know this?  I know this because this translation of Augustine includes an interpolation by von Franz, and also because this translation (along with the interpolated phrase) appears several times in Jung and is quoted by many authors thereafter, none of whom ap...