Thursday, November 18, 2010

The Way of Ugliness

Misrepresenting the Church of the past. To quote:
Art has the power of reinforcing ideas.  It is a particularly powerful tool for creating and perpetuating myth.  The meta-narrative of the American TOB movement is that chastity education in the United States prior to TOB was the product of “prudish Victorian morality,” and that this single corpus of Wednesday general audiences rescued the Church from the “Manichaean Demon.”  The treatment of TOB as a kind of self-contained panacea for the sexual revolution is justified on the basis of this mythology.
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5 comments:

Julygirl said...

More Catholic bashing. I did not go to Catholic school, and was not raised RC, but the warnings of the evils of sex and the power of lust was prevalent in the society in general pre-1960 until the 'Baby Boomer' generation thumbed their noses at such talk. As far as brutality in Catholic Schools, I can name incidents in Public Schools that would curl your hair....a child being left locked in a closet with his mouth duct-taped because the teacher went home and forgot about him, to mention one incident. Don't want to take up too much space with the others that come to mind.

elena maria vidal said...

And sadly this particular form of Catholic bashing is coming from other Catholics as a way to justify their new obsession with the flesh.

anothertwocents said...

Those with the acumen necessary to graduate grade school should realize that the movie is a parody.

Mercury said...

I find nothing wrong with speakers and writers who praise the goodness of sacramental, married sex.

What bugs me is the exaltation of it to the point that it seems to play a central role in the Faith. But we all know that, while very important to a marriage, it's not even THE central element, even there. So much is more important, and married couples spend their lives doing many many other things.

It's a great natural good, and to the married, perhaps one of the greatest gifts in Creation. But it need not be exalted above all else (most married people would say their children, for example, are an even GREATER gift), just as it need not be denigrated.

elena maria vidal said...

Anothertwocents, unfortunately, many people have taken it as a genuine representation of the past.

I agree, Mercury. It's a means to an end, not an end in itself. It is one aspect of sacramental married love which, like the other aspects, is supposed to lead us to God.