The Sinner’s Guide to NFP is on sale for NFP Awareness Week!

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In honor of nobody’s favorite week of the year, my book’s on sale all week!

The paperback version, (usually $9-10) is now $5 (only when you order direct from OSV).

The Kindle version (which you can read on any computer — you just need to download the Kindle app), which is usually $4.99, is now $2.99.

These prices will hold until  July 27th, so step lively!

Huffington Post to Donald Trump: Send out the clowns

Vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous pervert Donald Trump opened his festering gob and said of John McCain:

“He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

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So the Huffington Post said this:

After watching and listening to Donald Trump since he announced his candidacy for president, we have decided we won’t report on Trump’s campaign as part of The Huffington Post’s political coverage. Instead, we will cover his campaign as part of our Entertainment section. Our reason is simple: Trump’s campaign is a sideshow. We won’t take the bait. If you are interested in what The Donald has to say, you’ll find it next to our stories on the Kardashians and The Bachelorette.

Next, I’d like to see the elections commission print up a special scratchy ballots just for Trump supporters, so they really feel it when they stick them up their cornholes.

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Living in a panic room: Virtuous pedophiles?

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“Eternally hunkered down in a panic room.” That’s how one psychologist describes  the interior lives of people who are sexually attracted to prepubescent children.

Who could pity a pedophile? Of all the crimes in the world, child abuse rightly seem unforgivable.  “It would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.” That’s what Christ said about people who hurt little children.

But that’s how we feel about people who actually commit these unspeakable crimes. What about people who, through great effort, don’t?

Say you feel sexually attracted to children. You don’t want to feel that way, but you do, and you have felt that way your whole life. You’ve never acted on your attraction, but you’re afraid you might. What are you supposed to do? How are you supposed to live your life?

I need to speak to a therapist because I don’t think I can get through this on my own. But if I talk to a therapist he could report me, because I have to talk about my attraction to young girls. I don’t know whether he would or not and don’t even know how to go about getting more information. Even the friendships I have are in danger of falling apart because I can’t just keep saying ‘I’m fine’ and I can’t talk to anyone about my problem. I think about suicide a lot.

This quote comes from a website I came across the other day. It’s called Virtuous Pedophiles,  and its goal is not to normalize pedophilia but to “provide peer support and information about available resources to help pedophiles lead happy, productive lives.” They say,  “Our highest priority is to help pedophiles never abuse children.”

From what I can see, the approach is in keeping with how the Church understands temptation and sin: there is a difference between being tempted to do something, and actually doing it. People who are tempted are not sinners simply because they are tempted — but they do need help. It is possible that our extreme and fitting repugnance of crimes against children is actually making it harder for pedophiles to avoid committing these crimes, because there is no structure in place to help pedophiles who have never acted on their urges. People are, in effect, punished for admitting that they need help.

A few years ago, the American Psychological Association printed a new version of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and for the first time, it classified pedophilia as a “sexual orientation.” The nation responded with horror, and the APA quickly retracted what it called an “error.” In a statement, the APA said:

“Sexual orientation” is not a term used in the diagnostic criteria for pedophilic disorder and its use in the DSM-5 text discussion is an error and should read “sexual interest.” In fact, APA considers pedophilic disorder a “paraphilia,” not a “sexual orientation.” This error will be corrected in the electronic version of DSM-5 and the next printing of the manual.

APA stands firmly behind efforts to criminally prosecute those who sexually abuse and exploit children and adolescents. We also support continued efforts to develop treatments for those with pedophilic disorder with the goal of preventing future acts of abuse.

In other words, pedophilic disorder means that you are attracted to children, not that you do abuse children. If you have this disorder, you should be able to speak about it with a therapist, to help you avoid acting on your involuntary attraction. It is neither a sin nor a crime to be tempted, but it is treated as both.

It is possible that the APA briefly used the term “sexual orientation” because they were attempting to classify non-abusive pedophiles in such a way that they could more easily speak to their therapists about their urges without triggering mandatory reporting.

I am not sure if this was the reasoning behind the choice to say “sexual orientation” (and Virtuous Pedophiles does use the term “orientation” in its site, which is disturbing).  There is most certainly a push, in some quarters, to normalize the sexual abuse of children, and to call pedophilia just one more shade in the rainbow. Goodness knows that the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, as well as in nearly every other organization that comes into regular contact with children, has been criminally slow to recognize and crack down on abusers and the structure that enabled them, even while condemning the sin itself; and some Catholics are still speaking as if the sex abuse crisis was some overblown, media-created hit job instead of the deeply scandalous tragedy it was and continues to be.

But as it is, people who are attracted to children are told that they cannot get treatment unless they’ve actually already preyed on a child! Part of the reason for this dearth of preventative treatment is, according to the NYT, because all the studies about pedophila have been done on pedophiles who have succumbed to temptation.Many psychiatrists believe that pedophilia has a neurological origin; but people who feel an attraction to children but do not act on it are not included in studies because they are afraid of being charged with a crime they have not yet committed — and so the information about pedophiles is all information about criminals, whose brains, psyches, behavioral patterns, and family histories may be very different from people who successfully resist temptation. It’s a vicious cycle.

I believe very strongly that society shouldn’t do anything that even suggests that attraction to children is within the normal range of sexual experience, and I believe that our laws should prevent child abusers from living and working near children. But refusing to acknowledge the existence of “virtuous pedophiles,” who are struggling against their attraction, is the wrong response.

The longer we refuse to acknowledge the existence of “virtuous pedophiles,” the less likely these suffering souls are to find effective treatment to help them remain virtuous.

What is the Church to us?

Anybody remember this picture from a few babies ago?

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Our Sunday Visitor is publishing a series of companion piece for the World Meeting of Families Catechesis, Love Is Our Mission. In the latest print edition of OSV, I’m very honored to share a page with Scott Hahn and Archbishop Sartain!

My contribution is also online, here: Family Snapshots Capture the Mystery of the Church As Both Human and Devine. It’s an introduction to the chapter 9 of the catechesis, which is called “Mother, Teacher, Family: The Nature and Role of the Church,” and my essay is all about what you can see in this little snapshot of our domestic church.

We are brimming with anticipation, dying to receive the saving grace that will be poured out with the sacrament; and we are also horribly aware of our own inadequacy — and bristling in advance, in case anyone should dare to notice our flaws. We’re the mother, firmly correcting the wayward toddler; we’re the patient father, protecting us from our own wildness. We’re the rambunctious child, heedless and irreverent, only there because we have to be, and ready to spoil it all; we’re the blessed baby, so helpless we don’t even realize how badly we need to be cared for. And over us all rests that golden light — that grace.

Read the rest at OSV.

Watch Planned Parenthood Arranging to Sell Fetal Livers, Brains, and Hearts Over Lunch

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It helps to know which organs you are hoping to retrieve, Nucatola explains:

So then you’re just kind of cognizant of where you put your graspers, you try to intentionally go above and below the thorax, so that, you know, we’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m going to basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact. And with the calvarium [head], in general, some people will actually try to change the presentation so that it’s not vertex, because when it’s vertex presentation, you never have enough dilation at the beginning of the case, unless you have real, huge amount of dilation to deliver an intact calvarium.

Read the rest at the Register, including video highlights, full video, and full transcript

Is Your Facebook Feed the Sea of Galilee or the Dead Sea?

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I don’t have non-Catholic and secular Facebook friends merely because I want to proselytize them (although I try to answer any questions they have about my faith, and I’m delighted when I hear that they have learned something about the Church through me!). Instead, I have non-Catholic and secular Facebook friends because I like them, and find them interesting — and yes, I learn from them. Of course I do.

Read the rest at the Register. 

P.S.:  I heartily recommend the book I mention, Peter Kreeft’s Your Questions, God’s Answers. I’ve been reading a section a day with the kids ages 9 and up, and it does a good job of answering questions, reviewing stuff they already know, or opening up discussions about things they really wonder about. (And the rule is always: let the discussion happen! Doesn’t matter if it sticks to the original topic or not. If they ask a question about God, then right now is the right time to answer it, period.)

The segments are short enough to read in five minutes or less. It’s intended for teenagers and is slightly goofy but not pandering. It’s theologically meaty and profusely studded with scriptural references, but written in a clear and chatty style that is easy to understand. Not every last section is a whizz bang success, but it’s a painless way to keep a regular conversation about God open, and some of the discussions we’ve had have been really memorable.

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Why Pope Francis should be canonized RIGHT NOW.

Because he didn’t smack this guy right across his smirking puss:

(If the video doesn’t show up, you can see a similar one here.)

I don’t care what else you think about the Pope: that’s heroic virtue right there.

10 Ways to Insult a Catholic Blogger (and Why You Shouldn’t Bother)

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1. You’re just trying to get attention with this! Oh gosh-all-whillikers, not attention! You mean that I made an effort to write in such a way as to persuade people to click on the headline, think about what I said, and elicit a response of some kind? Is outrage! Next time I have a thought, I’ll jot it down on an orange peel and bury it under the shed. You know, for the greater glory of God.

(If I’m writing flagrantly click-baity headlines, attaching photos of Mila Kunis’ chestal area, or just plain lying about stuff, then that’s no good. But just being interesting? That’s my job.)

Read the rest at the Register.

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Maria Goretti didn’t die for her virginity

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Or she wasn’t canonized just because she managed to remain a virgin, anyway.

Let’s back up. When you think about holiness, do you fall into bathwater thinking?

Bathwater thinking is when you forget the baby — the living, breathing, vulnerable persons in front of you — and instead, you wallow around in that warm, familiar bathwater of your indisputably worthy cause.

Think about St. Gianna Molla.  A good many people believe that this woman’s greatness came in her eager, joyful acceptance of death in order to save her baby.  Not so.  It is true that she was willing to accept the risk of death when she refused the therapeutic hysterectomy that would have killed her unborn child.  And she did end up giving her life so that her baby could live.  But the whole time, she prayed and hoped and longed to live. She wasn’t devoted to being pro-life: she was devoted to her baby.  And she wanted to live, so that she could be with her baby and her husband and the rest of her beloved children.  She was pro-life:  she hoped for life in abundance, including her own.

The same is true, in a somewhat different way, for St. Maria Goretti, whose feast is today.  Over and over, I’ve heard this saint praised as a holy girl who prized her viginity so highly that she was willing to die to defend it.  And she did die as a result of defending her viginity.  But when her would-be rapist attacked her, she pleaded with him to stop because he would be committing a mortal sin, and he would go to hell.  She didn’t say, “Please, please, spare my virginity!” She begged him to spare himself.  

This is what it looks like when someone is close to God:  because they love God, they want to spare the person in front of them.  They are in love with living human beings, not in love with virtue in the abstract.  They are focused not on the idea of morality, but on the person whose life and safety (whether physical or spiritual) are at stake.

In Maria Goretti’s case, she was focused on her rapist — and it was her love for him, and not her blindingly pure devotion to virginity, that converted him and brought him to repentance before he died.  That is how conversions happen.  That is how people are saved:  when other people show love for them.  It’s about other people.  It’s always about our love for God expressed as love for other people.  That’s why, before someone is declared a saint, they have to perform two miracles for people still on earth.  Even after death, it’s not about the cause or the system or the virtue in the abstract.  It’s always about our love for other people.

Ideas like holiness, chastity, humility, charity, diligence, or any other virtue that springs to mind when you think of a saint?  These are bathwater.  These are the things that surround and support the “baby” of love in action.  A bath without bathwater is no good; but a bath without someone to be bathed is even more pointless. God doesn’t want bathwater saints, ardently devoted to a cause or a principle or a movement or a virtue.  God wants us to love and care for each other.  Love for each other is how we order our lives.  Love for each other is how we serve God.

Love for each other is how we imitate Jesus. He didn’t die for the cause of salvation; He died for us, as billions of individual beloved children.

It’s not an either/or: we don’t have to choose between pursuing virtue and showing love. But virtue doesn’t exist in a vaccuum, and the pursuit of holiness doesn’t mean anything unless it’s manifest in love for each other. It’s always about our love for other people. Otherwise, what’s the point?

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Image via Wikimedia Commons: By Giuseppe Brovelli-Soffredini[1]  (Original source of this reproduction is unknown) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

This post was originally published in a different form in February of 2014.

Poetry-ize your house for the summer

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Behold my triumph in a stealth supplemental classical education!  My nine-year-old son, the one affectionately known as “Rat Boy,” came up to me and said, “I really liked that thing you put up, the one about the cows and everything.”  He meant the great G. M. Hopkins poem “Pied Beauty,” which I had printed out, matted on construction paper, and tacked over his gerbil’s tank without comment.

He and his siblings certainly did not want to memorize poems when we were homeschooling!  Boy, did they not want to.   But I’ll be darned if I didn’t  hear my seven-year-old (also known as “Rat Boy.”  What can I say?  They act ratty) muttering, “What the hammer?  What the chain?  In what furnace was thy brain?”  Yes, folks, my boys are reading poetry, and they are enjoying it.

As I’ve mentioned, it’s good to be a decent writer no matter what your profession or vocation; and the best writing comes from people who read a lot, and who have certain ponderous, glorious, melodious phrases steeping in their brains.  It’s good to own these phrases whether we’re consciously thinking of them or not — whether we understand what they mean or not.  So I’m on a poetry rampage these days . . . but a stealthy one.  No nagging, no prodding, no pedantics or pleading.

I just sat down and skimmed through lists of famous poems, picking out my favorites, and printed them out in a large, plain font (it takes forever to write poems out by hand, for some reason).  Then I cut each page down to the size and shape of the poem, rather than leaving them on 8.5×11 paper — I think they look more appealing, less easy to ignore as educational-type stuff, if they’re nonstandard shapes.  Then I matted them on whatever color paper seemed appropriate (again, to make them more decorative and appealing, and less scholarly in appearance), and went around the house tacking them to walls.

I tried to make the placement relevant (“Love (III)” goes under Rublev’s icon of the Trinity; “Dust of Snow” goes next to the window on the side of the house where there are, in fact, crows and trees), but went first for places where I’ve noticed that people tend to hang around staring at the walls already.  Then I didn’t say a word about them, and just waited for the kids to notice.  I think the key was not making a big deal about it — just doing it because I felt like doing it.  No pressure, so they had no motivation to rebel or be difficult.

Here are the poems I hung up, chosen mostly because they’re fairly short and have wonderful sounds and/or images:

The Tyger” William Blake
Still, Citizen Sparrow” Richard Wilbur
Dust of Snow”  Robert Frost
Spring and Fall” G.M. Hopkins
Love (III)” George Herbert

and here are the ones awaiting colorful matting as soon as I remember where I left the construction paper:

“Thirteen Ways of Looking At a  Blackbird” Wallace Stevens
“When I Was One-and-Twenty” (from A Shropshire Lad) A. E. Housman
“Epistemology” Richard Wilbur
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” William Butler Yeats
“The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower” Dylan Thomas
“maggie and milly and molly and may” e. e. cummings
“The Walrus and the Carpenter” Lewis Carroll
“Nothing Gold Can Stay” Robert Frost
“Mock On,  Mock On, Voltaire, Rousseau” William Blake
“At the Sea-Side” Robert Lewis Stevenson
“Marginalia” Richard Wilbur
I Knew a Woman” Theodore Roethke

I wanted to put “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways,” but we have a Lucy, whom we do not want to creep out.  Otherwise, I gave my self full permission to just pick stuff that I happen to like for whatever reason, and didn’t feel obligated to choose Important Works Students Ought To Learn.

Oh, it’s so easy!  I’m very happy about this idea, and I don’t see how it could possibly do any harm.  When we stopped homeschooling, I was very glad to have someone else take over all the work, but felt persistently of blue that the curriculum was a little flat.  Now I feel like I’ve snuck vitamins into all their favorite snacks, and their days are bound to be richer.

Lots of people hang up quotes from saints or favorite authors, and I think this is a great idea, too.  But for now, I’m just pushing sounds and images.  Do you do this at your house?  What’s on your walls?

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This post originally ran at the Register in 2012.