I realize that I didn’t post my Catholic Exchange piece from last week to the blog. Here it is:
Our culture launches a brutal assault against men. It comes from two different fronts with seemingly contradictory attacks. The first is the radical form of feminism that has grown in prominence over the course of the last 40-50 years. This radical feminism spreads the narrative that men are sexist, pigs, brutish, predatory, inferior, barbaric and on and on. Social media is filled with these kinds of vile mischaracterizations of men that go after the jugular of masculinity. Watch closely in your favorite sitcom: the wife is usually the strong intelligent leader of the family while the husband is a bumbling idiot.
On the other front, we have a culture that is obsessed with hedonism in which men are told to lust freely after women, or men. Pornography is normal, as are things like masturbation, adultery, and promiscuity. The massive pornography industry, along with the advertising industry, has exploited and profited off of the visual tendency of men. These images are everywhere, from social media to television to grocery stores to billboards. It is impossible to avoid it. Lust isn’t just an issue outside of the Church, as much as we would like to think so, to our own detriment. This is happening in our own pews. Far too many of our brothers in Christ are waging a terrible battle and we largely ignore their struggles, either out of ignorance, because we have taken on the culture’s view of men, fear, naivete, or apathy.
The failure of finding authentic masculinity and femininity
In the wake of Vatican II — while far too many people greatly misread, misapplied, and distorted conciliar documents such as Gaudium et Spes —radical feminism found sway within the Church. A great project to feminize the Church began, and while the Church needed to embrace authentic femininity, in many corners it has largely disregarded its own heritage and applied cultural principles of feminism as opposed to the theological understanding of feminism so beautifully taught by St. John Paul II in Mulieris Dignitatem and his Theology of the Body. Instead, many women took the helm on far too many projects and left men to their own devices; everything has to have a female touch and typical masculine traits are discouraged.
Everything needs a balance of authentic masculinity and femininity which find their perfection in the Blessed Trinity. God is pure spirit. The “He” is found in the relations of the Persons of the Blessed Trinity, not in a biological sex or gender (St. Thomas Aquinas). God has revealed Himself to us as a relation of Divine Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Church’s understanding has always been that the sexes are equal in dignity by virtue of being made imago Dei, but differ at a biological and an ontological (the level of being, existence, reality) level in their masculinity and femininity. Both sexes possess masculine and feminine traits, but each of the sexes embodies these traits not only physically, but spiritually. Biological sex is also a reflection of spiritual realities. The Church is not either/or, she is a both/and in her teaching. The Church is the only vestige left that embraces authentic femininity and masculinity.
Men by virtue of their masculinity—and this is a great good—are defenders, protectors, providers, and deeply oriented towards ritual. I know this not only as a Catholic, but as a U.S. Navy Veteran. These traits are universal and, while our culture seeks to tear down the qualities that make men men, we have an obligation as Catholics to live in conformity to truth and reality. Men have a very distinct and crucial role to play in the Church. It is time we stop expecting men to be anything other then men. It is time to start allowing men to participate in the life of the Church through their distinct expressions of masculinity.
Swimming the Depths 