MARY BETH BONACCI

Achieving internal chastity is not an easy task. For many, it is a lifelong struggle, fought day in and day out.

Apparently, I’m becoming the queen of the two-part column. Once I get going on a subject, there’s often a whole lot to say, and one column sometimes doesn’t do it justice.

My most recent topic is no exception. In the last column, we were talking about the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. When Christ said “any man who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart,” He made it clear that chastity — and unchastity — don’t begin with what we do, but rather in what we think. And deliberately seeking sexual stimulation, even via the imagination, constitutes a sin against chastity.

But there is another side to this, one that deserves attention as well. Last time, we were talking about people who are deliberately looking for sexual thoughts. But what about all of those sexual thoughts which come into our brains — day in and day out — uninvited? Are those sinful as well? And, if so, how can anybody get to heaven, ever?

First of all, it’s important to understand that it’s impossible to sin “accidentally.” Sin has to be the result of free choice. Sin happens in the will, not the subconscious or the hormones or anywhere else.

God created us male and female. And he created us to be sexually attracted to each other. That’s a good thing in marriage, where that attraction is supposed to be acted upon. Problem is, our hormones can’t discern “spouse” from “non-spouse.” And so, from time to time, we respond sexually to a non-spouse. We start to think about how using this person’s body could give us pleasure. And therein lies the challenge.

Christians are called to rise above our baser instincts. That means that, when those thoughts pop into our brains, we let them go. We look past this person’s sexual attractiveness, to see him or her as a beloved image and likeness of God. The sin of lust occurs when, instead, we deliberately grab onto those thoughts and say, “I want to think about that some more.” At that point, we are using that person to get sexual pleasure for ourselves. When we deliberately consent to those thoughts, when we start adding to the fantasy, we sin against chastity. As a student of mine once said, “It isn’t the first look that gets you into trouble. It’s the second.”

Our emotional life, unfortunately, can also contribute to uninvited sexual fantasies. Father Benedict Groeschel, in his excellent book The Courage to Be Chaste, says that these fantasies often reflect the need for tenderness, reinforcement, intimacy and spiritual love. When we’re not getting those, we tend to be more vulnerable to sexual fantasy.

This causes many sensitive people to struggle with guilt, often unnecessarily. They think they’re bad people just because these thoughts enter into their brains. They think that chastity means that their sex drive should go away. Nothing could be further from the truth. Those involuntary thoughts are not in themselves sinful. Yes, they are invitations to sinfulness. (That’s the definition of temptation.) But we don’t sin unless we accept the invitation. We may be barraged by uninvited sexual thoughts all day long, but as long as we don’t voluntarily consent to them, there is no sin. (Consent, according to Father Groeschel, means having the presence of mind to say, “This is sinful, but I’m going to think about it anyway.”)

Of course, those thoughts don’t always go away so easily. They linger in the mind, taunting us. Trying to force them out of our minds is futile. (Have you ever tried not to think about something? The very act of trying forces you to think about it.) And violently forcing sexual thought out of our minds wouldn’t be terribly healthy even if it did work. It’s a form of sexual repression. Burying thought like that tends to keep them alive in the subconscious, where they can cause all kinds of mischief.

So what do we do? We don’t give in and focus our attention on the thoughts, but neither do we fear them and try to drive them away. We simply acknowledge them as a part of being human, and then turn our attention elsewhere. We distract ourselves. (Father Groeschel points out that very few people are tempted during a fire alarm.) We ignore the thoughts, even as they clamor for our attention. Eventually, they go away.

It’s also important to keep our lives in order. If loneliness or need for intimacy is fueling our overactive imaginations, we need change our lives, to satisfy those needs — in the right way.

Basically, it’s not easy to ignore thoughts that promise us such pleasure. We need God’s help. Chastity without prayer is impossible. All moral virtue involves turning away from short-term pleasure for the sake of long-term happiness. And that takes strength that we don’t have on our own.

Achieving internal chastity is not an easy task. For many, it is a lifelong struggle, fought day in and day out. Father Benedict Groeschel offers encouragement, saying, “Every temptation resisted is a great act of worship of God. To put up with temptation and not seek the easy way out is a powerful acknowledgement of the sovereignty of God … Even if one falls later on, he has accomplished an act of obedient worship that will not be erased” (The Courage to Be Chaste, p. 90).

Resist temptation. It’s not easy, but the rewards are huge.

Mary Beth Bonacci. “Banishing Unchaste Thoughts — the Healthy Way.” Arlington Catholic Herald (March 22, 2001).

Reprinted with permission of the Arlington Catholic Herald.

Barney Swartz reports:

WOMEN’S and girls’ magazines are full of advice on better sex, from how to catch and hold your man down to detailed instructions on sexual techniques. Now it seems the oldest written recipe, the Bible’s, might be the best.

Neuroscientific studies suggest that ”life-long heterosexual monogamy” is most likely to provide both sexual satisfaction and excitement, a Melbourne conference heard at the weekend.

While women’s activist Melinda Tankard Reist complained that Dolly magazine, aimed at 10 to 13-year-old girls, provided instructions on oral and anal sex without any context or warnings, Sydney University sexologist Patricia Weerakoon said biblical sexual ethics were healthy and life-affirming.

In a joint paper with her son, Sydney Presbyterian minister Kamal Weerakoon, she said non-religious people expected the church to be fearful, ignorant, defensive, repressed and hypocritical with only one message about sex: don’t do it.

But a biblical understanding of sex was deeply positive - ”do it, God made us for it” - while also being honest about human imperfections and limitations.

Read it all..

The women bishops’ debate at the General Synod sparked a discussion on this morning’s Toby Foster Bigger at Breakfast Show on BBC Radio Sheffield about whether religion has a place in 2010. Cranmer’s Curate, who was invited to take part, tried to make the point that the Church best serves society when it is being faithful to its counter-cultural convictions.

It is worth reflecting on the damage feminism, and the behavioural androgyny to which it has given birth, has inflicted on British society since the 1960s:

• House prices have become unaffordable for many because of the impact of double incomes. The pre-1960s practice of women being required to give up their jobs when they got married certainly helped to keep house prices lower in relation to average incomes.

• Social and financial pressure on young mothers to return to work causes distress to themselves and denies babies and toddlers proper emotional engagement with their mothers at a crucial developmental stage. Institutional supervision is no substitute for a mother’s love.

• Young women growing up are increasingly without positive female role models resulting in an upsurge of teenage pregnancy, binge drinking and the laddette culture. In pre-1960s’ Britain mothers were substantial figures with significant moral authority.

• Marriage has been destabilised because men are being discouraged from giving a lead and women are being discouraged from taking one.

• British society is less capable of producing outstanding women such as Margaret Thatcher and Mary Whitehouse, who were products of Christian Britain.

• The education system has been skewed against boys in favour of girls. This is going to cause huge social problems in the disenfranchisement of young men in employment, in family life and in wider society in the future.

With such obvious social problems caused to a significant extent by 1960s’ feminist ideology, Christ’s servants should surely be more, not less, confident to stand up for the God-created complementarity of the sexes in the teeth of fashionable androgyny.

June 22nd, 2010 Posted in From Lisa’s Lookout, Marriage, Morality, sex |

Carolyn Moynihan writes in Mercator:

It’s bizarre; it’s scary; it’s unbelievable at a time when paedophilia has been starring as the worst crime in the world. I am talking about a new low on the slippery slope of sexualisaing little children.

We have seen the little bras, the little t-shirts with sexy slogans, the pole dancing kits for little girls; now we are confronted with the complete little adult look.

The picture from the London Telegraph shows Suri Cruise, three-year-old daughter of Tom Cruise and Kati Holmes, tricked-out as a twenty-year-old. This is not child’s dressing up play, it is something contrived by commercial agents and her parents. Why, for heaven’s sake? Do they want her treated as a young woman?

But it is the ballroom dancing heels that are causing ructions in Britain right now. Justine Roberts of Mumsnet, a parenting forum that is running a campaign to get retailers to buck the sexualization trend, says:

“Some of the shoes I have seen on sale look more suited to a lap-dancing club than the feet of a young girl.

“The items in question are prematurely sexualising young children. We are saying to retailers, ‘Have a look at your range and ask yourselves if these items are appropriate. Some of the school shoes Tesco sells have got a two-inch heel. You shouldn’t have a high heel if your feet are developing.

“It’s not about being Mary Whitehouse. It’s about not sleepwalking into a world where this is normal.

Well said; sleepwalking is exactly what some parents seem to be doing.

Read More..

COLLEEN CARROLL CAMPBELL

It started out innocuously enough. Apple CEO Steve Jobs was responding to a late-night e-mail from a blogger critical of his company’s tight control over which applications, or “apps,” are sold for use with its iPads and iPhones

Jobs answered that Apple’s standards are meant to liberate consumers, giving them “freedom from programs that steal your private data,” “freedom from programs that trash your battery” and “freedom from porn.”

Those first two freedoms might be welcome in today’s tech jungle. But judging from the shock and outrage that erupted in response to Jobs’ offhand swipe at pornography, that last one apparently is not.

Beginning with the response from Jobs’ interlocutor – who objected that “Porn is just fine!” – the Apple CEO has found himself on the receiving end of a tidal wave of fury from online peeping toms offended by his refusal to enable their habit. They have denounced him as a puritanical zealot and iron-fisted censor who is “imposing his morality” on America by opting out of the virtual skin trade.

Never mind that today’s online pornography enthusiasts are free to take Jobs’ advice and buy other products that make their vice easier to indulge. Or that anyone with an Internet browser on his iPhone or iPad can access pornography online anyway.

The backlash against Jobs is not about access. It’s about indignation at anyone who dares to criticize America’s addiction to online smut.

Panning or banning pornography once was considered good business. Today, it’s increasingly seen as commercial suicide. Even the most anodyne comments – like Jobs’ response to the blogger that “you might care more about porn when you have kids” – are treated as toxic in our consumer culture, which thrives on convincing us that our dirty little habits don’t hurt anyone else.

A growing body of research is springing up to refute that feel-good claim. Reports such as the Witherspoon Institute’s recently published dossier on “The Social Costs of Pornography,” compiled by Mary Anne Layden and Mary Eberstadt, marshal scholarly research across disciplines to show how America’s $13-billion-a-year pornography habit impacts everyone involved.

Pornography’s costs range from the psychological damage and health risks incurred by “performers” trapped in the skin trade to the broken marriages and sexual dysfunctions suffered by adults who participate in it vicariously, and the general coarsening of a society that treats sex as a spectator sport and women’s bodies as just another consumer item.

Most alarming is the harm Jobs mentioned, to children for whom once difficult-to-find X-rated images now are only a click away. A 2009 study of children’s online activity by Symantec Corporation found that “sex” and “porn” were among the top five most popular search terms used by children under 18, with “porn” as the fourth most-popular search term used by children age 7 and younger.

In a society where pornography is so pervasive, it’s intimidating to face the truth about how it endangers our children, destabilizes our families and distorts our views of sex and one another.

A good Internet filter can thwart some of those searches. But outside the home, where the ranks of pornography addicts are growing, other porn-related threats to child welfare loom.

One is the well-documented tendency of habitual pornography users to move from soft-core images to more deviant and hard-core material including, in some cases, child pornography. That’s troubling, given that a 2007 Federal Bureau of Prisons study of men convicted of using child pornography found that 85 percent of them said they had committed acts of sexual abuse against minors. Those numbers suggest a stronger link between seeing and doing than pornography’s defenders care to admit.

In a society where pornography is so pervasive, it’s intimidating to face the truth about how it endangers our children, destabilizes our families and distorts our views of sex and one another. It’s easier to shout down the occasional unexpected criticism of pornography than to ponder its validity and change behavior accordingly.

Aficionados of online smut can holler all they want about the alleged Puritanism and moral authoritarianism of pornography critics like Jobs. The more they bellow, the more they sound like petulant schoolchildren trying to drown out the one voice that bothers them most: the whisper of a conscience that suggests their harmless little habit is not so harmless after all.

REX MURPHY

Somehow Israel is the rogue, the barbarian nation, the only state on Earth that can energize the professionally lethargic diplomats in the great tower of hypocrisy on the Hudson River.

I don’t suppose the world needs to remember Rwanda to note how sluggish in the face of imminent horror the United Nations is and can be. If that is not a sufficient cue, we could bring in other examples of areas of great threat or immiseration or both: Darfur, Tibet, Chechnya, North Korea, Zimbabwe, the Congo or Iran. On these the UN has the patience of a stone but only some of its energy.

But torpid as is its nature, and comatose as are its eternal deliberations, on one subject, and toward one state, the United Nations acquires a strange and uniquely transformative power. Bring Israel under its gaze and the diplomatic sloths at UN headquarters morph into the swiftest of gazelles. From lotus-eaters to adrenalin junkies in the twinkling of an eye. Quite amazing, really.

So naturally when the debacle over the so-called “freedom flotilla” – news media should be wary of letting activists choose the names of things – roared into the headlines, the UN reacted at the diplomatic equivalent of the speed of light. The Security Council issued its “condemnation,” and in a wonderful reversal of cause and effect also called for an investigation into what it had “condemned.” And the cruellest joke on the planet, what the UN with unbounded irony refers to as its Human Rights Council, issued, as unfailingly in every previous international incident involving Israel it has, a condemnation as well.

If the flotilla’s real purpose was to bring aid, then merely by complying with Israel’s request to dock at Ashdod – as five of the ships did, with no blood shed and no international headlines – the supplies on the sixth ship would now be in Gaza. In reality, it was exercise in early 21st-century propaganda on the battlefield of world opinion. Its only purpose was to challenge and delegitimize Israel’s blockade of ships travelling to Gaza – a blockade, as too many news reports fail to emphasize, which up until this “incident” was also being maintained by Egypt. That the Egyptian government, until a few days ago, mirrored in its actions Israel’s concerns about what might get shipped into Hamas is the only real obstruction in the otherwise perfectly concentrated anti-Israel narrative.

As to the “peace activists” on that sixth ship, the ones who received the Israeli soldiers boarding the ship with bats, pipes, knives and chains – well, the video footage of the moments preceding the boarding and the boarding itself will make most rational people review their understanding of peace and activism and some of the organizations that fly the flags of these conveniently fungible designations.

Any real investigation of the flotilla will not confine itself to the boarding, but include an equally scrupulous inquiry into the origins of some of its actors, its unstated as well as it stated aims, and the facility and speed with which it revved up the engine of international protest against Israel. It seemed like half the world took to the streets in less than half a day.

There are far larger, more egregious causes for the world’s attention than the episode off Gaza last Sunday, greater threats and deeper anxieties. But it is truly worth remarking that when Israel is in the dock, protest rage goes epidemic.

This was but one installment in the long and continuous campaign to isolate Israel, and to turn that state in the eyes of international opinion into a pariah, to erode its legitimacy and to break its will. You’ve seen the branding. Apartheid Israel. Israel is the worst thing to happens to Jews since the Holocaust. Racist Israel. Imperialist Israel.

The campaign has been remarkably successful, which is much to Israel’s woe and may be to the world’s woe as well. There are far larger, more egregious causes for the world’s attention than the episode off Gaza last Sunday, greater threats and deeper anxieties. But it is truly worth remarking that when Israel is in the dock, protest rage goes epidemic. To use that vile term so often recently turned upon Israel when it acts in its self-defence, the response is extravagantly “disproportionate.”

I truly do not know why this is so. Israel is a sanctuary state established after one almost successful attempt just two generations ago to rid all the world of Jews. And Israel is now in the shadow of a fundamentalist, ferociously anti-Israel theocracy which is about to equip itself with nuclear weapons. Perhaps, alas, under the threat of a second attempt.

Yet somehow Israel is the rogue, the barbarian nation, the only state on Earth that can energize the professionally lethargic diplomats in the great tower of hypocrisy on the Hudson River. Strange and dangerous times.