Fan mail!

A reader takes me to task
for taking some ex-Jesuit to task,
after he took a Cardinal to task,
because he took contemporary moral errors to task: clear?

No, it wasn't to me, either. I had to look up the original post to know what he was talking about. It's linked below.

The anonymous reader opines:

i find it breathtaking that communicants of the roman church continue to defend an institution that has lost virtually all its moral authority. your attack of ed ingebretsen was particularly offensive. i suppose all of this must be put in a realistic context: the roman church has always had problems with intellectual honesty. ed was... yikes.. honest. at least with the rise of secularism, your church was not able to stick him on a stake and burn him. that said, your organization continues to exclude so many, so unbelievably many from society. the irony though is that your church is so dominated by hopelessly neurotic, self loathing gay people. but i trust in god. eventually your church will find itself again on the wrong side of this issue, just as it did when confronted with scientific, intellectual and moral truth. now that the emperor is running around naked, the church is being watched very closely. and the picture is not pretty is it? your people represent the derriere guard of christianity.. could you please pick up the pace??

Well, at least the guy is consistent: first this Professor Ingebretsen gets three of his fifteen minutes of fame by insulting the honesty of a cardinal ("These things are exactly what he's paid to say"), and now the writer of the above fan mail impugns the "intellectual honesty" of the Catholic Church. Neither of them seems to realize what a weak argument that is: instead of openly disputing Catholic doctrine as erroneous, they evade the subject by suggesting that we don't really, truly believe it: if we would just be honest with ourselves, we'd agree with them.

Shall I tease the guy for not knowing his French? The term is garde arri�re, not "derriere"; and, given the context, the temptation to make a wisecrack about that is great.

But no, I will forbear: this irate reader has a soul too, and although I think he's inappropriately angry, I don't really want to hurt his feelings. We're all sinners here, and he needs instruction as all of us do sometimes.

The Church's teaching on sexual ethics w.r.t. homosexuality is just not understandable without The Big Picture, the noble and beautiful Catholic vision of sexuality and marriage. Maybe that's one more reason for me to point people to Bishop Galeone's pastoral letter. Until people understand the central meaning about the body, spousal love, and marriage, they'll regard the rest of Catholic sexual ethics as arbitrary.

Update: Back in July, CWN posted the text of Cdl. Arinze's praiseworthy speech at Georgetown that drew all this attention, with analysis by historian James Hitchcock.