UPDATE: In response to this threat, John Pacheco has founded the Canadian Catholic Action League
I don’t yet know if they will publish it or not, since I just finished it, but here’s a sneak peak of the latest piece I just submitted to the Wanderer:
O Canada!
Our Homosexualist Land?
Pete Vere, JCL
As a Canadian living in the United States, a number of things make me homesick for the Great White North. Off the top of my head, I can think of St. Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal, French-Canadian culture in Quebec and moose-meat in Northern Ontario. There are also my buddies among the Catholic apologetics scene in Ottawa, where I first cut my teeth as a Catholic writer while studying canon law.
So while surfing the internet the other day, I dropped by Catholic-Legate.com to check in on the gang back home. Rather than make me feel homesick, however, what I read at the website simply made me feel sick. I now live in America and the majority of The Wanderer’s readership is American. Under the present circumstances, this is a good thing since it affords me the protection of the First Amendment. Yet as one of Canada’s most popular websites of Catholic apologetics, Catholic-Legate enjoys no such protection. For if Canada’s political institutions get their way, Catholic-Legate could soon become one of many religious websites targeted under new hate crime legislation being railroaded through the Canadian legislature. How I long for the religious sensibility and moral self-restraint of the Clinton administration in comparison to those who have hijacked the Canadian political system!
Let me explain a little. This is the same political regime that recently ordered the Saskatoon StarPhoenix newspaper and Hugh Owens of Regina to pay $1,500 to three homosexual activists. Their crime? Publishing an advertisement quoting verses from Holy Scripture. According to LifeSiteNews.com: “The purpose of the ad was to indicate that the Bible says no to homosexual behaviour. The advertisement displayed references to four Bible passages: Romans 1, Leviticus 18:22, Leviticus 20:13 and 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 […]”
Svend Robinson, a member of the Canadian parliament, is now following up on this ruling that criminalizes the Natural Law. He has introduced Bill C-250 before the Canadian legislature, which potentially makes speaking out against “sexual orientation” a hate crime. Mr. Robinson, for our American audience, is Canada’s first openly homosexual member of parliament. Not surprisingly, he also belongs to Canada’s openly socialist party. Even Monica Lewinsky would blush in modest embarrassment with some of Mr. Robinson’s past reported shenanigans.
Perhaps this is why the Canadian federal government will not be appealing a recent judicial decision of Ontario’s highest court – a decision legalizing so-called marriage for homosexual couples. “The existing common law definition of marriage violates the couple’s equality rights on the basis of sexual orientation under [the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms],” this ruling stated.
And what about the proposed definition of “sexual orientation”? According to Catholic-Legate, “It was reported that Beth Phinney, Liberal MP for Hamilton Mountain, was in a meeting with a constituent concerning the implications of C-250. Ms. Phinney was asked if the term ‘sexual orientation’ included heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, trisexual, bestiality, pedophilia, incest, polygamy, sadomasochism, etc? The constituent was quite disturbed when this Liberal MP confirmed that ‘all of these sexual behaviours would be included under the category of sexual orientation’.” Within the context of the Natural Law this strikes me more as a practical definition of sexual disorientation.
Fortunately, I now live in America. The First Amendment protects my religious freedom to express my opinion in the media – even from the long wrist of Svend Robinson. North of the boarder, however, my friend Chris Beneteau may not find himself so lucky in the future.
“Whether or not homosexuality is a choice is irrelevant,” Chris writes in one particularly pointed Catholic-Legate commentary. “Homosexuals as well as heterosexuals can both choose to avoid sexual behaviours (such as sodomy) which the weight of scientific evidence suggest are dangerous and potentially fatal. […] It is one thing for people to do whatever they want behind closed doors, yet it is another thing to force the rest of society to embrace the behaviours. While I agree that the government does not belong in the bedrooms of the nation, I also do not think that they should open the doors and force us to peek in.”
I fear even more for John Pacheco, both the founder of Catholic-Legate and the Godfather to my daughter Angela. “Over the past few years,” John writes, “religious freedom in this country has come under increasing attack by a wicked and perverse judiciary with an anti-life, anti-religious political agenda. All people of Faith need to band together, and fight this menace head on […] To our Protestant, Muslim, and Jewish counterparts, please help us protect the sanctity of the human family and the dignity of marriage!
“Bill C-250 would add ‘sexual orientation’ to the list of protected classes in the hate propaganda sections of the Criminal Code which could criminalize any criticisms of homosexuality or homosexual activity. This could be used to threaten with prosecution […] any church that holds homosexual activities to be disordered and immoral; or any citizen who simply philosophically disagrees with the legal, financial or employment ‘rights’ being sought by gay lobbying group (e.g. adoption, spousal benefits, marriage status, etc.). It could lead to parts of the Bible being labeled ‘hate literature’ and references made to them in church statements or homilies as propagating hate.
“As a Roman Catholic Apologist, I consider this legislation to be a direct assault on my freedom of speech and my Constitutional right to practice my religion. The persons who are propagating such insidious legislation are engaging in religious persecution. What is the government going to do? Ban the Bible from the country? How about the Catechism of the Catholic Church? Is the government going to start arresting Catholic priests who cite the Catechism in rejecting the homosexual lifestyle?”
Love the sinner, but hate the sin. As Catholics, Christ calls us to love our homosexual neighbor and seek the salvation of his soul. We accomplish this task in exhorting those affected by this disorder to live chastely within the boundaries of the Natural Law. Unfortunately, this new piece of proposed Canadian legislation fails to take this distinction into account. Which is not surprising when, in the process of accommodating an ivory-basement judiciary that dissents from our traditional Judeo-Christian morality, our Canadian politicians confuse the boundaries between decriminalization, legalization, and the criminalization of the Natural Law.
Author: Pete Vere
She Was the Dancing Queen
My buddy Dave Alexander blogs some interesting comments about liturgical dancing. Just one quick comment; I thought the joke was suppose to go “Why don’t young Baptist newlyweds consummate their marriage standing up?”
Pre-Marital Annulments
First off, my sincere apologies to Kevin Miller and our readers from HMS Weblog who came over to hear my thoughts about North American tribunals and annulments. Unfortunately, we had a disk error on our new server, which we have now fixed, but in so doing had to revert to a back-up copy of the blog from Sunday.
That being said, here’s some thoughts on the annulment issue from the recent CUF-Tucson conference.
Additionally, here’s some thoughts from an editorial I wrote for The Wanderer last year:
“What is the main cause of so many annulments?” As both a canon lawyer and a married layman, this is the question I most often encounter when conversing with other Catholics. Now the Code of Canon Law lists many grounds upon which the Church may declare a marriage invalid. The more commonly used grounds concern the psychological maturity of the spouses at the time of the wedding, or else their intention going into the marriage. Nevertheless, rather than bore you with technical canonical jargon, let me identify one of two issues which, in my opinion, lay at the root of most annulments.
This issue is pre-marital sex. (The other, which I will save for another editorial, is contraception.) Although this is something society has come to expect of young couples today, given that pornography is currently the wallpaper of our culture, we cannot begin to measure the toll this takes on modern marriages. This is why when interviewing someone seeking to have their marriage declared invalid by the Church, I ask questions concerning pre-martial relations. This is because most problems that lead to the breakdown of a marriage are already noticeable during the courtship. Yet when the couple engage in pre-marital relations, these problems are usually overlooked during the courtship, and unresolved going into the marriage. “I knew this was a problem,” many women tell me, “but I overlooked it because I had already invested so much into our relationship.” Similarly, I often hear the following from guys: “I had my doubts because our disagreements, but I felt obliged to marry her because we were sleeping together.”
And this leads me to a second problem caused by pre-marital relations: In creating a false intimacy within an insecure relationship, the couple who engage in it often feel compelled to marry. This compulsion comes not out of love or a desire to spend the rest of one’s life with the another, but rather out of a sense of obligation to correct a morally sinful situation. Hence the romance deteriorates within the relationship before the vows are even exchanged. In fact, I quite often discover from friends and family members within their witness testimony that the couple never displayed simple acts of affection during their marriage such as holding hands and addressing one another by pet names.
Yet how does this affect the validity of marriage? Numerous scenarios are possible. A couple hesitantly approaching the altar, because their relationship lacks love, will often not want to bring children into a marriage unless it proves stable over time. Canonists call this partial-simulation, due to the fact the couple display an intention against children at the time they exchange their wedding vows, as well as an intention against permanence in that the couple hold divorce as an option if the marriage does not work out. From my Tribunal experience, a lot of partial-simulation is rooted in pre-marital sex.
Therefore, in reflecting upon what leads to the break down of so many marriages, we draw a simple conclusion: ignoring chastity during the courtship prevents love from blossoming into a marriage.
The Epooftapalian Church
As some of you may have heard, this has been a rather rough week for the Anglican communion which is now threatening to split along continental lines over the issue of homosexuality. Here’s my thought on the subject… click
Lidless Eye Roundup: Sungenis vs. Pacheco on Assisi
John Pacheco and Bob Sungenis are going at it for another round, this time over the topic of Religious Liberty and the Ecumenical Gatherings at Assisi. John offers a number of choice comments here, of which my favorite is the following:
If you are really interested in winning souls for Jesus Christ, you preach love, forgiveness, peace, mercy and the rest of the things the Pope preached. You do this because the world already knows all about damnation. We are damning each other to hell every day. The world needs to hear about God’s MERCY too and not just about judgement. That’s why we have a feast of Divine Mercy. We are talking about a tactical way of winning converts to the faith. The over bearing hermeneutic of damnation that you operate under is not as effective today as it once was.
This debate is fascinating for a number of reasons, one of which is the great familiarity of each principle party with the other. Throughout the years, many Catholic apologists have passed through CAI. Yet Sungenis and Pacheco were probably the two mainstays, as President and Vice-President of CAI respectively. When John made the difficult decision last Autumn to leave CAI and found Catholic-Legate.com, most of CAI-Canada followed him over. I hate to sound melodramatic, but in reading this dialogue there is a Luke Skywalker vs. Darth Vader feeling about it, in that John respects Bob as one of his mentors in the apologetics world and is now trying to rescue him from the dark side of radtradism.
Meenwhile, the Lidless-Eye Inquisition also has a number of great threads going on as usual.
Additionally, one of my favorite blogs, namely, Against the Grain from the Ratzinger Fan Club also has an excellent entry in response to various radtrad attacks that explains The Meaning of the Word Subsists.