SEX IS DEATH. (It's not a sin, if you enjoy it)

I came to Carthage, where I found myself in the midst of a hissing cauldron of lusts. I had not yet fallen in love, but I was in love with the idea of it, and this feeling that something was missing made me despise myself for not being more anxious to satisfy the need. I began to look around for some object for my love, since I badly wanted to love something. —St. Augustine, Confessions

...or, The Catholic crackup continues apace.

From the National Catholic Reporter (via Catholic Online):

What happened to confession – Changing mores reflective of use
by Ed Conroy

San Antonio – Lyn Woods, a middle-aged Catholic woman who teaches ceramics at the Southwest School of Art & Craft in San Antonio, said that, although she goes to church, she hasn’t been to confession in many years. She says her childhood experience of the sacrament of reconciliation explains much of her adult attitude toward it today.

“When I was 7, 8 or 9 years old,” she said, “I found myself repeating the same sins over and over to the priest. It seemed to me they weren’t really sins but simply human nature. On the other hand, if I did something really serious, the guilt alone would drive me to confession.”

What, now? Because you did not sin much as a child, it is acceptable to ignore your very real adult sins today?

Woods’ opinion that confession is often meaningless seems an increasingly common one among American Catholics.

That is not God's fault, nor The Church's, nor the Sacrament's. The perceived lack of meaning is all in Wood's defective will.

Over the past decade and a half, an increasing number of Catholic scholars and clergy in the United States have been seeking to understand the changing dynamics of confession, now called the sacrament of reconciliation, in the life of the American church.

Their inquiries are spurred by one undeniable social fact. Since the 1970s, the number of American Catholics making private acts of confession to their parish priests has, in the oft-quoted words of Boston College historian James O’Toole, “fallen through the floor.”

Here is the crackup writ large, kiddies. Instead of teaching their flock why they must change their sinful ways, our moral and intellectual superiors continue to try to change His Church to fit the stupidity of our benighted age so they can be "relevant to the youth of today" or some such nonsense.

This is exactly the foolishness of the foolish one that has been destroying the Catholic Church for over a generation while damning untold numbers of souls for eternity. There will be Hell to pay, kiddies.

O’Toole made that dramatic statement at a 2004 conference on the “state of confession” held in Washington at The Catholic University of America.

Organized by Leslie Tentler, a professor of history at Catholic University, the conference has been widely cited in articles written for U.S. diocesan publications during Lent, the time when priests generally encourage more lay participation in the sacrament.

Despite such encouragement, however, American Catholic churches that in the 1950s and early ’60s were filled with people going to confession on Saturday evenings are now full of people fulfilling their weekly Mass obligation.

Catholic sociologist James Davidson of Purdue University says it is necessary to see such changes historically, as part of a “bell curve.”

“It is important to remember,” he said, “that at the turn of the 20th century the Catholic church in our country was characterized by a lack of vocations and a general lack of popular participation in the sacrament of reconciliation.”

Davidson observed that the social situation of 100 years ago was not very different from that of the present time, and that the church has come to a trough in a curve that was at its peak in the ’50s.

“In the 1950s, American Catholics banded together after experiencing decades of anti-Catholicism. You saw a great upsurge in vocations to the religious life and a tremendous public participation in private confession in the churches on the weekends,” he said.

Brilliant! People rally to the defense of their faith when persecuted! Ain't sociology grand, kiddies?

Davidson’s perspective is informed by the research work he undertook with colleagues William D’Antonio, Dean Hoge and Katherine Meyer, which resulted in their highly respected 2001 study “American Catholics: Gender, Generation and Commitment.”

Never trust anyone who does not know what the word "gender" means, kiddies. This may make you look paranoid, but at least you won't be a dumbass corrupting language for political purposes.

According to Leslie Tentler, issues of gender and generation have played a role in shaping popular participation in the sacrament, as have disagreements over what behavior constitutes a sin.
Take, for example, the issues around contraception.

It is about time Citizen Conroy got to the real reason people don't like to actually confess their sins: Sins are icky and embarrassing.

Tentler, who has extensively studied North American women’s responses to Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical, Humana Vitae, says there is no doubt that reproductive issues have had an effect upon American women’s approach to the sacrament of reconciliation.

Ah, here we go, kiddies...

After interviewing parish priests around the United States and women who practiced birth control and still attended Mass, Tentler observed that “many women simply did not regard contraception as a sin, and so they simply stopped going to confession.”

Instant translation: "We want to fuck with no immediate consequences, so we will use technology to avoid those consequences while pretending no mortal sins are being committed. Therefore, since we are without sin, (After all, who could be guilty of a sin if they don't feel guilty about anything? The individual's conscience is supreme, isn't it?) we do not face eternal death in Hell and the Sacrament of Penance is irrelevant."

SEX IS DEATH once again, kiddies.

Tentler also said that the response to that situation from American Catholic clergy in the field has been cautious.

“In general,’ she said, “most of the parish priests I interviewed said although they agreed with Humana Vitae, they did not bring it up with their parishioners because they did not wish to alienate them from the life of the church.”

Fathers, there will be Hell to pay...

Tentler’s study of women who stopped going to confession because they did not consider contraception a sin suggests that they did not wish to lie to their confessors or found it prudent simply not to confront their parish priests with their disbelief in contraception as a sin.

Ain't it interesting how disordered sexual desire underlies so much sin as well as "modern" (read left-fascist, totalitarian, socialistic, or materialistic) rebellion against God and his good order? This is not REPEAT NOT a coincidence, kiddies. Satan knows orgasms feel good.

This tension between sincerity and prudence in the confession of Christian faith has existed since the Renaissance, notes John Jeffries Martin, chair of the Department of History at Trinity University in San Antonio.

Prudence? Do tell...

In his book, Myths of Renaissance Individualism, Martin explores the crises of conscience experienced by some notable Catholics in mid-to-late 16th-century Venice, Italy, when they began to feel conflicted over whether they should publicly profess their new Protestant beliefs.

“The most famous of such cases was that of Francesco Spiera, a sophisticated lawyer from a town north of Venice, who had converted to Calvinism but, when called by the Inquisition, lied and said he was faithful to Catholicism,” Martin said. “Spiera later felt he had committed an unpardonable sin, and although both Catholic and Protestant friends tried to dissuade him of that belief, ultimately committed suicide.”

That is two mortal sins, by my unofficial count.

Spiera’s case became famous throughout Europe. It was even cited by early Puritan clerics after a spate of suicides in England, apparently brought on by similar crises of conscience, as reason not to hold the faithful too strictly accountable for their sins, Martin said.

Behold the brilliance of schism and heresy, kiddies. Note the "solution" to this problem is eerily (but unsurprisingly) similar to that preached by today's savants.

Martin points out Catholics such as Spiera who converted to Calvinism rejected individual confession in favor of “the idea that one’s whole life should be a confession.”

Instant translation: "I do not want to face up to the reality of MY INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR MY SINS, so I will pretend the teaching of the Fathers of the Church and two thousand years of tradition from the best and brightest Western Civilization had to offer and the Word of God Himself* is null and void because I feel uncomfortable actually confessing my wrongdoing to one of His priests.

*From The Gospel According to St. John:

20:20. And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples therefore were glad, when they saw the Lord.
Et hoc cum dixisset ostendit eis manus et latus gavisi sunt ergo discipuli viso Domino

20:21. He said therefore to them again: Peace be to you. As the Father hath sent me, I also send you.
Dixit ergo eis iterum pax vobis sicut misit me Pater et ego mitto vos

20:22. When he had said this, he breathed on them; and he said to them: Receive ye the Holy Ghost.
Hoc cum dixisset insuflavit et dicit eis accipite Spiritum Sanctum

20:23. Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them: and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained.
Quorum remiseritis peccata remittuntur eis quorum retinueritis detenta sunt

Congrats, kiddies. You are exchanging the saving grace of your Lord and God for the lily-livered perversion of cowardly calvinism.

“At the same time, however,” Martin said, “Cardinal [Charles] Borromeo in Rome was instituting and promoting the idea that Catholic private confession should take place in the confessional box.”

What Martin sees as significant in this bifurcation of Calvinist and Catholic approaches to confession during the Renaissance is that both are intensely concerned with the exercise of the individual conscience.

An individual's sins lay heavily on that individual's unique, free, and immortal soul. How could confession be anything but individual?

As for privacy, that is a great act of charity and love for the sinner on the part of The Church.

“The Calvinist was constantly testing his sincerity, asking, ‘Are my motives pure, for if they are not pure and I am not sincere, I am not of the elect,’ ” Martin said. “Catholics, too, shared this deeply introspective quality in the process of the privatization of confession.”

Wow. That is a stretch only a deracinated modernist would attempt.

Today, centuries after the Reformation, does private confession to a priest offer the possibility of spiritual experiences that can be uniquely beneficial?

Oy vey!

Oblate Father William C. Davis thinks it does.

Father Davis, who currently serves as pastor of the predominantly Hispanic Immaculate Heart of Mary Church in Houston, Texas, served as pastor of St. Mary Church in downtown San Antonio in the 1980s and ’90s.

In an interview in Houston, he said he saw the pressures of modern life as a whole bringing a great diversity of people to him at St. Mary Church, in unusually high numbers, for private confession.

“I was surprised and delighted to find numerous Protestants coming to St. Mary’s for confession,” he said.

“They said to me, ‘Father, we don’t have this in our church, and I want to talk directly to you.’ So, I heard their confessions, and often would bless them by laying my hands upon their heads. When I told them that they received God’s forgiveness and the blessing of the Holy Spirit, I could see what a difference it made for them.”

Amen to that, Father! And you too, my protestant brothers and sisters...

But, can a non-Catholic really participate in the Sacraments?

Father Davis, now in his 70s, is also one of a great many parish priests who have received training in family and individual counseling and who see their work as counselors as part and parcel of their pastoral practice.

Uh-oh...religion as nothing more than psychological therapy..

Father Davis’ emphasis on helping the penitent obtain some kind of psychotherapeutic experience is no doubt supported by his “laying on of hands,” a more charismatic manner of administering the sacrament than the rather formulaic conversation many Catholics experience in the traditional confessional box.

How many parishes still have confessional boxes? How many that do still use them?

The larger question remains, however, as to whether private individual confession lends itself to psychological healing or to a meaningful spiritual experience among the general Catholic lay population of the United States.

It appears Catholics are willing to talk about the sacrament, if able to do so anonymously. Several persons raised in the Catholic faith and interviewed for this story recounted they no longer go to confession for a wide variety of reasons but refused to be identified.

Those reasons ranged from a general lack of trust of priests, reticence to speak of sexual matters, the seeming irrelevance of traditional penances, doubt of the priest’s power of absolution, and the feeling they said that confession gave them of being trapped within personal weaknesses, always guilty, always in need of forgiveness.

Welcome to the human race everybody!

Such feelings may well be driving people in other directions for meaningful spiritual experience. James Davidson said his sociological research at Purdue suggests that other forms of spiritual practice may be replacing that sacrament for American Catholics as the central feature of their spiritual lives.

“I think it is also important to note there are now many ways in which laypeople find a sense of spirituality that they also integrate with their participation in the life of their parish churches,” he said. “They may range from some form of social service to the practice of contemplation to various forms of physical activity such as tai chi or yoga.”

Yoga's nice, but you still go to hell if you don't go to confession, pal. That is what is known as the bottom line, kiddies.

Davidson noted those forms of spirituality emphasize social engagement with the world, or the development of the interior life, or a new relationship to the human body through meditative forms of exercise.

Have you noticed there is absolutely no mention of maintaining a proper relationship between the sinful individual and Almighty God in this entire story? Re-read it, kiddies. Not one word.

If sacramental confession continues to change within American popular culture, so too has psychotherapeutic confession changed in the context of popular culture.

Once largely practiced in private between a therapist and client, the sharing of secrets about perhaps taboo forms of behavior or thought is now increasingly becoming public.

Sick behavior is now healthy, while normal guilt becomes a mental disease. Orwell's totalitarians of 1984 would be proud of this willful and joyous abandonment of reality.

Today, millions of people are daily entertained by “the stories you can’t tell” that other people now confess, with little or no shame, on television shows hosted by Oprah Winfrey, Dr. Phil and the like.

Turn away from the boob tube, kiddies. Not only are you killing untold millions of your precious brain cells, you are losing your immortal souls.

Many other people confess anonymously, or participate vicariously in such confessions, on various Internet Web sites.

How sick is that?

Do these forms of expression cultivate the exercise of conscience or simply provide a brief moment of catharsis soon forgotten? Are they meaningful in ways not yet generally appreciated and challenge the church to find new ways of making sacramental confession relevant to a new generation?

There is no problem with the Sacrament, moron. The problem is us!

Scholar Martin sees the emphasis upon sincerity and the exercise of individual conscience, a legacy from the Renaissance, as now pervading American cultural life.

"Sincerity" and "exercise of individual conscience" are merely evasions, kiddies. (And unoriginal ones at that.) Don't let these fools corrupt Catholicism with the soul-stealing nonsense that has sent protestants straight to Hell for hundreds of years.

“Maybe it is possible to extrapolate and say that we in America live in a culture that pretends to be sincere and we appear to tell one another everything all the time,” he said. “In such a world, what need would people have to be introspective in the company of a priest when everyone is doing so elsewhere?”

Yet another bottom line, kiddies: Real and sincere confession is difficult. People do not like facing the fact they enjoy doing things that are objectively wrong. Of course they are going to avoid doing it if they can!

The Church must hold the line and defend the Sacrament of Penance by reminding "the faithful" they are risking the eternal condemnation of their immortal souls in unquenchable Hellfire.

And if you don't believe in Hell, there are plenty of "churches" out there that will welcome you with open arms.

That question calls for a creative examination of conscience about how American Catholics practice the sacrament of reconciliation, as individuals and as a community.

Get your morally relativistic paws off the Sacraments God Himself gave us!


Part 1: SEX IS DEATH. (Stories for boys) is here.
Part 2: SEX IS DEATH. (Distaff death) is here.
Part 3: SEX IS DEATH. (Joyously dispensing death) is here.
Part 4: SEX IS DEATH. (Sex is depression) is here.
Part 5: SEX IS DEATH. (When self-pleasuring becomes self-destruction) is here.
Part 6: SEX IS DEATH. (Sex is theft) is here.
Part 7: SEX IS DEATH. (A review of Bareback Mountain) is here.
Part 8: SEX IS DEATH. (What is the ultimate penalty?) is here.
Part 9: SEX IS DEATH. (Haven from reality) is here.
Part 10: SEX IS DEATH. (Sin-redemption-reasons-reason) is here.
Part 11: SEX IS DEATH. (Mommy loves you) is here.
Part 12: SEX IS DEATH. (George Gilder offers a clue) is here.
Part 13: SEX IS DEATH. (Post-killem depression) is here.
Part 14: SEX IS DEATH. (Whither womanhood) is here.
Part 15: SEX IS DEATH. (Saving psychology 1) is here.
Part 16: SEX IS DEATH. (Saving psychology 2) is here.
Part 17: SEX IS DEATH. (Fear of the boomers) is here.
Part 18: SEX IS DEATH. (The battle continues apace) is here.
Part 19: SEX IS DEATH. (Hot for teacher) is here.
Part 20: SEX IS DEATH. (Kids do the darndest things) is here.
Part 21: SEX IS DEATH. (Defects) is here.
Part 22: SEX IS DEATH. (Privates' privacy) is here.
Part 23: SEX IS DEATH. (National Condom Week) is here.
Part 24: SEX IS DEATH. (Wegenics) is here.
Part 25: SEX IS DEATH. (White wedding) is here.
Part 26: SEX IS DEATH. (Literally) is here.
Part 27: SEX IS DEATH. (Can't get me no satisfaction) is here.
Part 28: SEX IS DEATH. (Wrestle with mania) is here.
Part 29: SEX IS DEATH. (Press one for death/Presione uno para la muerte) is here.
Part 30: SEX IS DEATH. (Raunch culture) is here.
Part 31: SEX IS DEATH. (Gimme some of that sweet zombie lovin') is here.
Part 32: SEX IS DEATH. (The devil made me eat my baby) is here.
Part 33: SEX IS DEATH. (Mind control = womb control) is here.
Part 34: SEX IS DEATH. (The expense of playing with yourself) is here.
Part 35: SEX IS DEATH. (You can't always get what you want) is here.
Part 36: SEX IS DEATH. (Whom does a master serve?) is here.
Part 37: SEX IS DEATH. (Shootin' 5 for 8) is here.
Part 38: SEX IS DEATH. (Being a never-wed mom of four and an illegal alien is no picnic either) is here.
Part 39: SEX IS DEATH. (Duane indulges himself then goes out in a blaze of cowardice) is here.
Part 40: SEX IS DEATH. (The line is not fine at all) is here.
Part 41: SEX IS DEATH. (Worse than homelessness) is here.
Part 42: SEX IS DEATH. (Attack of the hooker dolls) is here.
Part 43: SEX IS DEATH. ('Benefits' for men - death for women) is here.
Part 44: SEX IS DEATH. (Even in India) is here.
Part 45: SEX IS DEATH. (The shifting sands of normalcy) is here.