twisted

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Dec 10, 2004

Jesuit Queer Shock Theology takes another step cellarwards with Fr. Andrew Hamilton's gibbering exposition of covert biblical feminism:

At the centre of God's plan for humanity are strong women whom responsible men marginalise. Later Christians softened this message. They saw female martyrs as central features on God's path. But they now described them as weak women who were given extraordinary grace by God. True enough, but the observers lost sight of the heart of the matter, that these were strong women humiliated by their society.

"You chose the weak and make them strong in bearing witness to you," says the Preface of Martyrs in the Roman Missal. Half-true and beside the point, says Fr. Hamilton. The "heart of the matter" is the saving message in gender role reversal, made all but invisible by the patriarchal backlash that produced the manipulative New Testament.

One messed-up Padre.

Hamilton is only one among a number of contemporary Jesuits who understand the universe -- past, present, and future -- as a deadly serious Mardi Gras pageant in which sexually ambiguous revellers frantically remake the world in conformity with their own elected gender-masque (for other examples, go here, or here, or here, or here, or here). Viewing reality through the rubbery lens of one's personal sexual confusion is far from sane -- grace, sacraments, morality, history itself are warped out of all recognition -- but in the current dispensation the men who "share the vision" are largely immune from censure.

What baffles me about the Jesuit Hamiltons is not that they exist, but that they perdure. It's not just that they think the Church is wrong. It's not just that they make their disagreement spectacularly public. But their pathologically virulent hatred of Catholic doctrine is so patent that their superiors either choose not to see the danger to the Church or else share the hostility directed at her. Neither alternative is reassuring.

The situation can't last. In the short term, vocations will go elsewhere, because very few men are attracted by a lifetime of hatred ("Join us and seethe ...!"). More to the point, God will raise up men who love the Church and want to serve him through her, and the cowardice and tepidity of careerist churchmen will simply cease to matter. Fr. Hamilton is wrong. God does choose the weak and make them strong -- not in airing resentments, but in bearing witness to him.