Endless Fixation

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Mar 12, 2005

You thought progressive bishops were hard wired into gay lib? Wrong! It seems all along they've been trying to get us to focus on infant mortality in sub-Saharan Africa. From MCJ:

Asked whether, as Primates, it frustrates them that the Anglican Communion is spending so much time on issues of human sexuality, [ECUSA Presiding Bishop Frank] Griswold replied, "I think the endless fixation on sexuality is the devil's work. So much energy goes into this one area that issues of hunger and disease, poverty, civil war, get overlooked ... It is not very life-giving and it leaves the poor and the diseased exactly where they were before."

And from the Bishop of Chicago:

Bishop William Persell expressed his frustration Friday with a report by Anglican leaders that criticized American and Canadian faithful for accepting same-sex relationships and electing an openly gay bishop. "It is sinful, and it is irresponsible, and someday we will look back on this period of our history and ask, 'Why were we so obsessed with this issue?'" Persell said. "We're using this to stir up people who have more to worry about, who are living with widespread AIDS and famine and poverty."

The devil's work. Sinful and irresponsible. How can you not love liberals? They shatter and flatten every obstacle in their path -- scripture, doctrine, authority, lay sensibility -- in order to institutionalize some fad du jour. If they meet with resistance, they project the manic fixation onto their adversaries, not hesitating to find the hand of Satan therein, conveniently forgetting that they trash-binned Satan back in the Harding administration along with Leviticus 20 and the Easter Bunny.

Take the language wars in our own house. In the 1980s the U.S. bishops rolled over and got repeatedly if consensually bernardinized by the most twisted among the deeply, deeply demented feminists still lingering in the Catholic fold. Their goofy Lectionary did away with Jews ("religious authorities"), lepers ("persons with leprosy"), and the masculine pronoun for God ("in green pastures you let me graze"). In Rome it got turned down flat. The liberal reaction? "Millions around the world are dying of hunger and AIDS while right wing Vatican curialists are obsessing about pronouns, for God's sake!"

It's all our fault. We worship grammar. We hate the poor and sick. That's why conservatives are constantly badgering Mother Teresa's nuns to pull out of the slums and set up a clinic in Montauk for massage retreats, aromatherapy, and treatment of female eating disorders. Ranged against us is contemporary Catholic justice thinking of the caliber produced by Sr. Sandra Schneiders, SSIHM, who toils among the indigent at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley:

If the demonic influence of patriarchy on the religious imagination is to be exorcised, if the neurotic repression of the feminine dimension of divinity is to be overcome, the imagination must be healed. It is absolutely imperative that language, which appeals to the imagination through metaphor, be purified of patriarchal overtones, male exclusive references to God, and the presentation of male religious experience as normative.

Notice that demon again? The Latin of Psalm 91 assures us we're not to fear the daemonium meridianum, "the noonday devil." I've often wondered idly who this noonday devil critter could be. Perhaps he's kin to the summer soldier or the fair-weather friend. He's the ad hoc Satan who exists sporadically, and only for the convenience of progressives -- i.e., they bring him out of the relievers' bullpen of demythologized literary devices when they need left-handed invective against the orthodox. He's occasionally a nuisance but, like the rest of the liberal bestiary, we need not pay him heed. Nor the arrow that flies by day.