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dixieagle
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Margarite -
Excellent explanation of the place of work. I recently read Laborem Exercens (On Human Work) JPIIs encyclical vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091981_laborem-exercens_en.html
This is a very detailed examination of the relationship between humankind and work, and touches specifically upon women, the family and work. It might be very good for us all to read and absorb.
God bless!
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GerardP
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As I stated above, it goes against the intended purpose of the sports as a teaching tool.
As to whether it violated current cultural standards of what constitutes masculinity and femininity, the current cultural standards themselves are violating divinely established norms of the genders. The culture is actively geared towards breaking down distinctions.
“Fashion” is an ambiguous term. But in any case, fashion must by moral standards of Catholicism correspond to the distinctions between the genders. This is why fashion has become a prime weapon of the devil.
Are you sure about that?
“And the Lord God made for Adam and his wife, garments of skins, and clothed them.”
That is a capitulation to evil and corruption is viewed as “progress.” At some point, women were doing the inappropriate and there was a cultural push to get women to wear pants. (Lucille Ball, Mary Tyler Moore being prime examples of mass marketing the idea)
So, in essence you are saying that doing something wrong long enough and if enough people do it, it becomes no longer wrong.
You aren’t taking into account the history of clothing. Pants were invented by men for men for men’s work. Even the ancient robes were folded in such a way as “gird a man’s loins.”
Taking that into account and the concupiscence of humans, male lust and women’s vanity, the adjustments made in pants to accomodate women do not do justice to their inherent dignity.
Whether women are conscious of this or not, this is what is happening.
Again we run into the scenario of how things change in a culture, are they improvements that bring people closer to God and closer to the nature that he created? Does consensus in rebellion towards God bring about His approval?
I think you view these issues without the perspective of a serious, serious war between Good and Evil with the devil a very active participant with each of us and society at large.
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GerardP
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Cultures (form cultus) are what a people believe. If the people don’t believe in gender differences or the dignity of those differences, they will eventually go the route of the natural passions and put themselves into denial regarding the sanctions that nature brings to their culture.
As I pointed out pants specifically designed for women do as much or more damage. They reveal even more of a woman’s curves and the details which only husbands should know. I remember coming to this conclusion at a Theology of the Body seminar when a very pretty woman was brought in to speak on pro-life issues. Aside from the fact that as she entered the sanctuary (another issue with problems in it) she gave a nice genuflection in front of the entire congregation and I’m sure that many other people than I noticed her attractive qualities.
It is an attempt to reconcile anti-Catholic “Enlightenment” thinking with Catholic dogma. It doesn’t work. This isn’t Aristotle who was laboring to understand reality. The Enlightenment is built on the exaltation of man as man in his own “dignity” without reference to God. And JPII subjectively comes to conclusions that are in line with Catholic teaching. However his conclusions are not the only conclusions that one can come up with.
It also imbibes in the most severe of the intellectual errors that were explored by Romano Amerio in “Iota Unum” Mobilism and Pyrrhonism. The idea that everything even truth is changing and that nothing can be known absolutely.
I also recommend Fr. Vincent Miceli’s “The gods of Atheism” and the “Adventures in Atheism” lectures that are available from Keep the Faith.
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Fone_Bone_2001
Guest
Now regarding EWTN. It is silly to think that EWTN is liberal. Compared with the SSPX, sure, even the Muslims are liberal.
Touche.
Well said.
All good points!
I agree there, too. I’m glad you decided to post again; these and the other points you made (that I didn’t quote) contributed a lot.
GerardP:
I’m not disagreeing with you that sports can help form boys into men, so this isn’t intended to be a loaded question. I’m just wondering what you see as the purpose of sports for girls?
Also, how on earth - in practical terms - could a female referee interfere with that formation? It’s her job simply to enforce the rules, judge the game, etc.
This reminds me of earlier pages in this thread, where the concept of a woman refereeing a middle school boys’ basketball game was contrasted with that of a girl playing football on a team of guys, against another team of guys. How are these two occurrences even remotely similar in terms of appropriateness?
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childofmary1143
Guest
With so many posts commenting on pants and retirement breeding laziness its amazing how this thread has strayed from its original topic.
Fact:
St. Mary’s School, acting under the authority of its coaches withdrew from a game because the referee was a woman.
Fact:
St. Mary’s issued a statement stating:
*In addition, our school aims to instill in our boys the proper respect for women and girls. Teaching our boys to treat ladies with deference, we cannot place them in an aggressive athletic competition where they are forced to play inhibited by their concern about running into a female referee.
*
Also they said this:
St. Mary’s Academy follows the directives of the Catholic Church regarding co-education. The Church has always promoted the ideal of forming and educating boys and girls separately during the adolescent years, especially in physical education (Cf. Divini Illius Magistri - Encyclical on the Christian Education of Youth, by Pope Pius XI, 1929 and The Instruction of the Sacred Congregation of Religious on Co-Education, A.A.S., 25 (1958) pp. 99-103). This formation of adolescent boys is best accomplished by male role models, as the formation of girls is best accomplished by women. Hence in boys’ athletic competitions, it is important that the various role models (coaches and referees) be men.
So then why are they promoting a business where a female Tae Kwon Do instructor teaches boys and girls? While the school can’t obviously control what goes on outside its doors, they are sending a mixed and contradictory message by promoting a business that goes against what they believe.
Fact:
St. Mary’s School, acting under the authority of its coaches withdrew from a game because the referee was a woman.
Fact:
St. Mary’s issued a statement stating:
*In addition, our school aims to instill in our boys the proper respect for women and girls. Teaching our boys to treat ladies with deference, we cannot place them in an aggressive athletic competition where they are forced to play inhibited by their concern about running into a female referee.
*
Also they said this:
St. Mary’s Academy follows the directives of the Catholic Church regarding co-education. The Church has always promoted the ideal of forming and educating boys and girls separately during the adolescent years, especially in physical education (Cf. Divini Illius Magistri - Encyclical on the Christian Education of Youth, by Pope Pius XI, 1929 and The Instruction of the Sacred Congregation of Religious on Co-Education, A.A.S., 25 (1958) pp. 99-103). This formation of adolescent boys is best accomplished by male role models, as the formation of girls is best accomplished by women. Hence in boys’ athletic competitions, it is important that the various role models (coaches and referees) be men.
So then why are they promoting a business where a female Tae Kwon Do instructor teaches boys and girls? While the school can’t obviously control what goes on outside its doors, they are sending a mixed and contradictory message by promoting a business that goes against what they believe.
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Fone_Bone_2001
Guest
Much of our culture does indeed break down the distinctions between men and women, and I agree wholeheartedly that that must be combatted.
While that would make having female refs wrong if true, I still have not seen a valid explanation for the notion that it is aside from personal discomfort. I addressed this in my previous post (above this one).
Of course fashion must correspond to the distinctions between the genders. But standards of clothing are one area where these standards do change over time, and legitimately so, i.e. not in response to gender-blurring.
There is a huge difference between people deliberately breaking down the difference between the sexes by wearing clothing whose common cultural connotation corresponds to the opposite gender and for general societal shifts in standards of clothing to change with regard to what is considered to be exclusively masculine or feminine. This is the crucial point that you just don’t seem to understand.
Heck, I’m not even sure if we really do disagree here. This aspect of our discussion was sparked by my pants example. Do you personally, Gerard, believe that it is immoral or at least spiritually destructive for women to wear pants?
Yes. In the verse you quoted, clothing had become necessary because the tragedy of original sin now meant that man and woman needed to protect the dignity of their nakedness from each other, but God didn’t prescribe specific types of clothing for each one - except in the Mosaic Law which we no longer follow.
I recently read the writings of Clement of Alexandria (one of the church fathers); his standards are even harsher than yours, because of the conventions of his time. If standards of fashion/clothing/appearance can’t legitimately change, then you and I are in trouble if we’ve ever shaved our faces, because Clement says that hair is a sign of masculinity, and that to desecrate it by removing it is wrong.
Does that mean that it is wrong for a man to shave? Surely you won’t say that, but what about the fact that - as Clement attests - it used to be a sign of masculinity? Is that cultural change wrong? Is the current practice of shaving an attack on masculinity?
No, I’m not, because what they did - blur gender distinctions - is just as wrong now as it was then. It wasn’t the actual wearing of the pants that was sinful; it was the blurring of gender distinctions intended by the wearing of the pants.
For a woman to wear pants no longer blurs those distinctions. Period.
It’s sort of like the fact that the Catholic Church in the United States has been exempted from the rule that we must abstain from meat every Friday of the year. What would you say if someone said, “The Church is hypocritical - it used to be a sin to eat meat on Friday, and now they say it’s not. They’ve changed their teachings on morality”?
Undoubtedly you would explain to them that the sin was disobeying the Church, and that eating meat on Friday was a sin only by virtue of the fact that it constituted disobedience.
The principle is the same with regard to this pants “issue.”
No, I do view these issues in light of that perspective. But paranoia can be a weapon of the devil, too; and it is a most effective one for those who cannot be twisted to knowingly do harm.
What does Satan do if one of his greatest tricks - deceiving people into thinking that he and demons do not actually exist - can’t work on someone? He gets them to see demons everywhere - see the intent to subvert and destroy God’s Truth in every innocent little action and change.
There’s got to be a middle ground where we are aware and alert, but not paranoid.
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Fone_Bone_2001
Guest
Many strong Catholic women today wear pants regularly. They staunchly believe in gender differences and in the dignity of those differences. This only solidifies my point that women wearing pants clearly just doesn’t do what you think it does.
Yes, many of the specific designs for women’s pants today are inappropriate in that regard. There I agree.
Some of that is our responsibility as men, Gerard.
On one end of the spectrum, you have the current secular world’s extreme, in which women are encouraged to wear clothes as revealing as possible, that are intended to sexually arouse.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have societies - i.e. some fundamentalist Islamic regimes - which see any tendency toward impure thoughts in a man’s mind as the woman’s fault. So in the minds of these people, the solution is for a woman in public to be clothed in such a way as to make it impossible or nearly impossible for a man to be aroused at all. That societal convention is sexist; it puts no responsibility on the man to strive for purity - rather, it’s all the woman’s fault if a man is tempted to lust after her.
Now, I am not in any way suggesting that you fall on that end of the spectrum, but I do think that as men, our first reaction - especially if the woman’s flesh is fully covered from neck to ankle - should not be, “Hmmmm, that’s kind of immodest” but rather, “I still have work to do on viewing women with charity and respect.” And for me, personally, that sentiment would of course be a true statement.
Of course, the ideal in a Christian context would be that a man puts responsibility on himself first and a woman puts responsibility on herself. So you have men focusing on ensuring that their thoughts are pure rather than blaming women, just as the women focus on dressing modestly and doing their part before they start blaming the men.
Now, if one is in a secular environment, it’s obviously more likely that a woman who seems to be dressed a little impurely is not trying to help men have pure thoughts, but if the woman in question is a Catholic who is giving a theology of the body lecture, then I think it’s only fair to assume by default that she does intend to dress modestly, and to first look toward ourselves and our own journey toward holiness.
Oh, but it does.
It takes the weapon of the enemy and uses it against him. It shows how the standards and philosophical assumptions that were intended to undermine our faith are really on our side. Evil can’t truly create anything for itself; it can only twist and corrupt the good into something else. John Paul II (and others before him, other twentieth-century phenomenologists) extracted what could be spiritually and theologically beneficial from the Enlightenment way of thinking. They “untwisted” what evil had twisted - the importance of the subjective.
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Fone_Bone_2001
Guest
Very good point.
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GerardP
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When you read TOB, you can easily determine that you are being subjected to a lot of “spin.” The authority and order of God is abandoned as the prime reason for morality. Those aspects are dismissed for the incredibly banal “God reveals himself to man and man sees himself through man.” gobbledygook.
Compared to St. Augustine, “We are made for you O Lord and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” Or the Old Catechisms explaining that God made us for Himself to know Him, love Him, serve Him and be happy with Him in this life and the next. It is really weak.
JPII looks at sins like adultery as unfortunate choices and not sins that offend God first which deserves Hell. JPII writes as if God is not the offended party but it’s just an example of somebody going off track.
Does eternal punishment in Hell ever enter into JPII’s discourses on TOB?
It’s par for the course with JPII to obscure the clear, confuse the harmonious and overcomplicate the simple. All the while avoiding the hard sayings regarding Man’s fallen nature and the filth of it all without regard to the fact that Man has dignity only in the fact that he’s a creature of God.
JPII leaves one with the impression-- (you can’t say that JPII ever says anything clearly) — that Man’s dignity is independent of God and should be subordinated to God as a good policy for happiness. Not that refusal to accept that God gives us our dignity only in relation to Him is to put oneself on the road to Hell.
This is the romantic gallantry of Man that is anti-thetical to the real meaning of the dignity of humanity.
I would also add that JPII had a very “symbolic” and modernist understanding of man’s original, unfallen state. He indicates that an attitudinal change and a closeness to the sacraments will bring back the “original unity” of man and woman. He is hampered by being snookered by modern ideas and attempts to reconcile dubious theories with revealed truth by denying the revealed truth.
I believe in a literal Genesis. And I believe that Adam and Eve were created far, far, far greater than us in terms of natural gifts, mental abilities and that they looked far more beautiful than us to the point where we would not think of them as “human” by our standards. The marital embrace of Adam and Eve prior to the fall would have involved a direct sharing of thoughts and experience along with higher levels of ecstasy and intimacy that cannot be achieved by us in our current fallen human forms. I believe this based on certain teachings by Thomas Aquinas, Bishop Sheen, Cardinal Ratzinger and Fr. Malachi Martin. (I bet you’d be shocked if I put a picture up that I found that I think is the face and form of Adam.)
The whole concept of human Evolution is actually a turning upside down of God’s created order. Man if fallen, now Man is rising, we were created in splendor is contrasted with how we were a glop of goo that sprouted fins, then legs and walked upright.
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seekerz
Guest
I apologize for being off topic, but since when is an inclination a sin? All inclination means is that that person is more susceptible to certain types of behavior; inclinations are still subject to free will - we do not have to act on them.
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GerardP
Guest
Inclination is not a sin. It’s a disorder. But the attempt to prove that same sex attraction is a natural state like someone’s inclination towards marriage or to climb trees or to be left-handed or right-handed, is to make God the author of an inclination to sin. And that just isn’t possible. That’s more of a Calvinistic mode of thinking where God positively made people for Hell as well as Heaven.
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whatevergirl
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I have somewhat thought this, too–although, like many disorders–we are charged with attempting to repent, and overcome. Dare I say–I agree with Gerard on this post.
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GerardP
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Brother_John
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GerardP
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Don’t worry. It’s quite painless and once you’ve started, it will increase in frequency.I have somewhat thought this, too–although, like many disorders–we are charged with attempting to repent, and overcome. Dare I say–I agree with Gerard on this post.
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bear06
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Zoinks! This is slanderous (of course not shocking that Ferrara would say it). They don’t reject “no salvation outside the Church”. They reject Feeneyism. Even Sugenis got that.
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whatevergirl
Guest
Don’t worry. It’s quite painless and once you’ve started, it will increase in frequency.
I have some advil handy, just in case it’s not as painless as you claim. hahahaha
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latinmasslover
Guest
You wouldn’t happen to have a Church document backing that theory up, would you?
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latinmasslover
Guest
I’d love to, as a matter of fact. See post 293 for my clarification, worded so much better by whatevergirl.Maybe you’d like to give the next presentation on Vocations Sunday?
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