An interesting adjunct can be found
here, in Dawn Eden’s criticism of Christopher West’s explications of the magnificent teachings by Pope JPII.
Dear PRmerger,
Cordial greetings and a very good day. What a pleasant surprise, jolly good to see you on the boards again and hope all is well. Thankyou for kindly submitting the link to that scholarly article, dear sister, which I trust the devotees of Mr. West will read and ponder carefully. Dawn Eden shows an in-depth knowledge of the work of Christopher West and her critique is bang on target.
There cannot be any serious doubt as to Mr. West’s disordered approach to the topic of human sexuality, owing chiefly to his
idde fixe with evangelising a new generation with his theology in the modern idiom so as to, supposedly, make it relevant and accessible. Unfortunately, dear sister, in his misguided desire to be right ‘with it’, he has sacrificed that holy bashfulness that ought to be the hallmark of any pious teacher of moral theology and in so doing has degraded and undermined the very message he seeks to communicate.
Sadly, dear sister, he is erroneously labouring under the mistaken notion that the pre-Conciliar Church was repressive and antiquated, but this, I think, is based soley upon his own individual personal experiences and not historical fact. Now I would not stop to deny that distortions can be found in the history of the Catholic understanding of Christianity, but they should be recognized as just that, aberrant distortions which are not representative of the core. It is untrue to claim that our Church has, until recent times, been utterly blind to the profound meaning and beauty of sex as the good Lord intended it. Morevoer, it is blatantly spurious to assert that prior to the permissive revolution, the beauty and pleasure of sex had been totally obscured by Puritanism and Manichaeism. Many of the older generation, still with us, would rise up and say that this is a gross misrepresentation that is factually incorrect (there are always exceptions) and that the catechesis that they received did not on the whole present a vision of sex as something ‘dirty’. To assert that this was the case is to engage in peddling untruths for polemical purposes, namely, to blacken and discredit the older Catholic moral theology. The reason for doing this is to present a less priggish (more worldly!) approach to human sexuality by making some concessions to the secularist view of sex and some of its debased conduct. Puritanism, contrary to popular modern Catholic opinion, was never the universal problem (within the bosom of the Church or without) and today it is barely a speck on the cultural landscape, the sexualisation of Western culture has certainly ensured that. If anything the pendullum has swung more in the direction of rampant sexual vice and the enemy is surely pornography not Puritaninsm these days!
What is seriously amiss with Mr. West’s presentation is that he does not approach his subject with a deep reverence. This chap, irrespective of good intentions, does not seem to grasp the delicacy, reverence, privacy and sacredness of the sexual sphere. Moreover, he underestimates the deep impact of Original Sin upon mankind and the virulence of evil desire, as do many modern day lay Catholics, and this results in defective and un-Catholic thinking.
Finally, dear sister, the writing’s of men like Christopher West and, to a much greater extent, Gregory Popcak, evince most clearly that they have assimilated the spirit of the age, especially as regards their presentations of sexual issues. Their indelicate language when refering to the mysteries of our most *holy *religion, or to things which are intimate and sacred, jars the spiritual hearing of any pious Catholic. Vulgarity of expression can never be justified for any reason and Messers. West and Popcak should remember that “our words are a faithful index to the state of our souls” (
Introduction to the Devout Life, Francis De Sales, part III, chapt. 26).
God bless.
Warmest good wishes,
Portrait
Pax
