1973 - when I started asking questions, like, "Why are we all dressed so funny?"

Sunday, April 04, 2010

Ahistoricism and education

Jeez, the abuse scandal stuff and the luridness of the media is getting tedious. At the risk adding sound and fury, here's my contribution:

The secular consensus seems to be that a good thing would be married clergy, gay marriage, condoms for all, a “zero tolerance policy” for sex crimes, and extravagant payouts for victims. This litany is trotted out as “the answer.”

I guess I don't have enough hubris to claim to know “the answer” (dear reader, please recall T.S. Eliot's injunction against “dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.”).

Those who possess worldly wisdom have what they think is the answer, but I seriously wonder how many of them have even asked the question, “Why not pedophilia?” I'm not being glib; this is a serious question.

Yes, my secular friends, in a certain sense, the Church has “brought this on herself.” It was Christianity who told the pagans (my beloved Socrates died before he got the memo) to give up pederasty. Without Christianity, without Christians, in short, without the Church, there is no guarantee that the nauseating “boy love” we find in Plato's “Symposium,” for example, would not be normative today. It was wrong then; it is wrong now, yet without the Church you wouldn't know that.