The abondonment of parental authority

The authority of the parent is a spiritual authority. As with all authority, it must be exercised with love, not control. It is for real: one does not need to try to be authoritative. Every parent is endowed with it; it is either being healthily exercised, or abused/neglected.

Parental authority is typically undermined by the parent's own reactions. Reactive parents do no good to their children. (That does not necessarily mean "high emotions". There are many families - I know some - where the mom will on occasion go ballistic emotionally and yet somehow her authority/love is communicated.) Parental authority is bolstered and made effective, in the best way, to the degree that it observes and preempts, and does not react. That is not to say preempting in some clever way, but preempting with a whole lot of love. What does that mean? Essentially the heart of the parent must become larger and larger. Just as you have made room for your children entering into life. In that regard, you do not have the final say.

God is pure act. He does not react. Children are traumatized by parent's bad reactions, never by their authoritative actions done out of love. You can know you are seeking control when you are seeking results. That way lies manipulation of your children.

Speaking to your children without puritanical hysteria about pornography, and what it really is, before they are exposed to it, or more especially, before they conceive of looking at it in the secrecy of their own thoughts, would be one great example of preemptive parental authority defeating evil and winning the battle for good.

In other words, a missing key in the battle against pornography is the healthy and prompt exercise of parental authority, made directly. Blocking access, removing the near occasion, "shielding" your children, is really nothing next to the power of your parental authority directly and openly talking to your children.

If you think your words to your children about pornography will have no effect against such a pervasive foe, or will harm them, you are extremely ignorant about the reality of the authority you as a parent have been endowed with. God does not give ineffective gifts.

I don't know how any parent today can conceive of not talking to their children about pornography as the best immunization. If you think about your responsibility as a parent, and the healthy exercise of authority that your children actually hunger for, how can a parent in today's world come to the conclusion that they don't need to talk to their children "in advance" about this issue?

I reflect back on certain times when my Mom said something one time, or my Dad did something one time - and these weren't huge moments, but just something they said or did - and how much I absorbed it, the degree to which it in-formed me. One thing is clear: parental authority is for real - a spiritual reality. It is not a style or a way of parenting that you choose, or take up or cast aside. Parental authority is an irrevocable spiritual reality. It cannot be ignored. Just think, God who is the author of all life submitted to the authority of Mary and Joseph. That's how much a reality parental authority is - and yet, somehow quiet. If you assume it with force, you are doing something wrong. If you abandon it, you are deforming it all the same.

Perhaps one could put it this way: you love your children undoubtedly, and the responsibility side of the equation of that love would be the role of your authority exercised for their happiness and well-being. That's what your authority is there for. And it helps to know that parental authority - genuine and benevolent - is desired by the children. It is a reflection of the benignity of the Author of life. Maybe some parents go wrong in thinking that authority = medicine, a corrective, when it is better to understand it as food. Health-giving food. And we know health-giving food is "the best medicine".

The simple acquirement of the belief that parental authority is an ontological reality can be enough, I believe, for families to get a bit better.

Anyways, did you know that majority-communist countries like Nepal are taking actions to ban pornography? I guess they - and not western nations - are taking up the torch because banning pornography is one of the items on the Communist Manifesto?

Of Nepal

"Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli (born 22 February 1952), more commonly known by abbreviated name K.P. Oli, is a Nepalese politician and the current Prime Minister of Nepal. He is one of the two Chairmen of the Nepal Communist Party, formed by the union of Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist–Leninist) and Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre)." --Wikipedia

"The Nepal Communist Party (NCP) is the ruling political party in Nepal and is the largest communist party in South Asia and third in Asia. It was founded on the 17th of May 2018, from the unification of two leftist parties, Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist–Leninist) and Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre). The unification was completed by the Party Unification Coordination Committee, after 8 months of planning. The two predecessor parties subsequently dissolved, making way for the new united party. The party retains the electoral symbol of the CPN (Unified Marxist-Leninist), the sun. The party is the largest political party in the House of Representatives, National Assembly and in six of the seven provincial assemblies. Khadga Prasad Oli, the Prime Minister of Nepal since 15 February 2018, is co-chairman of the party along with Pushpa Kamal Dahal." --Wikipedia

"Nepalese internet providers have begun blocking thousands of pornographic websites as part of a government directive aimed at stopping sexual violence, officials said Sunday.

"The government issued new criminal and civil codes this year that include regulations against the use, broadcast and publication of pornographic materials with punishment for violators of up to one year in prison...

"...'We are following the government order and have blocked the list of websites that was provided. However, it is not practical and technically not possible to block every pornographic website,' said Binay Bohra of Vianet Communications." --CTV

So government rulers in Nepal, who are majority Communist Party, are ordering porn sites blocked.

In the Great Last Bastion of Free Democratic Capitalist Enterprise and Western Civilization all porn sites are completely accessible to everyone and no rulings about blocking have been made.

Huh, imagine that.

Is watching Game of Thrones a mortal sin?

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

2354  Pornography consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners, in order to display them deliberately to third parties. It offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other. It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others. It immerses all who are involved in the illusion of a fantasy world. It is a grave offense. Civil authorities should prevent the production and distribution of pornographic materials.

The pornography of Alessandro Serenelli's time was basically the sort of stuff that sailors would have pinned up beside their bunks. It was a major influence and corruption in his life. He lost his mind to it.

What would he say of the material in Game of Thrones? People call it "soft porn" because it gets compared to the "hardcore" stuff on the internet. Yet Game of Thrones is totally hardcore in comparison to the pornography of Serenelli's time (from what I've read in descriptions about the show).

Isn't it interesting, the relativistic sliding scales we use in order to immediately excuse ourselves?

I was thinking about this because I just read this article at StAR about Game of Thrones.

Selfied to Death

Two recent articles on the culture of selfie:

Thou Shalt Have No Graven Images - Including Your Own, by Heather King

The Scourge of the Selfie Stick, by Simon Tatz (H/T: Patrick Madrid)


I'm interested in the cultural climate or leaven; there is nothing intrinsically evil or base or narcissistic necessarily in the mere fact of "taking a selfie". One does not need to get doctrinaire in reaction to it; yet that does not limit the extent to which we can penetrate the phenomena (yes, I'm using the plural) in order to lay bare other things in our culture that we would not otherwise consider.

Twice now in the Christmas season during the consecration at Mass I was moved, spontaneously, to pray, "Lord, this new year break the chains of pornography in our world." The feeling with this prayer was for something that would break these worldwide chains irreversibly, in some way, by a great positive, a great grace. That was the plea. This was compounded by a general sense of a pervasive tiredness, of a mounting dull deadness in our society and culture. And I can say that this was not just me projecting personal depression onto the world, as some psychologizer would say, because personally I was feeling very much alive and awake and filled with peace (none of it owing to any merit of my own.)

I am no fan, really, of the propensity for "Let's talk about Pornography and HOW HUGE IT REALLY IS IN OUR AGE!!!" Not because it is not true; it is true, more than we realize, but because in another sense, pornography is not huge. It is infinitesimally small. At its core is the vacuity of the imploding star - more so, for it is spiritual.

Which brings me to the point I was wanting to make: that pornography really has infiltrated our society and culture, tainting our ordinary lives - yes, tainting the lives of people who are not bound by it. Not because pornography is some kind of super potent cultural brain-restructuring phenomenon, but simply because it is a deadly sin. Ultimately my feeling is that all the science that shows what porn does to a person and the evidence of how it destroys lives is not going to bring about change, but the realization that it is a mortal sin, and that mortal sin really is mortal, and that, lo and behold, there really is such a thing as sin, from which we need to be saved.

Which is to say, we are either sowing life or we are sowing death. The life, if we accept it, is the very end for which we were made; and it is life in abundance, over-brimming; it is nothing less than the inner life of Jesus Christ living in your own soul. The death, on the other hand, really is death: more so than physical death. (Say, maybe that's simply the reason for the cultural love affair with zombies! The culture is just reflecting the fact that, in reality, with spiritual eyes, when in mortal sin, you are in a sense a walking corpse.)

The climate, the leaven, of a society in which porn-viewing is common knowledge addiction, something more acceptable than alcohol addiction and the like, indeed, almost spoken of like it was a kind of trend, is a climate in which people are dulled and dead from mortal sin; and this dull death becomes the acclimation, the accepted ground on which we interact, or avoid interacting. Isn't it interesting how people who persist in sin become the very antithesis of the tolerance and plurality they preach, demanding more and more - and indeed getting what they demand - that the very ground on which we have our personal being, as lived out in all its aspects, must be defined by their sins?

A sort of yeah, you may be the Taj Mahal, but you're just the background to our selfie on the moral-societal plane.

Again, this is spiritual. When we say "spiritual" we do not mean "airy-fairy". Rather the opposite: that which underpins our very life, our breath, our everyday ordinary life, and bears an imperceptible influence, like a clear conversation going on beneath the noise. This dull deadness of mortal sin that has permeated our society on the ground of common interaction is not to be understood in some psychological sense, as in a lack of cheeriness or lack of engagement with life or whatever. But immediate, spiritual death.

Anyone who has had an encounter with this, by which I mean a moment of seeing it, so to speak, with the eye of the soul, knows what I am talking about. Spiritual death is immediate inversion and the loss of light, of isolating darkness, and the fact you are still breathing and walking and so forth is testimony to the fact that, as with all of us, the mercy of God continues to sustain you, not desiring the smoldering wick to be extinguished. The alarm bells go off in your soul when you see this though. There is no mediation or dichotomy. It is super real. And it underlies and threads all what we take for granted as ordinary life, ordinary conversations, ordinary interactions, and so forth.

Now, how did I go from selfies to pornography? Oh! Oh! There are more things, more underlying things to ponder than one would otherwise consider!

What's close to home?

Indeed, what is close to home (to take the title from this post)?

Perhaps Viacom for one.

Things are upside-down.