UNITED STATES
Waiting for Godot to Leave
Kevin O’Brien
Here Ross Douthat writes the best piece I’ve yet read on Fifty Shades of Grey. He points out that sexual anarchy, like political anarchy, devolves not so much into chaos, but into a world where the strong prey upon the weak. He writes …
This is the sexual revolution of Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt and Joe Francis and roughly 98 percent of the online pornography consumed by young men. It’s the revolution that’s been better for fraternity brothers than their female guests, better for the rich than the poor, better for the beautiful than the plain, better for liberated adults than fatherless children … and so on down a long, depressing list.
This is because lust (as opposed to sex in general – sex is a good thing, but lust is a desire for sex without any resrtaint) is all about power. Lust is not about physical pleasure, it’s about physical, emotional and psychological control.
Which brings me to a real Nutt case.
After my wife and I were received into the Catholic Church, back in 2000, our parish priest suggested that we prepare for Confirmation by attending RCIA, the “Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults”. Foolishly I agreed.
It was nine months long and a total joke. It was run by a liberal nun in a pants suit and her cadre of parish supporters, and it made sure that absolutely nothing Catholic was taught to any of us. It was a shocking wake up call that the Church so lovingly described by Chesterton and Belloc had taken quite a few steps backward.
One of the things Sister Liz (that was her name, God rest her rebellious soul) made us do was go to a Mass at “the Rock” church on the near North Side. The only difference between what went on in RCIA at our parish and what was going on at the Rock church was, while the latter made me just as miserable, it didn’t last nine months, but only for about two or three hours.
That’s right. The Mass went at least that long, because the pastor, a certain Fr. Nutt, a charismatic preacher, was working the crowd for all the “amens” he could get, and took about a thirty minute recess for “the sign of peace” in the middle of the Liturgy of the Eucharist. The “sign of peace” became a party with high fives and shouts of laughter and Fr. Nutt traveling all over the nave, visiting every single parishioner and yukking it up. While the consecrated host sat patiently on the altar.
In my opinion, he was clearly and obviously an egomaniac. Had I still been an atheist, and had Fr. Nutt been given a TV show where he was shouting at people and “faith healing” them, I would have chalked him up as just another brash and shallow phony, like the televangeslits of my youth who so turned me off to the Christian Faith.
Not long after that, Fr. Nutt disappeared in one of the first sex scandals to hit the archdiocese of St. Louis. (See details below).
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