The Los Angeles Dodgers reversed their backtrack on their plan to honor the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (SOPI) so fast, you might not even have been aware that they’d backtracked in the first place. After “thoughtful feedback from our diverse communities,” and after the mayor of neighboring Anaheim announced that she would invite the “sisters”—men who dress up as glam nuns to promote perversion—to headline “Pride Night” at Angels Stadium, the Dodgers’ PR team not only reinstated the “sisters” to their Pride program, but offered a groveling apology for momentarily failing to recognize their “life-saving work.”
When I wrote about this a few days ago, I praised those who had so quickly objected to the Dodgers’ endorsement of anti-Catholicism. The Catholic lobby, so to speak, had sprung into action and had its voice respected. I thought it was a promising sign, even if it made me lament missed opportunities to present such a unified front in the past.
Now the promising sign is wiped away. The Catholic lobby and the lobby of sexual deviance squared off over America’s pastime, and the deviance lobby won. I fear this will be a watershed event—a sign to all our institutions that they don’t have to worry about showing respect to the Catholic Church (e.g., by refusing to honor those who overtly mock it) or about accounting for Catholic beliefs in their corporate decisions (e.g., by not endorsing, or by moderating how they endorse, ideologies opposed to Catholic beliefs).
How did we get here? The slippery slope of moral decay and the devil’s insatiable hatred of the Church are big factors, for sure. But I think that some of this is self-inflicted, too.
Catholic author and sociologist (and my friend) David Carlin likes to point out the essential incompatibility between Catholicism and modern gay activism. That is, they can’t coexist indefinitely as respectable societal forces; they can’t both occupy seats at our culture’s main dining-room table. Catholicism insists upon a certain ordering of body, will, and spirit, evident from nature and also commanded from God, that is necessary for human happiness. The gay-activist ethos rejects this ordering and so requires Catholicism to be false. So, every time our government, schools, corporations—and baseball teams—endorse the latter, they effectively say, “Catholicism is wrong.”
When we Catholics are united in our understanding of that ordering, we are formidable. The world understands what it’s dealing with; maybe is even compelled by the strength of our conviction. It’s clearer that groups like the SOPI are offensive to something sacred and intractably opposed to widespread and deeply held beliefs.
But when our side is lukewarm and divided in its convictions, the world will see less reason to respect us. Moreover, it will (not-unreasonably) pooh-pooh our premise that public endorsement of sexual deviance is an existential threat to our religion. If Cardinal Hollerich, and Fr. James Martin, and Dignity, and Out at St. Paul, and all those rainbow flyers for gay-affirming meetings in church basements, are Catholic things, they can say, your argument is invalid. We’re not opposed to Catholicism—just your (antiquated, dying) version of it.
Traditional Protestants are facing a similar problem. If they, for instance, cite their faith and the Bible as justification for not participating in a “Pride” event, activists and the Twitter class are quick to point out the many gay-affirming brands of Christianity and of biblical exegesis that disagree with them. Some don’t stop at pointing out that these alternative Christian moral-sexual schemes now exist; they insist such schemes are actually True Christianity, and that dissenters from them are just using religion as a cover for bigotry.
But you might say this is to be expected of Protestantism, whose principle of sola scriptura tends to encourage moral and theological fracture and has done so for centuries. Whereas although dissent is nothing new to Catholicism, one senses a novelty in how widespread, how bold, how aggressive, how high-up our recent selling-out of traditional moral certainties has been. I think the Dodgers sense it, too.