By Anthony Esolen
The German episcopate seems all stirred up, to say nothing of exalted and frenzied, to extend blessings to men who lie with men and women with women, apparently believing that St. Paul and St. Jude have nothing to teach them: having led Germany the way toward a world in which families are rich in children and stronger than ever; the love between man and woman is celebrated in songs and confirmed in customs and laws; popular culture is, in its most public manifestations, healthy and clean; and the baseness that exists has to hide its rat’s head in dirty alleys, dodging and eluding, if not the law, at least the reproach of all decent people.
Is that so, reverend sirs?
An advertisement I saw the other day on German television, which was promoting a sexual prophylactic, presented two men cuddled up in a bed and a woman in black lingerie entering the room to have fun with both of them at once. «Mit beiden?» said the subtitle, with intent to seduce, while a canned music melody, with that female «vocal fry» that is now worldwide—like that of a woman straining hard to expel a gallstone—celebrates the delight to come.
I felt dismayed, but not surprised. The last time I visited Germany, I saw pornographic T-shirts with comic intent for sale in a little town on the Rhine, out in the open, for the benefit of tourists and anyone else who was out on a warm September day. They featured cartoons of a talking phallus telling jokes. On the train, I picked up a glossy magazine for teenagers that someone had left on the seat, and what I read in the advice column is not repeatable here.
In this regard, Italy—my ancestral home—was no better. It was fortunate for us that our children were too young to notice things. Want a postcard to send to your family? Don’t go to that big stall near the Tiburtina train station in Rome, at least if your children have passed first or second grade. Likewise, don’t look at what they offer in that nice family hotel on the cliff overlooking Sorrento.
We Americans have many problems of our own, of course, and pornography is a soul-devouring plague that has spread almost all over the world. At least I can say that what is common in Western Europe would force you to close if you tried to sell it in an American airport or train station, as far as I can perceive. Perhaps American television is sicker and more disgusting than I know.
Many years ago, the retired tennis player Bjorn Borg was recruited to urge Swedes to do something about their population collapse. They put him on billboards, employing the Swedish word for the common obscenity in English. Of course, now the English word is everywhere in the United States: on T-shirts, bumper stickers, and in the dirty mouths of students, professors, and almost everyone else in public. Even more so, it seems to me, in the mouths of women than of men; women who fail to attain traditional masculine virtues, but who manage to adopt and flaunt the most unpleasant masculine vices.
But I still can’t imagine it on a public billboard, unless the word is spray-painted by the petty criminals whom some of our mayors don’t bother to punish.
The point is that no one in the Western world, and least of all Western Europeans, has the slightest credibility when it comes to arguing that we should liberalize matters relating to sexual morality.
In 1900, in the United States, even the poorest classes begot children within marriage, in more than 90 percent; that included blacks, poor farmers, factory workers, everyone, not just the upper-class Puritans.
That is long gone, but so is the time when nations managed to replace themselves with children, because people understood that a man worked primarily, and sometimes exclusively, for the well-being of his wife and children. And that children were at the heart of all the good things in life, not a burden to bear with, at best, some nice photos and a good dose of stoic resignation, and at worst, with resentment and contempt.
We are out of our minds, and the Europeans in this regard are crazier than the Americans, and have been for longer. Well, in Sweden and Germany, they can take your children away from you if you dare to homeschool them. It is more dangerous for your family to do that there than it was to attend religious services in the last years of the Soviet Union.
Yet, in this general and calamitous collapse that threatens the continued existence of their own cultures, the German prelates, along with many others in Europe, pay no attention, but seem determined to confirm the degeneration, as if the nature of a deadly disease could be changed by calling it a nice name and scattering rose petals over it.
The sewers have been clogged and vomiting their filth into the streets for a long time, and the remedy for this is what? Bursting the cast-iron pipes and replacing them with brick? Letting the excess discharge into the river? A layer of lavender?
And why the devil should any Catholic in the United States give them any credit at all, when they don’t bother to respond to the most obvious objection: that to address the problem between men and women, we must affirm that men and women are made for each other? End of sentence. For, who can tell Hans and Maria to wait until marriage, while smiling at Fritz and Kurt and the whole lifestyle that unites them in the first place?
But perhaps the real question is whether the prelates believe in God at all. They don’t trust the Apostles in matters that we can see before our eyes. Why should we trust them in what we cannot see?
Anthony Esolen is a lecturer, translator, and author. Among his books are Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, and Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World, and most recently The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord. He is a distinguished professor at Thales College. Be sure to visit his new website, Word and Song.