Luis Fernández Cuervo writes in El Diario de Hoy (El Salvador) about the treatment of the Church by the well-known writer Mario Vargas Llosa on the occasion of the Magisterium’s teaching on sexuality and, more specifically, on homosexuality. It is always interesting to learn the underlying ideas of famous people and, above all, the degree of consistency (or inconsistency) of those ideas.
The article “The Nefarious Sin,” by the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, published in this same newspaper on Sunday, August 24, deserves a calm response—not in the exalted, pamphleteering tone the celebrated writer employs, but with the moderation and objectivity required to address an important and delicate subject that Vargas Llosa takes it upon himself to distort and obscure. I have delayed my response until I could read the document that so enrages this writer.
This is a recent document from the Vatican, in which it is noted that “the present Considerations do not contain new doctrinal elements; they seek rather to reiterate the essential points on this question and provide arguments” (…) “aimed at protecting and promoting the dignity of marriage, the foundation of the family, and the stability of society, of which this institution is a constitutive element”.
The problem, according to the document, is homosexuality, “a troubling moral and social phenomenon”, and the fact that in several countries it is being given a legal equivalence to marriage and, in some cases, even the legal right to adopt children. The document also aims “to give direction to Catholic politicians by indicating the approaches to proposed legislation in this area which would be consistent with Christian conscience”. The document offers it “not only to those who believe in Christ, but to all persons committed to promoting and defending the common good of society”. Why this last point? Simply because marriage, its duties and rights, are also a matter of “natural moral law” that does not require the Catholic faith, but simply an honest mind, open to the moral arguments inherent in human nature and to the most elementary sense of justice.
Vargas Llosa says that what most surprises him is not the Catholic doctrine in this document, but rather “the vehemence with which it exhorts Catholic parliamentarians and officials to act.” Vehemence, according to the dictionary, is something that implies “impetus and violence.”
There is nothing of the sort in the reviled document. The same cannot be said of Vargas Llosa’s pamphleteering libel, in which the following niceties are hurled against the Catholic Church, its perennial doctrine, and its present document: “ferocious diatribes,” “rigid, caveman-like doctrine,” “dogmatic obstinacy,” “anti-homosexual philippic,” “anachronistic homophobic doctrine,” “virile brutality,” and in which the verb “to fulminate” is used and abused. Since the verb “to fulminate,” according to the dictionary, always means, in general, “to annihilate,” “to destroy completely,” “to pulverize,” or, more specifically, “to annihilate by means of lightning bolts or electric current,” none of that is to be seen in the Vatican document. Instead, a somewhat fulminating tone is indeed to be observed in the writer’s insults.
In the papal document it says that: “men and women with homosexual tendencies ‘must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided’. They are called, like other Christians, to live the virtue of chastity. But the homosexual inclination is ‘objectively disordered’, and homosexual practices are ‘sins gravely contrary to chastity’”.
When the Church opposes granting a homosexual couple legal equivalence with a marriage, it is entirely right, and no arguments of religious faith are needed, but simply arguments of common sense and legal sense. With such equivalence, the injustice is done not to homosexual couples, but to marriage, to its rights, and to its important role in society, since marriage is the union of a man and a woman who, through the mutual self-gift proper and exclusive to them, complement and perfect one another and, normally, procreate, raise, and educate the children born of their conjugal union, thereby contributing to being the irreplaceable foundation of society, of its stability and goodness, and of its perpetuation through the ages.
None of this can be said of the cohabitation of two homosexuals. As a Spanish lawyer and university professor commented in this regard, “no one is offended if what is different is treated in a legally unequal way; on the contrary, justice would be offended by treating unequal things equally. But common sense perceives at a glance that a union between two persons of the same sex is not a marriage, any more than is a union of five persons, or of a single person (recently a short item was published about an artist who celebrated her wedding to herself, promising herself perpetual and indissoluble fidelity).”
Vargas Llosa seeks to base his attacks on the authority of Sigmund Freud, perhaps ignoring that the creator of psychoanalysis described as perverse “any sexual activity that, having renounced procreation, seeks pleasure as an end independent of it.” He then endorses the declaration of Senator Edward Kennedy, stating that “the Catholic Church should concern itself with religion and not with taking political positions.” That is to say, both Kennedy and Vargas Llosa expect the Church to betray its divine mandate to spread its doctrine throughout society, to renounce the authority that Jesus Christ gave it over faith and morals, and to shut itself up within consciences and temples: the typical mentality of the anti-Christian obscurantism of the eighteenth century.
We live in times when, with the complicity of some journalists starved of real news, figures who enjoy prestige for their competence in some cultural field (song, football, the stage, or literature) dare to opine with great self-assurance and solemnity on matters about which they have insufficient intellectual knowledge and/or little or no moral authority. Vargas Llosa is an example.
That he writes well is beyond doubt. That he understands literature, likewise. But in this article and in earlier ones, he displays a highly sectarian and erroneous knowledge of world history, and a genuine phobia, difficult to explain, against Christianity in general and against the Catholic Church in particular. I will try to show this to the readers in my next article.
Answering Vargas Llosa
Truths and Lies in World History
Catholic countries were always cheerful, vital countries, very little repressed, in sexual matters as well.
I ended my previous article by saying that the Peruvian writer Vargas Llosa displayed “a highly sectarian and erroneous knowledge of world history.” And so it is. Historical truth is very different from how the furious writer presents it. Today I will refer only to two of his falsehoods:
1) To attribute to the Catholic Church the sending of thousands of Catholics and infidels to the stake in the Middle Ages. The subject of the Inquisition deserves a more careful and nuanced treatment than is possible here. I refer the reader to serious studies on the Spanish Inquisition, such as those of the English historian Henry Kamen or the Spaniard Beatriz Comella. But one must know, at the very least, that its significance lay not in the Middle Ages, which end in the fourteenth century, but rather in the full Renaissance and beyond, up to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which is when it passed from ecclesiastical power to civil power.
There were as many Inquisitions as there were religions in those centuries. In that era, an attack on a country’s religion—whether Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, or Calvinist—represented something as important to the stability of its government as terrorism or guerrilla warfare is to a present-day democracy. As for the Spanish Inquisition, at its height, between 1540 and 1700, those condemned to the stake numbered 1,346, representing 1.9% of all those tried. The French Revolution, so praised by secularists like Vargas Llosa, in a matter of days sent to the guillotine figures that were possibly greater, exterminated everyone in the Vendée region, and also destroyed a great quantity of religious buildings and works of art. And all of that in the name of equality, liberty, and fraternity.
2) To attribute to the Catholic Church “the systematic subordination and humiliation of women.” This falsehood is even greater, for one of the causes of the spread of early Christianity was the important role that women had in it, far above the role they had in the Roman Empire. And it was precisely in the Christian Middle Ages that women attained a dignity and a power such as they had never had before.
Mr. Vargas Llosa ought at least to read the books of the French medievalist Régine Pernoud to escape his error. Without a series of outstanding women—Genevieve, Joan of Arc, Catherine of Siena, Heloise, Hildegard of Bingen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Blanche of Castile, etc.—who were admired and respected by the civil and religious authorities of their time, including the Pope, European civilization would possibly have been impossible. Any woman could then set up a business or acquire property without her husband’s authorization. And it was the ladies of the Middle Ages who educated and refined men, who created courtly love, gallantry, and the honor of a man’s serving a woman. Where, then, is the “systematic subordination and humiliation of women”? It was with the Renaissance and the renewed rise of Roman Law that women lost the rights they had gained in the Middle Ages.
3) Vargas Llosa also accuses Catholicism of “distortions and repressions of sexual life in the name of a supposed normality”, which would be the heterosexual relationship. He pretends to ignore that, as long as Catholic religion and morality were strong in any country, sexual abnormalities and offenses were minimal. He confuses puritanism with Catholicism. Catholic countries were always cheerful, vital countries, very little repressed, in sexual matters as well.
As to whether the heterosexual is normal or not, the voice of history is very clear. In the most varied cultures, the constant is that, upon reaching marriageable age, and always with a certain religious sense, the natural marriage of a man and a woman is celebrated, and with it is obtained, as a marital right, the conjugal union, and the family is constituted through the raising and education of the children resulting from that union. This is not an invention of Christianity. It occurs even among very primitive peoples, ignorant of agriculture, animal husbandry, and religion, as the German anthropologist Gusinder demonstrated with the Fuegians of Patagonia.
In any age and culture, when the institution of marriage enters into crisis and licentiousness and sexual aberrations grow, anyone versed in world history can declare, without error, that such a culture is declining and, in one way or another, will disappear. It is not always beneath a fire from heaven that annihilates them, as in Sodom and Gomorrah.
At other times it is through the conquest by a more austere people, as when Rome conquered a Hellas in clear intellectual and moral decadence. And Rome, after its imperial splendor, will display those same symptoms that some now consider —not only Vargas Llosa— cultural progress: atheism, skepticism and relativism in the intellectual sphere; luxury, pleasure and idleness as life goals; the decline of marriage with divorce and adulteries; the fall in the birth rate with abortions or the abandonment of newborns and the growing sexual aberrations, as Paul of Tarsus testified in his Epistle to the Romans: “They became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools (…) Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves (…) their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error”.
The present-day wages of those same ancient vices have now been worse: the incredible increase in sexually transmitted diseases and AIDS, “child of the contraceptive pill,” as stated by the discoverer of the virus that causes that immunodeficiency, Dr. Montagnier. AIDS entered the U.S., El Salvador, Spain, and other countries by way of homosexuals. A good reason for “gay pride”?
To Understand the Present
If one studies the role of Christianity without prejudice, one observes that without it our civilization would not exist.
History is the teacher of life. One cannot rightly know the present, nor the world we have been given to live in, if one does not know the past, or knows it poorly. For this reason the historical culture of a people is of the utmost importance. But it happens that, since this is a science not subject to physical-mathematical verification, it is always exposed to easy manipulation for sectarian ends.
Among the honest cultivators of this science, there may be certain divergences in the interpretation of the facts, but new studies and the discovery of new documents keep clearing up unknowns and refining interpretations, and thus, little by little, greater clarity and better contours of past realities emerge. But do the new discoveries and the true historical certainties reach the general public with sufficient information?
Unfortunately, no. Frequently, through the mass media, what reaches the broad public is a series of stereotypes made of exaggerated half-truths, while important truths are left silenced. In our society, a great many teachers, university students, and journalists have very inadequate views of world history and of the history of El Salvador.
The historical events that I have had occasion to experience most directly, when I have later found them in versions intended for the world remote from those events, have almost always been strongly distorted by a strange prejudice of false neutrality or by an open sectarianism. Once again, on a universal level, the Gospel saying is fulfilled in this domain: that “the devil is the father of lies” and that “the children of darkness are more astute than the children of light.”
Regarding World History, common in our milieu are certain simplifications in which classical Greece, imperial Rome, the eighteenth century, the French Revolution, and the Independence of the Latin American countries are valued very positively, while, by contrast, the “punching bag” that takes all the blows is the Catholic Church. It is blamed for almost everything bad, and most especially for medieval obscurantism, for the destruction of splendid Indo-American cultures; it is accused of being an enemy of science and progress, and it is adorned with the fires of the Inquisition and even with the utter lie of the torture and death, in one of them, of the astronomer Galileo. These same detractors are now happily publishing, again and again, corrected and expanded, the scandal of homosexual priests, while by contrast applauding, as a cultural and scientific advance, the homosexuality of those who are not priests.
Historical reality is more nuanced and quite different. Throughout history, peoples and their cultures are born, grow, reach a maximum splendor, and then decline and disappear. But there are two mysterious exceptions. One is the people of Israel; the other, the Catholic Church.
Of course, in the history of both there are not only lights, but also shadows, and at times to such a degree that they seem to have lost their identity and to be on the verge of disappearing. Yet it is not so. Centuries upon centuries have passed, and there they still are.
If one studies the role of Christianity without prejudice, one observes that without it our civilization would not exist, nor science, nor technology, nor more important things such as moral values and virtues. The concept of the person is of Christian origin, and from it derive the essential equality of all human beings and their intrinsic dignity, which means that they cannot be regarded as a thing; and that is what made possible the abolition of slavery and the existence of egalitarian democracy—that of Greece was exclusivist, only for certain “citizens,” and under Pericles it was a dictatorship disguised as a democracy.
The dignity and equality of women, as I wrote in my previous article, arise from early Christianity and reach their peak in medieval Catholicism. The obscurantism with which the Middle Ages began was not because medieval people turned off the light, but rather they inherited it from the disaster of the collapse of the Roman Empire, caused by its own corruption. And they, on the contrary, went about lighting lamps, salvaging from that cultural rubble all they could recover of Greco-Roman culture through the patient copying, by hand, of its writings in the tranquility and perseverance of the monasteries.
To her we also owe the invention of the book and of the universities, of the middle class, of hospitals, of banking, the incredible marvel of the Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals, and a great many other things, in a cheerful and vital age—of physical insecurity but of great psychological security—for life had the clear meaning of ending in a new, happy, and eternal life, if each person fulfilled his social and moral role.
That is why, when now once again, from various quarters, there is an attempt to de-Christianize our culture, attacking the Church, marriage, and childbearing as social ills, and when, by contrast, secularism, skepticism, atheism, consumerism, and all the old vices of decadent Rome, corrected and expanded, are presented as social progress, one is completely blind.
Ernesto Sábato, a non-Christian writer, half-blind in his physical eyes, is not so in the eyes of the spirit when he recently said: “That we stand before one of the gravest crises humanity has ever undergone is an evidence that needs no demonstration. The human being feels that all those values which sheltered life for generations no longer count today, as Nietzsche well foretold, and in their place we suffer a society in which the only thing that seems to count is efficiency and money. Does that seem to you a small abyss? And yet I believe, despite what you rightly call the tireless smell of war, that a predominantly spiritual age may be at the gates.” I believe it too.
Author: Luis Fernández Cuervo
Source: Encuentra.com
