Dr. Donald DeMarco spoke at the Human Life Convention

Ottawa, Canada – April 1992

His topic was Unity and Plurality, and his thesis was that true plurality cannot exist without an underlying unity. Print, for example, in order to communicate a message, needs the page. Ideas need a common grounding in concrete reality. Truth can be understood and commonly held within the pastoral Magisterium of the Church. He observed that in contemporary society there exists no healthy pluralism, because there is no longer any common recognition of the moral law or the natural law, rooted in concrete reality.

Reflecting similar reactions to those of Dr. Joyce Little (First Things — Naming Good and Evil), Dr. DeMarco contends that the modern secular man has abandoned concrete reality, or objective truth. Instead, he has fashioned for himself a personal truth which suits himself. Modern man has replaced worship of the one, true, good, and beautiful God (who is The Creator of all things and thus is the supreme authority on what is good and what is bad), with “The Cult of Man,” who rejects concrete reality, and who claims as a right to create for himself, in his own mind, based on his own knowledge and decision making, what is good for himself. Objective truth is replaced by the will of man. Truth has no more status than non-truth. Reverence or respect become non-words.

Thus, a true community, a true communication, a common unity, which consequently allows for real plurality is impossible.

Dr. DeMarco tells a story about Gloria Steinem — the prototype of feminists. He said that during a press interview, Gloria Steinem was asked two questions, and she made two responses:

Reporter: Q. Why have you never married?

Gloria: A. I never wanted to mate in captivity.

Reporter Q. Why have you never given birth?

Gloria A. I have used my life to give birth to myself.

These answers are revealing, brilliant, and underscore an acute understanding of an underlying truth.

The truth is that in sacramental marriage, as instituted by Christ, the married couple do indeed “mate” in captivity — bonded by unconditional love and complete self surrender.

The truth is that in giving birth, and in child rearing, one surrenders oneself interest for the sake of the family members.

The truth is that marriage and family unequivocally dictate unconditional love and self-sacrifice. In living out these conditions, husband and wife model the love and sacrificial dimensions of the Triune God. One might say they “image” God and manifest reverence for God’s authority to tell man what is good and what is bad in relationship to Himself and to their own human natures.

Gloria Steinem, recognizing the “constraints” on unlimited freedom, posed by the marriage question, has chosen instead to rewrite the rules (i.e., to mate), but with no corresponding obligations. Gloria Steinem, recognizing that child bearing and child rearing carry with it obligations of time, of inconvenience, of suffering, of indeed, an investment of oneself, has chosen a path which rejects the obligations of loving another in favor of all her energies pooled to love herself. Again, this is a complete rejection of the nature of man as God designed him to be.

In concrete reality, we are called to love and be loved — to image the Triune God. The feminist’s most fundamental statement is that Man (oops! Should I say woman?) exists for himself, for his self-fulfillment, for his self-enjoyment.

For the feminist to posit self love as man’s true meaning, it is necessary that God (who calls Himself Love, and who told man that it is He who must be imaged) simply must not be. To quote Nietzche, as Dr. Little did in her article, God is dead. (Little, First Things, May, p. 28) He has to be, because the feminist and the sex-educator reject truth as it is, in favor of however they decide to choose it, create it, or feel it. And along with truth, they also reject love, authority, and purity.

God, as Father, as symbol of authority, therefore becomes neutered in sex-ed programs. God is not mentioned often, and when He is, its almost always with an error or a confused blurred meaning.

St. Joseph — is our human model of the perfect blending of purity and authority. Because he was pure, God entrusted His very Self to St. Joseph’s care, under St. Joseph’s authority.

This letter has explained and proved that our sex-ed programs are not pure. Neither is our society, or our churches.

To the extent that purity is restored to the formation of children, in the school, in the Church, and in the home, to that extent and that extent only, will authority be restored in our schools, our churches, and our homes.

Purity and authority are necessarily linked. Their practice and their respect lead a straight path to reverence for all things and worship of The Divine. This is why St. Joseph is patron of The Church.

Both Dr. Joyce Little, in her article Naming Good and Evil (First Things) and Dr. Donald DeMarco in his Unity and Plurality speech uncover the prime evil of our times — that of abstraction (rejecting concrete existence), complete with the rejection of authority of God. Both also refer to the accompanying sexual impurity which accompanies abstraction.

Dr. Little writes:

People intent on controlling their bodies and their lives are people intent on defining themselves and their purpose for existing. They are no longer interested, consciously, at least, in living their lives in such a way as to make visible in the world the invisible mystery of God.
Little, First Things, May 1992, p. 28

It is not simply coincidental that every programmized sex education program contains the elements of impurity, abstraction, and the rejection of authority inclusive of objective truth. It is easy to see why, in writing this letter, I have taken great pains to define what I mean, specifically and with concrete examples.

“When you say `hill,’” the Queen interrupted, “I could show you hills, in comparison with which you’d call that a valley.”

“No, I shouldn’t,” said Alice, surprised into contradicting her at last: “a hill can’t be a valley, you know. That would be nonsense—”

The Red Queen shook her head. “You may call it nonsense if you like,” she said, “but I’ve heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!”
—Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking Glass

(Mankowski, First Things, May 1992, p. 31)

Interestingly enough, I believe that the editors of First Things, chose on purpose, to place an article called Academic Religion, Playground of the Vandals by Paul V. Mankowski, S.J., directly after Dr. Little’s article in the same issue of May 1992. Fr. Mankowski’s essay contains the same themes — abstraction, rejection of Patriarchy (authority) and impurity. The focus of his attention, however, is not sex education, but a new breed of Church bureaucracy who are “responsible for a crisis affecting American religion as a whole.” Fr. Mankowski depicts the moral decline of the “new clerisy” (inclusive of sex-educators) who institute impure, heretical Church practices in a manner similar to vandalism.

Fr. Mankowski claims that there is a:

…profound and widening gap between ordinary church-goers and the administrative nomenklatura which, largely through the oblique pressure of committee and caucus, has gained control of the church executive or enfeebled those it doesn’t control. (Mankowski, First Things, May 1992, p. 31)
…the new clerisy, the “party of change,” operating across the denominational map, has further repelled and alienated the overwhelming majority of church-goers, viz, simple people who pray, who worship God.
Mankowski, First Things, May 1992, p. 31

I, a mother and wife, a church-goer, feel acutely this alienation. When asked to “sit on an advisory board at a national Jesuit seminary, I was told that my concern for dissent was not the proper “business” of an advisor or financial contributor. When I go to church to pray, I find instead, that I become troubled because of abuses occurring in the liturgy — such as, altar girls, neglecting to “call to mind our sins,” or praying to either a neutered or feminized God. When I send my children to school, I discover they have become victims to those who worship a “cult of man,” and wish to convert them to their impure ways. When I try to effect change, letters are passed from committee to committee…but the child molestation continues… When I point to the unity of the Magisterium, the new breed of clerics profess they do not understand. Von Hildebrand comments that the punishment of disobedience is spiritual blindness, a lack of understanding.

Fr. Mankowski’s article is based on his observations of the 1991 annual meeting of The American Academy of Religion (AAR). Not surprising, his article began with the C. S. Lewis quote I used a moment ago when I explained that I have been so careful to say what I mean and mean what I say:

“When you say hill,” the Queen interrupted, “I could show you hills, in comparison with which you’d call that a valley.”
“No, I shouldn’t,” said Alice, surprised into contradicting her at last: “a hill can’t be a valley, you know. That would be nonsense—”

The Red Queen shook her head. “You may call it nonsense if you like,” she said, “but I’ve heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!”

—Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking Glass
Mankowski, First Things, May 1992, p. 31

Fr. Mankowski’s essay is based on his analysis that this once distinguished group of scholars (AAR) now talk nonsense. Continuing the theme of C. S. Lewis, Fr. Mankowski writes:

“For instance, now,” she went on, “there’s the King’s Messenger. He’s in prison now, being punished: and the trial doesn’t even begin until next Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all.”
Mankowski, First Things, May 1992, p. 32

Fr. Mankowski finds that the lectures were frequently illogical and prone toward abstract language — nothing scholarly or balanced, nothing communicated. However, beyond the tendency to ramble to nonsense and abstraction, Fr. Mankowski did identify two common themes running throughout the lectures — impurity and rejection of patriarchal authority. He comments that:

…virtually unchallenged in liberal seminaries and divinity schools—has it that the special cultic authority reserved to males in Judaism and Christianity is not only a pernicious institution but one that was assumed by men, in bad faith, as a self-serving ploy to buttress political, economic, and sexual tyranny…
Mankowski, First Things, May 1992, p. 32

Perhaps even more striking to the newcomer than its counter-masculinism is the AAR’s preoccupation with sexuality. If this aspect of human life was too often neglected by earlier students of religion, compensation for the lack has certainly been made — and with a vengeance. Indeed, some of the addresses at the Annual Meeting were devoted so narrowly to sexual detail that they might have been read with (at least) equal appropriateness at a conference on psychotherapy of anthropology. Many speakers made no attempt to relate the subject of their papers to anything recognizable as prayer or morality or worship of God. Now it is obvious that the notion of “Religion” with which the American Academy concerns itself is a rather commodious term — virtually any area of human enthusiasm seems to qualify — and it was likewise clear that for many scholars present sexuality constituted this most fundamental enthusiasm, this ultimate ground of meaning: there is no need to make explicit one’s connection of sex with religion if, at bottom, they are one and the same thing…
Mankowski, First Things, May 1992, p. 33

Why should sexuality fascinate students of religion so disproportionately to the rest of the population, both the academic community and society at large?
Mankowski, First Things, May 1992, p. 31

Yet I cannot rid myself of the conviction—admittedly—subjective — that there is another, less innocent, motive at work in this preoccupation with sex. For want of a better term, I would call it an impulse to vandalism. The interest here displayed was overwhelmingly an interest in aberrant sexuality—evidenced not only in repeated protests against so-called “compulsory heterosexuality,” but in a macabre litany of erotic pathology: mutilation, child abuse, incest, sadomasochism, ritual castration, and so on ad nauseam. The most benevolent spectator could hardly attribute more than a fraction of these “data” to a disinterested study of religion. Surely the contempt for authoritative morality in general, and for sexual morality in particular, combined with the too-obvious relish in the details of deviant venery, cannot be a coincidence.

The vandal’s hatred is for the intact, the unstained, the integral; his delight is to chip the nose off the perfect statue, to soil the white wall with graffiti, to shatter the last unbroken window. His destruction is a record not only to malice but of conquest; as a dog is said to foul trees and lampposts as a way of marking territorial boundaries, so the vandal uglifies the yet-undefiled in order to chart the extent of his incursion into the world of order and decorum. By the same token, the ideals of sexual purity—consecrated virginity, the chaste yet fruitful marriage bed—have served as an emblem of the sacral function of Judaism and Christianity, as a redoubt of specifically human holiness: precisely the notion that the new clerisy wishes to expunge from religion. When scholars propose that the relation of nun to Church “might be reimaged in terms of a lesbian butch-femme relationship,” or that the story of “God’s sacrificing `his’ son legitimizes child abuse,” we are not to imagine that their targets are chosen at random. There is an ill-concealed glee in this parading, as it were, the vivid sexual hells of Hieronymus Bosch through the ruined courtyards of Protestant academic propriety. The AAR, like the oldline divinity schools and seminaries, which gave it birth, has become a playground of the Goth.
Mankowski, First Things, May 1992, pp. 23, 33-34

Toward the conclusion of this essay, after citing some examples, Fr. Mankowski, S.J., commented: “The text transposes factual relationships of our everyday world into a linguistic medium that begins to take on an alliterative life of its own, and thus loses contact with the thing itself.”
Mankowski, First Things, May 1992, p. 34

To an “alienated” church-goer such as myself, Fr. Mankowski has provided an answer to the mind boggling question, “How come we can’t communicate with this new breed of clerisy? How can the schools and churches (which bear Christ’s name) be so impure?”

The answer is, that for the new clerisy, reality must be ignored and rejected, because reality is linked to the patriarchal God of Judeo-Christian tradition. Facts and logic do not matter. Words can mean different things. Unclear thoughts allow for interpretation. Questions with no answers are better than questions with answers. Feelings and subjectivity substitute for truth. As von Hildebrand says: “The punishment for sin is blindness.”

Fr. Mankowski concludes his article thus:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”
Mankowski, First Things, May 1992, p. 34)

“I know what you’re thinking about,” said Tweedledum; “’but it isn’t so, nohow.”

“Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee, “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”
Mankowski, First Things, May 1992, p. 36

The religious wars declared in the 1980s will be fought not between denominations but within them: father against son, daughter-in-law against mother-in-law, functionaries against the faithful. For the dispute concerns not how one should worship, but whom. As long we pretend that the new clerks don’t really mean what they say, we will continue to surrender the only essential clarity, forfeiting the One named I AM to “he/she might be”— and that ain’t logic. Nohow.
Mankowski, First Things, May 1992, p. 37

With regard to sex education, the great Catholic philosopher, Dr. Dietrich von Hildebrand, noted for his outstanding work In Defense of Purity, warned many years ago:

To develop the right attitude and vision in the human person toward this sphere of sex, there exists only one possibility, namely, information about the mystery of sex must be disclosed in great reverence and in strict due personal dialogue, of the father or the mother with their child. Absolutely excluded is the pseudo-scientific teaching about sex in a classroom — that is, in a neutralizing and publicly-saturated atmosphere…with its accompanying irreverent disclosure to the child of this sphere in its deep mystery.
von Hildebrand, Sex Education: The Basic Issues, 1974 [4th printing], pp. 16 & 17

Similarly, one of the greatest minds of the 19th Century, John Henry Cardinal Newman, had occasion to write concerning the educational task of the Catholic Church:

It is the boast of the Catholic religion, that it has the gift of making the young heart chaste; and why is this, but that it gives us Jesus Christ for our food, and Mary for our nursing Mother? Fulfill this boast in yourselves; prove to the world that you are following no false teaching, vindicate the glory of your mother Mary, whom the world blasphemes in the very face of the Word, by the simplicity of your deportment, and the sanctity of your words and deeds. Go to her for the royal heart of innocence.
Cited by Committee of Catholic Parents, Buffalo, New York

Elie Wiesel, whose mother, father, and sister perished in the Nazi slaughterhouse writes that there “would have been no Auschwitz, if the way had not been prepared by Christian theology” (meaning, of course, the Christian clerical leaders in Germany at the time).

I submit that there would not be the widespread moral deprivation of the times — from abortion to euthanasia, from drugs to homosexuality, from materialism to atheism, if it were not for the wholesale selling out of the Catholic family by the new clerisy described so well by Fr. Mankowski.

In the so-called sexuality programs of the Catholic schools, in youth confirmation retreats, and in C.C.D. programs, the new clerisy has succeeded in liberating the child from his family’s values and authority, and from the eternal message of salvation of the Holy Catholic Church.

These programs do not just claim as victims the teachers and students, alone. The real victim is the Catholic Faith, itself, which is systematically being rewritten to fit the personalized cultic faith of the new clerisy.

Carindal Law, In your letter of February 4, 1992, you asked me two questions:

1. Are you opposed to any type of education on human sexuality in classrooms of Catholic schools or in religious education programs for students not attending Catholic schools?

2. Could you give me specific references as to titles of texts used in Catholic schools of this Archdiocese that you find to be questionable, as well as specific references within those texts to materials which you find objectionable?

I believe my letters (my answers) have completely answered your questions. As defined, I am opposed to any type of classroom human sexuality program. My opposition is based on the Church’s need to protect youth from sensuality. Facts about human sexuality (anatomy and physiology), “Should be imparted in private, avoiding unnecessary detail, and then only when deemed necessary and opportune” (Phone conversation, Gregory LLoyd, October 1992).

I have provided you with reviews of all that this Archdiocese promotes through the Religious Education Office. I believe that the documents contained in my letters, now called, Catholic Classroom Education is an Oxymoron, are sufficient for Catholics to conclude that the Magisterium of the Catholic Church forbids formalized programs of sex education (as defined) in the classroom.

Your letter to me regarding human sexuality education asked for my personal response. In refutation of the philosophy and methodology of values clarification, my personal response can be no other than that of the Magisterium. Any catechesis in sexual morality — at home, or church, or lecture, must proceed from the truth that:

Purity is that virtue which keeps the sexual secret hidden as a dominion whose disposition lies in the hand of God.
von Hildebrand, Purity — The Mystery of Christian Sexuality, 1970, Part III, Ch. II

Once, again, I request that you halt, as soon as possible, all classroom sex education programs and that with haste, “by the simplicity of your department and the sanctity of your words and deeds you go to Mary, your Mother, for her royal heart of innocence.”

Sincerely and with respect and love,
Alice A. Grayson

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