Santa Clara University
The lifelong, always open to life, marriage of one man and one woman is the ONLY place for conjugal relations. Each human has the right to originate in this loving embrace. Yet no matter how she came to be, she is owed absolute protection and respect. Lifelong, always open to life, marriage of one man and one woman is the ONLY place for conjugal relations. Each human has the right to originate in this loving embrace. Yet no matter how she came to be, she is owed absolute protection and respect. (Catholic Stand, 1/24/25)
In the early thirteenth century, a fanatical religious movement known...as Catharism or Albigensianism spread throughout southern France. Its fashionableness led self-interested local nobility to favor it....For the Cathars, the natural order is not the creation of a benevolent deity from whose grace we have fallen. Rather,... the product of an evil power. And they identified this evil power with the God of the Old Testament....Its chief component was renunciation of marriage and children, which were regarded as wicked insofar as they perpetuated the evil natural order of things....Whereas the Church favored sex [between a husband and wife] when it was procreative, the Cathars favored it only when it was not procreative.Since the God of the Old Testament was identified with the devil, biblical heroes like Abraham and Moses were dismissed as diabolical agents, and divine acts of judgment like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah were condemned as murderous....wokeness, like Catharism, is essentially about the radical subversion of normal human life in the name of a paranoid metaphysical delusion. Like Catharism, its fashionableness has nevertheless found it support among a large segment of the wealthy and powerful. And like Catharism, its rise has been facilitated by the Church’s being in such a low state that it is unable to provide an effective counterbalance. (Ed Feser, Wokism is the New Face of An Old Heresy, And It Can Be Defeated Again, 2/7/24)