Obey your elders

WARNING: I am not charitable in this post.  I pray for God’s forgiveness, but this kind of foolishness needs serious rebuttal.

National Catholic Distorter has a regular column called young voices.  In a recent such column, a young person named Kate Childs Graham advises the Magisterium of the Church, that august and timeless body, to scrap centuries of revealed Truth and the doctrine of the faith and instead heed the ‘lesson’ of the movie Footloose.   Yes, Footloose, the 1984 Kevin Bacon vehicle about good-natured rebelling teens in small town ‘Texas’ (it was filmed in southern California, as the mountains in the background reveal).  In the movie, the town preacher (a choose your own revealed truth Protestant) wages a war against rock n’ roll and dancing, to the dismay of the town youth.  The youth rebel, and have a big barn dance.  Hilarity insues.  Wake me up when it’s over. 

Apparently, young Ms. Graham was much smitten with Footloose.  She was so smitten, in fact, that she advises the Magisterium of God’s Eternal Church to follow the example of the preacher in the movie, who eventually came to realize that his opposition to the need for adolescent exuberance was misplaced.  How does this relate to the Catholic Church?   Ms. Graham states that:

Much like Rev. Moore (ED – the preacher), I believe that many church teachings, particularly around gender, sex and sexuality, began with good intentions. In excluding women from leadership, for instance, the bishops of yore were aspiring to do what they thought Christ would do

Ah, I see.  Yes, those silly old fuddy duddy Popes, Cardinals, and Bishops, they just can’t get with the times and be hip!  Don’t you see, there is no infallibly revealed Truth, but only the vagaries of the times.  You can’t have immortal teachings, you have to change your message to the whims of today.  Then, tired old Magisterium, you too can have a remarkable revelation just like the preacher in the movie, and you’ll be cool and hip!  Isn’t that neat?!

Good Lord.  First of all, deriving deep lessons on faith from a movie like Footloose is boneheaded in the extreme.  Secondly, what we have here is another case of someone looking for evidence to prove their already existing viewpoint. Ms. Graham didn’t suddenly come to the conclusion that the Magisterium just wasn’t with the times when she watched this silly movie – she already believed, apparently, that gays should be able to marry in the Church, that contraception is great, that abortion is a woman’s choice, and that women should be ordained.  In a truly adolescent fashion, she apparently saw in this cliched Hollywood movie, full of tired stereotypes of people of faith, some deep lesson that proved what she already believed.  Wow, I’m shocked.

No, really, I am shocked.  I’m shocked that an editor at a publication as well known as NCR would actually publish something this, I’m sorry to say, sophmoric.  Do the editors at NCR really feel that 2000 years of revealed Truth, supported in almost all cases directly by Scripture, should be scrapped in the name of receiving the approbation of the culture?   Do these guys even listen, are they capable of hearing, when Jesus calls us to die to ourselves and to the world, to take up our cross and follow Him?  Do they really think the infallible word of God can be somehow argued away by the lessons of a quarter century old teen flick?  Oh, wait…..we already know the answers to all those questions. 

This is actually depressing.  It is depressing to read the words of an ostensible ‘young voice’ repeating the very tired, and completely false, doctrine of the dissent crowd. 

I hope everyone will join me in prayers for vastly improved Catholic formation, for youth and adults.  Good formation is the only way to combat this error.