Posted by
Corthell on Friday, March 12, 2010 4:16:22 PM
In a column the Denver Catholic Register published online yesterday, Archbishop Charles Chaput offers a faithful, common-sense defense of the Archdiocesan policy that led the Sacred Heart of Jesus parish school in Denver to exclude children being raised by two lesbians from continuing their education at the school beyond the current year. The gist of his reasoning is simple: "Our [Catholic] schools are meant to be 'partners in faith' with parents. If parents don't respect the beliefs of the Church, or live in a manner that openly rejects those beliefs, then partnering with those parents becomes very difficult if not impossible." He takes great pains not to disparage the lesbian couple involved, concluding simply that "Persons who have an understanding of marriage and family life sharply different from Catholic belief are often people of sincerity and good will. They have other, excellent options for education and should see in them the better course for their children."
In any previous epoch, the archbishop's clearly reasoned and politely articulated statement would be taken for what it is – the understandable declaration of a policy consistent with the tenets of the Catholic faith and necessary for the integrity of a Catholic pedagogical institution. But we live in an era when elite forces are pushing with calculated zeal to consolidate what Nietzsche called the "transvaluation of values." And they do so with the very attitude that characterized the insane but insidiously mesmerizing rants of the German immoralist Hitler found so inspiring. It is an attitude of deep antipathy toward a "straw man" caricature of Christianity, one wholly indebted to the stunted, petulantly adolescent insistence that there is no God because we are not Him.
The normalization of homosexuality constitutes the cutting edge of this anti-Christian revisioning of right and wrong. It represents the utter rejection of the notion that we exist as part of a God-ordained whole whose nature has authoritative relevance to our understanding of the form and substance of human community. According to this view, such natural features of human existence as the bodily distinction of males from females have no more significance for moral understanding than other merely physical aspects of human appearance, such as skin color or the shape of one's eyes.
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On this account religious schools can have no more right to discriminate against children being raised by homosexuals than they have to discriminate against children from black or Oriental backgrounds. And the contention by a Catholic bishop that religious tenets justify such discrimination has no more validity than the similar claims once made by leaders of South Africa's Dutch Reformed Church that their religious beliefs required racial segregation. http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=127648