Masculinity

The Curse of Drink

in alcoholism, Masculinity, Southwest 1 Comment Tags: , ,

Tony Hillerman, as much as he admired the Navajos, did not idealize them, and described the blight of alcohol among the Diné, the people. In The Ghostway Jim Chee reflects on a drunken woman who was lying in the road and was run over, and on the others like her. “In the milder seasons, they drank themselves to death in front of trucks on U.S. 666 or Navajo Route 1. Now, with the icy wind beginning to blow, they would drink themselves to death in frozen ditches.”

In 1745-6, David Brainerd, a Presbyterian minister, worked as a missionary among the Indians in New Jersey near the New York border. He discovered they seemed “to abhor even the christian name.” Brainerd explained why:

This aversion to Christianity arises partly from a view of the “immorality and vicious behavior of many who are called Christians.” They [the Indians] observe  that horrid wickedness in nominal Christians, which the light of nature condemns in themselves: and not having distinguishing views of things, are ready to look on all the white people alike, and to condemn the alike, for the abominable practices of some. – Hence, when I have attempted to treat with them about Christianity, they have frequently objected the scandalous practices of Christians.  They have observed to me, that the white people lie, defraud, steal and drink worse than the Indians; that they have taught the Indians these things, especially the latter of them; who before the coming of the English, knew of no such thing as strong drink: that the English have, by these means, made the quarrel and kill one another; and, in a word,  brought them to the practice of all those vices that now prevail among them. So that they have now vastly more miserable, than they were before the coming of the white people into the country. – These, and such like objections, they frequently make against Christianity, which are not easily answered to their satisfaction; many of them being facts too notoriously true.

David Courtwright in his book Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to the Inner City claims that the Indians learned how to react to alcohol by observing how white people reacted. Unfortunately Indians did not see mature Frenchmen or Italians savoring a glass of wine, but young, adventurous, testosterone-driven males getting drunk and shooting up the town.

Among all the accusations made against the Spanish in their entrada into New Mexico, I do not remember reading that they introduced the natives denizens to drunkenness. They had wine and brandy; was it too rare to trade to the Indians, or did the Spanish, even on the frontier, not abuse alcohol as much as the English did?

(There is some evidence that before the Spanish arrived the Pueblo Indians may have made a weak beer by fermenting corn, but nothing conclusive and no traces in oral history of alcohol abuse in pre-contact times).

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If McQueary Had Been a Babushka

in Masculinity, sexual abuse 6 Comments Tags: ,

Part of the outrage over McQueary’s failure to stop the child rape he was witnessing is caused by the sense that he violated the canons of masculinity. A male’s strength is given to him to protect the weak. If he fails to do that, even if he did not technically violate a law, he has violated a code of honor to which most men subscribe.

If a 60-year-old cleaning woman had seen Sandusky raping a child, we would not have been angry at her if she had fled and called her husband asking him what to do. Many women would have acted more forthrightly than McQueary did (at least according to the version he told the grand jury). We would not expect an older woman physically to challenge a male associated with the football team, and we might be disappointed if she did immediately call the police, but we would not scorn her the way we scorn McQueary – a scorn that has begun to sting him and has caused him to rethink his story.

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A Priest Who Was a Man

in Catholic Church, Masculinity 2 Comments Tags: ,

After the disgusting displays of pusillanimity in the football program at Penn State, it is refreshing to turn to a real man, the Austrian priest Carl Lampert.

The German Resistance Memorial Center gives this biography:

Born in Vorarlberg in Austria, Carl Lampert was ordained as a priest in Brixen in 1918. After studying canonical law in Rome, in 1935 he was appointed director of the ecclesiastical court in the Apostolic Administration of Feldkirch. In 1939 he became provicar of Innsbruck. Carl Lampert was arrested several times for his protests against National Socialist church policy and finally imprisoned in Dachau and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. After his release in August 1941, the Gestapo compelled Lampert to take up residence in Mecklenburg-Pomerania. He found accommodation in Stettin and assisted in the ministry in the vicinity of the city. Even in exile, Lampert retained his critical attitude to the regime, unaware that he was under Gestapo observation. His discussions, telephone calls and correspondence were under surveillance. In February 1943 Carl Lampert was arrested again and severely maltreated during interrogation. The Gestapo accused him not only of expressing his opinions on the deportation of Jews and the murder of patients from psychiatric clinics but also of listening to foreign radio stations and “giving aid and comfort” to forced laborers. Carl Lampert was sentenced to death by the Reich Court Martial on September 8, 1944 and murdered with Friedrich Lorenz and Herbert Simoleit on November 13, 1944 in Halle/Saale.

Lampert was decapitated along with two other priests, Herbert Simoleit and Friedrich Lorenz, and died with the names of Jesus and Mary on his lips.

This is the wire altar cross that Lampert made in prison.

Sunday

Benedict XVI recognized the priest’s martyrdom and reminded his audience that “during an interrogation that could have led to his freedom, Lampert had said: I love my Church. I remain faithful to my Church and to the priesthood. I am on Christ’s side and I love His Church.”

Lampert has been declared Blessed, as indeed he was, to die for defying the forces of evil.

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Calls for Testicular Transplants for Penn State Football Administrators

in Masculinity, sexual abuse 1 Comment

We are supposed to be living in a heterosexualist culture which leads men to “patrol sexual boundaries” involving sexual contact between males. This was lacking at Penn State.

Alfred Doblin of The Record asks:

For starters, what the hell was wrong with Mike McQueary? A 28-year-old man allegedly sees a 10-year-old boy being sexually assaulted and walks away and calls his father? He should have called his father after he pulled Sandusky off the boy, after he made sure the boy was not in need of immediate medical attention, after he called the police, and, from my perspective, after he washed away the alleged sexual predator’s blood from his hands because he had thrown Sandusky violently across the locker room when he pulled him off the boy. Calling Daddy is not a priority for a grown man.

And there we have the heart of this sad, pathetic tale occurring in a sea of testosterone: a lack of men. Penn State’s football program, revered because it supposedly molds men, is nothing but a sham. Men do not watch children being sexually abused. Men do not wait or fail to report allegations of sexual abuse regardless of the consequences to their beloved institution.

It sounds strangely familiar if you switch out helmets and pads for white collars and black vestments. Many have likened what allegedly happened at Penn State to the sex abuse scandals of the Roman Catholic Church. The timeline of events is equally disturbing. The church scandals were at their height in the winter of 2002, the same time that Sandusky allegedly abused a 10-year-old boy in a locker room shower. That makes it even harder to imagine grown men failing to recognize the dangers of not bringing in police to investigate the possibility of a predator on the loose with unfettered access to sports facilities.

There is a good chance more alleged victims may come forward as this scandal continues. It will take more than a few high-placed firings to clean house. It also will take more than firings to right priorities at Penn State.

In an interview in USA Today, McQueary’s father said his son “did what he was supposed to do and all of this has been very hard on him.” Somehow, I don’t think this has been as hard on Mike McQueary as it must have been for the 10-year-old boy who allegedly was being sexually assaulted by Sandusky and left with him after McQueary walked away to call Daddy.

For all the bravado over a football dynasty, for all the sights of large, muscular frames pounding at each other on stadium turf, and for all the closed male ranks of failed leadership at Penn State, when it mattered most, there was a singular absence of men.

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Remedial Masculinity

in Masculinity, sexual abuse 6 Comments Tags: , ,

There’s my daddy. Let me ask him what I should do.

Mike McQueary, the 28-year-old aspiring coach at Penn State,  the  one who saw Sandusky butt-fucking a ten-year-old boy, left the scene of the crime and called his daddy. McQueary needs to take remedial masculinity courses.

DeeGee suggests this as a scenario that should be studied in such a class:

If you need a reminder of what to do if you walk into a shower area and find a grown man thrusting behind a boy bracing with his arms against a wall, you could do worse than the following.

You: Move away from the boy. I’m talking to you old man. Stand back. Do it now.

Man: Aw, come on, we’re just horsing around.

You: Shut up and move away from the boy. Kid? Kid, look at me. Turn around and look at me. Go get dressed. You’re going to the hospital.

Man: Hospital? For what?

You: SHUT YOUR FACE.

Man: Oh, you’re big stuff now. Is that it? You think you’ve got something on me? Me? Don’t make me laugh. You know who I am.

You: I don’t know you. The man I thought I knew isn’t here.

Man: Stop the innocent act. You don’t know me? Good one.

You: Kid, you need help over there? Let’s go. Let’s get out of here.

Man: What’s the hurry. He’s not late, he’s staying in my basement room.

You: Not tonight, pal, and not ever again. Not anyone.

Man: What’s that supposed to mean. You know what you signed on for, don’t you? If you want to move up the career ladder here, just walk out that door. You can do it. I’ll have a recommendation for you on my desk in the morning.

You: (picking up a trash can) Kid, wait over by the door. I’ll be right there.

Man: You don’t have to take him. I like him. You can have a different one.

You: (take the trash can into the shower for the sort of beating that crumbles the steel can and drops the man to the tile floor, then put the smashed can against his head and kick until your leg gets tired. Leave with the boy.)

Kid: Did you hurt Mr. Sandusky.

You: Did he hurt you?

Kid: Yes he did, again.

You: He won’t again. Do you like that?

Kid: Yes.

You: You’re not a throw away.

Kid: What?

You: Nothing.

Kid: I don’t feel so good.

You: Neither do I, kid, neither do I.

McQueary will be coaching Saturday – with a name that is custom made for mockery. I wonder if there will be a riot at the stadium.

Paterno and Sandusky are good Catholics and members of the Knights of Columbus (which honored him) and imitated the priests and bishops who taught them by example how to act.

Yes, I am bitter – I am bitter about the weak being sacrificed to the convenience of the powerful and the entertainment of the masses.

UPDATE

The Board of Trustees has more balls than the entire Penn State football staff. They have banned McQueary from the Saturday game – now if they would only fire him.

Penn State‘s Board of Trustees have asked the university’s head football coach to keep Mike McQueary, the assistant coach at the center of a child sex scandal, off the field during Saturday’s nationally-televised game against Nebraska, according to one of the trustees.

The board does not plan to fire McQueary or ask him to step down, according to the trustee, who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitive nature of the matter.

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Heroic Terrorists

in Masculinity, terrorism 1 Comment Tags: , , ,

In working in my new book, Meek or Macho? Men and Religion, I have been reviewing all the many, many ways that masculine development can go wrong.

Wolfgang Schmidbauer a German psychoanalyst, wrote a book, The Psychology of Terror: Why Young Men Become Assassins. He has these comments on Breivik:

Fanatical criminals like the Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik, according to the insights of the psychoanalyst Wolfgang Schmidbauer, mostly want to go down in history as heroes. “Hero-myths have always exercised a great power of attraction on young men,” said Schmidbauer.

He referred to the fact that Breivik explained his act in a detailed ideological pamphlet and did not shoot himself after the attack.

To the question, why such perpetrators obviously show no compassion, Schmidbauer said : I think they dissociate.” According to all appearances the perpetrator during the crime finds himself in a trance-like condition. ”In that condition he plays the role of the heroic killer,” said Schmidbauer….

The psychoanalyst assumed that during the planning of the crime the perpetrators lose all their empathy – that is, the ability to put oneself in the place of another human being. “Empathy develops in childhood. These perpetrators almost always come from a broken family and often have parents who were so preoccupied with their own problems, that they had no possibility to empathize with the child.”

Often these perpetrators have no empathetic father and have had no positive image of masculinity. Later they eventually have problems themselves with their own masculinity, which they seek to understand with their delusions of grandeur. They are dissatisfied and unhappy, They look at other persons who find joy in life, and develop a deeply rooted hate and envy of these persons.”

The perpetrators occupy themselves for a long time with fantasies of the role of hero, for example when they play corresponding computer games or watch action films. Then when in reality they take up weapons, in their self-image they do not consider themselves criminals. “They want to be heroes and saviors. That makes them so dangerous and at the same time so inconspicuous,” Schmidbauer said.

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Jihad and Crusade

in Islam, Masculinity, Voluntarism, war 7 Comments Tags: , ,

When cultures collide, sometimes they borrow good ideas from each other, and sometimes bad ideas.
The encounter of Islam and the Christian West has given us algebra, but we have also taken over some of the unlovelier products of Islam.
Islam spread the idea of jihad as meaning not only an interior struggle against evil but physical, military operation against the enemies of true religion, against the infidel. The West thought this was a good idea and developed the idea of a crusade, a war that was not simply just but holy, to counter the jihad that had conquered large sections of the Christian world. Christians killed in the name of God.
Islam, submission, developed the idea that God was absolutely unknowable, that our only response to him was to submit to his will, that is will was arbitrary, that all occurred because of his will, and that he could change his will as he pleased because it did not express his nature, which is absolutely unknowable. Hydrogen and oxygen combine to produce water because God wills it; the independence of secondary causes was neglected. God could change the moral law, and command what he had forbidden, and forbid what he had commanded. Our only duty is to submit to his inscrutable will.
The lines of influence are not clear, but I suspect that nominalism and voluntarism in the West are the result of an encounter with this Islamic idea. It sounds so pious.
Slavery had died out in the West, but then Islamic slavers – the Barbary pirates – enslaved perhaps a million Europeans, a process that continued until the nineteenth century. In desperation the papacy allowed slavery to revive in Catholic lands.
And now the Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik has, as the newspapers point out, issued a manifesto that is the mirror image of Al-Queda. Islamic terrorism has created Christian terrorism.
A recent survey of the values of European youth confirmed that young men are less religious than young women – no surprise there. The report is in somewhat opaque sociological language, but it also indicates that young men are more hostile than women to other religions, even if the men do not believe in the traditional religion of their country. That is, the young men may be indifferent or hostile to Christianity, but they are even more hostile to intruding foreign religions, such as (the report did NOT go on to say) Islam.
In fact, historically European men have been hostile to the clerical-feminine manifestations of their religion. Instead men feel an identification with the religious community, whose identity they have celebrated and defended in their own way. Mussolini was asked to allow the construction of a mosque in Rome; he said certainly, as soon as a Catholic church was built in Mecca.
And so we have a Norwegian, who seems to have shown little interest in prayer, liturgy, or other clerical-feminine manifestations of Christianity, observes Al-Queda and decides he is going to defend the Christian identity of Europe by provoking a civil war between Christianity and Islam.
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The Church and Male Honor

in clergy sex abuse scandal, Masculinity 10 Comments Tags: ,

Plato’s Republic and the Christian Church face the same problem in integrating the thumos, the firry spirit, of young men into the community. The political community cannot ignore it. The explosion of the Arab world in 2011 was set off  because one young man felt that his masculinity had been dishonored. He immolated himself, and large parts of the Arab world literally burst into flames. The Church in Spain in 1936-7 experienced the same male rage. Mostly, however, at least for the present, the male reaction is not destruction but indifference to or abandonment of the church.

          The sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church also illustrated the conflict between the clergy and young males. The clergy has long sought to control the boisterousness and sexuality of young males, and it needs to be controlled. However, a significant portion of the clergy used this socially-authorized control to exercise control over the bodies of young males through sexual abuse and psychological manipulation. The victims had long been propagandized that priests were superior beings and that the laity were unimportant; what a priest wanted was what mattered. The victims were profoundly dishonored by the abuse. They were further dishonored by the reaction of the hierarchy to the abuse: the victims counted for nothing, the perpetrators for everything. Victims were ignored, brushed off, insulted. Their rage did not burst forth in murder, but in a decades-long legal campaign to force the Catholic hierarchy to apologize and pay for the abuse that they had tolerated; to acknowledge that the victims were indeed important, that their suffering was  important, that the priests and bishops were not superior beings but in many cases of far lesser moral stature than the laity.

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Young Male Idiots

in anticlericalism, law enforcement, Masculinity 6 Comments

I often wonder at what age the male mind starts functioning in a rational manner (some women say never).

 

The NYT has an article on a young song writer who thought it would be hilarious

 

·       To sing an innocuous children’s song to a grade school class

 

·       Video their response

 

·       Go home and on his computer change the song to an obscene song

 

·       Show the kids as if they were reacting to his singing obscene lyrics and making obscene gestures

 

·       Post it on You Tube 

Mr. Emory, 21, an aspiring singer and songwriter, became a household name here last month when he edited a video to make it appear that elementary school children in a local classroom were listening to him sing a song with graphic sexual lyrics. He then showed the video in a nightclub and posted it on YouTube.  

His friends thought it was a scream. The police are taking a different view of the matter. He was arrested for child pornography and is facing twenty years and a lifetime on the child abuse register.

 

He is an idiot; but if all young male idiots were put in prison the world would rapidly empty out.

 

The conflict of young men and the clergy in France was a major contributor to anticlericalism. From the draft of my revised book:

 

Specifically masculine anticlericalism predates the Revolution. First of all was the battle of the village curé, as the agent of the Counter-Reformation and as the representative of the forces of decency and order, against the young unattached males, who, in France as elsewhere and always, were difficult to keep under control and to civilize. Philip Hoffman recounts this 1777 incident in the diocese of Lyon: a youth, Jean Marie Bonnefond, snitched a few cherries for the curé’s orchard. This was the last straw for the curé. The young men had been trampling his wheat and stealing his fruit. “Worse, Bonnefond was one of a number of youths who gathered each Sunday in front of the church to play the flute and pound on wine barrels.” On the day of the theft, the curé had asked them to stop because he was hearing confession, but the youths refused. The curé took a stick, pursued Bonnefond, and gave him a thrashing. The boy filed charges against the curé, who counterfiled charges, because Bonnefond and his friends “danced and sang defamatory songs in front of the curé’s house.”  In villages the youths would leave doing mass; the priests would lock the doors; the youths would break them open. The  curés also tried to put a stop to cruel sports at saints’ festivals — such a tying a goose up by its neck and then whacking it until it was decapitated — and tried to stop the male use of gang rape as a means to control the girls of the village. One has sympathy for the clergy.

Village louts were not the only ones to express their masculine dislike of the church. Even among the aristocracy, contempt shown the Church could have catastrophic consequences. Jean François Lefevre, chevalier de La Barre, was about nineteen years old when he was accused of blasphemy and sacrilege. He had sung blasphemous and bawdy songs, had refused to take off his hat for a religious procession and had (possibly) vandalized a crucifix.  For this he was tried in a secular court and condemned. The judgment declared on July 1, 1766 he   

will have the tongue cut out and will then be taken in the said tumbrel to the public marketplace of this city to have his head cut off on a scaffold; his body and his head will then be thrown on a pyre to be destroyed, burnt, reduced to ashes and these thrown to the wind. We order that before the execution of the said Lefebvre de La Barre the ordinary and the extraordinary question will be applied to have from his mouth the truth of several facts of the trial and revelation about his accomplices.

The Church had asked for a pardon for de La Barre, who was a victim of local intrigues. Voltaire was both horrified by an execution for adolescent folly and terrified, because when de La Barre’s room had been searched, in addition to some pornography, a copy of Voltaire’s Dictionaire Philosophique had been found, and the philosophes were being blamed for de La Barre’s conduct.The trial and execution did not endear either the philosophes or young men to the French union of state and church.

young males, irresponsibility, chevalier de La barre
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Jews, Sports, and Maculinity

in Judaism, Masculinity, Sports 4 Comments Tags: , , ,

I am revising my first book, The Church Impotent, and I am including a new section on the struggle  with masculinity that Jews have had in the modern world. For two millennia the Torah scholar was the ideal Jewish man; his exercise was not physical but mental. After the Fall of Jerusalem rabbis regarded sports, especially violent sports, as goyim naches, the games Gentiles play, things which if not forbidden by the law were still felt to be foreign and perhaps despicable. Sports were at best bitul Torah, a waste of time that should be spent studying Torah.

 

When Jews came to the United States, they were immersed in the American sports culture.  Jewish boys born in the United States wanted to fit in, but their parents were unsympathetic, and those who wanted to be athletes discovered that Jewish law made it difficult to compete in sports: Saturday games and a non-kosher training tables were the biggest problems. The Law indeed was designed to keep the Jews from becoming like all other nations, but Jewish males felt they could not be recognized as real men, either by themselves or by the Gentile world, if they did not become part of the sports culture.

 

The problem has led to endless disputes among Jews about the proper role of exercise and sports in Jewish life. The desire of men to be masculine is a strong competitor to the desire to remain a Jew, and many chose masculinity rather than Judaism. Among those who wished to remain loyal to Judaism while pursuing athleticism had to battle many obstacles.  Jeffrey Gurock, a professor at Yeshiva and an athlete, has written a informative, funny, and moving book on the struggle: Judaism’s Encounter with American Sports. He begins with the Maccabees’ rejection of the Greek gymnasium and ends with the New York marathon.

 

A sample:  

Growing up, Abe Gerchik, who in his parents’ opinion spent too much time playing ball in the streets of Brooklyn, “thought his  first name was ‘get a job’ and his last name ‘bum’ because his mother always used to say to this budding athlete ‘get a job, bum.’” 

Of himself: 

Does my passion for sports ever face off against Judaism’s religious teachings? Rather than conflicting with faith, athletic participation enhances me spiritually. The prophet Isaiah’s runners’ creed always moves me:

 

Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall. But they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint.

 

 

It is fitting that this particular prophetic portion is read in synagogues the week before or after the New York City Marathon. Here, Judaism and sports’ calendars surely intersect. I also encounter the Almighty up close and personal at the starting line of an arduous race when I confidently “entrust my spirit…as long as my soul is in my body. The Lord is with me, I am not afraid.” 

 

I believe that even if sports has not made me a more observant Jew, my deep devotion to athleticism has certainly bonded me closer to my Creator. 

The struggle that Jews have engaged in to keep loyal to the Law, even what Christians regard as the ceremonial precepts, is extraordinary and humbling for a Christian to observe. Too many Christians compromise the ethical demands of the Law, while Jews will often do their best to keep even the ceremonial Law.

 

Uniting body and soul in demanding physical activities is also rare, and one of the reasons men distance themselves from religion. Not everyone can be an athlete, but Christianity can become too cerebral, a matter of words rather than actions. Physical intensity and challenge is something men desire, and like us goyim, Jewish males feel the same pull.

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German Catholicism and Celibacy – A Short History

in anticlericalism, Celibacy, clergy sex abuse scandal, Germany, homosexuality, Masculinity, Moral Theology, Pope Benedict, Vatican 9 Comments Tags: , ,

 Supi, celibacy is going to disappear,and you can marry me – or?

 

German Catholics have long manifested a discontent with clerical celibacy. One of Luther’s first acts was to abolish clerical celibacy; Germans currently criticize Zwangszölibat, compulsory celibacy, forced celibacy. As Cardinal Brandmüller points out, the term Zwangszölibat misrepresents the discipline; no one is forced to be celibate.

 

Now a third of German theologians have come out asking for an end to clerical celibacy (and also demanding women priests and the acceptance of gay couples and divorced and remarried couples while we’re at it).

The appeal, published in newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung’s Friday edition, called on the church’s leadership to stop excluding gay couples and remarried Christians.

“The Church also needs married priests and women holding positions in the clergy,” the appeal said—in clear defiance of the Vatican’s dogmas.

In Germany theologians need the Vatican’s approval to hold chairs of Catholic theology, so this situatSupim cleibacy is going to disappear,a nd oyu can marry me, or…ion is ripe for conflict.

 

Josef Ratzinger himself at one time had asked for a discussion of the possibility of married priests.

 

The background of this conflict is the tension between German (and other national) Catholicisms and ultramontane Catholicism espoused by the Vatican, and behind that at least in part are conflicting images of masculinity: the one that sees sexual expression as an almost universal, necessary, and good aspect of masculinity and the other that sees celibacy as an expression of masculine self-discipline.

 

During the Kulturkampf in German (c. 1875) the Catholic Church was attacked as feminized and perverse. This accusation stung Catholic men, and a reform group in Munich, the Krausgesellschaft,  arose which tried to show that masculinity and Catholicism were compatible. 

 

 One of the aims of this group was the end of clerical celibacy, because it kept young men with healthy drives out of the priesthood and let in perverse types such as were exposed in a series of scandals around 1900 – scandals which turned out to be baseless. Furthermore, celibacy kept these healthy young German men from reproducing, and degenerate types, many of these Catholic reformers went on to say, were reproducing, and they should be sterilized. And German priests should produce German children because the Aryan race was the purest and most important race and the Jews were polluting it and… I think you can see where this ended up.

 

Historians have been puzzled why Nazism arose in Munich; later of course the conflict between Nazism and the Catholic Church was bitter, but at the beginning Catholic reformers – and remember, these were reformers –  were espousing naturalist and racial theories in Munich. The young Heinrich Himmler was a pious Catholic university student in Munich.

 

This is not to say that the current crop of German reformers are racialists or Nazis, but the Vatican has a long memory, and suspects with justice that demands for a change in the discipline of clerical celibacy often lead to demands for radical changes in Christian doctrine. The theologians who coupled  a demand for the end to clerical celibacy with a demand for the acceptance of homosexual couples have simply strengthened the Vatican’s determination not to make any major changes in the discipline of celibacy at this time. 

(The information about the Krausgesellschaft comes from Derek Hastings’ article  “Fears of a Feminized Church: Catholicism, Clerical Celibacy, and the Crisis of Masculinity in Wilhelmine Germany.”)

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Jew vs. Jew

in Anti-Semitism, Isreal, Masculinity 1 Comment Tags: , , ,

Israel is experiencing a growing tension between secular Jews and the ultra-Orthodox, the Haredim. The National Post has an article on the phenomenon. The men of the Haredim are exempt from conscription and spend all their time studying Torah – and fathering children. They do not work, but live on welfare.

About half of ultra-Orthodox adults do not work and nearly 60% of the men are full-time Torah students who receive government stipends.

But with a birth rate that far exceeds the national average, their numbers are expected double over the next 15 years. 

Many years ago I saw in picture in Time of a rally of young secular Israeli men who were carrying a stereotypically anti-Semitic poster of a Haredim. It showed a black-coated,  stooped, bearded, overweight reader of the Torah.

 

This version of Orthodox Judaism has found a way to connect men to the religious community but this way of connecting damages their masculinity both in perception and reality.

 

The male also has the important role of protector and provider, as well as fathering children and transmitting religious traditions.

 

The various Anabaptist communities, such as the Amish, seem to have achieved a far better balance of both cultivating the socially useful aspects of masculinity and integrating men into the religious community.

 

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Men and Sorrow

in Masculinity 8 Comments

In his comment, Joe makes the point 

·        Strength is not the absence of tears. Strength is the presence of resolution in the midst of crisis. 

Men should be able to show emotion: Jesus wept.

 

My mother died in my arms. I arranged the funeral, and a friend of mine led his choir. I kept my composure until the In Paradisum, when I began weeping uncontrollably.

 

I was not ashamed of it. My mother had suffered the pangs of childbirth and shed many tears over me as I was growing up. The least I could do was weep for her when she parted from this world.

 

My mother-in-law died  immediately after my mother’s  death. When I drove to her house the first time after her death, I was playing Celtic music. As I drove down the lane to the now-empty house, Lori Pappajohn began playing “I Will Ever Love Thee.” Again I wept. What better tribute could I bring?

 

Another friend of mine had become alienated from his family. He died in my arms, and I had to buy a burial plot and arrange for his funeral.

 

And so on. As I grow older, the list of the dead I pray for every days grows longer and longer, from infants to 12-year-olds to the elderly.

 

Sunt lacrimae rerum.

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The Jackassiness of the Male

in Masculinity No Comments Tags: , , ,

You Tube has given show-off adolescent males further motivation to engage in spectacularly self-destructive behavior. Teenagers have filmed themselves wearing a protective suit in a bathtub full of fireworks and throwing a flaming basketball soaked in gasoline – with predictable third-degree burns as the result.

 

In Spanish island resorts the sport of balconing has become popular.. It involves climbing from balcony to balcony in a hotel or diving from a balcony into a pool. Death sometime results.

 

The Spanish newspaper ABC reports that the profile of a balconer 

es el de un turista joven, normalmente varón, menor de 30 años (próximo a los 25) y habitualmente de nacionalidad británica, que está pasando una semana de vacaciones en las Islas.

 

That he is a young tourist, usually male, less than 30 years old (on the average 25) and usually of British nationality, who is passing a week’s vacation in the Islands. 

And (surprise!) drugs and alcohol are involved. 

ABC, a conservative Catholic paper, finds such behavior inexplicable and disturbing. But it is mad at Catalonia for banning bullfighting. Getting into a ring with an enraged bull or running before bulls in the streets of Pamplona are fine Spanish traditions.

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Declining Testosterone Levels at the Altar

in Masculinity, Women in Church 8 Comments Tags: ,

 

The Pope welcomed a gathering of altar servers in Rome. As John Allen notes: 

First, for the first time this year, the female altar servers in attendance outnumbered the males. According to organizers, the balance was roughly 60-40 in favor of females. The official Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, pointed to the turnout as a symbol of “the massive entry in recent decades of girls and young women into a role once reserved exclusively to males.” 

This predominance of girls was predictable (anyway I predicted it in my book The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity). Western Christianity has for a long time been regarded as unmasculine. It has been difficult to keep men, especially young men, connected to a church which seems to want to lessen their masculinity.

 

If an activity is obviously and mistakably masculine (such as soldiering), opening it to women does not make it a part of the feminine sphere. But if a sphere is already regarded as feminine (and Western Christianity is), opening an activity within it to women will make that activity a feminine activity.

 

The 60-40 split in altar servers mirrors the female-male split in Catholic church attendance. As boys are busy establishing their masculinity at that age, I suspect that the proportion of boy altar servers will decline further.

 

In many mainline Protestant churches, including the Evangelical church in Germany, women are already the majority of seminarians, and the clergy is being converted into a feminine occupation, like nursing. There are male nurses, but they are rare, and someday we willl have to say male minister, as we now say male nurse.

 

To further increase men’s suspicions about Christianity, in some denominations, such as the Episcopal, the remaining men are often homosexual. The heterosexual, male minister will be a rara avis in the not too distant future in the more liberal denominations.

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