It takes a movement

The post below shows how, yet again, one protestor can stop a good program that influences our young people. So why is it so blasted difficult for whole groups and organizations to stop a bad one?

For the sixth consecutive year, the Cardinal Newman Society (CNS) has launched its nationwide protest of Catholic campus performances of The Vagina Monologues, a sexually explicit and offensive play that favorably describes lesbian rape, group masturbation, and the reduction of sexuality to selfish pleasure.

Surely you are familiar with this, it has traveled so far across the nation in recent years. I’m just at a loss to even begin to understand how this got past ‘go’ when it first came out.

In addition to the annual protest, CNS is urging Catholic college students to sponsor competing programs , (found here) including lectures, prayer events, movies and other activities…that support women’s dignity, chastity and true romance.  Students have been offered advice and financial support for such programs.  For instance, CNS is proud to financially support the Edith Stein Project at the University of Notre Dame, a two-day conference on February 23-24 addressing themes of women’s dignity consistent with Catholic teaching.

V-Day — the national organization promoting the play — has announced performances at 26 Catholic colleges and universities during February and March, but already officials of three of those colleges have assured CNS that the play will not occur.  One other Catholic college has been removed from the V-Day list without explanation.

Little victories, but each one accounting for lots of students being spared the obscenity and degradation.

That leaves 22 Catholic colleges and universities expected to host the play this year.  In previous years the CNS protest yielded a significant decline in Monologues performances: from 32 in 2003 to 22 last year.  But faculty and student supporters of the play have dug in their heels at colleges including the University of Notre Dame, which has earned an annual public scolding from Bishop John D’Arcy of Fort-Wayne-South Bend for hosting a play that is “offensive to women” and “antithetical to Catholic teaching.” 

Last year Notre Dame president Rev. John Jenkins, C.S.C., rallied alumni and faithful Catholics worldwide to his side when he announced his opposition to the Monologues—which he decried for its “graphic descriptions of homosexual, extramarital heterosexual and autoerotic experiences”—but later alienated the same Catholics by bowing to activists’ pressure and allowing the play to be performed.

How do these activists wield such pressure? And why do people in positions of power bow to them?

“You must know that in taking this decision you have brought most joy to those who care least about Notre Dame’s Catholic mission,” wrote fellow Holy Cross Father Bill Miscamble in an open letter to Jenkins.  “…By your decision you move us further along the dangerous path where we ape our secular peers and take all our signals from them.”

Good for everyone who is speaking out. And chief among them, Patrick Reilly at the Cardinal Newman Society, for tirelessly alerting the public to the starkness of what this creeping exhibition is actually about.

 “This play describes the adult seduction of a minor to be the victim’s ‘salvation’ that lifts her into ‘a kind of heaven,’ said CNS President Patrick J. Reilly. “There is an obvious parallel to the clergy sex-abuse scandal here, and it is shocking that any Catholic educators are sanctioning its performance.”

This is not only an issue or controversy for Catholics. It’s one more flashpoint in the culture wars between those who profess secular relativism and the right to any pleasure, and those who believe in transcendent truths and the dignity of the human person.