Lex Anteinternet: Donald Trump. Flagellum Dei?

Lex Anteinternet: Donald Trump. Flagellum Dei?: A man who has conquered others, should conquer himself Pope Leo the Great to Atilla the Hun.  He never did.  He died following drinking too ...

Donald Trump. Flagellum Dei?

A man who has conquered others, should conquer himself

Pope Leo the Great to Atilla the Hun.  He never did.  He died following drinking too much on his wedding night.

Some evangelical Christians excuse Trump's lack of Christian adherence by casting him as Cyrus the Vance, the Persian Emperor who was not Jewish, but who regarded himself as appointed by God and whom advanced the cause of the  the Jews.  In their minds, the non believer Trump is advancing the cause of (Protestant) Christianity.

More of his Christian loyalists, however, come from a certain Christian worldview that's very strong in the US, but only in the US, the comforting, but completely false, "once saved, always saved" view of Christianity.

It's expressed here in the misunderstood posting of one Franklin Graham.

Graham is the son of the late Billy Graham, the famous Evangelical pastor beloved by many American Protestants.  I never grasped his popularity, and perhaps things like this are why.  What Graham posts here, and what has been widely misunderstood by those shocked by the comments, is in fact absurd.  Graham espouses the minority Protestant view that you can never lose your salvation.  Believe in Christ as your savior once, and you are good to go thereafter no matter what.

This sort of view explains why so many people who attend mega churches live in such flagrant disregard for the basic tenants of Christianity, particularly the sexual tenants.  And the belief, taken from and misinterpreted from one single line in the New Testament, is completely condemned by the whole of the Gospel.  St. Paul, who specifically spoke of people losing their salvation after their conversions, would be appalled.

But for somebody as lazy intellectually as Trump, it's no doubt comforting, assuming he worried about the afterlife at all.  He's lived a life of moral dissipation but, hey, he's okay.

The belief on Trump's part is no doubt not only comforting to him, but it probably emboldens him as well.  Compared to Cyrus, backed up by the intellectually think "once saved" theology and pastors who repeatedly assure him he's on a Devine mission, and with people like Pete Hegseth in his cabinet, what could go wrong?

Well, everything, in fact.  And indeed, everything is going wrong.

And therefore, we might legitimately raise this question.  What if Trump's place in Salvation History is  not that of Cyrus the Great, but rather Atilla the Hun?

It sounds absurd, but frankly its not less absurd that he being a Cyrus the Great, and certainly no less absurd than the claims he's a "Godly man" that some of his supporters make. 

Attila the Hung, during his lifetime, was called the Flagellum Dei, the Scourge of God.  The thought was that Rome having became so sinful was being served by being whipped by Atilla by license of God.

The modern US is certainly no less sinful that Rome was from 434 to 453, the reign of Atilla.  The country still practices infanticide, something that only became legal anywhere in the US in 1970 (Hawaii).  The country has the reputation of being deeply religious but the Playboy Culture that came in starting in 1953 has lead to rampant sexual immorality and indeed sexual confusion.  The materialistic culture that started to come in during the 1950s has converted a class dominated culturally and economically by the middle class to one controlled by and for the extremely rich elite, the pinnacle of which was on display on Epstein Island.  Closeted homosexuals in office pretend they hold family virtues.  Office holders who maintain their deep love of family espouse divorce and contracept to avoid having one.  Money is everything.  We are willing to fight and die for oil rather than address the damage that it causes.  We go so far as to excuse our lifestyles and occupations, no matter what they are, surely endorsed by God, effectively mocking him.

All along, we pretend we are a devout people.

Vice President Vance, who is a National Conservative, lectures the Europeans about their losing their culture while the American Civil Religion is such a washed out version of Christianity that it must shock the listeners.  He has a point, to be sure, the West in general had engaged in massive moral decline with a life made easy after the recovery from World War Two.  But it's hard the case that the United States can look ti itself as a champion of Western values.

Which leads back to this.  

The Protestant  Reformation brought in the modern world.  It's dying before our eyes.  The United States is a Protestant country, and the United States as a great power is over.  It started to take blows when fallen away Methodist Hugh Hefner started to prostitute the image of  young women in a particularly harmful way.  As the culture became steeped in immorality, the mainline Protestant churches adopted it rather than offend.  And off in the corners some Evangelical Churches took a more radical view, with those views now expressed in the MAGA movement.

Closely related, although not appreciated to be, a culture that fell into lust naturally fell into greed.  No decent society, let alone a Christian one, would allow the wealthy the leeway they have in our society, nor would it seek to allow their unabated accumulation of wealth.  Greed and lust are, in fact, the two primary attributes of American culture.  The fact that we don't seem to realize that is because a third deadly sin has become manifestly American as well,. pride.  To state that Trump is a prideful man, and that MAGA is prideful movement, is to state the blatantly obvious.

And while we are at it, we might note that envy has now uniquely entered the picture  We evny what Denmark has in Greenland, and what Venezuela has it itself.

And look at Trump, and consider sloth. , , 

And finally, listen to Trump, on anything, and consider wrath.

These would be bad enough in one man, but when that man is elevated to the leader of a nation, that nation has endorsed it.  We, as a nation, have adopted all seven of the deadly sins as our primary national virtues.

So why wouldn't we invite a scourging, if only by our own conduct.

Nobody knows whether Donald Trump is going to Hell after his death.  That is not for us to know. Franklin Graham doesn't know. What we do know is that the Presbyterian raised Trump has lead a strongly immoral life in multiple ways even without examining the worst accusations against him, which in fact now deserve to be examined.  But the same is true of many supposedly "devout" Christians.  Indeed, the number of Christians attempting to be Christian, of all branches of the faith, is likely a tiny percentage of Christians in the U.S. overall.

What Trump is serving to do is to bring forward the hypocrisy of the American civil religion, the easy Christianity where the rules are made up and the points don't matter.

Sincere devout Protestant Christians have been deeply distressed by Trump.  They should be.  But there's another emotion in some quarters as well, a sort of principled schadenfreude.  I.e., knowing that everything is collapsing and taking a sort of delight in it.

That may sound deeply odd, but perhaps it isn't as much as it might seem.  The moral draft that's been going on has been going on for decades, and its been an obvious problem. The sort of worship of money that divests the middle class and which exalts economic activity above everything, including the happiness of average people and the environment, has been going on for decades as well.  The profligate use of American armed force is not new. The hypocrisy of our ruling class, now at an all time high, has been developing for quite some time.  Some times it takes a crisis for people to wake up. If they don't, they just perish and somebody less dense takes over.

Will Americans wake up?

I think they might, but when they wake up it's not going to be morning in America.  That country has died.  It was already ill, and had been very ill since the 2010s, but Trump came in like the batshit crazy anti vaxers that are part of his overall movement and administered a lethal does of ignorance and stupidity.  The country they wake up to may, in fact, be more like an old one, hopefully.  One less powerful on the international stage, and less willing to throw its weight around without the cooperation of others.

In other ways, it's going to be something entirely new.  Far right Evangelical Protestantism will not survive Donald Trump.  People like Franklin Graham and Paula White are going to be regarded as ignorant fools.  The big box mega churches will be exposed for what they are, worship service centers think on the hard lessons of Christianity.

Faith won't die, and it hasn't anywhere.  The Ancient Faith has started to revive in France, the Eldest Daughter of the Church.  The Apostolic Faiths in North America are growing as the young turn their back on the American Civil Religion and Americanism in general, seeking the real.  The Protestant Reformation was already dying, but now that death will accelerate, even if the Protestant faiths, particular those of the early Reformation, will live on, particularly in their most conservative, and frankly Catholic, forms.

Holy Week started yesterday.  We live in interesting times.

Marilyn Monroe and the Wedding Industrial Complex

Lex Anteinternet: Saturday, March 23, 1946. Marilyn Monroe and the ...: A really interesting Richard C. Miller photograph of Marilyn Monroe was taken, which we learned of due to Reddit's 80 Years Ago Sub, and...

Saturday, March 23, 1946. Marilyn Monroe and the Wedding Industrial Complex. Truman warns Stalin, and holds up testing the bomb. No public necking in Japan.

A really interesting Richard C. Miller photograph of Marilyn Monroe was taken, which we learned of due to Reddit's 80 Years Ago Sub, and which we repost here via fair use.

Miller had "discovered" Monroe, who was already modeling following her photo spread in World War Two's Yank.  Miller, typical for the era, photographed her in swimsuits, including bikinis (very modest ones by today's standards), but also  had a an entire series of other topics, including the subject shooting firearms.  Here he depicted her in a wedding dress.

The real life model had already been married and divorced by this time, having married at age 16 and then filing for divorce while her husband was deployed in the Navy during the Second World War.  This photograph is actually commonly claimed to be a wedding photo from her first marriage, which it is not, although the veil is remarkably similar to the one she actually wore in her wedding.

Actual photograph of Monroe at her first wedding, when she was 16 years old.

In the studio photograph she's holding some sort of book with a Christian cross on it, with that style of cross depiction very common for the era.  This is what causes us to note this photograph in a way, as it brings up the topic addressed here:

The Wedding Industrial Complex

Notes from the Spesia Underground

A really interesting episode.

This really fascinating look at modern weddings brings up a whole host of things we routinely discuss here, including agrarianism and subsidiarity.  The episode from Catholic Stuff You Should Know points out the extent that weddings were, at at the time the photo of Norma Jean was taken above still remained, community affairs and not big bride focused shows.

We've lost a lot here.

And we really need to recapture it.

While indelicate, this also shows the portrayal of a really beautiful woman before Playboy perverted all of that.

Monroe was, as is well known, Playboy's first, and unwilling, centerfold.  But what's interesting here is that prior to Playboy arriving on the scene, this was not an uncommon depiction of a really beautiful woman.  There were, of course, already some women who were focused on for being really busty, Jane Russell giving an example, but the theme did not absolutely dominate.  To look at the 19 year old Monroe here, you would not have thought of her in that fashion.  A decade later, you would, and even after Life intervened to push her nude photograph first as an art item.  We've dealt with that before here as well, although frankly we need to modify our entry.  That post is here:

Appearance. Shape and being in shape and women (men will come next).

Also posted via fair use, Colliers had an article on keeping everyone employed year around, showing how times were in fact changing.

We've looked at that here too.

Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two

Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 99th Edition appendix. Sydney Sweeney has great jeans, and genes. So does Beyonce Knowles. And stuff.

Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 99th Edition appendix...: 

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 99th Edition appendix. Sydney Sweeney has great jeans, and genes. So does Beyonce Knowles. And stuff.

The Sydney Sweeney jeans ad praising her genes is genius: How nice to have the Sydney Sweeney “great genes” controversy. It is happily of no consequence, which is . . . 

Froma Harrop.

The massive overreaction to Sweeney being in an American Eagle ad while being white continues on, and is nicely addressed by Froma Harrop above.  Harrop's article reminds us of a few other pretty women, which likely means that it's a good thing the article was written by a woman.

Coincidentally, Beyoncé Knowles ad campaign for Levis continues on as well.  It predates Sweeney's ad for American Eagle.  I don't know anything about American Eagle jeans at all, but I do about Levis as I wear them a lot.

Knowles is also hot.

From Knowles Levis commercial

Knowles, of course, is an African American.

Of interest in this, both Knowles and Sweeney manage to be hot while fully clothed, a good trend.

Sweeney from her American Eagle ad.

Also of note, they're both actually really curvy and not sticks.  In other words, they look like actual women, which is of course what they are.  Knowles is particularly notable as she's been regarded as hot all along, even though she doesn't fit into the traditional stick figure model category that modeling agencies have tended to use for years.  She's big.  

Of course, all this brought out the political clowns.  Robot from Texas, Sen. Ted Cruz (why hasn't ICE deported this foreign born interloper yet?) felt compelled to state that due to the Democrats  “beautiful women are no longer acceptable in our society.”  That's really absurd.  One of the things that Sen. Krysten Sinema, now an independent but up until recently a Democrat, basically took criticism for was being hot while in office.  Sinema, whose politics are eclectic, is clearly highly intelligent. She's also a fallen away Mormon who is "unaffiliated" in terms of religion, and a lesbian, all of which puts her in the infamia category for Republicans.

Republicans, it might be noted, really lashed on to Sweeney when they found out she's a registered Republican, which means almost nothing.  Most of the MAGA politicos would have been regarded as fringe Republicans at best up until King Donny.  Real Republicans, as Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray likes to point out, are now regarded as Democratic infiltrators by the current GOP, which is lead by a lifelong former Democrat, Trump.  We really don't know about her actual political views at all.

She registers in Florida, and of course she might register Republican for the same reason that horrifies Chuck Gray in Wyoming, it might for the most part be the only place to register. The Unconstitutional Primary Election in Wyoming tends to be the real election, so that's where people register.  Maybe that's why Sweeney registers that way in Florida. Who knows?

Republicans, starting with Trump, have really latched on to her already, which is a metaphor that should make Sweeney uncomfortable.  Some real boofador from Fox News even went so far as to suggest that seeing Sweeney in jeans might remind American men of their demographic obligation to procreate, whic his extremely weird, and referenced Dylan Mulvaney as an example of what might be deterring them. While Mulvaney is genuinely bizarre, and transgenderism not a real thing, that's probably not what's keeping the WASPs home alone in their basements rather than going out and meeting someone.

Somebody in this category, who is going out, as in out of the state, is Artemis Langford, who, having graduated from university, is packing up and leaving, claiming the state doesn't want people like him here.  Langford, who deserves real pity, demonstrated self pity in the interview, as he had to have known that being a big overweight man in a sorority would draw attention, although he no doubt didn't expect all the litigation that ensued.  The basic gist of his complaint is that he doesn't like it that there have been laws passed to protect actual women from being displaced in women's sports and the like, and he doesn't like it that society has moved towards recognizing "transgenderism" for what it is, a mental illness, so he's leaving.  At least as of two years ago, his intended career path was law school.  Being a man presenting as a woman wouldn' t stop a person from practicing law here, although it probably would be limiting, so pursuing that career elsewhere probably would be a good idea, if that's his actual intent.

All of this gets into the topic of conservatism, cultural conservatism, culture, and populism, but we'll try to take that up somewhere else.  Maybe in our 100th Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist edition.

Anyhow, one denim glad guy saw an opportunity here, and took it:

Wyoming Outdoorsman Spoofs Controversial Sydney Sweeney Jeans Ads

He does like the Sweeney ad.  I'll bet he likes the Knowles one too.

And all this comes up, sort of, due to denim, something that women didn't often appear in, and for that matter decently dressed men, until after World War Two.  While women wearing jeans had taken off well before that, Levis didn't introduce 501s for women until 1981.

Related threads:

Levis

Labels: 1870s, 1873, 1890, 1890s, 1940s, 1947, 1950s, 1960s, Agriculture, Clothing, Growing up in the 1970s, It was because of World War Two, Standards, technology, trends, World War Two

Last edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 99th edition. Sydney Sweeney has great jeans, and genes.

Labels: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2020s, Advertising, Clothing, Conservatism, Culture, Ethnicities, Evolutionary Biology, flap de jour, Liberalism, nature, Patrick Dineen, Pronatalism, Sydney Sweeney, Women, Zeitgeist

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, February 23, 1925. Puyi moves.

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, February 23, 1925. Puyi moves.: 

Monday, February 23, 1925. Puyi moves.

Deposed Chinese Emperor Puyi accepted a Japanese offer of projection and moved to the  moved to the Japanese concession of Tianjin.

An item from Reddit's 100 Years Ago Today sub:

Truly awful.

It's really the early 1920s, not the 1970s, that gave rise to a really powerful "women's liberation" movement, although you can find it building in the decades prior to that.  The 20s, however, saw it really blossom in much the same way that it would later, with much of the same goals.  As with the movement in the 70s, it met with some pretty nasty counter reactions.

Coeds themselves, meaning women in college, was a fairly new thing in this form.  It wasn't really until the post war economic boom of the 1920s that a lot of women began to leave home to attend college for a secondary education.  

I'm not a feminist, of course, but part of the horror of the Trump years is watching these sorts of attitudes creep back in and begin to be expressed openly.

Last edition:

Saturday, February 21, 1925. A Republican President declares American Forest Week.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Art, Calvin Coolidge, Cartoons, Clothing, Conservation, Daily Living, Movies, Teenagers, United States Forest Service, Women

Lex Anteinternet: Blog Mirror and Commentary: QC: Human Sexuality | January 17, 2024 and the destruction of reality.

Lex Anteinternet: Blog Mirror and Commentary: QC: Human Sexuality |...: 

Blog Mirror and Commentary: QC: Human Sexuality | January 17, 2024 and the destruction of reality.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Alexander Pope. An Essay on Criticism.

Evelyn Nesbit, model and archetypical Gibson Girl, 1903.

And indeed, I'm likely foolish for bringing up this topic.

Model in overalls . Photos by Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1944.  This is posted under the fair use and other exceptions.  Life, by 1943, was already posting some fairly revealing photographs on its cover, but there was a certain line that it did not really cross until 1953, when it photographed the full nudes of Marilyn Monroe prior to Playboy doing so, in an act calculated to save her career, as it was a respectable magazine.  The publication of nude Monroe's from the 1940s went, to use a modern term, "viral" both in Life and in Playboy showing something was afoot in the culture.  This photo above shows how much things were still viewed differently mid World War Two, with a very demure model demonstrating work pants.

This post actually serves to link in a video posted below, which probably isn't apparent due to all of the introductory photographs and text.  And that's because of all the commentary I've asserted along the way.  

If you do nothing else, watch or listen to the video.

This post might look like a surprising thing to have linked in here, but in actuality, it directly applies to the topic of this website, the same being changes over time.  Or, put another way, how did average people, more particularly average Americans, and more particularly still, average Wyomingites, look at things and experience things, as well as looked at things and experienced things.

This is an area in which views have changed radically, and Fr. Krupp's post really reveals that.

At some point, relatively early in this podcast, Fr. Krupp, quoting from Dr. Peter Craig, notes that what the Sexual Revolution did was subtract, not add, to sex, by taking out of it its fundamental reality, that being that it creates human beings.

That's a phenomenal observation.

And its correct. What the Sexual Revolution achieved was to completely divorce an elemental act from an existential reality, and in the process, it warped human understanding of it, and indeed infantilized it.  That in turn lead, ultimately, the childish individualist focus on our reproductive organs we have today, and a massive focus on sex that has nothing whatsoever to do with reproduction, or at least we think it doesn't.  It's been wholly destructive.

We've addressed that numerous times here in the past and if we have a quibble with the presentation, it would be a fairly minor one, maybe.  Fr. Krupp puts this in the context of artificial birth control, but the process, we feel, had started earlier in the last 1940s with the erroneous conclusions in the Kinsey treatise Sexual Behavior in the Human Mail, which was drawn from prisoners who were available as they had not been conscripted to fight in World War Two and who displayed a variety of deviances, including sexual, to start with. The report was a bit of a bomb thrown into society, which was followed up upon by Hugh Hefner's slick publication Playboy which portrayed all women as sterile and top heavy. Pharmaceuticals pushed things over the edge in the early 60s.

Lauren Bacall, 1943.

The point isn't that prurient interests didn't exist before that time. They very clearly did.  La Vie Parisienne was popular prior to World War Two for that very reason, and films, prior to the production code, were already experimenting with titillation by the 1920s.  But there was much, much less of this prior to 1948 than there was later, and going the other direction, prior to 1920, it would have been pretty rare to have been exposed to such things in average life at all.

Indeed, it's now well known, in spite of what the Kinsey report claimed, that men and women acted very conventionally through the 40s.  Most people, men and women, never had sex outside of marriage.   Things did occur, including "unplanned births" but they were treated much differently and not regarded as the norm.  Included in that, of course, was the knowledge that acting outside of marriage didn't keep things from occuring in the normal and conventional biological sense.

Given that, the normal male's view of the world, and for that matter the normal female's, was undoubtedly much different, and much less sexualized. Additionally, it would have been less deviant than even widely accepted deviances today, and much more grounded in biology.  That doesn't mean things didn't happen, but they happened a lot less, and people were more realistic about what the consequences of what they were doing were in every sense.

Something started to change in the 1940s, and perhaps the Kinsey book was a symptom of that rather than the cause, although its very hard to tell.  Indeed, as early as the 1920s the movie industry, before being reined in, made a very serious effort to sell through sex.  It was society that reacted at the time, showing how ingrained the moral culture was.  That really started to break down during the 1940s.  I've often wondered if the war itself was part of the reason why.

From Reddit, again posted under copyright exceptions.  This is definitely risque and its hard to imagine women doing in this in the 30s, and frankly its pretty hard to imagine them doing it in the 1940s, but here it is.   The Second World War was a massive bloodletting, even worse than the Frist, and to some extent to me it seems like it shattered moral conduct in all sorts of ways, although it took some time to play out.

Kinsey released his book in 1948, and like SLAM Marshall's book Men Under Fire, its conclusions were in fact flat out wrong.  Marshall's book impacted military training for decades and some still site it.  Kinsey's book is still respected even though it contains material that's demonstratively wrong.

By 1953 (in the midst of a new war in Korea) things had slipped far enough that Hugh Hefner was able to introduce a slick publication glorifying women who were portrayed as over endowed, oversexed, dumb, and sterile.  There were efforts to fight back, but they were losing efforts.

Cheesecake photograph of Marilyn Monroe (posted here under the fair use and commentary exceptions to copyright. This photograph must be from the late 1950s or the very early 1960s, which somewhat, but only somewhat, cuts against Fr. Krupp's argument, which is based on the works of Dr. Peter Craig and heavily tied to artificial birth control as the cause of the Sexual Revolution.  I think that's largely correct, but the breakdown had started earlier, as early in 1948 in my view, such that even before the introduction of contraceptive pharmaceuticals a divorce between the reality of sex and reproduction had set in, leading to the "toy" or plaything concept of women that we have today.

And then the pill came, at the same time a society revolution of sorts, concentrated in young people, started to spread around the globe.

We've lost a lot here. A massive amount.  And principal among them are our groundings in the existential, and reality.   And we're still slippping.

QC: Human Sexuality | January 17, 2024.

Related threads:

We like everything to be all natural. . . . except for us.

Labels: Agrarianism, Agriculture, An hoc pertinet ad naturam?, Commentary, Daily Living, Food, Friday Farming, Medicine, Men, nature, The roles of men and women, transgenderism, trends, Women

Lex Anteinternet: Quick! Avert your eyes. . . nature is happening.

Lex Anteinternet: Quick! Avert your eyes. . . nature is happening.:       

Quick! Avert your eyes. . . nature is happening.

 

 Not a housecat, no matter what some commission may decide.

New York's Commission on Human Rights had determined that its unconstitutional not to serve pregnant women alcohol.

That's stupid.

Nowhere in any constitution, state or Federal, is there a clause that says "When a pregnant boozehound comes into your dram shop, you shall liquor her up".  Nonsense.

But a lot of or cutting edge social law has become quite nonsensical recently.

Truth be known, a lot of the original concepts of rights involve "leave people alone".  They hardly ever involved "you must recognize this".  People had the right to assemble, but you didn't have to credit their assembly as smart, nifty or valuable.  People had the right to be secure in their own homes, which basically meant leaving them alone, at home.  Lots of stuff was that way.

Now, however, there are beginning to be a lot of "you musts".  And the "you musts" are often followed by the social derision of the pop class, who is rarely impacted by anything directly.  And a lot of this is because our country has become almost completely divorced from nature, and seeing a sudden acceleration of "you must" recognize this or that.

Indeed, just yesterday I actually heard a person interviewed who has "changed" their gender (a genetic impossibility) state that he or she should be allowed in a bathroom that comports to his or her gender reassignment, but that those who dressed contrary to their gender were "perverts".  My goodness, how can a person actually make that statement?  Its incredibly biased, and at the same time mind numbingly confusing to the vast majority of people who are comfortable with the gender dictates of their DNA and their clothing.  Can a person actually say that?  I don't think so. They shouldn't say it, and I have to believe that what they meant was actually something else and that htey didn't mean to go after the clothing thing.  After all, how can a person who has had surgery and who is taking chemicals to defeat their DNA say that about somebody who is just wearing a different set of clothes.  Bizarre.

On the bathroom thing, I'm not commenting on where people who have had their genders reassigned should go and I doubt that they or anyone else actually regarded this as a burning issue.  It seems to me that they probably have to go where surgery has now assigned them.  Indeed, I'm amazed that this is now an issue that requires Federal pondering.  I'll say beyond that, however, that at the point at which the Federal government starts issuing guidelines on this, it obviously has too little to actually do. Likewise, when celebrities start spouting on it, it shows how slavish they are to trends.  I don't think any legislature needs to legislate on this at all, and that in the absence of all of the recent legislation, this would never have been an issue, but at the same time what this reflects is a sense in society that something has gone really wrong in what people are being told they must believe.  Gender reassignment is a prime example, as statistically its' a disaster with horrific impacts for a large percentage of the people who undergo it.  In Europe its generally prohibited for minors and its been shown that the majority of minors who claim confusion later resolve it in accordance with their actual DNA.  But here in the US we are actually entering a "you must not question" people who declare that they wish to do this, in spite of the horrible historical track records that actually exist.  We claim to have "freedom of speech", but here we are outright declaring that the speech must be squelched and you must accept this, in spite of the evidence.

This is contributing to the outright revolt in a percentage of the American electorate.  Commenters wonder why a figure like Donald Trump has seized the GOP nomination this year, but stuff like this is why.  When a person can't say "I think this is wrong", about gender reassignment, or "I think this is wrong", about serving a pregnant woman alcohol, they react.  And when they do, it'll be an extreme reaction.

Most of this is, in some way, related to our separation from nature.  We've always been a fallen species, but we now don't seem to know what we are.  As a species, we have the highest degree of morphological and psychological differences between the two genders of any mammal. That's simply a fact.  But in the name if equality we must now pretend that isn't so, and that everything is just the same as everything else. And apparently we must also pretend that a woman who is out to drown her baby in booze before the baby is even born isn't committing child abuse. She is.

No group of people can infinitely ignore nature.  It will not work.  Nature gets even.  And societal movements that don't credit that don't last forever.  Nor should they.

Nature deserves her due.

Churches of the West: The Bishop of Rome.

Churches of the West: The Bishop of Rome.: 

The Bishop of Rome.

By this time, most observant conservative Catholics are either so fatigued from Papal issuances that they either disregard them, or cringe when they come out. They seem to come out with a high degree of regularity.

And, while we don't technically have a new one, a "study document" issued by the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity has put out something that has the Pope's approval to be issued, that being something that looks at the role of the Papacy itself:

Now, it's a very large document, so I'm not going to attempt to put it all out here, and I haven't read all of it either.  So, we're going to turn to  The Pillar to find out what it holds.  The Pillar states:

What does it say? 

Helpfully, the text has a section summarizing the four sections (beginning on p106).

1) Regarding responses to Ut unum sint, the document says that the question of papal primacy is being discussed in “a new and positive ecumenical spirit.” 

“This new climate is indicative of the good relations established between Christian communions, and especially between their leaders,” it says. 

2) Concerning disputed theological questions, the text welcomes what it calls “a renewed reading” of the classic “Petrine texts,” which set out the Apostle Peter’s role in the Church.

“On the basis of contemporary exegesis and patristic research, new insights and mutual enrichment have been achieved, challenging some traditional confessional interpretations,” it notes. 

One particularly controversial issue, it says, is the Catholic conviction that the primacy of the Bishop of Rome was established de iure divino (by divine law), “while most other Christians understand it as being instituted merely de iure humano” (by human law). 

But the document says that new interpretations are helping to overcome “this traditional dichotomy, by considering primacy as both de iure divino and de iure humano, that is, being part of God’s will for the Church and mediated through human history.” 

Another enduring obstacle is the First Vatican Council. But the document says that here too there has been “promising progress,” thanks to ecumenical dialogues that seek “a ‘rereading’ or ‘re-reception’” of the Council’s decrees. 

This approach, it says, “emphasizes the importance of interpreting the dogmatic statements of Vatican I not in isolation, but in the light of their historical context, of their intention and of their reception — especially through the teaching of Vatican II.” 

Addressing this point in a June 13 Vatican News interview, Cardinal Koch said that since Vatican I’s “dogmatic definitions were profoundly conditioned by historical circumstances,” ecumenical partners were encouraging the Catholic Church to “seek new expressions and vocabulary faithful to the original intention, integrating them into an ecclesiology of communion and adapting them to the current cultural and ecumenical context.”  

“There is therefore talk of a ‘re-reception,’ or even ‘reformulation,’ of the teachings of Vatican I,” the Swiss cardinal explained. 

3) Summarizing the document’s third section, the text says that fresh approaches to disputed questions have “opened new perspectives for a ministry of unity in a reconciled Church.” 

Crucially, the document suggests there is a common understanding that although the first millennium of Christian history is “decisive,” it “should not be idealized nor simply re-created since the developments of the second millennium cannot be ignored and also because a primacy at the universal level should respond to contemporary challenges.”

From the ecumenical dialogues, it’s possible to deduce “principles for the exercise of primacy in the 21st century,” the text says. 

One is that there must be an interplay between primacy and synodality at every level of the Church. In other words, there is a need for “a synodal exercise of primacy.”

Synodality is notoriously difficult to define, but the document describes it at one point as “the renewed practice of the Synod of Bishops, including a broader consultation of the whole People of God.” 

4) Among the practical suggestions for a renewed exercise of the ministry of unity, the document highlights the possibility of “a Catholic ‘re-reception’, ‘re-interpretation’, ‘official interpretation’, ‘updated commentary’ or even ‘rewording’ of the teachings of Vatican I.” 

It also stresses appeals for “a clearer distinction between the different responsibilities of the Bishop of Rome, especially between his patriarchal ministry in the Church of the West and his primatial ministry of unity in the communion of Churches, both West and East.”  

“There is also a need to distinguish the patriarchal and primatial roles of the Bishop of Rome from his political function as head of state,” the text says, adding: “A greater accent on the exercise of the ministry of the pope in his own particular Church, the Diocese of Rome, would highlight the episcopal ministry he shares with his brother bishops, and renew the image of the papacy.” 

The new document appears months after Pope Francis restored the title “Patriarch of the West” among the list of papal titles in the Vatican’s annual yearbook, after it was dropped by his predecessor Benedict XVI. 

Commenting on that development at the June 13 Vatican press conference, Cardinal Koch said that neither Francis nor Benedict XVI offered detailed explanations for the change. 

“But I am convinced they did not want to do something against anyone, but both wanted to do something ecumenically respectful,” he commented. 

Another suggestion is for the Catholic Church to further develop its practice of synodality, particularly through “further reflection on the authority of national and regional Catholic bishops’ conferences, their relationship with the Synod of Bishops and with the Roman Curia.” 

Finally, the text mentions a request for regular meetings among Church leaders at a worldwide level, in a spirit of “conciliar fellowship.”

What does that mean?

Well, frankly, I don't grasp it.

Without having read it, I sort of vaguely grasp that the Pope, who recently revived using the title Patriarch of the West, is sort of modeling this view of the Papacy on the Churches of the East, sort of.  In the East, each Church is autocephalous, with the Patriarch of Constantinople holding a "first among equals" position.  I don't think the Pope intends to fully go in that direction, but vaguely suggest that the synodal model of the East should apply more in the West, and that as Patriarch of the West, perhaps the entire Apostolic Church could be reunited, and perhaps even sort of vaguely include the "mainline" Protestant Churches, by which we'd mean the Lutheran and Anglican Churches.

It sort of interestingly brings up the Zoghby Initiative of the 1970s, in which Melkite Greek Catholic Church bishop Elias Zoghby sought to allow for inter-communion between the Melkites and the Antiochian Orthodox Church after a short period of dialogue.  His position was, basically, that this reunion could occur with a two point profession of faith, those being a statement of belief in the teaching gof the Eastern Orthodox churches and being in communion with the Bishop of Rome as the first among the bishops "according to the limits recognized by the Holy Fathers of the East during the first millennium, before the separation."

Thing was, there really were no limits.  In the first thousand years before the separation it's pretty clear that the Pope was head of the Church.  Indeed, from the earliest days that was recognized.

Bishop Zoghby's initiative went nowhere and he's since passed on, but this sort of interestingly recalls it.  His effort received criticism from figures within Orthodoxy and the Roman Catholic Church, although a few Eastern Catholics admired it.  Here, I'd predict that conservative Catholics are not going to be too impressed.

Additionally, a recent problem barely noticed in the West is that the recent focus of Pope Francis on blessings for people in irregular unions, which is widely interpreted to mean homosexuals, has not only upset conservative Catholics, but Eastern Churches in some cases have backed away from the Catholic Church.  One Eastern Bishop who was getting quite close to Rome came out and stated that Fiducia Supplicans basically prevented any chance of reunion with his church.

This gets back to some things we've noted here before.  One is that this Papacy seems very focused on Europe, although the fact that this also looks towards the East cuts against that statement a bit.  Having said that, a good deal of the early focus of this Papacy was on European conditions, which have continued to be a problem as the German Church is outright ignoring Pope Francis to a large degree.  Loosening the role of the Papacy may stand to make those conditions worse, and probably won't bring the mainstream of the Lutherans and Anglicans in.  Which gets to the next point.  The Reformation is dying.

Seemingly hardly noticed is that the real story in Christianity, to a large degree, is the rapid decline in the old Reformation Protestant churches.  People like to note "well Catholic numbers are declining too", but frankly real statistical data shows that while there may be a decline, it's slight.  Indeed, what appears to be occurring in the Western World is that conversions to Catholicism offset departures. That's not growth, but what that sort of shows is the decline in cultural affiliation with a certain religion and, at least in the US, the end of the byproduct of the Kennedy Era Americanization of the Church.  Indeed, at the same time this is going on, the growth in Catholic conservatism and traditionalism in younger generations has grown too big to ignore.¹ At the same time, Eastern Catholic Churches are gaining members from outside their ethnic communities, and the Easter Orthodox are gaining adherents from conservative Protestants who are leaving their liberalizing denominations.

This is a study document, so it's not a proclamation.  Twenty years ago or maybe even ten, I would have thought this a really good idea.  My instinct now is that its time has passed.  While conservative Catholics hold their breaths about the upcoming next session of the Synod on Synodality, there's sort of a general sense of marking time here as well, and indeed, an uncomfortable one.  The current Papacy has is very near its end, everyone knows this, but it puts out a lot of material that's of a highly substantive, and often controversial, nature.  Much of this is going to have to be dealt with after this Papcy concludes. Both the volume and speed at which things are occurring may reflect this, as that knowledge operates against the clock, but it might also be a reason to slow down at the Vatican level, or even put a bit of a time-out on things.

Footnotes:

1.  Indeed, I was at Confession recently on an average Saturday and noted that as I was there a  young woman with her two children were waiting in front of me, with both children saying Rosaries and the mother wearing a chapel veil. Her mother came in and also was wearing one, and a stunning young woman of maybe 20 came in also wearing one.  Every woman, and most of them were young, were attired in that fashion.

It's a minor example, but very notable.  This is becoming common.