Poison Ivies and the Pope

The alleged Cornell gang rape should clearly reveal to the American Church its current job: transforming the moral demography of a floundering nation.

Pretty much every man in the American Catholic hierarchy—from the bishop of the smallest diocese to the pope himself—should have been tugging at his collar when the alleged Cornell University gang rape hit the news.

But nobody is making the connection.

That case is probably the tip of the iceberg of a debauched youth culture, for which the seeds are planted, person by person, long before college, and from which the Church has largely been absent as an illuminating day-to-day reality.

While the media and lawyers test for guilt using police reports, text messages, and details around consent, they are scrutinizing trees while missing a morally wrecked forest, and the solutions offered will likely be just as myopic and small. “When you break the big laws,” G.K. Chesterton wrote, “you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.”

Stepping back from the details, though, shows that there isn’t much moral innocence to be found among any of the main cast of characters. As the saying goes, “Nothing good happens after midnight,” and everyone involved should have known that.

But it seems they didn’t, which is why the Church must step forward—tardy as it is—with an approach much different from what it has been using.

It’s unlikely the minds of the young people involved were filled with much good, like getting to know a potential spouse and forming a family. Instead, these people were primed up for this by the popular culture, which is formed by men, sometimes enhanced, but often degraded and made dangerous.

Here is where the Church needs to be, because everyone is vulnerable.

“The most perniciously typical aspect of the modern era,” wrote Pope Saint John XXIII, “consists in the absurd attempt to reconstruct a solid and fruitful temporal order divorced from God, who is, in fact, the only foundation on which it can endure.”

Of course, the current global leadership is attempting such absurdity, and they don’t seem to find the Catholic Church much of a bother. Even though Pope Leo XIV was recently in the news for engaging French President Emmanuel Macron on life issues, it seems a church prelate just becomes one leader among many when he tries to exert influence in circles of secular power.

In fact, the Church should really not be in the news much, if at all. Instead, it should transcend the corridors of temporal power to engage the world within the walls of its own sanctuaries, and in the chamber of each individual soul, where it stands with God.

Here is where believers must hear about the great moral truths and how they play out in the human story. Here, in a concerted, nationwide effort by Church leaders, is where they must hear how the treasure of Catholic teaching and the Church’s vision for happiness touch each ordinary life, which, in fact, is not ordinary at all, but the journey of an immortal soul meant for Heaven.

As the elite use mass migration—human trafficking, really—to alter national demographies and destroy beautiful cultures, the Church must affect America’s moral demography to rebuild. It must work in young imaginations to show the road to holiness, because that is the road to happiness.

So, the current need is for the pope to lead his troops onto the battlefield of each human heart, where surveys show the Church is losing badly, at least in the typical Novus Ordo parish, on hot-button moral issues and even basic Catholic dogma.

Young people don’t need to be pandered to with clerical mimicry of popular culture. They need the Church to provide the good in a choice between good and evil, between the “City of Man” and the “City of God.” They need worship where they can enter into the mystery of God’s sacrifice for them, and where the depth of meaning in Scripture built into Mass can unfold—quietly, and without excess verbiage or up-to-date music—to meet each particular person in his everyday life.

Suppose priests regularly preached about marriage as a joy, an adventure, a loving sacrifice, and as part of one’s path to Heaven, so young people in college looked forward to and oriented their lives around it, choosing to be faithful to their spouses even before meeting them.

But the Church also needs to put its money where its homilies are (or should be), backing up this preaching with resources and organization. Men and women are supposed to be attracted to each other and should be encouraged to meet. God wants romantic, committed love between men and women. He wants marriage and family, so his Church should be a matchmaker of sorts, providing places for young men and women to gather. It should advocate for an economy that makes family formation financially viable for young couples. All this is well within its capability.

Parishioners should press for this and ask why if bishops don’t produce. Don’t they consider young people and family life a priority? If so, prove it. After all, a healthy faith is the foundation of a healthy social life.

But at the moment, instead of offering something substantial, the Church has buried its nose in synodality and doubled down on the obvious failures connected to the Spirit of Vatican II, quite out of touch with the challenges most people face. Perhaps that’s what confused Leo’s thinking when he suggested recently that several issues are more important than sexual ethics.

The Tradition of the Church tells us something different, though, connecting sexual ethics to healthy family life, which is important because, as Pope Saint John Paul II said, “As the family goes, so goes the nation, and so goes the whole world in which we live.” The news is only a reflection of this.

The Church has so much good that people can embrace. But they cannot embrace it until they turn away from secular morality. The Church needs to stop letting the world set its priorities. If it sets the right priorities for the faithful—and acts on them—proper Christian family life can be a light to the world because the social life found at decadent places like Cornell would have something far more attractive to challenge it.