This Just In: Sacrilege at the Opera and Metaphysical Denial in Politics

We’ll start with the blasphemy of the year. There’s nothing quite like relaxing at the opera with abundant female nudity, fresh blood, (real) skin piercings, and actual lesbian sex acts. This used to be called porn, and one did not go to the opera for it. Paul Hindemith’s half-hour one-act opera Sancta Susanna (1922), which caused a scandal in its time, has been expanded into a three-hour profane extravaganza called Sancta. It supposedly offers a “radical vision of the Holy Mass.” Well, that’s been done before. It’s called a Black Mass. This one includes a nude woman nailed to a cross, to the music of Eminem. 

In one scene, according to German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, a piece of a performer’s flesh is cut and “grilled medium rare,” to symbolize the Eucharist, or the body of Christ, which a nun then receives as “Communion.” There are other sacrilegious incidents that are too grotesque to relate. “At least 18 audience members required minor medical treatment after the October 5 and 6 performances of Sancta in Stuttgart, reporting nausea and dizziness,” according to opera spokesman Sebastian Ebling. Not to worry—Sancta continues to be sold out for its entire run.

The opera’s website tells us that “in Florentina Holzinger’s works in particular, natural nudity is a central means of expression.” I wonder what unnatural nudity is. A moment’s reflection answers the question. Natural nudity is the disclosure of a wife to her husband. Public nudity is unnatural. It violates the most basic need for privacy. Instead of the ironic “Sancta” Latin title, the opera should have been called Impius, or Impurus, especially in light of the live sex acts, which debase the “performers” and turn the audience members into voyeurs. 

Holzinger was raised in the Catholic Church and these puerilities are most likely her attempt to break free of its influence. All it demonstrates is how it continues to dominate her—as a positive does a negative. For instance, her depiction of the Eucharist as an act of cannibalism is sophomoric. Didn’t she ever pay attention in Scripture class? 

As usual, “shockers” like Sancta are a sign of spiritual and artistic bankruptcy. This work does not deserve a review, it deserves an exorcism.

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The justification of crime at a metaphysical level—for instance, to erase someone’s being, as in taking the life of an unborn child—requires a lie at the metaphysical level, as well. The perpetrator’s conscience is salved by insisting that the child isn’t there, only the woman’s body is. In spades, this is what Solzhenitsyn called “the desire not to know.” There is a children’s ditty that captures the conundrum: “Yesterday upon the stairs, I saw a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. Oh, how I wish he’d go away.” However, his absence haunts.

In Kamala Harris’ version, it is the unborn children whom she wishes would go away. And if they don’t, they will be made not to be there, like the man on the stairs. The name in which this will be done is: freedom. Hear her speak: “This is a fight for freedom.” [And now for the repetition which this great rhetorician invariably employs] “This is a fight for freedom—the fundamental freedom to make decisions about one’s own body and not have their government tell them what they’re supposed to do.”

Or, again, the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade created a “horrific, heartbreaking reality.” What could that be? That these babies survive? No, it’s all about the denial of freedom. 

Let’s just start with a fundamental fact, a basic freedom has been taken from the women of America: the freedom to make decisions about their own body. And that cannot be negotiable, which is that we need to put back in the protections of Roe v Wade. 

Protections against whom? Protections against the man on the stairs—or to be more precise, against the in-utero child? However, if women “make decisions about their own body,” how did the baby get there in the first place? Who knows? Because this isn’t about that but about “a fundamental freedom to make decisions about your own body.” We must “trust women to make decisions about their own bodies and not have the government tell them what to do.” 

Did you catch the leitmotif here? It’s that there is nothing there but the woman’s own body. Is the “baby” part of her body? I remember this inane remark from soon after the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. It was definitively answered that there was no medical or scientific way in which the baby could be taken as part of the woman’s body. It is completely chromosomally distinct and, therefore, a separate being from the mother. 

It is more than a “desire not to know” on Kamala Harris’ part. Let’s call it biological Alzheimer’s—a great forgetting. Metaphysically, it’s madness.

I remember a young female atheist telling me that she had had two abortions. She seemed to brush it off. Some days later, however, she said grimly, “God will never forgive me.” All of a sudden, there was God. So, the man on the stairs was really there, and so were these babies. They both do haunt.

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The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) reveals Iranian official Reza Taghavi’s lyricism over the murder of Jews: “Hitler was right in this approach of his. He said that the Jews—and I say, ‘the Zionists’—must not be allowed to remain in Europe. They must be persecuted, deported, and killed everywhere.” 

During a September 11 speech, Muhammad Al-Dadow Al-Shanqiti, former vice president of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, declared that the current conflict “is another chapter in the war that is ongoing since 1948 [the creation of modern Israel] and to this day. This is not a war against the Zionist entity, but against the infidel world in its entirety.” This provides confirmation of the Jewish warning: at first, they’ll come for us, but then they’ll come for you.

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The Wall Street Journal reports: “the U.S. assesses Israel’s actions in Gaza violate American law, say analysts and former officials.” Talk about extraterritoriality! If we play this game, how is Hamas doing in observing U.S. law? Should we give them a ticket? If they don’t respond within 30 days, the penalty should be doubled. But whom should we send to give them a ticket in the first place? Since we have no one there, perhaps we should ask Israelis to do it.

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The ruling emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, is no George Washington. The emir is going to hold a referendum on ending the voting for members of the country’s Shura Council, an advisory body to the Sheikh. So, the people of Qatar can vote on ending voting. No political parties are allowed. What could be more democratic than that? Also, the Sheikh is playing an extremely vital role in using his abundant oil income to financially support Hamas. It’s called voting with your pocketbook. But, hey, let’s keep our priorities straight. Egypt’s Al-Ahram voted Tamim “the best sport personality in the Arab world.” 

Khaled Mashal, one of the founders of Hamas, is a likely successor to Yahya Sinwar, whom Israeli forces finally sent to meet Allah in mid-October. Mashal is currently ensconced in the lap of luxury, living a comfortable life under the protection of the Qatari government—spending his days, according to the Washington Examiner, “alongside other Hamas political leaders at luxury hotels and villas within the emirate.” The U.S. is unlikely to allow Israel to whack Mashal in Qatar because President Joe Biden designated it as a “Major Non-NATO Ally” in early 2022. If this is how your allies behave, what must your enemies be like? 

By the way, the Emir’s mother, the warm-hearted Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, extolled Sinwar in his death: “The name Yahya means the one who lives. They thought him dead, but he lives on. Like his namesake, Yahya Bin Zakariya, he will live on and they will be gone.” But alas, Sheikha, so will you.