Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 4:07pm

The Perfect Article for America

Jesuits Everywhere

America as in the Jesuit rag, not the nation.  The Jesuits can close up shop now at America.  There is no way they can surpass this article which perfectly symbolizes the adherence of most contemporary Jesuits to the Faith, and their intellectual acumen:

 

A New Theology of the Transgendered Body by Sidney Callahan

Bravo Jesuits, you cannot possibly top, or rather bottom, that!

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Mary De Voe
Sunday, January 18, AD 2015 8:48am

God said: “Margaret, you have been faithful. What can I do for you?”
Margaret answered: “I want to win a million dollars and live to be one hundred years old.” God said: “OK”. Margaret won the lottery. Margaret had her face lifted and her hair done. On her way out of the hair salon, Margaret was struck and killed by lightning. Said Margaret: “Dear God, I thought you promised that I could live to be one hundred years old? ” Said God: “Margaret, Is that you?”.
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“It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.”

Mary De Voe
Sunday, January 18, AD 2015 9:17am

Sidney Callahan asks: “Can we hope now for an expanded theology of the body and person, to better understand gender and transgendered persons?”
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“God makes us human” said Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. What happens to the immortal soul, when the rational part of the person is displaced? What happens to the soul when the way to heaven is detoured through physical surgery without recourse to the search for God? The feminine part of a man’s soul calls him to serving Holy Mother Church, the medical profession, creativity, sensitivity toward suffering, love for his neighbors and a leader of his people. The male part of the human soul brings us Saint Joan of Arc, Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir ad infinitum… unless it is nipped in the bud through transgenderism.
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Transgendered persons have surgically removed their potential for fulfilling themselves and finding their destiny as who they are created to be. It is God Who brings us to know who we are as a person, not the surgical knife wielded by a finite individual. It is the theology of the transgendered who prevent persons from achieving themselves.
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Homosexuality is a vocation to celibacy.

bill bannon
bill bannon
Sunday, January 18, AD 2015 10:55am

Why such articles offend orthodox Catholics and Bible oriented Protestants is because in
part, Romans 1:27 warns against the opposite sex qualities appearing in a person after
active sodomy as punishment from God and nature…” receiving in themselves the fit recompense of their perversity”. The article in America is chaotic in that it does not bring forward a detailed scientific exception to Romans 1:27. And I believe there is one but I don’t know the solution…ie the chimeric new born …the chimera ( google it…fascinating) who results from two fraternal twin eggs merging right after conception who should have been two persons had there been no Fall. But instead one person is born with the dna of two. If the original fraternal twins were boy and girl, the resultant one person may have qualities of both the original boy and the girl. On NHK, the Japanese network recently, they followed the tragedy of a five year old Japanese boy who wanted to dress as a girl but simultaneously hated life and school and wept often because he knew he would be rejected by everyone at school. This is not what Romans 1:27 was condemning and was probably the chimeric tragedy. I was fascinated because I believe I met a chimeric person decades ago and never forgot that encounter.
I saw it in a 9 year old boy in my camp when long ago I was a teen myself and a camp counselor. He walked in one day, his first day wearing shorts like everyone else and I said to myself that he had actual female lips, eyes and leg shape and feet. All that first day, other children would ask him the same question…” are you a boy or a girl”. I don’t remember him ever answering but rather smiling and proceeding with a camp project. I was stunned and I’ve never again knowingly seen the phenomenon. It is this group who I at least know in their scientifically noticed case have an intrinsic not willful problem (Rom.1:27) in their very body.
I don’t know what the Vatican would say to such a person if they inquired of the Vatican
if they could have surgery in the direction of the dominant side of them and they provably had two sets of dna.
Wiki under chimera ( genetics) has this note:
” In 2002, Lydia Fairchild was denied public assistance when DNA evidence showed that she was not related to her children. A lawyer for the prosecution heard of a human chimera in New England, Karen Keegan, and suggested the possibility to the defence, who were able to show that Fairchild, too, was a chimera with two sets of DNA.”

Ezabelle
Ezabelle
Sunday, January 18, AD 2015 3:38pm

I hope “theology of the transgendered body” is just a comical spoof…?

Mary De Voe- I loved your joke.

Mary De Voe
Sunday, January 18, AD 2015 8:08pm

Bill Bannon: This would account also, for an individual to have both sets of sex organs. Then these individuals are not transgendered but simplified. Would that really help them, as their are still owning both DNA?
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Instead of invoking compassion for the individual, the article instigates a revulsion by placing the will of the person over the will of God, and casting aspersions on an innocent public even while the case may not.

bill bannon
bill bannon
Sunday, January 18, AD 2015 8:56pm

Mary,
Yes, there are sympathetic abnormalities ( mosaics also besides chimeras ) but the person themselves like the Japanese boy? may be the best judge of who they are predominantly.
Pray for all such people that God shows them His will and comforts them in their feelings of being alone in their problem. I prayed for one today but forgot the other that I mentioned which I’ll make up for now. The New England Journal of Medicine has written about both chimeras and mosaics in recent years and in vitro fertilization is adding to the numbers because inter alia it produces 28 times the normal number of twins.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Monday, January 19, AD 2015 3:56am

“[T]he embodied person’s whole identity”
Without wishing to attach undue importance to a single phrase, “embodied person” has unfortunate Cartesian overtones.
We all know what the word “person” means in expressions like “the person over there” and “Offences against the Person” ; it means a living human body. Everyone understands what “I am jumping up and down means” and how it can be verified.
Self-consciousness is simply consciousness or awareness that so-and-so hold of oneself, of this thing here, this living human body. To speak of a “self” as the name of something is simply a misconstrue of the reflexive pronoun. “I am MPS” means “this thing here is MPS,” the thing of which I have reflexive (non-observational) awareness.
The Cartesian Ego is at the root of a good half of the nonsense talked about “persons” or “selves”

Mary De Voe
Monday, January 19, AD 2015 6:05am

Bill Bannon: Thank you so much. Thank you, so very much for putting this in perspective, that I can assume and appreciate. Now for prayers even when I know not what or for whom. Makes life exciting.

Michael Paterson-Seymour: ““[T]he embodied person’s whole identity””
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Man, the human being, homosapiens is composed of body and soul. “I AM” is the body and the soul as man.
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““I am MPS” means “this thing here is MPS,” the thing of which I have reflexive (non-observational) awareness.” because MPS has a metaphysical, immortal, rational, human soul. Not simply a spirit, but a spirit with an human body, one person, one man. This is the embodied person’s whole identity in Jesus Christ.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Monday, January 19, AD 2015 9:49am

Mary De Voe

If the principle of human rational life in me is a soul (which perhaps can survive me, perhaps again animate me) that is not what i mean by “me.” Nor is it what I am. I am a living, human body and I shall exist only as long as that exists. If people find this idea shocking, they only betray how deeply infected by dualism they are. This is what St Thomas teaches (Summa Ia q 75:4) and the Ecumenical Council of Vienne (1311-12) condemns as heresy the denial that the rational or intellectual soul is the form of the human body, of itself and essentially.

Sydney O. Fernandes
Sydney O. Fernandes
Monday, January 19, AD 2015 10:28am

There is common confusion about “transgender” people. True discordance between genetic sex, hormone receptivity and external/internal organs is RARE. Most transgenders are normal men and women with none of the above mentioned abnormalities. Paul McHugh, MD, Chief Psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore proved in the late 1970s that most transgenders have a mental disorder; and surgically/hormonally changing appearances does NOT help their Gender Identity Disorder. While help and support for this group of people cannot be denied, it is another matter to simply consider them “normal”.

Mary De Voe
Monday, January 19, AD 2015 5:58pm

Michael Paterson-Seymour: “Nor is it what I am.”
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Nor is it who I am.
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“I am a living, human body and I shall exist only as long as that exists.”
Sir, you have confused life and existence. Are you proposing that existence, once it has existed, become not?

Murray
Murray
Tuesday, January 20, AD 2015 9:35am

Mary De Voe,

MPS can correct me if I’m mistaken, but I believe the standard theological answer is that God in some fashion sustains the “disembodied” human soul prior to the resurrection and the Final Judgment. So I think that what MPS is saying, in his characteristically indirect (not to say obtuse!) fashion, is that whatever your disembodied soul might be, it isn’t properly “you” until it is once again reunited with your body.

Anzlyne
Anzlyne
Tuesday, January 20, AD 2015 11:47am

Thank you bill- very informative.
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What about how exceptions should effect the rule? Teaching based on unique Individual sad cases risks a bad effect for so many people who for one reason or another simply see themselves as outsiders and want to find a category or ID they think they can fit under. Surely we need to understand and affirm the theology of the body (TOB) in the main; encouraging people to accept their own body/soul configuration.
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I have watched a young man from “down under” somewhere who was born with no arms, no legs, but who gives a wonderful talk and demonstration of his love and trust of God’s plan for him. Just a head and a torso moving quickly about the stage, full of life and hope for eternal life. Confident that his body and soul configuration now and in eternity will meet God’s specs. His soul seems great, it is his body that is outside the standard deviations.
Having a specific theology for the transgendered seems an invitation to floods of people in emotional distress to take their stand under the Transgendered banner- and it seems to isolate them even more from the rest.. making them more lonely and “outside” in stead of realizing the theology of the body already applies to them,as it applies to all…. because it is not Just about sexual identity and relationships, but more importantly about identity in Christ and eternal relationship.
We already know that some are born “eunuch”. Help us all to an acceptance of who we are. We don’t need a homosexual theology of the body- or bi-sexual, or transgendered.

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