"It's the Secular World That's Obsessed with Sex"

Heather King reacts to the notion, coming from a respected friend, that Catholics should stick to helping the poor and should shut up about sex:

Having been raised in the Church and long since fallen away, my friend can't possibly see, for example, why anyone of nominal intelligence, and the Church, would not counsel every woman in the world to get birth control. If women where in charge of the Church, she is sure THEY would change the "law"...

How can you tell people you have been saved from the abyss and thus live in state of insane bizarre grace and that you offer up your sexuality out of love? That to manage and control human creation, to the lover of Christ, seems monstrous? That when we say "I believe in God" we are really saying, "I view life as a gift, not as a possession"...

It's the secular world that's obsessed with sex. It's the secular world that has divorced sex from life. In my sixteen years in the Church I have never heard a single homily in which the priest exhorted the congregation that birth control is wrong, extramarital sex is wrong, being gay is wrong, gay sex is wrong. I've hardly heard those things mentioned. I have heard countless homilies about mercy, sacrifice, our longing hearts, our brokenness, our stumbling search to learn how to love.

Dorothy Day could be a champion of the poor partly because she left the love of her life and offered her whole self to God. St. Maximilian Kolbe offering himself up to starve in the place of another at Auschwitz was on a continuum with his celibacy. St. Francis of Assisi could speak to the birds because his entire procreative urge was ordered to Christ.

So it's not a matter of being right on social justice and wrong on sex (nor of celibacy being a higher calling than marriage): it's a matter of the ground of existence, whatever our station in life, being love.

Outstanding stuff... but it was at the end of the post where I was most grabbed.  There, Heather had embedded the following video and I was struck by the joy in the faces of these women, women the culture ridicules, women the culture thinks are oppressed, women most women would find garishly outdated.

Watch it... and notice for yourselves.