A Sister of Perpetual Indulgence

Ever quick to embarrass faithful Catholics who do the hard and thankless work of attempting to reintroduce sanity to a society gone mad with sexual sin, and rendered lonely and embittered amidst the madness, Sister Jeannine Gramick – co-founder of the heretical New Ways Ministry, probably the most notorious pro-LGBT+ group that claims to be Catholic – has written a letter to the management of the Los Angeles Dodgers, praising them for honoring the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence at the club’s forthcoming “Pride Night.”

The Sisters will be honored, says Sister Gramick, for their “financial assistance to those in need.”  The Sisters are gay men got up in sexually fetishistic garb, mocking the dress of Catholic women religious. But, says Sister, even though their “choice of clothing” may be “offensive to some,” though not offensive to her, that offensiveness, which Sister does not take seriously, must not be allowed to “trump the works of mercy.”

I’ll wager that many a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan provided monetary assistance to the poor, so long as they were white.  No doubt the Roman legions took care of the widows and orphans of their fellow legionnaires.  King Leopold of Belgium had a heart for the Congolese, and they paid for his care in blood.  Crocodiles were said to shed tears before they devoured their prey, and doctors who shoulder people out of this world with an easy needle full of poison claim to have soft hearts too. And I can well imagine their shedding a public tear while they pack their bags and leave the grieving family with the task, sometimes not entirely unpleasant, of settling the details of the funeral and the disposal of the beloved remains.

If you say that the comparisons are unfair, I ask, “Why are there Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence at all?”  They have defined themselves by the evil they do, though they do not see it as such, or they do see it, but they choose it anyway.  Why should there have been a Ku Klux Klan, if not for terrorizing blacks (and later on, because it is hard to keep the acid of evil contained, Catholics and others)?  Why should there be assisters of suicide in the first place?

If you say that the Sisters are harmless, I wonder what world you are living in, or, supposing that you are in possession of ordinary faculties of observation and judgment, how you can live in this one with such ease.  Your soft head does not so much astonish me as your hard heart.

In the world I live in, in the nation we share, many millions of children grow up without a married mother and father.

James Martin and Jeannine Gramick [source: Facebook]

In the world I live in, children and young people have been visited with a plague of sexual confusion which, as to its scope and the madness and the destructiveness of its character, is unprecedented in human history.

In the world I live in, unless they possess a heroic commitment to virtue, most young people will bring to their marriages, if they marry at all, a sorry series of sexual train wrecks, betrayals, and acts of animal indulgence, not boding well for their married future.

In the world I live in, the innocence of children is attacked on all sides, even in places where they should be held safest, such as schools, libraries, and parks.

The Klan gave all they had to prolonging, propagating, and making more profound the evil of racism.  The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, though they do not, in themselves, possess the sheer numbers that the Klan once boasted, do the like.  They exist to prolong, propagate, and make more profound the evils of the Lonely Revolution.

It is easy to oppose racism here and now, when everyone understands and takes for granted that segregation was evil and stupid.  What’s hard was to be someone like the novelist and reformer George Washington Cable, who wrote against the habits and feelings of many of his own people in the postbellum South, for the sake of justice and for their own moral and social welfare.

It was easy to oppose sexual vice at the Harvard of the Puritans.  What’s hard is to do so at Harvard now, when you know that if you do, you are likely to make your name odious to your fellow students, your professors, and prospective employers.

Two Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence [source: New Ways Ministry]
We may therefore turn Sister Gramick’s words back at her.  Why does she have no mercy for the children – in this case, mainly the boys, to whom she seems never to give a second thought – who must be spectators of the fetish?  Why does she have no mercy for the many and various victims of a world gone mad with sexual selfishness?

Even if she does not take seriously the many warnings against sexual sin that Scripture sounds, from Genesis through the prophets, from the Gospels to the letters of Paul to Revelation, why is she numb to the vast social and personal harm that it has caused?  Why should little children be burdened with broken families, parades of sex interests in and out of their homes, and the lewd and the vile and the chaotic everywhere in public?

And what about the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence?  Where is their mercy?  Where is their simple human decency?  Someone who actually thinks about other people and their welfare would never do what they do, or appear as they appear, in front of children and young people – and that is quite aside from the thoughtless coarsening of public morals.

But the answer to my question is in plain sight.  They want people to see them, especially children and young people.  Grooming, enticing, seducing; the message is clear.  “Look at us!  Aren’t we great?  Come join us someday, and have a lot of fun!”

I daresay that Sister Gramick knows very well that that is the message.  She does not care.  If that message gets to a young person and lures him into that life, she will be ready to cheer.  Easiest thing in the world.

__________

You may also enjoy:

Fr. Gerald E. Murray’s Pope Francis Must Stop the Madness

Brad Miner’s Homosexuality in Scripture

Anthony Esolen is a lecturer, translator, and writer. Among his books are Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, and Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World, and most recently The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord. He is Distinguished Professor at Thales College. Be sure to visit his new website, Word and Song.

RECENT COLUMNS

Archives