Dear Bunglehorn,

I enjoyed reading this little ditty on the net today. “Guess How Many Lovers We’ve Had.” More quality journalism from the Daily Mail. With voyersitic glee, we read all the juicy details of five women who share their intimate secrets in lurid detail.

The headline banner linking to the article asks, “Which of these women has had 180 partners?” Considering the popularity of shows like Sex and the City and Desparate Housewives, the lurid headline is sure to attract readership. What you’ll find useful are the anti-Catholic, anti-religious subthemes interlaced amid the garish public confessions. Let’s look at two glaring attacks, chastity despite religion and promiscuity because of religion.

Chastity Despite Religion

The first woman, the virgin, is “keen to point out that her vow of chastity is not for religious reasons.” How keen for the author to divorce any connection between her choice and religious teaching. The reader is led to believe people make good choices outside of the influences of religion. Skeptics will give her credit because she drew this conclusion on her own, even when her decision aligns perfectly with the Catholic Church’s view of chastity (CCC#2237-2247).

The virgin’s vow of chastity is something she naturally feels called to do. It’s a “calling,” those dreaded instincts the Enemy subplanted in the human persona, evidence of his love for them, like the appeal of self-preservation and survival among all living things. This intrinsic knowledge of universal truths is a crushing front for us to breach, especially those like the virgin. She’s a tough case. She has an innate understanding of the special intimacy, the shared vulnerability and loving support, between husband and wife. She’s also been allowed to see friends hurt by intimacy after they made themselves vulnerable prematurely. I pity this virgin’s demon. His best shot at conversion is the scandal of cohabitation, where she admits her urges can be “terribly frustrating.”

Promiscuity Because of Religion

The article showcases the fifth woman, who after 180 partners has successfully divorced sex from love. Her promiscous lifestyle is tied to a supposedly repressive Catholic upbringing. She proudly claims (and the author dutifully records) “Everything they say about Catholic schoolgirls is true.” Ooh la la!

“My friends and I were in competition to see who could lose their virginity first. I lost mine to a pupil from the local boys’ school.” See what happens when you try hold back the natural inhibitions of a young woman? How solatious!

This is hysterical because it’s just the kind of article to rile up the religious prudes. Her testimony flies in the face of Catholic teaching on intimacy, theology of the body, even feminism. Yet here she represents the Enemy’s Church! Your patient should easily conclude the Church’s abstinence philosophy is wrong.

The irony is, in order to blame the Church for nonsensical views of sexuality and failed catechesis, he must accept the premise that promiscuity is wrong. If their is nothing wrong with promiscuity, then the Church has not failed. This is a problem for us, since most people intuitively know that having too many sexual partners is wrong, even if “too many” changes for the times. What society upholds promiscuity as a virtue?

Should he become aware of his own contradiction in logic, suggest that religious leaders are the actual hypocrites. They are the one’s teaching that sex outside of marriage to be immoral. They declare promiscuity to be an immoral violation of nature, yet by this account, it is their teaching that lead to sex outside of marriage.

You may wonder, won’t he see that the Church’s teaching and how it teaches are two separate topics? No. It’s amazing, Bunglehorn, people can be so enthralled in apparent hypocrisy, especially among those who try to live a life of virtue, that they will not distinguish between what is taught and how it’s taught. The method can be wrong, an utter failure, but the core lesson may still be right.

Remember this valuable lesson. When a person of virtue fails, as fallible people inevitably due, associate their shortcomings with the lesson itself. When a preacher declares inebriation to be a sin of the flesh (it is), call the truth into question when he gets drunk and crashes his car. When a man declares adultry to be wrong (it is), call the truth into question when he cheats on his wife. When the Church teaches that sex outside of marriage is immoral, call into question when one of it’s flock falls prey to our lustful deceipt. From there, it’s not too difficult for your patient to conclude that people will have sex, it’s natural, there is no reason to try to stop it.

More Lessons on Love

The second woman, married, has figured out how to avoid us, so we ought to move quickly past her. “People ask what our secret is – it’s simply that we are totally in love and continue to invest the same effort in making one another feel as special as we did in those early days.” Note she describes a self-sacrificing love she and her husband give each other, thereby they receive from each other. The concept, like many of the Enemy’s, is stunningly simple.

The third woman, with a couple “long-term” relationships between the age of 16 and 18, worried that she’d “miss out on so much in life” if she settled down too soon. We get a lot of mileage out of that reasoning, so use it often. She felt proud of her ability to detach emotion from sex “the way men did.” She eventually learned that men view her differently when she rushed into sexual relations. She reported lower self-esteem and longed for a meaningful relationship with men. After a celibacy pledge, she seems to have regained a mental foothold on the sacred nature of sexuality.

Likewise, the fourth woman expresses shame for sleeping with 90 people and for an abortion. Here the author is the most poignent, in her observation of a woman who has confused sex and love in an ongoing quest for lasting affection. “her experiences certainly contradict the idea that sexual promiscuity is somehow “liberating”, or that women can detach themselves emotionally from their sexual behaviour.”

We see this search for love began when her parents divorced, her mother married and divorced again and her father appeared sporadically. “I’ve never had a man in my life who’s cared about me consistently, and that’s what I’ve been searching for – even if I’ve gone about it the wrong way.” Like other girls profiled, her parents did not discuss sex. The Church declares parents to be the primary educators of their children, so you and I can pry ourselves into the hearts of children whose parents neglect this duty.

I hope you’ll find opportunities to apply these lessons of deceit, especially with subtle digs against religion. Please keep me apprised.

Warmest Regards,
Wigglebrick

The Vault

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