The New Gospel

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">And may the good gods give you all your heart desires; husband, and house, and lasting harmony too.&nbsp; No finer, greater gift in the world than that … when man and woman possess their home, two minds, two hearts that work as one.&nbsp; Despair to their enemies, joy to all their friends.&nbsp; Their own best claim to glory.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">A husband and wife come together in order to lead their lives in common and to produce children, and that they should consider all their property to be common, and nothing private, not even their bodies … In marriage there must be complete companionship and concern for each other on the part of both husband and wife, in health and in sickness and at all times, because they entered upon the marriage for this reason as well as to produce offspring.&nbsp; When such caring for one another is perfect, and the married couple provide it for one another, and each strives to outdo the other, then this is marriage as it ought to be and deserving of emulation, since it is a noble union. &nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The Law orders all the offspring to be brought up, and forbids women either to cause abortion or to make away with the fetus; a woman convicted of this is regarded as an infanticide, because she destroys the soul and diminishes the race.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Do you not know that you are (each) an Eve?&nbsp; The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too.&nbsp; You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that (forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack.&nbsp; You destroyed so easily God’s image, man, On account of your desert—that is, death—even the Son of God had to die. &nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Woman is more guilty than man, because she was seduced by Satan, and so diverted her husband from obedience to God that she was an instrument of death leading to all perdition. &nbsp; It is necessary that women recognize this, and that she learn to what she is subjected; and not only against her husband.&nbsp; This is reason enough why today she is placed below and that she bears within her ignominy and shame.&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">It is impossible that the body’s natural heat should not sometimes assail a man and kindle sensual desire; but he is praised and accounted blessed, who, when thoughts begin to rise, gives them no quarter, but dashes them straightway against the rock [Christ].</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">It wearies me to tell how many virgins fall daily … over how many stars the proud enemy sets his throne, how many hollow rocks the serpent [Devil] pierces and makes his habitation.&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">What have I to do with the short-lived pleasures of the sense?&nbsp; What have I to do with the siren’s sweet and deadly songs?</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">So I arrived at Carthage, where the din of scandalous love-affairs raged cauldron-like around me.&nbsp; I was not yet in love, but I was enamored with the idea of love, and so deep within me was my need that I hated myself for the sluggishness of my desires.&nbsp; In love with love, I was casting about for something to love … I was inwardly starved of the food which is yourself, O my God … the more empty I was, the more I turned from it [the food of God] in revulsion.&nbsp; My soul’s health was consequently poor.&nbsp; It was covered with sores and flung out of doors, longing to sooth its misery by rubbing against sensible things; yet these were soulless, and so could not be truly loved … I secretly entered into an enjoyable liaison, but I was also trammeling myself with fetters of distress, laying myself open to the iron rods and burning scourges of jealousy and suspicion, of fear, anger and quarrels.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Loving and being loved were sweet to me, the more so if I could also enjoy a lover’s body; so I polluted the stream of friendship with my filthy desires and clouded its purity with hellish lusts; yet all the while, befouled and disgraced though I was, my boundless vanity made me long to appear elegant and sophisticated … [all the while I was] laying myself open to the iron rods and burning scourges of jealousy and suspicion, of fear, anger and quarrels … I was held spellbound by theatrical shows full of images that mirrored my own wretched plight and further fueled the fire within me.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Although, therefore, lust may have many objects, yet when no object is specified, the word lust usually suggests to the mind the lustful excitement of the organs of generation.&nbsp; And this lust not only takes possession of the whole body and outward members, but also makes itself felt within, and moves the whole man with a passion … so that the pleasure which results is the greatest of all bodily pleasures.&nbsp; So possessing indeed is this pleasure, that at the moment of time in which it is consummated, all mental activity is suspended.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Human nature, then, is without doubt ashamed of this lust; and justly so, for the insubordination of these members, and their defiance of the will, are the clear testimony of the punishment of man’s first sin.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The only thing that constrained me from being sucked deeper into the whirlpool of carnal lusts was fear of death and of your [God’s] future judgment.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">From the mud of my fleshly desires and my erupting puberty belched out murky clouds that obscured and darkened by heart until I could not distinguish the calm light of love from the fog of lust.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">And so the two wills fought it out – the old and the new, the one carnal, the other spiritual – and in their struggle tore my soul apart.&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">“Give me chastity and self-control—but please not yet!”&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active power of the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of a woman comes from defect in the active power.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">It has come to Our ears that members of both sexes do not avoid to have intercourse with evil angels, incubi, and succubi, and that by their sorceries, and by their incantations, charms, and conjurations, they suffocate, extinguish and cause to perish the births of women … &nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The Catholic Church continues to believe in the virtuous priority of virginity.&nbsp; Not only must clergy be celibate, but “marriage is a reality of this present age which is passing away [under the in-breaking kingdom of God]”&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">If a woman grows weary and at last dies from childbearing, it matters not.&nbsp; Let her die from bearing, she is there to do it.&nbsp; Women have narrow shoulders and wide hips, therefore they ought to be domestic; their very physique is a sign from their Creator that he intended to limit their activity to the home.&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.”&nbsp; They are contrary to the natural law … Under no circumstances can they be approved … Homosexual persons [recognized as a reality by the Church are therefore] called to chastity.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness … Many highly respected individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them … It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and a cruelty, too.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Periodic continence, that is, the methods of birth regulation based on self-observation and the use of infertile periods, is in conformity with the objective criteria of morality.&nbsp; These methods respect the bodies of the spouses, encourage tenderness between them, and favor the education of authentic freedom.&nbsp; In contrast, “every action which, whether in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible” is intrinsically evil.&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Techniques that entail the dissociation of husband and wife, by the intrusion of a person other than the couple (donation of sperm or ovum, surrogate uterus) are gravely immoral … Techniques involving only the married couple (homologous artificial insemination and fertilization) are perhaps less reprehensible, yet remain morally unacceptable.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Divorce does injury to the covenant of salvation, of which sacramental marriage is the sign.&nbsp; Contracting a new union, even if it is recognized by civil law, adds to the gravity of the rupture; the remarried spouse [and the person who marries him] is in a situation of public and permanent adultery. &nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee, and for thy maintenance commits his body to painful labor both by sea and land, to watch the night in storms, the day in cold, whilest thou liest warm at home, secure and safe; and craves no other tribute at thy hands but love, fair looks, and true obedience; too little payment for so great a debt.&nbsp; Such duty as the subject owes the prince even such a woman oweth to her husband; and when she is forward, peevish, sullen, sour, and not obedient to his honest will, what is she but a foul contending rebel and graceless traitor to her loving lord?&nbsp; I am ashamed that women are so simple to offer war where they should kneel for peace, or seek for rule, supremacy and sway, when they are bound to serve, love, and obey.&nbsp; Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth, unapt to toil and trouble in the world, but that our soft conditions and our hearts should well agree with our external parts?&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Moses trudges down from Mount Sinai, tablets in hand, and announces to the assembled multitudes: “I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news.&nbsp; The good news is I got Him down to ten.&nbsp; The bad news is ‘adultery’ is still in.”&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Sexual desire does not disappear with increased religiosity and activity.&nbsp; Instead, it gets redirected but the thoughts and incoming stimulation continue.&nbsp; The result is a constant distortion of the thought process.&nbsp; A person whose sexuality has been confined to a religious box will soon come to see people who are not as restricted as immoral or evil.&nbsp; It is easy for the religious person to label others as sexual deviants, promiscuous, as somebody who cannot resist temptation or has no self-control.</em></p>

<p>The feminist agenda is … about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages&nbsp;women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism,&nbsp;and become lesbians.</p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I do not believe that any man ever saw or talked with God, I do not believe that God inspired the Mosaic code, or told the historians what they say he did about women, for all the religions on the face of the earth degrade her, and so long as woman accepts the position that they assign her, her emancipation is impossible.</em></p>