Mademoiselle runs on its cover a supertitle (the opposite of a subtitle) that proclaims FASHION/BEAUTY/RELATIONSHIPS. If its clumsy stabs at explaining spiritual relationships are any sign, young women may want to turn elsewhere for advice on any matter the magazine addresses.
Its style can be grasped from the March 1994 issue, which features an article on what it calls “the new chastity” (apparently a synonym for restrained promiscuity). With that article runs a sidebar about “Great Moments in Celibacy.”
A representative squib: “O Virgin Mary: The mother of Jesus was visited by the angel Gabriel who ‘came in unto her’ (Luke 1:28). Immaculate Conception has never been duplicated since.”
This put-down of the Catholic faith must have been well received by Mademoiselle‘s readers, who, like the anonymous writer, wrongly think “Immaculate Conception” refers to the conception of Jesus.
To prove that theological ignorance can co-exist with historical credulity, in the same sidebar we find this: “1500s chastity belt: Placed over a woman’s pubic area, this metal device locks lovers out.”
Think about this a second. We’re supposed to believe that Husband leaves on a voyage and Wife remains in the castle. To stop her paramour, Husband fits her with a chastity belt and takes the key. He returns six months later and finds—what? A corpse, since the belt that prevents her unfaithfulness also prevents her responding to nature’s call, and who can wait for six months? The fact is that chastity belts never existed; they were hoaxes dreamed up by nineteenth-century polemicists opposed to medieval society and the Church.
In the same issue that features these insights into chastity we find a one-page article titled “Why I am a Catholic.” The writer is Tish Durkin, a Mademoiselle contributing editor who is not otherwise identified. Her words are subtitled, “What’s a 20th-century girl like me doing in a church like this?” Good question, Tish.
Let’s examine representative passages from her remarks. Her words are in italics, and my responses are in in roman type.
In the sunny Catholic school where I learned to read, every class began with prayer, every meal began with grace, and every child was said to be a child of God. And every January 22, the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, a bell tolled over our silenced schoolyard, a moment of mourning for the children of God who would never be born. I have long since ceased to view abortion as murder. But I still see myself (and everyone else) as a child of God. I still go to church, still observe Lent, still associate Christmas with Christ. I am still a Catholic.
Notice how she begins by demonstrating that she is not just a Catholic, but a Catholic who has “grown.” The chief sign of authentic growth is public acknowledgment of the licitness of abortion. (Remember: The only good Catholic is a bad Catholic.) If the opening lines of an autobiographical sketch set the theme for the writer’s life, what does her choice of topics say about her?
In answer to your first question [apparently she wrote in response to questions from the magazine’s editorial board]: I am not petrified of sex, consumed with guilt, or convinced that gays and atheists will go to hell. I don’t think the Pope is perfect, and I find nothing wrong with birth control, as long as it works.
Again, the concentration on sex. Apparently she’s petrified of something, perhaps of not seeming to toe the secularist line. It’s good to hear that she’s not petrified of sex, but the only people I’ve met who fidget about sex the way she does are those who take her recreational attitude toward it. If any petrifaction occurs, it’s among the promiscuous, not among those who subscribe to Humanae Vitae.
People who follow traditional Christian sexual morality are not only less likely to contract physical maladies, but they avoid psychic ones too. After all, following natural law makes a lot a sense. (That television commercial had it right: It’s not nice to try to fool Mother Nature.)
Durkin says she’s not “convinced that gays and atheists will go to hell.” What she really means, of course, is that she’s not convinced that anyone goes to hell–but, wherever she ends up in fifty years, she’ll know better.
Will gays and atheists be found in hell? If they don’t repent from their immoral sexual practices and willed disbelief in the God they know really exists, then sure they will. Likewise we will find in hell, but probably in different proportions from these two groups, heterosexuals and theists. Our Lord’s words in the Gospels give us every reason to expect that hell will be more crowded than New York’s tony CondNast Building (where Mademoiselle is located).
By the way, I too don’t think the Pope is perfect, so I agree with Durkin on something. After all, the Church never has taught such a silly theory; that Durkin believes it has is just another sign of her ignorance of elementary Catholic teaching. No, the Pope isn’t perfect—but he’s infallible, and even when he’s not exercising his infallibility his teaching ought to be followed, the only exception coming when one has extraordinarily well-founded reasons for disagreeing with him on a non-defined matter—and I frankly can’t imagine how folks with Durkin’s theological disabilities could hope to develop such reasons.
Many people have been scarred by growing up in the Church, whether they’ve been struck by Sister Mary Whatever’s ruler in fourth grade or, far more traumatically, suffered the sexual abuse by priests about which we’ve heard so much lately. As for the forbidden, it is a major point of reference—not least because our current, very conservative Pope is always spelling it out: no premarital sex, abortion, birth control, divorce, or women in the clergy.
Of course he’s “always spelling it out.” He has to, because you’re not paying attention! Instead of listening to Christ’s Vicar you’re listening to disinformation campaigns intended to “prove” that every other priest is a pedophile (in fact, such abuse is not statistically more common among priests than among other groups) and that every child who went to Catholic school ended up “scarred” by rulers slammed across his knuckles. (If there are so many scarred people, why so few scars to examine?)
What’s a 20th-century girl like me doing in a church like this? To be honest, I don’t always know. Partly it’s force of habit. . . . Partly, too, it’s fear. Not fear of hellfire, but fear of nothing—the black hole that would open up where my faith used to be, if I ever stopped believing. But I haven’t stopped believing. Despite everything, I believe in God, as given to me by the Catholic Church. I believe in Jesus Christ. I believe in sin, that it is done, punished, and forgiven. I believe in eternal life.
But apparently not in eternal damnation, eh? (If you don’t believe in hell, there’s no sense in fearing hellfire.) It’s consoling to know that Durkin believes in God, in Jesus Christ, even in sin–but she seems a bit selective about what to label as sinful. There is no evidence that she is willing to label any consensual sexual act as sinful, and it’s safe to predict that she will find sinfulness in “the usual suspects”—racial slurs, environmental degradation, and other things to which she isn’t tempted.
Ironically, she goes on to say that “it’s a relief to refer to a moral system I’m not making up as I go along.” Granted, she may not have invented it herself, but the moral system to which she subscribes seems to have little congruence with the one the Church promotes. She got her system from somewhere—perhaps from the pages of Mademoiselle.
Whatever social and political elements may feed these views, none is stronger than the spiritual. In a weird way, it is in my quarrels with the Church that I become most Catholic. These quarrels aren’t reasons to go. They are reasons to stay. For now.
Is she still in the Church? Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, definitively banning women priests, appeared after Durkin wrote her article. Perhaps it was her last straw. If so, too bad. I have the sense that if she weren’t “petrified” by Catholic teaching on sex, she might be able to learn the rudiments of the faith to which she nominally subscribed.