About
By Anthony Esolen
But first a note from Robert Royal:
Reports out of New York say that the state's Department of Health has issued warnings to the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, whose order has, for over a century, run a hospice for patients dying of incurable cancer. Indeed, the village where their hospice is located was renamed Hawthorne in their honor. The state, however, without giving it much thought, passed a law requiring all nursing homes to accommodate women who insist that they are men, and men who insist they are women, and other permutations of sexual expression that that factory of illusions, the human fancy, can invent.
As Anthony Esolen makes clear today, it's almost a radical act these days to speak obvious truths that no one - until the past few troubled years - would have even thought to deny. At TCT, we're committed to pursuing many subtle and complex truths, but also those simple, blunt truths necessary to bring a world badly out of kilter to something like sanity again. In fact, there's room for similar work inside the Church as well. We're moving along nicely with our funding, but we've still got a way to go. Tomorrow is Sunday, when no one should fundraise. So let's do - today - what needs doing. If you come here regularly, I'm sure you know. Keep TCT going this year and well into times to come.
That, of course, is not how they put it. It is as a sensible person may put it. So might a sensible person affirm other biological facts evident to anyone with eyes or a clear mind, such as that dogs can only be either boy-dogs or girl-dogs, regardless of whether they have been neutered, or that the developing child in the womb is human, individual, alive, a complete organism, and exactly where it is natural for him to be.
Now for today's column...
The sisters have gotten no complaints from their residents, so that the state's warnings appear to be motivated by sheer gratuitous enmity. For the sisters are Catholic. They have responded as did Peter in Acts: "We must obey God, not men."
The ironies abound. Their hospice is located in a village called Hawthorne, renamed for their order in the days when New Yorkers were grateful to them for undertaking work, at no expense to the state, that no one else was eager to do. Their foundress, Sister Alphonsa Mary, was none other than Rose Lathrop Hawthorne, the daughter of that titan of American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne, certainly no Catholic, though he bore no Puritan animus against the Church.
Nor did Rose, a convert, dishonor the memory of her mother and father. Far from it. Literary scholars owe to her a great debt of gratitude, for preserving, editing, and publishing their correspondence. I have read some of the letters they wrote when they lived for a few years in Italy and became close friends of Robert and Elizabeth Browning.
Rose remarked that all the great English and American writers and artists of that time, regardless of their faith, made their way to Italy to drink from the springs of Catholic culture.
Hawthorne himself, half-Puritan in sensibility, was acutely aware of his ancestry, even ashamed of it, as he was the great-great-grandson of John Hathorne, the most aggressive of the judges in the Salem witch trials. Those trials brought together the worst of both sexes.
In men like Cotton Mather, who died still believing there was witchcraft in Salem, the matter was set afire by the ferocity of intellectual warfare; he was fighting against a recrudescent materialism. If devils are real, materialism is false.
The victims of Salem were chewed up in the wheels of his acute and relentless mind. I hope God forgave him before he died, but if not, a present-day Dante might find a way to place him beside Lenin, two murderers by abstraction.
The girls come off no better. It is, indeed, impossible to imagine a group of boys getting together to faint, jabber, shriek, writhe, and set a whole colony by its ears with visions of the occult, catching the habit by s...
But first a note from Robert Royal:
Reports out of New York say that the state's Department of Health has issued warnings to the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, whose order has, for over a century, run a hospice for patients dying of incurable cancer. Indeed, the village where their hospice is located was renamed Hawthorne in their honor. The state, however, without giving it much thought, passed a law requiring all nursing homes to accommodate women who insist that they are men, and men who insist they are women, and other permutations of sexual expression that that factory of illusions, the human fancy, can invent.
As Anthony Esolen makes clear today, it's almost a radical act these days to speak obvious truths that no one - until the past few troubled years - would have even thought to deny. At TCT, we're committed to pursuing many subtle and complex truths, but also those simple, blunt truths necessary to bring a world badly out of kilter to something like sanity again. In fact, there's room for similar work inside the Church as well. We're moving along nicely with our funding, but we've still got a way to go. Tomorrow is Sunday, when no one should fundraise. So let's do - today - what needs doing. If you come here regularly, I'm sure you know. Keep TCT going this year and well into times to come.
That, of course, is not how they put it. It is as a sensible person may put it. So might a sensible person affirm other biological facts evident to anyone with eyes or a clear mind, such as that dogs can only be either boy-dogs or girl-dogs, regardless of whether they have been neutered, or that the developing child in the womb is human, individual, alive, a complete organism, and exactly where it is natural for him to be.
Now for today's column...
The sisters have gotten no complaints from their residents, so that the state's warnings appear to be motivated by sheer gratuitous enmity. For the sisters are Catholic. They have responded as did Peter in Acts: "We must obey God, not men."
The ironies abound. Their hospice is located in a village called Hawthorne, renamed for their order in the days when New Yorkers were grateful to them for undertaking work, at no expense to the state, that no one else was eager to do. Their foundress, Sister Alphonsa Mary, was none other than Rose Lathrop Hawthorne, the daughter of that titan of American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne, certainly no Catholic, though he bore no Puritan animus against the Church.
Nor did Rose, a convert, dishonor the memory of her mother and father. Far from it. Literary scholars owe to her a great debt of gratitude, for preserving, editing, and publishing their correspondence. I have read some of the letters they wrote when they lived for a few years in Italy and became close friends of Robert and Elizabeth Browning.
Rose remarked that all the great English and American writers and artists of that time, regardless of their faith, made their way to Italy to drink from the springs of Catholic culture.
Hawthorne himself, half-Puritan in sensibility, was acutely aware of his ancestry, even ashamed of it, as he was the great-great-grandson of John Hathorne, the most aggressive of the judges in the Salem witch trials. Those trials brought together the worst of both sexes.
In men like Cotton Mather, who died still believing there was witchcraft in Salem, the matter was set afire by the ferocity of intellectual warfare; he was fighting against a recrudescent materialism. If devils are real, materialism is false.
The victims of Salem were chewed up in the wheels of his acute and relentless mind. I hope God forgave him before he died, but if not, a present-day Dante might find a way to place him beside Lenin, two murderers by abstraction.
The girls come off no better. It is, indeed, impossible to imagine a group of boys getting together to faint, jabber, shriek, writhe, and set a whole colony by its ears with visions of the occult, catching the habit by s...