That organization hears a scary knock at the door (or its equivalent in a notice from a government agency) and discovers they are going to have to pay.

Obama’s campaign was already preaching against the organization. Now Obama’s agency moves to weaken and quiet the group. To make its members think again about their beliefs and actions. To make the group disburse and then disperse.

The organization is the Catholic Church and the knock on the door is the HHS mandate, which would fine organizations hundreds of thousands of dollars a year unless they are willing to violate their consciences.

The IRS scandal, in which the Internal Revenue Service targeted tea party and patriot groups critical of Obama’s policies (and probably pro-life groups,the National Organization for Marriage and a professor) has a lot in common with the administration’s HHS mandate targeting of Catholics and others critical of Obama’s policies.

Consider:

• The HHS mandate isn’t about health care:  Contraception neither treats nor prevents any disease.
• The HHS mandate isn’t about making contraceptives available: They are already widely available at low cost; 85% of corporations cover them, nearly all government jobs do, and Planned Parenthood and HHS clinics offer them free or practically free to fill the gaps.
• The HHS mandate isn’t about fairness: Under it, if you want a birth control pill you don’t have to worry about co-pays. If you need to take a drug to keep you alive, you have to come up with money for the privilege.

So, what is the HHS mandate about?

• Weakening the First Amendment. The HHS mandate reshapes constitutional rights. It makes a new “right to free contraception” a more fundamental right than the right than to free exercise of religion.
• Neutralizing Opponents. As Cardinal Francis George put it, the HHS mandate “attempts to weaken the unity between the bishops and the faithful.” As George Weigel and Ross Douthat put it, it is a political “divide and conquer” strategy.
• Expanding Executive Power. The HHS Mandate was a giant power grab. Cardinal George, as early as 2009 was warning that it was Obama’s opposition to health care conscience rules (despite his promise to the contrary at Notre Dame) that “could be the first step in moving our country from democracy to despotism.”

Look at the IRS scandal and you find the same contours.

• Weakening the First Amendment. The IRS scandal violates both the “freedom of speech” clause of the First Amendment, demanding Tea Party groups tell it the content of their speeches, and the “freedom of religion” clause, and demanding pro-life groups tell it the content of their prayers.
• Neutralizing opponents.  Salon magazine reminds us of four political foes that may have been targeted when George W. Bush was president. The Wall Street Journal  objected at the time. So did the NAACP, one of the targets, and congressional Democrats, who called it political “intimidation.” Their words are well-taken. Apply them to Obama’s IRS and the outrage should be exponentially higher with nearly 500 organizations targeted.
• Expanding Government Power.  Ironically, the IRS scandal targeted groups whose very purpose is to warn Americans that the government is grabbing too much power through taxes: King George’s taxation without representation. The IRS’s “taxation as vexation” goes one step further.

So does the HHS Mandate.

Government Oversight Committee Democrat Congressman Elijah Cummings calls the IRS scandal  “one of the most alarming things that I have ever seen.” Catholics should remind lawmakers that the HHS mandate is equally alarming. As even many many Democrats agree, the demand by the Obama administration that Catholic organizations violate their consciences or pay crippling fines is unconscionable. The HHS mandate is wrong for all the reasons the IRS scandal is wrong, only worse.

It is political intimidation at its worst. While the Obama campaign was using overheated rhetoric to call Catholic positions a “war on women,” the Obama administration was demanding Catholics violate their consciences on precisely those issues.

Fair is fair: If we are outraged about the IRS targeting political opponents on the left or right, and we should be, we should be outraged about the HHS targeting the Catholic Church.

Outside, a MoveOn.org demonstration gathered a handful of demonstrators. Ryan acknowledged them and said he wanted to disagree with them.

“Now, Good Catholics can disagree. And we do. … I’m not going to stand here and vanquish some straw men erected for my position. I’m going to take on the straw men erected against my position.”

His commencement address was covered by the New York Post and the National Catholic Register — which also asked him about remarks he made about homosexual adoption at a town hall meeting a week and a half before commencement.

Here follow the best quotes from Ryan’s speech.

10. His joke about Ayn Rand:

“At a young age, I started a lengthy search for answers. I read everything I could get my hands on: from Freud to C.S. Lewis, from Hegel to Hayek, from Aristotle to Aquinas—to everything in between. In fact, you may have heard that I enjoyed the work of a certain female author, whose books were monuments to the idea that men and women should be true to their individual passions—even in the face of relentless social pressure to conform. Yes, it’s true. I was—and I remain—a huge fan of the Twilight saga.”

9. On Pope Benedict vs. the “dictatorship of relativism.”

“Just as his predecessor Pope John Paul freed Poland from fear, Pope Benedict taught us how to protect the world from falsehood.”

8. On Pope Francis

“I hope he will heal the divisions between the so-called Catholic ‘left’ and ‘right,’ so ‘that all may be one’ in Christ — because it’s the spiritually impoverished who need the most help.”

7.  On service to the poor

“To truly help the poor, we have to help the whole person—not just the material needs, but the spiritual ones too. The fact is, government can’t give this help—because the law is blind. It treats everyone the same. And though we’re all equal, we’re not all the same. We have different needs.”

6. On “mediating institutions”

“Only people can meet these needs … people outside of government. And we will find them in our communities—in our churches and schools, in our nonprofits and neighborhoods, in our friends and families. Academics like to call these things ‘mediating institutions,’ But in the end, they’re just people—people working together.”

5. On the contributions of businesses

“They create jobs. They save lives. They feed people. They add to the store of knowledge. And most importantly, free enterprise gives us the resources to care for ourselves—and for others. It helps to ease human suffering.”

4. On greed

“Yes, we must guard against greed. … And there’s no greater opportunity for greed than government cronyism. Greed knows how to exploit the pages of regulations. It knows how to navigate the halls of power. So if we’re concerned about greed, we shouldn’t give it more opportunities to grow.”

3. The purpose of wealth

“Wealth is a means to an end. … The end is a good life—one lived in accordance with God. And to live a truly good life, we must go beyond ourselves. We must minister to the poor and the sick. We can’t outsource the job. Concern for the poor doesn’t demand faith in big government. It demands something more — from all of us.”

2. On happiness

“[W]e find happiness only in the thrill of accomplishment, in the comfort of community, and in communion with God. This is how solidarity and subsidiarity work together: They create a society that serves the poor.”

1. On Catholic social teaching

“That’s my take on Catholic social teaching. …  In a culture that stresses the ‘I,’ the Church stresses the ‘We.’ In a culture that liberates the passions, the Church shows that discipline gives you freedom. And in a world where relativism threatens the weak, the Church works to protect the poor and the powerless. These are the truths that anchor Catholic social teaching.”

What better time to share pop songs about Our Lady?

Let’s start with the the King of Rock-n-Roll, Elvis Presley. Here is his great old song “Miracle of the Rosary,” a favorite in the Hoopes household. This version has the lyrics, helpfully, in English and Portuguese.

Next, let’s fast forward to the 1980s and turn to a man who briefly inspired idolatry in the 1960s (“Clapton is God,” said London graffiti). Here is Eric Clapton’s “Holy Mother,” with help from Phil Collins. (In an interview, Clapton said he didn’t know who the “Holy Mother” was. Fair enough. We do.)

Last, to bring us to modern times, here is Justin Bieber singing “Silent Night.” I know it’s a bit of a cheat to use a Christmas song that mentions Our Lady, but it’s actually a nice version. Enjoy.

Preparing the final for my Mass Communications class, I thought I should share some of what we studied about one of the biggest players in the media today: pornography. Let’s count the reasons you don’t want to look at pornography.

1. You don’t want to be addicted.

A brief look, especially for guys, opens hormonal valves that make it hard to stop, because it dumps chemicals in your brain that demand more and more (the excellent “Fight the New Drug” website explains.)

Deciding to take a quick look at pornography is like deciding to open an airplane window for a second. To do so yanks you out of your world into its world.

2. You don’t want to support the pornography industry.

The pornography industry is an unhappy place. Look at the statistics: Women in pornography are much more likely to have been child victims of sex abuse and from foster care situations than the general population. They are more often depressed, more often in abusive relationships, more often the victims of sexual assault in adulthood, and more likely to be living in poverty.

“I work in this business and I know how many girls end up in the hospital suffering from brutal scenes,” wrote one man on an adult DVD industry website. “I know how many of these teenage girls have to go to an emergency room or a 24-hour clinic with chronic [e-coli-like] infections.”

Do you think it’s wrong for the industry to take advantage of people this way? Well, it’s just as wrong for you to take advantage of them through the industry.

3. You don’t want to kill your soul.

Let’s say it: Sin is a real thing, and it really kills your soul. “Mortal sin is a radical possibility of human freedom, as is love itself,” says the Catechism, No. 1861. “If it is not redeemed by repentance and God’s forgiveness, it causes exclusion from Christ’s kingdom and the eternal death of hell, for our freedom has the power to make choices for ever, with no turning back.”

For a sin to be mortal you need three things, says the Catechism: The act must be gravely wrong, and you must choose it with “full knowledge” and “complete consent.” Pornography is a “grave offense.” When you supply the other two conditions, it’s mortal.

4. You don’t want to be unable to form lasting bonds with real people.

Pornography users have a much harder time forming real, lasting, mutually satisfying bonds with real human beings. Patrick Fagan’s excellent research showed that.

As Pope John Paul put it, the opposite of love is use. To use another human being to please yourself is worse than hating them — and the more you use human beings to please yourself, the more incapable of love you become.

5. You don’t want to be creepy.

Men who are habitual users of pornography stop seeing people: They see parts. The pornography use trains them to think of people in a creepy way. They become creepy in ways that bother them, driving their self-esteem downward.

Davy Rothbart’s R-rated New York magazine piece demonstrates that.  The headline says it all about the porn addict: “He’s Just Not That Into Anyone.” But the quotes in it — for instance from John Mayer — make it clear that pornography brings people to a very creepy place.

6. Women, increasingly, hate it.

As Rothbart’s piece demonstrates, there may be a bit of a generation gap here — some women imitate pornography. Many also use it, as Patrick Fagan’s research points out. But in religious circles, a wife’s discovery that her spouse is using pornography is psychologically just as damaging as a wife’s discovery that her spouse is involved in an affair. Peter Kleponis, who works a lot with pornography addicts and assists dioceses in fighting the addiction, explained to me the “trust wound” they feel.

In Iceland, feminists are behind a push to ban online pornography and the sex industry. Feminist Gail Dines explains that especially now, pornography is far from empowering to women. Pornography increasingly is not about showing women enjoying themselves, but showing behaviors that are debasing; Gail Dines’ presentations are not for the weak-hearted.

7. You don’t want to change to suit your pornography habit.

Pornography draws users into stranger and stranger places, according to the studies Pat Fagan cites.  It also makes them less committed to their spouses, more likely to have lenient views of rape, and, as several news stories pointed out recently, makes them more open to redefining marriage.

It makes sense. As my students learn: We imitate what we see. And we are what we choose.

8. Pornography is the opposite of beauty.

Beauty is ennobling. It draws you toward goodness and truth. It inspires you to be better than you were, more loving, more caring. Pornography apes the appeal of beauty, but  — since its appeal is chemical, not spiritual — it twists it and warps it.

A friend of mine says it’s only a matter of time before the Left, which currently is accepting of pornography, turns against it. Oprah has. Salon, along with lots of pro-pornography articles, occasionally publishes pieces that ask questions like, “Did Porn Warp Me Forever?”

So, you don’t want to look at porn. You want to look at beauty. Here is a place to start: I consider this video (which includes a non-pornographic naked guy briefly) the very opposite of pornography. Let it teach you how to appreciate the vast wide world outside your computer screen.

For more information …

www.FighttheNewDrug.org is a great, dynamic site with lots of facts and testimonials.

www.flrl.org/TrueFreedom.htm offered by the Archdiocese of New York, this site includes many helpful Catholic resources for breaking free from pornography.

For space, I had to cut one quote which I often cite as my favorite quote ever in the Register. Our reporter at the Republican National Convention asked Bob Dole what he thought of George W. Bush’s faith.

Said Dole: “I think Bush’s faith is authentic, and that will be useful to us.”  That says so much about the Republican establishment — but also about Bush.

In his interview with the Register, the future president’s was very much to-the-point: “I’m a pro-life candidate,” he said. “I’ve been a pro-life governor. I’m going to set the goal that all children born and unborn ought to be protected in law and welcomed to life. I will sign a ban on partial birth abortions. I will encourage adoptions.”

Thus began a stormy love affair with Catholics.

The rest of the article reminisces about some flashpoints from that first honeymoon year of Bush-Catholic story that I hadn’t thought about for a while:

• The Lepanto 2000 Rosary Crusade
• Marian Feast Days on the Recount Timeline
• The Day 6 Cardinal McCarrick Visit
• The February Catholic Do-Gooder Summit
• The JPII Center Ribbon Cutting

Then in 2001 the storms came in late August, as they so often do, and the cyclone hit in September. Anyway, it was good to reminisce about the old days. And it was good to share some of the love at the presidential pow-wow.

I counted at least four hatchet-burying moments in Dallas.

First: the “Bush as divider” hatchet.

Bush was often mocked for saying “I am a uniter, not a divider.” That never made much sense.

But the kind words of the former presidents suggest they knew he was a uniter all along — Bill Clinton discussed Bush’s calls “just to talk politics,” Obama described the letter from Bush he found on day one in the presidential desk, Carter described how Bush helped him out. And of course, Obama praised him for his reach-across-the-aisle effort to promote immigration reform.

Second: the “war-monger” hatchet.

The National Catholic Register, when I edited it, certainly took Bush to task for his Iraq war decision — but even Cardinal Ratzinger gave an implicit green light to the Afghanistan war. And isn’t it odd that behavior (Google Libya, Guantanamo and “Kill Teams” for starters) that would have been be called “war mongering” 10 years ago is given a pass when Obama does it?

But the presidents graciously praised Bush’s efforts in Africa. President Carter went a step further when he gave Bush credit for more peace in Sudan: “In January of 2005, there was a peace treaty between north and south Sudan that ended a war that had been going on for 20 years,” Carter said. “George W. Bush is responsible for that.”

Third: The “Big Oil polluter” hatchet was buried. Or it should have been.

Though he was caricatured as pro-oil and anti-tree, Bush’s personal commitment to environmentalism is real and significant. He lives in a radical conservationist dream house in Crawford, Texas, that even Snopes agrees compares favorably to Al Gore’s house.

The AP reports that the George W. Bush library is like a green home away from home for the Bushes. It is LEED-certified platinum: as green as you can get. Many materials in the building came from within 500 miles of the site; a cistern will gather rainwater to water the plants, etc.

Fourth: Maybe even the Katrina hatchet was just a little bit buried.

Bill Clinton spoke joked about getting cozy with the Bush family – and revealed that he worked with them on Katrina. “You know, starting with my work with President George H.W. Bush on the tsunami and the aftermath of Katrina, people began to joke that I was getting so close to the Bush family, I had become the black sheep son. My mother told me not to talk too long today and Barbara, I will not let you down.”

Each of these was a small thing, but it was nice. I always liked Bush. I like anyone who is willing to stand for life against sneering opponents and gain ground.

As Obama put it: “To know the man is to like the man.”

Central Africa seems a lot more healthy than the Western World.

In my Christianity and Mass Media class, we spend the end of the year studying how the media affects our brains and personal identity.

• Google makes us forgetful and destroys our patience for long, sustained reading (as Nicholas Carr points out and Bill Keller observed).
• Facebook trains us in narcissism, as we market the major events of our life.
• Advertising does not sell a product so much as it sells an identity, making it seem possible, and desirable, to change ours.

Starving for truth, goodness and beauty, we stare at our smart phones, where all three are compromised. Then, Drudge linked a David Kupelian article that marshaled these and many other depressing statistics that spell out how lost our society has become:

• Suicides rose to beat car accidents as the leading cause of death in the United States, said a study in the American Journal of Public Health.
• In 2012, more soldiers died by suicide (303) than in combat (212) according to Stars and Stripes.
• One in three employees experience chronic stress problems, according to an American Psychological Association survey cited in the Wall Street Journal.

Then along comes this article from the Atlantic Monthly: “Where Masturbation and Homosexuality Do Not Exist.” It begins:

Barry and Bonnie Hewlett had been studying the Aka and Ngandu people of central Africa for many years before they began to specifically study the groups’ sexuality. As they reported in the journal African Study Monographs, the married couple of anthropologists from Washington State University “decided to systematically study sexual behavior after several campfire discussions with married middle-aged Aka men who mentioned in passing that they had sex three or four times during the night. At first [they] thought it was just men telling their stories, but we talked to women and they verified the men’s assertions.”

As the article goes on, the Aka and Ngandu people emerge as a rather healthy community.

• Sex is a good thing; they call it “searching for children” because they associate it with procreation but also have a ribald way of celebrating it — Chaucerlike, if you will.
• Masturbation is not something that they have shamed out of people; it just isn’t something anyone really has much desire to do.

Are these people the noble savages Rousseau hoped for? I’m sure they are not. They are human beings, subject to original sin and filled with concupiscence like the rest of us. Is technology the root of all evil? Nah. But it may be an evil accelerator.

But if what this article says is true, I do think that they have a healthier view of sex  than us. They don’t connect it with their own self-actualization — they connect it with family-actualization. They don’t make it an end in itself, but a means to an end. And, ironically, sex that is not freighted with so many expectations turns out to be more pleasurable and less emotionally torturous. (And it is exciting to think that Africa is embracing Christ without the West’s baggage.)

After citing the sexual habits of the Aka and Ngandu, the Atlantic story introduces a concept I have never heard before: WEIRD people.

This finding recalls a much-discussed 2010 Behavioral and Brain Sciences paper called “The WEIRDest people in the world?” in which the authors argued that far too many sweeping claims about “human nature” are drawn exclusively from samples of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies.

Sounds like they are onto something. My only fear is that the big money of Melinda Gates and the Contraceptive Imperialists will see this and want to go in and make these poor benighted people more like the wonderful, white suicidal West.

They shouldn’t. We should imitate them, not vice versa.

So it’s good to read an article like Victor Davis Hanson’s “Postmodern Prudes” and realize that we are not being bested after all. He catalogs some of the strange contradictions of modern morality. Here is my paraphrase of some of Hanson’s examples:

• Smoking marijuana — good. Smoking cigarettes — bad.
• Pornography in college classrooms — good. Calling a woman “honey” — bad.
• Morning-after pill on-demand for girls under 16 — good. Sex with girls under 16 — bad; illegal bad.
• Near-nude women gyrating on stage — entertainment. Calling them “hussies” — offensive.
• Eliot Spitzer’s prostitution scandal — a career-changer. Carrie Prejean’s “I’m for traditional marriage” scandal — a career-ender.
• Michael Vick’s dog-killing — big news. Kermit Gosnell’s baby-killing — not news.

It made me think of some others.

• Going hunting — bad. Going to watch gun violence set to music on a giant screen — good.
• Plastic bottles that hurt the environment — bad. Contraceptives that hurt the environment —good (read Simcha Fisher on that, by the way).
• Excessive plastic surgery to make a woman into the woman she wants to be — bad. Excessive plastic surgery to make a man into the woman he wants to be — good.
• Not having a car-seat at the hospital for your newborn — bad; illegal bad. Killing your not-yet-born at the hospital — freedom of choice.
• Religious people promoting chastity in an age of rampant venereal disease — dangerously repressive. Secular people promoting promiscuity in an age of rampant venereal disease — sexy fun!

And of course …

• Military interventionism before 2008 — bad. Military interventionism after 2008 — good.

Anyway, you get the drift. Hanson draws his own conclusions from this new morality. But I draw an additional conclusion: This can’t last. An ideology is something to take seriously: An uncompromising worldview that pulls beliefs and actions into its orbit with inexorable force. Environmentalism. Pacifism. Feminism.

But the new morality is only environmentalist until it wants to drive a car; it is only concerned about water pollution until hormonal contraceptives are the pollutant.

The new morality is for peace and domestic civil liberties only when they are threatened by a Texan.

The new morality is feminist except when it comes to pornographers and Beyonce.

The truth is, there is no new morality … just a collection of untethered beliefs “tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine,” to quote Ratzinger quoting Ephesians on the way to decrying “the dictatorship of relativism.”

The problem with such a morality is that it is very vulnerable: Like a teen-ager, the new morality rushes to affirm whatever happens to be “cool” at the moment. It can easily be hijacked and used for evil by a popular figure.

Its vulnerability is also an opportunity. I can think of literally dozens of people who I personally know who shook their heads at the absurdity of it all and left the new morality behind for firmer ground.

Let us help more people do so.

Leave aside that it is crazy for them to think we hate them. People hate smoking but not smokers. People hate over-eating but not over-eaters. People hate religiosity but not religious people. (I hope?) We can hate sin but not sinners.

But leaving aside that we don’t hate them, when every statement we make is answered by “You are a hater,” what can we talk about?

Our Symposium for the New Evangelization had three keynote speakers who had three answers.

1. They will still listen to beauty.

“Beauty will save the world,” said Pope John Paul II, echoing Dostoevsky, and Bishop Robert Morlino of Madison, Wis. —a speaker of humor, passion and depth — echoed both.

The way he argued the point was this: “If your mind and your body are at war, you cannot be free,” he said. “We share passions with the animals but we have feelings that are higher — hope and love, for instance.” To be free is to be able to act in accordance with those higher feelings, he said, and “Beauty is the primary educator of feelings.”

So we must evangelize with beauty. …. By  Promoting Sacred Art? Recycling? The good bishop didn’t say, but symposium speakers took up the challenge and made suggestions. The most compelling answer: witness. To see a Catholic life well lived is the only compelling argument people will believe. (Besides, that’s what Emily said to do, isn’t it?)

2. Truth is a person and he can reach the world, if we let him.

The next morning, Curtis Martin made another compelling case for “the way we can still be heard.”

He made the point that the “bad guys” in the world weren’t our biggest problem. The “good guys” in the Church are. He said too many Catholics had gotten the wrong message from the old adage attributed to St. Francis: “Evangelize always and when necessary use words.”

In fact, proclaiming the Gospel — using words — is a fundamental duty of the Church. “Do not presuppose the faith, but propose it,” he said.

His message: Stop wringing your hands and tell people about Jesus. He hears lot of excuses for why people don’t evangelize — they say they lack training, for instance. “But I never hear people say they don’t tell others about their favorite restaurant because they lack training. When it comes to Evangelization, the difficulty isn’t in the end, it’s the first step.”

3. Only by serving the poor do we gain the right to be heard.

Last was the answer given by Dr. Jonathan Reyes, executive director of the U.S. bishops’ Justice, Peace and Human Development Department.

“Modern people in our pluralist democracy may disagree on just about everything, but there is vast consensus, particularly among young people, that we are all supposed to help the most vulnerable in our society,” he said. “ This is good news for Catholics, because such a commitment is actually part of the very essence of the Church.”

Citing the actions of Pope Francis and the words of Pope Benedict XVI, he made the point that serving the poor is both the right thing to do and an “argument” people will listen to. Mother Teresa won a hearing by serving the poor. So can we — or, at any rate, we can take away a really good excuse for blowing us off.

So there you have it, three ways to reach the world. They just happen to be the three transcendentals that Pope Francis has been stressing (as George Weigel also pointed out): Beauty, truth and goodness.

Beauty — When faced with something beautiful, people don’t question, put up defenses or push back. They accept.

Truth — As Benedict XVI put it in his U.S. visit: “Truth is not an imposition. Nor is it simply a set of rules. It is a discovery of the One who never fails us; the One whom we can always trust …. Truth is a person: Jesus Christ.”

Charity —  First, we lost control of the culture; then we lost the culture war. But we can still be effective missionaries if we put our energies at the service of those in need.

The bad news: None of these is a short cut; each answer requires work. The good news: They are each natural expressions of an authentic relationship with Christ.

As Billy Graham put it (actually, it was his wife): “If God doesn’t punish America, he’ll have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah.”

A lot of Americans feel that way right now.

Legalization of same-sex marriage, in one fell swoop, will not just include more people in the category of “married.” It will legally declare adherents of the four major religions to be bigots because of their beliefs about marriage. Homosexual marriage means aggressive secularism will have the law of the land firmly on its side as it takes on believing Jews, devout Muslims, Hindu families, and mainstream Christians including Catholic men, women and children.

Hope can seem hard to find faced with such a development.

But for Catholics, hope should never be hard to find: It is the cross. The cross is hope for us because it shows the two aspects of God: His justice and his mercy.

With the cross, God says that the great sins of the world need to be expiated. The murders, rapes, betrayals and blasphemies of mankind cannot be shrugged off: They must be punished. Severely. But then the cross shows God’s mercy because he chooses to suffer the punishment on our behalf.

As Pope Benedict put it: “[T]he anger and mercy of the Lord alternate in a dramatic sequence, but love triumphs in the end, for God is love.”

This means we can have always have hope – but we can never have an easy, happy hope. Opponents in the culture and in the courts are not going to go away. A happy-talking politician who promises economic comfort is not going to return us to a Christian culture. We are not going to find the silver-bullet movement or issue that will restore the balance.

Our only hope is one that is founded in God’s actions, not ours.

We only have hope because Jesus is a savior.

We forget what a savior is sometimes. A savior isn’t someone who stands above the world’s dark ways and demands that we crawl out to him. A savior is someone who brings light into our dark world and leads us out.

A savior isn’t someone who disdains the mess we have gotten in and demands we clean up our act or suffer his wrath. A savior enters the mess and himself cleans it up.

Our savior does just that today. He encounters us in his mercy and transforms the world.

“Jesus Christ is divine mercy in person: Encountering Christ means encountering the mercy of God,” said Pope Benedict. “The mercy of Christ is not a cheap grace; it does not presume a trivialization of evil. Christ carries in his body and on his soul all the weight of evil, and all its destructive force. He burns and transforms evil through suffering, in the fire of his suffering love.”

Our society has made a mess of things in many ways. Our time is marked by the sexual revolution, aggressive secularism, and the violence of abortion. We are each among the people implicated in it. It is a false hope to think we can work ourselves out of the darkness we are in. That just isn’t possible. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that we are not the saviors of our world anyway. To reverse a recent political slogan: We are not the ones we have been waiting for.

Jesus Christ is our savior. And Jesus is merciful — and not just merciful; he’s anxious to take the first steps to save us.

All our hope lies with him. All we have to do is beg for mercy and follow him through the darkness and out the other side.

I have no idea how he will save his people. But I know he will.

We can start by following the last three popes’ urgent calls and pray for Divine Mercy.

But that didn’t stop the Salon website from featuring a strange piece by journalist Molly McCluskey who talks about her horror at her own Steubenville teen experience – she attended a Steubenville Catholic Conference, and didn’t like it … which she somehow tries to compare to the horrifying experience of rape.

First, the news: Two high school football players were convicted Sunday of raping a teenage girl at an August party. The story received national attention. Drunken teens had photographed and videotaped the sexual assault and shared the images on social media. There was widespread confusion as to whether the boys’ actions “counted” as rape – since the girl was drunk, couldn’t they do what they wanted to her? Many excused their behavior; some blamed the girl.

Commentators have taken a number of lessons from the event. Journalist Nina Burleigh writes, in The New York Observer:

“By now, we’ve all absorbed the main lesson of Steubenville: the dehumanization of the female is so pervasive that young people will stand by and not just watch rape, but laugh at it, video it, tweet it, post it to Facebook, and try to cover their tracks when police investigate.”

The event sounds ripe for a wake-up call: Wake up to the dangers of drinking, wake up to the hookup culture our teens are living in, wake up to the dangers of the pornographic culture of sexting.

That’s not how Salon sees it. The website chose today to highlight not the clear, present danger of the kinds of events that led to the Steubenville rape, but a vague, esoteric danger of the events designed to prevent such behavior. A journalist named Molly McCluskey writes about her experience going to a Steubenville summer camp.

“We gathered in seminars to discuss celibacy. We listened to seemingly savvy college students discuss how Jesus had made all things possible for them. We were told, repeatedly, that we were part of a community, we were loved, we were safe. We were blessed, and were the blessed,” she says.

“There was a darker side, of course,” she adds. She lists the problems:

1. Lack of diversity.
2. “Literal” interpretations of the Bible.
3. Lectures on “the sanctity of life in all its forms, the perils of evil … God’s plan for marriage.”
4. “We were told that God had a purpose for us, that we were part of a larger community of believers who would be sheltered as long as we led a pure life.”

Leaving aside the fact that her first point contradicts her others (“they should be open to others’ differences – but how dare they expect me to be open to theirs?”) her story reveals something shocking. She equates the experience of enduring a religious conference she didn’t like with the experience of a rape victim.

She does it in a very indirect way, but the implication is clear. She writes of the victim of the Steubenville rape:

“Her tale rips me up, because she was victim of a culture that was not safe, where football was the religion and the boys were the chosen ones. Not everyone can leave Steubenville on the back of a bus. I was lucky I could. I was lucky that I could move on from my own closed world.”

What are you saying, Molly?

See for yourself  what Steubenville Conferences are trying to do. Their message: “From the beginning of time God chose you with a perfect love he called you to echo a love that resounds throughout all creation. … God delights in you and he wants you to be happy.”

They are telling kids to respect themselves and others. They are connecting the beauty of creation to the beauty of their bodies.

In the midst of an  explosion of venereal diseases and  pornographic understandings  of sexuality, the Steubenville conferences are doing exactly what is needed.

By denouncing them in the national media on the basis of her own dislike, who is McCluskey trying to help?