Adam's sin disrupted male agreement

Pence writes:

Man is searching for the right authority and for true masculine communion. Cain and Abel were called to be lieutenants to their father.

Mankind was meant to be born within a kin group under the headship of Adam... When boys grow up without the compelling presence of male authorities, they become first and foremost deficient in attentiveness.

Attention deficit is the condition of those not living with a compelling authority.

We need fathers! We need our sacred altars, our female "temples of the Holy Spirit" and our male seed to once again be declared sacred and worthy of defense. We need acts of authority within our own system of governance and sacraments.The Catholics must change the dynamic -- and the Catholics are the Bishops.

The bishops protest against a specific and odious insurance requirement. Theirs is a protest of individual conscience -- a protest against authority, asking for an individual right for exemption. Like Martin Luther, they draw a line in the sand and say: "Here I stand; I can do no other." Like prophets, they speak a particular truth to power. Like adolescents, they are shocked that universal rules apply to them too.

The Catholic bishops are not Protestants. The priest kings do not hunger after justice only in the garb of prophets. Bishops are authoritative Fathers and Kings in their own domain. The 1960s are over -- for that matter, so is the 16th-century gambit of nailing demands on church doors.

Does anyone notice that in this war against the sexual rebels we are fighting the last configuration of the atheistic Enlightenment? In some ways because sexual order is so fundamental to the rule of love, it seems this is the legion of demons that rushed in after we evicted the Marxist devil. There never has been such willful and widespread confusion of what is good and what is evil. In other ways, though, the feminist homosexual masquerade is so pathetic, so deeply repugnant to whole cultures -- that one can imagine a good week of straight talk could totally turn the tide (even if there would be years of individual barn cleanings to follow.)

The bishops have authority in the sacred domain -- a precinct not meant to be a launching pad for politics. It is the higher domain that the political bond protects. In their heyday Cardinals Bernardin (Chicago) and Mahony (Los Angeles), along with Archbishops Roach (St. Paul) and Weakland (Milwaukee), turned the National Bishops Conference into the Senate Subcommittee on Moral Pronouncements. It does not help that as bishops become more orthodox, they keep the the Bernardin paradigm of the Catholic Church as a nag and lobbyist to the real authorities in Washington DC. It is the sacred precincts, not conservative policies, that are under attack and must be defended.

For decades now, feminists and homosexuals at work in the priesthood, church charities, remnant religious orders, Catholic schools, and non-profit agencies have built a highly effective alliance of government, non-profit, and church employees united by the common ideology of the sexual Left. Under the banner of women's health and a masquerade of civil rights and concern for the poor, they have rendered our civic discourse unintelligible because of fundamental category errors. They have kept the bishops off-balance by accusing them of being all male. What an odd change-of-pace screwball pitch that was! The problem with Catholic bishops is NOT that they are all male. It is that they are not masculine enough in personality, in temperament, in bonding patterns, in word and in deed.

Confirmed Catholics are aligned to each other under our bishops. We need them to clean our ecclesial houses to restore the sacred altar, to prune a corrupted priesthood and episcopacy, and to protect the Eucharist from defilement.

Nothing will help laymen in the political arena more than acts of protective authority in the sacral arenas. We need our bishop fathers to act in their own households to restore order. True Religion is the first rule of social justice: render God His due. Repent already, begin to cleanse His Temple, and Jerusalem will follow.