Philoflagellationism & Conservative Catholics
• Christian Pop Culture , • Hodgepodge
My business partner Gordon joked:
Gary Wills writes about The Passion of the Christ:Has any witty reviewer referred to the Mel Gibson Passion as Good Friday the 13th? Because not only is it bloodier than the average slasher movie, but--- just when you think they've finally killed him, he gets back up and keeps on coming!
My wife and I had to stop glancing furtively at each other for fear we would burst out laughing. It had gone beyond sadism into the comic surreal, like an apocalyptic version of Swinburne's The Whipping Papers.
And Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II:
Since the Legionaries [members of The Legion of Christ] draw on a very conservative pool of young men for their schools, and proselytize them intensely for vocations to their order, they are able to fill their seminaries at a time when the dioceses are finding it hard to recruit new priests. One of the things the Pope likes about the group is its ordination rate. The blessing, in Rome's eyes, is not the sheer numbers of Legion priests, but their orthodoxy on points of the Pope's special concern, including his detailed sexual proscriptions (against masturbation, homosexuality, marriage for priests, premarital sex; and, within marriage, against condoms even for spouses with AIDS, against diaphragms, the birth control pill, the morning-after pill, vasectomy, tubal ligation, and in vitro fertilization).
The New York Review of Books: God in the Hands of Angry Sinners