December 2016
Book Review
THE GLOBAL SEXUAL REVOLUTION by Gabriele Kuby, July 2015, 283 pp. Available on Amazon (£13.00 in the UK).
TIM WILLIAMS
The subtitle of Gabriele Kuby's book is "Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom". She describes, in compelling historical detail, an historically unprecedented attempt — so far outrageously successful — to uproot millennially held beliefs and values concerning the nature of marriage and the family.
Feminists were in the driving seat, homosexual activists were the engine room; but the people manipulating, directing and financing both groups were the power elites in global finance, the United Nations and the European Union.
Forensically Sound : Spiritually Unsound
Kuby is a convert to the Catholic Faith, but she lets the Church off quite lightly — given that it was the only possible bulwark blocking the path of the apostles of hedonism, and of the disciples of the Frankfurt School of Cultural Marxism. She writes:
Since bishops mounted opposition to the encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968), [...], an ecclesiastical vacuum has arisen in the proclamation and teaching of Catholic sexual morality. This has given the Church a split personality. Because of its teachings on sexual morality, the Catholic Church has been under constant fire from the media, even though these teachings are hardly ever preached, taught or lived in the local parishes anymore. [p. 233]
This book should be read, on the principle of "know your enemy". It is forensically sound and meticulously chronicled. It must have taken considerable courage to write it; and the book will have earned Kuby no shortage of brickbats. But the book is, nevertheless, from a diagnostic point of view, seriously flawed.
Strangely enough, the "elephant in the room" is the wholesale failure of the Catholic Church to teach and preach, in season and out of season, its Traditional doctrine on marriage and family life. So, much of this review will, inevitably, be an extended "spiritual health warning".
Fundamental Misunderstandings and Omissions
This is a book which, in both its earlier German edition and in its English translation, has attracted much praise. Indeed, much of this book does deserve praise. But Kuby's understanding of the theology of Catholic marriage is gravely deficient. This deficiency is mainly due to her wholehearted espousal of John Paul II's book, Theology of the Body — which has already been covered in CO in the course of Drs. Robert and Maike Hickson's book review of The Family Under Attack by Don Pietro Leone [Jan. 2015, p. 66]. Suffice it to recall here that Theology of the Body is anything but Catholic.
For example, on page 236, Kuby makes the following astounding assertion: "The sex act is the most complete expression of love possible between a man and a woman." One only has to consider the love of Our Lady and St. Joseph for each other to see the falsity of her statement.
In many countries, Kuby points out, the bishops' conferences refused to follow Paul VI's ban, in his encyclical Humanae Vitae, on the use of artificial contraception. They issued statements releasing married Catholics from the teaching authority of the Catholic Church regarding birth control methods, leaving that up to their subjective conscience. This massive episcopal "own goal" has effectively disabled the Church Militant.
The Cultural Marxists are aware that episcopal disarray gives them an unprecedented advantage. Kuby hints at this: "The battle to rescind moral standards is also raging in the Catholic Church. The Church's position in the German-speaking countries can hardly be called aggressive or uncompromising." (p.190) She quotes Irish moral theologian Vincent Twomey, SVD: "I think that the debate over Humanae Vitae brought the entire crisis with Western cultural history to a climax." (p.199) But she never explicitly makes the link between the failure of the leaders of the Catholic Church to uphold the traditional Catholic teaching on marriage, and the rampaging success of Cultural Marxism. It is this tragic failure — and only this failure — which has made the global sexual revolution at all possible.
Kuby doesn't speculate on what might have happened had bishops' conferences not been set up in the first place. Since the ban on contraception had always been part of the Ordinary and Universal Magisterium, which is infallible and which is seen in the constant, consistent and universal teachings of the Church in all times, in all ages all over the Catholic world, individual diocesan bishops would have been more likely to uphold it. Thus a crucial bastion of the Faith — a most powerful barrier to burgeoning Cultural Marxism — was removed by these bishops' conferences. Kuby doesn't give this tragic dereliction of episcopal duty the central strategic importance it has had in the rise of the global sexual revolution. She treats it, instead, as a mere epiphenomenon, or concomitant of something else: the "something else" being the top-down imposition of the imperatives of the global sexual revolution.
Magisterial Teaching vs. "Non-magisterial Utterances"
In his The Family Under Attack, Don Leone discusses what he calls "a novel tendency in the Magisterium". His use of the term "Magisterium" is doubly unfortunate. Firstly, because readers might very easily think that the "Magisterium" Don Leone analyses is infallible, when the very opposite is true. Secondly, because the Church's infallible Magisterium is twofold: the Extraordinary Magisterium in which the dogmas of Faith are precisely and infallibly defined; and the Ordinary and Universal Magisterium referred to above. So, to preserve the theological coherence of Don Leone's analysis, I propose to substitute the phrase "non-magisterial Church utterances".
According to Don Leone, such utterances
- 1. no longer accord priority to the procreative finality of marriage, but rather accord priority (at least implicitly) to "love";
- 2. condemn contraception not for its frustration of the procreative finality of marriage, but rather for its rupture of the bond between "the unitive and procreative meanings of the conjugal act";
- 3. advocate natural birth control.
The traditional doctrine is that the primary finality of marriage is procreation, which is the rationale for large families, for the disfavour for natural birth control and for the wrongness of artificial contraception. In Don Leone's view, the novel "doctrine" is (at least implicitly) that the primary finality of marriage is "love", which justifies small families and natural birth control. The wrongness of artificial contraception is presented as the rupture of the unitive and procreative meaning of the marital act. The two doctrines are clearly in conflict, so that the modern doctrine cannot be considered a deepening or a clarification of the traditional doctrine. Therefore, it cannot be considered as Catholic either.
"Gender Mainstreaming"
This departure from Tradition may in large measure explain why the disciples of the Frankfurt School of Cultural Marxism are sweeping all before them. Kuby's book is, in effect, a meticulously researched account of their astonishing success. But her narrative largely fails to account for the major role of the novel Catholic "doctrine" of marriage in the genesis of this geopolitical takeover. She fails to see that only a wholesale return to the Traditional Catholic doctrine of marriage will arrest the Cultural Marxists in their tracks.
On the plus side, Kuby is very good at explaining the real reason why the globally active power elites are so keen to back the global sexual revolution: to limit and reduce the world's population:
Terms like health, freedom of choice, women's empowerment, unmet needs, quality services, and reproductive health are cliches used to market the strategy of population reduction. Every woman on Earth should be able to choose how many children she would like to have by being provided with reproductive health services through the United States and UN agencies. This term is a Trojan horse for contraceptives, "safe" abortion, and sterilisation.
The benighted disciples of the Frankfurt School are merely "useful idiots" — in Lenin's phrase — who are being encouraged, financed and exploited by the global power elites. These "useful idiots" have one supremely powerful weapon in their arsenal: "gender mainstreaming":
Never before has there been an ideology that aims to destroy the gender identity of man and woman and every ethical standard of sexual behaviour. This ideology is called "gender mainstreaming."
This ideology is "strategically aimed at the human being's very core — his or her identity as man or woman — as the individual is increasingly delivered to a sex drive stripped of all moral standards." Kuby elaborates:
It was previously reserved for men to develop ideological systems that left outrageous destruction in their wake and cost countless millions of people their lives. Gender ideology was made up by radical feminist women, and its implementation has been secured — with unimaginable consequences. Many cultures have perished from moral degeneration. For moral degeneration to be forced on people by the rulers of this world is something new.
I must confess I had never come across this ghastly neologism — "gender mainstreaming" — until I read Kuby's book. I strongly suspect I'm not alone in this. This weapon has been kept well below most people's radar: hence its sudden devastating geopolitical power. Only insiders know the weapon by its name of "gender mainstreaming". What this re-education — for that's what it is — is supposed to achieve, according to Kuby, is the removal from our heads of the millennia-old habit of mankind: that of distinguishing men from women.
Sodomitic Engine of Irrationality
She pinpoints the homosexual movement as the activist engine that drives this global sexual revolution, which culminates in an attack on basic democratic freedoms and is especially directed against Christians:
Since the 1960s, with help from the United Nations (UN), the European Union (EU), and the media, a powerful lobby has been fighting to change the value system. The goal is absolute freedom, unfettered by any natural or moral limitations. For such absolute freedom that wishes to free itself from the "tyranny of nature", any natural precept is an obstacle that must be removed. When freedom is understood in this way, there is no "good", no "evil", and no system of standards. The concrete weapons in this war include deconstruction of male-female sexuality, alteration of the population's social norms and attitudes (especially among youth), complete legal equivalency of homosexual partnerships with marriage, and even social ostracism and legal criminalisation of any opposition to their new "norms".
As pointed out by Melanie Phillips in The Spectator (30/1/16), our political class is obsessed by gender issues. The Commons Women and Equalities Select Committee has produced a report saying "transgender people" are being failed. The issue is not just whether they really do change their sex. The crime being committed by society is to insist on any objective evidence for this at all. As Melanie Phillips says, logic doesn't come into this at all. I'm afraid that G.K. Chesterton's humorous paradox that the definition of a madman is not someone who has lost his reason, but someone who has lost everything except his reason — has no purchase here. Quite simply, logic has been jettisoned.
In a witty article in The Federalist (26/1/16), entitled The New Sexual World Order Is So Confusing, George Fields has great sport with the whole gender mainstreaming enterprise. Two quotes should suffice — and give a little comic relief in the gloom:
My consciousness-raising has begun. But I must confess that it will be very hard for me to make this transition, for I am even now deeply consumed by patriarchal modes of thought and masculinist conceptions of logical rigour. For example, it is very hard for me to understand how a transgendered person can claim they should become the other sex because they feel like the other sex; for how can they know what it is like to feel like the other sex if they have never been the other sex?
I find myself confused about how it is possible that high-heeled shoes, dresses, and lipstick are all tools of the patriarchy to oppress women and transform them into mere objects of male desire, yet it is considered necessary that men who transition to become women must wear high heels, dresses, and lipstick in order to “express themselves as women,” which would suggest that there is something innately feminine about these objects.
Melanie Phillips concludes her Spectator article thus:
Gender cannot be at real risk because it is anchored in an immutable reality. What is on the cards is oppression, socially engineered dysfunction and the loss of individual freedom. And it is so-called Conservative politicians who are helping wave the red flag of revolution.
Undue Optimism
Kuby painstakingly chronicles the steady, relentless, remorseless replacement of family mainstreaming by gender mainstreaming. She patiently describes the whole avoidable process by which this replacement has taken place. By so doing she has put all of us in her debt.
But I found her Afterword unduly optimistic. She does not mention the fact that, over the past fifty years, too few of our Church leaders have clearly reiterated the Divine warnings against the vice of sodomy as expressed in Scripture and the Magisterium. It is rare to hear priests and prelates denounce this vice as a mortal sin that sends the soul to hell if not repented. It is rare to hear a prelate speak as clearly as does Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Kazakhstan, who explained that acceptance of homosexuality "contradicts directly the words of God, which say that homosexual acts and the homosexual lifestyle are a grievous offence against the will of God (cf. Gen 18:20; Lev 18:22, 20:13; Is 3:9; Rom 1:26-27; 1 Cor 6:10; 1 Tim 1:10; Jud 7)."
By approving this vice, we open the door to persecution against Christianity. In 2 Peter 2:6, Saint Peter gives us this prophetic — and most timely — warning:
And reducing the cities of the Sodomites, and of the Gomorrhites into ashes, condemned them to be overthrown, making them an example to those that should after act wickedly.
Could this be a foreshadowing of the "annihilation of nations" warned of by Our Lady of Fatima in 1917?
Heavenly Solutions
The only way to oppose the madly careering juggernaut of the global sexual revolution is to do what Our Lady of Fatima has asked for: prayer, penance, daily Rosary; and for the Pope and the bishops collegially to consecrate Russia to her Immaculate Heart to obtain the triumph of her Immaculate Heart and avert Divine chastisement.
We must also oppose the rise of this sin that cries to Heaven for vengeance, and pray for the conversion of those trapped in this vice.