statue on display in cathedral, Linz, Austria

Decapitated statues of Mary are not uncommon in European nations culturally enriched by Muslim migration. So the July 1 beheading of the Virgin Mary in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception (a.k.a. Mariendom) in Linz, Austria, was a welcome detour from a political minefield. It shifted attention from Islam to a less threatening adversary: Catholic traditionalists. Let me explain. “Crowning,” a coarsely crafted sculpture of the Virgin Mary in labor, went on display at the cathedral as part of DonnaStage, a tangle of events celebrating the 100th anniversary of Mariendom’s consecration. Continue Reading
Sex Education, Then And Now

Sex education was simpler when I was a girl. There were only two sexes back then. And the word gender had not yet leaped from the declension of nouns to an identity. Sr. Edmund Marie, the biology teacher in the girls’ department of our parish high school, visited the grammar school every year. She spent a day talking to seventh graders (or was it sixth?) about the biology of plants, and brought with her a black portfolio of over-sized botanical posters. Continue Reading
A Personal Note On Pride Month

While the holy month of Pride was upon us, I thought often of the ancient Dance of Death. Through the 1990s, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, a parade saluting sexual behaviors that shortened lives struck me as a celebration against itself—an inverted Danse Macabre. What once had been cautionary and didactic was  becoming exhortative. The parade was encouraging if not, in a perverse way, edifying. A certain kind of free spiritedness, however lethal, was assumed to be tinged with heroism. Continue Reading
Pope Francis, The FCC, And Gender Ideololgy

Pope Francis’ coy two-step on sexual mores hangs over Catholic culture like the sword of Damocles. Papal ambiguity weakens the Catholic Radio Association’s current effort to resist newly mandated reporting rules about workforce diversity. Driving the rules is an ideological ambition to demolish the scaffolding of traditional behavioral norms regarding sex. Specifically at issue is the “nonbinary” classification. In February, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reinstated a dormant requirement that radio stations must file Form 395-B. The document requires radio stations and their affiliates to list the race and “gender” of their employees. Continue Reading
Seeing Things: Female Impersonation from Cabaret to Identity

So far as seeing things is an art, it is the art of keeping your eyes and ears open. (John Borroughs, 1908) You really can tell some things just by looking. It cannot be said too often: the eye is an organ of the brain. It has its own way of knowing. When it looks, for instance, at the grotesque Admiral Rachel (né Richard) Levine, or Sam Brinton, the non-binary former Biden appointee to the Department of Nuclear Energy, it discerns the gulf between sanity and a simulacrum of it. Continue Reading