A Thorp in Wenski's side: defending the Archbishop of Miami

By Eric Giunta

It's good to be reminded every once in a while that I could have done worse with my life than squander tens of thousands of dollars over the past three years on a silly piece of paper that may or may not land me a job after graduation. But for the grace of God, I could have ended up majoring in journalism and landing a job at the New Times Broward-Palm Beach. Sure, it'd be a paycheck, but at what cost? For what doth it profit a man to land a job at some leftist rag, but lose his intellectual sanity? Man does not live on bread alone . . . !

My homage to Providence is occasioned by an unexpected screed published yesterday in the aforementioned yellow-sheet. Maybe I'm being too harsh: every literate person in South Florida knows the New Times isn't exactly a bastion of investigative journalism and literary accomplishment. When I was an undergrad, the principal use most of us had for the paper was doubling-it-up for a toilet seat cover when the local fast food joints that distributed it failed to provide accordingly. Most of its readership consists of the lonely and confused who peruse the paper's extensive classified section, where a disproportionate number of advertisers are paid escorts, seemingly most of whom sell themselves by trumpeting their "special parts" that distinguish them from those of us in the conservative extreme who continue to identify ourselves as men and women. These ads were always good for a laugh, but I forget how long it was before I realized that "M2F," "MTF," and "M to F" did not mean "Monday thru Friday" . . .

No, what surprised me was the piece's author, one Mr Brandon Thorp. I can't claim to know the man particularly well, but Mr Thorp and I have corresponded over some of the . . . more unsavory goings-on in the Miami Archdiocese which, at least up until very recently, were business-as-usual in South FL Catholicism. No collaboration ever came of our correspondence (which he initiated), and this was probably for the best, but I left our conversation with a respectful impression of Mr Thorp. He's much more cultured and well-read — and articulate — than he lets on in his latest hit piece.

That piece is a rhetorical (but not intellectual) sodomization of an editorial published by Miami's Archbishop Thomas Wenski in the pages of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. The editorial was not an exercise in Catholic apologetics but a plea for public civility and that intellectual sanity that is not exactly a staple of contemporary leftist (especially homosexualist) discourse. Thorp seizes on this apologetical deficit (presumably the good archbishop left this heavy-work to others), and caricatures Wenski as some sort of superstitious dogmatist ready to oppress the psycho-sexually dysfunctioned at a moment's notice. Like any ideological primitive unable to distinguish between objects or concepts that share only the most superficial characteristics, Thorp is apparently unable to distinguish between a Catholic prelate and an Iranian ayatollah. He claims that the Catholic Church as an institution desires the criminalization of private, consensual sodomy, but can't provide a shred of evidence for it.

Archbishop Wenski's editorial is an exercise in mainstream commonsense. The homosexualist movement has nothing whatsoever to do with securing equal protection under the law, but is all about imposing one set of religious values upon the American people. And that's fine. Leftist mythology notwithstanding, the Constitution does not prohibit state governments from imposing moral and religious values on citizens: it simply carves out certain protections for religious minorities, promising that their own free exercise will never be abridged. The Constitution protects the rights of homosexualists to advocate, in the public square, for their superstitious understandings of gender androgyny and the essential irrationality of the human body; and Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and other more conventional religionists have the same right to argue for the intellectual and moral superiority of their anthropology, and to advocate its reflection in civil law and jurisprudence.

Thorp's facile comparison of Archbishop Wenski (and by extension, every person not an ideological homosexualist) to the proponents of Jim Crow and apartheid goes to show he knows his argument is lost before he starts it. His comparison of sexual behavior to race is categorically fallacious, failing as it does to distinguish between unwilled characteristics like skin-color which have no inherent moral implications whatsoever, and behaviors which clearly do. A black man is just as human as a white man; but potentially life-giving marital coitus is a fundamentally different exercise of the sexual faculty than infertile and potentially life-destroying sodomy. Whether and to what extent the state has any interest in reflecting such distinctions in its laws is an entirely legitimate question, but Thorp is disingenuous when he pretends that such fundamental distinctions do not exist. And I believe he is a bright enough man that he should know better.

The rest of Thorp's piece is a lively illustration of the principle that leftist polemic makes for poor historiography. He cannot produce a single Biblical citation from the Pauline corpus to illustrate the Apostle's supposed loathing of the sacrament of matrimony because he knows darn well (though he relies on a corresponding ignorance on the part of his general readership, who are not exactly South Florida's literati) the difference between extolling a greater good (e.g., consecrated sexual abstinence) over a lesser good (e.g., marriage), and loathing the latter. We can't all be expert in everything, but if Thorp is going to take it upon himself to deride the intellectual acumen of the Archbishop of Miami and play Patristics-scholar, he'd better know what he's talking about. He doesn't. He cites some words of Saint Cyprian (an early bishop of Carthage whose biography I am morally certain Thorp is completely ignorant of, else he wouldn't have placed the sainted pontiff, who was martyred in 258, a century too early), then tells his readers that Cyprian regards marriage as merely "okay."

After three years of law school (and so three years of what Archbishop Wenski rightly calls "the sophistry that so often today passes as jurisprudence") I'm used to this. Thorp does with Cyrprian's writings what leftists do every day with the Constitution: tell you it says something it doesn't. As I've noted, leftism is a superstitious religious system, imposing on its votaries the belief that every document, when read by a leftist, contains magic "penumbras" that fill in whatever convenient dogmas from the leftist hierarchy-of-truths that are missing. And so the U.S. Constitution protects a right to abortion-on-demand and gay marriage and imposes atheism and/or secularism as the state religion, Islam is a "religion of peace," the American Founding Fathers were liberated lesbians, and the early Christians loathed marriage, because . . . these claims fit the leftist paradigm, whatever the real facts of the matter.

So, what did Saint Cyprian of Carthage really think about marriage? Let his words speak for themselves:

But chastity maintains the first rank in virgins, the second in those who are continent, the third in the case of wedlock. Yet in all it is glorious, with all its degrees. For even to maintain the marriage-faith is a matter of praise in the midst of so many bodily strifes . . . {Source; emphasis added}

In other words, Mr Thorp, marriage is glorious and praiseworthy.

I needn't address the rest in any detail. Suffice it to say that Mr Thorp is in bad need of some serious schooling in matters of both Catholic dogma and Church history. His penchant insinuations of Church complicity in genocide and "gendercide" are not documented or hyperlinked because he knows that serious historians do not back up these regurgitated tropes — he also knows his leftist and culturally illiterate readership won't bother to fact-check either. He and his readers don't know, and probably don't care to know, that the Catholic Church has always considered laymen and laywomen themselves to be the divinely-ordained ministers of their own celebration of Matrimony, and so "the Church" (in the persons of her betrothed laity) was performing marriages long before ecclesiastical law required the betrothed to have their weddings blessed in special church ceremonies presided over by ministerial clergy.

Brandon, baby: this piece was beneath you; sit down before you hurt yourself. Submit your apology to Archbishop Wenski; ask him to offer you some Catholic instruction; pray a novena to Oscar Wilde; and hit me up after I've taken the Bar if you ever wanna enjoy reruns of Brideshead Revisited over some mimosas.

© Eric Giunta