It is wearisome to need to go to confession every week, week after week, but it is more wearisome to go once a year, even once every several years. I don’t know why I have often chosen the latter. The sins pile up like laundry you stare at in denial. That’s my problem this Ash Wednesday: soiled clothes. Maybe it’s my problem every Ash Wednesday. Ten Lents ago, when it was my first year blogging, I spent a liturgical season writing about the Victorian poet Christina Rossetti. I’ve not done that kind of thing since, so perhaps it’s time again. This year I’m going to talk about John Donne—with a break one week for George Herbert and another week for Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun a year or two, but wallowed in a score?
BY: Henry Matthew Alt • February 22, 2023 • Literature; Liturgical Year; Sacraments
Bill Donohue’s argument is that a marriage between two men (or two women) is impossible in natural law. Another way of putting that is to say that marriage has an ontological character such that two people of the same sex can not enter into it, any more than a square can enter into roundness. The law can declare a square round and make it henceforth “legally round,” but the square remains angular in fact. That’s Donohue’s point. If Fr. Martin wants to disagree, let him do so, but he should disagree with what Donohue is actually arguing. 
I am afraid the answer to the question is yes, but first let me fill in the background. What happened is that Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg was on Fox News with Brett Baier and, during a conversation about travel expenses for business, noted that he had often brought his “husband” (Chasten Glezman) with him. That prompted Bill Donohue to post an entire article at the Catholic League, denying that Buttigieg has a husband. Donohue admits that Buttigieg and Glezman are “legally married,” but goes on to construct an entirely orthodox natural law argument against the possibility that any two men (or two women) could be married before God.
At the National Catholic Reporter, Msgr. Irwin is exercised by the bishops’ draft document The Mystery of the Eucharist in the Life of the Church. His main concern is that the language of the document is too outmoded; “it reflects 400-year-old theology,” he says, rather than developments since Vatican II. It uses musty words like “transubstantiation”; it insists on obscure distinctions between “venial” and “mortal” sin; it uses the term “Real Presence,” for Jesus’ sake! “Are these terms,” Msgr. wonders, “aimed at people who no longer attend Mass,” or are they aimed instead at the bishops themselves?
Nancy Pelosi had an audience with the pope, and as sure as Old Faithful will blow, right-wing Catholics proved themselves faithful. Among them was Joseph Strickland, the bishop of Tyler, Texas; who mounted his pulpit on Twitter and declared, with all the solemnity of an edict, that Pelosi was not even a member of the Catholic Church. “Claiming to be Catholic is easy,” he tweeted. “Living the Catholic faith centered in Jesus Christ is extremely hard. As long as Nancy promotes the slaughter of the unborn she is not a member of the Catholic faith centered in Jesus.” Stop there.
