A Catholic gentleman on social media said that our current situation with male voters was because no one was listening to men– that the Catholic Church hasn’t listened to men.
At least, he said words to that effect. I didn’t see the tweet before it was deleted because of the outcry. But I’ve been thinking about the assertion ever since. It makes me sad. In the Year of Our Lord 2024, somebody apparently decided that the problem with everything was that the Catholic Church doesn’t listen to men. We have left men behind. We need to give more sympathy to the plight of poor forgotten men.
It’s not the first time I’ve heard such things, of course. It seems like Catholics are always thinking of how little they think of men.
“We’ve become too feminine” says the male prelate who wears silk and lace dresses in order to look “traditional.”
“Where is the outreach to MEN?” asks the Church which has one-seventh of the sacraments restricted so that only a man can ever get it, and all the top positions necessarily given to the men who have that sacrament and to nobody else.
“Can’t anyone think of the MEN?” says the theologian, who studies the texts of a 2000-year-old church which did not name a female Doctor of the Church until 1970.
“We are neglecting MEN!” says the Catholic NFP consultant, who demands that women fill out a complex calendar with their basal body temperature and cervical secretions and then palpate her cervix, carefully, so as not to accidentally masturbate, and write that down as well– all so that she can have a little space between pregnancies while avoiding mortal sin. Her husband’s part of this complicated job is to forego sexual intercourse now and then.
“Why can’t somebody think of the plight of MEN?” says the Catholic OB-gyn who convinces a lady to put off the hysterectomy she desperately needs in case God isn’t done giving her children yet.
“Our society is crumbling because feminists want MEN to be less MASCULINE” says the bishop, who quietly moved the priest who abused an adult woman in the confessional to another church, because it’s easy to write that one off as the woman’s fault and not “real” abuse. If it were an altar boy, that would be different.
“Let’s have a special ministry to our boys, free of female influence, so that they can grow up to be strong MEN,” says the youth minister, who turns a blind eye to the boys who snap girls’ bras and harass them at the Catholic high school.
“Let’s start a cenacle to pray for the chastity of our MEN, which is so often under attack,” says the faithful wife with ten children, who lies there obediently staring at the ceiling nightly while her husband scratches his itch, because she thinks it’s a mortal sin to tell him she’d rather not.
Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.
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