2 days Ago By By Ed Adamczyk
Guardians of morality, guardians of whatever Like a lot of matters these days, an incident like this can be met with a sort of interested ambivalence; it’s not shocking yet it’s not defensible. It’s just another manifestation of what was once derided as “situational ethics,” or perhaps, as Inspector Cleauseau said, just a part of the rich pageant of life. A Catholic priest in Brooklyn was “stripped of his priestly duties” for a heretofore undisclosed financial transaction pertinent to a corruption investigation involving the current mayor of New York City.
The media noted the priest, or former priest, was in hot water a year ago for allowing pop star of the moment Sabrina Carpenter access to his church to shoot a video. Dancing provocatively before the altar, wearing an assortment of flashy clothes, that sort of thing. It is surprising that a culture clash of this type can still draw attention, not to mention censure and outrage.
The financial malfeasance likely happens regularly whenever organizations of power collide – church and government, historically, are often unified – and violations of sanctity in music videos go back to at least Madonna’s time in the limelight. It becomes trivial, almost comic, eventually – look at the media’s portrayal of the devil in movies and elsewhere; what was once scary and horrifying usually has an edge of ridicule about it, and the use of the devil in, say, silent films of the early 20th century seems quaint now – and any outrage over sacrilege or disrespect diminishes after someone else’s shocking video is released. “O tempora! O mores!” the Roman orator Cicero used to say around 70 B.
C., and he evidently said it a lot. It roughly translates to “Oh, the times we live in! Oh, our morals and customs!” If he saw what we today wear displayed on our T-shirts and bumper stickers he’d be appalled, but evidently, it did not take much to get him started.
Yes, vulgarity is a free speech issue, but even places with no constitutional guarantees also feature their share of envelope-pushing provocateurs. It is said that one sign of getting old is one’s reluctance to change people. Back when we wore buttons pinned to our shirts to exhibit our interests, a popular one was “I used to be disgusted, now I’m just amused.
” Life is a lot easier with that attitude; just another advantage to getting older that no one tells you. The state of New York legalized same-sex marriages in 2011 and the number of such unions is in the hundreds of thousands by now. A lot of energy was spent on this matter, with careers made and wrecked, arguments of persuasion delivered on both sides, insults were pervasive and 13 years later, well: if you plan to leave the Empire State it’s likely for some other reason.
O tempora! It’s the story of things going in and out of style. Blowing cigarette smoke in someone’s face was acceptable, even classy in certain situations. These days you and the smoker have well-defined rights to invoke.
Dinner conversation is more inclusive. It is almost a given that your daughter’s jeans are too snug for your taste but just right for hers and that of her friends. Time and mores march on; that’s what nostalgia is for.
An aside: I recall attending a car show once, one of those events in which those with interesting, restored and usually older cars get together and take over a parking lot. Crowds gather in a friendly and non-competitive atmosphere, and in the last hour, the cars fire up and drive away, leaving a cloud of sweet-scented exhaust in the air. That’s the smell of leaded gasoline, I pointed out, a fond memory for some and something a lot of younger people had never experienced.
So a priest gets in trouble for holding a movie shoot in his church. I am not in the artist’s target demographic and it’s not my church, so perhaps I should not care, but it is an example of someone attempting to uphold what some regard as standards, and while it is a losing endeavor I salute them. There was once an enterprise called the Catholic Legion of Decency, which was everything its name implied, and whose prime mission was to rate newly-released films and rate them by adherence to the Legion’s views on morality.
One category was “C – Condemned,” and a Jesuit priest I knew at the time told me he sought out new films before they were “condemned” by forces above him. This was sound thinking..
