Fish on Friday and the Library

Those of us in Warren County who support our award-winning library wonder why those who want to ban books are so adamant and persistent.  Why, after the Republican primary elections, when library supporters received broad public support, did the foul four continue to punish the library by assigning its resources to other government functions?

To answer that question, you must be a Catholic of a certain age.

I was sixteen years old when the Second Vatican Council concluded its work and outlined reforms in the Catholic Church.  I am a Catholic both by birth and conviction.

I have vivid memories of the old church, the Latin mass, and fish on Fridays.

There is a joke we Catholics have about the fellow who went to a baseball game on a Friday.  Like any red-blooded American, he ordered a hot dog.  After all, he was at a ballgame.  With a hot dog in hand, he recalls that it is Friday and therefore, he cannot eat meat, namely the hot dog.  If he eats it, he is committing a sin.  If he throws it away, he is wasting food, and that is also a sin.  If he gives the hot dog away and someone else (presumably a fellow Catholic) eats it, he has caused that person to sin, and that is also a sin.   The way out of this dilemma is not to go to baseball games on Friday.

A few years ago, I saw an announcement that a local Catholic school was putting on a production of A Man for All Seasons.  I love that play, and I love Saint Thomas More, who was the man for all seasons.  Recently, I was at the Winchester Book Gallery, and I saw on the shelf Thomas More:  A Life by Joanne Paul.  Four hundred forty-five pages later, I knew a lot more about More.

I wondered:  What did the local Catholics in Front Royal like so much about Saint Thomas More that they would sponsor a program about him?

Saint Thomas More stood up to King Henry VIII and refused to accept that Henry could be both King and head of the Catholic Church in England.  The Pope is head of the Catholic Church, and he lives in Rome, not in London.  I am 80% Irish, and standing up to the British king is a grand deed indeed.

Thomas More lived during the rise of Martin Luther and his challenge to the Catholic Church.  While Henry was trying to get a divorce, Thomas More was leading the charge to apprehend and burn at the stake those who supported Luther or even those in possession of Luther’s books.  Ah, books.

If a person was in possession of Lutheran books, they could read them and give them to others to read and thus spread what Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher saw as polluted religion.

As he saw it, if Thomas More did not rid the world of Luther’s book and thoughts, then he, Thomas More, was committing a sin.  Thomas More would be giving the hot dog to some other poor soul to eat on a Friday.

If you are an old school Catholic, as I was in 1965, you might adhere to the position that homosexuality is, as I think the phrase was, “intrinsically disordered.”  It was considered a bad thing, abnormal, and a condition that led to sinful behavior.  You might feel the need to convert the sinner.  You might recognize that homosexuals existed, but you would insist that they not be open about it and stay, as it were, in the closet.

Then came liberation movements.  There was the black liberation movement highlighted by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  Then came the consumer liberation movement and the rise of Nadar’s Raiders.  Then there was the women’s lib movement, and then the gay rights movement.  Democracy was reaching out to include more groups in mainstream American life, bringing them out of the shadows and into the light.

There was a time when some in the Catholic Church considered “Americanism” a sin.  When challenged, the conservative Catholic often circles the wagons and pulls inward.

Conservative Catholics in Front Royal and elsewhere do not want books in a free public library that suggest that homosexuality is normal; that there is nothing intrinsically disordered, read sinful, about being gay.  This is a far cry from Pope Francis’ comment, “Who am I to judge?”

When Robert F. Kennedy, Sr. ran for President in 1968, Playboy magazine asked him if he would sit for an interview.   He refused.  When asked why, he replied, “Because I don’t want my kids reading that magazine.”  That, in my opinion, was the right thing to do.  RFK did not do offense to the 1^st Amendment.  Instead, he taught his kids what he thought was right and wrong.

I am not without sympathy for parents who are trying to teach kids acceptable behavior in the social media age, the age of computers.  I find it hard to imagine turning to my father while he watched a commercial on the six o’clock news and asking him, “Daddy, what’s erectile dysfunction?”

What I think we need is not fear and circling the wagons, but confidence in our beliefs and an engagement with the culture.  We don’t need an alternative culture but a reformed and redeemed culture.

A concrete example of what I am trying to say is the withdrawal by the Warren County School Board from the Virginia School Board Association in favor of a conservative upstart alternative.  If conservatives on the school board were convinced that they had better ideas than people in Arlington, Bristol, or Richmond, then they should have the confidence to share those good ideas with their fellow Virginians.  A confident person believes in their ideals and ideas and is not threatened by alternative viewpoints.  We could learn from the challenges faced by school boards in other parts of the states and, equally important, those places can learn from us.

Isolating yourself from outside forces is not a sign of strength and conviction but a sign of weakness and fear.

Tom Howarth
Warren County, VA

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