Parents in Brookline and Newton know what's going on, and they approve. I know, I used to live in a neighboring town, and attended a few school committee meetings when these issues were coming to the fore, about 15 years ago. It was like something out of a Frank Peretti novel. If the school committee and parents could have, they would have tarred and feathered the parents critical of the pornographic sex ed curriculum.
In other words, and perhaps more simple words, this is exactly what we proclaimed at Easter. Because of God’s raising of Jesus, the whole world is now divinized. All creation is redeemed. You and I and all creation are now in God. That is an astounding theological emphasis. But it is not the only emphasis the church has entertained over the centuries. Maybe that’s why I almost missed it. It is not what I was taught as a kid.
In the alternative version, the “world” is inherently corrupt, evil, and the enemy. In this interpretation, the church is the only bright spot on the horizon of an otherwise bleak and antagonistic universe. We are in mortal danger and must stand over against “them” and “it”–it meaning that worldly, wildly passionate, wickedly disordered world “out there” beyond the church. “Bad” out there; “good” only in here. It’s “we” against “them.”
And this interpretation is still with us, alive and well, in today’s church. It is still preached a lot. And it was very much in evidence just two weeks ago when the then Cardinal Ratzinger preached to his brother Cardinals in the moments before the recent conclave. He spoke of the church as a “little boat of Christian thought” tossed around on waves of “extreme” modern tendencies. And he spoke of the world as a “dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain....” It was all reminiscent for me of another time and place, when one of his illustrious predecessors, the more-than-somewhat reactionary Pius IX actually condemned all modern progress in the Syllabus of Errors published in the late 19th century. This even included the church’s condemnation of electricity as evil! No, I am not kidding! The world cannot be trusted.