Aquinas Was A Radical. We Need A Radical Now.

In the wake of the latest round of the Catholic prelates trying to destroy the Church with their own versions of the Little Boy bomb, I've proposed we go full St. Thomas Aquinas and modify our theology in light of our improved understanding of God's biological laws.

Hey guys? How about if the next time you want to play with little boys you go far out into the woods and play with one like this?

To recap:

• God doesn't make contradictions. When science conflicts with theology, theology must bend.
• We know a whole lot more about sexual biochemistry now than we did 1,000 years ago.
• Christ did not come to Earth to bring us a pile of hopeless tasks. Celibacy isn't achievable by the vast majority of males of any species. Jesus never demanded that we do the impossible.

When I've engaged with Catholic Traditionalists, with whom I have great affinity if not membership in their group, they keep going back to the Church Fathers' teachings. What they don't get is that a lot of the Church Fathers were considered crazed radicals by the traddies of their day.

St. Thomas Aquinas was a bonafide heretic to many of his contemporaries. Among his many revolutionary and brilliant ideas, Aquinas claimed that there was a lot of valuable truth to be found in the Greek philosophers, all of whom were pagans.

The traddies replied, "Pagans? What madness is this? There is nothing we can derive from pagans save death and sin. No, we must chant and pray and burn incense, keeping our heads down in our prayer books and hymnals. To claim that because the world was created by God, all paths lead to God is heresy, plain and simple. Begone, you lunatic!"

In a lot of cases, the Church Fathers' greatest achievements were responses to crises of faith. Some of St. Augustine's teachings were corrections of heresies. Those heresies weren't always nutty, some of them were well-intentioned and reasonably logical. It required a devoted, holy genius to work out the response to the crisis of the moment.

Well, we need that now. This is clearly not working and I don't think it ever did. There are stories of priests going off the celibacy reservation from medieval times. Somebody with the theological chops and Church gravitas needs to make a stand for sanity. 

We need an Aquinas or an Augustine and we need him right now.