Reaction from the bishops' critics didn't take long. Some said the bishops themselves have very serious problems with pornography; others pointed out the not-so-distant sex abuse crisis.

The upshot was that the bishops ought to have different priorities.

One could be forgiven for confusing this disagreement with one from the 1980s.

Didn't it play out over a generation ago — with the result that our culture basically accepts porn as part of sexual liberation?

Perhaps. But the era of magazine and video porn has been replaced by online porn, and this may lead us to wonder if Catholic teaching on this topic is worth a second look.

Indeed, the bishops' new initiative resisting porn is likely to gain many unexpected allies, including many feminists.

The digital age has produced a situation in which on-demand video of virtually any sexual act is available for free at the click of a mouse. Last year, one site alone had 18.35 billion visits, leading some to call porn "the wallpaper of our lives."

And as virtual reality porn becomes available, it is difficult to see how this trend might reverse itself.

The result has been that porn now dominates the American sexual imagination. What sex is for has been "pornifed."

The rise of "hook-up culture" is instructive here: Such casual and impersonal sex is, unsurprisingly, very similar to a porn scene.

Feminists — from Andrea Dworkin in the ‘80s to Naomi Wolf today — are among the few allies joining the Catholic bishops in energetically resisting this trend.

The porn industry, it turns out, is overwhelmingly patriarchal and works out terribly for women. Continue reading

• Charles C. Camosy is associate professor of theological and social ethics at Fordham University.

Jake had already connected to her story in what he believes is a miraculous way. The boy's inexplicable recovery from a flesh-eating illness in 2006 is attributed to prayers to Kateri (pronounced Gad-a-lee in Mohawk) on his behalf.

Jake, who is of Lummi descent, said he's gotten used to the attention he draws when people learn he's at the center of the miracle that led the Vatican to decide to proclaim Kateri a saint — a step that will make her one of the church's holy role models, and the first Native American to be canonized.

He likes to read and play basketball, and he loves video games. He and his 10-year-old sister, Miranda, are also training to become altar servers.

"I feel a great amount of gratitude and thanks to her," Jake said of Kateri.

The spring in upstate New York is believed to be where Kateri Tekakwitha was baptized and formally became a Christian on Easter Sunday in 1676. That spring water supplied the Mohawk village where Kateri lived for 11 years. Jake and his family filled several bottles with water from the spring to take back to their Ferndale, Wash., home.

The Finkbonners were among hundreds of people visiting the Kateri shrine and the Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs, in Auriesville, N.Y., as part of the 73rd Annual Tekakwitha Conference that took place in mid-July in nearby Albany.

The Tekakwitha Conference is based in Great Falls, Mont., and is the only Catholic Native American/Aboriginal religious organization in North America. An estimated 680,000 Native American Catholics live in the United States, according to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Read more

Sources

• The Washington Post
• Image: Zoomer