Letter #22, 2023 Wednesday, January 18: Top Ten 2022, #9: Matt Walsh
Each year we choose 10 people we feel are exemplary is some way for their witness faith, their hope, their charity — the three are related.
Among our choices was Matt Walsh, 36.
This young man has become very controversial in our “post-Christian” society, and often condemned for his traditional Catholic beliefs, particularly on gender and “transgenderism.”
But he has not been silenced.
He has courageously spoken the truth in love, despite vicious attacks against him.
Walsh rented an apartment in Virginia for one day in 2021 to qualify to speak out against the Loudoun County School Board for allowing transgender students the use of restrooms matching their gender identity.
During his speech, which he later featured in his film What is a Woman?, Walsh said:
“You are all child abusers. You prey upon impressionable children and indoctrinate them into your insane ideological cult, a cult which holds many fanatical views but none so deranged as the idea that boys are girls and girls are boys.” (link)
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St. Paul tells us in his famous verses in his 1st Letter to the Corinthians: “For now we see now as in a glass darkly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know even as I am known. So there remain these three: faith, hope and charity. But the greatest of these is charity. (1 Corinthians 13:12-13)
The question remains: What is true charity (from the Latin word “caritas,” meaning love)?
What is true love?
Webster’s dictionary tells us that charity means “in a general sense, love, benevolence, good-will; that disposition of heart which inclines men to think favorably of their fellow-men, and to do them good. In a theological sense, it includes supreme love to God, and universal good-will to men.”
“To do them good.”
But there may be some disagreement over what “good” one can or should do to another, or others.
This is our situation today.
It is agreed that we should love one another, and do good to one another.
But what is the most true and greatest good we can do?
When the apostles Peter and John were going into the Temple, there was a lame man who was asking them for alms.
Though the man was “expecting” money, he received both “less” and “more” than he expected.
He received less pity and more love, less money and more worth, less limitation and more freedom, less pain and more health. (link)
When the man looked up at them, seeking an act of love from them (the giving of a few coins), Peter said this:
“Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have I give unto thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk.
“And he took him by the right hand, and lifted him up: and immediately his feet and ankle bones received strength.
“And he, leaping up, stood, and walked, and entered with them into the temple, walking, and leaping, and praising God.” (Acts 3:6-8)
Real love means giving people the truth.
So the Apostles told the man to “rise up and walk” as an act of love and of truth.
And if you love children, you want to give them what is real, and what is true.
And if you truly love and want to help them, you do try to give them what is real and true, not guide and direct and encourage them to travel into a shadowland of untruth and falsity which ultimately abandons them to profound frustration, misery and despair.
For this reason, we choose the courageous Matt Walsh as one of our “Top Ten” people of 2022.
(Below is a more complete profile.)
Ten Who Shine
Catholics who showed us the good and beautiful in 2022
In this issue, we spotlight 10 Catholic individuals who “made a difference” in 2022 –– and beyond. Five of them are members of the Catholic clergy, men whose ordination has deepened and broadened a life-long desire to serve Christ and their fellow men by offering their entire lives to Him. Their life’s work has been infused with the grace of the Gospel, transforming them to love and serve others because they were first “captured,” falling in love with Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
Five of them are lay people who, like most of us, must struggle every day in between “the world” and “the Church,” to keep that love burning. Each of us desires to shine a light on something good and beautiful that God has given us in this time, and that modern man in all his troubles and sorrows and confusion needs. The lay people we have chosen have done that. Join us in saluting our “Top Ten” of 2022.
Matt Walsh
One Simple Question
A Catholic cultural commentator shines light on the illogic of “transgenderism”
The year 2022 saw the release of an explosive documentary film by Catholic cultural commentator Matt Walsh that asked the titular question, “What is a Woman?”.
The simple question, which Walsh posed to a variety of people ranging from clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson to transgender activists to African Masai tribesmen, proved to be a decisive one that some of his interlocutors just couldn’t answer.
And that was the point: how can one assert that transgenderism has a valid rationale when people who claim to transition from men to women (or vice versa) cannot even say what a woman is?
As the husband and father of four, writer, blogger and online Daily Wire host said himself in his column “What is a Woman? Why the Left Can’t Answer the Question”: “Gender theory has made it so that the word ‘woman’ itself, and the word ‘man,’ have no meaning. Leftists, because of their ideological commitments, cannot define the terms. They say trans women are women. They say that someone can start out life as a male and transition into a woman. But how can I understand any of these claims and declarations if I do not know how they define the word ‘woman’?”
The film, and the companion book he also released by the same title, caused a firestorm of criticism in the mainstream secular press, as well as appreciation and support in the Catholic press.
In it, he presses the logic of gender theory to its ultimate conclusion: if gender is not defined biologically, then it simply can’t exist, and even speaking of the concept “gender” means nothing.
The Masai tribesmen he interviews are the ones who provide the most straightforward and logical observation of what woman and man are: a woman has babies and a man does not.
Finally, it turns out, there is no alternative way to define the sexes.
We can add, “And that is what God meant when he said, ‘Male and female I have created them.’”
But the deeper issue that is thrown into relief by Walsh’s work is the ultimate fate of the soul of the world.
For sexuality, as American Orthodox writer Rod Dreher points out in a December 11 post at theamericanconservative.com (link) has emerged as the principal battleground of the struggle — it may not be an exaggeration to call it a cosmic struggle — for that soul.
Why?
Sexuality is the principal arena in which culture reveals its contours as either authentically human (meaning in harmony with our human natures as God created them), or anti-human.
There is no in-between.
(profile continues below)
So one lesson Matt Walsh’s documentary teaches us is that those who would deny that gender is a created reality end up denying our very humanity.
The result?
Human beings become playthings, as exemplified in ancient Roman society, where the free, landed male was culturally entitled to use whomever he wished — male or female, slave or freewoman — to satisfy his lust, effectively denying the humanity of those he used.
Christianity changed all that, bringing dignity and respect for their humanity, created in God’s own image, to ordinary people.
Today the situation is returning to that of pagan Rome.
The exception is the much-lauded but ultimately empty element of “consent” that exists where it did not in pagan Rome — but this does nothing to diminish the fact that modern sexuality, shorn first of its natural purposes through contraception, and now, in this “LGBT-friendly” age, even of its natural bodily expression, has become fundamentally a relationship of “using” others for pleasure — a situation Pope St. John Paul II labored throughout his pontificate to change through his “Theology of the Body” catechesis.
Walsh has done us a tremendous service by giving us new and irrefutable evidence that following God’s plan for sexuality, gender and procreation is really the only way that makes sense.
May Catholics around the world become awake to the danger human culture — another way of saying the world’s soul — is in because of our denial of reality in the sexual sphere.
[End, profile of Matt Walsh]
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