Rome, Italy, Oct 4, 2017 / 04:57 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- It’s well-known that in ancient Rome hundreds of thousands of people would to pile into the stacked layers of stone seating in the Colosseum to watch gladiators fight to their death, cheering on as the warriors met a bloody and often drawn-out end.
However, while being a “gladiator” in modern Rome has mostly become a way pick up extra cash in photo-ops with tourists, there are some who argue that the gruesome nature of the ancient battles, in which people would essentially celebrate and take pleasure in the pain of others, hasn’t gone away, but has rather taken on a new, less obvious form in the digital world: pornography.
When it comes to internet pornography, Dr. Donald Hilton Jr. of the University of Texas Health Science Center said we as a society have to learn to ask the “uncomfortable questions about our culture, why we’re so easily voyeuristic to watch people being harmed.”
While pornography has always been a problem, the new widespread access offered through the digital world has led to a culture that enjoys “watching women being hurt on screen,” he told CNA.
Hilton recalled that in a tour of the Colosseum, his guide explained that throughout the centuries of its of operation, the structure “had up to several hundred thousand animals and gladiators dying in the colosseum with people watching them and enjoying watching their pain.”
Now “I think we have a neon colosseum, a colosseum of screens where far more, now, are watching people being harmed. And people are enjoying it,” he said, adding that in his opinion, “we’re no better than the ancient Romans in that.”
“In fact, in some way I think we’re worse, because at least they did it openly, but we hide behind our screens at night and do it, and tell ourselves it’s okay.”
Hilton spoke as part of a four-day conference on protecting children in a digitally connected and global society. Titled “Child Dignity in the Digital World,” the conference is being held in Rome Oct. 3-6 and is organized by the Pontifical Gregorian University’s Center for Child Protection.
Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin opened the conference as a keynote speaker. Other participants in the congress include social scientists, civic leaders, and religious representatives. Discussion points include prevention of abuse, pornography, the responsibility of internet providers and the media, and ethical governance.
Several leading personalities participating argued that given the easy access children have to the internet, they are increasingly falling prey to an industry that, without the proper protections, can ultimately leave them vulnerable, becoming victims to a wide variety of abuses.
On day two of the conference, Hilton was part of a panel of experts exploring the dangers of internet pornography and its impact on children, specifically the link between pornography and violence, and the effects of porn use on the human brain, particularly among youth.
A celebrated neuroscientist and world-renown surgeon, Hilton examined the scientific changes in the human brain when viewing pornography.
Essentially, he said human beings have “two brains,” one being the cortex, which he called our “thinking brain,” and the other being the brain stem, referred to by Hilton as our “wanting brain.” So while the brain might tell us to do something because it feels good, the cortex will tell us to slow down and think about the consequences.
Between the two is the “reward center” of the brain, he said, explaining that while it is intended to help motivate us, the reward center can be “hijacked and diverted” from this purpose if we take in “powerful rewards indiscriminately.”
In this case, the reward center can “reset the pleasure thermostat of the brain,” and a “new normal” is established, which can quickly become addiction, Hilton said, explaining that the brain structure is impacted by learning, and that “addictive learning sculpts the brain in a very damaging way.”
Referring to a recent study done by medical personnel, he said addictions to food and sex have now been put on par with substance abuse, because the same changes are found in brain studies “and the behaviors are almost identical.”
Children and young adults are particularly at risk from this, he said, because for one, the frontal-lobe control center of the brain don’t fully mature until the person is in their mid-20s. However, most exposure to pornography happens at a young age, leaving children particularly vulnerable to changes in the brain structure.
He said children are also more at risk because the chemicals for processing rewards and addictions are more potent brains that are not yet mature, so “an immature breaking system is essentially paired with an accelerated reward-seeking drive.” He also cited problems with brains systems that identify observers with the “motivational state” of those performing in the program, which in pornography is often linked to violence.
In his comments to CNA, Hilton said porn access at a young age is particularly concerning because since the brain of a child or teenager is not yet developed, it makes a strong imprint and “sets their template” in way that essentially sculpts the brain to prefer what they watch over reality.
Quoting American author, feminist, and political adviser Naomi Wolf, he said “pornified” boys are increasingly led to a mentality that “real women are just bad porn.”
Hilton said that in order to help counter the online porn industry, the issue has to be addressed in a new way. Whereas in the past it has primarily been relegated to the moral realm, he said the issue is wider, and that it’s important to bring the issue up in public settings “without mentioning religion.”
“Can we talk about exploitation not only of youth who are viewing pornography, but of young female performers that are being used up so quickly and exploited by a very powerful industry? Can we leave the religion out of it and talk about it from a public health perspective?” he said.
“This is a vast industry, the internet is a vast industry,” he said, adding that if any other industry had the same amount of disease, emotional health issues, and drug abuse involved, “they would cry out and there would be outrage.
However, “with porn, as long as they take their clothes off and put a camera there, you can do anything you want,” he said, comparing porn to “filmed prostitution.”
“Can we really say that porn is good and that people should view it if the people that make it are being harmed? Is it an ethical product then?” he asked, and noted that according to one study paper, 88 percent of the scenes in the 250 most popular porn movies show aggression toward women.
So when looking at the concrete numbers, “if it’s not ethical to produce it, is it ethical to watch it? What is the price someone is paying to film that?”
Also speaking at the conference was Dr. Mary Anne Layden, a psychotherapist and Director of Education for the University of Pennsylvania, who addressed the link between violence and pornography.
In her speech, she presented various research studies linking the use of pornography to increased aggression toward women. In youth particularly, various studies have proved that exposure to porn at a young age increases the likelihood youth will be promiscuous at an earlier age, and are more prone to partner abuse as they get older.
Porn use also and the misconceived belief that if access is so common, it isn’t harmful, and that women who are treated violently in porn films actually like it, she said.
In comments to CNA after her speech, Layden said pornography is especially dangerous for children because “everything children see is educational,” and since porn is typically the only imagery kids have when it comes to sex, they learn about it from “this toxic form.”
“Now their brains are absorbing this and they are getting these messages, and then they very quickly start to act on that,” she said, explaining that they “will likely start having sex earlier, they will likely think all relationships are sexual, they’ll start to try and get their partner to try and act out things they’ve seen in pornography.”
Pornography also leads to misconceptions about the human body and what constitutes abuse, she said, explaining that many young adults have come into her clinic complaining that their bodies “don’t work” because things don’t happen like they do in movies.
While numerous research studies have proven that performers in pornography films don’t enjoy what they do on-set, many people still believe the opposite, Layden said, because they don’t see the suffering the performers endure.
What most people don’t know, she said is that “on those porn sets there is a doctor, on every porn set,” and “he will give you any drug you can name – he will give you Percocet, he will give you Xanex, he will give you heroine, he will give you anything to get you to go through that scene, take that torture and smile while they’re doing it.”
She said that when children first come into contact with pornography their initial reaction is that “there’s something scary” about it, and even something violent, but that very quickly they start to learn from what they see that “violence is a sex act,” and this notion becomes more normal as they get older.
In terms of protecting children from harmful images, Layden stressed the importance of educating parents on the risks and finding the right software to block problematic content from popping up.
Unfortunately, she said around only 20 percent of parents have actually put protective software on their children’s devices and activated it.
But if parents are looking for a good company, she said “Covenant Eyes” has programs that work very effectively through blocks and accountability software that will send a list of their child’s search history to them at the end of the week.
While it might not be possible bring the porn access to zero, it is possible to reduce it, Layden said.
“The fact that we can’t reduce it to zero doesn’t make us stop anything else,” she said, naming youth smokers and cancer patients as examples. And concrete ways to reduce exposure is to put filters on computers in libraries and at schools, as well as personal devices children own, and to not let them put their computers in their bedrooms.
She also stressed the need to get legislators and governments involved, explaining that pornography sites have finally been legally required to check the age of someone trying to access their web-pages.
“That won’t stop the damage that’s done to adult men,” she said, explaining that pornography first of all does damage to those who use it, “but it will stop with the most vulnerable, which is the children.”
Perpetrators of pornography must also be held accountable, Layden said, because the industry ultimately makes money by “hurting children.”
“This is an absolute scandal, these are child abuse perpetrators, these pornographic websites,” she said, explaining that they ought to be treated as perpetrators and put in jail, because “if you actually enforce law against obscenity, you can actually take all of their profits.”
Doing this would also “send the message to culture that if we’re putting them in jail, this must be a bad thing,” she said. “The permission-giving beliefs that say everyone is doing it, it must be fine, is just one of the biggest damages, and we can start the sending the message that it’s not okay.”
“We’ve got to stop saying ‘boys will be boys,’” and instead begin educating families more effectively on what healthy sexuality entails, she said, because pornography “hurts everyone involved; men, women, children, performers…it hurts everybody that comes close to it.”
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“It is not possible to have Sacramental Communion without Ecclesial Communion”, due to The Unity Of The Holy Ghost; it Is “Through Christ, With Christ, And In Christ, In The Unity Of The Holy Ghost”, that Holy Mother Church, outside of which there is no Salvation, due to The Unity Of The Holy Ghost, exists.
I do not expect this German prelate to participate with our Holy Father, Benedict XVI, in The Consecration Of Russia to Our Blessed Mother’s Immaculate Heart, due to the fact that in denying The Unity Of The Holy Ghost, he denies The Divinity Of The Most Holy And Undivided Blessed Trinity, Father, Son, And Holy Ghost, and is hus, no longer in communion with Christ and His Church.
Queer indeed.
What else is one supposed to believe? The Catholic Church is being nicknamed” the Homosexual Catholic Church” by many non Catholics.
These name-callers are jealous of our Church – Apostolic Church – and they are wrong.
As in the movie “Cool Hand Luke”: “what we have here is a failure to communicate!”
Cardinal Marx conflates the fictive “homosexual COMMUNITY [?]” with an exhortation against “discrimination and devaluation of lgbti PERSONS [!].” Identity politics is one thing, the reality of persons is another…
In an earlier posting, yours truly referred to Marx’s German “synodal way” as a decoy. What was meant by this is that Germania is serving as a lightning rod to possibly distract attention from “a church that is not new, but different.”
Will this different (c)hurch be less corrupt than Marx or his agenda, but still smuggle in place of the perennial and universal Catholic Church something more pandemic and Lutheran? Less of the Eucharist than of communion; less of deepening spirituality than of a horizontal participation; less evangelizing of the deposit of faith than a more generic mission?
The slogan for the Synodality: “Communion, Participation, Mission.” We notice that the Vademecum makes no mention of families, but appendix D curiously includes “married couples” (aka gay marriage?).
Of course, the German synodal way will remain as the worst apple included (inclusive!) in the odiforous barrel of synodality. And, the luminary Cardinal Hollerich, relator general for the Synod on Synodality, will then bless a breathlessly waiting world with smoothed-over words for all this…
This fellow appears to have re-made himself in the image of the dinosaur Barney. Like Barney, he is long on imagination, short on reality. Barney had common sense, so I suppose he has a model to emulate.
Why do we continue to have news items about cartoon characters? May God have mercy and spare us, O Lord.
However benevolent, wise, judiciously patient we might interpret His Holiness on the issue of Catholicism in Germany the glaring fact remains that error remains and flourishes like a deadly fungus.
Death Caps [Amanita phalloides] Webcaps [Cortinarius species] Autumn Skullcap [Galerina marginata] are deadly poisonous fungi. Not easily distinguished in the forest. Whereas, white button, portobello, shiitake are delicious and healthy. Relations between a man and a woman are clearly distinct from relations between men and men women and women. The moral health of the former and the morally poisonous of the latter have become, for many of us, indistinguishable. Why? As long as Cardinals Reinhard Marx, Jean-Claude Hollerich, Christof Schönborn, O.P. are allowed free rein to express and implement their endearment of same sex abomination [who can ever forget a smiling Schönborn in attendance of a homosexual erotic musical dance display in the sanctuary of Vienna St Stephen Cathedral even frolicking on the communion rail some dressed in satanic attire] the poisonous variety will be perceived by the faithful as safe for consumption, with a bit of training in schools and libraries even a deliciously vagrant Vatican approved choice. Sort like FDA approval on the can label.
Friends, Roman Catholics, Americans, et al I have commented here not to praise Caesar but to reprove him for most injurious inaction.
You speak with love in your heart and that nobility is a gift to all who love and honour the Lord.
The baggage you refer to is alarming. Bergoglio must act or the bishops must act.
Ezekiel 18:32 For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Lord God; so turn, and live.”
Psalm 51:4 Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment.
James 4:8 Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.
2 Corinthians 7:10 For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.
God bless you.
In my first formal lesson about the Catholic religion preparing to enter the Church after having overcome my youthful background of atheism, the good priest teaching us, did not talk at all about all the happy feel-good post VII thoughts popular at the time. He talked a great deal about the meaning of the sin of pride, emphasizing how all sins are derivative from pride, and told us how saints challenged themselves on a daily basis least they fall into a prideful manner of thought. I really needed to hear this because what had caused my delay in trying to cultivate a faith in the seventies was witnessing how so many foolhardy theologians in the Church were being hailed in the popular media as representing a “new Catholicism.” I now pray on a daily basis to be aware of my own sinful pride but also for such episodes where our clerics and prelates, in their desire to prove a superior sort of “love,” can overcome being so pridefully oblivious of such things as the meaning of such indisputable facts that 98 percent of gays are very supportive of not being “inclusive” of welcoming the lives of the preborn into the community of common concern.
Something tells me Luther, Marx and Nietzsche cast a long shadow over Germany.
Not to mention that fellow with the strange mustache..
Walking with Jesus is taking up our cross and denying ourselves. We follow Jesus because He is a correct guide for our soul. We follow, for He laid down His life for the forgiveness of sin.
God finds the sin of homosexuality especially egregious. We all have our besetting sins and our faith in Christ causes us to confess and repent. To openly promote homosexuality in the church, is an abomination to the Lord.
A prince of the church should have an excellent mind as to discern the will of the Lord. Prayer and denial of ones ungodly proclivities should be the goal of all Christians. To replace godliness with a personal penchant gains no one anything. The aim is to highjack the church and lower it the the baseness of mankind. Scripture uplifts the soul of the godly man and sets us on the right track, the path to helpfulness and ultimately to heaven to be with the Lord.
Leviticus 20:13 If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.
Romans 1:26-27 For this reason God gave them up to dishonourable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.
Jude 1:7 Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.
Some will say they don’t believe this, yet God’s word is eternal He is unchanging. We can count on Him totally and if we repent, Jesus’s death for our sins is active and we are forgiven. Let the love we have for our fellow man cause us to speak the truth. Truth is the domain of God. Love is from God and when we love Him we proclaim his truth.
A Queer Marxist who should be deprived of his red hat and priest’s collar.
Agree wholeheartedly. The problem is that the gay lobby in the Church is very powerful ( obviously).Many bishops are homosexual. Several cardinals as well as we have seen over the years in the media. He has typically a very powerful position in the Vatican. And his diocese is extremely rich.
Come on, Pope Francis.
You are being called out….into the open.
What is it going to be?
If his Excellency were referring to racists, as opposed to homosexuals, I suspect the reception would be different. Despite the fact that the former is an amorphous term, abused these days, and even though Mit Brennender Sorge recognizes race as “necessary and honorable [in] their function in worldly things,” one suspects that “racist” replaced for “homosexual” would garner a different response.
Some people may be born with a homosexual inclination. Others may be born with a sadistic inclination. What is Cardinal Marx’s point?
As the late Fr. Paul Mankowski SJ asked of “Rev.” James Martin SJ, we are all free to ask Pontiff Francis:
“Is sodomy a sin?”
I honestly think any Catholic living there would be fully justified in attending an SSPX parish.
The whole concept of “full communion” must run far deeper than mere institutional unity.
The Bergoglio papacy is a rare opportunity.
satan’s minions are feeling emboldened. They are throwing off their disguises as faithful Catholic leaders and calling openly for evil, defilement and debasement.
It is up to the faithful — in the pews and in the ambos — to stand up and reject the distortions and the diminutions, the exploitations and the degradations.
Bombshell lands in Rome:
Cardinal Pell calls on Pontiff Francis and his Vatican to publicly correct the apostate Bishops Hollerich and Marx:
https://www.ncregister.com/blog/cardinal-pell-calls-on-vatican-to-correct-2-senior-european-bishops-for-rejecting-church-s-sexual-ethics
The line is drawn…
Second Bombshell:
Sandro Magister publishes another memo circulated in Rome from an un-named Cardinal, criticizing the failure of the Francis Pontificate:
http://magister.blogautore.espresso.repubblica.it/2022/03/15/a-memorandum-on-the-next-conclave-is-circulating-among-the-cardinals-here-it-is/
Chris, thank you for sharing those bombshells.
Most interesting — and most disturbing.
The link you provided is informative. Mention of Pell calling out these apostate cardinals is appropriate. Where is Bergoglio?
It’s a remarkable tendency, that active homosexuals, usually consistent with their preference are proabortion. Then if we study the preference it’s by its nature the indulgence of displaced sensual desire at the expense of life.
The only icons in a church environment should be holy. The secular/sexual totem placed before the altar is certainly not in that category.
A true expression of love is the ability to tell people that the path they take is wrong. Telling them that they might have a case is modernistic, neo protestant obfuscation, decidedly not in the intellectual rigour of Catholic teaching.
The secular notion of «don’t be judgmental» does not apply here. Particularly in the light of the clerical scandals about which the secular world has chosen to be «judgmental», regardless of evidence.
Thanks to Bergoglio, the German Catholic Church is lost to the Faithful. He lacks the Fortitude to get rid of Marx.
Christ Himself said, “If anyone comes to Me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” Apparently, Cardinal (Karl) Marx likes not being Christ’s disciple because he insists you can love anything and everything before loving Christ. He preaches that any love, in any form, takes precedence over placing Christ first in our lives. Love of same sex, love of animals, love of sin, love of the anti-christ, love of your own feelings, love of killing fetuses, love of yourself…it’s all ok, he claims. He’s nothing short of a heretic and a dangerous man. To me he’s not worthy of Cardinal. He’s not even Catholic. He’s in the same boat as Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi. Anything is permissible, even murder…even placing Christ second or worse, last. Just as long as you blame it on love, no problem. I am disgusted that the Pope allows this message to flourish. It’s clearly in opposition to Christ’s own teaching.