“Why do men become beasts?”
The question was asked by South African Archbishop Buti Joseph Tlhagale. In a speech last August, he was warning men that they will be held accountable for the treatment of women. “The Son of God will make us pay for all the things we have done, or not done,” the archbishop said.
He was specifically addressing spousal abuse and sexual violence in South Africa, but I believe his warning stands for the men of the West as well.
The newspaper headlines tumble over each other, from Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein to the recent allegations against Sean Combs and former Abercrombie CEO Michael Jeffries.
We have seen previously well-regarded leaders of religious movements identified as predators, and our local newspapers routinely report stories of sexual violence and abuse and the shattered lives that follow.
Yet it is not just the headlines. The impact of pornography on male sexual behavior, the apparent inability of so many men, or man-boys, to make a commitment, for fathers to take responsibility for the children they have sired — it all suggests that too many of us have lost our moral bearings. Too many of our gender are guided only by impulses and appetites.
Examples of this selfishness, the exploitation of human beings’ basest desires, seem everywhere today, but perhaps most exposed for its sheer brutal egoism in the case of Gisèle Pelicot. This 71-year-old grandmother is the victim, the survivor and the hero of a shocking trial underway in a French courtroom, where 51 men are on trial for raping her while she was in a drugged sleep. She was drugged by her husband, who also raped her and who videotaped her rape by others over the course of a decade. The couple had been married for 50 years.
The case is extraordinarily horrifying for the ordinariness of the perpetrators. According to The New York Times, the men on trial include “truck drivers, tradesmen, soldiers, a nurse, a journalist and an IT specialist. They range in age from 26 to 74.” Ordinary men … who willingly became beasts.
“Lust is not interested in its partners, but only in the gratification of its own craving, not in the satisfaction of our whole natures, but only in the appeasement of an appetite that we are unable to subdue.”
The author of those words is Henry Fairlie in a 1978 book worth rereading: “The Seven Deadly Sins Today.”
Few take the church seriously on matters of sex these days, not least because of the hypocrisy and flaws of too many of its leaders and adherents. Yet the church has for millennia understood what heights man is called to as well as to what depths he is capable of sinking.
In language that seems almost foreign to modern ears, the church teaches that “either man governs his passions and finds peace, or he lets himself be dominated by them and becomes unhappy” (CCC 2339).
Given the rampant unhappiness today, it seems as if our passions are running the show. “Self-mastery is a long and exacting work,” the catechism adds. Indeed, living a life of virtue can seem difficult in this age of appetites unleashed, yet the challenge of self-mastery is not foreign to men’s nature. In athletics, in physical and intellectual labor, many men strive to meet that challenge. In our age, as in every age, there are strong and faithful husbands and fathers who take seriously their vows and live their commitments.
Perhaps what the church needs to ask today is not only why men become beasts, but how we as a community can help men to better themselves and their brothers in living lives of virtue and selflessness.
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