On her recent 90th birthday, philosopher Dr. Alice von Hildebrand was invested a Dame Grand Cross of the Equestrian Order of St. Gregory the Great by Raymond Cardinal Burke in the name of Pope Francis. It was in honor of her exemplary personal witness as a philosopher, teacher, author, and leading Catholic voice on cultural matters, and one richly deserved for her many books and articles reflecting the teaching of her husband of revered memory, Dr. Dietrich von Hildebrand.

It is in the sphere of Catholic anthropological doctrine that Dame Alice has excelled by defending the Church's teaching on the intimacy, secrecy, and sacred mystery of sexuality against the materialistic vulgarians of our day.

Her most recent work "The Dark Night of the Body" uses the remarkable insights of her husband to take to task the popular writings of Christopher West as well as other moderns who have seriously "misunderstood the authentic Catholic tradition, overlooked or disregarded essential aspects of it" and distorted Pope John Paul II’s "Theology of the Body" [TOB] with a "hyper-sexualized approach." For all his good intentions and "happy talk about sex and sexuality," West had failed to "grasp the delicacy, reverence, privacy, and sacredness of the sexual sphere, and underestimated the effects of original sin on the human condition," writes Alice von Hildebrand.

Having portrayed himself as a "revolutionary" seeking to bring to Catholics "authentic sexual liberation," West unwisely dismissed as "masochistic" traditional asceticism entailing sacrifice and self-control of the passions in order to counter the force of sexual concupiscence leading to sinful offenses against God.

Gravely overlooked is the always threatening tendency of bodily sexual passion to overpower the spirit. Contrary to West's "obsession with Puritanism" as "the great danger of our time," Lady von Hildebrand correctly noted that "in the sexual sphere, pornography, not Puritanism, is the cancer destroying our society."

Nor is the respect for the intimacy of the sexual sphere enhanced by West's use of street language in his speech and writings and his "infatuation with pop culture and rock and roll — a long way from the austere spirit of the New Testament."

Lady von Hildebrand has written a volume that has been badly needed. Concisely and trenchantly, and in easily understood language for the average reader, it refutes serious and widespread errors concerning human sexuality that have won their way into Catholic circles. There are valuable reflections on bashfulness and shame, on the relationship between body and soul, on degrading and perverse behavior against the natural law, the "pornification" of culture, and the Church's constant and relentless effort to safeguard the faithful from philosophical and theological errors that would deny the supernatural or reduce it to the natural.

This excellent volume is graced with a preface by Carlo Cardinal Caffarra, the archbishop of Bologna, who observes that it "offers a true analysis of intimacy and modesty in current Western culture," adding that "it is not Christian compassion to accept the error in which a person may have fallen."

 

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