Not what I was hoping to hear from Christopher West

The Catholic News Agency reports:

Colorado Springs, Colo., Sep 20, 2010 / 09:50 pm (CNA).- Christopher West, the popular author and speaker whose presentation of Pope John Paul II's “Theology of the Body” has provoked controversy, will return from a six-month sabbatical with a new multimedia show this weekend. Maintaining that his goal is to correct common misconceptions of Christianity, West added that he is most often criticized by members of “the religious right.”

His upcoming show, titled “Fill These Hearts: God, Sex and the Universal Longing,” is a collaboration with the young folk-rock group Mike Mangione & The Union. West's teaching will also be illustrated visually through film and sand paintings. The show was initially developed for Sydney's World Youth Day in 2008, and performed earlier this year in New York City.

The performance at Colorado Springs' Pikes Peak Center this Saturday will be West's first public appearance since his announcement of a six-month break in April. His “personal and professional” sabbatical followed a spate of critical comments from Catholic theologians and authors, such as Dr. Alice von Hildebrand and David Schindler, who claimed that West was ignoring the weakness of human nature and presenting an overly sexualized vision of Christianity.

West was also criticized for comparing Pope John Paul II to “Playboy” founder Hugh Hefner in a 60 Minutes interview, a comparison he said was misconstrued in the television profile.

Speaking to the Colorado Springs Independent last week, West said that his motivation is not to offer a new Gospel, but “to blow the lid off the common idea of what Christianity teaches,” which he has described as puritanical and negative. “Christianity isn't an invitation to starve,” he explained, but rather “the invitation to a banquet that really feeds the hunger.”

Dr. Alice von Hildebrand had this to say about West's arguments against Puritanism.

However, according to von Hildenbrand, “Christopher West’s presentations consistently use language that lacks sensitivity, thereby obscuring the good inherent in marriage and the marital embrace.”

She accuses West of being “obsessed by puritanism,” saying that he leads one to believe that this is “the one great danger of our time.” “In our sex-saturated society, to concentrate all of one's efforts on this deplorable deformation, is to beat a dead horse,” she writes. “Puritanism was never the universal problem he imagines (in the Church or outside it); and today it is barely a speck on our cultural landscape.”

On this point, she says West mischaracterizes the theology of the body when he calls it a “revolution.” “It is simply false to claim that the Church has, until recently, been blind to the deep meaning and beauty of sex as God intended it,” she writes. Rather than being taught that sex is "dirty," she says her generation was instead given a “sense of ‘mystery’” around sexuality.

West’s “hyper-sexualized approach,” she says, will only “aggravate” sexual temptation. Further, she also accuses him of ignoring the Church’s “one successful remedy” to such temptation: “asceticism, the spirit of renunciation and sacrifice.”

“It is sheer illusion to believe that moral perfection can be pursued without this purifying discipline,” she maintains.

I have friends on both sides of the Christopher West divide. I find the debate interesting.

Perhaps West would call that "purifying discipline" puritanism, eh? But I think that might be a mistake.

I'm sorry that he does not seem to get what she was driving at and instead seems to be trying to marginalize her and others with concerns as part of the Religious Right.

Doesn't he realize that those who coined the term see him as the "Religious Right," too?

Duh!