A Catholic Looks at Hugh Hefner

By Gary Topping–

The recent death of Hugh Hefner at age 91 prompts some reflections about the era of supposed sexual liberation over which he presided.  It wasn’t just sex: he laid out a whole program of materialism, hedonism, egotism and general licentiousness which he pretentiously called “The Playboy Philosophy.”  It often doesn’t get pointed out that his was a program for men alone; women did not share in the “liberation,” and in fact it took place at their expense.  Like the Playboy mansion, the fast sports cars, the state-of-the-art stereo systems and the expensive clothes, women were something to be purchased and owned.

Looking at all this from a Catholic perspective, I have to observe that Hefner did not originate any of it, although from the late 1950s he became its most prominent exponent and apologist.  We Catholics have seen materialism, greed, lust and selfishness as basic tendencies of human nature since the Fall of Adam and Eve; we just never thought to lump them all together as a “philosophy.”  Nor did most people look at such things as good things; they were there, to be sure, and most of us found ourselves slipping into one or another from time to time, but we thought of those lapses as just that, lapses, and the appropriate response was to repent and try to avoid them in the future.  But to Hefner, they were qualities to be aspired to.  If the movie character Gordon Gecko famously asserted that “greed is good,” Hefner didn’t stop there, and went on to add almost every other sin in the book to his “philosophy.”

For us Catholics, there is another way.  It is a way concisely summarized in the three classic vows made by members of religious orders: poverty, chastity and obedience.  We lay Catholics are not expected to live those vows fully, but at least to aspire to them: I don’t have to give away all my money and possessions, for example, but I am expected not to be governed by them, and to practice charitable giving.  Catholicism is the true counter culture.  Nothing flies in the face of mainstream culture more directly than poverty, chastity and obedience.  That way lies true liberation.