By Gary Topping–
The last thing I need to tell our readers is who Stormy Daniels is and why she has been a frequent presence in the news these past weeks. While it has been an interesting experience to see an actual porn star (with her clothes on) and to hear her say some things about her life, I think we are all eager to get beyond this and to return to actual issues of politics and diplomacy—the proper realm of the U.S. Presidency—or even to move on to the next scandal, which at least will give us a change of scenery. In the meantime, though, there are surely some moral lessons to be learned. I would like to suggest one that may not have occurred to you.
Ms. Daniels says that she and the President had a sexual encounter. The President, predictably, says she is lying. I have heard some people defend the President on the grounds that, given the nature of Ms. Daniels’s livelihood, she is thoroughly corrupt morally and cannot be depended upon to tell the truth or to behave morally in any other area of her life. This looks to me like John Calvin’s doctrine of Total Depravity, that if you are a sinner, you are a total sinner, completely devoid of any moral capacity whatsoever, and thus that God’s atonement has to be completely unconditional because we are incapable of meeting any condition that he might impose.
Fortunately, I haven’t been able to ascertain that any of the people saying this identify themselves as Catholics, because the doctrine of Total Depravity is incongruent with the Catholic concept of human nature. While we agree that human nature is fallen, we do not believe that Original Sin removed entirely the spark of the divine that God built into humanity. We believe, in other words, that while we have a certain propensity to do bad things, we also have a propensity to good ones. We are not willing, in the specific case of Stormy Daniels, whatever moral shortcomings she may have, simply to consign her to some kind of garbage dump of humanity.
And in what I have read about Ms. Daniels, I can see evidence that that divine spark has not been extinguished. For one thing, she passed a polygraph test. Not being a lawyer, I do not know where that places her legally, but in my layman’s mind, it does create a presumption of veracity. Also, she is married and has a young daughter to whom she is very devoted. I cannot imagine how she and her family have been able to reconcile her profession with her domestic life, but it seems that they have, and as weird as it might seem to the rest of us, I have to consider that a moral act.
I have my own sins—we all do—and while ours might not be those of Stormy Daniels, we are all obligated to live as moral a life as we can and to depend upon God’s mercy to make up our shortcomings. Stormy Daniels’s hope of heaven, if she has such a hope, rests upon that mercy, as do the hopes of all the rest of us.
