Catholic Candle note: Catholic Candle published a series of articles on gluttony as a vice and as an obstacle to spiritual progress and to salvation.  You can find these articles here:

➢  https://catholiccandle.neocities.org/faith/what-is-gluttony

➢  https://catholiccandle.neocities.org/faith/we-remain-at-the-beginning-of-the-spiritual-life-until-we-conquer-gluttony

➢  https://catholiccandle.neocities.org/faith/gluttony-is-a-most-disgraceful-vice

 

➢  https://catholiccandle.neocities.org/faith/the-wisdom-of-ecclesiasticus-against-gluttony

 

➢  https://catholiccandle.neocities.org/faith/the-spiritual-benefits-of-not-consuming-sweets-and-junkfood-when-you-are-alone

The article below has a different focus.  It shows gluttony as an example of the leftists defending and justifying vice in order to weaken the moral fabric of our country and to promote their racist narrative: i.e., that everything is racist and that a negative view of obesity “victimizes” blacks, especially black women.

As the northern hemisphere begins a new academic year, we reflect on the Truth – which is the goal of real education and which is the perfection of our intellects.

It is a tremendous blessing to have the true Catholic Faith and the true philosophy.  We should value those blessings “more than kingdoms”!  When we discover some truth which is new to us, we should marvel at it and consider that the particular truth (whichever one it is at the time) is really beyond all price – that any sacrifice is worth the cost, in exchange for understanding that truth.

That is how the truth is – engrossing, perfecting, and worth any effort and sacrifice.  But the truth does come with a cost (a price).  For example, when someone understands that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church, then he can no longer be religiously indifferent.  He sees the importance of trying to bring people into the Church because he wants their happiness, even if the path that leads to their eternal happiness passes through the “place” where they are offended by the truth – and don’t want to hear that they are now in a false religion and must become a Catholic.

In other words, the blessing of having the truth comes at the price of needing to act upon that truth.  We can no longer be “stupid” (or silent) like we were before we came to know that particular truth.

So, again, although the truth is an incomparable blessing, the price we must pay is to be obliged to act according to this truth that we now know.

One of countless examples of this is the understanding of virtue, as set forth in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.  We see that we can no longer follow our passions.  We must follow our reason and act according to reason.  We see that virtue lies in the reasonable middle (i.e., “virtue lies in the mean”) and that we must strive for that mean/middle.

The Explanation of Aristotle and of St. Thomas Aquinas

The great Philosopher, Aristotle, explains this truth as follows, with regard to the virtue of temperance:

To eat or drink whatever offers itself till one has overindulged, is to exceed the natural amount, since natural appetite is the replenishment of one’s deficiency.  Hence these people are called belly-gods, this implying that they fill their belly beyond what is right.  It is people of entirely slavish character that become like this.  … 

[E]xcess, with regard to pleasures, is self-indulgence and is culpable.  …  [T]he self-indulgent man is so called because he is pained more than he ought at not getting pleasant things (even his pain being caused by pleasure), and the temperate man is so called because he is not pained at the absence of what is pleasant and at his abstinence from it.

The self-indulgent man, then, craves for all pleasant things or those that are most pleasant, and is led by his appetite to choose these at the cost of everything else.  Hence, he is pained both when he fails to get them and when he is merely craving for them (for appetite involves pain).[1]

So, we see that being fat, especially being acutely fat (obese) shows an excess that is contrary to virtue and reason.  The harm to the body is not as great as the harm to the soul.  That is, the moral harm involved – including, by not limited to, the weakening of the will – is the greatest harm that the person suffers because moral goods are more important, higher, and more valuable than any goods of the body.

Of course, obesity causes many other harms, e.g., early death, diabetes, heart problems, hip and knee problems, greater vulnerability to respiratory and other diseases, etc.

When people are obese and gluttonous, they are (or should be) ashamed of themselves, because they are manifestly not living according to virtue and reason.  They are manifestly slaves of their passions, not controlling themselves.  Their vice is obvious and the harm they do to their bodies is predictable.  The harm they do to their souls is even more predictable, but is less obvious to many of them.

Sins of gluttony (and other sins against the virtue of temperance) are most shameful because they are most opposed to the glory of man’s human nature, viz., man’s intellect.  This is for two reasons:

 

1.    Those sins concern bodily pleasures.  These pleasures are furthest removed from our intellectual nature and are pleasures we have in common with brute beasts.[2]

 

2.    More than other sins, those sins dull the intellect, which is the glory of our human nature.[3]

 

The shamefulness of gluttony (and other sins against the virtue of temperance) is something that is known even without the gift of the Catholic Faith.  Aristotle, explains the shamefulness of gluttony (and other sins against the virtue of temperance) in these words:

 

Temperance and self-indulgence, however, are concerned with the kind of pleasures that the other animals share in, which therefore appear slavish and brutish; these are touch and taste.

 

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book III, ch.10.

 

St. Thomas confirms these words of Aristotle and quotes Aristotle summarizing this truth, that “intemperance is justly more deserving of reproach than other vices.”[4]

 

Everybody knows that obesity is caused by intemperance and is shameful.  Everyone knows that if a person eats far more than he needs – especially of high-calorie foods – he will become fat.

The Leftists are no friends of Aristotle or St. Thomas!

But the leftists hate the idea of man living according to reason.  They hate human nature and also the fact that gluttony and obesity are shameful. 

The leftists promote many varieties of the vices of intemperance and encourage nearly every type of sin.  The leftists promote those perversions which exploit children, but do not promote natural marital relations under the Natural Law, which produce children.  The leftists promote not only impurity but also gluttony because these vices weaken our country’s moral fabric and aid the leftists in subverting us.

The leftists not only call vice a “right” but also condemn anyone that considers vices such as impurity and gluttony in a negative light.  Concerning obesity, they refer to any negative, correct, and reasonable expressions concerning obesity as “body shaming”. 

Thus, e.g., the (leftist) American Psychiatric Association has labeled binge-eating as a  “psychiatric disorder”.[5]  The leftists say “it is not people’s fault that they are obese”.  The reason why people are binge-eaters (they say) is not because those people don’t tell their passions “No”.  O certainly not!  That is not why they are obese!  Instead, people are obese because they are “sick”!  This means that it is not their fault (since we do not blame people because they are sick)!

So, we see how this goes!  The leftists tell people:

Go ahead and indulge in sin.  The bad consequences are not your fault!  You are a victim of a “disease”!

So, we see that the leftists declare that a person is (supposedly) free to choose his own gender but he is not free to lose weight and cease to be obese (since the leftists claim that it is a disease).  According to the leftists, a man can choose to become a woman, but cannot choose to become thin.  When a person eats so much that it makes him fat, he has become “sick” and this (supposedly) is out of his control.  How upside-down society is and how unmoored it is from reality!

The leftists don’t want virtue among the people.  Further, they strive to set one group of the people against another.  They declare that it is unfair and racist for society to recommend to black people – especially black women – to lose weight when those women are obese.  See, e.g., the article: The Racist Roots of Fighting Obesity.[6]

The leftists declare that obese black women’s increased likelihood of dying has nothing to do with being obese but rather is caused by the “social stress” of suffering racism.  Immediately below, is one way that the leftists phrase this lie to excuse gluttony:

A 2015 study in Psychological Science, among the many studies supporting this argument, found that people who reported experiencing weight discrimination had a 60 percent increased risk of dying, independent of BMI [body mass index] (and therefore regardless of body size). The underlying mechanisms explaining this relationship may reflect the direct and indirect effects of chronic social stress.[7]

So, these leftists are declaring that people who are obese enough to “experience weight discrimination” don’t die early because they are obese.  They die early because they are “victims” of the social stress of “discrimination”.  In other words, the problem is not their own intemperance and their failure to say “no” to their passions.  The problem is that other people do not accept obesity as perfectly fine and that those other people think there is something negative about vice.

So, according to the leftists, the condition of our bodies (obesity) has nothing to do with dying early.  The leftists claim that the problem is racism.  Similarly, (according to the leftists) racism is the cause and root of every other societal problem.  In other words, according to them, racism, not obesity, is lethal.

Another way that the leftists phrase this lie is that:

the predominant reason Black women get sick is not because they eat the wrong things but because their lives are often stressful and their neighborhoods are often polluted.[8]

Perhaps the leftists might agree that white people become obese when those white people eat to excess.  But according to the leftists, black women can gorge on far too much food and can binge on high fat, high sugar foods and they would not get fat like white people, if only their neighborhoods were not polluted.  Also, it would apparently follow from the leftists’ claims that black women could stop eating entirely and would never lose weight as long as they continued to have stress and lived in polluted neighborhoods.  Leftists, like Satan himself, hate man’s reason[9] and so the leftists do not tend to use reason in their arguments.  They use emotion instead.[10]

The leftists do not like people being told the truth.  Here is an example from National Public Radio (“NPR”) concerning obesity:

The main advice that people are given when they are so-called obese [sic] is to lose weight, and there are so many problems with this ….  And then in addition to that, there are the psychological effects of telling people that their bodies are wrong .[11]

In this NPR quote, notice the leftists refer to “so-called obesity” because they do not want to call obesity by its name.  Further, notice that they do not want people who eat to excess to be told they should cut back, be reasonable, and not overeat.  Then at the end of this quote, the leftists object because people are told that truth, viz., that their bodies should not be that way.

Conclusion

Our fight for Christ the King must also be a fight against His enemies, both Satan and his minions, the leftists.

It is a fight for virtue and against vice.

It is a fight for the Truth and against leftist lies!

Let us join the fight!