One of my major problems with being "A practical Catholic man" as my membership as a third degree Knight of Columbus puts it, is that as a person suffering from Asperger's I rarely notice, let alone judge people by, apperances. If you don't tell me you're a sinner, you might even be sinning right in front of me and I simply won't notice.
This is especially true of the frivoulous way American culture has chosen to treat the Seamless Garment of Life. You might be married to your same sex partner, you might be spending your weekends in the loving embrace of farm animals, I'm not going to notice. You might be an old guy living in sin with your divorced neighbor and actually a part of my family, and I'm not going to say a word to you about it until you come right out and shove it in my face and ask my opinion (yes, this actually happened to me- at which point I had to get very autistic about my theological obsession and explain the differences between sin and sinner, between ideals and reality, to a man whose previous experience contained nothing more complex than the proper water-to-agregate ratio for concrete. Not a fun experience).
Yes, I'm like many "orthodox" Catholics, and I think that divorce is wrong in just about every instance- but that won't keep me from going out to coffee with a friend in the midst of an awfull divorce and offer my shoulder to cry on. I can survive it because I *don't* have NT empathy, because it's just another story to me in a world that I'm not certain is real to begin with. And because, I don't think individuals should be blamed for the mistakes of society at large- and certainly the frivoulous way we treat marriage in this society is a bad mistake.
