This picture may have been taken barely minutes after Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta received the flesh and blood of Jesus for the first time in her life. She attended Convent of the Sacred Heart, a private all-girls Roman Catholic school in United States. She described her school life as "very dedicated, very studious, very disciplined" but also "a bit insecure" as she told in an interview.
By age 19, this beautiful young girl started experimenting with life – in a wrong way. She started singing in bars and clubs to further her career on songwriting and singing and started her experiments with alcohol, drugs and sex. In her own words – “I went to a Catholic school but it was on the New York underground that I found myself."
Turning 25 a few days back, she is no longer that innocent Steffanie Germanotta but Lady Gaga aka Mother Monster. She holds a twitter account with a record 9 million followers (whom she fondly calls monsters) and her youtube channel upload views have crossed 1.37 billion (137,893,744 as I write this post). In last April she was named the Time magazine's 100 most influential people of the year. Winner of both Grammy and MTV Awards Lady Gaga has shown the world how to successfully mix music, sex and fashion in the right combination to become a global celebrity. She makes sure that she stays in the limelight by wearing (or not wearing?) the strangest outfits possible. Gaga's influence on modern culture and society has provoked the University of South Carolina into offering a full-time course titled "Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame" in the objective of unraveling "the sociologically relevant dimensions of the fame of Lady Gaga with respect to her music, videos, fashion, and other artistic endeavors".
What prompted me to write this article is the recent news that Lady Gaga is planning to come out with perfumes that smell blood and semen. Intrigued to find out more about this strange lady, I went online and did a quick research on her life. The findings as explained above left me shattered! The first verse that came to mind was Deutronomy 30:15 "See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil. Again verse 19 says I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live. This is the beauty of Christianity that you have a God who has left you with free choice – the choice even to abuse this choice!There is no compulsion or pressure on you to always take the “good choice” as some may accuse on the church. But for youngsters like lady gaga this freedom also paves the way for the destruction of their souls.
So the problem seems to be in the understanding of true freedom. True freedom doesn’t mean doing whatever you want but exercising it in the right context. Freedom finds its true meaning when you use it to obey God.
Venerable Pope John Paul II himself says:
“Freedom negates and destroys itself and becomes a factor leading to the destruction of others when it no longer recognizes its essential link with the truth. When freedom out of a desire to emancipate itself from all forms of tradition and authority, shuts out even the most obvious evidence of an objective and universal truth. . . then the person ends up by no longer taking as his sole and indisputable point of reference for his own choices the truth about good and evil, but only his subjective and changeable opinion, or, indeed, his selfish interest and whim”
Jesus is standing at the door of our heart (Rv 3:20) waiting for us to know the truth which will set us free (Jn 8:32), to choose life over death which will make us a complete man or woman. What do we choose today?
P.S:- While searching on Lady Gaga to write this blog, I got disturbed at the gravity of bondage of sin in her life. I offered the day’s mass for her conversion – may be the only sensible thing to do, as a Catholic for her soul?
