Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Lifesite News has published an important article about a new program in Quebec that will impose a relativist educational agenda on all schools in the province, public and private, as well as on all homeschoolers.

The program is entitled “Ethics and Religious Culture,” and it will be mandated from grade one until the end of high school. Here are some features of the program: 1) it presents homosexual “marriage” as a laudable lifestyle choice; 2) it presents all religions as equal, because equally the product of cultural construction; 3) it numbers “abortion rights” advocates among the greatest 20th century heroes in the struggle for human freedom.

As some have noted, this program is a harbinger of things to come throughout the continent. I would point out that it is an inevitable consequence of socialism. It is precisely the sort of program that the Democrat Party, if given control over all of the branches of government, will impose upon the U.S.

A Nancy Pelosi-led congress, aided and abetted by a Barack Obama presidency, would impose such programs upon American federal education, and even upon private schools. The Democrats are out for pure and absolute power over your lives. They will seek to eliminate educational choice, free political speech, and religious freedom. They will seek to eliminate home schooling, the real alternative media (through the so-called fairness doctrine), and the ultimate control of the Magisterium of the Church over the Church’s institutions.

All of this follows, as I have said many times, from the fact that socialists cannot tolerate societies other than the State bearing authority (educational or otherwise) in our lives.

There is no moral equivalvence between the Democrats and the Republicans on this issue. As has been well reported, Archbishop Burke has said that the Democrat Party risks becoming the party of death. Well, all of this follows from their vision of the cosmos, of history, and of the political order. There can be no patching up their vision of things with a few pro-lifers placed in the Party, here or there. Their whole Platform would have to be changed.

A warning to all Catholics: anything that you might do in this election to help the Democrats win, in either congress or the presidency, is a choice that you are making against your own religious freedom.

Update: Andrew McCarthy at National Review has a good post up illustrating what I am talking about: Obama uses the law to silence his opponents. See: Obama’s Tyranny

In my occasional travels through cyberspace, I have noticed that many pro-life Catholics are so fed up with the current state of American politics that they refuse to vote for either major party. Mark Shea is perhaps the biggest example of this. Indeed, one of his readers has accused him and his ilk of being “double-poxers.” They say a “pox upon both your houses” to Democrats and Republicans alike. They will vote for a third-party candidate, or not vote at all, and this, Shea’s reader asserts, is impractical thinking that will all but ensure a Democrat victory and the appointing of radical, activist judges who are pro-abortion.

I am in agreement with Shea’s reader, but I have a different way of putting it. Shea’s reader does not go deeply enough in his analysis of why “double-poxing” is wrong-headed. The double-poxers are not just impractical: they fail to see the guiding telos of the socialism homogeneously embraced by Democrat Party leadership. In order to assess the current political situation, one needs to go beyond the issue of practicality (though that is important) and even beyond specific issues such as war, torture, euthanasia or even stem-cell research and abortion. One has to acknowledge the true nature of socialism.

Socialism seeks to impose the mechanized central government as the religious authority in people’s lives. This is why socialists hate the family and the Church. Socialists cannot accept the idea that any society other than the State might have an authoritative bearing: thus, the natural society of the family and the supernatural society of the Church are grave threats to their political goals.

Of course, I’ve repeated myself several times about this on this blog, but the chain of ideas is borne out by chains of fact in countries such as Venezuela, Spain, Brazil, and Ecuador. The recently-elected, socialist government in Ecuador is in full and open warfare with the Church, just as the Democrat Party will be in the U.S., if given absolute power.

All of the policies of the Democrat Party, like those of their kindred spirits throughout the world, flow from their idea of governance. The idea of “abortion rights,” for instance, is as natural to their political orientation as the air they breathe is to their very lives. And they are only opposed to war or torture if they find that it is being carried out by the American, capitalist government they so despise as their archenemy.

They have no ontological basis from which to oppose war or torture. So, they equivocate on Islamic terrorism, just as their forebears equivocated on the inumerable atrocities perpetrated in the name of internationalist socialism in the twentieth century.

The only hope at present, to thwart the coming socialism, is a solidified and unified Republican Party getting either congress or the presidency. However futile our ultimate efforts may be in this regard, it seems to me that pro-lifers should work to help the Republicans.

I fear that Satan is having his one last grasp at world-power, before a turning occurs. I suspect that the universalist socialist nightmare is becoming a waking terror at this point. It will collapse under the weight of its own unmanageable soft-tyranny, but it certainly seems as if no one can effectively oppose it at this point. Still, that does not excuse us from making an effort.

A few days ago, Salon.com ran an essay from Camille Paglia in which she presented her case for abortion.  She proceeded with Nietzschean logic to assert that the pro-choice crowd must stop hiding behind solipist logic and admit that abortion is murder.  It is clearly the assertion of deadly power of the strong over the weak.  However, it is justifiable murder because it preserves a woman’s autonomy…in her own words:

Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue. The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman’s body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman’s entrance into society and citizenship.

On the other hand, I support the death penalty for atrocious crimes (such as rape-murder or the murder of children). I have never understood the standard Democratic combo of support for abortion and yet opposition to the death penalty. Surely it is the guilty rather than the innocent who deserve execution?

In a 1995 essay in the New Republic, Naomi Wolf ostracized herself from the pro-choice, feminist movement when she candidly made the same assertions.  As cold, ruthless and immoral as this thinking is, I suppose it has the merits of clear thinking and intellectual honesty.

All of this leads one to ask himself, which intellects are the more dangerous?  Let’s take some of our wannabe political leaders as relevant examples of new modes of fallacious thinking:

The Ostrich Appeal:

Barack Obama: It’s above my paygrade (my paraphrases). He does suggest some moral restraint when he decides he must avoid the question as to when life begins.  However, his thinking is most troublesome…as long as we do not know when life begins (a basic ignorance of science) it is ok to kill something that has only one finality and that is a mature human being because a woman’s choice is more important (the end justifies any means).

Nancy Pelosi: There is still debate in the Church on this question. Pelosi’s appearance on meet the press could lead to the impression that she intuits that she should have some concern for the faith that she professes.  This is probably why she adopts the Obama protocol and denies the obvious in order to justify the unjustifiable.

Appeal to Intellectual Schizophrenia:

Joseph Biden: I believe life begins at conception as a matter of faith.  Joe suffers from a problem of categories here.  He confuses biology with theology.  Further, by his statement he necessarily holds that abortion is murder.  However this is ok, as long as others are sincere in their murder.  Apparently he is willing to let people murder the innocent on the “higher” principle of “separation of church and state.”  Like his running mate, he reflects a troubling lack of knowledge and thinking skills.  He also believes that party ideology is more fundamental than natural law.  If his his public gaffes were not so plentiful, I would place me much closer to the Paglia/Wolf camp than the Obama camp, but it seems that much of the problem is soft thinking skill.

As a side note, I think that Biden’s run for VP is clearly an example of media bias.  When the subject was Dan Quayle’s gaffes or George W. Bush’s misspeaks, this was front page news during the election cycles (and often beyond).  All things being equal, one would expect the press would be having a field day with Biden.  However, he seems to be strangely absent from the news.  Now we wouldn’t want to bias the electorate, would we?

Appeal to Cranial Short-circuit

John McCain: Life begins at conception. Now here is someone who has it right.  Thus, he reflects very poor elementary logic when he concludes that killing innocent human life is justified in the cases of rape, incest, and perhaps after the fact, in the case of embryonic stem cell research.  He apparently has stonger moral conviction than the above (which I suppose is not saying much) but, like the rest, seems to be soft in the thinking department.  Nevertheless, call it Divine Providence, when it comes to voting he never seems to have let this soft thinking direct him to advocate killing the innocent.

So. . . . which is most is the most hazardous thinking for one who would lead this country?  None are happy choices.  None exhibits sufficiently clear thinking that, like Wolf/Paglia, one might discern that one or the other clearly has no sense of moral propriety.

In the end, it appears that one must come to the same conclusion from the perspective of thinking skills as one comes to with respect to the demands of morality.  McCain comes closest to clear thinking and at least demonstrates that he usually sides with the morally correct side of the issue.

I recieved an email recently that came from a couple who had received Steve Kellmeyer’s (via Bridegroom Press) mass mailing about the confusion many Catholics have in interpreting the USCCB’s Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship.  In his mailing, Steve asserts that voting for Obama is a mortal sin.  The couple sending the email indicated that given paragraph 35, it seems that this is not the case.

In short, I would like to have made a bit of a distinction if I had written Steve’s newsletter.  He is correct that it is grave moral matter but I do not think his analysis of the situation included a sufficient analysis of the matter of consent.  Nevertheless, contrary to the assertions of many “Catholic” Obama apologists, paragraph 35 does not allow one to overlook the candidate’s problematic positions on abortion in the context of his campaign against John McCain.

Here is why: first, let’s look at the problematic paragraph:

35. There may be times when a Catholic who rejects a candidate’s unacceptable position may decide to vote for that candidate for other morally grave reasons.  Voting in this way would be permissible only for truly grave moral reasons, not to advance narrow interests or partisan preferences or to ignore a fundamental moral evil.

Unfortunately, paragraph 35 is ambiguous because it can easily be taken out of context.  It must be read in the entire context of the document (especially paragraph 37) as well as from the frame of reference of the Church’s moral teaching.  This is, after all, what the document is intended to reflect.  The authors of this document are trying to apply moral teaching to the problem of voting, especially in ambiguous circumstances.

The reason for the ambiguity is that, unlike Magisterial documents for which one person has final responsibility (a bishop or the Pope), this document is formed by committees, including the entire body of US Bishops in the USCCB.  As with all such genre of document, I think that this paragraph reflects discontinuities and ambiguities given all of the various considerations of the different contributors which had to be accommodated.

The first distinction that must be made is what meant by paragraph 35 when it says “grave moral reasons.” The English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church continues the tradition of reserving the term “grave” in the context of moral considerations, for those acts which have to do with fundamental moral norms.  In other words, the full culpable violation of this class of moral norms would result in a mortal sin (see for example, CCC 1497, 2072, 2272, 2400).

It must be understood, therefore, that this phrase does not mean strongly held personal preferences, or even personal convictions that do not have to do with objective moral norms.  For example, perhaps because of my experiences, I may have a strong affective (emotional) response to a candidate’s position on something that strikes close to home such as his position on cancer research, universal health care, funding for education, foreign policy, etc. While these are important issues, no candidate from any party in recent history has, or is it likely any would today, be able to advocate a position on these types of issues that would fall into the category of a “grave moral reason.”

These types of issues generally fall under the rubric of prudential judgment.  That is, there is much room to judge as to how best to achieve the common good without either’s position being intrinsically evil; albeit some positions may be judged better than others.  This is what is being said in paragraph 37. One cannot equate abortion and, take your pick: healthcare, education, programs for the poor, etc.  The latter are important issues no doubt, and the voter must seriously consider them.  However, none of them outweigh the fundamental nature of the intrinsic evil of abortion.

The result is that paragraph 35 must be read as preparing the way for paragraph 36.  That is to say that paragraph 36 is a more complete explanation about the case of voting for one candidate who is otherwise objectionable, because the other candidate also presents grave moral reasons for not voting for him.  In other words, these two paragraphs together set out the case of when it is permissible to materially cooperate in evil.

Paragraph 34 clearly explains immutably grave nature of one’s formal cooperation in intrinsic evil. The document would have been better served had it also more clearly laid out the Church’s teaching on material cooperation with evil. Material cooperation is when one provides assistance (positive assistance or failure to act when one is obliged to do so) to another in carrying out an evil act. One may never materially cooperate in evil unless the only other options for action bring about greater evil.  This is known as the principle of double effect.  The effect cannot be directly willed but only accepted as an unintended consequence.  However, as I said, this non-intention alone is not sufficient to allow one to arbitrarily select whichever option.  If there is a clear difference in the predicted outcomes, one is obligated to choose the option which results in less moral evil.

Since the question here is whether it is licit to vote for Barak Obama instead of John McCain, let us apply this teaching on material cooperation to their policies.  The main issue in which either candidate presents positions that are intrinsically evil by their nature, is the issue of innocent human life. Some others are less clear but protection of marriage may also be one on which the candidates differ but each have problematic positions.  Both candidates also oppose the Marriage Amendment that will constitutionally define marriage as between one man and one woman. Both candidates also see no problem with federally funded contraception programs.  These are all fundamental moral evils.  However, the issue of marriage and contraception, while grave, are not as grave as abortion.

No other issue rises to the level of protection of the unborn, including the war in Iraq, because they generally do not involve intrinsic moral evil based upon the stated policies of either candidate.  On these other issues, good Catholics may disagree on the advisability of each candidate’s prudential judgment as to how bring about the greatest good but the differences are not of a fundamental moral nature.  Admittedly, there are some organizations who tout themselves as Catholics who wish to throw red herrings into the debate.  The primary issue raised is the war in Iraq.  However, as no candidate advocates policies that directly account for any of the moral evils that come out of the war, the fact that one judges that US participation should end earlier than the other does not fall under the category of a “grave moral reason.”

Both candidates fail in regard to protection of innocent human life.  While their policies differ in the extent to which they see neglecting one’s obligation to protect the unborn as legitimate, in principle both McCain and Obama agree one may do so.  Both support embryonic stem cell research that involve the destruction of human beings.  McCain is much more restrictive in what he would allow in terms of government funding for future destruction and recent reports are that he is becoming more so.  Obama sees no reason for any restrictions in destroying unborn human embryos.

Similarly, both McCain and Obama support abortion.  However, here the degree to which each does support it, differs considerably.  McCain thinks that abortion should be licit only in matters of rape or incest.  Obama believes that while abortion is a “serious moral consideration” he advocates abortion in all cases.  He voted against the infant’s born alive bill while in the Illinois legislature.  He feared that, even with a neutrality clause that says otherwise, this might somehow be interpreted in such a way that would jeopardize a woman’s “right” to have an abortion.  His reason can be restated to say that he considers a woman’s “right to choose” more fundamental than giving basic care to a baby born alive after a failed abortion.

Moreover, he has promised to overturn every executive decision of the current administration which limits government funding for abortion, has promised to appoint Supreme Court judges who will uphold a woman’s “right to choose,” and has said that his “first priority” as President will be to sign the “Freedom of Choice Act” which will eliminate all federal and state restrictions on abortion, including parental notification.  McCain opposes all of these, has promised to do the exact opposite, and in fact, in spite of his policies, he has a 100% pro-life voting record.

Paragraph 37 of the document says: not only must one judge the candidates by their stated policies but one must also judge what it is that they will likely do.  Looking at the candidate’s voting record is a primary source for this.  The voting records of both indicate that we can expect them to do as they have said and thus we can expect that many more babies will die under an Obama presidency.

Thus, we have a choice between two candidates who advocate intrinsically evil positions and unless we do not vote, which is also a violation of Church teaching about our obligations to society, or vote a write-in candidate (one might argue that this would effectively be material support for Obama) then we are left with a choice between two evils.

Given the Church’s teaching on material participation in evil, one need not deliberate very long in order to judge that one may not licitly participate in the overwhelmingly greater evil promised by one candidate, when the record and promises of the other candidate are likely to be, in much greater measure, in conformance with intrinsic moral norms.  Thus, by voting for Obama one materially participates in bringing about grave moral evil and voting for McCain makes material participation in grave moral evil a relatively low likelihood.

The matter of whether it is a mortal sin or not to vote for Obama is a matter of culpable ignorance.  It is possible that a Catholic can be confused about the situation.  Each person’s culpability will be based upon the willfulness of their ignorance in matters of morality and the positions/records of the candidates, their slothfulness in becoming informed, and their culpability given the scandal of some Church and political leaders who may confuse the issue.  It is likely that not every Catholic who votes for Obama will be guilty of a mortal sin though they will commit grave moral evil.  However, it is also likely that many will be guilty of a mortal sin for such a vote.

We received the most bizarre comment from “Kathy” to an earlier post showing a Grassroots produced clip on Catholic Voting. Let me share it with you:

The video and website, Catholicvote.com were produced by Fidelis. They have very strong ties to the Republican Party and to the McCain campaign. In February of this year they issued a press release endorsing John McCain for president and their website includes articles from Deal Hudson who is an advisor to the McCain campaign as a member of the “Catholic Outreach Committee”. They have given campaign contributions only to republicans and even supported republican Senator Rick Santorum over Bob Casey, a pro-life Catholic democrat, during the 2006 election cycle.

If you forward this video or link to the website in your official capacity you may be in violation of IRS regulations and Church policy. You will also be distributing materials that contradict Church teaching.

Among other things, the video glorifies US economic and military power. This runs contrary to Catholic Social Teaching which emphasizes a preferential option for the poor and solidarity. It also runs contrary to the Cathecism which teaches us that “Respect for and development of human life require peace.”

There is more than one intrinsic evil at issue this year. They include genocide, racism, torture, targeting non-combatants and engaging in unjust wars. They are all life issues and they all require our attention as Catholics.

Whether we vote Republican or Democrat this year what defines us is that we are Catholic.

Don’t let the political parties redefine what it means to be CATHOLIC.

Vote the Common Good!

I hardly know where to start.

Bob Casey as a pro-life Democrat, really?  With a 65% positive rating from NARAL, I suppose that from the MM and the Democrat party perspective, he is pro-life but he is not pro-life in any meaningful sense of the term.

The Grassroots video clip contradicts Catholic Social teaching because it “glorifies” US military and economic power?  Only the most partisan of minds could find this to be the case.  In fact, it says quite the opposite.  It says America’s strength comes from a commitment to moral values rather than just military or economic strength.  It’s real offense, I suspect, is that its depiction of a Catholic’s obligation of a commitment to protecting the dignity of life from conception to natural death goes against the Democrat party platform.

Implying that McCain and Palin embrace policies that embrace “genocide, racism, torture, targeting non-combatants and engaging in unjust wars” is simply ludicrous.  McCain was one Republican who stood up very early against what he believed to be interrogation techniques that fell into the category of torture.  The other claims are quite outside the pale of reasonable discourse.  One can only envision that these claims are coming from partisans who are desperate to find reasons to be able to justify voting for the most egregious “culture of death” ticket ever presented to the American electorate.  There is absolutely no question here.  While both parties present morally problematic positions (Obama/Biden hardly needs to be explained, McCain/Palin is problematic in the area of embryonic stem cell research and abortion in the cases of rape and incest), the McCain ticket still possesses a 100% prolife voting record.  When this is compared to the voting record of the Obama ticket and the promises Obama has made about his “culture of death” priorities starting with the “Freedom of Choice Act” the thin veneer suggesting that there is room for prudential judgment in this matter quickly melts away.  In order to follow Catholic moral teaching in this case, one must vote under the rubric of the principle of double effect.  The evidence clearly points to the fact that the overwhelmingly smaller proportion of evil will come from a McCain presidency.  Thus, given this choice, a faithful Catholic cannot materially cooperate in the evil that would come from supporting an Obama presidency.

Discussing all of this, apparently, is putting the Catholic Church’s tax exempt status in jeopardy.  If that is true, then I suppose we need to abandon dependence upon that status because what we are doing is nothing more than applying the principles of the Catholic faith to the concrete circumstances of this years options.  Of course, Kathy’s claim is ridiculous.  I cannot figure out if Kathy actually thinks that we are that ignorant or if the fault lies with her understanding.

Since this video does nothing other than present what the Church teaches and never mentions any candidate, what Kathy really intends to say is that anyone who understands Church teaching and applies it to the choice of candidates this election season has only one choice of the two major parties; and it is not her candidate.  Thus, she calculates, professing Church teaching is tantamount to advocating McCain.  In other words, in condemning the video she tacitly admits that one cannot both be a faithful Catholic and vote for Obama.

There is one thing on which I am in agreement with Kathy.  It is that we cannot allow either political party to redefine what it means to be Catholic.  However, neither can we allow confused Catholics like Kathy to do so either.  Catholics must vote for the common good, but the common good is not served by the thinly veiled dressing up of the Democrat platform to appear as Catholic social doctrine.  Unfortunately, this is what Kathy and her “vote the common good” partisan group wish to offer up.

Most people probably have heard the very sad news about an assistant chaplain at St. John’s Catholic Newman Center in Champaign so I will not rehash them here.  I am particularly close to this situation.  I know Fr. Layden fairly well.  We have worked together on many projects and he was an associate of our Institute.  This perhaps makes me unqualified to offer perspective.  However, that has not stopped me before.

From the moment when I arrived at about 0645 on Thursday morning and received the news, the situation has been somewhat surreal.  We began the week still on an emotional high, having just dedicated a $40M new building and renovation project of an existing dorm, expanding our dorm capacity to almost 600 students and opening a new school of theology.

The frictions that come from working in close quarters for several months, from the stress of trying to get finished in time for the start of school, and from when one’s own aspects of the overall mission seem to be more important than the other guy’s and he is getting the needed resources, all of these disappeared and a renewed unity again showed forth as we all came together for last weekend’s celebration.  The end of the week brought us crashing down from the heights when the alleged sins of one of our trusted leaders and friends was revealed to us and the rest of the world at the same time.

I say sin because that is what it is.  Hopefully, we all realize that priests are sinners too.  That is not to excuse his alleged actions.  Certainly cocaine addiction is not like alcohol addiction in that the initial choices that lead to this must be much more deliberate and are in themselves, sinful.  This is perhaps the part that makes the public revelation of the sin more difficult.

Another source of pain is the backhanded compliment which comes from the press when a priest is held up to greater scrutiny and ridicule for his sin than almost anyone else because of his failures.  The failures get much more airtime than the good deeds.  That is to be expected.

However, the coverage exacerbates the shock, sadness, and disbelief that comes when one who leads us, who stands beside us, and who encourages us while we work together to spread the gospel to a disbelieving and cynical world is branded as a hypocrite.  I often wonder what the difference is between a hypocrite and a sinner.  I suppose one thing is that the hypocrite dares to publicly profess the truth; otherwise, he could not be branded as such.  Another is that the hypocrite’s sins must become manifest to be labeled one.  A third is perhaps that a hypocrite, if he is authentically one, is so because he has not yet acknowledged and begun his attempt to repent and turn away from his sins.

Fr. Layden preached the truth, but no one knows if Fr. Layden can be called a hypocrite.  This is of course, the question that is on the minds of the news media.  It is the question on the minds of some of our students.  It is not clear how to answer this question.  However, it seems to me that this is not an important question.  The question I suggest arises from Satan’s temptation against the possibility of living a pure life after the manner of Jesus Christ. He claims that those who would dare to witness to this message cannot do so themselves and so are not to be deemed credible.  It is also clear to me that this apparent success on Satan’s part, is again becoming the catalyst for his undoing.

It appears to me that most of our students have dismissed this question as irrelevant, as it is.  Our students have begun to come together to offer prayers for healing and reparation, students and staff have instituted weekly fasts for the same purpose, the students have spontaneously begun to say the St. Michael prayer after Mass.  The unity that began with feelings of joy and accomplishment at the beginning of the week has begun to take deeper root in a solidarity borne in shock, sadness, and concern for our fallen spiritual father and Christian brother, but one that is nourished by faith.

We are again reminded that our faith may be strengthened by our brothers, sisters, and spiritual fathers, but our faith ultimately is in no man.  We believe in the Father, Creator of heaven and earth who always keeps His promises.  We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, Who suffered and died to win these promises for us.  We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life who brings us all to His grace: the fallen and the repenting.

St. John, pray for us!

A new website on Catholic voting has an excellent clip done by Grassroots Films:

A friend pointed me to a post from the other day on Fumare.  It is a short post about heroic fatherhood.  It is a sad post about the loss to a family.  It is a frightening post about the eugenic mindset of our culture.  Above all, it is an encouraging post that there are still some among us who love with a father’s love and there are many others who are blessed by such a witness.

I am always excited to find studies that confirm what the Catholic Church has always taught. In a 2002 research article (Does divorce make people Happy?) from the Institute for American Values there were some interesting findings.

- Unhappily married adults who divorced or separated were no happier, on average, than unhappily married adults who stayed married.

 - Divorce did not reduce symptoms of depression for unhappily married adults, or raise their self-esteem, or increase their sense of mastery, on average, compared to unhappy spouses who stayed married.

 - The vast majority of divorces (74 percent) happened to adults who had been happily married five years  previously.

 - Unhappy marriages were less common than unhappy spouses

 - Staying married did not typically trap unhappy spouses in violent relationships

 - Two out of three unhappily married spouses who avoided divorce or separation ended up happily married five years later.

 - Many currently happily married spouses have had periods of marital unhappiness, often for quite serious reasons, including alcoholism, infidelity, verbal abuse, emotional neglect, depression, illness and work reversals.

 - Spouses who turned their marriages around seldom reported that counseling played a key role.

What does this all mean? In general that marriages go through ups and downs. If you ride out the downs, as we are called to do, most marriages (8 out of 10) find themselves back on the sunny side of life. Divorce in our modern culture isn’t generally because the marriage is bad, but that one or both in the marriage are unhappy. Not sure our Lord would count that as a valid reason for divorce. In anycase the study finds that people who are unhappy in their marriages and divorce are found to be just as unhappy five years later. (No matter where I go, there I am!!) Seems that divorce isn’t the answer, staying married is.

Hmmm.  Way to go Jesus!! (Matthew 19:6)

Peace,

CLS

In an earlier post, Francis commented on the presumably illogical and uncaring position of Conservatives on taxation, especially as regards special needs children. I would like, in this post, to respond very briefly to this concern.

As everyone knows, the question of perennial taxation (as opposed to periodic levies) and its inherent purpose cuts to the very essence of political government and its teleology. Why does Conservatism seek to lessen the tax burden imposed by the modern state? One can understand why this is so in considering the basic principles of Conservatism.

These principles are subsidiarity and localism. This is to say that for Conservatism, prepolitical or natural communities, such as families, villages, and churches, should bear the primary responsibility for the care of society. These prepolitical institutions are understood by Conservatives to be the basic social matrix of our lives.

Perennial taxation should be greatly lessened, in the Conservative view, as a practical means of strengthening the cohesion of these prepolitical communities. The perennial taxation favored by the modern state ends up taking away the political and economic freedom and power of these natural communities.

Most modern political thought on the left views taxation as a good because it is thought that by means of it a levelling of natural communities is achieved that brings society under the control of a bureaucratic class well-trained in the art of calculative reason.

This is considered good because calculative reason is thought to be able to control the contingent forces of nature and human freedom. The presumed end result is to establish a peaceful social ordering in which a dominant middle class, kept safe by calculative reason, can live out its life in tranquil harmony.

Of course, the twentieth century unmasked this goal as a delusion and a terrible denigration of human freedom. It was seen that natural social life is irreplaceable. Bodies by the tens-of-millions piled up throughout the world as the Socialist desire to level prepolitical communities had its bloody requital.

Both Hitler (a National Socialist) and Stalin (an International Socialist) were inspired by this dream of modern political sovereignty: where human social existence is lived out entirely on the level of the fabricated political order.

Perennial taxation, as the Distributists (who were Conservatives in the counter-revolutionary tradition) realized, is a modern invention of the money power and the primary means by which wealth is coercively redistributed and the fabricated political order consolidated.

Of course, no modern political party thinks outside of the modern box on the issue of taxation. In our own country, Republicans are not through-and-through Conservatives.

If we were to reestablish the role and importance of prepolitical societies, it would require not only abandoning the Socialist delusion but the Lockean and Smithean economic materialism and atomism that the modern Republican Party in the United States embraces.

In regard to Francis’s specific point about special needs children I would reiterate: there are societies that exist between the state and the individual that are the basic social matrix for human existence. Conservatives believe that it is within the context of these societies that we should care for our children, disabled or not: excessive and perennial taxation weakens these societies rather than strengthening them.

The Republicans, in spite of their propensity to embrace atomism, are unlike the Socialist Democrats in that they are not out to destroy prepolitical communities intentionally.

Ultimately, that is a major reason why I believe a vote for McCain/Palin is morally acceptable for a Catholic (my chief concern on this blog), whereas an Obama/Biden vote is not. Of course, a suitable write-in candidate is also morally acceptable.

For those of you involved in any type of parish or diocesan ministry, there is a new media outlet for Catholic oriented video clips that you can use for a variety of venues.  It is called Catholic Media House.  It looks to be very interesting and quite helpful.  Check it out.

Most probably have heard about it, but Brian over at Ora et Labora has a Petition going in support of the University of San Diego’s withdrawal of their offer to let Rosemary Radford Ruether have the Monsignor John R. Portman Chair in Roman Catholic Theology.  This only makes sense because Ruether has rejected her Catholic faith.  In fact, she no longer holds a belief that anyone would recognize as Christian.

Brian is looking to reach 4000 names.  Right now his petition is smoking the opposing petition drive that is condemning the university and demanding the offer be reinstated.   If you haven’t signed the petition, please go over and do so.

 I was, like many conservatives and pro-lifers, quite impressed with Sarah Palin’s speech last night. In fact, many conservatives (so-called “paleocons” excluded, naturally) have been going bonkers over the speech. They are seeing in Palin perhaps the next Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher. On the face of it, the idea seems almost comical. But, much, much stranger things have happened in world history than the meteoric rise to prominence of a “hockey mother” of five. How does Palin’s speech last night compare to early speeches from those two immense political figures from the 1980s?

Well, Reagan’s speech to the 1964 Republican national convention is the speech that thrust him into national prominence. It is, as was natural for Reagan, well articulated and magnetic. But notice that the whole ambience for “speechifying” in those days was completely different than what we have today.

The audience was there to listen, rather than to cheer wildly, and Reagan gave a diagnosis of the modern political situation that was quite substantive. It is a marvelous speech, far outclassing anything that we have heard in the current election cycle: either republican or democrat. But, I do not think that such a speech would work today, as our attention spans would not be capable of handling it.

Thatcher’s speech in 1975 on the free society brought her to the forefront of national politics in Britain. Again, it was a much more substantive speech than anything we have heard in our current American election cycle. I could only find a portion of it on youtube, but one can get a true sense from this snippet of the oratorical skills that would make Thatcher such a formidable politician on the world stage. Also, one sees her playfulness, as she dusts the podium before giving her speech.

Sarah Palin’s speech worked on several levels. It was an engaging introduction to her life, a playful attack on her opponents, a stirring outreach to parents of children with disabilities, a rousing tribute to her running mate, and a strong indication that she will be defiant in the face of the left-wing feeding frenzy that will follow her whereever she goes.

Was it a great speech? Does it rank among the pantheon of speeches that launch important political careers? Only time will tell, of course. It did not have the substance of these Reagan and Thatcher speeches. But it did accomplish any purpose that the McCain campaign might conceivably have had for the vice presidential speech.

I was at the gym this morning, finishing my workout on the elliptical machine, when a conversation caught my attention.  I don’t own an ipod, though with mornings like this one I seriously consider allocating the little discretionary funds I have toward a personal ambient noise masking system.  That is to say, I am sometimes reduced to trying not to listen to some not so promising conversations of those next to me.

This morning CNN was showing the RNC floor and Sarah Palin’s being familiarized with the venue in which she would be speaking.  Of course, CNN was going through their concise “tutorial” on her and those salient details which the US voter needs to know.  I must say that they have done just a superb job, with the revelation about her 17 year old daughter, in exercising the same kind of restraint as they did with John Edward, haven’t they?

The MSM treatment obviously has been taken in by the woman next to me, who was perhaps in her 50s.  She asked the gentleman next to her what he thought about Palin.  His response was that he liked everything that he had heard so far.  As I live in one of the most extremely “left-wing” towns one can imagine among the cornfields of the Midwest, I was somewhat surprised by his response.  The woman’s retort. . . not so much:

Yes, but she is pro-life; she doesn’t believe in abortion, birth control, or sex education.  Just look at what this did for her daughter.  Hopefully it has opened her eyes and she now realizes that just talking to them doesn’t work.

I was barely able to restrain a reply, though I was not quite as successful in restraining my countenance.  While this one anecdotal case does not necessarily indicate the overall effect of the press’s coverage it does illustrate the way the coverage can affect a certain, and unfortunately not sufficiently uncommon, mindset.

It is interesting that this woman used the term “pro-life” albeit she seemed to regard it as pejorative.  It is also telling that Palin’s views on sexual morality seemed to be her primary concern with respect to her suitability for the office of Vice President.

The prevailing premise that seemed to pervade this woman’s line of thinking is that it is impossible to keep our kids from fornicating and so we must do whatever it takes to ensure that they do not suffer the consequences of their actions.  This is the definition of libertinism, I would argue.  She is certainly Machiavellian in her premise that the ends justifies the means without even seeming to question the latter.  Neither does she seem to question the message that teaching kids how to have sex might some how contribute to the problem. While seriously troubling, none of this is at all surprising.

Nor is this lady aware of the overwhelming evidence that indicates that it is the libertine culture that has opened the way to the prevalence of teenage sex and teen pregnancy/abortion and that the advent abstinence only education can be correlated with a decline in teenage pregnancy.  For this lady and many other like her, one isolated case proves her point.

Besides her lack of critical thinking and her generally “amoral” outlook about issues of sex and human life, her premise that children cannot be made virtuous, ratified by the failure of one pro-life politician’s teenage daughter, is also instructive.  Here she seems to reflect the social amnesia of the West with respect to the tradition of virtue and character.  Children, indeed all men, are simply ignorant animals who will follow their sexual “instincts.”  The most that can be hoped for is that we (these same ignorant, hormone driven animals) might hope for is to forestall the deleterious consequences of our libido.

She is right that just “talking to” children is insufficient.  However, authentic education is not just “talking to” the student.  It is not the conveyance of information.  Rather, authentic eduction encompasses the formation of the whole person, the formation of character infused with virtue. This is a difficult in our fallen state, even when there is a supporting culture.  Sadly, our culture is anything but supportive of the formation of strong and virtuous character.   This option, which is what abstinence only education (at least good programs) aims for, seems as foreign and strange to our culture as classical metaphysics does to the materialist.

I doubt that this lady’s hope for Sarah Palin will come about.  However, her words have served to once again open my eyes.  That is, I am again reminded about the severely detrimental impacts that bad philosophy can have when its ill fruits enter the public mainstream through the mass media. We are indeed edging ever closer to the precipice of cultural implosion.

If nothing else, this election will be about whether we as a nation abandon any hope of a return to sanity with respect to life, sex, and family or if we will plunge headlong into moral oblivion, led by those who think that respecting life is above their pay grade and that uncertainty about embryology among the ancients by erstwhile “Catholic” politicians legitimizes embracing such deadly views.