Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

It has been a very busy couple of weeks so as you have seen, we have not been posting lately.  My wife and I  left Champaign last week amidst a fairly strong wind storm driving windchills to almost -20 deg F.  We arrived in San Antonio to spend Christmas at 80 degrees.  The wife is kind of partial to weather feeling like winter during Christmas time but she didn’t audibly lament the positive temperature differential this year.  I have no complaints

We had planned on getting to see many of our old friends while we are back in SA, but with projects around the house for mom, unplanned events (like tix to the Alamo Bowl last night), etc. I don’t think that we will be doing too well on that account this year…but there is still time (but alas several projects as well).

Last Friday, we accompanied Shelray to the abortuary and that experience got me ta’ thinkin agin. This PP clinic has a “volunteer,” an older gentleman, perhaps in his late 60s whose primary role appears to be to try to intimidate the prolife presence.  He would come up to you, stand about three or four feet away from you and look right at you.  Not so much in the eye, but almost as if he is looking right through you.  He would not engage in any conversation or even respond to greetings.

It occurred to me that he almost seemed intent upon refusing to acknowledge the existence of the human person standing right in front of him.  This obstinate act of the will to ignore the evidence of his senses in order to satisfy his agenda seems to be the same fault that allows him to volunteer his time for such a heinous cause.

It is nothing new, I suppose, that men are able to dehumanize others in order to rationalize the treatment of other human beings as subpersonal animals or worse.  However, as John Paul II warned, there is a growing and widespread attack against the human person today.  This ominous trend reflects what he called a crisis of the human person.  He tied this to a lack of faith, saying that without God, man becomes an enigma to himself such that he inevitably will turn against himself.  This self-destructive death wish was highlighted by Benedict in a recent locution which gained much noteriety.

I am talking about the breathless reactions of the media to an aside within Benedict’s Christmas Greeting to the members of the Roman Curia.  This reaction reflects the confusion he discusses and in fact it demonstrates the exact point that he was making within his text.  There is so much in even the brief English translations currently available that could be expounded upon but I will limit my comments to the context of the recent hullabaloo. Most have seen the following text (obtained from the previous link):

…the Church cannot and must not limit itself to transmitting to its faithful the message of salvation alone. It has a responsibility toward creation, and must exercise this responsibility in public as well. And in doing so, it must defend not only the earth, water, and air as gifts of creation belonging to all. It must also protect man against his own destruction. Something like an ecology of man is needed, understood in the proper sense. It is not an outdated metaphysics if the Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman, and asks that this order of creation be respected. In fact, this is a matter of faith in the Creator and of listening to the language of creation, disdain toward which would be the self-destruction of man, and therefore the destruction of the very work of God. What is often expressed and understood by the term “gender” is ultimately resolved in the self-emancipation of man from creation and from the Creator. Man wants to create himself, and to arrange always and exclusively that which concerns him. But this means living contrary to the truth, living contrary to the creator Spirit. Yes, the rainforests deserve our protection, but man deserves it no less, as a creature in whom a message is inscribed that does not mean the contradiction of our freedom, but its precondition. Great scholastic theologians have described marriage, meaning the lifelong bond between man and woman, as a sacrament of creation, which the Creator himself instituted and which Christ – without modifying the message of creation – incorporated into the history of his covenant with men. It is part of the proclamation that the Church must make on behalf of the creator Spirit present in nature as a whole, and in a special way in the nature of man, created in the image of God. It is beginning from this perspective that one should reread the encyclical “Humanae Vitae”: the intention of Pope Paul VI was to defend love against sexuality as consumption, the future against the exclusive presumption of the present, and the nature of man against its manipulation.[...]

The essence of this short snippet is that man is created according to the structure of Truth itself.  There is a truth about the human person and how he must live…an ecology if you will.  Sanity demands that this giveness of creation and the structure of the human person be discovered and conformed to.  Insanity, a self-destructive death wish is manifested by those who promote the idea that man is solely that which he defines for himself.  This insanity is seen in Satan’s non-serviam, in man’s fall from grace, and in every sinful act of men.  However, the insanity is now becoming “common wisdom,” at least at this point among the intelligentsia and the media.

Above B16 is saying no more than the Church has consistently taught and recently, it always receives the same reaction.  While the only news here is that the Church still has not defected from the truth, such restatements of perennial Church teachings are now newsworthy.  Herein lies the issue.  Many of the attacks leveled against the Pope and the Church arise from the mere mention of the fact that man cannot without consequence, through the mere exercise of his will distort the proper structure of creation. Warning about the fact that nature is unforgiving is noteworthy for the fact that it demands public ridicule and scorn.

B16 chooses Christmas to mention this most urgent of all problems, that we have lost sight of who and what we are to our own peril. Christmas is most appropriate considering that Christ fully reveals man to himself.  Only Christ and the witness to Him can overcome the downward slide we have now begun.

As a society we are losing the sense of what it means to be human, created in the image of God as male and female.  The results of which are distortions which lead, according to the Pope, to man’s self-destruction.  Those intent upon self-destruction cannot bear to hear such warnings.

Their response is not simply the shrill cries of the confused.  They are that but the complaints are calculated to acheive a desired effect.  Those suffering from the various attraction and identity pathologies to which B-16 alludes cannot bear to hear the truth and so their aim is to squelch the voices of the witnesses to truth.  The strategy is two pronged.  The first tine is the now successful attempt to tie sexual pathologies (same sex attraction disorder, sex identity disorders, etc.) to civil rights.  Any witness to the truth then is deemed an affront to civil rights and therefore, equated with hate speech. The second tine which has not yet gained ground everywhere but is advancing, is the attempt to paint such witness as in and of itself, an insigation to violence against this now protected “minority “class.” Instigation to violence has long been a universally recognized exception to the freedom of speech granted by liberal societies.  It seems that Europe and Canada are soon to succumb to this strategy, that is until they are swallowed by the Islamic civilization that is now rushing to fill the demographic vacuum left by the culture of death.

As the octave of Christmas draws to a close, we are reminded that Christ came not simply to reveal to man the cognitive content of truth but to effect that truth in an ontological and immediate manner.  He has come to reconcile man with God and so also to reconcile man with himself, interiorly and interpersonally.

It is only in the power of the Cross, mediated to us through the Holy Spirit in Christ’s Church that we have the audacity to hope that what now seems lost will ultimately end in triumph.  Lent is fast approaching and the clouds of evil are gathering.  We see Good Friday looming near on the horizon but it is a “Good Friday.”  We know how it works out at the end.  In Christ is our hope, in Christ is our Easter victory.

I have recently had the pleasure of reading two fine, slim volumes of philosophy by the Jesuit philosopher James Felt (pictured above, far right, next to Thomas and to Alfred North Whitehead). One is a volume dedicated to epistemology entitled Human Knowing: A Prelude to Metaphysics. The second volume is dedicated to metaphysics and is entitled Aims: A Brief Metaphysics for Today. These books follow from and complete an earlier work of his entitled Coming To Be: Toward a Thomistic-Whiteheadian Metaphysics of Becoming. The first two books mentioned could serve as excellent textbooks in philosophy classes for beginning students. But they are also, in my opinion, of great interest to philosophers and theologians.

Felt does a very interesting thing in these volumes, something that a few short months ago I would not have even thought possible. He synthesizes, in a coherent presentation of the value of first philosophy, the metaphysical systems of Thomas Aquinas and Alfred North Whitehead.  And, remarkably, he does so without compromising Thomas’s explication of God’s nature as Pure Act.

As a Thomist, I have always found Whitehead to be an extremely frustrating philosopher to read. There are many good things to be found in Whitehead, to be sure. He is probably, outside of the sphere of explicitly Catholic thought, the most important and constructive modern critic of scientific materialism. He shows, perhaps even more clearly and doggedly than Edmund Husserl, another great critic of scientific materialism, that metaphysical materialism entails radical skepticism, and he develops a metaphysical system based on a realist assumption of the full variety of human experience. If scientific materialism is true, Whitehead realized, then human knowledge cannot tell us anything true about the world, except by pure chance and accident. We could not, then, even know that scientific materialism is itself true.

Yet, there are many frustrating elements in Whitehead’s thought. The most frustrating thing of all, which probably leads to all of the other problematical elements in his system — including an incoherent theology – is that he misunderstands the Aristotelian category of substance. He understood substance in the sense of Descartes, Locke, and Hume, as an underlying substrate of accidental properties that does not change when its accidents change. He attributed this modern view of substance erroneously to Aristotle himself. He thereby vehemently rejected the very category of substance as leading to all kinds of deformation of thought.

This rejection caused him to postulate that the primary actual entities in the world are tightly ordered successions of legions of atomic entities that do not endure. So, on his view, the human person, like all other beings in the world, is not an enduring entity but a succession of societies of atoms that pass on their experience and value to succeeding entities. In other words, the unity of the human soul, or of any other being in the world, can have no real basis in Whitehead’s thought.

Yet, the positive aspects of Whitehead’s thought are still so prevalent that he remains of extreme interest to philosophers and theologians alike. His persistent cosmological and scientific focus, which is sympathetic to religion, makes him a valuable dialogue partner for Catholic thinkers. This is so because the cosmological question remains the area of primary concern in the modern age in explicating the truth of divine revelation. Indeed, the cosmological question is of eminent importance generally speaking. Physical nature cannot be given over to mechanist materialism without turning the human person into just another object in the physical domain. Whitehead saw this fact and tried to turn the tables on metaphysical materialism.

Yet, given that his manner of turning the tables on materialism was so tied to a rejection of the category of substance, how can a Thomist possibly find common ground with Whitehead? The category of substance is central to Thomas’s theology and metaphysics. Whitehead’s obstinate rejection of it has made his thought very off-putting, to say the least, to many Thomists.

James Felt, in the books mentioned above, opens a possible path to reconciliation between Thomas and Whitehead. He shows that Whitehead’s essential insights on the nature of human experience are redeemable. He shows that the category of substance cannot be thrown out in the way that Whitehead did. But, at the same time, he shows that Whitehead’s recognition that sensory perception has a deeper connection to physical nature than materialism can allow is of great value and can help bring out in a manner thinkable for the contemporary age the Thomist doctrine of creation’s participation in Divine Being.

Whitehead argued that human experience perceives, in a non-sensory way, the causal influence of the world, and that all things are goal-directed and value-laden. This insight into experience is directly opposed to that of David Hume, who can be taken as one of modernity’s most representative mechanist materialists. Hume argued, based on his mechanist materialism, that we can have no knowledge of real causal influence in the world. All that we can know are our ideas of reflection, based on impressions of sensation. The latter are, essentially, the atoms of the material world that meet our sense organs in sensation and are turned by human intelligence into the structures of perception.

What we perceive, Hume argued, has no essential connection to the matter of sense. So, for instance, Hume argued, colors, sounds, tastes, values: none of these tell us anything about the actual world. Nor can we, according to Hume, know about causality. All that we experience through sense are our immediate sensations. These can tell us nothing about the past or the future. No sense impression has essential reference to what comes before it or what will come after it. We can only intellectually infer causality. But this inference has no objective validity. We build up our notions of causality from repeated experience of associated sensations, even though these sensations have no essential connection to one another.

Hume’s doctrine became an essential tenet of modern philosophy. Indeed, materialist presumptions must lead, by logical implication, to some variant of it. It is the core doctrine of modern skepticism, entailed by mechanist materialism.

Whitehead saw that if Hume’s account of sense-perception is true, then no human intellectual endeavor can have validity, not even science. It is often argued, as Hume himself did, that scientific materialism undermines the epistemic validity of religion. Whitehead argued, to the contrary, that scientific materialism undermines the epistemic validity of science itself.

In countering Hume, Whitehead showed that human perception has a more fundamental basis than sensory interaction with the atoms of the material world. The world presents itself to us not only as a congerie of sensations but as a causative agency that spurs us on to the achievement of value.

It is this fundamental insight of Whitehead’s that Felt incorporates into his explication of first philosophy. He uses it to bring out the basic fact of our experience, which shows us that all things are oriented to value and to purposeful ends. He shows us, with the assistance of the Whiteheadian alternative to Hume, that creation is, as Thomas understood, essentially marked by an exitus-reditus relationship to the Divine Alpha and Omega.

Felt’s accomplishment is worthy of further exploration and seems to answer in an unexpected way the question asked in the title of this post. Yes, indeed, Thomists and Whiteheadians can get along, though both may have to be a bit less dogmatic about their metaphysical systems in order to do so. Perhaps it is better to say that Thomas and Whitehead can get along, and to leave their followers out of it. At any rate, Felt helps to show that a corrected Whitehead has a place in the perennial tradition of philosophy. There is much more that could be said here, but I shall leave it to potential readers to explore Felt’s interesting books for themselves.

I was at the gym this morning and, as usual, was exposed to the latest bloviation from the mainstream media.  This morning, Kerry Kennedy was on some morning show offering her explorations into her Catholic faith that she is promoting through a new book, Being Catholic Now: Prominent Americans Talk About Change in the Church and the Quest for Meaning.

Kennedy is one of Robert F. Kennedy’s youngest children.  She describes her motivation to write the book:

So, what happened is that I was feeling conflicted because my Catholicism is so deeply important to me — it was my sense of connection to the almighty, to humanity, to my heritage, my upbringing. And my Catholicism informed my view of the world, and the work that I do every day on social justice issues. And yet, so often when I went to church, I was confronted with words and symbols that were anathema to my values. …So I thought it was time to take some time and reflect more deeply on these issues.

I suppose that this is a good thing.  One should feel a sense of consternation when the values one holds are in conflict with the faith one professes.  Now Kennedy is a lawyer, so we might assume a lawyer who is going to investigate some conflict of positions would begin by looking at the reasoning behind the positions in which she is in conflict.  That is not apparently what Kennedy chooses to do.

Her modus operandi is to ask 37 different prominent Catholic Americans for their views on Catholicism.  She wanted a broad spectrum of views from people of have thought seriously about some issue…any issue.  She did not think it important that they have thought seriously about what it means to be Catholic.  Some of her choices of “Catholics” are quite curious.  While there are a couple who might make sense, Cardinal McCarrick and Tom Monghan, others are bizzarre.  She interviews such authorities on what it means to be Catholic like: Bill Maher, Dan Akroyd, Susan Sarandon, Andrew Sullivan, and Nancy Pelosi.  Bill Maher, are you kidding.  Exactly what will you learn from this obscence, anti-Catholic ignoramus?  For some reason, I do not think that if I wanted to know about a topic, say superstring theory, that I would ask someone who has thought a lot about Keynesian economics but hasn’t a clue about superstring theory.  I dunno., maybe that’s just me.

The problem, it seems to me, is that instead of considering the source of the Church’s teaching and the source of her values, Kennedy instead seems to assume her values to be foundational and instead an open investigation into Church teaching and an honest self-assessment, she turns her focus on trying to legitimize her desire to remain Catholic while rejecting those teachings which conflict with her “values.”  With such an agenda, where else would one turn than to some of the notable leaders of dissent:

So, as Robert Drinan in this book pointed out, the pope apologized for 92 things that the Catholic church had done wrong, and he (Drinan) said, ‘These are fallible people and I expect them to do fallible things in the future as well.’ And so I think that that is a source of comfort for me, to view it sort of in that way, that we’re all fallible, and we’ll all make mistakes, but that this is an important institution to be part of.

This is the old, tired canard of dissenters.  The Church has erred on this or that issue in the past, and usually they make no distinctions among the issues that throw out, thus they are wrong (and I am right) in my dissent against this or that issue (which usually has to deal with sexual restraint).  These dissenters generally conflate matters of prudential judgment, sinfulness of some members of the hierachy (she makes much hay over the “pedophile” scandal), changes in disciplinary practice, and authentic development of doctrine all to suggest that the Church is not infallible (not asking how much more fallible she might be than the Institution). And that is what Kennedy does here:

I was trying to resolve that issue, of how do people who disagree with what the institutional church is saying to them look themselves in the mirror and say, ‘I am a Catholic.’ And what I found is that absolutely everybody disagrees with the church. The cardinals disagree with the church, and the nuns and the priests, and even Tom Monaghan disagrees with the church, so everybody has a disagreement, which is interesting to me. It’s just not a monolith at all. It’s an enormous organism with a lot of moving parts and people with strong opinions and I think that that’s good.

Tom Monaghan’s admitting that he would not again send his children to Catholic schools because they have become destructive to the faith of young people is not the same as Fr. Drinan arguing that abortion “rights” is an issue that Catholics can legitimately support. Kennedy certainly does not demonstrate that she possesses a mature understanding of her faith.  In fact, she does not manifest even the capacity for making critical distinctions that is supposed to be the art of a lawyer.  In terms of her  understanding of the faith, here is what I take to be her summary:

I also think that Catholicism is inherently about contradiction. So much of the New Testament is about Christ arguing with the Pharisees and with the scribes and with the Jewish leaders of the day, and as Pope Benedict said, it’s a quest for the truth. And so if you’re going to have a quest for the truth, you’re going to have a lot of questioning of authority. And we’re taught to have obedience to authority, but we’re also taught to revere saints, so many of whom were burnt at the stake or martyred because they questioned authority. And then we are told that Christ has died but Christ is coming again. And when Catholics say I don’t understand this, how can this really be transformed into the blood of Christ, is this really the body of Christ that we are eating now, they are told, ‘That’s the mystery,’ and ‘Go in peace,’ and that’s sort of it. And so I think that, in a way, I think it’s good, because it prepares us to deal with so many other parts of life, where there are conflicting emotions. At the moment of greatest love, there is greatest fear, and at the moment of enormous repression, there is resistance, and therefore a chance at revolutionary change. And so I think our lives are full of contradictions.

So since the Catholic Church is about contradiction she “feels” that she can be at peace with holding to the faith which is “anathema” to many of her personal  values.  For example, the Church is a strong promoter of social justice around the world she argues, except for the parish she went to in Northern Virginia which preached on ending a woman’s right to abortion.  Nor did it permit girl altar servers, an even more disturbing anachronism it seems.  But not to worry, now she is in a great parish in Armonk, New York where the priest is always putting a picture of haloed Gandhi on the altar. She seems to equate Christian mystery with contradiction reflecting a rather immature (and erroneous) understanding of this important doctrine.

Implied is that for Kennedy, the most relevant contradiction is the fact that the Church requires obedience to authority (at least she knows that) but on the other hand, everyone knows that Jesus was a rebel (of course, Matthew 23:2-3 was a distortion of the pure Gospel message inserted by some later, ecclesio-centric redactor). So she will be an obedient rebel?  I suppose she will be obedient to her personal “values” and rebellious against Church authority because it will not canonize her personal values.  The scary thing is that this lady says she is teaching CCD.

So the Church prepares us for the contradictions of life by being, not a contradiction with the world, but a contradiction with reason.  This sense that faith is opposed to reason, the radical individualism, and the anti-authority rebellion are emblematic of Enlightenment rationalism and are all manifested in Kennedy’s assertions.  But she is not even a rationalist.  Rather, she is parasitic on Enlightenment premises for some of her argumentation but proves to be, as will be seen, thoroughly post-modern.  This justifies (in her mind I suppose) her self-contradictions in arguing that her “Catholicism inform[s] my view of the world, and the work that I do every day on social justice issues” but at the same time it does not inform her moral world view in terms of same sex attraction disorder, abortion, contraception and the like.

One might ask why she would still want to be a member of the Church with which she has so much disagreement.  Well, it is for an immature understanding of a seriously correct reason.  The Catholic Church provides her “sense of connection to the almighty, to humanity, to my heritage, my upbringing.” It does provide this because the Church is man’s entry into communion with God.  Unfortunately, Kennedy’s dualistic ecclesiology feeds her individualistic worldview.  For her, the institutional Church “is separate and apart from my sense of connection to the Almighty, when I pray.” She believes that she can separate the “institutional” Church from her “Catholicism.”

Perhaps someone should recommend to her De Lubac’s Splendor of the Church, or Balthasar’s The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church as counter proposals to her defective understanding of the Church.  In these works, these 20th century thinkers show how the Church is an organic whole comprising the Totus Christus, the Whole Christ.  One cannot have the unity with the Father the Church effects while rejecting the hierarchical structure that the Lord Jesus established to tend His sheep. Or as St. Cyprian says, “one cannot have God as Father who will not have the Church as his Mother.” One cannot fully embrace the Father if one rejects the fullness of the Truth, which is His Son–and this includes the Son’s Mystical Body–the Church.  The fragmented thinking of our time might make a fragmented view of the Church seem plausible but it is worldview that has deleterious consequences for one’s soul.

Kennedy presents a confused sort of argument which allows her to maintain her connection with her childhood memories by remaining Catholic and still embracing her Enlightenment formed, personal “values.”  She hopes that her book will be a comfort for other confused Catholics who are searching for a rationalization, or more correctly mutual emotional support, for their dissent:

I hope that they’ll feel like they’re not alone…I hope that people will feel that there are a lot of others out there who are grappling with the same issues: Should I raise my children Catholic? What does that mean? Am I a good Catholic? What does it mean to be a good Catholic today? If I’m not following the way I was taught as a child, or that my parents approached the religion, does that mean that I’m somehow missing something, or that I’m bad? And I hope also that others might feel a sense that the essence, the goodness of Catholicism, of that relationship with God, of that sense of love, can be embraced without embracing the parts of the institutional church which are anathema to your values, to one’s values.

Kennedy chooses an apt term for her position.  Her desire that people considering dissent are able to “feel” a solidarity with other dissenters is more truthful than asserting that any honest, thinking person could embrace such drivel. She is in fact, proposing that the ground of action must be one’s arbitrarily chosen “values” rather than a quest for truth and justice.  When faced with a contradiction of values, Kennedy chooses to side with Nietzsche and Sarte.  Unfortunately, with these two rebels as her priest-mediators, she is risking abandoning the “connection with the Almighty” she claims to desire; regardless of what her affective senses tell her.

LifeSiteNews.com has a disturbing report up about Cherie Blair’s recent talk at the Angelicum in Rome. Ms. Blair, along with her husband Tony, is a dedicated and tireless supporter of international eugenics programs. It caused quite a stir, recently, when it became known on the web that she had been invited to speak at the Angelicum. So much outrage was directed toward the planners of the event at which she was to speak that they felt compelled to issue a public response, trying to justify their invitation to her.

During her talk, Ms. Blair seems to have put on quite a show. She feigned shock and surprise that anyone would question her allegiance to the pro-life cause. Her presentation must have been quite the tour de force. Indeed, a moral theologian at the Angelicum, Fr. Bruce Williams, stood up after her talk to attest that her words show that she is a supporter of life.

Fr. Williams’s elegy to Ms. Blair is dubious, to say the least. She seems to have said a couple of disturbing things after her talk. First, she admitted that she has difficulty accepting the Church’s “current” teaching on contraception. She thinks that abortion and contraception should not be tied so closely together by theologians and others. This is disturbing not only because it implies that she thinks the Church is going to change its teaching on contraception but because of the combination of ignorance and arrogance that the assertion evinces. Abortion and contraception are linked because they are the most concrete expressions of our sick culture’s wish to detach the act of sex from its procreative end. Someone should have made the effort to make this connection for her. Perhaps Fr. Williams’s energy could have better spent in educating her than in singing her praises.

Second, according to LifeSiteNews.com, at the end of her speech she “…criticised the Catholic Church for what she characterised as its failure throughout its history, until the 20th century, to become involved with the development of wider recognition of human rights. She said that women in the Church are under-represented in leadership roles, asking rhetorically what the Church would be like if “half of all Curia posts” were filled by women” (from the LifeSiteNews.com report).

This sentiment shows an appalling ignorance of history. She should have been challenged on it. There would be no concept of “human rights” if the Church’s teachings on the inherent dignity of the human person hadn’t become a settled instinct of the European soul. It took the witness of countless saints to overcome the dehumanizing tendencies of pagan humanity. Cherie Blair is not herself a witness to the importance of human rights. She is a purveyor of the culture of death. The contemporary attempt to detach the concept of human dignity from its moorings in the Church’s deposit of revelation is leading to civilizational destruction. Blair should have been forced to address the reality of Europe’s demographic winter, brought about by the feminism and eugenicism that she so wickedly and blasphemously advocates in the name of “human rights.”

It is unfortunate that ecclesiastical institutions give a public forum to people, like Blair, who are so obviously lacking in intellectual cultivation. It is not only scandalous to the faith. It is an offense to the dignity of the human intellect. What on earth does Cherie Blair have to add to public debates other than further confusion and obfuscation?

I mentioned in a post yesterday, the discussion I had with some FOCUS missionaries about last month’s Humanists’ attack on Christmas with their “Just Be Good for Goodness Sake” campaign.  I would like to mention that I heard today that five women missionaries serving the University of Nebraska, Lincoln were involved in a serious car accident yesterday on the way to a retreat.  One of the girls is in critical condition and underwent surgery for a fractured skull. Please keep these women and their families in your prayers.

With regard to the question about the possibility of a standard of “goodness” without God, I would like to offer the following.  The ad campaign, you may recall, was sponsored by the American Humanists Association. It was an opportunistic event, they admit, given the rise of the atheist apologists in the public spot light, to promote their own agenda.  As with most of this ilk, they like to promote their presumed intellectual superiority to argue that there is no God.  This group’s particular emphasis seems to be a concern to show that one does not need God in order to be moral.

The campaign itself provided little in terms of defending this position. Rather, they seemed more concerned with how they were made to feel left out during the holidays.  However, one of the campaign spokesmen, Fred Edwords, published an article some time ago in which he tries to justify the claim.

Admittedly, he has a tough challenge in order to describe the variety of arguments from different religious traditions and theological schools in terms of morality.  However, unfortunately, he is not up to the challenge of even describing one of them reasonably.   Alas, the article is a frustrating read.  It is fraught with error, caricature, and leaps of logic.  I would hope that such “intellectuals” could provide more intelligent arguments than we find with Edwords.

Edwords spends most of the article trying to describe and “debunk” belief in God is necessary for morality.  He argues that theists claim moral laws demand that there be a moral Law Giver.  His argument is somewhat convoluted, but he uses what seems to be an adaptation of Thomas Aquinas’ proof from efficient causality for the basis of moral law as his understanding of the theist position.  He responds that theists simply arbitrarily stop at some supernatural being as the first Law Giver and he asks the question why doesn’t this Law Giver need another to give Him laws.

Of course, he misses the point as do most atheists when they ask who created God.  He doesn’t understand the need for necessary existence.  As such, he assumes that this first Law Giver then would have to simply legislate arbitrarily and he sees no reason that this arbitrary law should be binding upon humans.  Thus, he proposes that there is something innate in human nature that is the source of morality.

He simply assumes the definition of good and evil is that which allows man to survive and grow in the context of competing needs.  He tries to show that morality arises only because the needs of some human beings naturally will conflict with others.  Thus, with only one man, there would be no good or evil. Why subpersonal animals are not factored into the mix, I am not sure.  Thus, what he presents is an argument from pragmatism it would seem.

He dismisses without comment, Nietzschean morality.  That is, he ignores Nietzsche’s assertion that the exertion of the will of the powerful over the weak is the logical consequence of atheism by parenthetically setting aside “coercion” as a possible option. This, I would argue is parasitic on Judeo-Christian morality or it is simply an assumption that “will to power” is not pragmatic.  Pragmatism, however, is not the same as calling something good and evil.  He might say that some action is or is not wise, or that it does or does not comport with his personal value system.  However, to say that good and evil is just the way we are does nothing to overcome Hume’s Law which says that an “is” does not equate to an “ought.”

Furthermore, Edwords simply assumes that human nature is a given.  He does not ask why it is that humans’ “similar feelings of compassion to like events” is so.  Neither does he ask why common human “values are not all based on simple individual self-interest or egoism.” He simply answers that it is the result of a natural developmental process and since we share a common gene pool, we all have it. Yes, but why.  How does the selflessness of morality promote survival of the fittest?

Moreover, it does not occur to Edwords to ask why if we are some way, that we should be asked to behave in accord with that way.  That is, he does he ask the question about free will.  He does not seem to see the elephant in the living room.  He touts human reason but he does not address why anyone should need to be convinced to behave in a way that he says we are already programmed.  Free will is an impossible issue for a materialist and so it is an issue that goes unaddressed by this secular humanist. In the end he says:

It is theological values, then, and not human-oriented values, that are the most baseless. For, with theological values, an arbitrary leap of faith must be taken at some point. And once that arbitrary leap has been taken, all values so derived are as arbitrary as the leap of faith that made them possible.

Edwords has not seriously engaged Catholic thought.  He can make this claim only based upon a caricature of classical Christian teaching.  He tries to define a difference between positive law and natural law but he does not have the knowledge or philosophical background to do so.  He has obviously read atheists’ dismissal of the proofs for God’s existence, but as with most of them, has not seriously contended with the arguments themselves presented by solid Catholic thinkers.  As such, we are left with an defense of atheist morality that is nothing more than a catena of assertions linked solely by grammar.

It is ironic that Edwords is very close to providing a solid argument for the need for God if one is to have a morality. One begins with the need for God as Necessary Existence.  When we argue that contingent existence demands necessary existence we are not making an arbitrary assertion but we are asserting an existential necessity.  Nothing comes from nothing.  Edwords’s attempt to separate positive law from natural law and ground natural law in human nature demands that he address the question of human nature.  If human nature is simply the accidental result of random evironmental processes, then ultimately the imperative “just be good” is tautological.  In fact, there is no logical possibility for imperatives.  The statement simply becomes an indicative: “man acts in accord with his nature.”

We are moral solely because we have intellect and free will.  We have a common sense of right and wrong because we are created in the image of God who is Goodness itself.  We have to exhort people to moral behavior because we are fallen.  Only Original Sin explains how man is naturally attracted to the good but to his detriment, is too often tempted to evil.  Leaps of faith, properly understood, are much more human than the leaps of logic Edwords presents us with. Morality is a demand because as human beings we must live by faith–human faith in one another.  But we can ultimately fourish only with supernatural faith and this theological virtue demands the morally good.

…anybody out there??? [Pink Floyd music begins]

We’ve been offline for a while.  It seems our blog wanted to send us a message.  It was getting lonely because of the sparse posting and decided to take a nap.  Shelray convinced it to go back on line with the promise we will pick up the posting as soon as the semester/end of year tasks let up a bit.  Shelray has that diplomatic knack that Hierothee and I lack.

A thought while I am at it.  I was talking with our FOCUS missionaries today and the issue of the Secular Humanist attack on Christmas came up.  You have all heard their slogan: “Just be good, for goodness sake.”  A question: if there is no God, then whence comes goodness and what is the justification for doing anything for its sake?

More later…

[This post is a joint effort between Hierothee and David]

Donna Freitas, a Catholic theologian and Assistant Professor of Religion at Boston University, recently published a book on attitudes toward sex among contemporary students at colleges and universities, Catholic and otherwise: Sex & the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America’s College Campuses.

She found that Catholic college and university students are as prone to contemporary “hook-up” culture as students at secular universities. She found that only strongly evangelical colleges comprise student bodies that reject the hook-up culture: because, she says, in the manner of a liberal protestant, these evangelical colleges encourage a “cult of purity.”

Freitas is apparently not a profound theologian. You can read a little bit about her book and her general take on things at National Catholic Reporter and decide for yourself. Nevertheless, it is useful to learn from her that students at Catholic colleges are as prone as any to engage in thematic “sex parties.” One particularly prevalent type of sex party, Freitas shows, involves young women dressing up as sexual objects (prostitutes, etc.) and engaging in random fornication with their male hosts.

Freitas gives us useful, though somewhat abstract, sociological information in this book. But the whole sordid trend becomes personally shocking when one hears a first-hand account of such a party.

We at C-L-S have been apprised of such an incident. It happened recently off campus at a prominent Catholic university, and involved undergraduate students from the university in a swingers’ game that was prominent in the 1970s. We cannot, of course, give the identity of the person who was brought, unwittingly, to the party and who told us about it. Nor can we disclose the particular university. The student in question left the party, appalled, as soon as it became evident what was going on.

There are many shocking things about all of this. But what is most shocking of all, in our opinion, is the resigned attitude that women who willingly partake in these sordid activities have about them.

We have recently posted on a study revealing the grim fruits of Catholic higher education.  The study indicated that half of the students in Catholic colleges and universities think that it is morally permissible to fornicate.  Most surprisingly, the study revealed that women were more likely (50%) than men (41%) to engage in premarital sex. Troubling as these numbers are, they do not prepare one for arrival of 1970’s swingers’ games that for some, or even many, appear to be what college is all about.

John Paul II was often accused of paying so much attention to women that he virtually ignored men in his theo-pastoral writings. He did, in fact, directly address women much more than men.  He did so because he recognized that a great evil had entered the culture, one that was directly attacking femininity.

What John Paul saw was that modern feminism had adopted Margaret Sanger’s distorted viewpoint that for women to be equal to men they must be able to compete with men in everything.  At the forefront of Sanger’s concern was the ability to be “equal” with men in hedonistic, sexual debauchery, which demands that women be free not simply from any procreative ramifications of unrestrained sex, but even free from any emotional attachments arising from sexual intercourse. Science was to help in the former, but not the latter.

Men and women are both created for complementary, total self-giving.  Sexual intercourse is the most intimate manner of total self-gift, but sex has an immutable, inner structure.  The complementarity of sex is not purely physical.  The natural telos of this physical complementarity points to a greater meaning. Fruitful sexual intercourse results in the unity of persons and, simultaneously, the openness to life-giving love.  This physical structure suggests a metaphysical structure to complementary love.  Namely, masculine love is one of initiating love, and feminine love is actively receptive.

As such, both men and women in their entire make up, physiological, emotional, psychological, and spiritual, are ordered according to this structure of love.  This makeup orients women more toward relationships and, in terms of the sexual act, to experiencing it as the permanent bonding themselves with another person.  Karol Wojtyla indicates this in his book, Love and Responsibility:

The very structure of the male psyche and personality is such that it is more readily “compelled” to disclose and objectivize the hidden significance of love for a person of the other sex. This goes with the relatively more active role of the male in such love, and also imposes a responsibility on him. Whereas in the woman sensuality is as it were covert, and concealed by sentimentality. For this reason she is by nature, more inclined to go on seeing as a manifestation of affection what a man already clearly realizes to be the effect of sensuality and the desire for enjoyment. There exists then, as we see, a certain psychological divergence between man and woman in the manner of their participation in love. The woman appears more passive, although in a different way she is more active. In any case, her role and her responsibility will be different from the role and responsibility of the male (Karol Wojtya, Love and Responsibility, [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993] 111-12).

The context of this statement is sexual intercourse. It is so very important, especially for girls and young women, to understand the differences between the meaning which men and women generally attach to the sexual experience. Because of their masculine structure, which is less integrated than women, men generally experience it more in terms of sensuality and enjoyment. Women, on the other hand, because they are more interior and integrated, will see and experience it more in the way of affection and attachment. That is not to say that men and women are not both damaged when this structure is violated.  They are, but in different ways.  Men, in general, experience the inability to form lasting relationships when they regularly fornicate.  Women generally experience emotional trauma.

The resignation of the young women at college sex parties shows that they are getting the message that they should be talking and thinking about sex in a manner more in keeping with fallen masculine habits.  Nevertheless, they still will experience sex as feminine persons. Due to their feminine structure, they generally should be more reticent about engaging in sex outside of wedlock, but in their confusion they are setting themselves, and the rest of society, on a collision course with reality.  They do not experience pre-marital sex in the same way they are told about it and talk about it. We suspect that the epidemic of cutting, anorexia/bulimia, and other psychological ailments that all too many young women are experiencing is due in large part to this confusion. The sage wisdom that says: God forgives always, men sometimes, but nature never, applies here. With religious restraint on social debauchery all but gone, and feminine restraint waning, there is little to prevent the cultural collapse that all societies face when they so reject the order of nature.

If we had a child ready to go to college, we would seriously consider delaying his entrance until we were morally certain that he had the spiritual maturity to weather the storm of hedonism that he will confront during his four years at what appear to have become fornication factories. Certainly this is not the case at every Catholic school, but only at those which take their Catholic identity seriously will there be a likelihood that the experiences of the young student that we mentioned at the beginning of this post will be avoided. Saint Maria Goretti and Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassatti, pray for us!

As anyone knows who has been following post-election political developments, a battle is being waged for the future direction of the Republican Party. Secularists in the Party are trying to pin the defeat of John McCain on the social conservatives in the Party. They wish to detach the Party from the presumed influence, however marginal, of ”fundamentalist” Christians and of orthodox Catholics.

Of course, the most hated target of these secularists is Sarah Palin. In order to diminish her future influence, they have portrayed her as an anti-intellectual. This has been going on since she was first given the VP nomination by John McCain. That the secularists in the Party would portray her in this light has continuously rubbed me the wrong way. This is so not because I think that Sarah Palin is a great intellectual figure. Frankly, I think that she’s a bit rambling and inchoherent as a public speaker, and her patois seems to indicate the need for much intellectual refinement.

No, the problem that I have with those who cast aspersions on Sarah Palin for her lack of intellectual status is that they are hypocrites. I’ll say it flat out. Most Republicans who loathe Sarah Palin because they find her uncouth, such as Peggy Noonan, David Brooks, Heather McDonald, Kathleen Parker, and Christopher Buckley, are not themselves operating with properly cultivated minds. They are superficial in their thinking, incapable of grasping deep essential structures. They have not understood the great metaphysical achievements that are at the root of the modern institutions that they take for granted. These are not people who have struggled with the profound questions of philosophy or of theology. They are smarmy posers, mere smirkers, who have views on things, and who can drop the names of certain literary figures. But none one of them has done any heavy intellectual lifting on ultimate issues. Their thinking is full of self-contradiction and of the confusion of accidentals for essentials: the tell-tale signs of dilettantism.

A case in point is Christopher Buckley. He is a second-rate satirist and a pundit who gets by on nepotism. His father, William F. Buckley, Jr., was himself a diletantte. But he knew this about himself. He never pretended to be otherwise. If reports that I have heard about him are true, he always wanted to be a true philosopher. He had his chance. He could have furthered his Ivy League education. I suspect that he had some regrets about choosing the path of pundrity and unremittent high-living over serious scholarship and intellectual pursuit. But, for all that, he respected philosophers. As public proof of this one can point to his television show. He dedicated entire programs of his PBS series, “Firing Line,” to in-depth discussions with Mortimer Adler on the immortality of the soul and on the existence of God. He was more proud of these particular airings than of anything else that he did on this long-running series.

His son Christopher, on the other hand, does not even seem to show the proper respect that is due to true intellectual achievement. He gives the appearance of being oblivious to the existence of philosophers of whom it can truly be said that they are profound. Indeed, he evinces no proper framework from which to make judgments about who qualifies as a first-rate thinker: he recently called the drunken purveyor of vocal flatulence, Christopher Hitchens, one of the finest minds of our age. I rest my case.

But perhaps I am too harsh on these “intellectuals.” Perhaps I am failing to appreciate the burden of their vocation. For all of them are journalists (with the exception of Buckley). Journalists, the public intellectuals of our day, have a special responsibility to harbor points of view, and to “keep up” with things. They cannot, by the nature of their work, be bothered to explore a line of thinking all the way through, or to check their work for self-contradiction and confusion. They have demands upon their time and resources for which we should all feel pity.

Indeed, Cardinal Newman discussed the plight of “intellectuals” quite poignantly in his preface to The Idea of a University. I’ll end this post with his trenchant words:

…parti-coloured ingenuities are indeed one of the chief evils of the day, and men of real talent are not slow to minister to them. An intellectual man, as the world now conceives him, is one who is full of “views” on all subjects of philosophy, on all matters of the day. It is almost thought a disgrace not to have a view at a moment’s notice on the Personal Advent to the Cholera or Mesmerism. This is owing in great measure to the necessities of periodical literature, now so much in request. Every quarter of a year, every month, every day, there must be a supply, for the gratification of the public, of new and luminous theories on the subjects of religion, foreign politics, home politics, civil economy, finance, trade, agriculture, emigration, and the colonies. Slavery, the gold fields, German Philosophy, the French Empire, Wellington, Peel, Ireland, must all be practised on, day after day, by what are called original thinkers. As the great man’s guest must produce his good stories or songs at the evening banquet, as the platform orator exhibits his telling facts at mid-day, so the journalist lies under the stern obligation of extemporizing his lucid views, leading ideas, and nutshell truths for the breakfast table. The very nature of periodical literature, broken into small wholes, and demanded punctually to an hour, involves the habit of this extempore philosophy…how many men at this day are assailed by incessant demands on their mental powers…There is demand for a reckless originality of thought, and a sparkling plausibility of argument…and demand for crude theory and unsound philosophy, rather than none at all.

 

. . . Clayton, over at Weight of Glory, passes along info about a contest which entails writing a script (5-10 pages) for a short film on some specific topics associated with John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.  If you’re interested, go take a look at the details.

I have to admit that in reading Tom Hoopes post in the National Catholic Register right after the election, I was somewhat dismayed by what seemed to be his naivety.  In fact, I was so much dismayed that I sent him an e-mail saying so.  For example, his statement that “if” Obama dare attack the innocent and defenseless that we would be there to oppose him seemed somewhat naive to me.  Clearly, BO has made it clear that this is a fundamental position on which he will brook no compromise.

However, I suppose what got me most was not so much the title of the post: “Our President” but his characterization of BO as a “civil, decent man.”  I suppose that I saw this as more naivety as it was prefaced by his saying that he had always liked BO (his initial post implicated all of NCRegister in this but he was led to change that after polling his compatriots). It was here that I took issue in my e-mail.

I am not sure if Tom has personal insight into BO’s character (of course he never responded to my e-mail), but my question to him was what warrants the term “decent” these days for someone with BO’s positions on life issues? Can someone who holds the Nietzchean principle that will to power (aka “pro-choice”) trumps the right of a helpless baby to life saving assistance, born after a botched abortion, be termed “decent”? It seemed to me that Tom had allowed himself to be swayed by the affective marketing of BO the candidate rather than by anything he knows of his personal character. What one appears to be, and in fact may be in many cases, does not warrant the classification of decent, if he holds even one unconscionably evil view.

Nevertheless, I appreciated the article’s attempt to exhort its readers to positive action rather than to demonizing rhetoric as the appropriate and most effective response to such a debacle that we have now found ourselves in.  That appreciation has not been shared by others.

Matt Abbot has been posting of late on some priests’ responses to the initial Hoopes post.  Father James Farfaglia, a priest of the Diocese of Corpus Christi was livid in an e-mail to Matt. He read it as a pro-Obama piece.  The next day, Abbot posted another article on the same topic.  This time by Fr. Euteneuer from HLI.  Matt does not say where the Fr. Euteneuer text came from, but in it the latter says that the Legion has sold out, comparing the Register to the NCReporter.  He says that he is cancelling his subscription to NCRegister.

While I understand these sentiments, I would like to ask whether differences in prudential judgment about the best approach to the goal that all of these folks agree upon warrants the daggers that are being thrown? I do not think that it does.  Clearly, the NCRegister and Tom Hoopes, even if I disagree with his character assessment of BO, is not pro-Obama. His plea to accept the choice of the electorate and support the incoming President in areas that it is possible and to oppose him on issues which do not admit of compromise is not being pro-Obama. His suggestions for prudent and pragmatic action are quite right it seems to me.

When allies turn on one another over issues of prudential judgment about how to accomplish a common goal, when neither is promoting a method that requires an evil means, this seems to me to be doing the devil’s work for him.  Even if we do not agree on the best approach, we mustn’t let our anger over BO’s election be a cause of joy for our foes.  St. Thomas Aquinas, pray for us!