A number of years ago, I recall hearing what at the time I considered to be an extremely fanciful theory about what exactly the act that comprised Original Sin entailed.  In a class, one of my students mentioned that they had heard Christopher West say that the original sin of Adam and Eve was contraceptive sex.  Now it is true there is a very old tradition, dismissed by most because of the way it is characterized, that their sin was sexually based.  This tradition is reflected in the (humorous?) adage, “it wasn’t so much the apple in the tree but the pair on the ground.”  But I wondered, how could one seriously move from this tradition to suggest that it was really contraceptive sex by which they sinned?

I have not read or listened to much of Christopher West, so I have never heard this myself and so I do not know how he might justify his theory (though the theory was confirmed to me by someone who knows West’s work well).  Nevertheless, to my surprise the more I considered it, the more sense it began to make to me.  Now I have not adequately fleshed it out in my thinking in order to begin teaching this as a cogent theory, but several of my classes have heard my current thinking on the subject.  Unfortunately, I think that I gave my best description of it during last year’s theology of the body class but I never did document it and cannot now recall all of my points.  Thus, I thought I might start to document them here.

Of course, we ought to begin with what Genesis has to say.  In sketch, Genesis 3 describes God’s proscription against Adam and Eve’s eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  I don’t intend to do a thorough exegesis of the text here.  Nor will I try to draw correspondences of all of the mythical language to this theory.

What I would like to look at first is the use of the terms “fruit” (periy) and “knowledge” (technically yada` is the verb form, while Gen 2 uses the noun form da`ath).  These terms certainly are used in a variety of ways  in Scripture but here the terms have a decidedly procreative meaning.  Anyone who has studied JPII’s Theology of the Body catecheses will understand the procreative significance of the term “knowledge.”  From a hylomorphic hermeneutic, knowledge encompasses cognitive knowledge but it extends to a more comprehensive exchange of persons and is completed in its most intimate visible manifestation in the marital act in which there is a complete body-soul exchange of gifts of one to the other in life-giving, fruitful love.

Fruit likewise, is a key term.  Adam and Eve were told to be “fruitful and multiply” as were the animals, but they had the additional charge to self-determination…to subdue the earth and have dominion over its creatures.  Choice, necessitating a free will, are fundamental to authentic human fruitfulness (i.e to go beyond simply animal procreation).   In these terms, the fruit of Adam “knowing” Eve was first Cain.  It would seem that there is warrant at this point to at least considering the possibility that the mythical language about “knowledge” and “fruit” in Genesis 3 could be a reference to the marital act.  But of course, we must go much further.

The next thing to consider is the adjectival phrase “good and evil” modifying “knowledge.”  One must ask the question how one might know evil.  Metaphysically speaking, evil can only exist parasitically in some good.  That is, evil exists by depriving the good of some necessary aspect of its existence.  Thus, evil is a state and not a created entity.  Evil has only a privative existence.

If we are consider what this primordial knowledge of good and evil might be in the context of our theory, we must recall that authentic knowledge must be an act where the form of the act manifests a potentially fruitful, complete exchange of persons in the most intimate of all self-giving.  This act is good but it can be experienced also as evil if it is deprived of some essential aspect of its being.  Any time the form of the act is altered from its archetypal structure, it is evil.  If the man does not cling to his wife as the two become one flesh (e.g. adultery or premarital sex) it is evil.  If it is not open to the two being fruitful and multiplying it turns into an evil (i.e. contraceptive sex).  Both cases lead to the “eating” of a deficient “fruit”,  however, it would seem that the text suggests that they are created as man and wife, called to consummate their marriage and so the latter option is left.

A reasonable question that could be asked would be about the significance of contraceptive intercourse as the act by which all of creation would be torn from its relationship with God.  This is indeed a significant question and I think that the theology of nuptial mystery provides the rationale for it and for a second question.  That is, why Satan would choose deforming the marital act as his first (apparently) attack against man.   The nuptial mystery understands Trinitarian Communion as the archetype of nuptial love.  The narratives of man’s creation in both accounts (Gen  1 & 2) focus on man’s creation as complementary selves who are called to be fruitful (Gen 1), to be one flesh (Gen 2) which by nature can be seen as ordered to the same goal.  Some strands of nuptial theology understand the marital act to be the one, par excellence, which hylomorphically manifests the life-giving, fruitful love of total-self gift which is the eternal Trinitarian Processions.  Man images God relatively (as St. Thomas says) more perfectly than the Angels, than Satan himself, in this act.  Where else would this prideful, fallen angel choose to attack man than in the act that allows man to image God, in one way, more than does Satan with all of his perfect intellectual nature.  That is, in the capacity to beget (recall the first Procession).

Recall also the tradition in which Satan is said to reply: non serviam when given the knowledge that he was made to serve man, this lowly vile creature with a body like the sub-personal animals.  Not only that, but that he would have to worship one of them whom God was to join to Himself.  What better way for Satan to prove to himself that he is superior if he can deform, and thereby pervert, the very act by which these (rational) animals superiorly image God?

But one would have to ask why Adam and Eve would be tempted into this?  It wasn’t like they would be afraid that college costs for their progeny would require them to give up the winter home in Aspen.  The Genesis text says that Eve saw that it was good for food, a delight to the eye, and desirable to make one wise.  Certainly knowledge, especially this marital knowledge is a good but Adam and Eve would have had to have been able to see that somehow this act without its procreative fruitfulness was preferable to the authentic act.  I think that the answer here is to realize that they were tempted into falling into Satan’s prideful sin.  They tried to achieve their destiny, to become God-like, without God.  I suggest that they thought that “knowing” one another on their own terms, without God’s “interference” (i.e. His law and the law of the order of nature) was the only way to really authentically experience their “freedom to choose.”  Isn’t this the continuing problem today.  We can often be so blinded by our need to freely choose, and this is a real human need, that we are drawn to ignore the structure by which this choosing leads to authentic human happiness.

Adam and Eve ruptured the integrity of God’s creation by abusing the gift of self-determination.  Instead of following the divine archetype in Whom, through Whom, and for Whom they were created–that is returning themselves to the Father in love, trust and thanksgiving–they tried to take the gift and use it for their selfish ends at the expense of the good of the sacred order.  A final thought.  If it were contraceptive sex that led to this, would this not perhaps by why it is pointed out that while God did not take away the gift of the possibility of fruitful self-giving, the fruit would now be more painful for the woman?

Ok, these are my thoughts thus far.  Thoughtful comments, critiques solicited.

Click here to view.

I was not as pleased with this session as the last but I have found that going by one’s feelings is not always a reliable indicator.  The president of our College saw this session and remarked that he had never seen me so animated.  I am not sure if that was good or bad?

This last week there was some sort of technical glitch (still not sure exactly what happened) but the radio simulcast did not activate.  As a result,  the regular EWTN radio program was playing for anyone who happened to try to listen in (I heard from a few).  Sorry about that; however, here is the video for anyone who might have the time and inclination to watch.

This runs live every 2nd and 4th Wednesday of the month, so we have a three week break until the next episode.  Again, these recordings will also be available on the sidebar under metathreads.

Click here to download.

Click here to download.

I suppose the place to start is with John Paul’s Trinitarian anthropology.  Man is made in the image of a Communion of Persons.  He explains this Communion, starting from traditional Processional theology, in terms of total self-gift.  Communion is total self-gift.  This total self-gift  is thereby the archetype for the human person in his relationships.

The human person is a hylomorphic entity; that is, a unity comprised of a spiritual soul and a material body.  Man exists at once,  in the realm of the spiritual and the animal.  As a spiritual being man shares in the capacity for communion by use of his rational faculties, intellect and will.  These faculties give him he capacity for total self-gift, for communion.

Animals also, in some way, must reflect God’s perfection.  As fundamental as communion is to God’s being, one might expect that there should be some way in which sub-personal animals participate in communion.  Certainly sub-personal beings do not have the rational faculties necessary for the communion of gift.  They do however, experience a sort of communion in which they join themselves to something of a lower nature (hopefully).  However, this union is through annihilating the lower nature and raising it into a higher nature.  They become one with it, though this is a defective communion because the “other” has lost its being.

Man lives in both of these dimensions.  He experiences both this spiritual communion of persons–most perfectly when the giving accords with the archetype, that is total, disinterested self-gift.  He also experiences the communion of consumption when he eats…though I would argue he can consume in other ways…when he treats another person as a means rather than an end…but this requires more discussion than we have space for.

Man now exists in a deficient condition; he is fallen.  It is very interesting to look at the third book of Genesis and the story of the fall in light of the above discussion.  The mythic (this does not mean untrue of course) imagery shows our first parents with the task of total self-gift–that is, to give themselves in trust and thanksgiving to God, very much the way that John Paul describes the second Procession of the Son.  There is a detailed discussion of the theology of creation in relation to the Son and the second Procession which should be inserted here but neither is there space for that so this might seem less compelling than it should be, but the support will have to wait a longer work.

The Genesis imagery of the fall indicates that the instead of achieving communion through this act of total-self gift, they instead chose consumption.  I would argue that whatever the act of rebellion might have actually been, the choice of the consumption imagery is significant.  It suggests that consumption–communion on man’s terms rather than God’s terms–is to be a perennial problem.  In fact, consumption now often masquerades as communion.  I believe that this is the anthropology behind what we know as “comfort foods” which are standard recourse for many of us, particularly when we have trouble with relationships of communion.

Man’s fallen state means that his capacity for love takes upon itself, potentially a bitter aspect.  It is now the case that one has to die in different ways, when one loves.  In the very least, he must die to himself and his selfish inclinations if he is to love the other for the other’s sake.  This is a type of sacrifice.  In fact, the challenge to love disinterestedly requires varying degrees of sacrifice.  Sacrifice is to give of yourself for the sake of the other to the point that you experience loss in some manner or another.  This is ultimately what the divine Processions are…though it may not be appropriate to use the term sacrifice for the divine Procession because of the attendant connotation of loss in sacrifice and there is no loss in the divine Communion.

However, the remedy to the fall, in which man’s failure to emulate the second Procession, will take on the proper meaning of the term sacrifice.  The Son Incarnate will freely choose to manifest temporally what He does eternally.  He will, in love, trust and thanksgiving, return to the Father all that the Father has given Him…including His human life.  This Sacrifice on the cross will restore the conditions of possibility for communion, but interestingly enough, it does so in a way the redeems the consumption by which man’s initial communion was lost.

Of course we know well the fact that the Cross draws together the eternal with the temporal.  It draws into itself the last Passover seder in the upper room before Christ’s Passion, as He transforms this  seder into the New Testament Passover–the Sacrifice of the Mass.  The Cross also brings forth the economic manifestation of the second Procession, that is Pentecost–in an analogous way in the first Procession brings about the second.

This one Paschal act, beginning with the Incarnation and ending with the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, is liturgically made present in the Sacrifice of the Mass.  The Mass re-presents the Sacrifice of the Cross through the memorial enactment of the New Testament Passover proleptically celebrated in the Upper Room.   It culminates in an efficacious symbol of communion which looks very much like animal consumption–we call it Holy Communion.

The consumption in the Garden of Eden which destroyed man’s communion with God  is now redeemed by the Son.  The Son, who in an act of total self-gift reflective of His eternal gift, continually gives up His Body and Blood in every Mass celebrated throughout the ages, that through an animal act of consumption the faithful are restored by this life-giving communion with the Son and thereby, inserted into Trinitarian Communion.

In a hylomorphic act of love which eclipses Aristotle’s greatest thoughts, both aspects of the human person, animal and spiritual, are incorporated during this divinizing rite we call Holy Communion.  The human person is inserted into the hypostatic order giving him entrance into Trinitarian life when he consumes the Flesh of the Son of Man and drinks His Blood…he now truly has life in him.

Consumption has been redeemed and is immutably implicated in spiritual communion.  This doesn’t mean that consumption no longer masquerades as communion; it does.

It does mean though, that when this masquerading does lead to sin, it is now the source of its own ultimate undoing…because where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more.  The love revealed and effected on the Cross, is poured out in time via the mediation of the Sacrifice of the Mass, restoring communion where souls choose to turn again to God.  Sacrifice has redeemed consumption and made it the material cause of communion.

The ideas developed by Rene Girard on the nature of sacrifice have recently created a considerable stir in learned circles. But his brilliant speculations overlook virtually all the contributions made in the last hundred years on this undeniably fundamental aspect of religion. Which may be why he considers supremely indicative of the meaning of sacrifice the apotropaic rites now recognized by all specialists as never having been looked upon as sacrifices by those who practiced these rituals. Quite simply, scapegoats and all variations on the theme, far from ever being considered as sacrifices to God, were always sent to the devil! On the materiality of sacrifices — the necessary starting point before any attempt to unravel their meaning — one may refer to works such as R.K. Yerkes’s Sacrifice in Greek and Roman Religions and in Primitive Judaism. This kind of factual study inevitably leads to a firm conclusion: it is not the killing which determines sacrifice, even when the victim is put to death, which is far from always being the case (see in this respect E.O. James, Origins of Sacrifice, London, 1953, pp. 256 ff.). Neither is its nature established by the oblation to the divinity. Instead, a sacrifice is a meal, but a meal considered as sacred because the divinity partakes of it, whether the sacrifice is exlusively intended for the deity (as in the holocaust), whether priests alone also take part (as in the Hebrew sacrifices for the expiation of sins), or finally whether the entire people participate with them, as in the sacrifice of communion. Or indeed in the Passover, and this seems to have been a characteristic of the very earliest sacrifices, in which all is consumed by the participants, with no role clearly reserved for the divinity.

This explains why, in the most ancient mythic expression of their significance, sacrifices are far from appearing as tremulous attempts of terrified humans to placate a bloodthirsty divinity through some kind of ritual murder. Instead, the gods themselves, acting either directly or through kings deemed to embody or represent them, are the initiators of sacrifices, and thereby show themselves as the quintessential benefactors of mankind, and more particularly the sources of human life in that which maintains it (nourishment) and produces it (sexuality). The idea of sacrifice as a ritual murder is nothing but the fabrication of self-styled scholars, who thus prove that they belong with the pathetic dupes who persist in taking seriously the alleged Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Why is it that we see so many problems with CCHD and the organizations that they fund?  While they have cleaned up their act considerably from the days that they openly and wantonly funded groups at odds with Church teaching, they still have not been adequately successful in purging themselves of past demons.  I propose that the reason for this lies in CCHD’s roots.  CCHD is essentially formed around the ideology of the architect of community organizing, Saul D. Alinsky.

Saul Alinsky is a complex figure who formed his ideology from a variety of sources especially from Marxism.  However, one cannot say that he was purely aligned with Marxism, though he did seem to most consistently espouse the gradualism of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Communist.   Gramsci promoted a gradualist sort communist revolution that relied on infiltrating the “oppressing” source of power and using the dialectic process in a transformative approach rather than fomenting bloody revolution.

Alinsky’s thought is summarized in his two books, Reveille for Radicals (1946) and Rules for Radicals (1971).  In these, he lays out his philosophy of life and his approach to community organizing.  For those wishing a quick look at his thought, let me point to one sympathetic treatment of his thought and another  not so sympathetic.  Interestingly enough, you get the same basic insights  from both.  Some points that seem to stand out with respect to Alinsky’s thought is that when it comes to the good of the community (in Alinsky’s view of good) that the end always justifies the means. In fact, Alinsky eschews the idea of following one’s conscience if it means not promoting what he understands to be the  good for the masses:

He who sacrifices the mass good for his personal conscience has a peculiar conception of ‘personal salvation’; he doesn’t care enough for people to ‘be corrupted’ for them. (Alinsky 1972: 25) (cited here).

It also seems to be the case that pragmatic activism is the only acceptable approach to change.  Pragmatic activism means that one cannot do nothing and so if there is only one option open to achieving an end, regardless of what it is or what one’s conscience tells him about this option, it must be taken if the “powerless” may be said to benefit.  Pragmatic further means that it must be able to achieve the end; an idealist approach that has little chance of working is also to be shunned.

Alinsky also seemed to be strongly influenced by the Marxist view of power and its dialectal “truth” that conflict was the necessary means by which two opposing views would be reconciled.  As such, a fundamental principle of community organizing is that the organizer must be committed to agitating.  He must create conflict where there is none, if there is going to be change.  For Alinsky, change is structural change in the organization of the community and organization of the community is defined in terms of who holds power.  If held by the elite it must be gradually wrested away from them and given to the “powerless.”

Alinsky was not against radicalism.  He was simply a pragmatic gradualist.  He thought that one needed to work within the system in order to transform it into a radically new structure.  Thus, while Alinsky’s sentiments for bettering the lives of the poor and downtrodden was noble, his Machiavellian-Marxist philosophy left him and his followers open to the attitude that anything goes in the struggle for power if the end can be characterized as giving power to the powerless and the end is achievable.

So what does Saul Alinsky’s philosophy have to do with CCHD?  Alinsky is known as the father of community organizing.  Lawrence J. Engel, in an article  published in Theological Studies, talks about Alinsky and his influence on CCHD.  Engel  shows that Alinsky must be considered not only the father of community organizing but also the father of CCHD.  Engel writes of Father P. David Finks of the Diocese of Rochester, active in Alinsky’s FIGHT organization and arguably one of the founders of CCHD:

Thirty years later, Finks recalled his own work during the late 1960s: “[T]he NCCB Urban Task Force, the Catholic Committee for Urban Ministry, my years on staff at USCC/NCCB, the organization and selling to the bishops of the Campaign for Human Development–all were an attempt to make available and find support for Alinsky’s approach to community organization, empowerment of USA citizens from the bottom up, and what his IAF successors now call church/congregation-based organizing. As for me, I loved Saul. He stood me on my head and showed me a radically different way to see the world, the church, and democratic politics.”(110) The influence of Alinsky is evident in Finks’s own words and is also confirmed by the priests who worked closely with him in the 1960s. John McCarthy recalls that Finks “idolized Alinsky” and that community organization was “all Finks would be able to talk about.”(111) Charles Burns of the Urban Task Force staff remember that “Finks worshipped [sic] the ground Alinsky walked on,” and that Alinsky was “his father.”(112)

CCHD was, and one might argue must still be assumed to be,  thoroughly imbued with Alinsky’s Machiavellian philosophy and his metaphysic of power dialectics.  Certainly those community organizing institutions that CCHD funds are to varying degrees infected by Alinsky’s defective philosophies.  Is it any wonder that ACORN is as corrupt as it appears to be?  Can we be surprised at what these Alinskyite organizations can justify and work for when what is always right is whatever some organizing leader claims would benefit the powerless and when one’s conscience is no justification for not acting on such.

Alinsky’s ideology is built upon a false view of reality and distorted view of the human person.  It is based upon moral relativism which can justify just about anything as a good.  It is founded upon agitation, ridicule (which is one of Alinsky’s 13 primary tactics for community organizers) and the premise that life is about a struggle for power.   Ultimately, this ideology’s underlying anthropology cannot account for the authentic needs of the human person.  It cannot consistently identify or work for the common good.  Even when it might happen to do so accidentally,  it’s methods will ultimately damage those it intends to support by fomenting a mentality which assumes the only way out of a difficult situation is to do battle in some deceptive manner, with those “in power.”

A Catholic approach to community organizing, rather recognizes that authentic structural transformation comes about not through deception and seizing power but through individual conversion and human solidarity.  It recognizes also that subsidiarity is a co-principle with solidarity.  This means that long term solutions are found in helping those in need to recognize that part of any solution is working for the holiness of both the “powerful” as well as the “powerless.”  It realizes that situations and societies are authentically transformed not through conflict but through selfless cooperation.

It recognizes that those being served must be an integral part of any solution meant to serve them, and this includes setting the goals and the strategies for achieving them.  It is not that confronting unjust situations might sometimes be necessary but a Catholic approach may not succumb to the ideology that confrontation is a normal, even necessary approach.

Neither can a Catholic approach fall into the adjunct heresy that life is a struggle for power. Authentic power is not the forcing of one person’s or group of people’s will over another’s.  Rather, authentic power occurs only when love triumphs.  God is love who is the source of all authentic power.  When one views the other as an enemy to be defeated, authentic power is suppressed.  When one views the other, even an oppressor, as a fellow sinner who Christ died for one will be better prepared to discern the proper approach for a particular situation.

Because CCHD was founded upon a counter-Catholic ideology, I would argue that CCHD must be disbanded.  The Church must also eliminate its material support of any organization formed around Alinsky’s  ideology.  It is true that we must support efforts that help others “learn to fish” but the Church cannot support corrupt, ideological movements in order to achieve such noble ends.

It is time to abandon this failed experiment called CCHD and devote the available resources to building a new Catholic apostolate dedicated to promoting authentic human flourishing.  This new apostolate should base itself upon the social teachings of the Church, built upon an authentic understanding of the human person and how the truth of man demands a social interaction according to the co-principles of solidarity and subsidiarity.  The social encyclicals of John Paul II and Benedict XVI are the most mature articulation of this.  Anything short of this will risk contaminating authentic efforts at social justice with tactics arising from a relativist, amoral ideology.  If we continue with the status quo, we cannot expect anything but more of the same.

His most recent posts, this one on the New Republic’s Greg Easterbrook, in particular, are bringing to light the truly despicable anti-humanism that is now, with the advent of leftist supremacy in the White House and in congress, coming out into full display. And where are the David Frums, Rod Drehers, and paleo-conservative pundits in general in taking note of this flourishing anti-humanism of the left? They are nowhere to be found. Here’s a tidbit from Wesley Smith’s most recent post, where he makes a connection between the biotech revolution and scientific anti-humanism (part of the ethos that supports eugenics):

The biotech agenda has never been about stem cell research. That is only a stage. The ultimate agenda is Brave New World, e.g. genetic engineering, reproductive cloning, post humanism, and anything goes.  This has been hidden for political reasons, but with the hated Bush’s stem cell funding restrictions now defunct, we are beginning to see some truth in advertising.Greg Easterbrook of the New Republic fame spills some beans over at Wired.  From his column “Embrace Human Cloning:”

Others argue that cloning is “unnatural.” But nature wants us to pass on our genes; if cloning assists in that effort, nature would not be offended. Moreover, cloning itself isn’t new; there have been many species that reproduced clonally and a few that still do. And there’s nothing intrinsically unnatural about human inventions that improve reproductive odds—does anyone think nature is offended by hospital delivery made safe by banks of machines?

This does not necessarily make human cloning desirable; there are complicated issues to consider. Initial mammalian cloning experiments, with sheep and other species, have produced many sickly offspring that die quickly. Could it ever be ethical to conduct research that produces sick babies in the hope of figuring out how to make healthy clones? And clones might be treated as inferiors, rendering them unhappy.

Still, human cloning should not be out of the question. In vitro fertilization was once seen as depraved God-playing and is now embraced, even by many of the devoutly religious. Cloning could be a blessing for the infertile, who otherwise could not experience biological parenthood. And, of course, it would be a blessing for the clone itself. Suppose a clone is later asked, “Are you glad you exist even though you are physically quite similar to someone else, or do you wish you had never existed?” We all know what the answer would be.

The column is mainly a bunch of assertions without real moral engagement.  Note, for example, that Easterbrook is unable or unwilling to say categorically that it would wrong to experiment on sick babies to perfect human cloning.  And that isn’t all it would take to make human reproductive cloning “safe.”  There would have to be many thousands of cloned embryos manufactured (raising the egg biological colonialism issue), eventually gestated into fetuses, and terminated to see how the genes are expressing and as part of the attempt to discover reliable quality control techniques.  Even successful reproductive cloning would also be  human experimentation of the rankest kind since any cloned child successfully brought to birth would be subjected to continued scientific prodding and poking to see how his/her biological systems functioned.

The ethos on display in this ”Wired” article that Smith dissects — that is, turning human persons into subjects fit only for scientific experimentation – was precisely that of the Nazi regime in Germany, in its first stages, and this is why so many on the American right are now prone to level charges of Nazism at the democrats: who uniformly support the biotech revolution. This is a legitimate connection, one that Edwin Black made quite convincingly in linking early twentieth century American eugenics and scientific experimentation to the ethos of Hitler, in his important book The War Against the Weak. Indeed, it was early twentieth century American progressivism that normalized eugenics and the reduction of the person to an experimental subject for scientific prodding. One hundred years later, little has changed.

Our late Holy Father, John Paul II, began his encyclical, Fides et ratio with a quote from a carving in the entryway of the temple Delphi admonishing those entering to “Know Thyself.”   This was perhaps the greatest theme of John Paul II’s magisterial papacy.  He spent much of his teaching trying to help Christians and all men of good will to better understand the truth of who and what they are.  Ultimately, he warned, that without God, man becomes an enigma to himself and in the end, he will turn against himself.

This is what John Paul saw in two evil political instantiations  during his early years in his beloved Poland which caused him to refer to the 20th century as the century of tears.  Indeed, both of these were socialist movements, Nazism and Marxist Communism, which explicitly removed God from the equation.  While both ostensibly were aimed at improving the lot of man, they grossly missed his meaning.  The failure to understand man as made in the image of God means that man becomes at best, an animal.  However, he is still not like the other animals.  He possesses something that makes him much more dangerous than the most ferocious carnivore.  He possesses free will (even if the more intellectually consistent atheists will try to explain this away, they still have to presuppose it).

This leads me to the motivation for this particular attempt at a post.  Reading Hierothee’s latest post got me ta think’un again.  The current administration has provided much fodder for posting (if one just had the time).  The big uproar over health care is part and parcel of the problem that comes from trying to address real social problems based upon a flawed, and therefore dangerous, anthropology.  So many of those in this administration exhibit this confused thinking about the human person.  They see him as special and in need of help and protection in some ways (programs for the poor, universal access to health care) but they likewise disregard his intrinsic value and see him as dispensable in so many other ways (abortion, embryo destructive research, euthanasia).

The tendency toward government control over all decision making further reflects this schizophrenic ideology.  This plutocratic tendency is one which reflects a distrust of man’s freewill in this fallen dispensation.  It demands, in gnostic fashion, that the few Enlightened do all of the important decision making for the “instinct” driven masses–though at some level they recognize that the danger is that the masses do not reliably follow their “instincts.”

This ideological crowd is at once philanthropic and misanthropic because they do not know man or why he is special.  They replace truth with ideology.  Without God they cannot know man’s dignity.  So they develop confused criteria for when a man must be treated with concern and when he can be thrown out as so much medical waste.

Without Trinitarian anthropology they cannot know man’s real needs.  That is, he is an individual made for communion with God and other human beings.  In his fallen state, this means he has a task.  So they deprive him of his authentic rights to help perfect himself and society and treat him as a quasi-special animal who must be pacified through “bread and circuses” and so whose free will can be controlled.

However, that is not man’s authentic nature.  Man must be provided the room to master himself, while respecting this opportunity for all men, in such a way that he can enter into authentic relationships, that is relationships of communion with God and with others.  These relationships of communion arise from the divine archetype, which is a Trinity of total self-giving.  Thus, man must master himself so that he fully possess himself and therefore has all of himself to give to God and to others.  That is, one gives oneself to others for their own sake and not for what they can do for me.

What this means is that man necessarily possesses free will because this is a prerequisite for authentic self-giving, which the Christian tradition calls agape.  Thus we see the human being as an individual who is made for relationships with others.  He is at once a member of the human family according to nature but alone as a person until he authentically enters into a relationship and thereby fulfills his potential as a person.

This is the anthropology behind the co-principles of human social relationships called solidarity (a mutual responsibility for all) and subsidiarity (responsibilities must be exercised at the lowest social structure possible).  Those representing the current administration seem to recognize (at some level) that we share a human nature and so have a mutual responsibility for one another–solidarity.  However, they do not recognize that man has a task to exercise his free will in such a way as to master himself in order to perfect himself as a person and contribute thereby, to the perfection of society–subsidiarity.  But as JPII intimated and B16 made explicit (though not using my terminology) in his latest encyclical, these two principles are co-principles.  That is, one cannot have one without the other.

Solidarity without subsidiarity denies the truth of the human being and so degrades into collectivism where the species is important but not the individual.  This is what we generally see with socialism.  It is what is behind, to some degree, the outrage of those who see the current administration as wanting to interpose the State into personal health care decisions.  The so called “public option” that is so important to those with a socialist ideology is seen as dehumanizing, which it certainly can quickly become,  for those who currently have health care.

However, it must be said that the response of this latter group does not always indicate that they appreciate the principle of solidarity.  That is, they express their wish to maintain their freedom of decision making but they do not show that they recognize that part of the reason for the health care reform movement is an inefficient and inequitable access to it for all persons.

The fact that we are in a fallen world, means that solidarity is not lived out with sufficient consistency.  There is a need for some coercive controls on society that ensures those with the smallest voices are also integrated into and have reasonable access to the benefits of society; i.e. there is some legitimate role for governmental involvement, as long as the principle of subsidiarity is honored.  Thus, when this group does not possess a zeal for solidarity, their subsidiarity devolves into individualism.

Which of these is more dangerous?  I would argue that the historical evidence is that the socialist denial of the importance of the individual leads to a totalitarian, coercive collectivism.  Thus, socialism has the most dangerous tendency, at least in terms of recovering from it without bloodshed.  However, tt seems to me that the failure of giving due concern to  solidarity is what opens the door to this socialist tendency.

On the other hand, left to its own, the trajectory of the latter group seems to be individualist anarchy.  That is, in fact, a good part of what we are seeing happening in our society. The difference being that in political structures tending toward the individualist ideology there is still the room for freedom of action that allows at least the possibility for authentic reform (though of course, the individualism must reformed).

Currently, both of these ideologies are now forming much of the rancorous debate and are at loggerheads with one another.  They reflect a crisis of the understanding of the meaning of the human person, his dignity and what he needs in terms of social structures for his authentic flourishing.  It is tragic that most Catholics in political positions to influence this problem have traded the truth for one or the other of these faulty political ideologies.  This even more, makes this situation a real crisis of anthropology.

He begins by suggesting that inter-curial machinations demand that one approach the Encyclical with a hermeneutic of suspicion leading to a source-critical reading of the text.  This seems to me, all too reminiscent of dissenting scholars’ approach to Church teaching and so it gives me pause at the outset.  I don’t know, Weigel may very well have inside information (in contrast to his implication that it is just a set of suspicions) that justifies his wariness.  For myself, I find the document to be seamlessly coherent.  I believe that what accounts for this difference is the politico-economic biases to which I would argue that he succumbs.

This is what I mean.  Weigel seems to have an allergic reaction to certain phrases such as “wealth redistribution.”  It is true that this is a favorite phrase of many socialists but one must recognize that B16 has accepted the use of the term for his Encyclical.  Clearly Benedict is thoroughly Catholic and in full agreement with Rerum novarum.  Unlike many revisionists, he does not distance himself from any of Leo XIII’s or subsequent pope’s criticisms of socialism (that I have seen any way). However, this does not mean that this phrase is not his.  Rather, one must read it in the context of Benedict’s references to the need for sharing wealth through gratuitousness.  He states that gratuitousness is in contrast to “the logic of public obligation, imposed by State law” (39).  In other words, when Benedict talks of wealth redistribution, he is not talking of technical solutions to problems of povery so much as he is discussing the needs of anthropology at the macro level.  This is why I would argue that Weigel’s complaint that the Encyclical does not give sufficient attention to wealth generation is unwarranted.

For Weigel, the discussion of gratuitousness and gift seems to be “clotted and muddled.”  If one presupposes that the Encyclical is interwoven with two opposing streams of thought then one will not be likely to look for clarifying explanations throughout the text.  This seems to be the problem with Weigel’s take on the “gift” discussion.  He recognizes that it might be the Communio school’s anthropology but seems to dismiss that possibility because he finds the language so “clotted and muddled.” Perhaps he does not recognize that this anthropology is more ubiquitous among Communio scholars that just JPII.  However, if one does recognize that B16 is in fact employing the vision of the human person as an individual who has the task of perfecting himself after the manner of the divine archetype, which is a total self-gift of self to others in relationships, the entire logic of the Encyclical becomes clear (at least as far as I have so far read).

Weigel and others seem to be worried that Benedict is implying a prudential judgment of the priority of wealth sharing over wealth production.  Benedict is doing nothing of the sort.  Again, he is instructing about a socio-economic necessity deriving from an anthropology that undergtands man is created after the image of total Self-gift.  His point is that for an authentic economic structure that promotes the integral human fulfillment of all of its members, the economic structure must be one which promotes all freely giving of themselves for the common, the greater good.

He is true to his word; he provides no technical solutions to such a great challenge.  However his comments in paragraph 39 (see above) and other places show that this structure has to be one promoting the free giving of individuals and societies at all levels.   In other words, this cannot be achieved through State compulsion.  That is not to say that there is no place for some level of public obligation.  Benedict is not trying to instruct the reader in the concrete solutions.  He is providing insights into what the human person and society need in order to flourish and to overcome the economic manifestations of the spiritual crisis in which we now find ourselves.

I am sure that I will have more to say later; especially in terms of Benedict’s discussion of what I term the co-principles of subsidiarity and solidarity.  I have an article I am working on that addresses this very point.  However, Hierothee has convinced me that it needs some reworking.  As I settle into a new routine, I hope to take the article back up again.

O.k., I suppose that I am done for now…