Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Hierothee suggested I do a post on my research about the connection of sacrifice to consumption.  This is very difficult to do in the space of a standard post so this will necessarily be a broad sketch of what one day may be a much more compelling (I hope) manuscript.

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.

I thought that I would add a bit to David’s great post on the influence of Saul Alinsky on the CCHD. The whole question opens up profound problems in regard to the history of the conciliar Church in the U.S., for Alinsky’s radicalism is very closely insinuated in the Church of that time and place. But the question is much larger than that, for Alinsky’s radicalism was favored by one of the great heroes of modern Catholic thought: Jacques Maritain. 

It is particularly troubling to consider the spiritual sympathy between Alinsky, a Jewish agnostic/atheist, who was a vulgar ruffian and an agitator of the lowest sort, with Maritain, whom many have assumed to have been a personal bastion of orthodoxy and a lock-step Thomist (do you have an excuse for this, Ralph McInerny?). Maritain was, of course, a close friend and confidant of Garrigou-Lagrange, whom Lefebvrists to this day revere and honor as the one and only twentieth century Catholic theologian worth his salt, and a Catholic philosopher whose idea of a fully Christian, political humanism — an “integral humanism,” as he called it — had a profound effect on the post-conciliar papacy. Indeed, in Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict XVI makes copious use of this expression, which was greatly favored by Paul VI, and which derives ultimately from the pen of Maritain. Maritain is also a favorite, it should be pointed out, of the so-called “neo-conservative” Catholics Michael Novak and George Weigel.

It is instructive to recount a pertinent section from Jean-Luc Barre’s biography of Jacques and Raissa Maritain: Beggars for Heaven, which was a best-seller in France (it went through several printings in the mid ’90s) and which was translated into English by Bernard E. Doering, who himself wrote a book on the close relationship of Maritain with Alinsky entitled The Philosopher and the Provocateur.

Barre points out that Maritain was among the first continental Catholics to express an appreciation for the idea of democratic America, including its principled separation of Church and State, and it is in the context of this love for the “American idea” that Maritain’s relationship with Alinsky is perhaps best understood.

Maritain considered Alinsky to be one of his closest friends, “an indomitable and dreaded organizer of ‘People’s Organizations’ and an anti-racist leader whose methods are as efficacious as they are unorthodox” (quoted from Maritain by Barre on p. 402).

Maritain had met Alinsky during the Second World War and was immediately taken with his “savvy” work in the cause of economic and social justice. Barre describes their mutual sympathy as founded on a profound “shared taste for subversion and irreverence…and a similar confidence in the people” (403). It should be remembered that, on the one hand, Maritain was greatly distrusted by many Church hierarchs prior to the council as a “Marxist.” Indeed, in visiting America, he could find little support among the hiearchy, and in the universities he could find even less support among the authorities, because there was, even in those days, a global antipathy to Thomism. This made him, in Barre’s words, a “desparado,” and a kindred spirit to Alinsky. On the other hand, Maritain was himself, like Alinsky, committed to what he took to be the “democratic ideal” that everyone should be free to question and challenge authority. How interesting, then, that Maritain, who had one great friend in the hierarchy in Garrigou-Lagrange, should play a role in the banishment of “la nouvelle theologie” prior to the council.

And did Saul Alinsky ever look up to Maritain! This is, I suppose, a reminder of the attractive character that the life of grace imparts to the human soul, an attractiveness so compelling that even hardened atheists recognize its appeal. In saying this, I should point out that I would not in any way, in recounting this story, wish to impugn Maritain’s holiness. At any rate, Alinsky was, to quote Barre, a “personage who was known for being aggresive and rude [but] was nothing but modesty and deference toward the intellectual who had come from France and of whom he asked one day, with unexpected timidity, for a signature on a photograph of Maritain” (403).

Indeed, Alinsky loved Maritain as a father. He told Maritain, in seeking to explain his desire for Maritain’s autograph, that he was not prone to idol worship: “…[but] what I am trying to say is that a picture of you with some personal statement on it would be one of my most cherished possessions. There I have said it” (403). Alinsky even dedicated his now-infamous Rules for Radicals to Maritain, with the inscription: “To my spiritual father and the man I love, from his prodigal and wayward son” (403).

Maritain seems to have seen in Alinsky’s work the possibility of imprinting the Christian ideal on movements for social justice and of shaping the creative energy of contemporary history. In a point of particular sympathy, Maritain saw in Alinsky’s community organizations the advent of “mediating structures” between the individual and the State that could buffer the individual from domination by the State.

But herein lies the troubling question of Maritain’s Catholic alliance with Alinsky, which would serve as a model for the post-conciliar Church in the U.S. and which should call the whole socio-political strategy of the post-conciliar Church in America into question. How could Maritain not have seen that Alinsky’s community organizations, his “buffers,” were in fact ordered to becoming functionaries of the State, its repressive arms of authority? Like all American agitators whose work operates in the trajectory of Marx’s nihilism, Alinsky awaited the day when a fully socialist political power would reign in the nation’s capitol. That day has now come, of course, as Saul Alinsky’s spiritual grandchild, and his heir to control of the community organizations in Chicago, Barack Hussein Obama, has now ascended to the presidency of the United States. Community organizations and “buffers,” such as SEIU, have now become potential instruments of governmental coercion.

Maritain could not see that Alinsky’s “community organizations” were always meant to be substitute churches which were ordered by their very essence to the derogation of the proper authority of the most important of the natural and supernatural mediating societies, namely, the natural family and the Catholic Church. Maritain could only see in Alinsky’s work the coming-into-being of new guilds, along the lines of the medieval guilds, that could put a check on the greed and radical individualism that underlies so much of the practice of free market capitalism. He thought that these organizations could embody the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, so that the grave social injustices of capitalism could be held in control without tyranical federal intervention. But he failed to realize that these organizations were in fact meant by Alinsky to be stepping-stones to the advent of, and eventual workers for, a centralized power structure that would coercively bring about his dreary, ugly, a-religious concept of social justice. Maritain seems to have failed, in other words, to recognize that it is perilous indeed to make common cause with those who have rejected the religious essence of man. Social justice without a truly Christian, religious foundation is a perversion of social justice.

And Maritain’s naivete in this regard is nothing if not representative of the attitude of most of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in the post-conciliar age. Perhaps the pre-conciliar hierarchy exercised prudence in keeping its distance from Maritain’s social “do-goodism,” which eventually would aid and abet those forces in society that seek the destruction of the natural family and of the authority and freedom of the Church.

So, what are we to make of this alliance between Maritain and Alinsky? In whose service was it formed?

I would like to end this brief post with a further question and a thought: If Barack Obama is Alinsky’s spiritual grandchild, does that make him in some twisted sense Maritain’s spiritual great-grandchild? The Catholic inspiration of history is so subtle that it often eludes our grasp, and sometimes, upon grasping its influence, we might very well think it better to have remained ignorant of it!

I was reading an article today about four US bishops who have stopped their diocesan collections for the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD).  This article brought to mind an article I recently read that a friend of mine is trying to get published.  In my friend’s article, he makes the argument that because of the foundation of the Legionaries of Christ is in a radically disturbed man, that the only real possibility for reform of the order would be by re-founding it completely cutoff from Fr. Maciel (though he does not seem to think that is possible).  I don’t intend to go into the issue of the Legionaries now but it occurred to me that this same basic idea must be applied to the CCHD.

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.

Given my mounting frustration of late with the ignorance of history so oppressively present among our generally-educated masses, I’ve been meaning to get around to some blogging on David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions. This book is about as good a response to contemporary atheism as one can give, recognizing as Hart does, with brilliant eloquence and tight logic, that the New Atheism is a disconsoling sign of cultural degradation. Hart asserts repeatedly in his book that the new bookselling atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, Harris, etc.) are desparately shallow and ignorant of history, in many ways unworthy adverseries of the Christian proclamation, unlike the great anti-Christian philosophers of the past, such as Nietzsche.  Hart seems to imply that there is really not much that an historically-informed intellectual can say about them or to them, because they are so much beneath the European tradition of high culture, whether atheist or not. It is hardly worth one’s time. His own book, in fact, is not so much a response to any one of these men, whom he considers to be rather truculent, overgrown adolescents, as it is a primer on history meant as edification for generally educated humanists of good will. Indeed, he implies that the spokemen of the New Atheism are just so proudly and obstinately and arrogantly ignorant of the historical revolution that Christian faith brought to man, and that is at the foundation of our modern sense of what it is to be human, that it is tempting for the Christian intellectual simply to ignore them and to go on with his business. After all, there remain a handful of genuinely sophisticated intellectual adverseries of the faith today, at least on the continent, though their ranks seem to be dwindling.

I. The Whigs: Modern and Postmodern

Yet, I am of the opinion that for all of the anti-intellectual petulance of the New Atheism that Hart laments, it is good that these men (are their any women among them?) are bringing out into the open the fact that the Whig myth of history remains the driving narrative of Anglophone culture. The postmodern, postcolonialist turn in the humanities might have temporarily blinded us to this fact. What does it mean to speak of a “Whig myth of history?” A bit of etymology is in order. In a well-known interview with Zenit, Tracey Rowland, herself a noted postmodern Catholic theologian, defined the term “Whig”:

Originally the word “Whig” came from the Scottish word “Whiggamor” for a cattle driver — though some sources say cattle thief and others say horse thief. It was initially applied to Scottish Presbyterians, mostly from the west coast of Scotland, who opposed the Stuart cause in the wars of the 17th century.

Their counterparts, the Tories — a word derived from the Gaelic for “outlaw” — consisted of some aristocrats, large landowners and agrarian peasants. They were mercantilist in economic policy, royalist in politics and tended to support the succession of James II [1633-1701].

Over time the term was used to refer to a faction in British politics. Although there was never anything like a strong doctrinal definition of the term, as a sociological generalization it can be said that the Whigs were the heirs of the Scottish Enlightenment, which emphasized economic and political liberty, or an emerging philosophy known as liberalism, which was often fused with a Puritan form of Protestantism.

In addition to what Rowland says, it should be noted that the view of history that emerged in a Whig context was anti-Catholic and rabidly secular. It equated the Middle Ages with the Dark Ages and saw the Church as an enemy of progress. The Whig vision of history was the predominant understanding of history taught in England and America, in the universities and on all levels of public education, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The postmodernists, who gradually took control of the humanities departments in the western universities in the last half of the twentieth century, presumed themselves to have exposed the Whig narrative as a mere fable, whose sole purpose, they argued, was to provide a justification for the exploitation and subjugation by European civilization of traditional cultures throughout the world. But, it must be admitted, none of the postmodernists or postcolonialists had any deeply-set objections in principle to modern, western colonialism as such. They simply did not much care for the West in its Christian religion, on the one hand, or its economic capitalism, on the other — not that these two are necessarily intertwined.

The advent of modern Europe was rightly connected by the postmodernists to some sort of Christian inspiration, however heretical in its theological foundation that inspiration may have been. The Whig vision of history was itself seen as a product of vestigial Christianity. With the continued fading of Christian belief, and the expansion in the twentieth century of socialist colonialism, the need to wage a prophetic rejection of the Whig fable diminished.

Already, by century’s end, the shibboleths of the postmodern rejection of modern colonialism could themselves be seen as ideological constructions, and it was clear that in fact a new Whiggish colonialism was in place that had brought the expansion into the “Global South” of a permutation of the domineering, western ideological tradition. Only this time, the colonialism involved scientific eugenics and the transgression of the natural family. Western Europe was well-underway, in other words, in exporting its sexual nihilism to the “Global South,” and the postmodern postcolonialists, it turned out, were little more than the new Whigs, proudly advocating a western-derived, secular ideology of history and progress as a justification for the worldwide subjugation of traditional religious moral values pertaining to marriage and the family.

Whether the contemporary academy basks for the moment in the light of modernism or postmodernism, underlying it all is the deforming secular ideology of Whiggish progress. Whether it is manifested in the capitalism of Adam Smith, or in the reactionary relationalism of Karl Marx, or in the post-Marxian, misaptly described “postcolonialist” form of idolatry that just is identity politics and revolutionary, proselytizing sexual transgression, the Whig vision of secular progress is the unifying, underlying root condition of the contemporary universities and of the secular cultural imperialism that they have spawned.

II. Hart’s Response

The incoherencies of postmodernism are well-known, and its relativism is rejected by those whose intellectual predilection is for science rather than the humanities. This is actually, in some respects, a relatively noble characteristic of the New Atheism. Perhaps we might conclude, then, contra Dr. Hart, that Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett in fact make more respectable adverseries for Christian apologists than Jacques Derrida, or Michel Foucalt, or even Friederich Nietzsche.

Well, perhaps that is taking things too far. At any rate, Hart has undertaken the evisceration of the vulgar and logically inconsistent outpourings of a Christopher Hitchens, or a Samuel Harris, in Atheist Delusions, though by placing his focus not on their actual works but on the over-riding cultural situation that makes their productions possible. He lays bare, in other words, the cultural ignorance that makes possible the New Atheism. 

Though he does not use the term “Whig,” he in fact goes straight at the Whig ideology that each of the New Atheists presumes. Hart confronts it in all of its popular manifestations. One of the most important aspects of this is his putting to rest the Whiggish myth of the origins of science. He has a wonderful chapter on this topic. In showing the Christian origins of modern science, his argument seems to derive, at least in part, from the work of Stanley Jaki.  Hart’s demonstration is not nearly as thorough as Jaki’s – after all, Jaki dedicated his whole career to this topic. And, unlike Jaki, Hart admits that it is not necessarily a knock-down point for Christian apologists to demonstrate the roots of modern science in Christian theology. The “progress” of science has been, in many ways, an annihilating, anti-humanist force, so Christians should be careful about proudly laying claim to its origination. Still, it is worthwhile to trace his argument for the Christian origins of science. Perhaps all of those high-school boys nowadays, who are natural targets for for the New Atheism, could benefit from a basic presentation in this regard: which they will not, unfortunately, receive at any point during their formal education.

III. Contra The Whig Myth of Science

In order to have a clue about where science takes its origins, one has to take the logic of history with much greater seriousness than Whig ideology allows. First of all, one must dispel the myth of an interminable “Christian Dark Age” existing in the West from the period of the conversion of the Roman Empire under the rule of Constantine, in the 4th-5th centuries A.D., to the time of the Florentine Renaissance of the 15th century A.D. No serious scholar of history has such a facile view about a presumed Christian Dark Age, nowadays, and yet, in popular culture, such a view still fascinates a great many people. This is mainly so, I suppose, because it is the basic notion of history that the generally educated masses still get in their grade schools and high schools and in their undergraduate textbooks at college or university. And, of course, it is the view of things that masturbatory and snickering sophomore men in college get from watching those oh-so-clever Monty Python productions.

The basic premise of the history of science that is propounded from the prism of Whig ideology is that the victory of Christianity under Constantine killed the Greco-Roman pursuit of science and high philosophy. Christianity, so the argument runs, values only blind obedience to authority and not the life of reason. The fideism of Christianity, then (so it is claimed), was the destructive agent that buried pagan wisdom, and it was only in the Renaissance, with the disinterment of the great pagan philosophers, that reason could once again flourish. It was only then that Christianity could finally be cast off and modern science take its origin.

No competent historian of science nowadays gives any weight to this sort of account of things, and, yet, it is the basic premise of so much that pours forth from the pens of the New Atheists. Pierre Duhem, a physicist and eminent scholar of science, had destroyed this myth over a century ago. Even lesser lights in the study of the history of science, who yet decisively shaped the field, such as Alexander Koyre, and who were even anti-Christian, realized that the Whig history of science was very much in need of demythologization.

Hart puts to rest the Whiggish mythical understanding of the history of science with the very basic and irrefutably logical point that “scientific thought does not lurch from one mind to another across gulfs of time, nor do great scientists suddenly and miraculously emerge from the darkness, like Athena springing from the head of Zeus.” (p. 58) In other words, the advent of Copernican and Galilean science has to be understood in terms of the immediate historical context in which it arose, and not by reference to a fabulous past that Copernicus could have suddenly rediscovered and revivified by his own unaided genius. Competent assessment of the history of an idea requires a thorough assessment of the immediate social context of its advent. It is an example of incompetent and amateurish historiography to place the genesis of a modern idea by finding its explicatory context in ancient history.

In short, what the Whig historians always fail to account for is that the ideas and advances of Copernicus, and Galileo, and Kepler, and Newton were made possible by the Christian universities in which these men matriculated, and which the Church created and zealously nurtured and defended, and which were, in fact, truly Christian institutions far longer than they have been secular institutions.

IV. The Christian Presuppositions for Science

We must, then, root the history of the origin of modern science in its immediate context. What was it about the Catholic universities of Europe in the centuries leading up to Copernicus and Galileo that made it possible for them to develop the essential thrust of inquiry that gave us modern science? Hart shows that the key lies in seeing  the recognition by 14th century scholastic cosmologists in Oxford and Paris, such as Buridan and Oresme, that the motion of bodies can be understood without reference to an a priori theory of causality, as in Aristotle’s physics.

The pre-Copernican scholastic theologians had begun to extricate themselves from the a priori conceptual schemes of Aristotle and Ptolemy that had been for so long the accepted cosmologies of late Antique and early Medieval science, in both Christian and Muslim lands. They had begun to develop, more specifically, an understanding of impetus that was “kinematic” rather than “dynamic.” This is to say that they had begun to study the laws of motion in themselves without consideration of an external force or “dynamis” as the ultimate causal agency of motion. This new, “immanentizing,” non-Aristotelian concept of motion was the stepping stone to the modern concept of inertial motion. It enabled the 14th century scholastic cosmologist to postulate, even, the existence of terrestrial rotation: whereas Aristotle and Ptolemy both understood the world to be stationary. Even more, it opened up these scholastic cosmologists to consideration of falling bodies and to their centers of gravity. This new type of study of motion was the Christian scholastic beginning of modern science, and Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton were the heirs of its spirit of inquiry and not its initiators sprung from a remote past or from nowhere.

Hart points out that the success of 16th and 17th century science amounted to the final defeat of Hellenistic science and not its ultimate triumph. Hart realizes, with all good historians of science, that the story of science as told by a Carl Sagan or an Arthur C. Clarke is pure nonsense. As early as the 6th century A.D., the Christian John Philoponous had already critiqued the Aristotelian and Stoic pantheistic doctrines of the cosmos as a cosmic machine or as a wondrous divine organism. Philoponous argued, contra the Greek natural philosophers, that the stars were not immutable and that terrestrial and celestial objects did not possess distinct natures. This made possible a valuation of the empirical study of the celestial regions. No longer could it be assumed, as almost all educated Greeks had done, that the nature of the stars and their motions could be deduced by a priori deduction. The celestial realm, Philoponous realized, is every bit as “creaturely” as the terrestrial realm. It was not a divine realm, as for Aristotle, and was susceptible therefore to the same contingency as the terrestrial realm. Its motion, therefore, had to be studied by empirical observation.

What made Philoponous able to make this breakthrough from out of the Greek natural philosophy? It was his implicit acceptance of the Christian doctrine of the transcendent God who created the world ”ex nihilo” — out of nothing. The celestial realm and the terrestrial realm of matter were able, as a logical consequence of this doctrine, to be seen as of the same basic substance(s), amenable to the same scientific laws, requiring empirical study in order to make sense of their contingent ordering.

Though Aristotelian science would still hold sway in the medieval universities for a long time, the breakthrough to modern science was enabled by recognizing, as these Catholic schoolmen in Oxford and Paris had done, that the world is not a divine being and that God is transcendent to it. It is ordered, to be sure. The scholastic theologians all recognized that God had made all things, as the Wisdom of Solomon tells us, according to measure, number, and weight. Many ancient cultures did not see things this way. For much of the Orient, for instance, the world was understood to be a pure illusion. Indeed, the Christian scholastics went even further in their estimation of the order of creation. They understood that the very orderer of the universe had united himself to matter in the most intimate manner conceivable in the Incarnation of Christ. The “logos” or rationality of matter was given thereby a special consecration that Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Neoplatonist, and Oriental cosmologists could not even have dreamt of and probably would have thought unseemly and undignified.

So, given its status as creature, the Christian scholastics began to understand that the universe has to be studied empirically and not by a priori deduction. Its being cannot be deduced in the way of, for instance, Anselm’s a priori argument for the essence and existence of God. On the other hand, given the dignity of its inherent logos, the universe is open to being known in its immanent laws. Both of these presuppositions about the nature of the universe, its contingency and its rationality, had to be held together in order for the scientific spirit of inquiry to develop. Both presuppositions are the logical outcome of the Christian doctrine of creation, held by all of the scholastic theologians who eventually, like Philoponous before them, were able to extricate themselves from the vestiges of Aristotelian pantheism and pave the way for the advent of modern science.

V. Overcoming the Myth of the Galileo Affair

Hart, then, has a nice and brief discussion of the shift in understanding of the universe that was enabled by the Christian doctrine of creation. It is not on the same level of Jaki’s thorough demonstrations, but it can serve as a good primer.

Yet Hart is even more concerned in his chapter on the history of science to lay to rest ridiculous myths about the presumed warfare between science and religion that fascinate contemporary culture. Such is the case with the Galileo affair. He gives a good presentation of basic points of the story that are too often missed: that Galileo was not subjected by the Church to torture or imprisonment in a dungeon for his science; that the conflict involved in the incident was not in essence between the Church and modern science but between Aristotelian science and modern science; that Urban VIII was not defending the faith, which we have good reason to think that he may not even have held, but the traditional science of Aristotle (in spite of the fact that the best scholastic theologians had already overcome its defects); that the Galileo incident was but one minor incident in a cultural context in which the Church’s universities were producing Jesuit and Franciscan scientists who were as truly scientific as any major modern scientists who have succeeded them; and most importantly, that Copernicus’s heliocentrism was a hypothesis at the time of Galileo and not an established empircal fact.

Regarding this last point, Hart shows that Galileo put forward an incomptent case in support of Copernicus’s heliocentrism. Indeed, he makes the plausible suggestion, given the poor case that Galileo had made to the Roman censors, that it was the Church who was in fact defending reason and Galileo who was acting on faith. Hart shows that Galileo was defending a theory that he had not proven and that violates our most basic common sense: we do not, after all, experience the earth to revolve around the sun. The extraordinary claim of heliocentrism, then, to parrot the unfortunate Carl Sagan, should have required extraordinary evidence, which Galileo, for all of his genius in fields other than astronomy, was not able to give.

None of this is to say that Hart rejects heliocentrism. It should be needless to point this out, but in this day and age one has to take extraordinary steps to state the obvious. But it is to say that it is hightime that the myth of the Galileo affair is put to rest in popular culture.

There are other important points that Hart makes in his chapter on science that are worth attending to, which is only a small part, and perhaps the most inessential, of his book. I don’t have time to go into these other points here. It should be reiterated that Hart does not wish to rest his whole case against the New Atheism on the issue of science, which has been in many ways but an ambiguous good in the modern age. Indeed, Hart has some deep sympathies with Martin Heidegger’s critique of the utilitarian objectivism and nihilism that gives rise to science-worship.

Nevertheless, the chapter in question is a good primer and worth reading as a whole. Upon doing so, one may want to turn to Jaki’s many volumes to fill in the details.

Everyone who is concerned with fighting the culture of death should be a regular reader of Wesley J. Smith’s blog at First Things: Secondhand Smoke. No one in the realm of public punditry understands better than he the ethos and tactics of the eugenicists in our midst. And, unlike prevaricators of Rod Dreher’s ilk, who think that it is more appropriate to target Glenn Beck for public recrimination than, say, John Holdren, he does not sugarcoat the perfidious direction in which the Barack Obama administration is taking our nation.

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.

This is perhaps the third or fourth post that I have started in the last month, never having had time to finish any of them.  But here goes again…

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.

Last Tuesday the County Commissioners for Bexar County, Tejas met to consider Judge John Longoria for a new position in the County Courts.  Judge Longoria had every reason to expect that this would be a simple formality.  Judge Longoria had served the San Antonio community since 1968. His impressive resume included serving as County Commissioner for Bexar County, serving in Commissioners Court for 9 years, serving multiple years as County Judge, and serving for 10 years as the State Representative of District 117 in San Antonio.  One week before the interview which was this past Tuesday, he had heard back informally from four of the five commissioners that he had their support.

Then, just before the weekend the following e-mail kicked off a flurry of similar e-mails:

From: Tracy Joseph Bogert

Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2009 04:41:56 -0700 (PDT)

To: <tadkisson@bexar.org>; <kwolff@bexar.org>; <mdflores@bexar.org>; <pjsmothers@aol.com>; <almallopez@hughes.net>; <amadeo2008@yahoo.com>; <arios3@sanantonio.gov>; <artahall@artah.com>; <barbaranellermoe@hotmail.com>; <carlos@carlosuresti.com>; <email@judgecathy.com>; <cmstone99@yahoo.com>; <dist1field@sanantonio.gov>; <chritian@thearchergroup.org>; <cwwalker99@hotmail.com>; <christina.bazaldua@sanantonio.gov>; <cyanas@aol.com>; <danpozza@yahoo.com>; <david.leibowitz@house.state.tx.us>; <plylar@cirodrodriguez.com>; <district6@sanantonio.gov>; <lukinforcongress@aol.com>; <drodriguez24@prodigy.net>; <district7@sanantonio.gov>; <erika@cirodrodriguez.com>; <gina@cirodrodriguez.com>; <gino12395@hotmail.com>; <glorys2u@aol.com>; <campaign@henrycuellar.com>; <hpaulcanales@juno.com>; <joaquincastro125@hotmail.com>; <jgfarias@sbcglobal.net>; <gabe@joefarias.com>; <jmenende@stewart.com>; <jose.menendez@house.state.tx.us>; <judith.zaffirini@senate.state.tx.us>; <judy.peterson@house.state.tx.us>; <julian@castroformayor.com>; <justin@jrrlawoffice.com>; <kpozza@swbell.net>; <katie.floyd@radnofsky.com>; <lsalinas925@sbcglobal.net>; <lcantu8@yahoo.com>; <leticia.vandeputte@senate.state.tx.us>; <leticiavandeputte@hotmail.com>; <leticiavandeputte@sbcglobal.net>; <lcantu2@sanantonio.gov>; <district5@sanantonio.gov>; <lukintjr@worldnet.att.net>; <mario48n07@yahoo.com>; <mrobles2@sanantonio.gov>; <mapcisne@aol.com>; <maryroman@justice.com>; <mcastro@castro-killen.com>; <michael.villarreal@house.state.tx.us>; <mreyes9927@yahoo.com>; <nicmar78@hotmail.com>; <norma.Rivera@sanantonio.gov>; <norman.garza@carlosuresti.com>; <olivarrilaw@aol.com>; <pelizondo@co.bexar.tx.us>; <petersakai4judge@yahoo.com>; <meyerlaw@swbell.net>; <rachel.kahn.johnston@gmail.com>; <raquelsakai@yahoo.com>; <richardandradem@msn.com>; <rochelleacevedo@hotmail.com>; <district1@sanantonio.gov>; <district4@sanantonio.gov>; <Roger@joefarias.com>; <district3@sanantonio.gov>; <roseann.maldonado@mail.house.gov>; <ruth.mcclendon@house.state.tx.us>; <DanGraney@stonewallsanantonio.org>; <shanti4alwais@gmail.com>; <district2@sanantonio.gov>; <support@tommyadkisson.com>; <sybil@leibowitz4legislature.com>; <syromo@aol.com>; <tessa@instructors.net>; <tessaherr@att.net>; <tim.salas@sanantonio.gov>; <vsalazar@sanantonio.gov>; <jbolds@sanantonio.gov>; <cc7bogert@yahoo.com>; <misterbalconesheights@yahoo.com>; <david@texas-patriot.com>; <MIRELES1@aol.com>; <annacaballerofordistrict6@yahoo.com>; <mcwatts@wattslawfirm.com>; <ginnysmcdavid@yahoo.com>; <gabequintanilla@yahoo.com>; <Yolanda.Byington@sanantonio.gov>; <glorisaldana@att.net>; <rosalbasaenz@hotmail.com>; <aidarojas46@gmail.com>; <luckythea@aol.com>; <tinactorres@aol.com>; <rebeca@rebeca4judge.com>; <info@voteforbarbie.com>

Subject: Open letter to Commissioner’s Court

Dear Commissioners

I would like to let it be known that I would have an objection to any appointment involving John Longoria to a County Court at Law bench. I completely respect Mr. Longoria as a person and agree with many of his ideas and opinions. However I have known Mr. Longoria to be at odds with a woman’s right to choose and other issues that have federal legal precedent. There are many qualified candidates for these benches who would much less controversial than Mr. Longoria.

Again thank you for the excellent work you do for the County of Bexar.

If I were a journalist I would suspect that this group had been organized by an “astro-turf” anti-life mob.  Quite frankly, it is not a very strongly worded e-mail.  Unless I were already an ideologue I, or very much afraid of them, I would probably ignore even a hundred like e-mails.

In general, the e-mail appears to say that Judge Longoria  is acknowledged to be qualified except that because he is a pro-life (he is a Catholic and a Democrat).  Being pro-life makes him “controversial” and therefore, unfit to serve.

I suppose that we have a bunch of brain dead commissioners here in San Antonio because this is all it took to cause those previously supporting him to drop their support.  The die has been cast.  In Bexar County, if you are known to be a faithful Catholic you need not apply to any bench position with the County Courts.  I suppose that this is not much different from what is happening elsewhere.

San Antonio has been transformed recently into a very “blue” town.  The purveyors of death have become sufficiently organized and aware that they are working to eliminate anyone from the judicial branch that might interfere with the march toward ubiquitous abortion.

There was a late response by the pro-life community.  It is not clear how many e-mails were generated in support of Judge Longoria but it clearly was insufficient to turn the tide.  Our Lady of Guadalupe, Ora pro nobis.

I dunno…does anyone else find that these appointments seem to be going to more and more radical idealogues?

We finally closed on the house but every step of the way, it looked like it would not happen.  From a loan officer whom we could not get to talk to us to a loan assistant who seemed not to be matched to her particular skill set.  Half way into the process when this became apparent we should have probably cut our losses and went elsewhere.  Any way, unless some surprise pops up (a potential eventuality I am not yet discounting) we may now be officially off the homeless rolls thanks to Shelray’s assistance.

As is usual, I have been quite busy but still have had a chance now and then to keep up on the goings on.  I have been thinking about the unsurprising response of many commentators in the media about the responsibility of the pro-life movement for the killing of notorious abortionist George Tiller along with the broader implications of this response.

Beginning with Mike Hendricks’s illuminating (though not illuminated) blathering in the Kansas City Star and then the subsequent piling on of the likeminded (if I can use the term): see Colby Cosh’s tirade in the National Post, and Ellen Goodman’s tortuous logic in the Boston Globe. The expected theme is the same in all of these: those who call abortion murder are thereby also guilty of Tiller’s murder.  If one looks at the logic flowing from these representatives of the mass media, one finds ominous signs for religious freedom and any speech that does not comport with the ruling party line.

Like BO’s speech at Notre Dame implied, these writers begin with the premise that abortion is not murder.  For BO it may be a significant moral consideration but it is not the killing of an innocent human person.  For BO dispassionate dialog can only begin on this premise.  It is not clear that those represented by the above media representatives are even open to allowing the prolife community a platform.  However, if they are, prolifers must first disavow the equation of abortion with murder.  This is the trap that so-called pro-life/pro-Obama Catholics seem to fall into.  To be invited to the table, they must be willing to reject such inflammatory language as “murder.”

The tactic of censoring speech because it is said to incite violence is nothing new.  The abortion lobby has used it for years and the homosexualist activists have adopted it as well.  However, the circumstances have changed considerably. One who shares this view now has the nation’s bully pulpit and the party most sympathetic to this view now hold dominant majorities in both houses of congress.  This is not to mention that the courts have been increasingly populated with activists who are also more and more likely to abet such a view.

Moreover, abortion is only one plank in the aggressive social restructuring agenda that the current president seems poised to attempt to enact.  His proclamation of June as LGBT pride month was also telling. In making this proclamation, BO put the office of the President squarely against natural law and the Judeo-Christian tradition.  Same sex attraction and gender identity disorders are now protected, nay, preferred and promoted lifestyle choices (see this LifeSiteNews article for an example of the results of this distorted way of thinking).  However, there is a stumbling block in the way of such an ambitious project.  We are beginning to see the administration’s strategy for overcoming this “problem.”

The actions of the Obama administration in appointing radically pro-abortion and anti-family “Catholic” zealots to executive and judicial posts, and its promoting of relationships with “Catholic” notables and organizations that are attempting to attenuate the significance of Catholic cooperating with pro-abortion policies all seem aimed at developing a dissenting “anti-magisterium” that can offset the authority of the only authoritative and organized voice against abortion and for protecting the natural family.  The Catholic Church is in fact the biggest threat to this social restructuring agenda.  No opportunity will be passed up in the attempt to marginalize, discredit, counter, or silence the truth about the human person proclaimed by the Catholic Church in the US.  The media’s response to the Tiller murder illustrates this.

Cosh’s comments are the most illuminating.  He indicates that if abortion is murder, then Tiller’s murder is justified and the pro-life community has to embrace this.  The others writers implicitly accept this when they say that calling abortion murder makes violence the logical consequence.  Obama’s response to the murder seems to imply the same.  For all of their talk of peace and justice, this logic betrays an implied threat to both.

I believe these rumblings to be ominous because they share the thinking of Robespierre and the purveyors of the Reign of Terror.  Declaring themselves the guardians of liberty, they mean their own liberty to act as they wish with no limitations placed upon them.  They have an implicit distrust others because their own will is made the arbiter of truth and so there is no way of adjudicating between competing wills other than through means of force.  Those who do not readily accept their assertions cannot be reasoned with for there is no defensible use of reasoned arguments in their assertions.  Thus, violence on their part is an ever looming threat.  What we are now seeing appears to be the preparations for justifying such violence (intended or not).

By no means is the majority of the country yet with this agenda.  However, neither does it have the intellectual or moral formation to defeat it on its own.  To overcome the current threat, we require the clear and unwavering voice of the Catholic Church.  This is what we began to see from the bishops during the last election and what we saw with the Notre Dame scandal.  The bishops see the impending threat and many are beginning to respond.  I think that the majority within the country is still influenced by natural law and the Gospel.  However, they require our faithful and continuing witness if we are to overcome the deleterious effects of the mass media engine and the bully pulpit of the current administration.

Well, I have just completed my first full week of unemployment.  I think that I had more leisure time while employed.  Unemployment began by waking up to 8 inches of water in the basement Saturday morning before last.  The sumps had stopped running for some reason.  I was able to get them started before heading off to Mass. The water was pumped out by the time we returned.  Tricia spent the morning trying to dry out our files that had been inundated with water while also holding a garage sale.  I spent the morning cleaning up the basement.  We headed out to Chicago to visit some friends in the afternoon and made it back home by 11pm.  That has been one of our more leisurely days.

We are in Dayton for our goddaughter’s graduation, so that is the only reason I have a breather right now.  I thought I would take the time to comment on a topic I have seen in my inbox this  month.  Several articles by several different persons have been forwarded to me about Christopher West and the fallout from his Nightline interview.  He has been taking quite a bit of heat for it.  According to some (Alice von Hildebrand and David Schindler), it is not simply the case that West was taken out of context and misconstrued,  but rather that he has some underlying problems in his anthropology.

First for some caveats and disclosures: I cannot speak as an expert on Christopher West’s interpretation of John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, as I have read and/or heard relatvely little of his thought.  However, I have read and heard some and have found that I share some of the concerns being presented.  I know David Schindler.  I took a course from him at the John Paul II Institute which, by the way, served as the inspiration for the title of this blog.  He was also a reader for my dissertation.  I do not always agree with Schindler’s take on John Paul II. I think it is often too heavily read through his “Balthasarian lens.”  However, I do think that some of Schindler’s criticisms are well-founded, and these criticisms will be the focus of this post.  I don’t claim to be the world’s foremost expert on John Paul II or his theology of the body, but I do consider myself to have an above-average expertise, as this was the foundation of my dissertation, and I have taught undergraduate courses on the theology of the body for several years.

Schindler begins with some apparently rather questionable statements that Christopher West has made.  Oftentimes, these questionable statements can seem to be reconciled with orthodoxy when contextualized, but even in doing so, Schindler says that there is a residual problem.  Schindler lists four issues he sees with West’s approach, and also with the substance of his theology.  These Schindler sees as giving rise to what many find vulgar and prurient in West’s approach.

Schindler first lists West’s underestimation of the damage done to humanity by concupiscence.  Schindler refers to his having brought this up to West a number of years ago.  I recall Schindler’s having mentioned this discussion (back in 2003, I think it was).  He mentioned West’s problematic dismissal of the perduring effects of concupiscence and West’s response.  However, I also recall that I did not agree with the way the Schindler seemed to frame the meaning of concupiscence.  He seemed to reify it as some positive reality then, as something that resides in the body.  His statement in the above linked article also intimates this understanding.  Nevertheless, what I have heard from West seems to suggest to me that he does in fact underestimate the impact of concupiscence on the human person.  Redemptive grace in this dispensation does not remove concupiscence, and concupiscence in sexual attraction cannot be ignored.  West seems to forget this, though “Christopher” of this blog, who has recently taken a class from West, indicated that West is reconsidering his take on concupiscence.

I have the impression of West that he seems to consider puritanism as a greater threat than the sexual libertinism of the sexual revolution.  I seem to recall seeing this written by him, but if I am wrong about this, I apologize.  However, if it is true, it would explain many things about his overemphasis on sex which Schindler thinks arises from his lack of a proper sense of the analogia entis (the analogy of being), which takes its archetype in God but never forgets that the difference between God and His creation is greater than the similarity.  Puritanism is a distortion of chastity.  Libertinism is a rebellion against not only puritanism but also against chaste virtue.

West seems to think that concupiscence can and must be defeated.  This is impossible.  Temptation must be overcome and defeated but concupiscence remains for the entirety of this lifetime.  Concupiscence is not an object to be defeated.  Concupiscence is a privation of integrity between the affects (i.e. emotions and appetites) on the one hand and the intellect and will on the other.  The original state was one of integration among these faculties, which we had only because of original grace–but this is how we were created–we were created for grace.  This integrity can be provisionally restored to a greater or lesser extent by cooperating with sanctifying grace, but the proclivity to sin always remains, and so it must not be tempted.  West can seem to dismiss this.  In doing so, it seems that he is falling into the error of presuming upon God’s grace in order to reject the admonition to avoid the near temptation of sin.  God’s grace can transform us if we cooperate it, but in our fallen state this is not a straight path that one can achieve simply through the force of will or by a quietist presumption on grace.

Schindler criticizes West for a lack of Marian sensitivities in his theology of the body. The way Schindler describes this is pure Balthasar and so it is not fair, I think, to consider this a failure. John Paul’s theology is certainly sympathetic with Balthasar’s Mariology, and good arguments cans be made that he incorporated this to some degree in his own thinking.  At most this should be proposed as a corrective to West’s prurience but not a fault in West’s theology.  Hildebrand argued that West loses the mystery of the person by his lack of sensitivity to the dangers of concupiscence.  This I think I have seen.  It is, I think, the reason behind his inability to discern what is inappropriate or vulgar and what is not.

Puritanism and sexual libertinism are both threats.  The former because it set the stage for justification of the latter.  However, both reject the authentic meaning of the human person and the sacredness of the body.  The danger is (and I think that this is the trap that West falls into) that the response of one who suffers from puritanical thinking can look very much like the response of one who has an authentic anthropology and responds out of a desire for purity.  That is, when subjected to sights that might be a temptation both will turn away.  The puritan because he thinks that the naked body is dirty or evil and the wannabe saint because he realizes that the goodness of the naked body is sacred, and in his fallen state he can be tempted to reduce the other to his sexual value.  Furthermore, there is a stewardship for the weaknesses of others that must be observed in order to protect them from temptations.

When inadvertantly subjected to experiences that can lead to lust, one does indeed have the obligation through self-mastery to overcome the temptation.  However, one also has the obligation to avoid the near temptation of sin.  It is ill advised, indeed it can be sinful, to  subject oneself purposefully to anything with which Satan or our simple fallenness can use to draw us more easily into sin.  Everyone is different.  Men and women are tempted differently.  Men tend to reduce women to their sexual value for the sake of pleasure.  Women tend to reduce men to the latter’s ability to meet their need for complementary bonding and personal fulfillment.  Among men, however, temperament, experience, history of subjection to pornography, etc. all factor into what can lead to temptations and how difficult it is to master oneself in this regard.  One may not sin in a misguided attempt to attain self-mastery. Neither may I assume that what I can safely be subjected to is the standard for everyone.

West’s use of images that offend the sensibilities of many good Catholics seems to be motivated by the fact that he thinks that puritanism is the root cause for their offense.  He needs to be reminded that puritanism is a relatively recent phenomenon and that chastity and purity are age old virtues.  While it is true that some cultures are not offended by things sexual that do offend others (a point I recall West often making), one must not draw conclusions based upon superficial assessments.  Lack of offense does not imply purity in reception.  Cultures in which men and women are both publicly naked must not be assumed to show that public nakedness is a possibility for a society that wants to achieve purity.  In fact, these cultures rarely show a high regard for women and their sexuality.

Ok, enough blathering and back to the question: is Christopher West’s interpretation of theology of the body dangerous?  First, I will say that I wish that this discussion could go on in private because it serves to give comfort and aid to dissenters and can undermine a good apostolate that West has developed, albeit, one that is in need of some course corrections. However, with respect to the question,  I suspect that for some people it can be.   I do think that in many ways he has done very much good, and I have no way of knowing how much that his disregard for concupiscience may have caused damage to those misled by it.  I do hope that he will take the public criticism to heart and find someone who can help him to correct his misinterpretations.  Our culture needs it and so does the Church.

Here is the latest line-up for Dappled Things:

It’s funny-eerily funny, some might say-how Lent falls upon you just as you’ve finished reading that last story, savoring that last poem from the Advent/Christmas issue of Dappled Things. What follows? A desert: a literary desert of forty-plus days that you must endure before rejoicing at last in the glory of Easter-and the delights of the new issue that comes with it! Dear reader, your days of penance are over: the Lent/Easter 2009 edition of Dappled Things, our most exciting issue to date, is now available online!

Once again we are blessed with a particularly strong batch of fiction pieces, including the grotesque and darkly humorous Black Market by August Roulaux-an abortion story like none you have read before-a profoundly affecting examination of a father’s struggles to reembrace his daughter in Fiorella de Maria’s Aftermath, and the terse, gripping subtlety of John Farrell’s A Circle of Cypresses, which delves deeply into life, death, marriage, love, and human yearning in deftly crafted prose:

“I am so sorry,” she said. She couldn’t think of anything else to say.

But Mr . Peebles didn’t need any prompting. “I’m glad you’re all right. The sergeant there, or captain, at the police station said neither of you was hurt, and that’s a good thing.”

She nodded without remembering to say yes.

“Are you there, Mrs. Gordon?”

“I just feel . . . I suppose it’s us-I mean we should’ve been the ones calling  you.” Mrs. Gordon.  It was  the first  time  since their wedding  celebration  anyone  had  referred  to  her  as Mrs. Gordon.

Looking for something meaty? In our feature article, “Prudence and the Providence of Plot“, Br. Bruno M. Shah, O.P., takes questions of fiction, as developed by E. M. Forster, and applies them to larger philosophical questions of the narrative of human life in the context of man’s journey toward (or away from) God:

An author’s insight into human nature cannot be exhausted by his characterizations. Somehow, homo fictus possesses a transcendent meaning that is capable of “opening out” beyond the novel’s horizon of mundane action. But what is this trans-narratival dynamism about, and what does it have to do with our own, concrete lives?

This little taste will have whetted your appetite-but the full article is only available in our printed edition! For those of you who have still neglected to subscribe, this must be the final spur!  Subscribe without delay!

Our offerings for Art & Photography feature a single artist. Sarah Ortiz, recently returned from a trip to Granada, Nicaragua, provides us with a vivid and striking photojournal. In the exquisite colors of everyday life, Mrs. Ortiz captures the earthy splendor of the human scene.

We have a striking collection of poetry-vivid and clever as with Robert MacArthur’s “The Cheshire Cat,” or full of haunting longing as with Fiorella de Maria’s “Widow’s Walk“. Returning poet R. S. Mitchell ponders the deep causes of this dappled universe in his mind-teasing, masterfully crafted poem “Reading Pascal at Mint Springs“:

Feel the earth of your situation

and smell the lake and, beyond, see

circling vulture, run of ridge,

for the puzzled trees bespeak

the jigsaw jointure of impression,

yellow and green and sheen of lake.

As always, our editors are eager to provide you with reviews and interviews. This issue, our intrepid editor-in-chief Katy Carl single-handedly gives us the fruits of her conversation with author Andrew McNabb, as well as a review of his new story collection, The Body of This. A second review deserves particular mention: Amor de Lohn is the first published collection of poetry by Gabriel Olearnik. His name should be familiar to you all, as he was first published here, in Dappled Things! Many congratulations to Mr. Olearnik!

Alongside these fascinating features, we offer two editor-produced essays: A Tribute to Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, written by one of his young former collaborators at First Things, our own Mary Angelita Ruiz; and, for those who remember Katy Carl’s insightful discussion of Self-Gift and the Literary Vocation, we offer a complementary reflection from another side of the artistic life, as Eleanor Bourg Donlon speaks of Publishing for Papists: Marketing the Literary Vocation.

These are just a few of the many, many more excellent fiction pieces, essays, poems, and works of art we have to offer you this issue.

Wishing you many blessings during the Easter season,

Bernardo Aparicio
President, Dappled Things

I just got back into town today after a quick trip to San Antonio for a job interview (see my earlier post if you want to know why) for a new, very small Catholic college.  I think that it went well except that my 30 year old Spanish has not yet come back, but I am working on it.  I never noticed before how, even outside of South Texas, that it seems easier to find a Spanish language radio station these days then often even a Country music station.  That is to say that I have now embarked upon a steady diet of Spanish radio when possible.  For those so inclined, I would very much appreciate your prayers for the rest of the selection process as the job seems to be an almost perfect fit to me and it will allow cornflakes to continue to populate the kitchen table…for that matter, it will ensure that there will still be a kitchen table.

Piggy-backing upon Hierothee’s most excellent post about the Notre Dame debacle, let me propose the following for your measured consideration. He covered quite well all of the logical inconsistencies of Fr. Jenkins’s rather pathetic rationalization for what can only be seen as a grave act of scandal.  Hierothee pointed out that there are clearly some heinous ideologies that people can hold about which no one can doubt that honoring someone holding the same could ever be honored, even if the end were dialogue and conversion.

In this case we have some one who not simply abets, but actually promotes mass murder.  Whether there are in fact any “accomplishments” to honor (Hierothee’s post assesses this dubious claim), honoring accomplishments while ignoring grave and extensive moral crimes is an intellectual schitzophrenia of the worst kind.  Let us consider substituting for BO, another figure from history who rescued a nation from economic turmoil while having the unfortunate character flaw that he thought some human beings deserved the protection accorded human persons while others did not.

Can we imagine Fr. Jenkins inviting Adolph Hitler to receive an honorary doctorate for his accomplishments in reforming the German economy, putting between 6 and 7 million unemployed  Germans back to work, reenergizing the German economy which had been in shambles after WWI, rebuilding the countries defenses, and unifying the country politically.  Of course, as with all socialist/totalitarian economic programs this probably would not have provided long term stability for the economy or the society but fortunately, the Third Reich fell before the house of cards could collapse under its own weight.

Nevertheless, can you imagine what Notre Dame would have to live down today, if a Fr. Jenkins-esqe school president had thought up some half-baked scheme to honor Hitler and to justify the act by claiming it is in order to dialogue with him.  Or suppose, perhaps, that this hypothetical brainiac had run a Catholic university in Nazi Germany.  Here the parallel would have been even more similar in that he would have been gaining “prestige” for his school with the intelligentsia for inviting a wildly popular leader of the state.  Even accounting for that fact that he oversaw a totalitarian regime, Hitler had approval ratings that still eclipse even BO’s at his highest (the link below reports that Hitler had a 90% approval rating in 1939).

Now some will argue that BO is not the cold blooded fiend that Hitler was and so the comparison with Hitler is unfair.  I say that  the comparison is more fair than they might be willing to admit.  It seems to me that it can only be those who reject the equation of abortion with murder, at least on some subliminal level, who would be drawn to call such a comparison unfair.  Though I admit I have no idea how authoritative this might be, I would still like to point to a very interesting assessment of Hitler’s worst mistakes.  These are so interesting because  they seem, eerily so, to effectively make my case for me:

Ultimately, Hitler’s worst mistakes were:

a) Formulating policy for a great state on the basis of a bizarre and fallacious worldview,

b) buying into his own press and gambling on his supposed Providence-supplied infallibility to play high-stakes power politics with an insufficient purse, and

c) ensuring the vilification of himself and his ideology by practicing industrial genocide on innocents.

How about providing some other personalities in the comment box that we might substitute into Fr. Jenkins’s rationalization so me might demonstrate his folly?

In the myriad crises that the media, as usual, is helping to in some cases fan (economic) and in others foster (ecological, racial, political, etc.) it is not surprising that more end of days prophets have surfaced.  One good thing about this kind of environment is that I have found myself better attuned to consider more carefully the despair of our modern day nihilists.

As I was putting together notes for a lecture tonight, I was reading through JPTG’s theology of the body catecheses once again.   His commenting on a passage from 1 John struck me in a way that I had not considered in the who-knows-how-many-times I had previously read it:

On the one hand, “the world passes away with its concupiscence,” on the other, “the one who does the will of God will remain in eternity” (1Jn 2:17) [Waldstein, 101:7].

The context of his talk is the eschatological hope that one finds in marriage as the primordial sacrament.  However, what struck me is the lack of eschatological hope of so many in our society.  I suspect that the numbers comprising this group are those who are wedded to the passions of the flesh.  Why this is so is suggested in the above passage.

Fixating on the satiation of bodily passions to the neglect of the deeper needs of the soul attenuates, and perhaps completely suppresses, any awareness of that which allows us to transcend the material world.  That is, the spiritual aspect of our existence.  With our focus solely on the corruptible, and steadily corrupting flesh it is no mystery why we would have no long term hope in eternal life.

We see our own flesh, and that of others, decaying before our very eyes.  We have a clear, if subliminal, witness that concupiscence eventually passes away–even if it is our own.   In fact, our experience of concupiscence is that it does not provide a lasting substance on which to build anything.  Once a particular lust is sated, we are left empty.  When we respond in a disordered way to satisfy the urges of the animal aspect of our human nature, we kill again the spiritual life which gives us hope.

I suspect that the world’s hope for the future that rang in the ears of the practical nihilists during BO’s presidential campaign, for a moment at least, resonated with their innermost being.  This explains the explicit messianic adulation that BO received and continues to receive.  His message is one of hope without demands.  This is no hope at all.

This world is passing way as is the concupiscence that keeps it and us from acheiving its greatness.  For those who wed themselves to satisfying their concupiscent desires at the expense of their souls, even the exuberance of  the last election cycle will not be enough to keep them distracted for long.

Our economy has been based upon a rampant consumerism focused too much on an attempt to satisfy concupiscence’s infinite wants at the expense of truth.  The great demand to fill our spiritual void with material goods could not keep up with our incomes so we had to continue to fill the void with goods bought on credit.  It appears that the credit bubble has now burst.  I do not know if we have come to the end of the line with this or not but as any one with eyes can see the crisis we now face is more spiritual than it is economic.

Nevertheless, this world is fading away.  Perhaps now is the most auspicious time to proclaim the new world that this passing world still awaits as it groans in travail, the new creation that will be given to those who do the will of God.

…, or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still pleasing men, I should not be a servant of Christ” (Gal 1:10).

Paul’s letter to the Galatians came to mind recently as I was considering the recent hullabaloo about which the local church in Austria has been screwing itself into the ground.  The bishops there are in open revolt against the Holy Father because he is not as beholden to the sensitivities of the world as they appear to be.  I still cannot fathom how seriously I had misjudged Cardinal Schoenborn.

These are gravely mistaken Austrian bishops who have chosen to take it upon themselves to engage in pressure politics, attempting to use the coercion of public opinion to overturn decisions made by the Holy Father with respect to schism-healing and episcopal appointments.  Of course, impudent reactions to the Holy Father’s guidance of the Church are not limited to the Austrians.

Now, I am certainly not surprised by the reaction of those who habitually fawn after the politically correct crowd.  It is not unusual that their determination as to the right or wrong of any particular action which the Church undertakes is to be judged by the positive or negative reaction of the mass media.  However, in this case, even some commentators less obsessed with “public relations” are criticizing the Holy Father for his lack of public relations savvy.  Here is why I think that the hypersensitivity of these commentators to world reaction is misplaced.

In the case of Bishop Williamson, world reaction betrays a willful ignorance of the Church and the meaning of this move.   These are people who are uninterested in the new progress toward reconciliation.  They have no concern for the gains that have been made in reforming, or at least isolating, Bishop Williamson as one who, for whatever reason, denies the actual horror of the holocaust.

Those who wish to accede to world reaction tacitly put forth the argument that no attempts toward rapprochement should have been made with SSPX, or at least with Bishop Williamson while he continues in his odd beliefs.  In other words, this is essentially saying that such people ought to be excluded from any attempts at reform.  One might observe that the people who condemn the Church for this action are the same who have hailed, or at least been silent about, BO’s intent to engage in dialog with Iran, a country whose President has declared that Israel has no right to exist and who has himself denied the holocaust.  This is very telling.  It strongly suggests that the motivation for this uproar is driven by animus toward the Catholic Church rather than any real concern over what some confused schismatic Catholic priest thinks about the Holocaust.

Since Pius XII, the Church has recognized the need and taken very significant initiatives in terms of rapprochement with our Jewish brothers and sisters.  It is disingenuous for anyone to imply anti-semitism on the part of the Church for the actions she has taken in trying to reconcile SSPX.  Those in the media and in the Church who do so are the same who lambaste the Church for being heavy-handed for any other excommunications.  They presume to tell the Church who should and who should not be in communion with the Church based primarily upon their notions of political correctness.  Frankly, it is none of their business.

The other issue is the nomination of an Austrian priest as an auxiliary bishop for a diocese in Austria.  The uproar here again, I think , has little to do with the priests’ impolitic speculations about the connection between some natural disasters and the unquestionable widespread moral depravity associated with the affected regions.  Certainly, I agree that in the wake of a devastating event with many innocents suffering, especially in our culture in which these statements would in themselves have little chance of being comprehended, it seems that such comments are more likely to exacerbate the suffering of the innocent than it would convict consciences of the guilty.

However, while his speculation was not a theological certainty, neither was it a theological error.  It is possible that God would permit devastation to occur as an opportunity for sinners to awaken themselves from their hedonistic stupor.  Again, it is unlikely that the priest’s statements were the real reason for this reaction.  By all accounts, it is more likely the case that the hierarchy in Austria is more concerned with his willingness to be a public voice of moral truth which will be, for them, an embarrassment.  If not an embarrassment, at least it will cause them difficulties with the largely dissenting clergy and laity.  Certainly, they are also concerned to have a prelate who will not be so “rigid” about truth and Church teaching.

Now, I am not saying that prudence in avoiding unnecessary offense and confusion ought to be set aside.  However, that is not the same as recognizing that we cannot always avoid uproar from an unbelieving world when Christ is proclaimed.  If the suggestion of these critics is that no decision ought to be made until it is vetted by some sort of public relations office, then we may as well simply join the Anglican Communion right now.

St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross would never have made it through such a vetting process.  Neither would have St. Maximilian Kolbe.  Dominus Iesus would never have been able to have been released. All of these caused uproars which could not be avoided.  A cautious vetting process would still have us waiting for an acceptable version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church to be brought forth. Perhaps we ought also to pass all Sacramentary and Lectionary changes/translations through some public relations vetting process?

When people are looking for an opportunity to be offended, there is little chance one is going to be able to proclaim the Gospel and avoid offending people.  With so many others looking for any excuse to attack the Church we perhaps ought to gain certainty that actions that get such an uproar in response were in fact the right ones.

Catholics ought not fall into this politically correct, obsessive mindset to which all too many otherwise solid Catholic commentators seem to have fallen prey.  Regensburg was not a public relations failure; lifting the excommunication on the SSPX was not a public relations failure; the appointment of a solid, if impolitic, Austrian priest as a bishop was not a public relations failure.  The reactions are all unavoidable, if ridiculous, clamorings of a world that cannot bear to hear the truth.  This confused world is abetted by Catholics who share their aversion for truth.

If we make affirmative responses from the world our touchstone for determining what we are to proclaim, then we can no longer be the servants of Christ.

At RCIA last Tuesday the topic was confession and the 1953 Hitchcock film, “I Confess” was brought up.  Having not seen it, my wife decided to pick up a copy at the library.  While watching it last Sunday night, several thoughts came to mind.

First, as is often said, it occurred to me that there is no way that a movie like this, i.e. one that is  sympathetic to the Catholic faith, could come out of Hollywood today (here is a summary of the plot in case you have not seen it).  Clearly, the failures of some of our priests in the last decade has not escaped Hollywood’s attention.  While they* now have evidence that priests are in fact human, the problem is their false understanding of humanity.  Namely, they believe that the human person is so compelled by his sexual appetite that he has not the capacity to master it.  In fact, they are afflicted with the Freudian myth that suggests that those who attempt to master their sexual urges will ultimately damage themselves.  This distorted understanding man makes a sympathetic treatment of the Catholic faith unlikely.  After all, that is their biggest beef with the Church.

There are many aspects of the 1953 film that will be beyond the reach of today’s Hollywood. Of course, the Hollywood wisdom dictates the need for some sex, or at least sexual tension, in such a film for economic considerations and perhaps also for the sake of a distorted view of artistic merit.  There is the bias against the Catholic faith, especially because she dares to continue to loudly proclaim the reality of sin.  As suggested above, from Hollywood’s perspective the sexual sin she warns against cannot be tolerated. However, even if we could get over these issues, there are other other fundamental problems.

The first thing that comes to mind is the way that the relationship is depicted between the main character Fr. Michael Logan, played by Montgomery Clift, and the leading lady, Ruth Grandfort, played by Anne Baxter.  In the movie, the two had a romantic relationship before he became a priest.  While Ruth continued to love Fr. Logan even after his ordination, there was no time afterward in which Fr. Logan ever doubted or seemed to struggle with his vocation.

Hollywood culture ensures their inability to deem credible anyone who possesses such a strong, supernatural sense of his vocation and the full self-possession of a handsome young man such as Clift plays in the film.  For directors, producers, screenwriters, such self mastery is not something of which they could make sense.  For those coming from a culture in which there is no reason to attempt to fully possess oneself, at least in terms of the sexual urge, the thought that it might be possible for anyone does not even arise.

Another aspect of the film that they would not know how to deal with in a credible manner is the issue of the seal of the confessional.  The idea of sacramental confession has been so caricatured by Hollywood that they lack the intellectual framework necessary to gain an authentic understanding of confession.  They are completely lost as to why there should be such a solemn obligation for silence on the part of the priest.  Perhaps the closest they might come is patient/client privilege, but even this the courts have ultimate jurisdiction over.  Moreover, they have not the capacity for sympathy needed to understand how a priest might be willing to suffer the punishment due to another to protect the confession of the very man to whom the punishment is due.  Completely beyond the pale would be the willingness to suffer this fate for the very man who is trying to frame the priest for the murder.  Rather than see this as heroic virtue they could not but see it rather as misguided folly.

A third element of the plot that would get no sympathy would be Ruth’s husband, Pierre.  Pierre is treated rather ruthlessly by Ruth who is more committed it seems to her still burning love for Fr. Logan than for her marriage commitment and the feelings of her faithful husband (something much more reasonable for Hollywood). Pierre continues to stand by her even when she tells him that she has really never loved him and that she is still in love with Fr. Logan.  Rather than seeing Pierre’s actions as virtuous in exhibiting this spousal fidelity to the marriage and a strong commitment to reconciling, they would rather cast him as a lovelorn sap.

I suppose at root the issues that cause Hollywood’s animus toward the Catholic Church are the same that would make them unable to be sympathetic to those things I mention above.  That is, again, the problem of the human person.  The recognition that there is such a thing as a virtuous character that is achieved through always choosing the right and rejecting the wrong, even the recognition that there is a right and wrong in the realm of sex, are truths that the Hollywood culture has long ago abandoned.  I do not think they are even capable of being open to anything sympathetic to true religion any longer.  But perhaps I am wrong.  I confess, I would be happy if I were.

* – O.k, I admit that I am painting with a rather broad brush.  Nevertheless, I do believe it is a relatively accurate depiction of the predominant Hollywood ethos, if I may use that term here.

Most of us have heard by now the latest news about Legionaries of Christ founder, Fr. Marcial Maciel.  Last week we had the very sad confirmation of what I suppose most of us had already realized what likely the case since Benedict removed Fr. Maciel’s faculties to act as a priest in public in 2006.  However, for the many Legionaries of Christ and Regnum Christi members who had held out hope that none of the allegations against their founder were true, this last week was a devastating one.

The question in light of the revelation: now what?  I would have to admit that I have found what some have decided to be the correct response, well, disappointing.  Now, I am not talking about the anti-Catholic press, or erstwhile Catholics in the secular press that have abandoned the faith, or even the (not so) Catholic press.  I am talking about faithful Catholics who have decided to lecture the Legionaries about what they should now do.  The advice ranges from internal purging of what they assume to be knowing enablers to dissolution of the order.  I am much troubled by such open letters and blog posts.

There is certainly a need for the Order to reassess what this means for them and to discern what, if anything, these confirmations demand.  However, the Legionaries ought to be able to do that themselves, in obedience to the Holy Father, without outside interference.  They do not need our “piling on” when they are down.

This is a time, it seems to me, to recognize that our brothers and sisters in the Legionaries and Regnum Christi are shocked and suffering and they need us to join with them in solidarity and in prayer.  The Legionaries and Regnum Christi have done enormous good.  They have established important and successful, world-wide media, education, and evangelization apostolates that are helping to transform the world.  It is true that sometimes they have grown faster than they had the organizational maturity to handle perfectly, but everything that they have done has been in fidelity to and for the good of the Church.

So what now?  For those who are Legionaries and Regnum Christi, it should be discernment in obedience to the Holy Father.  For the rest of us, it should be a response of gratitude to God for his having blessed us with this Order and our offering of prayers and support to those who have given themselves to Him through it.  Finally, we must all pray for those who have suffered at the hands of an apparently very confused and deceitful man.

Shawn brought up a series of articles the other day at lunch that I find at once: interesting, confirming 0f my experience, and frightening.  Yesterday, he sent along links to them.  At the Institute we often have discussions about our experiences teaching undergraduates and we generally agree that we see what the article describes.

Thomas F. Bertonneau, a professor of literature at SUNY-Oswego, has written a three part article for the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3).  Bertonneau has taught in a variety of higher education institutions and documents a worrying trend that other instructors of undergraduates have noticed.  I will snip heavily from Bertonneau’s article to allow him to make the points much more eloquently than I can.  He states:

Even in the mid-1980s, student interest in literature was low. I was a teaching assistant and teaching fellow at U.C.L.A.-a first-tier branch of a world-class state university. Except for a few English majors, however, most students saw the course as an obstacle to be hurdled or, better yet, circumvented. Poetry-averse engineering majors and haughty pre-law types volubly asserted the unfairness and inconvenience of having to study Shakespeare or Cervantes. Many read the assigned books desultorily and quite a few disdained to read any of them at all. Obsessively clever, they figured out ways to cheat on the quizzes that I imposed to keep them to the reading schedule. …

In the main, however, students used competent language. They completed their sentences in grammar not too defective, and they deployed vocabulary more or less at an adult level. And in those days one still saw students actually reading books, even if they were not the books assigned in their classes. I recall a moment when it seemed that every frat-boy on campus was lugging around the paperback of The World According to Garp. (I don’t know why.)

Bertonneau is not kidding.  These days the average student does not seem even to purchase the assigned texts, much less read them.  Bertonneau assesses the problem and its effects:

Adults know what propels the descent: proliferating electronic media, video games, an ideologically inspired de-emphasis of rigorous learning at all levels of education, and a pervasive attitude of entitlement that students now absorb into their deficient souls the way babies drink nourishment from a mother’s breast. Flashing lights and three-minute “rap” songs stultify cognitive development. MTV, that bastion of the youth audience, nowadays specializes less in the music video than in the “reality show,” with its endless, formless palaver among “twenty-somethings” confined in a house.

These models of comportment are definitely oral rather than literate. A number of publications over the last decade, such as Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, have remarked on the phenomenon of a noticeable restriction of cognitive range in college undergraduates. What Bauerlein sees, I see: young people cut off from any elevated sense of who they are, frozen in the “cool” indifference of pop-culture, largely confined to the restrictions of the present moment, and hostile to maturity.

We have seen this on our blog.  A number of years ago Shelray did a post using the image of sculpture of a human-dog chimera to illustrate his point.  This post was eventually facebooked by some one and has become our most active post.  Until we finally cut off comments, we were provided frightening insight into young people’s rejection of reading, their inability to articulate themselves in anything resembling coherent English, and a general substitution of emotivism for rational discourse.  The majority could not figure out that it was only a sculpture.  Shelray soon added a big bold caption to that effect.  It did not help.  However, after posting the “unmissable” caption we did get a few commentors who seemed to relish in their “discovery” of the fact and sought to chastise others who could not make it 1/8th of an inch further down the screen. If you have the stomach for it, you might go and look through some of the comments.

Bertonneau discusses the class he teaches on comparative literature and the grim fruits of the students’ ability to read, think, and articulate.  Here are a few examples:

“Athene helps Telemachus and Odysseus to be reunited and restore order to Troy. This all took place around 450 BC but it was not written down until 800 BC.”

“Beginning with Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’ written down around 800 BC, when infact the events took place in the 4th century. There are many examples of order, tragedy, and some triumph.”

“The Odessy, written down around 800 BC, its events are said to actually take place around 500 BC.”

This ignorance with how to handle  dates in BC, he states, are not isolated cases.  In fact, Bertonneau goes to great lengths in his classes to teach his students how to handles this dating scheme through lectures, a text book showing a graphical timeline, and lectures.  All to no avail.

And my favorite:

A related example is the phrase “the Labronze age,” which one student repeatedly substituted for the actual phrase, “the Bronze Age,” in an essay. This at first baffled me. Then my wife suggested that it referred to a currently famous basketball player, the currency of whose name overwhelmed the student’s visual impression of the historical term in its correct form.

This comes from a final exam.  Bertonneau describes that he provides a “cheat sheet” with 250 or so words and phrases and still the students cannot even look at the sheet and spell words or phrases correctly.  His analysis of the problem:

The answer is that written language, including orthography, makes little or no impression on a large percentage of students because these students are, in fact, operating with oral mental habits rather than literate ones. Many students no longer bother even so much as to press the Spell-check button before printing off a paper. This points, once again, to a failure of the K-12 phase of education to inculcate basic intellectual habits or even basic bourgeois attentiveness in these students. Many a critic has complained that the supervisors of K-12 nationwide have long since deemphasized rigorous literacy training in favor of unstructured oral “expression” and mediated visual demonstration. Not spelling a word correctly when the word is before one’s very eyes is, I would argue, a non-trivial error suggestive of a profound alteration of the mental state away from literacy.

The most interesting insight came when he asked for a comparison of St. Augustine’s Confessions with another protagonist in one of their readings.  Here is what he got:

“Much like Odyssus Augustine, who at one time was reared as a saint in Hippo, is tempted by pretty women as well as by a pear tree. But later he loses his self-control problem and converts into a Christian.”

And Bertonneau’s insightful analysis of this gem:

Although the construction is linguistically inadequate, we should observe that the student-writer has, in fact, hazarded a comparison-and indeed a valid one-which I strove to help students discover as they thought about the separate items of the syllabus as forming a unity. To be candid, the student-writer is only giving me back a remark that I made in a lecture, rather than forming an original judgment. The encounter with Augustine is not, for him, an occasion for thought, but rather for something like mere information retrieval.

Nevertheless, in his or her garbled manner, this writer has gleaned a parallelism assimilating Augustine in the period of late antiquity with Odysseus, protagonist of a poem written in the archaic period of Attic civilization. Sirens, demigoddesses, and husband-hunting princesses all in a sense tempt Odysseus, who, however, mainly contrives to avoid temptation. Homer says that the ability to control his appetites is why Odysseus survived where his crewmates did not. Odysseus sleeps with Circe and then with Calypso under necessity because they are demigoddesses, whom he cannot directly refuse. One may nevertheless suppose that he enjoys his pleasures.

Augustine was also, as the Confessions tell us, susceptible to female attractiveness, and spent a period of inveterate brothel crawling and inexhaustible fornication. But Odysseus seeks to win back the material wealth and chattels that the squatters in his palace would steal from him. In contrast, Augustine, in spiritual revolt against worldliness, rejects power and riches for the sake of his intangible soul. This essential difference the student entirely misses. It is as though the student cannot hold the resemblance and the difference in mind simultaneously.

The phrase, “at one time was reared as a saint in Hippo,” probably stems from my assertion during a lecture that Augustine was revered as a saint within a few short years after his death during the Vandal siege of Hippo. Revered has lapsed into reared. The former is probably an unfamiliar-to the student, an exotic-term whereas the latter still has some currency. The student probably took a high-school course called “Child Rearing.” The sequel is comical, for the student has Augustine being tempted not only by “pretty women” but, casually, also by “a pear tree,” as though one temptation (he has them out of sequence, by the way) was exactly like another.

The real mind-twister follows: “But later he loses his self-control problem and converts into a Christian.” It is worthwhile sorting out what the student, by a generous estimation, wants to say from what he or she actually does say. He or she wants to say, I guess, that, after succumbing to the anomie of many years of indulgence and feeling in consequence radically alienated from himself, Augustine at last found self-control, and found it in the moral dispensation of the Gospel.

Instead we get: “He loses his self-control problem,” an assertion that makes self-control the problem rather than the lack of it and implies that that movement from self-indulgence to self-discipline is somehow accidental and passive rather than deliberative and active. Augustine, in the student’s version of things, doesn’t gain self-control, as one would normally say, but rather he finds himself suddenly free of a burdensome condition (restraint), as if by magic.

The inability to make a straightforward statement along such lines as Augustine rejects self-indulgence and adopts self-control as a mandate of his conversion is much more than a funny instance of incompetence. It is a crippling intellectual deformity that will prevent a student who distantly glimpses a moral problem from adequately seeing or articulating it. The problem will vex and hobble the student whether it is his own or someone else’s. He will lack the very notion of a deliberative resolution. Agonies of error and indecision lie ahead in such a life, but where there is a mass of such lives, the misery of vexation and indecision will afflict everyone, not just the victim of deficient education and default of analysis.

It is not too farfetched to suggest that there is more to the student’s problem than an absence of grammar, vocabulary, and syntax or a life without reading. The hostility to religion that pervades the academic environment and popular culture also hampers him. For to say that self-indulgence is the problem and that Christianity was Augustine’s solution is to go against many years of-undoubtedly half-understood but sufficiently threatening-propaganda from the same crusading people who refuse to let student stores sell Christmas cards or Easter candy, but say nothing about promiscuity in the dorms.

And the results of this, Bertonneau warns, is a coming spiritual savagery:

I see in the resentful incapacity of so many students a not-so-dim “Shape of Things to Come” whose characteristics will be theirs: perceptive obtuseness, expressive coarseness, extreme limitation of language and therefore also of concept, radical unfitness to judge complicated technical or moral problems, complete disconnection from any meaningful past and, to borrow a term from Oswald Spengler, in a condition utterly “historyless.”

Of course, the problem is very clear to educators but it is a problem of family and society and so it must be addressed there first.  Unfortunately, as Bertonneau warns, it is going to be left to these very same people to solve and they will not have the moral resources to see or admit of the root problems of the social decline, as even today we cannot.  Much less will they possess the intellectual resources to implement an effective solution.  Thus, we will get more small, tyrannical laws trying to keep the Vandal’s at the gate all the time increasing the root problem by trying to appease the masses by more and more abetting sexual license and through other death promoting policies.

The only solution is the Gospel and the Catholic Church.  Just as the Church carried civilization through the fall of the Roman Empire and converted the Goths, She will be there to provide a stable structure for moral and spiritual leadership if the West continues on its present trajectory.  The question, however, is where She will exist.  By the time Rome fell, Christianity was legal and widespread.  My only hesitance in saying that She will be everyplace She is needed is that the direction of Western societies seems to make the possibility of Christianity once more an illegal religion not all that remote.

We are losing the ability to think, to understand, to remember, and to intelligently converse with one another.  We are forming attention spans and thought processes that are limited to that which is produced by electronically mediated entertainment.  We may indeed be entering the “Labronze Age.” St. Augustine, pray for us!

For those who are interested, here is some insight  from someone within the White House office for executive branch correspondence about the potential fruitfulness and the best approach for getting your concerns to BO:

1.) President Obama does demand that each correspondence is reviewed and logged, so you will be heard if you take the time to write to him.
2.) Electronic submissions are given the same attention as a hand written letter. In fact, all paper correspondence are converted into electronic form eventually. You can submit an electronic correspondence here:    http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
3.) If you do write a letter make it short and to the point. Sign your name.
4.) If you want to express emotions, state them, don’t try to convey them in your writing. (“This decision angers me” is better than “You are a jerk”)
5.) Personal statements are better than pre-written postcard that you sign. However, if you only have time to send the postcard, it’s better than nothing.
6.) WRITE, WRITE, WRITE. There is an entire department devoted solely to correspondence, so make sure your opinion is recorded.

Here is my short and to the point letter:

1.  I want to urge you to always remember your responsibility is to serve the common good of all human beings.

2.  One does not require divine revelation to appropriate the embryological fact that the life of a human being begins when the egg is fertilized and a unique DNA comes into existence

3. Those who have employed word games to quibble about which human beings might be denied their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness include such company as Southern US slave holders, German National Socialists and Soviet Socialists.

4. Does your failure to serve the common good of all by denying the unborn these rights imply your denial of science, your affinity for some aspect of one of the above philosophies, or is it due to some peculiar religious doctrine that you wish to impose upon others?

Peter Steinfels, writing in the NY Times, asks the question about when any bishop in the US will speak out against B16’s lifting of the excommunication against the four SSPX bishops.  Steinfels, is a journalist, the former editor of Commonweal, a Fordham professor, etc, and was instrumental in helping get the Common Ground initiative started.  He would seem to be the kind of self-styled “progressive” that John Allen Jr has attempted to become–that is, thoroughly “progressive” in terms of viewing Catholicism through the lens of the “liberal” US intelligentsia, while trying to maintain an air of fairness to the views of those he considers the “conservative” opposition.

Steinfels begins his weekly column by setting up what he seems to think is justification for seeing some dissent from US Bishops to Benedict’s magnanimous action toward the Lefebvrists.  In other words, he shows that it is possible that B16 could have made an error of judgment and that the Bishops have a certain autonomy in their own right.  Since they are not prevented then, from expressing misgivings by the Church’s constitution, why are they not?

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Steinfels, I suppose, that it might just be that they appreciate the significance of this gesture much more than he does.  In other words, they recognize that this is no mistake.  It is a mistake only to those who think that Regensburg was a mistake.  Church unity and the salvation of souls is of much more important than the trying to ride the fickle tides of MSM opinion which is always looking for a way to assault the Church.

Steinfels has two beefs.  First, he is concerned about the message that is being sent to the Jews given the response of some.  Second, he is concerned about, because of what SSPX stands for, what this is saying to the rest of the world about the significance of the  Second Vatican Council.  Steinfels writes:

Even Catholics who understand the priority that church leaders always give to healing any formal schism that can perpetuate itself are puzzling over the Vatican’s extraordinary solicitude for this relatively small ultratraditionalist sect.

They wonder whether proponents of liberation theology or women’s ordination need to enlist a few schismatic bishops, who might ordain further bishops, in order to get a similar hearing in Rome.

And of course there are Catholics who dread – and some who hope – that the accommodations made to the Society of St. Pius X augur a larger reversal of the work of Vatican II.

Surely Catholic bishops are aware of the corrosive effect that these kinds of nagging questions can have on the faith of their people. A few such questions have quite likely nagged at some bishops themselves. But so far none of them have chosen to discuss the matter out loud.

This silence would be understandable if the bishops’ only option were to engage in harsh criticism. But they have plenty of respectful, charitable alternatives, from merely acknowledging that the papal action was troubling or perplexing to indicating that they are requesting clarification of Rome’s procedures and the pope’s intentions.

It’s a safe bet that during the last week, private expressions of dismay or bewilderment have been flying from bishop to bishop and from bishops to Rome.

Steinfels here employs the disingenuous technique of the new journalism in which the journalist’s own biases are attributed to the anonymous masses in order to appear to objectively inject the biased tone the writer wants to engender.  It would be more honest if he were attribute the “puzzling,” “wondering” and “dreading” to himself.

I find it singularly remarkable that Steinfels is concerned about the “corrosive effect” that his perceived “reversal” of the work of VII might might have on the faith of Catholics.  He does not seem to be concerned about the “corrosive” effects of the dissent from Church teaching that the pages of the erstwhile Catholic magazine, Commonweal, had on the faith of Catholics while he was its editor.  After all, Catholics are adult and can make up their own minds.  Only when it comes to reversing the work of the Second Vatican Council does this become a threat to these “adult” Catholics.  This brings up the question as to what Steinfels understands to be the “work” of VII–a question I will take up shortly.

Steinfels seems to think that somehow SSPX is getting preferential treatment.  Perhaps he is saying more than he realizes when he says that proponents of liberation theology and women’s ordination need to enlist some schismatic bishops.  Since Steinfels recognizes that the lifting of the excommunication does not completely reconcile the SSPX, is he suggesting that perhaps the other groups he mentions have perhaps excommunicated themselves by their views? I doubt it.  Nevertheless, I am happy to see that he puts them in the same camp–that is, they all belong to a problematic group that needs to conform its views to the Church in some way or another.

Nevertheless, there are clearly differences.  SSPX has a validly (if illicitly) ordained hierarchy which governs approximately 600,000 souls.  They play a significant role in the faith life of many other Catholics who have similar concerns but who still maintain unity with the barque of Peter.  SSPX is especially important within France.

The possibility of dialogue with SSPX, as we have now seen, has been greatly enhanced with the lifting of the excommunications.  Steinfels certainly is sensitive to what he might call the chilling effects of excommunication on the possibilities of dialogue I would imagine. Why he does not seem to see that as applicable in this case is telling.

In fact, this group has now shown an extraordinary, I would say, turn around in their polemics against Rome since the excommunications were announced.  In fact, the apologies by Bishop Williamson and the efforts to silence him on the part of the other bishops can be directly attributed to the lifting of the excommunication.  For the run of the mill dissenters, it is left to their bishops and priests to help them to come to see the truth.  They have not been excommunicated as a group and so there are not the sames structure by which to bring them as a whole back into full communion with the Church.

Steinfels wishes to project his “nagging questions” upon the rest of Catholics in the US.  Perhaps he wishes, rather, to inflame them with the same.  Steinfels and his ilk are all about dialogue with those with whom one disagrees unless this dialogue might be viewed by his milieu as impolitic.  That would seem to be the case here.  If there is a chance to change the hearts and minds of Bishop Williamson and those he might influence, it will come about ultimately through restoring him to full communion with Church teaching.  Even if this conversion cannot happen, bringing  him under the authority of the Church is more likely to provide the opportunity to keep him from propagating his problematic views.  Indeed, just lifting the excommunication seems already to have born fruit in this regard.

I suspect that Steinfels’s problem is primarily that he shares the view of the SSPX, whether he would admit it or not.  That is, that Vatican II marked a rupture with the pre-conciliar Church and if there is a chance at all of bringing SSPX back in, this would upset his premise.  If it is possible to reconcile SSPX, then the Bologna school’s interpretation is all the more clearly reprobate than he might like to believe.  The hope of the Common Ground initiative to raise dissent to respectability and thereby firmly entrenching it in the US Church as a legitimate perspective, will have been further dashed.

Bishops, by and large, realize that the “progressive” agenda is dead.  The only question is what will be the size of the Church that remains after the laity comes to realize that the Church has not and will not change Her teachings.  Who will be the first to ask the question? It will surely not be by any Bishop who has thought about this issue in any theological depth and with any level of objectivity.

In reading Archbishop Robert Herman’s, the Administrator of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, recent column published in the St. Louis Review, I was reminded of G. K. Chesterton’s famous poem written in 1907, “The Secret People.”

In his article, Bishop Herman put things in the right perspective, showing that anger at BO and his administration is misplaced (do read the entire column linked to above).  Rather, our anger, or rather our focus, ought to be on the enabling of Catholics (or half of us) and of Catholic politicians who have allowed us to arrive at where we now stand.  BO did not hide what he had planned even if the MSM did its best to keep it out of public view.

It is a failure of Catholics to understand and live their faith that has allowed the country to drift into a post-Christian, post-God malaise.  Chesterton’s poem is written about events in English history that he sees as significant. Chesterton asserts that the average Englishman was/is more endowed with common sense than those leaders whose goal it was to labor for freedom from the Crown.  However, in each of these events he writes of he admonishes, it seems to me, the average Englishman for his silence being more interested in mundane niceties than fighting for what justice:

Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget;
For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet.
There is many a fat farmer that drinks less cheerfully,
There is many a free French peasant who is richer and sadder than we.
There are no folk in the whole world so helpless or so wise.
There is hunger in our bellies, there is laughter in our eyes;
You laugh at us and love us, both mugs and eyes are wet:
Only you do not know us. For we have not spoken yet.

Chesterton writes of the suppression of Catholic monasteries in England while the common Englishman says nothing:

They burnt the homes of the shaven men, that had been quaint and kind,
Till there was no bed in a monk’s house, nor food that man could find.
The inns of God where no man paid, that were the wall of the weak.
The King’s Servants ate them all. And still we did not speak.

He writes about reign of Charles I in an indictment of the blindness, in fact, the tyranny of the democratic forces that opposed Charles.  Recall that Charles I was the last King of England who professed the divine right of kings and who was eventually executed for his various attempts to secure this right:

And the face of the King’s Servants grew greater than the King:
He tricked them, and they trapped him, and stood round him in a ring.
The new grave lords closed round him, that had eaten the abbey’s fruits,
And the men of the new religion, with their bibles in their boots,
We saw their shoulders moving, to menace or discuss,
And some were pure and some were vile; but none took heed of us.
We saw the King as they killed him, and his face was proud and pale;
And a few men talked of freedom, while England talked of ale.

He goes on to speak of Napoleon and others but ends with what he seems to find to be the sad state of political affairs of his time and the fact that the common Englishman has not spoken yet:

They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords,
Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords.
They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;
They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,
Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs.

We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet,
Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street.
It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first,
Our wrath come after Russia’s wrath and our wrath be the worst.
It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest
God’s scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best.
But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.
Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.

What is common to both Bishop Herman’s column and Chesterton’s poem is that we all know, or should know, what is right and what is wrong.  We have the responsibility for standing up for what is right.

In our present circumstances, we must stand for the right of the unborn to be born and for the right of society to be free from the tyranny of disordered social structures mascarading as protected alternative lifestyles.  We have to put truth and justice ahead of convenience and social acceptance.  We have to put down our ale and stand to protest against erroneous claims of promoting freedom that in fact, deprive us of authentic freedom.

Both, perhaps could  be summarized by the dictum attributed to that 18th century Irishman, Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.”  Let us not talk of ale while our blind politicians talk of freedom.