If the Church had the power...

...to support traditional marriage by means such as this, and used it, the result would be called a new "Inquisition."

The drama continues...

The trad world is on tenterhooks. An agreement with the SSPX is just around the corner.

Methinks it always will be. As Mark Shea commented on my Facebook wall: " It's really hard for me to work up any interest in "Will this prissy enclave of prima donnas finally have their fussy demands met to their exacting standards?" Who cares? Drama queens wear me out."

This time, they came first for the Catholics

Only an outrage combining religion and politics has managed to rouse me from a self-imposed silence over the past several months. I am furious. As an RPG-toting Chuck Norris announced in the closing scene of one of his classically bad movies: "It's time."

Most of my erstwhile readers know by now that the Obama Administration has issued an "interim final rule" requiring employers to cover all forms of contraception and sterilization in their health-care plans at no cost to the user. In an access of generosity, expressed by President Obama in a phone call to Archbishop Timothy Dolan, faith-based employers not classified as "religious" have been given one year to comply. Now according to the Administration's unprecedentedly narrow definition of "religious," only organizations that exclusively serve believers, and are staffed exclusively by believers, count as religious. The implications of such a definition are by far the greatest for Catholic charities, hospitals, and schools, most of which serve and/or employ many non-Catholics. Those Catholic organizations must soon pay to violate the teaching of the Church. And so, those who lead and work for such organizations will soon be forced to pay for the privilege of violating their consciences.

This naked, cynical attack on religious liberty has of course been approved by the "liberal" establishment, including the New York  Times.  Worst of all, it was announced and enthusiastically endorsed by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, a former governor of Kansas accustomed to wearing her Catholicism proudly. Such as it is. The worst enemy is the one within.

One is reminded of another power grab many decades ago. Not long after World War II, a German Lutheran pastor composed a poem about how Nazi oppression proceeded once Hitler took power:

First they came for the communists,

and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,

and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

 Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak out because I was Protestant.

Then they came for me,

and there was no one left to speak out for me.

 Democrats who prefer to call themselves "progressive" aren't Nazis, of course, but they resemble the Nazis in one respect: now in power, they are moving from toleration to persecution of faith-based opposition. And this time they've come for the Catholics first. Why the Catholics? Because among faith-based organizations which serve people not of the pertinent faith, only Catholic ones are sponsored by a church that officially opposes contraception and sterilization. "Progressives" these days are authoritarian about everything except sexuality, in which the individual is to be accorded total autonomy within the bounds of mutual "consent." But of course, the legal protection and promotion of sexual autonomy eventually entails intolerance of those who oppose contraception and sterilization, both of which are necessary for the exercise of such autonomy. And that's what's started to happen.

Within the Church, even some "Obama Catholics" have protested the new regulation: e.g., Michael Sean Winters and E.J. Dionne. If the U.S. bishops have their way, the matter will almost certainly reach the Supreme Court in due course. And some Republicans fondly speculate that this regulation will cost Obama something called "the Catholic vote." But that's dubious at best. Catholics who care deeply about this issue aren't the sort who voted, or would vote, for Obama anyway. They're a distinct minority of self-designated Catholics to begin with. Among nominal Catholics, liberal Catholics will fall into line behind the Democrats this fall, as they always do at election time.

Our defense against the erosion of religious liberty, then, will have to count not on the bulk of Catholics but on the bishops, the clergy, and the committed minority of faithful laity. We now have the advantage of clarity where before there was ambiguity and wiggle room. To join the battle, I urge all such laity to go here, sign the petition, and keep the ball rolling. And all faithful Catholic bloggers should keep on this matter.

God's doing OK in the polls!!!

You read that right. According to William E. Carroll—a Catholic philosopher currently ensconced as a good old Fellow at Blackfriars, Oxford—a respectable organization conducted a national poll a month ago showing that

...if God exists, voters are prepared to give it good marks. Voters approve of God’s performance by a 52% to 9% margin . . . When asked to evaluate God on some of the issues it is responsible for, voters give God its best rating on creating the universe, 71% to 5%. They also approve of its handling of the animal kingdom 56% to 11%, and even its handling of natural disasters 50% to 13%. Young voters are prepared to be more critical of God on natural disasters with those between 18 and 29 rating it 59% to 26%, compared to 47% to 12% among those over 65.

If such trends continue, God would be a shoo-in to beat Barack Obama next year. At any rate, nobody's confusing the latter with the former anymore.

Now Carroll does say much of what I'd say about this sort of thing, starting with the report's use of the impersonal pronoun 'it' for God. Even on that score, though, his critique should have gone further. How, I'd ask, can an 'it' be evaluated for its performance unless it's a machine (or perhaps a lower form of life), which very few people think God is? Even pollsters need to think through questions like that before asking people about their theological beliefs. Unlike the polling company's writeup, though, Carroll does get the very project's inherent irony. Surely, if there is a personal God, then he (yes, he; but that's another debate) is worthy of worship; granted such an analytic truth, it is God who should be evaluating our performance, not we his. Withal, the mere conduct of a poll asking people their opinion of God's job performance puts us in Monty-Python territory: entertainment, not theology. Our consumerist, democratic selves are ready grist for parody. Self-parody, one supposes, would be too much to expect; I'd be pleasantly surprised if that's what the pollsters were up to.

Yet the still-greater irony here is that, among a people still describing itself in the main as Christian, neither pollsters nor polled seemed to suspect irony.

The late theologian Herbert McCabe, OP, once pointed out: "It needs a kind of cosmic megalomania to suppose that God has the job of saving my soul and is to be given bad marks if he does not do that. Whatever he does for us, like creating us in the first place, is an act of gratuitous love, not something that is demanded of him." Now it is not megalomania to suppose that God has set himself the job of preserving the innocent from ultimate harm, whether the harm be from other people's bad choices or from the forces of nature. In fact, according to Christianity, our first parents were innocent and preserved from harm before their Fall, and we, their unfortunate descendants, are all meant to be blessed forever, free of death and all other harms. But in this in-between time, there is no reliable correlation between virtue and good fortune. The minority who admit to giving God bad marks give them largely for that reason. That may not be megalomaniacal, but I believe it manifests what the psychoanalysts term "infantile narcissism" in people of an age to know better. They're like seven-year-olds complaining "It's not fair!"

Well, so what if it isn't? If it hasn't dawned on you by the age of majority that life is not fair and never will be, then you haven't outgrown your infantile narcissism. The more sensitive and thoughtful narcissists just invest it, on humanity's behalf, in a bitter cosmic complaint against the Almighty. I for one have found that to be the most common cause of atheism. But the problem manifest in the complaint is not God's problem. If you think it is, the joke is on you and the complaint is your problem.

Creation and redemption are about gratuitous love. Hence life in this vale of tears is about mercy, not fairness—even granted that, in the age to come, the two qualities will be as one. When we who are ostensibly Christian fail to recognize that, we neither see nor appreciate the real ironies of life. We just stay angry with God—even when we call ourselves atheists. So long as we think we're in a position to evaluate God's performance, we expose ourselves to that and worse ironies.

Outside the Magic Circle

With his conservative confrères, British Catholic blogger Damien Thompson likes to call the British Catholic hierarchy "The Magic Circle." The phrase is meant pejoratively, of course. They see the bishops as a self-congratulatory cabal more interested in maintaining its élite status among "the great and good," including and especially the Anglican establishment, than in easing the path of traditional Anglicans into the Church or, more generally, in implementing the Pope's policies for the Church at large. If they're right—and I have independent reason to think they are—the fact itself is disturbing. Whatever the ideological coloration, if any, of a magic circle might be, just being part of a magic circle is usually bad for peoples' souls. It constitutes a culture of privilege that insulates them from the worst criticisms, causes them to think themselves better than others, and makes them resistant to reforms the need for which is obvious to many outsiders. That sort of problem fueled the Protestant Reformation centuries ago. In a sense, the Catholic hierarchy in Europe and the Americas has continued to be a magic circle for a long time. But is that about to end?

With occasional and egregious exceptions, the Church hierarchy has been part of the Establishment, thus enjoying a presumption of good will on the part of government, big business, and high society. Indeed the exceptions, such as in Mexico and Spain for the early part of the 20th century, can be seen largely as reactions against that status. But in an atmosphere of ever-encroaching secularism, the sex-abuse-and-coverup scandals are fast destroying the status and most of what goes with it. I believe that faithful Catholics should greet that development the way Lenin greeted the travails of Russia in World War I: "the worse, the better."

Over at First Things' "On the Square," theologian R.R. Reno has lately been commenting on the iteration of the global scandal in the Belgian Church. In his latest installment, he notes:

Police raids, computers impounded, and holes drilled into crypts so that spy cameras can be inserted. Perhaps the chief investigator’s office was as blindsided as the Vatican, suddenly waking up to the fact that the Church is now outside the magical circle of elite society, and that elite society, always attuned to changes in status, demanded the Church be treated differently. Scrambling to action, they overcompensated with heavy-handed tactics. [Emphasis added]

Generalizing, Reno observes that "after the scandals," the Church in Europe

...has become largely disestablished on the ground, with few going to church (a social reality the consequences of which were masked, perhaps, by the remarkable charisma of John Paul II), and therefore it can no longer retain the privileges of social establishment, one of the most important of which is protection from debilitating criticism.

If I’m right about the larger dynamics at work in the current round of scandals, the Church is in for a tough season. The expulsion from the elite makes her leaders supremely vulnerable.

Already true of the Church in Europe and Canada, I believe that will come true of the Church in the U.S. and the rest of the Western Hemisphere. The Church will be forced in the concrete to recall why cardinals' hats are red. That the trends in Africa and Asia are actually running in the opposite direction is a fact whose significance I shall explain at the end. For now, we must see the travails of the Church in the West as the beginning of a much-needed purification.

Two factors allowed the sex-abuse-and-coverup scandals across the globe to get out of hand: the strength of the old presumption of good will, which obtained as much among the laity as among the clergy, and the inability of the bishops in their magic circles to grasp that moral and legal rules applicable to ordinary people applied to them and their brother priests. Such is the consequence of belonging to a culture of privilege. Politicians, at least in relatively democratic countries, aren't insulated quite as well because their enemies often cannot resist using their peccadilloes against them. It takes more than mere peccadilloes, however, to destroy prominent clergymen. It takes being part of a systemic corruption that hits a moral nerve in the larger society. That's what's been happening. In the long run, that will have proven itself a good thing.

In the late sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great was the first Roman pontiff to describe himself as servus servorum Dei: "slave of the slaves of God." His failure to see anything wrong with the live institution of slavery itself—a blind spot he shared with the entire world of his time—enabled him to adopt slavery as a metaphor for the servant-leadership he exemplified so well. It is that model which so many bishops have forgotten. Indeed, they had started forgetting it in the fourth century, when the emperors Constantine and Theodosius privileged them as officers of the state. The collapse of the Western empire did force the bishops, especially those of Rome, to assume a degree of temporal authority that some of them exercised well. Yet what St. Athanasius said in the fourth century has been true of all too many bishops since, even in Rome: "the path to hell is paved with the skulls of bishops." Of course no earthly or demonic force can destroy the Church; as Cardinal Consalvi pointed out to Napoleon, even the best efforts of bishops have failed to do so. And that much will remain the case. But God is as interested in saving the souls of bishops as he in saving other souls. Hence he will often chastise the bishops by permitting the Church to be persecuted in their persons. Such events remind some bishops—the ones disposed to be so reminded—that they are servant leaders, and that they should expect no easier a fate on earth than that of the One they are called to serve through serving His people.

That's what's starting to happen to the leaders of the Church in what is broadly called "the West." I think the Pope sees it. But he is not in the majority among his brother bishops. The recently retired Archbishop of Brussels, Cardinal Danneels, doesn't see it. Cardinal Sodano, formerly Vatican secretary of state and now dean of the College of Cardinals, doesn't see it. And how many bishops in the U.S. have admitted that their reflexive interest in protecting their culture of privilege, which included protecting a lavender mafia, was the cause of their own complicity in the sex-abuse-and-coverup scandal? It seems that almost everybody gets it but them. Until they get it and change accordingly, things will only get worse for the Church. If and when they do get it, then and only then will things get better.

This is a spiritual law I've observed at work even in my own life. Once, for about a dozen years, I had an academic career. Thus I was part of a magic circle: I got to treat abstractions as realities; I interacted mostly with the cultured and like-minded; I had enough vacation time to actually think and write about what interested me. I didn't have to take work that bored and alienated me just to keep a roof over my family's head. I was very comfortable and began, subtly and insensibly, to think myself immune from the iron laws of ordinary life that the vast bulk of humanity groaned under daily. My fall was slow but sure; I hit bottom when I suffered a severe bout of clinical depression a decade ago. When I recovered, my life became harder than it had ever been. Although I had nobody but myself to blame, it took me another several years to realize that. Aside from a few brief and happy interludes, my life has continued being hard—but no harder than that of most of the world's people, and easier than some. So if my circumstances ever improve enough to let me earn a living in roughly the sort of way I once did, I will not take the privilege for granted. I will be grateful, for I will have been chastened enough to see that all is gift, and that the pleasant gifts are less deserved than the unpleasant ones.

That's what the leadership of the Church needs to learn by experience. A few have, but most have not.  Before there can be resurrection, there must be death. The increasing size and strength of the Church in the global South may be part of the resurrection; it is certainly where the Church's center of gravity is shifting and is likely to remain. But the lessons about to be learned by the Church in her historic base of influence will eventually have to be learned everywhere.

Secular Ecclesiology

In my online career, I have found that the issues sparking the longest debates are almost invariably ecclesiological, i.e., questions concerning the identity, nature, and authority of something called "the Church." At one time, that surprised me. I do, after all, address a range of philosophical and political as well as theological topics, many of which are are objectively more basic and comprehensive than that particular branch of theology. Yet with the possible exception of abortion—where philosophy, religion, and politics all converge—it's ecclesiology that evokes the most passion around here and in that part of the blogosphere I frequent. At the end I'll say why I think that is. But at the moment I'd like to focus on the latest ecclesiological twist in the news.

At the end of its recent term, the U.S. Supreme Court "...left standing a lower court ruling that will allow an Oregon man to try to hold the Vatican financially responsible for his sexual abuse by a priest, if he can persuade the court that the priest was an employee of the Holy See." For the legal details of the case, you can start by consulting the CNA story I've quoted. Legal eagles will doubtless know where to find the actual texts of the lower-court decision. Now as a decided non-lawyer, I find my eyes glazing over when faced with most legal questions. What interests me about this case is something I've observed in other recent developments at the interface of religion and politics: the idea that it's somehow up to the State to address ecclesiological questions in order to discern and carry out what is just in the civil sphere. In the U.S. today, the organ of the State most often involved in making such decisions is the judiciary. They don't do a good job of it: the incoherence of church-state jurisprudence in America since the 1940s is widely acknowledged. But they sure keep trying.

Of course there are people who think nothing untoward is going on with the present decision. If a victim of sexual abuse is to see justice done to him, then somebody has to be held accountable for the failure of justice to be done in the past. And if this were a case of negligence on the part of some corporation, NGO, or governmental body below the national level, there would be no question who would be liable. Under civil law, officers of such bodies can be held liable for negligence in their oversight and discipline of their "employees." The only exceptions are heads of state. Now in this case the negligence, if it that's what it was, was exhibited by clerical officials of the Catholic Church. Prima facie, the question seems simple: whether the relationship between a local American priest-and-religious and the Holy See is enough like that of employee-employer to justify treating the Pope like, say, the CEO of a multinational corporation rather than a head of state and his government, who are ordinarily immune from prosecution. Even the Obama Administration has taken the side of the Vatican in this one, arguing in a brief that the case does not call for making an exception to the usual rule of immunity for heads of state.

You won't find me disagreeing with that. Yet given that the Supreme Court has allowed the present suit and decision to stand, it is now up to a U.S. District Court to determine whether the priestly perp was in fact an "employee" of the Vatican in the sense necessary to establish civil liability. And that's what troubles me. In general, the relationship between a priest and/or religious and their ecclesiastical superiors is not the same as that of employee to employer. The relationship between such parties is not really that of contracting with each other to exchange labor for material compensation, though that occasionally happens within the context of a larger and more fundamental relationship. But such an occasion does not seem to have arisen in this case. The plaintiff's attorney argues that merely functioning as a priest or religious makes one an "employee" of the Vatican in the legally applicable sense of that term. If that argument is allowed to succeed, then a secular government will be deciding, to a hitherto unprecedented extent, on the hierarchical nature of the universal Church. In effect, Erastianism will have become American law. King Henry VIII would be delighted.

Some would think I'm exaggerating. To such folk, all that's at issue here is whether being a church leader exempts one from the ordinary legal requirement to turn suspected criminals under their authority over to the civil authorities. The pope, the bishops, and religious superiors were in authority over the priestly perp in question; ergo, they should be held legally accountable for their failure to do what they could and should have under the law. Now that actually holds at the local level. That is why many dioceses have had to make huge payouts to abuse victims for civil damages. But in this case, the argument assumes that the kind of authority that the Vatican has over priests and religious everywhere is enough like that of a multinational corporation over its employees to create a due presumption that the former should be treated like the latter. For without that presumption, the papacy cannot be held liable for failure to reign in the perp. So, if allowed to prevail, the plaintiff's argument would commit the United States to treating the pope as the CEO of Catholic Church, Inc.

What's disturbing here isn't just the falsity of such a belief. Even more disturbing is the appearance of such a belief within the wider context of belief among the Church's many critics. For most purposes, they don't want the pope to function as the CEO of Catholic Church, Inc. They don't want the Vatican to muzzle or dismiss priests and religious for expressing heretical views. They don't want the Vatican telling laity who procure or support abortion that they're excommunicated. They don't want priests refusing absolution to couples who contracept. Many, like the kings and nobles of old, want the very selection of bishops taken largely out of the papacy's hands. For most purposes, they don't want the Church to retain an exclusive right to decide which members to elevate, discipline, or expel. But when it comes to protecting kids, the Church has to be treated like any multinational that can fire or prosecute its people at will. And the scariest thing of all is that they see nothing inconsistent about that stance. They want the Church to have less authority than she claims, except when she doesn't claim it and they think she should have it.

That's what I call 'secular ecclesiology'. It's an important aspect of what the present pope meant by the memorable phrase, delivered to the 2005 conclave, "a dictatorship of relativism." What the loyal citizens of that dictatorship want is for the Church to stop telling people what she thinks is right and wrong and instead conform herself to their ideas of right and wrong. At bottom, it's a question of authority: specifically, who gets to to settle disputes about the identity, nature, and above all the authority of the Church herself?

That is the secular parallel to the formal divisions that have rent the Church since the beginning, but especially in the fifth, eleventh, and sixteenth centuries. The underlying ecclesiological question when dealing with "heresy" and "schism" is always who has the authority to decide, in a definitive manner binding the whole Church, what's orthodox and, as part of that, where the fullness of the Body of Christ resides. The main reason I'm Catholic, as distinct from Protestant or Orthodox, is that I believe only the Catholic Church, as she understands herself, has that sort of authority. Christians who are not Catholics, of course, deny that she does—or they would become Catholics with all deliberate speed. But I suspect that the present-day depredations of secular ecclesiology are facilitated, in large part, by the collective failure of Christians themselves to resolve their ecclesiological divisions. If we can't agree on where to locate the divinely given authority of the Church, or even on who is "the" Church, then we're practically inviting the State to subordinate institutional churches to itself. That has always been a problem for the Catholic Church to some extent. It's been even more of a problem for Orthodox and mainline Protestant churches.

This is not just a difficulty about how to relate religion and politics to each other. It's not even mere fodder for ecumenists. I believe that ecclesiology has the importance for Christians today that the great christological debates of the first millennium had for Christians then.

The disputes then were about who and what Jesus Christ is. The disputes now are about who and what the Church is. In one sense, the Church is the pilgrim People of God; the Church Militant is not yet what she is called to be. But in another sense, the Church is Jesus Christ himself; for as his Bride, she is one Body with him in a mystical marriage to be fully consummated only when the Bridegroom returns. Both disputes, the christological and the ecclesiological, are about how God becomes visible in the world. It's about how the Word is made flesh.

Whatever the answer to that question, it cannot be treated as a matter of opinion without being rendered merely political, and therefore idle. That is why Newman said: "No revelation is given, unless there be some authority to decide what is given." By that he did not mean that the Church, whoever and whatever that is, gets to decide for herself what the revelation from God in Christ is. He meant that, if we are to distinguish divine revelation from human opinion about what the "sources" thereof mean, then some visible and divinely established authority has to be able to settle doctrinal disputes in a definitive and binding manner.

Whoever that is, it's not the State. But not for nothing did Chesterton call the U.S. "a nation with the soul of a church." It is here that the question will come to a head.

At least they're our perverts...

Already numb, I can't work up enough outrage about the exposé, published two days ago in The Brussels Journal, of "the fall of the Belgian Church" by Alexandra Colen, now a member of the Belgian parliament. (We can't say we're 'shocked' anymore, since everybody instantly repeats the word and thus evokes Captain Renault's joke in Casablanca.) Here's the opening paragraph of Colen's piece:

In Belgium today [June 24], police searched the residence of the Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels and the crypt of the Archbishop’s cathedral in Mechelen. They were looking for evidence of cover-ups in the ongoing investigation into widespread pedophilia practices within the Belgian church in the decades during which Cardinal Godfried Danneels was Archbishop. Danneels retired in January of this year.

The article proceeds to recount some of the lurid details, which the author was personally involved in discovering and protesting as a Catholic parent. Let the squeamish beware.

We've seen versions of this movie already, over and over, with different characters and plot twists in quite a number of countries. Yet for those not already depleted by outrage fatigue, two factors make this one more outrageous than most. I shall describe them in the hope and with the prayer that the right lessons will be learned by some of the right people.

The first kicker is how Cardinal Danneels was, himself, enabled to enable the problems for three decades. What makes it so astonishing is that, as the article makes clear, the problems were public knowledge for much of that time. So how did he get away with it?

Two reasons. For one, and as the MSM have made sure we know, the Vatican wasn't aggressive enough in disciplining evildoers. But the other reason is the MSM themselves. Danneels was a darling of both ecclesial and secular "progressives" throughout his 30-year reign. Since progressives dominate the MSM in Western Europe even more than here, the damning facts were reported only haltingly, and no drumbeat of outrage was sounded against Danneels or his minions.

Although there's no evidence that Danneels himself committed sexual acts that are criminal, the evidence is overwhelming that he did not acknowledge the gravity of what he was enabling right under his nose. On the charitable assumption that his failure was due to ignorance, the ignorance itself was culpable. Somehow, though, I find it hard to believe that it was just ignorance. By 2002, the sex-abuse-and-coverup scandals in the Church had become impossible for anybody to ignore. I think it more likely that, for whatever reasons, Danneels was swayed by some underlying sympathy with the perps. But the Belgian media didn't want to talk about the long-running scandal for a long time, even aside from the question of Danneel's motives for enabling it. Both their and Danneel's attitude seems to have been: "They may be perverts, but at least they're our perverts." If Danneel's theological and political orientation had been conservative, his own failure might still have been what it's been, but you can bet the farm that the MSM would have striven to bring him down.

A similar dynamic has operated in favor of Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles. Slated to retire and be replaced by a Latino coadjutor, he has long presided over the most extensive sex-abuse scandal of any U.S. diocese. Payouts have been enormous and, almost certainly, more will eventually be ordered. Yet Mahony openly stonewalled the civil authorities for years without ever being prosecuted for obstruction of justice—or even eliciting a widespread campaign for him to resign, as Cardinal Law did seven years ago in Boston. None of that is in dispute. How could it happen? Simple: ecclesial and political "progressives" such as Mahony don't exactly get a pass, but are held to lower standards because their MSM allies don't want to undermine their larger cause. The young are thus sacrificed to political expediency as much by the Left as by anybody else. But you're not going to hear about that from the MSM, especially when it comes to the higher incidence of sexual abuse in public-school systems.

The other kicker in the Danneels case is the dilemma it poses for the conventional progressive wisdom. Popes rarely depose bishops, and the more prominent a bishop's see, the less likely he is to be deposed. That's probably how it should be. The pope is not the CEO of Catholic Church, Inc; he is chief bishop among his brother bishops. His exercise of jurisdiction over the Church universal must and does take due account of that. But amid the current agony of scandal, many progs will have none of it. They all want the Church to be less centralized when that would weaken Rome's doctrinal authority, but want her more centralized when that would help prevent things such as the sex-abuse-and-coverup scandal—except, of course, when the guy covering up is himself a progressive. Then we must remember collegiality.

Of course they can't have it both ways. But as Chesterton loved to show, the Catholic Church has always faced mutually incompatible charges. That's one of the reasons I'm Catholic. When you're always damned if you do and damned if you don't, you're probably on firmer ground than your enemies.

Catholic higher education: here we go again

Remember the brouhaha a little over a year ago, when the University of Notre Dame not only invited President Obama to give a commencement address but also awarded him an honorary JD? The University did not seem to care that such a move blatantly violated the bishops' directive that "Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles"—a directive supported by the local bishop, who boycotted the ceremony. It got worse: Catholics, including priests, who peacefully demonstrated on campus against the event were arrested and prosecuted on orders of Notre Dame's president, Fr. John Jenkins. As Joseph Bottum put it, "when the protests over Obama’s honorary degree began, he decided to raise the stakes, which turned an unhappy situation into a disastrous one." The long-term problem that came to a head a year ago at Notre Dame is that of waning Catholic identity in Catholic higher education. Now it's cropped up again, this time at Marquette and the Catholic University of America.

The Marquette situation started so far south it could only go north. They were going to appoint an avowed, ideological lesbian, "sexuality scholar" Jodi O'Brien, to be Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences over two male finalists who were more academically distinguished. After an uproar both on campus and among some Catholic academics across the country, the nomination was withdrawn. Reporting in the Wall Street Journal, Anne Hendershott wrote:

In a post-settlement letter sent June 9th to the Marquette community, University President Father Robert A. Wild wrote, "[W]e have apologized to Dr. O'Brien for the way in which this was handled and for the upset and unwanted attention that we have caused to this outstanding teacher and scholar." Yet Fr. Wild also added that he stands by his decision to rescind the employment offer, a decision "made in the context of Marquette's commitment to its mission and identity."

The specific nature of the job at issue—as dean Ms. O'Brien would have been charged with helping to implement Ex Corde Ecclesiae, Pope John Paul II's 1990 apostolic constitution intended to revitalize Catholic higher education—may have driven Marquette to back off this particular appointment. But the real story here is that in the upside-down world of Catholic higher education, there is more status in hiring a sexuality scholar who denigrates Catholic teachings on sexuality and marriage than in choosing a serious scholar who might actually support Catholic teachings.

The major difference between what happened last week at Marquette and what happened last year at Notre Dame is this: in the end, Marquette chose fidelity over status; whereas at ND, status trumped fidelity. I don't want to explain why appointing an opponent of Catholic sexual morality, who didn't even have heavy-duty scholarship to offer, would have been a mark of status. Trust me: In the "upside-down" world of higher education today, it would have been just that. Of course, Fr. Wild might just have learned something from Fr. Jenkins' bull-headed mistakes. As somebody who taught for years in Catholic institutions of higher education, and is slated to do so again this fall, I can attest that the choice between fidelity and status shouldn't have to be made in most cases. Often, it's completely illusory. Yet some presiding demon seems to have planted that false dichotomy in the minds of Catholic university faculty and administrators who crave the world's respect.  It's a spiritual parasite that seems to suck the vitality out of Catholic identity in that sphere of life.

A subtler instance of that is the appointment of John H. Garvey as the president of CUA. I don't doubt that he has considerable merits and is often right. But I want to focus on one thing he wrote eight years ago and has never retracted or qualified. CNA reports: "In a 2002 letter, Garvey tried to allay concern that Boston College’s Catholic identity will require “a certain orthodoxy,” claiming that “no school that regulates ideas can justly call itself a university.” If that's Garvey's view today, the game is over before it starts.

Every school regulates ideas. That's why there's peer review in every discipline, which is a good thing. Some proposals and arguments are bad, others good, and professionals are bound to discern the difference. Of course it's wrong that Larry Summers had to resign as president of Harvard for expressing a reasonable scholarly hypothesis about women's interest in and aptitude for quantitative science. But that sort of thing goes on in various and subtle ways in the most self-consciously "liberal" universities. It would seem that only religious universities are supposed to forfeit the name 'university' for enforcing orthodoxy. Yet if ideas incompatible with the Catholic faith are allowed to be proposed as truths in a "Catholic" university, then in what sense, beyond the transiently sociological, is it Catholic? Because Catholic parents send their kids there thinking the place is Catholic? Because priests and religious retain some residual influence? Because it has a chapel nobody is required to attend? Maybe things like that are all some administrators mean by Catholic "identity." If so, they're not worth the money. And when I hear phrases like "in the Jesuit tradition," I expect to see the actual Catholics heading for the tall grass.

Garvey's remark was absurd no matter how you parse it. Its only conceivable purpose is to convey the old, false dichotomy between fidelity to Catholic teaching and intellectual respectability. It's like a reflex one picks up in the atmosphere of universities; the Boston area is thick with them, which is perhaps one reason for what Phil Lawler called the "collapse" of Boston's Catholic culture. Let's hope Garvey has "grown" in a direction that liberals who use that word would dislike. But I'm not holding my breath.

Part of the problem is that the people in charge of vast sectors of Catholic higher education are still smarting from the old charge of Catholic intellectual mediocrity, which first surfaced inside the citadel with Msgr. John Tracy Ellis' 1950s exposé. Like a great many American Catholics, such people are a number of things before they are Catholic. So, naturally, when one of those things conflicts with Catholicism, it's the latter which gets compromised. To be sure, there are some well-known and not so well-known Catholic schools that are faithful to the Magisterium and proud of it. Most of my readers will know of at least a few such places. And plenty of younger Catholic scholars in philosophy and theology are sound. But such institutions and people are at the periphery, not the center, of American Catholic higher education. That should come as no surprise when Catholics fully faithful to the Magisterium are nowhere near a majority of American Catholics.

Why is that? Because, like the ancient Israelites and many of today's Jews, most prefer the gods of the world to God. It's a very old problem. Most of the money and power are on the wrong side.

Conscience about conscience

Conscience seems to have become a hot topic again in the blogosphere, or at least that part of it which concerns Catholic intellectuals. That happens cyclically, mostly among such Catholics. What's apparent this time around is that conscience about conscience is sorely needed. The archeology of tradition is being mined selectively at best. That is, as it were, unconscionable.

The current flurry started with the debate over Phoenix Bishop Thomas Olmsted's decision to announce that Sr. Margaret McBride, by approving an abortion in her role as an ethical consultant at St. Joseph's Hospital, had excommunicated herself along with others who had formally cooperated in the procedure. I questioned Olmsted's decision in an article at First Things that was cited, without criticism, by Michael Sean Winters, Jimmy Akin, and Terry Mattingly in their own measured treatments of the issue. Of course the matter was extensively debated elsewhere too, and it has become clear that the central issue for the more thoughtful commentators is what role Sr. McBride's conscience played in her decision. Specifically: if in fact she had made her decision in good faith as a well-informed Catholic, what sense would excommunication, or at least an announcement to that effect, make? And why does that question matter?

Such, in effect, are the questions raised by Dominican bioethicist Kevin P. O'Rourke in the June 21 issue of America magazine. For the general reasons given by Jesuit philosopher John Kavanaugh in the same issue, the answers are not obvious. Now Fr. Kavanaugh's penchant for subtly positioning himself above ideology, thus supporting one ideological side more by what he does not say, reminds me of President Obama. That's not a compliment. Not all moral disagreements can be settled by agreement on the relevant facts; in fact, the most fundamental moral disagreements entail disagreements about just which facts are all and only the relevant facts. But Fr. Kavanaugh is right about the need to know all the relevant facts, which, largely for HIPPA reasons, are almost impossible to learn in the McBride case.

More troubling is the unclarity about principle. I don't mean Catholic teaching about abortion specifically, which is clear enough in the abstract. It's unpopular only because, as the recurring torture debate confirms,  unregenerate man is a consequentialist when push comes to shove. But even among non-consequentialists, there's considerable confusion about the concept of conscience itself. Again at First Things, David Layman raises concerns about the Thomistic conception of conscience, which in turn are briefly answered by Brandon Watson at Siris. That's the sort of excursus I want to continue here, because good answers to the Phoenix questions I've posed depend on answering a yet more fundamental question: In what sense could acting in conscience be, itself, culpable?

That's a hard and pervasive question for Catholic moral theology. On the one hand, as both Thomas Aquinas and the CCC (§1790) point out, one is always morally obligated to act according to one's conscience. For conscience here means one's sincere act of judgment, in light of one's knowledge of the relevant principles and facts, about what it's right to do in the circumstances. To act against that is to alienate oneself from oneself as a moral agent. That is performatively absurd, indeed vicious, by virtue of entailing a deep rupture of integrity. So much is undisputed. On the other hand it is possible, by acting according to one's conscience, to do what is objectively evil if one's conscience is malformed. Worse, it's even possible to be subjectively blameworthy for such objective evil if one's conscience is culpably malformed. The example of Nazis and Communists involved, even indirectly, in the mass killing of innocents is enough to show that, but there are many other examples more quotidian.

It follows that somebody who acts in sincere conscience, but erroneously, is thus morally obliged to do something morally wrong. When grave enough, that's tragedy in the purest sense, which didn't end with Hellenic paganism. It may occur less often than some Calvinists and Jansenists have thought, but I do believe it happens more often than most Christians think. Indeed, not many have given the problem much thought at all.

Fortunately, there are important exceptions: Joseph Ratzinger and Elizabeth Anscombe, as well as the CCC itself (§1791 ff). Anscombe was not the first, but among recent philosophers was certainly the most prominent, to raise this issue in Catholic moral thought after centuries in which the standard Liguorian conditions ascribing mortal sin to an agent had been used uncritically in pastoral practice. Those were: "grave matter," "full knowledge" thereof, and "full consent" of the will thereto. Very well, but can't a lack of full knowledge itself be culpable? Aren't there lots of cases when people don't "know" what's "grave matter"—i.e., what's objectively and gravely wrong—mainly because they just don't want to know? Of course there are, even granted that mere humans can't be certain exactly which. So we must admit that the Liguorian schema is inadequate. Those who act wrongly but conscientiously are sometimes culpable for the state of their conscience and hence cannot be exculpated by lack of full knowledge. They're "damned if they do and damned if they don't." Admittedly, that seems unfair. But such a tragedy needn't be permanent; there is such a thing as repentance freely induced by grace, which is not required by "fairness" either. But whatever the population of hell may be, I'm sure a considerable percentage are there because they could have repented of just such a tragedy, yet never did.

Now in a narrowly Catholic context, the question about somebody like McBride is not whether she was acting against her conscience—presumably, she was not—but whether, if she acted wrongly all the same, she did so according to a culpably malformed conscience. My interactions with her conservative, pro-life critics suggest that they believe the answer is yes. If they're right, then excommunication makes sense and calls for her repentance. But my main point had been that we can't know that they're right because we don't know all the relevant facts. Since we don't, and legally can't, know the specifics of the abortion case, we're in no position to assess the plausibility of Sr. McBride's decision about it, and hence we're in no position to make statements about the state of her conscience. To that extent, I sympathize with the complaints of the Kavanaughs.

But even if we did know all the relevant facts using Church teaching on abortion as for our criteria of relevance, and determined that McBride's decision was objectively wrong, a key question about conscience would remain. As my point of departure for that question, I shall begin by quoting Watson on Layman.

Aquinas holds that it is wrong to violate conscience; he mentions in this context Romans 14:23, in which Paul says that everything that is not of faith is of sin. David then asks:

Remember that for Aquinas, conscience is an “act” arising out of the “disposition,” synderesis (ST I, Q 79, A. 13). This disposition is an universal ordering of all humans to the good. According to the glossary...conscience is “the dictate of reason that one should or should not do something.” 

If that is true, then how can Aquinas equate an evil “conscience” with the Pauline phrase “everything not of faith?” If a human can know the dictate of reason, “I ought not commit suicide”, through reason–apart from faith–then how can an evil conscience be the absence of faith? The dictate of conscience (according to the Aquinas) does not arise either within faith or apart from faith. It arises from practical reason, determined by synderesis, the disposition (again quoting the glossary of LMP) that all humans “should seek the good proper to their human nature….” But the absence or presence of faith does not bear on this issue. I do not see how Aquinas can properly cite the apostolic text as authority for his claim.

In other words, “conscience” in Paul (and the entire New Testament canon) is a state of moral knowledge known in and through the living (in technical terms, “existential”) reality of a specific community that enacts and expresses a new experience of life and moral reasoning. Aquinas reappropriates this concept and redefines it as a state of moral knowledge known by, and accessible to all humans, apart from that new life.

But a little thought shows that this puzzle is unknotted easily enough. Just as reason, although universal, can be examined specifically in a Christian context, so can universal moral dispositions. That everyone has something in the way of conscience doesn't mean that it is formed in the same way for everyone. And in the Summa Theologiae, which David is considering, Aquinas is not considering conscience "apart from that new life"...

The point is actually generally important for interpreting much of Aquinas's moral theory in the Summa. The long, detailed discussion of virtue in the ST is a discussion of infused virtue. What reason says about acquired virtue comes up quite a bit, of course; but it comes up solely as a starting-point for understanding its infused and charity-formed counterpart. The Summa moves from God ruling over us to God working in us to God being with us; it is, as it says, a work of Christian theology.

The puzzle David Layman identifies, and Brandon Watson tries to clear up, arises from the distinction between conscience as disposition—which the Aristotelian tradition calls synderesis—and conscience as the act of judgment itself. Conscience as disposition, which means the active capacity for moral judgment, appears to be universal, and thus identifiable apart from "faith," in such a way that we can specify what general sorts of moral judgments people are disposed by such a capacity to make. Hence for Layman, conscience as act does not seem to require assessment in terms of faith—or at any rate, that's how he reads Aquinas. Now Watson argues that Aquinas, given the theological aim and context of the ST, is making no such argument. The Common Doctor is explaining conscience informed by infused faith, not natural conscience. Of course Aquinas thought there is such a thing, but I don't believe that's the only sort of conscience that he, or the Catholic moral tradition generally, is concerned with even for theological purposes.

Ratzinger indicates that, according to said tradition, the way in which conscience as disposition is formed by the life of faith, which includes the infused virtue of caritas as well, is not a heteronomous imposition on "natural" conscience. The pertinent aspect of his argument may be summed up thus: Just as natural, "speculative" reason affords us a "preamble" to the supernatural, "infused" virtue of faith, so natural, "practical" reason affords us a preamble to the supernatural, "infused" virtue of love—the highest of all the virtues. On the natural level, speculative and practical reason are thus and both capax gratiae. Accordingly, the relationship between conscience as formed by natural reason and conscience as formed by revelation and grace directly affects today's debates about conscience. How?

Ratzinger suggests that the rather vague and confusing term synderesis be supplanted by anamnesis, which here denotes a natural, primordial "memory" of the good, one that can be either elevated by grace or obscured by cultural distortion and personal vice. If such a memory can be obscured but never altogether erased, then it is naturally fit to be elevated by knowledge of the "New Law" of the Gospel, so that its natural content is not opposed to the Gospel but a partially inchoate anticipation thereof. And if that's so, then one cannot excuse certain decisions made in conscience-as-act by saying that one's conscience-as-disposition was never adequately informed by cultural norms or knowledge of revelation. For example, if it was objectively wrong—which, I stress, we do not know—a decision such as McBride's would be blameworthy as instancing a consequentialism that cannot be excused as somehow "natural." Killing one innocent person to save another is the sort of thing one can know naturally to be an intrinsic evil, apart from knowing the specifics of divine revelation transmitted by, say, Catholicism. The role of the latter would be not to demonstrate its wrongfulness but to explain it more fully than one could without it.

Contemporary Catholic debates about conscience, I believe, should focus on that issue. The pastoral consequences of taking Ratzinger's, and Anscombe's, position would be fairly obvious. That no such focus seems forthcoming is irresponsible. Intellectual conscience, at least for Catholic theologians, calls for more. Sometimes there's no excuse for not knowing.

When it's arrogance to cry 'arrogance'

What's so disgusting about the lead article from the June 7 issue of Time is not just that its headline, which disaffected Catholics will latch onto, is false. The Pope has apologized to victims in the U.S., Ireland, Malta, and God knows how many other places. What's worse is that the lengthy but tendentious "analysis" of Catholic doctrine and church order is sourced only by unnamed "Vatican insiders." Such is the arrogance of crying 'arrogance'.

Of all this, George Weigel has said:

It’s not easy to understand the decision of Time’s editors to run the magazine’s current (June 7) cover story, with its cheesy title, “Why Being Pope Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry.” The lengthy essay inside breaks no news; it recycles several lame charges against Benedict XVI that have been flatly denied or effectively rebutted; and it indulges an adolescent literary style (e.g., “mealy-mouthed declarations buttressed by arcane religious philosophy”) that makes one yearn and pine for the days of Henry Luce.

The lengthy story is also poorly sourced, relying (as many such exercises do) on alleged “Vatican insiders.” …

As real Vatican insiders know, real Vatican insiders don’t give back-stabbing and score-settling sound bites to the American media. That practice is more typically indulged in by clerics far down the Vatican food chain, monsignori who have no real idea of what’s happening within the small circle where real decisions get made inside the Leonine Wall, but who are happy to chat up journalists over a cappuccino or a Campari and soda while pretending to a knowledge they don’t possess. Such sources can be occasionally amusing; they are almost never authoritative.

Now as Orthodox blogger Terry Mattingly points out, one cannot dismiss Weigel's words as the knee-jerkings of a prominent Catholic "conservative" whose goal is to defend Rome at any cost. For instance, prominent conservative Catholics have written savage books about the recent failings of the hierarchy, such as Philip Lawler's The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston's Catholic Culture and Leon Podles' Sacrilege: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church. As a not-so-prominent conservative Catholic, I endorse those books (with the usual scholarly quibbles, of course). But let me repeat: the current attempt to discredit the Pope is scurrilous. As head of the CDF, he was the Vatican official chiefly responsible for convincing John Paul II that there was a serious problem, and to obtain the authority needed to do more about it.

My own contribution to this controversy, "Crucifying the Pope," does not argue that Joseph Ratzinger made no mistakes in his past handling of clerical abusers. Given the Church's long-entrenched legal culture, and the "black wall of silence" that officials such as Cardinal Sodano preferred to maintain, I would be very surprised if Ratzinger had not let too much slide before he became fully aware of the extent of the problem. But he's known now for quite some time, even before he became pope. And he's doing what he can about it. The current pounding is just arrogant malice and vindictiveness. It's what motivates the irony of calling for the Pope to do more, as if he had the centralized, CEO-style power that most of the media and the non-Catholic world wish he didn't.

Getting it right while getting me wrong

In the current issue of the British Catholic periodical The Tablet, Michael Sean Winters has weighed in on the Phoenix abortion-and-excommunication case and, in the course of so doing, praised my contribution to the unusually acrimonious debate over the case. How ironic that this is the closest I've ever come to fame: ABC's George Stephanopoulos once called Winters "the most famous person in DC whom nobody's ever heard of." Problem is, Winters got a few of his facts wrong.

Now I happen to agree with his conclusion:

There is a yet deeper concern, and one that has not been much commented upon in the Phoenix situation. Yes, the controversy can be seen as a part of the culture wars. But it is also an example of a deeper pathology in American religious experience – the way religion is reduced to ethics in American culture.

“It is a great temptation for the Church to reduce its mission to that of an ethical authority in order to gain access to the public forum,” Mgr Lorenzo Albacete wrote in the Catholic quarterly Communio more than 15 years ago, and the warning remains true. Pope John Paul’s and Pope Benedict’s call for a “New Evangelisation” will be stillborn if the Church can’t find ways to proclaim the Gospel effectively, and a main impediment to that proclam­ation is this reduction of religion to ethics.

Today, in America, the Catholic Left reduces the Church’s mission to a social-justice ethic, and the Catholic Right reduces the Church’s mission to its ethics on sexual morality. Bishop Olmsted’s decision has encouraged partisans of both Left and Right to embrace a defensive posture in which it is difficult to even hear the transcendent call of the Crucified who Lives.

When a moralism of the Left or Right trumps mercy, the Gospel is not proclaimed. The most frightening thing about Bishop Olmsted’s decision is, finally, not its justice or lack thereof. It is that, in his multi-paragraph statement announcing the excommunication, he did not even mention God. That is, if you will pardon the expression, damning.

As I had implied in my article, I believe it was a mistake for Bishop Olmsted to have announced Sr. McBride's self-excommunication publicly even if he was objectively right and she was objectively wrong in the matter. I explained my reasons for thinking so, and I believe Winters has given a still more important reason for thinking so.

But there are at least a few inaccuracies in Winters' article. The most important is his assertion that "Upon learning of the abortion at the Catholic hospital, Bishop Olmsted ordered Sr Margaret to be reassigned and pronounced the formal excommunication...." That gives the impression that she was excommunicated ferendae sententiae, i.e. by a formal juridical act. She was not. According to Bishop Olmsted's communications office, Sr. McBride excommunicated herself by formally cooperating in a "direct" abortion. That's called excommunication latae sententiae. Olmstead's announcement did not excommunicate McBride; it purported merely to point out what she had already done to herself.

The other inaccuracy concerns me directly: a small but telling misstatement of something I had said in my article. I had written:

The moral principle of Double Effect plays a role here. Catholic teaching condemns only “direct abortion”: abortion in which the death of the child is either directly willed in itself or directly willed as a means to some specific end. The Church does not condemn “indirect abortion”: abortion that is a foreseen but unintended side effect of a medical procedure designed to preserve the mother’s life, which is not wrong, at least not merely as such. (The most common example is an ectopic pregnancy, in which the Fallopian Tube must be removed to save the mother’s life, but the resulting death of the child is not directly willed.)

And that, apparently, was the defense McBride offered to Bishop Olmstead. He rejected it, apparently believing that the abortion was direct and thus immoral. And under Church law, all who procure or otherwise “formally cooperate” in direct abortion excommunicate themselves.

Now here's what Winters wrote about what I had written:

More thoughtful commentary has emerged on both sides as well. In the conservative journal First Things, Michael Liccione questioned the role of Sr Margaret’s subjective intent. He noted that the Church permits abortions that are not intended, for example when a woman has an ectopic pregnancy, requiring the removal of her fallopian tube. This will result in the death of the unborn child, but that is not the intended object of the surgery. Liccione argues that this “law of double effect” may have animated Sr Margaret’s decision, in which case, her moral culpability is diminished.

The more persuasive criticism of Bishop Olmsted’s decision is located here. In such dreadful circumstances, even if the actors make the “wrong” decision, heavy-handed punishment is ill-advised. Liccione writes that “the bishop’s ability to make such a confident judgement in this case seems very unclear – to me and to many others. Moreover, the public outrage over the Phoenix case illustrates the dangers of making politically significant announcements on the basis of moral reasoning that not many people can follow and that even theologically well- educated Catholics disagree about.”

Wittingly or not, the sentence I have bolded can give readers the impression that I thought McBride might have been justified in believing that abortion was indirect. But I don't know enough about the medical facts of the case to suggest any such thing (or the opposite, for that matter). I did imply that Sr. McBride thought it was indirect and thus justified, and argued that as a morally well-informed Catholic health-care professional, she should be presumed to have been acting on the good-faith judgment that the abortion was justifiable, even if that judgment turned out to be incorrect. I questioned Bishop Olmsted's announcement for that and other reasons.

Perhaps, of course, Winters did understand me and just expressed himself a bit carelessly. But then, perhaps his getting a rather basic legal fact wrong is a sign that he just isn't reading carefully enough. Sloppiness in a case such as this, which involves theological and legal intricacies beyond most people, only muddies the waters further.

Even so, I'm grateful to be noticed. For a man in my position, all publicity is good publicity. Perhaps I should get my bishop to announce my excommunication despite my good intentions.

The Phoenix abortion/excommunication flap: a clarification

My post of last Friday, which was about the controversy over the Phoenix case, has itself sparked controversy both at First Things, where I first published it, and at What's Wrong with the World. But I think the majority of commenters have missed my point. I want to clarify things here.

The point is not whether Bishop Olmstead's or Sister McBride's judgment about the morality of her act is right or wrong. From a distance, it seems to me that the bishop is probably right. But I don't know that, and neither does anybody else who is not acquainted firsthand with the case.

For my information about Bishop Olmsted's decision, I'm going by this release from his office. It does not rebut Sr. McBride's contention that the abortion was indirect and thus justifiable under PDE. It simply assumes she was wrong, that the abortion was direct and thus unjustifiable by PDE or anything else. That's why I raised the questions I did. I find it curious that the grounds for such an assessment are not stated, and that the statement was issued without any discussion with Sr. McBride. If the moral status of her act were that obvious, why not state openly the medical facts that make it so? Perhaps the mother's confidentiality is being protected. But if that's the case, the Bishop's announcement is inappropriate. He has announced an excommunication whose grounds cannot be made public. As a Catholic, I'm embarrassed by the political ineptitude of such a move.

I have to say that I agree with canonist Ed Peters, who's just been appointed to the Apostolic Signatura, about latae sententiae excommunication. In the First Things combox, he wrote: "This case is becoming a textbook example of why we must abandon latae sententiae penalties in the West, as they already have done in Eastern canon law."

UPDATE as of 15:17: Luke Coppen of Editor's Briefing has added my original post to his list of "Morning Catholic Must-Reads" today. That is reassuring. Most of my friends think reading the post is optional, and I've even lost one over it.

The Phoenix abortion/excommunication flap

For approving an abortion at an Arizona hospital late last year, Sr. Margaret McBride has incurred excommunication latae sententiae—meaning that her actions have caused her to excommunicate herself. Or so, at least, her bishop, Thomas Olmstead of Phoenix, has announced. And the bishop’s announcement has ignited something of a firestorm among Catholic commentators.

Read the rest of my piece at First Things' "On the Square."

Jeffrey Steel is back

According to Fr. Tom Finigan, formerly Fr. Jeffrey Steel of the CofE is returning to blogging, but now "as a Catholic layman." Last June I took theological note of Steel's decision to become a Roman Catholic; he and his family were duly received into the Church on July 18. It will be a pleasure to have him back in the blogosphere.

Archdiocese of Boston drops abortion-providing deal

That's the story the Catholic blogosphere is abuzz about. I wrote about the impending scandal two weeks ago. At that time, there was no evidence that Cardinal O'Malley was going to back out. Now he has. What a relief to see that he has stopped trying to square a circle.

Thanks to people like Carol McKinley and Julie Brown for holding his feet to the fire. McKinley complains that O'Malley was "outsourcing his conscience" by referring the matter to the National Catholic Bioethics Center. But I think it more likely that he knew the correct decision already, and was simply using the NCBC as political cover for what will surely be a firestorm from the Left within his ranks.

Patching up the seamless garment

With the appointment of Alexia Kelley, until now executive director of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good (CACG) to a Department of Health and Human Services headed by the shameless Kathleen Sebelius, the Obama Administration is not merely paying off prominent Catholic supporters. It is seeking systematically to co-opt those Catholics who still buy into the "seamless-garment" approach to social issues named as such, and pioneered, by the late, widely loved Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of...ahem, Chicago. For the moment it's working politically; but intellectually, there has been regress not progress among Catholics.

Since the late 1990s, the US bishops have on the whole been abandoning the seamless-garment approach. With increasing clarity, they have insisted on assigning greater weight to combating certain practices called "intrinsic evils" by the Magisterium, such as abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem-cell research, and same-sex marriage, than on promoting certain social goods, such as universal health care and humane immigration policy, which reasonable Catholics can differ about how and how much to promote. That shift of emphasis is only logical given the clear content of Church teaching. But President Obama's having won the election with almost 54% of the Catholic vote has re-energized Catholic progressives to patch up a seamless garment that's become rather tattered. If only to vary my intellectual exercise routine, I had been hoping to hear fresh arguments from them. But the patching process exhibits precisely the same shoddy reasoning so long characteristic of the Catholic left. Herein I shall discuss two examples.

The first is the performance of Pepperdine University law professor Douglas Kmiec, a prominent Obama supporter, at a recent debate with Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton and founder of the American Principles Project. (You can watch the Windows Media video here; at about an hour and twenty minutes, it's long for those who don't enjoy this sort of thing, and too short for those who do.) For a Catholic intellectual who once sported conservative credentials, Kmiec's arguments are remarkably weak. The following account by attendee Michael J. New, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama and a visiting fellow at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, sums up the debate accurately:

...the best word to describe Doug Kmiec would be evasive. He tried to argue that other issues trumped sanctity of life issues when voting. He tried to make the case that the new stem cell regulations were part of a reasonable compromise. He said that denying holy communion to Catholic politicians who support legal abortion was counterproductive. Finally, he argued that science has not come to a consensus about the sanctity of human life. He was all over the place and on no issue was he particularly persuasive.

Interestingly, Kmiec did not spend much time talking about abortion trends. He briefly claimed (wrongly) that abortions increased during the presidency of the first President Bush. He briefly cited the decline in the abortion rate that occurred during the Clinton administration. But he gave credit to the strong economy. While this is partly true, he did not mention state level pro-life laws. At least he did not claim welfare spending caused the 1990s abortion decline.

Professor George, on the other hand succeeded in describing vivid contrasts between President Obama and the pro-life movement. Professor George described in great detail Obama's refusal to support incremental pro-life laws and his administration's efforts to fund abortion both in DC and in other countries. He also found it telling that while the Obama administration wants to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, they never express an interest in lowering the number of abortions. Overall the Obama administration does not think that fetal life is worthy of legal protection which makes finding common ground very difficult, if not impossible.

Overall, Professor George was concise, hard hiting and made his points well throughout the course of the debate.

Kmiec's position is the same I have heard from many Catholic progressives over the years: given political and scientific reality, the best Catholics can do in the public square by way of promoting the sanctity of life is to cease trying to prohibit the killing of embryos and fetuses, and instead back public policies which will presumably reduce people's motivation for violating the sanctity of life. Those policies turn out, of course, to be remarkably similar to those of the Democratic Party on the full range of relevant issues. But political opportunism is natural. What's unnatural is how many people are taken in by the rationalizations for it.

Much of the progressives' case consists in arguments from alleged empirical fact. It is constantly asserted, for example, that reducing poverty by means of social programs will reduce abortion, so that, given how entrenched the Roe regime is likely to remain, the most effective means of reducing abortion is to reduce poverty. Now it stands to reason that reducing poverty would reduce some women's motivation for having abortions; the abortion rate did go down during the Clinton years, when the economy was strong. But so did teenage pregnancy; and it might be that whatever explained that development also explained the abortion reduction. Moreover, there is no evidence that laws restricting or discouraging abortion, which many states have, would not reduce abortion at least as much if not more than poverty reduction. Kmiec failed to address such considerations. Moreover, he offered no defense of the Administration's desire to repeal the long-standing Hyde Amendment forbidding the use of federal funds for abortion. It stands to reason that subsidizing abortion only encourages abortion; so, even if reducing poverty reduces abortion, making abortion a standard feature of subsidized health care is all too liable to cancel out the reduction as well as violate the consciences of many health-care workers. Kmiec did not address that issue either. Indeed, he had no answer to George's amply documented charge that Obama, who has alluded on occasion to the worthiness of reducing the "need" (!) for abortion, lacks genuine interest in actually reducing abortions.

What Kmiec said about the lack of scientific consensus is trivially true and substantively false. Of course there is no scientific consensus about the sanctity of life; for science never has and never will have anything to say about such matters. But that doesn't affect what science can and does tell us: that human embryos are individuals genetically distinct from their parents. In conjunction with Prof. Patrick Lee, Prof. George has made abundantly clear how that fact is relevant to both the abortion and the embryonic-stem-cell debate; see here and here. The question is not whether the embryo is a human being; science establishes that it is. The question is whether human beings who have not yet developed a certain kind and degree of consciousness are persons, and thus subjects of rights, beginning with the right not to be killed for the convenience of others. That is an essentially philosophical question, which one needn't profess any particular religion in order to advocate answering in the affirmative. So, while the pro-life position cannot be deduced from scientific knowledge, such knowledge can and should be used as evidence to support it.

From a strictly Catholic standpoint, Kmiec's argument for allowing pro-Roe Catholic politicians to receive the Eucharist did not engage the actual canon-law argument for denying them the Eucharist. Given his profession, that is unconscionable. Before he became Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, the Catholic Church's supreme court, Archbishop Raymond Burke made an airtight case that Canon 915 calls for bishops to do just what Kmiec says they should not do about this matter. That's probably a major reason why the Pope made him prefect. Unfortunately, only a minority of American bishops agree; but even the most influential representative of the majority, Cardinal Donald Weurl of Washington, doesn't really address Burke's argument. The position Wuerl defends is simply this: "the canonical approach" doesn't "change hearts," so canon law be damned. Now for one thing, that would serve just as well as an argument against excommunication for any offense whatsoever, thus undermining the very concept of worthiness to receive the Eucharist. And aside from the impropriety of such a position for an archbishop, Wuerl's is an empirically-based argument unsupported by evidence—for the perfectly obvious reason that the approach it rejects hasn't been widely adopted. Even if being denied communion didn't turn out to change many politicians' hearts, it could be a powerful witness to many others at a time when the bishops' moral credibility has not recovered from the sex-abuse scandal. Perhaps that's partly why support for the hard-line position has been slowly increasing; the latest to back Burke's stance is his newly-installed successor in the See of St. Louis.

The second example of seamless-garment patching I want to discuss is this post by Stephen Schneck on the CACG website, which criticizes more general arguments from Prof. George and Justice Antonin Scalia. It is a classic instance of political obfuscation.

During a speech at Villanova in the fall of 2007, Scalia remarked: “Just as there is no ‘Catholic’ way to cook a hamburger, I am hard pressed to tell you of a single opinion of mine that would come out differently if I were not Catholic.” In a speech given at CUA a few weeks ago, George "proposed that [the] institutional Church should refrain from promoting public policies except when the issue at hand is a matter of intrinsic evil." Schneck criticizes such remarks as instances of an attitude he sees in Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who concluded his widely-read 1984 book After Virtue with the following, even more widely quoted passage:

And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of the predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.

Schneck calls that conclusion "silly," an instance of arguing for a "retreat into sects of so-called pure Christianity." To hear him tell it, conservative Catholic intellectuals are now thinking in the same vein:

If progressives are in charge in America, the thinking goes, then the truly faithful should withdraw from everyday political life, so as to deny any legitimacy to “immoral” opponents. Instead of cooperating where there is common ground, we should rather hunker in faithful Catholic bastions, catapulting morality at barbarians beyond the gate and firing up the inquisition for apostates found within the walls. Let’s name this mood “After Virtue Retreatism..."

Such thinking, says Schneck, is opposed to the constant teaching of the Church about the need for political engagement, especially as developed in Gaudium et spes.

Now I can't speak with confidence about MacIntyre's interest, or lack thereof, in political engagement. Given his age and temperament, I doubt he's all that interested. But Schneck's criticism of Scalia and George is as silly as he believes MacIntyre's thoughtful conclusion to be.

Scalia's remark was never intended to suggest that the Catholic faith should not affect the values and priorities of Catholic politicians. If only as an ardent pro-lifer, Scalia does let his personal beliefs affect what he believes ought to be the law. We all let our personal moral beliefs do that. Rather, his remark was intended to suggest that the Catholic faith should not affect his understanding, as a SCOTUS justice, of what the Constitution actually says and means. Insofar as it presents universal values and norms which can be seen as such by human reason, the Catholic faith cannot but influence a thinking Catholic's view of what legislation and policy ought to be. But that is perfectly compatible with Scalia's view that constitutional jurisprudence should not consist in determining what the Constitution, and a fortiori legislation or policy, ought to be, as distinct from what the Constitution actually says and means. In effect, Scalia has bent over backwards not to adopt sectarian assumptions in his approach to jurisprudence. That is quintessentially American, not slyly Benedictine.

On the other hand, Catholic progressives insist that some tenets of Catholic social teaching ought to influence the interpretations of Catholic jurists. Some, but not of course others—such as those on procreation and marriage. What Schneck is doing, in effect, is depicting Scalia as a sectarian and a bad Catholic for being a constitutional strict-constructionist, when in fact Schneck is more sectarian than Scalia and at least as selective in the political weight he assigns to various tenets of Catholic social teaching. Such performative self-contradiction sells well in today's Washington, precisely because it is a classic case of political ideology displacing theology. But that is Schneck's problem, not Scalia's.

Schneck's treatment of Prof. George misconstrues the latter's point so thoroughly that one suspects disingenuousness. George holds that the political role of the Catholic hierarchy should be restricted to efforts to restrain what all Catholics are bound to believe are not only heinous but intrinsic social evils—for example, abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, and embryonic stem-cell research. That's because, according to Catholic teaching, there is no room for reasonable disagreement among Catholics that such practices are grave social evils in themselves, and should never be cooperated with regardless of any good consequences that might be thought to come from doing so. On the other hand, progressives want "the institutional Church" (i.e., the hierarchy) to push for laws and public policies that, while quite possibly promoting certain broad goods emphasized in Catholic social teaching, are really particular means of promoting those goods. And they want the hierarchy to do that while forgoing direct efforts to limit the grave social evils mentioned above. But Catholics can reasonably disagree about the wisdom of adopting this or that means of attaining what they should agree are social goods; as John Paul II made clear in Evangelium Vitae and Veritatis Splendor, there is no similar room for disagreement about the need to use all available political means to prevent what is intrinsically and heinously evil.

Schenk argues that George, in adopting such a position, is calling for a retreat into world-escaping sectarianism. But George's point is not that Catholics should refrain from political and personal action to help the poor, the sick, and the outcast, or to limit war and capital punishment (even though those latter two are not intrinsic evils). Many Catholics do engage in such action; many should; and George never suggested that they should not. His point is that the Catholic hierarchy should avoid pronouncing on policy questions on which it lacks special competence, and focus instead on doing what they can to limit practices whose intrinsic moral evil they are competent as clerics to know and proclaim. That leaves debatable questions of policy to competent laity while upholding moral norms which, from the standpoint of Catholic doctrine, are non-negotiable.

One argument for that position is strictly "in-house" and pastoral. If the bishops' political statements stayed within their true competence, political polarization among Catholics would not be as great as it is after several generations of the bishops' addressing what's truly debatable with as much emphasis as what isn't. But the other argument arises from understanding the objective importance of the non-negotiables for society at large.

Catholics can endlessly debate, for example, how reconcile the need to treat immigrants humanely with the need to control our borders and do justice to taxpayers. We can endlessly debate how much military expenditure is necessary for our security, whether this-or-that intervention meets just-war criteria, or whether there can be conditions under which the death penalty is justified. We can endlessly debate what are the most efficient and just means of ensuring access to adequate health-care for all citizens. But it's usually unclear how much our society's future hinges on the precise way in which such questions are resolved politically. By contrast, there can be no debate among Catholics about whether abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem-cell research, or same-sex "marriage" form striking features of the "culture of death." They do and we know it. As the impending demographic winter of the West indicates, it is the culture of death as a whole which poses the gravest threat to our civilization's future. Hence, George is right to stress their overriding political importance from the Church's viewpoint. Without prejudice to the need of bishops in some other countries to address different conditions, the American hierarchy best serves our polity, as well as the Church, by generally limiting its public-policy statements to combating the culture of death. That position is not a "retreat" into an enclave of purity. It casts no doubt on the need for Catholics to act as morally responsible citizens across the full range of issues. It simply recognizes the ecclesial and social desirability of the hierarchy's stressing only what it's best suited to stress.

There are only two possible explanations why a Catholic would call that stance "After-Virtue Retreatism." One would be that he simply disagrees with the Magisterium about the relative weight to assign various tenets of her social teaching. From that point of view, the problem with conservative Catholics is simply that they agree with the pope and the bishops about the social importance of the points in contention. But thinking with the pope and the bishops on such points is only sectarian if the doctrines themselves are sustainable only in light of divine revelation rather than of human reason. That's not a consistent position for a Catholic to take; for the pro-life and pro-marriage points in contention are presented as items of the natural law. Thus, unlike laws meant to apply to Catholics as such, they apply universally if at all and can be supported in non-Catholic terms. Moreover, if progressive Catholics insist they are free qua Catholics to dissent from the teaching of the Church on such matters, then they have deprived themselves of any logical basis for criticizing conservatives as bad Catholics for dissenting on other matters.

The other explanation would be that progressives, while agreeing with the Magisterium about the intrinsic evil of abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem-cell research, and same-sex "marriage," see such issues as lost causes in contemporary society and hence not worth the energy needed for the political opposition that the hierarchy and conservative Catholics present. That view is fairly common, and not just among progressives. If it's correct, then people like Prof. George are just tilting at windmills, which is more about self-satisfaction and group solidarity than genuine political engagement. But such a criticism calls, in effect, for retreating into a sectarian enclave about culture-of-death issues, and only engaging politically on other social issues about which the Church has no distinctive contribution to make anyhow. That would call for a bifurcation between faith and social action—which is precisely what is supposed to be wrong with "retreatism," and which is precisely what progressives see themselves as avoiding. So, such an explanation would be at best paradoxical.

Regardless of which explanation holds in Schenck's case, therefore, he has no effective argument that conservative Catholics such as Scalia and George are sectarian "retreatists." But I suspect that the first explanation is the operative one. Progressives such as Schenck just don't think they need to heed the hierarchy about the nature and importance of the culture-of-death issues. They see concern with such issues as sectarian because they regard the Church's position on them, unlike her position on their issues of choice, as justifiable only in theological terms they would reject. So the debate is not really about the desirability of Catholic political engagement in general; it's about which issues are worthy of political engagement. And that debate reflects a more fundamental one in moral theology about the truth of the Church's teaching on the culture-of-death issues. If progressive Catholics would simply admit that and proceed accordingly, we could avoid the sort of political posturing Schenck permits himself and address the real issue.

Without presuming to assess the late Cardinal Bernardin's original motives for the seamless-garment approach, which are no longer relevant anyhow, I have long suspected that said approach, as adopted by most progressive Catholics, is simply a cover for theological dissent and political ideology. When it comes to moral questions of political significance, most progressive Catholics are leftists first and Catholics second. The teaching of the Church is thus assessed in terms of a prior ideological agenda: when that teaching supports the agenda, it is believed; when it doesn't, it isn't. The Catholic right is sometimes guilty of that too, but not to quite the same extent. That's the reality American Catholics need to confront and purge; for that, we need fasting and prayer, which would foster the humility needed to put the Faith before ideology. Unfortunately, the ascent of Catholic progressives under the Obama Administration is already causing them to present a tattered, poorly patched garment as seamless. And so instead of a common pursuit of the truth, we will have more polarization and posturing.