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."

How divorce ruins childrens' lives

The conclusion of new mega-meta-study, cited at the blog of Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse's Ruth Institute, is summed up by William West:

A new study on divorce, looking at the complete spectrum of research on the subject, confirms what most people already know – even if they are not willing to admit it: divorce causes “irreparable harm” to the whole family, but  particularly to the children. There have been plenty of individual studies exposing one or more effects of divorce, but rarely do researchers give an overview of the findings to date – and it makes disturbing reading.

Read the rest here.

Have we forgotten about Satan?

By my fellow Dominican layman, Michael Seagriff.

Why feminism is sexist

With less to lose, I am freer to speak my mind than most members of the American chattering class. So I'll just say it straight: Feminism is sexist. But why?

It doesn't have to be, of course. And until fairly recently, it wasn't. Many of the American feminist pioneers before our time truly believed in, and worked to bring about, equal dignity and opportunity for the sexes. To a considerable extent, they succeeded. But "third-wave" feminism has moved well beyond that. It exists to secure special privileges for women at the expense of men, privileges for which women are thought to qualify as the world's premier victim class. Many women realize what's going on and, partly for that reason, refuse to call themselves feminists. But not many men realize what's going on. They're too chivalrous, or too distracted by their work, or too demoralized by their lack of work. But they had better realize it, if they're to do something about it. And they should.

Friedrich Nietzsche explained as follows why he opposed "equality" for women: "Women will never be satisfied with mere equality. The war between the sexes is eternal, and peace can only come with victory and the total subordination of men." In its time, that witticism was merely flippant. But no longer is it merely flippant. Mind you, I doubt men will ever be subordinate to women across the board, as distinct from being so in some spheres and cases. That's because most women need to respect a man in order to tolerate him, and few women respect a man they can dominate. In my time, I've known only one woman who truly respected the husband she ruled; apparently, no other type of relationship had ever occurred to either of them. But that's rare. Most women don't really want to be the dominant sex any more than most men want them to be. So it won't happen. Yet over the last fifteen or twenty years, I've come to appreciate the witty woman who once explained why Roman-Catholic priests may not marry: "No man can serve two masters." Among our élites, feminism has evolved into a movement for female superiority, and it's having a disproportionate influence on legal and cultural norms. That is to the detriment not only of men but, ultimately, of women themselves.

Consider some facts about contemporary America that, as far as I know, nobody denies. A substantial majority of students graduating from college are women, who as a class are more literate and cultured than men. Two-thirds of divorces are initiated by women—almost nine-tenths when children are involved. Women as a class are no longer greater victims of divorce than men as a class; indeed, most divorced fathers find themselves living at the margins of their children's lives, while of course being obliged to pay for them. I wouldn't call that sitting in the catbird seat. The sectors of our economy in the best shape are health care and education—fields dominated by women—while those in the worst shape are construction and manufacturing—fields where men have traditionally predominated. On average, single women outearn single men, and about one-third of wives now earn more than their husbands. Given current trends in education and employment, the trend in relative earnings will only accelerate. I could go on, but the point should be clear: in America and a growing number of other countries, women as a class are not subordinate to men. Nobody's complaining about that, and nobody should.

Of course it's been widely noted lately (here's one example) that women on the whole are less happy than they were in the 1970s, both absolutely and relative to men. Many women are disappointed to discover, in their exhaustion, that few can be it all, do it all, and have it all—at least not all at once, or indefinitely. But the same is true for men, and times are hard for most people, men as well as women. Although women still have plenty to worry about, and probably always will, that's not primarily the fault of "men" at this point.

One reason for that is something I have argued before: Hardly anybody believes that the sexes are inherently the same save for reproductive plumbing. So people don't believe the sexes should be treated the same. I gave numerous illustrations of what I mean, and I could add more. One anecdote will suffice.

A thirtyish man who had been a student of mine contacted me for advice. He had started work in an office where he was one of only two men among a few dozen women in a female-owned franchise. Since several of the women were quite attractive (including his mini-skirted, 25-year-old boss), the man wanted to know how he should behave so as to avoid any possibility of being accused of sexual harassment. I advised: "Well, you know how you'd like those women to behave toward you? That's how you should not behave toward them." After his sardonic chuckle, he agreed and was most appreciative. I've told this true story roughly a dozen times to people of both sexes; they all agree I gave good advice. In fact, their only criticism was of that young man, for needing such advice.

The moral? Everybody knows that sexual-harassment laws exist primarily to protect women from men, yet nobody finds that "discriminatory," meaning "invidiously discriminatory." That's because people know, instinctively, the differences between the sexes. Such differences run across the board, which is why the so-called "Equal-Rights Amendment" didn't pass in the 1970s, when second-wave feminism was at its peak. That amendment is still dead. Despite what many Americans say out of a misplaced sense of political correctness, they don't really want the sexes to be treated the same. And the reasons for that generally don't have to be spelled out. Some people, to be sure, feel a need to pretend that all the reasons are "merely cultural" and thus plastic. But not many of them believe that—not when push comes to shove. Nor should they.

So in America today, women are not subordinate to men, even as neither women nor men believe the sexes should be treated the same. Why then the chorus of complaints that women "earn less money on average" than men, even though far more men than women put in 80-hour weeks on the job, and even though far more women than men, naturally, choose part-time or zero employment so as to care for their children? Why is abortion doggedly defended as "a woman's right" when the mother doesn't want her child, but the father must pay 18 years for children allowed to be born, even if he didn't want them? Why do we see more and more "women's-health" centers, but no men's-health centers? Why is it perfectly fine to depict men in TV ads as bumblers and imbeciles, but not women? Why is it socially acceptable for women to boast of and laugh about the violence they would do to a cheating spouse, but not men? Was Nietzsche right? Will women not be satisfied until men have been totally subjugated?

I don't think so. At bottom, the problem is that feminism's generational momentum has outlived the need for it. Women who are Hillary Clinton's age grew up in a very different world from that of women who are Lady Gaga's age, but it's the Hillarys of the world who can and do push "women's issues," as if we're still living in the 70s. Lady Gaga, by contrast, takes her freedom and success for granted—just like the growing army of conservative female lawyers and politicians out there. So I think feminist sexism too shall pass. It will pass not when the secretaries to those women are men, but only when men have as much as those women to be unhappy about.

People, I'm religious but not "spiritual"

I just had to say that in this medium, as I once did on Facebook. The consternation I aroused there bodes well for the traffic I hope to get here. But my saying it here and now is not just lust for vainglory.

This morning I saw a tweet from The Anchoress that called for more than the ten seconds I usually devote to tweets. It linked to an article by one Lillian Daniel, a minister of the United Church of Christ—that bastion of all things PC—entitled "Spiritual but Not Religious? Please Stop Boring Me." I'm delighted to find a liberal-Protestant minister who's knowledgeable enough about this sort of thing to be bored by it. Rev. Daniels dealt with her boredom by producing that article for a website aimed at the more engaged among her co-religionists. I deal with mine by determinedly affirming the opposite of the slogan that bores me. But the article itself piqued my interest because, as I had hoped, it perfectly explains what's behind the all-too-American phenomenon of "spirituality" without "religion."

From her plane's seat, Daniels wrote (emphasis added):

Thank you for sharing, spiritual-but-not-religious sunset person. You are now comfortably in the norm for self-centered American culture, right smack in the bland majority of people who find ancient religions dull but find themselves uniquely fascinating. Can I switch seats now and sit next to someone who has been shaped by a mighty cloud of witnesses instead? Can I spend my time talking to someone brave enough to encounter God in a real human community? Because when this flight gets choppy, that's who I want by my side, holding my hand, saying a prayer and simply putting up with me, just like we try to do in church.

Exactly. For wisdom about and love of things divine, I need to trust the transgenerational assembly (ecclesia) of people I worship with far more than I trust myself. I may not trust the old lady next to me in the pew at Mass more than myself—she of the blue hair, the off-key singing, the suspicious scowl. I certainly don't look to that guy at the other end of the pew, that middle-aged used-car salesman sporting a beer belly and an oleaginous grin. And I do have an almost-unbreakable habit of imagining how much better a job I could do than the priest up there—or than our bishop, for that matter. But what I do trust, far more than myself or them, is who and what we all love, and what it all represents. I don't want to make God in my own image any more than I want to make him in the image of the average layperson or clergyman. What I want is what we all know we need to be a part of: the Body of Christ. That includes more than his Risen body in heaven. It includes even more than the Eucharist. Necessarily, it includes the Church, which St. Paul did after all call "the Body of Christ." Extra ecclesiam nulla salus is a dogma because we can be incorporated into Christ only through his Body, the Church.

That's the essential point utterly missed by the spiritual-but-not-religious crowd: those who want God without his people, Christ without his Church in all her challenging and irritating concreteness. The spiritual-but-not-religious can hardly avoid idolatry. Recoiling from the human imperfections of God's people, especially those of the leadership, they will settle only for a God who conforms to their ideas of what's appropriate, rather than vice-versa. And that's why I call myself "religious but not spiritual." I want to awaken people to the idolatry they confuse with integrity. That way, they might stop boring me.

Why "Apostolate" is Bigger Than Ever

The following is a slightly edited version of a column I have written for this month's Dominican Laity newsletter eLumen.

Only this year, my first as a Dominican, did I notice that August is a huge month for feast days. To name just some, in order: St. Alfonso Liguori, St. Jean-Marie Vianney, The Transfiguration of the Lord, St. Dominic (my father in faith), St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein), St. Lawrence, St. Clare, The Assumption of Mary (which I will have celebrated at one of her shrines), St. John Eudes, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Rose of Lima (lay Dominican), The Beheading of St. John the Baptist. Contemplating such a lineup, it's easy is to feel inadequate to the mission of evangelization—the most visible form of what used to be called "apostolate" in the Catholic Church, and in more traditional quarters, still is. But Christ spares no disciple their mission. Accordingly, while we do well to seek the help of our great forefathers and mothers in faith, the point is to emulate them.

Many Catholics seem to find such a resolution presumptuous, if not downright crazy. In their eyes, saints are like tangible miracles: by definition rare, and certainly not to be expected in the ordinary course. It's natural to live in such a way as to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy. But that is not how God wants things to be. “Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect” (Mt 5:48). And that “universal call to holiness” has a necessarily “missiological” dimension. Transformed by Christ ourselves first of all, we the laity are meant to transform the world for him. The two processes are inseparable: committing to either means committing to both. In today’s world especially, that means thinking and acting bigger than we are, by grace and faith.

The task too often daunts. Thanks to scientific advances, which have enabled humanity to improve the conditions of life along with our understanding of God’s creation, people can do more than ever without reference to God. Thus in the more “developed” countries, secularism, materialism, and unbelief abound. Even where God is remembered, his name is often invoked to rationalize violence, exploitation, and other forms of unlove. Lately, the need for conversion among the baptized, even among the clergy, has become all too evident. Those who would follow Christ have more work than ever, starting with themselves. So even aside from our natural incredulity about the call to holiness, the obstacles to answering and spreading it can seem overwhelming. No amount of virtue, talent, study, or publicity seems to make much difference in a world full of opposition to the Gospel. But what we do, if we offer it in faith to God, does make a difference. The Kingdom of God is “like a mustard seed” (Lk 13:19). Those who belong to it are small, and start small, but God gives the increase. And the increase is mighty indeed, if we would but let ourselves become living sacrifices of love for God and neighbor.

One way to do that is through the new “social media” on the Internet. Most of us know about them, and some of us use them. It’s easy to dwell on the pitfalls of such media: the over-the-top rhetoric, the opportunities for shallow publicity and self-indulgence, the threats to privacy, and so on. But as the Pope has repeatedly pointed out—see, e.g., here—the new media also present enormous opportunities for apostolate. I shall offer my own example, then generalize.

A dozen years ago, I hosted “Religion Chat” for MSN and moderated its largest Catholic “group.” From 2005 to 2010, I blogged on mostly theological topics (Sacramentum Vitae). That got more attention than I expected: attention evoked more by the message, thank God, than by the personality of the messenger. After a year in which my online interaction with people has been mostly on Facebook, to good as well as bad effect, I shall resume my original blogging apostolate. And I have now joined Google+, a new social network that, in my opinion, is better organized and has more even potential than Facebook.

Such activities are not just a personal hobby or eccentricity. Many Catholics are engaged in them, and I could here cite numerous examples with which I am personally acquainted. But to get a broader idea of how it's working in America, I cite young Brandon Vogt’s new book The Church and New Media: Blogging Converts, Online Activists, and Bishops Who Tweet (Our Sunday Visitor, 2011). To the extent we can, the members of the Order of Preachers in particular should make extensive use of them. Some of us do; I notice that the St. Joseph Province has quite a respectable website.

Then there’s all the research material the Internet has made available for study, private as well as public. Almost anybody can now carry around a library of Catholic classics, including St. Thomas’ Summa, in a device no bigger and somewhat lighter than most books. I plan on getting an e-reader as my Christmas gift to myself (unless, of course, somebody wants to spare me the trouble--hint, hint). Even the mobile phone I have now contains an “app” for reciting, and daily updating, the complete Liturgy of the Hours. The opportunities for living our charism in and through these new media are enormous. Let us pray and work together to take still better advantage of them.

Where's the joy?

Almost every American past puberty knows the old Wendy's hamburger slogan: "Where's the beef?" Used as a metaphor, it summarizes part of why I majored in philosophy and came to be still more interested in theology. The other half is summed up by "Where's the joy?" I started asking myself that question about life as a teenager after I had read as much Lewis, Tolkien, and Chesterton as I could. It's the question more people need to be asking themselves. We all want both, but fewer can articulate the longings expressed by the former than those expressed by the latter.

What I mean is illustrated by a contrasting pair of items from the blogosphere. Such items at least have the advantage of being easy to retrieve.

Consider theologian Rusty Reno's First Things "On the Square" piece Homosexuality and the Moral Failure of Higher Education.  Discussing why the affirmation of homosexuality has become a key benchmark of the rigorous orthodoxy enforced on secular campuses, he concludes:

Thus the need to use a kind of intellectual Agent Orange to destroy even the slightest judgments of immorality, because they reinforce what the voice of conscience keeps telling us, and what we would like to avoid hearing. Those who say that homosexual acts are immoral are oppressors, because their words—however dispassionate, however well-reasoned, however subtly expressed, however concerned for others—agitate consciences and block the free flow of desire.

Indeed, even those who are diffident are under suspicion, because that voice of conscience needs complete support to be suppressed. In the cause of sexual liberation nothing is acceptable short of full affirmation, or at least a scrupulous silence that expresses no reservations.

Sexual liberation is a Gucci freedom. Upper middle class Americans possess the resources to get a great deal of what they want, and part of what they want is sexual liberation. It’s not surprising, therefore, that the modern institution most closely associated with elite culture—higher education—should devote a great deal of energy to removing those who believe in moral limitations.

The well-known phenomenon Reno describes instances a larger phenomenon that philosopher J. Budziszewski calls "the revenge of conscience." Read both pieces in full. Now I am not primarily concerned to argue that peoples' consciences ought to tell them that sodomy, whether practiced by gays or straights, is immoral. I'm not even primarily concerned with the question how to tell the difference between the moral and the immoral. What I'm struck by today is the deep-seated joylessness of the new secular orthodoxy in general, and by that of complete sexual autonomy in particular. I've known plenty of people who live by that ideology. Such autonomy, when lived as though it can really be had, leads to many things—most of them bad. Yet even those who defend it passionately do not argue that it leads, in the long run, to what Lewis called "joy." Even old queens living together in a distant parody of marriage wouldn't tell you it does—at least not the ones I've known. Yet that joy, deep down, is what we all want—even though the self-styled best and brightest are ideologically committed to viewing it as "nothing but" one of the brain's evolutionary adaptations. Nothing-buttery is not tasty.

Now consider, by contrast, this story from Rod Dreher about how God gave him the woman he fell in love with and married. It's almost four years old now, and I wish I had seen it sooner. When I finished it today, I was in tears. What an affirmation of prayer in true faith, and the joy that it leads to!  The story of the Drehers' meeting, love, and marriage is an instance of how God wants things to be, at least for those called to Christian marriage. Whatever is natural, as opposed to what is anti-natural, can be a fit occasion for joy.

But the thing about joy is that you can't get it by striving for it directly. Doing that, in fact, loses it. You get it unbidden, and it leaves one with Sehnsucht, a poignant longing for the Reality toward which even the greatest of earthly beauty and joy only points. It is a law of spiritual nature that one only gains what joy is about by leaving joy aside to do what one must, while offering the resulting abnegation to God and remembering the joy. That's what Jesus did. That's what the ideologues of radical autonomism, sexual or otherwise, cannot do. If they remember joy at all, they think it can be had, or at least preserved, by doing what feels best. Sometimes, that is true—when what feels best coincides, like a husband and wife making love, with what we ought by nature to be doing. But only then. If we seek joy on our terms, we end up with ennui: the intimation of the nihil of evil, not of that Reality which is the source and goal of all.

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.

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.

Fathers are not fungible

I was going to give my preferred homilette on the Sunday Mass readings today, but over the past few years I've come to realize what self-indulgence that usually is. The way I used to get through many of the painfully mediocre homilies I've heard was to compose my own in my head. But then I realized that I was substituting my own wisdom for that of the spiritual fathers celebrating the Mass. Many were indeed bad preachers and clueless liturgists, unlike those of us who've never doubted we could do a better job in our sleep. But also unlike yours truly, those men had been called by God to be something priceless for their people. That had to count for more than what I thought about the exegetical issues at hand, or indeed about most anything else. And today that's got me thinking that fathers, in the ordinary sense of term, are not fungible.

I learned that phrase from Professor Brad Wilcox writing in Friday's Wall Street Journal. Here's the immediate context:

Until recently, there was one primary challenge to the intellectually fashionable view that fathers are fungible. It came from scholarship showing that children did better—e.g., were much more likely to finish school, avoid teen pregnancy and stay out of prison—in intact, married families than in homes headed by a single parent, most of whom are women.

Yet scholars such as Ms. Drexler were able to retort that much of the research relies on a comparison of middle-class married families with poor single mothers, so that differences in how children fare might be largely the result of socioeconomic differences. In their view, middle-class women who have a decent income and a good education can do just as good a job as a middle-class married mother and father.

That view ran into some major trouble this month, with the release of the report, "My Daddy's Name is Donor," by the Commission on Parenthood's Future (of which I am a member). The report is the first study to compare a large random sample of 485 young adults (18-45) conceived through donor insemination to 563 young adults conceived the old-fashioned way.

Significantly, the single women who chose to have a child by donor insemination were better-educated and slightly better off than the parents who had biological children together. So the study's results cannot be dismissed on the grounds that affluent marrieds were being compared to poor single mothers.

Ordinarily I would overlook articles like that, because what they say strikes me as so obvious. It is just obvious that, as Wilcox says, "despite the latest propaganda in favor of a father-optional future, this study suggests two stubborn truths: Children long to know and be known by their biological fathers, and they are much more likely to thrive when they have their own father in their lives." But after I called my own father today and was honored by one of my own children, I read that article and admitted that what ought to be obvious is not obvious in the politically correct world. Plenty of educated people hold as principle that fathers, in the ordinary sense of the term, are optional accessories in their children's lives. Many other people live as though that were the case, even though they wouldn't assert it and might not even like it. And millions of divorced men feel that the mothers of their children regard them as, at best, sperm donors and cash cows. Certainly most children, even those who have been not been properly loved by their fathers, know better. But it's not fashionable to admit that. It's a lot more fashionable to depict fathers as jerks, cretins, or abusers.

Some of my conservative and/or Catholic friends believe that the denigration of fathers is part-and-parcel of some grand conspiracy to destroy the family. It might be the UN, or the Marxists, or certain key 20th-century cultural icons such as Freud, Margaret Mead, and Picasso, whose creative ideas seemed to be closely bound up with their desire for sexual license. But I seriously doubt it's an organized conspiracy of human beings, save perhaps on the local level in California and New York. There's just a tremendous cultural force behind easy divorce, contraception, abortion, gay "marriage," artificial procreation, and other practices which corrode the traditional family. That's because the core of modernity's ideology is the goal of radical autonomy.

On this view, human freedom is so absolute, so precious, that anything which limits our freedom to define ourselves is either a political or a cosmic injustice. It's almost as if we're bigots if we believe that there is such a thing as human nature and that it admits of only so much self-definition by individuals. Nominalism has become not only respectable but morally obligatory. If that's how one sees human dignity, then anything that's important for who we are, but is nonetheless out of our control, is going to be either questioned, resisted, or changed (perhaps by evolving technology). To be sure, not many people want to do that to their mothers. Motherhood is still sacrosanct, largely for good and instinctual reasons. But a great many people do that to their fathers. The authority of the father in the family is now equated with the "domination" and "oppression" of "patriarchy." I've never thought of 'patriarchy' as a dirty word, but Hell's Philological Arm has succeeded in making it so. As women slowly but steadily achieve economic parity with men, the very usefulness of husbands and fathers as such, as distinct from that of the interchangeable "spouse" and "parent," now seems obscure to the educated classes. A great many people still feel otherwise, but most cannot articulate why they should. And so the erosion of fatherhood proceeds apace because of a faulty conception of freedom that now dominates thought.

The solution is holy patriarchs: in the family, in the church, even in the state. It's going to take women a while to recognize that such a thing is even possible, let alone necessary. But they'll come around if men do. I hope and pray to myself.

Lars Vilks, "Gay Muhammad" and "Freedom of Expression"

This past week brings news of yet another fracas involving Swedish cartoon artist Lars Vilks (CNN.com):

When Vilks entered a classroom where he was to deliver a lecture to about 250 people -- all of whom had passed through a security checkpoint to gain admission -- about five people started protesting loudly, Eronen said.

After Uppsala uniformed and non-uniformed police calmed the protesters, the lecture got under way at about 5:15 p.m. (11:15 a.m. ET), Eronen said.

But as Vilks was showing audiovisual material, 15 to 20 audience members became loud and tried to attack Vilks, he said.

As police stepped in, a commotion started and Vilks was taken to a nearby room; police used pepper spray and batons to fend off the protesters, Eronen said. Vilks did not return to the lecture. [Video footage of the event].

Last March, an American woman who called herself "Jihad Jane," Colleen LaRose, was indicted in the United States for allegedly conspiring to support terrorists and kill Vilks.

In a 2007 interview with CNN he had drawn the cartoon of Mohammed with a dog's body in order to take a stand.

" "I don't think it should not be a problem to insult a religion, because it should be possible to insult all religions in a democratic way, " says Vilks from his home in rural Sweden.

"If you insult one, then you should insult the other ones."

His crude, sketched caricature shows the head of Prophet Mohammed on the body of a dog. Dogs are considered unclean by conservative Muslims, and any depiction of the prophet is strictly forbidden.

Vilks, who has been a controversial artist for more than three decades in Sweden, says his drawing was a calculated move, and he wanted it to elicit a reaction.

"That's a way of expressing things. If you don't like it, don't look at it. And if you look at it, don't take it too seriously. No harm done, really," he says.

When it's suggested that might prove an arrogant -- if not insulting -- way to engage Muslims, he is unrelenting, even defiant.

"No one actually loves the truth, but someone has to say it," he says.

Vilks, a self-described atheist, points out he's an equal opportunity offender who in the past sketched a depiction of Jesus as a pedophile.

Why the new design of First Things matters

For a little while I worked full-time at First Things, and still contribute fairly regularly to its main blog. But even as a reader from Day One, I felt that the print edition's rather drab, no-nonsense design evinced a dogged unwillingness to face the challenges posed to print media in the age of the Internet. That of course was part of the magazine's appeal; its readership consists entirely of people who prefer steak to sizzle. I was quite content with the old look, and for that reason was skeptical when Fr. Neuhaus' successor as editor, Joseph Bottum, decided on a redesign. But now that it's here, I have to say I'm pleased. And I believe that the reason I'm pleased should matter to all who want to see FT survive and do what it's always done.

I shall explain that first by pointing readers to a favorable post by The Anchoress, another FT blogmeister, and quoting what she quotes from Bottum's post announcing the change:

…we have now undertaken the redesign that begins with this issue. In the public discussions of America, First Things works for several things. The fight, for example, with those who want to strip the world of its religious clothing and create the naked public square. The long struggle against the murderousness of abortion. The attempt to sort out the good of modern democracy and science from the horrors that have emerged through what we insist are wrong turns taken in the name of modernity. And, most of all, the effort to be physicians to this Iron Age in which we live—the effort to reinvest the world with the richness, thickness, and freshness that is found only in truly God-haunted nations and societies.

But, as a magazine, First Things also works to preserve the high culture of intellectual journals: a culture that is fading under pressure from the Internet, from the weak American financial situation, and, not to mince words, from the absurd decline of print standards in this country.

Many magazines have given up on poetry—and so we print poems. Many magazines have given up on the long-form reporting that was once the glory of American journalism—and so we want to showcase that kind of story. Many magazines have given up on intellectual essays—and so we continue to present them, as we have always done, to our readers. For that matter, many magazines have given up on superior and intellectually challenging crossword puzzles—and so (over some internal objections, I should note) I demanded that we pick up, as well, that fallen standard of journalism.

Most of all, American magazines these days seem to have given up on elegance—and so we decided to demand art covers, and interior photographs, and fine text layout.

In other words, First Things defiantly refuses to accept the diminished condition of American print today. The object in your hands must be a pleasure to hold and read—or what good is a printed journal, with the cacophony of the Web sounding all around us?

Much as my conservative instincts once resisted such thinking, I must agree. A serious magazine of ideas must give people a reason to buy it and carry it around with them at at time when they can get more interactive, if more ephemeral, content online. If you're like me, you often find yourself in situations where you're forced to wait for something, or just need a little quiet time, or, heaven forfend, can't get online. I usually carry a book around with me to deal with such situations. But my default print companion shall now be a sexier First Things.

I hope that the rest of the FT readership agrees. If the magazine can retain and expand its true substance while  appealing to a broader demographic, then that substance will be more widely disseminated. That is certainly needed more than ever. Bottum's move is admittedly a gamble; but in today's aversive environment for print periodicals, I don't see that he had much choice.

The Pill at 50

Today, I'm told, is the 50th anniversary of the Pill. More precisely, the 50th anniversary of the FDA's announcement that it was going to approve the Pill for general use. Given all the news stories, editorializing, and blogging—Meghan Duke's post at First Thoughts is a good guide—I surmise that people can no more wait to talk about the birthday than the government could to talk about the birth. Which is good, since the Pill was and is that important.

I have long argued, and I'm far from the only one, that the Pill was the catalyst for one of the greatest social revolutions since the invention of agriculture. Along with antibiotics for STDs, the Pill reduced the costliest of the potential costs of fornication for enough people to make fornication socially respectable. It then took no more than a decade for fornication to become almost de rigeur. Nobody bats an eyelash anymore about people who are unmarried at 30, but the few singles who are virgins at 30 have very good reason not to be open about it. Of course, the social degeneration did not stop with fornication. As many Catholic writers have noted, all of the nasty things that Pope Paul VI predicted would result from the contraceptive mentality have come to pass. Mary Eberstadt is perhaps the pithiest chronicler of that; see her "The Vindication of Humanae Vitae" in the July 2008 First Things (the article is available online only to subscribers.) But she writes partly for effect, so that the scoffers can always dismiss her as an insufficiently careful sociologist, even though sociology tends to confirm her hardly original point.

Lest one think the insight limited to Catholic writers, the quintessential sex symbol of the sexual revolution, Raquel Welch, is now inclined to agree. She concludes:

Seriously, folks, if an aging sex symbol like me starts waving the red flag of caution over how low moral standards have plummeted, you know it's gotta be pretty bad. In fact, it's precisely because of the sexy image I've had that it's important for me to speak up and say: Come on girls! Time to pull up our socks! We're capable of so much better.

Are the girls going to pull up their socks? Not if the guys have anything to do with it.

The culture of contraception has been a godsend for tomcat males. But it's no bargain for women, whose sexuality is more commodotized than ever, and who feel they have no excuse not to "put out" in order to land a man. Sure, they can "have sex like a man," to use the famous injunction of Helen Gurley Brown, the founding editor of Cosmopolitan. A rather small minority of women like that, and a somewhat larger minority actually do it. But all it means is that more women become as crass as men than otherwise would have, while many more women blame themselves if they're not happy with the relatively new social reality. Anybody who says that the sexual revolution has contributed to greater happiness for the greater number must think that fornication is so transcendent an experience that its ready availability compensates for the explosion of things that nobody says are good. I don't believe many people think that. They just don't want to seem uncool.

There are of course worse things than not wanting to seem uncool. As birth rates continue falling around the world, it's tempting to imagine that the worst long-term effect of the Pill will be the end of the human race. But that would be apocalypticism, of which I'm generally skeptical. No, the worst thing about the Pill—worse than the culture it has catalyzed, worse even than its often abortifacient effect—is that people no longer assume that sex and procreation are supposed to go together. Besides making same-sex "marriage" inevitable, the loss of that natural assumption has lent great force to the basic illusion of secular liberalism: what I call "radical autonomism."

I mean the ideology that human beings can remake themselves into whatever they please, given enough technology and imagination. On that ideology, there is no "human nature" whose inherent telos defines the limits of what we can become without destroying ourselves. The problem with radical autonomism was prophetically detailed by C.S. Lewis in his 1947 classic The Abolition of Man. He discusses contraception as part of that unwitting project. But our society is perhaps too sex-crazed to listen. Ultimately we have hell, and ourselves, to blame for that. But the Pill really did grease the skids.

Comedy Central needs a sense of humor

In a First Thoughts post yesterday, Jody Bottum noted:

Comedy Central—the origin of the South Park program that had its references to Mohammad censored— has apparently announced that it is developing a new cartoon about Jesus Christ, the premise of which will be that God, preoccupied with playing video games, loses track of Jesus, who moves to New York and tries to “adjust to life in the big city.”

There is much that could be said about all this, but here are two quick predictions:

1) It will be far more blasphemous about Christianity than the Danish cartoons were about Islam.

2) There won’t be any riots over it.

Indeed. The explanation might be just cowardice, as Bottum suggests. That smoking car they found near Times Square last week was a reminder of what we're dealing with. But I'm afraid it's also that Comedy Central sees no irony in the disproportion.

After all, it's not just that Christianity is safer to mock, for reasons the mockers don't seem to appreciate. To the worldly mind, the claims of Christianity make it more mockable than its competitors. I am reminded of a song that came out some years ago: "What if God was One of Us?. The writer/singer, Joan Osborne, had obviously not got the message that he has long been one of us in the only way that matters. Why didn't she get it? Well, for a post-Christian culture, it isn't enough that God the Son was born in a stable to a poor couple and died violently at a rather young age, a failure by the world's standards. No, he would only be one of us if he turned up as some shlub on the city bus. If he did, we wouldn't have to feel bad about mocking and patronizing him like the Roman soldiers who tortured and executed him.

They say that the essence of humor is a sense of the discrepant. Comedy Central could live up to its title if they mocked the media elite, including themselves, for the very discrepancy they're all generating. But first they'd have to realize there is one. Apparently that requires a subtler sense of humor than they have.

Another "so Sixties" bit of progressivism

It's decades old now. You know the sort of thing I mean. Catholic grayheads swaying to 70s guitar music at dwindling Masses, trying to fill Call to Action conferences, and complaining bitterly about the conservative young fogies coming out of the seminaries. Or, just as pathetic, secular grayheads fretting that we could solve problems such as teenage pregnancy, STDs, and overpopulation if only we passed out enough condoms, solemnly reminding the bored recipients that "better safe than sorry." (I myself find condoms among the least sexy artifices of man; but hey, I'm well on the way to curmudgeonry anyway.) I mention overpopulation as an example because the aging progs haven't even caught on to the fact that it isn't a problem anymore—if indeed it ever was. The problem is the impending demographic winter that began in Europe, where the birth rate among the native stock is now well below replacement level. Russia and Japan are now in absolute population decline, and the problem of falling birth rates is now spreading inexorably around the world, including the US.

If you don't like reading stats, which are readily available, watch the film. But the stats from ideologically neutral sources are telling. A quick summary can be found here, where it says: "..more than 70 countries have (as of mid-2007) a total fertility rate of less than 2" births per woman. Most of those countries are developed countries, where replacement level is 2.1 births per woman. That was three years ago; it's only getting worse. Even China now has a birth rate of 1.75 due to its "one-child-per-family" (!) policy, which, given cultural prejudices, results in gendercide against girls, which feminists don't like to talk about, for reasons I leave to readers.

In all this, there is yet another lesson to be learned about the gulf between ideology and reality. When progs complain of overpopulation, urging that non-procreative sex, of whatever kind and between whatever partners, be the norm, we should ask ourselves whether they are aware of the trends but choose to deny them, or whether they are opposed to population increase only among poor people. For the countries with high birth rates are mostly the poorest countries. The explanatory choices, in other words, are denial and "classism."

One is tempted to prefer the former to the latter. For in general, stupidity is to be preferred to snobbery; and in this case, the former doesn't carry the added disadvantage of hypocrisy. And yet people like Margaret Sanger and Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn't bother concealing their wish that abortion be kept legal as a solution to poverty. When impoverished mothers can easily deny their children the right to live, we'll end up with fewer poor. Right? But that too is a form of denial wrought by ideology. There is no evidence whatsoever that an efficient way to reduce poverty is to try to reduce the number of babies born to poor mothers. But there is a lot of evidence that birth rates vary inversely with the mother's level of education. That is why in developed countries, where women markedly outnumber men among college students and have corresponding career prospects, we see almost catastrophically low birth rates.

Since I'm not a sociologist, I won't attempt a comprehensive explanation for the coming population implosion. What interests me more is why the religious and secular Left haven't caught on to this. I can think of only one explanation: for them, the right to sexual autonomy trumps any and all facts. E. Michael Jones, a classic intellectual crank, once argued that most modern thought can be explained by the desire to rationalize sexual license. I used to think he was just being cranky. Now I'm not so sure.

The suicide of the West: a proposition

That's the title of a book published by National Review co-founder James Burnham in 1964. I read it when I was in high school; and though it was primarily about the Cold War, the idea that anti-anti-Communism represented the hatred of left-wing intellectuals for their own, Western civilization stuck with me. Of course Communism eventually collapsed under the weight of its own irrationality; with my exquisite timing, I wrote a few modest pieces for NR just before that happened. But I now think Burnham was more prescient than even he realized.

With Communism all but gone as a viable system, the essence of hard-leftism has emerged as hatred of all that is necessary to foster and sustain a healthy, free society. The feminist branch of hard-leftism, with its disparagement of men in general and, in particular, of accomplished women who don't toe the leftist line, is all about destroying the family. If the statistics on divorce, single parenthood, and birth rates are any indication, it has had considerable success,. The economic branch of hard leftism is all about rewarding the feckless with money forced out of those who produce real wealth. The foreign-policy branch of hard leftism is all about appeasing our sworn enemies rather then fighting them implacably and defeating them. Such tendencies, if allowed to intensify, are incompatible with the survival of any civilization that harbors them, let alone Western civilization.

Why would the most politically and scientifically advanced civilization in history, one with Judaeo-Christian roots, do that to itself? The irrationality of it leads me to think that only a spiritual explanation will do. The spiritual vacuum left by secularism is being filled with Satan, who desires our destruction. It's that simple. He has his dupes on the hard right too, but they are thoroughly disreputable and hence aren't much cause for worry. The real problem is the hard-left dupes.

They oppose racism and sexism, all the while becoming reverse racists and sexists themselves. They champion "science" while ostracizing scientists who come to politically incorrect conclusions. They champion the little guy while insisting on leaving the littlest guys of all helpless before the violence of mothers who do not want them. They champion sexual autonomy, with "consent" the only moral criterion, while forging an ever-more intrusive nanny state in almost every other area. They uphold an abstract moral relativism while dogmatizing their own transient values as universal and self-evident. Such contradictions signify the confusion of hell itself, and they are becoming increasingly prevalent.

Barring forceful divine intervention, the suicide of the West is inevitable.

The politics of the charge of "politics"

The University of Notre Dame's intention to bestow, this weekend, an honorary Doctor of Laws on the most radically pro-abortion president in our country's history has taken the polarization in the American Catholic Church to a new level. On that much, I can agree with Peter Steinfels of the New York Times and the editors of America magazine. But a popular defense of ND that liberal Catholics have been offering uses an essentially ecclesiological argument that reeks of hypocrisy—a fact that itself suggests which pole is in firmer moral territory.

One night over drinks about twenty years ago, when he was editor of Commonweal, I debated Steinfels on the question of his support for Roe v. Wade. Following then-Governor Mario Cuomo, who had given a lengthy "pro-choice" speech at ND in 1984, Steinfels argued that abortion should not be outlawed so long as there was no social consensus for doing so. I pointed out that the question was moot so long as Roe was in place. For that decision took the abortion issue out of the hands of legislatures and elevated it to the status of a constitutional right, thereby making it impossible to limit abortion significantly by using the normal means of political suasion in a democratic society. I agreed that, as a purely practical matter, consensus first had to be forged by persuasion; but I argued that overturning Roe was a logical step toward doing precisely that. It made no sense to insist on consensus while, at the same time, keeping the issue out of the hands of the people. Of course Steinfels was unpersuaded. He insisted that the putative "right to privacy" trumped all merely political considerations, and that Roe could not be overturned without violating the Constitution. He then accused me of confusing a radical right-wing political agenda with the teaching of the Church. I was "playing politics" with my religion.

Reel forward seven or eight years. In his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II wrote as follows:

Abortion and euthanasia are thus crimes which no human law can claim to legitimize. There is no obligation in conscience to obey such laws; instead there is a grave and clear obligation to oppose them by conscientious objection. From the very beginnings of the Church, the apostolic preaching reminded Christians of their duty to obey legitimately constituted public authorities (cf. Rom 13:1-7; 1 Pet 2:13-14), but at the same time it firmly warned that "we must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29). In the Old Testament, precisely in regard to threats against life, we find a significant example of resistance to the unjust command of those in authority. After Pharaoh ordered the killing of all newborn males, the Hebrew midwives refused. "They did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children live" (Ex 1:17). But the ultimate reason for their action should be noted: "the midwives feared God" (ibid.). It is precisely from obedience to God—to whom alone is due that fear which is acknowledgment of his absolute sovereignty—that the strength and the courage to resist unjust human laws are born. It is the strength and the courage of those prepared even to be imprisoned or put to the sword, in the certainty that this is what makes for "the endurance and faith of the saints" (Rev 13:10). In the case of an intrinsically unjust law, such as a law permitting abortion or euthanasia, it is therefore never licit to obey it, or to "take part in a propaganda campaign in favour of such a law, or vote for it."

So, not only must Catholics oppose legitimizing abortion under civil law; they must not even obey any enactment that does so. Of course, the prog response was that it was now a Polish conservative, not just American conservatives, who were playing politics with religious principles.

It's taken the American bishops a while to absorb the papal message and actually lead on this issue; but they've gradually been doing so since EV. In 2004, soon after the controversy about whether John Kerry should receive the Eucharist, they issued a directive called "Catholics in Political Life" which included the following statement:

The Catholic community and Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles. They should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.

The boldfaced phrase is in the original. As the local ordinary pointed out when explaining why he would boycott the ceremony honoring Obama, this is the exactly the directive that ND's board and president have defied. Dozens of bishops have publicly said the same. But pointing that out is also denounced by the Catholic Left as using religion for political purposes. And that's what's supposed to be unduly "polarizing."

One wonders why the obvious questions are so rarely considered. If the Church's agenda on abortion is "political" in an objectionable sense, why is it not political in an objectionable sense to promote the Church's agenda on capital punishment, which she opposes but the vast majority of Americans favor? Why are we not supposed to wait for consensus before trying to have the death penalty abolished, even though SCOTUS has upheld its constitutionality? Or, why should Catholics have followed the Vatican in opposing the invasion of Iraq, but not in trying to outlaw abortion? Why should we oppose "domestic violence" against women (such violence against men is never mentioned) but not violence against the most innocent and vulnerable human persons of all: those in the womb of women who are their mothers? The only answer to such questions I can think of is painfully obvious: "pro-choice," liberal Catholics are convinced that the Church is right on issues where her position coincides with that of the political Left, but are not convinced the Church is right on issues where it does not.

That's what makes their charge against the Right of "playing politics" so hypocritical. Politics is exactly what they are engaged in: so much so, that they evaluate and apply the Church's social teachings selectively in terms of a set of values deriving from an essentially secular agenda. Of course the Catholic Right is sometimes guilty of that too. Beyond the death penalty and other violence-related issues, the Church has consistently taught that, in countries that can provide it, basic health care should be treated as a right rather than as a commodity. Many American Catholic conservatives reject that position, but I can find no Catholic defense for doing so. A Catholic can reasonably oppose government-administered health care as inefficient and iniquitous; but that's a question of means, not ends. Surely there are other, better means of ensuring that nobody has to go without a necessity of life just because they cannot pay for it. But for the most part, the hypocrisies of the Catholic Right at least have a basis in Catholic teaching itself.

The Church, including the present pope, has clearly distinguished between actions of a sort that are intrinsically evil, such as abortion and euthanasia, and acts which are merely wrong for the most part, such as war or capital punishment. It is therefore quite self-consistent, logically speaking, to oppose keeping the former legal but sometimes to support the latter. Of course, it is possible to be wrong about when the latter meet the conditions necessary for justifying them. And sometimes, being wrong in that sort of way can and ought to be attributed to political motives. But error of that sort is empirical: people who support this-or-that war, or capital punishment under such-and-such conditions, are sometimes wrong about the facts, perhaps because they find it convenient to delude themselves about the facts. But they needn't be and typically are not wrong about the principles of Catholic teaching. On the other hand, there is simply no credible way to claim that wanting to keep abortion and related evils legal is consistent with Catholic teaching. So there is no credible way for the Catholic Left to claim that they are not playing politics with issues on which, citing Church teaching, they oppose American law or actions. They are inconsistent in the sort of way that only a politically motivated position can be. Accordingly, the charge that the Catholic Right is "playing politics" on abortion is—well, playing politics.

For good sense on the ND-Obama issue, see the following:

• The keynote address of Archbishop Raymond Burke, Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura in Rome, at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast on May 8.
• The YouTube video of a talk by Fr. John Corapi, S.O.L.T. He's one of my favorite preachers.
• Joseph Bottum, editor of First Things, on "God and Obama at Notre Dame."

Cutting to the bone

So much has been happening lately in the spheres which interest me that I have hardly known where to begin writing. I'll just start with three of the most egregious events as the set-up act for the big one.

I'm amused by Homeland Security's classification of pro-life activists as "right-wing extremists" and of returning combat veterans as potential "terrorists." Only dogmatic liberals could view that as more than ideological boilerplate. But I'm sickened by Notre Dame's bestowing an honorary J.D. on a president who thinks that outlawing even partial-birth abortion is incompatible with what the Supreme Court has said the Constitution means. This is the newest low since The Vagina Monologues was allowed to be performed on campus for what used to be called Valentine's Day, a holiday whose politically-correct designation is now 'V-Day'. With Ralph McInerny retiring from the philosophy department after 54 years, I have even less use for the place. By all means read his little jeremiad Is Obama Worth a Mass? Indeed we know what Jesus said about salt which has lost its savor.

I'm actually less sickened by the hue and cry over the Pope's remarks about the perennial AIDS-condom issue. Every few years or so, the media broadcast the charge that the Vatican is guilty of mass murder for opposing the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV infection in Africa. Now even if condom use were generally effective for that purpose, it takes only a moment's reflection to expose the recurring charge as ludicrous. Surely anybody can figure out that the number of AIDS-infected people who take Catholic teaching seriously enough to avoid using condoms, but not seriously enough to avoid sex with uninfected partners, has got to be pretty close to nil. In any case, all the Pope said was that passing out condoms en masse is more likely to be part of the problem than of the solution. Even the research from Harvard agrees—much to its author's chagrin, I'm told. What is the freakin' problem here? It's not that hard to understand. People who believe in what was called, during the 60s and 70s, "the sexual revolution" can't imagine that abstinence is a more humane and effective prophylactic than latex. That's because they can't imagine truly voluntary abstinence at all. Thus, if somebody capable of sexual activity and attractive enough to have a partner is abstinent, that must be because some malign force—such as mental illness, a controlling paterfamilias, or a religious hierarchy—is coercing them to avoid sex. That view is a prejudice which explains a lot of other attitudes as well. The latest hue and cry about the Pope, and the outrage against the Harvard report, only confirms the liveliness of the prejudice. But I'm more amused than sickened. And I thank God the salt's savor is likely to increase in quarters such as in the Archdiocese of New York under the newly installed Timothy Dolan.

Yet all the nasty things happening in society and the Church come down, I believe, to a culpably ignorant repetition of the sin committed at the very dawn of humanity. And I can't help feeling that the day of judgment is at hand.

The bone I want to cut to is described in the following few lines from an otherwise pedestrian article on pastoral strategy by an earnest Paulist priest:

We have to use tools that respond to the criterion that most people, de facto, use for religion today (whether we like it or not) -- experience. What people see, feel and get involved with constitutes the criterion of faith today. Faith (as modern Americans construe it) is not some objective reality into which they feel they should fit; rather, faith is the way people choose to assemble their ideals, in accord with the force or thrust of those ideals.

Again, we may wish this was not so, but it is. Just look at the proliferation of so-called ''non denominational'' churches -- they are a Rorschach for the multiple kinds of expressions of faith we Americans keep inventing for ourselves. The criterion for all of this? Experience. ''This is what I (want to) feel or think.''

That, my friends, presents the basic spiritual problem from which all of America's ecclesial and social ills flow. I wonder whether the author knew that when he wrote those words. I rather doubt he did, but I hope he comes to see it's so.

Think more deeply for a moment about the sentence I've bolded. Now think of Eve in the Garden as the serpent slithers and glitters before her. He tells Eve that she will not die if she eats the fruit of the "tree of knowledge of good and evil"; instead he asserts that God made such a false threat so as to keep her from becoming like God, "knowing good and evil." Eve sees that the fruit is a delight the eyes and fit for gaining wisdom. She concludes that eating it would be good for her; thus, she believes the serpent and disbelieves God. And so "faith is no longer an objective reality" into which she feels she must "fit," namely the objective reality of God and his will. She eats the fruit and induces her spineless husband, who should have prevented her from doing so, to eat it too. Faith has now become "the way people choose to assemble their ideals, in accord with the force or thrust of those ideals." And indeed the couple don't die: not physically, not right away. But they see they are naked and cover themselves in shame. Meant to be one body, in complete harmony with God and each other, they have lost their innocence. Now they are something of a threat to each other, and they experience God as a threat to them both. They fear and hide from him who made them and provided for them. For they know they have disobeyed him. They have died spiritually, and they will soon learn what that means.

Although the names 'Adam' and 'Eve' are obviously mythical, and the literal time and place of the Fall impossible to discover by research, such has always been the condition of fallen humanity. It is the condition from which God the Son came to redeem us. Christendom used to know that. But Christendom no longer exists. So, we are forgetting what the Fall was and, instead, are elevating the serpent's original falsehood to the status of principle.

That is why SCOTUS said in 1992, and was believed almost without question when it repeated in 2003: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." That's exactly the right our first parents claimed for themselves. Satan would have us think that makes them heroes, and many who call themselves Christians agree with him. But their Fall is the root of our problems. Given freedom for love—love of God, of each other, of the rest of creation—the first couple grasped freedom from the guideposts of love. The world has been full of lies and murder ever since.

For our day and hour, the above is why Barack Obama can blithely say that the question of the fetus' humanity is "above my pay grade" as he awaits the opportunity to sign FOCA into law. That is why marriage has become, under civil law, the only important contract that can be broken unilaterally with impunity, even reward. Now that marriage is such a legal monster, more and more people think it possible, even necessary, to make it an absolute farce: to redefine marriage so as to make the sex of the spouses irrelevant. That conceit has a common cause with what explains why the birth rate is falling below replacement level in almost all "developed" countries. Freedom from real love is also why we think we may produce human beings in vitro while discarding many of them as useless. And I'm omitting here a lot of other, apparently unrelated evils that bother more people than the ones I've cited. It's all about the imperial self in each of us. But we don't see that because, like Adam and Eve, we'd rather blame those other imperial selves over there.

So, I don't just see original sin anymore. Original sin is a state we inherit, not an act we commit. It is the state of deprivation of that divine grace we were given primordially. That state has the effect of physical death for us all and spiritual death for those who are not in some degree of communion with the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church. But what I also see now is actual, collective repetition of the first sin. That is only to be expected of the world at large; but we see it even in the Church, in the form described by that good, "pastoral" Paulist priest. It's why "cafeteria Catholicism" is now the rule not the exception. It's why only a remnant will survive the next great chastisement spiritually intact. The Church's flesh will have been cut to the bone.