Is the London Times going soft on Catholicism?

Of late, the British media have taken a deserved shellacking for their biased, ill-informed treatment of the Catholic Church. The Times appears to be doing something about that.

Last Saturday, it published an article by Brian Davies entitled "Aquinas proves atheists are closer to God than they think". Fr. Davies is an English Dominican now teaching at Fordham; I once used one of his books as the main text for an undergraduate course on the "philosophy of God." His point is simple enough: in one sense, God does not exist; in another, God is all that truly exists.

God does not "exist" because he is not one existent among others, like an apple or a number. I would put the same point this way: it would be misleading to compile an inventory of all that exists while merely including God as one of the items. That would only be a list of what can be said to be, in the sense of the existential quantifier: "There is an x such that x is ____." Rather, God is the primary cause of all that actually exists. As such, God is Being; he is not a being. As Davies puts it:

Creatures are there, right enough, but, for Aquinas, their being is derived or dependent. All that they are and do is God’s work in them. They have no reality from themselves. Creatures are temporal, finite, and caused to exist, while God is none of these things. Aquinas puts all this by saying that God’s existing does not differ from his substance, that God, and only God, exists by nature, that God is “subsistent being” while everything else “has” being — has it as given to it. You can find a similar line of thinking coming from St Anselm of Canterbury. God, he declares, is “the being who exists in a strict and absolute sense” since with Him there is nothing temporal and nothing received.

Once God be thought of in that way, it can be readily seen that what most atheists take themselves to be denying when they deny that "God" exists is not God. They are quite right to deny that God "exists" in the sense in which apples or numbers do. You will not discover God the way you discover the price of apples today or even the way scientists have discovered dark matter. You will only discover him when you recognize the radical contingency of the world of existents.

Now there are atheists, unlike the "new atheists," who know that. The relevant atheists bolster their atheism by arguing that the world—i.e., the universe we know and any others that may have been causally related to it—just is not the sort of thing whose existence is derivative. As Bertrand Russell put it: the world is just there, and that's all. But that is a very difficult point to argue for. To get the argument going, you have to place certain strictures on concepts such as causality and evidence which make it impossible in principle to say that there is evidence the world has a cause not of the world. The debate then becomes one about whether the concepts involved in arguing that God exists in that sense are coherent and otherwise workable as concepts. The question almost always ends up being begged against the theist. So I say: well done, Fr. Davies.

The other good sign of the Times is its publication yesterday of an article by Catholic convert Dawn Eden entitled "Casual sex is a con: women just aren't like men." Single at 38, having been there and done that as a groupie and media professional, Eden is more credible than a priest or a minivan mom to the kind of people who most need to hear her message. I must admit, of course, that I discovered the same truth myself through my sins: most women are more interested in bonding than in the meretricious, mutual exploitation that is casual sex. Many women who end up engaging in the latter started down that road in the hope of the former. The distinct minority of women who both live the lifestyle of casual sex and are content with it, carrying on the way some single men do and more would if they could, tend to develop hard shells that make them unattractive as people. It took Dawn a while to figure that out and dislike what she had become; many of the Manhattanites among whom she moves still haven't figured out that the Sex and the City lifestyle is spiritually empty and destructive. But the mere fact that a bastion of secularism such as the London Times would print her story, and her arguments, is a sign that sex has not completely fried the brains of sophisticated urbanites.

Now if only the New York Times would follow suit. So far, the only reference to Eden's work I have found there occurs in an article about bloggers to be found in the "Fashion and Style" section:

Earnest and well intended, “The Thrill of the Chaste” may help conscience-stricken women rein in libido. But heedless reprobates may prefer to wait for the blook of Forksplit — a lusty, foul-mouthed blog by a randy young woman who is as confused as Ms. Eden by the dating game, but makes no secret that she finds “saying yes to a man” less of a struggle.

At least the article's author admits that chastity is a reasonable lifestyle option. But there's a long way to go.

I don't know whether the London Times is going soft on Catholicism or is just trying to silence the critics before resuming the usual sneers. But we should be encouraged that the criticism has had even a short-term effect. It's a sign of what could be accomplished with persistence. If the Davies and Eden articles are sops, they are sops of a kind we could have again. Well done, Auntie Times.

The five-bloggers-I'd-like-to-meet meme

Professor Scott Carson of An Examined Life has taken note of the fact that the web version of anything is not quite as real as the flesh-and-blood, incarnate version. He remarks:

Some folks spend a lot of time surfing the web. I know a few who spend more time surfing than interacting with their family. And living in a web-based world encourages us to think exclusively in our own way rather than in ways that are open to the interpretations of others.

Quite so. As a divorcé who does not live with his children, I do indeed spend more time, a lot more, surfing the Web than interacting with my family. And I am keenly aware of the peculiarly new form of autism that "living in a web-based world" can develop in people. Other than prayer, my primary connections with reality are two: my very ordinary job, in the course of which I interact with many people I wouldn't otherwise, and Communion and Liberation, where I have loving companions on the journey of faith. For me, blogging is just a way to utilize my gifts in God's service now that it's been long since I've been able to earn a living doing so. But even as part of the cybercommunity of Catholic blogdom, I feel the need for more a more "incarnate" community.

Like Scott, I've enjoyed my phone conversations with Fr. Al Kimel. But I'd love to meet him, and there are other Catholic bloggers I'd love to meet as well. Leaving out yours truly, whom he includes in his list, they are the same ones Scott lists. Substituting for me would be Owen of The Ochlophobist. He's a guy I'd love to have a beer with.

Without God, Gall is Permitted

Click the title for the article by publisher Sam Schulman, who alludes to Dostoievski's famous dictum: "If God is dead, all is permitted."

I have said rather little about "the new atheism" on this blog because, as Schulman says:

What is new about the new atheists? It's not their arguments. Spend as much time as you like with a pile of the recent anti-religion books, but you won't encounter a single point you didn't hear in your freshman dormitory. It's their tone that is novel. Belief, in their eyes, is not just misguided but contemptible, the product of provincial minds, the mark of people who need to be told how to think and how to vote--both of which, the new atheists assure us, they do in lockstep with the pope and Jerry Falwell.

Why bother rebutting arguments that have been rebutted a thousand times before, when it's obvious that one is dealing with the basest contempt? Mostly, believers just need to let this new crowd be; the best argument against what they're peddling is the way they peddle it. In that respect, they are unlike the 19th- and early-20th-century atheists, some of whom were charming and noble.

Give me Hume, Voltaire, Matthew Arnold, even George Bernard Shaw. Defending the faith from the likes of them was a worthy pleasure. The new atheists only say "that they are addressing believers. Rationalists all, can they believe that believers would be swayed by such contumely and condescension? They seem instead to be preaching to people exactly like themselves--a remarkably incurious elite."

Preaching to the choir is not limited to the clergy, and is no more interesting when the clerisy does it.

Turning water into wine

Today's Gospel is about what Jesus did at the wedding at Cana; the first reading is about God's relation as bridegroom to his bride, Israel. It's a good occasion to discuss, in the context of marriage, a topic about which there no longer even seems to be a common vocabulary in Christianity: how the natural and the supernatural are related to each other.

At the Offertory, as he pours a bit of water into the chalice containing wine, the priest prays: "By the mystery of this water and wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity." In a way, that sums the mysterium fidei that the faithful are invited to proclaim after the consecration of the sacred elements. God became human without ceasing to be divine, so that we could become divine without ceasing to be human. The sacraments are the ordinary means by which that is done in the life of the Church. As an efficacious sign of Christ's relationship with his Church, his people who fill out his Body, marriage is one of those sacraments. Jesus' miraculous transformation of water into wine at Cana is in turn a sign of that, among other things. But what, exactly, is it supposed to look like in the concrete?

In Ephesians 5, St. Paul gives us something of an answer. He says: "Husbands, love your wives as Christ loves the Church" and "Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord." It amazes me how long it has taken humanity, including Christians, to come to grips with that. Most people have never really wanted to do either, because both are deucedly difficult things to will to do even if one is so "in love" that one wants to do them. Having been married twice with the best of apparent intentions, and twice-divorced, I know I kidded myself about the extent of my own willingness to do so. Indeed, until the 19th century, the idea that love is the basis of marriage was considered optional at best, and in many circles that is once again the case. As the preacher of the papal household, Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, puts it:

This affirmation -- that matrimony is based on love -- seems to us to be discounted today. But that marriage should be based on love is something that has only been recognized for little over a century, and it is still not recognized everywhere.

For centuries and millenniums, marriage was a transaction between families, a way of providing for the conservation of a patrimony or a social obligation. The parents and the families were the protagonists, not the spouses, who often did not know each other until the day of the wedding.

Why does Cantalamessa says that love as the basis of matrimony is "discounted today"? Don't people get married because they love each other and want to share their lives? On occasion they do; and it's often believed that they do, especially by the couples themselves. But those occasions are the minority and always have been. For well-understood historical reasons, it took a long time in the West even for people develop the idea that a couple needed to be "in love" with each other in order to have reason enough to marry. But that is not always the case and, even when it is the case, it often does not remain the case. Save for a fortunate minority, spouses do not stay "in love" with each other throughout their marriages, and the challenge of real love often begins at precisely the point where one ceases to be in love. The sort of real love that is supposed to characterize marriage is willed, whether or not desired, and is willed all the more efficaciously precisely when it is not desired. Today's divorce rate indicates that it often is not willed at all and that many people don't even see its necessity. I don't think that such a lack makes contemporary marriage terribly different from the past, when marriage was more of a transaction than a complete, mutual gift of self in agape love, and was held together more by economic necessity and social sanction than by love in the relevant sense. The difference nowadays is that those factors have been steadily weakening. Most people who want to dump their spouses no longer face economic or social disaster for doing it; so, at least half of them go ahead and do it at some point. And many of those who do not go ahead with it still regret their choice of spouse, even though they remain prudent enough not to say so out loud.

I don't say these things to be cynical. I say them so as to point up, by contrast, what is actually involved in the sacrament of marriage in particular and indeed sacraments in general: the miraculous grace of the Lord. When a marriage is truly sacramental, what holds it together and makes it what it is meant to be is the grace of the Lord, which people cannot make happen but can only dispose themselves, by their prayer, attitudes, and actions, to receive. Only then does God turn the weak water of human nature into the wine of divine love, manifest in our actions and persons. And of course that is true of the Christian life in general. It is often said that marriage is not a 50-50 but a 100-100 proposition. So is the life of the intentional disciple: God does it all and we do it all—the latter precisely because of the former. That's synergy, folks.

Siris on development of doctrine

Brandon at Siris has graciously, and again at length, replied to my latest on DD, which was itself a reply to his previous.

He concludes:

...there are four features of development of doctrine that I think to which I think an adequate account must do justice: (1) richness; (2) confidelity; (3) creativity; (4) entelechy. I think that inferentialist accounts, of whatever kind, and for all their good, fall short on all four points. The alternative I've sketched here -- very sketchily! -- does better, I think, although it requires a vast amount of development. And perhaps that's as it should be.

I'm sure Newman would have agreed with that, and Brandon does indeed quote Newman in support of his points. Having recently reread Newman's essay on development myself, I entirely agree that the four features Brandon cites, and expounds on, are ones that an "adequate account" of DD must include and explain. But that implies the inadequacy of "inferentialist accounts" only if all such accounts be taken as intending a complete account of what actually goes on in DD. I admit that, for my own part, I have hitherto failed to make clear that I was not offering my account as that. The sort of account I gave only yields an intellectual template, as it were. It does not tell us that the actual process of DD consists in nothing but inference, nor is it meant to tell us that. Rather, it indicates in the most general terms that would be useful what it is about actual and genuine DD that connects that process, logically and conceptually, with the pertinent sources. That is necessary but of course not sufficient for an "adequate" account of what did and must occur. The features Brandon discusses help to fill out and apply that template. Thus, the kind of ampliative inference I posit as the norm, i.e., inference to the best explanation, must and does exhibit, in the concrete, the features Brandon discusses.

I eagerly await the further work in that vein which he has promised. He is a true man of letters, which I am not, and I can only benefit from pondering his account.

The sex-abuse scandal in the Church: five years on

Over the past two days, NPR aired a five-part report on the sex-abuse scandal to mark the five-year anniversary of its explosion from the epicenter as reported by the Boston Globe. Neither as a Catholic who followed the stories as they unfolded, nor as an abuse victim myself, did I hear any new revelations or ideas. What was new for me this weekend was a thought that emerged from my reflection on the NPR treatment.

The fundamental issue raised for people by the scandal is whether the sexual deviance and lack of accountability it betrayed is endemic to how the Church is run or is a passing, if intensely painful, phenomenon attributable to failures of faith, self-discipline, and moral fiber. I believe both are partly true, but neither gets at the whole truth.

I was once tempted to embrace the former answer in toto, as some victims and other Catholics have actually done, with the result that they are ex-Catholics. The most passionate spokesman for that answer is Richard Sipe, the ex-priest, researcher, and victims' advocate whose animus against the Church seems only to grow with time. Not that I find Sipe a particularly credible character: his research methodology is pretty shaky, and he clearly has reasons other than concern for the victims for hating the Church, which he equally clearly does. But his central thesis is worth considering. The Catholic Church is hierarchically organized; the seal of confession has often been operative in cases of clerical as well as lay miscreancy, and is reinforced by professional clubbiness; and among those who commit themselves to lifelong celibacy, a certain amount of severe psychosexual immaturity is only to be expected. Indeed, it should come as no surprise that a thousand years ago, when the most serious and successful attempt to date was being made to impose celibacy on the entire Roman Catholic priesthood, a later-canonized saint was openly railing against clerical "sodomites" preying on boys! Given the realities of both fallen nature and the Church hierarchy, I think we have to expect a certain amount of such abuse to recur from time to time, as painful as that thought is. Sometimes it will wax; at other times, when the general revulsion has had its effect, it will wane.

But it hardly follows that the problem is the nature of the Church herself. Every citation I've seen from neutral sources indicates that the incidence of such abuse is similar in other churches and arguably higher in the public schools. That does not of course excuse the unconscionably high incidence in the Catholic Church; in fact, I accept the double standard that is often applied to find the Catholic priesthood wanting. Sexual abuse committed by Catholic priests is more newsworthy, and less excusable in the aggregate, than abuse committed by relatives, clergy of other religious bodies, or teachers in public schools, because Catholic priests have been ontically configured by ordination to be "other Christs" in a way in which the Catholic laity, Protestant clergy, and of course non-Christians are not. Accordingly, priests have an even greater responsibility to be Christ for others than other Christians do, and their failures to be that are all the less excusable. Be that as it may, however, the incidence of the relevant sorts of abuse in other sectors indicates that the problem cannot be explained primarily by the nature of the Catholic Church. There are times when human beings abuse the Church's hierarchical structure to foster and/or hide the problem; but of course that very structure is part of a broader constitution that helps to equip the Church's members to overcome the flesh. Corruptio optimi pessima. That is exactly why the double standard is justified. So the critics can't have it both ways: what justifies the double standard, and condemns the sin all the more, is the very same set of realities that make the Catholic Church, as constituted, the Church of Christ. Anybody who can understand Judas can understand that, and anybody who understands humanity can understand Judas.

Nevertheless, to say that the problem is a passing one would be a wretched copout. As I've implied, it's always been with us and probably always will be. But its waxing during the decades just before and after the Second Vatican Council indicated extremely serious, underlying problems among Catholic clergy at the time. Another symptom of such problems was the massive exodus from priesthood and vowed religious life in the five to ten years following the Council; still another is the persistent connection even today between theological heterodoxy and homosexuality among priests. In ways I haven't shrunk from pointing out before on this blog, that and related problems are still with us. In the long run, all Catholics must acknowledge that the hierarchy of the Church, as much as the laity, is semper reformanda. The hierarchs themselves must be the first and most zealous in acting accordingly. So far, I haven't seen enough of that at the episcopal level.

The free-will treadmill

Way back when I was in graduate school (daughter rolls eyes here), discussion of the perennial topic of free will vs. determinism was shifting more and more into the realm of what had recently been dubbed "cognitive science." The assumption seemed to be that the progress of neurobiology and related disciplines would be relevant to determining whether there is such a thing as free will. Of course the deck was rigged from the start: what counted as progress was progress in scientific explanation and prediction of human decision-making, which at best meant delimiting the scope of free will, and was sometimes hoped to mean eliminating the idea altogether. The whole project struck me as rather question-begging. I learn that they're still at it, and still begging the question.

In a succinct piece last week for the First Things blog, assistant editor John Rose summed up and gently criticized a pair of New York Times articles on the topic. I noticed that the scientists quoted seemed unable to make anything of a process that would be neither deterministic nor random: intelligible, even rational, but not necessitated. Accordingly, mental processes whose outcomes we can't predict with current methods must be one of two things: determined, with some of the necessitating causes opaque to us at present, or simply random. Neither would be free will as classically understood and experienced. The notion that we might choose to act for reasons, functioning as non-necessitating causes that do not stand in a strict identity-relation with neural firings we can observe and map, seems beyond their ken. Indeed such a notion lies outside the scope of what is now understood to be natural science. But what that shows at most is that, if there is such a thing as free will, it isn't scientifically knowable. To get to the conclusion that there is no free will, you need to add the premise that what isn't scientifically knowable does not exist to be known. That premise is known as "scientism."

Of course God can't be known scientifically either. In the final analysis, scientism is a form of atheism, whose real motivations are often something else. As Rose says: "Expect many similar articles in the coming years as new neurological research is published—much of it aimed, as the Times piece is, at exciting atheists into a belief that they’re closing in on a damning piece of evidence against religion." I hope they get bored. They're on a treadmill, really: running a race going nowhere on a machine of their own devising.

The latest development in the development discussion

Brandon, the philosopher who blogs at Siris, has posted a lengthy and thoughtful commentary on the discussion between me, Scott Carson of An Examined Life, and Zippy Catholic on the nature of the development of doctrine. He provides all the necessary links, and I find his entire discussion illuminating. Here I shall respond only to the points where I believe clarification or criticism on my part is in order.

1. He writes:

...it's perhaps not so clear what the discussants mean by 'doctrine' when they talk about 'development of doctrine'. A doctrine, after all, is just something taught; but necessarily there are different modes or levels of things taught, differentiated by how they are taught, and what the properties of the teaching are. For instance, a doctrine like the Chalcedonian definition is rather different from a doctrine like the limbo of children, and necessarily so; they are both things taught, but what is being done in teaching them is radically different. I think any discussion of development of doctrine has to make very clear what sort of doctrines are being discussed...

I think I can speak for both Scott and Zippy when I say that the doctrines whose development has been discussed, at least so far, are those whose development issues in dogmas. At least, all the examples have been of such doctrines. Nevertheless, I did not stipulate as much for two reasons.

First, I did not use the phrase 'development of dogma' because it raises too many hackles. In my experience, what too many people take one to be naming by that phrase is a process of development undergone by dogmas precisely as dogmas. That is not what I mean at all. Dogmas, which are "articulations" of the faith, can be "explicated" or "elucidated"; but in the standard case a dogma is a development only in the sense that it is the term, rather than the subject, of a process of development. Once a given doctrine is defined as a dogma, it is irreformable: not in the sense that the formulation in question could not be improved in principle, or even integrated into a broader whole, but in the sense that what the formulation affirms may never be negated. Yet, to many people, the suggestion that dogmas develop implies denying that dogmas are irreformable. Since we we all want to forestall such a reaction, the phrase 'development of dogma' has been left to the side for rhetorical purposes. But that is not to deny that doctrines other than dogmas develop; nor is it to imply that dogmas can never be better understood than they were when first formulated.

Second, developed doctrines that became dogmas have occasioned the most controversy. That is because dogmas are meant to be irreformable formulations of aspects of the depositum fidei—i.e., articles of faith—not merely theologoumena that some pope or council happens to want to make unquestionable. Yet it is precisely the objection of the Orthodox to certain distinctively Catholics dogmas, such as the Immaculate Conception, that they purport to make what are only allowable theologoumena into dogmas. In the case of papal infallibility, it is said that a demonstrably false theological opinion has been made a dogma. So, for apologetical purposes, it's worth focusing our initial discussion of development on dogmas that some do not recognize as genuine developments, in Newman's sense of the term 'genuine'.

2. Brandon writes:

While the dispute has been framed in terms of the nature of development, it seems to me that this is not quite the right way to frame it. After all, the nature of the development is purely historical, and to discover it you simply look at how the doctrines did, in fact, develop it. Rather, what the discussion has been looking at is the nature of anticipation or intimation in development of doctrine....what distinguishes a development from other changes is that what we have before internally anticipates or intimates what we have after. The change is not imposed from without, and the relevance between before and after is not merely a common substrate....This link of relevance between the before and the after in a case of development I will call, for lack of a better term, intimacy.

However, even intimacy is not enough to make a development in the strict sense, because there is another form of change involving intimacy (that therefore is development in a broad sense of the term) that is not development in the strict sense. This is deterioration, or decay, or corruption. In deterioration or decay, the before internally anticipates the after; but the change is not progressive. It is, so to speak, the development of the dying rather than the development of the living.

It is noteworthy that virtually the whole of Newman's discussion in An Essay on the Development of Doctrine is devoted to this distinction between development and deterioration. The reason is not hard to find; Newman is not so much interested in development of doctrine for its own sake, as for the light it sheds on an important question: Why is it important and worthwhile to consider the history of the Church from its origin to the present time in order to clarify current matters of dispute?...It is for this reason that Newman denotes so much time and space to the seven notes of development: they provide "tests" or signs (albeit "of varying cogency, independence, and application") that help us decided when something is development or decay. (It is also why it doesn't matter to Newman's discussion which development of doctrine we have in mind.)

This is quite right, and a real advance on our earlier discussion. The point of discussing DD is not to establish, in general terms, that there is such a thing; that is a matter of historical fact. The point is to learn, to the extent possible in theory, to distinguish between instances of "genuine" DD and corruptions or "deterioration." In genuine DD, the relation between the relevant normative sources and the developed dogma is, as Brandon, says, on of "intimacy": more like how an oak tree is related to an acorn than how a chair is related to the stump of wood it's made out of.

Yet the question remains how to understand the normative sources in such a way that the later developments being defended as genuine can be shown to bear such a relation of intimacy to those sources. I can't speak for Scott and Zippy here, but I don't think that's just a matter of figuring out what sorts of inferences—deductive or inductive—we can make directly from texts. The normative sources are far broader than texts, and both Brandon and I have given instances of them. Beyond indicative statements, many are practices (e.g., the liturgy), instructions (e.g., moral precepts), metaphors (e.g., God the "Father" and "Son"), experiences (say, of miracles or private revelations), or images (e.g., the Cross).

3. Here's where I think Brandon doesn't get me quite right. He writes:

The discussion here, however, seems to me to be very different; the focus is on the nature of the intimacy between the beginning and the end of legitimate development, or, to put it in other terms, the question is: given that B is the result of A, what constraints on A's anticipation of B make A's growth into B a development rather than a deterioration of some sort.

Michael's basic idea is that the process of understanding divine revelation recapitulates (in at least a general way) the unfolding of divine revelation. The unfolding of divine revelation, however, is ampliative -- new revelation does not merely clarify or work out the implications of the previous content, it (also) adds new content. His standing example is the way in which Isaiah's prophecy about an almah, became understood as about a parthenos, and this as suggesting a virgin birth. However, Scott has argued that the unfolding can't be ampliative: nothing can be contained in the conclusions that is not contained in the premises collectively. He argues that the Isaiah 7:14 example shows not an inference at all but an interpretation; and interpretation is common to ampliative and non-ampliative inferences alike....

Where I think a problem arises with both accounts is that they both end up talking about development of doctrine as if it were an inference. Clearly it is not; development of doctrine is a dialogue involving many different people, and what is more, it is an extremely complicated dialogue involving hundreds of thousands of inferences of many different kinds relating to each other in many different ways. This is not a trivial point; you can have both ampliative and non-ampliative inferences reaching the same conclusion, for the obvious reason that whether the inferences in question are ampliative or non-ampliative has nothing to do with the conclusions reached but only with the principles with which you started, which may be different in different contexts in which the conclusion in question is important. So the intimacy involved in actual development of doctrine can't simply be one or the other, but must be characterized in a different way; it must be as much richer than inference as the reasoning of a wild, living intellect is richer than paper logic.

First, I believe that what I'm doing is "different" from what Newman did only in the sense that I am trying to supply a bit more analytical rigor to the process of evaluating developments according to Newman's seven notes. I am not seeking to give an account of how the developments actually took place historically; they took place pretty much as Brandon says. I seek, rather, to say what form of reasoning would justify a given development, which would also and as such trace the intellectually fruitful path of the collective activities Brandon describes. That's why I've suggested that the way to see a development as genuine is, standardly, to see it as ampliative inference. As inference to the best explanation of the sources, it is a kind of abduction and thus a kind of induction; and it is just such a process that the "wild, living intellect" of the Church uses to arrive at genuine developments yielding articles of faith.

4. Brandon concludes:

Of course, what is tricky here is how we should characterize it if we are not going to characterize it inferentially. I hope to say more about my (somewhat embryonic) ideas about that in some future post.

As I eagerly await that post, I shall point out that we must all be careful to distinguish between describing what actually went on in various processes of development, which was indeed far wider and richer than logical inference, and describing what it was about the various processes that enabled them to yield genuine developments. I suggest that the latter is the kind of inference I've already described.

Who says ecclesiology is just theology?

I've just read that "[a] federal judge in Kentucky has ruled that sex-abuse plaintiffs can proceed with a lawsuit seeking damages from the Vatican." That ruling was made on the ground that "the American bishops were acting as agents or employees of the Holy See when they allowed known abusers to remain in clerical ministry. In his ruling the judge reported that lawyers for the Church had declined to contest that claim. If the Holy See can demonstrate that US bishops are not Vatican employees, he said, the ruling could be reconsidered."

So far, it appears that the plaintiffs' lawyers have successfully argued that, for legal purposes, the Catholic Church is Catholic Church, Inc. This is very bad news for the Vatican. On such an ecclesiology, the bishops are "employees" or "agents" of the Holy See, so that the latter becomes legally liable for the actions or omissions of the former—just as a foreign bank would be liable for fraud committed in the United States by its agents therein. So, in order to defend itself in this suit, lawyers for the Holy See (or perhaps just the U.S. bishops' lawyers, on appeal), would have to argue that the bishops are not "employees" or "agents" of the Holy See. The only way they could plausibly do that, it seems to me, is to present an understanding of Catholic ecclesiology superior to the one implicit in the case being made by the plaintiffs' lawyers.

I think they can and should. But whether they do or not, a lot of money and a dangerous precedent for international relations now seem to be riding on a theological debate conducted before a secular judge. Do any of our lawyers out there have anything to say about that?

Two promising new blogs

AtonementOnline, by Fr. Christopher Phillips, a Catholic of the Anglican Use (hat tip to Fr. Al Kimel), and Cathedra Unitatis, by an Orthodox exploring Catholicism.

Living mystery

Diogenes at Off the Record, a blogging Catholic priest whose favored tone is mordant sarcasm, sometimes manages to combine that with profundity in a way I find irresistible. I invite readers savor this instance with me.

Commenting on the latest book by Donald Cozzens, a prog priest whose caginess impressed me when I read an earlier book of his, Diogenes first says:

Fr. Donald Cozzens puts me in mind of one of those divers who takes higher and higher bounces on the springboard until he has everybody's attention, but then kills his jump, walks back off the board and robes up, still dry. As an author, he's penned a series of Prolegomena to Daring Stances, in each of which we are threatened with imminent candor. And spared. Recently Cozzens allowed himself to be interviewed about his latest book, Freeing Celibacy. No, he isn't calling for an end to mandatory celibacy. He says it needs to be "reviewed."

Anybody who follows these things knows what "reviewed" really means. But Cozzens isn't the sort to just come out and say it. He accomplishes more, or thinks he does, by seeming prudent, moderate, sagacious. So, in a promotional interview he says things like: "Many, if not most, of the inactive priests would be serving in our parishes if it were not for the law of celibacy." And this: "Celibacy used to go with priesthood as fish went with Fridays. Over the past 40 to 50 years, I would argue that more and more Catholics are questioning the need to link celibacy with priesthood." This sort of thing is not exactly unique. It is one symptom of a more general spiritual problem in the Catholic priesthood that is instantly recognizable in Diogenes's description:

We're all familiar with Cozzens's attitude, though perhaps most of us meet it in the celebrant at Mass. It's not as if they're obviously bored or perfunctory, but somehow they communicate the feeling that the real business takes place somewhere else. They seem bewildered, not by the meaning of Calvary exactly, but that the faithful would find it important. They don't understand genuflections or silences or prayers said kneeling. They're embarrassed by awe. Their breeziness at the altar as well as the velcro on their vestments shows that, for them, the whole golgotha/sacrifice/wine-into-blood thing is No Big Deal.

Their priesthood means something different to them than it does, say, to the faithful that show up at Mass during the week, whose eyes tend to focus on host and chalice. It's a priesthood in which the gift shop and the altar are simply two ways of reaching out to spiritual needs. It's a priesthood in which there's no damnation from which souls need to be rescued, a priesthood in which acceptance of self is more urgent than contrition. Small wonder if, for Cozzens's generation of priests, asceticism in general -- and celibacy in particular -- is hard to make sense of.

I don't know about you, but I can't tell you how many times, in my four-and-a-half decades as an active Catholic, I have encountered just that attitude in Catholic priests at Masses, at campus ministries, at academic conferences, and even in the confessional. It wasn't just there either.

As an adolescent in the early 1970s who had been abused by a priest as a pubescent, I gradually rediscovered and embraced my Catholic faith through prayer, reading, and a great hunger for authenticity. I was led to want to give my life to God, and I did so more in spite of than because of the clergy I knew. Yet the half-dozen or so apparently untainted priests I approached about the priesthood, over a three-to-four year period, seemed indifferent at best. They never quite said I didn't have a vocation; it was more that they seemed unable to understand why I would be interested. An attractive, intelligent young fellow like me could get married and become a well-earning professional, after all; why was I talking about spending my life in a way that would entail sacrificing such things? Was I trying to avoid real relationships, real work? I was urged to get my college degree; then to do post-graduate work of my choice; then to shed any debts; then to do the psych evals; then...well, you get the picture. Each time I left the meetings, and them, slightly bewildered. It wasn't that their concerns were off-base, exactly. Many were legitimate. But they didn't seem to give any weight to the real reasons I was interested in the priesthood. Only one even found them worth acknowledging.

With a nascent adult faith, I believed that Catholicism is true. Accordingly, I not only believed but felt that the truths and values which it conveys, and which are visibly embodied in the ministry of the sacramental priesthood, are, quite objectively, the most important truths and values in the world. That was why I wanted to be a priest. I couldn't think of anywhere near as worthwhile a way to spend my life. Of course I had a problem with celibacy. Not with the discipline itself, which I admired and wished to emulate; but like many young men who have considered the priesthood—including some priests—I doubted my ability to live it. I looked for a priest who would help me with that issue, perhaps by being or pointing me to a spiritual director who could aid my discernment and teach me sound spiritual disciplines. None did, or even showed much interest in doing so. So eventually I concluded that I did not have a vocation to the priesthood. I never lost my interest, but I could find no other way to explain why I wasn't getting anywhere with it. In my mid-20s, I acted accordingly and got married for the first time.

Looking back, I now believe my conclusion was premature. Whatever my own personal issues may have been, there was a problem with the priests I had approached, a problem that Diogenes describes in general terms and that I believe accounts in large measure for the dearth of vocations we saw in the last quarter of the 20th century. The sex-abuse scandal was only the most extreme manifestation of it. The problem was, and in some quarters still is, that the men in question did not have a lively enough faith to fully appreciate what they were and live accordingly.

Diogenes concludes his post as follows:

For a radically contrary view, compare the following remark of Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard (Archbishop of Paris 1940-1949), from a retreat he gave to his own clergy, published in a book called Priests Among Men:

To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist.

Suppose the Church took the advice of her Cozzenses and, having "reviewed" the discipline in question, made the change to optional priestly celibacy. To whom would the change appear as eminently sensible? What would the new witnesses be witnesses to?

The questions virtually answer themselves, of course. The reasons why indicate that the attitude Cardinal Suhard described should be the attitude of every baptized Christian adult, not just of every ordained priest. Each of us share, in some small measure, in the priesthood of Christ. I'm not the priest I should be yet: to most people who do not know me well or at all, my life makes perfect sense as that of a broke divorcé. But I strive for more, in prayer and in penance. My life is such that I don't need a special ascetical regimen to do that. And I trust that, to some who do know me well, my life would not make sense if God did not exist. Like others who want to be intentional disicples, and thus share in Christ's priesthood, I can be a living mystery by living the mystery of the Truth revealed to us through the Church. That is my goal. If the Cozzens of the world were as committed to that goal as their own vocations call for, there would be no clamor for making celibacy optional—and no shortage of worthy priests in the Catholic Church.

Excuses are running out: amniotic stem cells

It has been known for some time that adult stem cells have proven to be more successful therapeutically than embryonic stem cells. Far more, in fact. The excuse usually given for government funding of research into the latter is that, if only scientists could extract lots more stem cells from embryos, thus killing the embryos, the usefulness of ESC therapy could, and probably would, improve dramatically. Of course, only if you're a utilitarian at heart would you think that such a result would solve the moral problem; but then, most Americans are indeed utilitarians at heart, else we wouldn't have legal abortion. Yet now the usual excuse for embryonic stem-cell research is weakening.

It appears that stem cells gleaned from the amniotic fluid of the placenta have great potential. Since obtaining them involves no killing, the U.S. bishops' pro-life spokesman and the Vatican have acclaimed the new avenue of research. Of course the drumbeat for ESCR remains. Some scientists say that amniotic stem-cells aren't a "one-size-fits-all" shoe, so that there can and must remain a place for ESCR. That allows the political momentum for ESCR, renewed by Speaker of the House and "Catholic" grandmother Nancy Pelosi, to continue. To any objective observer, however, it seems that the excuses for forcing all of us to fund ESCR are starting run out. But the excuse that persists will remain powerful despite its objective weakness.

The momentum for ESCR funding is about the same thing as what motivates much other legislation: butt-covering. Most politicians, including nearly all Democratic ones, don't want to be blamed for the deaths of visible people that, it is thought, could be avoided if only the right laws, with the right funding level, were passed. The same goes for other issues, such as domestic violence. Congress recently renewed the Violence against Women Act, with its considerable price tag and outrageously sexist assumptions, so that it wouldn't have to deal with women who get angry whenever a woman is badly injured or killed by a male significant other. Men of course enjoy no similar protection even under state laws, which are mostly gender-neutral as written but far from gender-neutral as applied. There is no political cost to pretending that male victims of domestic violence don't matter, because the near-universal assumption is that men can "take it" on what is falsely imagined are the rare occasions when such violence occurs. Neither is there any political cost, in most jurisdictions, to pretending that embryos don't matter. With legal abortion, embryos are killed every day so that their mothers' lives won't become as difficult as they would be if they were allowed to develop to term and be born. That is now taken as a constitutional entitlement by the majority of women; one moral excuse given for that legal status quo is that unwanted pre-born children are better off dead. More important, however, is that if efforts to make most abortions illegal ever were to succeed temporarily, an army, mostly of women, would descend on state capitals and even Washington screaming bloody murder about deaths from back-alley abortions. All branches of government know that, which is why, despite considerable and growing pro-life sentiment, abortion will not be substantially limited by law anytime soon. And then there's in vitro fertilization and pre-natal genetic "testing." Because much-desired babies result from using those techniques, most politicians care no more than most parents do that their price includes the destruction of many embryos. And so nothing will be done about such practices, save to find ways of funding them at everybody's expense. Politically, there's far less of a downside to the killing of embryos for the benefit of others than there would be to forbidding it. That, after all, is why it isn't forbidden.

Long-term, the only solution to such problems is spiritual. Respect for the sanctity of life must grow to the point that there's a greater political cost to permitting, even funding, such things than to forbidding or discouraging them. That seems to be happening among young people regarding abortion, and may eventually happen regarding ESCR if present scientific trends continue. But the basic problem is the prevailing assumption that it's up to us to decide, for reasons that seem good to us, who among the most vulnerable should live and who should die. I'm not optimistic that such an assumption of godhood will be overturned. And if it is not, our society will eventually self-destruct from hubris.

Reblossified

Christopher Blosser has informed me that I've "misread" him. Apparently, my previous post gave him the impression that I believe he approves the Catholic hierarchy's development of pacifism and abolitionism into what John Allen calls "practical absolutes." That shows I failed to make clear by my language what was clear to me: that he accepts only Allen's analysis of where things have been headed. He has revised the last part of is post accordingly:

Bracketing for a moment the specific case of the war in Iraq, I think Dr. Johnson has demonstrated that there has been intellectual transition in contemporary Church thought on the interpretation of just war teaching which stands in sharp contrast to 'classical' Catholic tradition. More often than not, the Vatican, while registering its practical judgement on empirical matters regarding the war and the death penalty, has not adequately clarified or conveyed its present position in a way that reconciles it to past teaching.

According to John Allen, Jr.:

Indications from the Vatican and from a wide swath of Catholic officialdom suggest that in practice, it's unlikely there will ever again be a war (defined as the initiation of hostilities without international warrant) or an execution the church does not officially oppose.

At the level of application, at least, it would seem the debate is almost over, and the abolitionists are winning.

A conclusion that I find personally troubling, in light of the widespread confusion it has wrought and its tenuous relationship with -- echoing Cardinal Dulles -- "two millenia of Catholic thought."

Oh dear. I feel like the perennial student complaining that he's been given yet another addition to the ever-lengthening reading list he'll never get caught up with. (I often feel that way anyway, but I do manage to forget sometimes.) Only now I confront not a reading but a writing list. Once again, it's about the development of doctrine.

As I keep finding occasion to point out, and as Christopher knows, I did a multi-part series on that topic last year at Pontifications that Fr. Kimel has condensed into a little treatise with the series' title: Development and Negation. Within the constraints of the format, my aim was to show that on a range of topics where it has been claimed that the Church has reversed or negated past doctrines taught definitively, the claim is false. (I do not call that claim a "charge" or a "criticism," because some who make the claim applaud the Church for doing what they claim.) Many besides Christopher among my vast readership are already familiar with that effort; I left out several topics that did not strike me as particularly difficult or controversial, such as slavery and original sin as personal guilt. Given Christopher's not-uncommon belief that present teaching on capital punishment and war stand in "sharp contrast" to that of the past, it looks like it's time to add those topics to the list. I'll ask Fr. Al if he's willing to let me augment the series over there.

It should go without saying that, on the present as on the earlier topics, I do not believe the Church has negated any previously taught doctrine that satisfies her criteria for having been infallibly taught by the ordinary magisterium. As I suggested in my previous post, I believe that what the magisterium has been doing of late is propounding a "consistent ethic of life" not as an allegedly "seamless garment," which it isn't, conceptually, but as an "evangelical program" to promote respect for the sanctity of life. Even so, what Allen terms the "practical absolutes" are not quite so absolute, at least in the case of war. As for capital punishment, even if the hierarchy's present stance does render a practical absolute, that is not inconsistent with past definitive teaching but only renders more stringent the definition of the sort of social harm that capital punishment, even on the older tradition, is supposedly necessary to prevent.

That move, it seems to me, does not so much elaborate a precept of the natural law as prescribe an attitude that Christians as such should strive to develop. It's an effort to focus our concern less on human justice, which is always imperfect, and more on being vehicles of divine love. In the world as it is, of course, there is a limit to how much the state can do that without abdicating its responsibilities. But that limit has not been reached in the United States or anywhere else.

Blossified

Over at Against the Grain, Christopher Blosser, son of Dr. Phil Blosser and rescuer of this blog when I first despaired of its layout—a dubious honor now belonging to Joshua Goforth—has posted an intriguing review article on the state of the questions of war and capital punishment in the Church. As he does me the honor of mentioning me in the same breath as John Allen, the only Catholic journalist I always learn by reading, I thought I should do Christopher the courtesty of admitting that, and explaining why, he's raised a question in my mind that I am not happy to confront.

Taking a cue from Allen, he argues that the Church has turned her teaching on war and capital punishment into "practical" as distinct from "ontic" absolutes. Examples of ontic absolutes would include the prohibition on the direct, voluntary killing of innocents (e.g., abortion) and the direct, voluntary interruption of the generative process (i.e., contraception). Such actions are of kinds that are always and intrinsically wrong irrespective of motive, circumstance, further intent, or consequences. A practical absolute, on the other hand, would be the full proscription of action-kinds that are not always and intrinsically wrong as a matter of principle, but are such that the conditions necessary for their liceity are never recognized as being satisfied. That appears, says Allen, to be where the magisterium is now about war and capital punishment. While acknowledging in theory that such actions can be licit, in practice the Catholic hierarchy never seems to find an instance of either of which they approve. Thus we now face, from the ordinary magisterium, "functional" pacifism about war and abolitionism about capital punishment.

Allen and Blosser are surely correct about capital punishment, though I'm not so sure about war. John Paul II was quite explicit that he was "not a pacifist," presumably because World War II, which so marked his youth, remained fresh in his mind. Benedict XVI, who as a teen had been pressed into service on the Eastern Front by the Wehrmacht, would presumably agree. And under both popes, I have found some willingness in the Vatican to entertain the idea of "humanitarian" military intervention, such as in Kosovo in the 90s or Darfur now, so long as such an action is supported by the "international community" through the UN. But offensive military action to unseat odious regimes (Gulf War II), or even to repel their aggressions against their neighbors (Gulf War I), appears to be out of favor at the very least.

These are developments, and they are developments I cannot see as binding on Catholics. Of course I am well aware of, and can hardly disapprove, what motivates them: a desire for a "consistent" ethic of life. If we're going to oppose abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem-cell research, and even IVF on the ground that they kill, then it seems natural, almost inevitable, that we take the same attitude toward any other sort of action that kills. And surely it cannot be gainsaid that due respect for the sanctity of life entails a presumption against war and capital punishment. But the fact remains that there is neither logical inconsistency nor doctrinal selectivity in approving some cases of war and capital punishment while always opposing, as intrinsic evils, the other kinds of action I cited. Accordingly, the "consistent ethic of life" is not so much a theoretical necessity as an evangelical program: the Church wants humanity to unlearn the habit of employing lethal violence as a means of solving problems. And well she should. But at what cost?

I have no great difficulty, in theory, with functional abolitionism about capital punishment. The fate of whole societies in no way hinges on whether this or that heinous criminal is executed or not. If certain people are outraged that some such criminals are not executed, then all I can say, for the reason already given, is that they have a habit to unlearn. And as I've already noted, the Vatican's keeping the door ajar for war as humanitarian intervention reassures me. But I am nonetheless uneasy. World War II kept the world from being Nazified; and that was an undertaking all popes since have admitted as just, while rightly rejecting as immoral the targeting of civilians. But how much and what kind of a threat does an aggressor have to pose today before one can approve of military action? As I've suggested lately in the case of capital punishment, the answer to that depends on empirical judgments that can sometimes be reasonably disputed. So, while the Vatican may be turning pacifism into a virtual practical absolute, that development depends on ways of looking at the world that do not enjoy the prerogative of infallibility. Even when they happen to be right, the empirical judgments involved are necessarily matters of opinion. Hence there can be no requirement-in-conscience on Catholics to believe they are always right, any more than 19th-century Catholics could have been similarly required to accept Pius IX's thunderous condemnations of "liberal" regimes and the loss of the papal states.

What makes me uneasy about that result is not so much its content as the polemical handicap it incurs. Many Catholics who have no problem accepting the "practical absolutes" of pacifism and abolitionism, and who indeed seem to regard them as more than just matters of opinion, often have a very serious problem with ontic absolutes about, say, sexual behavior. In that respect, they are in a weaker position theologically than the "neocons" they disdain. But they can and do cover their polemical flank by tu quoque-ing the neocons about war and capital punishment, thus deflecting the charge of doctrinal selectivity from where it really is justified. Overcoming that is wearisome work; and so long as the Vatican carries on as it does about war and capital punishment, it is work that isn't going to end.

Oscar Wilde and the Vatican

The current tempest-in-a-teapot about that is best quelled by Wilde's own words: "The Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone. For respectable people, the Anglican Church will do."

Hat tip to Mark Shea.

Almost-Archbishop Wielgus: same tune, different lyrics

I rarely miss an opportunity to excoriate the U.S. bishops for collective, if not always individual, hypocrisy. Most of what disturbs me is motivated by worldliness: an inordinate desire to protect positions and keep money flowing, leading to coverups that are invariably blown and other moral compromises—such as those about birth control for the laity—that speak louder to people than words. I used to think, however, that certain sectors of the Church were far less tinged by moral compromise. A few indeed are. But the Polish Church, so long taken as a beacon of strength and vitality, is apparently not one of them.

By now, most Catholics know that Stanislaw Wielgus, appointed Archbishop of Warsaw by Pope Benedict XVI little more than a month ago, was forced to resign when it was revealed that he had once "collaborated" with the security services under the Communist regime. You can read the story and the background in last Friday's column by the ever-reliable John Allen of NCR. Scandal-mongers are, naturally, most interested in knowing what the Pope knew about Wielgus and when he knew it; it would appear that there was no excuse for his not knowing, if indeed he didn't know in time. Perhaps he was in denial, relying on the character testimony of his late predecessor or that pope's longtime personal secretary, now Archbishop of Krakow. The affair is certainly an embarassment. But that too shall pass. What interests me far more is the fact that Wielgus was far from unique among Communist-era Polish clergy in collaborating for the sake of securing coveted privileges. The environment was quite different from that of the United States, but the moral failing was of the same kind that I so often criticize in the U.S. bishops. To frame it as a sound bite: pandering for perks.

Such of course is hardly new in Church history. One might even say that Judas was the first and most egregious instance of it. The Church has always seen betrayal from within, even at the highest levels, and always will until the Parousia. My disappointment about it stems not from any imagined novelty thereof, or any naïvete about partially regenerate human nature, but from my impatience with the obstacle it poses to what so desperately needs doing: evangelizing the culture. No matter how many sound, well-reasoned, and high-sounding documents exhort the laity to do what needs doing, it won't be done sustainably with so many worldly prelates and clergy.

Mutilating Ashley: from parenthood to pet ownership

Diogenes at Off the Record has some biting commentary about the case, and a touching photo, of Ashley Peters, the mentally disabled nine-year-old whose parents have had various surgeries done to prevent her from becoming more difficult to care for as she grows older. Understandable though their motives may be, what her parents have done is mutilate a child for their own future convenience. Not that they would care, but the CCC (§2296) condemns that. Is this still another disturbing precedent for the future, or just an anomaly?

I hope the latter and resign myself to the former.

The question really is: to be or not to be?

Over at Glory to God For All Things, Orthodox priest Stephen Freeman has a terrific post entitled Resting in God. Starting with a poem by George Herbert, one of my favorite poets, Fr. Freeman interweaves several themes like the skilled preacher he is. The one that struck me most is that "the world," meaning the once-Christian world, is "weary." Thus:

There is a weariness of a world which no longer rejoices in the birth of children, only of a child, who, alone, will bear the brunt of all a family’s hopes, if hopes there be. But now our world shrinks, as Malthusian fears triumph and children are heard less and less. And with the divorce comes the blessing, “At least they had no children.”

Children are a marvelous gift of God. My parish is beginning to flourish with children and pregnant women. It is a noise I had almost forgotten as my own children have slowly grown into quiet, thinking, mostly adults. But in Western Country after Western Country, birthrates continue to shrink. Excuses such as overpopulation and the like come easily when the truth is that children “cost too much” and they’re “ever so much bother.” Surely it cannot be that the post-Christian nations of the world are so good that they have birth-controlled themselves out of existence and yet that is the claim....

John Paul II once spoke of the “culture of death” when he described the West. We’re not so much the culture of death as the culture that isn’t living. Sure, we kill plenty of people and would kill many more if only electorates would let us. Fewer elderly and fewer unborn would somehow make things better. There would be “less suffering.” But the goodness that afflicts us is the goodness that bears no fruit. Sex that has no purpose - wealth with nothing to buy and no one to buy it for.

Some are writing today of a “clash of civilizations,” but that would presume that there are at least two civilizations involved. Ours is weary, deeply weary. We can only pray that it draws us to God’s breast and not to the yawning emptiness that we create for ourselves.

Quite so, and it sounds the same existential theme that the Pope did in his review of 2006:

The Visit to Valencia, Spain, was under the banner of the theme of marriage and the family. It was beautiful to listen, before the people assembled from all continents, to the testimonies of couples -- blessed by a numerous throng of children -- who introduced themselves to us and spoke of their respective journeys in the Sacrament of Marriage and in their large families.

They did not hide the fact that they have also had difficult days, that they have had to pass through periods of crisis. Yet, precisely through the effort of supporting one another day by day, precisely through accepting one another ever anew in the crucible of daily trials, living and suffering to the full their initial "yes", precisely on this Gospel path of "losing oneself", they had matured, rediscovered themselves and become happy. Their "yes" to one another in the patience of the journey and in the strength of the Sacrament with which Christ had bound them together, had become a great "yes" to themselves, their children, to God the Creator and to the Redeemer, Jesus Christ. Thus, from the witness of these families a wave of joy reached us, not a superficial and scant gaiety that is all too soon dispelled, but a joy that developed also in suffering, a joy that reaches down to the depths and truly redeems man.

Before these families with their children, before these families in which the generations hold hands and the future is present, the problem of Europe, which it seems no longer wants to have children, penetrated my soul. To foreigners this Europe seems to be tired, indeed, it seems to be wishing to take its leave of history. Why are things like this? This is the great question. The answers are undoubtedly very complex. Before seeking these answers, it is only right to thank the many married couples in our Europe who still say "yes" to children today and accept the trials that this entails: social and financial problems, as well as worries and struggles, day after day; the dedication required to give children access to the path towards the future. In mentioning these difficulties, perhaps the reasons also become clearer why for many the risk of having children appears too great.

A child needs loving attention. This means that we must give children some of our time, the time of our life. But precisely this "raw material" of life -- time -- seems to be ever scarcer. The time we have available barely suffices for our own lives; how could we surrender it, give it to someone else? To have time and to give time - this is for us a very concrete way to learn to give oneself, to lose oneself in order to find oneself.

In addition to this problem comes the difficult calculation: what rules should we apply to ensure that the child follows the right path and in so doing, how should we respect his or her freedom? The problem has also become very difficult because we are no longer sure of the norms to transmit; because we no longer know what the correct use of freedom is, what is the correct way to live, what is morally correct and what instead is inadmissible.

The modern spirit has lost its bearings, and this lack of bearings prevents us from being indicators of the right way to others. Indeed, the problem goes even deeper. Contemporary man is insecure about the future. Is it permissible to send someone into this uncertain future? In short, is it a good thing to be a person? This deep lack of self assurance -- plus the wish to have one's whole life for oneself -- is perhaps the deepest reason why the risk of having children appears to many to be almost unsustainable. In fact, we can transmit life in a responsible way only if we are able to pass on something more than mere biological life, and that is, a meaning that prevails even in the crises of history to come and a certainty in the hope that is stronger than the clouds that obscure the future.

Unless we learn anew the foundations of life - unless we discover in a new way the certainty of faith -- it will be less and less possible for us to entrust to others the gift of life and the task of an unknown future.

The question for Europe, and for other countries where the birth rate among the native population is below replacement level, is simple: is our life, our civilization, worth passing on? The question has really become: to be or not to be? It is no longer just drama, as in Hamlet; it is no longer the preserve of bright, tortured adolescents and of philosophers safe in their tenured chairs. It concerns all of us, and we answer it by the concrete choices we make.

As of now, the existential question seems to be getting answered largely in the negative. I find that astonishing. At a time of unprecedented progress in technology, increase in wealth, and political freedom, people apparently would rather disappear than believe and live by what the Church, for two millennia, has proposed as "the foundations of life." The tragic irony of that is the most powerful bit of evidence now available in favor of what the Church proposes.

Theophany and the darkness

On second thought, it might not be so bad that Epiphany has become a moveable feast which, this year in the Latin Church, runs smack into the Baptism of the Lord celebrated today. In Orthodoxy, the feast of Theophany effectively combines both the first public "manifestation" of Jesus at his birth and the second at his baptism in the Jordan. Thus Theophany signifies the beginning of God's public, definitive, and complete Revelation precisely in its beauty. That is the primary meaning of both Epiphany and the Baptism of the Lord. And it is in contrast with that beauty that the faithlessness of so many American Catholics in public life seems so ugly.

The new Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has already made her agenda clear. She describes herself as a "Catholic grandmother" and has already received the Eucharist from Archbishop Wuerl of Washington. Yet what is near the top of her agenda? Easing federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, which President Bush, a Protestant, successfully vetoed early last year. It is also well-known that she supports Roe v Wade and gay marriage. In all that, she is in harmony with the majority of those 155 members of the House who call themselves Catholics. I call them CINOs: Catholics in name only.

This is a sign of darkness in the bosom of the Church. Like many Catholics, Pelosi supports those aspects of Catholic social teaching which are popular among Democrats and opposes those which are not. It is clear where her primarily loyalties lie, and they are not to the truth preserved and taught by the Church. She supports the teaching of the Church only to the extent that it conforms to ideas developed on other grounds, ideas that bear a striking resemblance to those of the secular Left. And her bishops do not impose any ecclesiastical discipline as the price of such infidelity. Is it any wonder why the Church in this country is so confused and divided? The followers do not follow and the leaders do not lead. The reasons for that are easy to explain. But the explanation does not come close to a justification.

At Jesus' baptism, the voice of his and our Father could be heard saying: "This is my beloved Son. Listen to him." Pelosi and her ilk are not listening to the voice of the Church on basic moral questions about which she has made herself undeniably clear. But "he who hears you hears me." Therefore, they are not listening to Christ. Why, then, give them that sacrament which signifies intimate unity with him? Do Wuerl and his colleagues believe that doing so might bring about a unity which exists in name only? If so, they are rendering their own stated guidelines effectively nugatory. As in the case of the sex-abuse guidelines, they do not impose on themselves the norms they prescribe for others. The light and beauty of Theophany exposes such hypocrisy for the ugliness it is.

Epiphany: light amid the darkness

It is one of the perversities of contemporary Catholicism that far more American Catholics are celebrating the Baptism of the Lord today than Epiphany. January 6 is the latter's ancient and traditional date, and the feast has long been a bigger deal in Orthodoxy than Catholicism. Of late it's gotten to be an even smaller deal for Catholics. Most of those attending Mass today will have availed themselves of the Saturday evening "vigil Mass" for the Baptism of the Lord tomorrow—not the Mass for Epiphany, which today comes only in the morning when Mass attendance is the sparsest of all the days of the week. At least I managed to bestir myself to attend the Vespers for Epiphany at Belmont Abbey. I was even alert enough to get most of the chant notes right. But I'm not proud that I forgot all about Mass in the morning, when I slept in to get over the remnants of my cold.

A few years ago, the U.S. bishops moved Epiphany to the nearest Sunday to January 6, so that Catholics in our highly mobile society would not be burdened by betaking themselves to Mass during the Christmas season any more than absolutely, positively necessary. Most Catholics, after all, seem to agree with the merchants that Christmas ends on December 25; I suppose the bishops' thinking was that, if you can neither beat 'em nor join 'em, you can at least make a concession to those sedentary folk who are still recovering from "the holiday season." So now the Sunday for Epiphany gives way to the Baptism of the Lord when the celebration of the former on a Sunday would push the latter Sunday past January 10 or so. O tempora, O mores.

What I see in this trend is the dimming of the light. According to Scripture and Tradition, three "wise men" from the East—quite possibly Chaldea (Iraq) or Persia (Iran)—were the first Gentiles to lay eyes on the Messiah, God-become-man. They were not deterred from doing him homage, and offering him expensive if symbolic gifts, by the lowly circumstances of his birth and by King Herod's grisly reputation for protecting his power at all costs. They had, and acted on, more faith than most Jews had. Of course that was taken by the early Church not only as the occasion of Christ's first "manifestation" or "epiphany" to the world, but as a sign of what was to come several generations after Jesus' birth: the "Gentilization" of the Church. "His own received him not," and so God's promise to Abraham of countless descendants was fulfilled in the churches of the Gentiles. That is more relevant today than in many centuries past because today, people of faith are a smaller minority in the West than they've been since the fall of the Roman Empire. The true disciples of Christ are like the three wise men, drawn by the light to what seems unimpressive, even superstitious, to the majority. But instead of using Epiphany to emphasize the themes of light in darkness and majesty in humility, we are steadily sandwiching it into oblivion.

Kyrie, eleison.