Is the truth too dangerous?

One of my favorite movie lines is Jack Nicholson's, in the person of his character Colonel Jessup in A Few Good Men: "You can't handle the truth!" That's true of most of us at one time or another. It might even be true of most of us most of the time. There's only so much truth we can handle, and it's not close to all the truth—at least when the topic is ourselves. I suspect that that fact underlies a theological misconception which, in turn, motivates a pastoral error more common than is generally realized.

Following St. Alfonso Liguori, most priests have been taught that three conditions on a given act must obtain in order for the act to count as a "mortal sin": grave matter, full knowledge, and full consent. 'Grave matter' refers to the objective moral quality of the act: a wrongful act counts as grave matter just in case it is intrinsically and thus objectively wrong, whether or not the sinner knows that. What counts as grave matter is typically easy to identify given the teaching of the Church and the wisdom of the race. Full knowledge is clear knowledge that the matter is grave; full consent is the uncoerced choice to perform the act in light of full knowledge. Sounds reasonable; and rightly understood, it is. But there is a difficulty.

Some theologians have held that full consent is rarely given to acts known by the agent to constitute grave matter. The argument goes roughly like this. If and when one knows the matter to be grave, then one knows the best reason not to do the corresponding deed; people do not desire what they know to be evil, but only what they believe, rightly or wrongly, to be good; so it seems likely that, when they do something of a sort they know to be objectively wrong, they are doing so in virtue of some influence on the will which diminishes their freedom and thus precludes full consent. Hence mortal sin is rare. Arguments like that motivate such theories as that of the "fundamental option," according to which mortal sin occurs not so much with the commission of this or that objectively wrong act, but only with a clear and explicit choice against God—a choice that might manifest itself in such acts, but not itself be constituted by the sorts of act they are in themselves.

The philosophical difficulty with the fundamental-option theory (FOT) is fairly obvious and decisive. If the more traditional view is correct, then any act which is intrinsically and thus objectively wrong just is a sort of act which, if done with full knowledge and consent, entails the exercise of a fundamental option against God. That is precisely why, in order to avoid begging the question, FOT advocates need the premise that full consent to such acts is rarely given. But if full consent is rarely given, inasmuch as people do not desire what they know to be evil, then a fundamental option against God is probably the least likely candidate for an option freely undertaken. Nothing could be more irrational than standing before God, knowing him and his will according to classical theism, and saying "No" to him. So if the moral psychology on which FOT relies were correct, then the fundamental option against God seems too irrational to elicit full consent, and hence cannot be said to be exercised at all. This is why, in my experience, most FO theorists end up as universalists. Perhaps many were so from the start. They just can't believe that, at the end of the day, there are people who defy God freely and knowingly. Hell is too irrational a choice for anybody to be held accountable for making it. There must be some exculpating factor that would allow escape.

Since, as John Paul II pointed out, FOT is incompatible with the definitive teaching of the Church, we need not linger over it further. My concern is with the premise that full consent to what is known to be grave matter is rarely given. One logical consequence of such a premise is that, the better one knows the correct moral theology, the less capable one is of mortal sin. That consequence is manifestly untrue, and I trust I don't need to cite examples. Sound moral theology can help arm one against sin, and sometimes does help; but it's by no means enough; what counts for more is prayer and character, which can be facilitated by moral theology but can also develop without it. That's a logical reductio of the premise that full consent is rarely given to what's known to be grave matter. And then there's experience to cite.

There's a crucial fact usually overlooked by those who uncritically apply the Liguorian conditions: people can be and sometimes are culpable for lacking full knowledge of the wrongfulness of what they do, or propose to do. Countless are the cases when people can and ought to know better than they do, but they don't because at some level they have chosen not to. Whole societies can be swept up in that: e.g., Germany in the late 1930s, or Rwanda in the mid-90s. Thus, even when the Liguorian conditions for full knowledge and consent are lacking, there can be and are cases where full consent has been culpably withheld from the task of acquiring, or maintaining, full knowledge. Thus the sinner can be just as guilty as they would be if the conditions were clearly met at the time the obvious sin is actually committed. Rationalizations abound, and by no means are they all involuntary.

In my observation, however, many confessors and moral theologians fail to notice or give credence to that fact. They don't believe it worth asking whether the sinner can be guilty at some operative level below the one on which the sinner consciously operates at the time the sin is committed. Or, if it does occur to them to ask such a thing, they are reluctant to bring it up with the sinner. This phenomenon is very common in the area of sexual sin. A lot of Catholics fornicate and contracept without believing such things are wrong; some do so while having had every opportunity to learn the objective truth, which they prefer to rationalize away as a matter of private opinion. Faced with that, some confessors see nothing to be gained by insisting on the truth, even by presenting arguments for it. For in many such cases, the process by which lust commands the will, and with it the intellect, seems too far advanced to allow for true repentance in light of full knowledge. That is why, as I said in a post earlier this week, some priests fear raising people to a level of knowledge that would make them more culpable for rejecting the truth than they would be otherwise. Better to leave such folks ignorant while hoping that they learn something in the school of hard knocks. For the time being, they just can't handle the truth.

Of course there are many other reasons for soft-pedaling, if not altogether ignoring, the full truth. Truth that can't be handled is unpopular; those who press such truths usually get into trouble. Priests like that often get into trouble with their local chancery, and soon find their hopes for desirable assignments quashed. As for laymen, I can't tell you how many times I've been dismissed as a neurotic, or as one dead before his time, for choosing celibacy as a spiritual path after two divorces, even though I'm not required to make that choice. Most of the people I deal with day-to-day assume that I ought to fornicate, because I can—if only before I marry for a third time, cavalierly expecting hope to triumph over experience. Many of the people who make that assumption are, I'm ashamed to admit, Catholics. All I can say after rolling my eyes is that we live in a society that has lost its moorings about sex, and that there's more of society in the Church than one would like to see.

Personally, I'd feel much better about life if I had one-thousandth the opportunity for the seminary that I have for fornication. That the ratio is even less auspicious than that is a truth I can't quite handle yet.

How much can one get away with disbelieving?

It's a relief to see that the one serious critique (so far) of my previous post on Luke 13: 24-30 comes from Scott Carson, a man I greatly respect as a Catholic and a philosopher, and whom I can thus engage as somebody with whom I share the same basic belief-commitments. With that understood, I don't think he'll mind my pointing out that his criticisms of my position are very similar to those I've encountered before—mostly from non-Catholics—and that my replies are accordingly similar to the ones I've made before.

First, Scott says [emphasis added]:

I think there's much to agree with in Mike's post--for example, I agree that some Catholics accepting or rejecting certain Church teachings appears to be more a matter of convenience than anything else, and it also seems to be true to say that religious belief has become something of a pro forma matter for some. But taking note of such social phenomena is, I think, a dangerous background for the interpretation of passages such as the one on offer, which was clearly aimed at Jews who assumed that adherence to the letter of the law was a sufficient condition for the virtue of piety.

It's worth noting that I had already conceded that "[o]n an obvious, historical level, Jesus seems to be speaking about certain Jews of his day...Not a few Jews of Jesus' day rejected him despite having eaten and drunk in his company and heard him teach in the streets. And Jesus duly warns them." But I know of no exegetical evidence that, in the passage at issue, Jesus was addressing primarily those Jews who thought "adherence to the letter of the Law" sufficed for "the virtue of piety." He was referring to those who, by how they lived, would be rejecting his message; the two classes overlapped, but were by no means coextensive; and it is at the very least possible that many members of the Church are to be found in that latter class. Indeed, when we read Scripture as addressed to the Church—which is what the four Gospels are, among other things—we must go beyond the obvious, historical level even as we acknowledge its meaning as the "literal" sense.

Second, Scott says:

It seems to me that there is often a danger, in attempting to explicate passages such as this Gospel or other passages having to do with "getting into heaven" or "avoiding hell", of treading too closely to what amounts to a kind of spiritual utilitarianism. It seems that analyses such as the one Mike offers make out heaven as a kind of reward for good behavior, hell a kind of punishment for bad, when in fact it seems to me that a more sophisticated analysis would see both in terms of standing in a certain sort of relationship with God, that is, a state in which a particular soul can be more or less in communion with God.

If I understand him rightly, I entirely concur with Scott that heaven and hell should be understood primarily as ways of speaking about how a person will ultimately stand in relation to God. Indeed, the passage of the Gospel on which I had been meditating, along with several related passages elsewhere in the Gospels, includes a number of extended metaphors on Jesus' part. In that vein I treat "getting to heaven" is a metaphor for finding oneself, after death, in a definitive state of loving communion with God; by the same token, I treat "going to hell" is a metaphor for finding oneself, after death, in a definitive state of rejection of God. Hell is for people who prefer it to living on God's terms; heaven is for those who prefer God's mercy and love to their own sins. But like the former, the latter preference is no mere velleity; it is a firm orientation of the will that requires, among other things, repentance. Yet it is not exactly easy to repent of actions, or attitudes, that one fails to see as wrong. Hence, knowing the relevant right from wrong is rather important for coming into and remaining in communion with God—or, if one prefers the metaphor, "getting to heaven." After all, "if you love me, you will keep my commandments"; we can't love well if we don't know what love requires and what love excludes. So the questions then become: what are the relevant commandments, and how important is knowing them?

If we read Luke 13: 24-30 as addressed to the Church, then believers know the relevant right from wrong in two ways: reason and revelation. Reason inclines us to know the natural and thus universal law inscribed in the hearts of all; revelation, as conveyed to us primarily through Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium of the Church, tells us all the rest we need to know of the eternal will of God for us. To the extent one knows the relevant precepts of reason and revelation, one is accountable for living by them. Since, as sinners, we cannot live by them on our own, we need the grace of God won for us by Jesus Christ. But in order to be duly empowered by grace to live as we are called to, we must admit not only the need for grace but also what grace is needed for. If a believer voluntarily rejects some precept of the natural law or divine revelation, then in that respect they are not admitting what grace is needed for, and hence are unlikely to be empowered to live well in that respect. It's not just that the more demanding the precept, the less able we are to observe it on our own power; people being what we are, the more demanding the precept the more likely we are to find reason to exempt ourselves from it. To the extent we exempt ourselves from it, we reject the divine authority with which it is given to us, and thus love God the less. That is why acceptance of the entire yoke of God's love is a necessary condition for finding it light. Conversely, the less we love God, the less in communion with him we are, and the more burdensome we find his yoke.

That, to my mind, is the most common spiritual danger today among believers. It has not always been so, of course: there have been some periods and quarters in the Church when overscrupulosity posed a greater danger than indifference or selectivity. And one can always find such individuals in any period. But I don't think it can be seriously suggested that overscrupulosity is the greater danger today. The greater dangers are indifference and, worse, a rationalizing selectivity. And that is what I felt the need to warn about.

Yet Scott says [emphasis added]:

I think it is also too common, at least in certain quarters, to use passages such as the narrow gate passage to frighten or even coerce those more-or-less believers into "accepting" things that they may not be quite ready to absorb fully into their hearts. I'm not sure what that kind of acceptance really amounts to in the end, and as long as we're approaching the matter in such a utilitarian way I'm not so sure I see the utility of scaring people into "belief" by threatening them with hellfire. For one thing, it reeks of a variety of fundamentalism that is particularly distasteful, the kind that walks around wearing placards that read "God hates fags".

I find that rather odd. St. Paul says [emphasis added]:

Do you not know that the unjust will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators nor idolaters nor adulterers nor boy prostitutes nor sodomites nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God.

Is this a "particularly distasteful" form of "fundamentalism," no better than that exhibited by people "wearing placards that read God hates fags?" Is it really incompatible with Jesus' message of love? St. Paul, after all, was the apostle keenest to stress that it is by grace alone, not by our own laughably puny merits, that we are saved; and he was always urging Christians to love one another. That much understood, I think Scott would agree that the message here is that those who voluntarily persist in serious sin will not be saved. And that is because such persistence is incompatible with bearing the light, easy yoke of Jesus: the yoke of true love of God and neighbor. Basing myself on that message, my point has been that people who refuse to recognize this or that kind of serious sin as serious sin are putting themselves in grave jeopardy. They cannot repent of what they don't recognize as sin, and hence they cannot receive the grace that is both required for and entailed by repentance. Thus, they could well be refusing the grace needed to enter by the narrow gate and putting themselves on the wide road to perdition. I know so because I have done so in my own life, and I do not predict that I never will again.

Scott's concern is for people who are "not quite ready to absorb" this or that difficult precept "into their hearts." He seems to think I'm being unduly harsh on them. But I believe he's failing to acknowledge a key distinction, and failure to observe it can be disastrous in a pastoral context. Since I can't talk about everybody in a "pastoral context," I shall speak only of Catholics.

Some Catholics who don't accept this or that definitive moral teaching of the Church—call it 'DMT' for short—are nonetheless sincere in their desire to follow Christ through his Church and to grow spiritually. In such a Catholic, failure to accept DMT can be due to any one or more involuntary factors. Perhaps nobody has ever explained it to them. Perhaps the spirituality of the person who did explain it to them was repulsively toxic. Or it might just be that they haven't yet learned to love enough to know, in their heart, just how T expresses and calls for the sort of love Jesus taught and exemplified. I agree with Scott that threatening such people with hellfire is typically useless and often counterproductive; the solution in such cases is more learning, both intellectual and spiritual. But that's not the kind of Catholic for whom my warning is meant. My warning is meant for two other kinds of Catholic.

One kind is the sophisticated cleric or theologian who produces finely wrought rationalizations for rejecting DMT despite having been given every tool and reason for knowing better. Such a person sets themselves up as part of a magisterium opposed to the Magisterium. It is just such people for whom the classic formula "let him be anathema" (Galatians 1:9) is meant. They are heretics; if unrepentant, they will be severely judged. And they need to hear that in one way or another.

The other kind is the Catholic who, though not a heretic in the above sense, is perfectly content with being deceived by heretics. Unlike the first, sincere sort of Catholic, they are not well disposed enough to learn what they need to in order to accept DMT. They think they'll get away with disbelieving DMT, and perhaps much else. They think they're perfectly fine as they are, thank you very much, and they don't need a bunch of sex-starved old men in the Vatican to tell them otherwise. Well, they aren't and they do. And sometimes they need a good jolt to learn that—the kind that Jesus delivered in the passage we've been discussing, and the kind that I've received more than once in my own life.

The line between assurance and presumption

Today's Gospel passage in the normative rite of the Latin Church is what got me thinking about yesterday's topic, about heretics and "trusters of heretics." Specifically:

Strive to enter through the narrow gate, for many, I tell you, will attempt to enter but will not be strong enough.

After the master of the house has arisen and locked the door, then will you stand outside knocking and saying, 'Lord, open the door for us.' He will say to you in reply, 'I do not know where you are from.' And you will say, 'We ate and drank in your company and you taught in our streets.' Then he will say to you, 'I do not know where (you) are from. Depart from me, all you evildoers!'

And there will be wailing and grinding of teeth when you see Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God and you yourselves cast out.

This and other passages pretty much rule out asserting universal salvation, i.e., that everybody will make it to heaven. To be sure, it is not formally heretical to allow for the possibility of universal salvation; in a relatively trivial sense, that possibility holds; for its holding is logically compatible with what has been irreformably taught by the Church. Since Christ's Passion is sufficient for all, everybody can make it to heaven. But I don't think Scripture and Tradition are hospitable to the idea that everybody actually does make it to heaven. It seems much more likely, given Jesus' language in particular, that some people will be damned. (For a good overview of this topic, see Cardinal Dulles' article "The Population of Hell.") But what's most interesting to me is the sub-population the Holy Spirit seems to have in mind in the present passage.

On an obvious, historical level, Jesus seems to be speaking about certain Jews of his day. Assuming he himself is the "master of the house," he has himself saying someday to certain people in the parable "I don't know where you come from," banishing them permanently from the household of God they want to enter. Not a few Jews of Jesus' day rejected him despite having eaten and drunk in his company and heard him teach in the streets. And Jesus duly warns them. But it's never that simple. The Lord's words apply as much to the future, to his Church, the new Israel, as to those present when he walked the earth. It is quite conceivable that some who are baptized, who are raised in the true Faith, who go to church and take communion often, will find themselves being told at the end "I don't know where you're from. Depart, evildoers!" Some people who are formally in the Church, the household of God, are not followers of Christ in their hearts, despite claiming to be and having a velleity, as distinct from a will, to do so. And they show that by how they live.

I think that phenonomenon is at least as common today as it's ever been. Legion is the number of people who claim to be Christian, of whatever variety, but who live lives indistinguishable from that of your average unbeliever. Legion are the Catholics who claim to believe what the Church teaches, and might actually do so up to a point, but only so long as it doesn't cost them much beyond a fin in the collection basket. For such Catholics, religion only goes so far; it becomes a different matter when following the Church's teachings on, say, social justice and/or birth control will cost us dearly. Then we come up with all the arguments we can—if we can be bothered with arguments—that such teachings are only matters of opinion, and therefore optional, and therefore safely ignored. Keeping religion out of the boardroom and the bedroom, after all, is so much more mature and realistic; it would be irresponsible, if not actually sick, to get too rigid about these things; and so on. We've all heard it before.

Such are the lives and attitudes of the people I think Jesus is advising to "strive to enter by the narrow gate." Actually, none of us are strong enough to do so; we should take that as a given. But if we don't even strive to do so, under the power of grace, then the grace that is always on offer won't "take." What's sufficient objectively for salvation, namely, what God has done for us in Jesus Christ, will not be enough subjectively. Many so-called believers fail to observe that distinction. When the failure is culpable, they cross the line between the assurance of salvation and the sin of presumption.

Those who sincerely put their faith and trust in Jesus Christ will indeed be saved. But there's a much misunderstanding of what that kind of assurance means. Among both Protestants and Catholics (I cannot speak knowledgeably about Orthodox), it is very common to assume that if you more-or-less believe and are a more-or-less tolerable human being, you will be saved in the end. As a result, many of us have little spiritual life to speak of; the effort and the self-abnegation hardly seem worth it if, without them, you can still make it through that door before the Master closes it. Yet Jesus' words supply no justification for that approach to life. The question we really need to ask ourselves is not so much where we are as what direction we're headed in. "Many of the first shall be last, and many of the last shall be first." If we think where we are is somehow good enough, then we're not headed in the right direction. And the longer we postpone a change in direction, the harder it gets to make the change. Some of us will probably find, in the end, that we have presumed too much for too long, and that it is now too late.

Heretics and Trusters of Heretics

Brandon at Siris has commented on a valid and important distinction made by St. Augustine. I want here to explain both why the distinction is important and at what point it ceases to matter.

Augustine says:

If....a heretic and a man trusting heretics seemed to me one and the same, I should judge it my duty to remain silent both in tongue and pen in this matter. But now, whereas there is a very great difference between these two: forasmuch as he, in my opinion, is an heretic, who, for the sake of some temporal advantage, and chiefly for the sake of his own glory and pre-eminence, either gives birth to, or follows, false and new opinions; but he, who trusts men of this kind, is a man deceived by a certain imagination of truth and piety.

It is safe to say that nowadays, and perhaps even back then, the majority of Catholics "trust" heretics, and pretty much for the reason Augustine gives: not because they recognize them to be heretics, but because they are "deceived." Hosts of ordinary Catholics uncritically glean opinions from people such as Marianne Williamson, Deepak Chopra, Dan Brown, Elaine Pagels, and even Joseph Girzone, to name just a few. With the possible exception of Brown, those people are plausible and, in their own several ways, attractive. Girzone is a retired priest whose novels give us a Jesus many of us prefer; that Jesus is plausible because he's enough like the One and Only to be reassuring but not so much as to be threatening. I've even seen Williamson up close: she's a knockout; as a healthy male, I want to believe her even when I can't. I understand the appeal of such people, most of whom have made a fortune peddling their ideas. But that's rather the point. To borrow a phrase from Rupert Murdoch, an unabashed man of the world whom I admire as such, what it's basically all about is "giving the people what they want." There's a huge market for this stuff, and many Catholics prefer it to what they get, or perceive they get, at church.

The problem thereby posed is that most Catholics, whether adolescent or adult, are hard to educate and form as Catholics. Ideas fundamentally incompatible with the authority of the Church, or with the content of what's proposed by such authority, are packaged and marketed much more appealingly than the truth and are aborbed almost by osmosis from the hyperactive media culture. Accordingly, a great many Catholics don't even understand what you're talking about when you talk about the Magisterium, orthodoxy, the Hypostatic Union, and so on almost ad infinitum. For them, all that sort of thing is an historical curiosity at best, an interesting academic exercise that might be worth taking seriously only if the clergy actually made a point of it. (Dorothy Sayers had some entertaining, and quite pointed, observations on this in Creed or Chaos?) This is why it's no good condemning such people as heretics. They don't know enough of the truth to be accounted morally culpable for rejecting it. And that, I suspect, is the reason so many clergy rationalize their failure to present the whole truth and challenge Catholics with it. They fear raising people to a level of knowledge that might actually render them morally culpable for rejecting what is irreformably taught by the Church. And so, hordes keep marching right up to communion without even believing—never mind living—even half of what the Church has thus taught.

Then there are people whom it is hard to believe are inculpable. I mean the aging, intellectual heretics who sort of stay in the Church and retain a strong following among their generation of Catholics: Hans Küng, Joan Chittister, Charles Curran, Rosemary Reuther, even Luke Timothy Johnson, to name just a few. The energy of such people and their followers is the passion with which they reject what was, in their youth, the recent past; they still speak with the voice of a Zeitgeist slightly beyond its sell-by date; yet the residual appeal and confidence stem from the sophistication, which masks the sophistry, of their arguments. Consequently, many Catholics in their 50s, 60s, and 70s trust such people far more than Rome; as Fr. Neuhaus says, dissent "is the tradition of which they are the traditionalists." Much of the difficulty even today in forming Catholics arises from the fact that many of the personnel who are, or would be, formators were formed by such intellectual leadership. Of course we needn't worry about that too much and too long. Young people are not inspired by "progressive" Catholicism, which by and large has become sterile and cynical. Progs certainly produce fewer babies and priests than their intellectual peers among the orthodox.

And so I don't think the problem is what to do with the real heretics. Both individually and demographically, they excommunicate themselves. The problem is what to do with the people who, remaining faithful to the Church by their best lights, trust heretics they are too ignorant to recognize as such. Telling such people they're ignorant won't win their ears; the only solution is to present the full, undiluted truth in ways that actually engage what most people hear and are subtly sold.

I hope you're game for that. I am, whether or not I get to earn a living at it. But I think I'd be more believable if I did!

Objectivity, abortion, and vocations

Communion and Liberation's annual Rimini meeting opened on Monday with the theme: "Truth is the destiny for which we are made." This notion of a Truth-capital-T which is everybody's destiny is the notion of a great objective truth that is a Person; our relativistic age is sometimes willing to grant that as a hypothesis, but never as a certainty. Yet one of the things I love about CL is that such a wildly countercultural theme is actually celebrated: with unrestrained music, lots of food, and not a little joshing as well as with a keen, prayerful awareness of how hard it is for us to let Truth Himself take over our minds and hearts. Love of and from Christ is palpable at CL gatherings—the small ones as well as, apparently, the yearly big one. This year's theme brings some specifics to mind.

The Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, has got the meeting into the MSM with an opening speech containing yet another criticism of Amnesty International for supporting legal abortion for rape victims in war zones. Like her disapproval of condom use by married couples for AIDS prevention, this stance of the Church is virtually incomprehensible to non-believers and to not a few believers. People wonder how can anybody with a heart could possibly oppose the availability of the choice of abortion for women who have conceived by being raped. In response, Cardinal Bertone is absolutely right to point out that, while "the Church is absolutely opposed to all forms of violence against women," she "cannot accept violence against the innocent child. Violence and injustice, he said, cannot be overcome by more violence and injustice, but only by the conversion of hearts." But such a response falls on generally deaf ears because subjectivity, at least for women, reigns supreme today. In the case of conception by rape, the child is a desperately unwanted intruder making use of a woman's body against her will. Since there are few if any violations of a human person's autonomy greater than rape, a violation which is augmented when conception occurs, the natural repulsion a woman feels is thought to justify at least giving her the legal choice to kill the intruder. The suggestion that the intruder is also an innocent person whom it is objectively and intrinsically wrong to kill is treated, in comparison, as a mere opinion—an opinion which a woman has the right to hold, if she chooses, but just as much right to reject. What matters is how she thinks and, even more, how she feels—not any moral duty that she might conceivably owe the life within her regardless of how she thinks or feels.

Whether in this particular form or more generally, the abortion issue is currently the most salient example of how Truth has been brushed aside as our objective destiny and reduced to individual opinion and feeling. The result of such an attitude, for nearly a century, has been the biggest waves of mass homicide in human history, of which abortion is not the least. Yet even many Catholic politicians believe we are not supposed to lift a finger to prevent the abortion holocaust because, on the conventional wisdom, what really matters is what women believe and feel about what happens in their own bodies—not what's true, regardless, about the life within their bodies. Such politicians conveniently ignore the fact that there are good non-sectarian arguments against their position; but Bertone is right that only conversion of hearts to Christ can change the underlying attitude.

From a male perspective, I believe the same phenonomen of contemporary subjectivity helps to explain the decrease of interest in the priesthood since Vatican II. Ironically, a bit of subjective narrative serves to explain that in turn.

First, the two subjects that far and away interest me the most are God and the Church. I have never been interested for long in any secular profession. I do not reject such professions, at least the morally legitimate ones; after all, God calls most men to them. What makes me unusual, I suppose, is that God and the Church interest me the most precisely because, as a Catholic, I believe they are objectively the most important realities of life. God is Being Itself, which is thus and also a triune communion of persons; the Church is that visible reality across space and time, heaven and earth, which as the Mystical Body of God the Son is meant to incorporate us into said communion. If one believes such assertions, I've always felt, why wouldn't one find the designated subjects more interesting than anything else? I realize that most believers don't, even when they have the time and leisure to do so; and far be it from me to condemn that. But I must admit that I don't quite get it.

Another reason I don't get it is that the Church actually needs more people with attitudes like mine. Consider the priesthood. I believe that the objective power and importance of the ministerial priesthood makes it the greatest vocation a man can have. It's not the "robes and rituals" as such that attract me; those are the outward, aesthetic symbols, which have their small appeal but are purely ancillary. What attracts me is the essence of the sacraments: the fact that the sacraments administered by priests, chiefly the Eucharist and Reconciliation, transmit the presence and transforming power of God ex opere operato—i.e., through the very thing done—rather than ex opere operantis—i.e., through the doing of it by this or that man. When a priest confects the Eucharist, it is the risen Christ himself who replaces the bread and wine on that altar as a living sacrifice of praise to the Father for our salvation. When a priest pronounces absolution, it is that same Christ who is absolving us. The grace and power that only a priest, by God's mysterious design, can transmit by such means are there whether we believe or accept it or not; so long as the priest intends what the Church does in the sacraments, their power does not even depend on his own virtue. It is the utter objectivity of the inestimable gifts given us through the priesthood that I find so compelling and attractive. For that reason I've always wished I had the vocation, even though at this point I must admit I don't. But there don't seem to be many Catholic men out there today with a similar attitude. The very idea that the priesthood is something inestimably powerful and noble for its purely objective reality is lost on most Catholic men in our society precisely because it is lost on most people in our society. The values of most Catholics seem to be formed more by the surrounding secular culture, with its emphasis on subjective gratification, than by what the Church objectively embodies. Is it any wonder that the ratio of priests to laity continues to shrink?

Whether we're talking abortion, the priesthood, or the Christian life generally, the biggest step in the right direction is the first step. By how we think, live, and above all love, we must preach to the world that Truth Incarnate, Jesus Christ, is what life is all about—and that he is what he is regardless of what the world thinks and feels about him at any given time. What ails the Church is that is not often enough kept in view, in a world that hardly has it in view at all.

Why don't we care more about freedom?

As a young man, I was a Republican of the libertarian sort. I believed that the sole duties of government were to defend the borders, enforce contracts, and punish those who victimized others by force or fraud. Once government went beyond those duties, I believed, it would inevitably swallow up more and more of our liberties until freedom meant little or nothing. That is exactly the path that government in America has been following—with popular consent to be sure—since the New Deal. I shall say a bit at the end why I'm no longer a libertarian; but I still think one can and must protest against the steady erosion of freedom in our country. What really scares me is why more people don't do just that.

The latest example of what I decry is this set of subtle moves. They're part of a trend that is all the more insidious for being bipartisan. It's about forcing people to do what's right. Thus, another part of the trend is taxes: more and more of people's earned income goes to paying taxes, which are extracted by the not-so-implicit threat of force. All for the public good, right? The needs of "the people" are enormous, right? Yet in the form of income tax, sales tax, Social Security tax, gasoline tax, and car tax, at least a third of my own quite modest wages go to the government—not counting child support, of course, which is only slightly less. I'm supposed to believe that such a rate of taxation is for my own good, which I don't believe at all. Yet many people pay much more, and not a few of them think we should be paying out at this rate, if only because we can't think of a more creative and humane way to satisfy the apparently insatiable demand that things be made right. Meanwhile it's the little things that often rankle, and reveal, the most.

The sales tax is particularly noisome to me not because it exists—consumption taxes, in my view, should be government's main source of revenue, with income taxes reserved for the wealthy—but because of how it's collected. Nearly every day I have to fiddle with pennies, which cost more to produce than they're worth and are useful for no other purpose, just to pay the sales tax "to the penny," because merchants are forbidden by law to include said tax in the price of what's sold. The system is enormously inefficient, but it persists because it allows people to maintain the illusion that they're being ripped off less than they would be otherwise. Totally irrational—just like what's happened with family law, which I've discussed before but see fit to bring up again.

Because of the divorce culture, government is now in the business of regulating the family lives of countless people. Non-custodial parents, mostly fathers, are often reduced to peonage; single parents, mostly mothers, often and also need this or that government service to get by. Fatherless children are much more likely to become crime statistics than those from intact homes. What's astonishing and frightening to me is that most people don't seem to see enough wrong with such a state of affairs to want to take concrete steps to change it. Sure, most people say divorce is a Bad Thing, especially for children—but most also say that a bad marriage is worse. So, most of us want the freedom to replace our spouses but see nothing wrong with the ceding of family authority to government that this often entails. Apparently, such a loss of freedom is considered a worthwhile price for the preservation of freedom to pursue the often-receding prospect of sexual and emotional self-fulfillment. The irrationality of it ought to be, but apparently is not, widely perceived. Hope triumphs over experience, indeed; too bad it's the wrong sort of hope.

People seem to think they enhance their freedom if they "pursue happiness" unfettered in some private sphere while "the government" takes care of the rest. Yet the more we grasp at personal freedom so understood, the less of it we end up with. Such is the logic of sin. Starting with Eve, Satan has always made disobeying God seem like an exercise of godlike freedom; yet the more alienated we become from God in how we live, the greater slaves to sin, and thus to Satan, we become. That's why I'm no longer a libertarian: I now believe the government must uphold the entire natural law, else people will stop caring about it. The only way to preserve our freedom is to obey God. Then there will be less need to try to force each other to do what's right. But then we'd have to give up the illusion of control. Maybe that's why we don't care more about freedom.

Next time I fly, I'll wear my Crocs to the airport. For some reason, the TSA hates it when I doff those things.

Not a Nice Guy

I don't mean me; I've never been thought of as a "nice" guy. At least I've never been called one to my face. I mean Jesus. Many people prefer a nice-guy Jesus: a dreamy, effeminate idealist who can be safely consigned, if not to actual irrelevance, then at least to the realm of sentiment, where he serves to soften the hard edges of life without rudely interfering with the activities of the boardroom and the bedroom. Much popular religious art reinforces that image of Jesus. But today's Gospel is one of the passages that does not sanction it.

Consider:

I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing! There is a baptism with which I must be baptized, and how great is my anguish until it is accomplished!

Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. From now on a household of five will be divided, three against two and two against three; a father will be divided against his son and a son against his father, a mother against her daughter and a daughter against her mother, a mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law."

I was once called "divisive" by a prog priest for saying that I loved this passage and explaining why. Had that fellow grasped the irony of what he said, he would not have said it. I hope he grasped it later, in prayer.

The reason I love this passage is its clear implication that those who follow Jesus must draw a sharp line in the sand that will not be erased with the soft passage of time. I don't mean the obvious line we draw against certain kinds of felonies; among Nice People Like Us, that is uncontroversial. I mean the line to be drawn between Truth and Untruth. That is controversial. For just as in the ancient Roman Empire, relativism is popular today as the default option for getting along with people who are different: what's "true for me" is not "true for you," as they say; I'm OK and you're OK. To be sure, that attitude is often appropriate when we're dealing with matters of taste. It is sometimes appropriate even when we're dealing with disagreements about the best means to attain agreed-upon ends, which is really what many political disagreements are about. For sometimes there is no single "right" resolution to such issues. But when it comes to ultimates, such an attitude will not do at all. If Jesus really is what Scripture, Tradition, and the teaching authority of the Church together present him to be, then the only appropriate attitude toward him is complete faith and surrender, which entails being baptized with suffering. That was the life, and death, of many of the early Christians. And if Jesus is not what they collectively present him to be, then the only appropriate attitude is to dismiss him as one more deluded would-be messiah, even crazier than the ones the Romans brutally crushed both before him and after him—though without, as in Jesus' case, the active collusion of the Jewish leadership.

There have been many attempts, mostly among modern, "scientific" biblical scholars, to evade that choice and thus to brush away the line in the sand. Thomas Jefferson, judicious editor of the Jefferson Bible, was a good example of how intelligent people can cut Jesus down to their own size. As an antidote to that sort of thing, I recommend the Pope's book Jesus of Nazareth. But evading the choice is not just an intellectual phenomenon. Because we are all sinners, we all do it sometimes in our own egregious ways and, more insidiously, our sneaky little ways. We make compromises all the time hoping, for example, to avoid trouble with that ol' mother-in-law Jesus alludes to. There are countless other compromises. Sometimes we compromise faith itself, because conformity to popular opinion, relativism, or just cynical skepticism wins us more points and costs us less than orthodox, undiluted belief. Always we compromise our virtue—or at least put off the development of virtue—because that's easier and more gratifying than dying to self so that He might live in us. And often we can't be honest with ourselves, or even with God, because we're afraid of paying the bill that fully facing the truth would present to us.

In anything pertaining to the spiritual life, we must prefer honesty to niceness. Of course we'd thereby create much division. But we'd be on the right side of that line in the sand.

Watch those trads

It is just as I thought.

In a recent interview, Bishop Bernard Fellay of the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X greeted Summorum Pontificum as "very significant historical event in the history of the Church and in post-Vatican II history." All well and good, that—as far as it goes. But that's not far at all. For it also becomes clear that this illicitly consecrated bishop, like his three colleagues, does not accept the ecclesiology of Vatican II and therefore rejects much of what Pope Benedict has in mind in liberalizing celebration of the Tridentine Rite.

Insofar as it addresses the question what bodies count as churches, that ecclesiology is crisply presented and summarized in a CDF document issued almost simultaneously with SP and obviously with the trad audience as much in mind as any other. As a hermeneut of continuity like the Pope, I've already expounded and defended that document. But here's the nub of what Fellay has to say about it:

In the declaration about the motu proprio, we insisted in saying that the confused excerpts of places in the letter show that the need to enter into theological discussions was reinforced very, very strongly by this document which is telling us that a circle is a quadrangle.

You have a perfect illustration of what we have said for 6 years. That is that Rome is continuing in a confusing way because they don't seem to give much care to contradiction and non-contradiction.This document seems to be a clarification of nothing but assuring once again that "Yes" means "No."

Q: Your Excellency, can you give us an example?

A: Sure. One example is precisely the question about subsistit...Why use the expression "subsistit in" and not "est"? [I've answered that. —ML] You read the answer and you conclude nothing. They say it is "est"and that there is an identity with the Church of Christ with the Catholic Church; and there is no change of doctrine. And then the next phrase is precisely a change in doctrine. So... It is a contradiction.

In his sermon in Ecône, Bishop Williamson said that in Rome they say something like two plus two makes four, but maybe it also makes five. And here you have a perfect illustration of that.The only positive thing [in the document] is about the Protestants which are now barred from the title of Church. Great! [Ed. Note: This doctrine on Protestant "ecclesial communities" has already been outlined previously by Dominus Jesus and other authoritative Church doctrinal clarifications.] Besides that, it is a confirmation of what we say. This text tries to tell us that there is no contradiction between the doctrine of the Church of the past and of Vatican II. And we insist by saying that Vatican II is in disharmony — is in contradiction — is even teaching error opposed to the traditional teaching, especially on ecumenism. And here [in this new document on ecclesiology] you have both sides put together; that is, the past and Vatican II.

As I said, it is just as I thought. The motu proprio will do little to bring the trad schismatics back into full communion with the Church because, for their leaders, the obstacle to full communion is not so much liturgical as doctrinal. Like the progressives they despise, such trads believe that the ecclesiological developments of Vatican II, taught and defended by the popes since, are fundamentally incompatible with what had long been presented as the settled and irreformable doctrine of the Church. The difference is that the progs like what they take to be that fact, and the trads dislike it. The progs think with the Church they still hope will evolve in the future; the trads think with the Church they still believe existed in the past. The more radical among both are thinking with chimeras. But that is always the way of schismatics.

As is evident from the text of SP, the Pope hopes that making the Tridentine liturgy—the one he first celebrated as a priest, and which is loved by not a few Catholics—more widely accessible to the faithful will lend momentum to a much-needed reform of that reform which was launched in the 1960s and 70s. Not content with making a theological case for continuity, he wants to foster a palpable sense of continuity. He is right. But that's not what the rad-trads have in mind. They want restoration, not continuity. They want to replace the Novus Ordo, not enrich it. They want to repudiate what is distinctive in the theology of Vatican II, not embrace it.

One must admit they're consistent, though.

Getting away with murder

Can anybody explain this in any terms other than the double standard?

I doubt that the victim's having been a minister had much to do with it. Then again...

The Feast of the Assumption

What I love about this feast is that it affords us a beacon of hope during the dog days, which have never been pleasant for most people in the so-called temperate zones and are worse than ever for students now that the academic year begins during them. As I worked in a 100+-degree warehouse this afternoon, it was that hope which buoyed me.

The hope is that we will be as the Mother of God now is: living forever in body, as well as soul, suffused by the glory of God. That is what the doctrine of the resurrection of the body holds out as the unimaginably blessed state of those who love their Savior in this life by keeping his commandments. ("If you love me, you will keep my commandments.") Thus the doctrine of the Assumption fleshes out the real point of Mariology, which is to "punctualize" in a real person what it is to be a disciple of Christ, and thus to facilitate our growth in that discipline. Mary was the first and foremost disciple of her divine Son; as such, the intercessions she makes to and through him are the most efficacious there are among those offered by mere humans. As even the Muslims recognize, truly she is the Mother of all as well as Mother of the Church.

I speak of the "point" of Mariology because it is so often missed even by those who, in their heart, really know it. By divine fiat Mary helps, more than any other member of the Mystical Body, to incorporate us into that Body, which began in her womb. Her "immaculate conception" in the womb of her own mother—i.e. her miraculous preservation from original sin—made her, in a unique way, what we all become at the moment of our baptism: a vessel filled with God's unmerited grace, which in the primary sense is nothing other than his divinizing love. The virginal conception of Jesus in her womb by the power of the Holy Spirit made her, in a unique way, what we are all called to be in virtue of our baptism: bearers of God in the flesh into the world. Her "assumption" into heaven at the end of her earthly life made her, in a unique way, what all the blessed will be on the Last Day. In every way her life anticipates what we are to be, and helps us get there by the very forms of the anticipation.

I have heard very few priests discuss or even note the fact that, in the only terms that ultimately matter, Mary is the most powerful of mere creatures. Unlike most powerful people, she is also readily accessible. You cannot go wrong if you seek her intercession, in faith and love and according to the teaching of the Church. You might not have an easy or gratifying life on earth; but to the extent you put yourself under her care and protection, you will stay on the path to your true destiny in God. I am convinced that, if and when I reach it, I will find that she had a great deal to do with it.

Salve Regina, mater misericordiae!

The issues behind the issues

In an article on the First Things blog last week, Prof. Robert P. George wrote (emphasis added):

There are many profound respects in which our culture is in need of transformation. Work is needed in every sphere. There are two issues, however, that are so central to our future and, indeed, to the future of mankind that they must, surely, be given a certain priority. Both are on the table now and will be resolved—for better or for worse—in the next decade or so. Critical (possibly irreversible) decisions will be made in the next year or two. I speak of the issue of marriage and the complex set of issues sometimes referred to compendiously as “bioethics.” In respect of both matters, things will go one way or the other depending on the posture and actions of Catholics.

Having once briefly worked under Robby, and having continued to follow his work with stupefied admiration, I am obliged to agree with him that the political difference will be made by Catholics—if, that is, a difference is going to be made. But I am far from convinced that there is still time to make a difference. That is because the issues behind the ones he identifies as top-priority seem largely to have been decided—and decided wrongly.

In the case of marriage, the "developed" world as a whole has firmly adopted the premise that marriage is only what people collectively decide it is. That holds of the Anglosphere, which includes the United States, in particular. What is still understood to be "traditional" marriage—a lifelong union between a man and a woman, ordered to the transmission and maintenance of new life—is no longer assumed by our legal and cultural norms to be divinely instituted. To be sure, many tradition-minded believers of all major religions still maintain that assumption. Some even act accordingly. But in the public square, traditional marriage is now treated as just one option among others, just like one's choice of religion. Marriage as an institution is thus becoming something we may adapt at will, on the basis of ideas, preferences, and goals that make no necessary reference to a divine or even a natural law. That is the main reason why intentionally sterile marriages, no-fault divorce, serial divorce-and-remarriage, and even cohabitation without the formality of marriage are now more widespread than at any time since the pagan Roman Empire. That is why same-sex "marriage," currently opposed by the majority of Americans—who are, after all, still formed by the residual sentiments of tradition—is slowly spreading among nations and states. Ineluctably, it will gain well-nigh universal acceptance. So long as our legal and cultural norms assume that it is human choice, not "the laws of nature and of nature's God," that determines what marriage is to be, then what is called "marriage" will become more and more elastic, stretched to fit more and more forms of moral and spiritual absurdity defended by the buzzwords of "freedom" and "equal rights."

As for the array of bioethical issues that keep arising with the advance of science and technology, we can raise all the "ethical" objections we like to this-or-that practice made newly possible; but in the end, such objections cannot of themselves make much difference. I need not discuss specifics, such as pre-natal screening or human cloning; for the underlying problem is that there is no longer any common religious or philosophical framework in which to discuss such issues, and to which appeal could successfully be made to resolve them. The very terms of discussion reinforce the default impression that this array of issues is a matter of adjudicating democratically among competing ideas and beliefs—many of which have a certain plausibility, but none of which are ultimately more than just matters of opinion. So, amid the cacophony of competing opinions and Weltanschauungen, the irrefragable fact of what can be done ensures that all of it, eventually, will be done. And once such things are done, they develop too much of a constituency to make banning them politically realistic. Just look at what's happened with IVF.

All of this is the fruit of what I call "autonomism": the idea that human freedom entails the freedom to decide what the most fundamental norms of life are to be, a freedom constrained only by obvious considerations of physical reality and social utility. Now if autonomism could still be effectively reversed, Catholics would indeed be best placed to do the job. The pope and the bishops say all the right things, in theory; and they do have allies among the Orthodox, conservative Protestants, observant Jews, even Muslims. The Catholic Church is certainly pivotal here. But as Robby seems implicitly to recognize, the most the Catholic bishops can realistically do is "encourage, exhort, and cajole." That is not just because the political sphere is the province of the laity, which of course is true; it is because the bishops confront, among the Catholic laity themselves, the same autonomism that has gained purchase in the culture at large.

Among those Catholics who care enough to even understand Church teachings about marriage and bioethics—and such Catholics, in my observation, are not the majority—many regard such teachings as reformable, and thus as "take-it-or-leave-it." In other words, the teachings are treated as matters of opinion. That, I believe, is the most likely reason why why more American bishops do not withhold the Eucharist from Catholic politicians who support a so-called "right" to abortion. If they were to get tough about that particular matter, the ensuing storm of controversy would rightly raise the question why they don't get equally tough about other moral issues on which many Catholics, in theory or in practice, treat settled Church teaching as a matter of opinion and thus as optional. Marriage is quite high on that list of other moral issues: the divorce rate among Catholics roughly matches that of the general population, and many divorced-and-remarried Catholics receive the Eucharist without qualm or question. And of course there's contraception, a matter on which the vast majority of Catholics reject, in both theory and practice, a teaching of the Church which has not varied for as far back as we have records on the subject. I don't hear any bishops suggesting that loyalty to such teaching be made a litmus test of good standing with the Church. So, if they can't crack down on those issues, how are they going to energize Catholics who aren't already loyal to join forces with other religous believers about the issues Robby sees as so crucial? Even leaving aside the aftershocks of the sex-abuse scandal, the de facto moral authority—the street cred, if you will—just isn't there.

None of this is to say that I wouldn't want to join forces with people like Robby on such matters. I'd be on the side of light and truth, after all; in fact, this blog is my own small way of doing it. And if, in careerist fashion, I got a job out of the whole business, I'd have an interesting life to boot. But I believe that, in the end, only radical divine intervention will make much difference. Things have to happen that will shock people back into a sense of spiritual reality. I hope it won't have to be a combination of natural disasters, wars, and economic dislocations that would reduce us to a peasant-style existence; but I wouldn't be at all surprised if that's what it takes. In the meantime, let us keep saying what needs to be said; but above all, let us pray, do penance, and love one another. Drawing people back to God depends above all on his grace, light, and joy shining in our hearts and faces. In short: on our holiness.

A voice from the cyber-wilderness

Apologies to my friends and the rest of my vast readership for not having posted in a few weeks. I keep meaning to, honest. But every night I tumble into bed before doing it. For one thing, I'm exhausted from working mostly outdoors in the heat. For another, my landlord cut off our Internet access, which had been in his name, when he moved to the West Coast to be with his girlfriend; and my roommates can't find a few extra dollars in their budgets to help me get it restored, even though I've offered them access to my computer for the purpose. On top of all that, I've been on a high-gear job search when not working my job. Perhaps I've just been on a divinely enforced vacation from the blogosphere.

But vacations end, almost by definition. I've got creative about getting Internet access; today I saved a draft of a post on the thesis of this article by Professor Robert George of Princeton, one of this country's most prominent intellectuals who is Catholic rather than CINO. You will get to read it tomorrow, after I've polished it up. Frustrated homilist that I am, I shall add a meditation on the Mass readings of the day. As and when I can, I shall also work through the backlog of material I've accumulated.

In the meantime, I ask my friends not to worry. Please pray that this latest chapter of my long job search, which I am certain is being fueled by the Spirit this time, ends with success.

Harry Potter: basta!

I've seen one Harry Potter movie and haven't read any of the books. I'm not buying the present one which, alas, appears to be the fastest-selling in the history of publishing. Unless I get to work with teens and/or pre-teens fairly soon, I don't plan to. I agree with the Pope and with this author about the phenomenon.

If that makes me a stick-in-the-mud, I don't care.

The wisdom of the children of darkness

This vocations article in the Raleigh News and Observer is headlined in the usual, predictable way. But I found it worth a look for two reasons. One was that Michael Brown found it worth linking to; the other was that I know some quite spiritual people in that diocese, having spent some time there for several purposes, one of which was to pursue church jobs, unsuccessfully, in 2002 and 2004. Sure enough, I found in the article a golden nugget of that wisdom which unbelievers sometimes pick up faster than many churchgoing Catholics.

Here's the passage that caught my attention:

In the Diocese of Raleigh, which spans 54 counties from Chatham to Dare, there is one priest for every 1,791 Catholics. Nine small parishes have no priests, and mega-parishes strain at the seams with round-the-clock masses every weekend to accommodate an ever-burgeoning Catholic population.

Since Bishop Burbidge arrived in Raleigh last year, he has added a monthly service to pray for more priests. To encourage teens to consider the priesthood, he even refereed a basketball game of seminarians versus students from St. Thomas More Academy in Raleigh. So far, eight men have responded to the call -- an impressive feat that brings the number of seminarians in the diocese this coming school year to 21.

"I'm thrilled with how the awareness has been heightened," Burbidge said recently.

Scholars say that might not be enough. Dean Hoge, a leading expert on the priest shortage, estimates that efforts by bishops such as Burbidge might result in a 10 percent increase in priests at a time when the church needs a 100 percent increase.

"A 10 percent increase is fine," said Hoge, a professor of sociology at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. "Is it going to solve the problem? No."

But there is a curious thing about the new crop of Catholic priests. Many of them, such as Burbeck, who is 23, have a passionate commitment to the Catholic Church. At a time when many Catholics blame their priests for the horrific cases of sexual abuse of children, Burbeck said that in embracing the church, he felt not qualms but clarity.

"That's the reason I was created," Burbeck said referring to his desire to become a priest. "That's the meaning of my life."

Bishop Burbidge ordained eight new priests this year, which isn't enough to compensate for both retirements and deaths among priests and the inexorable burgeoning of the laity. But if Michael Burbeck is any indication of the attitude of incoming seminarians, Burbidge will be ordaining priests at an accelerating rate in the future. I found myself pumping my fist after reading this story.

The spiritual commitment of the Michael Burbecks in the Church is infectious. They do not aspire to the priesthood so as to escape anything. They do not seek it out as a career or as a mark of social status. They don't even see it as a "vocation" in the generic sense, which could apply just as well to mothers, doctors, or first responders. What's happened in the American Church over the last several decades makes the inadequacy of all such motivations painfully evident. No, they enter the seminary because they recognize that what they're there for is simply to become who they are in Jesus Christ, their chief love in life. They choose it not because it's something they'd like to do, but because it's simply who they have been created, in love, to be. The choice is so clear that it's hardly a choice at all.

I've known a few other guys like that. They are now terrific priests. The Holy Spirit is calling many such men. I resist my temptation to envy them by exercising the priesthood of believers: offering my own sufferings partly for them. I have no doubt that is efficacious, especially in conjunction with adoration of the Eucharist outside Mass. It sustains and augments the clergy, especially the higher clergy. Indeed, if more bishops like Michael Burbidge are appointed, more seminarians like Michael Burbeck will keep coming to the fore across this country and become terrific priests in their turn. They will do so despite massive incomprehension and resistance, not just from the world but including and especially from within the bosom of the Church. Such is the leadership we need; if we pray, love, and believe as we ought, such is the leadership we will get.

"Cautionary Tales" for actual and wannabe converts

Mark Shea tells them well.

I can think of several people who either left the Church or wouldn't join her because, in James Joyce's words, she's "here comes everybody." As is so often the case, what they take to be evidence against Catholicism, I take to be evidence for it.

Why I'm a natural theologian

Most people who meet me for the first time are surprised to learn that I am interested in theology. Some who have known me for a number of years think me misguided when I indicate that, at this point in my life, it is my chief interest. The former group assumes that I am, and the latter that I ought to be, a lawyer or a salesman, or at least somebody whose energies should be devoted mainly to acquiring money, prestige, and sex. But those who care to know me for who I am know that I am a natural for theology, where 'theology' is used as a name for an academic discipline, as distinct from that speech about God which only the truly holy can efficaciously utter. Of course I'm not considered qualified to teach theology at the post-secondary level, even though I have taught at several seminaries and touch on theology whatever and wherever I teach. That's because I have never taken any graduate-level course in theology; for reasons having to do with academic and ecclesiastical politics, I chose in youth to pursue the slightly less unmarketable discipline of philosophy. But the philosophy is my point.

When I call myself a natural theologian I mean that I am a practitioner, fitfully, of that branch of metaphysics, and therefore of philosophy, which is known as natural theology. The aim of natural theology is to acquire some knowledge of the divine that does not, logically speaking, require data of special divine revelation (if any) as premises. Here I want to explain, in terms anybody can appreciate, why I made that choice and why it is so worthwhile.

Alluding to Romans 1:20, the First Vatican Council defined: "If anyone denies that the one true God, our Creator and Lord, can be known with certainty in the natural light of human reason through the things that have been made: let him be anathema." Accordingly, as a Catholic I take the Church's word for it that natural theology, as a way of acquiring some real knowledge of God, is possible. But that is reliance on authority, not just on reason. It is not why I originally took up the discipline. I took up natural theology as a student for three reasons.

The first was that I could find no other honest way to decide whether it was rational to profess a religion, and rationality was something I prized given the physically and emotionally chaotic environment in which I was raised. By the time I was 15, the faith of my childhood was no longer adequate for me; I needed to find some basis for an adult faith if I was to have faith at all. And it seemed to me that an adult faith entailed making not only a "reasonable" choice but a "rational" one. What's the contrast?

It is reasonable for some people to cling uncritically to the religion in which they were raised, simply because they lack either the leisure, the inclination, or the native ability to think critically enough to arrive at an adult faith. If they live long enough, life will probably challenge them to go beyond that; and it would be unreasonable for them to refuse the challenge if they're up to it. But some people never experience the challenge, and others who do aren't up to meeting it. Who's to say they are unreasonable for having, or even losing, a childish faith in such circumstances? Not I. But neither did I have the luxury of not knowing better than such people.

I had had Catholic catechesis, accurate as far as it went, and I had a good mind. But I came to need a worldview that was objectively rational, not merely reasonable given my limitations. That was because I had ceased being able to believe that what mattered to my parents, teachers, and friends, or even to myself, mattered period. I could no longer believe that life was worthwhile just because I had a sanguine personality, or because I had been taught it, or because everybody around me assumed it. For a time that left me in something of a void, depressed and rudderless; my mother, whose values were entirely conventional, worried that I studied and brooded instead of dating; but I didn't want to spend my spare time working a boring, menial job in order to get money for dating when I wasn't even sure that life was worthwhile. I read voraciously and worked diligently on a project I would now describe as trying to find sound arguments that that life is worthwhile. Otherwise there was no reason to prefer reality to the drugs that I couldn't afford any more than I could afford the girls.

What ended up convincing me that life is worthwhile was a deceptively simple point: in the final analysis, it's more rational to try to make overall sense of reality than not; whereas the various forms of nihilism, such as atheism and French existentialism, did not make overall sense of reality, and indeed argued that it was irrational to try. Thanks to an English teacher who happened to be a Jesuit scholastic, I had read as much of C.S. Lewis, JRR Tolkien, GK Chesterton, and Dorothy Sayers as I could get my hands on. As much by the power of imagination as by logic, they convinced me that theism made much more sense out of who and what people are than atheism. My high-school religion classes, fashioned just after Vatican II when so many priests and religious were shucking tradition, seemed sterile and pointless by comparison. Yet the salient point has been put well in the context of the current debate about "the new atheism:"

Atheists and theists seem to agree that human beings have an innate desire for morality and purpose. For the theist, this is perfectly understandable: We long for love, harmony and sympathy because we are intended by a Creator to find them. In a world without God, however, this desire for love and purpose is a cruel joke of nature — imprinted by evolution, but destined for disappointment, just as we are destined for oblivion, on a planet that will be consumed by fire before the sun grows dim and cold. This form of “liberation” is like liberating a plant from the soil or a whale from the ocean. In this kind of freedom, something dies.

I was, to be sure, prepared to accept the death of what is thus said to die; what I could not accept was the earnest belief of the atheists that it was somehow more rational to see reality that way than to be a theist. The theists had a reasoned answer to the question why the world, and we, exist; the atheists could only try to persuade me that the question is unanswerable. But proving a negative is notoriously difficult. It seemed to me then, and still seems to me, that the atheists had only one argument: unlike religion, science has a consensual, publicly accessible method for testing claims to knowledge; therefore, it is more rational to accept a purely scientific worldview than a religious one. But the argument struck me, and still strikes me, as a non-sequitur. From the fact that only science gives us such a method, it does not follow that science is the only reliable way of acquiring knowledge. All that follows is that we should rely on science to evaluate the kinds of knowledge-claim that science, as a method, can evaluate. But that supplies no reason to believe that only what can be known scientifically can be known at all, i.e., the thesis now called 'scientism'. Given the inner world first limned for me by the British writers in question, I was compelled to believe that true empiricism had to be wider than the advocates of scientism allowed. And I could find no argument for atheism other than scientism.

So, I was now a rationally convinced theist, and that itself involved the doing of natural theology. I was relieved because I now had reason to participate actively in life; I was also challenged, because the Hound of Heaven was still after me. Thus the question for me became what sort of theist I should be. As a college freshman, I decided to double-major in philosophy and religion largely in order to answer that question. Since ideas have consequences, and wrong ideas about ultimate things have very bad consequences, the question struck me as vastly more important than that of what career such disciplines could equip me for. (My father was pleased by my choice, since he thought the intellectual discipline I would learn would equip me to follow him in a career in law. I didn't have the heart to disappoint him by telling him I was much more attracted to the clergy; in any event I didn't have to tell him, since I could never interest the Catholic clergy in accepting me into their ranks. Indeed, several of the priests I later consulted about the matter seemed much more interested in my body than in my mind or soul—a fact which itself turned out to be a grave challenge to my ongoing intellectual project.) But I had gradually become convinced that only monotheism, as opposed to pantheism or polytheism, was philosophically defensible. The question then became what sort of monotheist to be.

The three major monotheistic religions are Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. It didn't take me long to decide for Christianity. Having arisen from the Judaism that preceded it and persisted despite the Islam that came after it, Christianity seemed incomparably fuller and richer than either, incorporating even what seemed true in the various pagan religions. It seemed to me that, if the one true God did reveal himself to humanity, this was more likely to be the full story than the alternatives. So then the question became what sort of Christian to be.

I couldn't help noticing that the two main Christian alternatives to my native Catholicism, Protestantism and Orthodoxy, didn't seem to put much stock in the discipline that had helped convince me that life is worthwhile. As best as I could tell at the time, most of their representatives held that we cannot arrive at any knowledge of God without already being committed to the truth of Christianity. In other words, natural theology is an illusion, and to persist in the illusion is to corrupt the Faith. Of course, I gradually learned that the picture is more complicated than that. Some Protestants have done, still do natural theology explicitly, and I have read a good many of them; some Orthodox, including some of the Eastern Fathers, have done what is in effect natural theology, but without characterizing it as that; and I've read some of them too. But even having learned all that, I find no reason to abandon my youthful impression that only Catholicism explains why natural theology is both possible and worthwhile. So, once I decided to remain Catholic for that and other reasons, I had further reason to do natural theology, if only so as to deepen my acquaintance with my own tradition.

But the third and clinching reason I kept at it came from the political philosophy I also studied and debated in college. It seemed to me, as to nearly everybody else at Columbia, that the West in general had only learned relatively recently the social importance and the moral necessity of religious freedom. The Catholic Church herself had only acknowledged it within my lifetime. Yet for reasons I explained yesterday, secularism as a political ideology also seemed to me untenable—a conclusion that set me sharply at odds with my professors and most of my fellow students. So the question for me then became: How can one expound a basis for the moral legitimacy of the state that is neither theocratic nor secularist, i.e. that required neither imposing a particular religious tradition on people nor dispensing with God altogether? The only answer I could find was the sort of thinking summed up in Thomas Jefferson's phrase "the laws of Nature and of Nature's God"—in other words, the natural law as promulgated rationally by the Higher Power, the God, knowable to some extent by human reason. Only in the Catholic tradition was that notion seriously and systematically developed, and it depended in part on that natural theology for which the Catholic tradition had always maintained an important place. And so my chosen discipline bore, at least for me and for some Catholic thinkers, considerable political significance. Given the challenge of Islamism today, it retains that significance.

I don't expect this little autobiography to convince my readers to become natural theologians. But I hope to have exhibited why that discipline is both a reasonable and an important one to pursue.

Damned either way

One of the reasons I decided in college to remain Catholic is that many of the criticisms of the Church, from both non-Catholic Christians and non-Christians, seemed to me to be of the damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don't variety. I always and instinctively sympathize with the object of any such criticism, even when the criticism turns out to be correct. Today the genre seems as robust as ever.

A case in point lately is one reaction from an Orthodox Christian blogger, the Ochlophobist, to Summorum Pontificum, the new papal motu proprio granting a universal indult for the Tridentine Mass. Refreshingly, he openly recognizes that his criticism is of the variety in question; regrettably, he thinks that exposes a problem with the Church, not with his criticism. I don't agree with him because, as a cradle Catholic, I am convinced that his prognostications about the future effects of the indult on the liturgical culture of the Church are too idiosyncratically pessimistic. But his pessimism about the Catholic Church is not always idiosyncratic. For instance, in more than one combox on this blog, the Ochlophobist has complained that the papacy reduces its credibility by failing to excommunicate more heretics and depose more bad bishops. He is far from alone in making that criticism; in my time, I've heard it from many quarters, including some Catholic ones. But as emotionally satisfying as I might find a massive housecleaning, I remain deeply skeptical. For if the papacy were to undertake what the critics want in that regard, many of them would join the ensuing media chorus denouncing the new Reign of Terror, the return of the bad old days of papal absolutism and the Inquisition. The more sophisticated critics would cite the issue as telling evidence that the Catholic Church is not the Church; for if she were, so the argument would go, she would not have to choose between anarchy and tyranny. Indeed, I've noticed that that is already a somewhat popular criticism of the Church in the Orthodox blogosphere.

The ironic thing, though, is that much of what restrains the papacy from attacking imagined anarchy with real tyranny are features of Catholic ecclesiology that many Orthodox complain are honored more in the breach than in the observance. Such Orthodox complain that, in the Catholic Church, there is only one bishop with many auxiliaries; but historically as well as today, Rome has exerted much less de facto authority over local ordinaries than popular notions of papal supremacy would suggest; and given her official ecclesiology, that is as it should be. The applicable considerations are well explained in an article by Fr. Robert Johansen. I wish I had seen it sooner. It's not just the Orthodox who need to hear it; the truths he expounds are lost on many loyal Catholics too.

Defining our enemies

Most serious Christians are what Luther said: simul peccator et justus, at once sinners and justified. I know I am. Luther's error was to hold, in effect, that that's the best we can hope for. By contrast, the more ancient traditions of both Catholicism and Orthodoxy maintain that we can and ought to be truly and progressively sanctified, with our free cooperation, by that grace which is nothing other than the Trinity's self-communication to us. But Luther's point helps to remind us that, once we are beyond childhood, our chief enemy in the spiritual life is ourselves. Our external enemies, chiefly Satan and his minions, have only as much power over our souls as we choose, consciously or no, to give them. The same goes, I believe, for what's left of Christian civilization today.

Pace the callow evasions of our political and academic élites, our chief external enemy today is militant Islam, which is committed to our destruction as a civilization and has openly said so. I shall not debate whether, in the final analysis, Islam can be anything other than that. I think it undeniable that it is not. For one thing, whether the means employed are violent or not, Muslims as such are committed to the "struggle" (jihad) to win the world for Islam. That follows from Islam's being an essentially missionary religion. But the same could be said of Christianity, which is also a missionary religion; hence militancy, in the sense operative in the phrase 'the Church Militant', is not what distinguishes Islam from Christianity. The distinguishing feature of Islamic militancy is that it seeks to make Islam, precisely as such, the explicit basis of political authority wherever it is the dominant religion. For a long time, to be sure, Christians were wont to do the same with regard to their own religion; but save in a few isolated pockets, that approach has been given up, as it should be if Christianity is true. We've learned our lesson. Yet the Muslim world, the Umma, has not learned the lesson. Nor do I think it can. That is the main, underlying reason why the Umma has such a hard time repudiating al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah and Hamas. It is the main reason why "Islamic" parties are gaining ground even in ostensibly secular states such as Turkey and Indonesia. All over the Muslim world, we hear more and more calls for imposing sharia, even on non-Muslims when possible. Even now, Christians in Iraq are reduced to the options of oppression or flight; Sunnis and Shi'ites, who seem to agree on little else and continue fighting each other, seem to agree on that much. That's the attitude which is steadily gaining the upper hand throughout the Umma.

Such a totalitarian and ineradicable feature of Islamic militancy is the polar opposite of the ideology that now dominates the Western world: secularism. The core principle of secularism is not the separation of church and state as institutions; most of us believers in the West agree that such separation is good for both. I for one am glad that the papacy no longer has temporal authority and that I live in a country whose constitution ensures religious freedom. For when religion is not adopted freely, according to individual conscience, it is to that extent an obstacle to human flourishing; and that's why people brought up in any given religion ought to think critically about it if and when they can, so that they can make their choice in an informed and adult way, consistently with their God-given dignity. But I object profoundly to secularism. For the core principle of secularism as an ideology is what I call autonomism: the proposition that man himself can and ought to define the basis of the state's legitimacy, without any necessary basis in or reference to a moral law higher than himself. From that standpoint, appealing to any "higher law"—such as what the Declaration of Independence terms "the laws of nature and of nature's God"—as the basis of the state's legitimacy is an unacceptable infringement on freedom of thought and conscience. Of course it is rarely explained why we should consider that moral judgment binding if we happen to disagree with it; the few explanations I've seen are patently inadequate even on their own terms; for they can be and have been used to justify the worst sort of tyranny—always, of course, in the name of "the majority," or the Volk, or the oppressed, or something like that. Secularism is worthless as a political ideology because its autonomism reduces in turn to moral relativism, which can justify anything and therefore nothing. We cannot truly secure the dignity and freedom of the individual unless we acknowledge the Authority, the "Higher Power," that they come from, and why we have no right to defy that Authority.

Indeed, relativism is why the secular liberals of the West, especially in Europe, have such difficulty coming to grips with the challenge posed by militant Islam. As relativists they are reflex multiculturalists; as such, they instinctively believe that if we would just be nice to the Umma, giving ground and money here and there while fighting only the most violent of the terrorists, then the threat would gradually fizzle and we could all resume enjoying our comforts and gadgets. Such an illusion, if indulged long enough by enough people, is fatal. It undermines the will to resist, and that's just what our militant Muslim enemies are counting on. They are right to hate secularism—and right to believe that Islam is stronger than secularism. The former has a spiritual energy and motivating force that the latter cannot sustain. Resurgent, militant Islam is indeed the just scourge of the secular West.

Our primary enemy, therefore, is within: our desire to set things up for ourselves independently of that God who can be known in the natural light of human reason. That is true on an individual level; that's why we're sinners, to the extent we are, and we all are. On the collective level, it is that God, and only that God, who must be acknowledged as the basis of the state's legitimacy. Although the God of divine revelation is infinitely bigger than that, he at least that—and only respect for the laws of that God, the God of "ethical monotheism," suffices to preclude tyranny. But secularism won't even allow us that much of a foundation. Only if we defeat that enemy within can we find the will to resist our chief external enemy, our just scourge, for the right reasons.

The passion and the patience

Today's Gospel in the ordinary form of the Roman Rite was Luke 10: 38-42, the story of The Lord in the middle of a minor domestic issue between two sisters, Mary and Martha. I've always loved this passage. Not only does it present a very human situation; a given person's reaction to it says a great deal about where they are spiritually. I've heard many ostensibly good Catholics say that the Lord was being unfair to poor Martha. Since the thought of Jesus doing something wrong is intolerable to them, they conclude that the story was either the writer's own invention or that it had somehow got garbled in oral transmission. Once, I even heard a prog nun say that the story was made up to discredit Martha in her later roles as preacher and prophet, because she was getting to be too much of a threat to the Apostles' authority. You know, the personal is the political, and all that. Not knowing where to begin, I just rolled my eyes.

I believe that the Catholics who reject this story are wrong. Many preachers, exegetes, and spiritual writers—including most of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church—have produced meditations on this Gospel. I've read a fair number of them, and from my readers I welcome references to those you have found most helpful. What I want to do here is synthesize what I've learned so far.

Part of my stock material is an ever-lengthening list of Yogisms, which I must someday make a post out of. One of my favorites is: "Progress entails deterioration," a fact I see confirmed every day in the business world I am obliged, for the time being, to work in. In the typical MBA mind, for example, "improving productivity and efficiency" means either making employees work harder for the same pay or, what amounts to same, firing some of them and giving their work to those who are left. (I recall the term 're-engineering' being used for that back in the '80s.) In my observation, however, that only works when the work process itself is also streamlined, which rarely happens unless what's being implemented is sheer automation, which it usually isn't. Most of the time, all that happens is that the people who are left take longer to get the job done and are even unhappier about it than the customers. So, all that's served is the short-term bottom line; consigned to irrelevance, the long run gets awfully slow. Management's lack of patience—which, in public companies, is driven largely by stockholders' impatience—can end up killing the passion behind the business, thus killing the business over time. I've seen it happen firsthand, more than once. It's the sort of thing that happens when Martha wins out over Mary. Whether it's business life, personal life, or even political life, our society is replete with examples of people who undermine their own goals by pursuing them without due regard for the less tangible but more important side of their reality.

Another Yogism of mine is: "A prayer for patience is the one prayer that God can be counted on to grant immediately." As you Latinists will have noticed, the words 'patience' and 'passion' come from the same root: the Latin patior, whose broadest meanings are "to undergo" and "to endure." To have a passion for something or someone is to undergo a powerful attraction, hard to resist, and quenchable only by something stronger than and incompatible with it. To be patient, by contrast, is to undergo something instead of acting when one might, and doing so for the sake of a greater good—even if the greater good is only that of avoiding the cost of refusing to endure. Now the "Passion" of the Lord was both. He loved us so much that endured even a horrible, shameful physical death in order to save us, by his presence in our darkness, from horrible, shameful spiritual death. By his "obedience unto death, even death on a cross, God highly exalted him" through the Resurrection and Ascension; our hero now has "the name above every other name, at which every knee shall bow" when all is fulfilled. Baptized into him, our vocation is to emulate that pattern in our own lives. Our passion for the Lord must take the form of sharing his cross with joyful patience; only if we die with Christ will we live for and with him. When we ask for that gift in love, we will get it before we know it. For in the life of the spirit, passion and patience can and must go together.

Martha's sister Mary had both the passion and the patience. She had the same passion for the Lord that Martha did, but also had the patience to sit at his feet and contemplate his words and his person. It did not occur to her that splitting the chores with her sister was more important at the time; I somehow doubt she would have complained if Martha had joined her rather than getting dinner on the table right away. We can safely infer that the Lord himself would not have complained either. Mary represents people more concerned with the meaning of things than with practical affairs, those of us who want to sit at the Lord's feet rather than dash about doing things to earn his approval or, short of that, to forestall his displeasure. But our society encourages us to be Martha. We must always be doing things or we're "good for nothing;" and by doing things, we can assure ourselves of the Lord's good fortune in having people like us doing things for him. Sort of like Martha.

But that is not the life of grace. As Abbot Placid reminded us today at Belmont Abbey, the message of today's Gospel is that it is by grace alone that we are saved. Whatever good we do that also avails for our salvation, it is God who is doing it. That doesn't mean we are to do nothing but wait for him to act; it is our actions, as much as our prayer, that serve as the raw material by which God shapes what he is re-creating us, and the world, to be. We need to be Martha as well as Mary. But the priority of the latter over the former, the unum necessarium, must always be kept in view. Love of God begins with openness to him, not in trying to gain his favor. If we make that openness our chief priority, only then will our actions be his. The passion must begin with patience.