Catholic nerdity

I don't know about you, but my mind needs a rest from time to time. Here's a pause that refreshes.

You know you're a Catholic nerd IF:

• you feel challenged by Catholics who see no irony in considering themselves more Catholic than the Pope.

• at Mass, you find yourself mouthing sotto voce a prayer prescribed for the priest, only to be horrified by his ad-libbing.

• you're disappointed that the Church doesn't have an official position on every controversial issue.

• you have nightmares about defending the faith from angry, liberal Catholic women. (Bonus nerd points if the nightmares are no worse than the reality.)

• a public exhibition near you of rare relics of saints is your idea of a hot date spot.

• you've taught in a seminary that had refused to accept you as a student.

• you feel guilty about forgetting to thank God for your sufferings.

Since seven is the number signifying perfection, I shall stop there. Of course there could be more, lots more. After all, I needn't remind my regular readers whose life the above items are drawn from.

Enjoy. And if you care to, add some!

News, notes, and questions

Well, I'm back from my interview in DC. As much because as in spite of my limitations, the Holy Spirit let them know I belonged there with them. I just hope they surrender. I have one more phone interview to go; I should know within a week. Tonight I begin my novena to St. Joseph for this and related intentions. Thanks to those of you who have joined me in prayer.

Before I blog on any given day, I spend 20-30 minutes reviewing Catholic news. Two items I found today spur me to comment.

The first is an article about men's spirituality: How real men can be real Catholics. The occasion was the 2nd annual "Men of Christ" conference held near Milwaukee. What one priest there was quoted as saying sounded manly enough: "To be holy is to be real," Fr. Larry Richards of Relevant Radio told the gathering. "We don't need any more pansies following Jesus; we need men!" And: "If you don't eat, you die; if you don't pray, you die," he said, reminding them to spend time reading the Bible every day." Perhaps Fr. Richards also reminded the men of how fond St. Paul was of athletic metaphors. Then again, perhaps not. What impact could it have had?

I wasn't there, so I concede I missed a lot. But the "real men" the reporter chose to quote were, respectively, "a buyer for an automotive tool and equipment warehouse"; the "vice president of finance for Aurora Health Care,"; a teenage confirmation candidate; and a man who is "head of his own construction company." In other words, "good guys," the kinds of guys who elicit the moral approval of wives and parents, not least because they make or will make pretty decent money. All that they said was edifying enough; but I found myself asking: "What are these guys saying that sincerely Christian women could not just as well say for themselves?" What struck me is how generic the lay spirituality was, at least as presented. And of course there seemed to be nothing explicitly Christian about how they actually spend most of their time. Their orientation to discipleship makes itself felt in using their occupations as occasions to practice Christian virtue: e.g., treating people on the job fairly and lovingly. All that is quite necessary, to be sure. But in the article I saw no hint, other than the possibility of priesthood for the still-unmarried minority, of how Catholic men might be explicit witnesses to Christ above and beyond becoming better, i.e. holier, men while continuing to spend their time just as they already do. Isn't there more to it than that? (Don't tell me about paid "lay ministry", which I once did myself. Most of those jobs are, for good reason, held by women who are not their families' primary breadwinners, and there really aren't that many such jobs to go around.)

The other news item helps to answer that question. I'm proud to report it.

Belmont Abbey College, where I attend Mass and do other things, has just requested that its health-insurance carrier drop coverage for "abortion, contraception, and voluntary sterilization." According to President Bill Thierfelder, who has at least six kids, "eight faculty members filed formal complaints with various state and federal agencies, demanding the reinstatement of these coverages." There will doubtless be other repercussions. This is the sort of thing that lay male professionals need to be doing on the job. Witness takes real courage.

Pray for work

Friends, I'll be away this weekend for a job interview. This is important to me. I believe the wind of the Spirit is at my back. A couple of my friends in Communion and Liberation need suitable work too. Please weigh in with St. Joseph along with us. I'll be back Monday.

Atheism for children

I'm sure all of you have heard of Philip Pullman and the movie The Golden Compass, even if you haven't had occasion to sample his book series or the movie. The mysterious villian in GC is called "the Magisterium." You get the idea, even if the undercatechized Catholic Nicole Kidman does not. Pullman's stuff is slickly packaged atheism for children. Since the movie came out he's tried to hide that, but the cat had already been let out of the bag.

For those who want to help parents inoculate their kids, I recommend the 100-page book Pied Piper of Atheism: Philip Pullman and Children's Fantasy, by Pete Vere and Sandra Meisel. The introduction is written by Carl Olson, who had co-authored with Meisel a decent-selling book debunking Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code. You remember that row, don't you?

Pope to rehabilitate Luther???

The London Times says yes. But like its establishment counterpart the BBC, the Times has a target-rich record of error in reporting Catholic affairs.

In this case, CWN points out and proves that the article manages to "cram three significant errors of fact into a single sentence." I challenge readers to find that sentence without reading the CWN analysis first. The Times' credibility about the Catholic Church has sunk to a new low.

Pay no attention to that reporter behind the curtain.

Fun the morning after

(Augmented on 3/7. New text in bold.)

Since this is a presidential election year, I'm posting a lot more often about politics than I usually do. I know that many conservatives are tempted to sit out this November, and I understand. I disagree with them, of course; I'm going to vote for McCain, for reasons I've explained before. But I want to urge conservatives, indeed Republicans generally, to enjoy themselves as hugely as they are being enabled to by how the Democrats are doing.

Last night, the Republicans had the best primary outcome they could hope for. McCain clinched the nomination, prompting Huckabee to do what he said he would do: drop out gracefully when the math became clear. But more important and less predictably, the Democratic race was extended—probably all the way to the convention. The battle will only get nastier in weeks ahead, which can only help the Republicans, who are now in the process of uniting behind the de facto nominee. Even more important than its getting nastier, however, is why and how it is getting nastier.

Hearken to a member of the chattering classes of whose person, and views, I am generally most dubious: liberal Democrat Maureen Dowd. In her NYT column this morning, she writes:

With Obama saying the hour is upon us to elect a black man and Hillary saying the hour is upon us to elect a woman, the Democratic primary has become the ultimate nightmare of liberal identity politics. All the victimizations go tripping over each other and colliding, a competition of historical guilts.

People will have to choose which of America’s sins are greater, and which stain will have to be removed first. Is misogyny worse than racism, or is racism worse than misogyny?

As it turns out, making history is actually a way of being imprisoned by history. It’s all about the past. Will America’s racial past be expunged or America’s sexist past be expunged?

As Ali Gallagher, a white Hillary volunteer in Austin told The Washington Post’s Krissah Williams: “A friend of mine, a black man, said to me, ‘My ancestors came to this country in chains; I’m voting for Barack.’ I told him, ‘Well, my sisters came here in chains and on their periods; I’m voting for Hillary.’ ”

And meanwhile, the conventional white man sits on the Republican side and enjoys the spectacle of the Democrats’ identity pileup and victim lock.

Well, I'm not a conventional white man; if I were, I'd be pursuing a demanding, unfulfilling career just because it pays more or less the amount of money that conventional people seem to expect of me. But I am very much enjoying "the spectacle of the Democrats' identity pileup and victim lock." Dowd forgot to add that when they get out of their cars, they'll be shooting themselves in the foot.

There's more: the wine track vs. the beer track. Obama wins among upscale professionals; Clinton wins among working-class whites. That's a cultural clash; those are usually bitter and always linger. Then there's the generational divide: Obama wins the young people, Clinton the retired. For the pièce de resistance, there's the Florida-Michigan cockup. On the one hand, it's "unfair" not to "make every vote count"; on the other, it's "unfair" to "change the rules in the middle of the game." Whatever. It's also likely the race will be decided by the superdelegates, the professional pols who at this point cannot escape sorting out all these intractables. If they settle on a nominee in spite of the popular vote, the cry from the losing side will be that the Democratic Party is not democratic. Yet if they settle on a nominee simply on the basis of the popular vote, they will be reduced to irrelevant rubber-stampers, which was not the role envisioned for them and will be impossible anyhow if there's any meaningful disparity between the popular vote and the elected-delegate count. Nor can the race be prettified by trying to settle it on the substantive issues; the differences thereon are not great and do not arouse the passion. Yessiree: whoever wins will win ugly.

As two wars continue and the economy sinks into the doldrums, the Democratic battle is the best hope McCain has in the fall. It is the natural outcome of how that party has been developing for the last several decades. For me, that movie is better entertainment than anything Hollywood is likely to offer between now and then. Even those conservatives who plan to sit back and hold their noses would do well to enjoy the movie for free.

Development and Negation VIII: Slavery

Many of you are familiar with my "Development and Negation" series, which I've condensed into a Google document accessible by the link in the sidebar under "Articles of Mine." For those who aren't familar with the series, I note that the salient issue comes up over and over again, case by hoary case. It's time to deal with another case.

Generally speaking, the impression is widespread that Catholicism's

...own course of doctrinal development belies the Church’s claims for her teaching authority, which themselves belong to that course of development. The Church claims that her “definitive” teaching—according to either the extraordinary or the ordinary magisterium—has been taught infallibly: in its solemn exercise, the magisterium is preserved from error in virtue of that divine infallibility in which Christ bestowed a share on the Church. But such a claim would be exposed as mere effrontery if it could be shown that, in the case of even one teaching that the Church has definitively proposed as belonging to the deposit of faith, she has formally or materially reversed herself on precisely the definitive point.

In defense of the Magisterium, I addressed six well-known cases in my series. But one that I neglected is slavery.

I neglected it because I assumed that Cardinal Avery Dulles had already addressed it effectively enough in a review article, "Development or Reversal?", about John Noonan's important 2005 book A Church That Can and Cannot Change. The main topics that Noonan, and perforce Dulles, addressed were slavery, usury, religious freedom, and marriage, with slavery getting by far the most treatment because Noonan had previously addressed the others elsewhere. Although I had learned much from Noonan on those others when I addressed them myself, and find his scholarship about the Church on slavery useful as well, I concur with Dulles in rejecting Noonan's conclusion that the Church has effectively reversed her traditional teaching on slavery. Yet now that the most notorious prog theologian in the blogosphere, Joseph O'Leary, has pressed the slavery issue by means of a direct rebuttal of Dulles, I see an occasion to address it myself. Such a treatment will be needed in the book I plan to turn the series into, if I can manage to interest a Catholic publisher in it. (So far I've sent a proposal to three, and been ignored.) Such a book, it seems to me and to several other Catholic authors, is itself badly needed.

It would seem that the Church got tougher on slavery under the papacy of John Paul the Great. Dulles notes:

Speaking at the infamous “House of Slaves” on the Island of Gorée in Senegal, from which innumerable slaves had been exported, [JP2] declared: “It is fitting to confess in all truth and humility this sin of man against man, this sin of man against God.” Noonan adds: “What this confession did not remark was how recently the sin had been discovered.”

But as Dulles points out:

...if we look up the quotation, we will find that the pope is here speaking of the slave trade, which had repeatedly been condemned. Far from changing the doctrine, John Paul is explicitly reaffirming the position of Pope Pius II, whom he quotes as having declared in 1492 that the slave trade was an enormous crime, magnum scelus.

Of course Noonan has a stronger argument for doctrinal discontinuity than that. Again, Dulles (emphasis added by me):

In 1993, in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor, John Paul II took, from Vatican II’s pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world, a long list of social evils: “homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and voluntary suicide . . . mutilation, physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit; whatever is offensive to human dignity, such as sub-human living conditions, arbitrary imprisonments, deportation, slavery, prostitution and trafficking in women and children; degrading conditions of work which treat laborers as mere instruments of profit, and not as free responsible persons.” Where Vatican II had called these practices “shameful” (probra), John Paul II calls them “intrinsically evil.” In the same encyclical the pope teaches that intrinsically evil acts are prohibited always and everywhere, without any exception.

The central question here is what, exactly, the Pope was condemning when he condemned "slavery" as "intrinsically evil." Was it just the slave trade—which the Church has quite consistently condemned for centuries? Was it just certain practices by which servitude is enforced, such as violence, family separations, and rape? Or was it, purely and simply, all forms of involuntary servitude?

Here, I must agree with Dulles' observation that

...if [JP2] had wanted to assert his position as definitive he would have had to say more clearly how he was defining slavery. He would have had to make it clear that he was rejecting the nuanced views of the biblical writers and Catholic theologians for so many past centuries. If any form of slavery could be justified under any conditions, slavery as such would not be, in the technical sense, intrinsically evil.

That is not only true but crucial. If the Pope had been condemning all forms of involuntary servitude as intrinsically evil—and thus as prohibited always and necessarily, regardless of motive, further intention, circumstances, or likely consequences—then even involuntary penal servitude would be prohibited. Thus, forcing imprisoned convicts to pick up trash along roadsides, or make license plates, would be intrinsically evil. I don't think a case can be made that the Pope was implying that, let alone saying it. But if we read JP2 as Noonan and O'Leary do, we would have to say that he was implying that. By the same token, we would have to say that popes who used Muslim prisoners of war to man the oars of Christian galleys were doing an intrinsic evil. Still more radically, we would have to say that slave owners who do not forthwith manumit their slaves are committing an intrinsic evil, regardless of how the slaves were acquired or why they are retained. That was a serious issue for English-speaking Catholics, as well as Protestants, in the mid-19th century, including and especially America. But neither St. Paul nor the Church prior to John Paul II ever went that far.

I don't believe we must say that even John Paul II went that far. Given the data of historic Church teaching that Noonan and Dulles both accept as data, the fairest conclusion is that the Pope was condemning as intrinsically evil not any and all involuntary servitude, but rather any attempt to force innocent people into servitude. That, at any rate, is a quite a reasonable way to make his position continuous with historic Church teaching. Why, then, interpret JP2's words in such a way as to make them discontinuous with said teaching?

As both Noonan's book and Dulles' reply suggest, the reasoning of the discontinuants seems to be by analogy with the development of doctrine on religious freedom. It took the Church over 1,500 years, spanning the fourth to the twentieth centuries, to formally recognize that any attempt to coerce adult consciences into professing the true faith is intrinsically evil. During those prior centuries, by contrast, heresy was punished as a civil crime because Catholicism was the spiritual premise of the social and political order. That led to well-known forms of persecution which the Church now condemns as intrinsically evil, even though some popes explicitly authorized them. So, does it not seem that the same sort of development occurred under John Paul II regarding slavery?

Frankly, the analogy doesn't hold up because its terms have not been adequately stated. When the Church condemns efforts to coerce consciences, she does not condemn the establishment of the true religion by the state. She does not even condemn the punishment of heresy. What she condemns is any effort to force people to change their minds about questions of religious truth. And she condemns it because, by the logic of her own account of the virtue of faith, such a thing is objectively impossible and hence can only be a gratuitous violation of basic human liberty. The same cannot be said about penal servitude, or about keeping slaves until the time is ripe for their manumission.

So, the hermeneutic of discontinuity is no more credible in the case of slavery than it is in the case of religious freedom. The Church has indeed changed her approach to those issues to some extent; it would be foolish as well as dishonest to deny that. But there is no good evidence that such developments have negated anything the Church has ever taught with her full authority.

Baptism with gender-neutral language ruled invalid

So indicates the CDF, which settles it. Amy Welborn has a good post up about it.

Why this and why now? As in the case of women's ordination, Rome is concerned to maintain the gender-symbolic integrity of the sacraments. Jesus did not refer to himself as "the Son," and to God the Father as "Father," just to mollify "the culture." The Jews were and had long been surrounded by cultures with female deities and with priestesses. No, there's a point here that God, unsurprisingly, understands better than we. Today more than ever, people should not be allowed to forget it.

Display issues

Dear readers, I had to remove the lush graphical background of this blog because changes Blogger made to the XML elements of the template were incompatible with it and thus ruined the post display in Firefox and Safari. All the other content remains.

I'm hoping that my IT guru can take time from his busy schedule to figure out how to restore the old background compatibly with the new Blogger layout.

The Obama Weltanschauung

Well, it now looks like Tuesday, March 4 will be Senator Clinton's Alamo. The polls indicate that Senator Obama, even if he doesn't win Texas or Ohio, will garner enough votes to prevent Hillary from catching up to him in terms of elected delegates. Even Bill has conceded that his wife must win both primaries convincingly in order to stay in the race. So, proceeding on the assumption that Obama will be Senator McCain's opponent in the general election, how should he be evaluated?

Since most readers of this blog probably wouldn't consider voting for Obama any more than I would, I want to propose three themes that McCain needs to sound against him in order to have any chance of winning in face of the groundswell of Obamamania. Even Obama's supporters would do well to note his vulnerability on those themes. Since two of them are, or should be, obvious on a purely tactical level, I shall merely state them without further comment. The third is where our most basic concerns should focus.

The first is that McCain has actually done something important that Obama can only say he wants to do: reach across the partisan divide so as to accomplish things in the legislative branch. Leave aside the question whether the fruits of what was thereby accomplished are truly worthwhile or not. There will never be full consensus about that. The fact remains that, if he sticks to his current ideology, Obama would not be able to do the same sort of thing as president. With one of the most if not the most liberal voting records in the Senate, Obama is a left-wing partisan. His stated, substantive policy positions in this campaign only confirm that. As president, such a man could not and would not win over most Republicans. The most he could do would be to rely on an enlarged Democratic majority in both houses of Congress to pass, over the supine and demoralized minority, the most liberal agenda since the New Deal. That would increase this country's political polarization, not reduce it. It would certainly increase taxes on everybody who pays them, not just on the affluent, who already pay the bulk of taxes as they should. McCain needs to make that clear to the American people, even as he proposes concrete alternatives and makes a case for them.

The second theme is, of course, the commander-in-chief thing. In the upcoming campaign, Obama is never going to be as credible on that score as McCain. The jihadis can help McCain by pulling off some spectacular attack on Americans somewhere, especially on our soil; but I suspect that Bin Laden and Zawahiri have learned enough not to do that. They probably know by now that they helped Bush in 2004 by endorsing Kerry; do you think they're going to help McCain with actual deeds? McCain will be on his own to argue that he understands what we're up against out there better than Obama, who just wants to make nice to everybody except al-Qaeda outside Iraq. McCain needs to stress that letting Iraq slide once again into civil war, which is what a full and precipitate withdrawal from Iraq would be tantamount to, would help al-Qaeda not only in Iraq but all over.

Such things are the bread-and-butter of political tacticians. What really concerns me is where Obama is spiritually. While nobody can effectively judge the state of another's soul, the signs are not good.

Obama is winning the Democratic nomination because his persona is so much more appealing than Clinton's. He is young, smart, cool, skillful both rhetorically and tactically. And it's good for the country that a black man like that is a credible candidate for the Presidency. He's got young people and latté liberals, as well as black people, swooning over him. By contrast, Clinton seems like everyman's first wife or mother-in-law—which explains why her last remaining solid bloc of support is white women old enough to be first wives and/or mothers-in-law. But the really disturbing thing about him is that, underneath the smooth rhetoric of unity, he shares the liberal Weltanschauung. I do not mean merely that his policy prescriptions are predictably liberal fare. I mean that, by sharing the liberal world-view, he makes his persona so radically ambivalent as to be incoherent.

In said world-view, America is more of a problem than a solution for the world. On that score, his wife's comment about being "really proud of America for the first time" in her adult life is revealing. By all means read what this female journalist and that one have said about Michelle in response to that. One comment in particular struck me as a giveaway. Michelle said that Americans have become "mean" and "cynical" and have "broken souls." Now, doubtless there is no shortage of people like that. In today's real world, the temptation to become or to stay like that is ever present for many of us, for reasons I need not elaborate. But I don't think it's valid as a generalization about Americans. And neither is her making such a statement a minor gaffe by a prospective First Lady that the candidate himself can effectively disavow. It is a given of today's liberal Weltanschauung.

Liberals do not, on the whole, like this country. Like much of the rest of the world, they see America first and foremost as greedy and militaristic, in need of more socialism, multiculturalism, and still-greater rights and privileges for women than have already developed over the last generation. In short, we need to become more like Western Europe and Canada. It is in terms of such a world-view that Barack's policy prescriptions, in the foreign and domestic spheres, make sense. But given how he has thematized his persona and campaign, it makes him radically incoherent as a candidate. He simply cannot be coherent as both a builder of bridges among Americans and a liberal whose prescriptions assume that America is mean, rapacious, violent, and cynical. It's not just his voting record that calls his theme of unity into question. It's the very view of reality given away by Michelle's incautious mouth.

This problem is not the sort of thing I know how to highlight in a series of sound bites. But that's what McCain and his staff need to find a way to do.

When the blind need to lead the blind

Today's Gospel reading—from the "ordinary" form of the Roman Rite, of course—has long been one of my favorites. A man blind from birth is healed by Jesus, and for the testimony he gave in answer to their questions about it, the officially pious eject him from the synagogue. I like to think that the guy's eventual fate as a disciple was something like the one expressed in my favorite all-time bit of movie dialogue:

Kirk to McCoy: "Well Bones, once again we've saved civilization as we know it."
McCoy to Kirk: "Yeah, and the best thing is they're not gonna prosecute."

If there's any justice, the man Jesus healed of congenital blindness wasn't prosecuted again for all the good he went on to do as a disciple.

Of course the Gospel passage itself drips with an irony long recognized. The man blind from birth does not at first know who "the Son of Man," the Messiah, is; in that sense, he is spiritually as well as physically blind. Yet he comes to "see" spiritually, by a faith elicited in turn by his being made able to see physically by Jesus; while the Pharisees, the educated and observant, don't see at all and in fact are made blinder still by their hardness of heart. Even as Jesus came to "open the eyes of the blind," he was to do so in such a way that those who "have eyes," and thus see, see not. All that is well understood; yet there are deeper lessons. I shall offer one I have been given to learn. But it will take a bit to work up to it.

It was assumed not only by the Pharisees but by Jesus' own disciples that the man's physical blindness was due to somebody's sin: his own or, perhaps, his parents'. The well-nigh universal assumption among the Jews at the time was that misfortunes such as birth defects, leprosy, even poverty had to be somebody's fault, so that the malady was just divine punishment. That's the flip side of the belief that caused the disciples to be astonished when Jesus told them how hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. Just as misfortune is a punishment for sin, good fortune is a reward for virtue. That was a very Old Testament view despite the alternative literature, such as Job and Ecclesiastes, that came to be canonized. Today we supposedly know better, at least if we are Christians. But do we?

How many of us ask ourselves "What have I done to deserve this?" when some major misfortune, or a steady series of misfortunes, strikes us! How many of us think well of ourselves when we have the things the world values! In this country especially, poverty is still thought of quite often as the due penalty for fecklessness, or some sort of spiritual weakness; those who become successful in the world's terms are assumed to have earned such good things by their merits. What makes such an attitude so seductive is that there is often an element of truth in it. When people are having a hard time, it is sometimes their own fault, at least in part; when people are enjoying the good things of life, it is sometimes because they have earned them, at least in part. That is a major reason why the prosperity gospel remains strong even among those who call themselves Christians; and in some of the more out-there New Age circles, there seems to be this idea that we somehow control whatever happens to us. But when being objective and honest, we recognize that much remains beyond our control. And many people are in lousy situations for which nobody in particular, beyond the effects of original sin, is to blame.

As Jesus' explanation of the man's blindness suggests, God's purpose in permitting such things is not to punish, but rather that his "mercy be shown forth." Ordinarily, that does not happen by miracles of healing. Padre Pio did once give sight to a blind girl born without pupils in her eyes, and there are other examples of things equally extraordinary in the history of the Church. But almost by definition, such events are extraordinary and thus rare. Ordinarily, God's mercy is supposed to be manifest by how we treat the unfortunate. That is how we are all called to bear Christ into the world. The mercy of God is shown by how we show his love to people regardless of how little they deserve it or how little we can get out of it. That is why those who find themselves summoned, by love or by work, to care for people who cannot care for themselves have such a great vocation. That is how people ordinarily "see" what God is. But even people with that vocation often overlook something that I too long overlooked: our first mercy must be to ourselves, by receiving God's mercy to ourselves.

Regardless of their formal religious belief or lack thereof, that is very difficult for a lot of people. As I get older, I become more and more convinced that "blame and shame" is the name of the game that most people are playing and/or defending themselves against. A lot of what's attended to in the workplace, for example, is sheer butt-covering: procedures whose purpose is not to produce anything but to ensure that the blame, if something goes wrong, falls—well, somewhere else. Since most of you have jobs, you needn't think long to see what I'm talking about. The same goes for domestic life. We all know families as well as workplaces where the first question asked when something goes wrong is not "What do we do about this?" but "Who did it?" But even if you are fortunate enough to have a job or family that isn't like that, it is often more difficult to forgive ourselves for wrongs we have done than to forgive others for how they have wronged us. I have heard more than one priest say that 90% of the problems that persist between people are due to unforgiveness. I think that's right—if one includes unforgiveness of oneself. So many people walk around burdened by guilt and self-condemnation, even those who profess belief in divine mercy. Sometimes the conscious reasons are quite specific; sometimes it's just a deep-rooted feeling of unworthiness, often caused by buried wounds from childhood or even infancy. But whatever the cause, a lot of people really do believe subconsciously something like: "There's no excuse for being who I am. I'm not worth much and probably deserve less." I speak what I know firsthand as well as what therapists and spiritual guides say about people.

The so-called "self-esteem" movement in education and parenting was meant to address that kind of problem. When it has any measurable effect at all, of course, such an approach tends to produce pampered narcissists ill-equipped to address real problems with courage and perseverance. What we need to do instead is recognize that our value comes from being conceived by the mind of God in boundless love. But that is not something humanity could have figured out for itself given enough time and research. Because of original sin, we start out blind to it and can only be assured of it by divine revelation. But many who have heard the Gospel are still blind to it. To be able to receive it, and the mercy on offer with it, we must admit our blindness to who we really are and humbly beg to be granted a personal encounter with Love Himself. Only those who admit they do not see Reality themselves can have that encounter. If they have it and respond accordingly, then those who think they see will be convicted of their own blindness. The blind who are brought to see must lead the blind who think they see. That is true evangelization.

Unclogging the drains

When asked why he focused so much on matters of logic and philosophy of language, Catholic philosopher Peter Geach replied: "Somebody's got to unclog the drains." I too feel called to unclog the drains, albeit by means of different specialties. One way I do that is to rebut a charge leveled against the Catholic Church rather often: to wit, that her development of doctrine sometimes involves negating claims supposedly made in the past by her full authority. The notion that those who exercise the solemn Magisterium discredit their authority by somehow missing the fact that they keep contradicting others who have exercised it is ultimately as silly as it is common. Now a similar sort of charge is sometimes leveled against myself and my intellectual allies: to wit, that we are at odds with each other on this or that point. Even when I'm tired and out of sorts, nothing motivates me to write more than a criticism like that.

At first I missed the most recent version when it popped up a few months ago at Energetic Procession. There Perry Robinson, an Orthodox thinker with whom I have disagreed before on a few other key issues, was responding to an eloquent post by my friend, Fr. Al Kimel, on Disbelieving the Predestinarian God. What exercised Perry was his apparent belief that he himself has been unfairly criticized in the past by Catholics partial to Fr. Al for rejecting the Augustinian account of predestination, which Fr. Al now and also rejects. As he writes (emphasis added):

...Kimel appears to quite strongly reject the idea that God selects persons in a deterministic fashion for salvation while passing over others. This is quite strange since this is exactly the same position as can be found in lots of Catholic doctors and theologians albeit in a variety of nuanced ways. (Aquinas, Scotus, Anselm, Albert) At bottom, it is still essentially the same view. How Kimel is going to reconcile this fact with current Catholic teaching would be worthwhile to consider. Even more curious is the fact that against the Orthodox claim that I have advanced regarding the Augustinian and Scholastic position, Kimel is silent on criticising Michael Liccone’s endorsement of this position. Liccione is quite clear that the reason why some are elected and some are not is that God loves some persons “more than others.” If such a view is repulsive to Kimel, how strange it is to find that Kimel doesn’t extend this repulsion, charges of serious error, etc. to Scotus, Aquinas or Michael Liccione. It is also strange that Kimel finds such a view repulsive and damaging and yet it is quite an acceptable view in Catholicism, holding a very high theological status and long pedigree. A difference of opinion is one thing, but repulsion, heresy and such things are quite another.

Let's get clear on one point first. The doctrine that Fr. Al clearly rejects is that of double predestination: the idea that some people are predestined to salvation and others to final damnation. Like Perry, I too reject that doctrine: I believe that grace sufficient for salvation has been granted to all, even to unbelievers. Ever since her confrontation with the heresy of Jansenism, the Catholic Church has clearly affirmed as much. Whether, by contrast, Augustine or other Catholic thinkers actually affirmed DP has been long debated; but I agree with Fr. Al's scholarly judgment expressed thus:

I know that I traduce the vast theological work of St Augustine. Augustine speaks profoundly of the love and mercy of God throughout his homilies and tractates. In his De Trinitate he brilliantly unfolds the mystery of the triune God who is infinite love. But the controversy with the Pelagians forced him to subtly divorce love and grace. Augustine did not explicitly draw the conclusion of double predestination, yet how close he came. Driven by the logic of irresistible grace, he found himself incapable of affirming the universality of the salvific will of the Creator. But for anyone of sensitive conscience, the fine distinction between reprobation and preterition hardly matters. The damage is done. Both positions call into question the truth and reality of God’s love for the individual sinner. Am I the object of divine love or divine hatred?

Because of Augustine's influence on this point, many Western Christians have indeed been haunted by the idea that God might well hate them. Because of my life experience, I myself have occasionally wondered as much. But I chalk that up to spiritual immaturity: an emotional response that contradicts and occasionally threatens to overwhelm my intellectual convictions. I have never for a moment believed that the Catholic Church actually teaches as much or expects me to believe it. Nor does Perry suggest that DP was ever the solemn teaching of the Catholic Church: he presents it, rightly, as a highly influential theological opinion. What, then, do I believe?

When I claim that God "loves" some people "more" than others, I mean that he calls some to a higher level of participation in his divine life than others. In that sense, some get "more grace" than others. So much has always seemed obvious to me: Padre Pio, e.g., is a greater saint than I am or ever will be, and that's not just because he happens to have made more right choices than I have. He just has more spiritual gifts than I do. But this goes beyond the merely personal: it is arguably a matter of divine revelation.

Thus the author of the Gospel of John speaks of "the Beloved Disciple"(probably himself) and, at several key narrative moments, contrasts that disciple with Peter. Some exegetes explain that as, among other things, a symbolic contrast between the charismatic and the institutional sides of the Church, the former being more highly valued than the latter. That seems to me true as far as it goes. What Hans urs von Balthasar called "the Petrine charism" exists to serve the more fundamental "Marian charism" of the Church, which the Beloved Disciple more clearly manifested than the other apostles, including Peter, whose headship is nonetheless not denied. Now does the fact that one disciple is called "the" Beloved mean that the others are not loved? Of course not. God loves each of them with a love inconceivably greater than that which they have for themselves or each other. The same goes for Christians in general, indeed people in general. That some are loved to a peculiar degree does not mean that all are not loved to a degree sufficient, and more than sufficient, for their eternal beatitude. For "God wills that all be saved and come to know the truth" (1 Timothy 2:4). We're all meant to be "up there." Some are just meant to be further up than others. If you're Catholic or Orthodox and don't believe that, ponder the fact that the Virgin Mary is the only human person whom Tradition calls "spotless" and "all-holy." Among Christians, she is by far Satan's most powerful adversary. She is God's great love.

The Virgin Mary is the test case. It is inconceivable to me, as a Catholic, that she might have been damned. She received grace not only more than sufficient for salvation, but grace of a degree incompatible with the possibility of damnation. Nothing else would have been compatible with her appointed role in the economy of salvation. Thus, I believe that she at least was irresistibly predestined to salvation. That definitely does not mean she was deprived of all freedom: one can be predestined to an end without being rigidly predetermined to adopt any particular means to the end. I have no doubt that, within her destiny, she made many choices that could have gone otherwise. I believe that others are predestined to salvation: for instance, some baptized people, such as infants or mental defectives, called home by God without their intellects and wills having developed enough to make them capable of morally significant choices in this life. I sometimes wish I had been one of those people. But like many others, I am called to a spiritual combat the outcome of which is in no way predetermined. I do not believe that means that God doesn't love me with an infinite love. For all I know, it might mean that I and people like me are actually called to a higher degree of sanctity than are those who make it to heaven without any spiritual combat. Just as I believe some people have been called to a higher level of participation in the divine life than I, so I believe that I have most likely been called to a higher degree than still others. And of course none of this is about merit. It is what I call a positive mystery: intelligible given, in this case, the truth about the divine nature, but by no means necessitated by the divine nature.

If it can be said at all that some are "passed over" by divine design, the most that could mean is that God does not go out of his general way with all of us to save some of us. He loves such people; he gives them grace enough and more than enough for their salvation; but within those conditions, he leaves their ultimate fate up to them. I believe I am one such person. I do not believe that to be an injustice to me or to those like me. It reveals the same divine mentality as is revealed in the parables of the prodigal son or the day-laborers.

The standard retort to that picture, which I have seen Perry and others deliver, is: "If God irresistibly predestines some to salvation, why not all? Why bother with the whole drama of sin and redemption?" My answer is: we don't know, and it doesn't matter that we don't know.

We don't know because we can't know. Therefore, nobody should be expected to know. Admittedly, in Perry's theological universe, where nobody is irresistibly predestined to salvation, one can come up with a tidy explanation for the drama. Freedom, understood as a choice between good and evil that is not predetermined by any factors outside our control, is necessary for both personhood in general and for our love of God in particular. Now I agree that freedom so understood is necessary for some, such as myself, in the economy of salvation. But the cases of the Virgin Mary, the more spectacular saints, and baptized people who die before reaching "the age of reason" lead me to believe that it is not necessary in all cases. And I can think of no theological reason why that should not be so. It is of course incompatible with certain philosophical accounts of libertarian freedom. But as a believer, I say so much the worse for those accounts.

In offering such a response, I cannot speak for Fr. Al. He may well have a different view about the doctrine of single—as opposed to double—predestination which I have affirmed. But I am at one with him in rejecting DP, and I believe the doctrine I have affirmed to be fully compatible with what he has said.

Just unclogging one more drain. I hope that helps a few readers to get things flowing.

Humanae Vitae for priests

The following mass e-mail to priests from Fr. Thomas Euteneur, President of Human Life International, describes what needs to be done about the problem of contraception in the Church.

We are just five months away from the 40th anniversary of the papal encyclical on birth control, entitled Humanae Vitae, and I am writing to ask your assistance in a project that I hope will impact thousands of men responsible for this marvelous teaching—our priests and seminarians. The project is simple: to send to as many priests and seminarians as possible a new email newsletter that is dedicated to educating them on the teaching of this encyclical. In a moment, I will tell you how you can help me in this project, but first let me explain why this is important.

There are two complaints that I have heard in literally every one of the 50+ countries I have visited. Complaint one is that priests don't preach enough about abortion. That is painfully apparent to all of us. Complaint two is that they are almost totally silent about the issue of birth control as well. Some have described this as a "conspiracy of silence" in the face of one of the most important issues of our day.

Rome, thankfully, has not been silent on either one of these issues. Popes Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI have been brilliant examples of preaching and teaching on the life issues. The problem comes down to the delivery of these teachings at the grass-roots level! It benefits the "average Catholic" very little if the pope writes a document on an issue of faith or morals only to have priests ignore it in their pastoral care of souls. This has been the de facto situation of our clergy for forty years on the issue of birth control, and it is not too strong to say that the teaching of Christ has been neutered by clerics who contracept its life-giving force!

Don't get me wrong. I am not judging this clerical contraception—I am condemning it! Priests who deprive their people of moral guidance on birth control dig their own graves. "My people perish for lack of knowledge," says the prophet Amos. Yes, and they also perish for the sins of contraception, which has apparently been adopted by the vast majority of Catholics—men, women and physicians—who see no contradiction whatsoever in contraception and the reception of Holy Communion.

HLI has never condemned this lack of clerical responsibility without at the same time offering a positive solution to it. We relentlessly supply bishops, priests, seminarians and religious all over the world with rock-solid information about the life issues, and in doing so, we know that we are helping to form the leaders of the Church Militant to fight the culture of death—and we will never relent in our mission!

In the lead up to the anniversary of Humanae Vitae on July 25th, HLI will publish a special e-newsletter for priests and seminarians dedicated exclusively to teaching them about Humanae Vitae. Here is what the e-newsletter will provide them:

* commentary on the cultural degradation that has been generated by contraception
* homily helps for preaching on birth control
* technical information about the abortifacient dimension of contraception
* resources for promoting natural family planning among your people
* feature-length articles exploring the beauty of Humanae Vitae
* straight-talk regarding priestly dissent on this issue and how it leads to loss of souls,
and finally
* a manifesto for priests to sign to demonstrate that we will never be silent about this issue!

This all sounds like an ambitious plan, I know, but their priestly souls are worth it aren't they?!

Now, here is how you can help us: send us the email addresses of priests and seminarians that you know so that we can invite them to receive this email newsletter. We already have a database of priests and seminarians who will receive this next week, but we want every present and future cleric to enjoy the benefit of this marvelous work.

All we ask is that you hit the REPLY button at the top of this email and send us the email addresses of any priests or seminarians you know. It is not necessary to include their names—just their email addresses. We will invite them to receive our new publication called Humanae Vitae Priests.

Help us take back our Church from the dissenters—it's time to hear the full teaching of our Church from the pulpit again!

Housekeeping notes

1. Blogger has just introduced changes to the XML code in the base template I use for this blog. As a result, the display in Firefox and Safari is very bad. But it's still fine in Internet Explorer. I urge Firefox and Safari users to open the blog in an IE tab until the problems can be worked out.

2. One new feature I've adopted myself: at the end of each post is a Haloscan link inviting people to rate the post. Please avail yourself of it. Feedback is always important.

3. There are many topics on my list that I want to and can write about. What prevents me from posting more these days is the absurd unpredictability of my job schedule. It throws off not only my outside activities but, even more importantly, my sleep. So, every day I apply for other jobs. Please pray that I get something soon with a regular schedule. Much hinges on it.

Thanks to all for hanging in there with me!

William F. Buckley Jr., RIP

I wanted to write about this yesterday but couldn't. It was the end of an era for me, and I don't handle era-endings well, at least not without a bit of prayer and reflection. Having had that bit, today I can write.

Just about every literate American over a certain age knows who he was: the witty, aristocratic, and Catholic founder of "the conservative movement." Appropriate encomia can be found at NRO; there will doubtless be many more. But I want to make this one personal. Those are usually best.

Between the time, roughly, of my first communion and my first sexual encounter, I idolized Buckley. He was the closest thing to the man I wanted to be that I had encountered before my mid teens. My father had said the same for himself, which probably accounts for why I felt as I did. Viewing Buckley's PBS talk show Firing Line was as much an expected part of our Sundays as the Mass, and to me just as interesting. (Even its musical theme, from Bach's Brandenberg Concerto #2, sparked my interest in "early" music. Later, my music-humanities teacher at Columbia refused to believe that I, a non-musician, was capable of such a sophisticated discussion thereof. I almost got done up for plagiarism.) I dreamed of meeting WFB as he ran for mayor of New York on the Conservative Party ticket in 1965; but he never did visit Staten Island, where we lived, since in that borough he was assured of beating the Democratic candidate. Nonetheless my father worked for his campaign, and I assisted enthusiastically until hearing Buckley's reply when asked what he would do if elected: "Demand a recount." My ten-year-old mind didn't quite get it. Yet naturally enough, I said the same on my own account when I ran for Congress as a Conservative in Manhattan in 1988. By then nobody cared; what was good in me was not original.

Though I never met the man, I came close twice. Once was the same year I ran for Congress, when I received a personal thank-you note from him for a series of book reviews I had recently written for National Review, the rag he had founded and which I had read regularly since the age of nine. I asked an older friend of mine, with whom I had briefly shared an Upper-West-Side apartment in college and who had also written for NR, whether the note meant that the great man was intrigued enough by me to want to meet me. The reply was: "Not really. He does that for all his authors." I was less crushed by the news than stunned by the good manners of it. I had never thought of WFB as that well-mannered. I still haven't met a controversialist that well-mannered.

The second time I came close was soon after I had "tea" with another writer friend of mine and his then-pal, one Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia. We had met and noshed at the old Russian Tea Room; having got stuck with the rather hefty bill, I dropped a half-joking hint about getting something out of the occasion other than a lighter wallet. Apparently I was subtle enough: La Princessa suggested that I accompany her to Pat and Bill Buckley's Manhattan pied-à-terre the next evening, where she had been invited to a gathering of "intimates." Of course I was quite excited; of course it didn't actually happen. But least I got some plausible excuse over the royal phone a hour or so before the scheduled rendezvous.

That was 1990. Soon thereafter, my first wife and I left New York for Houston to take up job offers. I had accepted that a meeting between my childhood idol and me was not in the designs of providence. And in any event, I thought I'd outgrown him.

NR, over which he was surrendering day-to-day control, had ceased to interest me much, and conservatism as a political philosophy struck me as less intellectually coherent than the body of Catholic social teaching anyhow. I was troubled by the oft-quoted remark he had made decades before, by way of greeting Pope John XXIII's social-justice encyclical Mater et Magistra: "Mater sì, magistra no." I had even learned that he also dissented, sort of, from Paul VI's Humanae Vitae. To my mind, that made him one of those CINOs much reviled at the institution, the University of St. Thomas, where I was headed to teach. But my disillusionment was not permanent.

About a dozen years later—unemployed, homeless, and divorced from my second wife—I read for the first time two books of his with 'God' in the title: God and Man at Yale, which had launched his career in the 1950s; and Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith (1997). Amazingly, the former is still in print as well as the latter. My awe returned.

Reading those books enabled me to see into and savor Bill Buckley himself at a much deeper level than I ever had. Once again, I wished I could have been much more like him. His various struggles with Catholicism and the Church became much more comprehensible to me as quarrels between lovers. For the first time, I was able to understand and empathize with intelligent Catholics who could not easily swallow all that the Church expected of them. I briefly made plans to get back to New York and find a way to meet him before he died. But I couldn't even scrape together enough money to see my own family of origin and old friends. Providence reasserted himself.

Still, I hope to meet him in the hereafter. Perhaps we can then have the discussion I always wanted to have with him. But then, perhaps it won't be necessary. And perhaps that will have been the point.

How many husbands have we had?

In view of today's Gospel reading, I mean that question for every adult, human soul. For as the Bible's nuptial imagery and a good deal of mysticism suggest, men and women are collectively "female" in relation to God. God wants to marry us. That's why the Second Person of the Trinity called himself "Son," incarnated himself as a male, and also called himself the Bridegroom. All people are called to be members of his Bride, the Church. But we are unfaithful, as the ancient Hebrews often were by paying attention to other gods. They committed adultery against their husband, the only God. So do we, even when our language professes otherwise. It is a truism that every sin is an act of infidelity to the Lord; what believers often fail to recognize, however, is that while married to him in name, and meant to be married to him in reality, they often marry others.

To the Jewish members of John's audience for his Gospel, his ascription of five husbands to the Samaritan woman at the well would have been well understood as an historical allusion to the five pagan gods, baals (lords), that the Samaritans had worshiped. As the late Raymond Brown pointed out in his commentary on this gospel, and as the Ignatius Bible also recognizes, the Samaritans were a mixed breed both ethnically and religiously. After the northern kingdom—"Israel" as distinct from the southern, "Judah"—had been vanquished and exiled by the Assyrians in the late 8th century BC, foreigners from five different districts were forcibly resettled among the Hebrew remnant. Intermarriage and religious syncretism produced what came to be known as the Samaritans, from the district in Palestine where they eventually concentrated. Relations between Jews and Samaritans had been execrable ever since Nehemiah expelled them from common worship when the returned Jewish exiles began reconstituting Israel. But common elements remained, especially the expectation of an anointed prophet, what the Jews called the Messiah. Jesus' conversation with the woman at the well, the same well where Jacob had met one of his wives, indicated not only that he was claiming to be the Messiah but was also the true Bridegroom of unfaithful humanity. Yet few of us love him as such, at least most of the time.

Most of the time, we trust more in other things: money, power, prestige, sex, science and technology, institutions—or, most seductively of all, people who actually do love us, such as parents or spouses. People who lack all such things are deemed pitiable; the prospect of having none of the above terrifies most of us; that's why trusting false gods comes more easily to us than faith in the true God. But when we trust more in what is not God than in God, we worship another god and are thus married adulterously. Spiritually speaking, we are bound to end up like the Samaritan woman—not even married to the latest "man," returning to the well over and over for the water of life. Temporal goods fail to satisfy our deepest longings. None of us will take them to the grave, even those fortunate enough to take some of them to the threshold thereof. Only Jesus satisfies our thirst; only Jesus is our true husband.

Yet his first words to the woman were: "Give me a drink." The difference between the Son of God and the false gods is that he thirsts for us, who can find him in those who thirst and meet him in slaking that thirst. We must see others like that. To do so, we must start with seeing ourselves like that. Only then can we get our marital status straightened out.

The embryo debate continued

Most of my post last Saturday, entitled Struggling with incoherence II: who counts?, was a critical review of the debate between pro-life thinkers Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen on the one hand, and pro-choice thinker William Saletan on the other, about the ontic status of the human embryo. Here I note that their debate continues. Saletan replied to the RPG/CT piece here, posing the question slyly: "Are embryos morally equal to people? I say no." The latest RPG/CT rejoinder appears here.

I highly recommend following the whole debate. The discourse is both civil and of the highest level one is likely to find outside specialized journals. I will have more to say tomorrow.

Eternity: do we get only what we want?

Fr. Al Kimel has posted some fine thoughts on a perennial question that the Apostles themselves asked Jesus: "How many will be saved?" Of course I didn't need to be convinced of his conclusion, which alludes to Jesus' answer: "Foreswear the counting of the saved or the damned. Strive, rather, to enter through the narrow door!" I have long thought the question itself useless. We can't even predict the result of the next election, never mind the size of the elect, which latter God has chosen, in his infinite wisdom, not to tell us. But I have long been interested in a related question: do we get in the hereafter only what we ultimately want? Whatever the answer is, it is neither obvious nor unimportant. But unlike "how many are saved?", the question is well worth exploring.

We all want eternal bliss even when it's conceived, wrongly, as a superabundance of sex (or, for some women I know, chocolate). But it doesn't follow that we all want heaven. For heaven is a state of conscious and perpetual union with God whose prerequisite is a thoroughgoing purification and reconstitution of our being. In the real world, that in turn requires suffering and death, which we don't want. Yet, as St. Thomas Aquinas said, "to will the end is to will the means to the end." So, to get to heaven one must want it badly enough to die to self spiritually so that one can die physically in some sort of union with Christ. I rather doubt that everybody wants heaven that badly.

Indeed, many traditional Christians are wont to say that the default fate for humans is damnation. From this point of view, each of us is damned unless, with divine help, we choose to do whatever is necessary to be saved. That answer seems reasonable enough. After all, Christ came to save us from the thralldom of Satan because we were, and are, incapable of doing that for ourselves; so, what is necessary for avoiding damnation is to choose for Christ. But it doesn't take a lot of critical reflection to see that such an answer must, at the very least, be seriously qualified.

First there's the consideration, which follows ineluctably from the teaching of the Church, that baptized infants who die before becoming capable of morally significant choice go straight to heaven. Others have chosen for them; they had no spiritual battle to fight. Cool. And what of others who are in no position to make what is thought to be the necessary choice in this life: infants who die unbaptized; those adults who die never having heard the Gospel at all; those who have been more or less exposed to it, but only in some toxic or otherwise misleading form which they understandably reject—what of these? Are they to be damned just for the bad moral luck of having had neither a clear opportunity to choose for Christ nor the love of some believers who choose for them? I'm not going to speak for other Christians, but I speak with the Catholic Church in affirming that God damns nobody through no fault of their own. If damnation is default, it can't be for such people. There are quite a lot of them.

Of course, purebred Augustinians will insist that inheriting original sin, which we do just by belonging to the human race, means that every human being is conceived personally guilty before God. If that is so, then those who have never had the opportunity to choose for Christ in this life are actually in a worse position than those who have. Some are forever deprived of union with God even though they have died without having made a single free choice or even known anything relevant. Others who have grown up enough to commit serious actual sin will burn forever in hell even if they have never heard the Gospel at all or have only heard it distorted. All such people belong to the massa damnata from which it is the purpose of Christ to extract the fortunate, predestined elect.

Aside from the sheer ruthlessness thereby ascribed to God, the problem with that picture is its premise: original sin as personal guilt. While that's what Augustine held, and has thus influenced many in the West to hold, that idea has never been dogmatized and is now, in fact, the opposite of the ordinary teaching of the Catholic Church. Thus CCC §405:

Although it is proper to each individual, original sin does not have the character of a personal fault in any of Adam's descendants. It is a deprivation of original holiness and justice, but human nature has not been totally corrupted: it is wounded in the natural powers proper to it, subject to ignorance, suffering and the dominion of death, and inclined to sin - an inclination to evil that is called "concupiscence". Baptism, by imparting the life of Christ's grace, erases original sin and turns a man back towards God, but the consequences for nature, weakened and inclined to evil, persist in man and summon him to spiritual battle.

I have explained before how that development in Catholic teaching is compatible with the Council of Trent's dogmas on original sin. Unlike Augustine's view, it is also compatible with the Eastern-Christian understanding of "ancestral" sin. And so a Catholic cannot argue that it follows from the de fide doctrine of original sin that damnation is our human default fate. We are each conceived in a state of alienation from God; but it doesn't follow from that alone that such is what anybody ultimately wants, or even that anybody is just going to fall through the nets willy-nilly into hell.

What about the alternative: is salvation, rather than damnation, the default fate for humanity? That is what many Catholics today seem to believe, and it's hard to fault them for that. After all, "God wills that all be saved and come to knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:4), and God's will is in some sense unthwartable. Grace sufficient for salvation is given to all, even to unbelievers. Indeed, there has never been a time when humanity has been without grace. The purpose of our creation was to be elevated by God to partake in his own trinitarian life, and that elevation is the primary theological referent of the very term 'grace'. Creation is irrevocably suffused with grace, even when we don't experience it that way. Accordingly, among those Catholics who are Catholic enough to admit that damnation is a very real possibility for people, the most common opinion now is that only people who die wanting and choosing to be damned are, in fact, damned. They are bathed in a supernal light that they hate so much, it burns.

But I don't believe that's quite right either. Consider an example of such thinking from a saint, Leonard of Port Maurice, cited by one of Fr. Kimel's commenters:

When Saint Thomas Aquinas's sister asked him what she must do to go to heaven, he said, "You will be saved if you want to be." I say the same thing to you, and here is proof of my declaration. No one is damned unless he commits mortal sin: that is of faith. And no one commits mortal sin unless he wants to: that is an undeniable theological proposition. Therefore, no one goes to hell unless he wants to; the consequence is obvious. Does that not suffice to comfort you? Weep over past sins, make a good confession, sin no more in the future, and you will all be saved. Why torment yourself so? For it is certain that you have to commit mortal sin to go to hell, and that to commit mortal sin you must want to, and that consequently no one goes to hell unless he wants to. That is not just an opinion, it is an undeniable and very comforting truth; may God give you to understand it, and may He bless you. Amen."

I have added the emphasis. Unfortunately, the syllogism is invalid.

All that follows from the premises is that voluntarily committing what one knows to be mortal sin is necessary for damnation. From that, however, it doesn't at all follow that no one is damned unless they want to be. For it is quite possible to freely commit what one knows to be "mortal sin,"—i.e., an act of a sort objectively incompatible with abiding in God's grace—without at all wanting what would be its consequence for eternity if one dies unrepentant. I daresay that happens all the time. That is why compunction and repentance, under the influence of grace, remain possible in this life for those guilty of mortal sin. If and when the sinner comes to see mortal sin in all its ugliness, they can readily turn from it toward God. Some doubtless do. Of course there are those who choose not to see and repent. But can even they plausibly be said to want hell? In most cases, I should think not.

There may well be people who prefer actual, eternal hell to living on God's terms; if they have died, their souls are certainly in hell; but there's no evidence whatsoever that such people are abundant. At any rate, if I've ever met any I didn't know it. That shouldn't surprise: preferring eternal hell to life on God's terms is too irrational, even by our sorry human standards, to be common among us. For saying that, I expect to be told by somebody that I am not cynical (oops, "realistic") enough; but I think anybody inclined to make such a criticism would be saying more about themselves than about their brethren. Among those in hell, if any, there must be some who would have chosen to live differently had they known how things would turn out.

In fact, I know of no good arguments either that we are saved only if we want to be or that we are damned only if we want to be. But that doesn't mean that heaven is a merely extrinsic reward and hell a merely extrinsic punishment, bestowed by divine decree rather than produced by our choices themselves. For those capable of making relevant choices, where they end up for eternity is, at least in part, the natural outcome of those choices. But they needn't know that in order to make the relevant choices. Where they end up may well be the result of having done what they want, but it needn't thereby just be what they want.

To acknowledge that is to become aware that some of one's most humdrum or offhand choices can be momentous. We can cooperate with grace, and in the end be saved, without knowing that's what we've been doing. But we can also oppose grace, and in the end be damned, without knowing that either. Awareness of what is thus at stake accordingly induces both humility and vigilance. When cultivated further by a sincere search for truth, those can only aid us in our spiritual combat.

Being God's works of art

Among the many works written by my first philosophy professor, Arthur C. Danto, is one called The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. It's an instance of the philosophy of art, one of his specialties. Such interest as I developed in that branch of philosophy, as distinct from the arts themselves, was aroused by that book. That was mainly because, in one of God's many little ironies, the title could just well apply to the spiritual life itself—even though art was about the closest thing to a religion that Danto had. Since today's Gospel was about the Transfiguration, I thought I'd say a bit more about how the title applies.

Unlike what is implied by many priests and theologians, I do not believe that every good thing is also holy or sacred. "The sacred" is a realm of being distinct from "the profane." From the standpoint of man's search for God, the sacred is that which man "sets apart" from the profane for representation of and/or service to the divine. Thus, people and things become sacred in virtue of being lifted out of the profane. The rituals in which such people and things serve a sacred function are themselves sacred because they are not ordinary, profane activities but rather ones in which some form of contact with the divine is sought. In natural religion, all the "profane" activities of life are valorized by being somehow related and oriented to the sacred activities. Now in the true, "supernatural" religion, revealed by God and thus signifying God's search for man, we also have sacred people, things, and activities. Human culture and convention play a part in all that. But they are ultimately established and given their meaning by God, and thus valorized, through Christ in the Holy Spirit. Our purpose in participating in them is to extend the Incarnation through the profane world by making Christ "be all in all," starting of course with ourselves. We are to become sacred ourselves so as to "transfigure the commonplace." If you like, we are to turn the world into God's work of art by first being his works of art.

Most lay people seem to have a very hard time grasping that. The most important human relationships, which occur in the "commonplace" spheres of family and work, are not often seen as that which we are destined to transfigure and thus make sacred. They seem to take their primary meaning from our secular and thus profane reality, and the best we can do with them spiritually is to try to follow "the rules" of Christian morality as we navigate through them, so that we aren't derailed by them. They remain profane in our consciousness and in reality; the "sacred" is reserved for liturgy, prayer, and maybe some volunteer activities. Among the truly "devout," this is rationalized by assuming that all the world is God's and everybody is a child of God, so that everything good is taken in theory to be sacred even if we don't often feel that in the realm of the commonplace. Such an attitude of course ignores the very real need for transformation: first, that of metanoia or conversion, a turning of the mind and heart to God; then, that of transfiguring the commomplace to serve the same purpose. If everybody and everything good is somehow sacred to begin with, then creation needs no transfiguring. God has done it already, to the extent it needs to be done at all; all we need to do is be nice and prosper.

That is illusion. To transfigure the profane as we are called, we must each undertake the journey of faith as Abraham did. We much each persevere, despite the deserts, the setbacks, and the unfairness of life, in the belief that God will make of us and our world something incomparably greater than we can see if we but conform ourselves to Christ. It's not easy to be God's work of art, or even to see how one is such a work in progress. Yet such is the meaning of the sacred, as opposed to the profane. We are set apart and thus sacred by baptism; but that is only the start of transfiguring the commonplace.

Struggling with incoherence II: who counts?

In my previous post, I expressed amusement as a philosopher about the intellectual muddles people get themselves into and struggle with. That is no mere academic form of entertainment. On some issues very important to most of them, philosophical incoherence prevents Americans from collectively deciding what the law should be. All sides of the spectrum, for example, agree that the body of Supreme-Court jurisprudence on the "incorporated establishment clause,"—i.e., the First Amendment's religious-establishment clause as incorporated by the Fourteenth, and thus applied to the states—is an incoherent jumble. But the situation is unlikely to improve because there is no philosophical consensus about the origin, nature, and scope of religious freedom. On the matter of health care, we cannot decide whether basic health care should be a right for all, and funded by all who can help fund it, or a right only for some and a mere commodity for others. That is why the status quo, recognized for the ludicrously expensive and inequitable mess it is, stays pretty much the same. We can't agree on what, if anything, should replace it—because we can't agree on what duties we have to one another in this matter, and therefore on what should be funded and by whom. Now it may well be that history, as distinct from philosophical debate, will end up deciding such questions willy-nilly. At some point, de facto universal health care might evolve under pressure of economic necessity; at some point, local communities may end up deciding for themselves how much to facilitate religious expression, simply for want of a coherent alternative. That's what seems to be happening anyhow. But on the more specific matter of abortion, dissensus is at once more acute and more amenable to being reduced by argument. That is grounds for hope.

Under current law, women have the right to kill their children in the womb, at any stage of pregnancy and for almost any reason; but in most jurisdictions, if somebody kills her while she's pregnant, the killer can be and sometimes is charged with two homicides. Thus, an action protected as a right for the mother counts as a felony if anybody else does it. (I'm just waiting for a case in which the father of a child is charged with a form of homicide for having assaulted the mother, thus having inadvertently caused the death of their unborn child, while she happened to be on the way to getting an abortion. "News of the Weird," indeed.) Such legal incoherence persists, and is widely accepted, because there is no agreement about the moral status of the unborn child. Some hold, and others deny, that such a child is a person, entitled to that moral respect which persons owe to persons merely as such. That dissensus is why "choice"—for the mother, and only for the mother—is the mantra of those who defend the status quo. In the absence of consensus about the moral status of the unborn child, it is left up to the mother to decide what to do with "her own body"; for it's a lot easier to get political agreement about the extent of her moral autonomy than about her duties, if any, to her child. That doesn't make the resulting legal regime any more coherent, of course; but it does at least highlight a question that admits of an answer. The question is: how can it be rationally decided whether, and if so when, the unborn child is a person entitled to the respect owed to persons merely as such?

As a resource for answering that question, Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen have produced a splendid tome entitled Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (Doubleday, 2008). In it, they make a case for the personhood of the embryo that does not rely on any distinctively religious premises, but on the basis of reason alone. That has been done before, to be sure; but I've never seen it done as clearly and convincingly. One can rationally disagree with them, as does William Saletan; but their arguments show that one doesn't need revealed religion to make a reasonable case that the embryo is an individual human being and thus a person. That becomes all the clearer in their reply to Saletan. If such a case can be widely disseminated, it could have enormous political significance in fact as well as in theory.

Notice that I said "reason alone." I did not say "science alone." Science cannot tell us what, if anything, counts as a person or what the rights of persons as such are. The concept of personhood is irreducibly philosophical, even if our understanding of it relies crucially on intuitions and experiences which are pre-philosophical as well as pre-scientific. Science can only give us data that make it reasonable, or not, to count some biological entity as a person. But there is pretty broad agreement among ordinary folk that entities which count as individual human beings, as distinct from mere cells or organs of other human beings, are persons and thus, unlike sperm or egg cells, merit some sort of moral respect. Of course there's not such a clear consensus that innocent persons have an absolute right not to be killed, and that is more of a problem than many pro-lifers seem to realize. But the main intellectual focus appears to be still more basic; for there is as yet no public consensus even on the question whether human embryos are individual human beings. So even though the basic issues are philosophical, debate among the most rigorous protagonists typically hinges on how much scientific support can be mustered for the proposition that human embryos are individual human beings.

That's the question on which George and Tollefson focus much of their book, and their answer is "A lot." It is also on that question that Saletan focuses his critique. I've already provided the link to his review; you can read it for yourself. I believe that George and Tollefson successfully rebut the specifically scientific arguments that Saletan adduces. But I also believe they are making a tactical error. Ironically, their rebuttals of Saletan's arguments also show what the error is.

They show, convincingly enough, that the scientific facts Saletan cites fail to establish that the embryo is not an individual human being. The way they show it is to expose the philosophical problems Saletan gets himself into with his objections. They then provide a cogent argument that Saletan, and by the same token each of us, was once an embryo. If you were once an embryo, then there is spatial-temporal continuity between the embryo you were and the individual human being you are now. That makes it reasonable to hold that the embryo you were was an individual human being. And all that in turn makes it reasonable to hold that the embryo you were was the same person you are now—if you hold that spatio-temporal continuity between biological entities A and B suffices for identity between A and B; if you define 'person' roughly as Boethius did, as "an individual substance of a rational nature"; and if you hold that each and every individual member of the species Homo sapiens is a person in that sense. Now I share those premises with George and Tollefsen, who also summarize philosophical arguments for them. But people who, for philosophical reasons, don't share those premises, aren't going to find the "scientific" arguments of George and Tollefsen persuasive. They might, at the end of the day, be willing to concede that it is reasonable on scientific grounds to hold that human embryos are individual members of the species, but at the same time be unwilling to concede that all such entities are persons meriting the moral respect due to persons merely as such. That is the line long taken by George's Princeton colleague Peter Singer, who sees nothing wrong in principle with infanticide. He's operating with a different conception of personhood, and hence of the moral status of persons, from the classical one on which George and Tollefsen rely and which they defend. Hence, he hardly bothers debating the science of the matter. Admittedly, most "pro-choice" Americans are unwilling to go that far; but that only shows that many of them haven't thought through how far they're willing to go.

That's why it is hardly dispositive, even though true, to say as George and Tollefsen do:

Is the human embryo a whole living member of the species Homo sapiens—a human being—in the earliest stage of his or her natural development? We say yes, that is exactly what a human embryo is; he says no. The question is not metaphysical or religious, but rather scientific.

The science is important for defending a premise necessary for the philosophical argument. The premise is that embryos are individual human beings "in the earliest stage of natural development." One might quibble at the margins about whether science can demonstrate that as opposed to merely making it reasonable to hold it; but either way, the difficulty is that the nub of the argument is philosophical, and the science cannot settle such an issue one way or another. I see the same sort of problem with Intelligent-Design advocacy. The scientific facts cited by ID advocates make it reasonable to believe that the universe is designed to be roughly the way it is; but science can never establish any such belief just by itself, and there's always the lurking possibility that natural facts which are now scientifically inexplicable won't remain so. What then becomes of the argument? It's best to keep it philosophical to begin with.

That said, the strength of the George-Tollefsen approach is that it attends carefully to a question people are inclined to attend to, and shows that pro-lifers have more to gain than lose by that. I just wish they wouldn't give out the impression that that's where the main work lies. They actually do much else of the needed work; but that's not what you're likely to hear about unless you earn your living at this sort of thing.