Checking in after the Pope

It's tough to keep blogging while caught in the throes of moving and job-hunting. But as things evolve, I'll get a bit more time to keep up next month. This is my brief reflection on Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the U.S. this past month.

Three things struck me: President Bush's obvious admiration for His Holiness; the prominence of the theme of pederasty in the Pope's talk; and the focus of the MSM on the shortage of priests. Each offers more than meets the eye.

Think and feel what you will about the President. His words to and about the Pope were not only true but sincerely meant—so much so that I permit myself to wonder whether Bush, like Tony Blair, will become Catholic. No doubt others have more informed things to say about that than I do.

It was evident that the Pope decided to confront the pain of the clerical sex scandal head-on rather than skirt it with platitudes. Though insufficient to heal the wounds, that was certainly necessary. I'm delighted he had the courage to see that and act accordingly. Praise be to God.

The priest shortage is news so old as to be almost outdated. Some dioceses, such as Omaha, St. Louis, and Denver, are doing quite well with recruiting and retaining seminarians. Yet others are in a world of trouble. Until the Pope's visit, the Archdiocese of New York was looking at having no entrants into next year's freshman seminary class. The vocations director nows says he's receiving a "tsunami" of inquiries from prospective candidates. Let's hope a few end up actually going to Dunwoodie.

There is no shortage of vocations. There is only, in some quarters, a shortage of willingness to recognize, encourage, and foster them. That the needed encouragement comes from this pope is a sign of the Spirit at work.

Is the Catholic Left in this much trouble?

Perusing a site I visit often, I was led to this article from last week by Fr. Andrew Greeley. (I admit not being hooked into the 24/7 news cycle, but for my purposes that doesn't matter.) Its headline is: Obama has become target of sick minds. Having investigated the substance of that assertion, my concern is more about Greeley's mind than about Obama's critics or even the Senator himself, whom I would never support anyhow. And my question is how representative that mind is of Obama's Catholic support.

It goes without saying that some sick minds have attacked Obama. In a country as big and diverse as ours, it would be shocking if a viable presidential candidate were not a target of a few sick minds. Anybody who reads Internet comboxes can easily spot them. But the minds Greeley alleges to be "sick" with "hate" are those of Thomas Sowell, a prominent conservative academic who happens to be black, and Naomi Schaefer Riley, "assistant taste editor" at the Wall Street Journal. You can find their cited articles here and here. Having read those, I find no evidence of mental illness or even of that kind of "hate" which is an evil thing indeed. What I do find is a rather transparent attempt on Greeley's part to turn Obama's "pastor problem" back on the Senator's critics. What causes my concern is the cynicism and ham-handedness of the attempt. Since I don't have time for a detailed presentation, I'll just state my reaction and leave the analysis to those who care to read all three articles at issue.

Greeley would have us believe that Rev. Jeremiah Wright's anti-American and racist words were taken out of context and weren't really hate speech, which rather emanates from Sowell and Riley. But when you read what the latter two wrote, you don't have to agree with everything they say to see that it's not hate speech. Riley's article in particular is moderate, well-researched, and carefully argued. Nor can any contextualizing turn Wright's words into something other than hate speech--which is why Obama repudiated them even as he tried to excuse them. But Greeley won't even admit that they were hate speech; supposedly, the "hate" comes from people who think the Wright scandal says something troubling about Obama. Of course that scandal has receded for now, and I'm not really interested in it for its own sake. But I can't help wondering how representative of Obama's Catholic support we may see Greeley's attitude as being.

Consider, for example, that Obama is the only member of the Senate who has refused to vote for protecting infants born alive during attempts to abort them. On that basis alone, it is simply inconceivable to me how an informed Catholic could actively support such a candidate without mental gymnastics of the degree one observes in Greeley's article. The gymnastics are certainly far less plausible than the arguments his article condemns as "sick." That worries me.

New sins and other fictions

Strictly speaking, there aren't any new kinds of sin, at least not of the "deadly" sort. There are only various ways, some newer than others, of manifesting the "seven capital vices" or "deadly sins" in action. A "sin" is simply a kind of action that manifests at least one of those capital vices. The possibilities afforded by technology alone expand apace; and for those entertained by evils as imaginary as they are egregious, there's always the 1995 movie Seven. What I find more entertaining than the movie, though, is the hash so many people keep making of an interview last month with Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti of the Apostolic Penitentiary (!). His words were as highly publicized as they were misunderstood, and were highly publicized largely because they were misunderstood. When it comes to the Church, fiction sells well when packaged as fact—just as theory, such as The DaVinci Code, sells well when packaged as fiction. They'll sell whatever makes the Church look silly or sinister—preferably both, for those with the wit to manage it.

I was first alerted to the hash last month by reading this article from the Torygraph, which was so confused that nobody who really knows moral theology could take it seriously. The notion that new sins, mostly against our planet's ecology, could somehow replace or even augment the seven deadly sins is just the sort of freshman error that Ethics 101 corrects, or could correct if students were tested on it. I doubt such a silly thought, let alone the words, had even occurred to Archbishop Girotti. In fairness, I brushed the story off because, of course, one cannot expect any better from the secular British press when it comes to Catholicism. Yet now we've got this piece of OpEd tripe from the New York Times.

Its author is Eduardo Porter, a Mexican economics journalist who now belongs to the Good Grey Lady's editorial board. I suppose it's too much to expect the American newspaper of record to get somebody with a substantive background in Catholic theology to write about this topic, but maybe that's only because they couldn't find any such person willing enough to embarrass themselves. But there is a passage in Porter's piece that merits close attention, if only because it contains the giveaway about what's really going on:

Norms encoded hundreds of years ago to guide human behavior in a small-scale agrarian society could not account for a globalized postindustrial information economy. Polluting the environment, drug trafficking, performing genetic manipulations or causing social inequities, new sinful behaviors mentioned by Msgr. Gianfranco Girotti, regent of the Vatican Penitentiary, are arguably more relevant to many contemporary Catholics than contraception.

As Professor Scott Carson observes:

Ah, yes, of course, contraception. What a surprise to find that the sin of contraception is so very old fashioned as to be no longer relevant to modern Catholics. I don't suppose the prevalence of, say, lust, in contemporary culture could have anything to do with the contemporary Catholic (and, well, let's face it, everyone else's, too) attitude towards the teaching on contraception. It also comes as no surprise that the "new" mortal sins amount to a typical listing of leftist Shibboleths (which is not to deny that some of them probably really are sins, at least when engaged in by individuals).

What Scott says is true, but I don't think he's quite got the problem nailed here. It's worse than he suggests in his post, though I suspect he would agree with what I shall now say.

People like Porter, who is presumably from a Catholic background, are given to depicting the Church as struggling with irresolvable tensions between ancient dogma and modern truths. There are several reasons for that, not all of which motivate all the Porters. But one reason this particular song-and-dance sells is not hard to grasp. If the Church is really engaged in such a hopeless struggle, then of course those ancient teachings of hers which are also unpopular not only can but should treated by Catholics as bygone relics with no spiritual relevance for today. That holds especially in the moral sphere, and in the moral sphere it holds especially with regard to sex. Hence Porter's reference to contraception. If the Church's well-known but poorly understood teaching on that topic is just a bygone relic, then Catholics can plausibly claim the right as Catholics to sexual activity intentionally shorn of its primary biological purpose, thus sparing themselves the likelihood of great trouble and expense. After all, it's just too hard to have a jolly good sex life if you take Catholic sexual morality straight up. So we needn't and don't.

But Porter is a bit more sophisticated than that. Quoting a fellow economist, he holds that “[r]eligions are in the unusual situation in which it pays to make gratuitously costly demands. When they weaken their demands they make on members, they undermine their credibility.” So then the question becomes how the Church can strengthen her moral credibility in an era when her old teachings about sex are widely ignored and often ridiculed even by Catholics. And the answer is now ready to hand: create a list of new sins to feel guilty about and repent of! Hence Msgr. Girotti's pronouncements. Or so goes the theory.

But the theory doesn't hold up. The idea behind Catholic moral teaching, whether old or new, is not to enhance the Church's marketing appeal by making "gratuitously costly demands." If that were the idea, then the old gratuitously costly demands would do just as well as the new ones; indeed, in some quarters the old ones are doing quite nicely. Nor is the idea to increase market share by making new demands that reflect "leftist shibboleths" (to use Scott's phrase) and are thus, presumably, less likely to be ignored. If you think about it even for a moment, it becomes obvious that the people most likely to buy leftist shibboleths are least likely to be motivated to become (or remain) Catholic by virtue of the Church's adopting them. If your world-view is formed primarily by the secular left and only secondarily by the Church, you're not going to find anything in a fashionably leftist Church that you haven't already got elsewhere.

My hunch is that the Eduardo Porters of the world know that perfectly well.

Thoughts on the road, especially about atheism

I've often heard it said that if you want God to laugh, tell him your plans. Indeed: which is why it is even more often said that life is what happens when things don't go according to plan. I've given up even trying to figure out what the ancient pagans called fortuna, and what we moderns instinctively call "luck" whether we are religious believers or not. But if we are Christians, we must call the mystery "providence" for those who believe. Luck becomes meaningful as providence to the extent that it becomes a narrative of God's love for us and, through us, for all. And it becomes that to the extent we offer it as such, to him, in faith. Coincidence becomes luck; bad luck becomes good luck; good luck becomes providence. "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose" (Romans 8:28).

I've been thinking about all this because of why I've been travelling again. Over the Easter weekend, I had to interrupt not just my blogging, but also what I thought was my search for meaningful work, in order to deal with a family emergency. Having played my due role in the latter chiefly by my presence, which I've never thought of before as a healing factor for anybody, I found that an even better opportunity for the former was presenting itself. I am now in the process of exploring that opportunity. I wish I could say more and say it publicly; but as usual in my life, whatever it is that's supposed to happen is not happening with the speed and clarity I would prefer. Much depends on the choices I freely make, especially on my choices about the seemingly smallest of practical matters. It is a sore trial for a philosopher who prefers thought and talk to action—thought and talk about Big Things as opposed to little things, which really aren't little when you see them aright, as the youngest Doctor of the Church taught us.

Such is the insight in light of which I've been pondering a combox dialogue between two bloggers who know each other in real life from their time at UC-Berkeley. They do not hide their real names, which are "Arturo" (a Catholic) and "Patrick" (an ex-Catholic atheist). Now I shamelessly admit that I read those guys periodically because they have said nice things about my writings. Arturo often comments here, and Patrick has written favorably about my take on the problem of evil. I also note that the views Arturo expresses in the post heading the combox I've linked to do not surprise or disturb me in the least. I could quibble with him, certainly, in the way professors whose worldviews are very similar quibble with each other in the faculty lounge as a way to avoid real duties for a bit. But Patrick's brief adumbrations of his loss of faith astonished me. I believe they are worth addressing for a wider public.

In the aforesaid combox, he wrote:

...I have seen holiness as a transformative and inspiring power, both first-hand and second-hand; but my knowledge of human nature has expanded to the point where even this holiness seems better explained in natural psychological terms. The most radical avatars of this kenosis (Mother Teresa, Therese of Lisieux, and the examples in my own life) seem to be driven by interior anguish, doubt, guilt and darkness even (and especially) in their most luminous moments to others. Suffering molds character, self-inflicted inner suffering most of all; and the particular nature of the “bad conscience” keeps its bearer on the path of humility we marvel at most in our saints. Catholic theology has explanations for this as well, but I’ve come to find a psychological explanation more and more probable.

Prima facie, what's curious here is the insouciance of the juxtaposition. Patrick fully acknowledges the state of holiness, and understands what it often involves in the souls of the saints; yet he calmly states that he finds "psychological" explanations for the interior struggles of the saints "more and more probable" than those of theology. In a post of his own, Patrick expounds further what he takes to be the relevant concept of probability, and does so as part of a "A Prolegomenon of Prodigious Length to the Further Explanation of my Apostasy."

Reflecting on Patrick's thoughts, though, I find myself astonished by the assumption that "psychological" explanations somehow compete with "theological," which seems to be a particular case of the more general assumption that scientific explanation competes with theological explanation. I find that general assumption simply incomprehensible. I suppose one could assign a Bayesian probability to somebody's coming to believe, or disbelieve, that there is such a God as classical theism holds, given their experience and reasoning ability. This is why Patrick can and does say this:

Thus there is an implicit notion of subjective probability in all the claims we make, even the firmest ones; and the reason that I count myself an atheist today is not because of one knock-down argument against the existence of God, but because the total scope of my human experience leads me to assign the existence of the Christian God a very small probability.

What Patrick is doing in that sentence is stating an undeniable empirical fact about himself. But that is biography, not metaphysics. What I find so astonishing is that Patrick is confusing explanation with justification in a rather elementary way. Given the concepts and experiences Patrick cites, it makes perfect sense that he would be an atheist. But he has said nothing to rule out the live possibility that both scientific and theological explanations of reality could both be true, at different levels of explanation where calculations of probability cannot be univocally made. For a brief take on what that might look like, I suggest this. But that which I and other theists have to say about explanation is less interesting to me at the moment than what Patrick himself is doing.

His aim seems to be to avoid the cardinal sin of "self-deception" and face up to reality with an unflinching concern for objective truth. I applaud that. I have always believed that what really matters is not what matters to any of us as individuals, but what matters period, if there is such a thing and whatever it may be. And I read Nietzsche in college too; I took him seriously enough to write my first philosophy paper about him. But it does not seem to have occurred to Patrick, yet, that being an atheist can be just as much a result of self-deception as being a theist. When discussing the relative rationality of belief and disbelief in God, what matters is not such motives for belief as are peculiar to this-or-that person, which are indeed subjective. What matters is whether both sides can agree on a set of objectively applicable norms for rational assent in such matters, and what those norms are thus taken to be. Much of the difficulty in debates between atheists and theists arises because neither side is as clear about this as they need to be. I don't think Patrick has achieved the requisite clarity yet. But I won't put him down by speculating as to why.

Secret disciples

The Gospels say that Joseph of Arimathea, a wealthy and prominent Jew to whom Pilate gave Jesus' body for burial, was a disciple only "secretly, for fear of the Jews." It is quite conceivable that he was also a member of the Sanhedrin who had to maintain his cover by pretending to condemn Jesus along with the rest. We don't know, but it doesn't matter. The type appears today to teach us.

It turns out that that Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union, was only pretending to be an atheist, and did so for the sake of power. But despite Ronald Reagan's well-publicized suspicions, it still isn't clear that Gorbachev was actually a Christian by then. Years after the failed coup leading to the end of the Soviet Union, when he could freely have come out as a Christian, he seemed to come out only as a naturalistic pagan: "Nature is my god," he said at one point. The draw toward the truth since then appears to have been St. Francis of Assisi. Nobody who isn't close to Gorbachev can say just when that fascination set in, but again it doesn't matter. Nor does it much matter, really, whether he returns to the Russian Orthodox Church or becomes a Catholic instead. What matters is what Gorbachev's spiritual journey teaches us about grace.

If he really had been a Christian before now, then it would have been wrong for him to pretend otherwise. Christians under Roman persecution had faced this sort of issue, and we know how the Church handled it. I can well understand why Gorbachev would have found it useful to pretend, just as Joseph of Arimathea might have found it useful to do so. But having been baptized into an Orthodox church, and having had every opportunity to learn the fullness of the truth, Gorbachev would not have had Joseph's excuse. Consider a parallel. When asked why, given his views, he didn't become Catholic, the late popular philosopher Mortimer Adler, a Jew, replied to the effect that he wasn't ready to give up his favorite sins. That's honesty. Gorbachev may have been unready to give up the chance to make the Soviet Union a better place, but his position still implicated him in much evil. I wonder whether he was honest to himself about that. Yet given the available evidence, I doubt that Gorbachev was a true believer when he was president.

It seems more likely to me that he suspected that Christianity might be true, and also shared enough of its values to move his country toward respecting those values. He might not have wanted to go whole hog and actually make the assent of faith precisely because he wasn't prepared to pay the cost. If so, then in that respect he wasn't just like Mortimer Adler: he was like a lot of ostensible believers. A lot of us baptized fall into indifference or heresy because we don't want to pay the full cost of discipleship. A lot of us who are neither indifferent nor heretical still make major choices which constitute a refusal of discipleship. They can be sneaky sins, such as adultery, or they can be open lifestyle choices, such as materialism. Most Christians are like that and probably always have been. Proud of my knowledge of the faith and formal piety, I've been like that myself. What makes any of us better than Gorbachev was when he was one of the most powerful men on earth? Nothing. Nothing at all. The only question is whether we accept or refuse the invitation of grace when it is extended. Gorbachev may have accepted it more authentically, even as president, than many lifelong, orthodox, practicing Christians. After all, he did take grave risks and nearly ended up dead.

That's how grace works. One of Jesus' most devoted followers, who stood by him at the foot of the cross, was a woman named Mary who had been a great sinner. So had Matthew been, before he became a disciple and was elected to replace Judas as an apostle. The important question is not where you start from but where you're headed at the end. Sometimes, ending up in the right place involves starting by honoring God while he's dead.

The key to the riddles

It is certainly not surprising that the disciples were able to understand the meaning of the Cross only slowly, even after the Resurrection. The Lord himself gives a first catechetical instruction to the disciples at Emmaus by showing that this incomprehensible event is the fulfillment of what had been foretold and that the open question marks of the Old Testament find their solution only here (Lk 24:27).

Which riddles? Those of the Covenant between God and men in which the latter must necessarily fail again and again: who can be a match for God as a partner? Those of the many cultic sacrifices that in the end are still external to man while he himself cannot offer himself as a sacrifice. Those of the inscrutable meaning of suffering which can fall even, and especially, on the innocent, so that every proof that God rewards the good becomes void. Only at the outer periphery, as something that so far is completely sealed, appear the outlines of a figure in which the riddles might be solved.

This figure would be at once the completely kept and fulfilled Covenant, even far beyond Israel (Is 49:5-6), and the personified sacrifice in which at the same time the riddle of suffering, of being despised and rejected, becomes a light; for it happens as the vicarious suffering of the just for "the many" (Is 52:13-53:12). Nobody had understood the prophecy then, but in the light of the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus it became the most important key to the meaning of the apparently meaningless.

—from Hans urs von Balthasar, A Short Primer for Unsettled Laymen

Blood and water

If we wish to understand the power of Christ’s blood, we should go back to the ancient account of its prefiguration in Egypt. “Sacrifice a lamb without blemish”, commanded Moses, “and sprinkle its blood on your doors”. If we were to ask him what he meant, and how the blood of an irrational beast could possibly save men endowed with reason, his answer would be that the saving power lies not in the blood itself, but in the fact that it is a sign of the Lord’s blood. In those days, when the destroying angel saw the blood on the doors he did not dare to enter, so how much less will the devil approach now when he sees, not that figurative blood on the doors, but the true blood on the lips of believers, the doors of the temple of Christ.

If you desire further proof of the power of this blood, remember where it came from, how it ran down from the cross, flowing from the Master’s side. The gospel records that when Christ was dead, but still hung on the cross, a soldier came and pierced his side with a lance and immediately there poured out water and blood. Now the water was a symbol of baptism and the blood, of the holy eucharist. The soldier pierced the Lord’s side, he breached the wall of the sacred temple, and I have found the treasure and made it my own. So also with the lamb: the Jews sacrificed the victim and I have been saved by it.

“There flowed from his side water and blood”. Beloved, do not pass over this mystery without thought; it has yet another hidden meaning, which I will explain to you. I said that water and blood symbolised baptism and the holy eucharist. From these two sacraments the Church is born: from baptism, “the cleansing water that gives rebirth and renewal through the Holy Spirit”, and from the holy eucharist. Since the symbols of baptism and the Eucharist flowed from his side, it was from his side that Christ fashioned the Church, as he had fashioned Eve from the side of Adam Moses gives a hint of this when he tells the story of the first man and makes him exclaim: “Bone from my bones and flesh from my flesh!” As God then took a rib from Adam’s side to fashion a woman, so Christ has given us blood and water from his side to fashion the Church. God took the rib when Adam was in a deep sleep, and in the same way Christ gave us the blood and the water after his own death.

Do you understand, then, how Christ has united his bride to himself and what food he gives us all to eat? By one and the same food we are both brought into being and nourished. As a woman nourishes her child with her own blood and milk, so does Christ unceasingly nourish with his own blood those to whom he himself has given life.

—from the Catecheses of St. John Chrysostom

Theological boot camp

The few. The proud. The seminarians.

It's good to know who's training to defend our values. Enjoy.




HT to Francis Beckwith.

The Obamasaga

We all know by now what Senator Barack Obama's spiritual mentor is. Since I have nothing to lose, I'll say it: Jeremiah Wright is a racist hate-monger. Of course you won't hear the R-word in Obama's disavowal of Wright's views, or from Obama's savvier supporters. The candidate's way of finessing this problem is vintage Obama. If you haven't heard the speech already, you can hear it or read it here. It's a work of art. He's convinced me that he's not a racist hate-monger. It's also clear that he owes his mentor too much, personally and politically, to dump him altogether. Beyond Wright, that signifies the fundamental problem with Obama's candidacy. It is not about to go away. McCain should thank God on his knees.

When one listens to what Jeremiah and Michelle have said in unguarded moments, and have not retracted, only the most determined wallow in that river in Egypt can prevent one's concluding that the people closest to Barack do not love America. I shall charitably assume nonetheless that Barack does love America, deeply, and that he means everything he says about transcending the old polarizations and uniting Americans. The fact remains that, given both his base and his policy positions, he cannot transcend the old polarizations. His base consists of upscale liberals, blacks, and young people—a demographic coalition whose view of America is, on average, unquestionably dimmer than that of the country as a whole. They favor his policy positions precisely because those positions address what they dislike about America. So, in order to be the president he says he wants to be, Obama would have to stiff his base and triangulate his policy stances into unrecognizability. If he more-or-less keeps his base and sticks to his policy stances, then he cannot do and be what he tells Americans he wants to do and be for them. If he wants to be effective, in other words, he will either have to betray those who have gotten him where he is or make a mockery of how he has presented himself to the country as a whole. He cannot have it both ways.

But he keeps trying to. If people have any sense at all, they will not reward him for that. I used to think that was too big an 'if', but there are a lot of ex-liberals out there who can, and do, communicate good sense to their fellow citizens. Sample this and this delightful illustration of that. And pray.

That little black spot

Most literate folk are familiar with the Yin-Yang symbol. I don't want to get into a discussion of what Yin and Yang really are, or are supposed to be; that is a topic for comparative religion, and Gagdad Bob is better qualified to handle it in a way I would respect. By way of introduction to my real topic, however, I note that when I first saw the symbol, I thought that it was intended to represent the relationship of good and evil in human beings. Thus, there's a little bit of good even in bad people (the little white spot) and a little bit of bad even in good people (the little black spot). I am told that such is a common misimpression among undergraduates. I am reminded of it by a post I've just read by a man who calls himself "janotec" and seems to be an Orthodox cleric, even perhaps a theologian.

The post appears at the blog "Second Terrace" and is entitled Orthodox theologians do not speak in tongues. It is an impassioned yet reasonably well-argued plea for Orthodox theologians to expound dogma more and worry less about meeting the so-called "challenges of the age." With one qualification, I wish that I had written that post myself as a plea to Catholic theologians, whom I am better positioned to address. The qualification is that I object to the following two sentences, which unfortunately appear near the beginning:

A long time ago, when Orthodoxy got too conservative (or seemed that way), relevant philosophers who "responded" to "contemporary challenges" forged a nominalism that made Grace a far less frightening thing, and intellectualized it into something less than a phenomenon. Too, the West could now take its ethics in spoonfuls, in casuistic legerdemain.

For me, that kind of thing is like the little black spot: a stain on what would otherwise be dazzling white. I want to explain why so as to contribute, in my own small way, to an eminently desirable goal: getting Orthodox and Catholics to preach the Gospel effectively in today's world not only with the abiding resources of the Great Tradition, but with better mutual understanding.

The problem with the above-quoted little passage is not that it is altogether false. It contains an important element of truth. The problem is that it rhetorically lumps in something of the bad with something of the good which may be found within the theologies of something called "the West"—a term of art which, in Eastern-Orthodox parlance, means that part of Christendom which, for well over a millennium, worshiped and theologized in Latin rather than Greek. (To Christians in such places as Armenia, Iraq, and India, of course, "the West" included Constantinople too. And John Bekkos, a medieval patriarch of Constantinople with strong "Western" leanings, at least got a hearing in the city for a while. Yet for reasons it would be counterproductive to explain, I don't want to stress that very much.) The resentments, misunderstandings, and rivalries go back to at least the time when Pope Damasus I (366-384) substituted the vernacular Latin for Greek in the Roman Mass and didn't even take note of the First Council of Constantinople (381), which produced what was eventually accepted everywhere as the ecumenical Creed. And for various reasons, the negativity gradually worsened over time, eventually causing the schism that persists to this day. For my present purpose, the two most relevant problems are the Catholic-scholastic idea of "created grace" and the Western development of moral theology at the same time in terms drawn from legal theory.

I start with the concept of created grace. There certainly were Catholic theologians in the later Middle Ages who were "nominalists," and it is certainly true that many of those nominalists treated the question of grace in more or less the way janotec criticizes. But not all scholastics were nominalists by any means. The via moderna of that period in Catholic theology, in my opinion, did tend to go wrong as janotec says; and that was a key precursor to Protestantism's essentially forensic account of justification. But some Catholic theologians were Franciscans and Thomists who were anything but followers of that path. Indeed, in the hands of those more traditionally-minded theologians, the very concept of "created grace" was intended largely to explain how justification and sanctification consisted in what we'd now call an "ontological" change in the human soul, in such wise that the soul could become a "partaker of the divine nature" without becoming God-by-nature. In that respect, use of the concept of created grace had the same goal as that of St. Gregory Palamas when he expatiated on the distinction between the divine "essence," which cannot be shared, and the divine "energies" or actions ad extra, which can and indeed must be shared if we are to have the life God destines us for—the "life eternal" otherwise known as theosis or "divinization." As I see it, the chief difference between the older, more robust Catholic theology postulating "created" grace, and the Palamite view that the divine energies are "uncreated" and thus God, is that the Catholics used the term grace not merely for its primary referent, which is indeed the Uncreated himself insofar as he communicates his life to us, but also for the instruments he uses to communicate his life to the human person, and especially for some of the effects of that communication within the human person.¹

The main problem arose when neo-scholasticism as a whole became preoccupied with classifying and analyzing the kinds of created grace so understood, in order to explain how our "correspondence" with grace causes "congruous merit" in the human soul. That went on to such an extent that people started forgetting about the primary referent of the term 'grace' and got into the habit of speaking of grace as though it could be located, divvied up, and distributed almost according to formula. That explains a way of speaking even today that has always grated on me. Catholics often speak of grace as if it were some sort of spiritual fuel, with differing levels of octane, that one can get more or less of depending on one's recourse to the "means"of grace, such as the sacraments and prayer. That's what accounts in part for why many Catholics seem to treat church as a spiritual gas station: a place where you pull up, pay up, tank up with grace, and pull out in time for brunch or the football game (depending on which scheduled Mass you got up in time for). When people receive the Eucharist with such an attitude, it does them a lot less good than it could and, in cases of unrepented serious sin, real harm. Catholicism really has needed to recover a more Eastern, relational sense of grace as God himself operative within the person, without thereby sacrificing use of the term 'grace' in the derivative senses already described, which are perfectly consistent with the primary referent of the term when properly contextualized and understood. That, in effect, is what various Catholic movements and theologians have been doing ever since the ressourcement that preceded and helped to guide Vatican II.

For a long time, though, the chief obstacle to bringing that to fruition in Catholic sacramental, ascetical, and mystical theology has been a tendency to legalism in moral theology. When one treats Christian morality primarily as a set of rules, one comes to think of progress in the Christian life primarily as progress in observing those rules. Salvation is then conceived primarily as a reward for such progress—i.e., for one's degree of merit—and the function of grace is seen primarily as that of enabling one to achieve such merit. The serious Christian will thus do what they can to get "all the graces" they can because, after all, one can never have enough fuel for a long journey in which one too often finds oneself traveling backwards. That is the grain of truth in the common Protestant view that Catholicism teaches salvation by "works" rather than by "grace." Many Catholics, and not just Catholics, have in fact run their spiritual lives as if that were so. It is a kind of spiritual immaturity that certain tendencies in late-medieval, neo-scholastic, and Counter-Reformation thought only encouraged. I have seen the results in many an older Catholic, even those in bitter rebellion against it. I've even seen it in some young "trad" Catholics.

But as a doctrinal matter, the common Protestant view is false. The Catholic Church does not teach that salvation can be earned, and many writers have taken great pains to show that. "Merit" is the fruit of grace, and when God crowns our merits he is crowning his own gifts. Theologically too, the Catholic tradition is much richer than legalism and much closer to the Orthodox. And many Catholics do get it. The reasons why also show that janotec's charge of "casuistic legerdemain," made from an Orthodox point of view, is mostly empty rhetoric.

The purpose of casuistry is to apply genuinely Christian norms to "hard cases" so that people have specific, well-thought-out helps to form their consciences for dealing with such cases. Casuistry need not be, and is not intended by the Church to be, a substitution of law for grace. It is not even intended as an exhaustive resolution of cases. The harder the case, the more its resolution is a matter of individual judgment—or, if you prefer, conscience. The norms governing casuistry are guideposts, not inspiration. To be sure, many people have ridden "the rules" too hard, as if external conformity to even the most technical of them were the primary measure of virtue. But that's not a problem with the rules in themselves. It's a problem with some people's own spiritual growth. And though I can't speak for all Catholics, I don't take my "ethics in spoonfuls." I have learned by hard experience that Christ often calls us to a level of discipleship beyond "the law," i.e. beyond that level of behavior which casuistry can often excuse. He never stops challenging us to reach greater spiritual maturity. And I have found plenty of room in Catholicism for that recognition. It is indeed Catholic saints who have helped me to attain that recognition. And that room is taken up every day by a myriad of saints-in-the-making who will never be canonized.

I just wish janotec and many other intelligent Orthodox could lay off the potshots at "the West" and join with Catholics in rediscovering the common ground that East and West have come to till differently. That little black spot would then get smaller and smaller, so that scandal would not be given to undergraduates and other innocents.

_____________________________
1. I have been influenced to adopt this view by, among other works, Cardinal Journet's The Meaning of Grace (1957), republished in 1997; and by Jeffrey D Finch, "Neo-Palamism, Divinizing Grace, and the Breach between East and West," in Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Tradition, edited by Michael J. Christensen and Jeffery A. Wittung, (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008).

Moral theology, moralism, and spiritual growth

Lately I've noticed a style of moral theologizing in which moral uprightness, understood as external conformity with precepts that can sometimes be quite technical, is presented as a sine qua non not just of the Christian life itself but even of—well, basic credibility. I don't want to call that Pharisaism, exactly; the precepts involved are typically more important, objectively speaking, than many of those the Pharisees thought important. But we have here a kind of moralism particularly seductive for highly intelligent Catholics who, if they succumb to it, thereby become prone to impugn the character of those who disagree with them about one or more of the technical precepts at issue. Such moralism is a problem for both "the Right" and "the Left," i.e. for the rigorists and the laxists. It is important that moral theology not become moralism because, if and when it does, it becomes at least as much an obstacle as an aid to Christian spiritual growth. Besides the uncharity it encourages in those who practice it, it has the (often unintended) effect of presenting Christian morality as a set of rules that, in the harder cases at least, most people would be no more able to understand than to live up to. My purpose here is to illustrate what I mean by considering how a recent moral controversy has developed online.

Consider a well-known case of public moral disagreement. In 2005 Terri Schaivo, a still-young Florida woman who had been in a "persistent vegetative state" (PVS) for over a decade, was euthanized by the will of her husband Michael. She was killed by the legally authorized withdrawal of the tube providing her with "artifical nutrition and hydration" (ANH); it took her less than two weeks to die of dehydration. The Vatican and most pro-lifers, including yours truly, regarded that action as murder even while it was only being proposed; politically, an ultimately futile effort was made to override the local judge and secure federal intervention to delay or prevent Terri's death. Along with not a few other bishops, the local bishop had seemed unable to issue clear moral guidance on the matter, which was a problem because Terri and her family of origin were Catholic and, as such, her family had sought support from the Church in their effort to prevent Terri's death. Partly if not wholly because of that unclarity, the US bishops sent a dubium, a formal "question," to the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, about the sort of case that the Schaivo case was. You can read the CDF's responsum ('CDF-R' for short), which came last year, here.

If it isn't obvious to those capable of understanding the text of CDF-R, it ought to be obvious that the document warranted the judgment by Catholics that Terri's killing was, objectively speaking, murder. As I argued last year, the principles enunciated in CDF-R were a positive and authoritative development in Church teaching that had begun under John Paul II. Received and taught as intended, CDF-R would have the practical effect of making Catholic health-care professionals and families unwilling to see ANH as "extraordinary" care in cases like Terri's, and thus less willing to withhold or withdraw it in PVS cases generally than many Catholics had been in the past. But that's not what seems to have happened. Indeed, few minds seem to have changed one way or the other.

What seems to have happened instead is this. One side tries to spin CDF-R into practical irrelevance, consigning any better reception for the document than that to pro-life "extremism" (i.e., wingnuts); the other tries to depict as murderers, by formal if remote cooperation, anybody who had broadcasted the opinion that Terri Schaivo's killing was morally permissible. The former instances the moralism of the left; the latter, the moralism of the right. Each side impugns not only the arguments, but the personal credibility, of the other. I find that disturbing no matter which side it comes from.

To me at least, the moralism of the left is clear in how the slowly but steadily shrinking "progressive" Catholic intelligentsia has received CDF-R. Anybody who cares to learn what that reception has been has only to search the online archives of Commonweal and the National Catholic Reporter. But I shall save everybody time by focusing just on the article I've just linked above, the one that spins CDF-R into "practical irrelevance." I shall save myself time and space just by linking my detailed critique of that article here for you to read for yourselves. But it is necessary for me to add a couple of things in this post.

One is that the author of that article is Capuchin Brother Daniel Sulmasy, MD, PhD, one of the most influential, if not the most influential, Catholic bioethicists in the U.S. As such, he has a reputation for doctrinal orthodoxy that is not entirely undeserved. I have heard him speak myself, at a lecture he gave in a Catholic parish near Duke University a few weeks ago; to my surprise, the talk turned out to be a 45-minute crash course in bioethics for lay Catholics. As a former bioethics lecturer myself, and one who is thoroughly informed about magisterial teaching on bioethics, I could find nothing objectionable in principle in Sulmasy's talk. But during the Q & A, he cleverly sidestepped the Terri Schaivo case. He pointed out, rightly, that ANH can be extraordinary and thus optional care, which is why John Paul II permissibly refused it when he was nearing death. Sulmasy also pointed out that a number of conditions need to be fulfilled if we are not to count ANH as extraordinary. There was no time to discuss that claim with him further, but I for one had no need to. A reading of his article and my critique indicates that he frames the conditions in such a way that Terri Schaivo's murder might have been justified. I leave it to readers to find the loophole.

This is the sort of laxism that the Jesuits, e.g., were often charged with even in the days before their vow of obedience to the pope was honored more in the breach than in the observance. It was said that the Jesuits construed moral norms designed to cover difficult cases in such a fashion as to license behavior almost indistinguishable from what one could expect from the heathen. I don't think that was usually true in the past; but it has certainly become so today, at least in those areas of life where prevailing secular morality has itself grown more lax. Such laxism is moralism because it suggests, without ever actually saying, that external conformity to "the rules," construed in a plausibly minimalist way, suffices to make everything OK. My own life experience, with the present sort of case and others, indicates that that is often not the case. And Sulmasy's brand of left-wing moralism becomes a bludgeon when those who reject the laxism are accused, in effect, of being somehow beyond the pale. You can see how subtly Sulmasy does that himself in his article, but he's not even the most egregious example. I myself have been accused of "Jansenism" for holding that the now-standard "three conditions" on counting an act as a mortal sin should be tightened up to take account of culpably malformed conscience. Among Catholics who know and care what Jansenism is, or was, that sort of charge functions as mere ad hominem even when it is not so intended.

And that brings me round to the right-wing moralism I've observed—in this case about the Schaivo case, but there are many others. Let's assume what I've already conceded: that what brought about Terri Schaivo's death was an act of murder. Let's even assume, for argument's sake, that writers who influenced others to disagree with that judgment thereby "cooperated" in some remote fashion with Terri's death. Does this mean that any such person is actually guilty of murder by "formal cooperation?" Clearly not. It depends on the influence they intended to have, the influence they actually had, the degree of their own culpability for their rejecting the moral truth in this matter, and the degree of others' culpability in sharing that error without having themselves done the actual deed. Trying or even succeeding in getting others to agree with them about the moral status of Terri's death is as bad as murder only if they were actually trying to induce somebody to yank the tube or, failing that, were disposed to yank the tube themselves if given the chance to do so. Merely contributing to a climate of erroneous moral thinking about a proposed course of action is not the same thing as being guilty of the wrong action itself. It is to be guilty of leading others into error about the applicable moral precepts. Just how guilty one is for doing that will, in turn, depend on how guilty one is for holding the original error, which only God knows, and how important the matter is. There is no one-size-fits-all human judgment to make here. But you'd never know that from what some pro-lifers say.

The kind of moralism I'm lamenting is not the only kind. It is not even the only kind among laxists and rigorists. What I'm lamenting is an over-emphasis on external conformity to technical moral precepts that few people even understand well enough to apply reliably on their own. It is possible to interpret such a precept too rigorously without thereby joining the wingnuts. It is possible to interpret such a precept too loosely without thereby setting oneself on the slippery slope to hell. Often, people who err on either side are guilty of nothing worse than not yet having learned enough about the full implications of the Gospel. For them, overcoming that problem is simply a matter of becoming more Christlike—not of picking the right side of a technical debate among moral theologians. To suppose otherwise is to make one's own spiritual growth more difficult.

The Pope's blow against intolerance

Now that there's been time to reflect, you just gotta love it.

St. Patrick and the TSA

The Transportation Security Administration is supposed to protect air travelers from terrorism. Given the results of various tests since 2002, its utility probably lies less in keeping weapons off planes than in reassuring, by its clumsy intrusiveness, a public anxious to be reassured. My confirmation saint, St. Patrick, also reassures me. By most accounts, such as Thomas Cahill's, he composed his justly loved Breastplate prayer to ward off "the spells of women and smiths and druids" as well as of demons directly. Believing I faced no specific, unseen personal enemies, I used to use it less as self-defense and more as just a beautiful prayer. I was wrong. Now I use it for both purposes. On my spiritual journey, he's an important part of my own personal TSA.

I picked "Patrick" as my confirmation name when I was 10 because even then I had an inchoate sense that I had a vocation to teach people about the Trinity, specifically. As crude an image as it had to be for his illiterate, heathen audience, I could not get his three-leaf clover out of my mind. I still can't. Every time I see clover I am reminded of my vocation. I doubt I have fulfilled it as intended.

That's why I pray with the Breastplate and many similar aids. To fulfill my vocation as intended, which is doubtless a greater thing than I see, I must press on with my spiritual journey with as much protection as possible against whatever would terrorize me out of it. As the world grows ever more nihilistic, we all need to be doing that. You have many TSA agents to pick from. Let us thank God for the one we celebrate today.

Redeeming secularity

When I'm feeling more desperate than usual, I like to re-read Jean-Pierre de Caussade's Abandonment to Divine Providence, a spiritual classic available in a range of editions and translations. In one of them, the work is entitled The Sacrament of the Present Moment. I cannot recommend that volume highly enough; on me, a careful reading has the effect of calming my silly fears and inducing me to rest in God's love. Beyond circumstances, what's brought it to my mind again is a marvelous post of the same title by Fr. Steven Freeman. That post has also set me pondering anew a seemingly intractable problem I've always had with being a layman in the world. The problem has a simple solution, to be sure. But the simple solution is by no means easy.

Ever since I made a more-or-less adult commitment of faith, I haven't wanted in my heart to be a layman at all. As a high-school senior, I resolved internally to become a philosophy major in college as preparation for the seminary. Of course I didn't tell that to my parents or teachers, because I didn't think the resistance I could expect if I did would be a price worth paying. It was the Catholic Church in the 1970s, after all. I had been sexually abused by a priest a few years earlier; still more to the point, priests and religious had been bolting in droves, and the faithful remnant was openly indisposed to encourage the young to plunge themselves into the mess. It didn't get any better once I got to Columbia. Most of the priests I met were progs who didn't think me prog enough; the rest were either trads who didn't think me trad enough, or just plain didn't care. My disgust caused me to flirt seriously with Orthodoxy before I fell in with a crowd of older, lay Catholic intellectuals. As I neared graduation, the few vocation directors willing to hear me on the merits neither offered nor suggested spiritual direction to help me with the discipline of celibacy. They were rather keen, however, on reminding me that I had to repay my college debt before any of them would consider me. I ended up getting married. I had concluded that that was what God wanted for me, as distinct from what I had wanted for myself. And who was I to complain? I now had a wife who loved me; and I loved her back, in my own immature way.

The question for me then became: how could I do some sort of "ministry," my chief and indeed only abiding occupational interest, as a married Catholic man? I had committed myself to a state in life in which earning a certain level of income was likely to be far more important than how I earned that income. I did not relish that part of marriage and family. Still, I was fortunate in being married to a woman who understood me and facilitated, in every way, my arduous trek through the doctoral program in philosophy at Penn. And despite using NFP to conceive a child, we did not conceive, only adopting a baby privately after ten years of marriage. For that decade, I had had the luxury of avoiding the question how to earn a respectable living. I taught part-time as an adjunct and did some paid freelance writing. My scope for self-indulgence was such that I even got to run for Congress in 1988. The downside was that I also got to remain a superannuated adolescent. Some of that resolved itself naturally after I got my PhD and began teaching full-time in Catholic institutions. But soon enough, choices I made in response to stressful events destroyed all that. I'm now twice-divorced, tethered to paying child support. That has only raised the question of "ministry" anew for me. And I have yet to resolve that question. I still don't want a secular "career" any more than I ever did. I want a vocation focused on the only matters in which I have an abiding interest for their own sake: those having directly and explicitly to do with the truths about God derivable from both natural reason and his own self-revelation. Indeed, I'm such a Catholic nerd that I have a very hard time understanding why most intelligent, orthodox Catholics don't want the same for themselves.

When I've discussed this with people close to me, including the occasional spiritual director, the responses I've gotten are remarkably similar. They point out that most Christians, including most good and holy Christians, are neither clergy nor theologians. They point out what that entails: most of us can and ought to serve God well in the course of ordinary human life, without being clergy or theologians. They cite the biblical doctrine of the priesthood of all believers to remind me that I can be a "priest" in that generic sense in which all Christians are called to be priests. They gently remind me that I have no good reason to think myself too good or special for that. And of course they are right. I have no rebuttal to offer. But my heart does not change; my real interests and aspirations remain as they are, which is what they have always been. I pursue my real interests in my spare time; this blog is a part of that. I look on my unfulfilled aspirations as a sign from God that his work-in-progress known as Mike Liccione needs a lot more work in order to be credible again in something called "ministry."

But, the voices ask, what if I'm just still not "getting it?" Fr. Freeman's meditation poses the challenge starkly:

The Eucharist reveals Christ to us. But as Fr. Alexander Schmemann always noted, the Eucharist not only reveals Christ to us, it also reveals the true nature of creation to us. Bread can no longer be the same if Christ has taken it and made it His body. It is always possible, indeed it has already happened, that we build a fence around that sacred moment and confine it to the liturgy itself. Outside the service, everything returns to “normal and ordinary,” and the Orthodox become as secular as every Christian around them. This is a denial of the Orthodox faith. God is “everywhere present and filling all things,” thus there is no “normal and ordinary,” no “secular.” Everything is changed. There is no eating of bread that is not a communion with God. There is no encounter with a tree that is not an encounter with the hard wood of the cross, the “weapon of peace.” In Jeremiah (23:23-24) we read:

Am I a God at hand, saith the LORD, and not a God afar off? Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him? saith the LORD. Do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the LORD.

We do not have a “neutral zone” where we live apart from God. Instead, we have zones of ignorance, where believing Christians live as unbelievers, awaiting their next attendance at a “God permitted” zone. No, the truth is that God has united Himself not only to humanity in the incarnation, but to matter itself. Man is the “microcosm” according to the Fathers, a “little cosmos” in himself. This is most fully and completely true in Christ, who has truly summed up the cosmos within Himself. Thus we look forward to the redemption and resurrection of the whole created order and not just man (Romans 8).

Thus we are never separated from God who is freely with us, but also giving Himself to us in everything around us. This is no profession of pantheism. God has not become everything else. But everything else holds the possibility of encounter with God as surely as the holy water within the Church or every sacrament He has given us. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.”

In the combox to another post, Fr. Steven tells one reader something that he could just as well tell me:

The church doesn’t miss out on having any of us as priests. If I die tomorrow the Kingdom of God will continue to exist. The only priesthood is that of Christ. My merely human talents add nothing to the Church whatsoever. The treasure within us is the gift of God. Seek God first, don’t worry about the priesthood. It is the priesthood of Christ you need to encounter.

Well, yes. There is no "neutral zone" for a Christian. For those who stay the course of sanctification, all is holy, all is redeemed. So, the challenge I confront is to encounter the "priesthood of Christ," and join myself to it, without being able to spend the bulk of my time dealing explicitly with the things that priests and theologians, as such, deal with. I really don't experience that encounter subjectively, but I acknowledge it happens whenever I offer myself, my actions, and my sufferings to the Lord in complete detachment from everything but him and his commandments of love. Perhaps that's all there is to becoming his priestlings once we leave the church building with the Body of Christ in our bellies. I suppose there isn't much alternative anyhow, if I am to be immersed in our world's secularity, spending the bulk of my time and energy pretty much as most people do.

But that's still not my heart. I still have to force myself to thank him for being put on such a path. Which means I'm not really grateful. Which means I'm not really offering my heart. And what does that do to my own priesthood as a believer? I'd rather not think about that. Of course the solution is simple: "Say yes, joyfully." Alas, easier said than done. My prayer this Triduum is to be shown a way out of the box I'm in. I can only hope that's the right prayer.

Quotation of the day

"I like to attend meetings of the Catholic Theological Society in order to keep up with the latest trends in liberal Protestantism."

—Protestant theologian Robert Jenson.

Theology and economy

“The cross and resurrection are the eternal dialogue of Father and Son as projected on to the screen of history, what it looks like in history. If you want to know what the Trinity looks like be filled with the Holy Spirit and look at the cross. The Trinity, when reflected in our history, like something reflected in rippling water, looks pretty strange, just as the human being in our history looks strange, being despised and crucified: Ecce homo."

Herbert McCabe, God Matters (New York: Continuum, 2005), 100.

HT to Inhabitatio Dei.

The fans and the mob

For reasons I won't waste your time speculating about, my mind returns every Palm Sunday to the contrast between the crowd's adulation of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey with the venom of the mob calling for his crucifixion before Pilate a few days later. One thing I'm sure of is that both crowds are figurae, types, of own souls as they oscillate between grace and sin, between living, joyful faith and preference for the world's way of doing things. We welcome Jesus as our savior, yes; we also shout "Crucify him!" whenever we sin seriously, as most of us have done. I'd love to help do a movie in which a couple who had greeted Jesus with hosannas went on to join the crowd yelling for Barabbas' release instead of Jesus'. A plot premise would have them desperately poor, ripe to take a few shekels from the high priest's henchman for joining the mob. I have an old friend who could write a good script for such a movie. Of course there's always the matter of raising the money...

Which brings me to my main point. The Jews weren't ready to accept the idea that God could come to them in person as a man who, sans army, formal education, or even money, would challenge their religious leadership rather than the occupying power. You can hardly blame them; they thought as people normally would. The Anointed One they expected would be a political savior. He would eject the Romans by force and turn Israel into a glorious earthly kingdom where other nations would worship God just as they did. That's what the Apostles hoped for too, which is probably why Judas was disappointed enough to betray Jesus when it had become clear that wasn't going to be the script. They didn't start to get it until Jesus appeared to them after the Resurrection; they didn't even understand, until well after the fact, that he had actually prophesied the whole thing. My friends, the Apostles are us.

We instinctively assume that good fortune consists in our obtaining the blessings the rest of the world considers blessings too. That's the movie we want to see, or better, to make. When we don't see it or have the wherewithal to make it, then God's script for us can be a bitter disappointment indeed. In response, some of us betray him and are lost, temporarily or permanently; many abandon him when the path of fidelity seems likely to yield, at best, a cruel joke. We return only when some grace, foreseeable yet unforeseen, brings us back round. Rare are the Marys and Johns who stand steadfast by him at the foot of the Cross. And even they often don't get to see, until their own passing, much of the Great Light to follow.

This Palm Sunday, I pray for the wisdom and courage to follow the script God is writing for me. I don't want to be tempted, any more than I already am, to leave the fans for the mob.

Rewriting the book on excommunication

Among Catholics, the loudest school of thought about excommunicating people is the "progressive." The progs find the exercise presumptively neanderthal, typically useless, and often counterproductive. If done at all, it should only be done to people who are publicly and pertinaciously un-PC. Thus, I've heard occasional praise from progs for the 1962 excommunication of segregationists in New Orleans, and for the Italian hierarchy's excommunication of certain Mafia types. But that's about it. Heaven forfend that anybody should be excommunicated for pertinaciously denying some de fide doctrine—i.e., for heresy—or for brave public acts such as voting against a partial-birth abortion ban or doing a womyn's ordination. Since progs are still somewhat influential in chanceries and very influential in Catholic universities, they have most bishops pretty cowed about the whole thing. But that not only should change; it can change, given leadership that is competent and creative as well as courageous. Believe it or not, we've actually got that.

Archbishop Raymond Burke of St. Louis has just formally decreed the excommunication of three women involved in that pseudo-ordination last year about which I wrote at the time. Of Burke's decree, Dr. Ed Peters, a top-notch canon lawyer from whom I learn often, writes:

I would like to say that Abp. Raymond Burke's excommunication of three women who recently participated in a pseudo-ordination in Saint Louis is a "text-book illustration" of how (non-judicial) excommunication is supposed to be applied in the Church today, but I can't say that. Why not? Because Abp. Burke's attention to juridic details and his provisions for the pastoral care of the people entrusted to his care so exceed what the textbooks teach, that it is the textbooks that must copy from him, not him from the textbooks.

That ought to lend some encouragement to those of us who think bishops have got awfully woolly about excommunication and need to do a bit more of it for the good of people's souls, including the souls of those excommunicated. Why should we all care about that?

As I've written before:

There certainly are quarters of the Church in this country where the virtue of faith, and the orthodoxy on which it depends, are understood and fostered. But such a witness is severely undermined by the degree to which the bishops allow dissent to go unpunished. E.g., even personally orthodox bishops such as Egan of New York and Wuerl of DC refuse to withhold the Eucharist from Catholic politicians who openly defy Church teaching on points that the Pope himself has indicated are non-negotiable. Other personally orthodox bishops, such as Flynn of the Twin Cities or O'Malley of Boston, refuse to discipline heterodox theologians on the faculties of universities over which they have at least nominal authority. And then there's the fact, so widely known as to be rarely mentioned, that on the literally vital matter of contraception, lay Catholics are allowed to do exactly as they please—which in most cases involves rejecting the constant, irreformable teaching of the Church. Even Catholic media are caught up in the corresponding ambiguity: we have the National Catholic Register, yes, but we also have the National Catholic Reporter. Of course it is well-known, among those who give thought to such matters, that the Catholic Church in America is polarized. But what is not so well understood is that the very persistence of that polarization strengthens the heterodox sides of the spectrum. Once again, it gives out the impression that orthodoxy is optional: not merely for American Catholics as Americans—which is and ought to be unexceptionable—but as Catholics. That makes it impossible for the virtue of faith to be widely fostered and understood among rank-and-file Catholics.

If we get more bishops doing the sort of thing Burke is doing, the virtue of faith can once again be fostered and understood wide-scale, not just here and there. To that end, I once again recommend his brilliant, peer-reviewed academic article about Catholic politicians who support abortion "rights."

New heresies to savor

Check out this priest's list, now making the rounds. Hilarious.

I can't resist offering a sample:

"OCTORBITISTS – Note the different spelling. This is not the Octoberfests, a little known cult that involves the drinking of great amounts of beer in October but the Octorbitists. Oct, meaning the number eight and orbits referring to path the earth makes around the sun. This sect only recognizes the Church for about eight years usually only stopping in the parking lot Monday through Friday to drop their children off for school. They do not recognize the spiritual role of the Church but submit to its authority in teaching math, science, and the making of collages."

McCain's best hope

Think two Democratic cats, and you get the idea:

"There once were two cats of Kilkenny
Each thought there was one cat too many
So they fought and they fit, and they scratched and they bit
Till excepting their nails and the tips of their tails
Instead of two cats there weren't any."

HT to Michael Hirsh.