Prof. McInerny on Pelosi

All too briefly we were permitted to savor the image of the Speaker of the House poring over the writings of St. Augustine in the watches of the night, looking for things of which the Bishop of Hippo had been unsure. Always mindful of the public, she did not keep her findings to herself. In an impromptu lecture to the press, she opined that she could tap into the putative Augustinian ignorance and go on killing babies and be as good a Catholic as he. Seemingly San Francisco had made her an honorary STD.

And then, mirabile dictu, the chiding voices of bishops were heard. Not one, not two, but half a dozen, perhaps more. Admonishing bishops have become almost as rare as theologians in Congress, but here we had corrective statements remarkable for their pith and point. There is no cover in Catholic doctrine for abortion, any more than there is in natural law.

Where did Nancy Pelosi come by the notion that she could offer alternatives to “official” doctrine and that this was actually the Catholic thing to do? Where would she have acquired the confidence that abortion is a live option, that everyone could just follow his own “conscience,” that moral absolutes are no more? The answer is simple. She is a typical product of Catholic education.

Read the rest.

Quotation of the day: on freedom

"...once you intuit the Absolute, humility is the only option. It is as natural as the urge to dump a bag of manure on Bill Maher."

—Robert "Gagdad Bob" Godwin

Did Palin have a choice?

by Perry Robinson

One of the lines beginning to codify as a criticism of the Republican V.P pick Sarah Palin is that she made a choice to have a child with Down syndrome but that she would deny that choice to other women. She is therefore a hypocrite. Dr. Rahul K. Parikh over at Salon.com is one of many Obama surrogates who puts forward what looks like an argument. But this in fact isn’t a good argument against voting for Palin or her political position. In fact it is far from clear that Dr. Parikh or others who I have seen put forward this line have even grasped the issue.

But before looking at the reasoning, it is useful to examine Dr. Parikh’s article for the way the popular press usually frames the matter. Often enough doctors are employed as political mouthpieces since our society holds doctors generally in high esteem. Doctors have expert knowledge in things medical, and abortion is a medical procedure. But there is logical legerdemain here. While doctors do have expert knowledge in medical procedures, they rarely have expertise in the ethics of those procedures or ethics in general. Vivisection is also a medical procedure but hardly moral. The question on the table is not a question of technique or skill but of permissibility and obligation. As Socrates warned, craftsmen were still fools, for while they actually possessed some knowledge in a few areas, they made the mistake of thinking they were qualified to speak as experts in others. Readers should treat physicians as laymen in the field of ethics unless they have good reason to think otherwise.

Another way the matter is usually framed is in terms of being a scientific question. Authors drone on about this or that procedure dropping the litter of technical jargon as they go. Dr. Parikh wastes a good deal of his reader’s time describing and explaining genetic and statistical data as if the cause of disagreement was a lack of information on one side. The issue on the table is the ethics of abortion and whether Gov. Palin is violating some sound legal or ethical principle in wanting to deny the legal right to abort a child with Down syndrome or a perfectly healthy child for that matter. None of the scientific information that Dr. Parikh cites and elucidates moves the ball down the argumentative field.

Often the sympathy is moved from the recipient of the procedure to the hardships to be endured by the parents of a special needs child. Dr. Parikh makes this shift when he argues that the appropriate way of looking at the matter is not one of eugenics but of pity. “But try telling that to a mother who is told early on in her pregnancy that she will be raising a child who will have a host of medical and developmental problems, requiring intense medical and social attention for the rest of his or her life. It can be tragic and nearly impossible news to bear.” But no one doubts the hardship of raising a special needs child. What is more, it is difficult to see how we get from the hardship of raising such a child to the conclusion that it would be morally better to make the child the recipient of suffering in the womb. It is eugenics even if it is dressed p in an appeal to pity..

But even more so, Dr. Parikh begs the question. If the unborn entity is a human being and hence not capable of being classed in terms of property, then it is really quite irrelevant the hardship that the parents will face in raising such a child. And here is where Dr. Parikh has failed to grasp the issue. Are humans capable of being legitimately classed as property? If the fetus is my property, then it is my choice what I do with my property. If it is merely connected to my body but not my property, then choice goes out the window.

Looking at the matter squarely should remind American readers that we have had this discussion before in the debate over slavery. It is fundamentally the same debate just recast in the context of size and development. Slave owners made similar arguments in defense of slavery. They weren’t forcing their choice to own slave on any one else. They wished to leave that question open and this was because they presupposed that Africans were not human beings. They were “pro-choice” and the abolitionists desired to remove from the law that choice since the humanity of Africans morally trumped choice. As Kant wrote, objects have a price, but persons have a value.

The question that Dr. Parikh has failed to face is whether humans in the womb are legitimately classed as property or not. If not, then Gov. Palin is not violating some ethical norm or legal principle in advocating the removal from private choice the act of abortion. She is no hypocrite as Dr. Parikh suggests. In fact, for Palin, I’d argue it already is a matter of law. For her I’d suspect along with say Dr. King, the moral law trumps the written law of the land. For Palin, she never had the kind of choice that Dr. Parikh imagines she did. It is akin to asking me if I would torture my three year old for ten bucks. It isn’t ever going to happen. It might as well be a law of nature.

Why a vote for McCain isn't a vote for cannibalism

In June 2004, just as the American presidential-election campaign was ramping up, then-Cardinal Ratzinger issued a "memorandum" to the U.S. bishops entitled "Worthiness to Receive Holy Communion: General Principles." Undoubtedly timed to address the specific controversy about the worthiness of pro-Roe Catholic politicians, such as John Kerry, to receive the Eucharist, the memo also if briefly addressed the more general question whether, and if so under what conditions, Catholics can licitly vote for candidates who favor liberal abortion or euthanasia laws. Meant to be confidential, the memo got leaked; any Catholic can read it. Indeed, any Catholic who is literate enough to understand it probably should read it, for the same issues have come up again this election year. Yet now there's a special twist.

It is of course nothing new that we have a Democratic candidate who not only favors the Roe regime but also opposes banning partial-birth abortion. Without judging the consciences of Catholics who will vote for Obama anyhow, I cannot do so in conscience, and many American bishops seem to concur (see the USCCB PDF). For Catholics have a duty to oppose abortion by any and every morally legitimate means within their power as individuals; in a democratic society, that includes trying to persuade people to approve laws forbidding abortion, or at least voting for candidates who would favor such laws. But candidates who support the Roe regime are logically committed to holding that abortion should remain a "constitutional right," immune from infringement by legislation; hence, they are committed to refusing to return the issue to the people, where the normal processes of moral and political suasion can be put to work against the worst form of social injustice in contemporary times. That stance, to my mind, is morally indistinguishable from formal cooperation with abortion; and I do not believe there are any "proportionate reasons" weighing clearly in favor of voting for such candidates despite their formal cooperation with abortion. Even though that is an old debate, I shall have recourse to it in considering the new twist: the Republican candidate, John McCain, though morally opposed to most abortions and also anti-Roe, also favors, and hence favors Federal funding of, embryonic stem-cell research (ESCR).

That is morally objectionable inasmuch as ESCR entails killing the embryos from whom the stem cells are taken. Given as much, some in the Catholic blogosphere call McCain a "medical cannibal" and/or "baby harvester," morally no better than his opponent. They are wont to conclude not only that they personally cannot vote for McCain, but that it would be at best inconsistent, perhaps even hypocritical, for Catholics who oppose any-and-all pro-Roe candidates to vote for McCain. My aim here is not to persuade them that they ought to vote for McCain—a matter best left to their own consciences—but to argue that it is neither inconsistent nor hypocritical for a duly pro-life Catholic to do so.

I begin with the Ratzinger memo. Here's the first part to note:

The Church teaches that abortion or euthanasia is a grave sin. The Encyclical Letter Evangelium vitae, with reference to judicial decisions or civil laws that authorise or promote abortion or euthanasia, states that there is a “grave and clear obligation to oppose them by conscientious objection. [...] In the case of an intrinsically unjust law, such as a law permitting abortion or euthanasia, it is therefore never licit to obey it, or to ‘take part in a propoganda campaign in favour of such a law or vote for it’” (no. 73). Christians have a “grave obligation of conscience not to cooperate formally in practices which, even if permitted by civil legislation, are contrary to God’s law. Indeed, from the moral standpoint, it is never licit to cooperate formally in evil. [...] This cooperation can never be justified either by invoking respect for the freedom of others or by appealing to the fact that civil law permits it or requires it” (no. 74).

Undeniably, what Cardinal Ratzinger said above about abortion and euthanasia applies just as well to ESCR, a practice which involves directly killing the innocent. Catholics may not vote for legislation permitting or funding ESCR, or even in "take part a propaganda campaign in favour of such a law." Accordingly, the question be to considered is whether Catholics can, in good conscience, vote for a candidate who favors ESCR even if the candidate opposes most or all forms of abortion or euthanasia, as does McCain.

It would seem not. The memo concludes:

A Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil, and so unworthy to present himself for Holy Communion, if he were to deliberately vote for a candidate precisely because of the candidate’s permissive stand on abortion and/or euthanasia. When a Catholic does not share a candidate’s stand in favour of abortion and/or euthanasia, but votes for that candidate for other reasons, it is considered remote material cooperation, which can be permitted in the presence of proportionate reasons.

So, it is immoral for a Catholic to vote for a candidate on the grounds that the candidate favors permissive laws about abortion or euthanasia. And the same considerations apply in the case of ESCR. But it does not follow that no Catholic can, in good conscience, vote for a candidate in spite of the candidate's favoring abortion or euthanasia or ESCR. A Catholic may do so given sufficient "proportional reasons" to do so; in that case, the voter would only be involving herself in "remote material cooperation" with the intrinsic evils in question, which is not itself sinful. When a candidate favors laws permitting, even funding, the killing of the innocent, could there be such proportionate reasons?

Pro-Obama Catholics, such as Prof. Douglas Kmiec, say yes. In their view, the sum of Obama's policy positions would, if adopted, tend to reduce abortions by reducing the costs of childbirth for women, thus making abortion a relatively less attractive option for many women than it now is. Couple that with McCain's less generous, more typically Republican social-policy stances, along with his support for "wars of choice," and you get a calculus according to which Obama comes out de facto as the more pro-life of the two major presidential candidates. Now for many reasons, I don't find such a calculus credible. Not in the slightest. But this is not the place to explain why; the bishops and others have already done a reasonably good job of that. The point is that it is quite possible for a Catholic to accept such a calculus in good conscience. Such Catholics are, from my standpoint, just as mistaken as other loyal Catholics believe me to be mistaken about the Iraq war or capital punishment. But I wouldn't say they are committing sin just for being mistaken in that sort of way and voting accordingly. For all I know, their error could be perfectly innocent. So, voting for Obama in spite of his favoring permissive laws on abortion, euthanasia, and of course ESCR is not necessarily immoral even if it is objectively mistaken. In the circumstances, one can see why a loyal, informed Catholic might think there are proportionate reasons to vote for Obama even though, in my strongly-held opinion, there are not.

The same holds a fortiori in the case of McCain and ESCR. McCain does not believe that ESCR should be a constitutional right insulated from legislative infringement. He believes that, given the pre-existing stem-cell "lines" and the therapeutic promise of further research, ESCR should be conducted and funded. He is objectively and gravely mistaken, for scientific as well as moral reasons. But given how and why he's made this mistake, I believe McCain is educable on the subject—unlike Obama on abortion. So I believe a Catholic can, in good conscience, vote for McCain in spite of his ESCR stance, because there are arguably weighty "proportional reasons" to do so. He is morally opposed to abortion and anti-Roe, and he favors many other policies that I believe would, on the whole, be good for the country. Of course he is far from sainthood. In the USA, we will almost certainly never get a president whose policies comport perfectly with the social teaching of the Church. As always, the question is whom to hold our nose and pull the lever for. I don't believe that loyal, orthodox American Catholics would be either logically inconsistent or personally hypocritical in doing so for McCain.

Sometimes it's just easier to do standup...

Wish I'd thought of that. One wonders how much more money I'd make with it though.

9/11: In memoriam

The best I could think to do on this anniversary is offer this podcast by The Anchoress. It is drawn chiefly from the Liturgy of the Hours' Office for the Dead.

Pray well, and remember.



[This entry is cross-posted at Philosophia Perennis.]

Two women I'm jealous of

The first is Ruth Gledhill, religion correspondent for the London Times. And I'm only a bit ashamed to admit it. I'm not jealous because she has a significant other who isn't me; I don't know and don't care whether she has a significant other. For that matter, I don't know or care whether she has any money. No, I'm jealous about two other things.

One is that she's having a good time in Rome doing her job, as you can surmise from reading her most recent columns. I'd love to be working in Rome myself, and I'm pretty sure I'd have a good time doing it. Over the last few months, two well-placed friends have initiated contact with me about the possibility of teaching philosophy in Church-affiliated institutions there. It's been made clear, by the people in the best position to know, that there's a need for what I have to offer. So I've followed up. The problem is that the Italian Government, for rather understandable reasons, is very anti-immigration right now. They don't want foreigners taking jobs from Italians who could do them. I doubt it would help that I'm of Italian ancestry. Perhaps the solution is to go to Rome as a student to earn a papal licentiate in theology. I'd love that too, and I dream fondly of paying for it with a teaching fellowship. We shall see. In the meantime, Ruth makes me green.

Another thing I'm jealous of her about is her ignorance. In her most recent column, she writes:

...no-one has yet explained to me the moral justice of a situation where a priest sacked for child abuse could turn up at his local parish church and receive communion (after confession of course), while a perfectly good woman whose husband has run off with the nanny and who has been fortunate enough to fall in love and marry again but does not fulfil the requirements for an annulment, could be refused it.

Well, in the combox to that column, I and several others explained it to her. Given the Church's doctrinal premises, the juxtaposition of policies that Ruth finds so puzzling makes perfect sense. There have been times in my life when it would have been very convenient for me to be in Ruth's position of ignorance. But God has not granted me that luxury. So I'm jealous of Ruth on that account too.

The other woman I'm jealous of is Camille Paglia. Her most recent column for Salon.com, devoted chiefly to discussing the Sarah Palin phenomenon, reveals things about Paglia herself that are breathtaking in how they combine intellectual honesty and unapologetic vice.

A self-professed "atheist" and "libertarian," Paglia had never belonged to the herd of independent liberal-feminist minds. Consider this:

One reason I live in the leafy suburbs of Philadelphia and have never moved to New York or Washington is that, as a cultural analyst, I want to remain in touch with the mainstream of American life. I frequent fast-food restaurants, shop at the mall, and periodically visit Wal-Mart (its bird-seed section is nonpareil). Like Los Angeles and San Francisco, Manhattan and Washington occupy their own mental zones -- nice to visit but not a place to stay if you value independent thought these days. Ambitious professionals in those cities, if they want to preserve their social networks, are very vulnerable to received opinion. At receptions and parties (which I hate), they're sitting ducks. They have to go along to get along -- poor dears!

It is certainly premature to predict how the Palin saga will go. I may not agree a jot with her about basic principles, but I have immensely enjoyed Palin's boffo performances at her debut and at the Republican convention, where she astonishingly dealt with multiple technical malfunctions without missing a beat. A feminism that cannot admire the bravura under high pressure of the first woman governor of a frontier state isn't worth a warm bucket of spit.

Spot on, Camille. And her assessment of Palin is also spot on. But my question as I got into the article was, as always, about abortion. I soon got my answer:

But the pro-life position, whether or not it is based on religious orthodoxy, is more ethically highly evolved than my own tenet of unconstrained access to abortion on demand. My argument (as in my first book, "Sexual Personae,") has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature's fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.

Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue. The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman's body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman's entrance into society and citizenship.

On the other hand, I support the death penalty for atrocious crimes (such as rape-murder or the murder of children). I have never understood the standard Democratic combo of support for abortion and yet opposition to the death penalty. Surely it is the guilty rather than the innocent who deserve execution?

How many "pro-choice" Democrats, i.e. the vast majority of Democrats, are willing to admit openly that they see abortion as "murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful," yet insist that the right of women to "control their own bodies" should be upheld even at such a cost? A few, perhaps, but not many. How many "pro-choice" Catholic Democrats who believe the same are nonetheless far from being "pro-choice" when it comes to the death penalty? I love the way Paglia busts open the categories of syndrome thinking. In fact, I'm jealous of her for how she manages to make a decent living out of doing just that. Also, the majority of her enemies are the right ones. I haven't managed that yet either in my life.

Of course maybe I shouldn't be jealous of Paglia. Like me, she had a Catholic upbringing in New York State, so she probably has less excuse for ignorance than Ruth Gledhill, if she can even be thought of as ignorant. But she sure has fun knowing what she knows and acting on it. I want some fun doing the same on my own account.

OK, don't worry. I have now taken a deep breath, apologized to the Virgin, and repented.

The Marian Papacy

I had meant to post this yesterday, the feast of Mary's birthday, but got rather full of myself writing about freedom. Still, I remain pleasantly surprised.

John Allen, of the National Catholic Reporter no less, has convinced me that Pope Benedict is consciously placing his papacy under the mantle of the Virgin, just as his predecessor did. Actions speak even louder than words. I doubt the Pope knows something that Tradition doesn't; but he sure knows something a lot of his theologian colleagues don't.

See this page for a good account of the feast. Meanwhile, I suspect Rome is catholicizing Mr. Allen, in spite of who signs his paycheck.

You can't parody this

From The Boston Globe: "Kerry Kennedy talks about her new book, in which she strives to reconcile her Catholic faith with the teachings of the church."

Read that quote again. Then watch the video.

She even says at one point that certain "words and symbols" of the Church are "anathema" to her. If you know the context in which that word is traditionally used...well, my talents as a parodist can't begin to match this one.

This entry is cross-posted at Philosophia Perennis.

"Crunchy" theology of the body?

I kid you not. Most of us have heard the phrase "the domestic Church". A few Catholics even use it. In the theology of John Paul the Great, it designates the Christian family. And in his "theology of the body," one gets quite an inspiring perspective on how conjugal sex figures in founding and nourishing the domestic Church.

Now consider this from the theology blog Inhabitatio Dei:

David Matzko McCarthy’s Sex and Love in the Home: A Theology of the Household is perhaps the best theological treatment of marriage and sexuality to be written in recent years. One of the great things about the book is the way in which it really explores what it might mean to think about sex “maritally” so to speak. McCarthy argues that sex only has its meaning and only is what it is in the context of a shared nuptial life which is in turn shaped and determined by the couple’s participation in the church-community.

I haven't read the book, but I get the sense from ID's discussion that McCarthy is developing JP2's theology of the body along lines that would make the Crunchy-Con crowd proud. Which makes it all the more surprising that the post itself never mentions TOB explicitly. If I had the time and money for such things, I'd buy the book and do a serious review.

Is this a model for evangelization?

It's a Jesuit one, of course. You decide

Hell and Sarah Palin

The selection of the Governor of Alaska to be the Republican candidate for Vice-President has stirred a frenzy. She's just what the Republican base of activists loves; hence their new moniker "Baberaham Lincoln." By the same token, she's just what the Democratic base of activists hates; hence the revival of her old sports nickname "Sarah Barracuda." One might think, as I first did, that the frenzy is just another one of those tempests-in-a-teapot that politics yields up every few weeks or so. I no longer think so.

Made for ordinary political reasons, Senator McCain's choice has brought to the fore "the culture wars" that both presidential candidates would prefer to shy away from. The revival of the culture wars started with Obama's "Wright problem," continued with his dissimulation about his stance on the Illinois "Born Alive" Act, and proceeded apace with his performance at Saddleback. Catholics stayed focused on the culture wars when the bishops, in a too-rare display of magisterial muscle, took House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to task for her public account of Catholic teaching on abortion. But Palin's ascent has taken the wars to a new level. We're seeing here not just an acceleration of the news cycle, but a glimpse of a truly spiritual war.

I have been convinced of that by two writers I have long respected despite their flaws. One is Peggy Noonan, a former Reagan speechwriter, accomplished author in her own right, and self-confessed "Bubblehead," meaning somebody whose head lives in the inside-the-Beltway bubble. In Noonan's syndicated column about Palin, published yesterday, I find nothing to disagree with. What stood out for me, though, was this:

This new war on new turf is not good, and carries the potential of great harm. Everyone really ought to stop, breathe deep, and think.

I am worried they won't. A friend IM'd the day after Palin's speech, and I told him of an inexplicable sense of foreboding. He surprised me by saying he shared it. "Calling all underworlds reporting for duty!," he wrote. "The bed is about to fly around the room, the puke is about to come out." He meant: this campaign is going to engage unseen powers and forces. He meant: this campaign, this beautiful golden thing with two admirable men at the top and two admirable vice presidential candidates, is going to turn dark.

I agree. There are "unseen powers and forces" at work in this epochal election, and they don't like Sarah Palin. All the more reason to like her, worry for her, and pray for her. The flap about her pregnant daughter is only the beginning.

Then there's Robert "Gagdad Bob" Godwin of one of my favorite blogs: One Cosmos. A practicing PhD psychologist with degrees from secular universities, Bob is not the sort of person one would expect to talk about demons and mean it literally. But he does, not infrequently, as part of his brilliant, ongoing synthesis of scientific psychology, religious "esoterism," and orthodox Christianity. So, I take him very seriously when he says this:

Make no mistake about it: Sarah Palin is being tested, not just by the left, but by the demonic energy they embody. You will note that their energy is chaotic, disorganized, hysterical, shrill, bullying, harassing, disorienting, intoxicated, "over the top." The only way to make one's way through this storm of insanity is with divine assistance. There is no other way. One must surrender to the higher in order to master the lower.

The lesson applies to her would-be boss too:

Perhaps it is fortuitous that John McCain is our candidate, since he has literally been to hell and back. No, not the Hanoi Hilton. Rather, he was once the darling of the barbaric media whordes. Now he is their demon. He, better than anyone else, should now understand that he was treated well so long as he served as a useful idiot for them. He capitulated to them in a way he never did to the Vietnamese, perhaps because they are more seductive and flattering. Does he understand what is going on? I mean, the lesson could not be more vivid. What does he need, a signed affidavit from the Father of Lies that he is under spiritual attack? What else do you call this frenzy? It is designed not just to counter the light, but to exhaust and demoralize. To make people say, Okay, I give up. It's just too much. We'll replace her with Tim Pawlenty.

Now each in their own ways, Noonan and Godwin can be over-the-top, especially the latter. But I don't think the observations I've quoted are at all over-the-top. We know why hell doesn't like Sarah Palin and John McCain: they are against legal abortion, and the latter in particular has been turned by bitter experience into a servant of God. Now the role of hell in opposing them is unmistakable, for those with eyes to see.

McCain's theological rationale

[OK, I lied. When I started Philosophia Perennis last week, I gave out the impression that I would close down this blog. But I've come to realize that some of my thoughts are better expressed here than there. I want to keep PP as a place for high-level philosophical and theological discussion. But even I can't limit myself to that. I have much more to say, politically and personally. The place for that is here.]

Given how much theology and pseudo-theology have been swirling about Barack Obama as a candidate, I thought I might transfer something of that interest to John McCain. The thing is worth doing because there's gravitas there.

I listened to McCain's acceptance speech (full text here) last night. Much of it bored me, as most political speeches do. But I started perking up toward the end, when he related his POW experience, how that experience changed him, and how the result relates to his campaign for the Presidency.


What he said, in effect, is this: being imprisoned, mistreated, and manipulated by the North Vietnamese for years, reducing him at some points to complete dependence on his fellow American prisoners, but never causing him to accept his captors' cynical offer to release him out of turn, taught him that his life was not about him. It was about serving others in a cause greater than himself, and being constantly grateful to God for the opportunity to do that, no matter how much suffering and how many setbacks that might involve. That is the pivotal factor which has made John McCain the man he is. That is what makes his candidacy worthwhile.

Of course McCain has wanted to be President of the United States for many years. That means he has quite an ego, like most politicians—especially most Senators, who would love to be President if they could be. He is quick-tempered, unpredictable, and often takes pleasure in irritating, even alienating, ostensible allies as he reaches out to those they consider enemies. He is not a saint, any more than Barack Obama is a saint. But unlike Obama, McCain is an authentic hero. He didn't just go through a hazing rite. He didn't just kill. He was forged for a long time in a searing crucible. He professes to believe that his political career is justified only in terms of what motivated him then and what he learned then. Even if I thought he was insincere in that profession—which is not for me to judge—I would believe what he professed.

It is those terms, not his rather vague and understated theology, which explain why he is what the pundits call "pro-life." Years ago, his wife induced him to adopt a sick child she had taken off Mother Teresa's hands in Bangladesh; and this year, he has picked as his running mate a gun-totin' "hockey mom" who bore a Down's-syndrome child, as her fifth child no less, rather than abort him. OK, so he's wrong about some things, including embryonic stem-cell research. So what? I've never encountered a politician who's right about everything; I've never even encountered a pope who's right about everything. But I would vote for McCain over Obama even if Obama were pro-life, which he manifestly is not.

Obama is a smart, ambitious young man who, like McCain, benefited hugely from having a strong, loving mother. A law professor for nearly a dozen years, he has more academic smarts then McCain. He's a far more polished speaker than McCain. He professes to be about "change", so much so that the word has become a mantra; and the change is supposed to be from the partisan politics of division to the bipartisan politics of accomplishing what the American people so clearly want and need. But when one looks at Obama's record, what one finds is the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate. If such a man could reach out across the partisan divide as President, that would only be to toss a few crumbs he could afford to toss to a shrinking, demoralized Republican minority in Congress. McCain, by contrast, has a legislative record which proves he can work with Democrats, even liberals, to get things done. A lot of people, especially a lot of Republicans, don't like what thereby got done; but that, to me, is a truly secondary matter.

Thanks to Wendy's, the American lexicon now includes the question: "Where's the beef?" The important thing to me is that McCain has the beef to be President—not just as an agent of "change," whatever that would amount to at day's end, but more importantly as a man. In a world growing ever more dangerous and challenging, that's what we need. I don't expect all my readers, even all my blogmates, to agree with me. But I think I'm giving voice to a spirit that will move many voters, including many Catholic ones.

My new blogging venue

If all goes as planned and prayed, this will be my last post at this blog. I have launched a new blog at Wordpress called Philosophia Perennis. I shall be posting there from now on.

The new blog-in-the-making is a group blog with Catholic philosophers as the authors. Several of my friends, erstwhile colleagues, and would-be colleagues have already agreed to come on board and contribute. But as the idea for this blog originated with me, the chief responsibility for administering it has fallen to me.

I'm making the shift for three reasons. First, I don't have time to post here as often as I'd like to, and doing a group blog with like-minded friends and colleagues would enable me to intersperse the posts I can manage with those of others I trust. Second, the new blog will in due course expose my readers to a wider array of talent and personality than just my own. Finally, the focus of the new blog is likely to be more academic and less personal than this blog's, and that's exactly what I need for the sake of facilitating my eventual return to academia.

I thought it peculiarly appropriate to launch the new blog on the liturgical feast day of St. Augustine, who was a philosopher before he became a Catholic. Once he underwent his conversion, a process so eloquently documented in that classic of Western literature known as his Confessions, Augustine adopted a different set of priorities for his thought. He became a Catholic first, a theologian second, and a philosopher—well, he gradually abandoned philosophical inquiry for its own sake. He prayed, he preached, he meditated, he theologized; but philosophizing for its own sake, he came to suspect, was something only pagans did.

Some philosophers think that meant he ceased to be a philosopher; some believers think he didn't leave philosophy nearly far enough behind. On my own account as a Catholic, I'd say that I do philosophy for the sake of understanding myself, the world, even God better than I would if I didn't do philosophy. I know by long experience that studying philosophy in depth, and constructing serious philosophical arguments which do not require any divinely revealed truth as premises, is an excellent discipline even for committed believers.

That good philosophy is intrinsically valuable remains so even for those of us who believe that, in the final analysis, our response to divine revelation and grace, as manifest in how we are thereby transformed as persons, is far more important than philosophy as an academic discipline. Divine revelation is for everybody, after all—as is philosophy in the original sense of the Greek term, which means "love of wisdom." Everybody who comes to love God and neighbor comes to love wisdom too. But philosophizing in a systematic way is for the (relatively) few. I think most of my contributors at the new blog would agree with that. Of course they would have qualifications to add, and probably wouldn't say it the way I have, but that's a philosopher for you. We wouldn't have it any other way.

It's been a great three-year run, and I am grateful to all of you for making this blog as useful and interesting as it's been. See you all over there. Thanks especially to Jesus Christ, my Alpha and Omega, for heeding his Mother's intercession on my behalf.

Thomas More strikes again

The following is the main body of a press released e-mailed to me yesterday:

(Merrimack, New Hampshire)— The Thomas More College of Liberal Arts and Sophia Institute Press entered into a collaborative partnership last week that establishes the Press as the publishing division of the College.

This collaboration will immediately return to print over 50 works from Sophia Institute Press that are currently out-of-print, including How to Get More out of Holy Communion and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s God’s World and Our Place in It. With the help of the College, Sophia Institute Press will strengthen its marketing department, and extend its reach into bookstores, institutions, homeschool groups, parishes, and other Catholic markets.

Dr. Jeffrey O. Nelson, president of Thomas More College, has also become Chairman of the Sophia Institute and its internationally recognized press. Dr. John Barger, founder of Sophia Institute Press, will continue his work as publisher.

“Upon taking the helm as president of Thomas More College two years ago, I laid plans to establish a publishing program that further advances the College’s mission of evangelizing the culture by promoting the Catholic intellectual tradition. I have always admired the work of Sophia Institute Press, and had hoped to establish a Press that mirrored Sophia’s substantial work,” said Nelson. “All of us at Thomas More College are excited to have the opportunity to form a relationship with Sophia that reduces repetition and enables Thomas More College and the Institute to more fully realize their missions of serving both the Church and society.”

Barger is equally enthusiastic about this endeavor.

“We at Sophia Institute Press are excited to be closely associated with an orthodox Catholic college like Thomas More. I am delighted that Sophia’s 25-year tradition of publishing great Catholic spiritual works will continue well into the future as the publishing imprint of Thomas More College. I have full confidence in Jeff Nelson’s leadership and look forward to working closely with him for years to come,” stated Barger.

The Thomas More College of Liberal Arts is a four-year college that provides the rising generation with an education that forms them intellectually and spiritually within the Catholic intellectual tradition and with full fidelity to the Magisterium. Additionally, the College has launched entrepreneurial new centers that seek to advance the teachings of the Catholic Church beyond the confines of its campus. These centers include the Vatican Studies Center, the Center for New England Politics and Culture, the Caroline Gordon Program, and the Center for Faith and Culture in Oxford, England.

Sophia Institute Press was established to nurture the spiritual, moral, and cultural life of souls and to spread the Gospel of Christ in conformity with the teachings of the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. Having published more than 200 titles over the past 25 years, including works by Catholic saints, scholars, novelists, biographers, and others, Sophia Institute Press has sold nearly 2.5 million books worldwide to hundreds of thousands of individuals, bookstores, and institutions. In a letter to Barger, the late Mother Teresa of Calcutta said, “I am convinced of the good your books can do in helping people grow closer to God.”

I love TMC and what they're doing. It's getting to be quite a place.

Philosophy bites...not

I've stumbled across a rather interesting and definitely useful site: Philosophy Bites. Unlike the occurrence of the word 'bites' in this post's title, which functions as a slang verb, the word's occurrence in that site's title functions as a slang noun. The QuickTime audio "bites" are clear, responsible, easily digestible introductions to how contemporary, English-speaking philosophers, in dialogue with the humble but well-educated hosts, approach the range of perennial issues in the discipline.

Most readers of this blog will not, of course, agree with a lot of the philosophers recorded at PB. I sure don't. For that matter, literate people in general would not agree either with or about a lot of the philosophers recorded at PB. That's good: if things were otherwise, we wouldn't be dealing with philosophy. But one bite that I particularly like is on free will.

Its main speaker is Dr. Thomas Pink, Reader in Philosophy at King's College, London. He's an active, committed, orthodox Catholic. And in good philosophical fashion, what he says about free will is perfectly compatible with Catholicism without ever relying on it for premises. To me as a Catholic, that's precisely the sort of thing that makes philosophy useful. Getting things right philosophically is what enables intelligent Catholics to communicate with intelligent people in the secular world about God and man without appeals that would, in the view of such people, just beg questions.

Rebutting the Pelosi anti-catechism

The Speaker of the House apparently has her own account of Catholic teaching on the subject of abortion. At least she is to be credited for tackling the philosophical and theological issues instead of dodging them like St. Barack, who professed it was "above my pay grade." She is to be credited for courage because she knew the rebuttals would come, in spades.

Kathleen Parker, one of my favorite columnists, offers a biting summary of the best rebuttals. Read it, enjoy it, follow it up. I've addressed the history of abortion teaching in my Development and Negation treatise thus:

"In the case of abortion, for example, the Church’s teaching has developed toward greater strictness and gravity. Somehow that seems objectionable to many people who nonetheless have no problem with greater moral strictness about warfare, capital punishment, and domestic violence now than in the past; but I shall leave that fact aside as one of more psychological and political than theological interest. To be sure, the Church has always considered abortion immoral; and many early Christian writers condemned it as murder (see, e.g., Didache 2:2 and this list). But that injunction appears to have applied only to women who are unmistakably pregnant, either by their appearance or by the detection of quickening. It was not clear on that account that procuring abortion at any stage of gestation is a form of homicide, which is what the Church teaches now.

St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, held that the process of conception required forty days for boys and eighty for girls before the conceptus was ready for the infusion of the rational soul (Commentary on the Fourth Book of Sentences, d. 31 exp. text.). And that was the common view through the eighteenth century. Abortion prior to said infusion was not held by the Church to be the killing of a human person; it was condemned only as a particularly nasty form of contraception. What changed that, of course, was the development of the modern disciplines of obstetrics, gynecology, and above all genetics.

As soon as it became clear to the Church that even the blastocyst, under normal conditions, was a genetically unique individual member of homo sapiens—twinning being a separate, still controversial case—Pope Pius IX included abortion at any stage of gestation as a form of homicide in his renewed list of offenses incurring excommunication (Apostolicae Sedis [1869]). And so the teaching and discipline remain today. The reasonable-enough assumption has been that whatever is a genetically unique individual member of the species is a human person, not just part of a person such as an organ or a gamete. Disputes about the time or process of ensoulment thus recede into obsolescence. A good defense of that development, for which pro-lifers of varying or no religious affiliation are rightly fond of citing natural science, may be found in Robert George and Patrick Lee, Acorns and Embryos. Granted that science just by itself has nothing to say about moral norms, its considerable relevance to this question is the chief basis for claiming that opposition to legal abortion needs no specifically religious premises. That of course is politically very important.

The change here, then, has not been in the precept that abortion is gravely immoral but in the explanation why: due to the advance of science, the Church now condemns all, or almost all, abortion as murder, not merely abortion after a certain stage of gestation. What’s changed is the understanding of the empirical conditions under which the Fifth Commandment is applicable."

Of course there's always the CCC itself for those who, unlike the "ardently Catholic" Speaker, actually believe it.

The case of Brother Roger

Long ago, St. Augustine remarked: “There are some whom God has, whom the Church has not. And there are some whom the Church has, whom God has not…When we speak of within and without in relation to the Church, it is the position of the heart that we must consider, not that of the body . . . All who are within the heart are saved in the unity of the ark” (On Baptism 5). For reasons doubtless known more to the Holy Spirit than to me, I've been thinking a lot lately about that anomaly in the economy of salvation. It just is true that some non-Catholics are in fuller communion with the Catholic Church than some Catholics. That fact calls for theological explanation which not everybody can appreciate—and that fact in turn that is troubling enough, at least to me. But my friend Dr. Phil Blosser has brought to my attention a particular ecclesiological anomaly whose official explanation is even more troubling than the anomaly itself.

Calvinist pastor Roger Schutz, the de facto leader of Taizé who was murdered in 2005 by a deranged woman at a public ecumenical service, had previously been given the Eucharist by then-Cardinal Ratzinger and by Cardinal Kasper, who now serves as President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. At long last, Kasper has explained that anomaly. Here's the gist of the explanation:

He denies that Fr. Schutz "formally" adhered to the Catholic Church. And much less did he abandon the Protestantism into which he was born. He affirms, instead, that he gradually "enriched" his faith with the pillars of the Catholic faith, particularly the role of Mary in salvation history, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and the "the ministry of unity exercised by the bishop of Rome." In response to this, the Catholic Church allowed him to receive Eucharistic communion. According to Kasper, it is as if there had been an unwritten agreement between Schutz and the Church of Rome, "crossing certain confessional" and canonical limits.

That greatly puzzles me, Phil, and other orthodox Catholics who know and care about such things. If Brother Roger, without evincing any intention of becoming formally Catholic, could receive the Eucharist, then why not traditional Anglican clergy? Why not anybody who believes certain distinctively Catholic doctrines but who, for whatever reason, sees fit to remain formally non-Catholic? What happens to the RCIA? In what sense, beyond the merely empirical, does it remain a norm to reserve the Eucharist for those who are in full communion with the Church?

Since I often disagree with Cardinal Kasper, and certainly don't find him as good a theologian as the countryman of his who occupies the Chair of Peter, I'm not really interested in hearing his answers to such questions. I'm interested in hearing the Pope's. As Ratzinger he was, after all, directly implicated in the case of Brother Roger. Will we hear from the Pope about this? I don't know. Perhaps the answers are already latent in the Church's norms, and I just haven't thought hard enough to make them patent. But right now I can't think quite hard enough to manage that.

Can anybody offer something that isn't just a way of restating the problem?

Communion by degree

Everybody knows—OK, almost everybody who reads this blog—that the American bishops lack a unitary policy about giving the Eucharist to Catholics who reject and/or disobey the definitive teaching of the Church. For even better-known reasons, that fact always comes to the fore in a general election. Now that Senator Joe Biden, a Catholic who is as pro-abortion-rights as he is anti-men's-rights, has "ascended to Barack Obama's right hand," the issue has resurfaced. As always, John Allen has instructive things to say. But the recurrence of this familiar issue in the news cycle has prompted me to connect it with another, broader one that tends to interest readers of this blog even more.

Like so many other such issues, the one I have in mind is ecclesiological: just what does being "in communion" with the Catholic Church consist in? What are the necessary and sufficient conditions? How and when are they met? And how, short of juridical excommunication, does a Catholic get herself out of communion with the Church? I once thought that debating such questions was just an arcane theological exercise, the sort that occupies people who don't have to worry about mere temporalities such as earning a living or changing diapers. But in fact it is anything but. The questions that arise here affect us all on the personal, pastoral, and political levels, which are intertwined in many ways. The issue is also very much an apologetical one. Since I can't do everything in one post, I shall focus on the issue mainly from that angle.

One thing that I've consistently observed since Vatican II is that many people, Catholics as much as non-Catholics, have the impression the Church's teaching on membership in the Church is, or rather has become, incoherent. It is widely believed that the Church once taught that you had to be what we'd now call a "card-carrying Catholic" to be saved—and even for those people, the prospects were pretty dicey. Being such a Catholic entailed being "in communion with" the Church of Rome. But having been exposed to Vatican II and ecumenism, many people now believe that the Church no longer teaches that. The general impression seems to be that the Church now teaches that you can squeak into heaven, perhaps by way of purgatory, just by avoiding the grossest and blackest forms of wickedness and being vaguely contrite, in the end, about one's preferred forms of wickedness—or at least about those which one has managed to recognize as such. From this point of view it hardly matters what religion you profess, or even whether you profess any at all.

Of course the above is a caricature I've devised for expository clarity. But it is not a terribly unfair caricature of how many people see these things. It is actually a reasonable summation of what I've been hearing for decades. And how such people see these things is not only wrong but terribly unfair to the Catholic Church, whose teaching on this subject is profound, nuanced, and still developing. Explaining why will help illustrate what being "in communion" with, and thus a member of, the Church actually means—and why that is important.

It is true that the Catholic Church has taught, with her full authority, the doctrine extra ecclesiam nulla salus: "outside the Church, there is no salvation" ('EENS' for short). For people who care about such facts, I don't even need to document that. It is also true that Vatican II did not repeat the words of EENS, at least as a pastoral matter. For what the Council did say, I always urge people to read the documents, especially Lumen Gentium and Unitatis Redintegratio. But for now, here are the three most pertinent statements (emphases added):

Basing itself upon Sacred Scripture and Tradition, [this sacred Council] teaches that the Church, now sojourning on earth as an exile, is necessary for salvation (LG §13).

Even in the beginnings of this one and only Church of God there arose certain rifts,(19) which the Apostle strongly condemned.(20) But in subsequent centuries much more serious dissensions made their appearance and quite large communities came to be separated from full communion with the Catholic Church-for which, often enough, men of both sides were to blame. The children who are born into these Communities and who grow up believing in Christ cannot be accused of the sin involved in the separation, and the Catholic Church embraces upon them as brothers, with respect and affection. For men who believe in Christ and have been truly baptized are in communion with the Catholic Church even though this communion is imperfect (UR §3).

Those also can attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience (LG §16).

The key development of doctrine here is this: those who are, for whatever reason, not culpable for failing to become formally members of the Catholic Church, can still be saved by responding positively to that grace, won by and coming from Christ, which is given to humanity in and through the Church, i.e. the Catholic Church. (The Catechism of the Catholic Church's explanation of EENS helps to make that clear.) The people so described are thus in "imperfect" communion with the Church. Being "in communion with" the Catholic Church thus is, or often can be, a matter of degree—just as the journey of the "pilgrim Church" herself toward eschatological fullness is a matter of degree. And if you are objectively inculpable for that degree's not being full, then you're "in," at least to a degree that can enable your salvation.

That matters a lot for ordinary pastoral practice, evangelization, and missionary activity—for only God can really know who is culpable and who isn't. But the idea of imperfect communion remains very controversial in some quarters, probably because it is so widely misunderstood.

It is often taken to mean that EENS has been, at least from the standpoint of logic, repudiated by the Catholic Magisterium. Of course I have vigorously argued that EENS has not been thus repudiated. My first formal argument to that effect was made in a 2006 post at the now-defunct version of Pontifications, where it evoked a combox running to well over 300 entries, many of which were scholarly. That post is preserved as the first dogma-specific entry in my long essay Development and Negation. The point the naysayers couldn't (or, in some cases, wouldn't) see was itself simple: it is one thing to say that there's no salvation outside the Church; it's another to say what being inside the Church can consist in. The former claim remains the teaching of the Church, now expressed by LG's formulation that she is "necessary for salvation." But the latter claim is that being in the Church, or at least being related to her in a salvific way, is often a matter of degree. That is a real development of insight into the fixed content of the deposit of faith.

What most interests me at the moment, however, is not how non-Catholics can be in some degree of communion with the Church, but how Catholics themselves can fail to in full communion—and why that matters.

The Eucharist is, among many other things, an expression of the intimate unity between God and his people, between Christ and the Church. As such and perforce, it is also an expression of the full unity of faith and graced fellowship among those who share it. So even American Catholics are taught, rightly and in considerable detail, that if they have sinned seriously in this-or-that way, they would be profaning the Eucharist by receiving it. That is because it is held, on the basis of Scripture and Tradition, that those who have abandoned their baptismal vocation by falling into mortal sin are no longer in full communion with the Church, and thus would be lying to the Church, and well as dishonoring the Body and Blood of the Lord, by receiving it into their bodies. Those who receive "unworthily" thus receive "unto their own condemnation" (cf. 1 Cor 11: 23-30). If they are thus and culpably not in full communion with the Church, they can be saved only if they repent. So much used to be taken for granted by Catholics in general, and still is in some quarters. Most Catholics know that, if they have committed sins such as adultery or grand larceny, they need to do something to reconcile with God and the Church.

Now even Catholics who only formally cooperate with grave and intrinsic evils, such as abortion, are committing what is, objectively speaking, serious sin. Hence and in particular, Catholic politicians who support laws giving wide scope to the practice of abortion are doing grave wrong. But it does not necessarily follow that they are guilty of that sin, so that they profane the Eucharist if and when they receive it. That follows only when (a) they are aware of how the teaching of the Church applies in this case, or (b) if they are unaware, they are culpable for being unaware. And the same holds for Catholics in general about any sort of serious sin, especially that of heresy. This is where the problem of pro-abort Catholic pols really arises from.

On a whole host of issues, mainly those having to do with sexuality, marriage, and procreation, many American Catholics do not actually believe the definitive teaching of the Church. And so, of course, they feel no obligation to live by it. The Catholic politicians they help elect are, by and large, no exception. The practical question which thus arises for the Church's pastors, especially the bishops, is whether such people should be presumed culpable for that or not, and thus whether they should be denied the Eucharist or not. In most cases, bishops and priests presume that people are not culpable for their infidelity to Church teaching. They presume either that people are approaching the Eucharist in good conscience or that it is not the role of pastors to judge the consciences of communicants when they march up to receive. And in the case of many ordinary Catholics, that presumption is correct. The depth of ignorance and deception among ordinary Catholics, which reached new lows in the decade or so after Vatican II, remains so great in many instances that such Catholics cannot be presumed culpable when, out of habit and sentiment, they receive the Eucharist. And so, even when such a Catholic is objectively culpable for not being in full communion with the Church, the appearance of full communion on their part is generally kept up.

Nevertheless, that poses a serious obstacle to evangelizing both ignorant Catholics and the culture at large. If, for what seem to be sound pastoral reasons, many Catholics who neither believe nor live by the moral teaching of the Church are receiving the Eucharist with apparent impunity, then how seriously are ordinary Catholics and the world at large to take such teaching? The general impression has become that such teaching is optional: a rather dismal section of the cafeteria line that one is free to bypass and that will, sooner or later, be tossed along with all the other food nobody buys. Thus the policy of keeping up appearances for the sake of pastoral economy has the effect of entrenching, on a wide scale, the very problem that occasioned the policy in the first place. And so, the preaching of the full Gospel has been largely buried under a collective rationalization. That, I am convinced, is the basis of most of the other problems in the American Catholic Church, including the sex-abuse-and-coverup scandal that peaked five years ago. I blame the bishops for the fundamental problem as much as for its most egregious manifestation.

It can be argued that, given the sorry lack of adult catechesis, there is no practical alternative to the present policy of keeping up the appearance of full communion in the case of Catholics who are objectively not in full communion. That's what many bishops do argue, and the argument is cogent. One cannot just pick out, and pick on, the ordinary Catholics who are implicated in this mess. Most of them are not morally responsible for it, nor is it their role to clean it up. But one can and ought to pick out and pick on erring Catholics who have the education to know better and the power to affect a great many lives by their actions. I mean, of course, the Nancy Pelosis and the Joe Bidens. Archbishop Chaput has had some especially trenchant things to say about such people. If they have excuses, they shouldn't be left with them. Too much is at stake.

But there is a still-more fundamental problem here. Having acknowledged and taken into account the reality of imperfect communion for many non-Catholics, Rome must do the same for many Catholics, if only for self-consistency's sake. If she does so, as she has done for decades, she only reinforces the Church's internal problem for the reason I've already stated. If she does not, she becomes pastorally inconsistent: ecumenism will apply only to those who were never formally Catholic, so that we'll end up with a much smaller, if purer, Church. The Pope seems headed, slowly, in the latter direction. How he and his successors will carry on with it remains, however, an open question. In the meantime, the American bishops continue to disagree about how to handle the Pelosis and the Bidens. Maybe that's inevitable.

Either way, they should be more concerned with the formation of ordinary Catholic adults. Almost a decade ago, the USCCB produced a bracing document which points the way. Little has been done to implement it. I'm waiting with my resumé in hand.

CINOs elect CINOS

Kathryn Jean Lopez, editor of National Review Online, notes how clearly the Catholicism of Nancy Pelosi differs from that of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Prof. Scott Carson has some pointed observations about the Pelosi anti-catechism. Now that Joe Biden is the Democrat VP choice, we could just as well say the same of his Catholicism. Or that of John Kerry. The list goes on, and on. As Archbishop Charles Chaput implies in a homily quoted by KJL, such people are Catholic in name only. I call them 'CINOS' for short. So, why do they attain a measure of success with their appeals to "the Catholic vote"?

They manage it because their "Catholicism," such as it is, is pretty much that of a substantial segment, if not a plurality, of American Catholics. CINOs in the electorate help to elect CINOs to office. Over time, that has become the most visible obstacle to the Church's effort to evangelize the culture. How can there be a "Catholic" witness in the public square when so many powerful Catholics are CINOs, just like so many other Catholics who help to elect them?

Nothing will change unless the clear majority of American Catholics actually embrace Catholicism in reality, not just as an inheritance from which they can pick and choose to suit their inclinations. In other words, Catholicism for them will have to become faith rather than opinion. Then we'll get lots more Bobby Jindals—which is exactly what we need.