The authority question restated

As promised, I have deleted my lengthy post of February 1, "Which contest is worth pissing in?". I did so in order to respect the privacy that my chief interlocutor felt he needed in order to conduct his theological discussion without scandal. That said, however, I want to improve the contribution I made to that discussion, and to encourage the continued involvement of readers who made contributions to the lengthy combox of the deleted post. (Any of those contributors who want a copy of that combox for reference purposes should email me for one. I've saved it in Word format.)

Over the decades, I have heard countless debates about ecclesial authority and contributed to not a few of them. For reasons I've described on this blog and elsewhere, such debates are unavoidable and, up to a point, healthy. Many people try to avoid them, of course. They deny that any entity called "the Church" has authority beyond appeal to preserve, present, and interpret divine revelation for us. They insist that Jesus Christ alone, who has been given "all authority in heaven and on earth" (Matthew 28:18), has the requisite authority and thus merits the requisite submission of mind and will. In a sense, that is true. But the debate is precisely about the extent to which something called "the Church," the Mystical Body of Christ which, together with the risen Christ, makes up "the whole Christ," has been granted such authority. I don't believe, and never have been able to believe, that we can dispense with the living voice of "the" Church—whichever communion of churches that may be—in ascertaining what God has revealed to us. In that belief, I am far from alone.

I hold said belief because, after many of the aforesaid debates, I became convinced that, if nobody on earth after the Apostles has the same degree of divine authority as theirs to say which propositions are and are not de fide, then the question where to draw the line between theological opinions about the data of revelation and divine revelation itself reduces, always and necessarily, to a matter of opinion. And that effectively renders the entire subject of divine "revelation" a matter of opinion, not of revelation. That is the reductio of denying divine teaching authority to some entity justly deemed "the Church." As Newman so pithily put it: “No revelation is given, if there be no authority to decide what it is that is given.” Such an authority cannot of course decide on its own “what is given”; to serve its function, it can only do so with the subject matter and the authority Jesus Christ has given it. But if such authority has in fact been given it, then when it interprets Scripture and Tradition in a manner intended to bind the whole Church irreformably, the Holy Spirit guarantees that those interpretations will not be false.

That follows from the teaching of the Catholic Church, but it is not a distinctively Catholic position. The Orthodox churches too maintain that Scripture and Tradition can only be rightly received and interpreted in and through something called "the Church," that the authentic voice of the Church is the voice of Jesus Christ. The authentic voice of the Church is thus beyond appeal even if not "infallible" in the technical sense of that term employed by the two Vatican councils. Orthodoxy does differ from Catholicism about ecclesial authority, to be sure: it differs with Rome over the questions who in the Church teaches with the aforesaid voice and when. And those differences are significant enough to cause the Orthodox communion to regard itself, rather than the Roman communion, as "the" Church of Christ.

In point of fact, the centuries-old debates about ecclesial authority reveal not two but three distinct "hermeneutical circles" encompassing the relationship between Scripture, Tradition, and ecclesial teaching authority. I shall describe those circles shortly. To characterize and understand them, however, we need to be limit who counts as participants in the debate.

It has become a sociological commonplace over the past few decades to note that the divisions between the three major strains of Christianity—Catholicism, Protestantism, and Orthodoxy—are less important than the division between the more conservative and the more liberal believers within each of those strains. A conservative or a liberal believer within a given church generally has more in common with her counterparts in other churches than with people on the opposing wing in her own church. (Orthodoxy, of course, has a smaller percentage of "liberals" than Protestantism and Catholicism; but "liberals" there are, and I suspect there will be more in future.) I think the new commonplace is correct, and is best explained as the difference between people who believe that religious doctrine is ultimately a matter of provisional opinion—i.e., the liberals—and those who believe that divine revelation has given us identifiably absolute truths—i.e., the conservatives. It is the conservatives who count in the debate about ecclesial authority, because it is they who maintain that the revelation in and through Jesus Christ is public, complete, and definitive, in such a way that the deposit of faith left to us as the precipitate of revelation many neither be added to nor subtracted from. Accordingly, the three basic disagreements about the relationship between Scripture, Tradition, and ecclesial authority are disagreements among those who hold that the DF is both reliably identifiable as absolutely true and may neither be added to nor subtracted from. They are disagreements about precisely how the DF is to be handed on, received, and interpreted reliably, without augmentation or diminution, even as it was first left to us by a God "who can neither deceive nor be deceived."

As I've said, the disagreements take the form of three hermeneutical circles. The idea of a hermeneutical circle began, ironically enough, with the liberal Protestant theologian and biblical critic Friedrich Schliermacher; the term was formally introduced a century later by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who developed the idea further in parallel with another German philosopher, Hans-Georg Gadamer. The core idea was that, in reading a text, the parts can only be understood with reference to the whole and the whole can only be understood with reference to the parts. That yields a circle. But an interpretive motif arising therefrom need not be viciously circular. For hermeneutical circles are unavoidable, and the way to decide between them—if and when we face such a decision—is to assess which of them is most capacious and plausible in light of what is known about the intentions of the author(s), the literary antecedents, and the historical context of the text. And even when such "knowledge" is too limited to settle the question, there's always the distinct possibility that such limits will be outgrown in the future.

For purposes of discussion, I cannot avoid oversimplifying the content of the three competing hermeneutical circles which, I believe, define the epistemic differences between the three main strains of Christianity. I am forced to omit all the variations and nuances of each and most of the supporting arguments for each. But each involves an account of the relationship between Scripture, Tradition, and ecclesial teaching authority; and I believe that, in the final analysis, the three circles may be described as follows with minimal unfairness:

• The Protestant HC. Scripture records the substance of apostolic Tradition, and the canon of Scripture was put together by ecclesial authorities over a rather long period of time. But once that process was complete, Scripture was recognized and accepted by all Christians as the sole written work of man which is inspired by the Holy Spirit. As such, Scripture is (a) materially sufficient as an expression of the DF, and (b) perspicuous enough in itself to enable any Spirit-led believer who reads it to reliably understand the parts in terms of the whole and the whole in terms of the parts. Accordingly and (c), Scripture is the sole "infallible" rule of faith after the Apostles, and comprises all that is necessary for any Spirit-led believer to know, in its fullness, the verbally expressible content of what God has revealed to humanity in and through Jesus Christ.
  
  This HC is complete in principle. It enables believers, quite generally, to judge the orthodoxy of ecclesial authority in terms of Scripture. For given the material sufficiency and interpretive perspicuity of Scripture, any doctrine which is not explicitly stated in Scripture must be derivable therefrom by some form of rational necessity. The sole function of ecclesial authority is to bear and enforce faithful institutional witness to the Truth that can, in principle, be understood independently of such authority. Thus, such authority is not strictly necessary for assimilating divine revelation; it is only a disciplinary and educational convenience.
  
  
• The Orthodox HC. Scripture is indeed inspired by the Spirit and materially sufficient for expressing the DF. But Scripture is a work of the Church and for the Church, and can only be reliably understood as read by the Church in light of the broader "Holy Tradition" handed down to her from the Apostles. Tradition in that sense is the sum total of the ways in which the life of the Holy Spirit is manifest in the Church as a collectivity. Those ways chiefly include: the liturgy, the writings of the Fathers, the lives and wisdom of the saints, and the Ecumenical Councils. Although ecclesial teaching authority is ordinarily exercised by individual bishops over their flocks, only the dogmatic decress of the Ecumenical Councils must be understood as affirmations of faith which bind the whole Church.
  
  The doctrinal authority of such councils, however, is not primarily juridical. It lies in their "reception" by the whole Church over time as authentic expressions of the consensus of the faithful, informed as that consensus is by Scripture and Tradition understood together. From that point of view, "the Church" consists of those believers who accept such criteria as exhaustive touchstones of orthodoxy; hence the "Orthodox" communion. Such an account of the relationship between Scripture, Tradition, and ecclesial teaching authority constitutes an HC; for we know by the consensus of the Church which understandings of Scripture and Tradition are orthodox, and we know who is in the Church by their adherence to what is orthodox.
  
  But this is not a vicious circle. For to know the Way, the Truth, and the Life, who is a Person, entails belonging to his people, his Body, the Church; there is no standpoint outside her by which the true doctrine can be reliably known. At the same time, there is nothing in the historic consensus of the faithful to suggest that Jesus Christ willed that any one bishop or leader in the Church, apart from the consensus of the whole, exercise supreme doctrinal or disciplinary jurisdiction over the Church catholic. Orthodoxy is a gift of divine love, collectively received and collectively known. Though juridical authority is necessary in the Church, even for teaching, disputes about doctrine cannot be resolved by mere juridical imposition on the whole Church without her consent. Consensus, not diktat, is the true sign of what is Orthodox.

• The Catholic HC. First, read Dei Verbum §7-§10 and Lumen Gentium §25.
  
  Although Scripture and Tradition taken together are "materially sufficient" for expressing the entire DF, and can sometimes be understood to a great extent by various individuals without ecclesial authority, they can only be interpreted and understood "authentically"—i.e., with the authentic and thus binding voice of the Church—by the apostolic teaching authority or "Magisterium" of the Church. The "ordinary" way in which that is done is by the consensus of the bishops, which must be at least diachronic and is ideally synchronic too; "extraordinarily," it is done by the dogmatic decrees of ecumenical councils of the bishops and/or the dogmatic definitions of popes.
  
  For a putatively ecumenical council to bind the whole Church, it is necessary that its dogmatic decrees have at least the free consent if not the ratification of the Roman Pontiff, who succeeds Peter as the visible head of the episcopal college. Indeed he can, if he so chooses, speak unilaterally with the authentic voice of the Church, and when so doing enjoys "the infallibility with which Christ willed His Church to be endowed in teaching on faith or morals." Such definitions do not therefore acquire their binding character from the "consent of the Church" (cf. Vatican I, Pastor Aeternus); yet in such cases "the assent of the Church can never be wanting, on account of the activity of that same Holy Spirit, by which the whole flock of Christ is preserved and progresses in unity of faith" (LG §25).
  
  Such an account of the relationship between Scripture, Tradition, and ecclesial teaching authority constitutes an HC. On the one hand, it is clear that Scripture and Tradition, which together form "one sacred deposit of the Word of God," were not formed and cannot be authentically understood without the Magisterium (DV §10). On the other hand, the Magisterium has no authority other than that which Scripture and Tradition record as having been given by Jesus Christ to the Apostles and their successors, the college of bishops united with their head, the Bishop of Rome. Indeed the Magisterium, whether episcopal in general or papal in particular, would make no sense and could not function without a general understanding and possession of the DF in the Church as a whole. But without sitting, knowingly or unknowingly, on the "three-legged stool" of Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium, one cannot know what is orthodox by reference to Scripture and Tradition without the Magisterium. The ambit of orthodoxy, including the authentic development of doctrine, is definable only by the Magisterium in its definitive and binding interpretations of that unified "Word of God" known as Scripture-and-Tradition. But whenever the Magisterium does issue such definitive and binding interpretations of the DF, it must do so in a manner that logically consistent with its prior interpretations that enjoy the same degree of authority. It is of course logically possible for the Magisterium to fail to do so; but it is not spiritually possible, given that the three-legged stool is God's means of ensuring the Church's unfailing profession of the "faith once given to the saints" (Jude 3).

The first point to be made about the above three "hermeneutical circles" is that none can be shown superior to the others with an argument containing only premises that all parties involved—Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic—would accept. From within each circle, the others will seem at best question-begging and, at worst, viciously circular. To borrow a metaphor from the philosophy of science: each HC constitutes a paradigm that is epistemically incommensurable with the others. And that holds even when many quite similar doctrinal conclusions are reached from within each HC.

For example, for the last quarter of 2008, I actively participated in a series of Bible studies led by a team of conservative, evangelically-oriented Protestant ministers. Throughout the series, I heard not a single doctrinal assertion that was incompatible with Catholicism. Although the leaders did not recognize the Catholic Magisterium's claims to authority, their interpretations of the DF on the doctrinally significant points that came up were virtually indistinguishable from those of the Catholic Church. Similarly, as a college student in the 1970s, I attended many Orthodox talks and liturgies; once again, I heard not a single doctrinally significant assertion that I could find, after due inquiries, to be logically incompatible with Catholicism. Both the Protestants recently and the Orthodox back then turned out to be professing the same doctrines I did on the points being discussed, even though their language and conceptual framework were often quite different from what I was used to. The disagreements with me as a Catholic only came up when I asked them to give their reasons for interpreting the sources as they did. More generally, it seems to me that the differences defined by the three HCs are less over what we know of the DF than over how we know it.

But that source of Christian disunity, I submit, is not merely a philosophical problem. It is not just a matter of epistemological differences that could eventually be overcome by scholarly means such as clever argument, creative re-reading, and further research. No discoveries of lost texts or artifacts, no renewed critical editing of known texts, no work of theological genius, would even begin to break open and join into one the three HCs that define the basic epistemological differences between the three main strains of Christianity. By the same token, no arguments from reason alone are objectively cogent enough to rationally compel any informed but uncommitted inquirer to decide that one particular HC is better than the others. Each such inquirer should in due course decide, on the basis of the sort of information I've described above, which HC is the most plausible to him; and ordinarily, that suffices to justify a decision in good conscience to embrace one of them as a matter of faith. But given that each HC presents its understanding of doctrinal authority as an element of the DF, and therefore as a matter of faith, no such decision can be shown to be the only rationally justifiable one. For if any one HC were the only rationally justifiable one, then its understanding of doctrinal authority would be a conclusion of human reason rather than a tenet of divine faith.

I shall not repeat here my reasons for having chosen the Catholic HC. I've explained all that before and, if only as a means of defending my faith, will doubtless find myself doing so again. The point I want to close with is one that ought to be granted by any participant in the intra-Christian debates over ecclesial authority: if such debates could be resolved by scholarly considerations alone, they would already have been resolved. I am tempted to say they would never have arisen in the first place.

News, notes, and a heads-up

1. Amy Welborn's husband, Michael Dubruiel, has died unexpectedly. She and their children need your prayers. Amy has also asked those who can to show their support by buying his books. Googling him will get you a nice Amazon list.

2. Last night, I attended Lemoyne College's annual Loyola Lecture in Syracuse, NY. Given by Mark Massa, a Jesuit theologian from Fordham, its title and theme was: "A More Evangelical Catholicism? Catholic Identity in the 21st Century." I was interested in attending because I know and admire Fr. Jay Scott Newman, a convert and parish priest in the South, whose robust adult-education efforts are combined under the umbrella of what he justly calls The Center for Evangelical Catholicism. (It's right down the road from Bob Jones University.) Two things about Massa's talk turned out to be what I expected, and one turned out to be a delightful surprise.

First, his diagnosis of the American Catholic Church's difficulties in handing on the faith to the young, especially young adults, was devastatingly accurate. Most of Massa's prescriptions were spot on too. I found little I could disagree with, and I hope he publishes the talk soon as an article. It deserves wide circulation.

Second, it soon become evident that Massa is a middle-of-the-road Jesuit, which today means that his theology is too liberal. (He actually thinks the question of women's ordination is and ought to be open. Sigh.) He and Fr. Newman, whose bent is more conservative, would probably disagree about many things. But as I opined in the Q&A, a conversation between them about the nature and necessity of "evangelical" Catholicism would be most interesting. Each of them would probably find it incomprehensible that I agree with both of them about said topic. Such is a very small instance of the ironies with which the Catholic Church in the US abounds.

Third, Massa interlarded his rich material with a number of jokes that elicited a few real belly laughs, from me and others. I needed that. Spreading the joy, here's a sampling:

*** Georgetown University started out aspiring to be the Catholic Harvard. It ended up as the secular Notre Dame.

*** Just sitting at Mass won't make you into a saint any more than just sitting in the garage will make you into a car.

*** When a ding-a-ling gets ordained, what the Church gets is an ordained ding-a-ling.

3. My previous post, "Which contest is worth pissing in?", was premised on a misapprehension. I had thought that the Facebook thread out of which it grew was visible to anybody on the Internet, so that no special difficulty would arise from my bringing the conversation—or at least my part of it—into the blogosphere. That turns out to have been false. The initiator of the original "note" and thread, whom I criticized sharply in my post, had made the note and thread visible only to Facebook members whom he invited to the discussion. He had reasons of his own for doing things that way, and I ran ignorantly roughshod over them. I've already apologized to him privately.

Accordingly, I shall delete the post tomorrow while saving the combox discussion and emailing it to anyone who cares enough about it to request a copy of it. I shall then rewrite the post both to respect people's privacy and to focus more attention on the doctrinal questions raised by "the theology of the body."

Two peeks that obscure

Consider this AP story, dated yesterday, about the opening of the Apostolic Penitentiary to public view. I've long been amused by that official title of the oldest, and one of the most secretive, of Vatican departments; to this American, it conjures images of aging clerical heretics and pederasts unable to escape from an ill-guarded prison. I suppose the ApoPen was overdue for some sort of corrective publicity; but I'm afraid that, given its stated purpose, this peek will be self-defeating. And I'm afraid the same goes for the widely anticipated report from the Congregation for Catholic Education on the state of American seminaries.

The stated purpose of the first peek was "to explain what the Apostolic Penitentiary actually does, and thereby encourage more of the faithful to go to confession, said Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti, the tribunal's No. 2 official." The ApoPen's main work is to deal with sins whose absolution, if sought, must ordinarily come from the pope—which, according to the story, include defiling the Eucharist, breaking the seal of the confessional, or offering absolution in exchange for sex. A fourth type of case considered by the ApoPen is that of men who, having once formally cooperated in abortion, seek ordination.

Having inquired about this, I find that such a man can get ordained if he no longer has financial obligations to born progeny. A related irony surrounding the recruitment and deployment of priests is the one described by this story about foreign (mostly African and Asian) priests brought into the US. Apparently a man can have bad English, a rudimentary theological education, and no familiarity with American culture, but still serve as a priest in an American parish, so long as he doesn't have really serious baggage such as a wife and/or minor children. This while thousands of Roman Catholic American laymen with great theological educations, pastoral talent, and a keen desire to give their lives to the Church (leaving aside, of course, the thousands of priests who left to marry) cannot get themselves considered for ordination simply because they do have such baggage. I find the irony a bit much to appreciate.

But I digress. Notice that all of the aforesaid matters reserved to the ApoPen involve the sins of priests or of those who aspire to ordination; only "defiling the Eucharist" is something any ordinary layperson can be guilty of. Yet how many lay defilers are there who would be held to account for the deed and care enough to appeal to Rome for absolution? Even the case of Eucharistic defilement seems to draw the Vatican's attention only when a priest is the guilty party and seeks absolution for it. How is this focus on those actually or potentially in the clerical state going to encourage the run of laity to go to confession more? All it's going to do, if it does anything, is draw attention to the fact that the papacy allows common murderers and child molesters to be absolved at a lower level than itself. That hardly advertises the sense of priorities that the Church ought to be inculcating. The only people who will "get it" will be those who don't need to get it. And I say that as somebody who celebrates the sacrament of reconciliation at least twice a month because he follows the only prudent course and regards himself as an inveterate sinner.

Then there's the seminary report, the second in a little over a decade. The "apostolic visitation" whose results are therein reported was apparently thought to have been necessitated by the sex-abuse scandal that peaked in 2002-3. But what does the report conclude? "This visitation has demonstrated that, since the 1990s, a greater sense of stability now prevails in the U.S. seminaries. The appointment, over time, of rectors who are wise and faithful to the church has meant a gradual improvement, at least in the diocesan seminaries." Now I do not dispute that conclusion; even if I were inclined to, I would be in no position to come up with enough counter-evidence. My disappointment is over the fact that it's been made available to the general public. The countless people who were, and in many cases still are, outraged by the scandal will not be mollified by said conclusion. The somewhat fewer people who know that homosexuality was at the epicenter of the scandal are not going to be reassured by the nuances that qualify said conclusion. And I doubt that the report's call for a greater emphasis on orthodox "moral theology" is going to address whatever spiritual diseases still afflict seminaries. Being told "the rules" does not, by itself, increase either the willingness or the desire to abide by the spirit of the rules. What we need in the seminaries are more and holier men. The report has nothing to say about how to meet that need. And its release to the general public will only give that public impression that the hierarchy still doesn't "get it." That impression wouldn't be universally true; some fine bishops are attracting more and better men to their seminaries. But the impression retains more than enough truth to resist being dispelled by reports such as this one. Worse, there will now be less impetus to weed out those insiders who still constitute the problem. The pressure is off even if that was not the intent.

When I ponder the Church's prospects, I do not go quite so far as the French bishop who, in response to Napoleon's boastful threat to destroy the Church, replied: "You cannot succeed where so many generations of bishops have failed." But I sometimes veer perilously close to such cynicism. One of the best signs of the Church's divine origin is how she keeps on managing to survive her leadership. We happen to have a very good pope; but he is after all only a man, and he lived in an ecclesiastical bubble for too long. So, apparently, do many of his lieutenants.

The undying light in the darkness

Today, in the calendar for the Roman liturgy according to the ordinary form, we celebrate the Baptism of the Lord. In the New Testament, the Baptism of the Lord affords the only occasion when all three persons of the Trinity were sensibly manifest. I love that partly because I love trinitarian theology, but more because our world is in ever-more desperate need of the undying light that pre-existed and, for those with eyes to see, suffuses it.

Two news items today bring home the darkness for me, and a third brings out the light.

The first bit of darkness that enveloped my spirit, out of the countless ones that could have, is what's been going on in Gaza this month. It seems like pure darkness not because either side is purely evil—as Solzhenitsyn said, the line between good and evil runs through each human heart—but because the evil in each side so much obscures what's truly good about them.

The Palestinians cannot be faulted for desiring their own homeland, or for resenting the Israeli blockade of Gaza that persisted even during the fragile cease-fire of the last six months of 2008. But the Gaza Palestinians are governed—if one can call it government—by people whose avowed aim is to destroy Israel, not to live alongside it. They hate Israel more than they love their own children whom, forsooth, they educate to glorify "martyrdom" for the cause. One Hamas leader has agreed with an al-Qaedist's proclamation that "we are going to win, because they [the opponents of radical Islam] love life and we love death."

When Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it tore down synagogues and left behind greenhouses. Instead of turning the greenhouses into farms, the Palestinians tore them down too. Instead of turning other buildings into factories for goods to be exported for sale, Hamas turned them into factories for making Qassams to rain down on Israeli homes and schools. As soon as last year's ceasefire expired, they started shooting other rockets, imported from Syria and Iran, that reach further and explode in a wider radius. Now that the Israelis have become so fed up that they've gone into Gaza to destroy Hamas' military capability, the Palestinian civilian toll mounts because Hamas fights mostly from civilian areas and structures. If you want to attack Hamas militants, you often can do so only at the cost of shooting or blowing up the children and women all around them. It's a brilliantly, fiendishly cynical Hamas tactic—as evidenced by the fact that there's far more media attention to and world outrage about Palestinian civilian casualties caused collaterally by the Israelis than about Israeli civilian casualties caused deliberately by Hamas.

Not that the Israelis avoid all sin, mind you. Not everything done by the soldiers of a country at war is right. But exactly what, in the grander scheme, is Israel supposed to do about an enemy that attacks its territory daily as a putative religious duty, sometimes causing civilian deaths? Another ceasefire that leaves the Hamas infrastructure intact will only allow Hamas to rearm for the next round while being protected and motivated by all the outrage over this one. And that's exactly what most of the world seems to want. Once again, the Jews are expected to acquiesce in their own slaughter. Only Satan is laughing.

Another bit of darkness is of interest mostly to that minority of the world's population which either loves or hates the Catholic faith. Apparently, the Dutch foreign minister has summoned the papal nuncio for that country to "explain" the Pope's opposition to the proposed UN declaration on human rights and homosexuality. Now I doubt that the Dutch government is particularly concerned about the Vatican's stance on homosexuality; rather, the homosexualist lobby is so angry that it's become politically necessary for the government to appear concerned about the Vatican's stance. This is really depressing. I have only recently digested the fact that, in my lifetime, the majority of Westerners with higher education have moved from regarding sodomy as immoral to regarding opposition to its sanctification by the state as immoral. The Netherlands in particular has had gay "marriage" for years. But now the Vatican arouses fury there by suggesting that countries which still penalize sodomites should not be penalized in their turn by the United Nations. All pretense of tolerance is dissipating. It won't be long before churches which still preach against sodomy, or even use the term, are persecuted in the name of an enlightenment which is really an endarkenment.

There is a bit of light, however. With hat tip to Taylor Marshall of Canterbury Tales, I note that Dr. Carl Djerassi, a co-inventor of the birth-control pill, has now repudiated it. Dr. Djerassi merely points out the obvious: we now have a "demographic catastrophe" in Western Europe. Of course this is not a bit of light. The light shines from the fact—on which I have often remarked—that by the end of this century, the only surviving Westerners will be those whose parents had enough faith in God and creation to replace themselves. Next to its parents, that generation will have the Catholic Church to thank for its existence. For she is the only Christian body that has not only maintained the ancient ecclesial consensus against contraception but also articulated the purely spiritual reasons for that consensus.

"This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Listen to him."

Richard John Neuhaus, RIP

This is the third time in less than a year that I feel truly sad to hear of the death of a public figure. One of the other occasions was Bill Buckley's death last February; the other was Cardinal Dulles' death just over a month ago. I should have met both men, and could have, but never did. But I did meet Fr. Neuhaus once.

I was just getting my PhD and told him, at a Christmas party for conservative Catholics, that I needed a job. He suggested I send him a résumé and even granted me an interview at First Things, which I blew because I didn't mention more than one of the many solid people we both knew. In retrospect, I realize that he intimidated me and made me tongue-tied; I had, after all, just observed him dealing with the noisy protesters against Cardinal Ratzinger at a 1988 lecture the latter gave in New York about biblical exegesis (of all things). Apparently, RJN had the same effect on a lot of people. Some of them needed, and still need, to be tongue-tied.

The eulogies have been pouring in, of course, from the White House and the Vatican on down. Even though I've read several of the man's books including his memoirs, I continue to learn more about him. What I most loved about RJN in life was the unflappable wit he displayed as he managed to make all the right enemies. That's mainly what I loved about WFB too. But I loved RJN more because he was making all the right ecclesial enemies, not just those in secular politics, where he offended plenty who dissed him as a mere "neocon" apologist for the Bush Administration, which he wasn't. Within the Catholic Church, both trads and progs reviled him: the former, for being such an ecumenist; the latter, for his being such a staunch friend and supporter of Pope John Paul II and the traditional moral teachings of the Church.

What they were really objecting to, of course, was RJN's suave advocacy of what many, including his circle, called "the hermeneutic of continuity." I've written about that whole topic often, including in my obit for Dulles; indeed, a 2003 article by RJN is what first convinced me that the basic division in the Catholic Church is between those Catholics who do, and those who do not, believe that the Catholic Church after Vatican II continues to be...well, the Church. In the latter category we find both the far Right (the rad-trads) and the far Left (the progs), though of course for opposite reasons: what the former disapprove, the latter approve. But as suave and centrist as he was in theological terms, RJN did not hesitate to offend when he felt that offense was called for. He once told Andrew Sullivan to his face, in an elevator, that he is "objectively disordered." The thing needed to be said. It was said right where and when it needed to be. And the same holds for much of what he said.

I feel just as comfortable asking RJN to pray for me as I do praying for him. And that's probably the most important thing that remains to be said about him. All else is a conversation that he advanced well enough to make it continue without him.

Even THEY are getting it...

Every religious conservative of a certain age knows William Butler Yeats poem "The Second Coming" and can recite its best-known line of all: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." We know and love that line because it expresses how things have always seemed to us. Morals and the weather, at any rate, have been getting worse for what seem like millennia. I suspect that, to people like me, things always seem to be getting worse—and today, apocalyptically so. Yet we rarely imagine that other kinds of people will go all apocalyptic on us—at least those indisposed to "drink the Kool-Aid."

Yet they do get premonitions, even secularists like Roger Ebert, the movie critic. See this from his blog last week; the post has already garnered hundreds of comments. The only post of mine that's ever come anywhere close to that number of comments was about the prospects for Orthodox-Catholic ecumenism, and that's only because most of the Orthodox rejected my moderate optimism with contumely. I suppose that anything likely to happen only close on to the Parousia—such as Orthodox-Catholic reunion, or the collapse of the ecosphere—is going to excite a lot of emotional speculation; but I can find nothing to disagree with in Ebert's post, save his lingering, implicit, touchingly naïve belief that a political solution is possible.

Those who believe in prayer, pray that we get more Eberts. Even when he's wrong, he's headed in the right direction.

Harold Pinter: R.I.P.?

See David Pryce-Jones' blog for the best obit of the boring, boorish playwright I've seen. The best lines about him: "Pinter is a man of few words, most of them bad" and his work is "a pause followed by a non-sequitur."

It drives me crazy that guys like Pinter are successful. But I suppose that's exactly the effect that Satan wants them to have on me.

The tonic of unpleasant truths

As the new calendar year approaches and the Christmas season continues, I want to address the general exhaustion by recommending meditation on a pair of truths that most people find too unpleasant to contemplate.

The first is that there are people who are actually attracted to Catholicism by the Church's teachings on contraception and homosex. Consider convert David Mills' latest article at Inside Catholic, "Contraception and Conversion." This is the sort of thing I'd find way cool at a New Year's Eve party; or, if hung over from the party, way cool as an accompaniment to chicken soup and ibuprofen on New Year's Day. Savor this passage:

The regularly attending, basic-believing Catholic is usually pleased as punch to meet a convert. He rarely asks why -- and, when he does, wants only the most general of answers. Becoming a Catholic for him is just an obvious thing to do, and he is glad to have you around.

The sporadically attending, selectively believing Catholic is slightly bemused, because (if I understand him right) he seems to think of the Church as a heritage and a home and doesn't see why anyone else would be interested in it. He seems to feel as he would if you showed up to the Wisniewski family reunion or dropped into the Aquilina's for Sunday dinner or starting putting ornaments on the Rothfus's Christmas tree. Yet he is usually rather pleased that we did join, being a patriot.

The "progressive" is not so patriotic, if he isn't actually a traitor. So I will often say, in as cheery, boosterish, and cheerleading a voice as I can manage, "My wife and I discovered the truth of the Church's teaching on contraception, and after a while we just had to join the one body in the world that was telling the truth about it."

That usually shuts down the conversation. I am now familiar with the sequence of facial expressions that begins with incredulity and then, after a period ranging from half a second to four or five, moves to either annoyance, disgust, or fear. People have, when they realized exactly what I'd just said, edged away while keeping their eyes on me as if I might hit them from behind. (I am not making that up.)

I know that David is not making that up, because I've seen worse things myself.

I once found myself at a New Year's Eve party attended mostly by Catholics whom I'd call "full-time religionists": people who make the business of the Church their main business, even when they aren't ordained and/or don't get paid for it. (I wasn't a full-time religionist just yet; I was merely in via; and that's a "way" that God has since knocked me off.) But of course there were clerics galore too. With one of them, a Benedictine monk and priest, I was discussing what biblical scholars call "the infancy narratives" in Matthew and Luke. He mused that, though of course he did not believe that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, he would continue to preach that Jesus was born in Bethlehem so as not to upset the faithful. I promptly asked: "So Father, are we to have one truth for the hoi polloi and another for the intelligenstia?" He responded by tossing the contents of his cocktail in my face, muttering "you little shit" (I was much younger than he) as his face twisted with rage. Our gracious host gave me a big cloth napkin, ushered the offender into the hallway, and gave him an extra shot of bourbon.

"Progressives," in my experience, can't handle the truth. Apparently, they don't in David's experience either. But that's a feature of all ideologues.

Of general interest, then, is this bluntly brilliant analysis by Michael Ledeen of the current Middle-Eastern situation, which is going through a little nastier-than-usual spell. Ledeen is spot on: the main problem is Iran, and there is no solution as long as its mullahs can do mischief. But not many people recognize that, and fewer are willing to say so out loud. Once Iran has the bomb, we will have reached the point of no return. Is President Obama willing to do what it takes to prevent reaching that point? Even to raise the question is usually considered bad form.

Happy New Year.

Brief meditation on the Holy Family

The 14th-century Dominican Johann Tauler wrote as follows on the Gospel for today's feast in the Roman calendar for the ordinary form of the Mass:

Herod, the one who pursued the child and wanted to kill him, represents the world which clearly kills off the child, the world that we must by all means flee if we want to save the child. Yet no sooner have we fled the world exteriorly… than Archelaus rises up and reigns: there is still a world within you, a world over which you will not triumph without a great deal of effort and by God’s help.

For there are three strong and bitter enemies that you have to overcome in you and it is with difficulty that we ever win the victory. You will be attacked by spiritual pride: you would like to be seen, taken note of, listened to… The second enemy is your own flesh, assailing you through bodily and spiritual impurity… The third enemy is the one that attacks by arousing malice in you, bitter thoughts, suspiciousness, ill will, hatred and the desire for revenge… Would you become ever more dear to God? You must completely forsake all such behaviour, for all this is the wicked Archelaus in person. Fear and be on your guard; he wants to kill the child indeed…

The worst thing about today's world is how evidently it wants to "kill the child." It does not want God to be its Father, begetting each of us in love; it does not want the Christ Child to be its brother, born shivering in a barnyard stall; it does not want the Holy Spirit to be its comforter and guide, filling it with a life to be poured out in maturity for God and neighbor. It wants to be "grown up," independent, a law unto itself, bending things ever more to its own pleasure and devising. The result is misery, even for those who have many of the world's most cherished goods. The prevalence of abortion, the greatest holocaust in history and set only to expand, is a gruesome sacrament of this evil. The killing of children in the womb signifies the spiritual disorder within; and in signifying that, reliably helps to bring it about.

As Tauler indicates, this "world" is in each of us, if only because of original sin. Even the redeemed must struggle against "the world," within and without, so as to recover their real "inner child" and thus become what God created them to be. I do so daily, often without apparent success. Life for the disciple, if one really wishes to be a disciple, is a spiritual combat. And this, I believe, is the true message of the story of the Holy Family, commemmorated so peacefully in our beloved crèches.

Things have got so bad that I shall deliver myself of another Yogi-ism: in America today, an overtly healthy, intact family is assumed to be covertly dysfunctional. Normalcy, according to the norm of bygone days, is suspect. But consider what the family is for. It is the incubator of human beings, not so much in the physical sense, in which it is dispensable, but in the spiritual sense. It is where we are equipped to become what God created us to be; parents are merely the stewards of that process. But in a world determined to kill the child, the family cannot achieve its purpose well. In a world determined to be "autonomous," the divine and natural law is steadily supplanted by human law. It is we who now decide, by mores and statutes, what marriage consists in; it is we who now decide whether we shall reproduce naturally or technologically; it is we who decide when conceived children will be allowed to see the light of day; it is we who reserve the right to break up a family, ostensibly for the good of its members. In the so-called developed world, the family is increasingly an artifact of convenience at best.

That "kills the child" because we can no longer accept the family as a gift, the way Mary and Joseph accepted Jesus as a gift, and the way all children are gifts. We have done this to ourselves.

Kyrie, eleison.

Ecology and Autonomy

Yesterday, the Pope spoke of the need to recognize and defend something called the "ecology of man." Significantly, the occasion was the "traditional exchange of Christmas greetings with prelates and members of the Roman Curia." What attracted media attention was, of course, not so much explanation of our duty to be responsible stewards of the rest of the planet; apparently that's taken as platitudinous, which it isn't. The antennae went up for his remarks on gender theory.

Thus:

"It is not outmoded metaphysics," Benedict XVI affirmed, "when Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman, and demands that this order of creation be respected." He said it has more to do with "faith in the Creator and listening to the language of creation, the contempt of which will lead to the self destruction of humanity." The Pope warned against the manipulation that takes place in national and international forums when the term "gender" is altered. "What is often expressed and understood by the term 'gender,' is definitively resolved in the self-emancipation of the human being from creation and the Creator," he warned. "Man wants to create himself, and to decide always and exclusively on his own about what concerns him." The Pontiff said this is man living "against truth, against the creating Spirit." "The rain forests certainly deserve our protection, but man as creature indeed deserves no less," he added.

The immediate expressions of outrage at that were predictable. What's remarkable about them all the same is their unintended irony.

Most people who consider themselves environmentalists are also left-wing politically and, as such, favor "homosexual rights." Like the Pope, they want to protect the natural ecology; but unlike him, they don't seem to think that there is a human ecology, distinct but not separate from the natural, which entails a normative human sexuality. Indeed, there's a strong movement at the UN to "de-criminalize" homosexual activity, which the Obama Administration will doubtless sign onto. Now as a Catholic and a conservative, I too favor the decriminalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults, as well as of prostitution involving consenting adults, because I believe that such laws cannot be enforced fairly. To that extent, I actually disagree with the Pope. But the decriminalization of homosexual acts is only one item, and not the most important one, on the LGBT agenda. As the reaction to Proposition 8's victory in California indicates, that agenda is less interested in privacy, democracy, and due process than in establishing an ever-widening range of sexual deviancy (i.e., what the phrase "Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender" is really referring to) as equal in moral value to marriage, and in some cases even as marriage. If incoveniences such as the will of the people in a sovereign state get in the way, then recourse to other authorities (the courts, the UN, the Episcopal Church) must be had to eliminate them.

That kind of determination signifies a radical philosophical anthropology, not merely a desire to be free of oppression and hate. The idea is that the freedom of the human person is not so much freedom within the limitations of human nature as freedom to define what human nature is to encompass. Thus if I experience, as a given prior to choice, a desire for genital intercourse with members of the same sex, then respecting my freedom means affirming me when I define my personal identity in those terms. If I experience myself as being of one gender-identity when my overt bodily features would suggest that I'm of the opposite gender-identity, then respecting my freedom means affirming me in my choice to alter my body, surgically and chemically, so as to bring my physical reality more into line with what I take to be my spiritual reality. If all that is so, then the Pope's call for respecting a sexual "ecology of man" on pain of collective self-destruction is a rejection of human freedom at a very basic level, akin to medieval Christendom's physical punishment of those who publicly professed heresy. The Church has outgrown the latter; so why not the former?

The reason is that the latter was a historical distortion of the divine and natural law, whereas the former is a rejection of the very idea of the divine and natural law. Once we claim the right to treat heterosexuality as only an empirical norm, rejecting any suggestion that it is also the moral norm, then we have re-committed the sin of our first parents: aspiring to be as gods, "knowing good and evil" apart from what God has told us. By transgressing the limits God has set for us, we have claimed a moral autonomy that leads only to our spiritual self-destruction. "Original" sin is that state of spiritual destruction which we inherit from our first parents. Carried as far as we've carried that today—e.g., with atomic weaponry, human cloning, and now the idea that marriage need not be between men and women—it could lead to our physical self-destruction too.

Of course the "progressive" response to all this is to insist that religion needs more updating, more "enlightenment," not that humanity needs more humility and self-abnegation before God. But once again, that betrays the assumption that religion as well as morality is a purely human cultural product. The idea that an all-powerful, perfectly holy God might actually have told us that sodomy is an abomination must be "outmoded metaphysics," so that sticking to such an idea is naïve, or a mere defense mechanism, or downright evil. I've heard it all before, and I've heard it many times. But I don't buy it. Like many other human tendencies, homosexuality is objectively disordered at the psychic level—which ought to be evident just by knowing what human genitalia are for. It is incompatible with the ecology of man.

I find it funny that left-wing environmentalists and Gaia-worshippers don't get that. But this Christmas season, when we contemplate God's assuming human nature in the form of an infant, it is perhaps one of the most serious truths we can contemplate.

Cardinal Dulles and the hermeneutic of continuity

I was both saddened and encouraged to learn last week of the death of Avery Dulles, SJ, prince of the Church and de facto dean of America's Catholic theologians for quite some time. Requiescat in pace. He was the sort of man both the Church and our country needed, and left behind a substantial body of useful work. Now we no longer have his gentle, sage, and moderate voice, which he lost even before the end, which is sad. But we will have his intercession before the Throne—which I'm sure will have greater effect than his opponents realize.

Perhaps his most signal contribution to the contentious world of post-Vatican-II Catholic theology was his suave advocacy of what the present pope has termed "the hermeneutic of continuity," about which I've written more than once before. To a considerable extent, the Church in the developed world has become ideologically polarized:

Thus, while trads resent Rome for spoiling the oldie-goldie days of full pews and sound teaching, the progs resent Rome for failing to commit the Church to the liberal-Protestant agenda that their mythos still peddles as the wave of the future. Both sets of malcontents believe that the Second Vatican Council constituted a decisive break with the Church of the past; the main difference is that the trads, decrying the break, want the Council to become a dead letter while the progs, celebrating it as "the spirit of Vatican II," are impatient for the Church to complete what they take to be the Council's revolutionary work.

Such polarization is, in other words, facilitated by the hermeneutic of discontinuity. It has been the work of such churchmen as Wojtyla, Ratzinger, and Avery Dulles to offer a hermeneutic of continuity that is intellectually more challenging than ideology but, ultimately, the only one capable of upholding the catholicity of the Church over time as well as space.

A good example of how that works on concrete issues is this book edited by Scott Hahn. One of Dulles' last books, Magisterium: Teacher and Guardian of the Faith, an indispensable summary of the topic for non-specialists, is another example. Of course the objections raised to that book are motivated mostly by the hermeneutic of discontinuity. It is claimed that the Church's course of doctrinal development, by dropping or even reversing certain teachings, belies the Magisterium's claims to being infallible under certain conditions. Dulles did much in his earlier work to rebut that charge, but much remains to be done.

My "Development and Negation" (see sidebar link) series was a start. I'm trying to turn that into a pamphlet. I invite suggestions; I'm thinking "Catholic Truth Society."

Back to the grindstone

Thanks to all who've expressed concern about me. I've been spending the last few months looking for full-time work and doing occasional day labor. For reasons well known to those who know me well, I do not have the luxury of time; if I did, I'd be off to DC or Rome to earn a papal licentiate in theology, which would take about a year-and-a-half. So I suspended blogging for the duration, on the assumption that I would not have too much difficulty landing the sort of job I held for the last several years. For reasons understandable to anybody who follows the news, that assumption has proven incorrect; despite a number of interviews and promising leads, nothing has so far materialized. Yet I've decided to resume blogging anyway, on the principle that the Lord expects my abilities to be used in his service.

Spiritually, the break has been fruitful. I have not succumbed to depression, my congenital danger; indeed, I've come to realize that it had become too close and old a friend. I'm done with that because I believe God dismissed her. Instead, I have received a greater outpouring of love and support, from true old friends as well as new acquaintances, than I ever thought possible. I cannot and do not want to sing for my own pity party, because people do care and help. The Spirit is at work. Amid and often through my daily struggles, the Lord has been making clear to me that it's time to trust him completely and just do the things he created me to do. That's why I'm back. The rest will take care of itself. "Seek ye first..."

There's been much to ponder in what's termed "current events." Often, the mega-event unfolding through them does so without being noticed as such. I get the sense in prayer that what's happening in the world today is a clearing of the field for a truly decisive struggle between good and evil. The clearing process is most evident in the worldwide economic recession, which is a deserved crisis of trust, and in bioethics.

I do not believe that the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency will arrest the process; indeed, his ascendancy is part of it. Like the complicity of the German people in the Holocaust, his stand on abortion is atrocious because it does not, will not, recognize the atrocity. To hear him tell it, the moral question is beyond his pay grade. The atrocity will be held in check, if at all, only because the Democrats have failed to gain a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. But whether Obama gets FOCA through Congress or not, this country stands under judgment. His election showed that the majority of the American people, including the majority of Catholics, cared more about their money and about getting past Bush than about the ongoing holocaust that their false conception of liberty has licensed.

The economic crisis is simply the unravelling of illusions that were sustained by the same sort of greed. As usual when a financial panic has set in, the new fear is as irrational as the old greed; so now we have a downward spiral rather than an inflating bubble. Eons ago, paper money was backed by gold that the government was presumed to have; now it is backed only by trust that people, and above all the government, will pay their debts with the same selfsame paper, or even with just computer bytes representing that paper. When that trust is diminished by real events such as the foreclosure fiasco, money is not lent, capital does not move, jobs are lost instead of created. I believe that the trust will not be fully regained. And I believe so not because I am ignorant of business cycles, in which booms alternate with busts; I believe so because I believe that God will no longer permit business as usual.

Humanity is killing its children and poisoning the planet at an unprecedented rate. The West, with its moral and spiritual decadence, faces a fanatical enemy dedicated to destroying it---not just in two active theaters of war, but in as many ways and places as they can. Above all, however, we are proceeding with the "abolition of man" himself. 

Britain and other countries now see nothing wrong with creating human beings for the express purpose of harvesting their cells for the benefit of others. Legally, such human beings can be altered and killed at will. The rot hasn't set in quite as far here; but it's only a matter of time, especially with the Democrats in charge. And it's only the latest symptom of the underlying disease.

First it was eugenics, which got a bad name because the Nazis practiced it; now it's back, in the form of "pre-natal screening," which will be ubiquitous within the lifetime of baby-boomers. And the ball's been rollin' for a while. Widespread contraception created the general impression that sex and procreation need have nothing to do with each other. That has been gradually destroying not only sexual morality in general but marriage in particular, which is why homosexual liaisons can be regarded as marriage, which they aren't. Then, artificial reproduction not only reinforced that separation but made it possible to treat children as commodities. With IVF, embryonic stem-cell research, and now pre-natal screening, that's exactly what we have. When sexuality becomes a commodity for the mainstream culture, our children are not far behind. And when that happens, it's a sign that we have surrendered completely to our own appetites.

One term for this is 'moral relativism'. Hving reduced morality to prejudice, policy, and will-to-power, we are left with nothing by which to evaluate our appetites. In that case, we are ruled simply by the appetites of the most powerful among us, and have no appeal against them other than our own. It's the law of the jungle all over again. C.S. Lewis termed that terminus "the abolition of man"---the title of one of the most prophetic books of modern times.

But I do not believe that God will let things reach that terminus. Humanity is not a mere evolutionary experiment doomed to self-destruct. Each of us, rather, is conceived by God in love, even when our human parents did not conceive us in love; each of us is destined to eternal life, bodily as well as spiritual, in fellowship with the Triune Love. That is why one of those Persons was sent to die and rise for us: to reach into the very depths of our wretched sinfulness, and of the suffering brought on by sin, so as to lift us into a share in the divine nature itself.  A God who wants that for us, and can do his own will, won't let us completely ruin the earth, and re-bestialize ourselves in the process, before the Great Restoration.

In the meantime, please pray that I soon get the job God wants me to have.

Two propaganda videos

Like several other friends, Prof. Scott Carson has called my attention to this video from Catholicvote.com:



I agree wholeheartedly that the video dramatizes (or perhaps melodramatizes) what ought to be the central issue for Catholics in this general election campaign. It expresses my feelings. But will it really change the heart of anybody who is not already convinced of its main premise? I hope so, but I am not sanguine. What people care about now is "the economy, stupid." Saving the unborn seems to be a much less pressing issue for most voters, even for most Catholic voters, than saving their 401-ks and health insurance. That is natural if unfortunate, and it's not the sort of problem that propaganda can solve.

Still, I'm heartened by the contrast with a bit of propaganda for the opposing side: this one, a pro-Obama video from comedienne Sarah Silverman. She's hip and hot; I'd enjoy her if I didn't hate her worldview and the resulting ugliness that's so plain in her mouth and eyes. Indeed, Silverman's lexical and spiritual profanity is what prevents me from offending my readers by embedding her video on this site. But the interesting thing is that such videos are broadly supposed to help Obama. It's taken for granted that the young, the hip, and the hot, most of whom will vote for Obama, lap this sort of thing up. That's what's really scary. The very spiritual tenor that repels me is what attracts them. It's hard to find a clearer indication of what is at stake.

The trouble with leftism is that, having forgotten the real God, it makes an idol of humanity by means of ideology. The historian of ideas Kenneth Minogue argues that "pure ideology"—whether instantiated as Marxism, feminism, or some other academically fashionable ism—is a narrative of human reality as an ongoing conflict between the bad-guy oppressors and the good-guy oppressed, with history being about the latter's struggle to overthrow the former and thus attain "liberation." Any critique of such a story is dismissed as an apologia for the oppressor. In the current election, those who buy the story have focused their quasi-religious fervor on Obama. Indeed, pure ideology in Minogue's sense is but a secularized version of the cries and hope for justice that one finds in the Hebrew prophetic tradition. But the irony is that the unborn today, like the Jews and Gypsies of 1930's Germany and the kulaks of the 1930s Soviet Union, are the eggs being broken to make the omelette. In this nominally religious country, so many have forgotten that "Whatever you do to these, the least of my brethren, you do to me." With so much money at stake now, they are unlikely to start remembering.

My favorite post-election commercial

HT to Mark Shea.

The Lady Militant

No, I don't mean Sarah Palin, though I would enjoy applying that theme to her. I mean the Mother of God.

Today is the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, instituted by Pope Pius V in thanksgiving to Mary for the victory of the Catholic fleet over the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. All that victory did was save Western Christendom from conquest by the Ottoman Empire, which had extirpated the Byzantine Empire in the previous century. I have said my rosary today for victory over the culture of death in the West, which is a much bigger killer today than Muslim terrorists. Our Lady of Medjugorje is reported to say that the Rosary is the only way to defeat Satan.

Prof. Ralph McInerny says that the young should memorize GK Chesterton's poem Lepanto. For the convenience of the young of all ages, I present its full text here:

White founts falling in the courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard,
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips,
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross,
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard,
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred,
Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half-attainted stall,
The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall,
The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung,
That once went singing southward when all the world was young.
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
Don John of Austria is going to the war,
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold,
Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums,
Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes.
Don John laughing in the brave beard curled,
Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world,
Holding his head up for a flag of all the free.
Love-light of Spain - hurrah!
Death-light of Africa!
Don John of Austria
Is riding to the sea.

Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri's knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunset and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees,
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.

They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn,
From temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn;
They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea
Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be;
On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl,
Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl;
They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground, -
They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound.
And he saith, "Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk may hide,
And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide,
And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest,
For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west.
We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,
Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done,
But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook our palaces - four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not 'Kismet'; it is he that knows not Fate;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey in the gate!
It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth,
Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth."
For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
Sudden and still - hurrah!
Bolt from Iberia!
Don John of Austria
Is gone by Alcalar.

St. Michael's on his Mountain in the sea-roads of the north
(Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.)
Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift
And the sea-folk labour and the red sails lift.
He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone;
The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone;
The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,
And Christian dreadeth Christ that bath a newer face of doom,
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,
But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.
Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse
Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips,
Trumpet that sayeth ha!
Domino gloria!
Don John of Austria
Is shouting to the ships.

King Philip's in his closet with the Fleece about his neck
(Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)
The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin,
And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in.
He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon,
He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon,
And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey
Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day,
And death is in the phial and the end of noble work,
But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk.
Don John's hunting, and his hounds have bayed -
Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid.
Gun upon gun, ha! ha!
Gun upon gun, hurrah!
Don John of Austria
Has loosed the cannonade.

The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke,
(Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.)
The hidden room in a man's house where God sits all the year,
The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.
He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea
The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery;
They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark,
They veil the plumed lions on the galleys of St. Mark;
And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs,
And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs,
Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines
Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.
They are lost like slaves that swat, and in the skies of morning hung
The stairways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young.

They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on
Before the high Kings' horses in the granite of Babylon.
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell,
And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign -
(But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!)
Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate's sloop,
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.
Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria!
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!

Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,
Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in vain,
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade. . .

(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)

- G.K. Chesterton

THE LIES WE LOVE

There are many such lies, but today I can only call attention to three. One is simply American; two are American and Catholic.

First, as I contemplated the tanking economy today, I was reminded by the Spirit of these words from the prophet Jeremiah (Jer 6: 13-15):

Small and great alike, all are greedy for gain; prophet and priest, all practice fraud. They would repair, as though it were nought, the injury to my people: "Peace, peace!" they say, though there is no peace. They are odious; they have done abominable things, yet they are not at all ashamed, they know not how to blush. Hence they shall be among those who fall; in their time of punishment they shall go down, says the LORD.

Such, I believe, is contemporary America. Small and great alike, we have lived beyond our means for many years and allocated resources unjustly. Small and great alike, we are now starting to pay the piper. But rather few of us "get it" yet. The small say it's the fault of the great, the people with the "real" money and the "real" power, not regular folk like us. It's supposed to be the fault of the people who say, from their multi-million-dollar homes, that everything will be basically alright and back to normal once we get the credit flowing again. Well, the great (or those whom the Brits call "the great and good") are full of it. But so are many of the little guys and gals. What's happening now will get worse before it gets better, and it's the fault of everybody who assumes there's nothing wrong with living beyond their means while countless others scrape by with next to nothing. And let's face it: that assumption is a lie which most Americans, from rednecks to high-rollers, love to tell themselves. They rationalize it with an optimism inherited from a simpler time, taking for granted that the toys and other indulgences one cannot pay for now can always be paid for later when things will be better. We need to be weaned from that lie, and "getting back to normal" once we get through this embarrassing part of the boom-bust cycle isn't going to cut it. "Full of fraud," the majority say "peace, peace" when there is no peace. We "know not how to blush." We do not fathom the injury done to God's own people.

Among God's people are the voiceless unborn who are slaughtered in vast numbers so that their parents' lifestyles, or life-plans, will not be ruined by their birth. Among God's people are the workers and farmers around the world who are paid pittances so that we can buy things from them which many of us could not afford to buy if made by our fellow Americans. But God's people are paradigmatically those who, whether they have money or not, are ever striving by grace to be detached from this world's allurements and focused on becoming for eternity the lovers of God and neighbor they were created to be. In the economy of salvation, there is always a saving remnant of such people. If one believes, as I do, that the Catholic Church is the Church, then one believes that such people should be centered on the Catholic Church. In some parts of the world, they are. But American Catholics as a whole are actually worse than America as a whole precisely because they aren't much better than America as a whole.

With the exception of one hour on Sundays, the lives of most American Catholics are indistinghishable from those of other Americans. On one end of the political spectrum, such Catholicism-in-name-only has for decades been facilitated by clergy—the Drinans, the Hesburghs, the Mahonys—who show by their actions that they consider it more important to uphold the Democratic Party platform than the clear, constant, and irreformable teaching of the Church. That there are so many Catholic Obamabots today is a symptom of that legacy. A good antidote to their rationalizations is Dr. Mark Lowery's pamphlet "Catholic Voting and the Seamless-Garment Theory".

But there's also a problem with many of the more "conservative" Catholics. I don't mean the homeschoolers, the Latin-Mass attendees, the NFP enthusiasts, the parents of special-needs children they could have aborted, and the unsung others who make real sacrifices to lead authentically Catholic Christian lives. Such are clearly among the people of God who are screwed by the way America in general is today. I mean the many Catholics I've encountered who are theologically orthodox, and might even be willing to die for the faith if it ever came to that, but who haven't considered sacrificing anything major in their comfortable lives, as led in either the secular world or the Church, so as to become more effective witnesses to the power of the Cross in the here-and-now. The sex-abuse-and-coverup scandal was the fault of both left and right, laity as well as clergy. Just as the false moral theology of the "liberals" helped many priests to rationalize the ephebophilia seen in so much of the abuse, so the complacency and institutional loyalty of the "conservatives" enabled the problem to be denied and covered up for as long as it was. Some of the latter like to point out that there is an equally grave problem of sexual abuse of minors in the public schools. That is true, and we hear relatively little about it because people hold the world to lower moral standards than the Church. But by and large, American Catholics don't live up to "higher standards." Some don't get why they should; others are too far gone even to acknowledge the higher standards as standards.

Hence, just as many American Catholics love the specific lie that the American lifestyle of heedless materialism is nothing to be ashamed of, even more love the general lie is that it's OK to settle for mediocrity. If one can be saved by avoiding the grossest and blackest forms of evil, squeaking into purgatory as a smug mediocrity, then there isn't much motivation to be different from most of the rest of the world. The trouble is that once one settles for mediocrity, one becomes insensibly but thoroughly complicit in the real evils that pervade one's culture and society. That is what happened to the Catholic Church in Germany before World War II. It happened inAmerica at all levels after World War II, and continued merrily on for the next forty years. As a result of the butt-kicking we got from the abuse scandal, and the backbone the American bishops seem to have started acquiring since Ratzinger became pope, there are some rumblings of change. But we have a long way to go before most of us are ready to give up the lies we love.

For that we need unity around the truth. But we are far from there yet. Priests and bishops like to pretend there's unity, but it just ain't so. This is the third big lie American Catholics love, and it's perpetrated largely by the clergy. They say "unity, unity" when there is no unity. The theological and the political polarization are still great enough to constitute an internal schism, and anybody with perspective on and interest in ecclesial matters can see as much.

A symptom of that was what I heard, or more precisely didn't hear, at Mass yesterday. It was the evening Mass for the students at a Catholic college. The problem wasn't so much the music; that was was the standard Haugen-Haas stuff, which I generally dislike, but which you have to expect at such occasions. The problem wasn't the ritual of the Mass itself, which was done more rubrically than I expected; the priest did omit the lavabo at the Offertory, a common fault which has irritated me for thirty years; but I have long been accustomed to saccharine music and minor liberties taken with the rubrics. What really appalled me was the homily.

Technically, it was brilliant: well-delivered, intelligent, pertinent to the bible readings. But the priest took no note of the fact that yesterday, or what was then "today," was both Respect Life Sunday for the Church in the U.S. and the opening of the worldwide Synod on the Word of God in Rome. Both events have been well-publicized in the MSM; the Pope himself has even begun reading the entire Bible over the radio. But from this homilist you would never have got the impression that such events were worth attending to. Instead, he took the day's biblical theme of "the vineyard" as metaphor for the people of God, and said that the walls of the vineyard should not be used to "keep people out." I don't know how many of the students got the message, but I sure did. Perhaps that's because I've heard it all before, way too many times. "Respecting life" does not mean denying communion, and thus "full communion," to anybody who supports "abortion rights." Celebrating the Word of God does not mean denying full communion to people who interpret the Word of God differently from how the Church herself does. How could I not get that message from the homily, if I knew what was going on in the wider Church and could put two and two together?

Such is how unity is undermined by the very celebration of the sacrament of unity. I've seen many other examples of this. The Devil counts on most of us not recognizing the lie. But the Spirit is saying, and not just to me, that the time for lies is growing ever shorter.

Why I am a conservative

Years ago, when it still made sense for me to subscribe to print periodicals, I used to get a conservative journal called Modern Age. It was published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which has now taken to publishing many of the articles from MA and its other periodicals online at a site called First Principles. Recently they've posted a series of articles, each entitled "Why I am a Conservative," from various old-reliable authors who contributed them to the Summer 2007 issue of MA. I thought about contributing myself until I realized that I'm a year too late and they probably hadn't heard of me anyhow. So I now do it here.

In high school I was a conservative for three reasons: my father was; most Catholics I knew were; and I thought liberals hated God and country. At any rate, it seemed to me that they were always readier to see the faults of the Catholic Church and of various levels of American government than those of the Church's and America's enemies. I'd sum it all up now by saying that I was a conservative out of loyalty to family, church, and country. I joined Young Americans for Freedom and got my own subscription to National Review.

As my interests shifted during the 70s from politics to philosophy and then theology, I learned much about the social teaching of the Church and became unwilling to identify myself any longer as a "movement" conservative. I even gave up my NR subscription. That unwillingness dissipated in the mid 80s because of Ronald Reagan's opposition to abortion at home and "the evil empire" abroad, so that by the late 80s I was writing book reviews for NR and running for Congress in New York on the Conservative line. After many years away from my home state, I am once again a registered Conservative in New York. But I've never been able to maintain my enthusiasm for American "movement conservatism" for very long. The brand includes quite a range of ideological flavors, none of which conform fully with the "social teaching of the Church," and some of which overlap with it hardly at all. Until this year, I was willing to call myself a conservative only because my positions on what American political lingo calls "the social issues" are, in such lingo, more "paleo-conservative" than anything else.

But now I've changed my mind. It remains the case that I can summon enthusiasm for American "conservatism" only to the extent that the enemies of my enemies are my friends. But I am a conservative in a deeper sense than that.

I got to thinking about this after a friend with whom I have had many discussions of The Big Questions recently sent me a link to this video by psychologist Jonathan Haidt. At first, the practical lesson of Haidt's presentation seemed to me unobjectionable. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to understand why I am and must be a conservative.

Haidt noted that both Left and Right tend to go in for uncritical group-think and an over-righteous sense of the superiority of "us" over "them." Such is indeed a universal human trait which manifests itself in ethnic, religious, and cultural attitudes as well as in political polarities. Plausibly enough, Haidt argued that in order to transcend uncritical group-think, in which the "other" is typically misunderstood and disparaged, "liberals" and "conservatives" need to see each other as placing different emphases on values sought in common by innate, human moral psychology. He sketched five such values: "care" or mutual concern, "fairness," the "ingroup," "authority," and "purity." I would gloss those as five polarities: care vs. harm, fairness vs. unfairness, ingroup vs. outgroup, hierarchy vs. equality, purity vs. dirtiness or corruption. Haidt is quite right that "conservatives" generally find the last three more important than "liberals" do. Liberals tend to emphasize the first two, or what they conceive of as the first two, at the expense of the last three. Haidt closed with the suggestion that liberals and conservatives, so understood, are each as necessary to a healthy polity as Ying and Yang are to a healthy cosmos. I found myself being seduced by Haidt's presentation. Then I began to reflect a bit more.

I reflected on how Haidt had defined the liberal/conservative polarity before explaining it as above. Liberals, in his view, are people who are generally open to new experiences and ideas, whereas conservatives are those who prefer the tried, the comfortable, the familiar. Given such a definition, the subsequent explanation makes a certain sort of sense. After all, what generally determines the tried, comfortable, and familiar for most people are carriers of the last three of the five value polarities. Family, religion, ethnic group, friends, the state—all those factors which serve to distinguish an "us" from a "them," and lending great importance to such a distinction—just are those factors which determine what the conservative temperament is wont to conserve. When liberals advocate compassion and fairness over the "in" group, hierarchy, and ideas about purity, they seem inevitably to advocate the new and the other as opposed to the familiar, the comfortable, the "us." And so it would seem that such advocacy will be the natural preserve of those more open to the new than enamored of the old. Haidt's definition is quite plausible.

But that, in my experience, is not how things work. For one thing, I have found throughout my life that liberals are actually more authoritarian than conservatives about everything except sex. For them, environmental degradation is a sin. Political incorrectness is a sin. Violence against those who have been born for more than a few hours is a sin. Religious fundamentalism, at least on the part of Christians, is a sin. Even smoking is a sin. And the coercive power of the state should be brought to bear against such sins. But even though consenting adults should be prosecuted for smoking in a public building, heaven forfend that they be prosecuted for having sex in a public bathroom. We disrespect young women by telling them, and young men, to avoid sex until marriage; we respect them by handing them condoms, winking, and giving them anti-depressants for surviving the hookup culture. Promoting peace and justice entails allowing women to kill their children in the womb while having their husbands or boyfriends tossed into jail and banned from the home for threatening violence. What all these attitudes have in common is the conviction that sexual autonomy and the exercise thereof are unqualified goods, no matter how bad other things may be, including some of the things that the exercise of sexual autonomy may lead to, such as pregnancy. And so maximum sexual freedom should be allowed between consenting adults, no matter how harshly we may and should punish consenting adults for certain other activities which are, after all, sins.

That tells me that liberals are not open not so much to "new ideas" as such, but to certain ideas that have been articulated more recently than those which conservatives often favor. But those ideas have, themselves, been around for a long time now. Think Kinsey; think Rousseau. In academia today, secular hard-leftism constitutes an orthodoxy of its own, and has for several generations now. I conclude that liberals favor not so much novelty in itself as a counter-tradition to that great tradition of the West which stems from both Athens and Jerusalem. Of necessity, the counter-tradition is parasitic on the Great Tradition of which it is a counter-tradition. It takes values that are assuredly present in the GT but pits them against other, still more fundamental values. In short, what now goes by the name of "liberalism" in America is a heresy within that tradition which many educated conservatives consciously seek to conserve. The heresy is best summed up by Saul Alinsky's dedication of his book Rules for Radicals to Lucifer.

Another thing I've noticed about liberals is that they go in for group-think and disparaging "the other" every bit as much as conservatives do. The difference lies simply in who gets defined as the Other. For liberals, the Other is not the distant enemy threatening our civilization, but the one nearby who stands in the way of their counter-tradition. For the feminist movement today, e.g., the evil Other is not the Muslim paterfamilias who keeps his wife barefoot, pregnant, and wrapped in her hijab—and might well find it necessary to honor-kill a straying daughter—but the American business executive who earns a few dollars more than his female peer and stares at the nice legs she exposes under her power suit. For the Ivy-League liberal male, it more natural to think of Todd Palin as the Other than of Osama bin Laden, who is seen more as an understandable reactive "symptom" of American imperialism. I could multiply examples, but you could do the same for yourself.

Given how group-thinky liberals are, how enamored of academic credentials and the nanny state, how hung up they are on "purity" ideas such as anti-smoking and environmentalism, I believe Dr. Haidt is wrong to suggest that liberals value the last three of the five "values" less than conservatives. Liberals only say they do, and Haidt just takes them at their world. But they're just kidding themselves. What's really going on is that, wanting to undermine the Great Tradition in the name of sexual autonomy and the pomo relativism which rationalizes it, they end up substituting ersatz forms of solidarity, authority, and purity for true and good forms. It's very unattractive, at least to me.

And that's the main reason why I'm a conservative. I believe the Great Tradition is healthy and the leftist counter-tradition is unhealthy. But what are the healthy forms of solidarity, hierarchy, and purity?

Of course would take a book, and a lot more than a book, to answer that adequately. So here I'll just answer as a Catholic: all those which are necessary for the spiritual health and integrity of the Church and the family. For the two mirror each other; indeed, the latter is the cell of which the former is the body.

As members of the Church, we are engrafted into the Mystical Body of Christ, which exists to extricate us from the fallenness of the world and turn us into gods. Whatever forms of solidarity aid that project are good; the divinely constituted "hierarchy" or "sacred order" of the Church is good; whatever the Church condemns with her full authority as sin is impure, and whatever she approves with her full authority is pure. The same goes for the family as "the domestic church." The authority of the pope and the bishops over the Church, which concretizes for us the authority of Christ the Head, is also analogous to the authority of the husband and father in the family. Such human authorities are limited, however, by the divine and natural law which we know by means of them. The authority of the state, given it by God, should also be given through the governed so as to limit the temptation of the powerful to tyranny and theft. But the chief duties of the state are to protect the innocent at home and to protect the polity from its enemies abroad. Disagreements about how much more scope for action the state should possess should be resolved by discussing, and observing, the potential and actual effects thereof on the family.

Notice that I have not spoken the language of individual "rights." There are such rights; they are important; and they should be enumerated. But the first task is to get clear about the nature of the human person. Only then can we be clear about the place of the individual in the family, in civil society, and ultimately in the cosmos. Only after that can we speak about what inherent individual rights are and what prescriptive individual rights ought to be. I think the signers of the Declaration of Independence were pretty reasonable about all that, even if not entirely correct to a man. Hence, I don't think that people who today are called "liberals" come at political questions from the right direction. I suppose that's why I feel impelled to be a conservative, despite my misgivings about much of contemporary American conservatism.