Display issues

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

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

The Obama Weltanschauung

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When the blind need to lead the blind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unclogging the drains

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Humanae Vitae for priests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Housekeeping notes

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

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

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

Thanks to all for hanging in there with me!

William F. Buckley Jr., RIP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How many husbands have we had?

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

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

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

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

The embryo debate continued

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

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

Eternity: do we get only what we want?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being God's works of art

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

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

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

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

Struggling with incoherence II: who counts?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Struggling with incoherence

As a philosopher, I am richly entertained by watching people struggle with their incoherence of thought in face of their clashing instincts. Occasionally, I'm even entertained by my own incoherence, for that brief moment before I strive to end it. Either way, it's more fun and much cheaper than cable television or movies. It's more worthwhile too. Today I offer two examples to entertain as well as educate.

The first is the struggle of American conservatives with the idea of John McCain as the Republican nominee. True, he's not a predictable ideologue; he seems to be more motivated by his ideals of honor and decency than by movement-style ideology. But considering the alternatives, what's wrong with that? Vain and prickly, he's not a perfect human being either. But who is? All this outrage, this doom and gloom, is completely unjustified. Yet Ann Coulter says she'd rather have Hillary Clinton than John McCain as President.

Of course that's the sort of thing she would say. Coulter has become rich by marketing her well-honed hyperbole to the angry Right, and it doesn't hurt that she's a slinky blonde who favors dressing in black. It's largely an act, even if not entirely an act. But sometimes people become their act. I'd love to have dinner with her, unnoticed, just to see what she's really like. (OK, and to see what she'd wear too.) Perhaps there's still a coherent core of authenticity there. But the notion that conservative ideals would be better served, even if only via backlash, by the return of the Clintons to the White House, is just plain adolescent. We might remain pure ourselves and gain more converts, but we would be letting our opponents do incalculable damage.

For one thing, as Sam Brownback has pointed out, the next president will almost certainly get to define the ideological direction of the Supreme Court for the next generation. Given McCain's record of supporting the Roberts and Alito nominations, the possibility of overturning Roe would be far greater with McCain in the White House than with either Clinton or Obama, with whom the possibility is nil. This issue is extremely important to social conservatives and ought to be important to any Catholic voter. As for the second leg of the three-legged conservative stool—strength on national security—both McCain's deserved persona as a war hero and his actual policy record are as strong as anybody's. Would conservatives really rather have a president who has competed with her (or his) primary opponents about who would pull our troops back faster? What really angers conservatives about McCain are his unwavering support for limiting the influence of money in politics and his willingness to be flexible about illegal immigrants. Frankly, I don't care about the former, and the latter actually brings him closer to Catholic social teaching than most conservatives are on the subject. What's the big deal?

We're dealing with syndrome thinking rather than with a coherent philosophy. Partisans of the Right and the Left have rarely thought out their political philosophy. Rather, their positions form a syndrome based even more on sentiment than on reason—and even when based on reason, the reasons are not always mutually compatible. E.g., Ronald Reagan is the conservative icon and fiscal conservatism is the third leg of their stool. But under him, federal budget deficits grew to a level unseen since World War II—for good reason, I would add. I could go on, but time is limited and the greater threat, at least in my view, lies on the other side and in the religious sphere.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has called for "plural jurisdiction" in Britain, with Sharia law governing those Muslims who want it and British law everybody else. (What happens when a husband wants it and a wife doesn't is an interesting question.) Of course the outraged reaction of most Britons, well expressed here, is justified. But the amusing thing is that Williams is exhibiting the same incoherence on this political point that he has cultivated in theology as he presides over the slow implosion of the Anglican Communion itself. In a show of apparent realism, he suggests that Sharia courts may "unavoidable" anyhow. Yet he backtracks when it's pointed that Sharia law is incompatible with the notions of women's rights and gender equality that he has so vigorously defended. As John O'Sullivan asks: "[I]s sharia unavoidable or not? If it is, then women's rights will simply have to give way. But if women's rights can be protected against it, then sharia isn't unavoidable - and we need have none of it." So, which is it? Williams doesn't say.

Such incoherence is of a piece with the relative silence of Western feminists about the oppression of women in Islam. Leftists in general cannot decide whether the notions of human rights to which they appeal as though universal are nonetheless trumped by multiculturalism or not. If intolerance must be tolerated, even within our midst, when shown by people who are not otherwise "people like us," then are there universal human rights other than the right to define oneself over against others? Why or why not?

This is why I lost interest in politics as a college student and never went to law school. Questions of the sort I've just raised are necessary to raise, pursue, and answer if we are going to live sensibly together. It takes courage and honesty, as well as time and thought, to pursue them to conclusions. So that's why I did. But when I ran for Congress back in 1988, the year I earned my doctorate, I learned that such is rare in politics because unrewarded. Instead, adults who pursue them are shunted into reservations called "universities" where they can talk to each other without either bothering or being bothered by everybody else. Nowadays, if you can't get a teaching job, there's alway blogging. But you can't usually get good sound bites out of real thought. The really important questions do not entertain.

At least it's entertaining to watch the results of refusing to entertain them.

There's temptation, and then there's temptation

The penance given me at my most recent confession was to pray the Lord's Prayer "slowly and meditatively." Of course, when I pray any traditional prayer in that way, it usually doesn't take me long to start mulling over its theological interpretation. In the present case, the issue was the closing two phrases. In the original Greek, that's καὶ μὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν, ἀλλὰ ῥῦσαι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ; in Latin, ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo; in the King-James translation that English-speaking Catholics still insist on using, it's "lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." Given that today's Gospel was Jesus' temptation by Satan in the desert, I thought I'd bring my internal discussion out into the open.

It was the Holy Spirit who had led Jesus into the desert to fast and pray as preparation for his ministry. Being stuck out in the desert has a way of bringing things "right down to the real nitty-gritty," as the 60s pop-song refrain went. The ancient, newly liberated Hebrews wandering in the Sinai desert were sure brought there. As eremitic tradition indicates, it can bring one face to face with demons, both figuratively and literally. And sure enough, Satan challenged Jesus face to face at the end of the fast. Thus, as I observed last year around this time, by leading Jesus into the desert "God did to the Son of God what the Son of God instructs us," in the last two phrases of the Lord's Prayer, "to ask God not to do to us." Despite knowing all about the usual historical-critical exegesis on this point, I remain puzzled by that. I know we are confidently assured that the phrases in question, at least as understood by their original audience, were eschatological in significance. Jesus was telling his followers to pray that they be spared the supreme "time of testing" that Satan would be permitted to visit upon the elect in the very last days leading up to the Second Coming. And I do not doubt that that is at least how the phrases were meant and understood. But there's very little in the words and actions of Jesus that mean only what was first explicitly stated and understood. This is no exception.

For each of us can face our own, individual eschatological crisis. Many people do: some, at the very hour of death; others, at points in their lives where a momentous, life-defining choice between real good and merely apparent good—i.e., evil—must be made. They face a test, a "temptation" in the sense of "trial." That's the kind of thing the Lord's Prayer points to, beyond the historically well-attested. I myself once faced a test like that. Of course I flunked. It is only by the infinite mercy of God that I am still a candidate for final salvation at all, and I've been doing my penance since—even though my awareness of that fact is far too recent. All of that helps me understand more deeply what the last two petitions of the Lord's Prayer mean even to those of us who consider it highly unlikely that we'll be around for the Really Big Test just before the Lord comes again.

My experience convinces me, beyond any reasonable doubt, that we do well to pray not to be "led into" any eschatological crisis. Even those of us who've been given all we need to pass the test can, and readily do, flunk. And if we flunk at the hour of death, we won't get to take a makeup exam. We do well indeed to pray that we be not led into that "temptation." But the likelihood of finding ourselves in the thick of it rises with our presumption and sloth. That is why we are exhorted to "watch and pray," knowing full well we are sinners and ever seeking to become more like the one for whom we are watching, through whom all our prayers reach the Father.

Since Jesus was incapable of sin, he was sure to resist his "temptation" by Satan in the desert. Since we are sinners, he urges us to pray not be led into such temptation; yet his victory over Satan, culminating on the Cross, simultaneously shows us the pattern we must emulate if we are to reverse the effects of original sin in our lives, and gives us the power to do so. By refusing to turn stones into bread when he was famished, Jesus showed us that we must put fidelity to our mission as disciples above our personal needs and desires. By refusing to gain temporal power at the price of worshiping Satan, Jesus showed us that real power, the only kind that matters, consists in submission to God. That's what Adam and Eve forgot. By refusing to throw himself off the temple parapet in the expectation that he would be saved by angels, Jesus let God be sovereign rather than at his beck-and-call. And after all that, he was of course ministered to by angels.

Thus he gave us the power and the promise. Let us not forget that they are the fruit of a struggle that our first parents lost and that we often lose. It is by doing what we must but cannot do for ourselves that Jesus gave us our chance to do it at all. Thank God it's never by ourselves, like him in the desert. We always have him, and his spotless Mother, to rely on.

Viewing the skulls of bishops

Now that we're in Lent, I am not only reading but carefully pondering Fr. Al Kimel's fine series on purgatory. I recommend the same to all even as I look forward to defending it from the inevitable criticisms. But my Lenten meditation also includes, as it should, prophetic diagnosis of sin itself. Like each of us for ourselves, I must begin and end with my own sins; but those are of less general interest than the sins of Church leaders, which also point to the purification that American Catholics need to undertake collectively.

In the past I've been critical enough of the clergy, especially of the American bishops as a group. Having had my say, I figured that too few would notice or care if I said anything more. But now a few friends have drawn my attention to Fr. Richard John Neuhaus' pre-publication review, entitled "Paved with the Skulls of Bishops," of Philip Lawler's new book The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston’s Catholic Culture (Encounter). I have not read the book or even had the opportunity to buy it; that will change ASAP. But to me, the most important thing is what the book prompts Neuhaus, a man far more influential than I or even Lawler himself, to say. The news is not good. But the right perspective on it, which Neuhaus provides, affords a certain kind of hope. It helps some of us see ourselves in the problem.

From the review:

“The thesis of this book,” writes Lawler, “is that the sex abuse scandal in American Catholicism was not only aggravated but actually caused by the willingness of church leaders to sacrifice the essential for the inessential; to build up the human institution even to the detriment of the divine mandate.” Bishops again and again responded to the crisis as institutional managers, employing public relations stratagems to evade, deceive, and distract attention from their own responsibility. Lawler several times invokes the terse observation of St. Augustine, “God does not need my lie.” The bishops lied, says Lawler, and many of them are still lying. This is offered not as an accusation but as a conclusion that he believes is compelled by the evidence.

The first aspect of the scandal, the sexual abuse of children, has been acknowledged and addressed,” Lawler writes. “The second aspect, the rampant homosexuality among Catholic priests, has been acknowledged but not addressed, and later even denied. . . . The third aspect of the scandal has never even been acknowledged by American church leaders.” The third aspect, the malfeasance of bishops, “is today the most serious of all.”

Over 80 percent of reported cases of abuse were with teenage boys. That does not include, of course, uncounted instances of sex with men who are of age, since those cases, as several bishops have opined, constitute no problem for the Church, meaning no legal or financial problem. Spiritual and moral problems apparently do not enter the equation. The name for this is corruption.

Indeed. By way of explanation, Neuhaus quotes Lawler quoting a once-widely-discussed article by Jesuit priest Paul Shaughnessy that was written well before the Boston scandal broke in 2002. It is entitled "The Gay Priest Problem." I myself have read that article, quoted it before, and owe much to it. It explains a lot. By all means read it.

Why do I dredge this up again? Because, just as the Boston scandal was a "synecdoche" for the national sex-abuse-and-coverup scandal, so that national scandal is a synecdoche for the failings of American Catholics as a whole. With some laudable exceptions, the bishops as a whole are like American Catholics as a whole: they don't yet "get it." The bishops as a whole have yet to confront and address the fundamental, spiritual failings on their part that let the sex-abuse problem get out of hand; American Catholics as a whole have yet to confront and address the failings of theirs that have so gravely undermined the witness of the Church in this country. We do, after all, get the leadership we deserve. But just as it is too convenient for the bishops to focus attention and outrage on those under their authority who sexually abuse minors, so it's too convenient for American Catholics to focus attention and outrage on the failings of bishops and priests. When it comes to sin, the first finger we point must always be at ourselves. What we need is purification: of our faith itself, and of our personal practice of our faith.

We need to purify our faith because, among American Catholics as a whole, the theological virtue of faith is no longer fostered or even widely understood. Consider one important example.

If you're an active Catholic who is not a "progressive" Catholic, but who has belonged to a parish or institution not committed to maintaining orthodoxy, you have probably observed a phenomenon familiar to many of us. If you make a point of seeking fidelity to the Magisterium in such a setting, especially from clergy or vowed religious, you will find yourself labeled "divisive" and/or "intolerant." If you lack formal credentials in theology, you will also be labeled "ignorant"; if you have them, especially if they are impressive, you will merely be labeled "arrogant." In neither case will you be permitted to catechize. Of course none of this is to say that frank orthodoxy is actually verboten, though it occasionally is; most progs recognize that the cardinal virtue of tolerance requires recognizing that all of us, even the orthodox, have a right to our opinions. But in the nature of the case, such tolerance is—to adapt a phrase from Herbert Marcuse—"repressive tolerance."

That's because, in a Catholic setting, to regard fidelity to the Magisterium as just one tolerable option among others is to reject the very concept of fidelity to the Magisterium. To be Catholic means that one does not regard that which the Church teaches with her full authority as a matter of opinion. One regards it as that which God has revealed, and one so regards it on the authority of the Church, which one believes is the Mystical Body of Christ sharing in his authority as her Head. Understood as including without being limited to fidelity to the Magisterium, orthodoxy is therefore not opinion. It is necessary as a boundary condition for that assent of faith which, as such, carries with it the certainty that we are not deceived. This is not to rule out all theological opinions; those cannot be avoided, and some diversity thereof is healthy. It is not even to rule out all false theological opinions. What the assent of faith rules out is treating what the Church has taught with her full authority as itself a matter of opinion, as ideas which some might find useful but which could turn out to be false. It also rules out treating as irreducibly a matter of opinion the question what counts has having been taught with the full authority of the Church. When there is disagreement about that question, as inevitably happens in this or that case, it is ultimately for the Church herself to settle, either through the consensus fidelium over time and space or by a formal ruling from the Magisterium.

But that is exactly the stance which, in many quarters of the Church in America, is roundly rejected. Again, it is not always or even often rejected by formal denial. Many Catholic leaders are too prudent for that, if only because they don't want to jeopardize their platform and perks. But once orthodoxy is treated as mere opinion, it is effectively ruled out. It comes to be seen only as an irritating ideology that must be tolerated for the time being, but which cannot be allowed influence to match the authority on which it claims to be based. More or less quickly, a necessary condition for the assent of faith gets sidelined and silenced within what is, or ought to be, a community of faith. Heterodoxy then becomes the community's orthodoxy. At the extreme of such a process, this-or-that kind of orthodoxy opposed to Catholicism, often of the secular, left-wing variety, takes the place of mere heterodoxy.

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

For not only is it not obvious that orthodoxy is optional for Catholics as Catholics; it's downright false, and when it's believed, it's objectively incompatible with being Catholic. That's why it has often been observed, rightly, that American Catholics have come to think habitually like Protestants: the Church is one "denomination" among many; as a simple matter of conscience, one may pick and choose among her teachings; the only important things are to worship at the church of your choice and be a nice person. Such is the attitude that must be extirpated if we are to purify our faith. But it cannot be extirpated if constant, irreformable teachings of the Church are themselves treated as mere matters of opinion. Do the bishops have the courage to get us past that? Their record, at least as a body, is not encouraging.

The problem of optional orthodoxy is also important because, unless faith itself be purified, we cannot properly understand how to purify our practice of the faith.

Purgatory is a post-mortem process, for the already saved, of being "purged" of our sinfulness to as to be divinized as fully as God intends. We can avoid that if we complete our purification on earth by learning detachment from sin through suffering, both involuntary and voluntary. But that's a concept and a necessity which, for several reasons, we've largely lost sight of in the American Church. When thought of at all, purgatory is seen mostly as an eschatological escape valve for the lukewarm, an excuse for not answering the universal call to holiness. I still have a vivid childhood memory of the joy with which the men of my neighborhood started grilling hamburgers on Friday evenings when Pope Paul VI eased the traditional fasting rule. Ascesis across the board has pretty much gone south from there. I rarely even hear anymore about the old idea of "offering up" suffering joyfully as a way to participate in Christ's Passion and thus become more like him: holier. The idea and the reality are still very much out there, of course, especially among conservative younger priests and adult converts; but neither that form of ascesis or any other form plays a prominent role in collective Catholic life anymore. Aside from the relaxed fasting rules, which are unenforced and therefore effectively optional, ascesis is purely private and optional. That would be fine if clergy and vowed religious led the laity by preaching and example to greater ascesis all the same. But they don't, and nobody much cares.

Given that orthodoxy itself is effectively optional, it should come as no surprise that ascetic orthopraxis is too. But if everything is effectively optional (except smoking in church, which will get you ejected if not arrested), what becomes of collective witness? What we've become is a collection of individuals willy-nilly at variance with each other and often at variance, for good or ill, with our leaders. So much for being the Mystical Body "one in mind and heart" with her Head. So much for answering the universal call to holiness together.

The road to hell, as St. John Chrysostom once said, may well be "paved with the skulls of bishops." But we need to learn something about ourselves by viewing them. I think we can. As Barack Obama likes to say: "We can do this."